Nora Jane (49 page)

“As soon as I’m well we’re all going up to Willits and start figuring out how to build some more rooms on the house,” Freddy
said. “Nieman wants to do it too.”

“Did you know that nun is coming here to visit?” Tammili asked. “She wants to visit the labs at Berkeley and see the scanning
electron microscopes and all the stuff. She wants to see the first reactor and all the things you and Nieman used to show
us all the time.”

Nora Jane came into the room and stood looking down at the tableau, her husband and her children, all there ever is, the blessed
moment, life and peace. Today. Tonight. Forever.

“Let’s go to bed now,” she said. “Lydia, can you move Freddy?”

“Let him stay,” his daddy said. “I like him there. I like to listen to him breathe.”

M
ITZI OZBURT’S MOTHER
had got wind of what was going on in California and she was headed that way in a Lincoln Continental Town Car with her boyfriend,
DeLesseps Johnston, to stop it.

Mitzi never did find out how her mother knew, but she blamed the Dominicans, since who else would have told except Nora Jane
and she didn’t, and, besides, never would.

“It’s happened before,” Carla Ozburt was saying. She and DeLesseps had spent the night near the Petrified Forest in Arizona,
but Carla barely glanced at the scenery when they passed it right after dawn. “When she was sixteen she fell in love with
a priest at St. Mark’s and I had to change churches and go to the cathedral for a year. I had her in Sacred Heart for a year,
but she wouldn’t kneel in the gravel by the statue and she wouldn’t learn anything she wasn’t interested in, so then we put
her in a school out in Metairie where they mostly teach art, but she didn’t like that either. Then she started staying at
her daddy’s half the time and I totally lost control. A hairdresser. I can’t believe I clawed and fought my way out of Boutte
to end up with a hairdresser atheist as a child.”

“Mitzi’s not an atheist, Carla. How would she meet a priest if she were an atheist? You are exaggerating this, and she wasn’t
just a hair-dresser. She worked at the John Jay Salon. My mother goes to John Jay. She’d miss my funeral not to break an appointment
with that man.”

“You can’t know. You don’t have any children.”

“That’s a mean thing to say. I’d like to go back by that Petrified Forest. I wish we’d had time to look at that.” DeLesseps
was a small, pretty man who had been spoiled rotten by his mother and his aunts. He worked halfheartedly in the mayor’s office
in New Orleans, a job one of his uncles had arranged for him. Before that he had been in the admissions office at UNO but
got fired for not showing up. He was forty-eight years old and had not really found himself until he met Carla and signed
on to be her slave and driver and sometime lover. “I carry the bags,” he told his friends. “I like to watch her operate. She’s
a piece of work.”

“We need to find a place to stay in some good part of San Francisco and go there and change and then just go find her. There’s
no reason to call her anymore. She’s not going to return the calls.”

“We don’t even know for sure she’s in San Francisco. They may have run off somewhere.”

“No. He’s still at his church. I checked on that.”

“I think we should have flown. This is going to take another day and part of one after that. We can’t make it tonight, Carla.
It’s too far. We could stop in Las Vegas. Look on that map. It couldn’t be that much out of the way.”

“When I get my hands on her, I promise you this time it is going to be real. If she does this she is out of the will.”

DeLesseps kept his thoughts to himself. There was no point in talking to Carla when she was on the crazies over Mitzi. The
worst thing was that they were exactly alike. They looked alike, they dressed alike, they were the same size. Mitzi was softer
and sweeter and more reasonable, but she was more determined also. DeLesseps had known her since she was eighteen and just
out of high school. He had never known Carla to win a battle with Mitzi yet.

They were in a desert now. After about fifteen miles DeLesseps had to speak. Carla had been on the phone with her travel agent
in New Orleans, finding a hotel in Sacramento for the night and one in Berkeley for the following week. He waited until she
settled down from that and then he made his pitch. “Maybe this guy wasn’t really cut out to be a priest and he was going to
leave the church anyway and Mitzi was just in the right place at the right time. You don’t know what’s going on, Carla. Reserve
part of your judgment until we get there. Remember when you thought she was into drugs and it was just some loose face powder
you found? You could have had a heart attack while we waited for those tests.”

“He is an ordained priest in the Holy Roman Catholic Church. He is a servant of God and my daughter has played his Abishag.”

“His who?”

“King David’s whore. In the Old Testament. Don’t Episcopalians read the Bible? I thought you all read the Bible.”

“No, that’s Methodists, I think. Listen, Carla, is this heat gauge always like this? I don’t remember this being way over
here.”

“Let me see.” Carla leaned over him to look at the instrument panel. She didn’t know anything about machines but she always
pretended that she did. DeLesseps certainly didn’t know anything. He could hardly change a lightbulb from being the great-grandson
of a famous Louisiana politician and spoiled rotten from being the only male in his branch, not to mention being raised in
a house with two older sisters and more servants than there were family members and then having the family lose all the money
and being thrown out to try to make it in a real world, where people worked and had to fix things that were broken.

So there was no one in the car who understood what was happening as the motor heated up and the power-steering hose began
to split. Carla hadn’t had the car serviced for forty thousand miles, because she was too involved in the Race for the Cure
luncheon she was cochairman of that year.

The car really began to heat up about ten miles out of Weggins, Arizona, a small town near Death Valley National Park. By
the time they limped into Weggins, the Lincoln was going to need a major overhaul before anyone was going to drive it to San
Francisco. There was no one in Weggins to fix it, and the truck to haul it to Bishop couldn’t get there until afternoon, so
Carla and DeLesseps paid the service-station owner to drive them to a motel and got a room with a hot tub that didn’t work
and a television with fifty channels and settled down to wait it out.

DeLesseps had his laptop computer and Carla had her cell phone and that was going to be about that until late the next day.

“We just have to make the best of things,” DeLesseps volunteered.

“We could make love. We haven’t done it in a long time.”

“Are you kidding? My only child is on her way to eternal damnation and you expect me to want to fornicate. I hope you aren’t
serious, DeLesseps. I hope you didn’t mean that.”

“Then could we find somewhere to eat? I’m starving, to tell the truth.”

“Okay.” They left their bags unpacked and went to the dining room and looked at the wilted lettuce in the salad bar and decided
to see what else was available.

“There’s the Four Steers Steakhouse two blocks down the road,” the man at the desk told them. “It’s nice. I eat there myself.”

“Just down the highway?”

“Yes. Just keep on the side so you don’t get run over.” The man put down his newspaper and handed them a card with the name
of the restaurant on it. “Tell them Will Maynes sent you. It will help me out.”

They left the motel and began to walk along the highway past a junkyard and some small businesses and an optometrist’s office.
Carla wasn’t talking. She had put on her tennis shoes and she was feeling her age for the first time since the last time she
was stupid enough to leave New Orleans and go wandering around the world. She was in such a bad mood that she had forgotten
why she was in Arizona on the first day of March, two thousand and four, only five days past her sixty-fourth birthday and
what seemed like a million days since the last time she was comfortable or happy.

“I give up,” she said in a quiet voice, just loud enough for DeLesseps to hear but not loud enough so he had to hear it unless
he wanted to.

“Don’t do that. I can see the sign. It’s right up there. We’ll have lunch and then call and see if there’s an Enterprise rental
that will bring us a car.”

At the Morning Glory Motel the man who was living off of the Mexican girl who cleaned the rooms had taken her keys and was
in the room Carla and DeLesseps had rented. Going through the bags, he found the case with Carla’s jewelry and opened it and
thought maybe he would cry with joy. He took the case and the laptop and the leather holder for the cellular phone and three
of DeLesseps’s shirts and a suit and sweater from Rubenstein Brothers and a pair of running shoes from Fleet Feet of Boston
and stuffed it all into a laundry bag and got into his truck and took off for Mexico. He was leaving Maria Elena behind without
a word of farewell. He didn’t even have the courtesy to stop off and give her back the keys he had taken while she was napping
in their room.

He threw the keys away in the desert near the Arizona border. He traded in the car in Nogales and crossed the border into
Sonora, where the spoils of his evil would make him a wealthy man for many months before his karma caught up with him.

Carla dug into her steak and baked potato, forgetting her low-fat, low-carb life and concentrating on saving room for apple
pie and ice cream.

DeLesseps was almost as indulgent. At least it was a break from sitting at a desk at the mayor’s office being a flak-catcher
for every out-of-work voter in the parish. “My great-grandfather was the governor of Louisiana,” he reminded Carla. “And I
have to work for that asshole and he didn’t even give me a raise this year. I think I’ll stay out here in California and start
over again.”

“What? What are you talking about?” She looked across the expanse of the tabletop, with its cheap paper place mats and dirty
salt and pepper containers, and past the tables to the dusty windows with the plastic curtains and tried not to think of what
would happen if she caught giardia as she had one time in Colorado.

“Never mind. Just go on thinking about yourself. I’m going outside to smoke. Order me some dessert. Just pick out anything.”
He got up and left the table. He almost never got mad at Carla, but this trip and this day were too much. He walked outside
and lit a cigarette and watched as the pickup truck carrying his laptop computer and half his clothes sailed by on the dusty
four-lane highway.

After they finished lunch Carla called New Orleans and had her travel agent search the area for a car rental place that would
deliver. In fifteen minutes the agent called back to say there was a place in Reno, Nevada, that could have them a car by
ten that night. Five hundred dollars’ delivery and fifty a day. “We’ll take it,” Carla said. “Charge it to my card.”

Carla called the service station to check on the Lincoln. The attendant said the tow truck still hadn’t come to take it to
the dealer-ship in Bishop. She gave him her cell phone number and told him she would pay him to call her when it came.

“Would you take fifty dollars to drive me back to the motel?” she asked the cashier at the restaurant.

“Sure,” he said. “But you have to wait until the lunch crowd clears out.”

“We’ll wait.” Carla went back to the table where the remains of their lunch had not been cleared away. The pie plate was covered
with flies. She sat down at a clean table and DeLesseps joined her and they sat like that for a long time, talking about times
they had been in California with different people they had been married to or sleeping with. By the time the cashier came
and found them and said he could drive them back, they had become friends again, full of each other’s stories and jealous
of everyone each of them had ever known.

The cashier’s name was Frank Donald. He was twenty-six years old, had been an Orkin field man for a while in Los Angeles and
returned to Weggins to decide what to do next. He was a stepson to Will Maynes, the clerk at their motel. Frank said he wanted
to go to the motel anyway to borrow a shovel for digging up a broken sewer line in his mother’s yard.

“So that’s about it for my story up to now,” he said, turning into the parking lot at the motel. “What room are you guys in?”

“Three one three,” DeLesseps answered. “You can just let us out.” “I’ll be up at the office if you want to go anywhere else.”
Frank took the fifty-dollar bill Carla gave him and looked embarrassed. “This is way too much money. I’ll take you someplace
else if you like. We have a movie house in town, where you rent movies for the VCR on your TV You may have some time to kill.
Or I could just drive you around and show you the town and where folks live. We have a Hopi ruin about ten miles from here
where some professors from the uni-versity are digging. You can see part of the main kiva, that’s where they did their religious
ceremonies. It’s pretty cool really. We used to hang out there after dances when I was in school. I know all about it. You
have to walk to get there. You got any good boots with you?”

He was still talking while DeLesseps was opening the door and still there when DeLesseps discovered what had happened. “We’ve
been robbed,” DeLesseps said. “Goddamn it all to hell. What next? Is there anything else that can go wrong this week?”

“What?” Carla said. “What, what, what?”

Thirty minutes later both of the policemen in Weggins were there and ten minutes after that the sheriff and the sheriff’s
deputies. Carla and DeLesseps were ordered to stay out of the room while the deputies dusted it for fingerprints.

Carla called her insurance agent in New Orleans, then called her lawyer, then called her travel agent, then tried to call
Mitzi for the fifteenth time that week. Then the rented car arrived from Las Vegas with a second car following to take the
driver back to Las Vegas. It was a Dodge Intrepid. It was not the Mercedes Carla had ordered, but she took it nonetheless.
Frank suggested they go into town to the sports bar to get a drink while they waited for the fingerprint experts to arrive
from Holcomb and do their work. Carla stormed into the motel room and demanded her cosmetic kit and when they refused she
screamed until they took the things she wanted out of the kit and put them in a paper bag and handed them to her. Holding
the bag, she stalked back to the Dodge Intrepid and got in behind the wheel. DeLesseps got in the passenger seat and Frank
got in the back.