Aunt Lute lifted a brow in Barbie’s direction, then picked up an apple and whacked it cleanly in half. Barbie jerked upright, her breath catching in a tiny gasp. Down the hall in the playroom, the twins were taking out the Sheetrock, by the sounds of it, but Barbie was oblivious to that.
Letting my head fall against the wall, I leaned across the bar into the kitchen. “Aunt Lute, please. We have to figure out what to do here. We have to think.”
Aunt Lute tipped her chin up haughtily, cored the apple slices, then swept everything into a crystal bowl. “In the meanwhile, someone must throw bread to the birds. The natives are restless.” Scooping up the bowl, she cupped it against her chest and shuffled across the kitchen without giving Barbie another look. The knife lay on the counter, glimmering atop a pile of dismembered fruit and vegetable parts, the juices running in a sticky stream along the seam in the granite, flowing downhill toward the floor. I grabbed a jelly-stained napkin and dropped it over the lazy river, stopping the flow as Aunt Lute disappeared down the hall, heading toward the mayhem in the playroom.
A moment later, the cacophony stopped, and finally everything was quiet. I turned back to Barbie. She was changing the TV channel again, as if by trying it enough times, she’d finally find one with different news on it.
“I called Paul,” she muttered, holding up her cell phone, like some kind of proof that she was doing all she could. “I’ve called and called, but he won’t answer. . . . He’ll call back. He’ll tell us what to do.”
“He’s in Mexico, Barbara.” Where I had harbored something between love and ambivalence for my father, now there was a burning anger, painful and bitter. But there was also disbelief. My father was Superman. This couldn’t happen to him. He wouldn’t do this. “He left us.”
“That’s just . . . it’s just something . . . something on TV,” Barbie murmured. Snatching the cat from under the coffee table, she stroked it in a frenetic rhythm that matched the bouncing of her foot against the baby carrier. “He told me . . . this morning, he said I might hear some things . . . he said . . . he said not to worry. He said . . . he said he’d have it worked out . . . by tonight. He was upset about the car wreck. He told me it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been down there getting rid of stuff the kids should still be wearing. We had a fight, but then he told me he’d take . . . he’d take care of it. . . . I shouldn’t worry. . . .” Her voice quavered to a stop, like a scrap of paper coming to rest in a blind alley.
He told me that, too. He lied.
“Barbie, he’s gone. He left the country. Whatever’s going on, he’s in some serious trouble and so are we.” Barbie just didn’t get it, or she didn’t want to. “I think we should call Uncle Boone.” Uncle Boone wasn’t really my uncle, but he was my father’s oldest friend. Boone and Dad had been together since their football-playing days—as far back as I could remember. They starred in Householders commercials together, and my father had helped Boone’s construction company win various building contracts. Other than Aunt Lute, Boone was the closest thing to family we had. “If anyone knows what’s going on, Uncle Boone will. He can tell us what to do.”
“Paul’s going to call. We just have to . . .” Tears welled and glittered in Barbie’s eyes, ready to spill over. Her lips, perfect and plump and surprisingly still wet with gloss, trembled as she looked around the room, then put down the cat and scooped Jewel out of her carrier. “He’ll call.”
“We can’t wait,” I whispered. Didn’t she see that waiting for Dad to sweep in and save us was pointless? He had created this mess, and now he was powerless to fix it. For months, maybe even a year or two, or more, we must have been sinking further and further under, yet he’d never said a thing, never told Barbie to slow down on the spending, and never suggested to me that there wouldn’t be any new car arriving on my birthday. He’d come and gone as if everything were normal. Only two months ago, he’d let Barbie plan a massive superhero birthday bash for the twins, complete with over two hundred guests, a petting zoo, a bounce house, a water slide, and a make-a-movie studio in the playroom. My father even wore his Householders’ superhero suit for the event.
Was it really possible that, while he was hamming it up on the lawn, signing autographs for kids from preschool and playgroup, he knew that some banker was drawing up papers to kick us out of our house? Would he really have moved Aunt Lute in six months ago if he believed we might all end up on the street? Would he have kept paying for Barbie’s spa days, and my private golf lessons, and the country club membership, and the twins’ preschool, the nanny, and the endless supply of high-end kiddie clothes from the best boutiques in Highland Park?
“I’m calling Uncle Boone.” With my mother out of touch on her mission in Central America, Uncle Boone was the only one we could turn to. “We can’t just sit here and wait to see what happens tomorrow morning.” My head was a swirl of words as I searched through my cell directory for his number. It was impossible to know what to say at a time like this.
Aunt Lute returned with her bowl. The doorbell rang. Barbie didn’t move. Aunt Lute disappeared down the entryway. The bells chimed on the wall as she opened the door, then chimed again as she closed it and returned to the kitchen.
“It’s best to avoid the front entrance,” Aunt Lute advised as she rinsed her hands in the sink, then dried them on a towel while checking her purple fingernail polish. “A man out there came bearing a camera. I gave them what was left of the fruit, and he made a film of me.”
“He . . . what?” Sliding off my stool, I closed the phone, then crossed the kitchen and the foyer to check the entry hall. Shadows moved outside the door, pressing close, trying to peer through the swirls of frosted glass. Someone knocked, then rang the bell incessantly.
“Hello?” A voice echoed through the wood. “This is Garth Culver with Channel Eight news.”
“Don’t open it,” Aunt Lute whispered. “He’ll think we’ve gone out.” She winked one foggy violet eye before disappearing in the direction of the utility stairs and her room.
Backing away, I dialed Uncle Boone’s number again, and this time he answered. He was on his way home from the lake with some girl giggling in the car. When I told him what had happened, his answer was a string of expletives, followed by a long sigh. “Guess the Postman got caught with his pants down this time. I told him this was gonna happen.”
The girl in his car stopped giggling. I could hear her asking, “What’s wrong, honey?”
What’s wrong?
There wasn’t enough time between here and Lake Ray Hubbard to even begin to answer that question.
Within an hour, Uncle Boone was at our house, minus the girl. He forced the reporters off our lawn and back to the public domain of the sidewalk. The chimes on the doorbell finally stopped their insane ringing, and Jewel quit wailing. When Boone came in, Barbie deposited Jewel in the bouncy seat and said to no one in particular, “Take her down to the playroom. She likes to watch the boys.”
I stared at Barbie, wondering what planet she was living on. Could she not hear the boys tearing down the playroom walls? Jewel wouldn’t last five minutes there before someone tipped over her bouncy seat or whacked her with something. But after an hour of nonstop noise, I was willing to do almost anything to keep the baby quiet, so I picked up the carrier and went looking for Aunt Lute. I found her in her apartment over the garage, serenely reading a copy of
Lord of the Flies
.
Tucking the book cover under her chin, she smiled at me. “Have you seen this novel? It’s very good.”
“Aunt Lute, can you watch Jewel for a few minutes?” I stood in the doorway with the bouncer propped on my hip. Normally, the sibs were strictly forbidden from Aunt Lute’s room—too many prescription bottles, tubes of oil paint, containers of solvent, and hoarded treasures she’d been unwilling to leave behind at her old house. “Uncle Boone’s here. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“Certainly,” Aunt Lute agreed, smiling as if today were nothing out of the ordinary. “I’ll take her downstairs again, if she requires her mother.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Is there a problem?” Aunt Lute gave me a lucid look, and for the first time today I had the sense that she wasn’t as unaware of our situation as she often seemed.
“I think so,” I admitted, walking into the room and setting the bouncer on the coffee table in front of Aunt Lute’s small sofa. “I think Dad’s really in trouble.”
She nodded gravely. “We lost the farm once. If a man from the bank comes, don’t let the mother leave.” Frowning at Jewel, she stretched out a hand, her fingers crooked and trembling as she pressed a knuckle to Jewel’s foot and lifted it. “Tell her a mother must stay.”
More than once over the years, I’d sat at banquets where my father was the celebrity speaker. I’d heard him blithely tell the story of my grandfather losing the family farm, and the family’s downward spiral into poverty and dysfunction.
After a few months, my mother just packed her suitcase and left
, the story went.
There were seven of us, and my father worked long hours. My oldest sister, Lutia, took on the raising of us as much as she could, but Lute had to work, too, which left us with a lot of time to run the streets. Luckily for us, that first apartment in the city was right down the road from the Boys and Girls Club. . . .
Dad’s “One Thing Can Make All the Difference” speech went on to chronicle the descent into gang life of my father’s eldest brother, the death of a sister in an alcohol-related teenage accident, the gang-related shooting that killed one brother and left another in a wheelchair. Even Aunt Lute, who by my father’s definition had been a brilliant, creative girl, had become trapped in the shadow of the neighborhood, working a mindless factory job while caring for her father and invalid brother. Out of seven siblings, Dad was the only one who’d pried loose the grip of poverty and alcoholism and left his old life behind. He was a poster child for community intervention into the lives of struggling kids. He’d climbed from the ghetto to grab the brass ring.
Sometimes I wondered if, underneath all the hype, there was still the frightened nine-year-old boy who’d wandered the streets alone, locking the world outside, angry at everyone, until a coach at a community sports program lured him into a game of flag football and found a way in.
“Nobody’s leaving,” I told Aunt Lute. As much as the sibs drove me crazy, they were still my family. I knew what it felt like to have the people who were supposed to take care of you decide to move on. My father knew that feeling, too. How could he just take off for Mexico and leave us behind?
When I came back downstairs, Barbie was wrapped around Uncle Boone, her arms interlaced over his broad shoulders, her head buried against his T-shirt, her long blond hair trailing pale and golden against his coffee-and-cream skin. He was patting her shoulder with one hand and trying to dial his cell phone with the other.
I heard a crash down the hall, and one of the sibs—Daniel, I thought—let out an ear-piercing scream.
Barbie lifted her head, trembling as she wiped a mascara-stained cheek. “Can you go get him?” she whimpered.
“Why don’t you?” I snapped.
“Tam . . .” Nothing irked me more than when Barbie tried to use the mom voice on me. She only did it when we were in front of people—so that she’d look like the perfect, parental stepmom, and I’d look like some teenage spoiled brat.
Right now, I didn’t care. “You know what, Barbara? The boys are not my problem. You’re their mother. You’re not my mother, thank God, but you’re
their
mother. Why don’t
you
take care of them?”
Barbie’s blue eyes narrowed and turned icy. She disentangled herself from Uncle Boone so she could point a long, French-manicured fingernail in my direction. “Why don’t
you
stop acting like it’s
your
world, and we’re just living in it, Tam? Why don’t you just—”
“Me?” Anger and frustration and hatred for Barbie exploded inside me like a land mine. “Me? You’re the one who—”
“All right, all right. Just a minute!” Stepping out of Barbie’s reach, Boone held up his hands like a referee calling time. “You two going at it ain’t gonna help any.” Even after years in the city, and with the big diamond stud in his ear, Uncle Boone was still as country as dirt. “Both of you siddown. We need to talk. There’s a lot bigger problem here than whether the two of you like each other or not.”
By the time Boone finished explaining what he already knew, and what he’d been able to piece together about my father’s financial situation, Barbie was the least of my worries. The fact was that my father was embroiled in a financial scandal that was as large as Ross Burten, who, along with the company’s chief financial officer, stood accused not only of bribing city officials, but also of siphoning huge amounts of investor money out of the athletic park project and various real estate developments to support lavish trips, a professional sailing team and boat, several estates and vacation homes, and Ross’s $1.5 million wedding to his third wife. Unfortunately for him, his second wife had tipped off the feds.
The question now was how much my father knew, when he knew it, and whether he’d shared in the ill-gotten windfall. Burten’s ex-wife, who knew my mother and had a particular disdain for middle-aged men with young replacement wives, had implicated my father along with Burten and the rest of the company’s financial management.
Given my father’s current financial state, and the fact that he’d fled to Mexico, the prognosis didn’t look good—for him, or for us. By noon tomorrow, Barbie, the sibs, and I would be out on the street. The new owners of the house didn’t want to talk to us—they just wanted us out. Immediately. Uncle Boone had already tried calling them, and they weren’t budging—especially not for a homeowner facing a federal investigation.
“I told Paul he needed to come clean with it all,” Uncle Boone finished. “I told him he was only gonna dig this thing so wide and deep even Superman couldn’t get out.”