"Helen told me about your visit," Annie Gibson said. "I don't know if you're good people or not. But she spoke well of you, and that'll have to be good enough for me. I'm going to miss Helen. We had coffee together every other day, just about, and we went shopping in Little Rock together twice a year. We sent each other birthday cards." Tears began running down her plump cheeks, and Annie reached for the box of tissues on the table before her. She patted the tears and blew her nose, unself-consciously. "Our mamas were best friends, and they had us the same month."
I tried to imagine having the same person as a friend for so long. Annie Gibson was probably in her late thirties. I tried to imagine having grandchildren, but I couldn't even project how it would feel to have a child. Having a friend for as long as Annie had had Helen - that was something equally unimaginable.
I would be lucky to live that long, I thought. I watched the tail end of that thought trail out of sight and wondered where it had come from. At the moment, I had to pay attention to this woman across from me.
"I have to talk to you about something you may not like," I said. This was a direct woman, and I sensed it would be better to approach her head-on.
"You have to run it by me before I decide." Her face might be soft physically, but there was nothing soft about her will. "Some things ought to be secret."
"I agree," I said. I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. "Ms. Gibson, Helen herself told us she had a bad time when she was drinking."
Annie Gibson nodded, her eyes not leaving my face. "That's so," she said.
"With Teenie being murdered, Helen was real upset when she asked us to come by to talk to her," I said, going so slowly, so carefully. "When I told her about Teenie and Sally, she said, 'I'll have to call their fathers.' What I want to know from you is, Who was Teenie's father?"
Annie Gibson shook her head. The brown curls moved with her, as if they'd been fixed in place with spray. Maybe they had. "I promised Helen I'd never tell," she said. "She told me not to tell even if Teenie came and asked me."
"And did she?" I asked. I blessed my brother for his silence.
"Yes," Annie said without hesitation. "Yes, she did. Right before she died."
"So, it seems like that was a pretty crucial secret," I said. "You see? She asked, and she died. Helen tells me she's going to call Teenie's father, and she dies."
Annie Gibson looked startled, as though she'd finally put two and two together. "But that can't be," she said. "He'd have no reason to."
"He must have," I said. I tried to keep my voice gentle and reasonable. "I told Helen that Hollis's wife Sally was murdered, too. All three members of that family are gone now. And they all knew who Teenie's father was."
"Not Teenie," Annie Gibson said. "Teenie never knew. I didn't tell her. I promised Helen I wouldn't. And I knew she'd asked Helen, many a time, after she began to suspect it wasn't Jay."
"Jay?" Tolliver asked.
"Helen's husband. Sally's father. He's coming back for the funeral. He may have been divorced from Helen, but I guess he inherits the house now. He called me this morning."
"Where is he staying?" I wondered if he would have a few words with us.
"He's at the motel where ya'll are at. But don't expect to get much sense out of him. Helen may have quit drinking, but Jay ain't. She had to take out a restraining order on him, I guess a year or two after Sally was born. Jay used to be a nice-looking man, and he had sweet folks, but he ain't worth a tinker's damn."
"We've had experience in dealing with drunks," I said.
"Oh, like that, huh?" She looked at me, with level eyes. "I thought I seen the mark on you."
"The mark?"
"Kids raised by drunks. They all got the same mark. I can see it. Not everyone can."
I was certainly not the only person walking this earth possessed of a weird little talent.
Tolliver and I rose to our feet, and Annie wiggled forward on her chair to rise with us. I looked around the small house, and I noticed she had good locks on the doors. And it was obvious a drove of friends and family came in and out all the time. The phone had rung twice while we were there, and she'd let her answering machine take the call. Annie seemed fairly well protected.
"If I were you," I said, very carefully, "I'd go to Little Rock for a couple of days to go shopping, or something like that."
"Are you threatening me?" she said right back at me.
"No ma'am, I am not. I liked Helen, the little I knew of her. And I saw her after she died. I don't want you to be as scared as she was."
"Sounds to me like you are threatening me," Annie Gibson said. Her jaw hardened, and she looked like a very determined pug.
"I swear I am not," I said, as earnestly as I could. "I'm just worried about you." She wasn't going to listen to a word I said, so I might as well save my breath. From now on, anything Tolliver and I told her would go straight to feed her conviction that we meant her ill.
"You all need to go to the gospel singing tonight, get some good thoughts in your head," she concluded, shutting the door behind us.
"I thought Helen was a tough nut to crack," I muttered. "I just hadn't met Annie Gibson."
We ate lunch at a McDonald's, which showed we were at the bottom of our spirits. Our parents had fed us from the fast-food place so often when we were little that we could hardly bear the smell of one now. When my mother had been married to my father, and we'd had the nice home in Memphis, we had a maid I'd been fond of. Her name was Marilyn Coachman. She was a stern black woman, you didn't back talk her, and when she told you to do something, you did it. The minute she'd realized my mother was using drugs, Marilyn quit. I wondered where Marilyn was now.
I looked down at the French fries in their grease-marked cardboard sleeve and shoved them away. She was a great cook.
"We need vegetables," I said.
Tolliver said, "Potatoes are a vegetable. And ketchup is made from tomatoes. I know technically they're a fruit, but I always think of them as vegetables."
"Very funny. I mean it. You know I have to avoid this shit. We need a place where we can live. I'll learn to cook."
"You mean it?"
"I do."
"You want to buy a house."
"We've talked about it before."
"But I didn't... You were serious, huh?"
"Yes." I was deeply hurt. "I guess you weren't."
He put down his Big Mac. He wiped his fingers on the paper napkin. A very young mother went by, carrying one child on her hip. The other hand held a tray full of food and drinks. A boy, maybe five, followed close on her heels. She put the tray down on a nearby table and began getting the children into their places and sorting out the food. She looked harried. Her bra strap kept falling down her arm; both her arms were bare. She was wearing a sleeveless tank top despite the chilly day.
Tolliver was giving me all his attention, now. "You're still thinking Dallas?"
"Or thereabouts. We could find a nice small house, maybe in Longview or even closer to Dallas, to the north. That'd be more central than the Atlanta area, which was the other place we'd discussed."
His dark eyes searched mine. "Dallas is close to Mariella and Grace."
"Maybe they won't always feel the same."
"Maybe they will. There's no point banging our heads against that wall."
"Someday they'll change."
"You think those people will let us see them?" Mariella and Grace now lived with my stepfather's sister and her husband. Tolliver's aunt Iona had never intervened to save me and Cameron, or her blood kin Tolliver and Mark. But when the end came, when Human Services discovered after Cameron's abduction how bad things were in our household and I'd been farmed out to a foster family and Tolliver had gone to his brother, Iona and Hank had swooped down to save poor precious Mariella and baby Grace, in a hail of publicity and denials of all knowledge of how low my mother had sunk.
After living with Iona and Hank two months, our little sisters had gone from regarding us as their saviors and defenders to reacting as if we had visible plague sores.
Out of many painful memories of that short era, the picture of Grace screaming, "I don't want to see you ever again!" when I'd gone to pick her up was the most shattering.
"It couldn't be them," I said for maybe the hundredth time to Tolliver, as we sat surrounded by the smell of cooking oil and lots of primary colors. "They loved us." He nodded, as he had every other time.
"Iona and Hank have convinced them we had something to do with how that household was run," he said.
"Or not run. How it was bungled," I said, out of the deep well of bitterness that separated me from other people.
"She's dead now," he said, very quietly. "He might as well be."
"I know, I know. I'm sorry." I waved a hand in front of my face, to dispel the recurrence of anger. "I just can't help but hope that someday the little girls will be grown up enough to understand."
"It won't ever be the same." Tolliver was my oracle, and he knew. He almost always said the things I was scared to even think. He was right.
"I guess not. But someday they'll need a sister and a brother, and they'll call us."
He bent back to his food. "Some days, I hope not," he said very quietly, and I couldn't think of anything to say.
I knew what he meant. We had no one to answer to. We had no one to take care of. We only had each other. After years of desperately plastering the cracks in our family so no one could see in, just watching out for each other in the here and now seemed relatively simple and even soothing.
Hollis sat down at our table, his meal in a bag in his hand. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything," he said. "I was going through the drive-through and I saw you two in here. You looked mighty serious."
Tolliver gave the policeman a sharp glance. Hollis was in uniform. He looked good in it. I smiled down at what was left of my lunch.
"We're ready to leave this town," Tolliver said. "But we can't go until the sheriff gives us the nod."
"What happened at the funeral home?" Hollis wisely ignored Tolliver.
I told him that Helen had been killed by someone she knew and trusted, which was no revelation. Her little house had been as neat as a house can be that's the site of a violent murder. No one had broken into it. No one had rifled it.
"Someone wearing long sleeves, not a uniform." I knew that.
"That's all you got?"
"No, I released Helen's soul to heaven," I wanted to say. But there are a lot of things that are better left unsaid, and this was definitely one of them. "Tell me, Hollis... someone told me that Helen had taken out a restraining order on her first husband, Jay. Is that so?"
"Yeah, Jay was a drunk like Helen was, at least at the time. He was drunk at Sally's and my wedding, for sure. My uncle had to take him out of the church because he was getting loud. It embarrassed Sally real bad." Hollis shook his head at the recollection. "He's back in town, I hear. Evidently, Helen had made a will. Jay inherits the house and what little Helen had in the bank."
"Why would Helen leave what she had to a man who abused her so badly?" That hadn't fit the Helen Hopkins I'd met, however briefly.
Hollis cleared his throat. "Ah, well, she might have been grateful that he was willing to acknowledge Teenie as his."
"No one knows for sure who Teenie's dad was?"
"No, but there must have been at least a chance that Jay was. They never had a DNA test, though. Jay acted like she was his, and Helen put his name on forms, so - "
"Why would he agree to that?" Tolliver asked, his eyes still focused on the food wrappers. He was crushing them into balls and putting each ball on our tray.
"If he said she wasn't, he'd have been admitting his wife wasn't satisfied with him," Hollis explained, as if the answer were self-evident.
"He'd rather acknowledge a bastard than admit his wife had slept with someone else?" Tolliver was openly skeptical.
"And it was the gentlemanly thing to do." Hollis did some staring in another direction himself this time. He was looking at me, and I could feel the heat rising in my face. "Sometimes men do the right thing," Hollis said, very seriously.
"But if Teenie wasn't his, he was denying another man the chance to do the right thing," I said.
"Weren't a lot of men clamoring for the honor of claiming the baby," Hollis said.
I remembered high school all too clearly. There was something that had baffled me from the start, and now seemed as good a time as any to ask Hollis about it. "There's something I don't understand. Dell Teague didn't mind dating a girl with such a bad reputation? He's from the best family in town, right? Or at least the one with the most money. And yet... he's dating a girl who has an alcoholic mother and an absent father, a poor girl, a wild girl." I waited, with my eyebrow cocked, for Hollis to comment.
Hollis ruminated for a minute or two. "They didn't run with the same crowd, until Helen started working for Sybil. She'd have Teenie come over there, after school, and do her homework. They were drawn to each other from that time, is all I know to tell you. When Teenie got into trouble after that, it was when Dell's parents decided to interfere between them, or when Helen was on a tear. If Teenie couldn't go out with Dell, she'd raise hell."