13

BEFORE CHECKING OUT the next morning at the airport hotel, I took the three photos of my mother and pinned them in a trinity inside my suitcase lid. There was the one of her as a bashful young girl and the one I remembered of her as a teen. There were common items in the teenage photograph, such as a wheelbarrow and a washtub against my grandmother’s house, a spotted dog on the porch. My grandmother posed in the middle of a group of relatives. Mother stood two people away. Grandma wore a cotton dress and a black straw hat, small brimmed, but tall as a three-layer cake. Like my mother, she gardened no matter what the circumstance. Even though hard times shadowed all the relatives’ eyes like sinkholes, the photo revealed a trio of begonias in clay pots on the porch steps.

Delia ranted about the hotel, criticizing the loud airplanes roaring overhead all night. So I checked us out and asked the concierge to reserve a car for me. The rental car attendant brought it right to the curb.

“We left that Grady far behind, I’ll say that,” said Delia. “He’ll never think to look for us in Pasadena.”

An old billboard advertised the Strawberry Festival from last May.

“I’ll be. Here I thought they was the place for the Rose Parade,” said Delia.

The gas tank was only partly full, so I pulled off of Gulf Freeway into a convenience store lot. Delia struck up a conversation with the station attendant while I selected an atlas. His name tag said, Beefy. “Busy place, this Houston. What do you do for fun around this place?” she asked.

“Used to go dancing down at the Cowboy Ranch museum. They shut the place down,” said the young man. He had a gold-capped front tooth and wore an earring with a feather. “There’s a Waffle House and a CVS drugstore on every block, but we lose the one thing that made us not like every place else.”

“Why don’t you open the Cowboy Ranch yourself then?” Delia asked.

He looked startled, like he’d been asleep and just got shook.

I bought Cheetos and cold drinks. Delia got a jerky just to say she got one in Texas.

Beefy asked Delia, “What’s your name?”

“Delia. What’s yours?”

“Todd.”

“Never knew a Todd named Beefy before.”

He glanced at the name tag, laughing at Delia. He was charmed by her. Men often were at first. They bought into her childish pout as if she sold it for a dollar.

I looked down and saw a large moth upside down on the floor. It was coated in ants. I tapped Delia’s foot since she was about to put her foot right on it.

She jumped.

We paid and then drove onto 1-45. Cars were stacked, lining up for rush hour.

“Texas is like every place else,” said Delia.

“You haven’t been every place else. How do you know that?” I asked.

“TV.”

“What did you expect?”

“Horses, guns.”

I told her to look around us at the idling drivers. “Lots of cowboy hats. Don’t see that in North Carolina.”

“I guess so.” She sniffed the jerky. “Gaylen, you was crying in your sleep at Aunt Renni’s.”

So much had happened since we left Siphon. Delia jolted me back to Renni’s. “I don’t know why I do that,” I said. “Mother used to shake me awake and ask me what was so much to be sad about. When I woke up, I didn’t know. I seemed to know more in my sleep than I did awake.”

Delia took out a cardboard picture of Jesus. It was the size of a pack of cigarettes and hung by a chain.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“Todd give it to me, probably because he slid his phone number into my hand at the same time. I’ll hang Jesus up for luck.” So she hung Christ over the rearview mirror.

He had a purple heart painted right over his robe.

“You think Jesus really looked like that?” she asked. “White dress, purple heart, hair like Jerry Garcia?”

“There weren’t any cameras to take his picture.”

“I think the purple heart means he’s sad.”

“He’s the King of kings, Grandma used to say. Why would Jesus be sad, Delia? Because he knew he was going to die?”

“I think it was because he had to watch us running around like ants, eating each other alive. He wanted to stop us, but it was like stopping ants.”

I thought about the ants on the giant moth. I did not know if that was the right analogy. I studied bugs in high school and the way they made colonies. I never read that ants were eating each other. But I imagined them down in the bowels of the earth, not knowing that a Waffle House was being built right over them. “I think he was sad because he has to look down on the earth and everywhere he looks people are asleep. So he comes down here to see who he can wake up.”

Delia looked over at a car idling next to us on the interstate. A woman was driving a shiny truck. Next to her sat a man with a cowboy hat over his eyes, his arms crossed at his chest. His mouth had fallen open.

“I want to get me a Texas cowboy hat just so my friends at the Waffle House know I been to Texas,” said Delia.

We merged onto 1-610. The closer we got to Mr. Savage’s house, the more nervous I got. It was a twisted kind of nervous, like cables of nervous and mad wrapped up around my chest. I imagined Mother and Daddy in California, but I could not see Truman. Mother once said she took me down to the ocean and touched my newborn foot to the salt water just so she could tell me I had been to the ocean. When she told me that story, it was like she had lit a torch inside of me, making me want to leave Boiling Waters and see the other side of the ocean. I could not imagine the rest of the country spread out between the place where I was born and the place I grew up. I wondered now if she did that on purpose or if she even knew what she was doing to me. But she never said what had come of her boy. Was he with her and my father in Salinas? Mr. Savage would surely know since Truman was his boy too.

Delia kept saying, “Stay straight, turn right, and turn right again,” until we finally pulled up right in front of the address I had printed in the library. We got out and sidled gingerly up the walk. The house was a brick ranch, like the kind built back in the ′50s. The door opened. Mr. Savage was a big man like my father. He kept staring at me as if he were reading something familiar in my eyes. “May I help you?” he asked.

“I’m Gaylen and this is Delia. Our half brother’s name is Truman Savage.”

“I don’t know any other Truman Savage in the country. I’m the only one.” He seemed proud of that, his heels lifting a bit when he said it.

Delia pulled out Truman’s grade-school picture. I didn’t know she had grabbed it from the house. “This is him,” she said. “Our brother.”

His face turned the color of a shell. “What do you want?”

I said, “Mr. Savage, you and my mother were once married.” He kept staring so I said, “Fiona Chapel from back in North Carolina.”

He studied me more intently, like he wanted to push me off his porch. “I left: that all behind,” he said. “I don’t have anything to do with those people. Say, what’s this about anyway? You come digging up trash around here, you’ll not get anywhere with me.”

I tried to assuage Mr. Savage’s temper and assure him I wasn’t looking to trash him. “Not at all, sir,” I said. “My mother passed away some years back. But my brother, your boy Truman, he’s in prison.”

That surprised him.

“Could we talk to you, sir?” I asked. “We’re trying to understand a few things about him.”

He did not invite us in right away. But then Delia set to gibbering about our inheritance and how we were driving all over the country seeing family. Something about the words spilling out of her caused him to sigh, like he realized he could not get rid of us. So he invited us inside.

The house was decorated like everything had come from a Cracker Barrel country store. Little jars of okra and jars of cookie mix tied with ragged pink ribbons lined a shelf in his kitchen. Photographs of Mr. Savage and his wife, Gloria, and their son, Parson, were all over his house, on a fireplace hearth and next to medicine bottles on pretty little Hepplewhite tables. A miniature Christmas tree covered in faded silver and blue ornaments decorated the hearth. Mr. Savage had left it all as if Gloria might happen through the living room at any moment. He saw me looking at the tree and said, “My niece Tess worries over me since Gloria passed. She put that up. Otherwise I’d not fool with Christmas.”

I took a seat in an embroidered rocker. “Your wife was Gloria. I noticed that she passed away.”

He looked suspiciously at me. “How did you know that?”

“Internet.”

“You looking up my business for a reason?”

“We thought you was murdered by Judge Cuvier,” said Delia. She looked at Mother’s ex, the two of them staring at one another, quiet as sunning gators, until I said, “My brother, Truman, wrote to us, telling us that he needed money to get an attorney and get back his father’s land in Houston.” I then told him what Truman had said about him. “He said you were murdered.” I half-smiled. “Obviously you’re not murdered.”

“I’m as alive as can be. What would he say that for?”

“He wants money for an attorney,” I said. “He just wants out of prison.”

“Mr. Savage, my brother sounds sad. Do you ever contact him?” asked Delia.

There was a festering anger in his eyes. “I’ve disowned Truman. He knows why. But he’s nothing but a liar, so don’t ask him to tell you anything. It won’t be true.”

“My mother told us that he ran away from home,” I said, remembering Renni’s different version but playing dumb. “I’m trying to find out why.”

He sat with his hands clasped, tapping his thumbs, like someone accustomed to holding together others dependent on him. I tried to imagine him married to my mother. If my father had not gone off on emotional tangents, he would be a lot like Mr. Savage: a man of few words, who, when he finally speaks, examines the words before allowing them to go public.

“The day he ran away from our house, my Aunt Renni says he came to you. Is that right?”

“Best I knew, your daddy put him on a bus,” he said. “Had to. His mother, Fiona, kicked him out. There wasn’t no running away to it. Don’t know why she told you that.”

Delia glanced at me.

“My father bought him a bus ticket?” I had not counted on my father being in on the trouble with Truman.

“Had to. Truman was only fifteen. He wouldn’t have had the means.”

“How long did he live with you?” asked Delia.

“A month.” He pressed his hands together as if smashing a bug. “My little boy, Parson, came to me crying. The whole month Truman lived here, he was molesting his little brother.” His jaw clenched. “If Parson had told me sooner …” he stopped. His shoulders lifted slightly as he breathed, while he tensely stroked his forehead with one hand. Finally he said, “But Truman had threatened him, told him that if he told, he would hurt him worse.”

The room darkened. There was a change in the Texas weather.

I sighed, my head suffering the early pangs of a headache. “How do you know my mother made Truman leave?”

“Truman said she threw him out, but that didn’t surprise me. She never treated him right. Of course, I always thought poorly of her as a mother, so I felt sorry for him. I’d tried to get her to let him come and live with me. If she didn’t love the boy, why’d she have to hold on to him?” He got up and went for his medicine. “Pardon me, ladies. I just had a recent spell with my heart. Put me in the hospital. Got to watch my blood pressure.” He went into the kitchen for water and then returned to the living room.

“What kind of mother was she … my mother … to Truman?”

“Mad as all get out. She whipped him, sometimes for no reason that I could see. But she was mad at me, mad at her mother. Fiona Chapel was mad at the whole world.”

“I remember her like that,” said Delia.

“I think she tried harder with us to be a better mother,” I said. “I was born in California, Mr. Savage. But my parents moved back to North Carolina after I was born. Did Truman go with my mother to California?”

“He did. I tried to keep her from doing that. She had up and married one fella, but it was short-lived. Then she run off with Mr. Syler, your daddy. I told her he’d not put up with her any better than me or any other man. No man could tolerate her angry spells. She was two-timing too.”

I imagined on the flight from North Carolina asking him if the dallying had been mutual. But sitting looking him straight in the eyes, I could not get up the nerve to form the words. He had an imposing stature and took a hard line on his own opinions.

“But I didn’t want Truman so far away I couldn’t check on him. She never listened to me. Fiona Chapel could not be told what to do. She was going to have things her way or not at all.”

I said to Delia, “So Truman was living with Mother and Daddy in California. He was there when I was born.”

Delia said, “Hah!”

“Fiona dropped out of contact with me after that. I moved off to Texas and married my wife. I had mailed a letter to Fiona one last time, just so Truman would know of my whereabouts. Then we had Parson. Life was finally good … until the day he showed up looking pitiful.”

“My brother must have been good at gaining sympathy,” I said.

“He was quite the actor. Boy could summon tears like a woman. And believable! He could work an adult like no kid I ever saw. I got my eyes opened, though.”

“Did you make him leave?” I asked.

“I did. I wanted to kill him with my two bare hands, but throwing him out somehow seemed better punishment. Not twenty minutes passed and my brother Will called me from three streets away, angry. Said I was a terrible father for kicking Truman out without a dime or a place to eat. He took him right in.”

“Didn’t you tell him what had happened to Parson?”

“Of course not! People don’t talk about such things,” he said.

Delia asked, “How long did Truman stay at your brother’s place, Mr. Savage?”

He looked as if the color was completely bled out of his face. “He molested all three of my brother’s children: Tess, Bo, and Jana. Then my brother kicked him out.”

I wanted to ask Mr. Savage again why he did not tell his brother about Parson, the same as my mother who did not tell why she kicked him out. He could have stopped it from happening. But he looked so lost, having been forced to stop and consider the past, that I kept my thoughts to myself, and they were legion.

The sun evaporated, and Houston beamed like a Mexican festival on the flat plain of southern Texas. I drove to a taco stand for a late lunch. Then Delia and I stopped in at a giant flea market before driving into Houston. I was glad to put Mr. Savage behind us. Not knowing what to expect, I had booked a flight to leave the next day.

“Truman molested us, didn’t he?” Delia asked me.

“I’d like to know for sure,” I said.

“Mama should have told us. We’ve got the right to know.”

“There’s got to be someone who knows for certain,” I said.

“Truman knows.”

I felt angry but did not tell Delia the thoughts going through my mind. I imagined Truman sitting in prison, waiting to get out. I wondered if my mother had been in contact with him all of those years. In the letter to Delia and me, he had called us baby sisters. That was how he remembered us: infant girls, young and vulnerable. But I could not remember any tangible evidence of the events that transpired his last day in Boiling Waters. No matter how hard I tried, I could not picture his teen face. I tried again to remember the day he left our town. All I could remember was how he stood over my father’s bed, dissecting a frog and then my mother beating him.

It was like trying to see through a painted window.

We drove up and down the downtown streets, Delia ogling the city sights and me wanting to hunt down whatever restaurants were driving me nuts with the smell of Tex-Mex and Mex-Mex.

We pulled up to the Magnolia Hotel. The valet opened Delia’s door. She stepped out in her fake lizard boots and cowboy hat. Although I would not have put cowboy boots with the Burberry outfit, she somehow blended with the Texas glitz of downtown Houston. She kissed the doorman’s cheek and asked him his name. He blushed and told her, “Duke.” I thought it was some name all the Texas hotel people were told to say, so I did not take stock in it. She asked him if there was a vacancy, and he was certain we could get a room.

I asked him, “Where do you recommend we eat?”

“You can’t beat Houston for food, ma’am. They say the food here is like visiting one hundred and twenty or more countries. But if you want, I can make you a reservation, call you a cab. That way you won’t have to find your way around.”

“Give us thirty minutes, then, Duke. You pick the place.” I gave him the keys, and we hauled luggage out onto the walk and checked it with him.

Delia skipped up the walk under the long black hotel awning. A woman walking a small white dog bent to scoop up her pet and step aside, wide-eyed at the sight of Delia laughing and flinging her hair. I walked past the hotel guest, smiled, and whispered, “She loves those Texas margaritas.”

“Why sure, sure!” the woman laughed. “Can’t blame her for that!”

Duke touched my arm. “Is your sister single?”

“Um-hm,” I said.

“She’s pretty as any woman I’ve seen,” he said.

“You just have to watch, Duke. My sister bites,” I said.

He turned and walked back to his post.

Delia waited near the fireplace in the lounge, touching the Christmas tree ornaments. She lifted one off the tree and held it up to the light.

I checked us into a room with two queen beds, overlooking Houston toward Galveston. By the time I checked in, night had fallen. Delia had struck up a conversation with a businessman wearing a suit and a cowboy hat. He was tall as a pine, smiling down at her admiringly.

“My sister and I are rich now too,” she told him. I hooked her arm in mine to lead her toward the elevator.

“What about drinks? You promised,” he said to her. His eyes traveled from her to me.

“We’ve already called a cab,” I told him, still leading her away.

Delia fumed all the way up to the ninth floor. “He’s an oil man, Gaylen. Keeps horses out on a ranch and flies back and forth to work in a helicopter.”

“He told you all of that in the two minutes it took for me to check in?”

“Why you got to ruin the night? I had us double dates set up with rich brothers.”

“Married, Delia.”

“He didn’t say he was married.”

“His ring finger was white, while the rest of his hand was tanned. He took off his ring to get a date.”

She looked stunned, like she had never taken Dating 101. “Still. Rich and good-looking men don’t come along like that in Boiling Waters. Least not down at the Blue Water Cafe.”

“Here’s our floor,” I said. I handed her a room card and demonstrated how to swipe it like a credit card. I washed up while Delia found a TV special about the Bush family.

“If I was going to be a Republican, I would vote for him. I like the way he goes in gangbusters to kick the bad guys’ butts,” she said. “TV’s been so much better with him in the White House.”

I slipped into black pants and put on some jewelry. “Since when were you not a Republican?” I asked. Delia and I were both brought up to vote for the Republican rather than the candidate. It was the Syler way.

“Lee hated Republicans.”

“So you’re a Democrat because of Lee and a Catholic because of Freddy Deals.”

“Basically.”

“He can’t run again anyway, Delia.” We locked up the room and headed down to the lobby. Duke had the cab waiting. He helped Delia into the backseat. She giggled.

“Take these two lovely girls to Cafe Annies,” he told the driver.

I tipped Duke and he winked. I was starting to like Houston, as well as spending at least a little of the money my father had hoarded in case the world might end. The bluing dusk that settled over Houston’s green city glow gave me an assurance that for this one night the world would continue, at least into the big Texas sunrise only twelve hours away.

Delia stared out and up at Houston’s cityscape. I was certain we had been to Raleigh as girls, but Houston was the mother ship next to Raleigh’s pod.

The Mexican driver drove through a red light, which made Delia squeal and then laugh. After that, it seemed as if he ran red lights just to hear her snort and guffaw.

“Tell me your name,” she said to the cab driver.

“Benny,” he said, no accent whatsoever.

Delia hooted.

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

She kept laughing and slapping her knee until we pulled up in front of the Cafe Annie’s royal blue awning. “Look, a for-real Texas palm tree,” said Delia. She cocked back her hat, smiling serenely at the doorman. “Let me check us in,” she begged me. “My turn, my turn to play big shot.”

A foreign woman, perhaps European and blond, checked our reservations. She invited us to wait at the swanky bar until she pulled up our name. Delia ordered a margarita.

“Pinot noir,” I told the bartender. I was feeling irritable, so I had to resist the urge to down the wine.

A waitress approached me. “The gentlemen seated behind you have ordered you a bottle of whatever you want,” she said, a waifish twenty-something wearing a black dress and white beads.

“Tell them to keep it,” I said, without looking behind me.

Delia whipped around in her chair. “That was downright rude, Gaylen.”

“Don’t start.”

“No, let me talk for once. Here we sit like two queens in Houston, drawing good-looking men like sirens, and you run them off.” She sipped her margarita and then whispered for the first time all day, “Is it because you’re not over Braden?”

“That’s no secret, Delia.”

“Or is it Truman? The way Mr. Savage spilled the beans today, not holding back, I mean, made me sick at my stomach.”

I pushed aside my glass, again deciding that I would not drink. “Does it seem like we never knew our mother?”

She asked the bartender for an extra plate of limes and then said, “That’s no secret either.”

“You and Mother went at it, but not us, not like she did with Daddy or the aunts,” I said. I knew Mother didn’t have many friends. But that was why I thought she felt a bond with me and considered me a confidant. Even at the age of seven, I felt I held a strange power over her. “Of all people, I thought I knew her. Now, starting on the drive back from Pasadena, all of these things are coming back to me. It’s like she’s speaking to me from the grave.”

Delia said, “Hmmph!”

But something about watching Delia sucking limes while Cowboys’ fans seated around the horseshoe bar cheered triggered a small fragment of something my mother said. “I remember her standing in the kitchen and telling me that she would go to her grave with the things that Truman did. But she was so irate, she intimidated me. I was a kid, and she was being loud, and I just wanted her to calm down. So I never asked her what she meant.” I was seeing Mother differently now. “Those things she said about Truman were not clear, not then.”

“Now you know.” Delia was floating away into a mellow margarita state.

I was in the third photograph of my mother I had pinned inside my suitcase. I was eighteen months old, and she was holding me on one knee, squatted in front of my grandmother’s house. She was smiling in a way that must have faded with time. I never remembered that look, not that effusive smile, not in real life, not like the one frozen in that still photograph. She was happy. That I did not remember about her without looking at that photograph of us.

I was round cheeked and laughing as if my mother and I were posing for a happy family magazine. I was so young that baldness was expected.

“But I can’t prove anything. I keep trying to see Truman at our house. But there wasn’t an extra room for him. There was me and you and—” I stopped.

Delia sucked the guts right out of a lime wedge.

“She made you and me sleep in a bed next to her. Do you remember?” I asked.

“Um-hm.”

“But where was Truman? Did he sleep on the couch? Why did she sleep with us instead of in Daddy’s bedroom?”

“She was a big nut, not sleeping with her own husband.”

“Or she was keeping us close by.”

“Hah!”

“I wish I would have known enough to ask before she died.”

“She wouldn’t have told.” Delia closed her eyes, allowing the drink to trickle down her throat. Then she opened her eyes, curiously watching the bartender who was shaking a fresh margarita.

“I would’ve made her.”

“You were afraid of her,” said Delia.

I was stunned at her words. “Why do you say that?”

Delia turned around in her seat to try and pick out the men who had attempted to buy wine for us.

Things that my mother said that, at the time, seemed inconsequential seeped into my mind. “I’ll never forgive that boy for the way he treated us … No one knows what he put me through.” The words fell into some of the missing slots of the past, but did not entirely fill every gap; they were just enough to leave me wanting to know the whole of the matter.

“Everybody was afraid of Fiona Syler. Even Mr. Savage,” said Delia.