At Risk of Being a Fool (9 page)

“He’s so nice. Wish he was mine. But I’d be lousy at taking care of him. Like Dominic.”

“That’s your son.”

“Yeah. Nine months old.” Tears rolled steadily. “He was a drug baby.”

Brynna and Sorrel disappeared into the women’s bathroom. They’d probably be there for half an hour, but that was okay. Jeanie doubted the classroom would be useable for a while. Quinto collapsed in the corner again, wrapping his arms around his knees. Tonio strolled down the hallway and crouched beside him.

“I didn’t mean for him to get hurt,” Rosalie mumbled. “I cleaned up when I saw him hurting after he was born. I couldn’t stand it, that I hurt my own baby. And I
wanted
to take care of him, be a good mother. I did, Jeanie, I really did.”

The imploring look tore Jeanie’s heart. “I know that.”

“Only, my Dad and Mom, they wouldn’t even see us. Well, Mom, she did, when I saw her in grocery stores, but Dad, he said I was,” the words sank into a singsong chant, “a disgrace, a whore, dishonor to the family. Before the baby, my Dad caught me with Dominic’s Daddy once, and chased him off with his gun.

“All my life, I was Daddy’s girl, and now he won’t say nothing to me, nothing at all. Hangs up if I call, yells at my Mom if she says my name. I thought I could do it, be a mommy, but that money come in, for the welfare, and I spent it all on meth. There’s my baby, crying, needing stuff, and I spent it all. Every dime.”

Corrigan squirmed closer and rubbed his nose against the girl’s face.

“Dominic’s safe now, and so are you. You’re doing well at Esperanza.”

“I guess. But the judge, he took my baby away, gave him to foster care. The lady there, she wants to adopt him. Maybe I should let her, my baby don’t need no fucked-up druggie. His Daddy sure don’t want him. You should’ve heard him cuss out the judge about child support. Judge Hodges threw him in jail for thirty days. Jeanie, I love my baby. I do love him.”

“Sometimes,” Jeanie said, “the best love there is, is to let someone go to a safer place.” Her throat closed, as the parallel overwhelmed her. Edward lived in a safer place.
But I need him so much. No one else knows me.

“Hey, don’t you cry, too. You’re twisting your ring, like you do when you’re worried. It’s no good crying, Jeanie, it don’t change nothing.” Rosalie shook Jeanie’s wrist.

The touch, from one of her “untouchables,” made her dizzy. Jeanie drew a shaky breath, and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Hey, we’re twins, with our blotchy faces. Don’t we look awful?”

Rosalie managed a chuckle. “Maybe you should wear makeup, Jeanie. Want to borrow mine?”

“No thanks. By the time it covers all the freckles, it looks like a mud pie on a snowman. Hang on a minute.” Jeanie went to the bathroom and retrieved several twists of toilet paper. Sorrel and Brynna were completely engrossed at opposite ends of the mirror. She blew her nose and took the rest of the tissue out to Rosalie.

Rosalie unslung her purse from her shoulder and rummaged through it. “Hey, Jeanie, how about a tattoo? One of the girls, she got a bunch of tattoos at those little machine-things? She gave me one.”

A business card fell onto the floor. Oscar Kemmerich, Attorney at Law. A scribble in Rosalie’s unformed handwriting read
Silvio
, followed by a phone number. Dominic’s father, perhaps?

Rosalie snatched it up, stuffed it into the bottom of her purse, and extracted the stickers. “Here it is, see? You stick it on, and press hard, and the paper comes off. It’s a butterfly.”

You are a butterfly
, thought Jeanie.

Rosalie smiled. “Here, let me, please? I want to.” Her sadness had vanished.

“Well,” said Jeanie, “all right.” She held out her arm.

“No,” said Rosalie, with a teasing note. “There, right there.”

Jeanie found a paper pressed to her cheek. Fingers rubbed and pried carefully.

“There, it looks great. Hey, Quinto, Tonio, look at this. Don’t she look great?”

Chuckles spread through the hallway, in melodic counterpoint to the fist pounding the walls of the classroom.

~*~

“Only a few more steps, Edward, we’re almost there. Now a step up. Foot up, up, up; there you go.”

“I do believe we’ve made it,” said Edward in surprise.

Jeanie beamed at him. Kherra was right; he was having a good day. She’d said other things too, less palatable. “Don’t you go foolin’ yourself, Jeanie girl,” Kherra warned. “It’s not an improvement. It’s an oasis in the desert.” Kherra, of milk-chocolate skin and many-braided hair, was a lady of infinite heart. Emergencies flooded into her hands on a daily basis and emerged as gentle streams sliding through her capable fingers.

“Yes, of course,” Jeanie said. But Kherra looked troubled as they left.

An apple-blueberry crisp was baking in the oven, as was Edward’s favorite hot chili casserole. He loved strong flavors, to do battle with his fading taste buds. Jeanie had cranked up the spice on her chili until she feared a visit from the fire marshal. Edward looked around the small living room. He’d been there many times, and even stayed overnight in the hospital bed that took up so much room in the larger bedroom. The unfamiliarity still threw him.

“The house looks smaller than it used to,” he said.

“After the boys grew up, we didn’t need such a big house. And now you stay at your club so much, it seemed better to get a smaller house.”

“Ah. I see. I believe I have a new investor, did I tell you? A young man came by late last night. I saw him through the window, admiring the club’s garden. I rapped on the window and invited him in, but he left suddenly. No doubt he’ll return during regular business hours.” Edward was always in “business” of some sort. Lately, it was an environmentally conscious energy producer.

“A new investor? How encouraging.” Now he was seeing phantoms in the garden at night. The floor seemed to tilt, as it did when she faced his delusions. It was like living in a house of mirrors, where everything was askew by a few vital degrees.

“Yes,” mused Edward. A vague frown furrowed his forehead. “I’m not quite sure how he left. I didn’t think there was door just there, in the garden. A gate, I mean. Is there?”

“I’m sure there must be, if he didn’t come inside,” she said with false cheer.

“Tell me about your day. You seem a little stressed,” he said.

She sat on the floor and pulled off his shoes. His feet were like blocks of wood. She rubbed his feet, trying to loosen the stiffness in his ankles, as she rambled on about her day. The flow of words seemed to relax him.

“
...
So, I took Rosalie home. After all that uproar, I didn’t want her to get sidetracked on the way to the bus. Mackie says there’s at least one drug house about a block away, and Rosalie could sniff it out in a flash. Corrigan calmed her down a great deal.”

Rita jumped onto the sofa, and settled into Edward’s lap, purring loudly. Jeanie found herself watching his wrists, assessing his joint movement as he stroked her. “Yesterday, I found Rosalie down the hall talking to that lawyer, Kemmerich. I called her back to the classroom, and she bounced right in, the way she does
...
you know, like a little girl skipping rope. I asked if he was bothering her. I thought maybe he was hitting on her, but she said no, he was just asking about the bus schedule.” She sighed. “It might even be true, but you can never tell, with Rosalie. I just hate it, the way he hovers, as if he’s waiting for us to do something illegal. Lawyers!”

“Some of my best friends . . .” Edward said, letting the sentence die suggestively.
Some of my best friends are lawyers, but I wouldn’t want my son to marry one.

They both laughed. Edward sobered, staring at her intently. Jeanie met his eyes.
Please love me, Edward
, she thought
. Please show me that you remember me.

Slowly a smile engulfed his face. “Why Jeanie, my love, it appears that a butterfly has landed on your cheek.” He touched the ink tattoo with a gentle finger.

Jeanie clutched his hand. She lowered his feet to the floor, and snuggled next to him on the sofa, her arms around him. “Edward, my darling, I do love you so.”

She was home again, for the moment. Thank God.

~*~

It was fun, being invisible. He hid his grin. Some of the guys bragged about how good they were, how they could mooch around looking like regular kids. He didn’t say nothing, just listened to ‘em talk. Because they were wrong. You didn’t want to look like everyone else, be part of a crowd. People noticed crowds of young guys. But no one noticed him.

He lay on the grass on his stomach, waving his feet in the air. With a pen wedged between his teeth, he studied a magazine open on the ground, where anyone could see it. He wasn’t looking at guns, like a hood, no way. No, he was just dreaming about the cars he wanted, circling engine features, and making little notes inside the back of the magazine, of prices and car parts. He’d seen the feet pause near him, the looks landing on the open magazine, the casual dismissal of a thing noted and promptly forgotten. Besides, he liked cars.

He liked a few other things, too. That was what it was all about, wasn’t it? Improving your life, getting what you wanted? A high school teacher had told him that, like she never realized what a guy like him might want. She was thinking about her safe little house, her two-point-five kids, her guy in the armchair, pretty painted pictures on the wall, and a nice ocean cruise. God, what an idiot.

He looked down the hill and watched this one, the new teacher, hanging onto the old guy at the bridge over the lake. He’d asked around, broke into the classroom one night, and poked around in the office. He’d asked the others, to see if he’d missed something, but they agreed. She never talked about her family, or stuck pictures on her desk. He’d found some names and phone numbers, but not many. Kherra, Keith, Geoff, and Shelley. Shelley’s didn’t look like any phone number he’d ever seen, had periods in it instead of dashes. Maybe it was a web site. He’d written it down, so he could check it out. Mackie’s Rolodex had the teacher’s address and a phone number for Oriole’s Nest. That turned out to be an old folks’ home.