“You’d better write your mother,” Brock said one cool evening as they walked in the park. “She’ll want to get home in time for the wedding.”
“I doubt she’ll care, Brock, but I’ll write to her.”
Felicia had, by that time, started sending postcards with terse little messages whenever she changed locations. Brock thought this was a good sign, that it meant she was beginning to miss her only child, but Phoebe knew better. It had just occurred to the woman that someone should always know where she was, that was all. It was just Good Old Mom looking out for Good Old Mom.
“I’ve never seen a mother yet who didn’t want to be at her daughter’s wedding,” Brock said.
Actually, Phoebe was thinking of sending her on to the Mediterranean. She dreaded the thought of Good Old Mom at her wedding, meeting Brock’s respectable family. And besides, there was a better chance for disaster in the Mediterranean. Remember Athens? They had that Red Brigade in Italy, didn’t they? And it was closer to the Persian Gulf.
Phoebe didn’t tell Brock all that. She just wrote to her mother as she had promised, telling her about the wedding (she could picture Good Old Mom snorting when she read that bit of news) and including some more money (which she had been forced to borrow from the bank) along with a ticket for a Mediterranean cruise (that she bought with a credit card). It would be up to Good Old Mom which direction she chose to travel. Phoebe had very little doubt about which way she’d decide to go.
The wedding was accomplished without Felicia Hooks, much to her daughter’s relief. Phoebe and Brock had a Hawaiian honeymoon, and when they returned, they moved into a nice new house. They took the parakeets with them, of course, and Felicia’s things were stored in the basement. And Phoebe kept sending money to Good Old Mom, who had decided to see the pyramids.
Toward the end of June, Felicia’s postcards began to be a little more chatty. She told Phoebe how much fun she was having, almost as if they were on good terms. “She sounds like a reasonable person to me,” Brock said when he read one. But it was unlike Mom and it worried Phoebe. She couldn’t be getting homesick, could she? Maybe she missed her parakeet. When Brock suggested again that maybe she was beginning to miss her daughter, Phoebe just laughed.
Now that she was married to Brock (who made Fifty dollars an hour with limited overhead) and had his car to drive, life was easier. More and more of her pay-check went into keeping Mom on the other side of the Atlantic, though it sorely rankled because she knew Felicia’s Social Security checks were being automatically deposited all the time and she was accumulating a bundle of her own. But it couldn’t go on forever, could it? How long could an American with a mouth on her go about the Middle East these days and stay out of trouble? She wondered if Mom could go to jail for hoarding those Social Security checks without reporting that her daughter was supporting her. Probably not. Other people, maybe, but not Felicia Hooks. Rotten apples seemed to have the most incredible luck.
June melted into July and July into August. Knowing from her postcards that Felicia was wandering around in that part of the world, Phoebe turned eagerly to the news each night to learn about the heightening tensions in the Persian Gulf. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait. The last card she’d had from Mom had come from Kuwait City. It was not a good place for an American to be.
She did not experience the joy she had thought she would. She kept picturing Good Old Mom at the mercy of those barbarians, and it made her stomach knot up in a tight little ball. Strange reaction.
So. Was Felicia Hooks one of the Americans who had been “detained” by the barbarians who had invaded Kuwait? Brock contacted the State Department with little success. All they learned was that her name was not on anyone’s list. But the postcards had stopped coming.
As the days of August ticked away, the big guns seemed more concerned with keeping the barbarians out of Saudi Arabia than about what had already happened to little Kuwait. Phoebe didn’t like the situation at all. She had pictured Mom getting wiped out quickly and neatly and painlessly, not suffering through some long, drawn-out ordeal.
Phoebe and Brock had just come back from the supermarket one Saturday afternoon when the phone rang. Phoebe answered it.
“Damn you!” shrieked the unmistakable voice of Felicia Hooks. “Didn’t you get my card, Ugg-face?”
“Ma — Mom?” Phoebe gasped. Brock, who was just putting the groceries down on the kitchen table, looked at her with a startled expression. “Mom, where are you?”
“About fifteen miles away at the airport. You were supposed to pick me up, dummy!”
“We didn’t—”
“I had to leave most of my luggage at a hotel in Kuwait and make a break for it in the back of somebody’s lousy, beat-up old pickup wearing somebody’s lousy, fleabitten old native costume, and then I had a helluva time making the right connections to get home. And then what happens? You can’t even get to the airport on time.”
“But I didn’t know—”
“And now there’s a big thunderstorm headed our way. I can see big black clouds rolling in right now. You’d better get here fast, Ugg-face, seeing as how this is all your fault.”
“All right, all right, we’ll leave right now.”
Brock and Phoebe hurried out to the car and took off for the airport. The sick little knot in Phoebe’s stomach was replaced by the old familiar hot lump at the back of her throat. “She was just awful,” she told Brock. “Just as bad as ever. Still the same old name-calling, still Good Old Mom.”
“Well,” Brock said mildly, “she’s upset. That’s understandable, isn’t it, after what she’s probably been through in the last days?”
“Just you wait, Brock Weaver. You’re finally going to see Felicia Hooks flying her true colors.”
Brock just smiled. He undoubtedly felt that as soon as they got Good Old Mom home and rested she’d be a sweet little old lady who was, after all, grateful for the wonderful gift her daughter had given her.
But Phoebe knew better. These last few unfortunate days would by far outweigh all the other months when Mom had been having a wonderful time. Phoebe would be blamed for it. Not a day would go by when Felicia would forget to remind her daughter that it was her fault she had been in Kuwait when all hell broke loose. And Phoebe would have a heck of a time getting her to take another trip.
Why was it that thoroughly rotten apples like Felicia Hooks seemed to lead charmed lives? She could probably walk through the middle of a gun battle and not be harmed. She would probably live to be a hundred and ten.
Phoebe’s spirits had fallen about as low as they could go by the time Brock turned off the freeway at the airport exit. What can I do? she asked herself as big, sloppy raindrops began to shatter on the windshield. Now her paycheck would have to go into a nice apartment for Good Old Mom or else she’d be moving into their house and disrupting everything with her rattlesnake personality and her garish sofa cushions. Could her marriage survive Felicia Hooks? Phoebe doubted it.
Oh, if only she had been hatched! This business of having a mother like Felicia was the absolute pits. But what could she do? What could she do?
When they pulled into the loading zone at the terminal, it was raining hard. Phoebe could see Good Old Mom inside, just beyond a bank of double doors, standing amid a heap of luggage. She just sat there and looked dully at her mother through the rain-spattered window while a cloud of misery settled down over her.