Double Up Read online

  “See, Davis? That’s just it. I don’t know. Cancer, maybe? Like a brain tumor? Or maybe I’m having a heart attack?”

  “You’re twenty-seven years old. I doubt you’re having a heart attack.”

  “You’re not a doctor.”

  “Then why are you calling me? Call a doctor, Baylor.” I loud-whispered, so House wouldn’t dial Dr. Calliope’s office, because they were sick and tired of it. (Me too.)

  “And say what?”

  “What you just said to me. That you’re dying.”

  “I can’t say that to a doctor.”

  “Then why would you say it to me?” Like talking to the wall.

  Warning him I didn’t want the gory details, I asked what his symptoms were. He told me he couldn’t sleep, think, or eat. He got my attention with eat. Baylor could put a buffet out of business. He could empty a refrigerator in twenty minutes. He had a Taco Bell Supreme Party Taco Pack every single day of his life to hold him over between lunch and dinner. Then it occurred to me it was the week after Halloween. “Baylor, did you go trick or treating?”

  “What? No.”

  “What did you do Halloween? Remember last year when you drank that Devil Punch and Fantasy and I had to take you to that quack hangover doctor?”

  “That man is a genius.”

  “Whatever, Baylor. What’d you get into on Halloween?”

  “Nothing. I worked.”

  “Tell me the truth,” I said. “I don’t have time for this.”

  “Davis, I worked. I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned it to you, but I’m the only one left. I worked the whole night, I mean all the way through the night. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Do you know July, the Holiday Host?”

  “Twelve years old? Big hair?”

  “She’s not twelve years old.”

  And just the way he said it, as if I’d insulted July the Holiday Host in the most vile and offensive of ways, I caught on. I’d been a police officer in Pine Apple for seven years before I was a Super Secret Spy at the Bellissimo, so these things didn’t slip by me too easily, babies or no babies. “Baylor? Do you like this girl?”

  “Like her? Davis, I would die for her. I think I am dying for her. She might be killing me.”

  And that was why Taco Bell was going out of business. Baylor met a girl.

  She wasn’t his type at all. Baylor preferred hookers and strippers and married women. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw him with a woman who wore less than DDD breasts, and for the most part, they were ten years older, loaded with money, and could drink him under the table. Occasionally, and by occasionally I meant once a week, Baylor explored other demographics of women, just to, as he put it, “keep it real.” He went missing (all the time) once last year to the point of Fantasy and I having to stop what we were doing, go to his apartment and break in, where we found him entertaining an entire bachelorette party. Not a single one of those girls (was conscious) spoke English. We plowed through—bonjour, excusez-moi, try the gray stuff, it’s delicious—and found Baylor passed out in the bathtub wearing nothing but a wedding veil. So for him to fall for a girl, and fall so hard he couldn’t even eat, was big news. And of all things, it was the girl next door who took him down.

  I talked to Baylor more than I talked to anyone else, because if I didn’t occasionally call him back, he’d swipe himself in my front door like he lived here. Even House thought he lived here. So I talked to him every third or fourth time he tried to trick me back to work.

  “Davis, we have new slot machines.” (He knew I loved slot machines.) “Davis, the casino is flooded.” (No, it wasn’t.) “Davis, someone is shooting up the lobby.” (No, they weren’t.) “Davis, I want you to meet July.” (It was December. He was still dating July?)

  They showed up at seven on the Friday after Christmas with a Hamilton Avenue Tomato Pie, my favorite, from Sal & Mookie’s on Lameuse Street. Baylor and I ate the pizza and talked about everything except work for two hours while July played with the girls.

  He’d found his appetite and she was a natural with babies.

  At first, I thought she was showing off for Baylor. Marriage material and all. But when the girls didn’t cry for me once in two hours, I gave it a second thought. It could be she liked my babies, and my babies definitely liked her, which was so different from the seven nannies I’d fired that month. Then there was this: In those two hours, July taught Bex and Quinny how to sign, in American Sign Language, the word helicopter. And that was in addition to the signs for Mommy, Daddy, and chicken. I couldn’t believe it. She told me as they were leaving that the girls were months ahead of where they should be developmentally, an amazing twinning trait where they taught each other that she’d read about but had never seen live. This, from a Holiday Host. I beamed and let it go until the next day, when I had a bouncing baby girl on each hip at the kitchen window and a helicopter flew low over the Gulf. Their chubby little fingers flew; they signed helicopter. Which was when I remembered a line from July’s résumé; she had a degree in Early Childhood Education. She didn’t know it yet, but she was getting ready to put it to work.

  The doorbell rang at five ’til ten. I ran past Bexley and Quinn who were in their Snuggapuppy bouncers dressed in matching Boogaboo playsuits. (Too cute for words.) “Girls! Your new nanny is here!”

  (“Baabaa!” and “Moomoo!”)

  I threw open the door. “July!” But it wasn’t July.

  I might have been hallucinating. I might have died and gone to hell. My hand slid off the doorknob and my knees turned to rubber. It was my ex-ex-mother-in-law, Bea Crawford.

  “Are you going to leave me standing out here in the hall or are you going to ask me in?”

  “Bea?” I fell against the doorframe. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to meet the babies.”

  “With everything you own?”

  Behind my ex-ex-mother-in-law were three giant rolling luggage racks stuffed to the gills. I didn’t know how she got it up here without a moving truck. I couldn’t imagine the scene downstairs when Bea parked her rattletrap rusted-out Lincoln in front of the beautiful Bellissimo fountain and the display in front of me started spewing from it. It looked like inventory for a city-wide flea market. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what was happening, why Bea Crawford was at my door, and why in the world she had so much stuff. I could see a shrink-wrapped flat of Mountain Dew in two-liter plastic bottles, a bag of Cheetos the size of a bed pillow, a crossbow, and a vast collection of her Hawaiian muumuu dresses loose, piled high, and draped over a beat-up cabinet television that was at least twenty years old. It had antennas. The antennas were wearing aluminum foil hats. And that was just one layer on one luggage rack. Clearly, this woman had the sum of her earthly possessions at my front door.

  “Did you think about calling, Bea?” So I could have said no?

  “I called umpteen times,” she said. “I can’t help it if you don’t answer your phone.”

  Leaving her worldly goods in my vestibule, she waltzed right on in. “Where are those girls?” Bea Crawford marched straight through to the living room, where she proceeded to scar my children for life, squealing, “It’s your Banana Nana Bea Bea! It’s time to meet your Bea Bea! Your Bea Bea’s here to see you!”

  Then as clear as a bell, my precious Bexley spoke her first coherent word. Not mama and not dada and not helicopter. She said, for all to hear, “Bee Bee Bee!” Not two seconds later, Quinn chimed in. “Bee!”

  The elevator doors dinged open, right in time with my heart breaking into a million little pieces. July Jackson stepped out, taking in the scene, and came to a dead stop. She looked past Bea Crawford’s personal effects and told dumbstruck me she could come back later.

  I was seeing stars.

  “No, July, no. Stay. Pleas
e stay. Can you help me with the girls for a few minutes?”

  “Sure sure.”

  Seven

  There wasn’t a time in my life when I didn’t know Bea Crawford. She and my mother were the same age and grew up on the same street in Pine Apple, Alabama. One of my first memories of Bea was when I was four years old and witnessed her winning a biscuit and gravy eating contest. To this day, I couldn’t be in the same room with a biscuit or a gravy. A year later, at the same county fair, I watched her take down a three-hundred-pound pot-bellied pig. Another blue ribbon for Bea. When I was six years old, she stopped on the sidewalk in front of our house where I was playing in the yard and told me redheaded children came from baboons and my real parents lived at the Birmingham Zoo. Bea picked on everyone, including her own. I’d seen her chase her own husband down Main Street, screaming her lungs out about him leaving a mustard knife on her kitchen counter while beating him black and blue with a corn stalk. Bea and Melvin were the proprietors of Mel’s Diner, which made up exactly half of the eating establishments in Pine Apple. The other half had recently changed hands and, I’d been told, was serving actual edible food, a novelty for Pine Apple. So Bea’s latest trick was to blow in the door of Jed’s Meat and Three at high noon armed with a three-pronged sixteen-inch stainless-steel meat fork, snatch plate lunches right off tables, then walk out the door and feed the pack of feral dogs who followed her around. Once she climbed out of Pine Apple’s only dental chair, shoved Dr. Puyallup in it, then drilled his left incisor out of his head because he’d hurt her. When she wanted to spread gossip, she went to Pine Apple’s only grocery store and helped herself to the loud speaker. I was fifteen years old when she announced over the Piggly Wiggly intercom that I was pregnant with her only son Eddie’s love child (no I wasn’t), and that’s how I ended up marrying him the first time. So to say I didn’t want Bea Crawford in my home was to say I didn’t want anthrax, or venomous snakes, or Freddy Krueger in my home.

  I asked July to take the girls to their room while I (got rid of) dealt with Bea, who’d settled into Bradley’s chair like she owned the place. I chose a seat as far away from her as possible. “Bea.” I cleared my throat. “What are you doing here?”

  “I need to hire you, Davis.”

  “I don’t want to be hired. I don’t work, Bea. I’m a stay-at-home mom.”

  She shifted in Bradley’s chair, it protested, and I thought about asking her to switch seats to something a little sturdier so my husband would have somewhere to sit when he came home from work. This was assuming I could get it fumigated between now and then if she didn’t split it down the middle first. Bea wasn’t a little woman, in the same way a truck wasn’t a little vehicle and a tornado wasn’t a little storm. She was almost six feet tall and had biceps as big as whole hams. She was thick through the middle, and by middle, I meant the space between her head and her feet. Her ever-changing hair style was, at present, an inch long, spiked, and two-toned—jet black at the roots and cotton white on the ends—in high contrast to her ruddy complexion, which she claimed was rosacea brought on by her nervous pills. She had a perpetually clogged tear duct, so her right eye bulged. She swung her puffy eye my way and trained it on me, which meant she had an announcement to make. “Melvin’s stepping out on me.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but I couldn’t get any words out. If I could’ve, they’d have been in the form of a question, and would’ve been one of these: What? So? Why are you telling me? Why did you have a filthy oscillating fan at my door?

  “Are you sick?” She leered my way. “If you’re dying and can’t do it, just tell me. I understand dead.”

  CALLING EMERGENCY SERVICES! CALLING EMERGENCY SERVICES! CALLING EMERGENCY SERVICES!

  And that was where I had to explain House to Bea. In the end, she said, “I’ll be dadgum.” Then she took it for a test run. “Hot!” she said to the ceiling. “I’m Bea Crawford and I’m burning up hot!” Within seconds, House threw us into a cryogenic chamber. Bea got a big kick out of it, slapping her leg and hooting, while, teeth chattering, I told House to take us back to seventy-two degrees and asked Bea to try to whisper.

  “So that’s what’s wrong with you? Is this place killing you?”

  “What, Bea? What? No!”

  “So you’re just sick?”

  “No, I’m not sick.”

  “Have you got the gout?”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Well, you’re white as a sheet. You look like you’ve got the gout.”

  It’s funny how life can change so fast. From one minute to the next, really. Here I was, not ten minutes ago, minding my business, living my life, raising my daughters, being a good wife, hiring a nanny, making plans to save the Bellissimo, then Bea Crawford showed up at my door. “I’m fine, Bea.”

  “You need some meat on your bones, Davis. Men don’t trust skinny women. I’ve never seen anyone in my life so scrawny after having two babies. I’m still trying to lose this gut I got when I had Eddie.”

  Eddie was thirty-five years old.

  “You look sick sick sick to me, Davis. You should go see a doctor.”

  DIALING DOCTOR CALLIOPE! DIALING DOCTOR CALLIOPE! DIALING DOCTOR CALLIOPE!

  Her head lolled around. “It’s like the Twilight Zone in here.”

  It was now. And not that it was any of Bea’s business, but it was Dr. Calliope who told me I’d have to eat fried chicken and chocolate cake around the clock to consume more calories than I was expending nursing the girls, and I believed her; of the forty-four pregnancy pounds I’d gained, forty of them were gone before my daughters were two months old. Which didn’t make me sick. “I’m fine, Bea, thank you for asking.” We had a gun in the house. Several, in fact, locked in the safe behind a hinged marbled mirror in the study. I mentally ran the combination. Just in case this got any uglier and I had to shoot Bea. “However,” I cleared my throat, “I can’t help you at all. Tell me what you drove all the way here to ask me to do, and I’ll help you find someone who can.” I meant every word. Whoever she needed, I’d hire them—hitman, exorcist, Dr. Oz—if it got her out of (Bradley’s chair) this house. This city. This state. I could go on.

  “I told you what the problem is. It’s Melvin. He’s not keeping it in his pants. And I don’t want to hire some total stranger, Davis. I want you. I need the personal touch.”

  In my lifetime, I’d drawn so many lines with Bea Crawford. So many. And here was another place I drew the line: I was not touching her. And I made sure there’d be no way for her to misinterpret my answer. “No.”

  “Well, Davis,” she puffy-eyed me, “after worshiping the very ground I walk on for forty-some years, Melvin’s going out on me. And whether you like it or not, I’m hiring you to find his hussy and bring her to me, then I’m going to beat her within an inch of her life. I’m going to kick her ass all over Wilcox County. And I’m going to keep the children for you while you’re hunting down Melvin’s whore. Which is why I brought a few things with me. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, because he’s a sneaky bastard. He stinks too. Just about bathes in that nasty Bengay. It’s hard to believe anybody’d have him.”

  Agreed.

  “Well? Cat got your tongue? Speak up, Davis.”

  I couldn’t, because at this point, I was a tad delirious. Under no circumstances did I believe or care that her sixty-year-old husband was cheating on her. I hadn’t left my daughters for ten minutes since the day they were born, and if I had any intention of being separated from them now, in a million years it wouldn’t be because Melvin Crawford was having an affair. Not to mention I wouldn’t leave the girls in Bea Crawford’s care for even one minute.

  “Bea,” I stammered. “No.” I shook my head. “No, no, no.” I skipped her marital woes and went straight to the heart of the matter. “You can’t be here. You just can’t. This is wrong on so many levels, and whatever it is
you and Melvin have going on, I’m sorry for your troubles, but I can’t help you.”

  She chewed a thumbnail. She raised an eyebrow. The puffy-eye eyebrow.

  “You have to go, Bea. This is my life.” I displayed my personal space she was invading. “This is my home. This is my family.”

  “And you ruined mine.” She pronounced ruined with a T. “You owe me.”

  I gripped the chair arms and gasped for what little oxygen the room offered that Bea wasn’t monopolizing while trying my hardest to come up with a response.

  “Say,” she said. “I’d like a cold drink.”

  “What?”

  “A cold drink?” she said. “I’ve been on the road all morning. I need to hit the head too. Had a few fiesta breakfast burritos from the Sonic on the way in and they’re working on me.” With great effort, most of her stood. “I’ll powder my nose and you fix me a Mountain Dew on ice with a straw. Then we’ll get this deal hammered out.”

  Gathering my strength, resolve, and will to live to live through the words I was about to impart, I stood too, and the space between us narrowed to an uncomfortable twenty feet. “Wait just a minute, Bea. Let me say something.”

  “Make it quick.”

  “I don’t owe you anything. Not a thing, Bea. Eddie and I were married for ten minutes a million years ago, and I did not ruin your family. I can’t help you and you can’t stay here.”

  She planted her camouflage Crocs wide and her balled fists disappeared somewhere deep into her midsection.

  “You can’t deny me my grandchildren, Davis.”

  I gasped and grabbed for my heart. “Bea! My daughters aren’t your grandchildren!”

  “Davis Way.” She closed the gap between us to a tight ten feet. “You ruint my boy. You ruint my family and my boy. He’s never going to give me any grandbabies. It’s your fault he’s ruint and that makes your babies the closest I’m ever going to get to any of my own. Melvin’s kicked me out, Davis, came after me with a meat cleaver this morning, which is partly your fault, because you’re the one who ruint my family. Most days Eddie’s not worth taking out back and shooting, which is all your fault because you ruint him up and down and sideways. So your girls are the only family I have left. You either get on the stick and figure out who Melvin’s catting around with or I’ll see you in court when I sue you for my grandmother visiting rights.”