“You don’t really want that number,” Daisy said. “You don’t really want to know about the life she chose.”
I took my hand off the call log. I remembered once finding my mother’s journal and reading the notes she’d made of our days. Lacey is whiny today, getting on my last nerve. I hope it’s a stage. He hit me again last night after she was asleep. Told me I was the worst names in the book. Sometimes I look at Lacey and I think I won’t be around to see her grow up. I don’t know why I think that but I just can’t see it. I don’t know why I can’t ever feel good.
“Steer clear of men like him and you’ll do just fine,” Daisy said. “I learned my lesson but some women never do. If you come back here let it be because you want to, not because you want anything to do with that disgusting man. She was weak to him, and why be around weakness if you don’t have to?”
I wanted to please her, to show her I could be satisfied in this new life without my mother, agree with Daisy’s logic of good and bad. That I was above all that had happened. I settled into the fainting couch and pretended to doodle on some of Florin’s paper. I waited until I heard Daisy’s door click shut from upstairs. I was not above anything.
It wasn’t hard to find my mother’s name on the call log, or to see the name written next to it multiple times a day every day—Rick Walden Rick Walden Rick Walden—until he had come through the phone and taken her.
THAT NIGHT I slept the deepest I had in months, my heart quiet, my mind a dreamless scape.
When morning came, I dialed the Turquoise Cowboy’s number—or Rick Walden’s number, actually, a name so simple it seemed it couldn’t possibly be right—on the go-phone. I remembered how Vern spoke of faith, how faith lived not in the mind, contrary to what everyone thought. It lived in the body. It was an action. You had to throw yourself into action without thinking. Thinking could come later, would come later, as a divine happening if you just put the body in motion. I rocked back and forth on the mattress. I needed to pee but everything could wait. I pressed the call button. It rang and rang. Finally a rasp of a woman answered.
“Rick’s Angels,” she said. “How can I direct your pleasure?”
“I’ll need to speak to Louise Herd, please and thank you,” I said in a deep voice.
The woman paused. “You talking about Little Lou?”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s the one.”
The line was quiet, then I heard breathing.
“Hello,” a voice said on the other end. It sounded strange. I realized I never talked to my mother on the phone much. She had always been right there.
“Where are you?” I said.
A long pause, so long I feared she’d hung up on me.
“You’re different,” she said finally. I detected a hint of the slanted drunk voice I hated. The voice that told me she wasn’t there anymore.
I felt a lump threaten my throat. “I’m sorry.” How I’d wanted to say those words to her. “I’m sorry for not standing up for you.”
I had imagined spending the first ten minutes of the call telling her she was forgiven, listening as she cried and begged for me to love her again. But she hadn’t even told me she missed me. That she was sorry, too. That the whole thing was wrong, but could be fixed. I wanted her to fear losing me, tell me with desperation that I was hers. But I hadn’t ever needed to squirm away from her grasp. It seemed her hands never held me tight enough.
“You are my mother,” I said. A reminder.
I heard her light a cigarette. “You couldn’t say one nice word about me to that church. And now that I’m here, well, I can see you wouldn’t like it.”
I saw Lyle’s body then, I felt the gummy way the white stuff he put in me stuck to my skin, the way it never seemed to properly wash off. The blood on her bikini, my hand off the blanket, in the dirt.
“I just want to be with you.”
She was quiet. Sighed. “He thinks television is the way for me. He said I’m television pretty, not movie pretty.”