It was really none of her business anyway. Out of her control. I agreed. She didn’t love this guy anymore and certainly didn’t want him hanging around her place. But I knew Teresa was wondering if maybe Marjorie was getting more cash for her son than she was getting for hers. If Marjorie was sleeping with this guy again, it would stand to reason she was also reaping fringe benefits like take-out food, new clothes, occasional movies, a new toy for her son. Their son. At least while the bloom was still on the rose. If he was spending money on Marjorie, he was, in Teresa’s mind, spending more money on Marjorie’s son too, even in a roundabout way. That would make his son with Marjorie better off than his son with Teresa simply because he was having sex with Marjorie instead of Teresa. That is, if his actual presence could be considered an advantage to Marjorie’s boy. Both boys knew he was their father but neither one had really known him and so couldn’t really miss him. It was complicated. Teresa was trying to put a price on time and affection. If in her opinion, Marjorie’s son reaped some extra benefit, then Teresa’s son should too. Just because Marjorie and this guy were having sex didn’t mean that Teresa’s son should have less money than Marjorie’s son, did it? That was what we were talking about. Or rather what Teresa was talking about. While she was talking I was running up and down the stairs. Dill went up. I brought him down. He went up. I brought him down. It was a good form of exercise, and when I was up, it gave Teresa time to formulate her next thought on the whole mess with her ex and Marjorie.
“What are you guys talking about?” asked Lish, coming down the stairs.
“Men and sex and money,” answered Teresa, her red lips pursed.
“Jesus Christ, is that all we ever talk about? Bitch bitch bitch let’s change the subject.” She rammed her key into her mailbox and flung it open.
“To what?” Teresa slapped a mosquito that had landed on her arm and her own blood smeared her skin. Alba and Letitia picked Dill up and started fighting over him. “Men and Sex and Money. Men and Sex and Money,” they chanted while they tugged at Dill from opposite sides. I noticed we were all barefoot.
That’s when Lish grabbed my arm hard. “Oh my god. Oh my god. I can’t believe this. Oh my god. This is too weird,” That was the day she got her first letter from the busker. He had stolen her wallet from the hotel room, he had written, and had carried her address around with him since.
My mother was killed in a botched robbery attempt. My dad and I told her over and over again she was crazy to pick up hitchhikers. Didn’t she read the papers? But she’d say, “Why would anyone want to kill a little old lady like me?” So it was her policy to pick up any hitchhiker with a bag or a suitcase. If they had a bag they were serious. Sometimes she scared the hitchhikers: why would a single lone female be so eager to pick them up? Didn’t she read the newspapers? She’d slow down and stop beside them, a big grin on her face. They’d back away and wave her off and shake their heads. She’d laugh. Suit yourself. Sorry for you if you’re afraid of a little old lady. And she’d spin out in her big old Ford with her window wide open, her elbow sticking out and her hand tapping on the roof of the car, always in a hurry to get where she was going. I guess she liked the company and the potential risk of picking up strangers. When you think about it, we had both been affected for life by picking up strangers. She had lost her life and I got Dill.
The day she was killed she was on her way to a farm just outside the city. She was a family therapist. Her office used to be my playroom. There was a lot of talking and yelling and crying going on in that room. It bothered my dad that my mom had all these unstable people streaming in and out of our house, so whenever he was at home and she had clients he would mow the lawn — or shovel the driveway in the winter. He’d mow the lawn tight outside the window to the playroom/office, bumping up against the house and going over the same patch of grass many times. Our lawn had never looked trimmer. Actually it was bald in patches. I think this was his way of telling my mom’s clients to get a life, get busy like him and leave his wife alone. Or he’d start crashing around in the kitchen, washing dishes and slamming cupboards. The only time he washed the dishes was when my mom was trying to work. My friends said, “Oh wow, your dad washes dishes. That’s nice.” But I knew it wasn’t. My mom did her best to ignore him, When it got to be too much she’d wake me in the middle of the night and off we’d go on the train to my cousins in Vancouver for a week or two. If that was impossible she’d run to the piano and play songs like “Moon River” and “Alfie” and “Five Foot Two” as loud as she could over and over until my dad left the house. Then she’d walk away from the piano, beaming, red in the face, swish over to the counter and make herself a pot of coffee. Once she spit into every pot and dish and cup he had washed and then threw them out the back door into the yard for all to see. My dad stood by saying, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
The day she was killed she was driving off to some little town to counsel abused farm women. I think she was trying to tell them, “Get the hell off that farm. Take your kids and leave. Move to the city and go on welfare if need be. Start a new life. Just get away.” Like Naomi at Half-a-Life. But she had to get the women to come to that conclusion themselves by repeating a lot of what they said. My mom said she acted as a kind of mirror. That was her job, as far as I could tell.
So on her way she had picked up a hitchhiker, a drifter with a bag. Only the bag had knives and guns in it. Right beside a billboard advertising fresh honey on the number 75 highway, he asked her to stop and get out of the car. She said, fine, she would, but not without her briefcase, which contained all sorts of confidential files and tapes of women and my mom talking. The guy was nervous and said No. So she said something like, “Look, you can have the car, you can have my money, just give me my bag.” Then she reached over into the back seat to get it and he freaked.
He didn’t shoot her, he just smashed her over the head with his gun. This is how he told the story after he was caught a couple of days later. She wasn’t dead then. He dragged her out to the ditch, threw her briefcase on top of her and took off. A while later she died in the ditch. My mom had always done what she had wanted to do, more or less. She’d done it quickly, too. Even at home, cleaning up or whatever, she’d almost run to get it over with. Swish, swish across the linoleum, in her red down-filled slippers. Sometimes she’d have power naps. She could hold a spoon in her hand, she said, and fall asleep. At the moment it dropped she would have had enough rest to feel completely refreshed. Then boom, she’d be up. Swish, swish. She could make herself a tuna salad sandwich in three minutes and a pot of coffee in one. “If that was lunch, I’ve had it,” she’d say and then coerce me into playing a quick game of Dutch Blitz before she had to go back to work. She always lost because her fingers were shorter and fatter than mine and she’d have to take sips of her coffee.