Kiss the Girls and Make Them Cry(78)

“Yes and no. Next thing I know a lawyer from town comes knocking on my door and met with me and Jordan. Paula had sent the lawyer a check for one hundred thousand dollars. The money could only be used for Jordan to go to a facility to get himself clean.”

“Did Jordan do that?”

She smiled. “He did. I told you Paula was smart. She set it up so that if after treatment Jordan made it to one year of sobriety, he could keep the rest of the money for himself. Jordy made it. Now he’s working and using it to finish college at night.”

The waitress arrived with their orders. Lucinda pointed at her empty glass. “I’m ready for another. How about you?”

Knowing that she had a lot of work ahead of her, Gina declined in favor of a club soda.

“In New York they’d charge forty to fifty dollars for a steak like this,” Gina announced while savoring her first bite.

“Get out of here!” Lucinda responded.

“I’m not kidding. Tell me, Lucinda. Did you grow up around here?”

For the next twenty minutes Lucinda shared details of her life growing up on a farm, getting married at eighteen, and having her first child a year later. Motherhood in the early years was a happy experience; 4H clubs, school plays, and barn dances were pleasant memories. The whole town would show up for high school football games. Jordy was the quarterback and star player.

There was no conversation during the first half of the drive back to the house. Lucinda broke the silence by asking, “I know I asked you last night, but what are you hoping to find in those boxes?”

“If I can, I want to find out who Paula dealt with when she agreed to her settlement. Even more important, I want to confirm my belief that she was in the process of renegotiating, and if she was, who she was talking to.”

“My Paula was a good girl,” Lucinda said, as much to herself as to Gina. “She saved her brother’s life. After she died that same town lawyer came knocking on my door. After her condominium was sold, almost two hundred thousand dollars was left. In her will she left half of what she had to the trust the lawyer made up for Jordan. The other half she left in a trust for me. Same deal. If I get treatment and get sober for a year, I get to keep the rest of the money.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You may not believe me after tonight; I owe it to my little girl to give it a try,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye.

As they approached the driveway, Lucinda said, “When those boxes arrived, I just shoved them in Paula’s bedroom. After you called last night, I slit them open. Most of them have clothes, books, dishes, and the like. I separated the ones with papers and put them by the door. I’d invite you in, but I’m a little embarrassed. I’m not much of a housekeeper.”

“It’s okay. I’d rather take them to a hotel room where I can spread them out and sort through them. I’ll drop them back off in the morning.”

“If I’m not here, just leave ’em on the porch.”

Five minutes later four boxes were in the trunk or backseat of the rental car. After saying goodbye to Lucinda, Gina tapped on her phone and made a reservation for a hotel thirteen miles west on Interstate 80.





84





Rosalee Blanco reread the letter from her mother. My poor family, she said to herself. My poor people.

She had just turned thirty when she emigrated from Venezuela almost fifteen years ago. That was before things really started to go bad, before the dictators Chávez and Maduro destroyed what had been the country with South America’s highest standard of living. Her father and mother had run a successful grocery store in Coro, a city that at one time was the capital, before that title went to Caracas.

The grocery store, along with most of the businesses in Coro, was forced to close. After they were ordered by the government to sell items at below the cost of acquiring them, before long there was no money to buy new inventory. Instead of feeling sympathy, the authorities had arrested Rosalee’s father. Shuttering his store, they claimed, was proof that he was working with foreign powers against the government.

Using the precious American dollars Rosalee sent, her mother was able to bail him out. Her parents spent their days scrounging for food. With all of their neighbors doing the same thing, it was hard to find any. They would have been able to afford to buy more, but they insisted on using most of the money to buy Rosalee’s brother’s asthma medication.

Trained as a hairdresser in Venezuela, Rosalee had quickly found work in New York City. She worked six days each week and split her evenings between taking English classes and learning to do makeup. She dreamed that one day she would move to Hollywood and work on movie stars.

The salon that employed her was on the Upper East Side. Through word-of-mouth recommendations she counted as clients half a dozen women from REL News. One day a woman in her forties came to her for the first time. When Rosalee finished working on her, the woman gave her a business card with a number written on the back. “That’s my cell. Call me when you get off duty.”

A week later she had an interview with this woman, who was assistant director of human resources at REL. Two weeks after that she was working as a hair and makeup artist for the company. “The people I work on are not in the movies, but they are on TV,” she had proudly written to her mother.

But it wasn’t only the people one saw on TV who would come to her. Of course they were the first priority. When she wasn’t busy, the young girls would often come by when they’d finished their shift, to freshen their look before heading out for the evening. She loved getting to know them. They were the daughters she would never have.