“You spill some liquor?” Mary asked.
Still looking away, Angie said, “I got a little upset and a bottle broke.”
“You dropped it?”
“Threw it against the wall over there.” A vague wave in the direction of the front wall.
Mary saw a stain on the wall, just beneath the windowsill. Broken glass in the carpet glinted in the morning sun. Angie had been pissed off, all right. Desperate. Mary said, “This about Fred?”
“Yeah, fickle Fred.”
“Who told you about him?”
Angie snorted, wiped her nose, and turned to face Mary. There was a bead of mucus on her upper lip, and her eyes were rimmed in pink. She looked very tired and very old, and, for a frightening instant, not like anyone Mary knew. “Fred told me about Fred.”
“What’d he say exactly?”
“Said you was bound to tell me about him dancing with a woman at Casa Loma Friday night, so he mize well tell me first.”
“Well,” Mary said, “he was only dancing with her.” Wasn’t that all Danielle Verlane was doing the night of her death? Wasn’t that how Mary had defended her against Jake’s accusations yesterday? Now she was defending Fred, but not meaning it.
“Fred’s sure as hell no dancer,” Angie said. “The knees he’s got, he’s lucky he can walk across a room without falling on his ass.”
Mary had to smile. “Yeah, the truth is he didn’t look all that smooth.”
Angie pulled a wadded Kleenex out of her pocket and wiped her nose as if trying to tear it from her face. Maybe she’d hurt herself, because she dabbed delicately at her eyes. “Fred said not to make anything outa that Casa Loma thing. Said the woman you saw him with was just somebody he knows from his part-time job, and they’re friends is all. You believe that shit?”
“I dunno. So what’d you tell him?”
“Didn’t tell him anything-I hung up.”
“When was all this?”
“ ’Bout an hour ago. Phone’s rung several times since then.”
“It’s possible Fred was telling the truth,” Mary said.
“We had a date Friday night. He called and broke it. Said something about an emergency on the job. Bastard threw in a lotta details to make me believe him. I know that game. You do, too.”
“What’s that mean, Angie?”
“You and Jake.” Her nose was dripping again, mucus catching the light like the broken glass in the carpet. “I know about men like Jake, Mary. You and him back together?”
“No.”
“Good. The sick bastards don’t change. Your father-”
“Angie!”
“Okay. Duke had his good points; I get dru-Sometimes I forget that, but you shouldn’t. I don’t wanna say anything I’m sorry for. But Jake, I mean, I see Duke in Jake. Maybe that was to be expected, that you’d go for a guy reminded you of Duke.”
“Jesus, Angie, Jake’s nothing like Duke was!”
“ ’Cept in a dangerous way.”
Mary remembered the marred doorjamb, the message of the dead bird. Jake wasn’t the only one who was dangerous; in fact, having him back in her apartment would provide a certain degree of protection. But this wasn’t the time to tell Angie that.
“If Fred called an hour ago,” Mary said, wanting off this subject, “you can’t have been at the gin very long.”
“Sometimes it don’t take long.”
“What about this morning?”
Angie breathed in deeply and stood very still, her arms extended straight out to the sides at shoulder height. “I’m okay this fine morning. Really, I am. I only had a couple of hits off the bottle, then the phone rang and I knew it was Fred calling back, so I lost my temper just listening to the goddamn phone, and that’s when I made that mess over there on the wall.” She grinned. “Felt great, even if it was a waste of good booze.”
“There’s no such thing as good booze for you.”
“Oh, you’re right, Mary. I know you’re right.” She dropped her arms suddenly so her hands slapped against her thighs, as if abruptly giving up on a momentary notion of flying.
“You think you’re okay to go get some breakfast?” Mary asked. “You need food in you, and I think we need to get outa here.”
“I can make it,” Angie assured her. “Least I’ll be fine by the time we reach Uncle Bill’s. You better drive, though.”
“I’d intended on it. Button your dress straight, all right?”
“Ain’t that the style?”
“Like feather boas,” Mary said, and waited patiently while Angie fumbled with the buttons.
She watched Angie take the stairs to the street door. She seemed to be moving okay, had her balance, even though she had a death grip on the banister.
In the car, Mary gave her a cinnamon Life Saver from the roll she kept in the glove compartment to freshen her breath before dance lessons. “You gonna forgive Fred?” she asked.
“To forgive’s divine,” Angie said, chomping on her Life Saver so hard Mary feared she might break a tooth. “It’s in the Bible.”
“I don’t remember the nuns at Saint Elizabeth’s telling me that.”
“You done really well in school, Mary, right through college. I mean, truly applied yourself.”
“Is Fred gonna be the recipient of divine forgiveness?”
Angie stared out the window at the sparse Sunday morning traffic. “Fred’s all I got, such as he is.”
“Could be worse, I guess,” Mary said.
“We tell ourselves that, don’t we?”
“Yeah, we do.”
“You’re a good daughter.”
“I know, I know.”
“Gimme another one of them mints, will you? Women like us, we gotta stick together.”
13
They sat in a window booth, gazing out at the traffic swishing past on Kingshighway, while they ate Uncle Bill’s pancakes and sipped coffee. The restaurant was crowded as always on Sunday mornings; many of the customers were dressed up, on their way to or from church. Waitresses scurried between the tables, balancing trays of hotcakes, eggs, and steaming coffee, refilling cups and smiling and dealing out checks signed with a scrawled “Thank you” above their names. In the air was the faint smell of hot cooking grease and frying bacon. The murmur of conversation flowed over the clinking of flatware and china.
Angie had ordered wheat cakes and saturated them with butter and syrup. She didn’t say much while she ate, but Mary could see she was feeling better, and the three cups of strong black coffee she’d downed had to have gone a long way toward sobering her completely.
After her last bite of pancake, Angie fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, then leaned back and fired it up with a disposable lighter. An elderly couple at a nearby table glared as a finger of smoke found them, but Angie paid no attention. This was the smoking section, and Mary knew her mother would defend with nail and fang her constitutional right to foul the air. Her life was pulled this way and that by forces she didn’t understand, but what territory she was sure of, she would fight for with tenacity beyond reason. Mary was glad the people at the nearby table were almost finished eating. She’d seen militant nonsmokers and Angie clash before, and didn’t want to see it again. She wondered as she often did how a woman so fierce in public could have been such a punching bag for Duke.
As if reading her mind, Angie exhaled a glob of smoke thick as cream and said, “It’s a pattern that’s sometimes impossible to break, a relationship like yours and Jake’s.”
Well, she hadn’t been reading her mind quite accurately. “I was thinking about you and Duke,” Mary said. She could defend her territory in public, too.
Angie’s mouth smiled beneath weary eyes, her teeth stained by years of nicotine. “Okay, just so there’s some way I can get you to understand. Duke, Jake, they’re all alike; put ’em in a bag and shake it and it don’t matter which drops out. That’s the point. It’s like they’re born with the need and the cruelty, and early on they learn what buttons to press and strings to pull so they can control people. Some men are like that. They move knowing how it’ll make us move. It’s like a dance we do and we got no choice in. You oughta understand that.”