Julia's Chocolates (28 page)

Sometimes life just takes the words right out of your mouth and all you can do is nod, and that’s what I did.

And then I turned to Dean Garrett, put both arms around his neck and kissed him.

When the kiss was over he put his forehead against mine and held me close. I kissed him on the cheek, got into my ratty car, and drove off.

I tried real hard not to cry.

When I got home, I helped Aunt Lydia in the yard, then she and I sat down to a celebratory meal of omelets with Katie, who had brought the kids with her, and a cinnamon coffee cake, and with Caroline, who had brought a spice loaf and banana bread. Katie hugged me, Caroline kissed my cheek, and the kids danced around me calling me The Chocolate Lady and Aunt Lydia, The Egg Lady.

Aunt Lydia had sold all her eggs, too. The city folk had been out in force, and they had loved the different eggshell colors. “Doesn’t take much to turn them on, does it?” Lydia said.

Luke showed me that he was wearing four T-shirts, then pulled two pairs of pants down to show me he was also wearing three pairs of Superhero boxer underwear. Logan circled me in his Spiderman outfit, arms out at his side. Haley jumped up and down, and the purple glittering eyeballs on her antennas bebopped about on her head, and Hannah, dressed in black as usual, looked happier than I’d seen her in a long time.

Lara darted in to our Egg and Chocolate Celebration after parking her car behind the barn, telling us she had told Jerry she was sick and couldn’t go to church today. “I have to be home before the last sermon ends,” she said. She gave me a huge hug and a bouquet of flowers from her garden. She gave Aunt Lydia a bouquet, too. Then she brought out two bottles of champagne.

My Psychic Night friends and Katie’s kids toasted me, and we laughed our way through breakfast. Lara had a few too many, but Katie was going to drive her home. We did not know how she would explain the smell of champagne on her breath to her husband, but we didn’t much worry—we were having too much fun.

The laughter stopped only when we got the phone call from the state police.

Hospitals have always made me feel ill. Doctors have always made me nervous. It does not take a psychotherapist to figure out why I avoid hospitals as if they’re covered in germs from the Black Plague.

I ended up in hospitals several times as a child. Once after one of my mother’s boyfriends knocked me across the room and I hit my face straight on and blacked out. A neighbor, high as a kite on pot, but a kindly soul nonetheless, was there when it happened. Over my mother’s objections, the drugged-out neighbor called the ambulance.

I stayed in the hospital for five days. The boyfriend fled the state, and my mother admonished me for making him mad when she finally visited me on the third day.

“You always, always piss him off, Julia. Surely you can learn to keep your mouth shut around men when they’re already in a bad mood? You didn’t need to butt your big nose into our business.”

“But, Momma, he was hitting you!” I whispered through swollen lips the size of bananas.

“Haven’t you learned nothin’ yet? They all got tempers, and you can’t make a fuss every time you get a little knocked around.” She drew out a cigarette, but a nurse, who was making sounds in her throat during the whole visit as if she was disgusted with my mother, told her to put it out. Now.

“I can take care of myself, Julia, you just make things worse for me. Look what you done now. Trayce’s gone to who knows where because of you. If you looked at yourself more often in the mirror I would think you would be focusing on yourself instead of me. You don’t get rid of your holier than thou attitude and do something with all that hair, there ain’t gonna be any man who will come near you.”

“Good,” I muttered. Very good.

“What did you say?” My mother snapped. “Are you giving me some of your lip?”

“No, Momma,” I said quickly, my head starting to ache again, as if a thousand needles were being pounded into it. “No Momma, no lip.”

“The police came lookin’ for him ’cause of you, Julia, and now I ain’t got my man. What do you have to say for yourself?”

I just looked at my mother, sitting across the room from me in a tight pink dress, her white-blond hair piled on top of her head, her makeup thick. She was working as a dancer at that point, which was where she had met this latest creep.

“Well, what do you have to say for yourself, girl? I get ya a roof over your head, your clothes, your food….” she went on and on about what she provided, and my neck was aching and my head was pounding as if needles were being poked into it with a sledgehammer, and I didn’t want to argue with her.

But if I had had the energy to argue, I would have pointed out that the women at the local church had been bringing me their children’s clothing, including a brand-new coat they’d all pitched in to buy, and the school gave me a free breakfast and lunch every day. I often got dinner at one of two neighbors who felt sorry for me: a gay man who was trying to become a ballerina and who had lots of nice artsy-type friends who were always kind to me, and a transsexual who worked as a mechanic by day and wandered around town like a woman by night. The transsexual made great meatloaf, spaghetti and meatballs, and cous cous.

“Well? I’m talkin’ to you, Julia. Your smart mouth lost me another man, so what do you say to your momma?”

“I think I’ll say that it’s time for you to go, Miss Nudley,” one of the nurses said, having caught the tail-end of my mother’s diatribe. The nurse stood straight and tall by my bedside. She had gray hair and a young, flushed face. I could see she hated my mother.

“You can’t tell me what to do,” my mother protested, her eyes wandering down the woman from head to foot. It was her “you sure are ugly and worthless” look that she had down to a science. But it didn’t faze the nurse.

“You may not be aware of it, Ms. Nudley, but your daughter suffered severe injuries when your boyfriend threw her across the room. She has a concussion, bruising—”

“Oh, please!” My mother cut in. “The doctor already told me about her injuries. She’ll be fine. And I’ll leave when I damn well want.”

The room was starting to swirl around for me now, as my mother’s hatred seemed to seep into me like the stuff in the IV that was plugged into my arm.

“No, ma’am,” the nurse said. “You. Will. Go. Now.”

At that, I opened my eyes.

“You fat bitch,” my mother said. “This is
my
daughter, and you can’t order me around. Get out of this hospital room. Get. Out. Now.” My mother mimicked the nurse’s voice, her little eyes narrowed.

The nurse reached down and pressed a button near my bed, not taking her eyes off my mother. Within a millisecond I heard feet rushing down the corridor, then three men entered the room.

One of them, young and handsome, looked to the nurse. “What is it, Nora?” he asked, his voice kind, his eyes kinder.

“Ms. Nudley is overstaying her welcome, I believe,” the nurse said, her tone calm, but I could hear that hard steel in her voice. “She is angry with her daughter because the police are after her boyfriend, Trayce”—she said the name
Trayce
as if he were vermin—“because he threw our patient, Julia here, across the room, severely injuring her face and chest. Ms. Nudley is upset because now she has lost ‘her man.’”

My mother’s face became beet-red with fury. I wanted to cry. If Momma was pissed off she would take it out on me. Here, at home, wherever, somehow it would be my fault.

My mother took a deep breath, stood up, straightened her dress, and stuck her ample bosoms out. She took several steps toward the young doctor and the two other men with him, who I assumed were also doctors.

She smiled, a smile I’m sure she thought was sexy. “Doctor.” She looked at his name tag. “May I call you David?”

“You can call me Dr. Horner,” the young man replied.

My mother blinked, surprised. This was not the response she usually got from all the men she had met before in any number of bars.

She tried that smile again. “We have a misunderstanding here. This nurse”—she shot a venomous look at Nora—“is overstepping her boundaries. I am here to visit my daughter. This nurse is telling me to leave. Surely you can inform the nurse that it is not her job to decide who comes and goes here at this hospital?”

My mother’s voice was smooth as honey. Even her speech was different. But she could do that. She would sound one way in front of me and her boyfriends, the speech of her rough childhood, but she also knew how to sound formal and polite, slightly southern, which I assumed she got from her grandmother, who spent a lot of time raising my mother when her mother ran off with various abusive men for months at a time.

My mother blinked her eyes, holding her hands behind her back so the doctor could get a better look at those huge boobs.

The doctor smiled at my mother, and I figured she had won over another man. And just when my mother smiled back and swayed left and right a bit, kind of like a little girl might do, his smile dropped.

“Miss? Mrs.?”

“Oh, honey,” my mother said. “You can call me Candy.”

He paused, as if he didn’t like that name. “Candy it is, then. Your daughter has been here for three days. I know we talked on the phone the first day she was here, but I don’t believe you’ve been to see her until now, is that correct?”

My mother swallowed, her swaying stopped for a millisecond, then she started up again. Smile in place. “I’ve been very busy, Doctor.”

He nodded. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“Single working mothers don’t get very many breaks, as you know.”

“Yes, I do realize that, Candy. But as I understand it, Trayce has been living with you, is that correct? Did you know that on your daughter’s body we found many signs of past injuries? Can you tell us where those injuries came from?”

The smile faltered a bit. “Julia has always been a clumsy child, falling down all the time—”

“Ah, well, then,” said the doctor. “That would explain why she broke three ribs some time ago. When children fall down they often break their ribs.” Even I caught the sarcasm.

My mother flushed slightly. “I didn’t say nothin’ about her breaking ribs when she fell. I didn’t know she’d done broke her ribs!”

“You didn’t know?” He raised an eyebrow at her. “Did she ever complain about her side hurting her?”

The flush became darker. I was so exhausted now, my head aching so bad, one of my eyes drooped shut.

“That child is always bitchin’ about everything, all the time. Something’s always wrong.”

“Your daughter may well have been complaining about her stomach hurting, because there’s bruising there, too, not to mention the bruises up and down her arms, a few scars from recent burns, two of which look like cigarette burns, and several scars that appear to be from a whip or a belt. Which one was it?”

It had been a belt, I wanted to answer, but my mouth didn’t seem to want to work. I knew my mother knew that it was a belt, too, because her eyes lit up a bit with her answer, but then she snapped those red lips of hers tight shut.

“There wasn’t no belt, no whip, Doctor.”

“Can you explain the injuries?”

“No, I can’t, and I don’t have to. The kids at school probably hit her. She annoys me—she probably annoys the hell out of them, too.”

I wanted to raise my hand and argue that point, but that head of mine felt like it was going to explode. I noticed Nora coming over to my side. She put her hand on my forehead, looked at the IV, added something to it. I really liked Nora.

“Candy, how long has Trayce been living in your home?” The doctor said it like Trayce was a little black leech that had attached himself to our walls with his gooey, sticky body.

“For about a year, off and on.”

“Off and on?”

“Yes, Trayce comes and goes as he pleases, but now it looks like he’s gone for good since the police is after him.” She shot me a look. Yes, Momma was very pissed off, no doubt about it.

“I am making a note of your daughter’s injuries and the fact that Trayce gave them to her. I hope the police catch up with him, because although you don’t seem to agree, any man who does this to a child deserves to be in jail.”

“
In jail?
” My mother sounded shocked. “For God’s sake! Trayce just lost his cool with a kid who’s got a smart-ass mouth and a bad attitude. He didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”

Now the doctor and Nora, the nurse, looked like they were going to lose it. So did the other two men standing by the doctor.

“People lose their cool all the time,” Dr. Horner said, “but that doesn’t give them the right to pick a child up and fling her face-first against the wall, giving her a concussion. Your boyfriend could have killed your daughter. You don’t seem to understand that.”

The doctor was staring at my mother as if he couldn’t understand her, talking to her as if she were an idiot. She had had me when she was seventeen, and I had always thought she was so pretty. I still thought she was pretty. I thought all men thought she was pretty. It was clear as day that no one in this room thought my mother was pretty.

“I understand it plenty damn fine!” my mother shouted, crossing her arms. “Why don’t you mind your own business? Trayce is outta my house—that’s all you need to know.”