I could feel the warm rush of blood to my face and a pain in my gut as if Bobby had punched me with his pitching arm, hard. Sadie’s mouth was open in a perfect circle.
We’d never been provided details of the crash. In the years since, I’ve thought dozens of times about looking up the story in the Fort Worth newspaper archive to see whether the facts matched Bobby’s story. I never did.
“Shut up, Bobby,” I said furiously. “Just shut the hell up.”
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Sadie’s little body was dry heaving, bent over.
Bobby being Bobby, he couldn’t shut up, and I was too busy holding Sadie’s hair back to stop him.
“Your Granny never touched those cards again,” he persisted. “They had ducks on ’em, I think. I heard she burned ’em in a witch’s ceremony.”
I took a threatening step forward and Bobby did what he did best. He ran.
Granny turned the peaches Sadie and I gathered that day into twelve pretty jars of jam, but that batch always tasted bitter to me.
CHAPTER 9
I turned the key over in my hand, grateful for the four-letter imprint on one side: “BOWW.” Otherwise, the search for a mysterious safe deposit box somewhere in the behemoth state of Texas-or maybe anywhere in the forty-eight contiguous states-could have swept us on a useless, consuming journey.
Instead, it was almost too easy. Our search took approximately thirty seconds of old-fashioned thumbing through the Yellow Pages. There it was, a discreet ad in the bottom right corner of page 41. Bank of the Wild West, 320 West Third Street.
Quaint. I’d never noticed it once in all my years of traipsing around downtown Fort Worth. It certainly wasn’t an institution I ever heard Daddy or Wade mention. What reason would Mama have to use it?
“Mom, we’ve got to go,” Maddie said, tugging on her arm. “It’s almost three.”
“We’re registering for school today,” Sadie told me apologetically. “The M through Z’s start signing in at three-thirty. And we’re wallpapering her locker with peace-sign paper and buying a Taylor Swift lunchbox. It’s been a long-standing date. Maybe we could go to the bank tomorrow. I don’t think we’ll be back by the time the bank closes.”
She hesitated at the door. “So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to the bank.”
I desperately didn’t want to go by myself. To open a box of Mama’s secrets in a strange bank without someone to catch me when the earth shifted. But, even more than that, I didn’t want to wait. Or involve Sadie and Maddie unnecessarily. I needed this to be over as quickly and cleanly as possible.
“Tommie, are you sure? You don’t look… like you feel good.”
I knew she was thinking about the lavender. Wondering if her tough, fear-no-bull big sister was going the way of her patients.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “I’ll pick up the stuff, dump it in a bag, and bring it back here. We’ll open up everything together tonight.”
Forty-five minutes later, an assistant bank manager quickly put that thought to death. Ms. Sue Billington strode over when I stepped into the Bank of the Wild West as if she were on a mission to sell me the latest Buick. She was dressed in a JC Penney uniform: navy blue two-piece suit, starched white shirt, suntan hose, and black Easy Spirit pumps. I saw a bulge on the left side near her size 12 waist. She was packing.
She also carried invisible red tape, which she had been wrapping around and around my head for the last seven minutes. We glared at each other across her shiny, glass-topped desk, empty of everything but a computer, a phone, a pen, and a spanking-new empty yellow legal pad.
Her voice was breathy, sweet, patronizing. I stared at her mouth, a leathery pink purse, the lines around it creased from an overgenerous application of Maybelline foundation a couple of shades too dark, maybe in an effort to match the suntan hose.
The little mouth kept saying versions of “No way.”
“I’m her daughter,” I tried again. I slid my driver’s license back at her, leaving a smudgy trail on the glass. “I’m her guardian. My sister and I share control of all her legal matters. I have the key to her safe deposit box in my hand.”
“Please lower your voice, ma’am. I heard you the first time and the second time.” She spoke slowly, reminding me of the Sunday School teacher who’d slapped me with a name tag that said “Sinner” after I’d raised my hand and suggested hell might not exist. I think I tried to pronounce the word “conceptual” to no avail. Granny was big on jump-starting our vocabularies at a very young age.
“Ms. McCloud, your mother has no other business with this bank. According to our computer”-she paused and tapped the space bar three times-“the box has not been opened for a number of years. We are not privy to any legal authority you may have over Mrs. McCloud’s affairs. You brought no documents with you. You are not listed here as the one person who has permission to open the box.”
“Who is?” I asked impatiently.
“Ms. McCloud, you must know I can’t divulge that. All I know is that your driver’s license says you have the same last name. A common last name, I might add. In this era of identity theft, I would think you would be grateful that we undertake such diligent precautions.”
The truth was, she was right. I knew it. I kicked myself for not talking to Mama’s lawyer before showing up.
“Our father just died,” I persisted.
“I’m real sorry about that,” Sue Billington replied tightly, unmoved. As I stood to go, she beamed a row of snowy veneers at me, probably a month of her salary. She chose that moment to parcel out the piece of information she knew I’d want most.
“You and your sister should really coordinate with your brother, don’t you think? He was here recently asking about the same box. He was much more polite, if I do say so.”
Then she bent, retrieved a paper towel and Windex from under her desk, and, with a businesslike spritz, wiped my fingerprints off the glass and into oblivion.
I slipped on my Maui Jims as I exited the bank into the blinding sun, wondering why people thought sunglasses helped them hide.
I’d never felt more exposed, more vulnerable in my life.
The perfectly innocent new mother pushing a stroller by me right now had no idea I wasn’t staring at her sleeping baby because he was adorable under his ducky blanket but because I wanted to warn him that life was not going to be what he expected. That it was random and unforgiving. Forget Daddy’s death, Mama’s dementia, their apparent lies. Tuck’s death alone proved that.
A fresh wave of grief rolled over me. For Daddy? Or Tuck? I blinked back tears.
Who could be impersonating Tuck? Why?
The man in a suit wrestling with an overstacked Subway sandwich on the bench across the street had no idea that I wondered, Is it you? Are you pretending to be my dead brother? Are you watching me?
Get out of your head, my psychologist brain advised. Do something.
The sandwich guy tossed what was left of his early dinner in the trash and wandered up the street to report back in either at his boring office job or to a goon in a cowboy hat and a black vehicle.
I took over his spot and dialed up W. A. Masters, our family lawyer. A brilliant legal mind and an old University of Texas buddy of my grandfather’s, W.A. didn’t use office technology invented after the electric pencil sharpener-certainly not a cell phone. His equally ancient secretary, Marcia, promised to hunt him down the old-fashioned way, walking over to Riscky’s, a barbecue joint and his favorite place to drink a tall glass of iced tea with four Sweet’N Lows in the late afternoon while he sorted through the next day’s round of court appointments.