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  “Please don’t call me Wilhelmina,” I said.

  That got her attention. Granny raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t call me Wilhelmina, Granny. Everyone except you calls me Bil. I prefer it.”

  “Well, I don’t know why,” she objected. “Wilhelmina is a lovely name, very regal. I cried when your mother told me that you were going to be my namesake. I was named after Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands, and you . . .”

  “I’m not exactly a queen.”

  Granny rolled on. “We’re Dutch on my father’s side. English on my mother’s. Being adopted, of course, you’re not Dutch or English but . . . what are you? Do you know? Have you ever thought of looking for your birth parents? Genealogy is so interesting, don’t you think?”

  “Go on,” said my mother. “Answer her.”

  “I’m Samoan,” I lied. “And Greek. One-quarter Egyptian and two-thirds Eskimo. By way of Louisiana.”

  “I forgot you were born in Baton Rouge,” Granny mused. “Do you like hot food?”

  Three of my parents’ five children are adopted. Two, Sarah and Sam, are African-American. Though my grandmother came to grips with the reality of having an interracial family years ago, the fact that I’m white like my parents and yet also adopted seems to strike her with fresh wonder whenever she thinks of it.

  “Of course. I put Tabasco on my corn flakes. Would you excuse me, Granny? Dry throat. Need some coffee. Must dash.”

  Granny blinked like a turn signal and immediately began addressing my mother. I grinned benignly, ignoring Emma’s gorgon glare, and backed quickly away. Damned if I was going to let my mother steamroll me. Sam could just cool his heels for an extra minute or two while we behaved like decent, civilized people. I would offer Sylvie and her mother my condolences. I’d make polite conversation, talk about the weather, or the World Series. And if I happened to suggest that we meet sometime for coffee or doughnuts or Desert Hearts, so much the better. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  I pushed my way through to the refreshments table. Sylvie was busy chatting with the organist. I poured a cup of coffee, examined and rejected the oatmeal lace cookies, and found a nice quiet spot next to an old upright piano where I could sit and wait.

  I thought the organist would never shut up. On and on he went, like the living embodiment of perpetual motion. Eventually, I got tired of watching him. I took a pen from my pocket and played three games of tic-tac-toe on the back of the funeral program. I lost every time. In desperation, I tried to drink the coffee. It tasted like stewed cigarette butts.

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “They filtered this through someone’s gym socks.”

  A voice spoke, low and attractive. “Don’t you know better than to drink church coffee? It’s never good.”

  Hot liquid sloshed over the edge of the cup and onto my hand. With all the suavity and coolness I could muster, I stood up. “I’m never good,” I said thickly. “I mean, I never go to church. So I don’t drink the coffee. Hi, Sylvie. How are you?”

  “I’ve been better,” she replied. “Your hand . . .”

  “It’s fine.” I wiped my hand on the leg of my trousers, remembering too late that they were dry clean only. “I’m tough. Old asbestos hands, that’s what they call me.”

  She laughed. “How are you, Bil? I haven’t seen you since . . .”

  “Since high school,” I finished, my heart skipping a beat.

  “It was nice of you to come.”

  I shrugged. “It was nothing. I mean, of course it’s something. I mean . . . I’m really sorry about your father, and, um, everything.”

  I was having difficulty concentrating, and my tongue seemed to have grown too large for my mouth. She was tall, at least as tall as I was, and she was standing less than a foot away from me. I’d forgotten how green her eyes were, like the leaves on a tropical plant. Her pupils were rimmed with gold, and there was something wolf-like about the concentrated way she was looking at me. It was disconcerting—disconcerting, but attractive.

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what to say. It’s been a long time and I feel sort of stupid.”

  To my surprise, not to mention gratitude, Sylvie laughed. “There’s no need to feel stupid. What can anyone say? This isn’t exactly typical, is it?”

  “No,” I agreed, “it isn’t. Not typical at all.”

  A silence fell between us, and I shifted uncomfortably. To fill the gap, I said, “So, I hear you’ve moved back to Cowslip. Why?” I could have kicked myself. Nosy and blunt—a nice way to start.

  If she was bothered by my question, it didn’t show. “I wanted to be closer to my mother,” she said. “I moved back about a month ago, before all of this happened.” Her gesture seemed to encompass the church, the funeral, and her father’s disappearance and awkward return. “I came back for graduate school. Cowslip College has a good program in botany.”

  “Botany?” I didn’t mean to sound quite so surprised. What was I expecting her to say, modeling? Walking down the catwalk in leather and latex? Sylvie interrupted this fantasy before I actually began drooling.

  She laughed. “Yes, botany—cliff botany, to be exact. That’s my specialty. How about you? You were at the University of Washington, weren’t you? I guess you’ve graduated.”

  “Ah, no, I haven’t. I’m enrolled at Cowslip College as an undergraduate. In English.” I paused, wondering how to explain my stupid and very sudden departure from the University of Washington without getting into specifics, like the fact that I left because my girlfriend of two years had jilted me. For a man. A man named, of all stupid things, Euphrates, Euphrates Jones. Fucking idiot hippie parents. I shook my head to get rid of the image of that skinny moron with his sparse goatee and his black, laced, puffy-sleeved poet’s shirt. Ugh.

  “I wanted to be closer to my family,” I said, which was at least a little bit true. “I got homesick, and I really didn’t have much to lose. In my three years at the University of Washington, I had five different majors. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. Maybe a cliff botanist?”

  Sylvie laughed again. I liked her laugh. It was warm and smooth, and, for some reason, it made me think of toffee—good, English toffee. Before I could figure this out or say anything else, she leaned forward and put her hand on my arm.

  “Bil, would you meet me somewhere this afternoon? I want to talk to you. The Cowslip Café, maybe? We could have a cup of coffee. Good coffee.” She smiled, displaying a perfect row of very white teeth.

  “Um, sure, but . . .”

  “Three o’clock,” she said. “If the rain stops, I’ll be waiting at one of the outside tables. If not, I’ll be inside, probably somewhere near the back. It’s quieter there. More privacy.”

  Privacy. “Okay. Three o’clock. I’ll be there.”

  “Good.”

  She left before I had the chance to say anything else, or perhaps break into a song and dance. I watched as she made her way back to the coffee table, slim hips shifting beneath the smooth fabric of her blue linen dress. I didn’t have time to wonder what she wanted to talk to me about or even to say wow before, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother bearing down upon me at breakneck speed. She couldn’t have looked more like an angry bull if she’d had horns and a ring through her nose.

  “Are you quite finished socializing?” she asked, taking my arm and maneuvering me across the narthex and out the door. “Honestly, I don’t know what gets into you sometimes. Your brother . . .”

  “Is in jail for the nineteenth time.”

  “Which makes this my nineteenth nervous breakdown,” she cracked. “Have pity on a poor old woman. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

  “Yeah, right. And speaking of poor old women, I gather we’re leaving Granny to hobble home on her bunion-infested feet?”

  My mother looked smug. “Nope. I’ve fobbed her off on that enormous Millicent Rutherford. Neither of them is happy about i
t, but I don’t give a damn. Now stop talking and start walking. We have to go bail out your brother.”

  Chapter 2

  “Could you drive a little faster?”

  “For the millionth time, no. The speed limit is forty-five, and I can’t afford a ticket.”

  My mother drummed her fingers on the dashboard. I knew she was dying for a cigarette, but I can’t stand smoking in the car. Even when it’s her car.

  Though the signs weren’t good, I decided to venture a question. “Did Sam say why they’d arrested him?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” I continued, “it has to be one of three things—pot, pilfering, or pussy. Since we’ve already had the pot and the pilfering this month, my money’s on the pussy.”

  My mother stopped her drumming and looked at me sideways. “Nice language. I suppose you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  “Only on Mother’s Day. And only because she makes me.”

  The Lewis County Jail was on the opposite side of town from St. George’s Episcopal Church, right at the spot where Main Street turned into Highway 8. Though my mother was anxious to get there, I was in no hurry to be sucked into another of Sam’s epic battles with the criminal justice system. In the short time since I’d moved back home, I’d seen enough action to have earned a bronze star.

  Emma tugged absently at a loose string on the cuff of her pants.

  “So,” I asked reluctantly, “what’s the plan?”

  “The plan? We find out what they’ve trumped up against him this time. Then, we find out how much it will cost to bail him out. After that, we go home, you hide in your bedroom, and I break the news to your father.”

  “I don’t think it’s fair to say that I hide.”

  “Fine, you don’t hide. You discreetly absent yourself. How’s that?”

  “Much better.”

  After my brother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, my mother gave up having friends and a social life. It was a full-time job just keeping Sam alive and out of jail. The illness struck him at a bad age. He was seventeen and already mildly delinquent. It was all petty stuff—he’d been caught shoplifting and drinking beer in the cemetery. The diagnosis changed that. Knowing there was a good chance that he might not make it to twenty pushed Sam over the edge. In the space of a few months, all the while going through radiation and chemotherapy, he managed to rack up an impressive juvenile record: breaking and entering, larceny, vandalism. Because of his illness, and because he was usually lucky enough to go before sympathetic judges, he generally got a slap on the wrist—a lecture, probation, and release on his own recognizance.

  Then his cancer went into remission. Sam graduated from high school and got a job. Nothing exciting—he sold tickets and worked the concession stand downtown at the Adler Cinema. For a while it looked as if he might actually make it, that he might escape from the past and become a productive citizen. The peace lasted for three years. He went to work, he stayed relatively clean, and we came to believe that his luck would extend beyond the legal. Then, the cancer came back. Sam quit his job and picked up where he’d left off. Always stoned, always in trouble, and always somewhere he shouldn’t be with people he shouldn’t have known.

  Sam and I never talked about his cancer. We kept our conversations superficial. He’d ask me if he could borrow some money, and I’d say yes or no. Mostly yes. I knew he was taking advantage, pressing my buttons, but lending him money went a little way towards easing my conscience. I suspected my sisters did the same. They were all professionals, a doctor, a lawyer, and a librarian. Good sources of ready cash. Between us, Sam probably raked in enough to keep half the county in beer and weed.

  Although to some extent I could understand Sam’s criminality, I couldn’t excuse it. My mother, on the other hand, was in complete denial. She’d developed a persecution complex. The cops were out to get him. He wasn’t so bad; they unfairly singled him out. Emma liked to believe that his troubles all began with the initial diagnosis, conveniently forgetting that Sam was always light-fingered. She stopped taking us to yard sales when we were kids because Sam had made a habit out of stealing old shoes. Usually just one, and usually the left. When she caught him, she’d make him take it back, but this never seemed to serve as a deterrent.

  The cops were getting tired of my brother. So were the DA and the formerly sympathetic judges. Sam was nearly twenty-two now, and five years of saying, “I can’t help it man, I’m dying” were beginning to wear thin. Sooner or later, he was going down for a long stretch. If he lived that long.

  “You know,” my mother said, getting out a cigarette and putting it in her mouth, “I wish your brother put as much fight into taking care of himself as he puts into fucking with the cops.”

  I tried to deflect. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  “Never,” she replied. “But you know what I mean. If he goes into remission again, chances are good he’ll get to spend several healthy years in the state penitentiary.”

  “Yeah. Look, you’re not going to light that, are you? You promised you wouldn’t smoke in the car.”

  “Fine,” she snapped, putting the lighter back into her purse. “When did you become a Mormon? I was only going to suck on the filter.”

  I shuddered. “That makes me want to vomit. Why don’t you get some nicotine gum or the patch or something?”

  “Hmm,” she said, tapping the filter against her lips. “Why don’t you take up smoking?”

  We turned into the jail’s parking lot. I switched the car off and gritted my teeth. “You’ll behave yourself, won’t you? No theatrics?”

  My mother smiled grimly. “Of course. What kind of woman do you think I am?”

  “You should be shot to the moon for this!”

  Deputy Donald Smith, Jr., stood behind the counter with half a doughnut in his hand, powdered sugar sifting down the front of his khaki uniform. The other half was in his mouth. I doubted he’d be able to work up enough spit to swallow it.

  “Well?” my mother continued. “What is it this time? Jaywalking? Parking tickets?”

  “Mrs. Hardy, please. If you’ll just calm down . . .”

  “Calm down? Listen, you worthless, one-bullet Barney Fife, I want to know what trumped-up bullshit you’re trying to pin on my son.”

  I grabbed Emma by the arm, giving her a little shake for emphasis. “You’re not helping.” I turned to Donny. “What my mother is trying to ask, Deputy Smith, is what is the charge against Sam?”

  Donny chewed rapidly, somehow managing to choke the doughnut down. Sweat trickled from the broad expanse of his pale forehead, and he smiled faintly, a sure sign of his helplessness in the face of my mother’s bull-headed fury.

  “Mrs. Hardy,” he said, though he looked at me for reassurance, “I’m sure we can straighten this out if you’ll just calm down. All of this yelling is getting us nowhere.”

  Donny Smith was not a small man. He was six feet four inches of clean-living, potato-fed, caffeine-free Mormon. Next to my mother, however, he was a lightweight. I almost felt sorry for him.

  Emma leaned forward and said in her brimstone baritone, “You don’t know what nowhere is, Donny, my boy. I’ll send you to a hot fucking nowhere if you don’t have Sam out of that jail cell in the next five minutes. I’m getting pretty tired of coming down here every other day to bail out my son. My daughter’s a lawyer, you know. I’ll sue your fat ass!”

  Ah, Naomi, that august member of the Idaho Bar. If I were a sensitive soul, my sisters might have given me an inferiority complex. They were all over-achievers. Naomi was only twenty-eight, and Ruth, the physician, was thirty. Sarah, only three years older than me, was the deputy head of the reference department at the Cowslip College Library. Each of them, by the time they were my age, had already earned their bachelor’s degrees. I, on the other hand, was still technically a sophomore. Damn transfer credits, anyway. Perhaps my sisters were paying a hidden emotional toll for their collective success. They were a
ll single, but then again, so was I.

  Donny shoved his mouth into what was clearly supposed to be a patient, Latter-Day Saintly smile. He was breathing heavily, and every time he blinked, his eyes stayed shut for a fraction of a second past normal. He spoke slowly, as if he could sweeten his words by pouring them on like cold syrup.

  “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Hardy, but Sam’s in on a very serious charge.”

  My mother cocked her eyebrows in anticipation. “And that charge would be?”

  Donny swallowed. Again. “I have orders not to discuss it with you until Lieutenant Young gets back. He won’t be long.” He looked at his watch. “Not long at all.”

  “I see,” said my mother. “As soon as your lieutenant gets here, he’ll pull the string on your back and you’ll start talking. I’m a busy woman, Donny. I don’t like to wait. Is there anything you can tell me in the meantime?”

  “I can tell you . . . I can tell you that he resisted arrest.”

  “Oh really?” said my mother. “Anything else?”

  “And . . . and . . . on the way to the station . . . your son urinated in the squad car.”

  “Goddamn it,” Emma barked. “I don’t care if he pissed on your doughnut. In case it’s escaped your notice, Deputy Dawg, my son is sick. He has cancer. He is in the middle of a course of chemotherapy. If you keep hounding him like this, he will die. Is that what you want?”

  Donny said nothing. He rocked back and forth on his heels and examined his fingernails.

  “His hair,” my mother went on, “is falling out. Surely you people have noticed that he wears a wig. Usually, you are thoughtless enough to confiscate it. My son doesn’t sleep well. He doesn’t eat. He weighs a whopping one hundred and twenty-two pounds. He’s only a few inches shorter than you are, Donny, and he weighs less than your left leg. What the hell has he done to justify this police persecution? Petty shit! Nothing!” She dismissed my brother’s crimes with a wave of her hand.

  Donny stared at a spot some inches above our heads. “I can’t do anything about it, Mrs. Hardy. Lieutenant Young is in charge, and he’s gone to see Judge Andrews. Why don’t you go home, and we’ll call and let you know when Sam is arraigned? It won’t take long.”