Leaving L.a.

“What’s the matter?” I cooed to him once I reached the door. “You’re acting like an old man with prostate trouble.” I turned pointedly to Carl and smiled. He looked a good fifteen years older than Alice and not particularly well preserved.

I opened the door, Tripod ran out, then I turned to Alice. “Where do you want to go to talk?”

“Can it please wait?” she asked, her voice soft, her hands a nervous knot at her waist.

My sister is really pretty. She takes after my mother with her sunny hair and vivid blue eyes. She was over forty now and still heavier than was considered healthy. But she was a lot thinner than I’d ever seen her. She looked good. Sweet and soft. Put her in a blue bonnet, and she’d be my image of Little Bo Peep.

I, meanwhile, apparently took after my unknown father. Red hair, pale skin. Thank God not too many freckles. I was taller than Alice and Mom, with bigger boobs—which I sometimes loved and sometimes hated. Let’s just say they have their uses and have got me past a lot of locked doors a lesser endowed woman couldn’t have entered.

But that was neither here nor there. “Wait for what?”

“Daniel’s missing.”

“Missing? No, he’s not. He’s at his friend’s house. He asked me for a ride.”

“Without telling me?” All of sudden Alice’s soft side turned fierce.

“He told you he was going. I heard him.”

“Well, I didn’t. What friend?”

“Some kid. I don’t know. Josh,” I said as the name came back to me. “Yeah, Josh.” Of Voodoo Fest and four-wheeler fame.

Alice and Carl shared a look. “I’ll go get him,” Carl told her. “If you’ll be all right,” he added, shooting me an aggrieved look.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, patting his arm.

I slapped my hands, rubbed them together, and grinned. “Well, good. That’s settled. So, big sister. Shall we have that talk?”

I walked past them and into the kitchen. My stomach had started growling the moment I drove up. Since the house was half mine, I decided that everything in it was, too.

I stood in the open refrigerator checking out the healthy selection of white bread, bologna and processed cheese. Yuck. I strained to hear the muffled conversation in the hall. Though I couldn’t make out most of the words, I didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know Carl was royally pissed.

Poor Daniel. I didn’t envy him the ride home.

Bending back to the refrigerator, I noticed some bacon and took it out, then found eggs. “Do you have any grits?” I asked when Alice came in. “I haven’t had any decent grits since—” since G.G.’s last Southern tour “—since forever.”

She handed me a Martha White bag and a pot, then sat down while I started the grits, put the bacon in the microwave and slapped a thin pat of butter into a cast-iron skillet. I was seriously hungry. “Want any?” I added as an afterthought.

“No.”

I worked in silence as the grits bubbled and thickened. Once I turned them off, I broke three eggs in the skillet. “So here’s the deal,” I began as I scrambled them. “Mom was Granddad’s and Nana’s only heir, and we’re her only heirs.” I turned off the skillet and scraped the eggs onto a plate. “This place is half yours and half mine. And I want my half.”

She frowned. “You want me to split the farm in half?”

“I don’t want any part of this godforsaken place,” I said. “What I want is half the value of the property. And I want it as fast as I can get it.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and started to eat, as if I was totally nonchalant and this conversation was not absolutely critical to my escape from my past—my pasts in both Louisiana and California.

She shook her head. “But I don’t have any money, Zoe. I can’t afford to buy you out. And this place is hardly god-forsaken. It might once have been but not anymore. Lester and I made it into a good home. A God-fearing home.”

“Well, good for you. But that doesn’t change anything. It’s still half mine and I’m willing to sell you my share. Surely your wonderful husband had life insurance.”

She stiffened. “He only had a burial policy.”

“You’ve got to be kidding! With a family and all—”

“He had health problems. A bad heart. Life insurance was too expensive, okay?”

I wanted to ask how old he’d been when they got married, fifty? Sixty? But I didn’t. “So he left you in the lurch. Isn’t that just like a man.” I fixed her with a sharp eye. “Is that why you’re hooking up with good ol’ Carl? Need another sugar daddy?”

Finally I got a real rise out of her. “Just because you’ve lived a debauched life doesn’t mean the rest of us have!”

I gave a sarcastic snort. “I was here for seventeen years, Alice. I know exactly what sort of debauched life we lived.”

“I was raised in it, yes. Just like you. But I never lived my own life that way.”

“What makes you think I did?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Come on. I saw that music video, Zoe.”

“Really? Which one?”

“There was more than one?” Her face was a study in horror.

I just smiled, folded my hands on the table and nodded. But inside I was raging. How dare she judge me?

“The one I saw was about ten years ago. You were dancing in this low-cut dress, rubbing up against some guitar while this man watched you.” She shuddered.

I, too, shuddered in disgust when I thought of Dirk and the Dirt Bags, but for an entirely different reason, though that wasn’t her business. “How did you ever come to see that video?”

“Sue Ellen Jenkins. She saw it and she thought it might be you. So she recorded it and showed it to me.”

“So, what did she think?”

Her chin started to tremble and it took me aback. Why was she getting so upset? “I told Sue Ellen it wasn’t you,” she said in a shaky voice. “I told her you’d died in a car wreck in Texas.”

CHAPTER 3

“You told everyone that I was dead?”

It didn’t matter that Alice looked contrite. It didn’t matter that she ducked her head in shame. She’d told the whole world that I was dead even when she knew for a fact I wasn’t. Except for her son, I was her last living relative if you didn’t count her father, who’d disappeared long before I was born.

For her I was it. Yet she’d rather I be dead.

You abandoned her first.

I didn’t want to think about that, but it was an inescapable fact. When she wouldn’t run away with me, I’d run away without her and had never looked back. But that hadn’t been about her. It had been about this place. I’d had to get away; she’d been content to stay. That’s why now I ignored any excuses she had for her lie about my early demise. “You told Sue Ellen Jenkins that I was dead? Why? Were you afraid it would dirty your standing in the narrow, self-righteous church community you married into?”

I shoved my plate across the table, crossed my arms and glared at the top of her bowed head. Tears were dripping from the end of her nose. Phony, crocodile tears. “Tomorrow I’m getting a lawyer, settling the estate and putting this place up for sale.”

Her head jerked up. “You can’t do that!”

“Wanna bet? You can hire a lawyer to fight me, Alice. But that’s going to cost a lot of money, and in the end I’ll still get my inheritance. You can’t stop me.” I paused a beat. “So why not just strike an agreement with me now?”

She stared at me though teary eyes. “You don’t understand. I can’t. This is my home, mine and Daniel’s.”

“Oh, come on! There’s plenty enough land to go around. Just get the property appraised, split it into two parcels of equal value, and if you don’t want to buy my portion, then I’ll sell it to someone else.”

She shook her head. “It’s not that simple.”

“Well, that’s just too damned bad, isn’t it? You can’t poor-mouth your way out of this. You’ve lived here over twenty years, Alice. That’s a lot of free rent.”

“That’s not fair. Yes, I lived rent-free. But I’ve worked like a dog on this place. I’ve cleaned and scraped and sanded and painted. I’ve planted every single tree and shrub—”

“And it looks great. So what? Consider that sweat-equity your rent. I don’t care. It doesn’t change anything. This place is half mine, and I need my share!”

I hadn’t intended to get mad. I had meant to stay cool, to sit back and let her flail around on the hook of what’s-fair-is-fair. But just being in this house made me crazy. Decadent or painted up like an Easter egg, it didn’t matter. This place was a hellhole and I hated it. I wanted my money and I wanted out of here. The sooner Alice realized I was serious, the better.

So I leaned back in the chair and tried to calm my galloping pulse. “If you want the house, fine. I’ll take the back acreage and sell it.”

“But you can’t,” she muttered, head down again.

“Why the hell not?”

“Because…Because Lester and I…we built our church on it.”

I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. “You built a church on it? On this foul piece of ground you built a church? That’s the church Daniel was talking about?”

“I’m not surprised that you’d laugh at a church.” Alice threw the words at me, rising from shame back into her comfort zone of righteous indignation.

“Oh, relax, will you? I’m not laughing at your precious church. Church or house, I don’t care, Zoe. All I want is what’s legally mine.”

“You don’t understand,” she said in a lower voice. “You can’t take the church because…”

I waited expectantly for whatever justification she would come up with.

“Because we sold the land it’s on to the church board. It belongs to them now.”

I wasn’t sure I heard her right. “You sold it? How could you have sold something that wasn’t yours to sell?”

“Everyone thought you were dead!”

“Everyone except you! You knew I was alive. You’d seen that video.” My rage boiled over, bone-deep and fire-hot. “You lied to get your hands on my inheritance. That’s illegal. That’s fraud. I could have you arrested.”

I pushed out of the chair and stormed to the back door. Then I whirled around and stared at her. She was scared. Good. She’d better be scared. “What did you do with the money? My money?”

She pressed her lips together. “Most of it went to fix up the house. And to build the church.”

“Okay. Fine. I’ll take the house then.”

“No, Zoe.” She stood up and reached a hand to me. “Please. This is my home. Daniel’s home.”

“No, it’s my home now—”

I broke off when the front door banged open. Someone stormed up the stairs. Daniel. Then Carl strode into the kitchen.

His frown turned into a scowl when he saw Alice and me facing off. “What’s going on?” He crossed to Alice. “You all right?”

Of course she immediately burst into tears.

I rolled my eyes. Alice didn’t like the way I used my sexuality to get what I wanted. But how were her phony tears and feminine helplessness any different? Naturally Carl leaped to her defense in the same way a hundred men had leaped to mine in the past. Rockers or preachers, they were all the same. They flexed their muscles, pounded their chests, leaped to the little lady’s defense and hoped like hell that would get them a free ticket into her pants.

I’d become very adept at using men yet keeping them out of my pants. I wondered if Alice was as adept at it. Or was she already sleeping with good ol’ Carl?

“What did you do to her?” he shouted at me.

“Caught her in a crime that could land her in jail,” I said. Then with a glib wave of my fingers, I waltzed out the back door. I didn’t slam it. That would only signal that I’d lost control, and I wasn’t about to let Alice and that creep ever think that. But boy, I wanted to slam it.

Instead I stood on the bottom step and made myself take deep, calming breaths. I stared at the sky. The sun had set and a half moon rose, skimming the tops of the pines. Down by the creek the frogs were calling back and forth, tempting any lady frogs within distance with their macho bluster. Were there no worthwhile males anywhere in the animal kingdom? Or were they all just swagger and smoke?

From upstairs I heard the sudden thump of hard-driving music. Nothing I recognized. I stepped into the yard and looked up at Daniel’s window, its drapes drawn tight against the night. How long till he, too, became an absolute asshole?

Then Tripod came galloping toward me, tongue lolling and tail whacking from side to side. “At least you love me,” I said, squatting down to rub his ears. “And I love you, you ugly, old thing. Looks like you’re the only one around here having a good time.”

He rewarded me with a slap of his tongue that my face only partially avoided. “Okay, okay.” Then he was off again, happy as I hadn’t ever seen him. I started after him, I guess because I didn’t really feel like being alone. He might be at home in the country, but I wasn’t. A condo in Miami was more my speed. Or Austin, Texas. Some place with a good music scene. But not L.A. or New York.

New Orleans would be perfect.

I shook my head against the thought. Too close to this place. Besides, what did I want with a good music scene? Certainly not a musician for a boyfriend. I was giving up the Red Vidrine lifestyle for a quieter, calmer one. Zoe Vidrine, soccer mom.

I stopped at the outer edges of the mowed yard and stared into the wild thicket that carpeted the woodlot, on down to the creek. Where I moved to would depend on how much money I could get from selling this place. All I needed was a nice little condo—two bedrooms—in a neighborhood with a good school.

With my left hand I made a slow circle over my deceptively flat stomach. “I’m doing this for you,” I whispered into the night. “So I can stay at home a couple of years and devote myself to you. We come from a long line of motherless women, but that’s going to change with you.” All I needed was a small home, a few writing gigs a month—music reviews, band interviews—and the two of us could get by.

The three of us, I amended when Tripod came crashing through the undergrowth, wet this time. “The three of us,” I said, fondling his ugly mug. “Come on, let’s go inside and get you your dinner, unless you’ve already eaten Angel.”

Though I didn’t want to deal with Alice and her other lapdog, Carl, no way was I letting them think they could intimidate me. Alice had cheated me out of a lot of money. She knew it and I wasn’t going to let her forget it. So I strode into the kitchen—only to find it empty.

Just as well.

I fed Tripod, all the while conscious of the heavy rhythm of Daniel’s music shuddering through the ceiling. I was up on all kinds of music, from hardcore punk to ambient noise, to hip hop, to grind core. But I didn’t recognize this band. As I started up the stairs, though, I got a brilliant idea. Daniel was fourteen or so, just coming into his own when it came to musical preferences. If I chatted him up about his music, it would probably piss the hell out of Alice. But it could also be the start of a great article: Tomorrow’s Music Connoisseurs—What They’re Listening To Today. Plus, I needed to learn how to relate to kids.

I knocked twice before Daniel cracked the door. He looked like a younger version of G.G. when he was in a foul mood. Lowered brow, downturned mouth.

“What?” he asked. I couldn’t hear the actual word due to the volume of his music, but I could read his lips.

I smiled. “I was wondering who that was. I don’t recognize the band.”

“What?”

“The band!” I shouted. “Who is it?”

“Oh.” He opened the door to let me in. Then he lowered the volume and handed me the CD cover. Power of Odd.

“Never heard of them. Are they local?”

“Sort of. One of them went to Covington High School and they’ve played at a couple of youth revivals.”

“Youth revivals? You mean they’re Christian rock?”

“Yeah.” He gestured me to sit on his bed, then picked up a handful of CDs for me to look though. As I checked them out I listened to Power of Odd. No reference to Jesus in the lyrics, at least not directly. No wonder I hadn’t pegged it. With the pounding drums—it sounded like a double set—and the howl of angst delivering the lyrics, it had more in common with Metallica or White Snake than what I thought of as saccharine church music. Debbie Boone it was not.

“These guys aren’t as fierce,” he said, as he reloaded the CD player with a different group. “More lyrical. Good for relaxing.”

“While Power of Odd is better for raging?”

He ducked his head and shrugged. “It’s been a weird day, you know?”

“Tell me about it.”

We listened to the beginning of the first song, about temptation and love and getting your strength from above.

“Why’d you come back here?” he asked me.

I straightened up. No way was I discussing this house and my half of Mom’s inheritance. “Doesn’t it make more sense to ask why I left?” Another bad subject but not quite so dangerous.

“Okay. Why’d you leave? How old were you, anyway?”

“Seventeen. And this place was nothing like it is now.” What a monumental understatement.

“You ran away?”

“Yep.”

“How come?”

I laughed. “My mother, of course. She was crazy. And cruel. And selfish.”

“Just like mine,” he muttered.

“Oh, no, buddy boy. No way. Your mother is nothing like our mom.”

“Oh, yeah? Well you never had to live with a religious fanatic who thinks you’re five years old!”

“That’s true,” I admitted. “But at least you know she loves you. Cares about you. My mother treated us like we were adults. We had to feed ourselves, clean ourselves, take care of the house and pets—and her while she was loaded, which was most of the time. It was up to us to keep this place functioning while a bunch of pothead dopers crashed here whenever they wanted to.”

He stared at me in shock. “Grandma was a drug user?”

He didn’t know? If Alice hadn’t told him that, it stood to reason that she would be furious when she found out I had. Digging up all our buried family secrets and baring them to the light.

But too bad. It was his family history, too.

I slid onto the floor, sat cross-legged on the rug and leaned toward him. “My mother—your grandmother—lost her father when she was five. He died in Korea. Her mom promptly had a nervous breakdown. That’s what they called it in those days. Anyway, my mother was raised here on the farm, for the most part by her grandparents, who were already old and devastated by the death of their only son. From the stories she used to tell, it seems like nobody really took control of her, and she grew up pretty wild. By the time your mother was born, both of the old folks had died. So it was just Mom and Alice out here on the farm and, later on, me.”

He was listening intently, chewing on one side of his lower lip. “Even though Mom’s last name was Blalock, Grandma never married my mom’s father, did she?”

“No.”

He nodded. “That’s what I figured. But Mom won’t ever talk about it.”

“It wasn’t easy for us, growing up around here.” Another understatement. “Back then Vidrine Farm was known as Hippie Heaven. You know, a commune.”

I could tell by his blank look that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I rolled my eyes. “Go to the library and check the local newspaper during the seventies and eighties. There are lots of articles about Caro Vidrine and the Vidrine Farm.”

“Maybe I will,” he said, frowning. “Once I’m not grounded anymore.”

“You’re grounded? Why?”

“They said I split for four hours without telling them where I was going. But I did tell them!”

“Yeah, I heard you.”

“And anyway, it’s not Carl’s place to ground me.”

“Carl grounded you?”

Daniel flung himself on his bed. “He thinks he’s my dad or something. But he’s not.”

I considered a long moment, then decided, so what if I was pumping the kid for information? “Are your mom and Carl, you know, a couple?”

He shot me an aggrieved look. “If you mean, like, are they getting married—” The rest was muffled when he slapped a pillow over his face and screamed into it.

I stared at him in shock. He was a strange mixture of polite kid and raging teenager. Homeschooled and protected but part of a sick family history of neglect and depravity. Self-control versus self-indulgence, that sure described me and my poor, uptight sister. And now Daniel was trapped in a new version of the same hellhole. Mom the drug addict; Alice the religion addict; and me the—

What?

What was my addiction? What made me feel safe and in control? Shopping? That was temporary. Adulation? Unfortunately that too was temporary, especially since I didn’t have enough talent as a model, actress or singer to make the big time.

So where did I turn for comfort? Certainly not to men. Men have their uses. But after my first disastrous love affair, I’ve never had any delusions about them.

My hand moved once more to my stomach, and that’s when it dawned on me. This child. I was banking on her—or him—to be my happiness.

I’d never wanted children. Certainly I’d been very careful to always use birth control. Always. But somehow I’d managed to conceive this child. And once I’d figured out why my breasts were so sore and my period was late, I’d become fixated on her.

Me, a mother.

I was determined to do it right, to do it as close to perfect as I could. That’s why I needed to get settled down in the right place and the sooner the better. My child would have the safest house and the best mother any child ever had. At least I hoped so.

Daniel sat up abruptly, startling me back to the moment. “How long are you staying here with us?”

“I’m not sure. Why?”

“What do you think of Carl?”

Now that was an interesting question. I decided to be honest. “He seems too old for Alice. And too rigid. And mean.”

He snorted. “Nice description of the man who’s trying to be the next pastor at our church.”

“You’re saying he wants to run the church and marry the former minister’s widow?”

“You got it.”

I tried to picture Carl married to my sister, to picture her crawling into bed with him, and felt a shudder rip right through me. “Do you think she loves him?”

He gave a hopeless shrug. “I don’t know. All I know is I don’t like him, and he’ll never be my dad.” He looked up at me. “Did you ever meet my dad?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Sorry.”

Again he shrugged. “So how come you were gone so long? Mom says it’s like, twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-three. And I left because I hated this house and everybody in it.”

He picked up his remote control, pointed it at the stereo and lowered the volume. Then he stared intently at me. “You hated my mom, too?”

I let out a long, slow breath. “When I left here…yeah. I hated her, too. I begged her to leave with me. I’d been begging her to leave ever since she turned eighteen. But she wouldn’t go.” Chicken-shit bitch. I managed a careless smile. “So one day I just took off on my own. But don’t you be getting any big ideas like that,” I added. “You’re only fourteen. And from what I can see, you’re not exactly in any danger here.”

“You were in danger? In your own house?”

I straightened up, stretched my legs out and flexed my ankles. “I thought I was. The kind of men who hung around here weren’t above hitting on a teenaged girl.”

He digested that a moment, then in a low voice asked, “What about my mom?”

“You mean, did they hit on her?” I thought back to those days, to how fat Alice was then, how frumpy and maternal. Meanwhile I’d been the leggy daughter, willowy and tall for her age, with an untamed head of fiery red hair—and a fiery temperament to match. To a certain sort of self-indulgent man, that’s like a signal light flashing “come and get it.”

“Alice had a way of discouraging dirty old men. Look,” I went on, needing to change the subject. “I doubt your mom wants you knowing all this sh—all this stuff. The reason I knocked on your door was to try out an idea on you.”

“An idea? On me? What do you mean?”