Lone Star

Finally six o’clock arrived like the executioner’s hour.

Sometimes Chloe thought of her grandmother as Zeus in his Athenian Temple, gargantuan and fierce. Sometimes Moody was like Tamerlane of Mongolia, murderous and crippled. Sometimes Chloe saw Moody as Siddhartha, half the size of China, wise but terrifying in his omnipotent silence.

On Memorial Saturday, Moody was just a kettle-sized white-haired woman. She had been married to Lochlan Devine since just after the war until his death, fifty years, four of them pretty good. She had given him six children, five surviving, all boys, though what she wanted was two measly daughters. Everybody knew it because she never missed an opportunity to say it.

She was nearly deaf in both ears, but denied she was hard of hearing in even one. She grew odd white fuzz on her face. She liked to drink whiskey and eat caramels and strange spicy sausages she said were from the old country. She smoked unapologetically. She spoke fluent English in a loud, heavy and indeterminate accent. She had occluded sight, which prevented her from driving, though didn’t prevent her from complaining about not driving. Hence her life’s motto about envying the good fortune of people who could push around their own wheelchairs, which she repeated again tonight as she walked through the front door. “They don’t know how lucky they are,” Moody said.

Behind his mother, Jimmy walked in without a word, dropped his keys on the side table and went to sit down. Lang, dressed in church clothes, fussed like a tumbleweed. After Moody hugged Chloe, she blurted without so much as a half-blind appraisal, “Why do you always look so dour, child? What is this awful thing you’re wearing? You’re a beautiful girl. Why are you hiding yourself from boys? Or is it one boy in particular you’re hiding yourself from? It won’t work. They all know what’s inside the hefty bags you wear for clothes. Come, let’s go. I’m not even taking my coat off despite your mother’s efforts. Take me to the cemetery. Don’t protest, better go quick before it gets dark. You don’t want to go to the graveyard at night, do you? I jest. Of course you don’t. Believe me. So let’s go pick some flowers from this famous garden of yours, and get to it. Jimmy, give your daughter the truck keys. You haven’t suspended her license for speeding—or other violations—have you?”

“You mean like Dad didn’t suspend Kenny’s?” Jimmy said, gesturing at the keys to Chloe. “Yeah, Chloe’s still driving. She’s also not speeding, or otherwise violating the good laws of all sane people.”

Moody stared coolly at Lang.

Lang glared at Jimmy.

Chloe rolled her eyes and quickly took her grandmother out of the house.

Chloe never saw her mother as respectful to anyone as she was to Moody, and her father as silent. Lang didn’t sit until Moody sat. There was no eating, drinking, or speaking, until Moody ate, drank, and spoke. Every other question out of Lang’s mouth was, do you have enough salt? More ice? Enough cream on the mashed potatoes? I made chocolate profiteroles for dessert, and fresh coffee, but I also have decaf, or some brandy, if you like. Of course I have whiskey. Would you like some now? Are you cold? Would you like a shawl? You’re too hot? Chloe, open all the windows. And bring in the floor fan from the shed.

Her mother sat in adoration. As if Moody had waltzed in, in light cloth, sans sandals, and beyond her stooped shoulders trembled two wings. That’s how Lang behaved around her husband’s mother. Not so much the husband.

“I fixed the screens,” Jimmy said in a stiff tone meant to convey he had built the Maginot Line—between himself and his mother.

Moody shrugged, as if his fixing the screens was an achievement on par with brushing his teeth. “Good,” she said. “Because I don’t enjoy mosquitoes.”

When Lang would pass Moody’s chair, she’d place her hand gently on the white-haired woman’s shoulder, patting her. It would be amusing if it weren’t so exasperating. All the while Jimmy gazed upon his wife with a pungent mixture of compassion and hostility.

A stressed and anxious Chloe was sullen and silent, like her father, though, she guessed, for different reasons. She and Jimmy sat gray like the unfallen Berlin Wall and stared at their food, at the darkening lake, warily at Lang and Moody across from them making small talk. Chewing her lip, counting to 741 by unlucky thirteens, Chloe tried to be still, to not think. The evening blossomed with the smell of mint and quivering fresh water.

“Moody, how are your flowers doing?” Chloe went over to her grandmother’s every spring and planted beautiful things in the raised black soil.

Moody made a face. “The flowers bring bees,” she said. “Which I also don’t enjoy, having grown up in a bee farmer’s house. Especially the blood orange tulips that came up a few weeks back. Pretty, but the bees! Never seen anything like it. Don’t plant those again.”

“Tulips are perennial, Moody. They come up on their own.”

“Well, plant something else. Something that doesn’t attract bees.”

“You want me,” Chloe asked slowly, letting it sink in, “to find flowers that don’t attract bees?”

Nothing sunk in. “No bees is what I want,” Moody said. “How you get there is your problem.”

Chloe’s scalp tingling, her skin shivering, she clawed at an old bite on her forearm. Was the grand diminutive woman ever going to get to the point of her visit?

There was much food and meaningless conversation before there was finally no food and a meaningful one. After coffee with Baileys, and a second helping of profiteroles (or was it a second helping of Baileys?) Mudita Devine, née Klavin, mother of six sons, oldest one deceased, Lochlan’s widow, fluttering Clarence Odbody clockmaker, opened her mouth.

“So your mother tells me you’re wanting to go to some damn fool city in Europe.”

It wasn’t a question. It was just a beginning. And what a beginning! Chloe nodded.

“Why?”

Before Chloe could reply, Moody cut her off. “I don’t care why. Neither do your parents.” Her mother across from her and her father next to her didn’t have time to nod. “The question is, is this a good idea?”

Chloe knew better than to even pretend to answer.

“Your mother and father don’t think so. You plan to go with your friends? That boy you’ve been hanging around with?”

“Mason. Yes. I’ve grown up with them, Moody.”

“Did I ask how long you’ve known them? Did I ask their names? What does any of that matter to me? You could know them five minutes or fifteen years. None of it matters. What matters is they’re boys, and you want them to join you girls in some tomfoolery.”

“Not …”

“Chloe.” Moody raised her hand. “You’ll have plenty of time to speak briefly. Your time has not come yet. Let me ask you this. In broader terms, beyond the few weeks you’re hoping to grab on a beach, have you given any thought to what you want to do with your life?”

Now could she speak? Chloe glanced from her mother to her father. She answered. Yes, she said. She has thought about it. She was thinking of going into law. She was thinking of majoring in history.

“So what I’m hearing is you want to major in history, yet your first inclination is to head to a Barcelona night club?”

Chloe must have looked flummoxed. “It makes me wonder,” her grandmother said in explanation, “how serious you are about your life.”

“Moody, I’m not even eighteen …”

“Do I not know how old you are?” Moody exchanged a glance with Lang. “So to your parents, you declare that you’re almost eighteen, as if you’re so grown up that you can make your own decisions. Yet now you remind us of your insignificant age to excuse why you can’t be serious about the road before you.”

A squirming Chloe kept quiet.

“So which is it? Are you eighteen or are you eighteen?”

Chloe had no answer, except yes. She couldn’t look up.

“I thought so. Look at me, child. That’s better. Your mother tells me you’ve had your heart set on Europe.”

Not Europe, Chloe wanted to bleat. Barcelona. She wasn’t even brave enough to defend her one small dream to her grandmother.

“You can decide to visit any European country,” Moody continued. “There are nearly two dozen to choose from. You have a few precious weeks before college. An opportunity of a lifetime. And you choose—Barcelona?”

Why was this so frightening? Her heart drummed in her chest.

“Yes.”

Moody raised her strong, wrinkled hand. “Still not your turn, child.” Her gaze was unwavering, which was more than Chloe could say for her own. She’d rather look at her mother! What torture this was.

“Your parents tell me that Hannah talks a good game, but has not yet produced enough cash for your Iberian adventure. And the young men, having come into your dream belatedly, are even more broke. Is this true?” Moody stopped Chloe from replying. “I have a proposal for you,” she said. “A proposal I’ve talked over with your parents, and they agree. A way for you to get what you want. That’s why I came. Do you want to hear about it?”

Chloe couldn’t hear anything above the thumping in her chest. A way for her to get what she wanted! was all she heard. What could Moody possibly have in mind? That Lang and Jimmy go with them to Europe to chaperone? That they go to Canada instead, as her dad had suggested? Moody was speaking, but Chloe—bouncing up and down on the trampoline beat of her excited heart—missed the important part, and she knew she had missed it because the three adults around her had fallen silent.

Chloe blinked. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that? I don’t think I heard right.”