Lydia (30 page)

Bill slid up to our table and leaned in, propped on the knuckles of his right hand. Snuffy regarded him with curiosity, not knowing our history. I kept my eyes glued to the saltcellar.

“Here’s what I’d like to ask the squaw,” Bill said. “What I’m mighty interested in.” He leaned lower toward me. “Ask her which of us is the natural father of that baby.”

Lydia and Roger swapped duties in Santa Clarita, on the theory that a driver with a license would be better when passing through the outskirts of Los Angeles. For a boy who lived up a dirt road, the intersection of 405 with the San Fernando Valley Freeway was truly terrifying. A pickup load of teenagers flipped Roger off on the merge. He had no idea why.

Shannon saw signs to Santa Monica and wanted to go there. “We have time for a detour. I want to see a movie star.”

Oly had refused to give up the front seat or the map, which put Lydia in back with Shannon. “This isn’t a pleasure trip,” she said. “We have no time for movie stars.”

Shannon looked out the window at the sparkling city to the south. The sun had gone down, and lights streamed out across the valley and up the mountains. The brightness gave the illusion of going on for eternity. “I’ve never been to LA. It seems kind of pitiful to come this far and miss it.”

“You are in no position to curry favors. It’s because of you we are behind schedule.” Lydia was in a foul mood. She’d lavished all her charm on the gas-station attendant, and he had been impervious. Twenty years ago, he would have been panting like a hound in summer, simply begging to be graced with a smile. Hell, ten years ago, he wouldn’t have charged her for the gas. What made it so bad was that her power hadn’t dissipated slowly, a bit at a time over the years. She could have dealt with that, maybe. But she’d gone into prison as a force to be reckoned with and come out a tiny shred of the aged mass. Strangers dismissed her as irrelevant. Hatred, she could fight; being dismissed was intolerable.

Lydia ground her teeth in an unladylike fashion. She said, “And don’t pretend I didn’t hear you refer to me as
Grandma
in front of two males.”

***

Roger thought it was around 11:30 when they reached the first Santa Barbara exit. He didn’t wear a watch and the BMW dash clock was broken, but Roger had a ranch boy’s innate body clock. He was seldom wrong by more than two minutes.

He asked Lydia, anyway, in case California had thrown off his inner timepiece.

She said, “Ten thirty. You have somewhere you need to be?”

Roger tipped the rearview mirror to look back at her. “I could have sworn it was later.”

“We’re in a new time zone,” Lydia said. “We picked up an hour back in Mesquite.”

“I forgot.” Roger hadn’t been out of his home zone in years. It felt weird that hours could jump back and forth. “Do they have Daylight Savings out here?”

Lydia said, “Everybody has Daylight Savings.”

“Arizona don’t,” Oly said.

Shannon awoke with a start. She’d been dreaming about soaking in a hot tub with Eugene, her first boyfriend from years gone by. In the dream, Eugene’s penis looked and felt like a wine cork. She held it in her hand, saying,
What am I supposed to do with this?
when she suddenly came to in a car.

“Where are we now?”

Roger said, “Santa Barbara. We’ve reached where we’re going.”

Shannon turned to Lydia, whose face was the color of parchment in the interstate highway lights. “Do you know how to find Loren Paul’s house?”

Lydia’s eyebrows stretched out tightly—a negative sign. “It’s too late to go knocking on a stranger’s door tonight.” Her voice took on that overly casual tone that her loved ones knew disguised prevarication. “We’ll head up the coast a ways and find a motel. Roger needs to shower before he meets his step-father tomorrow.”

“You don’t know he’s my step-father,” Roger said.

“You don’t know he’s not. We must assume he is, until proven otherwise.”

“Why?” Shannon asked. She had caught the disinformation tone. In spite of her generally droopiness of spirit, or maybe even because of it, Shannon was sensitive to mood shifts in others. After all, she is my daughter and I am a novelist. Recognizing moods is my life. “Why are we taking for granted this man was married to Roger’s mother?”

“Because we’re Goddamned optimists, that’s why,” Lydia said.

Shannon wondered if she was supposed to take that as a joke or irony, or maybe Lydia believed she was an optimist. Lydia’s self-image had always struck Shannon as a mysterious and constantly morphing blob, not unlike ectoplasm with warts.

Roger had more specific doubts. “Why should I drive up the coast? They have motels in Santa Barbara.”

Lydia touched her hair, above her ear. It was her Katharine Hepburn gesture. “It’ll be cheaper if we go north a bit. Santa Barbara is the most expensive city in America, and I’m paying for the trip. The rest of you are along for the ride.”

“We’re here so Roger can talk to Loren Paul in person,” Shannon said. “He’s the reason for the ride. I don’t see how you can say Roger is just along.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. Don’t twist my words.” Lydia leaned forward to tap Roger on the shoulder. “Keep going. We’ll pick a town forty miles or so up the coast, somewhere between here and Santa Cruz.”

A light came on in Shannon’s brain—the moment of
Aha
.
“Isn’t Hank up in here? I remember Dad telling me he flew into Santa Cruz when he came out to a parole hearing.”

Lydia didn’t slap herself in the forehead in amazement, but her voice jumped. “I completely forgot about that. Hank is in Lompoc. I wonder how far away we are from Lompoc.”

Oly raised his head from the map, stretching his turkey neck nearly tight. “Forty miles, and it’s where you meant to go all along.”

They dropped into mutual silence. Lydia’s eyes went to Roger’s, watching her through the rearview mirror. From his expression, she couldn’t tell how surprised he was. Mostly he showed resigned disappointment.

She said, “That statement is such an exaggeration, it falls into the category of falsehood.”

Oly hmphed, a sound that irritated Lydia no end.

Shannon said, “You mean it’s true? You dragged Roger all this way as an excuse to see Hank?”

Lydia broke the eye lock with Roger. “We drove—all this way—to find where Roger comes from and what caused him to stop talking. I only recently put it together that Hank is nearby. I think if I’m going to such trouble and risk to help Roger, the least I should be allowed is two hours for my own needs.”

“That’s a twisted way to word it,” Shannon said. She looked toward the driver’s seat, at Roger. “Did you know you were being exploited?”

Roger’s eyes went forward, checking traffic, then back at Lydia again. “Sam said there was more to the deal than Lydia was letting on. I figured she would tell us when she was ready.” He glanced over at Oly. “How did you know?”

A line of drool dripped down the corner of Oly’s face like a teardrop, only shiny instead of salty. He said, “I may be senile, but I’m not stupid.”

“I could have sworn it was the other way around,” Lydia said.

“The entire population of Haven House knows where her Indian lover is in prison. All you had to do was look at a map to divine the true call for our journey.”

No one spoke for five miles. Lydia studied her nails. Shannon worried at a loose thread in the seat cover. Roger drove with both hands on the wheel, working out whether he should feel screwed or not. Like Lydia said, he was getting what he wanted, or what she had convinced him he wanted. He wondered if seeing Hank had been the only drive in her encouraging him to seek out his history, right from the beginning, and if so, should he resent her pretending an interest in him.

He decided he had a right to feel screwed, but even so, he didn’t. Whatever Lydia’s reasons, without her needling, he probably would not have worked up the energy it takes to dive into the past. Roger considered his choices and chose not to condemn Lydia.

Shannon, however, looked at the facts from a different perspective. She said, “Shame on you, Lydia.”

Shannon expected curses, rage, and possibly even a slap. No one got away with criticizing Lydia. Lydia criticized others; she did not accept it herself.

Neither vile nor violence erupted. Lydia just sat there, twisting her wedding ring around her finger and staring at the back of the driver’s seat. A chill skipped its way up Shannon’s spinal column. Lydia’s silence was more frightening than her wrath.

Oly said, “Before the hotel, I must visit a liquor store, if you please.”

***

Lydia insisted on separate rooms for girls and boys. She said, “Do what you must after lights-out, but Maurey Pierce would rip my hide if I set her kids up to share a bed.” So Roger was stuck with Oly, who as soon as they let themselves through the Comfort Inn door, rummaged his suitcase for a plastic sandwich bag containing a child’s soft-bristled toothbrush and a travel tube of Pepsodent.

Roger sat on the end of a queen-size bed, flipping channels on the TV and listening to Oly brush his gums. Roger hadn’t known people without teeth needed to brush. It wasn’t something he’d thought about. Oly was the noisiest of brushers too. Sounded like a horse drinking from a stock pond.

Like almost everyone who prides themselves on not owning a TV, when Roger found himself someplace with television, he watched too much of it. We used to have satellite TV at the Home for Unwed Mothers, before Roger came there, because Maurey’s husband, Pud, is a satellite-system installer. That’s where they make their money. Raising horses is just a way to pour cash down a hole. Pud set us up with satellite, but the girls argued so much about what to watch—the dish brought in over three hundred channels back then—that I pulled the plug. Believe me on this: there’s nothing more irritating than a covey of pregnant girls carping at each other. Teenagers think being with child makes their personal desires into imperatives.

The Comfort Inn TV carried thirty-two channels, but Roger didn’t find a one worth spending time on. There was a show where a man wrestled a crocodile that was okay until the first commercial. Another channel played nothing but weather reports. Roger couldn’t fathom why anyone would watch weather reports for more than two minutes, which is how long it took to find out the forecast. Two stations broadcast sports. Roger had no interest in team sports. His brother Auburn had been a jock. As a reaction against him, Roger discovered jazz and books.

He mostly flipped channels for the sake of flipping channels. The road trip so far had him too confused to settle on one show. He’d expected a case of nerves over meeting Loren Paul, who might or might not know the secrets of his past. That was intense enough, but then Shannon dropped out of the sky, and she was a big deal too. The two big deals canceled each other out. He couldn’t focus on either one.

Shannon seemed to be taking something for granted, and she assumed he was taking the same thing for granted, but he didn’t know exactly what it was. Were they going steady all of a sudden? It felt like they were, although they hadn’t talked and hadn’t touched beyond holding hands. He’d missed the courtship segment. Or was this the courtship segment? Was he supposed to marry her now, or what?

He heard a flush, and Oly came from the bathroom wearing a pair of butter-colored boxer shorts and nothing else. He carried his toothbrush and toothpaste in one hand and a motel glass in the other.

He said, “Might I bother you to open the bottle, son?”

A pint of Captain Morgan rum sat on the nightstand between the beds. A pint was all Lydia had been willing to spring for, and it took the threat of blackmail for Oly to get that.

He’d said, “
I’ll tell the prissy woman
,” and Lydia said, “
I see this threat business turning into a never-ending nightmare for the rest of my life
.”

Oly said, “
My life.
”

Lydia said, “
That better not be much longer, you old goat. If you don’t back off, I wouldn’t feel an iota of shame about shoving you into traffic
.”

Now, Oly humped over to his wheelchair and more or less fell into it. He screwed around with his hearing aid, either turning it up or down, Roger couldn’t tell, then Oly said, “Turn the TV to an exercise show, if you please.”

Roger tore the seal off and twisted open Oly’s rum. “I’ve been around the dial more than once, and I’ve haven’t seen an exercise show. All they have are regular shows and sports. There’s a news-all-the-time channel, and a station to tell you what’s on the other stations.”

“Those ladies on the exercise shows are hired for enticement.” Oly held out his glass while Roger poured. “I watch them before bed. They improve the quality of dreams.”

Roger said, “I don’t think this TV gets exercise shows.”

“I’ll settle for Weather Channel if there’s no exercise,” Oly said. “Weather girls are hired for enticement too, but the dreams they bring about are not near so entertaining.”

A knock came at the door and before Roger could say, “Who is it?” the door opened.

Shannon stood in the dark rectangle of the doorway. She said, “I can’t stand this anymore.”

Roger and Oly looked at one another. Roger said, “Can’t stand what?”

Oly assumed it had to do with the TV. “You don’t even know what we’re watching.”

Shannon walked toward Roger. “We have to talk.”

“Uh-oh.” Oly gulped from the motel glass. “I’ve run into that one before.”

Shannon nodded at Oly. “Without him around.”

“Whoa there.” Oly affected offense. “I’m harmless.”

Shannon picked Oly’s overalls off the floor. She held them at arm’s length, between her thumb and index finger. “Get dressed, Oly. You’re going to my room.”

Oly stuffed the glass between his floppy thighs and dug his hands into the wheelchair handles. “I just took my clothing off. I’m not putting it back on again. At my age, you don’t waste time undoing what’s done.”

Roger finally caught up with the situation. “Lydia will fly off the handle.”

Shannon knelt to peer under Oly’s bed, searching for the shirt, but she didn’t find it, because he’d washed the shirt in the sink and left it to dry on the shower-curtain rod. She said, “Lydia’s long gone.”

Roger turned off the TV. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Soon as we checked in, she changed her clothes, grabbed her keys, and took off.”

“Where to?” Roger asked.

“What I don’t have here is a clue.” Shannon gave up on the shirt and stood with one hand on her hip, hovering over Oly. “It’s a warm night, compared to back home, anyway. We’ll take him like that.” She raised her voice to a near shout. “You ready to roll, Oly?”