Wendy Hornsby - Midnight Baby

“Don’t congratulate me. I didn’t have anything to do with it. It was just one of those things. Or that’s what my oldest told me at the time.” She smiled, resigned.

“What I mean to say is,” she continued, “they look so different when they start to fill out. Amy had real fair hair when she was little. I suppose it darkened up some. Like mine did. I never was as blond as she was. The last time I saw my natural color it was sort of lightish brown.”

Her hair that day was about the color of honey. She held one of the Hillary pictures at arm’s length to study it. Hillary’s hair had been bleached white. “What color do you think her real hair was?”

I shook my head. “Maybe the coroner can tell us.”

She had to swallow hard, and I regretted having said that so baldly. She shook it off. “I’ve been going through this routine for a lot of years. You’d think I would get used to it by now. But I just don’t seem to.”

“I think that’s normal,” I said.

“I guess so.” She dropped her eyes and busied her hands unwrapping her straw. She stuck the straw into the cup.

Some people have about them an appealing mantle of vulnerability. You are drawn to them because you think they need protection. They make you feel like big stuff, strong and capable. Leslie made me feel that way. Until she took a drink through her straw.

Leslie pushed her cup aside and roughly grabbed the arm of a passing busboy. Her expression was severe enough to scare the boy.

“Tell Arturo to come over here,” she ordered. “Tell him I said move fast.”

I turned to watch the boy scuttle away. “Something wrong?”

“These kids. Just when you get one trained right, they go quit on you. It’s just constant aggravation.” She softened again.

“I’m used to it, though. I always said I had six big babies, five kids and George. Now I have about ten times that many. Believe me, you gotta know how to handle them.”

A tall, lanky boy about seventeen sidled over. He had dark, close-cut hair and a single stud earring. If I’d had to choose which of them, him or Leslie, needed a protector, I would have taken the boy. His knees shook.

“You want me, Miz Metrano?” His voice changed register twice.

She handed him her cup.

He paled as he took it. “I forgot.”

“Arturo, your job is recharging the soda base. There’s nothing in this cup but fizz and water.”

“The fry timer went off when I was standing right there. I had to take care of the fries.”

“Are fries your responsibility?”

“No, ma’am.” He looked weepy.

“Were the fry people around to take care of their job?”

“Yes.”

“Your job is the soda dispensers. You come on in the middle of the lunch rush, Arturo. The soda base is gettin’ real low by then. If you don’t do your job, what happens when the customers get their drinks?”

“I’m sorry, Miz Metrano.” Arturo was backing away. “I won’t forget again.”

“You got that right,” she said. “Go back to work.”

I did a quick reevaluation. The woman was no creampuff. She turned her attention back to me. “Sorry. Where were we?”

“Mrs. Metrano, do you know a family named Ramsdale?” I asked.

“Ramsdale?” She ran it over in her mind. “Commonish name, I guess. I can’t think of anyone in particular, though. Why?”

“They had a fourteen-year-old daughter named Hillary.” I tapped a Pisces picture. “She has been identified as Hillary Ramsdale.”

“Did she run away?” Leslie asked.

“She ran or was pushed away.”

“Dammit, though,” she said in her soft voice. “If I’d known how hard it is to hang on to your kids, I would have had them all tattooed.”

“Amy has something better than a tattoo. She has her parents’ DNA. Did you and your husband give samples to the police so they can run a DNA screen?”

“I did.” She emphasized I. I couldn’t read her. All she had to do was give a small amount of blood. It was neither scary nor painful. Nothing to be embarrassed about. “They only needed one parent. Might as well be me. George doesn’t like needles.”

“My pictures haven’t helped, have they?”

“Tell you the truth? They only make things more confusing.”

I gave her my card with Mike’s home number written in below mine. “Call me anytime. You can leave messages.”

As I gathered up Guido’s pictures, Leslie Metrano gathered hers. She handed them to me. “You might as well have them. You never know what will help.”

“I’ll keep in touch,” I said. “I’ll let you know what happens.”

Following Leslie Metrano’s precise directions, I approached Belmont Shore from the east end this time. I crossed the bridge onto Naples Island, passing over the ski boat basin and the channel to the open sea. The scenery on Naples was more boats, more yacht harbor, more million-dollar houses.

I had looked up the address of the yacht club in the Thomas Guide map book I’d found in Mike’s car. The area was a maze of narrow streets and intersecting waterways. I got lost a couple of times, stymied by one-way passages and dead ends, before I found the right path.

I drove around a horseshoe-shaped bay and over a two-lane bridge. Past a swimming beach with an opalescent boat-oil veneer shimmering on the water, and past the Sea Scout headquarters, I found the yacht club.

The main building sat on a promontory that bulged out into the boat channel. A spiky collar of naked masts defined the contour of its water side. The clubhouse looked something like a Polynesian restaurant left over from the sixties, a long arc of heavy wood and fieldstone shaded by shaggy-leafed banana trees and leggy coco palms.

Though everything looked well tended, I wouldn’t have described the club as posh. It was the boats out back and the cars in front that defined its status. Here were Mercedes station wagons, sleek Jags, more Cadillacs and Lincolns than I had seen in one place outside of Detroit, and litters of Volkswagen convertibles – the California teenager’s car of the moment. What this said to me was that there were at least three generations of the affluent playing in the same sandbox.

I walked in past the brass plaque on the door that said “Members and guests only,” crossed the parquet entry, and headed straight up the stairs toward the sound of voices. Not a soul said boo to me.

On the second floor, I found the bar, a large, cozy lounge walled by glass. Terraces overlooked the Olympic-size pool on the deck below and ranks of moored boats beyond. Through the open windows a brisk breeze blew in off the water, smelling more of bait and petroleum than sweet ocean. A dozen fat brown pelicans rocked in the wake of a passing harbor patrol boat. A peaceful place.

I stood to the side, next to a popcorn machine, and surveyed the crowd, looking for an opening wedge. The atmosphere was friendly, the wealthy at ease among their familiars. My father, who teaches at Berkeley, would have described the group as Establishment. Even worse, Republican.

I don’t know why I was even thinking about my father. Actually, I do know. I say the same little prayer of gratitude every time I am in an opulent environment and I do not find my father. It’s a knee-jerk sort of thing.

When I was immediately postpubescent, my mother enrolled me in a cotillion at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. All the better sort from our area sent their little future ambassadors to learn to dance, bow, and curtsy so that they wouldn’t disgrace their families should they be invited to dine at the White House. The boys had been okay, and the dancing instruction wasn’t so bad. It was my father’s presence that caused me pain.

My father, who has never missed a meal without intending to, or lived in a house with fewer than five bedrooms, carries a tremendous load of guilt for the comfortable circumstances of his birth and upbringing. So, while I box-stepped and cha-cha-chaed, he sat in the parents’ gallery, double bourbon in hand, and did his best to convert the local matronage to the virtues of socialism. Some of the mothers instructed their sons not to ask me to dance, lest I taint them. I heard enough pinko jokes that I will never wear pink again as long as I live.