Dirty Blonde

CHAPTER 36

Cate found herself sitting on a worn brown plaid couch in the small, cozy living room of Mr. Pell’s apartment, waiting for him to return with the tea. Handmade bookshelves filled with plastic-covered biographies, history books, and mystery novels bought at library sales lined the room, many still bearing the yellow stickers of Sherlock Holmes. Amateur photographs of local landscapes, enlarged and mounted on foamcore, covered the paneled walls. The rug was a shaggy brown, and lamps on the end tables had heavy wooden bases. Across from the couch sat an old TV and a matching plaid chair, on which an overweight gray tabby slept in an oblivious ball.

“Here we are.” Ed entered the room with a tumbler of ice and a can of generic cola. He’d taken off his coat and, with his brown slacks, had on a maroon sweater vest over a white shirt, well-worn but spotless. “I’m out of tea. Is Coke okay? It’s a classic bait and switch, I’m afraid.”

“Thanks.” Cate rose, accepted the glass, and set it down on a cork coaster on the table.

“Do you mind if we share the couch?” Ed came around the coffee table and gestured at the cat. “I can’t disrupt Mr. Puggy. He looks asleep but he’s on the job, you know. He’s a paperweight, for chairs.”

Cate smiled. “How old is he?”

“He’s seventy-five. I’m fifteen.”

Cate laughed, and so did Ed.

“Well, this is nice to have you here,” he said, patting his leg and leaning back, regarding her through the bottom half of his bifocals. “You do look so much like Deirdre. Yes, you’re almost a carbon copy.” Ed searched her face in a way that managed not to be creepy. “You have her blue eyes and the exact same color of her hair. You’re both lovely women.”

“Thank you.”

“She was so proud of you, as I said. Of your record as a student. And she was so thrilled that you were going to law school.”

“So you knew her just before she died.”

“Yes.”

Cate felt a twinge. Her mother’s life insurance had paid for her tuition at Penn Law. She never could have afforded it otherwise.

“How she would have loved to see you become a judge, even with your troubles of late. I’ve been following them in the newspaper.” Ed shook his head. “Up here, Philadelphia seems like a different world, with its murders and such.”

“Oh,” Cate said, surprised. She hadn’t realized that he knew she was a judge. Bait and switch indeed.

“Oh now, I can see I’ve gone and upset you. My apologies.” Ed frowned. “I can be too blunt. My wife always says that.”

“Your wife?” Cate glanced around. It was clearly a man’s apartment, everything set up for one.

“I’m a widower. My wife, Melinda, died three years ago. I met her at a photography class I was teaching. Did you come up for the day, today, to visit Deirdre?”

“Uh, no. I’ve been up-” Cate started to explain, then stopped herself. “How did you meet my mother?”

“I used to be an investigator. Here, I brought this out to show you. It’s my favorite snap of us.” Ed pulled a curled photograph from his sweater vest. “Don’t judge my photographic abilities by it, please. We took it with the self-timer on the camera. Set it on a ledge at a custard stand, on the boardwalk.”

“The boardwalk?” Cate took the photo. It was of her mother and Ed, both grinning broadly, their cheeks pressed together. The sun shone high in a cloudless blue sky and shimmered on the sea behind them. They were giggling, their arms around each other, their love palpable. Cate couldn’t get over it. Her mother, with this man. And happy, even After.

“I have many, many pictures of your mother.”

“You do?” Cate asked, gazing at the photo. She held it under the low lamplight, with wonderment.

“Boxes and boxes. She was my favorite subject.” Ed nodded, his mood lifting. “That one was taken on a trip to the Jersey Shore. Atlantic City.”

“My mother went to Atlantic City? I didn’t think she went anywhere.”

Ed frowned behind his bifocals. “Don’t be so hard on her. It was very hard for her to be happy. You must know that.”

“I do,” Cate said, oddly chastened.

“I believe it was what did us in, ultimately. She just couldn’t permit herself to be happy again after her baby died, that way. She thought the fire had something to do with it. The fumes. I think she was right.”

“It may have. If the government had paid them sooner, she would have moved in a minute. So how long did you see her for?”

Ed squinted, thinking. “We met the spring of ’87 and saw each other for the next year and a half. I asked her to marry me on my birthday. I told her the best gift she could give me was her heart, for the rest of my life. So I blocked her in. She had to say yes.” Ed laughed.

“And she did?”

Ed nodded, unmistakably proudly and Cate tried to process the information.

“So you saw each other for a year and a half and even got engaged, and she didn’t tell me? I talked to my mother every other day, at least.”

“She didn’t want us to tell you. I think that was part of her guilt, over her own happiness. It was as if by telling you, she was afraid of being judged.”

“But I wouldn’t judge her, I’d be happy for her.” Cate felt confounded. “I used to tell her to go out and date.”

“No, she was judging herself.” Ed swallowed visibly. “So about a month after that, she told me that she couldn’t see me anymore, that we weren’t getting married. Even gave me back the ring, though I didn’t want it. She was punishing herself, the rest of her life, for the baby’s dying.”

Cate knew he was right. She had even suggested her mother get therapy, but she’d refused.

“And a month after that, she died. I read it in the obits. It was so sudden.” Ed sighed, falling silent for a somber moment, and so did Cate. “She was in such good health. It took me by surprise. I kept thinking, she’ll come to her senses someday. We could have had a wonderful life together.”

“I’m sure,” Cate said, eyeing the room. She would have wanted just this for her mother, this warm, comfy place with this caring man. In the next minute, she told him as much, and he looked up with a sad little smile.

“Thank you.”

“I hate that she’s buried in Centralia. The fumes, the fire. It’s like she consigned herself to hell, forever.” Cate heard herself say it, though she had never thought of it that way until this moment. Her gaze fell again on the photo. “How did you meet, again?”

“I went to see her, for my job.”

“You said you were an investigator?”

“For a law firm up here. John Bober’s firm. You know, call 1-800-WANNA-SUE?” Ed laughed. “John got all the big cases those days, all class actions. Birth defects, stillbirths, cerebral palsy. And all those breathing disorders. COPD, asbestos, black lung, and emphysema, especially in the Centralia area. My job was to keep an eye on the hospitals and the morgues for unreported cases, for potential members of the class.”

“So what did my mother have to do with that? Was it because of the stillbirth?”

“No. Your father.”

Cate frowned. “What about him?”

“When I saw that he died of black lung, I went to see your mother and see if she wanted to join the class.”

“Black lung?” Cate blinked, confused. “My father didn’t die of black lung. He had a heart attack.”

“No, it was black lung. His death certificate said so. Coal workers’ pneumoconiosis. That was my job, to review the death certificates in the region, for black lung or any similar disease. Progressive massive fibrosis or silicosis. Most of those cases were in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, but plenty were up here. My beat was the mining counties. Schuylkill, Carbon, Luzerne, Northumberland, Lackawanna, Columbia, and Dauphin. Sullivan County, too.”

Cate listened, reeling. Black lung?

“Usually I heard somebody got sick and went to visit while they were alive or on oxygen, at home or in the hospital. They all got sick, sooner or later. But a few would slip through the cracks, like your father, and I’d pick him up when I reviewed the death certificates. I used to pay a clerk to tip us off, too.”

“Do you remember where you found his?”

“Columbia County, I think. He stayed close to Centralia. Your mother told me he didn’t see you much.”

“Not at all.”

“That’s too bad,” Ed said, with sympathy. “Then I used to go find the family and see if they wanted to sign up. They usually did, they’d be mad as hell about the black lung. They’d authorize the release of the medical records, and I’d review them and see if they qualified for the class, which they always did, if they wanted in. Is this really news to you, about your father?”

“Yes. My mother said he died of a heart attack.”

“No, black lung. He died young from it. He was only fifty. Most miners die or at least show symptoms around that age. Shortness of breath, wheezing, coughs that won’t quit.” Ed wrinkled his bony nose. “I don’t buy all that hooey about when coal was king. Coal was hell for miners.”

“But my father wasn’t a miner.”

“Yes, he was. Can’t die from black lung and not be a coal miner. It’s caused by the coal dust that gets in the lungs.”

“I know, but…” Cate didn’t finish the sentence. She knew what her own father did for a living, at least she had thought she did. “He had a motorcycle shop. I went to it when I was little. I remember.” She did remember, the visits stamped on her brain with a child’s impressionism. “The shop was dark and smelly and a little cold. He went there every day. I still have a T-shirt with the name of the shop on it. Mike’s Bikes.”

“Maybe he did that for a time, but Deirdre told me he was a miner.”

“You can’t be right. We had motorcycles parked out front of the house, all the time. People came to see him.” Cate flashed on the engines roaring. The black exhaust smoke. Her father’s greasy hands. “Maybe he became a miner after he left?”

“That’s not what Deirdre told me. Or what the certificate showed. She told me he mined and she wasn’t surprised when I told her what he died of.” Ed brightened. “Then she told me they were divorced, so I asked her out.”

“But my father wasn’t a miner,” Cate repeated, then remembered something. The small bathroom wastebasket at their house. Used Kleenex tissues stained with black dirt against the white. Don’t touch that!

“She told me no. Said she didn’t want to date anyone. She had her job, up at the school, and she was busy. I didn’t know then about the baby, of course. So I called her about fifty more times, and she finally gave up. Only woman I ever met with a will stronger than my own.”

For a second, Cate could almost hear something. An echo. The hack of a cough, first thing in the morning. A racking that wouldn’t stop. Was she imagining it? Was it the power of suggestion?

“We didn’t go out much in the beginning, but after a while we did, and always out of town. I told her she used to make me feel like we were cheating. I figured out it wasn’t your dad she felt like she was cheating on.” Ed slapped his leg. “Hold on, I’ll go get you those pictures. I keep the boxes in my little office.”

Ed shuffled from the room, leaving Cate with her questions. Why had her mother kept Ed a secret? Why had she kept her father’s job a secret? Then she realized the answer, with a start. She hung her head, and by the time Ed returned with a cardboard box, she felt overwhelmed by sadness. With one little fact, everything about her family was explained, once and for all. She reached for her cola and took a shaky sip.

“This is only the first box.” Ed set the box down and pushed back the strand of white hair that had fallen onto his forehead. “It could take all afternoon to go through them. That’s okay with me, if it’s okay with you.”

Cate looked up at Ed, who was reaching into the box and handing her a first stack of photos. “Well, did you figure out why they didn’t tell me about the black lung?”

Ed stopped the photo stack in midair, and his cheer vanished.

“My father had to have been a bootleg miner. That would explain it. He had the bike shop in the day, but he mined at night, right?”

“Probably.” Ed set the photos down on the coffee table. “Don’t judge too harshly, Judge. A bootleg miner was only a petty thief. A man who poached coal and undersold it, to make extra money on the side. It’s a tradition going back to the Molly Maguires.”

“But in Centralia, you know what it means to be a bootlegger as well as I do. As well as my mother did. Part of the reason the mine fire couldn’t be put out was because of the bootleg mines. Wasn’t that right? Bootleg mines didn’t show on the mine maps.”

Ed nodded, his lower lip buckling. “Yes. Bootleg miners did what’s called robbing back, working the mine the wrong way, back to front, chipping away the coal pillars that were left to support the mine roof. They took out the pillars, collapsing the mines. It made it impossible to stop the fire when the government filled the shafts with fly ash in the seventies, and again in the eighties.”

Cate felt a wave of shame. “She must have known he was bootlegging.”

“Of course, but it was extra money, and times were tough. Nobody liked the bootleggers, it’s true, but mostly they looked the other way. They hated the coal company even more. They couldn’t foresee the fire. That the bootlegging would jeopardize everyone. The entire town.”

“And a little baby,” Cate added, dry-mouthed. “No wonder she blamed herself.”

Ed fell silent, and she reached over and picked up the photos.

To meet the stranger who was her beloved mother.