"You get boyfriend, you stop worry," she said.
I didn't want to tell her I had a boyfriend. Hers.
She turned on her side, her large nippled breast falling out of her bikini top to the workmen's vociferous approval. She hiked her top up, which called forth more excitement. She ignored it all, rested her head on her hand. "I been thinking. Everybody has license plate frame from dealer. Van Nuys Toyota, We're Number 1.1 think, we buy license plate frame, you paint nice, we get maybe ten, fifteen dollars. Cost us dollar."
"What's my cut?" I derived a perverse satisfaction in knowing the right moment to say it. I had arrived on Ripple Street, the paradise of my despair.
THE DARK GREEN Jaguar sedan parked in front of the plumbing contractor should have tipped me off, but I didn't put it together until I saw her in the living room, the explosion of black curls, her bright red lipstick I recognized from the news. She wore a white-trimmed navy blue Chanel suit that might even have been real. She was sitting on the green couch, writing a check. Rena was talking to her, smoking, laughing, her gold inlays glinting in her mouth. I wanted to run out the door. Only a morbid interest kept me in the room. What could she possibly have to say to me?
"She like the salad set." Rena looked at me. "She buy for friend collect Tiki everything."
"It's the latest," said the woman, handing the yellow check to Rena. "Tiki restaurants, mai tais, Trader Vic's, you name it." Her voice was higher than you'd think, girlish for a lawyer's.
She stood and held out her hand to me, short red nails garish against her white skin. She was shorter than I was. She wore a good, green-scented perfume, a hint of citrus, almost like a man's aftershave. She had on a gold necklace thick as a bike chain, with a square-cut emerald embedded in it. Her teeth were unnaturally white. "Susan D. Valeris."
I shook her hand. It was very small and dry. She wore a wide wedding band on her forefinger, and an onyx intaglio signet on the pinky of the other hand.
"You mind if Astrid and I. .. ?" she asked Rena, wagging her wedding-banded finger between the two of us. Eeny meeny miney mo.
"It's not problem," Rena said, looking at the check again, putting it in her pocket. "You can stay, see if there's anything else you like. Everything for sale."
When we were alone, Susan D. gestured to the green couch for me to sit down. I didn't. It was my house, I didn't have to follow instruction. "How much did you give her?"
"Doesn't matter," the lawyer said, taking her seat again. "The point is, you've been avoiding my calls." To my surprise, she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her Hermes Kelly bag, which I recognized from my Olivia days to be strictly genuine. "Mind if I smoke?"
I shook my head. She lit up with a gold lighter. Carrier — the gold pleats. "Cigarette?" she offered. I shook my head. She put the pack and the lighter down on the cluttered table, exhaled into the afternoon light. "I don't know why I never got around to quitting," she said.
"All the prisoners smoke," I said. "You can offer them a cigarette."
She nodded. "Your mother said you were bright. I think it was an underestimation." She looked around the crowded living room, the bentwood hatrack and the hi-fi and the records, the beaded lamp and the fringed lamp and the poodle lamp with the milk glass shade, the peasant woman with the orange scarf, and the rest of the artifacts in Rena's thrift shop. A white cat jumped into her lap and she quickly stood up, brushed off her navy suit. "Nice place you got here," she said, and sat back down, glancing for the location of the hairy interloper. "Looking forward to graduation? Making your plans for the future?"
I let my bookbag drop onto the dusty upholstered armchair, sending a cloud of motes up into the stuffy air. "Thought I might become a criminal lawyer," I said. "That or a hooker. Maybe a garbage collector."
She made no parry, kept her mind on her purpose. "May I ask why you haven't returned my calls?"
I leaned against the wall, watching her quick, confident movements. "Go ahead and ask," I said.
She put her slim red leather briefcase on her lap and opened it, removed a folder and a yellow legal pad. "Your mother said you might be difficult," she said. "That you blame her for what's happened." Susan gazed into my eyes, as if she got a point for every second of eye contact she could maintain. I could see her practicing in front of a mirror when she was in law school. I waited to hear the rest of the story they'd concocted. "I know you've been through a terrible ordeal," she said. She looked down at the file. "Six foster homes, MacLaren Hall. The suicide of your foster mother, Claire Richards, was it? Your mother said you were close to her. It must have been devastating."
I felt the wave of anger rise through me. Claire's death was mine. She had no right to handle it, to bring it up and somehow relate it to my mother's case. But maybe this too was a tactic. To get it all out in the open to begin with, so I wouldn't be sullen, withholding my feelings about Claire, difficult to draw out. An aggressive opening at chess. I saw that she knew just what she was doing. Going for the sore spot right away. "Did you ask your client about her involvement with that?"
"Surely you don't blame your mother for the death of a woman she only met once," Susan said, as if there was no question about the absurdity of such a statement. "She's not a sorcerer, is she?" She settled back on the couch, took a drag on her cigarette, watching me through the smoke, evaluating my reaction.
Now I was scared. The two of them could really pull this off. I saw how easily this bouquet of oleander and nightshade could be twisted around into a laurel wreath. "But I do blame her, Susan."
"Tell me," she said, holding the cigarette in the left hand, making some notes on the yellow pad with the right.
"My mother did everything she could do to get Claire out of my life," I said. "Claire was fragile and my mother knew exactly where to push."
Susan took a drag, squinted against the smoke. "And why would she do that?"
I pushed away from the wall and went over to the hatrack. I didn't want to look at her anymore, or rather, have her looking at me, sizing me up. I put on an old hat and watched her in the mirror. "Because Claire loved me." It was a straw hat with a net veil, I pulled the veil over my eyes.
"You felt she was jealous," Susan said in a motherly way, spewing smoke into the air, an octopus spraying ink.
I adjusted the veil, then tilted the brim of the hat. "She was extremely jealous. Claire was nice to me, and I loved her. She couldn't stand that. Not that she ever paid attention to me when she had the chance, but when someone else did, she couldn't take it."