Lone Star (9 page)

The old woman studied Blake intently as she ate. The fork trembled in her shaking hands.

Blake smiled. “I know. She's too good for me, Lupe.”

“That's not quite what I was thinking.”

Chloe pulled on Blake's denim sleeve, and the two of them perched on a nearby bench and kept the woman company while she finished her lunch.

“Has your mother agreed to let you go yet?” Lupe asked.

Chloe shook her head, keeping mum on Moody's imminent visit.

“She will, though, don't you think?” Blake said. “I keep telling her.”

Lupe shrugged. “The odds are about even. Don't count on it, but don't discount it. I've met mothers before. I was one myself until my sons got too wise for my help. Mothers can be an unpredictable bunch.” She took a swig of her ice tea, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Let me ask you,” she said to Blake after he offered her a peek at his journal. “You say you want to go to Barcelona for research.”

“That's right, ma'am.” And to Chloe, out of the corner of his mouth, added, “And for other things.”

“Call me Lupe. But can't the answer you're looking for be found right here in New Hampshire and Maine?”

“I don't think so.”

“Sure it can. Answers are found everywhere. And in anything. You just have to know where to look.”

“Barcelona will make for a far more interesting story, don't you agree? Rather than writing about boring old North Conway.” North Conway, the biggest town in two counties, was a two-mile stretch of a straight rural highway. Fifteen traffic lights and Applebee's dueling it out with Burger King. Pizza Hut against KFC, Baskin-Robbins against Carvel. There were one or two antiques shops, an outlet mall, an L.L.Bean, and gas stations. That was the town. And China Chef, of course,
purveyor of hot-and-sour soup that Hannah supposedly placed on people's tables. How do you find the answer in a town like that?

Lupe insisted. “You can. I'm telling you. You can find answers anywhere.”

“I'd like to find them in Barcelona,” Blake said, and Chloe was proud of him for not being
too
intimidated by a ninety-something woman. Forgetting herself for a second, Chloe almost made a joke. Leaning to Blake, opening her mouth, she almost,
almost
said—we should introduce Lupe to Martyn, don't you think? They're about the same age—before slamming her hand against her mouth. What was wrong with her!

Blake must have liked Lupe because he talked to her for longer than any of the others. And she must have liked him too because she kept asking him to do chores for her. She pointed out that her chopped wood was too far from the fire pit. It was all the way down the slope, near the river. Chloe and Blake carried the chopped wood and the iron rack to the front of her yellow house. They set it up near the fire pit, stacked the wood, covered it with blue tarp. Lupe looked pleased by their efforts, especially Blake's. She asked him to build her a fire. She's my last one, Chloe told Blake, as they collected branches for kindling. She always keeps me here. She's lonely, he said, and she likes the company. I don't mind. “Lupe,” he called to her, “do you know that your fire pit is eroding on one side? The stones have broken off.”

“I know,” she said. “Who's going to fix it, me? Or my children out in California?”

Blake motioned toward the mansion-like house. “Who lives there?”

Lupe shrugged. “A family. They don't help me. They got their own problems. The husband is sick. He just don't know it yet. Or don't want to admit it.”

“How do you know?”

“Can you tell the difference between a healthy man and a sick one? They're like two different species.”

To this, Blake bowed his head without reply. He knew the difference well. His own father had been a Hercules before the disaster that almost claimed him, and now was a husk.

“Maybe I can help,” Blake said. “I can go to the quarry, pick up some stones.”

The woman shook her head. “Why don't you come by Thursday after school instead? I have a doctor's appointment. Usually I get a taxi. Maybe you can drive me. I'll pay you for your time, and then after, we can go to the quarry together. Pick out the stones. I'll pay for them too.”

“
You're
going to go to the quarry?”

“I'm ninety-two,” Lupe said, jangling her jewelry. “I'm not dead.”

On the way home, Blake rained on Chloe with questions that at first sounded like research but perhaps weren't. How long had she been visiting Lupe? When did the husband die? Why did she go to these twelve homes and not others? Why did she stay for five minutes in one home, but an hour with Lupe? What happened if she saw something suspicious? What if the people behaved erratically? What if they hurt her?

He had been slightly concerned about Mr. Gibson, a blind man with long scraggly gray hair who had grabbed Chloe's hand and wouldn't let go, not letting her leave or feed him. Blake gently, but not too gently, pried Mr. Gibson's dinosaur fingers off Chloe's white wrist.

“He's fine,” Chloe said. “He's just lonely. Like Lupe.”

Blake was off again about Chloe and her pants vanishing.

“Give it a rest, Blake. I'm not your project, I'm not your story.”

“But if you disappeared,” he went on, speeding, invincible, in Jimmy Devine's sirenless off-duty police truck, “that would be quite a story, wouldn't it?”

“No! It's only a story if there's a reason why I disappeared.” Chloe paused. “Also, what does my disappearance have to do with your blue suitcase?”

“Maybe everything,” he said.

“You leave me out of your lunacy, Blake Haul.”

“It's fiction,” Blake said. “In fiction, you can have everything to do with my lunacy. Isn't that what you told me? I can use my imagination and have it all turn out exactly how I need, how I want.” Fiendishly he rubbed his hands together while driving with his knees. His expression was for once both serious and remote, as if he was thinking about something else entirely.

Covering her face, Chloe groaned.

It was a good afternoon.

S
HE FOCUSED THE RED DOT OF HER ANXIOUS BRAIN ON HER
mother. Rather, focused it on her mother's back, while her mother's studious front was forming tiny spicy Mediterranean meatballs with feta and fennel.

“Tell me right now. Why's she coming?”

“You shall see.”

“Why can't you tell me?”

The eminently sensible Lang pointed out that if she told Chloe, then Moody wouldn't need to come.

The eminently sensible Chloe opened her hands to say,
exactly!
But it was done to her mother's oblivious back. “I'm making meatballs,” Lang said. “Do you want to help me?”

“If I help you, will you tell me?”

“You
will
help me,” said Lang, “and I won't tell you a thing.”

“It's about Barcelona, right? She's got some plan?”

“It's about a man with a horse. Come here and help your mother.”

Their house had once been Moody's summer retreat. Lochlan Devine built it for his young bride back in the fifties so she could have a home by the lake, as she had dreamed of in the refugee camps. Twenty years later Moody gave it to Jimmy and Lang as a wedding present.

“Why is she suddenly coming over?”

“She says it's been too long.”

“Tell me why so I can prepare myself.”

“Prepare yourself for what?”

Chloe wanted to provoke her mother. “Moody told me last Thanksgiving that she doesn't come here anymore because she's mad we still blame Uncle Kenny for everything.”

“Well, that's just silly,” said Lang, looking at no one.

Her father spoke his first sentence of the afternoon. “We do blame your uncle for everything,” Jimmy said.

“Jimmy, shh.” Lang turned to Chloe. “Stop stirring the pot, young lady. Your grandmother wants to help.”

“Help who?”

“Did we ask for her help?” Jimmy said.

“Yes, Jimmy, we did,” Lang said, one hand on her husband's shoulder, one hand straightening out the errant lamp shade behind him. She had been feverishly cleaning as if preparing for an open-house viewing.

“
You
did,” Jimmy said. “Not me. Chloe is right. My mother shouldn't come if she's still mad.”

Lang leaned her tranquil solemn face into a sitting and grim Jimmy. “She is putting away the bygones and coming for your daughter.”

Jimmy sat coldly. “Who says they're bygones?”

“Come on. We agreed.”

“You agreed. I'm resigned to it. Big difference.”

She kissed his forehead. “You promised you would be civil, kind, polite.”

“No. I promised only that I'd be silent,” Jimmy said, standing up. “And you're not letting me keep my promise, woman.” He went outside to do some yard work and then left to go pick up his mother.

The next three hours crawled by in epic time, in Thackeray time, every day lasting a thousand tragic pages. Finally six o'clock arrived like the executioner's hour.

Sometimes Chloe thought of her grandmother as Zeus in his
Athenian Temple, gargantuan and fierce. Sometimes Moody was like Tamerlane of Mongolia, murderous and crippled. Sometimes Chloe saw Moody as Siddhartha, half the size of China, wise but terrifying in his omnipotent silence. On Memorial Saturday, Moody was just a kettle-sized white-haired woman. She had been married to Lochlan Devine since just after the war until his death, fifty years later, four of them pretty good. She had given him six children, five surviving, all boys, though what she wanted was two measly daughters. Everybody knew it because she never missed an opportunity to say it.

She was nearly deaf in both ears, but denied she was hard of hearing in even one. She grew odd white fuzz on her face. She liked to drink whiskey and eat caramels and strange spicy sausages she said were from the old country. She smoked unapologetically. She spoke fluent English in a loud, heavy, and indeterminate accent. She had occluded sight, which prevented her from driving, but didn't prevent her from complaining about not driving. Hence her life's motto about envying the good fortune of people who could push around their own wheelchairs, which she repeated again tonight as she walked through the front door. “They don't know how lucky they are,” Moody said, setting down her cane.

Behind his mother, Jimmy walked in without a word, dropped his keys on the side table, and went to sit down. Lang, dressed in church clothes, fussed like a tumbleweed. After Moody hugged Chloe, she blurted without so much as a half-blind appraisal, “Why do you always look so dour, child? What is this awful thing you're wearing? You're a beautiful girl. Why are you hiding yourself from boys? Or is it one boy in particular you're hiding yourself from? It won't work. They all know what's inside the Hefty bags you wear for clothes. Come, let's go. I'm not even taking my coat off despite your mother's efforts. Take me to the cemetery. Don't protest, better go quick before it gets dark. You don't want to go to the graveyard at night, do you? I jest.
Of course you don't. Believe me. So let's go pick some flowers from this famous garden of yours, and get to it. Jimmy, give your daughter the truck keys. You haven't suspended her license for speeding—or other violations—have you?”

“You mean like Dad didn't suspend Kenny's?” Jimmy said, gesturing at the keys to Chloe. “Yeah, Chloe's still driving. She's also not speeding, or otherwise violating the good laws of all sane people.”

Moody stared coolly at Lang.

Lang glared at Jimmy.

Chloe rolled her eyes and ushered her grandmother out of the house.

Chloe never saw her mother as respectful to anyone as she was to Moody, or her father as silent, gazing upon his wife with a pungent mixture of compassion and hostility. Lang didn't sit until Moody sat. There was no eating, drinking, or speaking, until Moody ate, drank, and spoke. Every question out of Lang's mouth was directed at her mother-in-law's comfort. Do you have enough salt? More ice? Enough cream on the mashed potatoes? I made chocolate profiteroles for dessert, and fresh coffee, but I also have decaf, or some brandy, if you like. Of course I have whiskey. Would you like some now? Are you cold? Would you like a shawl? You're hot? Chloe, open all the windows. And bring in the floor fan from the shed.

In adoration and respect, Lang sat. As if Moody had waltzed in, in light cloth, sans sandals, and beyond her stooped shoulders trembled two wings. That's how Lang behaved around her husband's mother. The same could not be said for the husband.

“I fixed the screens,” Jimmy said in a stiff tone meant to convey he had built the Maginot Line—between himself and his mother.

Moody shrugged, as if his fixing the screens was an achievement on par with brushing his teeth. “Good,” she said. “Because I don't enjoy mosquitoes.”

A stressed and anxious Chloe was sullen and silent like her father—though, she guessed, for different reasons. She and Jimmy sat gray as the unfallen Berlin Wall and stared at their food, at the darkening lake, warily at Lang and Moody across from them making small talk. Chewing her lip, counting to 741 by unlucky thirteens, Chloe tried to be still, to not think. The warm evening blossomed with the smell of mint and quivering fresh water.

“Moody, how are your flowers?” Chloe went over to her grandmother's every spring and planted beautiful things in the raised black soil.

Moody made a face. “The flowers bring bees,” she said. “Which I also don't enjoy. That's what happens when you grow up in a bee farmer's house. Especially the blood-orange tulips that came up a few weeks back. Pretty, but the bees! Never seen anything like it. Don't plant those again.”

“Tulips are perennial, Moody. They come up on their own.”

“Well, plant something else. Something that doesn't attract bees.”

“You want me,” Chloe asked slowly, letting it sink in, “to find flowers that don't attract bees?”

Nothing sunk in. “No bees is what I want,” Moody said. “How you get there is your problem.”

Chloe's scalp tingling, her skin shivering, she clawed at an old bite on her forearm. Was the grand diminutive woman
ever
going to get to the point of her visit?

There was much food and meaningless conversation before there was finally no food and a meaningful one. After coffee with Baileys, and a second helping of profiteroles (or was it a second helping of Baileys?), Mudita Devine, née Klavin, mother of six sons, oldest one deceased, Lochlan's widow, fluttering Clarence Odbody clockmaker, opened her mouth.

“So your mother tells me you're wanting to go to some damn fool city in Europe.”

It wasn't a question. It was just a beginning. And what a beginning! Chloe nodded.

“Why?”

Before Chloe could reply, Moody cut her off. “I don't care why. Neither do your parents.” Her mother and father didn't have time to nod. “Is this a good idea? They don't think so. You plan to go with your friends? That boy you've been hanging around with?”

“Mason. Yes. I've grown up with them.”

“Did I ask how long you've known them? Did I ask their names? What does any of that matter to me? You could know them five minutes or fifteen years. What matters is they're boys, and you want them to join you in some tomfoolery.”

“Not . . .”

“Chloe.” Moody raised her hand. “You'll have plenty of time to speak briefly. Your time has not come. Let me ask you this. In broader terms, beyond the few weeks you're hoping to grab on a beach, have you given any thought to what you want to do with your life?”

Now
could she speak? Chloe glanced from her mother to her father. She answered. Yes, she said. She has thought about it. She was thinking of going into law. She was thinking of majoring in history.

“So what I'm hearing is you want to major in history, yet your first inclination is to head to a Barcelona nightclub?”

Chloe must have looked flummoxed. “It makes me wonder,” her grandmother said in explanation, “how serious you are about your life.”

“Moody, come on, I'm not even eighteen . . .”

“Do I not know how old you are?” Moody exchanged a glance with Lang. “So to your parents, you declare that you're almost eighteen, as if you're so grown-up that you can make your own decisions. Yet now you remind us of your
insignificant age to excuse why you can't be serious about the road before you.”

A squirming Chloe kept quiet.

“So which is it? Are you
eighteen
or are you
eighteen
?”

Chloe had no answer, except yes. She couldn't look up.

“I thought so. Look at me, child. That's better. Your mother tells me you've had your heart set on Europe.”

Not Europe, Chloe wanted to bleat. Barcelona. She wasn't even brave enough to defend her one small dream to her grandmother.

“You can decide to visit any European country,” Moody continued. “There are nearly two dozen to choose from. You have a few precious weeks before college. An opportunity of a lifetime. And you choose—Barcelona?”

Why was this so frightening? Her heart drummed in her chest.

“Yes.”

Moody raised her strong, wrinkled hand. “Still not your turn, child.” Her gaze was unwavering, which was more than Chloe could say for her own. She'd rather look at her mother! “Your parents tell me that Hannah talks a good game, but has not yet produced enough cash for your Iberian adventure. And the young men, having come into your dream belatedly, are even more broke. Is this true?” Moody stopped Chloe from replying. “I've come here because I have a proposal for you,” she said. “I've talked it over with your parents, and they agree. There is perhaps a way for you to get what you want. Do you want to hear about it?”

Chloe couldn't hear anything above the thumping in her chest. A way for her to get what she wanted! was all she heard. What could Moody possibly have in mind? That Lang and Jimmy go with them to Europe to chaperone? Moody was speaking, but Chloe—bouncing up and down on the trampoline beat of her excited heart—missed the important part, and she
knew she had missed it because the three adults around her had fallen silent.

Chloe blinked. “I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I don't think I heard you right.”

Moody sighed. “Riga,” she said impatiently.
“Riga.”

“I don't know what Riga is.”

“The capital of Latvia. Also, the city where I was born.”

“Of course.” Chloe vaguely nodded, as if acknowledging that she already knew that.

The three adults waited for Chloe's reply. Chloe waited for an explanation.

“So, honey, what do you think?” asked Jimmy.

“Of what?”

“Of your grandmother's plan.”

“I don't understand. You want the four of us to go”—Chloe struggled mightily with it—“to Riga?”

“Yes.”

“No! Why would we do that?”