Double Cross (16 page)
While the type of life I’d lived was certainly no better—flash back to eight o’clock that very morning— I had at least never had the audacity to hold myself out to the world as anything other than a person careening toward damnation. The rotten men and cheap booze (or was it rotten booze and cheap men?) had left little time for the spiritual. That is, until I met Simon. While he had not pulled off a Road-to-Damascus conversion on me, a Bible story told and retold to recovering alcoholics, Simon had nudged me to what could charitably be described as the periphery of the outer edge of faith. Thanks particularly to the alcohol-recovery program, his efforts appeared to be working. That is, until Rob Morrow pulled up in his Ferrari.
Since drying out, I’d become an occasional Bible reader, although still not a churchgoer. Granted, I most often picked up the Bible when my cravings for a Maker’s Mark were the strongest, but I picked it up nonetheless. That was progress. On the downside, though, I had not yet learned to view the Good Book as much more than a literary curiosity with a talismanic tendency to calm me when I was twitching in the direction of the nearest bar.
So, struggling under the weight of as much emotional and spiritual baggage as any twenty-nine-year-old should have to deal with, my overriding thought as my mother held open the back door of Stanley’s BMW was,
What a stinking hypocrite!
Nevertheless, I got in and slid across the black leather seat to the other side. She got in beside me.
What a stinking hypocrite!
Nevertheless, I got in and slid across the black leather seat to the other side. She got in beside me.
Stanley turned and looked over the seat.
“Stanley, this is my daughter Taylor. Taylor, this is my husband, Stanley. Isn’t he cute?”
He ran a hand through his graying hair, which was sparse on top and too long everywhere else, and stuck his other hand over the back of the driver’s seat. “Nice to meet you,” he said, in a baritone voice that seemed a mismatch for his narrow nose and thin lips.
I took his hand and shook it. It was slender and damp, and when he turned away from me to pull the car onto the street, I wiped my palm on the leg of my jeans.
“If I had known we were going to church, I would have dressed a little nicer.” I tugged at the hem of my fitted leather jacket, as if by pulling hard enough I could somehow convert it to a skirt. I’d lived most of my life in inappropriate attire, and my uncanny talent for dressing wrong no longer completely unnerved me the way it had when I was younger. Still, it was a flaw that was unmatched in its ability to accentuate my long list of insecurities. I let go of my jacket and twisted a finger in my hair as I thought about what I should be wearing.
“Your jeans are just fine, dear.” My mother pulled her mink wrap around her shoulders. “You know how the kids are nowadays. They wear just about anything to church. You’ll probably be dressed better than most of them.”
“That’s great, but I’m twenty-nine years old.”
“Of course you are, but you’ll always be my little girl. Did you know that the average American owns seven pairs of jeans? Stanley, turn up the heat, it’s like an icebox in here.”
Stanley sighed and pressed a button on the dash.
My meeting with my mother had been strange the week before, but this was downright surreal. She acted as if I were still nine and had just come home from summer camp. I wondered whether she had any concept of the passage of time. Plus, she was a walking Trivial Pursuit game. The pitch and yaw of the conversation left me yearning for solid ground. Like a passenger on a boat in a rough sea, I looked out the window and tried to focus on the horizon.
After driving for ten minutes down a parkway lined with subdivisions with names like Astor Ridge and Chesterfield Falls, Stanley pulled the car into the circular drive of the Calvary Baptist Church. Judging by the size of the building, the height of the sparkling steeple, and the quality of dress of the people entering the church, this was not just any old church in Southlake society.
Stanley glanced back over the seat. “I’ll park. You get us a place to sit.”
My mother stepped out of the car and slung her wrap around her shoulders with a flair. Without even a glance behind at me, she strode up the stairs with her head held high. I stopped on the second stair and watched her. She was making an entrance, and I may as well have been wherever I had been for the past twenty years. I sighed and followed, increasingly conscious with each step that I was the only adult in sight who was wearing blue jeans.
When she arrived at the door, she turned to me. “For such a young, healthy thing, you certainly walk slowly. What happened to your finger?”
So, she’d finally noticed. I opened my mouth to explain, but she turned away and walked through the door. My shoulders sagged.
We stepped into a huge, carpeted vestibule where people milled everywhere. As we approached the entrance to the sanctuary, a tall greeter with a thick Texas accent said, “Mornin’ to you, Mrs. Venable.” He handed us each a bulletin. My mother nodded at him with no more sense of recognition than if he were a bellman at a hotel. She walked down the aisle and selected a seat halfway to the pulpit in the center section.
The choir began its opening number, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” a song I actually had a faint memory of from my childhood. Before they were halfway through the first verse, my mother began to sing, softly but audibly. I turned to her, my eyes wide, but she was looking straight ahead. I glanced around to see whether anyone else seemed to hear her. No one was looking, but her voice grew stronger with each passing second. Soon, I noticed a few people giving her furtive looks. Others seemed oblivious, though by now her voice was loud enough to be heard halfway to the front row.
I tugged her sleeve. “I don’t think the congregation is supposed to sing along with this.”
She patted my hand. “Honey, this is church. We’re here to praise the Lord. If people don’t want to hear it, that’s their problem.”
Stanley slid into the pew next to me. He must have noticed the horror on my face. He leaned toward me and whispered, “Don’t let it bother you. The regulars are accustomed to it.”
“Doesn’t it embarrass you?”
He shrugged, then pulled a graphing calculator out of his pocket, and went to work on some sort of calculation. Just a hunch, but I don’t think it had anything to do with the pastor’s theme for the day.
By the time the song ended, my good hand was squeezing the edge of the pew so tight that the blood had left my knuckles. I eased my grip and took a deep breath. When I opened the bulletin, I received a confirmation that God was truly merciful: The choir didn’t have any more numbers scheduled for the service.
Although I had been inside some churches since I was nine, I hadn’t been to an actual church service. My mother had been right, though, when she said that we attended church every Sunday when I was a kid. As the service unfolded, everything was reasonably familiar. The sanctuary, with its white arches and cryptic stained glass, was far fancier than the church of my youth, but still not as imposing as some of the cathedrals in D.C. where my Secret Service pals and I had worked functions. The rhythm of the service was similar to those I remembered from my childhood.
As the minister shared a story about a neighbor who was crushed beyond solace at the loss of a child, I thought of the night Dad died. We had relaxed by the campfire and talked, and it had been nice. I learned more about him in that one conversation by the fire than I had my entire life. I learned about the things that haunted him; the marks that war and killing—necessary killing, but still killing—had made on him. I remembered, in particular, one thing that he told me about my mother, who by then had been gone eight years. He said that before her emotional problems won out, she had been a woman of faith, of strength. He worried that he had cheated me of that faith, which he clearly viewed as important.
All of that came before the men with the shotgun arrived, and the talking stopped.
I looked at my mother and tried to picture her in the way Dad had described her, but I couldn’t. Each time she breathed, the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes contracted and expanded, struggling to break through the putty of her makeup, struggling to reach the light once again. She had so thoroughly buried her face’s strong, solid features that I wondered if I would someday discover that she was little more than a clown. But Dad had loved her to the end, even after she’d been gone so many years. That was proof enough for me that she wasn’t a clown. There was something of substance beneath the tacky façade. There had to be.
She turned to me and smiled, and I thought I noted a hint of real affection in the way the tiny lines above her lip crinkled. We see what we want to see, though, and I was afraid that my emotions were trying to PhotoShop a picture that was as impassive as a still life.
I had trouble concentrating on the pastor’s message, but when he began his closing prayer, I lowered my head along with the rest of the congregation. Simon had taught me to pray, but the results had left much to be desired. After all, Simon was dead. If God was much of a listener, he had given a strangely tone-deaf response when he deleted from my life the one man who had mattered to me since my father died. Despite my doubts, though, Simon gave me hope, and sitting there in the pew next to my mother, I raised a hopeful prayer that God would give my mom back to me again.
As we filed out of the sanctuary, my mother looked right past me as she nodded at this person and that. Waiting on the front steps for Stanley to pull the BMW around, she finally spoke to me—but only about the nasal quality of the pastor’s voice and the garishness of the song leader’s tie.
Once we were on our way back down the boulevard toward their house, she fanned herself with the church bulletin. “Pastor Franklyn is a good man, but sometimes he just goes on so long—and the perfume on that woman next to me! I thought I was going to be asphyxiated.” She glanced at me. “Oh, sorry, that was a poor choice of words in light of your friend’s suicide.”
I kept my eyes on the back of Stanley’s head. “It’s all right.”
“I would have introduced you to some people, but I thought you would be uncomfortable, what with your blue jeans and all.”
As she yammered, I picked at a thread that dangled from the seam of my pocket. They weren’t even my best jeans. I snapped off the thread.
On the way back to their house, I spent a lot of time looking out the window. I turned occasionally to nod or smile, just enough to look like I was listening. I was thinking, though, about Simon. He worked so hard to sell me on the idea of God, but here I was disappointed again. After all, what good is God if he never, ever gives a person a break?
Dad had always warned me that self-pity was like quicksand. If you let yourself get too deep in it, it becomes nearly impossible to get out. During that ride back to my mother’s, though, I quietly wallowed in it. And I enjoyed it. I wondered when it would be my turn; my turn to have an anchor in my life; my turn to have someone who would love me no matter what. Maybe it was too much to ask. Or maybe it was simply that God works methodically just like the rest of us. Even he must need time to fix a mother-daughter relationship as messed up as this one.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
BACK AT MY MOTHER’S house, she escorted me to a large breakfast nook cupped by a bay window. The window looked out over a Texas winter garden dominated by clusters of purple and yellow pansies and a sculpted marble fountain. The breakfast table was set for three, and in the middle was a platter with a variety of fruits and muffins. When Stanley came in from the garage, we sat.
My mother unfolded her napkin. “Stanley, say grace.”
He folded his hands in his lap. “Bless this food and bless us, too. Amen.”
A Hispanic woman in an apron appeared next to me. “Would you like an omelet, ma’am?”
I raised an eyebrow and leaned over to whisper to my mother. “You have servants?”
“Oh, no, honey. We just decided to have brunch catered. It’s a special occasion with you here. This is”—she lifted her reading glasses, which dangled from a gold chain around her neck, and peered at the woman’s name tag—“this is Maria.”
I looked up at Maria and smiled. “I’ll have a cheese omelet with bacon and ham and wheat toast, please.”
Maria smiled back at me. “Hash browns?” Her accent was thick.
“Yes, thank you.”
My mother adjusted her napkin in her lap. Without looking at me, she said, “My, that is certainly a lot of food. You know, you’re getting to the age where most women can’t eat as if they’re teenagers anymore.”
I looked down at my jeans, which were stretched tight over my thighs. I had bought them too tight. I was sure of it.
She took a drink of her grapefruit juice. “When I was your age, I could eat anything that I wanted. You got more of your father’s build. He was sturdier.”
I fiddled with the cocktail ring on my finger. Was it my imagination, or was it more difficult to get off than it used to be?
Stanley spooned some fruit onto his plate. He seemed to pay no attention to either of us as he stabbed bite-sized pieces of cantaloupe with his fork and shoveled them into his mouth.
“I understand you were a hero again last week,” my mother said. She set a blueberry muffin in the center of her plate. With her butter knife she scored four precise lines across the top of the muffin. I was so fascinated by what she was doing that I forgot she’d asked me a question. Holding the muffin with one hand and using the scored lines as a guide, she carefully sawed the muffin into eight equal slices. Then she meticulously arranged the slices in two rows of four on her plate.
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