“And what did Irene have to say?”
“I can hear your tone, Tommie.”
There are words for people like my sister. Kook was harsh. I preferred free spirit. Sadie is both my polar opposite and my favorite person on earth.
There are words in my head for Irene not nearly as kind.
“She laid her out on her table. She thinks Mama stores too much energy in her head and that’s causing some of her headaches and memory problems.” Sadie took a breath. “I swear, Tommie, I think I saw something rise out of her like a fog. Mama kind of shuddered. And then we had a nice lunch at Catfish King. You know how she loves Catfish King. She called me Sadie Louisa. She hasn’t called me that in ages.”
I stopped myself from saying that Sadie should be thanking a piece of fried fish for triggering Mama’s memory instead of a lapsed-Catholic/psychic/yoga instructor with an occasional marijuana habit.
Two years ago, doctors diagnosed our mother with early dementia. Eleven months ago, Daddy gave in and moved her to a nursing facility that specialized in Alzheimer’s and its many unnamed cousins.
No cure, just drugs that could help but often didn’t. All of us took it hard, but Sadie still passionately sought the supernatural miracle that would bring Mama back to us.
“That’s great,” I said carefully.
“Really?”
“Really. Good job.” I wasn’t lying. It probably did Mama a world of good to get out of that place for a while. And who was I, the runaway, to criticize how Sadie took care of Mama when I was usually hundreds of miles north?
We hung up, agreeing that I’d be at the ranch by mid-afternoon, with CFS in hand as a peace offering. That would be text-speak for Chicken Fried Steak.
I spent twenty glorious minutes with my back to the shower’s luxury hot water massager, the equivalent of a generous man giving me a back rub without expecting anything in return.
While I toweled off, my brain, still relentlessly processing, conjured up another picture. Mama pulling weeds in the garden, singing to herself, a mournful, bluesy song at odds with a bright day, knee deep in cilantro and lemon mint, the most cheerful of herbs. Still, it was a beautiful sound. Haunting. I was about thirteen, several yards away, cutting lilac for the sachets Granny liked in her underwear drawer.
When I asked, Mama told me the song was an Ethel Waters classic from the twenties. She said her mother used to sing it to her when she was a little girl. She seldom mentioned her mother, so those few words, that tiny glimpse, were a rare gift.
An odd lullaby, I thought. More of a lament.
Ain’t these tears in these eyes tellin’ you.
Right after Mama was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I became obsessed with listening to every version of “Am I Blue” in digital existence. Ella Fitzgerald, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson. At the time I just thought I was missing the Mama who used to know the words, hoping to trap her inside a little machine and plug her voice back into my head.
Now I wondered if my subconscious had been bubbling up, telling me that even at thirteen, I already knew something was not quite right. That the song was a clue.
A finger of dread found its way under the thick cotton of the complimentary hotel robe. I shivered. I stared in the mirror and told myself to buck up, raking my fingers through wet, stringy hair that reached halfway down my back.
I’d never believed in layers or bangs or Chi irons. I washed my hair. I combed my hair. I let the air dry it.
I’d only seriously chopped it off once, three years ago, donating it to a little girl named Darcy. In her case, A was for alopecia. She’d arrived at the ranch with a bad synthetic wig and the kind of emotional scars that only other little twelve-year-old boys and girls can scratch out on your heart. Darcy loved the horses first and my hair second. When she left, a hairdresser in town cut off fifteen inches. I put it in a plastic bag as a goodbye present, which sounds creepy but wasn’t in the least.
Myra, a good friend and the psychologist who ran the therapy side of the ranch, pulled me in afterward.
“That wasn’t exactly protocol,” she said.
“Do you think it was the wrong thing to do?”
“I don’t know. It’s not Darcy I’m worried about, Tommie. Or any of the other kids. You have the highest degree of success of anybody here. I give you the most messed-up kids for a reason. The person I’m worried about is you. You get in too deep. I’m afraid the next body part you chop off will make you bleed.”
I wasn’t sure whether she was speaking metaphorically or not.
“I don’t know any other way,” I protested. “And I always let them go.”
“Maybe you watch them walk away, Tommie. But you never let these kids go.”
I scooped my jeans up off the floor by the bed where I’d dropped them last night, smelled under the arms of the peach-colored Lucky Brand T-shirt I’d borrowed from Sadie because the clean clothes in my suitcase had run out, found my bra and one boot under the bed and another near the door.
I tugged it all on and checked my purse for the pistol.
A weapon didn’t seem like overkill even in the light of day. Then I called down and asked for a cab to take me back to Daddy’s pickup in the Stockyards. Victor, I knew, had a lunch date with a single mom he’d met online.
CHAPTER 5
I decided to take the stairs because all the magazines say you should.
Those same magazines also advise you never to walk into a parking garage alone, even in the daytime.
Later, when I thought about what happened, I wondered if it was sweat or intuition that sent a prickly feeling down my neck when I placed my foot on the first step. I’m not one of those women who walk with their keys poking between their fingers, ready to combat a would-be rapist, but I’m more wary than average and my paranoia had hit Level Orange about eighteen hours ago.
My father descended from a long line of federal marshals, soldiers, and Wild West lawmen, one said to have put a bullet into Clyde Barrow. My late grandfather-federal marshal, combat veteran of two wars, and one-time sheriff of Wise County-religiously trained Sadie and me in target shooting and hand-to-hand combat on Sunday afternoons when Granny took her nap. The combat part mostly involved lots of giggling and kicking the straw out of a homemade dummy’s private parts while we knocked it around the trampoline. The goal was to empower us and it worked. Boys’ private parts never scared us much.
Halfway up the second stairwell of the parking garage, I heard noises above me. A symphony of muttering voices, percussive thwunks, and intermittent groaning. Someone was getting beat up.
Should I go up? Down? Was I the hero type? My heart began a slightly faster pound, like I was five minutes into a treadmill workout with the incline rising.
Was my imagination working overtime? Yes. It was probably a couple of construction workers. Or tourists. What kind of bad guys struck on Sunday morning in the middle of a tourist haven famous for expensive western wear, saddle bar stools, and the Cattlemen’s restaurant where J. R. Ewing ate his big rare steaks?
Sweat dripped little raindrop streams down my chest, my neck, my back.
Do not, do not, do not, DO NOT have a panic attack.
I whispered this to myself like a mantra, as if it would actually help, while I slipped off my boots and padded cautiously up the stairs, dodging broken glass from Coors Light bottles. The stairwell door was propped open on the third-floor landing, making me an instant target, so I dropped to all fours, jamming my left knee into a jagged two-inch shard of glass. I pulled it out without thinking, wincing, feeling blood dampen my favorite jeans.
Tourists.
I was wet with perspiration. I guessed that it was about 110 degrees in the unventilated stairwell. The concrete barriers blocked most of the brutal sun, letting in only slivers of light. It took a second for my eyes to adjust. Daddy’s pickup was twenty feet from me, right where I’d parked it yesterday.