Sing

CHAPTER 14.

MONICA

I took a white-knuckled drive up the five freeway, past all signs of civilization, past subdivision after subdivision, up a bifurcated mountain and back down it, the bestfuckingthingever drinking gas like a frat boy at a kegger. Everything was dead, flat, dry. Then it hit. Castaic. Burned dry. All the garage doors faced the street like mouths stretched into a closed grimace, and front yards that had not been flattened by concrete were neglected and brown or tamed and green, with sad blowup snowmen and fat, jolly Santas placed wherever they landed, scorched by the sun, smiling in the unforgiving landscape. Even the mountains ringing the town looked compacted under the weight of the sky.

Or maybe that was just me.

Big girl pants.

Maria Souza-Faulkner had two settings. Park, which meant she was passive, sweet and slept seventeen hours a day, and Fourth Gear, which meant she was in full on rage with an eye to wiping the world of sin. Kevin had suggested she was bipolar. I’d laughed, not because he was so wrong, but because she’d never do something as sensible as see a doctor to figure out why she was crazy. Dad had loved her through all of it, when he was around, so obviously, there was no need to fix what was functioning just fine.

The house, a one story beige box with a two car garage and a front door set back twenty feet behind it, had fallen out of repair. Dad wouldn’t have allowed it, and spent his time in the states painting, plastering and gardening. The young citrus he’d planted had a few leaves on the twiggy branches and the front lawn looked like an infield. I didn’t know how long she’d been stuck in park, but judging from the look of the place, it had been at least through the beginning of the summer.

My mother answered the door in a long polyester thing that fell over her curves in a way that was modest, but sexual at the same time. Like me, she had a body that was hard to hide, and unlike me, she kept trying. She was a Brazilian beauty my dad had met on some unholy peacetime mission. Five eleven. Early fifties. Darker skin than I’d been given, but the same dark eyes and hair. Catholic as only a South American girl can be. And that was the rub. She believed in the infallibility of the Pope and the virginity of Mary long after anyone else with a brain had moved on.

“Hi, ma.”

She hugged me warmly, and after a second, I hugged her back, but she held on longer than I thought she would. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. We’d just forgive each other. She moved out of the way and I stepped inside.

She saw the car. My immediate reaction was to make excuses for it. It was borrowed. I was returning it. I didn’t ask for it. Then I decided to shut up. I didn’t come to fight and I didn’t come to lie.

She closed the door without saying anything.

The house was hermetically sealed against the desert heat and dust, and the artificially cooled air was stale and thin. Everything was beige. Dad had hated beige, but my mother insisted, and when she insisted, she got what she wanted.

Well, everything permanent was beige. It seemed like whatever had been moved in was a color, and a bright one. African masks and Mexican blankets. A hand-carved teak partition blocked a window draped in Ikat fabric. Stacks of travel books stood in front of the stuffed bookcases. It looked like my mother had gotten the shit stamped out of her passport.

“You came,” she said.

“Yeah.” The couch had a pillow on one end with a case that matched the bed sheet balled up at the end of it. She was sleeping on it, probably regularly.

“I don’t think we can save the house,” she said.

I had a speech prepared, so I spit it out. “I didn’t come because of the house. It’s not that I can’t move or get an apartment or whatever. I just find it hard to believe you’d let the place go. I got worried about you.”

“Oh, Monya,” she said, calling me by my grandmother’s name. “All this way for nothing.” She put her hand on the doorknob.

This was her. She’d kick me out and waste away rather than admit there was a problem. And though she seemed healthy, if older, I could tell sunshine and butterflies weren’t the order of the day.

“Come on, Mom. I’m here. Make me some tea.”

Her hand slipped from the knob. She glanced out the window as she turned, to the white Jaguar in the street, as if she didn’t trust it and didn’t like it. As she walked me to the kitchen, I saw more third world knicknakery, and clean, beige rectangles spotting the walls. It wasn’t until she indicated my seat that I realized what those rectangles represented. They were where the pictures of Dad had been.

And as she put a copper pot on the stove and got out a mug with I LOST MY HEART IN BELIZE scripted across it, it all became clear. The tchotchke. The missing pictures of Dad. The depression. The multiple mortgages.

“Still waitressing?” she asked.

“Yep. You still doing the books for the church?”

“What’s his name?” she asked, not answering my question. “You didn’t buy that car on a waitresses salary.”

“I don’t make a salary. I make tips.” I paused. What kind of answer was that? That was the answer of a woman ashamed of who she was, and I’d given that up. “His name is Jonathan. I hope we’re not going to argue about it.”

“As long as it’s not that other guy. I didn’t like him.”

“Does yours have a name?”

She didn’t answer, just dicked with some floral canisters that may or may not have been full of expired tea.

“Mom, is there anyone out here you can talk to? The priest? Someone in the choir?”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Is it the rector that dumped you?”

“For the love of all that is holy, Monya. That is—“

“A totally reasonable assumption. Except for the obvious world travel that’s happening. You’re sleeping until afternoon so I know you’re not working for him. You can’t talk to anyone, and all your friends are there.”

“I don’t want to.”

The teapot whistled.

“I’ll be gone in a few hours. So you might as well tell me.”

She put the mug of hot liquid in front of me and left the room. I started to follow, but saw her open a door in the china cabinet and crouch down, rummaging through old dishes and cookbooks, until she came up with a brown paper expanding file.

I sat back down, and she slapped it in front of me.

“This is what you came for. All my paperwork. Take it. No, I don’t want to lose the house. I love that house as much as you do. If I didn’t love it, I would have sold it and kicked you to the street for being an indolent, disrespectful bitch two years ago.”

“Don’t hold back, ma. Tell me how you really feel.”

She didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t laugh and forgive me either. That was it. That was what she’d wanted to say. And it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I didn’t get crushed under the weight of her disapproval.

But she was right. Despite my initial protestations, I wanted to save the house. I slid the folder to me.

“I’m sorry about whatever his name is,” I said. “It looks like you guys had a good time together.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.”

I unspooled the string from the felt disk and flipped open the envelope.

I don’t know anything about finance. Numbers only interested me insofar as they related to sound vibrations, but once I spread the papers across the table and stacked them into a narrative I could get my head around, one thing was abundantly clear.

My mother had blown about three quarters of a million dollars travelling the globe.

The house I lived in had been purchased for 95K in the mid nineties, and paid in full twenty years later with my dad’s life insurance. But Echo Park had been in the nascent stages of a renaissance when my parents had bought it, and since then, more and more people like Dr. Thorensen had moved in next to artists, Hispanic families and gang members.

According to a bank located in Colorado, my little house on a hill was worth six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I knew this, because my mother had cashed out every dime, and then some, piggy backing mortgages and loans. She’d attempted to squeeze almost another hundred grand in equity out of the thing when I’d had those permits opened. As if there were going to be actual improvements.

She’d bailed on her job in February. She’d been at that church since I was in high school, and had a salary good enough to make all her obligations, if barely, but without that job, it all tumbled on her. I imagined the gentleman in question was the cause of her slide.

“You’re a goddamn genius, ma.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“You know you’ll never pay this back?”

“They won’t miss it. It’s a bank.”

“It’s about four banks. Mom, Christ—“

“Mouth.”

“I can’t even get my head around what to do.” I collected the papers. I wanted to slam and bang them to illustrate my annoyance, but they only made shuffling sounds. “Can you just tell me what happened? Because you didn’t raise me to do stuff like this.”

She put her fists on her hips. “Like what?”

“Stealing. This is stealing.”

“Not if I let them have that house.”

“It’s not worth seven hundred thousand dollars.”

“The appraisers said it was, so it is. That’s what things are worth. What experts say they’re worth. People like us, we’re nothing. Our opinions don’t mean anything. And you agree. In your heart you know it. You think the house isn’t worth anything because you love it and if you love it, it’s garbage right? Well, how much would you pay for it? Huh? How much for your father’s trees? How much for the porch your father and I sat on after you were in bed?”

“Mom—“

“How much for the kitchen where I cooked for you? How much for the side door you snuck into after curfew as if I didn’t know? Or the bathroom where I miscarried two babies? How much is it worth, Monya? Even that cracked foundation your father promised to fix a hundred times before he shipped himself across the world. That house was where I waited for him. Where he wasn’t when I found out I had cancer? How much would a stranger pay for those years? If my life there wasn’t worth seven hundred thousand dollars, what was my life worth?”

I couldn’t take it any more. Her face was red and strained. Her voice had his a crescendo, and I had been a neglectful, indolent bitch. I bolted up from the chair and put my arms around her and let her cry.

“It’s okay, ma. We’ll fix it.”

“I can’t. I tried everything.”

“I have friends who are lawyers. I can—“

I could have them look at the paperwork, maybe explain the situation. But I stopped myself. Jonathan was going to offer to buy the house, no doubt, and I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want to go down a road where he started bailing out my family, then my friends. I didn’t want him to trade Jessica’s financial distress for mine. I could soothe my mother for the moment, but in the end, we’d have to let the house go. I’d tell Jonathan I was ok with it. Make it out like it wasn’t a big deal.

A call came in. Still holding my mother, I slipped the phone out of my pocket. Margie. I missed it by a second and put it back in my pocket while it went to voicemail.

“Let me see what I can do,” I said. She sniffed and stood up straight.

“There’s nothing to do. I’m sorry you have to move.”

“I’ll live.” I waved it off, but I knew I wasn’t convincing. So I changed the subject. “I should have come around sooner.”

“Yes. You should have.”

“I’m sorry.”

A text blooped. My mother and I looked at each other expectantly.

“This the man with the car?” The tone did not bode well for an intelligent conversation. If I had just learned to stop calling myself a whore, my mother hadn’t. She was in a depressive phase but that could change on a dime.

“No it’s his sister, probably.”

I looked. It was a text from Margie, as I expected.

—Where the fuck are you?—

The next one came immediately after.

—He’s bleeding into his chest. Bad suture ripped tissue—

It took me sixty seconds to say goodbye to my mother, promise her I’d do my best for her, scoop up the papers, and get in the car.