Prosky, the wiseass, smirked. “You watch a lot of TV, Eunice? You saw Miss MacGowen on TV?”
She nodded.
“You like the show?”
“The officers put it on. I like ‘Wheel of Fortune.’”
That was as noncommittal an answer as I’d ever heard.
Prosky said, “Miss MacGowen has some questions for you, Eunice. About your son.”
“Which one?” she asked.
“How many have you?” I asked.
She answered by raising one shoulder. Did she not know, or wasn’t she saying?
“Ronald Miller,” I said.
“I think I used to know a guy named Ronald Miller. Tweaker. Big-time tweaker.” She tilted her chin up and looked at me down her nose. “I think he died.”
“A tweaker, meaning he used crack cocaine?”
She nodded. “A tweaker.”
“Did you tweak?”
After a quick glance at Prosky, she said, “On the advice of my attorney, I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege.”
Prosky laughed out loud. “Eunice, honey, you’re already in here for the rest of your life. What more do think they can do to you? Go ahead, answer the lady’s question, for chrissake. She’s trying to help your son.”
Looking askance at me she said, “Yeah, I used.”
“Were you using when you were pregnant with Ronald?”
The question seemed to throw her.
“Let’s try it this way,” I said. “When did you start using?”
“High school, like everybody.”
“Were there times when you were clean?”
“Yeah. Sometimes, when I was incarcerated I couldn’t get high. Sometimes.”
“But even on the inside you could usually get your hands on something,” Prosky said.
“Usually.”
I looked around the yard, at all the little family gatherings. “What about here?”
Prosky touched my arm. “Wrong question. If Eunice answers that one she could be sent to a punishment unit. I’ll tell you, though, there’s always something available; these people are like walking chemical laboratories. Bath salts, hand sanitizer, they’ll try anything.”
“Hand sanitizer?” I’d heard about people snorting bath salts, but Purell?
“You put salt in it,” Eunice said. “Separates the alcohol.”
I put that nugget away for later. I asked, “When you were pregnant with Ronald, were you using?”
She shrugged, saying she couldn’t remember. I had brought a couple of photographs to show her, but had to leave them in Reception. Not that it mattered. I realized early in the conversation that she had no idea who Sly was, and probably who or where her other children might be.
We gave her the bag of quarters and she went over to the vending machines to spend them. She must have missed school the day they taught about waiting one’s turn. She elbowed away the kids who were between her and her heart’s desire.
“Impulse control problems?” I said as I watched kids scatter out of her way; no one came to their aid.
“You could say that,” Prosky said. “Get what you want?”
“I think I got all I’m going to.”
Chapter 9
“Want nail polish, Mom?” I’d trimmed my mom’s toenails and was smoothing them with an emery board.
“You have nail polish?” she asked, surprised by the notion that I might have such a frivolity on hand. I had brought the clothes I was wearing to Jean-Paul’s reception, and changed at Mom’s apartment.
“Casey went through a nail polish phase in high school,” I said, referring to my daughter who was a sophomore at UCLA. “I brought some of hers.”
“What colors?” Seemed that Mom could warm to the idea.
“Black and green and something called Vampire.” I held them out to her. “If my daughter went through a pastel moment, I missed it.”
Mom laughed, a lovely deep-throated laugh that I always loved to hear.
Still holding out the tiny bottles of polish, I asked, “So, what will it be?”
“Maybe when I can wear sandals again we’ll think about painting my nails.”
With conscious effort to raise her leg using the muscles of her thigh as she had been taught by her physical therapist, she lifted her foot off my lap, gingerly bent her new knee and set the foot on the floor with only the smallest wince.
“Thank you, darling. You’ll never get me to go home again if you keep spoiling me like this.”
“That would suit me just fine,” I said. “I’ve loved having you close by, Mom. I worry about you rattling around alone in that big house.”
“I know.” She leaned forward and inspected her feet. “Maybe green nails for spring, do you think?”
Meaning, the subject of her moving out of her house in Berkeley was closed. I understood; some essence of everyone who had ever passed through still filled its rooms; her children, her friends, the husband she loved. But the house was big, and old, and needed constant maintenance. It was a growing burden. On both of us.
When she decided to have a knee replacement done, for my convenience she had agreed to have the surgery performed at a hospital in Thousand Oaks, near my home in Malibu Canyon. Also for both our convenience, she rented a pretty, sunny, furnished apartment in Thousand Oaks at a place called Mountain Aire Villas, which she preferred to call the Decrepit Arms and Legs because of its proximity to the rehab facility where she went for therapy every weekday morning.
I enjoyed being able to see her every day and to do little things for her that she had never allowed me to do in the past. The time we were spending together was important to her, too.
The year before had been my annus horribilis. In the spring I lost my wonderful husband, Mike. And in the fall I learned that the woman who raised me, Mom, was not my biological mother. The outing of that particular truth made a difference in our relationship, but it’s difficult to describe just how. In some ways, that discovery brought us closer. How many women would take in the product of a husband’s affair and raise that child-me-with all love and care? I always knew she was an extraordinary woman, but just how extraordinary, I was yet learning.
Still looking at her toes, Mom said, “Thank you, dear.”
“We can’t take you to the French consul’s reception with ragged toenails, can we?”
“I suppose not.”
She caught my hand and drew me down to the arm of her chair. Still holding my hand, she said, “Margot, dear, after what happened last night, it would be perfectly all right with me if we sent our regrets to Jean-Paul.”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “How often does an invitation like this come along?”
“Rarely. But you don’t need to be brave for me. How perfectly awful that must have been for you. If you prefer…”
She held up her hand, at a loss to think of something that I might prefer than the French consul general’s party for a pianist at the beach in Malibu. I couldn’t think of anything.
I kissed her forehead. “Thank you, but I’m fine. I hardly knew the man. I am sorry for what happened to him, sorrier still that I’m the unlucky soul who found him.”
I gave her hand a last squeeze and stood up. “So, are you ready for your dress?”
Smiling again, she turned enough in her chair to look at the dress hanging on her wardrobe door.
My mother, an old leftist, generally would not allow herself to take pleasure in material possessions. But that dress… For that dress she made an exception. We had seen it draped on a mannequin in the window of a very chichi boutique during her first outing after the surgery. She was still using a walker then, and in far greater pain than she would let on. More than anything, she probably wanted to find a place to sit down instead of walking the distance the doctor ordered. But when she saw the dress she seemed to forget about any discomfort and stopped to admire it. I had never seen her do that before, stop to admire a dress.