Criminals (22 page)

“Not for long,” Pat said wryly.

Angie had heard the stories about shirttail relatives who turned up in Seattle when the software fortunes were first being made. Right from the beginning Bill Diehl kept her up on those things. “Pat's going to break the bank up there. She's smart, she's in the right place at the right time,” he said. Bill had no money of his own but he could always sniff it when somebody else had it or was going to get it. “Some people get kinged,” he said, “just like in checkers.” He was a man of no resentment, and that was what Angie had loved, she had loved his gleeful accounts of sudden, undeserved windfalls, occasions of wild luck. In fact when he and Terri realized they wanted to be married to each other, he told Angie this could almost be one of those, the first of his life.

Angie could not stand in the way of such a thing. “So what are you waiting for? She's the one for you,” she said. “I know about that. I had that. There's only one.”

Of course she did not believe this. If one, why not more than one. Fortunately Bill would not think of it in that way. His way had always been to skip over twenty-five years of Angie's history and treat her as a widow. Early on she had made the discovery of his serious gift for comfort, his knowing at what point to pour the wine down the sink and wipe a woman's tears with a clean handkerchief. He had bowed his head to the story of Rudy more than once. So let him see himself as an episode late in the day, for Angie, someone with whom she had joined forces for a couple of years, and shared one vacation, and a cat that gave birth in the closet. Though for his sake she had been at some pains to keep up the idea that their arrangement was a romance.

“We bonded over a stray cat,” she would tell people. Bill was the cat-lover, but they spent weeks united in the search for homes for the kittens. In the end the cat went with Bill, even though she had won Angie over in her solemn hunt for each of her given-away young.

“Why did the guy put these railings all over the place?” These were of a luminous metal and had a decorative, all-purpose look. Angie had taken hold of one herself a time or two. They were in all the downstairs bathrooms and ran along the first-floor walls.

“He had a fall. Rock-climbing. I'm going to take the rails out but I haven't had time to hire anybody.”

“What happened to him?”

“A chunk of the rock face fell on him. Crushed his legs.”

“No. That's awful. Does he still have them? His legs?”

“He does. Lots of rehab. Listen, he's out of the wheelchair, he walks. Don't worry about him, he's a tough guy.” Was Pat's voice bitter? Had the man been her lover? “He tried to take me over. My company.”

“So you ended up with his house?”

Pat smiled. “I bought his house.” In her head Angie heard what the old Pat would have said to her. “It amazes me the way you're always ready to sympathize with some guy. It could be anybody. Somebody's always hurting these poor men. The guy fell. He went to rehab. He moved. End of story.”

P
at did not give Angie a tour; she didn't boast of anything in the house, or the garden with its tall fountain, blown out wide some days like a sheet on the line. While Pat was at work Angie gave herself a tour. She sat on the rim of the fountain by herself.
I'm not kidding, I wouldn't trade with you.

Oh, because I'm not a good-time girl like my mom?

You're not the only one, Patty, who's had more than one life.

They didn't say these things any more. Why was Pat lost to her?

When Pat came home the first day Angie said the high ceilings made the place echo, but Pat had her yell to prove it, and there was no echo, only her shout.

Pat had not indulged herself, beyond Erika's school and this house. She didn't travel except to meetings and she didn't buy cars or wear good clothes. She didn't join a health club. In Oregon Angie lived among people who were barely making it, who swore by health clubs. But Pat ran. Her legs showed knots of muscle and her hips were narrow from the miles she ran, as if she were training for Erika's relay.

After she ran and showered, Pat came out and flopped down with her feet up on the coffee table. This was the best time of day to approach her, sitting around the huge table, a metal ring on tube legs holding up a four-inch-thick slab of clouded, pocked glass. You had to be careful where you put a drink down on it because the glass had hills and valleys. “I bet this thing cost you,” Angie said the first day, not sure about swinging her own feet out and raising them to the level where they could be propped. Anyway the table might be for Pat's feet.

“Do you like it?” Pat said. She never took offense or acted like she didn't care for Angie's meaning, as she once had; she never argued any more. She was above argument.

“Yeah, I sorta do. It's weird but it appeals to me.”

“Weird,” her daughter said with a dreamy expression.

Angie knew this expression. “I know, honeybaby,” she said. “I know it's art.”

“Well, a sculptor did it.” Angie wondered if the sculptor was someone Pat knew. Other than the wheelchair man, Pat hadn't mentioned anyone she knew. If the phone rang it was for Erika; Pat didn't even look up. I know about that, Angie might have said. I was blank that way after your father died. But as far as she knew, nobody had died.

“By the way, you don't have to do the wash,” Pat said. “Cham will do the wash.”

“I just put a few things in. I like having something to do.”

“Right, well, maybe you'd do something for me. Rika's birthday. Fourteen.” As if Angie didn't know, didn't have presents in her suitcase. She wasn't sure about them, though. She knew to stay a little ahead of the game, but she could see that Erika had suddenly taken a step. Mention of her previous interests would bring a vague, regretful smile.

“I'll be here for her actual birthday but then Friday I have to go to Palo Alto, and the party's that night. If I change it, half the girls can't come. You have to get these things on the calendar. I can hire a party coordinator but Erika won't like that.”

“A party coordinator? Are you kidding? You asked me, I'm doing it.”

Cham would be in the house, of course. The girls couldn't put anything over on Cham, a woman who had run into a burning grade school. You could see scars on Cham's neck and jaw and only guess about the rest of her, always covered up. She had hidden in a sow's pen, swum through sewage, to get out of Cambodia. Angie knew that. Somewhere back in the dark of that period was a family, children Cham had had, the ones who had been in the grade school. A complicated story of who had gotten out of the country. None of the children. Cham was alone here, suspicious of everyone but Pat. Cousins were here in the city but there was a problem with them; they thought Cham had cursed some relative. She had been with Pat for years now, arriving with a double name that Pat had shortened.

Cham would be right there, in her bare feet and khaki pants, keeping an eye on everything. But it would be better if Angie met the girls at the door. And you had to be careful with sleepovers. Sometimes boys this age came around. How they got there Pat didn't know, since none of them drove yet; they were kids. They would come in
twos and threes, with cameras or flashlights or masks, after the parents were asleep, and not do anything, just occupy themselves in stealth and heckling and making the girls hysterical enough, as these skinny prepubescent boys could somehow do, to burst out with confessions to their own parents the next day.

Sometimes drugs turned up, of course. Nothing big so far, knock on wood. And some of the parents had a high enough profile that they had to worry about their children for security reasons. Guard them. One of the party guests was in that category, with her own bodyguard. Or custody disputes, same thing.

“Some of them know boys from I don't know, a previous school, or camp, or even church. Or community service. They have to do community service, through the school.”

“Well, good for them,” said Angie. She knew Pat expected it of her. “What do I do if they show up?” She pictured a string of boys sneaking up the bank from the lake, past the fountain, with knives in their teeth.

“Send them home. Say you'll call their parents. But you won't have to, they can't even get in the gate. Oh, now you're going to worry. Hey, even if they cook something up, they're pretty much a joke to these particular girls. At this age the boys are way behind the girls. This group has a lot to keep them busy. The boys they see in school—they're so-and-so's son but these girls know they're twerps. Erika does. She's like me,” Pat added, and it was true. But not in the way Pat meant it, not the way Pat had been at her age, full of tears and threats and some display in her walk, Angie thought, some sad teasing, some heat coming off her that might have been called slutty before they all, Angie and her friends, knew slut was a patriarchal term.

Angie remembered sitting around on the floor with the women she had lived with when Pat was little—women considerably younger than she was, leaning on radiators as they nursed their babies. Every once in a while they dropped a new term into the middle of their sleepy talk, like cloves into the stew. Their subject might be the commodification of breasts. But they would slip back, they would sigh over Angie's little daughter's rounded beauty, her awareness of her
limbs and body as she bathed and danced and fastened her barrettes, her languorous, sweet manner with their boyfriends. But smart, too. Very smart. Competitive. Up in the high percentiles when she got to school, skipping second grade. So there was some connection, after all, between that little girl and the Pat of today.

And no father. A father who was gone, dead.

Pat had no memory of Rudy. So she said. None. She had seen the pictures, heard the tapes. When she got to be seven or eight she didn't want to go with Angie to the cemetery where Rudy was buried, but once, later, she let her boyfriend Eric take her. The Grave of the Unknown Rock Star, she called it. No, she wasn't especially curious beyond that.

Pat didn't have Angie's problems with pregnancy; she could have had ten babies. But she had only Erika. Rika, now; Erika had renamed herself, just as Pat had. “Pat” was not Pat's real name, of course. Her name was Parvati. Angie was not going to apologize for that. She and Rudy were back in Oregon; it was 1969 and they had moved into a double-wide just before the home birth—trailer-birth, Pat called it—with Mount Hood visible above the pines. Parvati. Daughter of the mountain.

In your thirties, in those days, you thought time was running out. Angie had been pregnant four times. “I'm staying put this time. I'm going to have this one if I have to stay in bed the whole time. You do whatever you want. Go on. Go with them!”

This was after she had scattered the carload of girls who followed the band. She got up from the bed and routed them out of the motel parking lot where they were beating tambourines on their hips. Pregnant, Angie was a terror.
Get out of here! Leave us alone!

There were always pretty girls around, in droopy long dresses, with cracked heels and no makeup. But they weren't the ones she had to worry about. She had to think for a minute, remembering. Those two who had traveled with them, and had some right to be there, those were the ones—Mariah? Mara. “Mara meaning bitter,” the girl would introduce herself, twisting her ripe lips. She sang with the band and
had crying fits on the road requiring Rudy's presence in the room she shared with her friend with the made-up name. Sky. Mara and Sky. Names Angie had imagined were written on her skin, dug into her palms. And she had forgotten! Or almost forgotten. She was old.

But she hardly ever felt old. On the contrary, she had been old then. They were old, she and Rudy, for what they were doing, the company Rudy liked to keep. They were on the far edge. All around them were kids. Rudy was tired of the band and they were tired of him; during his guitar solos they liked to wander around the stage talking and drinking. He wasn't all that well because he was careless with his insulin. When he went to the free clinic for his cough the nurse told him to quit smoking but she said it was the diabetes that was going to get him if he wasn't careful.

Rudy was trying to quit smoking. He did quit. He got a job. The baby was born and then the changes came of their own accord for several years, and then the diabetes went out of control again and this time his kidneys failed and then his heart, and he died.

“I wish he could see this house,” Angie said. They were having breakfast on the terrace, on the second day.

“Who?” Pat said patiently.

“Your father.”

“Why is that?”

“Oh . . .” Angie took off her glasses to wipe off the fine spray from the fountain. Why? Why this wish to get the attention of the dead, force them to marvel at some exceptional thing? As if the sight of the living themselves, fighting and sleeping with each other and crawling through sewage, would not be enough to shake the husks of the poor emptied-out dead. “It would . . . mean something to him.” But what, exactly? She felt a flash of conspiracy, the arrival of an undermining opinion, cool as the spray on her cheek: Rudy would laugh at this house. “Well, he didn't have money in his pocket till near the end. You know”—she turned to Erika—“when my dad hired him, he was out on his own. Hitched all the way from West Virginia to the Oregon coast. The reason he came at all was to play music at the carnival—we had a timber carnival in town. He was thin as the neck of his guitar.
That kind of diabetics aren't fat. He had to give himself shots, and my mother was a goner when she saw that, that and the smoking. She was going to put a stop to that, and feed him up. But he was a grown-up sixteen.” The quality of Erika's listening changed. “He went right to work in the yard. The lumberyard. You could be a man at that age, back then, if you had to.”