Chapter 10
On the way back to her mother’s house from the lawyer’s office, Maeve realized she hadn’t eaten all day.
She pulled into the drive-through line at Carey Hilliard’s on Waters Avenue and ordered a chopped pork barbecue sandwich, onion rings, and half-and-half iced tea.
But when she reached into her billfold to pay, she frowned.
She’d gotten two hundred dollars from the ATM the day before, but as she counted the folded bills, she realized she was missing a hundred dollars.
She handed the drive-through girl a twenty, and silently fumed while she waited for her change, because she had a very good idea how that money had gone missing.
By the time she’d gotten back to the house, she’d devoured the sandwich and onion rings and sucked down half the iced tea. She’d called Therese’s phone twice, but of course, her sister didn’t pick up.
Maeve used her mother’s house key to open the toolshed in the carport. It smelled of gas from the lawn mower and was crammed with her father’s long-unused tools, rakes and shovels, and a narrow wire shelving unit groaning under the weight of half a dozen cardboard banker’s boxes.
She hit pay dirt with the second-to-last box on the shelf.
She lugged it into the house and dumped it out on the coffee table in the living room.
Sorting through the contents, she recognized her mother’s idea of a filing system.
Bills—utility, credit card, even the tuition bills from St. Mary’s—all still in their original envelopes going back to the 1990s, were each stamped PAID and bundled together with now-brittle rubber bands.
She felt a familiar twinge of grief as she thumbed through the bundles of condolence cards sent after her father’s death decades earlier. Another bundle held cheerier greeting cards marking birthdays, Mary Helen’s and Maeve’s and Therese’s; Christmas; Easter; St. Patrick’s Day; and Mother’s Day.
Her pulse quickened when she found a bundle her mother had labeled with a paper scrap: Charitable contributions.
She found thank-you letters and receipts from half a dozen do-good organizations whose names mostly started with St.—St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, St. Vincent DePaul, St. Joseph’s Hospital, and of course, St. Mary’s School.
Mary Helen had been nothing if not steadfast, in her faith, as well as her charity. But there were no letters or receipts from Showers of Blessings Cathedral, Brother Jerome’s organization.
With a sigh, she gathered up the bundles and began dumping them back into the box, but at the bottom of the pile, she discovered a slender packet of colorful picture postcards that had somehow escaped her notice.
She flipped over the top card, which pictured the iconic hillside Hollywood sign. She recognized her sister’s handwriting and noted the postmark—from 2015.
Hi Mama. I’m in Hollywood, auditioning for a pilot for an NBC show. Please cross your fingers and rattle those rosary beads so I get the part. Love, Therese.
There was a card showing the lit-up Las Vegas casino strip with a postmark dated three months later.
Hi Mama. Bad news. The TV pilot didn’t work out. Networks suck! But one of the girls I met in LA got me a job at one of the casinos here. I’ll put a quarter in the slot machines for you. Love, Therese.
The next postcard came two months later, from Chicago.
Hi Mama. Thanks bunches for the money order.
You’re the best dam mama in the world. Can you believe I’m in a touring company of Guys and Dolls?
Man is it cold in Chicago. Guess I know why they call it the windy city.
Next stop: Kansas City. I’ll order a big-ol’ ribeye steak in your honor. Love, Therese.
Maeve checked. There was no postcard from Kansas City. After a two-year gap the next one was a postcard of the Empire State Building.
Hi Mama. I got your check for the new headshots, and you are still the best mama in the whole dam world.
Everything in New York is soooo expensive.
I’ve been staying with four other girls in this gross roach-ridden apartment, and you wouldn’t believe how much it costs.
But I’m working at a little diner, so I eat for free, and my new agent has me auditioning all day every day.
Good news is I got a callback for a deodorant ad today. Whoo-hoo! Love, Therese.
The last postcard in the bunch was postmarked Miami, November 2021, and featured palm trees and a glowing sunset.
Hi Mama. Well, this pandemic really sucks. I was up for a part in a Miami Vice reboot, and then BAM, they shut down the shoot. Driving for Uber Eats so don’t know how I’d make it without your help with the car situation. You’re the best dam mama evah. Love, Therese.
Maeve fanned the postcards out on the coffee table.
Therese had lived a nomadic existence since high school, but now, looking down at her sparse correspondence with their mother, she saw her sister’s life as a loosely woven string of high hopes and broken dreams. There were no other postcards since Miami, where Mary Helen had obviously stepped in—again—to keep Therese’s dreams afloat.
And after Miami, in those five years, what had happened to unmoor her sister?
For a second, she felt a flash of empathy. Maybe she should extend her sister some grace. And then she remembered the missing hundred dollars and got pissed all over again.
She heard the sound of a car pulling into the driveway, the lurch of LeBeast’s brakes, a car door slamming, and a moment later her sister burst into the living room, both arms wrapped protectively around the portrait of Lady Geraldine.
Maeve slipped the stack of postcards beneath a bundle of utility bills.
“Hey!” Therese set the painting gingerly atop the fireplace mantel. Her face was alive with excitement. “Wait until you hear. Our money problems are over.”
Maeve gave her a curt nod. “Where’ve you been?”
“Researching Lady G. Maeve, I know you think Mama made up all that stuff about the portrait, but I swear, this painting is the real deal.”
“And you know this, how?”
Therese pulled out the tiny spiral-bound notebook where she’d scribbled the information she’d uncovered about Valerian DeJongh and the painting and waved it in the air.
“Remember Wyllona Jackson? From St. Mary’s?
She’s an art expert. She works for the biggest auction house in New York, but she’s in town this week because it’s her dad’s birthday.
I tracked her down and I showed her the portrait.
And Maeve, the artist who painted Lady G is really famous.
His stuff is exhibited in art galleries around the world.
Wyllona says our painting could be worth a shit-ton of money.
If we can authenticate the provenance, it could be worth over a million dollars! ”
“Riiiight,” Maeve said. “And just how do we do that?”
Therese plopped down on the sofa beside Maeve and grabbed both her sister’s hands. “I think we gotta do what Mama wanted. We go to Ireland.”
Maeve snatched her hands away. “Just up and run off to Ireland. Find someone who can tell us about a painting that came over here, what—a hundred years ago? That’s your solution to figuring out what to do about this house?”
“Well, yeah. You got a better plan?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“Of course,” Therese said, crossing her arms over her chest in her signature pout. “Maeve always knows best. Can’t wait to hear how you single-handedly save the day.”
“I actually took your advice. I went to see Scotty Childress this morning. He says we might have a course of action against Brother Jerome. For elder abuse. And, if we can find any correspondence to Mama from him, or his so-called church, for mail fraud. Also, we might even be able to go after the bank.”
“You actually think we’re gonna get money out of a bank? What was it Mom used to say about getting blood out of a turnip?”
“According to Scotty, the bank had a responsibility to protect their client’s assets. The teller who noticed Mom’s withdrawals and alerted that bank president about them? The bank had a responsibility to investigate.”
“Maeve, aren’t you the one always telling me to ‘get real’? Even if Scotty does sic the law on the church and the bank, that could take months and months. Years, probably. In the meantime, what am I supposed to do for money? I was counting on the money from this house. My inheritance.”
Maeve felt her face grow hot. “Mama’s dead, Terri. She can’t bail you out anymore. So maybe it’s time for you to grow the hell up and get an actual job? And while you’re at it, maybe stop stealing money out of my purse?”
Maeve jumped up and went into the kitchen.
She’d picked up a bottle of Chablis at a convenience store on her way home, and now poured herself a full glass.
She stood at the sink in her mother’s kitchen, gazing out the back window, gulping cheap wine, shaking her head and wondering how she’d gotten to this point—day drinking and needling her only sister.
Such a useless exercise. Therese was who she’d always been: beautiful, erratic, talented, selfish. Their mother had spent a lifetime defending and enabling her oldest daughter, and now, like it or not, it was just the two of them.
The wine left a sour taste in her mouth, and the one-sided fight she’d just picked with her sister left her stomach roiled.
She dumped the remainder of the wine down the drain and went back to the living room to try to make peace.
Therese slumped forward on the sofa, stunned and shamed. She and Maeve had bickered in the past, but her sister had never been deliberately cruel before. And the thing was, the words stung so much because they were so true.
She tossed the notebook onto the coffee table, where it landed in the stacks of mail Maeve had been studying. She rested her elbows on her knees and clutched her head between her hands.
Her eyes came to rest on the coffee table. Peeking out from the yellowing envelopes she spied a splash of color. The postcards she’d mailed on her cross-country search for acting gigs.
Reading them now was a humiliating visual reminder of all her many failures. Of course Mary Helen had saved them all. And now her sister had obviously read them too.
She heard a faint ding coming from the coffee table, and moved aside some papers, where she discovered Maeve’s cell phone.
Without consciously meaning to, she picked up the phone and read the incoming text from someone named Zorayah.
Oh no, sis! Sasha says that bitch Janelle axed you. Call me if you wanna talk.
“Holy shit,” she breathed. Saint Maeve, fired?
“What the hell?”
She looked up to see her sister glaring down at her.
“So, now you’re a thief and a sneak?”
Therese dropped the phone. “I didn’t mean to…” It sounded lame even to her.
Maeve snatched up the phone and glanced at the text message. She felt her cheeks redden. “So now you know. You’re not the only one out of a job.”
“I’m sorry,” Therese managed, her eyes filling with tears. “Really, really sorry. About the money, and the house, and you losing your job, and me not coming to see Mom when she was sick…”
She was full-on blubbering now, snot running down her face.
“And I know you read those postcards I sent her. I’m such a loser.
Such a fucking loser. I couldn’t face you guys.
I tried so hard, I really did. I got a new agent, new headshots.
I went on every fucking call, and nothing worked.
After the pandemic, and then the writers’ strike, there was just no work in Atlanta, and I couldn’t afford to go back out to California or New York.
And yeah, I’m a grown-ass woman, an out-of-work so-called actress, staring at forty, taking money from my widowed mom. ”
Maeve sank down onto the sofa and wrapped her arms around her sister, whose shuddering sobs were muffled against her chest.
“It’s okay,” she murmured, stroking Therese’s back the way you’d soothe a fussy baby. “We really are in the same boat now, right? A couple of unemployed old maids.”
Therese raised her head and sniffled. “What are we gonna do, Maeve?”
“Only thing we can do, I guess. Mary Helen Dunagin strikes again. Mama always did know how to get what she wanted. We call Uncle Keith and then book our trip to Ireland.”