It was July. She turned off the AC to discourage a too-long visit. Outside it was a buck twenty, and even with the shades drawn and the ceiling fan turning, it was pushing ninety in her kitchen. The smell of fresh paint — one of her boys had talked her into letting him paint her cabinets white and the wall behind them chartreuse, because one or the other would “pop” — lingered a full week after the work, growing sharper in the mounting heat. It was starting to get to her, but the kid didn’t seem bothered.
A fat fly that had followed him in buzzed overhead, circling like it was waiting for permission to land.
“A grown damned woman,” she mumbled, her own enthusiasm waning. “Bawling.” Donna had been dining and drinking on the story of her incarceration and the events leading up to it for fifty-odd years. The kid’s dubious stare wasn’t the reaction she’d come to expect.
“I wasn’t aware,” he said, enunciating with the smarmy cool diction of an NPR correspondent, “they had prisoners squat as part of the intake process in 1963.” He folded his hands on the table next to the white robot-looking microphone recording their talk to his laptop. Across from him sat the box of chardonnay she’d demanded as compensation for speaking with him. If she knew he was going to be a pain in the ass, she would’ve demanded bourbon.
Donna raised her eyes to the faces of the Rat Pack staring down from a black-and-white photo on the wall behind him and offered up a silent prayer for strength to the city’s patron saints. “I don’t know. Don’t remember.” She scratched her temple at the edge of her lace-front wig’s nylon cap. “Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.”
“Details are important to establishing the veracity of your account.”
“Veracity?” she said, rolling her eyes at the kid’s shameless sincerity. “You can’t tell a story as long as I have without embellishing a point here and there.”
“The unembellished, and with any luck verifiable, truth will go a long way in helping me help you set the record straight.”
Donna swatted at the fly. “This is Palm Springs. About the only thing left around here anymore that’s straight is the record.” She allowed herself a cackle at that one. “Not that I mind the boys. My boys. They adore me. They see me as dangerous, glamorous. Beautiful, like I used to be. Not this wheezing colostomy bag I’ve become.”
The kid tapped his fingers on the table’s Formica top. Genuine midcentury modern, a succession of her boys had cooed about her chrome dining set when first they laid eyes on the “antique” Donna had bought new. The kid stopped midstrum, as if he realized the sound was being picked up on the recording. Or maybe he misread her contemplation of herself as another midcentury modern relic as irritation. He polished a spot with his shirt cuff.
Donna felt an inexplicable flash of sympathy for him. She sighed. “Maybe it is the truth. Who the hell knows after all these years? Who the hell cares? After this long, it’s the story that matters, not the truth.”
“The truth is why I’ve come.”
“Then I’ll sow a few grains in from time to time.” She placed her cup beneath the wine box spigot and held it there till it was half full. “So, this program you’re doing...?”
“It’s a podcast. You are familiar—” he began, the obvious — given her age — question forming.
“Yeah, yeah.” She waved her hand like she was training a pup to sit. “The old lady knows what a podcast is. Have even listened to a couple.”
She must have flipped some switch because all at once the kid was on. “Ours examines organized crime, but from a different angle.” He leaned in, his formerly passive features animated. “It’s an anthology focusing not on made men, the gangsters themselves, but on the women who, often through circumstances not of their own choosing, find themselves caught up in the gangsters’ world.” Each word came out with a polished enthusiasm, addressed, it seemed, to an imaginary audience of thousands rather than one old woman at her kitchen table.
Donna waited till his evangelical fervor cooled. “Not my cup of tea, but you think people will listen? A lot of people?”
“We haven’t released any episodes yet. We want people to binge, the first season at least. But with stories like yours, I’m sure we’ll pick up a massive following in no time.”
“With stories like mine.” Donna laughed and saluted him with her drink. She sipped her cup, dribbling wine on her chin. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. He watched her, patient, impassive. Maybe he hoped the wine would loosen her tongue, but the joke was on him. If her tongue got any looser, she could slip it out with her dentures.
He slid the mic a touch closer to her. “Perhaps we could start a bit earlier? What brought you to Palm Springs?”
Donna feigned surprise. “Why, you must know. I was an actress,” she said, rolling the word in deep plush drama. She read his noncommittal expression as skepticism. “I had some roles. Look it up. They were small but they were speaking. You should’ve done better research before showing up at my door.” She rose, her knees protesting. “I’ve got something I can show you.” Donna shuffled, her steps heavy, tired, to the bookshelf in her living room, and took down the thick coral-colored scrapbook — a gift for her seventy-fifth last year from her boys. A warmth filled her chest as she thought of sharing it with the kid. It was crazy. He wasn’t anything special. Not a prize by anyone’s standards. But he was here, and she wanted him to see her as she’d once been. She made her way back, pausing at the threshold. The kid sat there, futzing with his phone, kicked back in his seat and looking bored.
“Sorry for the wait,” she said, chagrined not to be returning to a rapt audience. “You’re going to like this.” She set the book before him, detesting the sight of her mottled hand as she flipped open the cover. She watched him, studying his face, waiting for his reaction to the decades-old headshot.
His eyes scanned the photo but didn’t warm at the sight. “This is you?”
Donna examined the photo. It was glossy. Black-and-white. Even so, it was clear that her eyes were crystal blue, her hair a buttery blond — natural.
The kid turned the page, flicking it over with the nail of his index finger like he was afraid to touch the book.
A couple of candid snapshots. Donna in a zebra-stripe one-piece that gave her the look of a vintage Barbie. A faded color shot of Donna lounging in an aqua-blue peignoir set. That one was a warm-up to a few private “artistic” nudes that helped her make rent when the roles didn’t come rolling in.
“I bet you would like to get together with her.” The kid’s eyes darted to her, then away. “She’s still in here, you know.” Donna’s tongue grew thick and heavy, feeling like someone had pumped it full of cement. She felt the pulse in her temple. “I don’t mean...”
The fly buzzed past.
“You were beautiful,” the kid said, then looked back at her and flashed a grin. “And you wouldn’t have looked at me twice.”
Donna didn’t feel gratitude often, but she did now. She’d stumbled into deep water, and he was offering her a chance to surface. She shifted around the table to her chair. “No, I wouldn’t have.” She nodded at the scrapbook. “Go ahead.”
He turned the page using the same odd nail flick.