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“It’s not candy,” she said sharply.
“I saw Red Hots, Mama.”
“No. It’s medicine. See?” Kathryn opened her hand, then put the pills back inside the bottle. “It’s just medicine to help me sleep.”
“I want some medicine.”
Kathryn knelt down. “Come here.” Laurel would have found her. Laurel would have found her. Shaking and numb, she rested her chin on her daughter’s head, surrounded by the scent of baby shampoo and Ivory soap, a familiar, clean smell. It took a long time for Kathryn to let go.
“I can’t sleep.”
Jimmy’s face in miniature stared up at her. Every day she would look at that face and see the man she loved, and Kathryn didn’t know if that would be a gift or a curse. “Let me wash your face. You can see tear tracks.” She used a warm wash rag to clean Laurel’s red face. “There. All done.” Kathryn straightened and automatically shut the mirrored medicine cabinet. In her reflection she caught a flicker of a pale, shadowed life and had to brace her hands on the cold sink. It was achingly painful to realize she was here and Jimmy wasn’t.
Eventually she would clear out the medicine chest; she would put things in the trash without panicking, wash the sheets, and do something with his clothes. They weren’t him, she told herself; they were only his things.
“Does the medicine taste like candy?” Laurel pointed to the prescription bottle.
“No.” Kathryn made a face. “It’s awful.” She dumped the pills into the toilet and flushed it. “We don’t need medicine.”
It was amazing how skeptical a four-year-old could look.
“It’s late,” Kathryn told her. “You can sleep in our—in my bed.”
Laurel jumped up, all excited and so easily distracted. “Because Daddy’s gone?”
“Yes. Because Daddy’s gone.”
The last time Laurel Peyton waved good-bye to her father was from the backseat of a long black Cadillac that belonged to the Magnolia Funeral Home. Waving goodbye was normal when your father was on the road all the time, but the camera flashbulbs and reporters alongside the car were anything but normal.
The three women inside the car—Kathryn, her sister, Evie, and Julia, Jimmy’s mother—tried to shield Laurel from the faces at the car windows, until the press, dressed in their amphigoric darks, were left behind and stood crowlike at the edge of the grave site while the Cadillac continued down the hill.
Behind them Kathryn saw only a monochrome Seattle sky, and scattered all over the lush green lawn were absurdly bright clumps of fresh flowers, bits of life scattered over a place that was only about death. The tires crunched on the gravel drive and sounded as if something were breaking, while rain pattered impatiently on the roof of the car and the electronic turn signal ticked like a heartbeat.
Jimmy’s mother tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Young man. Young man! Can’t you hear that? Turn off that turn signal!” Julia Laurelhurst Peyton looked as if she were carved from granite. Only Jimmy could ever seem to crack through her veneer.
Laurel began to sing one of Jim’s hit songs in a slightly off-key young voice. Feeling sickened, Kathryn glanced at Julia, who was looking out the car window, her face away from everyone else in the car.
Evie took her hand. “She doesn’t understand, Kay.”
“She will soon enough,” Julia said without turning, her voice serrated and burned from too many cigarettes. She opened her purse and pulled out her cigarette case. “You must make her understand, Kathryn. It’s your job as her mother.”
Her job as a mother was not to swallow a handful of Seconal. Her job as a mother was to go on hour by hour and day by day. Her job as a mother was to do what was best for Laurel, at the expense of anything else, because Jimmy wasn’t there.
Julia tapped a cigarette against the back of her hand, then slid it between her red lips and lit it. Smoke drifted around them. “My son was a star.” She looked at Kathryn, at Evie. “You saw the reporters there.” Julia took short drags off her cigarette. “Tomorrow, they’ll play his songs on the radio.”
Kathryn wondered if she would constantly search the radio for his songs. She began to silently cry.
“Don’t, Kathryn.” Julia held up her hand. “Don’t.”
Evie handed her a tissue. “She can cry if she wants to.”
Julia crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. “Laurel? Come see Grandmama.” She patted the seat next to her, but Laurel climbed in her lap instead. Julia began to hum the same song, holding her granddaughter tightly, and soon tears streamed down her slack and chalkish powdered cheeks.
Six long hours later, it was Kathryn who hung on tightly to Laurel as she ran through the waiting reporters at the front doors of their apartment building.
“Kay, I’m sorry,” Evie said. “We should have hired some security.” She blocked the closing elevator doors as a couple of persistent newsmen shouted questions at them.
Thankfully no one was on the tenth floor while Kathryn waited for Evie to unlock the apartment door. “Look, Evie. Laurel’s sound asleep. I want to be a child, oblivious to that chaos downstairs. I want to wake up and have it be a bad dream.”
Evie quietly closed the door behind them. “Go on. Put her to bed.”
A few minutes later Kathryn walked into the living room.
Evie stood in the corner over a bar cart with an ice bucket and crystal bottles of decanted liquor. “I’m getting us drinks. Strong drinks. God knows I need one.” She studied Kathryn for a second. “What am I saying? I should probably just give you a straw and the whole bottle.”
Kathryn unpinned her hat and tossed it on the coffee table. “Today was bad.”
“Your mother-in-law didn’t make it any easier. Look at me, Kay.” Evie patted her cheeks. “Am I pale? Do you think I have any blood left since leaving Julia’s, or did she suck it all out of me?”
“You’re awful.”
“No, she’s awful. I’m truthful.”
Kathryn unbuttoned her suit jacket, sank into the sofa, and let her head fall back on the pillows. Above her was the hole in the acoustical ceiling left over from a swag lamp. One of those things they’d meant to fix. The iron poker near the wood box was bent from when the movers ran over it. The mirror over the fireplace hung a little crooked. Everything was the same, yet nothing would ever be the same again.
“You’re a sweetheart for putting up with that woman. She’s so critical.” Evie dropped ice cubes into a couple of highball glasses. “What do you want to drink?”
“Anything.”
“I don’t know where you get your patience. Pop used to check his watch every two seconds if anyone kept him waiting, and Mother was just like I am: intolerant of anyone who disagrees with us. You are the saint of the family, Kay.”
“No, I’m no saint. I just loved her son.”
Evie paused, ice tongs in her hand. “It broke my heart when Laurel started to sing.”
“My first urge was to put my hand over her mouth.”
“I can’t think of anyone better to sing a Jimmy Peyton song than his daughter. The only reason you didn’t know what to do was because Julia makes everything so uncomfortable.”
“It’s not Julia. I don’t understand the world anymore. It seems so wrong, Evie, so unfair. I want to shout and shake my fist at God and tell him he made a huge mistake. Jimmy had so much left to give the world. He was going to make it big. I knew it. You saw it.”
“Everyone saw it, Kay.”
“We had such big dreams. The sheer waste of his life makes me want to scream.”
“You can holler the walls down if you want. It is unfair. Do whatever you have to do to get through this horrible thing.”
It was a horrible thing. Everything was changing and out of her control. Her skin hurt; it felt too small for her body, like the changes to her were happening in a matter of days. She glanced at the crooked mirror above the fireplace to see the ravages of sudden widowhood right there on her face.
Evie clattered through the bottles on the cart. “Where are those silver things that go on the bottle necks to tell you which liquor is which?”
“Laurel thought they were necklaces. She put them on her storybook dolls.” Kathryn dropped her hands away from her strained face. “It drove Jimmy nuts, but he didn’t have the heart to take them away from her.”
Evie held up two of the bottles. “I wonder which one is the scotch.”
“The brown one.”
“Funny.” Her sister sniffed one of the bottles. “Bourbon.”
“I’ll take bourbon and Coke.”
Evie dumped bourbon into the glass and splashed a small bit of Coke over it.
“One night Laurel made me tell her what each necklace said. She named her dolls Bourbon, Scotch, Rum, Gin, and Vodka. Jimmy and I laughed about it.” Strange how his laughter was still fresh in Kathryn’s mind, and for just the briefest of moments, she didn’t feel locked in some dark, parallel dimension made for those left behind.
Here.” Evie handed her a drink and sat down, folding her legs under her. They didn’t speak.
Her years with Jimmy filed through Kathryn’s mind like frames in a documentary. His laughter, his fears, his tears of excitement when he first saw their daughter in her arms, squalling and hungry. She could hear him singing the songs he had written to her, and for her. She heard the first thing he ever said to her—and the last: Just one more night on the road, babe. I’ll be home tomorrow.
Her sister set her glass down. “Lord, that tastes good. Maybe a few drinks will wash away the bitterness of Julia’s tongue.”
“Do you think what she said was true?”
“I doubt it,” Evie answered. “But which tidbit of your mother-in-law’s viperlike wisdom are we talking about?”
“That society treats women without men as nonentities.”
“Oh.” Evie laughed bitterly. “The idea that widows should be strong because it makes people uncomfortable to see someone’s grief.”
“Well, she is a widow. She should know.”
“She’s a black widow. They eat their mates. She deals with her grief by denying yours. She also said single, independent women have their life preferences questioned.” Evie raised her chin and mimicked Julia’s husky voice: “‘You are a divorcée, Evie dear, and marrying a divorced woman is like going to the track and betting all your money on a lame horse. Divorcées are only fair game for men who want to get them into the bedroom but would never consider marrying them.’”
“You shouldn’t let her get to you.”
“You’ve had more practice dealing with her than I have, Kay.”
“I might be getting a lot more practice.” Kathryn rested her glass on her knee and stared into it. “Julia wants me to give up this place and move in with her.”
Evie turned sideways on the couch, facing her. “You cannot live in the same house with that judgmental woman who will suck every bit of life from you. Half the time I want to muzzle her. Even now, when I should feel terribly sorry for her, she can say something that makes me just want to pop her.”
“Underneath, Julia is as fragile as I feel. You saw her in the car. She needs Laurel, and with Mom and Pop gone, Laurel needs to know her only grandparent.”
“The woman is an emotional vacuum.”
“She’s never that way with Laurel. It’s sad, really, the way she was talking today about her son the star, as if all she had left of him would be those few minutes when some radio station played one of his songs. I have Laurel. Maybe Jimmy’s mother should, too.”
“You’re Jimmy’s wife. She should treat you better.”
“He used to say it wasn’t me. She couldn’t let go of him. I look at Laurel and I’m so scared about what kind of parent I’ll be. What if I cling to her? How do I do this alone? How do I know what’s right and wrong, and how do I protect her?”
“The same way you did when Jimmy was alive. You can’t completely protect her from everything.”
“Laurel doesn’t have Jimmy anymore, but if we move in with Julia, at least she would have his mother. This apartment isn’t the same. All the colors look so faded. Nothing is sharp or clear. It feels empty. I don’t know if I can stay.”
“You can stay with me, Kay. It’s wonderful on Catalina. The island is small and safe. The house is small, too, but we all can fit. There’s room in back to build a small studio for your kiln and wheel.”
“You said you were going to plant a garden there.”
“Who needs a garden? My faculty meetings are always in the mornings. I could watch Laurel in the afternoons and evenings while you work. Please. Think about it.”
“I love you for offering, but it would be a disaster. Besides the fact that you just bought the place, you have one bathroom. You know we’d be on top of each other.”
Evie took her hand. “I wish you would.”
“I know you do.” Kathryn looked around. “Maybe I’m being silly and I should stay here.”
“Oh, hell, Kay, I don’t know. I can’t tell you what to do. I worry about you both living with that woman.”
The doorbell rang.
“Ignore it. They’ll go away.” Kathryn took a drink.
The bell kept ringing and ringing.
Evie shifted. “I can’t stand it. I’ll get it.”
“No. No.” Kathryn stood. “I’ll do it.” When she opened the front door, a flashbulb went off and everything was suddenly white.
“Star magazine, here. We’d like an interview, now that you’re Jimmy Peyton’s widow.”
“Leave her alone!” Evie was suddenly standing behind her, a hand on Kathryn’s shoulder. “Go away!” Evie reached around her and slammed the door, swearing.
Kathryn buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Mama?” Laurel was standing in the dark recesses of the hallway, a stuffed duck Jimmy had given her tucked under one arm.
Kathryn rushed to pick her up. “Are you okay, angel?”
Laurel nodded, hugging the duck, but she kept staring curiously at the front door.
“That kind of thing wouldn’t happen at Julia’s.” Kathryn looked pointedly at her sister. “She has the front gates and hired help.”
Evie nodded.
First and foremost, Kathryn knew she had to protect her daughter. Today people had said the stupidest things: It’ll get better with time. God needed Jimmy more. You’re young, dear, you’ll marry again. She could only imagine how Laurel might interpret any one of those comments. And how long would it be before the newspaper people finally left them alone?
“Mama?” Laurel framed Kathryn’s cheeks with her small hands and brought her face very close, the way she did whenever she wanted someone’s sole attention. “Those people at the door want to view you because you’re Daddy’s window.”
