Antiques Roadkill (2 page)

At the end of Elm, I turned into the long driveway of a two-story white stucco house whose green shutters and wraparound porch were solely in need of a coat of paint. Or two.

I got out of the car, stretched from the long trip, then retrieved Sushi from the front seat. I stood under an ancient, familiar forlorn-looking pine, listening to the wind whispering in the tallest branches, while Soosh peed. Many of the lower boughs that I used to climb as a kid (getting sap stuck in my hair) were long gone, sheared off by storms or man.

Leaving my stuff behind in the car, I picked up the dog and headed toward the house.

As usual, the door was unlocked—actually, finding it locked would signal an alarm, indicating Mother might have reverted into one of her “spells,” in which case even
the sheriff would have had difficulty getting in. But the barricades were down, and I easily stepped into the small front foyer.

Nowhere else smelled like our house. It wasn’t unpleasant; it wasn’t pleasant. It was just my nostrils welcoming me … home.

All the way from the Chicago suburbs, I had been dreading this moment. How would I feel? Defeated? Miserable? Depressed? Would I see the ghost of a little Brandy—skinned-knee, dirty Scooby-Doo T-shirt, long stringy hair—looking back at me accusingly for making such a mess of her future?

But little Brandy wasn’t there. And grown-up Brandy felt nothing negative at all … in fact, something comforting. And a surprising sense of … possibilities. Why, I had practically my whole life ahead of me. A second chance for love, wealth, and happiness. A new dawn was beginning!

Thank you, Prozac.

I went through the mahogany French door separating the entryway from the large front parlor, and put Sushi down on the bare wooden floor. Peggy Sue had tried to prepare me on the phone, but it was still a shock.

Gone were the Queen Anne needlepoint furniture, Hancock straight-backed chairs, Duncan Phyfe table, and Persian rugs … family heirlooms, all. Even the colorful collection of small glass shoes (think Cinderella’s slipper) that had forever graced the picture windowsill was AWOL. I felt a terrible lump in my throat, and a sense of loss rippled through me in a wave reminiscent of nausea.

“Everything can’t be gone,” I’d said to Peggy Sue on the phone, knowing how she could exaggerate.

“Not
every
thing … but most of the downstairs things.”

“Surely Mother didn’t let go of the chairs Grandpa caned?” I wanted those.

Her silence was all the answer I needed.

“Can’t you get it all back?” I wailed. “Mother was mentally ill—isn’t that fraud or something?”

My sister sighed heavily. “I’ve already talked to our attorney.”

“Mr. Ekhardt? Is
he
still alive?”

“He is, and he said the antique dealer bought everything in good faith and had no idea Mother was … well …”

“Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?”

“… off her medication.” Pause. “Why these doctors don’t call the family, when a patient misses an appointment, I will never know.”

“But those are precious things. It’s like the bastard bought our childhood! Stole our memories!”

“Brandy—you
are
taking the Prozac …?”

“Yes, yes … they just take awhile to kick in, is all. But even when she’s in one of her lunatic phases of the moon, Mother surely wouldn’t give away such precious—”

“Brandy,” my sister said, voice tight, “I wish you wouldn’t refer to Mother’s condition in so, so … insensitive a manner. You know as well as I that it’s a disease.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, hoping to thwart a probable, inevitable scolding. Peggy Sue had a way of reducing me to six years old. Or five.

“How,” she was saying, off on a pedantic tear, “are we ever to eradicate the stigma attached to this illness, when you keep using words like ‘cuckoo’ and ‘lunatic'?”

Too late.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“Do you have any idea how lucky we are that Mother responds so well to medication?”

Note that Peggy Sue hadn’t said how lucky Mother was.

“I said I was sorry,” I said.

Make that four years old.

The strained silence that followed was not unusual in our phone conversations.

Finally Peg asked, a trifle testily, “When are you coming back to Serenity?”

“In a couple weeks. After the divorce is final.”

And my medication has kicked in.

“And will Jacob be with you?”

Why did she even ask that? Peggy Sue knew Jake’s dad had custody!

“No, Peg—he’s better off with his father. For right now, anyway. At the moment, Jake blames me for everything.”

Peggy Sue didn’t jump to my defense—not that I expected her to. Instead she shifted gears, saying pleasantly, “It’ll be such a relief to have you living with Mother.”

“Thanks.”

“Finally, someone else to drive her to the doctor, so she’ll never miss another appointment.… You
do
know she had her license suspended?”

“Yes, you wrote. How
are
the cows?” Mother had taken a shortcut through a pasture, on her way to a play at a rural church.

I could almost hear the frown in my sister’s voice. “Are you being sarcastic?”

“No.” But I wondered if Peggy Sue could almost hear
my
snide little grin.

“If you really want to know, there was only one bovine fatality, though the others were certainly traumatized.” She added cheerfully, “Thank God the insurance paid for everything, including the damage to that combine. They’re terribly expensive, you know.”

“Cows?”

“Combines! Honestly, sometimes I don’t know whether you really are that thick, or are just pulling my chain!”

I’ll leave it for you to decide.

“Personally, Peg? I’m most relieved that in the accident the only casualties were farm equipment and some shaken-up livestock. That Mother wasn’t hurt …?”

After the next strained silence, we had managed to chat a bit longer about nothing in particular, both of us sensing the need to work our way somewhere where the conversation could end on a cordial note of truce.

That was about a month ago.

I watched as Sushi took a few tentative steps from me in the living room, feeling her way along. At least with most of the furnishings gone, the dog wouldn’t be bumping into so many things.

I was wondering where Mother was when I heard the muffled sound of the downstairs toilet flush, then running water. In another minute she was gliding through the kitchen doorway, and my smile froze.

Mother was wearing an unbecoming, ill-fitting purple dress—I might have made it in seventh-grade sewing class with my eyes shut—and a huge red straw hat arrayed with plastic fruit, arcs of white hair swinging like scythes on either side of her face, her attractive features bordering on self-parody with an overapplication of makeup and her blue eyes huge behind the big thick-lensed glasses.

My heart sank. Peggy Sue had said she was stabilized!

Mother beamed when she saw me, magnified eyes bright with delight. She had put a few pounds on over the years, but remained a tall, striking figure, despite the ghastly dress. “Brandy, darling! Thank the Lord you’ve come! And just in time, too.”

“Yeeees,” I replied. “I think I am.”

The big buggy eyes narrowed suspiciously as she advanced toward me for a hug. Then she held me out in front of her like a painting she was considering to buy and said, “Darling child, you look simply stricken—are you all right?”

“I am … question is, are you?”

“Of course, dear. Well and truly medicated. Now hurry up, or we’ll be tardy …”

What was I, back in school?

“… and this is not the kind of event where a late entrance is considered fashionable.”

“Event?”

Mother made a little cluck with her tongue. “Oh, Brandy! At my age, I’m the one with an excuse for being forgetful—you promised you’d go with me!”

“Go … where?”

“The Red Hat Social Club luncheon! Remember? The guest speaker is one of the Keno twins!”

Well, I
had
forgotten—or rather banished it to a corner of my mind. The idea of dressing up in a red hat and purple dress was not my idea of a good time, particularly on the heels of a long car trip.

I said hopefully, “I thought you meant you just needed a ride. How can I attend? Don’t you have to be, you know, uh …”

“Old? Why, yes, dear thing, an incredibly ancient fifty! And I know you don’t qualify, but didn’t I mention it?”

“Mention …?”

“This is mother-daughter day! And I’ve told simply everyone that you were coming back, and would be with me. Brandy, every chapter in Serenity will be there!”

“Why not take Peggy Sue?” Vaguely I recalled either Peg or Mother mentioning that Sis was a Red Hat, too.

“She and I are in different chapters,” Mother said. “She’s going to sit with her own group. Now shake a tailfeather!”

I guess I was going. Half sarcastically, I said, “How can I attend? I don’t have a red hat!”

“Ah, dear girl, don’t you know your mother by now? I think of everything.”

She disappeared in a swish of purple fabric and a bobbling of fake fruit.

All too soon she had returned, from the kitchen, saying, “Luckily I found some paint out in the garage … I do hope it’s dry.”

Mother handed me a straw hat that I remembered from some play she’d been in, when I was a kid; she had revamped the nineteen-hundreds-looking affair with bright red paint, which was tacky in more ways than one.

“What,” I said, “no fruit?”

Mother put her hands on her hips. “Fruit is strictly optional, as is the purple dress. Now, if you don’t want to go, don’t. I am perfectly willing to call a cab and go and be humiliated.”

My own humiliation in the worst, wackiest “Red Hat” imaginable did not occur to Mother. She had always lent her theatrical production touch to apparel, makeup, and other everyday matters, forgetting that what looks good to an audience past the footlights might seem bizarre in what I laughingly like to refer to as “real life.”

Long ago I’d lost every battle over Mother’s homemade “solutions” to various fashion crises; now was simply not the time to change my ways.

“I’m coming,” I said, dutiful daughter that I am.

Anyway, why not attend a Red Hat meeting, and see what I’d be doing with my free time in about thirty years? Don’t laugh (or cry)—that’s how Peggy Sue wound up, right?

But I had enough dignity left to say, “Just give me a few minutes, Mother,” and went out to the car and retrieved some things.

When I returned, Mother was cuddling Sushi in her arms. I wasn’t sure how she would take to Soosh; it had been a number of years since a pet had invaded the house … and a high maintenance one at that.

“Look, dear,” Mother said, beaming, “the little darling—unlike you—likes my outfit.”

“Sushi’s blind, Mother … she can’t see your lovely ensemble.”

Mother held the dog out, inspecting her. “I thought something was strange about those eyes.…”

Oddly, Mother’s eyes and Sushi’s looked about the same.

Then Mother shrugged, clutched the dog against her chest, and sighed, “No matter … we’re all damaged goods around here.”

In the upstairs bathroom, I ran a brush through my shoulder-length golden-blond hair (L’Oreal Preference; you can usually find coupons) and applied a little Rimmel makeup (at least it was British, even if it didn’t look as good on me as on Kate Moss).

I put Sushi in her bed next to the tub, left a bowl of water (diabetic dogs get
really
thirsty), and shut the door.

“Let’s take my car, dear,” Mother suggested when I came back downstairs. She had found a big lighter purple purse somewhere, which actually went well with the purple frock. “Automobile engines are like people, you know—if they sit too long doing nothing, they wind up dead before their time.”

Even medicated, Mother had no shortage of such words of wisdom. Anyway, it sounded like a plan.

At the end of the drive was a freestanding garage, with an old, heavy door you had to open yourself. If things hadn’t changed, the keys to the ancient pea-green Audi would be waiting on its dashboard—and they were. That careless key security had made sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night and taking the car so beautifully easy, way back when.

While I drove downtown, Mother informed me Serenity had six chapters of the Red Hat Social Club, and over twenty thousand in the entire country (I feigned interest), and that each chapter had its own “darling” name like Better Red Than Dead, and Code Red Hat, etc.

When Mother and some of her friends who belonged to
a mystery readers’ book club—Mother “adored” Agatha Christie—had tried to join various chapters around town, each in turn was told that all the chapters were closed to new members.

Whether she and her fellow eccentrics suspected they had been turned away for any reason other than no-room-at-the-inn, Mother didn’t say.

What she did say was: “At any rate, we just started our own chapter, turning our little readers’ group into ‘the Red-Hatted League.’ That’s a Sherlock Holmes reference, dear.”

“I know, Mother.”

At that point Mother launched into a detailed comparison of the relative merits of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett as the great Baker Street detective, making a good case for each.

I parked in a packed lot adjacent to the Grand Queen Hotel, which at eight stories lorded over its loyal subjects, the surrounding riverfront buildings. The view of the Mississippi from the top-floor ballroom (where the luncheon was being held) was breathtaking. For a small town. In the Midwest.

The wealthy publisher of the
Serenity Sentinel
had saved the Queen (named after one of the founders of Serenity, Nathan Joshua Queen, and an ancestor of said publisher) from the chopping block, giving her a face-lift to the tune of three million dollars. People came from all over the nation just to stay in one of the many “theme rooms”—from the serene Grecian-spa bedroom to the way-out moon room, complete with space-capsule bed.

That such funky fantasy suites had nothing to do with the Victorian wedding cake of a building that housed them bothered no one, particularly not the
Sentinel
publisher, who was even richer now than before.