Текст книги "Never smile at strangers"

Автор книги: Jennifer Jaynes

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter 4

SUNDAY MORNING, THE aroma of sautéed andouille sausage, garlic, and onions clung to the air as Haley chopped scallions in the kitchen, careful to make them fine, as fine as Nana used to chop them.

She was afraid. Afraid for her mother who looked more and more like death every day. Afraid for her sister who’d never openly mourned her father. Afraid for her life which had unraveled nearly a year ago, and might never get back on track.

She wished Nana was still around to tell her what to do. When her maternal grandmother was alive, she had been the centerpiece of the family. Daddy was the voice of reason, but Nana was the voice that spoke of reasons, deeds, and beliefs no one wanted to think about, much less believe. Haley’s mother always said to pay her no mind. That Nana was growing senile. But Nana didn’t seem senile. She was alert and full of life. More so than most of the kids Haley’s age. Haley knew if Nana was alive now, she’d know how to fix everything. How to whip her family back into shape. . . make them happy and healthy again.

Haley’s boyfriend, Mac, had just shown up. He sat at the kitchen counter, his nose buried in a fishing magazine. He was a vision of health. Tall, tanned, athletic, confident and always relaxed. Nothing seemed to ever bother him. She’d become the opposite of him over the long months: Pale, puffy, stressed, and unconfident. Certain she’d become a downer, Haley wasn’t even sure why he still wanted to be around her.

Her life had become difficult, but she knew she didn’t have the luxury of drowning in a depression. Her mother had claimed that path before anyone else had the chance. Someone had to care for her mother, Becky, and the house. There was no one else.

“You have a good fishing trip?”

“Yeah,” Mac said, not looking up, “relaxing.”

“Get back last night?”

“Yesterday afternoon. Put in a couple of hours for Lloyd. Would’ve called, but couldn’t get a damn signal at the site. By the time I got home, it was pretty late.”

Mac worked for Lloyd’s Towing, a tow truck company in Weston. He put in odd on-call hours, working any chance he could. He also worked other part-time jobs on occasion, including cutting lawns. Something he’d done since he was fifteen.

Haley wiped beads of sweat from her temples with the heel of her hand. The wall-mounted air conditioning unit in the living room barely cooled both rooms, and lately the unit in Becky’s bedroom had been on the brink. She needed to call a repairman, but the bill would run her a couple hundred dollars. Money she didn’t want to part with.

She dropped a handful of chopped scallions into the skillet, then gently stirred them into a crackling mixture of flour and oil. Her attention fell to the refrigerator door. Along with old report cards, her high school graduation photo, and an old “To Do” list, was a note from her father, telling them he went out to buy sheet rock. It was a note he’d left on the refrigerator just hours before he died, held by one of the magnets he used to pass out at parish fairs. “Education Is Forever,” it read. How about when you’re dead, she wondered, bitterly. She’d wanted to take the note down several times over the months but couldn’t bring herself to. Apparently, Becky and her mother hadn’t been able to either because it was still there.

Mac set his magazine down, then pulled off his LSU ball cap and began working the bill between his thick, strong hands. His forehead and cheeks were sun burnt, and just above the collar of his t-shirt, along his neck, were three jagged, red lines.

“What happened?” Haley asked, concerned.

“Ah, nothin’.” Mac quickly pulled his cap back on, then lightly fingered the scratches. “A branch got me while I was fishing is all. Wasn’t payin’ attention.” The skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled as he flashed her a tired smile.

“They look pretty bad. You put anything on them?”

“It’s nothing, Hale. Believe me, looks worse than it is.”

Haley decided to take him at his word. Men didn’t like women who nagged, besides she had enough to worry about.

Lowering the fire on the stove, she continued to stir. She’d only eat a cup of the gumbo. As always, she had an extra five pounds around her middle that she was determined to get rid of. If she couldn’t control anything else in her life, she’d control it.

Mac got up and walked around the counter. He kissed her cheek. “I’m goin’ to go lie on the couch and have me a little nap. After that, I’ll take you for a sno cone. How’s that sound?”

***

HALEY WAS FOLDING towels when the phone rang half an hour later. She picked it up, expecting it to be Tiffany. But it wasn’t. It was Julia Perron, Tiffany’s mother.

“Weren’t you with her last night?” Mrs. Perron snapped when Haley told her Tiffany wasn’t there.

“Yes, Mrs. Perron, I was. We went to Provost’s.”

“And she’s not there?” the older woman asked again, skeptically, as though Haley would now say yes.

“No ma’am.”

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. “Haley, this wouldn’t have anything to do with the little argument she and I had yesterday morning, would it?”

Mac stirred from where he lay on the couch.

Haley lowered her voice, not wanting to wake him.  “I. . . I don’t know.”

“Could you tell me who I should call then? She wouldn’t be with that Charles boy, would she?” She made the name Charles sound like a cuss word.

Months earlier, Mrs. Perron forbade Tiffany from dating Charles, one of only a handful of blacks in Grand Trespass and the surrounding towns. Families like the Perrons, white, working class, and sometimes narrow in their views of what and who were acceptable, didn’t look kindly on minorities. When Mrs. Perron found out that Tiffany was secretly seeing Charles, the two fought like a pair of rabid bobcats and she demanded that Tiffany not see him any longer. She hadn't told Mr. Perron for the sake of his bad heart, but she’d threatened to disown Tiffany if she found out she was seeing him behind her back.

“No ma’am, I wouldn’t think so,” Haley said, cradling the phone between her shoulder and ear and folding a blanket her sister, Becky, had left in the middle of the floor.

After hanging up with Tiffany’s mother, Haley tried Tiffany’s cell phone, but got her voice mail. After leaving a message, she walked to the kitchen. Mac had already awoken and was placing a new bottle on the Culligan cooler.

“Sounds like Tiffany’s going to be in hot water the rest of the summer,” she sighed. “That’s if she’s not disowned.”

“She stay out last night?” Mac mumbled.

“Yeah, guess so. And her mother’s pissed.”

Mac grabbed a dish towel and wiped his hands. “She with Charles?”

“I guess. I can’t think of anyone else she’d be with.”

But she could, she thought. Tiffany could be with the guy she’d begun to tell her about.

Chapter 5

MAC EASED THE truck to the side of Main Street and killed the ignition. The Ford shook for a few seconds, then became quiet. Wondering if Tiffany had made it home yet, Haley pushed open the passenger side door and climbed out into the oppressive sun.

Her bare feet burned against the sun-beaten asphalt. She took slow, deliberate steps, because while she concentrated on the blistering heat, she couldn’t think of anything else. Her father, her mother, the insomnia, her future. . . The asphalt was agonizing but also therapeutic in a way. A Southern anti-depressant.

Dead, dried up worms, some in L-shapes, some in the shape of C’s, were glued to the blacktop. She slowly made her way across the road, trying to avoid stepping on their mangled bodies.

“The tar’s gotta be blazin’. Shit, I can feel the heat clear up to my ankles,” Mac said, waiting on the other side of the road. “Why you walkin’ so slow?”

“It’s not that hot,” she said, and tried not to wince. “Really.”

As they stood in front of Bob’s sno cone stand, an old run down trailer that had been parked on the side of Main Street for as long as she could remember, Haley noticed a girl her age standing on the side of the road several yards away. Erica Duvall. She was staring into the woods, a backpack hanging low on her back.

“What do you reckon she’sdoin’?” Mac asked, squinting against the sunlight. He handed a blue sno cone to Haley.

“Don’t know.”

“She hangs out in the woods an awful lot,” he said, taking another cone from the pimply-faced kid who was working the counter. “You’d figure a girl our age would’ve grown out of that type of play. Moved on and become a young lady.”

“She doesn’t have any friends,” Haley muttered, watching Erica disappear into the woods. Haley found Erica beautiful and mysterious. Tiffany only found the girl creepy.

“You two get along okay at Luke’s?”

Haley bit into the ice, barely tasting the sweet syrup on the tip of her tongue. She nodded. “Yeah, she’s quiet, but nice enough.”

Haley had taken a job as a waitress at Luke’s Diner a few weeks earlier to help her family with the bills. Since taking it, she found herself mesmerized with the quiet, petite girl who was also a waitress there. She was much different than the others, always reading, always writing, always in a different world than everyone else. Tiffany, who also worked at Luke’s, had a much different impression of Erica. She only found her weird and a bit freaky and like she did with so many other people, looked down on her.

Erica’s family moved to Grand Trespass from San Francisco when she was in the first grade. Haley remembered when she first saw her at school. She was small and skinny and had the same long, brunette hair framing her tiny face. Her clothes and eyes had both looked way too big for her.

Sadly, she had the same number of friends walking into the classroom that day as she’d had the day she graduated from high school. None.

***

FOUR O’CLOCK that afternoon, Haley carefully skimmed the greasy scum that had settled at the top of the gumbo pot. Setting the big wooden spoon back on the stove, she went to her mother’s bedroom and quietly opened the door. The woman appeared to still be sleeping. The only part of her body Haley could make out for the bedcovers was the crown of her head. She hadn’t come out all day. It was as though she was attempting to sleep away the reality of her father’s death.

Haley closed the door and walked to the recliner. Mac’s six-foot-one frame was sprawled out on the large couch against the wall. His empty sno cone cup was on the floor by his side, next to two crumpled cans of Coors Light.

“You think you should call Dr. Broussard?” he asked. “This has been going on for far too long. It’s not healthy for her to stay holed up like that.”

Haley sighed. “He was just here a couple of weeks ago. She wanted some pills to help her sleep. Now she stays in there and sleeps more than she did before.” Haley sighed. “I don’t know what to do.”

The phone rang. Haley sprang up and hurried into the kitchen. “That’s gotta be Tiffany.”

When she picked it up, she immediately heard terror in the voice on the other end of the line. “Please tell me Tiffany’s there,” Mrs. Perron croaked.

Haley glanced at her watch, and her heart skipped a beat. It was already five past four.

Chapter 6

FIVE MINUTES AFTER the phone call, Mrs. Perron climbed into Mac’s truck and thrust an ample hip into Haley’s side. Haley squeezed closer to Mac, and Mrs. Perron slammed the truck door closed.

“Le bon dieu!” she cried, mascara smeared into the deep recesses beneath her worried eyes. “It’s not like my Tiffany to run off like this!”

Mac threw the truck into gear and headed to Trespass Gardens, where Charles lived. Haley looked out at the dusty road watching the big cypress trees as they whizzed by, their branches seeming to reach for the truck. She folded her arms over her body and held herself tight. Where could Tiffany be?

In the distance, a cottonmouth slithered across the blacktop. Mac skillfully eased the truck across the yellow dotted lines, sparing its life. As Haley glanced behind her, watching the reptile hurry into the unkempt grass at the edge of the woods, she thought again of what Tiffany had begun to tell her, wondering if the guy she’d been flirting with was someone she knew. If he could have had anything to do with her not returning home. But just as quickly as the thought had come, she dismissed it.

Tiffany was with Charles. She was okay.

A few minutes later, they pulled off the two-lane blacktop road and bounced their way into Trespass Gardens, a park on the opposite end of Trespass Bayou that housed trailers and small shack-like houses. Gravel crunched beneath the truck as they crawled past one old trailer after another, then several shack-like houses. Haley took in the porches that sagged beneath tattered couches and disfigured toys. Trash barrels of all sizes and colors were lined up for collection.

Soiled-faced children played freeze tag in front of the homes, running through bent sprinklers and beneath clotheslines that groaned with drying wash. Old people rested on lawn chairs and regarded them suspiciously as they rode by. A boom box had been set on the dusty hood of a mud-splattered Ford Escort and the noise of accordions and the wailing voice of Cajun singer Wayne Toups blasted through the blistering air.

Mrs. Perron clicked her tongue, shaking her head disapprovingly as they rolled past the rows of battered homes.

“There,” Haley said, pointing to a small white house in the distance. “That’s Charles’s house.”

Mac pulled off the path and slowed the truck. As soon as he yanked the emergency brake, Mrs. Perron was out the truck door and hurrying up to the porch. At the top of the steps, she smoothed out her pink polo shirt and yanked open the screen door. She rapped loudly.

Mac’s engine popped and hissed as the two sat watching the older woman. “How many times have you been out here?” Mac asked.

“Just once,” Haley said, looking around. A tricycle lay on its side next to two crepe myrtles. Azalea bushes were in full bloom in rock gardens at either side of the concrete steps that led to the front door. Unlike most of the homes in Grand Trespass, Charles’s actually looked cared for.

He fumbled for his cigarettes. “This ain’t a good place for young girls to be hangin’ around.”

Haley had known Mac would comment about Trespass Gardens. He was always worrying over her. Had been for the whole year they’d been together.

He produced a cigarette. “Just want you to be safe is all.”

She looked into her boyfriend’s eyes. The boy who had stood by her side at her father’s funeral and afterward, taking care of the things her father had taken care of before he passed. The yard, the gutters, the siding, her tears.

“You worry about me too much.”

He grinned at her. “If I don’t, who will?”

Sticking the cigarette between his lips, he reached for the door. Before opening it, he glanced up at Mrs. Perron and shook his head. “The girl’s not right in the head. Making her mama worry like this is just plain wrong. A nice, wholesome girl like you would be better of with more upstanding friends. But you know where I stand on that subject,” he said and winked. Then he jumped out of the truck.

Mac had never liked Tiffany because he thought she was too promiscuous and self-centered. The more Haley tried to get him to change his mind about her, the more resistant he was. He was as polite to Tiffany as he was to everyone else, but it was more than obvious that he didn’t care for the girl and never would.

Haley climbed out of the truck to find him pulling down the tailgate. He sat and lit his cigarette. Several yards away, a bunch of kids were squealing, hopping over sprinklers and sliding across a faded Slip ‘n Slide.

Mrs. Perron was still knocking on the front door. “Anybody home?” she shouted, her voice becoming more and more agitated. “Anybody? Tiffany? You in there?”

Haley wandered around the house, into the backyard. A thick plume of smoke curled into the air, rising from a distant neighbor’s barbecue. Its tangy, mesquite scent filled her nostrils. Rotten figs, oversweet, lay at the base of a small tree and a lone pair of jeans swayed in the hot breeze on an otherwise empty clothesline.

She stopped at a tall anthill, slid off a flip flop, and pushed her foot into its soft center. In a matter of seconds, annoyed ants swarmed out and up her ankle. She watched as they slowly spread up her shin, past her knee. She savored the sting of their tiny bites. But once they reached mid-thigh, she pulled her throbbing leg to safety and gently brushed the insects off.

She glanced at the house and startled. Someone was peering out from behind a window shade, watching her. Quickly, the shade fell back against the window.

Someone was home.

She hurried back to the front yard. Mrs. Perron was still speaking to the front door. “Tiffany, if you’re in there, you’d better come out right now,” she threatened, her words shaky. “If you don’t, I’ll make sure your father knows everything. I mean everything. Bad heart or not!”

Mac flicked his cigarette ash into the grass as Haley walked up. He ground it with the heel of his shoe. “No one home?”

“Someone’s here. But whoever it is isn’t answering,” she said, staring back at the house. “I saw someone at one of the windows out back.”

“Tiffany?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see.”

“We can come on back here after we take her home,” he said, picking an ant off of Haley’s arm. “If she’s in there, she’ll open up if her mother ain’t around.”

Chapter 7

THE LANDRYS’ HOME was no different than most of the ranch-style homes the middle-class families had built in Grand Trespass in the 70s and 80s. At the front door, one would walk into a small room which connected to a nice-sized kitchen, then a relatively spacious living room. The bedrooms and one bathroom were located off the living room. Standing at the front door, one could see clear through the house to the back door and vice versa, the architecture not lending itself to much privacy. The women in Grand Trespass liked the floor plan because they were able to cook and still keep an eye on their children playing in the living room. Haley liked it because she could easily keep an eye on both Becky and her mother when they weren’t in their bedrooms.

“Who’s the kid?” Mac asked, letting the screen door snap shut behind them.

Cigarette smoke hung in the air. Haley had seen a bicycle leaning against the house when they pulled up but figured it was Sadie’s, her sister’s friend. Sadie’s mother was always buying her things, trying to make up for the time she ran the child over in the driveway, leaving her with a lame right arm.

“I don’t know.” She walked past the kitchen and into living room where Becky and a raven-haired teenage girl were watching television.

“Hey,” Haley said.

Fifteen-year-old Becky turned to her with a practiced look of boredom, an irritating expression she seemed to have mastered overnight. “Hey,” she answered, pulling her thin, mousy hair into a ponytail. She pointed to the girl. “Haley, this is my new friend, Seacrest. Seacrest, this is my sister, Haley, and her boyfriend, Mac.”

The girl blew out a steady stream of smoke and fixed her gray eyes on Haley’s. “Hey,” she muttered.

Haley watched the smoke spiral into the air.

“The Landrys don’t smoke in the house,” Mac said, his voice matter-of-fact, but polite, one of the many mannerisms Haley admired in him.

The girl smirked. “Well then, I’ll go on outside.” She stood and pulled at the hem of her short denim shorts. Then she sauntered out the back, letting the screen door snap shut behind her.

“Why’d you tell her she could smoke in the house?” Haley asked, exasperated.

“She didn’t ask,” Becky replied. Her feet, stained brown on the bottoms from walking around barefoot, dangled from the arm of the big recliner. She twisted in the chair, lowering them to the floor.

“Well, who is she?” It wasn’t every day that Becky brought a new friend to the house. In fact, she couldn’t think of the last time she had. Sadie was Becky’s only friend.

Becky shrugged, and smeared some lip balm on her cracked lips. “I don’t know. Just some girl.”

Mac took a seat on the couch. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I just met her. She was riding her bike out front and we just started talking. She’s pretty, huh?”

“Does she go to your school?” Haley asked.

She shook her head. “She lives in Weston.”

Mac frowned. “She rode her bike from Weston? That’s an awfully long way in this heat.”

“I guess.”

“I don’t like that she smokes,” Haley mumbled, trying Tiffany’s cell phone again. She’d grown anxious. She and Mac had just driven to Trespass Gardens for a second time, but again, no one had answered the door. She didn’t have Charles’s cell phone number and directory assistance said that his home number was unlisted.

“What’s wrong with smoking? Tiffany smokes,” Becky said. She lifted her chin in Mac’s direction. “So does Mac. He smokes.”

“Tiffany and Mac are adults,” Haley pointed out, checking the answering machine for messages. There were none. “Did Tiffany call?”

Becky shook her head.

Haley sighed. Where the heck was she?

“And Mom. Has she come out of her room at all?”

“No.”