She pivoted suddenly to face Jim, her elbows out, envelope passing between her mouth and the telephone, then into the ready-to-mail box. “The governor’s on the other line; I’ll call you back.” She hung up and shook her head at Jim. Her pale blue eyes had an exhausted, dull sheen to them. “I tried every florist in Newport, Laguna, and Costa Mesa. Nothing. Then I went alphabetically and made it to the El Modena listings before it got too late and they started to close. There’s a hundred and forty-six in the county and I’ve got a hundred and twenty-eight left. Where have you been?”
“Ann’s. Around.”
Virginia studied him with suspicion. “What was that meeting with Brian Dennison about?”
Jim explained that he was helping in the investigation of Ann — unofficially, tangentially, as a citizen and a brother. Virginia accepted it but suggested there might be, in fact, some plot at hand to penetrate the Flynn for Mayor and Slow Growth camps. Weir decided to let her entertain her conspiracy theories: Virginia was happiest when she was most paranoid. As far as he knew, the L.A. Times had never had any problem delivering a paper to the Weir household.
“Anyway,” she said. “I want to talk to you about Annie and tell you how it should be handled. I don’t think Brian Dennison’s force is doing anything correctly.”
Jim took a chair beside his mother, who immediately pushed in front of him a stack of Flynn for Mayor brochures and a pile of envelopes. He looked at Becky’s face on the front, a hyperglossy mug shot that made her look older and more reliable than Becky truly was. He wondered how many times he’d kissed that mouth, lost his fingers in those wonderful brown curls. Some memories never go away, especially when you cling to them like a life preserver for thirty-four fever-ridden days in a stinking Mexican jail. Maybe that’s what they’re for, he thought.
“I hear you finally dropped in on Becky,” said Virginia.
Jim nodded. Maybe that was one of the reasons we fell apart, he thought, because every time we held hands or had a fight, everybody in the whole neighborhood knew. Years ago, Weir had entertained the thought, rarely shared, of trying something genuinely storybook with Becky. The phrase go off somewhere together had, at times, an almost electrically urgent ring to it. But Becky was deep into the Public Defender’s Office, and he was mired in his forty hours a week of playing sheriff. Plus, Becky had no sentimental streak that Weir had ever been able to find. Becky, for instance, had found a revival house rerun of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet to be comic, although after Weir took her to see it, she’d made almost frighteningly emotional love to him that night aboard Lady Luck. Who could figure it?
“It was good to see her,” he said.
“Give her a chance,” said Virginia, case closed.
They looked at each other for a long moment, and Weir could see the injury in his mother’s cool blue eyes. There comes a time when a son can look at his aging mother and see the girl she used to be, the girl who accepted the awesome responsibility of motherhood, the girl who sacrificed her youth and her heart and her lithe young body to give him — this wailing, insatiable, unformed long shot — life. Was there any way to understand the bigness of it? Jim stood up and wrapped his arms around her. As he hugged her and ran his hands over her taut bony back, he looked around the old living room and sensed the memories — the afterimages and aftershocks of events now decades old but somehow still present. “Thank you,” he said.
Her hands pressed into his back. “For what?”
“Everything.”
“Well...”
“I’m starting to understand some of what you did.”
Her voice was hesitant now. “Now don’t start feeling sorry for me. Because I’d start feeling sorry for myself, and I’d go to pieces, and going to pieces is a luxury I can’t afford.”
A luxury she can’t afford, he thought. So Weir. He broke away and gave her a smile as he sat down beside her. It was the kind of smile that suggests whatever silly thing just happened, the wearer is now back in control. Virginia had one, too. Another Weir trademark.
“Couple of real stoics, aren’t we?” he asked.
“I’ve made a career of it,” she said. “Well... now, I...” Then all of a sudden Virginia’s face decomposed and she wiped at a big tear that ran across her hand and off a knuckle and landed audibly upon the old wooden chair. “Goddamn it, Jim,” she whispered.
“I know.” This has been a long time coming, he thought.
“Poon and Jake and now Ann. How much of this is a woman supposed to take? I...” She was sobbing now, her big gnarled hands trying impossibly to wipe away the tears. “... I miss her and I think about her every second and she’s gone. I mean even when your father had his heart attack, we knew it was coming, and even when Jake, in the war, that’s something you can understand... but Annie out in the cold, down by that horrible muddy swamp, and this... this animal uses a kitchen knife on her, all those times... oh my God, it just changes the way I feel about everything. It’s not enough, Jim, the way I tried to live wasn’t enough, thinking that if you didn’t cheat and took care of your own that when it was... all said and done there’d be more good than bad and you could take a little comfort from the fact that there really was some kind of... oh... justice...” She wiped the sleeve of her yellow windbreaker across her face, but the tears kept coming. She inhaled in jerking little gusts but nothing seemed to come back out. “Was it my fault?”
The girl, thought Jim. “No, Mom. Everything you did was right.”
She was shaking her head now, miles of regret in every wide, despondent arc. “Then why?”
“Maybe only God in heaven knows.”
Her pale blue eyes focused on him through the tears. “I have a new theory about God in heaven. My theory is he’s not much help to us down here. When I say my prayers, I don’t ask forgiveness anymore. I don’t ask for mercy. I don’t ask for peace. What I ask for is that I be treated with a little respect. That’s all. Just a little respect.”
The phone rang. To Jim’s astonishment, Virginia lifted the receiver and spoke her name into the mouthpiece with some semblance of control. She nodded, and looked at Jim with an expression of near-disbelief. “I understand your confusion, Mrs. Simpson, and I’ll put it in a nutshell for you. The Slow Growth Proposition will make it possible for the people of this county to exercise some control over a development industry that wants to drain the last penny of profit from the land before they pack up their bags and go do it somewhere else. Slow Growth is your chance to slow them down. It’s your chance to save what little is left of what made this a beautiful place to be. It’s that simple.”
She listened and looked at Jim again. “No, Mrs. Simpson, in spite of what that commercial said on TV last night, the Slow Growth Proposition will not kill our economy and make our traffic worse. It is not something proposed by rich Yuppies living in beachfront condos. It is not only for the south county, at the expense of the north. Those are lies told by developers who actually believe people are dumb enough to believe them. The lies were invented by a consultant in Los Angeles by the name of Harvey Keep, who is paid large amounts of money to invent such things. If you don’t understand that, Mrs. Simpson, I can’t help you. Tickets to the Wrecking Ball are fifty dollars. It’s a fund-raiser and, believe me, we need the funds. It’s Tuesday.”