Blood Orange (20 page)

He was drawn and quartered by the demands made of him: as a
lawyer, a husband, a father, a man who cared about doing the right
thing by his client, his wife, his child. He wanted to say, I love you,
we love each other. He wanted to ask, Don’t we? Don’t we?

“I’ll come home,” he said. “Four?”

Her eyes softened.

He said, “Promise me you’ll think about Marsha.”

It was how the game was played. You gave up a little yardage,
but if you kept your eye on the goal, you got to the end zone anyway.
It took a while and wore you out, and sometimes you wondered
why you bothered, but you got there eventually.

ana knew she would eventually give in. And she knew that
)David also knew it. At breakfast she said Marsha Filmore
could live over the garage until the case was over. She could have
said it the night before and made it easy for both of them; but they
did not dance that way at their house. Dana thought all marriages
must have such patterns of feint and parry, dominance and submission, the unique choreography of the relationship.

She had not told David about the note left on her front seat.
When he came home late and in a bad mood, thinking only of himself and his work, she had perversely kept silent, not wanting to
share any more than the time of day with him. She wondered if she
was being irrational, then decided not. There was nothing David
could do about the note, and his mind was already crammed full.
With a pinch of guilt she realized that knowing something he did
not gave her an energizing sense of power.

In the afternoon she spent an hour trying to make a few notes
about the Nerli Altarpiece but she did not get far. She liked thinking about her thesis more than writing it. Actually, lately, she wasn’t
much interested in thinking about it, either. Bailey pestered her, wanting to be held; and Moby barked at anything that moved on
the street. Now, as she drove to her grandmother’s house, she
thought about families and wondered if, in the Middle Ages, husbands and wives had danced around each other as they did in the
twenty-first century. Maybe Tanai Nerli had gone in his carriage to
San Frediano to visit his daughter because his wife was driving him
around the bend and halfway to the bughouse with complaints
about the servants and demands for a larger, grander palazzo.
Maybe he always escaped to his daughter’s instead of staying home
and fighting it out. And maybe the wife resented the daughter because of it. Or perhaps the art historians were all wrong and the
woman in the background was Nerli’s lover, not his daughter. In the
painting Lippi had captured husband and wife kneeling in the foreground, gazing at one another devotedly. But if Dana knew how to
paint smiles over her anger, it was likely the Nerlis also covered their
grudges and resentments. Dana did not call this lying. Without
masking, marriage would be impossible.

Or maybe it was her thinking that was cockeyed. Maybe most
husbands and wives waltzed through marriage like Ginger and
Fred. As usual, she could only guess at what normal was.

The North Park business district had been shabby for as long as
she could remember. The big red and blue neon hand advertising
VOICE OF THE SOUL PSYCHIC READINGS had occupied the same space
since Dana scooped ice cream at the Baskin-Robbins down the
street. There were a few restaurants with signs in their windows advertising DISCOUNTS FOR SENIORS, bars where Happy Hour stretched
from two in the afternoon until nine or ten at night, some thrift
shops, and a couple of storefronts where for a fee a person could
borrow against the next month’s government check. In her grandmother’s neighborhood the houses were small frame Craftsmen
built in the twenties or pseudo-Spanish bungalows, barely more than cottages. Some had been gentrified, a few had expensive additions, but most were old and worn out. The owners were probably
senior citizens like Imogene, surviving on fixed incomes and paying
in Prop Thirteen-protected taxes a fraction of what their golden
property was worth.

A white Dodge van was parked in Imogene’s driveway. It wasn’t
anything like the one that had run over Moby Doby, but, still, it was
a van and it was white, and those two things were enough to encourage the voices of panic. For a few minutes Dana’s imagination
ran wild with “maybes” and “what if”s.

She drove around the block to find a parking place.

The bungalow where Dana had lived from the age of five until
she went to college was not as rundown as those on either side of it.
She and David had it painted every other year and paid for a oncea-month gardener to trim the grass and groom the pink hydrangea
bushes under the windows. At the edge of the porch stairs Dana
paused to check the bushes for whitefly.

Her grandmother’s voice, still strong despite her eighty-four
years, came from behind the screen door. “It’s you. I didn’t know
for sure you were coming.”

Dana drew her hands back covered with a sticky white powder.
She brushed them together and a cloud of bugs, like tiny white dash
marks, floated upward.

“You’ve got whiteflies.”

“That man you send over, he’s no good. Don’t do anything but
hack up my lawn with that noisy power mower.”

“Hi, Grandma.”

“Hi, yourself.” She held open the screen. “Come in if you’re
coming”
.

Imogene’s hair was the flat black color of India ink, and she wore
it in a tightly turned and sprayed pageboy. She was tall, long waisted, and not so much fat as large. “A big-boned gal,” David
said. As a girl Dana had been mortified by everything about her
grandmother but especially by her baggy breasts swinging side to
side under the outsized man’s T-shirt she usually wore. Beneath
Levi’s rolled to midcalf, her legs were pale and blue-veined. Dana
still hated the way her grandmother looked, still cringed with mortification at the sight of her ridiculous clothes, her painted mouth.

Imogene turned her cheek for Dana’s dutiful kiss.

The kissing was new, and Dana did not like it. Up close, under a
heavy dusting of rose-scented powder, her grandmother smelled
stale and greasy, and although she claimed to have given up cigarettes, she smelled like smoke.

“I don’t have long,” Dana said.

“You never do.”

“I brought you a check.”

“It won’t bounce, will it? That time last February, the bank
wouldn’t take it.”

“I told you, Grandma, David had to borrow from our personal
account to pay some of the office expenses.”

“Maybe he shouldn’t be in business if he can’t pay his bills.”

And maybe I should walk out of here and never come back. Dana
slung her shoulder bag over the back of a chair and perched, glancing around at the familiar front-room furnishings. Her imagination
cramped at the effort it took to see the child Imogene playing the
baby grand piano that took up half the front room. She still played
well, though her musical choices were peculiar: hymns and jazzy
Broadway tunes. Dana dimly remembered being told that Imogene
had once been a band singer, traveling across country in a bus, the
only woman. Despite doubts about the truth of that story, Dana momentarily felt sorry for her grandmother’s lost dreams, whatever
they were. Then she remembered waxing the piano every week, and the sound of Imogene’s voice sawing the air on Wednesday afternoons: “Elbow grease, Danita. Show some muscle.”

“Why didn’t you bring Bailey? I like that child. I’d like half a
chance to know her.”

“She irritates you.”

“That’s what you tell me, but I haven’t noticed it myself.”

“She’s got a cold.” It had always been easy to lie to Imogene.
“Another time.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re not eighty-four years old.” Imogene
spoke of her aching hip, her stiff hands, her bad eyesight and constant indigestion. Dana tuned her out.

In the kitchen a drawer squeaked.

“Do you have company? I heard a drawer.”

“Must be a ghost.”

No more irritating woman walked the planet.

“We have to talk about money, Grandma.”

“Two hundred’s not so much.” Imogene eased herself into her
Lazy Boy recliner with its flattened cushions and threadbare arms.
A blue towel lay across the headrest. “What happened to all the
cash David got when he was a quarterback?”

“That was years ago.” And David had never been a high-advance,
big-paycheck athlete. Despite high school and college stardom, he
had been chosen late in the draft; his only really big bonus came as
the result of a Monday-night game against the Raiders when he
went in after the half and threw two touchdown passes for an upset
win. Commentators still talked about that game. For a while he’d
been the team and the town’s glory boy, but it had been a fluke performance, a lucky afternoon for David and the Chargers, nothing
more.

“Maybe you shouldn’t of bought that expensive Mission Hills
house.”

“This isn’t about how we spend our money.”

“I know Mission Hills, and I wouldn’t want to live there if I
couldn’t afford to.”

Heat rose up Dana’s neck and spread out along her jawline.
“Grandma, you’ve got to do better living on what you’ve got. You
buy too many lottery tickets.” She made no house payments. She
did not drive a car. “We can’t keep giving you extra.”

Imogene had never given Dana anything extra. At fourteen Dana
struck a deal with the owner of the ice cream shop. He paid her
cash to scoop his thirty-six flavors through the dinner hour until
ten, when business was always slow. She had time to study, and
when she got home she stayed up half the night with her books and
made the grades that got her a scholarship, first to Bishop’s School
and then to Miami of Ohio.

Dana said, “Since the start of the year-“

“You could work for the IRS, the way you count pennies.”

“Seems like I learned from the Queen of Cheap.”

“Don’t start complaining.”

Don’t complain, because it does no good; don’t complain, because, as Lexy had told her so often, it was all in the past now, and
the past was just a story. It was Dana’s choice to hold on to the story
or let it go.

Let it go, let it go.

In the kitchen the radio blared and the voice of a talk-show host
sawed through the door between the rooms. As abruptly as it came
on, it went off.

“Clock radio,” Imogene said.

Dana would not give her grandmother the satisfaction of her curiosity. She put the check on the piano. “I can’t stay, Grandma.
David came home from work to watch Bailey.”

“How is she?”

“She’s fine.”

“You bend the truth, bad as your mom.”

Dana told Imogene about the bodysurfing and Bailey’s gregarious behavior at Bella Luna.

“That’s good news; you should be grinning ear to ear. How come
you look like you’re carrying a grand piano on your back? You’ve
got something on your mind, Danita. Spit it out.”

Conversations with Imogene were always this way. She knew
more and better than Dana, no matter what the subject, what the
issue.

“What happened?”

“Oh, there was a note.”

“Another one.”

“Different. Not threatening this time. Just someone wanting attention. “

“What did it say?”

Dana told her. Don’t be afraid. I love you both.

“Gives me gooseflesh.” Imogene rubbed the tops of her arms.
“What’s the cop think?”

“I haven’t told him yet.”

“Why not?”

“There hasn’t been time.”

“Bullshit. For something like this, there’s always time.” Splaying
her hands on the arms of the recliner, Imogene levered herself onto
her feet. She winced and rubbed the small of her back. “Danita,
what do you know that you’re not telling?”

“If I knew something, don’t you think I’d tell Lieutenant Gary?”

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

Dana jerked the door open and stepped onto the porch. “I don’t
have time to stand here and discuss this. David has to go back to the
office.” She could not wait to get away.

“If you were to ask me, he’s wasting his time defending that
slimy s.o.b. Everyone knows he did it. He’s gonna get the gas for
sure.” She tugged her denim pants down at the crotch. “Probably
done plenty else, from the smarmy looks of him.”