"Then you just stopped?"
Tess was thinking about the food they had left in her office. She had eaten quite a bit, yet there was still so much left. They had wrapped it up and put it in the refrigerator, except for the pad thai, which Jackie would take home. There was a time when even that would have been too risky. She would have thrown it away, or forced Jackie to take it. She wouldn't have trusted herself to behave responsibly around so much food.
"Overeating is like alcoholism, except that you don't have the option of going cold turkey. Everyone has to eat, right? On top of that, I have to exercise, because I'm addicted to the endorphin rush. I just brought both activities into almost-normal limits. I started rowing, which isn't as hard on the knees, and I alternate my runs with weight workouts. I also resigned myself to life as a mesomorph. Women think I should lose ten pounds, men think I'm fine the way I am." She grinned. "That's better than the obverse, isn't it? Unless, of course, you're a regular customer here."
"You look fine. As I said before, white girl craziness."
"Really? Then why did you get so upset when Willa Mott kept saying you were fat?"
Jackie made a face, as if repelled. It wasn't clear if the face was intended for Willa Mott, or the girl she used to be. "When I got pregnant, I spent the first four months eating like crazy, thinking no one would notice I was carrying a baby, they'd just think I was fat. It wasn't the most inspired plan, I admit. By the time I accepted what was going on, there was nothing to do but carry the pregnancy to term."
"You look so different now." Tess was seeing the photograph again, the shapeless girl with the flash of camera caught in her myopic eyes.
"Not so different."
"You do. It's not just the weight. It's the glasses-"
"I wear contact lenses now. You've heard of them?"
"And the hair-those two little tails sticking straight out from your head, the ends looking as if someone chewed on them."
"Hey, not everyone can wear the same hairstyle for their entire life. As I said before, you haven't changed much. You have one of those faces that will never change. When you're fifty, people will be able to match you to that photograph. Is that something in the genes, you suppose, having a face that never changes?"
"I've never thought about it much, but I guess it is, at least on my mother's side. The Monaghans start out with these round little marshmallow faces that get sharper and frecklier every year. Not too long ago, I was walking downtown and someone I went to fourth grade with recognized me and said, ‘You haven't changed a bit.' I wasn't exactly flattered."
"You should be," Jackie said fervently. "To have that kind of continuity in your life, to have people know you that way-that's a wonderful thing."
"An interesting observation from a woman who changed her name, ran away from her family, and did everything she could, short of going to a plastic surgeon, to alter her appearance."
Jackie said nothing, just played with her empty glass, running her fingers over the painted surface.
"Ready to go?"
"Absolutely."
Outside, the night air was muggy, as if a storm might be near. Tess and Jackie were moving slowly up Collington Street, when a skeletal woman pushing a baby carriage approached them. Although the woman looked as if she hadn't eaten in weeks, the sleeping baby was pink-cheeked and healthy looking.
"Ladies, ladies, do you have any spare change tonight, ladies? My baby needs a prescription, and the food stamps are late this month, and the doctor says I have to start on this new medication, and my husband, he just wrote from Georgia that he can't find work-"
Jackie started to reach inside her purse, but Tess laid a hand gently on her wrist.
"We're down to living on plastic until our next pay day," she told the woman, politely but firmly. "Sorry."
The woman looked at them resentfully, muttered something under her breath, and pushed the stroller forward, accosting a group of people gathered on a stoop several houses down.
"She had a baby," Jackie said. "She's not some druggie or alcoholic trying to get money for a fix."
"It's not her baby and that's exactly what she is."
"How do you know that?"
"She's famous in the neighborhood. You see, she kept coming back. Some people tried to help her, get her a place to live. They found out that she volunteers to babysit when she's hard up, then wheels the baby around, using him as a prop to get more contributions. One of the Blight's columnists wrote about her. The details give her away. Lies demand details, lots of them. People pay her to shut up as much as anything. She's one of the women who walk."
"Who?"
"The women who walk, the lost souls of Baltimore, the ones who talk to themselves and wander through the city. I see them on buses, down in the harbor, even up at the Rotunda shopping center. Some of them panhandle, some don't. Not that long ago, I used to worry I was going to become one of them."
"Bullshit," Jackie said softly.
"What?"
"I said bullshit. You were never really in danger of falling through the cracks like that. You have parents, family. There was always someone to catch you if you really fell."
Tess wanted to argue, but Jackie was right, she had caught her in her lie as surely as she had caught the woman with the stroller. Oh, she might have felt as if she were scraping bottom at times, but there had always been family to help her out. When she had lost her job, Aunt Kitty and Uncle Donald had rallied, finding work for her. And if she hadn't been so proud, her father would have squeezed her on the city payroll somehow.
"You're right, I was being glib. I always had support. I guess you really didn't."
"I had one person. Now I don't have anyone. I'm all I have."
Tess wanted to contradict her, say something soothing, but what was there to say in all honesty? Her mother was dead, her daughter was someone else's daughter. Jackie Weir was about as alone as anyone could be in this world.
Chapter 17
Tess yearned to go straight to Tyner's office the next morning, but it was her turn to take Gramma Weinstein to the hairdresser, one of Gramma's many codependent rituals. Unlike some older folks, who clung to the steering wheel long past the point of prudence, Gramma had announced on her sixtieth birthday that she would not drive any more. She had taken it for granted that her husband and, after his death, her children and grandchildren, would gladly pick up the chauffeuring duties.
But the rotation, as maintained by Gramma, was far from foolproof. Today, as Tess pulled into the parking lot behind Gramma's apartment building, she saw her mother getting out of her blue Saturn.
"Free at last," she said to herself. Now she could check in with Tyner, find out where things stood with Beale. But something in her mother's face kept her from throwing her car into reverse and peeling out of the parking lot. The tense lines on either side of her mouth, the anxious look in her eyes. She reminded Tess of herself, on her way to visit Judith.
"Hey, Mom. Looks like Gramma double-scheduled again. I thought it was my turn."
"Great. I had to take a personal day to get the morning off. Unlike you, I can't make my own hours. The federal government isn't quite so flexible."
"Nor is the state government, yet here comes Uncle Donald. Triple-teaming-that's a new one even for Gramma. Is she getting senile, or does she just not care what else we do with our lives?"
"Don't be disrespectful of your grandmother," Judith said automatically. "She won't be with us much longer."
"You wish," Tess said, and her mother looked stricken. By the joke, or the reality behind it? Impossible to tell.