Candles Burning (34 page)

“Who were the witnesses?” Mama demanded.

Miz Starret rattled her copy of the will. “Mr. Vincent Rider and someone named Martha Poe.”

“Rider? I never heard of him. And Martha Poe? What was she doing at the house?”

“Perhaps she was helping your mother with the will.”

“Why the hell would she do that? Martha's a nurse!”

“Really?” Mrs. Mank said. She had been so quiet that I had nearly forgotten that she was there. She was smiling in amusement. “I was under the impression Martha Poe was another girl lawyer—like Adele.”

Usually Mama remembered and kept track of her lies. That she had forgotten this one was a measure of her distress.

Mama hesitated a moment, then said, vaguely, “I believe Martha studied both medicine and law—at Huntingdon College—but couldn't make up her mind which one to devote herself to—curing people or getting them off the hook.” She changed the subject. “And that other one, Rider—some stranger, stranger to me, anyway.”

“Mr. Rider is new to Tallassee,” Miz Starret said, “so perhaps you never met him. He deals in pianos. Evidently your mama asked him to assess a piano that she had in mind to sell. He is a respectable businessman.”

“Mama would never have two strangers, one of them a complete stranger, some piano peddler, witness such an important document.”

“Nevertheless, the witnesses both confirm that your mother wrote out the entire will, signed it, enclosed it with the pen in the envelope, and sealed the envelope.”

Mama lit a cigarette with quivering fingers. None of it made sense. It was all bad.

What Miz Starret told Mama next was very much worse. “Your son will inherit somewhat over ten million dollars from your mother.”

Mama snarled, actually
snarled.
“Mama didn't have ten million dollars! Mama didn't have anything like that! She bought her Cadillacs on time!”

“I tend to estimate low in such matters.”

“I am listening to a lie!”

“Then it's not me that's lying,” returned Adele Starret. “It's U.S. Steel and AT&T and Coca-Cola that are lying when they tell me how much of their stock your mother owned.”

I waited for Mama to speak, to protest, to question, to prompt some mitigating response from Adele Starret. But she was rendered silent for a long moment. Cups clattered, the women sipped their coffee, Mama smoked.

Finally: “I want my baby boy. I'm his sole living parent. I only left him with Mama because he's sickly and she could take care of him. I was always gone go back for him. He'll surely be cheated out of his inheritance by that wicked old shyster Weems. Isn't there something I can do?”

“You did sign him over to your mother, and she made the choice to assign his protection to Mr. Weems and Dr. Evarts. But certainly you can sue to regain custody. You have a good chance. Most courts would be sympathetic to a blood relative, let alone a parent, seeking custody of a minor in your son's situation. Of course if you won, you would still have to work out some arrangement with Mr. Weems and Dr. Evart about access to his inheritance.”

“I was cheated once, and now I've been cheated twice,” said Mama. “First by the man I married, and then by the woman who gave me birth. It's not up to you and me anymore, Miz Starret, because they both are dead and beyond our reach.”

Miz Starret ignored the theatrical declaration to proceed to the practical. “What day did you leave Tallassee?”

“I didn't leave. My own mama hounded me out of town. The day Mama died.”

Miz Starret's voice became impatient. “What
day
of the week did your mother hound you out of Tallassee?”

Mama finally got what she meant. “Thursday. I know it was Thursday because there was a brand-new wheel of butter on the table Wednesday night, and the butter-lady comes on Wednesday morning, and there wasn't any left the night before.”

“So it was Thursday, the twenty-fourth of the month,” said Miz Starret.

“Yes. Thursday the twenty-fourth.”

“
Thursday,
the twenty-third,” said Miz Starret pointedly, “is how she dated the will. Either your mother got the day of the month wrong, or else she got the day of the week wrong.”

“What damn difference does it make? Mama couldn't even remember my birthday and on Thursday she was always thinking it was Friday.”

“Here's the damn difference it makes,” said Miz Starret, sounding like a real lawyer. “If she made out the will on the twenty-third and just got the day of the week wrong, then she was probably sane, and you are out of luck.”

Mama sat up straighter. “But if she got the day of the month wrong, that means she wrote the will on Thursday, the day she lost her mind and went out buying up every umbrella in town. And if she was crazy when she made out the will, then—”

“Then we can contest it,” Adele Starret said with great satisfaction.

ADELE Starret must have noted the discrepancy in the date when she obtained the will. She might have told Mama at once. But she didn't.

Mama was instantly invigorated. Mamadee might be dead but Mama could still fight her, with no possibility of Mamadee retaliating down the line. Once the money was hers again, Mama would not only be returned to her rightful station in life—rich—but would have Ford back.

Mama was ready to whip Miz Starret off the verandah to her automobile, so urgently did she want the woman lawyer to get started.

Miz Starret was not so easily moved. She had something else on her mind. “We haven't talked about a fee for my services yet.”

“I'd give you a million dollars, Miz Starret, just to see justice done, but as you see I have been robbed blind twice already in the past year, and I don't have a penny to my name,” Mama said.

“I understand that, and I'm willing to wait until we come to the resolution of the case. Lawyers do it all the time. We call it a contingency fee.” Miz Starret continued, “My fee will not be a million dollars. I'll satisfy myself with fifteen percent of whatever may be the total of the estate that eventually comes to you.”

After a pause, Mama spoke. “That seems a lot to me.”

“I regret to say that I never bargain,” said Miz Starret.

She stood. Miz Verlow and Mrs. Mank came to their feet a fraction of a second later.

“Thank you, Merry Verlow,” Miz Starret said. “It was a pleasure to see you again.”

“Give my love to Fennie,” returned Miz Verlow.

“Thank you, my dear,” Mrs. Mank told Miz Starret in a grim tone that was just short of an apology.

Mama was too agitated to react coherently.

Adele Starret reached the verandah steps before Mama caught up with her.

“Miz Starret!” Mama lowered her voice but her words tumbled out breathlessly. “I thought you said
fifty
percent. I thought you meant
half
! Of course you get your
fifteen
percent!”

“Fifteen percent!” Mrs. Mank said, from just behind Mama.

Mama jumped. She hadn't noticed Mrs. Mank following her. Or Miz Verlow, for that matter.

Clutching the dropped pen, I crept after them, beneath the verandah, until I reached the steps. The skirt there gapped a little, to allow the ascent of the steps, and I was still small enough to slip out, and into the shadows, without being noticed. Quietly I emerged from the shadows to sit on the bottom step, as if I had been there all along.

“Normally,” Mrs. Mank said, “my friend Adele wouldn't take a case like this at all. She was considering it only as a favor to me. Even when she takes on such cases, cases with much more likelihood of success, she'd take twenty-five percent at the very least, and her usual rate is a full one-third of the estate.”

Miz Starret, Mrs. Mank and Miz Verlow started down the steps, with Mama falling in behind them. They skirted me as if I were a plant pot that had always squatted there at the turn of the railing. I jumped up and grabbed Mama's skirt. She glanced down at me without surprise or any particular interest.

Mrs. Mank and the woman lawyer stood a few yards away, engaged in a seemingly casual murmured exchange. They chuckled. They were recollecting the meal they had eaten at Merrymeeting. Mama couldn't hear them, of course.

“Don't just stand there like a street sign,” Mama said, “start praying, because if Mrs. Mank caint get that woman lawyer to contest that will, then you and I are going to starve, and since you are littler, you are going to wither away weeks before I do.” Mama hugged herself. “I caint take this anymore,” she said finally. “I'm going inside and slit my throat. If they ever finish out there, come in and tell me what they decided.”

Mama went past Miz Verlow, watching her friend Mrs. Mank and Mrs. Mank's friend Adele Starret having their tête-à-tête, at the bottom of the steps. The screen door slapped smartly after Mama going into the house.

“The dishes,” Miz Verlow said, without looking at me.

I climbed the steps and went to the alcove, where I picked up the envelope, folded it and tucked it into one sock. The pen went into the other. I stacked the cups and saucers the four women had abandoned and carried them to the kitchen. Cleonie and Perdita ignored my entrance. On my step stool, I could see into the parking area, where Mrs. Mank now stood at the open driver's window of a late-model yellow Cadillac, still talking to Miz Starret behind the wheel. Just as I had seen Miz Verlow saying good-bye to Mrs. Mank. At last the woman lawyer turned the key in the ignition and drove away, while Mrs. Mank watched her going.

We retired to our room that night as soon as was decently possible.

Ostensibly in the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face, I locked the door and examined the pen and the envelope. On the envelope was written

 
The Last will and testament of Deirdre Carroll.

 
The ball of the pen glistened with green ink.

Mama was waiting in our room.

“Give it to me.” Mama held out her hand.

One after the other, I removed the pen from one sock and the folded envelope from the other sock and handed them over.

She studied the envelope for a long moment before she looked up at me.

“Do you know what this means?”

I nodded.

Mama threw the envelope down on her vanity and dropped the pen on top of it.

“I caint believe it!” She sat down on the edge of the bed and thrust out one foot.

I tugged off her shoes for her.

“Go take care of your hands,” she said.

When I came back from brushing my teeth, washing my face and my hands, she was in her pajamas.

She reached for the ashtray and her cigarettes and settled onto her bed. She watched me open her jar of foot balm.

“I've been a fool,” said Mama. “I believed that Mama loved me. Deep down. She loved me. But she never did. She must have hated me.”

“Reckon she did,” I agreed, sitting at her feet.

Mama waved her cigarette at me. “What do you know about it? You're seven years old. Both your mama and your daddy have loved you every day of your life. You may be a Dakin but you've had every damn thing you ever wanted. Your daddy spoiled you rotten.”

Preferring that she rant on, for whatever I could glean from her unguarded speech, I said nothing.

“I don't know why I am the least bit surprised,” Mama went on. “I should have seen it. I thought that when I ran away to Grandmama's that I was just trying to get out from under her thumb. I should have thought about my sisters and what she did to them. The only one of us she ever gave a damn about was Bobby. And then Ford. She had to get Ford away from me.”

Risking the possibility that she would button up at an interruption, I asked, in a whisper, “What did she do?”

Mama was blowing smoke circles at the ceiling. “Grandmama came and took them away and Mama said good riddance.”

I dug my knuckles into the sole of her foot the way she liked and coached her, “Tell me about Great-grandmama.”

She closed her eyes. “Keep doing that. Nobody knows how I suffer with my feet. They are just an agony tonight.”

A few minutes went by and I figured that she had done talking about anything that I wanted to know.

“My grandmama,” she said, her free hand gone to her bosom, “loved me. She really did love me. She
took
Faith and Hope, but
welcomed
me, when I ran away to her. I didn't need to be anything but myself.”

“But why did she take them?”

She gave me an irritated look and I wished that I hadn't asked.

“They were special,” she said, with a deliberately false lightness. “Very special.”

“Why?” I prodded.

Mama narrowed her eyes at me. “We were talking about me.”

I applied myself at once to her feet.

“I wasn't as old as you are now when Grandmama took them away. I can hardly remember them.”

“What did Grandmama do with them?”

“Raised them,” Mama said. “I swear you cannot be my child, you can be so dim.”

“Where are they now?”

Mama ground out the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray. “Do I look like a Missing Persons Bureau? Mind what you are about and stop your endless ridiculous questions.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I agreed.

She settled back and closed her eyes again.

Moments passed and her breathing seemed to even. I capped the jar.

“I was supposed to be Charity,” Mama whispered. “Do I look like a Charity to you?”

I gave her no answer.