“I am driving, so I’ll stick to the mineral water.”
She made a face. “Your choice. ”
I sat down with one of the small green bottles of water and we both drank while the salad sat on the table and wilted. Mother was taking her time with the shower. My phone vibrated, but I poked it into silence, not willing to lose someone else’s perspective on my mother.
“You’re not the sort of woman I’d have expected my mother to employ as a housekeeper.”
“I’m not the housekeeper. I’m the maid. I just clean once a week. I come with the house.”
“With the house? I thought she owned it.”
“Leased. The owner lives in Dubai right now. He wants the house taken care of properly, so the tenant gets me and my husband with the house. Tahn does the garden and fixes things. I keep it clean. And I keep an eye on the tenants.” She shook her head. “Your mother. She’s not a bad tenant, but she’s so. ”
“Crazy?”
“Yeah! If she doesn’t have a man around, she’s sad. When she does, she’s scared he’s going to leave.” She shook her head. “Why a rich woman like her is worried about having a man, I don’t know. I love my husband, but I wouldn’t be worrying myself into a skeleton if I didn’t have him.”
Something she’d said earlier had just worked through my brain. “Vinny, what time did you leave here?” I asked.
“When I forgot my bag? About a quarter to two. She said you were coming at two and she needed to change.”
“She wasn’t doing her yoga when you left, was she?”
“I’ve never seen her do yoga. I think she goes to the studio down the hill.”
“Oh,” I replied, thinking. Mother hadn’t been struggling with the moves, so she wasn’t faking, but it sounded like her routine didn’t normally include yoga at two p.m. And she didn’t own the house, as she’d led me to believe. I wondered if she owned the car. How much of her facade was false?
“Has she ever. seemed in financial difficulty?” I asked.
“Your mother? No. She pays on time, in full. Never a problem. The lease term is up soon, but I don’t think she’s too worried about it, now that her man is making with the matrimony.”
“They’re engaged?”
Venezia would have answered, but we both heard my mother’s clippy little heels approaching and turned our faces toward her as she entered the kitchen.
“Vinny. Dear. Did you forget something?” she asked, casually brushing her hair back from her face to hide a momentary scowl.
“Yes. My bag. When you chased me out. Your daughter was so nice,” she added in a pointed tone, “that we just. got to talking. And there’s salad. So now I’ll get my things and get out of your way.” She stood up and walked to the door, sweeping a tan Gucci purse off the tiles. She slung it over her shoulder and came back to offer me her hand. “I enjoyed meeting you. I hope you’ll be back down for the wedding—it should be nice.”
Then she bustled out past my mother, who glared at her, and disappeared toward the front door. I heard the door close and silence fell for a moment.
Then my mother said, “Well. I was hoping to surprise you with that little tidbit, but I guess I won’t be doing that now.”
“It’s not that much of a surprise, Mother.”
Mother made an aghast face I didn’t buy for a minute. “Don’t you like Damon?”
“That’s irrelevant. Do you love him?”
“Marriage is not a matter of love—that’s just a fairy-tale idea. It’s about security. You may be perfectly content to gad about and take whatever comes, but when you’re my age, you want to know you won’t end up in some. old-folks ghetto.”
I was rolling my eyes so frequently around her, they might as well have been marbles. “Please, Mother. Security I understand, but you’re being melodramatic. You’re not going to end up in a Medicare home. You’re wealthy and you’re only sixty years old.”
“Fifty-nine!”
“Fifty-nine,” I agreed, putting my hands up in a placating gesture. “I’m just saying, you’re not old and you’re not going to be cast into the street. You don’t need to marry anyone. Unless there’s something you haven’t told me. I’d like to think that you’re getting married to someone you actually like and want to spend time with, not someone you think you need for financial reasons.”
“When did it become any of your business, Snippet?”
“You’re my mother.”
“That hasn’t made you care what I want in the past.”
I didn’t want to argue with her. I just wanted to return the box, take a few things, look at the family photos, and leave. I didn’t care to admit it, but I was feeling a little sorry for her. I’d always thought of her as mercenary, selfish, thoughtless, and pushy, and here she was challenging my prejudice. It was annoying.
“Let’s try this again. You’re getting married? Congratulations! I’m happy for you! Better?”
Mother pouted. “Yes.”
“Then let’s have lunch.”
We ate the salad, which was tasty but not what either of us really wanted. Mother ate more than I’d expected, but she still ended up picking out the fruit and leaving most of the meat and cheese behind. Neither of us was satisfied, but we didn’t say so.
Afterward I opened the box and asked to keep the Grey items—including the puzzle and the journals.
Mother waved them away. “Keep what you like. As you said, it’s your father’s junk and I realized I don’t really want it. You might as well have it.”
I put them aside and closed the box up before I glanced at her again.
“What happened to Dad’s receptionist?”
“Who?”
“Christelle LaJeunesse. Dad had a note in his journal that you thought he was having an affair with her. Then she just seemed to disappear. What happened to her?”
“Oh. Her. She just took off one day out of the blue. I never really thought Rob was. up to anything with her, but I think I may have said so once when I was mad at him. When he. died it was a nine days’ wonder, and the police did think he might have killed her, but they gave that idea up. It just didn’t fit, so they dropped it.”
“But what happened to Christelle?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea, nor do I care. I suppose she ran off with some man or changed her name and became a movie star—who knows? Does it matter?”
Only so far as determining if my father was a murderer. But I doubted that mattered to anyone but me. Was it better for him to have killed someone because he was deranged or for him to merely think he had, because he was slightly less deranged?
“No,” I lied. “I guess it doesn’t matter, really.” I picked up the box and carried it back down to the storage room. Mother followed me downstairs and perched on her ladder again as I replaced the box and pulled out the two Grey twinkling cartons of photos. They weren’t very large, but they were dense and heavy for their size, so I didn’t want to take them far. I also noticed my jeans and T-shirt were smeared with dust. I swatted the worst of it away and sneezed. Then I looked up and caught Mother’s eye.
“Is there someplace we can go through these that’s more comfortable?” I asked. “And not so dusty?” I’d forgotten how irritating the pollen-laden dust of Los Angeles in spring could be.
She hopped down from the ladder with her face alight. “Let’s take them to the living room! We can look at them on the coffee table.”
Back up the stairs and through the kitchen, I slogged with the boxes. Mother trotted ahead of me and turned through an arch that led away from the carport end of the house. I followed, still sneezing and humping boxes.
The living room was filled with flattering, cool light filtered through pale aqua curtains. The sheer panels over the windows moved in the breeze entering through the open French doors and turned the blue canyon light into rippling motes of color on the white walls. The furniture was all light and soft-looking also, made of curling gray metal and puffy overflowing cushions in pale watery colors. The coffee table looked like a mermaid’s forest of silver seaweed holding up a floating slab of sandblasted aquamarine glass. My mother scooped an arrangement of seashells and beach glass off the table and put it in the hearth of the small, white-plastered fireplace. It looked like a magical blaze of blue and green cold flames.