Rexanne Becnel: Leaving L.a.

Okay, Aunt Zoe, here’s your chance to impress your nephew, who’s obviously never even heard of you. “You know, I’ve met Mick Jagger a couple of times. Partied with him and the rest of the Stones.”

His eyes got big. “You have?”

“Uh-huh. Keith Richards, too.”

His eyebrows lowered over his bright blue eyes. Alice’s eyes. Mom’s eyes. “My mother says Keith Richards is depraved.”

“Depraved?” I would like to have argued the fact. Anything to contradict Alice. But what was the point? So I settled for a vague response. “You know, not everyone who lives a life different from our own is depraved.”

“I didn’t say they were.” He looked at me, this earnest kid of Alice’s, and I suddenly saw him as girls his age must see him. Tall, cute, maybe a little mysterious since he didn’t go to regular high school.

Or maybe weird and nerdy, an oddball since he didn’t go to regular high school.

Damn, but I’d hated my brief fling with the local high school.

No. What I’d hated was being the girl who lived in the hippie commune. The girl whose mother never wore a bra. The girl who didn’t have a clue who her father was. At least Alice had her father’s last name. But I was just a Vidrine, like my mother, and other kids were merciless about it. Love Child, they’d called me, and sung the Diana Ross song whenever I walked by.

Tripod put his head on my knee and whined. That’s when I realized I was trembling, vibrating the swing like a lawn-mower engine. Even my dog could tell I was wound just a little too tightly.

I looked away from Daniel, wondering when Alice would get here, then wondering how I was supposed to make this plan of mine work if just talking to this kid got me so upset.

“Did it hurt?” he asked. “You know, when the car hit your dog?”

A new subject, thank God. “I guess it did. The first time I ever laid eyes on Tripod he was flying off the front fender of this giant black Hummer.” Which Dirk, my ex-ex-boyfriend had been driving. “I stopped and so did this other car.” Dirk drove off and left me on the highway. “Anyway, we got him to a vet, who said his leg was shattered and did we want to put him to sleep or amputate.”

“Wow. You saved his life and adopted him?”

I shrugged. It sounded so altruistic the way he said it. The truth was, I’d charged the vet bill to Dirk’s credit card, then kept the dog to remind me how glad I was to be rid of that SOB. Never date drummers, I’d vowed after that six-year fiasco had ended.

But at least I had Tripod. We’d been together for almost four years now. I rubbed his left ear, the one that had a ragged edge from some incident that predated the Hummer. “He may be an ugly mutt, but he’s my ugly mutt.” And the only semitrustworthy male I’d ever known.

We both looked up when a Chevy van pulled into the driveway, swung past my Jeep and pulled around the side of the house toward the garage.

For someone who hadn’t seen her only sister in over twenty years, Alice sure took her sweet time. She came in through the back door. I caught a glimpse of her in the house—much slimmer than I remembered but still pleasantly plump. She paused at a mirror and fiddled with her hair. Even then it took her another full minute to join us on the porch. I guess she had to brace herself. After all, she obviously felt like I’d risen from the dead.

As kids she and I hadn’t exactly been close. You’d think we would have clung to each other in the midst of all the chaos thrown at us. Instead we’d become each other’s primary targets, both of us competing for the meager fragments of Mom’s love and attention.

Later, when I’d begged her to leave with me, I couldn’t believe she meant to stay. As furious at her as I was at our mother, I’d left without her, scared to death but determined to go.

I’d had my revenge two years later, though, when she called me about Mom being sick. I told her point-blank that I didn’t give a damn about Mom and what she needed. Four months later Alice had tracked me down again to say Mom had died, and what did I think we should do about a funeral?

Though now I know it was illogical, my response at the time had been utter rage: at Mom for dying and at Alice for crying to me about it. And maybe at myself for feeling anything at all for either of them.

“Don’t you get it?” I said to her in this cold, unfeeling voice. “I don’t care what you do with her or anything else in that hellhole of a house. I left Louisiana a long time ago, Alice. Get over it.”

And that had been that. Our last conversation.

But even though that had been twenty years ago I could feel the old animosity rise, like a fever that the antibiotic of time had only held at bay. We were still competing for Mom’s scraps. Only in this case it would be our inheritance.

“Hello, big sister,” I said with a wide, for-the-camera smile.

Alice’s wasn’t quite so eager. “Zoe. Well, hello.” She stood there, just staring at me as if she hadn’t believed Daniel, as if she wasn’t sure she even believed her own eyes. She glanced at Daniel, then away, clearing her throat. “I see you’ve met my son.”

With my left foot I set the swing into motion. “Yes. He seems like a great kid, though I could swear he’s never heard of his aunt Zoe.”

If it was possible her pinched expression grew even tighter. “Go inside, Daniel.”

When he didn’t jump right up, she turned a stern look on him. “I said go. Finish the history chapter—”

“I already did.”

“Then start the next one. And take off that awful T-shirt!”

He muttered something under his breath, but he did as she said. When he opened the door, however, the poodle slipped out. One yip and Tripod sprung off the swing, nearly knocking Alice over when she snatched her obnoxious pet up from the jaws of death.

“Make him stop!” she yelled at me while Tripod bayed at the fur ruff she held up over her head.

It would have made a hilarious photo, my ugly, three-legged hound up on his hind legs trying to reach her sweetly groomed little dog while she screamed bloody murder. A great album cover for a band like Devil Dogs.

Slowly I unfolded myself from the swing. “That’s enough, Tripod. Come on, now.” He could probably tell I didn’t really mean it. That’s why I had to haul him back by the collar while Alice put “Angel” back in the house.

Then still not sitting down, she said, “So what brings you back to Louisiana?”

I perched on the porch rail like I used to when I was a kid, before it was torn off in a drunken rage by one or another of Mom’s so-called boyfriends. “This is home, isn’t it? I’ve come home.”

She got this wary look on her face. “What do you mean? You’ve been gone over twenty years, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, you decide it’s time for a visit?”

“Something like that. Only this isn’t a visit, Alice. I’m back to stay.”

That’s when she sat down. I guess the shock made her knees weak. “You mean you’re moving back to Louisiana? But…you said you hated this place. You called it a hellhole.”

In my opinion it still was. But I only shrugged. “Things change. Not only am I moving back to good old Oracle…” I said, watching her wariness turn to horror. “I’m moving back here,” I added, sweeping my hand to include the house and its forty-plus acres. “In case you’ve forgotten, it is half mine.”

Just like her son, Alice’s first reaction to the little bomb I’d laid on her was to run inside and get on the phone. I suppose she was calling her hubby so he could hurry home and somehow make me leave. Like that would work. It might have been an angry impulse when I ditched Palm Springs and my sunbaked, half-baked existence there. But I’d had six long days of driving with only a nauseated dog and a string of country and western stations to keep me company. Lots of time to think. And now I was committed to my plan. I wanted my half of our inheritance, and I wasn’t leaving here without it. Keeping this farm was the only thing my mother ever did right. With my share I could start a new life, someplace where neither G. G. Givens nor my mother’s ghost could find me.