Unexpected Dismounts Read online

  Hank looked at me, thumb blackened and poised, and I offered her my head. I wasn’t sure which was more velvety—Hank’s touch or the puff of ashes themselves. “Remember that you are dust,” she said.

  There was no doubt about that. It struck me that maybe God had decided I was more dust than anything else, that I needed more work before I was going to be of further use.

  And then it struck me that Zelda’s glasses were flying across the trunk. That was how violently she was shaking her head.

  “You ain’t puttin’ that stuff on me.” She gritted what was left of her meth-rotted teeth. “I ain’t no piece of dirt. I am clean and sober.”

  I put my hand up before Mercedes and Sherry could jump into the fray or Jasmine could go straight into hyperventilation.

  “Let’s go out on the porch,” I said to Zelda.

  Mercedes got in a “Yes, do that thing.” Everyone else just breathed audible sighs as I steered the scrawny Zelda out the front door, grabbing both our jackets from their hooks on the way. It’s a myth that Florida is warm year-round, at least north Florida. February in St. Augustine can get your attention, which was what I was banking on.

  I drew my arms through my leather sleeves and tossed Zelda the donated denim jacket Sherry had decorated for her with fabric markers, but she flung it to the porch deck and wrapped herself into a bare-armed fold. I picked it up pointedly and wrapped it around her bony shoulders. She squinted at the floorboards.

  “Do you want me to go in and get your glasses?” I said.

  She gave me a lip curl, once again revealing her lack of dental work. We’d gotten her to the optometrist. The dentist was on the agenda for tomorrow. If she made it that far.

  I sat on the first of the three steps and smacked the place beside me. Zelda dropped to the step below, flanked by one of Jasmine’s struggling camellia bushes on each side. Even she didn’t hesitate when I went into what Mercedes called my Miss-Angel-ain’t-playin’ mode. She had her back to me, but I let that pass.

  “So what’s the problem?” I said.

  “I need me some space,” she said. “It’s too crammed-in here. I feel like I’m livin’ in a can of Vienna sausages.”

  Now there was an image I hadn’t heard before. The message, though—that I’d heard over and over from this woman.

  “Sorry, Zelda,” I said. “I’m only hearing new business today.”

  She gave me a sharp profile.

  “You have a clean bed to sleep in every night. Three meals a day. Someone always available to talk you through—”

  “See, that is it, right there.”

  I got a full frontal, which I stared at blankly. “That’s what?” I said.

  “People always in my face, wantin’ me to talk.” She jabbed a thumb toward the front door. “Just like that in there, tryin’ to make me go on about how bad I am. I ain’t no piece a dirt, just like you ain’t no angel, Miss Angel.”

  She waggled her head. I didn’t bother to remind her that I hadn’t given myself that name. We’d been over the fact that she was free to call me Allison. Or Wicked Witch of the West, for that matter.

  “So the lack of space isn’t really the problem,” I said. “It’s the fact that now that you aren’t using, you think you’re done and you don’t want to work on what got you addicted to drugs in the first place.”

  The scowl I received was something you wouldn’t want to confront in a dark alley.

  I shrugged. “This isn’t my first rodeo, Zelda. It’s the truth, and you know it.”

  She squirmed inside the jacket caped around her—as much as a piece of wire can squirm—and glowered in the direction of the one forlorn palm tree stuck in the ten bedraggled feet between the house and San Luis Street.

  “You used to talk nicer to me,” she said.

  “Back when you’d have cracked like an egg if we looked at you wrong.”

  “Maybe I’m still fra-gile,” she said, emphasis on the gile.

  “No, maybe you just like everybody taking care of you all the time, which is not the point of being here. We’ll give you all the help you need to start walking, but we aren’t going to carry you anymore.” I nodded at her feet. “Where’d you get those Nikes?”

  “You know you give ’em to me yesterday.”

  “I didn’t. One of my HOG friends did, after he drove all over St. John’s County collecting stuff for you ladies.”

  “I said thank you.”

  “Fabulous. Now it’s time for you to get off your butt and use those shoes.”

  Her whole face writhed into something out of an Edvard Munch painting. “That’s what I’m sayin’. You too … blunt.”

  “Just because Miss Angel say it like it is don’t mean there ain’t no love in it.”

  We both twisted to look up at Mercedes, who was closing the front door behind her. The fact that the Sacrament House sign on the door didn’t swing reassured me that Mercedes had gotten past wanting to slap Zelda up the side of the head. The ashes must be doing their job.

  “She tellin’ you she loves you right now,” Mercedes said to Zelda. “She just don’t care if everybody don’t like how she say it.”

  “I sure don’t,” Zelda said.

  Her face closed off, and she got to her feet.

  “Going somewhere?” I said.

  “To my room. The one I got to share with somebody.”

  “Good choice,” I said.

  I waited for the door to slam, and for Mercedes to put the sign back on its nail, before I pulled my legs against my chest and sighed.

  Some of the women I “got” right away. Geneveve had been like that. Jasmine and Mercedes and Sherry had taken longer, but I’d figured them out eventually, once I learned that they were more than their current issues, and that whatever operated beneath their addiction constituted their real journey. But even after two months, I didn’t have a clue where Zelda was going, except maybe out the door.

  Mercedes was already sitting next to me, big warm hand rubbing my leather-clad knee. “You think she gonna stay?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. Which is a horrible thought. I don’t want to see her going back to West King.” I ran my thumb across her knuckles. “You’re officially the house Big Sister now. Tell me what you think. What does she need?”

  Mercedes grunted. “She need somebody in her face twenty-four-seven. I can do a lot, but I also got my own stuff to work on. Not to sound all selfish or nothin’.”

  “If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of anybody else.” I didn’t add that Mercedes had been clean and in Sacrament House for only four months herself. Saying it out loud would strip my whole vision naked: that we could somehow save every woman working West King Street.

  I wasn’t sure we were any closer to that than we were Christmas night when Zelda had found her way to my door to join the others. Yeah, we had nonprofit status now. We had a board of people who actually gave a rip. We had my Harley-riding friends gathering clothes and food and a vast assortment of toiletries, which they delivered to the doorstep almost weekly.

  But a woman I’d had so much hope for was practically out the backdoor, where it was only a three-block crawl through the gap in the fence back to the pit we were trying to keep her out of. That alone made it feel like we were going backward.

  “I hate to break this up,” Hank said from the door. The thing was starting to resemble a turnstile. “But you and I have a meeting, Al.”

  She handed me my helmet and slipped her own on.

  I gave Mercedes’s hand a final squeeze and stood up.

  “So, whatchoo want me to do ’bout Zelda, Miss Angel?” Mercedes turned a creamy palm to me. “And don’t worry, I promise I won’t tie her to the bed or nothin’.”

  That was at least progress.
/>   “Just love her and call her on her stuff and pray for her,” I said. “That’s all you can do.”

  When the door closed behind Mercedes, Hank pushed her visor to the top of her helmet. “You’re sagging,” she said.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Only to me. So what’s the deal?”

  “What isn’t? We need more space. We need more money. We need more volunteers. We may be about to lose Zelda, and I don’t feel like there’s anything I can do about it.”

  “Which is why we’re having this meeting. India says she thinks this donor she has lined up may give us enough to buy that place.”

  She nodded toward the house across the street.

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  The structure had more once-mint-green paint hanging precariously in peeled-off chips than was still attached to its cinder block walls. The roof shingles curled like a blown-dry hairdo, and the broken window sealed off with a black garbage bag gave it the appearance of a pirate who should have gone into retirement long ago. Somewhere in its history, a resident had tried to turn it into a home, as evidenced by the concrete porch lions minus their facial features and the stagnant fishpond in the middle of the front yard.

  I dropped even lower.

  “I know it’s a fixer-upper,” Hank said.

  “It makes this place look like the White House.”

  “Nah, I think this one was worse, and you’ve got more people on board now to help get it into shape.”

  “We’ve got carpenters and plumbers. What we need are more people around to prevent this Zelda kind of thing from happening.”

  Hank poked her fingers into her glove. “Leighanne and Nita—everybody at NA—has told you we’re not going to have a hundred-percent success rate.”

  “I hate numbers.”

  “I know. Which is why India is the one setting up these donor meetings, and why Bonner and Chief are there to do the talking.”

  “In other words, I should keep my mouth shut.”

  Hank’s lips twitched. “Actually, India says this old lady we’re seeing today is just as feisty as you are. Maybe you’ll speak the same language.”

  “Is she old money?”

  Hank nodded.

  “Then she might as well be speaking Swahili.”

  She donned her other glove and took me by both shoulders, no easy task since she was half a foot shorter than my five-nine. “For once you might want to recall some of that old-money breeding you got in there someplace.”

  It was my turn to grunt as I followed her out to our bikes. “Recalling” wouldn’t even begin to get me there. “Digging out with a backhoe” might come closer to doing the job.

  I fastened my helmet and flung my leg over the seat of my Harley, and the bike let me hunker down on her. I settled in the minute her engine growled itself to life. Now, that was a sound like no other. The closest I could come by comparison was a powerfully attractive male calling my name. It eased me into sorting-out mode. That was what happened most times when I got ready to ride, which was why I was convinced that my Heritage Softail Classic had a soul. I never said that to anybody. A lot of people thought I was weird enough as it was.

  When I got her up to second and made the first leaning turn, that was when the Pathetic Pleading Prayer kicked in: So, God … a Nudge? A whisper? A nod in the right direction?

  Something?

  I followed Hank’s lead out onto vacuous West King Street and across the dividing line that was Ponce de Leon Boulevard. The line between all the people we had yet to touch—the drug dealers and the drug users and the prostitutes who qualified as both—and the seekers of the past and the refrigerator magnet collectors on ancient St. George Street who weren’t even aware that six blocks away there were people who sought only to forget the past, and didn’t want a souvenir to remind them.

  Of course, I still wasn’t the steadiest rider ever to mount a motorcycle, which meant I also had to concentrate on things like squeezing the brake so I didn’t mow down a coed jaywalking her way to Flagler College. That was probably why God sometimes chose those times to speak to me: because they were the few occasions when I actually shut up long enough to listen. Besides, God was the one who had put me on this thing in the first place and steered me from there to where I was going now.

  And that was where exactly? India had said we were meeting at this woman’s residence, which was apparently tucked into the capillaries of the historic district. Since St. George was closed to vehicles, to allow the tourists the freedom to wander from the Oldest This to the Oldest That without fearing for their pedestrian lives, Hank led me along the east side of Flagler College and up Cordova past the funky restaurants and shops travelers could come upon by surprise and think they’d discovered secret treasures. From there she took me across St. George on Treasury Street to Charlotte, with the brooding Cathedral Basilica whipping by on one side and a row of resale boutiques passing in a campy blur on the other. By the time we careened into Toques Place off Hypolita, my prayers had morphed into please-please-please-don’t-let-me-be-killed. As for hearing God, forget about it.

  Toques was little more than an alley whose drippy walls bounced our engines’ roars back into my face and revved me into a near panic. I missed taking out a row of trash cans by a hair and was just about convinced that Old Lady Whoever must be a figment of everybody’s imagination when Hank finally stopped. My heart was beating like a jackhammer, and I was in absolutely no shape to meet anybody with any breeding whatsoever.

  “Seriously?” I whispered to God. “Ya got nothin’ for me?”

  The words whispered inside my helmet.

  I’m giving you this: Wash their feet.

  Oh.

  Now, that cleared everything up.

  Wash their feet? After weeks of nothing, you’re giving me ‘wash their feet’?

  “You waiting for an escort, Classic?”

  I jerked the wheel and started to go sideways. A long-legged man with a narrow brown-eyed gaze pushed me back to a vertical position. If an eagle had a smile, it would look like his: wise and infuriating.

  “You might want to set that kickstand,” Chief said.

  “I know,” I said, voice rising like it belonged to an adolescent girl who, in truth, knows nothing. “Just give me a second.”

  I tried to look like I was going through my mental shutdown checklist. In the first place, I hated looking like a motorcycle moron in front of Chief, a look you’d think I’d be used to achieving by now. And in the second place, I was trying to decide whether I’d heard the instruction to bathe somebody’s heels or just imagined it. Though why I would have conjured up that image on my own was beyond me. I’d done a stint as a pedicurist twenty years ago and had had an aversion to feet ever since. Although, truth be told, God seldom made much sense to me at the front end of these commands.

  I glanced at Chief, who was still giving me the half smile. One thing was for sure, I wasn’t going to share this particular message with him until I had a handle on it. He did get me better than most people, but even he might actually move his face enough to raise an eyebrow at this one.

  “They’re waiting for us, Classic,” he said.

  He took my elbow as I climbed off the bike and steered me toward the end of the alley. I got the usual was-that-an-electric-shock? sizzle at his touch. That, and the way he parted his lips only enough to be heard by the people who were really paying attention, always sent a bit of a current through me. Curse the man.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “Around the corner. Cuna Street.”

  “Then this lady must have money.”

  “Oodles of it.”

  I smirked up at the raptor profile. “You did not just say oodles.”

  “I’m quoting India. Where were you?”
/>
  “I had to deal with a Zelda issue,” I said. “Where did Hank go?”

  “Still back there combing her hair.”

  I noted that he’d obviously already combed his, a graying ponytail that hung in dignified fashion between his squared-off shoulders. He’d already shed his leathers and was looking lawyerly in a crisp white shirt and red tie.

  “I guess I should take off my chaps,” I said, although the Target jeans I had on underneath weren’t a whole lot more businesslike. India tried to dress me in outfits from her boutique, Secrets of India, but I still didn’t own anything appropriate for begging money from women whose wardrobes alone were worth more than I was.

  “You might want to wipe off your forehead,” he said.

  “It’s ashes. For Ash Wednesday.”

  “You don’t have time anyway. India’s probably recycling her small talk.”

  “Hard to believe.”

  “Bonner’s already oohed and ahed over every figurine in the Lladró collection.”

  “What in the world is Lladró?”

  “Yeah, we’re in trouble.” Chief stopped me at the bottom of a set of much-painted wooden steps that led up to a wide, very white veranda. “You might want to let us do the talking. Unless you get one of your Nudges. Then I know there’s no stopping you.”

  I didn’t remind him that they weren’t my Nudges. The fact that he even accepted them as somehow real and not something I pulled out of my imagination was huge for a man who consistently stiff-armed the Divine. On his best day, Chief viewed God as a worthy opponent.

  “You might take off your helmet, though,” he said.

  I obeyed and shook my hair out and unzipped my jacket and zipped it back up again.

  “Oh, let’s just go in,” I said. “I’m a lost cause.”

  Though three stories high and venerable, on the outside the house was as plain and white and gray-trimmed as a Southern gentleman. However, one step inside the massive wood-and-glass door, which a grave-looking Hispanic woman opened for us, and the effect was something out of a Victorian novel full of eccentric heiress aunts. The walls were papered in gold brocade, the ceiling hung with lead-crystal chandeliers that hungrily picked up what little light sneaked in past the layers of silk festooning the windows. If Jane Eyre had floated down the red-carpeted steps, I wouldn’t have batted an eye.