Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

13

Mother Confessor

Molina unfolded and rose to her impressive five-ten inches of height, bending to swoop up his coffee mug and her almost full lemonade glass.

“I have a confession to make. Better get you a beer.” And then she left the room.

Matt had little time to speculate, and decided to put on his counseling hat, a deerstalker in this case.

“Hmm,” Matt intoned as Molina returned to put the open beer bottle down in front of him, “Dos Equis. ‘Dos’ is ‘two’ in Spanish. Two horses. You must be facing at least a two-pipe problem.”

He smiled and answered her puzzled frown. “That’s what Sherlock Holmes told Watson when the great detective was handling a particularly troubling case. It was a three pipe problem. So I’m playing Watson here? At least I don’t smoke.”

I regret to inform you,” she said with that utterly deadpan Molina the homicide lieutenant face, “that you’re facing a pretty nasty rejection.”

“Rejection?”

All Matt could think was, Oh, God, Molina had been keeping tabs on Kinsella and he was back in town…seeing Temple? No. Temple wouldn’t put up with his now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t act anymore.

Still, his head was buzzing so wildly he almost didn’t take in her next sentence.

“This is no mystery. You are no longer required as escort for the annual Fall Dad-Daughter Dance at the junior high.”

“What? Mariah? She doesn’t want to go now?”

“She doesn’t want to go with you. I’m sure it breaks your heart. She’s changed her mind, Matt. Mariah has decided to ask Rafi Nadir to escort her to the Dad-Daughter dance this fall.”

“Whew,” Matt said, just happy not to have heard the word, “Max”, then taking a pull on the Dos Equis. “Would you be insulted if I said I’m relieved? That’s a really mature decision on Mariah’s part. Rafi Nadir has truly helped her fulfill her aspirations without betraying your confidence. He’s playing a Dad-type role he never had a chance at earlier. So what’s the problem?”

“Rafi Nadir is an Arab-American name,” Molina said absently. “Think Ralph Nader, the long-time political activist, who has Lebanese roots. These days a Mideast ancestry can be as targeted as a Hispanic one.”

Now she was twisting the condensation-dewed beer bottle in her hand.

“Look, Carmen.” He nodded at her hands. “You never fidget. It’s against your professional and personal code. You’ve been fidgeting since I got here. What’s really going on?”

“Mariah and Rafi are coming back from a rehearsal session at a studio. Seems everything musical today involves digital manipulation.” Her apologetic crooked smile and shrug were out of character too.

“Carmen, do you regret Mariah favoring him over me? I’m not insulted, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It’s not that.”

“So he is her father and you guys can admit it now,” Matt said. “Mariah’s solved the problem herself. The Dad-Daughter Dance is the perfect coming-out party. It’ll be a smooth transition. She’s debuting in her first year in junior high and no one will know you kept it quiet when she was in grade school. Please don’t tell me his ethnicity wasn’t why you kept it secret. I know people are paranoid these days and your police connection—”

Molina exploded. “Yes, his ethnicity played a part in it. So did mine. And the paranoia was mostly mine. But that was fifteen years ago in L.A. How do I bring you up to date on fifteen years of lies?”

Matt stared at her troubled features. Time to back off. He spoke solemnly, but softly, confidentially, with a tone of wry humor. “You say, ‘Bless me, Father. It has been fifteen years since my last confession.’”

He glanced at the LED clock visible on the kitchen’s microwave oven. “And make it snappy. A lot of elderly folks are waiting in line, leaning on their canes and walkers, to spend their half hour in the dark little booth enumerating a supermarket cart of venial sins when you’ve got a Dumpster of big league ones to unload.”

The kicker made her laugh. “A pity you and the confessional booths didn’t stay in the priesthood. You would be a huge improvement over Father Hernandez’s brusque, businesslike manner with penitents. So would the anonymity of a dark booth.”

“The booths are still used for oldsters at Our Lady of Guadalupe, and me.”

“You?” Then she took a deep breath and told him.

She’d been the “illegitimate” eldest bi-cultural daughter in the large traditional Hispanic family that followed when her Latina mother married a Latino man.

“How many younger siblings?” Matt asked.

“Now you sound like a sociologist. Six.”

“So your magnificent blue eyes….”

“Came from a Daddy unnamed, a best-forgotten Gringo, seducer of my seventeen-year-old mother.”

“It’s hard to grow up in a minority community with such a visible badge of difference.”

“You seem to like them.”

“I do. So Mariah has her dad’s dark eyes, and your Hispanic heritage. Did not knowing your real father haunt you?”

“No. I was too busy babysitting my half-sisters and brothers.”

“More of a nanny than a daughter?”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“Now you see what I do on the radio advice show. So you were a never-ending Act of Contrition on your mother’s part,” he added.

“That’s harsh.”

“I think it was harsh.”

“We have time for another beer.” Molina stood and disappeared into the kitchen.

Matt frowned at his interlaced fingers and shook off the gesture he recognized was one of old Monsignor Janoski’s back during his own “illegitimate” Chicago childhood. Now he understood Molina’s iron self-control and utter professionalism, obviously needed working in a macho man’s field, but also to survive a family in which her very presence was a rebuke.

He was even beginning to understand better why his mother had fought so hard to grab a veneer of respectability, even if it was marriage to a loser like Effinger. At least she was married and Matt grew up as a kid with an identifiable father, however lousy.

No wonder Carmen Regina Molina was unraveling at having to confront her only daughter with her lies and evasions and self-shame. The daughter she had denied a father, as her own mother had done before her.

Matt shivered to his soul. Families came with long-standing PR as the social core of stability and future promise and safety. Maintaining that illusion took such a toll. Growing up was maybe realizing nobody was perfect, including yourself.

Molina slammed the beer bottles down on the low table.

“Short form on my family life. I had to get out of there. Worked my way through four years of college, then applied for the police force.”

“Why the police?”

“I don’t know. I’d been mocked for being a big girl, a tall girl in that culture of shorter people. I think my father may have been Swedish. Something really alien.”

Matt smiled to himself. Coming from a Chicago full of blond Polish and Nordic people, he knew one person’s “alien” was another person’s relatives.

“Anyway,” Molina said, “I thought I could make the physical. And— You’re right. I had some crazy idea that I might be able to track down my real father.”

“What did you find on the police force?”

“An administrative eagerness to employ women and minorities accompanied by deep distrust and dislike of both among all the ranks.”

“You beat that. Look at you. A tower of authority. A commander of men. A damn good torch singer, and the only woman who can make my girlfriend secretly shake in her Stuart Weitzman heels.”

“Really? Kinda like Dorothy in the Haunted Wood and I’m the Wicked Witch?”

“Naw. You’re the Iron Maiden of the Metro Police.”

“I know they call me that.”

“That’s a grudging compliment, but you know that. It wasn’t always like that.”

“God, no!” She glanced at him. “Sorry.”

“God likes to be included in the conversation, especially when you’re being honest. I’m as far from the priesthood—if that means you’re thinking of me as a judge and excommunicator—as you are from the LAPD. What happened there?”

“We made it into the force. Women and Hispanics, Afro-Americans and Asians and even Arab-Americans.”

“Ah,” Matt said, sinking like Sherlock Holmes deep into the easy chair and the two metaphorical pipes and the unfolding mysteries of Molina. “Enter Rafi Nadir.”

“He was even more alien than I was.”

“You…bonded. How?”

“What is it always? What we had in common, being minority officers. Then, when he found out that I sang in the police choir, he said I should be a soloist. He pushed me into working up an act. We trolled L.A. vintage stores for my retro blues singer nineteen-forties wardrobe. What they sold then for mere dollars.” Molina’s smile was nostalgic. “Temple Barr would have died and gone to heaven in blue silk velvet.”

“Those long, spare gowns in your singing wardrobe aren’t right for Temple. More something frilly from the thirties and fifties. You’re straight bobs or upsweeps. She’s waves and ponytails.”

“My, haven’t you become the expert.” She shook her head. “You remind me of Rafi. He’s quite a pop culture marketer, you know.”

“And adaptable. Do you realize Mariah is in the pop singer sweepstakes? If he was so supportive of your aspirations and a child was on the way, why did you split up?”

This new Mellow Molina vanished in a millisecond. “Because there was a child on the way!”

Matt flinched at her frustration.

“On the police force,” she explained, “Rafi and I weren’t just fighting prejudice from the white male officers and a lot of the public. If any staff cuts came, it would be among us minorities. While we were united against in-unit sabotage, we were also competing with each other.”

She sat back to sip some beer. “I guess you need to know the intimate details if you’re going to help me, us, with Mariah. Are you going to do that?”

“I’m stuck,” Matt said, “but how intimate?”

“I didn’t want to get pregnant. I wanted to establish my career, despite the odds. I like odds. I especially didn’t want to leap into motherhood after years of helping to rear half siblings. Rafi was on board with that.”

“I get it. The young Catholic Latina woman used birth control, even if it was against the Church’s position.”

“Well, the woman had to do it then, didn’t she? Nothing really effective for men, no little pink pills for girls then. Men were pill-allergic until Viagra and the little blue-for-boys pill came along. Medical insurance would cover Viagra for men, but not contraception for women. They were making single mothers. How crazy is that?”

“Whatever, something didn’t work for you.”

“I doubt this is your area of expertise and way too much information for you. It will be graphic. The pill didn’t agree with my system. Diaphragm and foam, together, that was pretty effective. Then, a period didn’t come. That was shocking. Even more shocking was finding a pinprick in my diaphragm. Not a manufacturer’s flaw or the material thinning, but a big fat pinprick I could see with my naked eye under the medicine chest’s top fluorescent light.”

“You thought Rafi had—”

“To get me out of the running. He’s from a religious and ethnic tradition where women’s place is in the home, having babies.”

“And your conscience was in a bear trap,” Matt said. “Barrier contraception is one thing. Abortion is quite another.”

“He’d said he wanted kids someday. I figured it for a two-with-one-blow.”

“You’re off the career fast track on maternity leave.”

“It wasn’t even a fast track, Matt. It was survival. I had school loans only a steady job could pay off.”

“And you immediately suspected him, not some manufacturing issue?”

“We all were edgy and paranoid. And manufacturing issues aren’t perfectly round pinpricks.”

“Some malcontent in the manufacturing process could have done it as a prank.”

Molina blinked her Isle-of-Capri-blue eyes. “You? Mr. Optimism? Coming up with a sick scenario like that? Product-tampering. Could be. And if I’d been the woman I am today, I might have come up with some benefit-of-the-doubt options too. But I didn’t. I panicked. I left. I ran.”

“Like Max Kinsella did to protect Temple from his past.”

“Don’t compare me to him! I was protecting my baby’s future. I’d never let my child become a pawn, or a bone of contention.”

“You’re the woman you are today because you did that. You chose to become a single mother and have done an admirable job. But your trust issues are higher than the Eiffel Tower on the Strip.”

She swallowed. Not beer. Just the bad taste in her mouth. “I was wrong. I made a rush to judgment, as the phrase goes. I underestimated Rafi. All my own baggage buried him. I can’t explain it now myself. Only… I know, I see, disappearing so utterly without a word, was the worst thing I could have done to him. Because, and we’ve talked about this, he was innocent.

“He thought I’d been kidnapped, killed. He thought he’d been powerless as a cop and a partner, the worst thing to do to a man. He almost sank after that. Did sink. Didn’t care, drifted, lost touch with family and friends. He made the department cut him. And always, he was looking for me, maybe dead, but looking for me.”

“Gosh,” Matt said, “you two are made to order for my new talk show. Dr. Phil would kill for you.”

She half-lurched up. “You even think that…if that oily Oprah hanger-on ever got near me and mine—”

Matt started laughing. “Angst is not going to get you and Rafi past the tremendous hurdle that is Mariah, Mama Bear. Humble pie is.”

“What does that old expression even mean?”

“Forget your own regret and guilt, and play district attorney. Make the best and most honest case you and Rafi can before the judge and jury that is your daughter. Look. She’s a teen. Conflict with her mother is cool. Listen. Rafi has eased into her life and done the same mentoring he did for your singing talent. He’s won her respect all by himself. That’s what you don’t want to sabotage at any expense. You’re the villain of the piece. All you can do is repent.”

“Grovel, you mean.”

“Prepare for the shock and betrayal she’ll feel toward both of you.”

“And you’ll be…?”

“Refereeing, I hope. Rafi does know you’re planning to do this intervention?”

Molina swooped up the beer bottles and headed for the kitchen. “Yes, but not when.”

“So when’s when?”

She poked her head around the barrier wall. “He and Mariah should be back from rehearsing any minute now. I think we’ll switch to Dr Pepper.”

Matt stood. “Carmen Molina, you have got to be kidding me.”

“Pulling off scabs is best done quickly. Glass or bottle?”

“Er, bottle. Better not to have contents easily thrown.”

“How do we start?” Molina wiped her palms on her jeans.

“We put Mariah on the defensive. Have her tell me about her switch in escorts.”

“Isn’t that a bit manipulative?”

“Aren’t you trying to defend yourself against years of major lies?”