Chapter 44 #2
By ten fifteen, I was sitting up very straight at my table, studying every car that pulled up out front.
The plan was, at ten thirty, all the girls were to come back outside to the dance floor, even if it meant cutting an appointment short.
We expected Mrs. Tartt and Frances to be home as soon as ten forty-five or as late as eleven.
At ten twenty-nine, as planned, all the girls came out—except for Flossy.
She was upstairs with a college boy who’d shown up alone without an appointment. Flossy’d figured he be “quick.”
At ten forty-five I saw a taxi coming. He honked twice as we’d instructed Frances to do.
I waved to Charlie, who whispered something to Mr. Binny, and “Stormy Weather” eased into “Night and Day,” a song that would probably raise my hair for the rest of my life.
Charlie went inside to go unlock the front door.
A few minutes later she, Frances, and Mrs. Tartt walked out on the back porch.
Standing up now at my telephone table, on full alert, I watched Mrs. Tartt take it all in.
The hem of her cotton dress was wrinkled from sitting through two picture shows.
She set a glass on the porch rail, a healthy pour of bourbon on ice that Charlie’d given her.
Her shoulders sagged, already tired again from yesterday’s trip as she watched Esmeralda foxtrotting in long, lithe sweeps, her legs stepping forward, then back.
Frances stood beside her, ill, probably terrified that Ruby would decide she wasn’t doing a good enough job.
Dear God, it would be a miracle if we got through this without Mrs. Tartt putting it together.
Charlie handed a small box to Mrs. Tartt.
I watched her open it, and even from here, I could see her mouth make a perfect little o.
She slipped the ring on her finger, easily now since she’d dropped so much weight.
This morning I’d gone to Fauster’s and bought back Mrs. Tartt’s wedding ring for twenty-one dollars.
She hugged Charlie tight and then she showed Frances, who looked at it, then over at me.
She scowled, looking put out, like why hadn’t we bought her ring too? God, my sister.
Mrs. Tartt gazed out at the girls dancing, a small smile on her face.
The white-headed fella Esmeralda was with stumbled drunkenly, but she caught his arm before he fell.
Trixie’s partner was leering at her, then from my side, I saw him clamp his hand down on her rear end—tell me Mrs. Tartt didn’t see that.
Trixie said something to him that jolted him, and he moved his hand away.
After another insufferable minute of this, I bared my teeth at my sister: Get Mrs. Tartt upstairs, give her two heart pills, and put her to bed. Frances didn’t seem to get the message.
Out front, another taxicab pulled up and what looked like two college boys got out. I stood up and Charlie met me halfway on the porch stairs. I told her, “Deal with those boys. I’m getting them upstairs.”
“Mrs. Tartt,” I said going to her, “let’s get you up to bed.” Blue eyes shiny with exhaustion, she nodded gratefully.
Before going inside, she took one last look at the yard. “It feels like the old days out here,” she said, then looked up at her house like it was a person she loved deeply and knew she might lose. How badly I wanted to tell her she wouldn’t.
I led her past Henry’s head, which somebody’d thankfully turned around, hiding the menu on the back.
Frances followed, struck dumb, behind us.
On the main stairs, Mrs. Tartt said, “Thank you, Birdie, for my ring. When I peeked in the window of Fauster’s shop tonight and didn’t see it, I was afraid he’d already melted it down. ”
“You’re welcome.” I didn’t want to be thanked for anything else. All I felt was guilt and fear and sweat trickling down my back.
“I saw all my beautiful furniture in there though. It was awful,” Mrs. Tartt said, taking each stair slowly. “Like a graveyard full of dead friends.”
On the second floor, Mrs. Tartt stopped to rest and looked down at Flossy’s closed door like she had yesterday. Halfway up the steep attic stairs, she stopped again and looked back at us.
“Woof, I must be tired. I’d swear I just heard Rory.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Frances said.
After forty-four stairs from the first floor to the attic landing, Mrs. Tartt was breathing hard. “It’s mighty warm up here this evening, isn’t it.” It wasn’t warm, it was downright hot, even with the electric fans blowing.
Frances moved past us into Mrs. Tartt’s room. “You want two pills again tonight?” she asked, cracking open the bottle by the bed. “How ’bout two?” She was starting to sound complicit in all this. Now that she was getting paid, I supposed she was.
“One is just fine,” Mrs. Tartt said and swallowed it with the glass of water I’d set by her bed. When she went into the little lavatory, Frances whimpered.
“Franny, I know this is hard on you,” I said. She turned away and wouldn’t look at me. “Please just remember, we’re doing this to save your home. But also your mama’s and her mama’s in Footely. Please remember that.” I kept myself out of it, hoping that would help.
Nothing. I got a hot lump in my throat. It felt better when I didn’t feel anything.
When I went back outside, I told Charlie, “I’m staying in the house to keep watch for now. I’ll man the door inside, you watch the table, give it another fifteen minutes before you let anybody inside.”
When I went in the kitchen, Flossy was in there with Virginia. “Where have you been, Flossy? She’s home, she’s upstairs—”
“I’m sorry,” Flossy said. “Kid’s so nervous it’s like eating a spaghetti supper.” Her knees were burning red. She was picking at the cork in a bottle of bourbon that’d been pushed in too hard.
I took the bottle and yanked the cork out with my teeth, poured some in a glass for the boy upstairs, and told her, “Keep him up there at least another ten minutes.”
“You look like you could use one of these,” Virginia said when Flossy went back upstairs. She poured a shot and handed it to me. I drank it without even thinking and coughed up a lung.
“Deep breaths,” Virginia said, patting my back.
The music outside finally changed from a never-ending “Night and Day” to “Temptation.” Seconds later, I heard a soft knock on the side door at the bottom of the service stairs and a twin say Frances’s name.
Virginia went to answer it for me and then came back into the kitchen.
“Thank God there are only two more nights after this,” I whispered. “You must be glad it’s almost over.”
“I’m going to miss working here with all of y’all,” she said. “It’s Mississippi I can’t wait to get away from. I think the only person more excited to leave this state is Esmeralda.”
“I know she misses her girlfriend,” I said. It didn’t even feel strange to say that anymore.
She nodded. “That and she’s afraid somebody here’ll recognize her,” Virginia said.
Esmeralda’d told me her family lived only about thirty miles from here. “I sure wouldn’t want my mother to know I was doing this, and I’m just running the front.”
“Oh, they know she does this for a living. She’s afraid they’ll find out she’s here. Show up and make a scene and give her away to the customers or worse the law.”
“What do you mean?”
Virginia looked at me like one of us was confused. “That’s why she hates the car so much. She’s afraid it’ll give her away, like it did at Priscilla’s.”
I was lost—was the car stolen? But before I could ask, I heard rapid footsteps, and suddenly Frances rushed in in her nightgown. “She wants an aspirin tablet!”
“It’s alright, I’ll get some,” Virginia said and went down to the cellar.
“Franny, you go back up and I’ll bring it to you,” I said. Frances was barely out of the kitchen when I heard a door shut hard over my head.
Girls, be quiet! Virginia came back upstairs and handed me a tin of pressed pills. But then I heard something, or maybe I sensed it, and I went out and into the main hall—
A bright shock seized my body because there was Mrs. Tartt. In her blue nightgown … floating down the wide stairs, her face white as a winter moon.
Trixie appeared at the top of the stairs with a sheet wrapped around her. “Ma’am?” she called down to her. “Was that you just come in the bedroom?”
Without turning around, Mrs. Tartt said, “I beg—I beg your pardon. I thought I heard my son in his room.”
Frances rushed into the hall, with Virginia behind her.
We all stared up at Mrs. Tartt. And then a man came stomping past Trixie, from the direction of Rory’s room, saying, “I want a refund! This ain’t no way to treat a customer!
” Still buttoning his shirt as he thundered down the stairs, past Mrs. Tartt.
She was gripping the rail now, looking unsteady and a little unsure this wasn’t just a dream.
Virginia took the man’s arm and shoved him out.
Charlie came rushing in and when she saw Mrs. Tartt she looked slapped; she was too stunned to even speak.
Meanwhile my mind tore through the choices—either we pretended Trixie had snuck upstairs to do some fadoodling, perhaps with a man she liked, or we accepted that what Mrs. Tartt saw would add up to the truth.
My vote was for the first—and I was about to scold Trixie for sneaking a man upstairs—when Dixie, the dumb one, came out, barefooted, her dress on lopsided.
She stood at the top of the stairs next to her sister.
“Did he leave?” Dixie asked Trixie. “I thought he booked a hour with us.”
Well, shit.
“Viktoria, please … please sit down,” Charlie said. I’d never heard Charlie call her that before, but Viktoria did not sit down. Oh God, I could only imagine what she’d seen. She started blinking, her mouth puckering into a little red sour cherry.
“Viktoria,” Charlie came closer to the stairs. “Please, before you say—before you do anything … I have—there’s some very good news.” Charlie reached into her pocket and pulled out a large roll of cash. “Seven hundred fifteen dollars,” Charlie said. “It’s yours. Your share of the business.”
The rapid Morse code blinking continued. It took Mrs. Tartt a good ten seconds to look like she understood what Charlie’d said. Then the blinking stopped.
“Is that … money from …” She glanced stiffly to the side like she was afraid to turn around and see the twins again.
“The dance club,” Charlie said firmly.
Mrs. Tartt stood straighter. It happened slowly. “That … that’d be enough to save my house,” Mrs. Tartt said. “That’d be … more than enough to save it.”
“It wouldn’t leave you much to live on, though. After you paid the mortgage,” Charlie said.
“No,” Mrs. Tartt said matter-of-factly. “But it’s … a lot.”
“But there could be more.”
Charlie set the money on the second stair, just below where Mrs. Tartt was standing and stepped back from it.
Behind me, I heard Frances draw in a breath.
As the bills furled open, Mrs. Tartt grimaced slightly.
It was very impolite to discuss money like this, downright garish to show it off.
Then again, this entire situation was very, very impolite.
“Two more nights. We only need to stay open two more nights,” Charlie said. She sounded scared, but she stood very upright. “The busiest weekend of the year. And then we close and that’s it. We’re done.” Charlie cut her hand through the air to show she meant it.
Mrs. Tartt said nothing. She did not look tired anymore. She looked firmly grounded and, strangely, several years younger.
“I can’t promise how much more we’ll make, but I do think it would be … significant. To you, to Birdie, and the girls. They work very hard—”
“O-oh.” The word had a shudder in it. “I’m sure they do.”
“And it would be very significant to me too,” Charlie begged.
Her posture, her bones looked like they were cracking on her, she was clutching her wrist. “I’m not greedy, Mrs. Tartt.
All I want is to get my daughter Meg back and make sure I have enough money to take care of her.
And never have to do something like this again.
” I saw tears well up in Charlie’s eyes, but she blinked them back.
Mrs. Tartt’s grip on the rail loosened. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly as if Charlie had just laid a heavy suitcase in her arms. I could practically hear Frances’s jaw drop at what she’d heard. My daughter Meg. Now she knew.
“Charlie, what you’re asking me—” Mrs. Tartt said and looked at me. “And Birdie.” Her voice was leaden with disappointment. “I don’t know if I can allow something like this to continue in my home.”
This was too much to ask of the poor woman who’d been nothing but kind to us. I wanted no more lies, no more deception. “Your mortgage note—it’s been forgiven,” I said. “The bank dismissed what’s left of it. I only found out myself this morning.”
Charlie turned to me, surely thinking, Why would you tell her this now? But her face broke into a genuine smile, the likes of which I had never seen on her before. “Is that true?” she said. “She can keep all her money?”
“It’s done. It’s been forgiven,” I said. “Except for a dollar. I wanted to give you the satisfaction of paying that, unless you want me to do it for you.”
Mrs. Tartt set her hand on her neck; her face turned red. Oh my God, was she about to have a heart attack? “I could keep it, all of it?” She glanced, eyes only, down at the money on the stair. “And what you make this weekend would only … add to that?”
Charlie nodded. “Evidently so.”
“With all that, I could probably keep my house for years, long as I could afford my property taxes. And when Rory comes home, I’d still be here … and I could pay Pic and Polly …”
Charlie did not move or blink; she just waited for Mrs. Tartt’s answer. I knew she was praying, beseeching Mother Mary.
“Well, I …” Mrs. Tartt touched the back of her hair, so nicely styled.
“Henry always said, you have to take risks to make real money.” She gazed down at the ring on her left hand.
“He’d say it’d only be wise to keep the place open a little longer.
” She seemed to be speaking to Henry when she said this.
She glanced down at the money, then at me and Charlie as if to say, I’ll let you deal with that and began the slow climb back up to the attic.
“I reckon we better get up to bed then, Frances. You must be tired. Charlie, don’t let the dance club go too late now. ”