“Yes,” said Clara, going over to the coffeemaker. “Lucille was telling me all about it.”
“Who told you?” asked Jerry of Lucille.
“Ruth.” Lucille gave Jerry a strange look.
“You’re really dripping, honey,” said Clara, looking her daughter up and down. “Go upstairs and put on some warm, dry clothes. Jerry, follow Maggie up and grab some of my husband’s old clothes to wear while we dry yours. I’m sorry you lost your job, but I’m sure you’ll find another one you’ll like even better.”
Maggie started from the room and then stopped. “Mama, did you find Michael?”
“I found him. I can’t tell anybody where he is and that includes you, but I found him. He’s thinking about giving himself up, but he wants me to call the assistant district attorney’s office first and find out what kind of charges he’s looking at.”
“Well, the charge would be murder, wouldn’t it, Mama?”
“But the question is if he could plea out for manslaughter.”
“It wasn’t an accident, Mama.”
“But he wasn’t in his right mind, honey, and I know in my heart that he didn’t set out to pitch that poor boy out the window.”
“We don’t set out to do a lot of things we end up doing,” said Jerry philosophically. Then he and Maggie left the kitchen.
After they were out of earshot, Clara said to Lucille, “Don’t say it. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Say what?”
“That those boys are bad eggs. I know they’re bad eggs.” Clara put a steaming cup in front of Lucille. “I should make more coffee. You look pale, honey. Are you cold?”
Lucille shook her head. “Ruth said the girls weren’t having anything else to do with them, but then Maggie walks in with this one.”
“Maggie has a forgiving nature,” said Clara. “You’d have to, to have lived with me all these years. Lucille, I don’t like that look on your face. Tell me what’s going on. We’ve all been dealt enough shit over the last several days. Please just tell me something else hasn’t just happened.”
“Maybe nothing’s happened.”
“For God’s sake, Lucille, just say it.”
Lucille nodded. She spoke slowly, choosing her words carefully. “Your son — the one you gave away — his name is Jerry. I mean, that’s the name his adoptive family gave him.”
Clara’s eyes widened. “Are you saying there’s a chance the boy upstairs is mine?”
“Ruth said his name is Castle. That isn’t Caster. It’s very similar, but it isn’t the same.”
“You’re right. And this is Bellevenue, and where did Herb say the family moved to?”
“Little Rock. It could just be a coincidence.”
Clara sat down slowly. “I did see something in his eyes that reminded me of John.” Clara shook it off. “This is silly. We’ll just ask him. Maggie, you and Jerry come downstairs. We need to ask you something.”
Clara got up. She went to the coffeemaker again. Neither woman spoke to the other. A sepulchral silence fell over the room. It was broken by the sound of Maggie and Jerry clumping down the wooden stairs in the other part of the house. Maggie entered the kitchen carrying a plastic laundry basket filled with their wet clothes. She was dressed casually in a pink sweatshirt and jeans. Jerry was wearing clothes that had belonged to Maggie’s father, which Clara had never bothered to throw out: an old Memphis State Tigers T-shirt and frayed khakis. He had slick-combed his wet hair back the way John Barton used to when he and Clara had first started dating in college. Clara suppressed a gasp. Lucille, who remembered John from the old days, looked as if she’d just seen a ghost.
“Your last name, Jerry,” said Clara steadily. “Has it always been Castle?”
Jerry shook his head. “It used to be Caster. But I hated it. I changed it.”
Clara grabbed the edge of the table. “I have to ask the two of you something,” Clara went on, now anything but emotionally steady. “You have to be very honest with me. Are you having sex?”
Maggie shrieked. “Mama!”
“I have to know.”
“You don’t have to know. And you certainly don’t have to know right in front of Jerry and Ms. Mobr—”
“She does have to know,” interrupted Lucille. “It’s very important. Tell us if the two of you are sleeping together.”
As Maggie hedged, Jerry stepped in. “Yes, we had sex. One time. An hour ago. Out in the tool shed.”
Clara and Lucille exchanged bug-eyed looks of almost comic-book horror. Picking up on this, Jerry made his case: “I’m sure you’ve heard about the game by now, but the game’s over. You have my word. Mags and I — we did it because we wanted to. I wanted to. She wanted to. She’s white and over twenty-one as they say, and she can do whatever she wants to with her own body, so maybe we can all just drop it, okay?”
Maggie gave her mother a cold stare. “What is wrong with you — I mean, what is wrong with you today?”
“Maggie — Oh God. Maggie, Maggie — Oh my dear God.”
Lucille grabbed Clara’s hand for strength. Then she looked up into the quizzical faces of Maggie and Jerry. To Maggie she said, “Honey-girl. Forgive the language, sweetie, but you just screwed your brother.”
Jerry left without speaking a word.
Lucille volunteered to drive a trembling Maggie to the doctor to get her an ECP. As she and Lucille were walking out the door, Maggie said to her mother, “Please be here when I come back.”
“I will, baby. I will.”
By now the rain had let up and the skies had partially cleared. There was more bad weather headed this way the forecasters said, but not until tomorrow. Jerry got in the car and drove toward Lucky Aces to clean out his locker and pick up his last check. He took a wrong turn and had to double back.
He nearly ran over a dog.
Ruth had made up her mind. Earlier that afternoon, she’d discussed the whole matter with Maggie on the patio. Under a thick canopy of gathering rainclouds, the two drank Frescas and ate Bugles and bean dip, and Ruth had decided this was a good time — given all that had happened — for her to make a major change in her life. She told Maggie about the very last conversation she’d had with Cain. It was over coffee at Harvey Joe’s on the square. Cain had announced to Ruth that he’d decided to make a big change with his own life: he was going to Los Angeles to see if he could get a job working in movies or television or something. All his life he’d loved old movies and wanted to be a movie director.
“But you have to pay your dues,” he’d told Ruth. “You have to start at the bottom and work your way up. I’m young. I’ve got time.”
“What about Pat?” asked Ruth.
Cain had laughed, his eyes registering warm thoughts about the man he loved. “I have this fantasy that I become a big Hollywood director and then I bring Pat out to the coast and ‘discover’ him and he becomes the next Chris O’Donnell.”
“That shouldn’t be your only motivator.”
“Of course not. It’s just one of ’em. So instead of being a casino cocktail waitress, you should do what everybody else in Hollywood does who’s waiting for their big break — you should wait tables on Rodeo Drive. You can slip your screenplays into the briefcases of Hollywood executives when they aren’t looking.”
“How do you know I’d ever want to write movies?”
“You like to write — to write stories, right? Writing film scripts is a way to write stories and get paid obscene amounts of money for them.”