“Oh, he’ll turn on you,” Rose assured him. “The only question is, when they come digging for stuff to use against you—and dig they will—what will they find?”
I knew what they’d find. For Schmitz and Rose it was always about cash—cash in the safe, cash in velvet-lined boxes—the more bundles the better. Well, good for the police, I thought. They might as well pick Rose’s safe and lock her up too.
I thought this out of spite, and oh, so many things. How the two of them had put me in the middle of their filthy antics—how I had put myself there.
“They’re cold,” I whispered when Bobby kissed me good night. “I didn’t want to believe it, but now I know.”
“Who is? Start at the beginning, and tell it to me,” he urged.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t see the beginning and I surely couldn’t see the end. Whatever I felt about Rose, and it was changing all the time, I knew I had to keep quiet.
I couldn’t tell Bobby that as I showed Schmitz out, he asked, “Vera, what you just heard. How do you figure it?”
Once more he showed me his real face—that mix of scoundrel and choirboy that frightened me so when I was a little girl. Maybe there was a time when the choirboy could have won the day. Maybe if Schmitz had been gifted with a more expansive nature, and humility, maybe so. But Schmitz had only one real interest and that was himself.
“Are you asking, Mayor, if the ends justify the means?”
Schmitz grimaced, to hear his old question put back at him. The question whose real answer he never wanted to hear.
“They don’t care about anyone,” I whispered as I shivered in Bobby’s arms. The tremble never leaving me, not in all those months.
“You’re talking in riddles,” Bobby said, and he kissed and kissed me, hoping to kiss the cold out of me.
Monkey Bread
Those winter afternoons when the weather was fair, Rose bathed in the sun. The sun, she insisted, healed her in ways no medicine could. She had Tan and Cap drag the velvet chaise from her bedroom onto the balcony, with its proper view of the garden and the blackened hills beyond. There, dressed only in knickers and a silk robe, which she opened to expose her breasts and belly and thighs—with the sewn eye pocket naked too—Rose gave herself to the sun. I think it must have felt delicious to have some heat on her bones, and though it was the fashion of the time for women of means to go around looking pale as cadavers, Rose preferred herself golden.
“Join me,” she said one afternoon. She directed me to a second, smaller chaise Tan had positioned next to hers. “Go on,” she urged, “no one’s looking. Let the sun heal you, Vera. Let it turn you and me the same nice color.”
I went as far as unbuttoning my blouse, so that the lace and ribbing of my combination was exposed.
“Look at you,” Rose said dreamily, “going wild.”
Was she making fun of me, or was she pleased? She lay back like a Mayan queen, with her eye shut and her chin raised to the gods.
I should add she was deep in the whiskey, the glass gripped in her hand. Rose wasn’t Morie when she drank, but even so, I was cautious. Drink never did a single good thing for either of my mothers.
Yet I was free to observe her. To see that her hands were my hands, her bare feet the same as mine. We pointed our identical beaks toward the sky. If we talked, I expected we’d fight, so I stayed quiet. Still, I had the notion this wasn’t to be a casual mother-daughter afternoon.
Tan had left us with a plate of monkey bread to share. Rose broke off a bit and chewed with her mouth open. “Have a bite,” she urged.
I wasn’t hungry but I ate anyway; it seemed rude not to. I ate one piece and, finding it delicious, ate another; she ate three pieces, all the while walking through the rooms of her mind.
“I make a point never to judge,” she said at last.
With that, I knew I was in trouble.
“I’ve seen everything—everything,” she said, taking another bite of the gooey monkey bread and washing it down with whiskey. She had my full attention.
She went on, “I’ve concluded that even a saint is capable of murder, and inside every murderer there lives a sweet, lost child. In other words, everyone has the whole organ inside them. Understood? And since I don’t judge, I don’t particularly care. All right?”
I sighed volubly to let her know I wasn’t really interested in hearing another chapter from the madam’s handbook.
“Now, no harm, no foul,” she said, barreling on. “That boy out back: What’s the story?” She sighed. “I hear all kinds of things. This house might as well be made of paper.”
When she smiled, or tried to, only one side of her mouth lifted. “I expect you’re trading favors. Do you know how to keep safe? Have my girls taught you at least that much?”
When she saw that I was too flustered to speak, she chuckled. “It’s all right. I just don’t want to see you in a fix—”
“Like you were?”
“Oh, fa.”
“Here’s something,” I said, and flourished the copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam I’d brought with me.
“My, my, where’d you unearth that thing?”
“Don’t you remember? On my birthday, I found it on your shelf.”
“A jillion years ago,” she said. “Give it here.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “First, tell me what is it about these poems.”
“The duke,” she said. “He read Khayyam to me when we were young.”
“So, are we Persian?”
“Ah, you with the questions. Look, we’re a lotta things. But I never did hold to the idea of countries decided by the whims and wars of men. Now, shared understandings,
