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PART III
GLADYS

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79

TREY DIDN’T GIVE two shits about the censure his grandparents directed at him, and he blew up at his grandfather when he was summoned to their massive library after he’d personally taken Marina’s baggage to her room, sat her in a plump chair to nurse a grape pop, and knelt in front of her to rub her feet until she went to sleep.

Then he’d stormed downstairs to give them what-for. “‘Do what you have to do,’” Trey barked, pacing in front of both his angry grandparents, not giving them a chance to start in on him again. “Remember that? The second I told you her name, your scruples vanished.”

That shut them up.

“‘Do what you have to do,’ because for some reason I still don’t know, you had a hard-on for Scarritt too. So now you get to take care of this girl because I am the villain here, which I fully admit—”

“Nothing we could’ve said or done would have made you stop!”

“That’s absolutely true. You are not to blame for what I did, not in any way. But you wanted me to, so every time you look at her, know she’s about to say hi to God, you think about the fact that this was what you wanted too. Stew in it, old man. And so help me, if you let her die, I will put a bullet in your head before your sugars crystallize in your arteries.”

Grandmother Susanna gasped. “You wouldn’t!”

Trey snarled at her. “Try me. I’ve known her a lot longer than I’ve known you. Shit, for all I know you’ll let her do it just to get whatever revenge you need.”

“Let me explain!” she pled. “Please, Trey, let me explain.”

“Explain to me why you’re gonna let Marina die?” he challenged.

Her color dropped. “No,” she rasped. “No, I will do everything in my power to keep that from happening. I can’t— Not again—”

“Again?!”

“Scarritt conned the daughter of one of my very good friends in Chicago,” Grandfather Elliott said quickly. “Good Catholic girl. Sicilian.”

That stopped Trey dead in his tracks.

“My friend,” Grandmother Susanna began. “Adriana. We were eleven when we became friends. My father started doing business with her father. Our families became close. Went to the same parish, went to Mass together. Our fathers approved of our husbands.”

“So your daddy wasn’t any more clean than hers.”

Grandfather Elliott snorted and Grandmother Susanna gave him a watery smile. “Adriana and I started having babies at the same time. Our children grew up together, so when I speak of her children, I’m speaking of mine.”

Trey nodded.

“I do not know how Carlotta met Scarritt—he went by Truesdell there—but suffice it to say, he conned her into sneaking out at night, she got pregnant, her father was furious because she wouldn’t name the baby’s father and his soldiers couldn’t find out who it was. My friend asked us to take Carlotta in and keep her away from her father and her beau.

“Elliott and I had a plan. We let Carlotta think we trusted her not to sneak out. Elliott followed her out one night, found her with Scarritt begging him to marry her, to take her away, to not leave her alone with a baby and two furious fathers. He said some very cruel things I don’t want to remember. Scarritt ran when Elliott showed himself. Elliott brought Carlotta home and she stayed with us until the baby was born and adopted out. As soon as the baby was gone, she … killed herself.”

Trey couldn’t breathe. “She—”

“Yes,” she croaked, looking out the window, her expression full of regret and grief. “That’s why— I want—”

She began to weep. Softly.

“Another chance.” Then he remembered something else. “You believe suicides go to hell, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Grandfather Elliott said gruffly, then cleared his throat.

“Why didn’t you go after him then?”

“He gave Carlotta a fake name. We couldn’t track him down. We suspected when he was gaining prominence as an evangelist. We kept an eye on him and a few other men we suspected. Then his congregation ran him out. He left before we could get him and didn’t know where he’d gone, and we still weren’t sure he was the right man anyway.”

“Oh.”

“Meanwhile,” Grandmother Susanna murmured. “Adriana’s husband, Carlotta’s father, had gotten himself into a bind with the Black Hand and he was summoned to New York.”

“Oh, God,” Trey groaned.

“Not even the bosses in the Chicago outfit could save him. He went, as one does. Adriana and the rest of her children came to live with us, but she wasted away. Her children stayed with us as family until they flew away to start their own families. We decided to let it go when we moved here to get out of the Outfit.”

Trey took a deep breath and looked away.

“I have done very few things I regret,” Grandfather Elliott rumbled. “One of them was driving your father away. Another was not getting to Truesdell when I had the chance, whether he was or wasn’t the right man. Now, I add encouraging you to avenge Carlotta on an innocent girl, not thinking of her.”

“I was no better,” Grandmother Susanna rasped and looked away, patting her eye with a handkerchief. “It was easy before we met her.”

It was always easier with someone you didn’t know. Just a name. Trey didn’t carry out hits on people he didn’t know.

“For what it’s worth,” Trey said, “Mrs. Scarritt’s no better than he is.” He went on to describe Marina’s eviction and subsequent punish­ment the missus received for said eviction. His grandparents were in shock. “I can’t fault Scarritt too much because he did treat Marina well even though Gladys wasn’t his and his way of getting rid of Marina was decent. Or it would’ve been if I’d been on the up’n’up, I mean, but he doesn’t see himself as able to be conned so he didn’t check. Or he didn’t care enough to check.”

“But you married Marina,” Grandmother Susanna said earnestly. “Scarritt abandoned Carlotta.”

“I wouldn’t have married Marina if I didn’t already want to,” he pointed out. “And I brought her to you because she’s about ready to pull the trigger.”

“But you feel you have no reason to trust us,” she said weakly.

“No,” Trey said flatly. “I don’t. But I have no other option at the moment.”

“And … the Mormon family? The one who took her in?”

“First, it’s too close to me for her comfort. Second, Albright’ll kill me, an’ that ain’t hyperbole.”

“Hy-PER-bow-lee.”

“Goddammit!” Trey barked, too angry to be embarrassed by his grandmother’s automatic, absentminded correction.

“I’m sorry, Trey,” she whispered miserably.

“I ain’t sayin’ I don’t deserve it, ’cuz I do, but I ain’t checkin’ out on my kid the way my daddy checked out on me.”

“You shut your filthy mouth, boy!” Grandfather Elliott snapped, attempting to charge up out of the chair, but his bulk wouldn’t allow it. “His spirit was strong enough to weather it. His body wasn’t. You can believe what you want but you will not speak of my son that way again or I will thrash you.”

“You come on up outta’at chair an’ try it, ol’ man,” Trey sneered. “I told her she’s free to go, but I’ll take the kid so she don’t have the responsibility, and so long as I know she’s alive and happy, I’ll stay so far away from her it’ll be like she never met me. She has money and a car, nothin’ draggin’ her heels, the world wide open to her. I told her she was welcome to stay here as long as she wanted, although she’s gotta be turned out eventually—”

“No,” Grandfather Elliott muttered. “As long as we live, she has a home here. And the baby, if she wishes to keep it.”

“Thank you much,” Trey said, weariness dropping on his shoulders, so he dropped his body into a chair just as heavily. He slouched and closed his eyes.

“Trey,” Grandmother Susanna said softly.

“What.”

“Do you love her?”

“I don’t know what that really feels like, ’cuz I’ve been burned before. I like her a lot. I like her company. I like livin’ with her, can’t wait to come home to her. I like bein’ best pals—that’s what we call it. I call it. Her gal pal’s got top billing. If that’s love, then yeah. Generally, we get along like gangbusters. Until other cats start eyeballin’ her and I see red.”

“That isn’t her fault.”

“No, but the world I live in, women like attention an’ they work to get it an’ sometimes they reward a cat if he does it good enough, an’ that’s what I’m used to an’ I know Marina’s desperate for someone to tell her she’s pretty ’cuz I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“’Cuz ‘pretty’ don’t mean nothin’. It’s like cotton candy, all fluff, no flavor. To my way o’ thinkin’, ‘pretty’ is an insult. What’s that sayin’? Uh … damning with faint praise. Yeah. She caught my eye. That should be enough, but it ain’t. She gotta hear that word, ‘pretty.’”

“Tell her!” Grandfather Elliott barked. “I don’t give a good goddamned what you think of it. The rest of the world thinks it’s a compliment, and it’s not going to conform to your twisted logic no matter how much you want it to. She is pretty to you—and other men, apparently—in a way that is unique, but it still boils down to pretty and quit hashing a word just because you’re trying to convince yourself how clever you are.”

Trey sighed heavily and shoved his fingers in his eyeballs. “I can’t now,” he muttered. “She’ll think I’m lying.”

There was silence in the room but for the grandfather clock ticking in the corner, the soft swish of curtains floating with the breeze, and birds singing just out the window.

“What do you need us to do?” Grandmother Susanna murmured after a while. “Something special, I mean. That will set her on her feet, make her feel her life is worth living.”

“I dunno,” Trey said wearily. “She wants to have the chance to be a child. She never was. She was allowed to pretend she was a teenager a couple hours every day with Dot, but not within the Scarritts’ sight. Crotchety old bags who don’t like kids. You know. She wants— She wants the kind of family Dot has. Shit, she wants to be Dot. Make sense?”

“Yes. But she is not Dot, so we’ll plan out the best way to give her what she wants.”

“She may get tired of it,” Grandfather Elliott rumbled. “I doubt folks raised as adults from the cradle, who’ve had total freedom, money, and a car for the last several months, will like being treated as children.”

“I’ve been pushing her to go to college so she can go to law school—” His grandmother gasped. Trey didn’t know what that meant. “So between that and the house and house books, ropin’ her into my business, I’ve been doing my part to make her grow up before she’s ready.”

“Well! Then. Go on home to your real wife and maybe think about how to get out from under her.”

Trey opened his eyes and looked at his grandfather. “I’m lookin’ for a buyer,” he said warily, still rattled by the idea that the speak was his wife, and Marina the side piece. His grandfather looked shocked. “I ain’t attached like that, but Marina don’t see past tomorrow, much less any further down’a road. She was raised to be a caretaker to the end of her mama’s days, an’ she didn’t even cotton to that much until Dot said somethin’. To her, life is one long round o’ housekeepin’. She got no goals, no plans. Me, I got an eye on ten, twenty, thirty years from now. Speak ain’t my wife. It’s a springboard. But she don’t understand it. She ain’t ever gonna understand it. One reason I’m pushin’ law school. Make her think about her future, somethin’ of her own to grab onto.”

“Oh,” Grandmother breathed. “Trey, that’s … ”

“Stupid, I know,” he sneered.

“No,” she shot back testily, “lovely.”

“Yeah, well, lovely or not, every time I tell her she can do it someone comes along to tell her she can’t. Lack o’ smarts, female, married, mama— An’ she thinks I’m in love with my speak, like I’mma expect her to be everything plus law school while I go off an’ see to my own interests, which she can’t see are her interests too. See what I’m fightin’ here? And I just put the nail in that coffin.”

“She needs a breather,” Grandfather said. “I see. We’ll do our best.”

79

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