He wants to know why but he’s not surprised.
I tell him. “Your mama called her a servant and said how she had to iron your daddy’s boxer shorts. And Mawmaw’s like, ‘No thank you, Mrs. Snow, I am not your servant and I am not about to put my hands in a strange man’s underpants.’”
Mr. Snow-I’m sorry, I don’t want to call him Tilden-laughed. He says, “I didn’t know that. And here’s something I bet you don’t know. I remember you. Your grandmama brought you to the house with her one time while she was cleaning-”
I nod. “She brought me with her to a lot of houses because I helped her clean till I started at Pretty Woman.”
“Well, one time when I was there visiting my grandma and I guess I was about six or seven, I asked you if you wanted to swing on my swing and then I asked you if you’d marry me. Do you remember that?”
“No.”
“You don’t remember that?”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head like he couldn’t believe I’d forget he wanted to marry me when I was four or five years old. Then he stacked up all his papers to go. He says, “Well, my grandmama was a bitch on wheels. And I bet the same can be said for your sweet Dr. Nina Rothmann.”
People think you can’t be nice and smart both but I don’t see why. Mawmaw used to tell me and my brother Tanner, “I’d rather have sweetness and niceness in a child than a report card full of As,” but why couldn’t she get both? Course the last A she ever saw was the one I got in algebra in tenth grade. But I blame that on going out almost every night with Kyle, who was a senior and the star of the basketball team. Rich as Tilden Snow was, even he wasn’t popular like Kyle. So my grades slipped. Meanwhile my brother Tanner would probably still be stuck in first grade if all his teachers hadn’t passed him along to get him out of their classrooms. I bet he’s the only boy ever flunked conduct in a elementary school.
Our grandma Mawmaw raised me and Tanner after Daddy and Mama got killed trying to beat a Food Lion truck through an intersection. She said they wasn’t cut out to be parents anyhow, due to drugs, drink and the NASCAR tracks. They dropped us off at Mawmaw’s almost every night even before they got killed. Mawmaw said my Mama was the only thing my Daddy ever met that was as fast as him. He loved speed and speed killed him in the long run. And he took my Mama along for the ride. Only twenty-four, both of them, which is how old I am now, so I guess twenty-four is just a real unlucky year for the Lubys in general, since that’s how old my brother Tanner was three years ago when he held up the ABC store while still on parole.
Poor Mawmaw, she used to tell me with my brother Tanner it was déjà vu right back to our daddy only worse. Daddy was Mawmaw’s only child and she said he was one too many. Plus she said she didn’t have her strength like she used to. But she never quit. Thirty-five years at the job and she’s still cleaning houses. Because of her I was never cold and I was never hungry and I was never made to feel no good. And I know my little boy Jarrad never will be either, if Mawmaw can just hold on to him against Kyle’s mama’s, Mrs Markell’s, lawsuit. Kyle’s mama getting her hands on jarrad scares me more than a lethal injection. I mean, look how Kyle turned out. So bad his own wife shot him.
Way back when Daddy was fourteen and he robbed Mawmaw’s purse, stole her car and drove it down to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, she asked her minister at Church of the Open Door if the devil could of got her pregnant while she was asleep at night, ’cause she’d started wondering if Daddy was the son of Satan. But the minister said the Devil don’t make personal acquaintanceships in the modern world. Well, that minister never met my husband Kyle Markell. And I wish I could say the same. When Mawmaw came down to the hospital after they pumped out my stomach, she told me the only way somebody wouldn’t have killed Kyle sooner or later was they never met him. But I sure don’t think Mawmaw figured it’d be me. I never was a violent person, never yelled, never cursed, and I never could stand blood. I couldn’t even cut up a frog in biology. And when that Clemson guard whammed his elbow into Kyle’s nose his freshman year and they couldn’t stop the bleeding, I fainted dead away in the stands. I fainted other times too, like when Kyle had juliaRoberts put to sleep just because of her seizures. That was my dog that had eyes like Julia Roberts. I’m convinced Kyle ran over her with the van and swore he didn’t. I never wanted to hurt anything in this world till the day I picked up that gun and told Kyle to put down that basketball and shut the fuck up.
Anyhow, the reason I wouldn’t go on the stand in my own defense was the samples Mr. Snow gave of what the District Attorney would likely ask me. I wouldn’t tell that sort of thing to Mawmaw on my deathbed, much less testify on a Bible about it to everybody in my hometown. Like the weird disgusting stuff Kyle heard on the Internet that he kept trying to make me do in bed. And Mr. Snow said how they’d twist things all around so lies would look true and the true things sound like lies. So I kept telling the lawyer the same thing I used to tell Kyle. No thank you. He got real upset. The lawyer, I mean. To be honest it was nothing much compared to the way Kyle used to freak out on me when he was alive, which I guess it’s my fault he’s not anymore. All my lawyer does is grumble how I’m tying his hands behind his back. One day early on in the trial he said I had a sympathetic personality and was young and petite and pretty-the way his eyes shifted around behind his glasses when he said that, I had the feeling he was coming on to me without even knowing it, which would be pretty strange considering, but he wouldn’t be the first man that got strange on me at the wrong time. His idea was if I took the stand and started crying I could maybe win over the jury to go easy on me even if Kyle had played in the Sweet Sixteen.
Three weeks back, the night before my trial started, my lawyer goes, “I don’t want to scare you, Charmain”-(Sure!)-but he explains how unless I testify so he can bring up about the drug stuff and weird sex stuff and the 911 and the rest of it, I could get Death.
I’m like, “Well, okay, then, I’ll take Death. But I won’t take the stand.”
He’s like, “Great. You know who’s gonna love this? The District Attorney. You know why? Because you just lay down in the death chamber, Charmain, handed him the needle and said stick it in!” He shakes this bunch of papers in my face. “Look at this, look at this, look at this!”
I say, “Excuse me but I heard you the first time.”
“This is State’s evidence. These are exhibits the State’s gonna be showing to the jury and you don’t think they’re not going to have a seriously deleterious impact?”
Well, I didn’t know what “deleterious” means but from the twitch in his mouth I could tell it wasn’t good. I looked at the papers. Stuff like:
STATE EXHIBIT #7. One desert eagle mark VII.44-caliber Magnum pistol, black matte finish. Six-inch barrel. Fingerprints of defendant on grip.
STATE EXHIBIT #13. Eight-round clip of.44 Magnum shells. Two rounds fired.
STATE EXHIBIT #28. Emptied kerosene can. Fingerprints of defendant on handle.
STATE EXHIBIT #51. Two.44 Magnum slugs taken from cranium of the deceased.
STATE EXHIBIT #85. Five-page letter of confession to shooting on Marriott stationery signed by defendant.
STATE EXHIBIT #97. ACC tournament basketball with bullet hole.
STATE EXHIBIT #103. Photographs of partially burned corpse of the deceased.
I said it did look like they had plenty of exhibits. Tilden Snow just nodded like his head was on a spring. But he was right about them making the most of what they had. For two weeks mornings and afternoons that sour-faced District Attorney, Mr. Goodenough, kept shaking plastic Baggies with those exhibits in them in front of the jury’s faces. He made it all sound like I was the original black widow spider. The worst was the pictures of Kyle’s body. I didn’t look at them. But the foreman lady, Dr. Rothmann, turned gray as a old dishrag when Mr. Goodenough shoved them at her, and I’m not sure how much she even saw because she turned her head so fast.