Chapter Twelve
I race into the driveway at Shadow Bluff, bound up the front-porch steps, unlock the front door, and take the inside stairs two at a time.
The boxes are where I left them in the front bedroom. I grab the one with the cowboy hat I assumed was Mama’s. The image of her in bed that night years ago materializes. Her swollen and bruised eye. A cigarette between her lips. And a black cowboy hat perched on her head.
I rip open the box and dig through the musty clothes.
The hat is still there. I extract it with a shaky hand and study the dry-rotted band above the brim, a decaying rattlesnake rattle wedged between it and the hat.
I flip it over and search inside. No name.
Just more rot. I drop it back in the box.
My mouth feels too dry. I stumble to the bathroom faucet and drink water from my hand.
Then I splash it on my face. I grab a towel, blot the water off.
I look behind my reflection and see Mabry in the tub after I came back from dumping the car.
Steam rose from the water. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen like she’d been crying.
I placed a warm washcloth on her chest. “Mabry, tell me what happened.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“Mean what?”
She opened her small mouth to answer but only spoke one word. “Okra.”
Years before, I’d given Mabry a safe word.
One Krystal Lynn didn’t know about. Anytime Mabry felt unsafe, she could say that word, and then I’d get her out of the house.
It was our secret. Not that we even needed a safe word.
She could have just said she was scared, but I thought sharing a weird word was a smart way to hide our fear of Mama from Mama.
The same word I thought I’d heard that caller say on Fort Worth Live.
I shut my eyes. When I open them, I notice my folding toiletry bag hanging where the towel was. I reach inside and pull out the silver object I can’t seem to leave behind. It’s cold between my fingers. Leave it alone, I tell myself. I drop it back in the bag and cover the bag with the hand towel.
I’m punching in my mother’s number before I even make it back downstairs.
“Did your boss in Broken Bayou wear a black cowboy hat, Mama?” I say when she answers, slightly out of breath.
“What are you saying about a cowboy hat?”
She coughs, then a clatter, and the line goes dead.
“Mama?” I look at my phone, punch her number again, but this time, it goes straight to voicemail. She can be quite adept at seeming inept when she needs to be.
Blinding sunshine warms my face as I walk through the kitchen door into the backyard. I press Mama’s number again.
“Willamena, what’s going on?” she says instead of hello.
“We need to talk.”
“Well, those are the worst words a person can hear. I haven’t even had my lunch yet.”
I gaze at the dry dirt in the backyard and remember the greenhouse that used to be there. Dolly Parton serenading the plants inside. The smell of fertilizer and soil.
“We need to finish our conversation about the car.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“What did we do?” My voice sounds steady, but my hands are starting to shake.
Several seconds tick by.
I stop next to what looks like the oldest oak on the property. The circumference of its trunk matches that of a corn silo, dried Spanish moss whipping from its branches.
When Mama speaks, her voice is a shrill scream in my ear. “We did what we had to!”
I press my hand on its bark, hoping to feel grounded. Krystal Lynn’s conversations have a way of making me feel full of helium. “You don’t need to yell. Just talk to me, Mama.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m some project of yours,” she spits. “I know how you are. I know your type. And I know if I tell you my story, you’ll just call me a liar. You always call me a liar. Liar this, liar that. Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
The old tree holds me up. If I had any doubt before that Mama had stopped her meds, I don’t now. I’ll have to call her doctor. But first, I need to calm her down. I may never find another moment when I’m ready to hear what she has to say about that night.
“I promise I won’t call you a liar,” I say in a soft voice. “I really want to hear what you have to say.”
There’s a long pause. I hear her labored breathing, like she’s just come in from running. “I don’t know where to start.”
“It’s okay, Mama. Just start at the beginning.”
She clears her throat. “Mabry was upset that night you went out with that boy.”
I lean harder into the old oak. I remember Mama being upset, too, more like jealous. The way she’d grabbed Mabry’s arm. The cocky look she’d given me from the driver’s seat. Don’t wait up.
“Where did you go that night?” I say, my jaw tightening.
“A bar.”
“With Mabry?” I try to keep my voice light, but it’s starting to harden as much as my jaw.
“Yeah. She slept in the booth while my boss and I had drinks.”
My stomach clenches. The picture in Mabry’s sketchbook. Mama and a man. “What the hell?”
“Listen, it was harmless. I knew the owner.”
I shut my eyes a moment. Harmless for her, not Mabry. I open my eyes. “Then what?”
“Then my boss says he needs a ride back to the office. So I gave him a ride.”
“What time was it?”
“I don’t know. That was a long time ago. Why are you dragging this up?”
I ignore her question. “So you gave your boss a ride?”
“Yes.”
“At night to an empty office.”
“Willa, I . . . yes . . . I gave him a ride.”
“With Mabry.”
“Yes, with Mabry.”
“Why was your face bruised that night?” I say, hoping to throw her off and get an honest answer.
“Was it?”
“It was.”
“I don’t remember.”
There’s her first lie. I hear the stutter in her voice, the pause as she tries to think of what to say next.
“Okay, let’s back up.” I bring my hands to my eyes and squeeze. “What happened when you took him to the office? Did he run off? Did he go inside?”
“Well, no . . . yes. Kind of.”
“Mama, I’m losing patience. You need to tell me—”
“He fell, okay?”
“What do you mean he fell?”
Mama coughs a loud wet cough into the phone. It takes her several minutes to regroup.
“Well,” she says, “I followed him to the front door, and he unlocked it and turned off the alarm, then went to the back office. He was fiddling around with something back there when I heard a big thump. I ran back, and he was on the ground. Hit his head. Completely unconscious. And that safe was just sittin’ there, wide open. ”
I inhale a long, slow breath and exhale into the phone. “So you robbed him.” Not a question.
“Willamena, that man owed me. I saw my chance to get the money I was owed, and I took it.”
Now it’s my turn to be silent.
“Willamena?”
“Why did you leave the car there?”
“Mabry wouldn’t get back in it. You know how she was. So on the walk home, I thought up the idea of the car and insurance. I really did think we could get some easy money for it.”
Easy money. Krystal Lynn’s city of Atlantis. Always talking about it. Always searching for it. Never finding it.
“And you sent me back to that office?”
“Right. For the car.”
With an unconscious man inside the—I snap off the thought. “There was no man in that office, Mama.”
“Oh. I bet he woke up and took off.”
I want to scream. I want to pound my phone into the oak tree until it shatters.
And most of that anger is at myself. How could I have agreed to do what my drunk, disheveled mother said?
How come I didn’t call the police when I saw her bruised face?
How come I told myself all those years what I did that night was no big deal?
None of it made any fucking sense. But Krystal Lynn had been out of her mind that summer.
Her mania escalating to a height I’d never seen before.
Any choice she made, made perfect sense to her.
And I’d learned at a young age not to question her.
Agree, go along, head down. That’s what worked.
Mama stays silent.
My legs feel weak, and I stare at my orange boots and wish like hell for ruby slippers that wouldn’t take me home but back to the past. But that’s the wish of a child. I can make choices now that will make up for the ones I made back then.
“And that’s the truth. I’m not lying. I’m telling you, I’m not lying. I am not lying.”
She’s lying.
“What’s on that security tape, Mama?”
“What security tape?”
“You’re not the only one who stole something from that office that night.”
“Now, you listen to me, I don’t know anything about a security tape.
All I know is, I did what I had to do.” Her voice sounds younger than it has in years, hints of the fireball she’d once been.
Under different circumstances, her renewed vibrancy would give me hope.
Instead, it pushes a rush of hot blood through my veins.
“What does that mean?”
“It means . . . none of your business.”
“Thanks to you, this is very much my business. What about your old boss?”
“What about him?”
“Where is he?”
“I have no idea where that scumbag is.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t remember.”
And there’s lie number three.
A sound floats to me in the backyard. Tires on the oystershell driveway. I want to ask her why a police officer is asking me about the trunk, but I don’t. I’m not up for another lie.
“Mama, I have to go. But this conversation is far from over.”
I hang up and bolt back inside, through the kitchen, and up the hallway to the front door. Just as I open it, I see a delivery truck pulling away, and at my feet sits a large brown package.