The Late Child (6 page)

Outside in the sunlight Harmony remembered the day she had driven Pepper to the airport and put her on the big shiny airplane for New York. Pepper had looked so grown up, that day; she had perfect confidence in her own dancing and was certain that she was flying away to become a big star on Broadway. Still, Harmony knew that underneath Pepper's confident manner she was still a seventeen-year-old girl; she wasn't so grown up, not really. Pepper said goodbye and got on the plane and was gone. On the way back from the airport Harmony had cried so hard she had to stop at a Jack in the Box and have several cups of coffee in order to regain her composure.

Harmony reflected that if she had known the truth, that day—that she had just seen her daughter alive for the last time—all the cups of coffee in all Las Vegas would not have been enough to restore her composure. If she had had any inkling of what was to come she would have given up right then; and there would have been no Webb, no Eddie, no job at the recycling plant, no nothing.

But mainly, that day, she had just felt like a mom might feel whose child had gone away to college—Pepper had departed for the big college called New York City; she would be home for Christmas, probably, or at the worst, for summer vacation—she could not have imagined that nearly six years would pass without Pepper coming home for a visit. Harmony was soon to have Eddie inside her; she had to concentrate on having a healthy pregnancy—after all, she was almost forty-two at the time, she might not sail through this pregnancy quite as easily as she had sailed through her pregnancy with Pepper.

While she was thinking back to that day, which she had not realized would be her last day in the company of her daughter,
Jasmine Legrande came wobbling along the sidewalk—very likely she had been out drinking all night. Jasmine had once been the reigning showgirl of Las Vegas herself, from an era earlier than Harmony's—well, much earlier, really; there had hardly even been a Las Vegas at all when Jasmine reigned at the Sahara from the very day that it opened. Even Gary, who was sort of the oral historian of Las Vegas, hadn't been there the day the Sahara opened.

“Harmony, I had a bad dream, is something wrong in your life?” Jasmine asked; she was a kind old woman even if she was almost always drunk and even if she did weigh three hundred and fifty pounds. Once her days as a reigning showgirl were over Jasmine had definitely let herself go.

“Oh Jasmine, Pepper died,” Harmony said—why conceal it? Everyone she knew in Las Vegas would know it soon enough, probably most of them already did know it.

To her surprise, Jasmine began to tremble, and the next thing Harmony knew, she fainted dead away and fell against the little faux picket fence in front of the apartment building. The pickets were just plywood or some other very weak wood; when Jasmine collapsed on the fence a whole section of fence collapsed with her—the apartment manager certainly wasn't going to like that, and who could blame him?

Still, the fact was Jasmine had fainted and was lying in the yard. Harmony knew she couldn't lift her, so she raced back in the house to seek help; everyone was just sitting around watching Eddie gobble his waffle when she appeared.

“Help me, please, Jasmine's fainted,” Harmony said. Everyone looked completely startled except Eddie, who went calmly on eating his waffle.

“Is she deaded too, Mom?” he asked—the concept of deading had interested him ever since he watched
Benjy
the first time and had to grapple with the question of whether the black wolf was really gone forever once he fell off the cliff.

“Eddie, I hope not—I think she just got too hot or something,” Harmony said.

“I'll get a cold rag,” Gary said, and he did; pretty soon they were all standing over Jasmine, fanning her and trying to shade her with newspapers. Harmony couldn't quite get her mind off the destroyed fence; the manager was a Mormon who didn't like for things of an unexpected nature to happen around the apartment building.

Gary's cold rag was having a good effect, Jasmine was definitely still breathing. Harmony realized she was going to have a close call when it came to getting Eddie ready for school—when she went back inside to see about him he was flipping channels with the remote despite the fact that his fingers were sticky from the maple syrup.

“Eddie, you're getting the buttons sticky, the remote won't work if you do that,” she said. “Jimmy won't be able to switch to the ball game.”

“I thought you said he had gone away,” Eddie reminded her. “He wasn't here for breakfast.”

“You're right,” Harmony said—she had forgotten that little fact. “He's not here but it's still not a good idea to get the buttons sticky on the remote.”

“Did he fart himself away?” Eddie asked; he was in one of his giggly moods, which was fine with Harmony. In three minutes she had him upstairs and dressed and back down to the front step, just in time, too; the school bus pulled up ten seconds later, while Gary and Juliette and Jessie and Myrtle were still trying to get Jasmine to her feet.

“I don't need to latch the gate this morning, Mom, because the fence is down,” Eddie observed, just before he gave her a kiss and raced up the steps into the school bus.

“What happened?” Eddie's friend Eli asked, seeing a crowd around a fat woman in Eddie's yard.

“Jasmine fainted and broke our fence and my sister died,” Eddie said. He always tried to sit by Eli on the bus.

“I wish my sister would die, she's a dickhead,” Eli remarked.

Eddie wanted to giggle, but tried to hold it in. He knew that dickhead was an even worse word than fart—if the teacher ever
heard Eli say a word like that Eli wouldn't get to go out at recess for many days—probably for a whole week.

Eli was eating licorice; his Mom put it in his lunch and he always got it out and ate it on the school bus on the way to school. The licorice made his teeth black.

“Did you have to smell farts last night?” Eli asked. He was interested in the fact that Eddie's mother's boyfriend farted a lot.

“No, he didn't even come home last night, I think he deaded, too,” Eddie said. The last was just something pretend he thought up to impress Eli.

“Boy, you're lucky, a lot of people die at your house, it must be exciting,” Eli said.

Driving to the airport, later in the day, Harmony reflected that it was a little bit of a sad comment on her years in Las Vegas that she was still borrowing cars—Gary's, in this case. It was an old Mercury that had been involved in a few fender benders. After all, she had been a reigning showgirl too, for more years than Jasmine had; and yet she had never quite got far enough ahead to buy a car. Even carpooling for Pepper or picking her up at dance class had always been in borrowed cars—usually she would just borrow one at the casino, at the last minute. Once or twice she had sort of chipped in with boyfriends and owned parts of cars for a while, but, without exception, when the boyfriends left they forgot about Harmony's chipping in. They always took the cars with them.

Recently she had promised Eddie that they would get a car and a puppy soon. She knew she had to pull herself together and make good on the puppy at least. In view of the wall-to-wall carpet, getting the puppy housebroken quickly was important—the manager wasn't going to take kindly to any messy puppies, not after Jasmine smashed his fence.

After Jasmine had recovered enough to come inside and drink vodka with Myrtle, Gary took Harmony aside and reminded her that Jasmine had also lost a daughter—the daughter had been involved with a trapeze artist, but, after that, the story grew vague. Not many people left alive had been in Las Vegas when it happened.

“Even if you knew exactly what happened I wouldn't want you to tell me about it,” Harmony said. “I just don't care to hear about it right now, Gary.”

But it did make her feel a sadness for Jasmine—that was probably what caused her to let herself go to the extent of weighing three hundred and fifty pounds.

“I know what you're thinking,” Gary said. He had known
Harmony so long that much of the time he actually did know what she was thinking—at least he usually came close.

“I'm trying
not
to think, Gary,” Harmony pointed out. “The fewer thoughts I have right now, the better.”

“Harmony, you're not going to turn into a drunk who weighs three hundred and fifty pounds,” Gary said. “This is the worst tragedy ever, but you'll survive. You have to. You have Eddie.”

Well, it was the truth—and if any little boy deserved a good mom it was Eddie. For sure he deserved a mom who could afford to own a car. Right now, when he was only in kindergarten, maybe it didn't matter so much; but in a few years it would be a big embarrassment for him, that his mom couldn't even afford a car; there probably weren't two hundred people in Las Vegas so poor they couldn't afford some kind of car. When he got big enough to go on dates—after all, that would only be another seven or eight years—lack of a car would amount to a serious problem.

“Maybe they'll make me manager of the recycling plant,” Harmony said, thinking out loud. Gary got a look on his face that suggested that he didn't think being manager of a recycling plant was aiming high enough—but, from Harmony's point of view, it was sort of shooting for the stars. After all, she didn't have many skills—for most of her life her beauty had been the only skill she needed, nobody else had been chosen Miss Las Vegas Showgirl three times running.

“Gary, don't look that way. I want to make enough money to buy a car, otherwise Eddie's going to be embarrassed,” Harmony said.

The truth was, the people in her house—although they were her dearest friends—were beginning to depress her. Jasmine had passed out on the couch—her makeup was all runny.

Meanwhile, Gary had gone to the bathroom and taken several pills. Gary had never been able to stay off speed; he claimed it was working odd hours that made him need it but why he needed it didn't really matter; the fact was, Gary took a lot of speed. It made him bitchy when he was on his way up and even bitchier when he was on his way down. Pretty soon he was going
to start bitching out Jessie, who had been crying continuously ever since she heard the news. If there was such a thing as a contest for continuous crying, Jessie would win hands down.

Juliette had finally worn out and gone to sleep in a chair, and Myrtle, very drunk, was sowing disorder in Harmony's kitchen. She was so drunk she couldn't tell a clean dish from a dirty dish; she took a whole dishwasherful of unwashed dishes and put them back in the cabinet on top of the perfectly clean dishes that were already there.

“Myrtle, those dishes haven't been washed, please leave them in the dishwasher,” Harmony said.

“Harmony, I was washing dishes before you were born,” Myrtle said. It was pointless to argue with her when she was drunk. Reason was the last thing Myrtle wanted to listen to; even when she was sober, she wasn't crazy about listening to it.

Harmony decided she couldn't stand to be at home anymore. Of course, it was several hours before her sisters would be arriving from Tulsa, but she didn't care. Several hours of sitting in the Las Vegas airport was preferable, in her view, to even one hour of watching Jessie cry or Jasmine smear her makeup or Myrtle sow disorder in her kitchen.

So she drove Gary down to the Stardust, where he worked. He was in love with a Chicano boy who was a janitor there. Gary was happy to loan Harmony his car; his new love was on his mind, not his old Mercury.

On her way to the airport, Harmony remembered Ross, Pepper's father. She knew it was up to her to start looking for Ross; Gary had said he would ask around, and maybe he would, but Gary had never thought much of Ross. He had even sort of opposed the effort Harmony made to get back with Ross, seven years earlier, when Ross was working as a light man in Reno.

Gary had been right about that one, her effort to hitch up with Ross again had been El Floppo, as Myrtle would say. Harmony knew before she went to Reno that Ross was involved with a young woman named Linda, who happened to be pregnant by him at the time, but she had allowed herself to be convinced that
Ross's relationship with Linda was just kind of a roommate thing. Then Harmony got to Reno and found out that the relationship with Linda
wasn't
just a roommate thing—it was closer to being a mad passion; why Ross had even urged her to come to Reno she never knew. On the whole, that venture had been pretty discouraging—so discouraging that she hadn't talked to Ross a single time since she got herself back on the bus and limped back to Las Vegas. For the next year or two her self-esteem was at a low ebb, which is probably why she ended up getting pregnant by Webb.

Still, getting pregnant by Webb had produced Eddie, just as getting pregnant by Ross had produced Pepper: Harmony was not willing to think of either guy as just a total mistake.

“Harmony, never go out with a guy with sideburns like that,” Gary had said, in disgust, the first time he met Webb. “Those sideburns are from another age.”

It was true that Webb had biker sideburns—he had mainly been a biker until he got in the tow-truck business.

“Gary, I guess my standards are just different,” Harmony said. She couldn't imagine rejecting a guy with a shy grin like Webb's just because his sideburns were a little long—that was before she knew about the impatience, of course, or any of Webb's other bad habits, such as having five or six girlfriends strung out up and down I-15, from Las Vegas to San Bernardino.

Speaking of impatience, Gary himself didn't have much room to talk; he was becoming more and more intolerant of her boyfriends, although quite a few of
his
boyfriends were really nothing to write home about.

“Your standards are the standards a doormat would have if a doormat wanted to claim it had standards,” Gary said. He was on his way down from taking too much speed and was unusually bitchy—later he apologized for that remark. It
had
hurt Harmony's feelings; she didn't feel she was exactly a doormat because she tried to be accepting of things about her menfolk that maybe she wasn't too fond of, such as Jimmy's digestive condition or Webb's impatience; after all, nobody was perfect and if you
weren't willing to put up with a little imperfection in a guy, here and there, then the alternative was to have no relationship, and be alone.