The Patron Saint of Liars (42 page)

"Why would you want to be? Who cares?" I saw cooking as a trap, something that no one should aspire to. As long as you knew how, you'd be condemned to a life of waiting on other people.

"Everybody wants to be good at something," Lorraine said. "They need me here now." Lorraine kept her hair tied back tightly when she was in the kitchen. She braided it into a rope down her back and used barrettes to catch the pieces that sprung out from her head.

"Sure they need you. They need you to do a job they should be paying somebody for. If they don't need you, they'll need somebody else."

"Ah," Lorraine said smiling. "But just think, if it's not me, that somebody else could be you."

Even if I refused to take over what my mother had left behind in the kitchen, I did fill her place in other ways. I hadn't realized all she had done for Sister Evangeline. She took care of her clothes, she helped her dress. She steadied her when she went from chair to wheelchair to bed. I did that now. It scared me at first. I didn't like seeing her look fragile. I didn't like the way she felt so shaky at times and had to lean heavily on my arm. What bothered me most, of all the stupid things, was seeing her without her habit in the morning. Her hair was thin and long and it fell around her shoulders until she could get it into a bun. Her hair seemed wrong to me somehow, not like I'd imagined it at all. It made her seem delicate, vulnerable.

The other thing was the way she talked about my mother when we were alone together. Out in the kitchen, with all the people milling around, her name hardly ever came up, unless it was somebody saying, How did Rose make her white sauce? or, Where did Rose keep the cardamom? But alone with me, Sister Evangeline could go on and on about little things that made me want to jump out of my skin.

"Your mother was practical. Not like me. I'd do the same things over and over again and never think how to make them better, but your mother had a sharp mind." I was looking under the bed for her left shoe, not finding it anywhere. "By the time I was eighty, I had a hard time with shoelaces. Arthritis, see, in the finger joints. Some things I can do just fine, but those shoelaces, well, there were mornings I'd just want to cry I'd get so frustrated. So you know what Rose did? She went right out and bought me loafers. Her own money, too. Didn't go to Mother Corinne or anything. Loafers! Why didn't I ever think of that?"

"I don't know," I said. The shoe was under the dresser, no telling how it got there, but sitting there with that shoe in my hand, thinking about how my mother had gone out and bought it just out of logic or thoughtfulness, got me all choked up. That's how it would come back to me, her leaving. In little ways you never would've imagined.

It was my father who seemed to be coming to terms with things slower than the rest of us. Unlike Sister Evangeline, who was anxious to talk, he wouldn't say her name after the first few days. That absence of a name was so much clearer, and sadder, than the talking. He was quiet in general. He'd always been quiet, but this was different. He stayed so busy now. He decided not to take the shutters to Owensboro and pay to have them sandblasted. Instead, he took them all off and stripped them by hand on the lawn near his toolshed. I brought him his lunch outside because he wouldn't come in to eat it. He wouldn't stop even that long. I left him thermoses of iced tea, bottles of water, hoping that he would at least have sense enough to stop and take a drink.

"Can't you do that in the shade?" I said, my hand over my eyes.

"I can see the little bits of paint better in the bright light," he said.

"Yeah, but you're going to have a heat stroke. It's hotter than hell out here."

He stopped for a minute and wiped his neck and forehead with a handkerchief. He was soaked. His scar had gotten darker from being out in the sun so much. It was so angry and red that it looked like it had happened just the minute before. "Can you stay?" he said.

"I brought my lunch." I sat down in the grass and brought two sandwiches out of the bag. My father was the one person I'd still cook for, especially now because he liked to eat at home.

The grass wasn't good to sit in anymore. It was too late in the summer. It was coarse and dry and so alive with bugs that you felt like you'd landed in the center of their universe no matter where you sat. But I didn't mention it.

"Egg salad," he said. "Great."

And we sat there, the two of us, on a day hot enough to melt metal, and ate our lunch. We must have had a million things to say to each other, but we were quiet. In truth, it was still better being together, even when we couldn't talk.

This is the dream I had at night: I am in a restaurant. It's no place I've been before in my life. I'm with some friends. In the dream I know them well, but they are not people I really know. They say that some friends of theirs I haven't met before are coming to eat with us. After a while three women come in and sit with us at the table. One of them is my mother. I start to say something, to shout, to jump across to her, but she holds me in my chair with her eyes. She gives me this smile that says, just pretend, just play along with this. It's a wonderful feeling, being on the inside of a secret with her. I give her back the slightest nod. When we are introduced we shake hands, we say our names, Rose, Cecilia. We say how happy we are to meet each other. All through the meal we are careful. We speak to each other, but never too much. We don't exchange knowing glances or fix our eyes. We are in complete conspiracy, and I am happy.

"Cecilia? It's Sister Bernadette."

"Hello, Sister," I said, and felt a little wave of panic because it was rare that anyone from Saint Elizabeth's called me on the phone. "How are you?"

"I'm fine, dear." She hesitated for a moment. "There's a man here at the front desk. He's come to see your mother."

"My mother?"

"I was wondering if you could come over and speak to him. I can't find Son anywhere."

"Sure," I said. "I'll be right there."

To the best of my memory, my mother had never had a visitor, other than her friend Angie, an old Saint Elizabeth's graduate she had been especially close to. I'd called Angie first thing when my mother left. She said she hadn't heard from her. She sounded sad enough about the news that I believed her, too.

I had been lying on the sofa, reading my second detective novel of the week, when I got the call. I was wearing shorts and a Murray State tee shirt. My recently highlighted hair was pulled up in a ponytail that had gotten more than a little ratty over the course of the day, but I didn't want to take the time to change. Someone who was looking for my mother might know something about her. Or maybe he was an investigator. Maybe she'd done something or something had happened. The more I thought about it, the faster I started walking.

The man who sat in the lobby of Saint Elizabeth's was no detective. Not unless he had the most ingenious cover in the world. He was small-boned and blond and tired-looking. He wore little metalrim glasses and a pale blue suit. He had his jacket on, even though it was a hot day.

"Cecilia," Sister Bernadette said. "This is the man I was telling you about. The man who's looking for Rose. This is Cecilia Abbott," she said to him. "This is Rose's daughter." I could hear the relief in her voice, relief that I was there now and could handle this thing she didn't know what to make of.

The man stood up and shook my hand. He was staring at me so hard. I knew he was looking for a piece of her in me, a piece I didn't possess. "I'm Thomas Clinton," he said. He kept looking at me. "I'm sorry," he said. "I never knew Rose had a daughter."

I nodded. "That's me," I said. I thought about it for a second. "Clinton? Are you a relative of my mother's?" Did she have a brother? A cousin? I wished to God I knew. "Clinton is my mother's maiden name."

"I tried to find Son," Sister said, looking a little nervous. "I don't know where he is."

"No telling," I said to her, and then to this man. "Do you know my mother?"

"I did," he said. "A long time ago." He waited a minute and then added, "Is she here?"

I looked at Sister Bernadette, who looked helpless. She hadn't told him anything. "Let's go in the kitchen," I said. "I'll get you something to drink. We can talk."

Thomas Clinton followed me back to the kitchen, which thankfully was empty except for Lorraine. She was peeling potatoes.

"Hi there," Lorraine said, and wiped the strips of peeling from her hands. The man shook her hand and I introduced them.

"Mr. Clinton is trying to find my mother," I told Lorraine.

"So she is gone," he said. "I thought it was something like that, when the sister wouldn't say where she was." He sat down at the kitchen table. He looked sick with sadness. Lorraine brought him a cup of coffee he didn't ask for and he thanked her. "Has she been gone a long time?"

"A week," I said.

He looked a little hopeful at this news. "So she'll be coming back?"

"No," I said. "I don't expect she will." The man must have known my mother because he took this news as disappointing, not surprising.

"Where do you know Rose from?" Lorraine asked, pulling her chair up to the table to make herself one of the family.

"I was married to her," he said.

I looked at him again. I don't know what I thought exactly at that minute. What do you think? I sat down at the table, and Lorraine brought me a Coke from her secret stash in the pantry. "When?" I said dully. I was thinking maybe a year ago, three or five. I was thinking that maybe he lived nearby and she went to him at night after she left the kitchen. Two husbands. It was possible for her.

"It was a long time ago, before she ever came here. It was in California." And then he added, as if it would explain everything, "We were young at the time."

I was trying very hard to take it all in, but it was strange enough just having a man in the kitchen, much less my mother's ex-husband. You just didn't see men at Saint Elizabeth's. Every now and then someone who was lost or had a flat tire and needed to use the phone, but even that caused a little ripple in the daily routine.

"So you and my mother are divorced?" I said. "I'm sorry to be so dense about all this. She didn't ever talk much about her past."

"Technically, no, we're not, but it isn't an issue," he said quietly. "I never remarried, so I never followed through with a divorce. After a certain number of years I imagine these things dissolve."

"I think that all you have to do is put an ad in the paper," Lorraine said. "Publicly announcing it or something. Or maybe you say you aren't responsible for their debts. If the person doesn't get in touch with you, you're divorced."

I gave her a look that suggested she should keep the editorials to a minimum.

"I never minded it," he said. He was quite possibly the most painfully shy person I had ever seen in my life, which is saying something because we get a lot of shyness coming through here. He talked all right, but he kept his eyes down. He held onto his coffee cup like the last flotation device on a sinking ship. He was still wearing a wedding ring.

I had so many questions I could barely think of where to start. "Why did you come now?" I said.

"Rose's mother died," he said, and then he looked at me and suddenly his face flushed. "I'm so sorry," he said. "That's so thoughtless of me, just telling you like that. She's your grandmother. I'm sorry. I'm still not used to this, Rose having a daughter. She was a wonderful woman, Helen."

"Helen," I said. My middle name. She'd told me it was for her mother. Helen was dead.

"I looked for Rose for years after she left, and then, after time—" His voice sounded almost confused, as if he was trying to remember how he could have let such a thing happen. "I stopped trying. I came to understand this was what she wanted. Helen and I were always close. She was a wonderful woman. When she died, her husband gave me a box of postcards from Rose. The postmarks were different for a long time, but in the last five years they've all come from here. The town was so small. It wasn't difficult finding her, once I had something to work with. I was sorry Helen hadn't given me the cards earlier. I respect your mother's privacy, but it would have been good, if she could have seen Helen before she died. It would have meant a great deal to Helen."

"You mean none of you knew where she was all this time?" My mother was too smart to forget about the postmarks. She wanted her mother to find her, but her mother didn't get the clue.

Thomas Clinton shook his head.

"But when she left—" I stopped, not knowing exactly how to say this. "A long time ago, what did she tell you then?"

"She didn't tell me anything," Thomas Clinton said. "She was just gone."

There was an awful silence after that. The three of us sitting there, all looking away. "I guess I should go try to find Son," Lorraine said. She wanted to go now, to be out of the kitchen and all of this for a minute, and I couldn't say I blamed her. She excused herself and was out the door.

"I can't believe you just missed her," I said. "It seems too crazy. You looking all these years and then getting here the week after she goes."

He crossed his hands over his knees. His shoulders seemed to round into themselves. "I'm afraid that's my fault," he said.

"How could it be your fault?"

"I wrote to Rose when Helen died. I wanted to tell her in person. I didn't want her to get the news in a letter after all this time. Rose and Helen were very close, very, very close. I don't know your mother anymore, but I couldn't imagine how she would take the news. So I wrote and told her I was coming out to see her, just to talk to her and then I'd go." He stopped and took a deep breath. "I would have liked to see her."

"So she left after she got the letter from you."

Thomas Clinton looked so sorry. It was the only word I could think of. "You must think I've done something awful to your mother," he said. "I've done something to make her hate me this way, but I don't know what it was. I never thought I would have scared her off. It's been such a long time."