Now or Never (15 page)

She hitched up the bodice of her lace dress, smoothed her hair. “I know that at heart you’re just an old-fashioned guy and not out to take advantage of me,” she said, throwing him a flirtatious glance under her lashes, as she headed for the kitchen.

Harry followed her. He took off his jacket, then stood, arms folded, propped against the kitchen door. “True,” he said. “Only thing is—and I don’t know if anyone else has ever told you this.”

She looked expectantly at him.

“Your lips are as velvety as the violet petals.”

“Hmm. Is that so, detective?” She took the bottle of champagne out of the refrigerator and held it up. “Your favorite. I didn’t forget.”

He nodded, impressed. “So you didn’t.” He took the bottle from her, opened it without spilling a drop, and poured the champagne into two thin crystal glasses.

“Here’s to a jolly evening, Detective Harry,” she said, back to her old mocking self.

“You mean it’s not over yet?”

She laughed. “I can’t send you home hungry. There’s food in that refrigerator too.”

He pulled open the door and inspected the contents. “Looks like you were planning a dinner party.”

“I was, until I chickened out.”

He took out the boned quail. “You were going to cook these? For me?”

“Yup. And the stuffed zucchini flowers. And the couscous with scallions and spinach and lemon.”

He raised his eyes to the heavens. “She can cook too,” he said in an awed voice.

“How about a sandwich? It’s quicker. Mayo or mustard?” She held up the jars.

“Both.”

He watched as she fixed the sandwiches and put them on bright blue and yellow plates.

“Matisse would have painted them just like that,” he said admiringly. “Still life of two turkey sandwiches in Manhattan.”

“Don’t forget the bottle of champagne.” She snatched up the glasses and led the way back into the living room. She put the champagne on the coffee table, kicked off her sandals, then sat on the rug in front of the fire and pushed the CD button. Elgar’s
Enigma Variations
wafted through the room.

She glanced at Harry, sitting opposite her. “I’m wondering how a man who can compare a turkey sandwich to a Matisse painting ended up as a detective.”

“You already know how. We went over it on our last date, remember?”

“Our last
date?”

“What else would you call it?”

She took a bite of her sandwich, thinking about it. “A meeting. That’s what it was.”

“Maybe for you.”

“And ‘velvet violet petals.’ That’s not cop talk.”

“How do you expect a cop to talk?”

“Oh, you know. Hard, tough, down to earth. Black and white, and no nuances.”

“I’m known for my nuances.”

She laughed. “I see you’re enjoying the sandwich.”

“I missed Ruby’s tonight. Still, everything considered—the luxurious surroundings, the high quality of the sandwich, the yellow and blue Matisse plates, the velvet lips—I’d rather be here.”

He didn’t say “with you,” but she knew he meant it. Pleased, she sat back on her heels, sipping her wine, watching as he finished the sandwich.

He glanced around the room. “It looks as though
you’ve lived here forever. The ancestral home, forebears on the walls, family photos in silver frames.”

He picked up a photograph from the side table and inspected it. It was a picture of a couple. The man was tall and good-looking in a burly outdoors way, and his arm was draped around the shoulders of a petite, preppy-looking blonde with a big smile. It had been taken on the wooden deck of a substantial home overlooking a lake, and they looked happy and comfortable with each other.

“Your parents?” he guessed.

She lifted a shoulder. “Do I look like them?”

He studied the photograph. “I think so.”

“That’s why I chose them.”

His head shot up. “You
chose
them?”

“Of course I did. In a junk shop. I chose all the people you see here, in the photos and paintings. When I was reinventing my past.”

Harry put the silver-framed photograph down carefully. “You want to tell me about this, Malone?”

“No. You know what I mean.”

Her mouth was suddenly tight, and she had that bruised look.

“I don’t think I really do know what you mean.” He walked over to her and took her hand. “But I think you need to tell somebody about it. Why not me?”

She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s a commonplace enough story. It’s just that I’ve tried so hard to put it all behind me. To become someone else.” He frowned, puzzled, and she said, “The truth is, I didn’t really exist until I invented myself.” And then suddenly she was telling him about her childhood—about her brutal father and depressive mother, and about them running away to the seaside, and Golden.

“A bitch of a little town,” Mary’s mother had called it when they first arrived there with all their worldly belongings
piled into the ancient turquoise Chevy with the chrome fins. And she was right.

Golden’s gray weather-scarred wooden buildings clung with ferocious tenacity to the windswept shore. There was a Kiwanis Lodge and an Elks; a Veterans War Memorial and the Midway Supermart; a diner masquerading as the Lido Café; and old folks growing older. It was a cheap little place that flirted briefly with the stray summer visitors, struggling under faded, festive buntings to look prosperous and inviting. But these visitors who stopped to look never stayed. They drove quickly on, searching for livelier, gayer venues.

Golden’s residents had all been born there, and their fathers and grandfathers before them and they quickly labeled the Malones trash and locked them out of their clannish little society.

Mal had no words to describe the terrible loneliness of those years. The sheer bleak aloneness of it, stretching endlessly behind her, infinitely in front of her. The only person close to her was her mother, but only because they lived together, not because her mother cared; she cared about nothing. Sometimes, lying in the orange vinyl sofa, trying to sleep, Mary Mallory would be overcome with terror, because she knew if she died that night nobody on God’s earth would care. She was truly no one.

Mal could still see the drafty old trailer, smell the sea and rotting garbage and the sour odor of poverty. In that instant, she was there again—living it, breathing it,
hating it
.

The trailer was meant to be a summer rental. It was small and worse than shabby—it was ugly. Everything in it was worn and gray, except for the vinyl sofa, and even that had faded from red to a dull blood-orange. Her mother occupied the one bedroom at the rear, with a small window that refused to open even on the hottest days, though Mary Mallory had done her best with the
screwdriver, prying and hammering to no avail. So when it was hot, her mother simply sat in the living room with the door wide open and the TV set on all night, while Mary Mallory gave up hope of getting any sleep.

Her mother was addicted to TV. She watched everything, all the late-late shows, though Mary Mallory swore she never heard a word they said. It simply passed in front of her eyes—people, places, events—while smoke wreathed endlessly up to the ceiling as she lit cigarette after cigarette. Mary Mallory doubted her mother lived vicariously through TV, the way she herself did through movies; it was just there to remind her she was alive. She never even switched channels. Whatever was on the channel when she turned it on, that was what she watched.

Mary Mallory would try to coax her to bed. “Come on, Mom,” she said, placing herself in front of the set. “It’s awful late, and I’ve got to get some sleep.” Her mother glanced vaguely up at her and lit another cigarette.

“I’m watching TV,” she said mildly. But looking into her mother’s desolate blue eyes, Mary Mallory knew she had her own soundtrack running in her head.

Her mother never did get a job. They were living on welfare, and it was Mary Mallory’s duty to go the welfare office every Monday after school and pick up food stamps.

“You again,” Miss Aurora Peterson said, looking down her long nose at Mallory and adjusting the string of small cultured pearls at her scrawny but respectable throat and reached for the Malone file. Even though Mary Mallory was certain she knew the details of their poverty by heart, the supervisor still made a great show of flicking through the papers, glancing up every now and again, and saying, “Hmm … hmm … I see.”

Mary Mallory often thought it was a great pity that the welfare office was not staffed by the same people who needed the help, because they surely would have been
nicer and had more genuinely charitable feelings in their hearts for unfortunates like herself.

But Miss Aurora Peterson lived in a nice white-painted house, shaded by old oak trees, on the right side of Golden’s tracks—the very same house she had been born in and that had been left to her by her father. She wore pale blue twinsets and had her hair permed three times a year at Jody’s beauty salon, where they also painted her nails a safe clover pink. She drove an almost-new white Buick, took her two-week vacations at the same resort in the mountains each year, and attended St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Golden every Sunday, even though she had no love in her heart for anyone—and Mary Mallory suspected that that included Jesus—but it gave her an opportunity to wear her latest hat.

Mary Mallory stared down at the scarred linoleum floor and the shabby shoes of the other people standing in line while Miss Peterson examined her file as intently as if she were cracking a mysterious code. After five minutes or so, the woman glanced up and said wearily, “Oh, you Malones. When is your wretched mother ever going to get herself a job instead of letting us taxpayers take care of you?”

She took out a big rubber stamp and banged it down on the page, then finally counted out the food stamps and pushed them through the little opening at the bottom of the glass window that separated her from the roughness and uncouth manners of those who had fallen on hard times. And not once did she even glance at Mary Mallory.

Her cheeks burning with embarrassment, Mary Mallory walked to the Supermart at the other end of town. She grabbed a cart and walked quickly up and down the aisles, picking up cornflakes, milk, margarine, Velveeta cheese, bologna, and sliced Wonder Bread. She picked up a can of beans, and half a pound of the cheapest hamburger meat, and whatever instant coffee was on special. She went to
the produce section and bought two baking potatoes and, for a treat, two green apples. Then she went and stood in line at the checkout and prepared herself for the second humiliation of the day.

Her cheeks flamed again with the shame of it as the manager counted her food stamps. She was always terrified that she had spent too much and would have to put things back. Clutching her brown paper bag, she walked down the street to the little gas station, where the owner let her buy cigarettes for her mother even though she was underage. It was the one act of kindness in her day, though he was doing it because he never let a sale pass him by, not because he took pity on her. Still, it saved a lot of trouble because after that first optimistic year, her mother had practically stopped going out of the house at all, and without her cigarettes Mary Mallory was sure she would have gone really mad.

The only time her mother left the house was when the very blackest of depressions came over her. Then, when she came home from school her mother would be gone. She would find her mother on the cliffs, staring out to sea, or walking slowly along the beach, oblivious to the storms and the rain and the giant pounding waves roaring in with the sound of an express train, making the earth tremble beneath her feet.

Eventually, she would return home. She would dry her rain-soaked hair and fix a cup of coffee and turn on the TV. It was as though the violent storm had soothed whatever it was that tortured her.

Once, on her way home from the market, Mary Mallory passed girls from school. They were wearing smart new sweaters and riding metallic-red bikes, and their mouths were bright pink with a kissy-looking new lipstick color. They didn’t seem to notice her, though, or if they did, they avoided looking at her. They were busy chatting with one another about boys as they cycled aloofly by in a
heavy cloud of perfume, just purchased at Bardett’s Drugstore on Maln.

Mary Mallory shifted the grocery bag to the other arm. She adjusted her owlish plastic eyeglasses and peered enviously after them. She was blind as a bat, and the lenses were so thick, they looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles. She felt hidden behind them, and that the girls couldn’t really see her, or else why wouldn’t they have said hello at least. But then, no one ever said hello.

She remembered her first terrible day at school. The secretary had escorted her into the homeroom and pushed her out in front of the class. Thirty pairs of eyes had bored into her, taking in her washed-out dress that was too short, her worn sneakers, and her ugly glasses. With the well-honed instinct of the pack, they knew instantly that she was an outsider—“a weirdo” and “ugly,” the girls whispered to each other behind their hands, giggling.

“Say hello to Mary Mallory,” the teacher ordered, glancing impatiently at her, still standing forlornly in front of the class.

“Hello, Mary Mallory,” they chorused, then collapsed into giggles.

Mary Mallory muttered a quick hi, then hurried to the desk the teacher had pointed out.

She was dreading recess, but she needn’t have because no one spoke to her anyway. No one offered to show her around or be her friend. No one even bothered to stare at her or make fun of her. For all the seventh grade of Golden Junior High cared, she might have been invisible.

It was the silence that got to her. At home her mother rarely spoke, she was always lost in her own world. And at school, apart from occasional questions from the teacher, no one even greeted her. She had always been shy, but now she became inhibited. She told herself it was because she was ugly, because she was poor, because her mother
was a “crazy woman,” because she had to line up in front of patronizing Miss Aurora Peterson and then hand over her humiliating stamps in the Golden Supermart. Because her clothes were cheap and purchased from the secondhand store; because she could never buy
Glamour
magazine and a soda and try out all the new lipsticks and perfumes at Bardett’s. Because she was no one. Nothing. The invisible girl of Golden Junior High.