“Weezie? Pick up the phone, Eloise. I know you’re there.”
I put aside the silver candlesticks I’d been polishing and did as I was told. Mama had been leaving messages since Saturday afternoon.
In my own defense, I’d been busy dealing with my toolshed treasures.
A phone call to a vintage luggage dealer in Dania, Florida, netted me two hundred dollars for the three pieces of crocodile luggage. The blue-and-white toile drapes had been a nice moneymaker too. They were French, beautifully made with silk linings and silk fringe. In all, there were eight panels and four shaped cornices. I got five hundred dollars for the lot from Mallery David, a high-end antique dealer whose shop is on Whitaker Street.
“Eloise!” Mama repeated sharply.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, picking up the phone. “I was just fixing to call you. How’s Daddy?”
“He’s fine,” she said. “Did your uncle James speak to you?”
“About what?”
“Penance,” she said. “For your sins. I asked him to talk to you, but I guess he’s chosen to overlook your shortcomings.”
Uh-oh. It was Sunday, and only eleven o’clock. Had she gotten into the Four Roses this early?
“Mama, I am sorry for all my sins,” I said. “And I promise, I’ll call you more often. OK? We’ll talk soon. Love you.” I made kissing noises and hung up.
She called right back. “Eloise, I wasn’t finished talking to you. Daddy and I want you to come over for dinner. I’m making your favorite pot roast.”
I was barely able to suppress my gag reflex. Mama had discovered a recipe on the back of an onion soup mix box. I’d actually had this pot roast recipe at other people’s houses and liked it. But in Mama’s hands, the roast came out dry as sawdust, with a bizarre sulfurous aftertaste.
“I don’t think I can make it today,” I said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do. I bought a whole shedful of stuff yesterday and I’ve got to get it all ready to sell.”
“You can go back to work after lunch,” Mama said, as if that settled it. “And after we eat, you can come over to Cousin Lucy’s house to decide what you want to buy. The cousins have agreed to let you have first pick. Isn’t that nice?”
“Terrific,” I said.
“One o’clock,” Mama said. “Don’t be late. I don’t want my roast to dry out.”
I disconnected. Wouldn’t want that yummy roast to get ruined. Yeech.
I finished with the candlesticks. They were sterling, with square bases and three arms, probably from the twenties. Silver sells really well in Savannah, and I knew a couple dealers who would be happy to pay me $150 for the pair.
There were a few other pieces of silver that still needed polishing, but they’d have to wait ’til later. Right now I needed to clean up for the command performance at my parents’ house.
But first, I called Uncle James.
“I understand my mother wants you to talk to me about repenting my sins.”
“Oh jeez. She talked to you, huh?”
“I’d sort’ve been avoiding her, but she nailed me a few minutes ago. Now I’ve got to go over there for lunch in a little while. I thought maybe you could fill me in on what’s going on. She sounded really strange.”
He laughed.
“No,” I said, “stranger than usual. What’s with the sin stuff? I knew she’d been going to that karaoke church, but this is a whole new approach.”
“She’s having visions,” James said. “At your cousin Lucy’s house. There’s a statue of the Infant of Prague. She says it’s crying real tears. So she prayed about it, and the Infant told her he’s crying for you. Because of your sins. You know, the divorce, and the homicide.”
I felt sick to my stomach. “My own mother believes I’m capable of murder?”
“Maybe it’s the change of life,” James suggested.
“She went through that ages ago, remember? When she dyed her hair black and bought that Subaru?”
“Well, something strange is going on with her. A plaster statue is telling her this stuff, if it makes you feel any better.”
“I guess I better go see if I can settle her down. I don’t suppose you’d like to join us for a lovely family meal, would you?”
“Oh jeez. I’d love to. But my stomach’s been acting up.”
“It’s pot roast,” I said.
“I think I feel a cramp coming on,” he said.
“Coward.”
Mama had the dining-room table set with her good microwave dishes. The pot roast smelled delicious, surrounded by canned peas and watery instant mashed potatoes.
We said the blessing and Daddy hacked valiantly away at the roast with a carving knife, eventually slapping two cinderlike slices on my plate.
“Gravy?” Mama passed the sauceboat to me. I spooned the greasy-looking glop over my meat, hoping to moisten it enough to chew.
Mama and Daddy exchanged looks. I knew I was in for it.
“Uh, Eloise, uh,” Daddy started.
“Joseph, talk to her,” Mama said.
Daddy stared down at his plate. “I was wondering, uh, what kind of tires you’re running on that truck of yours?”
“Tires?” I was drawing a blank. “I don’t know. Round. Black. Rubber, I suppose. Do they still use rubber to make tires?”
“Hell no,” Daddy said, getting worked up. “It’s all synthetics now. Come out of who knows where. China or Korea or someplace. I was noticing those tires of yours are looking pretty bald. What you need is a good set of steel-belted radials. American-made.”
“OK,” I said. Maybe dinner wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe we were just going to talk about tires. “I guess I am due for new tires, now that you mention it.”
“Joseph!” Mama said sharply.
“We’ll, uh, talk about that later,” Daddy said. “Right now your mama is very concerned. Uh, when was the last time you went to church?”
They both know the only time I go to mass is with them, to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I decided to head the discussion off at the pass.
“What’s this all about, anyway?” I asked, looking directly at Mama. “Uncle James said you’ve been having visions. Is that true?”
“The Infant of Prague is weeping. For your sins,” she said.
“A statue? A statue thinks I committed murder? Mama, it’s impossible.”
“It’s not impossible,” she snapped. “Not for a believer. Now finish your food. We’ll go over to Lucy’s and you can see for yourself.”
“I didn’t kill her,” I said, reaching for a roll. These, at least, I knew would be edible, since they came directly out of a Pepperidge Farm carton.
We ate in silence. Mama’s hand rested silently on her tea glass. Twice she went to the kitchen for refills. She was looking extremely glassy-eyed.
“I’ll clear,” I said, jumping up from the table as soon as I’d pushed the food around my plate for a sufficient amount of time.
Mama looked up, surprised.
“Your daddy always does Sunday dishes.”
“Not today,” I said. “You two go on in the den and put your feet up. I’ll have the dishes done in a jiffy, and then we can take a ride over to Lucy’s.”
After I heard the television switch on in the den, I closed the kitchen door and went to work. It took only a few minutes to rinse the dishes, load them in the dishwasher, and wipe down the counters and stove.
I went through the cupboards, one by one, and the drawers too. I finally found the bottle of Four Roses in the bottom of Mama’s ironing basket. It was only about half full. I dumped most of the bourbon into the sink, leaving about an inch in the bottom of the bottle. I added water until the bourbon was at its original level, then went looking for something to add for color.
Vanilla would make it smell wrong. Mama’s bottle of Gravy Magic was on the counter, but it would make the bourbon taste wrong. Then I spotted the pitcher of iced tea on the counter. Perfect. I added the tea to the water. It was a dead ringer for Four Roses.
“All set,” I said, standing in the door of the den.
Cousin Lucy’s house was a neat redbrick box on a narrow street in Thunderbolt, which used to be a fishing village on the edge of the Wilmington River, but the shrimp mostly played out in the 1980s, and now Thunderbolt is just a suburb of Savannah.
Mama unlocked Lucy’s front door. I stepped inside and nearly passed out. The place smelled like the bottom of an ashtray.
“Whew!” I said, fanning my face. “Now I know why that statue’s crying.”
“Blasphemer. Let me just air it out a little,” Mama said, bustling around drawing the drapes and opening windows.
The air helped, but not much. I looked around the living room. Everything was a dull yellow; walls, floors, drapes, and even the frayed and spotted wall-to-wall carpet. Everything had a thin nicotine-tinged sheen to it.
“Isn’t this nice?” Mama said, running her hands over the arm of a sofa. “Cousin Lucy spent a lot of money on this furniture, you know.”
The sofa was an overstuffed roll-arm number from the forties, with maroon cut-plush upholstery. There were two matching armchairs too. I’d have snapped them up in a minute at another house, but here they had that sick yellow tobacco sheen. To be usable, they’d have to be stripped down to muslin and re-covered. Not an inexpensive proposition.
“Look at this dining-room set,” Mama said, moving through the arched doorway into the next room.
It was a good solid Grand Rapids, Michigan–made mahogany dining suite, again from the 1940s. There was a table, six chairs, a sideboard, and a china cabinet. I saw sets like this in every other estate sale in Savannah.
“Real antique,” Mama said. “We were thinking maybe a thousand dollars for the whole set. A bargain, right?”
“Very nice,” I said, trying to sound noncommittal. The varnish on all the furniture had blackened with age and would probably need to be stripped. Again, not too profitable.
“The bedrooms are back this way,” Mama said. I followed her into the hallway. She stopped in front of a small niche in the wall and fell to her knees.
“It’s the Infant of Prague,” she whispered, gesturing toward the niche.
The Infant of Prague looked like every other statue I’d seen in every other little old Catholic lady’s house I’d ever been in. Painted plaster, with a bemused look on its face. But no tears, that I could see.
“I don’t see anything,” I said.
“Because he knows you’re not a believer,” she said.
“Whatever.”
I poked my head into what must have been the master bedroom. It had the usual assortment of religious pictures, plaques, and shrines. The furniture wasn’t too bad. Lucy’s bed was a high-backed carved Victorian piece, and there was a matching oak bowfront dresser with mirror, a washstand, and a nightstand. The cigarette smell, however, drove me back into the hallway.
“We’ve gotta get some air in here,” I said, coughing.
Mama and I managed to get some windows open, and I found an old box fan in a closet, which I set up in the hallway to create cross-ventilation.
She stood in the doorway of Lucy’s room. “This oak stuff is junky, I know, but I think maybe Lucy’s mother passed it along to her.”
The “spare” bedroom had a set of badly scarred mahogany furniture consisting of twin four-poster beds, a highboy, a lowboy, a dressing table, and two nightstands. It was of the same era as the dining-room furniture, good, solid, respectable, boring brown furniture.
The bedspreads were pink chenille, with large rose medallions. If I could ever get the essence of Virginia Slims washed out of them, I could sell them on the Internet for a hundred dollars for the pair.
“Well?”
“Let me think about it.”
Her face fell. “I told the cousins you’d probably buy everything.”
“I know,” I said apologetically. “But I just took on a bunch of inventory yesterday. All my money is tied up in it, and until I sell it all, I just don’t have any cash ready to lay out for more stuff.”
“We could wait,” Mama said.
“No,” I said. “Tell you what. I’ll take the stuff in the two bedrooms. Would three hundred be enough?”
“For that trashy stuff? But what about that beautiful antique dining-room set? Surely you’d rather have that. It’s real mahogany, you know.”
“It’s lovely,” I lied. “But I don’t have the room to store furniture. I think you and the cousins should have an estate sale. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“I suppose,” she said, wavering a little.
“Good,” I said, picking up my purse. “If you give me the key, I’ll come back after I drop you off at home, and I’ll load the bedroom furniture in the truck.”
“You can’t lift that heavy stuff,” Mama said. “And you know your daddy’s back.”
“I’ll get a helper,” I said. And I had a very good idea of the sort of helper I needed. I got my checkbook out. “Who do I make the check out to?”
She pressed her lips together. “Well, the cousins said they’d prefer cash. You know, what with your arrest record and all.”