The concrete wall warmed Tally’s back as she waited for Chase to get out of his last class. Around her, throngs of students laughed and chatted, either in groups or on their cell phones, on their way to parking lots and bus lines. They stepped around her, noting her presence without looking at her.
The third day at school was as unremarkable as the two before it. What she had hoped for was happening. She could be anonymous here. There were other brunette girls with magenta streaks in their hair who carried tattered backpacks and spoke in class only when necessary. She could actually blend in without any conscious effort.
There were probably a couple hundred girls like her at Chase’s school: anonymous observers who earned average grades and flew below the radar. It would be very easy to leave here when her father came back.
She leaned her head against the wall and let the radiating heat massage the back of her head.
Sometimes when Amanda looked at her, she could tell her aunt was imagining what her life must be like with just Bart for a parent—and without a mother, since being a mother seemed to nearly define Amanda’s existence.
There had been only a couple of times when Tally thought perhaps a mother figure might enter her life. Both times it hadn’t worked out that way. The first woman she could remember was when she was nine. Her father had taken a job as a doorman for a resort in Cape Cod, and the two of them lived in a cottage with three other hotel employees, including a woman who was the hotel’s hairdresser. When she wasn’t working, Connie would braid Tally’s hair into cornrows or curl it into ringlets or tease it into a cone or dye it different shades. And whenever she fussed with Tally’s hair, she’d tell her all the things she would do if she had a little girl like Tally. Tally remembered asking her dad if he was going marry Connie. After six months of Connie’s affections, Tally had thought it was a pretty good idea.
Her father laughed and frowned at the same time. “You’re a cutie, Tally-ho,” he said. “But I can’t marry Connie. She’s already married. Besides, I don’t love her.”
Her father handed her a hot dog wrapped in a slice of Wonder bread—the menu for dinner that evening—and told her that Connie’s husband had stolen money from his company and was doing time. Tally hadn’t known what doing time meant, but she was more interested in why he didn’t love Connie.
“It wouldn’t make any sense to love a woman who’s married to someone else, would it, Tally-ho? That’s just asking for trouble.”
Six months later Connie left the cottage to go live with her sister in Miami. Six months after that, her dad heard a new casino was opening in Reno and they were looking for blackjack dealers. Her father quit his job at the resort, bought a used car, and pointed it west. They never made it to Reno. The car broke down outside Tulsa, and by the time Bart had money to fix it, he had met some people who were opening a sports bar and grill and they wanted him to work there. They stayed in Oklahoma for two years until Bart met Mellanie, an underwear model from New York City who was in Tulsa for the wedding of her college roommate.
On the night of the rehearsal dinner, the wedding party came to the sports bar to unwind, and Mell and Bart fell into a conversation that lasted until dawn. After the wedding on Saturday, Mell came to their little apartment and invited Bart to come to Manhattan to be her bodyguard, valet, chauffeur, escort, and live-in assistant. Bart told her it sounded like a great job, but he couldn’t come without Tally. Mell had winked at him and told him she only had a two-bedroom condo, but Tally was welcome to the guest room.
Tally had looked away. She knew what Mell meant. Even at twelve she knew Mell was asking Bart to share her bedroom. Her bed. She knew enough to be embarrassed by Mell’s little wink.
After Mell left the bar, her dad made hot chocolate and asked her if she wanted to go live in New York.
“Do you?” she said.
“It might be fun for a while. Mell’s got money.”
“How long will we be there?”
Her dad shrugged. “You like Tulsa?”
“Not really.”
“Want to see the streets of New York from the inside of a Jag?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it seems to me it doesn’t matter how long.”
She’d sipped her hot chocolate and formed the next question in her mind as the hot sweetness stung her tongue. “Are you going to sleep with her?”
He hesitated only a moment. “You and I will be Mell’s guests. We’ll sleep in the guest room.”
She never asked him about it again.
There were some nights during those six months in Manhattan when she’d wake up and the green-striped sofa across from her bed would be empty. She didn’t know if her father was with Mell in her bedroom, and she really didn’t want to know. Because, for the most part, the six months they lived with Mell in her high-rise off Fifth Avenue were enchanting. Mell bought her expensive clothes, enrolled her in a private school, let her try on all her fancy evening dresses, and sometimes brought Tally down to the studio to watch her work under a track of amber lighting with a dozen men standing around her while Mell wore nothing but a bra and panties.
Mell’s attentions weren’t motherly in nature, Tally could see that now. She had treated Tally like a favorite girlfriend’s little sister. But at the time, she felt that the connection between them was maternal. Tally had grown fond of Mell and her spontaneous generosity and was nearly beginning to envision staying with Mell forever when she overheard her father tell Mell, after he’d consumed far too much of her expensive whiskey, that Virginia Kolander blamed him for Janet’s death.
“Who’s Janet?”
Tally picked up on the tentative tenor in Mell’s sultry voice even from behind her closed door.
“Tally’s mother! The woman I was going to marry!” The words were slurred but the tone unmistakable: Bart Bachmann was still in love with Janet Kolander, Tally’s mother, dead twelve years.
It wasn’t long after that evening that Mell announced she was moving to Paris and was not taking any of her New York staff.
Her father had enough money saved to buy two one-way tickets to Nashville, where friends of his “from way back” owned a horse ranch and offered him a job in the stables.
“Sometimes you gotta be the one with the shovel, Tally-ho,” he said after his first day mucking, the airy elegance of a Manhattan condo far behind them.
She sat at a rickety two-seat kitchen table and watched him pull off boots caked with manure and straw. “I miss Mell,” she said.
“You miss having everything handed to you. That’s a dreamer’s life. It ain’t real. In the end, you have to make your own way. It’s okay to have a little vacation from reality, but you can’t live like you’re on vacation.”
“Why not?”
He set his boots down by the front door to their minuscule apartment. “Because you wouldn’t be happy.”
“Mell was happy.”
He moved toward her and knelt so that his eyes were level with hers. “Two things you need to know, Tally-ho. First, that was Mell’s life we were living. She’d made that life for herself, and we were just visiting. Second, Mell was not happy.”
“She looked happy to me.”
“Money has a way of doing that. Think about it, Tal. Don’t you think it was kind of weird she asked us to come live with her after knowing me for just one day?”
“But you went.”
He put his hands on her shoulders. “I thought it would be a nice break, Tal. And I wanted you to see what money can buy and what it can’t. I don’t have any regrets about going to New York, and I sure don’t have any about leaving. Look how quick she let us go.”
Even now, with her eyes closed and her back warm against a tower of concrete far from Tennessee, Tally still winced when she remembered Mell zipping out of her life as quickly as she’d zipped into it.
There hadn’t been any mother figures to intrude upon her life after that. Bart had dated a few women since: the manager at Luigi’s who let them sleep in the basement when they arrived in Dallas with no money the year she turned thirteen. The manicurist at an upscale salon in Houston who bailed Bart out of jail when he was arrested for driving with no license, no registration, no insurance, and outstanding traffic violations from years past. The flight attendant who took them to Switzerland for Christmas two years ago.
But no one Tally itched to think of as a mother.
Amanda was storybook maternal, everything she’d seen from a distance when she watched other mothers: gentle, kind, generous, insightful, and protective. And she didn’t seem like one to claim half an inheritance that had been left to someone else. But her dad didn’t want to trust his sister. He didn’t want to trust anyone.
He had come home early from his job as a chauffeur the day he decided to drop everything and go to Poland. Tally had come home from registering for her junior year, and he was sitting at the little built-in table in the double-wide trailer they were renting. Open on the table was a little cardboard box he’d kept in the trunk of his car for the past two years. “Just some of my father’s stuff,” he’d said of the box, which she knew contained the silver lighter, a pocket watch, her great-grandmother’s wedding ring, and a letter from his dad that he’d never opened.
The letter lay open on the table.
“You’re home early,” she said.
He turned toward her, and his face looked weary and energized at the same time. “I’m not working for Mr. Charles anymore.”
She leaned against the door frame, mentally preparing for whatever he planned to tell her. When her dad quit a job, there was always a new plan. “Why not?”
“There are some things I just won’t do, Tally-ho.”
A moment of silence hung between them as she weighed the chances of staying in San Antonio. “What happens now?” she finally said.
“I’m going to Poland.” He picked up the letter and waved it. “All this time I thought this was either a lecture or an apology. I didn’t want either one. It’s really the map to treasure, Tal. All the gold and jewelry my father hid in his backyard from the Nazis? I know where it is. It’s all here in the letter.”
She heard him, every word. But she still whispered, “What?”
“When he was just a kid, my dad hid the family’s gold and jewelry before the Nazis came for them. He buried it in the backyard. My grandfather told him to.”
“But…”
“It’s probably still there. I’m going to go get it.”
“But school starts next week…”
“I’m not taking you on this trip, Tal. You’re going to stay a week or two with your grandmother in Tucson. It’s all arranged. When I get back, we can live anywhere we want.”
“But, Dad…”
“We can’t stay in San Antonio, Tal.”
In that moment she knew that whatever Mr. Charles asked her father to do, it was illegal. And now he knew too much. She let her body slide down the closed door until she rested against it on her bottom.
“Sorry, Tally. I really am. But we can’t stay.”
For a long moment, she said nothing.
“When are we leaving?” she finally said.
He stood. “Now would be a good time.”
He let her sit there for a few moments before extending his hand to help her up. “You can pick the next place, Tal. Anywhere you want. You want to go back to Manhattan, we’ll go. Anywhere you want. Except Texas.”
“Why Grandma Virgie’s?” She reached for his extended hand.
“Because she’ll be so glad to see you, she won’t ask questions. This is our little secret, Tally. My dad told no one about this except me. He told me it was my decision whether or not to do anything about it. Well, I want you to go to college and have a nice house to live in. So I’m doing something.”
She watched him grab the wedding ring and pocket watch, knowing their first stop out of town would be a pawn shop. “How long will you be gone?”
“A week, ten days. Two weeks, tops.” He shoved the ring and watch into his pants pocket. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
An hour later, San Antonio was in their rearview mirror.
That was more than three weeks ago. He had promised to call. He hadn’t.
She hadn’t read the letter. She didn’t know where he was headed, just somewhere near Warsaw.
“Hey.”
Tally’s eyes snapped open. Chase was standing next to her.
“Were you actually asleep? I said your name twice. Come on. Let’s go.”
“I wasn’t asleep. I was just…remembering.” Tally stood slowly, moving as if she had in fact been sleeping and was suddenly wrenched from a dream.