The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(20)

I'm not sure where she gets the guys. Her liquor supply and pool table have just always attracted tan, muscular men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, three or four a night ever since my mom got her divorce. As near as I can tell, Mother doesn't know these guys, never calls them anything but "dear," has no recollection that most of them went to school with me. The man pouring the shots at the moment had once traded lunch boxes with me in third grade. His name was Bobby something. Or at least it had been. Probably Bob, now. Mr. Bob.

Every piece of furniture had been removed from the center of the living room. Mother's Guatemalan-patterned sofas were piled in the entrance of the den. Her pigskin chairs were lined up on the back porch by the hot tub. The upright piano had been pushed into the hallway. In the middle of the now-bare floor, Mother was kneeling on her twenty-by-twenty Persian carpet, folding large pieces of marbleized paper into origami hats.

Jess stepped over several of the finished products and retrieved a Lone Star longneck from the fireplace mantel. "Tell your mother she's obsessed."

Mother carefully made a fold in the paper, pressing out a long isosceles triangle. "Please, Jess."

She was dressed in jeans and black turtleneck under a red-and-orange dashiki. Her Birkenstock clogs were nearby on the carpet. Mother's Cleopatra haircut had been newly frizzed in what was either a perm or the aftermath of an electrical storm.

She pressed another triangle into the paper. "The Crocker Gallery sold two yesterday, Tres — Samurai Moon and Plum Dragon. The buyer owns a hotel in Florida. He wants to see five more that match the color schemes of his suites by the end of the week. I'm simply swamped."

Jess mumbled some obscenities about Florida, looked at me to share his disgust. "I told her let's just hire some Mexicans, get 'em folding the damn things in the backyard. Set up a damn art factory."

My mother sat on her haunches and glared at him. "This is my art, Jess."

Jess plunked his beer back on the mantel. "They're f**king paper hats, Rachel. Get over it."

Before she could respond, he stormed off toward the bedroom hall. It's difficult to storm properly when one has to squeeze sideways past an upright piano, but Jess did his best. I heard seven more heavy footfalls, then the door of the master bedroom slammed.

Over at the pool table, billiard balls clacked. New beers were opened. Joni Mitchell sang softly on the stereo behind the rednecks, telling them all about Paris and flowers and Impressionism.

My mother stared into the empty hallway, her face stony with anger.

"He's learning to take time-outs all by himself," I said. "That's encouraging."

The comment didn't even get her attention, much less a rise.

"Mother?"

The creases in her origami unfolded slowly, the paper trying to find its original shape. Mother closed her eyes.

She reassembled her composure — a weak smile, chin higher, wisps of black hair pushed away from her face.

Then she stood and gave me a hug. "I'm sorry, dear. You shouldn't have to see our little squabbles."

Their little squabbles. As if she hadn't been married to my father. "It's okay, Mother."

She pushed me away gently, wiped something out of her eye. "Of course it's okay."

She stared down the hall.

"Isn't it?" I asked.

"Of course! Or it would be if you wouldn't keep scaring your poor mother to death. Look at your face."

She ran her finger down the three new stitches on my cheek.

"The day picked up after that," I told her.

"I don't want to hear it."

"Okay."

She glared at me. "Of course I want to hear it, Jackson. Kitchen. Now."

I followed her down the Saltillo-tiled steps. The smell of boiling shrimp was overpowering — brine and allspice and Tabasco. Mother stirred the pot, reset the timer, then sat me down at the butcher-block table with a beer in my hand and a fresh red wine in hers and commanded, "Tell."

Several times during the story her eyes drifted toward the sliding-glass door that looked across the patio to the master bedroom. The curtains on the other side stayed shut, blue TV light flickering behind them.

I told Mother about the UTSA job, the police assurances that the Brandon case would be wrapped up quickly, the arrest I'd witnessed this morning. I told her about my double date tonight.

She stared into her wine.

I waited for half a Joni Mitchell verse. I found myself studying Mother's hands, the way they cradled the glass, their raised veins and faint age spots the only real indications this was a woman in her mid-fifties. "You missed your cue."

She refocused on me. "What, dear?"

"Your cue. For pestering me about my date. Asking me how soon I can quit P.I. work now that I've got a real job. Lecturing me on why I shouldn't go riding with Ozzie Gerson. Stuff like that,"

She plinked a fingernail against the blue-tinted rim of the Mexican glass.

"Please, Jackson. I am never that bad."

"What's up with you and Jess?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Did you hear my story at all?"

"Of course."

"And?"

Mother's eyes drifted away. "I remember Ozzie. Your father and he hunted out at Sabinal many times — Jack used to say that Ozzie's hobby was collecting bad luck."