CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Mom took one look at me and said, “What’s wrong?”

Maybe because I was home early, maybe because she had seen Jack’s profile in the red Jaguar as he dropped me off. Maybe because I set my gym bag carefully in the bottom of the hall closet and didn’t sling it onto the couch the way I usually did. The Jaguar purred away up the street, one of those quiet cars you can hear for a long distance.

Her voice steel quiet, she asked, “What did he do?”

I took my time arranging myself on the sofa, determined to say nothing about any of this to Mom. Jack had not talked much on the drive except to tell me not to sweat this, as though a slangy, casual approach would give me peace of mind. He did add, as he pulled over to the curb, “Cops love reading lawyers their rights.”

But I wondered if news about Dad’s arrest had been on the radio—Mom doesn’t watch much TV. Or if the grapevine of Mom’s friends had flashed word that Harvey Chamberlain was marched in handcuffs down the front steps, away from his new bride. Did they use plainclothes cops, or uniforms? When they told him he had a right to remain silent, I wonder if he lifted his eyes from the driveway, the front lawn, to shame them with a smile.

Mom had Polaroids of tropical flower arrangements spread out on the rosewood side table, proteas and ginger blossoms, and classical guitar tinkled in the background, the sort of music she stands in line to hear in concert. But when she saw I wasn’t talking, she snapped the remote to shut down the Bose sound system and brushed the pretty flower pictures into a pile with the side of her hand.

“Talk to me, Bonnie,” she said, and even when I understood the impression she had, and wanted to reassure her, I still couldn’t make a sound.

“If he messed with you—” Mom has bursts of articulate language, but she fades out when she’s upset. Her web page is almost all pictures, anthuriums and pink-fruited bananas, not nearly enough text.

“Jack didn’t do anything,” I said, sounding like he had. I studied the way the toe of my tennis shoe scuffed and smoothed the nap of the carpet.

“What happened?”

I was surprised at how the sounds came out, distorted by my feelings, and I knew Mom couldn’t make out a word. But she was a little mollified, half-convinced that Jack hadn’t overstepped decency in the front seat of his XJ6. She came over and sat next to me, and right beside me, knee to knee, waiting companionably for me to recover enough to talk, but not pressing, not reassuring me, because by now she knew she didn’t have a clue what was wrong.

“They took Dad,” I said.

Mom sat with her wise-cat expression and heard everything, everything I knew. I paced up and down, blowing my nose and telling her Dad would sue the County of Alameda for false arrest, and she kept the same attitude, her arms folded easily, letting me wind down.

“Your father will deal with this,” she said, after my energy had spun itself out and I was seated again, on the floor with my back to the sofa. “He can take care of himself,” she added, but she said this like it was a character flaw.

“I know it,” I said, aware that we were having a serious disagreement, even though our words seemed to follow the same path.

She fed some silence into the conversation, the way you feed a fireplace with kindling. “You need to think about us,” she said.

I was very close to telling her that life did not consist of making sure all the root fungus in the East Bay has been gamma-rayed to death.

“You need to think about you,” she said.

I used minimal force, but I couldn’t keep my voice steady. “Don’t you have any compassion at all?”

I knew, as soon as I had spoken, that I was close to challenging Mom in a way she would never tolerate. She would get up and leave the room.

“Think about your own future, Bonnie. Close your mouth, and take a breath, and think.”

I spoke with care. “It’s a vendetta. The DA is out to get him.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. She went to the side table and sorted her flower snapshots, like a game of solitaire.

Maybe. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“It’s a real embarrassment for Cindy,” she said. She snapped a rubber band around her Polaroids.

“They hauled him away? Your dad?” said Denise.

Hauled was a typical Denise verb. Things were always getting stuck, busted, ripped off in her local dialect.

“You make it sound like it would make more sense if my mom got arrested,” I said.

“Your mom would make a good crook,” said Denise.

“That’s a nice thing to say,” I responded, feeling no desire to laugh.

“She knows how to keep her mouth shut.”

I didn’t say, Maybe you should take lessons.

I could hear Denise kicking clothes and shoes off her bed, clearing a place to sit down. My own room was organized, in a fuzzy-logic way. A picture of the first female Olympic champion, Charlotte Cooper, cocked her racket beside a blow-up of Rowan working in the Rockies, cradling a boom mike. I rarely visited Denise’s room, not wanting to scale the piles of rubble.

“But your dad. It doesn’t make any sense,” Denise said.

“I know it.”

“I mean, in order to defraud his clients he would have to withhold payments from them, for example, right?” Denise was tossing things, soft thuds.

“Clients pay lawyers,” I said, “not the other way around.”

“Some of the people my dad has working for him,” said Denise in her husky monotone, “you absolutely would not believe.”

Rowan wasn’t home. They have one of those professionally recorded answering messages, a telephone company sort of voice that says that none of the Beals are available right now. I couldn’t leave the message I wanted, that my father was in a county correctional facility. I asked Rowan to give me a call, sitting there fingering the plush box that held the pearl.

Mom knocked and put her head in once, just before I snapped out my light. “Myrna’s in my room, I forgot to tell you.”

Mom has a polyester shoe organizer in her closet, two dozen pockets for pumps, sandals, walking shoes, go-aheads, mukluks, handmades, flats, heels, ninety percent of them shoes she has worn once. Myrna had carried each kitten all the way to this new closet, and now she was ensconced in Mom’s old file boxes.

Mom keeps her financial archives here, records going back to the days of the marriage, three steel boxes with latches and locks. Myrna had her back against one of the boxes, FIREPROOF in red letters.