She jumped up the next morning, afraid that she had over slept, but she hadn’t. But now she couldn’t go back to sleep. The sun hadn’t even come up. She spent a couple of hours sorting out her mother’s clothes, actually keeping some things for her own use, mostly old lady shoes, and a few things that her new friend might like. She showered and put on her own jeans and a one of her mother’s flannel shirts. They’d be the Bobsey twins. She dumped everything on the bedspread and tied up the corners and dragged it out to the truck, figuring to drop it off on at a Goodwill on the way. It was heavy and took a bit to get it there and even more work to get it into the back. When she turned to go back inside, she saw it. In large spray painted red letters, across the wall and front door of her apartment, was written Whore. The letters were a couple feet high. Her first thought that maybe it wasn’t dry yet. She ran back to test it. They must have done right after she went to bed. It was dry all right.
Was this her friend? The frigging lawyer? She hadn’t been here forever, how could she have any enemies? Winston did it because she didn’t call him yesterday? This didn’t make any sense at all. She must have aroused somebody’s pent up anger. Well, the whole world would get to see it today, because she didn’t have time to paint it over now. She grabbed her bag and the check book and her keys and the little something for Mark and locked up. Looking at it again from the car, made her sad suddenly.
What on earth did I do? This goddamn town! She had never done anything to deserve this? She’d make somebody pay for this!
She put it in gear and jolted down the street. She realized she hadn’t met or seen any of the tenants in the apartment building. Maybe it was one of them. The bundle of clothes was easier to get off the truck. She just backed to the door of the donation office and dumped it there. There was no one around yet. Mark was in the alley waiting sheepishly, dressed as a Bobsey. They drove on out of town.
She told him about the graffiti.
“You don’t think I did it?”
“It had crossed my mind, but you wouldn’t be standing there waiting for me, if you had.”
She pulled over in a secluded spot beside a corn field. There wasn’t a house in sight and no one was on the road. He was wearing the bra she had given him. She padded him out with balls of nylons, applied his make-up and helped tie a head scarf on his head. She had a scarf on herself to look the part.
“So you get to be Marcie today.”
She turned the rear view mirror to him so he could look. He was presentable. As long as he didn’t talk or try to sashay he could pass.
“Try not to say anything when we’re around anyone down there. You comfortable?”
He had an erection. He laughed.
“Deep breaths,” she said and started back down the road. “And remember not to touch your face.”
There was quiet for a little while as neither of them could think of anything to say.
“Why come back now?” he asked her.
“My mother’s estate.”
“But you act like you’re here to stay. Usually the folks that live out of town come back and hire a lawyer and leave again.”
“It was time.” You never confess anything to the johns.
“It must have been fun there,” he said.
“It was. There was always music and drinks to be had. And friends if you wanted them. The sunrises in the Quarter were always something to get up for. The city at night was like a great whore queen that made you pay and pay.”
He had to think about that.
“You looked like you were enjoying yourself when I saw you that time.”
“Would you go out with unhappy hooker?”
“I guess not.”
“I’d guess you went away to school to be an accountant. Why did you come back?”
“I had a girlfriend here and Edward offered to help me set up my office.”
“He seems like a mean person,” she said.
“You don’t know. He’s dangerous. If I wasn’t obligated by the business he sends my way, I’d not have anything to do with him. Your mother and Winston were good friends with him. I never saw why.”
She wanted to say ‘you’re wearing her underwear,’ but she bit her tongue.
“My mother was mean.”
“She never really spoke to me. She’d drop of the financial info and I’d do her taxes. Winston barely gives me a nod, though I’m usually in the diner for coffee in the morning when he’s there.”
“You said Edward was dangerous?”
“After he came back to hang out his shingle, he got into an argument with his first landlord and clobbered him down on Main one afternoon. Edward cracked the guy’s head on a display window.”
“So, you all right?” Daydee asked.
“Sure, I guess.”
Mark grew quiet.
“I just cry sometimes,” he said. “How about you?”
“I haven’t cried in twenty years,” she said. “You could change things if you wanted to.”
“Don’t much know how.”
She patted his hand.
When she stopped for gas, she bought them both a beer. It made the ride a lot more fun.
They found the memorial company in Terre Haute and Daydee pulled around to their loading dock. Mark stayed in the truck. She went in and paid and without trying at all got them to load the vault in the back of the truck. They even told her they could deliver next time if given enough notice. She was surprised by what it looked like. It was just a big white casket, big enough to put a casket inside. She wasn’t sure why she was thinking it would look like a big bath tub.
They were loaded up and on their way out, when Mark waved at a guy on the dock.
“Flirt!” she told him.
“One of my guys in the French Quarter used to sell stuff like this to the elderly. Down there the water table in the ground is so high, that if you used something like this, it would just back out of the ground like a cork floating on water. He would sell special two way valves that cost extra so the vault wouldn’t come out of the ground. He said the guy that was putting it in the ground would just smack a hole in the side with his shovel.”
“If the water is getting to the casket, why have a vault at all?” Mark asked.
“There never has been much sense to what people do,” she said.
They got back to the cemetery before lunch. There wasn’t a soul around. She pulled the truck around behind the shed just to be careful.
“All thing need to come to an end,” she told him.
She cleaned his face from her bag of tricks and took back the stuffing from his bra before they pulled out to go over to the grave. He removed the scarf and rifled his hair. Winston’s car was parked in front of the office. He was walking back toward it from the shed when they saw each other. He had seen something. She pulled alongside him.
“You’re just in time to help,” she told him. “Mark offered to help me get this where it’s supposed to go.”
“Go ahead. I’ll walk behind you.”
She carefully navigated the markers and stopped with her tailgate next to her stakes.
They got out. Mark was very embarrassed, but was trying to act nonchalant. If Winston knew anything, he wasn’t letting on.
“I got the guys I bought it from to load it. I don’t know how heavy it is,” she told Winston,
“It’s not. It’s fiberglass. I helped Jack out from time to time when your mother got too ill to leave the house.”
The three of them easily pulled the vault from the pickup and sat it a little distance away from the stakes.
“This will give Jack room to get the backhoe in and out.”
“There’s a little crane thing to lower the casket down?” she asked. “I’ve seen it done, but never looked close before.”
“It’s in the shed. I can come the morning of and help if you want,” Winston said. “Jack knows what he’s doing. Is it all right to stop by the apartment later? I have a couple of things to discuss with you.”
“Sure…thanks. I need to take Mark back to his office.”
They hopped back in and took off.
“You think he saw something?” Mark asked.
“No,” she said, but didn’t believe it. This whole thing was unraveling. Pretty soon the entire town will know she was turning tricks for a living. And along with that poor Mark would be driven out of his closet. How would he explain driving around town in drag to his wife?
Daydee was knocking on the several apartment doors in the building with the thought of introducing herself to the tenants, but no one seemed to be home. She was walking back to her own door when Winston pulled up. It was evening and the shadows were growing long behind the trunks of the elm trees in the yard. She waited for him.
“I found a couple of folding chairs in the closet,” she said to him when he reached her. “Why don’t we sit out here? I’ve even made some lemonade.”
He agreed and helped her bring it all out on the lawn.
“What you usually do for dinner?” she asked him.
“If I’m real hungry I go to the diner. Usually I eat a frozen dinner in front of the TV.”
“You cook?”
“I’ve been known to, but there’s just me,” he said.
“You and me are cooking dinner tonight, how’s that?”
“All right.”
She poured them both a glass of the lemonade. Thought she might go get the rum to add to them, but then changed her mind.
“So what’s on your mind?” she asked him.
He developed a real serious look on his face and stared off at his car for a bit. Men could take a hour to say what it would take a woman fifteen seconds to say. She was patient. They were all children.
“I wanted to tell you that it was above and beyond the call of duty- what you did for Mark. You really are a generous person.”
“What exactly did I do for Mark?”
Winston looked at her.
“It’s really none of my business, it just struck me as real generous. We’re friends?”
“Sure,” she said.
“I’ve done a lot of horrible things in my life.”
“Everybody has,” she said.
“No, real things that can’t even be talked about. Things that I should be in jail for.”
He glanced at her again. Now she realized it was a pleading look.
“I’m afraid I’m going to go straight to hell when I die.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Winston. You sure that things are that bad?”
“I’m scared.”
“Well, if you feel this way, maybe you need to go talk to a minister.”
“I’m not ready. It’s going to take some time to get where I can talk about any of it. But I was wondering, if you were serious about going to Jack’s church and if you were, would you mind if I came along. I don’t think I could go on my own.”
“Winston, church isn’t my favorite place in the world, but if you think it will help I’ll go with you.”
“Thanks, you have no idea how much this means to me.”
They didn’t talk after that. Daydee didn’t want to slip information about New Orleans and god only knew what was going on in Winston’s thoughts. They sipped the lemonade and then went in to make dinner together. Winston fund an old Frank Sinatra album in the hutch and put it on the old stereo. They ate without much said. Only when he headed out for the evening, did he pause to touch the sprawled graffiti across her threshold.
“Maybe I get a little paint to cover this up,” he told her.
“That would be great.”
The next morning, she found her mother’s pass keys for the apartment building and exactly at 9:00 she started at the first apartment next door. She knocked a couple of times and when there was no answer, she let herself in. The apartment was empty. There was no trace of any furniture or any belongings. She went to the next apartment. It was empty as well. She didn’t bother knocking at the next one. Every one of them was empty. The last one, with the entrance on the side near the driveway that led back to the building parking lot, had a bureau and an old bed, but those looked like they had been abandoned. There were no personal belongings. What kind of crazy person would own an apartment building and not rent the apartments?
What was she going to do? The mortgage would be due soon, where would she get the money? She had no rent income? She went back to look at her mother’s receipt book. It hadn’t dawned on her to look at the year on the most current receipt. It had been a year since she had collected her last rent payment.
She hopped in the car and drove downtown to look for a real estate agent. She found one open and it looked like there was a woman agent so she went in. The woman was about her age, and had that look of perky businesswoman written all over her. Just the bleached blonde you’d expect to meet at an open house. Daydee was offered a seat and introductions were made. Her name was Sarah.
“I have an apartment building to sell,” and she told her about inheriting it and who her mother was and the woman seemed to know where the building was.
“You are in probate now?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re the executor?”
“Yes.”
“Who- never mind, I know who your lawyer is. We shouldn’t have any problem listing it. You need to let Edward know what you want to do. He will need to file with the probate court and they’ll have to approve and hold a hearing to close the sale.”
“I just don’t understand why there are no tenants.”
“Your mother was pretty wacko toward the end. Let me see what I can do about finding you some tenants. It would help to sell it at what it’s worth. Would you willing to give a first month discount or a freebee?”
“Sure,” Daydee said. This woman could be trusted. “I’m not sure if I can come up with the mortgage the way things are now.”
“It’s a small town, honey. The bank will goof off if they know the building is listed for sale. Edward is on the Board of Directors at the bank. I’m guessing it’s financed there.”
“Which bank?”
Sarah wrote the name down for her, The Edgar County Bank, so she could check the paper records to make sure it was the same one.
Daydee went to the Goodwill. She’d been doing this all of her life. It was a good place to get things cheap. It had started in New Orleans, with her first pimp. He took most of her money. You tried not to think about the part where most of this stuff came out of dead people’s closets. She found a couple of cheap lamps that were kind of funky. Then she started in looking for dresses. She had promised to go to church on Sunday. She hadn’t seen the inside of a real Midwest church in a thousand years. The only time she was in a church in New Orleans was when someone she knew was getting married or there was a funeral. With the crowd she ran with most of her life, there were more funerals. Occasionally, though, one of the girls she knew from the street would hook up with someone legit and down there it meant a big hokey Catholic wedding. The whole religion thing down there was so much hocus pocus. It just wasn’t real. Up here it was real. She couldn’t remember which church Jack said he was the minister of and she wondered now, if that was the one Winston had meant to go to, but it was a Paris church and she didn’t have any dress appropriate to wear. Everything she had was too short and too tight. Somehow she doubted it was going to be a Pentecostal church. The one she remembered from her childhood had collected all the real weirdoes from all over the county. Those losers wouldn’t care how she dressed; in fact, they might have gotten a kick out of her wardrobe. There was a very thin line between the Pentecost and alcoholism. Jack struck her as strictly middleclass.
The dresses had to be pulled out and checked for size. There was nothing here that was sorted in any way. Some of them she recognized as part of what she had dropped off here that had come out of her mother’s closet. A lot of the others looked like they came out of someone else’s mother’s closet. She had put on a couple of pounds too, which didn’t make her feel any better about dressing dumpy. She tried on several and finally decided on a flapper like dress that was actually pretty plain. Having curves in the right place, livened up almost anything. It did look a little retro, but it was blue and to her knees and didn’t demonstrate anything up above. She also found what looked like a banker lady’s suit that was navy and would be good for funerals at the cemetery if she had to be there to officiate. The first one was this Saturday. She wasn’t sure if she was expected to be there. She would go and hang out in the office if nothing else. She reminded herself to go by this afternoon and check to make sure Jack opened the grave and had set everything up. What was the name of the secretary on the Beverly Hillbillies? This was her kind of suit.
There was a blue flannel shirt on the men’s rack that caught her eye. She went to look. It was soft and untouched. It didn’t look like a soul had ever had it on. It also struck her as an expensive one, somehow. Were there designer flannel shirts? The color was warm and it was big enough to get lost in. It could be worn as a dress, not that anyone would. The only thing missing was the slight hint of aftershave or someone’s odor that she knew fondly. She tried to recall what John used to use. It was probably just Old Spice or something dumb like that. This shirt was a real find.
She looked through the costume jewelry for something conservative and demur, but didn’t find anything. Then she wondered what had become of her mother’s things. She hadn’t seen a jewelry box anywhere. This whole thing was getting weird. Maybe they were hidden somewhere in the apartment. This was fun, you could have a whole shopping spree and spend nothing. She even took a little pair of cow salt and pepper shakers that she liked.
She waited in the lawyer’s office reception for nearly a half hour before he could see her. He was in grumpy mood when the receptionist showed her in.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
She told him about the necessity of putting the apartment building up for sale and told him that the real estate agent had explained how a sale in probate could work. He laughed out loud at her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You talked to Sarah?”
Daydee nodded, put out by his whole manner.
“That’s my ex-wife. She should know what she’s talking about, sort of.”
“She told me you were on the Board of Directors of the bank that held the mortgage.”
“Did she tell you I was a crook and a bastard as well?”
“Well, now that you mention it.” She heard herself say. “No, she didn’t say anything of the sort. She didn’t mention that she had been married to you.”
“Well, the bank makes its loan decisions separately from the board involvement. There’s little I can do there. If they foreclose, they foreclose. I will make a motion for the probate court to schedule a date for the sale closure. It’s up to you to find a buyer.”
“I realize that.”
“Good luck. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said.
He didn’t get up.
Daydee let herself out. Maybe it was time to change lawyers. She reminded herself to ask around about other lawyers in town.
She found the jewelry box under the bed. She set out on the bare mattress and looked through it, laying the things out in neat rows beside the box. She hadn’t been allowed to touch it as a child and a teenager. This was all too valuable to be touched. God, was she crazy. There was nothing really here. A few slight chains of plated gold. A few rings, and the earrings that her mother had thought valuable, were barely so. Daydee had real diamonds and pearls in her own box that she had brought with her. The johns when they did buy things spent good money. And the pimps’ little things were real as well. It looked like her mother had taken all of her great grandmother’s and her great aunt’s things. There was a nice broach she recalled her aunt wearing. She would keep the things the older women had. She fingered a cheap pendant of her mother’s, and wondered what her eyes would have done if she had ever seen Daydee’s huge emerald. One of the girls, years ago, had advised her to put extra money into jewelry. You get down on your luck, you can always hock it. Daydee had splurged on a few things. All of which looked good in a big hotel in the French Quarter, but would be totally out of place in this little town. Giving her mother’s things to the Goodwill would be an ultimate form of revenge for her refusal to share with her as a child. She could have at least let me touch a little here and there. There were good church going earrings here and even a little simple cross on a chain that had been her great grandmother’s. Hopefully it wouldn’t burn her flesh when she put it on.
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