Slow Dollar

CHAPTER 5

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

I tapped on the metal door, and eventually Tally Ames opened it. Like me, she was wearing a long blue skirt and her charm bracelet. Her eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, and she stared at me a moment as if trying to think why I was there.

“I thought you were another reporter.”

“Have they been bothering you?” I asked.

“Not as much as you’d’ve thought. Carnies are like migrant workers far as the local newspapers ever care.” Her tone was bitter as she held the door wider for me to step inside. “They’re always so sure it’s one of us whenever there’s any trouble, and as long as we’re killing each other...” She shrugged in resignation.

Those first few minutes of a condolence call are always awkward. Anything I say sounds so trite in the face of such loss and it’s even worse when it’s the death of someone young.

I held out my shopping bags of food cartons. “My sisters-in-law thought maybe you and your family might be able to eat a little something.”

“That’s nice of them.” She took the bags with a wan smile and set them on the kitchen counter that probably doubled as a snack bar.

This travel trailer was fairly big, designed to be pulled by a two-ton truck. The master bedroom was two steps up over the flatbed, and there was a pop-out bedroom at the back end. In the middle were a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a surprisingly roomy dining room/den combination. The deep blues, turquoise, and amethyst of the furnishings had been chosen with a knowing eye for her dark hair and blue eyes, and the space was brightened by September sunlight that spilled through a line of skylights in the ceiling.

Except for a drink cup of clear purple plastic on the shelf beside the plaid couch and an ashtray with three cigarette butts, there wasn’t a paper or thread out of place. Janice Needham would’ve been hard-pressed to find something to pick at here.

I glanced around as we sat down in the chairs at opposite ends of the couch. The doors to both bedrooms were open and she seemed to be alone. A house of bereavement is normally crowded with relatives, friends, and neighbors. In this case, though, relatives and neighbors were probably back in Florida, and friends here would be out working the carnival. This sunny Saturday had brought out lots of people and profit margins were probably too small to let natural sympathies take precedence till after hours.

She noticed my glance. “Arn’s over at Braz’s trailer with your deputy friend. And we’re so shorthanded, I told Val he might as well help keep the stores going. Nothing else for him to do right now till they release Braz’s body. I guess that sounds sort of mercenary to you?”

I shook my head. “My mother died near the end of barning season. The neighbors did what they could, but they had their own fields to harvest. So I know a little bit about what it’s like for you.”

“Yeah, I was sorry when I heard she’d died.”

That surprised me. “You knew my mother?”

She abruptly reached for her glass and stood up. “I’m going to have another glass of tea. Can I fix you one?”

I stood, too. “Let me get it for you. You’re the one who should be sitting.”

“Trust me, I’m not, okay? If I sit still for too long, my mind keeps going over and over all the thing I might’ve done different, things that might’ve kept Braz safe.”

“Mrs. Ames, how did you know my—”

“Call me Tally, okay? Unless you mind if I call you Deborah?”

“No, of course not.”

“Or is it Deb?”

“Never,” I said firmly. “Too many Little Debbie jokes when I was a child. Dwight—Major Bryant said you wanted to see me?”

She put ice cubes in a second glass and poured tea from a jar in the small refrigerator. As she handed it to me, both our bracelets tinkled and she gave me a wan smile. “You do remember, don’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

Now it was her turn to look puzzled. “Isn’t that why you wore your bracelet to come here today?”

“Because I saw yours in court? No, I came across mine by accident this morning. I’d almost forgotten I even had it.”

“Pure coincidence, huh?”

Her tone was flatly skeptical and I didn’t understand why.

She held out her wrist and said, “Take a good look at mine.”

From the weight of the charms as I touched them, I was sure they were solid gold and worth a lot more than my sterling ones. And yet, there amongst all the little gold totems was a single silver one, a tiny teddy bear identical to mine.

A silver teddy bear?

I could almost hear Mother’s voice. “Just like yours, Deborah. You were only three, though. That’s probably why you don’t remember.”

“Olivia?”

Her smile was half-defiant. “Or should I call you Aunt Deborah?”

I couldn’t believe it. But here were those blue, blue eyes that I had noticed that first day in court.

Cornflower blue.

Knott blue. Like every one of my daddy’s children.

Like all his grandchildren, too, it would seem. And on some visceral, subliminal level, my subconscious had picked up on Tally’s eyes—on Braz’s as well—and sent me a dream of blue quarters.

“I had just turned five,” Tally was saying. “You weren’t quite three. My mom had dumped me on my Hatcher grandparents that summer, and you and your mom came out to the farm. She gave me a bag of chocolate candy and a silver charm bracelet just like yours. I forget what all was on mine besides the teddy bear. It came loose and I kept it in a little box by itself or it’d be gone now, too.”

“She told me about that visit right before she died,” I said. “What happened to the rest of the bracelet?”

She gave a rueful shrug. “Who knows? Mom probably hocked it to buy another bottle of gin, okay?”

“She was an alcoholic?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Deborah. You think our mothers were anything alike? That I ran away from her because I hated algebra or was having a bad hair day?”

“How old were you when you ran?”

“Fourteen.”

“I was eighteen.”

“You ran away? With all that you had? Why?”

It was my turn to shrug. “Bad hair day?”

She gave a small, disbelieving snort. “How long did you stay gone?”

“A few years. Long enough to learn that bad hair’s not the end of the world.”

“Get pregnant?”

“No, I managed to sidestep that.”

“Must’ve been the difference between fifteen and eighteen,” she said. “Or maybe you weren’t looking for love in all the wrong places.”

“Oh, I did a little of that, too.”

When Mother died, everything else seemed to fishtail out of my control as well. I fought with Daddy and most of my brothers, left college at the end of my first semester, ran off with a redneck car jockey, damn near stabbed him through his sorry heart, and didn’t come home again for several years till I finally got my act together. But hard as it might have been in patches, it was hardship of my own choosing and probably an eiderdown featherbed compared to the life led by Tallahassee Ames, aka Olivia Knott.

“Was Braz’s dad with the carnival?”

“He was a roughie even greener than me. It was my second summer of washing dishes and working one of the grab joints and I knew how hard carnies work, okay? He thought it was going to be blue skies and cutting up jackpots. He made two jumps with us, then he was out of there. But not before I’d played possum belly queen for him. I never even knew his last name, and he was gone before I missed my first period. Sounds like my own daddy, doesn’t it?”

“Andrew married your mother,” I said mildly.

“With my grandpa riding shotgun all the way to South Carolina’s the way I heard it.”

Well, yes, there was that aspect of it, I suppose. I tried to talk to Andrew about Carol and Olivia right after I first came home, but he told me it was none of my business and to shut up about them.

“It wasn’t my baby” was all he’d say.

But Mother had said differently that last summer. “Andrew doesn’t believe the child was his, but I only had to take one look at her, Deborah. Olivia was him all over again. Same eyes, same smile. Your daddy’s tried to find her, but Carol’s never come back again, at least not that we’ve ever heard. Amanda and Rodney Hatcher aren’t the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. He’s Old Testament righteousness and she’s under his thumb with no more backbone than a squashed beetle, so there’s no learning from either of them where Carol and Olivia are.”

The very next day, out of curiosity, I’d driven over to that eastern part of the county. The land’s a little flatter there, more coastal plains than sandhills. The soil’s easy to tend but everything leaches through so quickly that it needs a constant supply of fertilizer and water. I found the Hatcher farm and drove slowly past it two or three times. It was a depressing sight. The crop rows were cleaner than a preacher’s jokes. Not a weed, not a blade of unwanted grass. The outbuildings were modest, but in good repair. The house itself sat in a grove of oak trees a couple of hundred feet back off the road, and if it hadn’t been for the barns that surrounded it, I would have thought it was the sharecropper shack of a tightfisted land owner. The paint was peeling, the tin roof was rusty, a few of the windowpanes had been replaced with cardboard, and there was no indoor plumbing if that outhouse behind the barn was any indication.

A cheerless, loveless place.

The only spot of color was a rusty washtub full of red petunias that bloomed by the front steps, and as I drove past the third time, an old white woman came out and poured water on them from her dishpan.

Everything for the land, nothing for the woman who helped tend it. Probably nothing for the daughter, either. I could understand why Carol had shrugged off the reins and tore loose. It all happened before I was born, but I knew the rough outlines.

Andrew, nine brothers up from me and going through his own wild teen years, had gotten a Widdington girl pregnant.

Or so she claimed.

Andrew swore he wasn’t the only one having sex with her at the time, but her father had literally pointed a shotgun at him and asked him what he meant to do about the situation. There had been a hasty drive to Dillon, South Carolina, where underage kids could get married without a waiting period or blood test, and he’d moved into this shabby old house with her parents, prepared to “do the right thing,” even though he roiled with anger at getting trapped. That’s when he started drinking heavily.

The arrangement lasted till two or three months after Olivia was born, when Carol told them all to go to hell and she’d lead the way. That was the last time anyone in my family ever saw her again. Daddy let it be known around the Hatcher neighborhood that he’d be mighty grateful if anybody heard tell of a girlchild being there, but it was five years before someone sent him word.

The summer she was dying of cancer, Mother told me all sorts of things she thought I ought to know, things she trusted me to keep to myself till the knowledge was needed.

Olivia was one of those things.

“Your father was set to run right over there as soon as he heard,” she had said, “but he and the Hatchers had already had so many hard words between them by then that I said I’d go for both of us and I’d take you as my shield. Rodney Hatcher’s a foul-mouthed old man, but I suspected he’d behave in front of a little girl like you. Lucky for both of us, he wasn’t even home that day. As soon as I saw the child, though, I knew she was Andrew’s. I should have just gathered her up and brought her home with me then and there, but I was waiting for the right time to speak to Andrew. That was barely a month or so after he married Lois, remember?”

Well, certainly I still remembered Lois. Andrew’s second marriage only lasted about two years longer than his first one, but the wedding itself had been a big splashy circus. That may have been the first time I was pressed into service as a flower girl. After a while, all the weddings ran together, so there must have been something special about Andrew’s.

“You were so cute,” Mother said nostalgically.

As if there’s ever been a three-year-old flower girl who wasn’t.

“What happened when you told him?” I’d asked.

“He still claimed Olivia wasn’t his daughter, but he went with me to see her. When we got there, though, the child was gone. Carol had taken her again.” Her eyes had glistened with tears then. “I’ll never stop blaming myself that I didn’t do something quicker. If she ever comes back, you make sure she’s part of this family if she wants to be, you hear?”

“I hear.”

“Promise?”

I promised.

“Should I call you Olivia or Tally?” I asked her now.

“Tallahassee’s my legal name, okay? They called me Tally when I joined my first carnival in Tallahassee and I made it official when I married Arnold Ames the day I turned twenty-one.”

“And Carol—?”

“Dead.”

She took a long swallow of her tea. “And my father’s married for a third time with some hell-raisers of his own.

I wasn’t as surprised as she seemed to think I’d be. “You’ve kept tabs on the family?”

She nodded. “Every time we come through Colleton County, I stop at the library and the courthouse. I’m real good at searching legal documents.”

For the last few minutes, she’d been fiddling with a pack of cigarettes. “Will it bother you if I smoke?”

I shook my head as she lit up, hungrily drawing the smoke into her lungs. “You should have contacted us.”

“Why? Y’all never contacted me, did you?”

“But we tried,” I said. “Least Daddy did. But it was as if you and Carol had vanished off the face of the earth. Then after your grandparents died and the farm changed hands, I guess you just slipped out of our memory.”

Saying those words jarred a more recent memory. “In court you said you owned property here in the county. The farm?”

“Yeah. Ironic, isn’t it?” She flicked ashes into the tray beside her. “My Grandpa Hatcher wanted to make sure we’d never get a penny out of him and he willed the place to his only sister, who willed it to her son Mack. Mack got killed in a car wreck about a week after she died and guess who was his last living relative? So, yeah, I’ve been paying taxes on it for three years now.”

It occurred to me that Daddy must be starting to lose it a little. In years past, he’d have known about this the minute Tally took title to the farm. Anything that touched his family touched him, and since Mother had been so sure that Carol’s baby was his granddaughter, he’d have tried to keep his feelers out. Somehow, this had slipped past him.

“We’ve been fixing the place up a little every time we pass through,” said Tally. “The house isn’t much, but at least Aunt Nancy put in plumbing. And the outbuildings are solid, okay? We’re using some of the barns for storage.”

“Storage?”

“Yeah. Arn and Braz? They buy up stuff when we’re on the road and we cart it back to Gibtown when the season’s over. We sell it on eBay or flea markets in the wintertime.” She sighed. “Every time Braz went off and bid on a storage locker or bought something at a salvage auction, he thought he was going to hit the jackpot. Score big. Poor kid. He wanted to be rich so bad.”

As she spoke, I remembered that she’d said she never knew the biological father’s name. “Major Bryant told me your son’s name was Hartley?”

“My first husband,” she said. “He sort of took me under his wing the week I joined the carnival. He owned a couple of grab wagons, okay? Let me wash dishes for my keep and made me go to school in the winter. When I got pregnant, he already had the colon cancer. Told me it I’d stay and nurse him, he’d marry me and say the baby was his so we could have his name and Social Security. I was eighteen when Hartley died. His Social Security and his grab joints kept us going till I met Arnold and I earned every penny of it, okay? But he was good to me. Gave me books. Made me get my GED.”

“I’m really sorry I never got to meet your son,” I said. “I wish you’d called us, let us know when you were here.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t see the point.”

“But you’re family.”

“Yeah?”

The skeptical look she gave me was so like Andrew or A.K. that even if Mother hadn’t made me promise, I’d have had to say it. “Can I tell the rest of the family who you are? Andrew? My daddy?”

She was clearly torn. “I thought I would one of these years, but now... What with Braz and all...”

Tally stubbed out her cigarette and lifted her anguished blue eyes to me. “I don’t want him left by the side of the road somewhere. That’s why I asked your deputy friend to ask you to come. Do you think I could bury him in your family graveyard?”

I leaned over and gave her a hug. “Of course, you can. It’s your family, too. Honest.”

As if things to do with family are ever that easy.

“What about Andrew?” asked the pragmatist.

“Andrew can damn well lump it,” said the preacher.