sure. Either way, it was stress related.”
I could feel another rock and roll flashback coming on.
“And if you do get some satisfaction,” she said, stretching her arms over her head, “that period of elation is fleeting. More likely you’ll regret it. I remember being ticked off at a roadie once. The guy promised to get me backstage to see Jerry Garcia after a concert. He got me backstage all right, but everyone was already gone. No Mr. Garcia, only Mr. Johnson.”
Babe’s revenge had been swift. She let the roadie keep drinking while she spilled her own wine in a bucket of sand meant to be used as an ashtray. When the guy was good and plastered, she led him out onto the empty stage, telling him she wanted their first time to be something special. Instead, he was so falling-down drunk she was able to tie him to a set of drums, where he passed out with his pants down around his ankles.
“The whole crew knew about it in the morning. It’s amazing what some guys will let you do when they think they’re going to get some. Coupla years later, he got religion and wound up traveling all the way to Decatur, Georgia, just to apologize to me.”
It warmed my heart that Babe was no longer inclined to seek revenge, but not everyone was as highly evolved. Something told me Eddie Donnelley wasn’t one of the enlightened. If he was in town, I didn’t think it was to give Caroline a big old bear hug and to have that cathartic “closure” conversation.
I hadn’t called Warren back. What for? The way the previous evening had gone we would have only missed each other again. And he’d have had to have the innocence of Charlie Brown to show up a third time for a rendezvous with a woman who claimed to have never called the cops and yet always seemed to have a police escort.
Instead, after a final round of verbal sparring with O’Malley I’d gone home and crawled into bed thinking how close I’d come to getting answers-if only the police hadn’t shown up again.
“The police,” I said, thinking out loud and shaking my head.
“Excuse me?” Babe was horrified. She was still reliving the revenge memory. “Jerry Garcia was a member of the Dead, the Grateful Dead? Sting, Stewart Copeland, and Andy Summers were the Police.”
“Give me some credit, I know that. I’m not one of your little acolytes. I’ve owned vinyl. I was just thinking how happy I was to see the police the first time last night, then how unhappy.”
Babe was relieved-she didn’t take kindly to too many disappointments in one day. “Has it occurred to you that O’Malley may have appointed himself your guardian angel?” Babe said.
It hadn’t. Over the last few years the snappy dialogue between O’Malley and me-even when it bordered on the frisky-had built up a kind of scar tissue. We couldn’t touch nerve endings if we tried. And I think we did try every once in a while, but never, it seemed, at the same time, so we never made that complete circuit required to turn on the lightbulb.
“Speaking of the angel…” Babe jerked her chin in the direction of the police station across the road, where a now ubiquitous patrol car sat idling and O’Malley stood leaning against it, on the phone. “The angel’s lookin’ good. I think he’s dropped a few pounds,” she said, sizing him up. “You take him out of that blue polyester uniform, put him in a pair of black jeans, black T-shirt, leather blazer. I bet he’d look mighty fine, with that salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes.” Clearly she’d given this some thought. I hadn’t and I had a hard time resisting the urge to raise myself up off the counter stool, peer out the window, and visualize Mike O’Malley’s proposed makeover.
Babe left to seat a couple of women with two toddlers and I peeked at O’Malley while pretending to be reaching for napkins. Not bad, but was he really date material? What was it Lucy and Babe were seeing that I wasn’t? Maybe all these near misses meant we were just supposed to be friends.
“You’re busted,” Babe said over her shoulder.
“I just wanted to see if he was coming this way.”
“You are such a bad liar. If you’re going to survive in a small town, you’re going to need to hone those skills.”
O’Malley headed toward the diner. He sprinted across the street easily, and moments later the screen door opened, then jingled shut with a smack. Babe was still with the newcomers, helping one of the women strap an obstreperous kid into a wooden seat that had all the appeal of a vintage electric chair. No wonder the kid was screaming.
“Hello, ladies. Okay if I serve myself?” O’Malley needn’t have asked for permission. Babe adored him and he knew the diner’s setup better than some of her employees. He poured himself a coffee and slid onto the counter stool beside me, a smug look on his face.
“Okay. What?”
“State police didn’t need to chase your friend too far-he drove straight into an overpass on the Merritt. Sheared off the top of his rig.
“Oh, and there’s something else. Caroline Sturgis is coming home.”
Twenty-nine
Home. Was it here in Michigan where this cell was; Oregon where my fictional grandmother lived and died; or Springfield, where everyone knew me as Caroline Sturgis? Bland, boring, stay-at-home, faintly amusing and to-be- pitied Caroline Sturgis, who drank a little too often and rarely finished her crafts projects but was otherwise just like any of the other suburban moms who spent their days chauffeuring kids from one structured activity to the next with only the occasional break for spa treatments or Wednesday matinees in New York City.
The last weeks had been a far cry from soccer matches and afternoon theater dates. I no longer knew or remembered how I’d managed to keep track of all the lies for so many years. It was as if I’d kept an internal bulletin board just like the slick white one in my kitchen that told me where everyone was. Some days the schedules were as complicated as the landing at Normandy, but the bulletin board gave me the illusion of order-Molly at soccer, Jason at hockey practice, Grant gallivanting all over the world, Caroline in Connecticut, not to be confused with Monica in Michigan. Never to be confused with that girl I used to be.
They put me in solitary confinement for my own safety. No one seriously thought that I’d hang myself with an Hermes scarf, but they’d never had a resident like me before and frankly didn’t know what to do with me. Oddly enough, I might have welcomed the company of the other women. As it was, I heard them only once a day when I was let out for my forty-five-minute exercise break. Some jeered and some cheered as I was led past their cells. I heard everything from “skinny bitch” to “hockey mom, can you hook me up with some blow?”
I tried to focus on Grant and the kids. Was Molly keeping up with her piano lessons in Tucson? Was Jason wearing his helmet for the pickup hockey games he’d be playing in? I didn’t imagine anyone else in the building was thinking about hockey pucks, and it was difficult for me to do it. I kept drifting back to the path that had led me here.
Sherry, the girl I’d met at the soup kitchen, had been around the block at least a couple of times. She was a user, and I knew it, but I learned a lot from her-good and bad. We spent two weeks together, my total-immersion apprenticeship into a life of petty crime. She and I took full advantage of all the social services agencies in the city, offering different names and different sad stories to each and moving on before too many questions were asked. We stayed away from personal details, even with each other.
On her own, Sherry inspired others, inside the shelter system and out, to grip their handbags and backpacks as if she was about to snatch them and make a run for it. It was an understandable reflex. She had the look of a female Artful Dodger, eager to give them the pitch, slick and practiced and knowledgeable of which buttons to push for maximum, sympathetic effect.
With my cherubic face, we made a good team. I gave her credibility. People were more trusting of us. As a duo, we got the benefit of the doubt, until one day she did snatch someone’s bag while waiting for her turn at a communal shower. She ran off and left me, her presumed accomplice, to face the music alone. It took all the vestiges of my Midwest charm to convince the others at the shelter I’d had nothing to do with the robbery.
But it was a sign I should move on before I slipped up and gave something away. I’d lost my cicerone, my guide to the strange city, where every ten-block neighborhood was larger than my entire hometown.
I was sitting on a bench in Central Park, eating a bologna sandwich on squishy white bread for breakfast, when Sherry reappeared, jumping out from behind the statue of Balto, a hero dog who’d saved a bunch of people during a
