The Book of CarolSue Read online

  “Produce the parents,” I said, nice and calm.

  “This is part of my church work,” he retorted. “I’m doing it for my church people!”

  “Bless your heart,” I went back at him, but still breezy. “Church members have last names and they don’t just disappear. Who are the parents and where are they? You’re not telling the truth about something.”

  I decided to risk it, to call his bluff. “Well, maybe Gus ought to be involved now. I can apply to be her foster mother. He’d know how I should do that.” I could see Louisa off to the side, and of course, she’s freaking out. I held up my hand to stop her. “Don’t worry, Sister,” I said. “I’ll move out with the baby if you don’t want us here.”

  I hadn’t really thought that through. I wanted Gracie for sure, but what if Gus had to take her away before she could be placed with me and then the foster placement people said I was too old? Still, I wasn’t going to give her up.

  At that point, the whole family scene had seriously deteriorated. Gary, who’s big, not exactly in good shape and was sitting on his butt, tried to rotate around to pick up Gracie, but I saw what he intended and swooped in to scoop her up. I put her over my shoulder and patted her back. “I’m the one she knows, Gary. I’m the one who loves and takes care of her. We’re bonded.”

  “Don’t call Gus,” he said. “Just don’t.”

  “CarolSue,” my sister started to say.

  Whatever it was, I didn’t want to hear it. I carried Gracie into the house and stayed there until Gary left. When I went back outside, Louisa and I just looked at each other in tacit agreement to keep our own counsel, although I’m sure she had a lot to say. We ate a late supper because we stayed outside as long as we could, in that exhausted silence after a dispute, when no one can stand to open the subject again and each lets it lie, hoping against hope that it will die and bury itself. Knowing it won’t. “No mosquitos,” Louisa observed, and she was right. Just the crickets’ warning song, while all I wanted was to hold the baby in that golden hour and stop the earth’s turning toward winter.

  * * *

  Couldn’t we have predicted that would be the evening—fortunately after Gracie was in bed—that we’d hear a car turn onto the gravel driveway? I guess I thought that only so much gets messed up in one day. I was wrong. Louisa checked the front window. “Oh my God, I think it’s Gus!” she shrieked.

  “What is he doing here?”

  “How should I know? Pick up the baby stuff. I’ll run outside and meet him.”

  “Maybe you can nap out in one of the lawn chairs,” I snapped. “Hasn’t he ever heard of calling first?”

  “For God’s sake—”

  “Stay in the dark. You’re a mess.” I shot this at her as she went out the front door. I was frantic, squatting to pick up the detritus that ends up all around a living room when there’s a baby in residence. Rattles, baby books, a receiving blanket. Oh, there on the side table was her empty bottle. Oh Lord, Jessie’s toys, too. She loved to snatch Gracie’s, so we’d bought her some of her own and they kept trading. I made a run for our bedroom and dropped an armload there, saluting Glitter Jesus on the way out. I wondered what he’d have to say about all this. I was clearing Gracie’s things from the bathroom when I heard the front door open and Gus’s boom of a voice in the living room. I crept down the hall with the baby tub and bath toys. I’d not made it to the kitchen.

  “CarolSue has a bad headache, so we need to keep our voices down,” Louisa said.

  “Oh, that’s a shame,” Gus bellowed.

  I went into the living room after depositing my load from the bathroom into the baby’s room and shutting the door. She was still sleeping soundly. “Keep her asleep,” I instructed Glitter Jesus. “Help me out here.”

  “Oh hi, Gus,” I said. “This is a surprise. I didn’t know you were here. Nice to see you.” What a liar. “I just came out to fix myself some tea. I’m going to bed early. I have a bad headache. Can I fix you two some tea? I’ll be in the kitchen anyway.” I gave Louisa a meaningful look to signal her to keep Gus out of the kitchen so I could clear it.

  Fortunately, Gus had wedged himself into Harold’s old recliner, probably not remembering that he always had trouble getting out of it. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Sorry about that headache. Louisa told me you were under the weather. You makin’ that special tea you girls enjoy? I’ll join you in a cup if you are. Got some fine news to share.”

  “Honey, keep your voice down. Her headache is a migraine and noise makes it worse.” Louisa stood to one side of the recliner and put her hand on Gus’s shoulder tenderly. She was trying to shut him up so he wouldn’t wake the baby.

  “Oh, got it, right,” Gus said, a tenth of a decibel lower. Louisa turned off one of the floor lamps, too, playing up the part. I beat it to the kitchen, snatching the empty bottles out of the drying rack and stashing the canned formula in the cupboard with the baking sheets.

  The tea kettle whistled. I made up a tray, loaded our cups with lemon slices—the fancy version—and honey, and doctored the teapot liberally with the Wild Turkey Louisa always bought in honor of her beloved hens.

  “So what’s your news, Gus?” I said as I carried in the tray. “I’ll join you two long enough to hear that, and then I’ll retire with my tea and give you two some privacy.” What I intended was to be in the bedroom to make sure I was right there if the baby stirred. This was enormously risky, especially if Louisa and Gus napped, which involved an unfortunate soundtrack. Surely Louisa had better sense. Or not.

  “You girls had the news on tonight? If so, you ought to already know!” Gus forgot to keep his voice down in his excitement. Louisa, who’d pulled one of the dining chairs next to the recliner so she wouldn’t be more than six inches from him, good Lord, put a finger to her lips, which he missed entirely.

  “No, honey, we were outside,” she said. “What happened?”

  “That big project with the Feds? It’s over. It’s all over the news. Today. It was immigration raids. I couldn’t tell you before. It’s done, arrested a whole bunch of undocumented, they’re in custody, and our part is over. I got a lot of time off coming. That’s what I had to come tell you.”

  “Oh, honey, that’s great. I mean that you won’t be at work all the time,” Louisa said, and kissed him on the lips. Not a short casual kiss, either. She meant it. “We can celebrate! Cheers to you having time off!” And she raised her cup and clinked it against his. “Isn’t that great, CarolSue?”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Just wonderful.” I’m sure I’ve mentioned my inherited gift for sarcasm. My sister was so caught up with Gus that she had no idea. Charlie would have known right away, though, and it was in moments like those that missing him came over me in a suffocating wave, and whatever I thought I’d set aside was acutely remembered, like the way you remember breathing in the absence of air.

  * * *

  In the bedroom, with Gracie asleep and Glitter Jesus’s red-dot pupils looking like little spots of fire above her night light, I lay on top of the bed, not even thinking for once about taking care of the quilt that Mom had made for Louisa, unable to sleep and not only because of the soundtrack running in the next room. Louisa wanted Gus. I wanted Gracie. Gary wanted something else, but I didn’t know what.

  “Go ahead, Glitter Jesus,” I muttered. “You look like you want to burst into flames and it’s okay by me.”

  Chapter 24

  Gus

  It was the strangest damn thing. He’d been over to Louisa’s to tell her the news, and sure, he could tell she was as happy as he was that the project was finished—at least his department’s part in it, the force magnifiers’ part. And when he’d taken his blue pill last night, she’d called it their personal force magnifier, which they’d both thought was hilarious and then she’d said his force was hugely magnified all the time anyway, and so it had all been great. That wasn’t the strange part. He’d gotten a weird feeling, first that CarolSue didn’t want him there, which
wasn’t entirely new, but then, and this was what he couldn’t really figure out, something had been poking into his butt while he’d been sitting in the recliner, and when Louisa took their cups to the kitchen, he’d gotten up and taken the cushion out, thinking maybe the chair needed to be fixed and he could do it for her. There was a baby rattle jammed back there.

  So he’d pulled it out, and when Louisa came back he showed it to her. She looked weird a minute and then said, “Oh, it’s one of Jessie’s toys.”

  “You got baby toys for the dog?”

  “She likes to chew on them,” Louisa said. She held out her hand for the toy, but before he handed it to her Gus looked at it. No teeth marks.

  “We lost that one before we gave it to her,” Louisa had said, seeing where his eyes had gone, doubtless. She was smart, he’d give her that.

  Still, it made no sense. The Supply Company in town had racks of dog toys, some of them advertised as indestructible chew toys for retrievers, because so many people around here had sporting dogs. Why would Louisa buy a baby toy? It wasn’t like she didn’t have more experience than most with animals. Jessie would have destroyed that thing in a hot minute. Plus, it wouldn’t have been safe for a dog, not with those little plastic beads inside it. Nope, Louisa wasn’t telling him the truth.

  Gus tucked what he knew in a pocket of his mind to think on later. He wasn’t about to spoil his chance to reclaim his crown as the King of Naps by calling his girlfriend a liar. And she wouldn’t lie without reason anyway. He’d figure it out later.

  * * *

  There was one more thing Gus thought he should do, even though technically he didn’t even have to be at work the next day. But with Billy being off, it was hardly wise to leave the station to Jimmy alone anyway, so Gus went in the next morning.

  “What are you doing here?” Connie said from the dispatch area. She had that big hair thing going on. It must take her forever to rat it out like that. Gus didn’t really see the point.

  “Jimmy . . .” Gus said by way of explanation.

  “Gotcha. I woulda called you if anything big . . .”

  “S’okay,” Gus said. “Not stayin’ all day. Got some stuff to check on anyway.”

  Gary had told him that the young woman he was looking for, who’d come to his church for help, might be an undocumented migrant. Rosalina Gonzalez. Or maybe Lopez. Before Gus told Gary that he’d tried and come up empty, so he could be done with it, he’d check the names of the women they’d arrested in the raid. He didn’t imagine many of them were real names, though. All he could do would be to go by the I-9 papers they’d seized, and he’d have to get access to those from the Feds. Claim he wanted to check the list against local wanted names. They’d say immigration took precedence and he’d say, Yeah, yeah, but I can quit lookin’, right? And they’d probably give him the list.

  It took all morning, phone and email, but he was right. It worked. They sent the first list over, the ones that were processed, said the rest would come. The men were being held separately from the women, that was standard. He didn’t have any idea where the kids were. The raid had been daytime, the chicken packing plant—which was a big place. Any kids would have been in daycare or school, wouldn’t they? Maybe there was family in the area, or other migrants who worked somewhere else. Legal immigrants. The raid had been all over the local news. People must have known to get the kids. Women were being held at the county jail, where there’d been enough room. They’d be processed and most deported. That’s what the Feds had said. He and Billy had been perimeter guards. There’d been dogs. Handcuffed men and women led out. Crying. It looked like some were either arguing or begging, but the little he could hear was in English heavily accented and mixed with Spanish, which he didn’t understand. He’d been part of it, yet not. If he’d tried to say what had really happened, he wouldn’t have been able to. He was an American. He was safe. There was comfort in that, he supposed.

  No Rosalina was listed. Gus shrugged, cleaned his glasses on his shirt front, went through his email, read the paper, checked that Jimmy was out being seen, had Connie radio him to write some damn tickets outside town if there are any out-of-state plates over the limit, and told Connie the coffee was too old and smelled bad, could she please make some fresh. He was relieved to have stupid junk to do.

  He took himself to lunch at the café. Margo seated him at a dirty table and took her sweet time clearing it, so he changed his order twice to annoy her. She retaliated by putting pickles on his tuna sandwich and upped the ante by spilling coffee into his saucer, leaving the whipped cream off his pecan pie, and overcharging him on his bill. He won the round by grossly undertipping her and left having thoroughly enjoyed himself. He still couldn’t believe he’d asked her out, though. What had he been thinking?

  He could have called it a day. He had a ridiculous amount of comp time coming, and he’d even put in a half day when he hadn’t needed to, so he looked really good. Maybe he just wanted to tell Gary he’d even checked the names of the undocumented picked up in the raid that was all over the news, and that the person he was looking for had just melted into the shadows and he shouldn’t expect to find her. Happens all the time. Gary should let it go. Gus hoped there wasn’t more to it than what Gary had said, but something about the story bothered him. If Gary was in a mess, then would Gary’s mother end up in it, too?

  So instead of doing the sensible thing and letting well enough alone, he went back to the station. “Just can’t stand to stay away, huh?” Connie said.

  “Some adult’s gotta check the kindergarten.”

  “If you find one, let me know. I’m busy running this place.”

  He liked Connie. She was smart, stayed calm, and had a sense of humor. People didn’t know how important the dispatcher was, and he wished his other two were nearly as good at it as she was. When Jimmy had had to fill in for a couple of hours, he hadn’t had a clue how to talk a scared kid down. Connie wasn’t bad to look at either, except for the big hair thing. Looked like a storm cloud about to dump a heap of mud on her head. He hoped she was done having kids so he wouldn’t have to put up with another maternity leave, but Gus was careful not to mention that, and certainly not her looks, not even on her best days, when she just stuck to a normal-looking ponytail. He stayed five feet away from the dispatch desk; either that, or he called to her over the glass if he needed to talk to her at any length. Better yet, he’d wait until someone else was present. He knew the drill about sexual harassment. His record was clean, and he intended to keep it that way.

  He got sidetracked for a bit. Jimmy hadn’t done a damn thing he was supposed to, meaning written any tickets. He checked the faxes, went over the quarterly budget report that was due to city council. Then he checked his email. He’d been copied on the scan of the next set of processed names from the raid. The feds had told him at least half would be fake names, based on fake I-9s and that he couldn’t assume that local wanted either were or weren’t picked up based on the list; that he could compare the photos if they had priors. Otherwise it was a crapshoot.

  But Gus was looking for one name. Rosalina Gonzalez.

  Damn.

  She was in custody.

  Gus laid his glasses on the desk, rolled his chair back and stretched his legs straight out, his body diagonal, head resting on the chair top. He stared at the stained ceiling, took in a breath and exhaled long, cheeks puffed out. Shit, shit, shit. It would be so much easier if he hadn’t found her. Or if he thought Gary was telling a straight story. Now he had to figure out what to do.

  Gary

  Things were a mess. The last time he’d been at his mother’s, CarolSue had dropped it on him that she wanted to keep Gracia. Of all the crazy ideas. He’d gone over there to see the baby, of course, but hoping he could talk to his aunt in private, to borrow money. Brother Zachariah was breathing down his neck, and hard as he’d prayed on it, nothing had brought in nearly enough. He’d given it his all at his Wednesday night message, the prayer meetings,
and his Sunday sermon, during which he’d pulled out all the stops, including a slight dusting of gold glitter in his own curls so the overhead light he’d installed would pick up the glint and suggest to the Brothers and Sisters that Jesus truly was speaking to them in his ministry when he exhorted them to donate. It had been one of Brother Zachariah’s ideas, which he said was a godly use of the power of suggestion.

  He’d never gotten to even ask CarolSue. She’d gotten all uppity and threatened to call Gus about Gracia. Well, not exactly that, but to ask him about becoming her foster mother. The welfare department couldn’t be getting involved with his daughter. No way could he have that, not that he could explain why. Anyway, they’d ended up in a big argument and he could hardly ask her for money.

  At this point, he didn’t even know whether his biggest problem was waiting for Gus to find Rosalina, preventing CarolSue from calling Gus, or trying to get the money for Brother Zachariah, who’d been coming around to collect, threatening to turn him in because he had failed to register the church properly. Brother Zachariah had reminded him that even Mary and Joseph had traveled on that donkey all those hundreds (was it thousands?) of miles to go get registered and pay their tax. Brother Zachariah said that he was damn tired of Saving Gary, and if Gary didn’t come up with the money he owed, Brother Zachariah had no choice but to have the church shut down. Which, he said, would sure increase Gary’s guilt for Cody’s death in God’s eyes. How would he atone without the church?

  That last had been yesterday when Gary had said he just didn’t have the money yet. Gary had cried, begged for time and Brother Zachariah said, “You best get it. I’m watching you.”

  He’d thought on it and prayed on it, and it seemed the best course was to both mollify CarolSue, make sure she didn’t involve Gus about Gracia, and to borrow money from her. Not that he had a clue how he could ever pay it back. Maybe she’d make it a donation; that would be the best solution. He knew she had a big soft spot for him, and if he asked in the right way, and his mother could be kept out of it—that would be tricky—CarolSue would likely come around. There was nothing else to try. He’d have to go over there. For sure it wasn’t the sort of thing he could work over the phone.