What Looks Like Crazy Read online

  I’d barely made it downstairs when I heard the rumble of a truck. I knew that sound. My mother and my aunt had purchased a bright red 2007 Navistar CXT monster pickup truck to haul their junk. It weighed six tons and was twenty-one feet long. You could haul a lot of stuff in a truck like that—a small town, if you wanted.

  The doorbell rang. I peered through the peephole and found my platinum-haired mother and my aunt standing on the other side of the door. They were identical twins, Dixie and Trixie, who still dressed alike, even in their midfifties. They wore their signature red overalls, the words “Junk Sisters” embroidered over their left breasts. They were exhausting. They were reminders that my family tree had shaky branches, that my gene pool was probably unfit for swimming. I considered slipping out the back door.

  My mother raised a red and white bucket of fried chicken up to the peephole. “Open the door, Kate,” she said. “We know you’re in there.”

  My taste buds did a happy dance at the thought of fried chicken. But was it worth the high cost of dealing with two women who thought they looked good wearing turquoise eye shadow and two-inch fake lashes? You could sweep an entire house with those lashes. As if acting on cue, my stomach grumbled and growled.

  I opened the door.

  “We heard you had a bad day,” my mother said as she and Aunt Trixie stepped inside, plucking their sunglasses from their eyes and looking me over carefully, as though checking for injuries.

  “Mona called you?” I asked.

  “Now, don’t get mad,” Aunt Trixie said. “She was concerned about you and felt bad that she’d already made plans for the evening.”

  Mona’s plans included a twenty-four-year-old medical student. They’d met at a party. They’d been standing across the room from each other when their gazes met and locked. It was love at first sight, Mona claimed.

  “I only have one piece of advice,” my mother said.

  I knew my mother had more advice than I would ever need. “What is it?”

  “You can’t save the world.”

  “She’s right, honey,” Aunt Trixie said.

  I nodded and followed them to the kitchen. My mother was already looking through the cabinets. “Where are your dishes?”

  “I haven’t gotten around to buying any. I mostly use paper plates.” I pointed to another cabinet.

  “Trixie and I could have gotten you a good deal on dishes if we’d known,” she said.

  Aunt Trixie nodded. “We could have picked them up for next to nothing at an estate sale yesterday.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t do much cooking.”

  “That’s why you’re so thin,” my mother said. “I hope you’re not getting one of those eating disorders.” She shook her head sadly. “Mona said you’d let yourself go.”

  “Mona said that?” I asked, feeling a bit hurt.

  “She didn’t mean it in a bad way,” Trixie said quickly. “She’s worried that you’re under too much stress. She says you almost never get manicures anymore.”

  “You don’t have any flatware either?” my mother asked, opening and closing drawers until she came to one that contained plastic knives and forks and hundreds of tiny salt and pepper packets. “I’ll bet you don’t even have pots and pans. Trixie, make a list.”

  My aunt pulled a pad of paper from her purse and started writing. “It’s no big deal, Mom,” I said.

  Aunt Trixie waved off my remark. “Let us take care of it,” she said. “We’re professionals.”

  I’d learned long ago not to argue with my mother and aunt, because they would do exactly what they wanted. Before long I’d have more cookware than most restaurants. I grabbed three diet sodas from the refrigerator and carried them to the table. “Thanks for getting the chicken,” I said once we’d sat down and filled our plates.

  Aunt Trixie patted my hand and winked. Unlike my mother, who worried and nagged me about every little thing, Aunt Trixie was the peacemaker, the one who wanted to make everything okay.

  “I wish you’d been a teacher like your grandfather,” my mother said. “It can’t be good for you, working around all those crazy people.”

  I looked at her. This, coming from a woman who’d once delivered my forgotten sack lunch to school wearing oversized Bugs Bunny bedroom slippers and pink foam hair curlers. She had almost caused me to drop out in second grade. “They’re not crazy, Mom,” I said. “They have problems, just like anybody else.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s healthy, listening to people’s troubles all day. I would get depressed. In fact, you do look a little depressed. What do you think, Trixie?”

  My aunt put her hand to my forehead as though checking to see whether I had a fever.

  “Would you two cut it out?” I said. “I’m not depressed, okay?” I decided it was time to change the subject. “How is the move coming along?”

  My mother smiled proudly. “Great. You should see the new showroom. The wood floors are beautiful. Tell her, Trixie.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “I can’t wait to see it,” I said. My mother and aunt had become celebrity junk dealers after a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution interviewed them. That had led to an article in Southern Living and a segment on Home & Garden Television. Suddenly people were coming from all over to buy their junk.

  They’d learned to weld, and that had resulted in a bunch of whatchamacallits and thingamajigs finding homes in wall art and sculptures. High-priced decorators began calling for accent pieces, and the Junk Sisters, as my mother and aunt were referred to, designed tags and renamed the items “Junque.”

  They were forced to hire employees in order to meet demand, but they quickly ran out of garage space. Finally they purchased a building in an area known as Little Five Points, a bohemian-style neighborhood likened to New York’s Greenwich Village and New Orleans’ French Quarter, and they’d been hauling Junque over there for weeks in preparation for their grand opening.

  “Have many people responded to the invitations?” I asked. Mona and I had spent a full day helping them write out hundreds of invitations to the event.

  “We’re going to have quite a crowd, even for a Sunday night,” my mother said.

  “Great.” The grand opening was to be held on Sunday night to accommodate my cousin’s band, who’d offered to play at a cut rate since they seldom had gigs that night. They called themselves the Dead Musicians, a group of five men with shaved heads, tattoos, and nose rings.

  After a few minutes, I noticed a silence in the room: my mother and aunt had stopped talking. While that normally would have brought me much relief, I had the feeling something was wrong. “What is it?” I asked.

  My mother took a deep breath. “It’s about the invitations.”

  “First, you have to promise not to get mad,” Aunt Trixie said.

  I knew the news wasn’t good. “What?”

  My mother looked at Trixie. “You tell her.”

  “No, you tell her.”

  “We invited Jay,” my mother said.

  I looked from one to the other to see whether they were kidding. The pucker between my mother’s brows assured me it was no joke. “Why would you do that?”

  “It wasn’t intentional,” my mother said. “Tell her, Trixie.”

  “It wasn’t intentional, hon,” Aunt Trixie said. “Jay was in the same checkout line at the Wal-Mart store. We got to talking—”

  “He said a friend of his read about us and was interested in seeing some of our art,” my mother interrupted, “so I pulled an invitation from my purse and gave it to him, and—”

  “To give his friend,” Trixie cut in.

  My mother nodded. “And then I realized how rude it would look if I didn’t give Jay an invitation as well.”

  “Our divorce is final in a little over two weeks, Mom. He would have understood.”

  “Honey, he looks just as good as he did before you split up,” Trixie said.

  Just what I wanted to hear, I thought. �
�Well, don’t be hurt if he doesn’t come,” I said. “I’m sure he would be as uncomfortable as I would, under the circumstances.”

  “Oh, he’s coming,” Aunt Trixie said. “He told us he wouldn’t miss it for anything. He even asked about you. Wanted to know how you were.”

  “Naturally, he was concerned about your weight loss,” my mother said.

  I looked at her. “You told him I’d lost weight? Mom, he’s going to think I’m pining for him.” For once, just once, I wished my mother and aunt would stay out of my business.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I told him it was due to financial stress and the crappy place where you were living.”

  I buried my face in my hands. “Oh, gur-reat! He’s going to think I can’t manage my life now.”

  “What do you care what he thinks?” my mother said. “You’re divorcing him.”

  I looked at her. “It’s a matter of pride, okay?” I carried my plate to the trash. “I can’t possibly go to the grand opening now,” I said dully.

  “Oh, honey, you have to come!” she said.

  I shook my head. Just talking about Jay Rush upset me. Why would I want to see him and reopen all the wounds? “I can’t, Mom.”

  “That’s silly,” she said. “He’s going to think you’re afraid to see him.” She shook her head. “This whole thing is silly. The two of you need to kiss and make up before it’s too late.”

  I sighed. “It’s already too late.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “I think he’d take you back if you asked.”

  “Hello?” I waved my hands in the air. “I’m not going back to him. Not after what I went through.”

  My mom folded her arms on the table. “That’s not fair, Kate.”

  “He lied to me, Mom!”

  “He tried to make you less afraid.”

  “He told me his job as a captain was less dangerous than a regular firefighter’s. He said better technology and advances in fire science, blah, blah, blah, made firefighting much safer.”

  “Well, that’s essentially true,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean the work is risk free.”

  “He could have died!” I reminded her. “It doesn’t matter how many advances have been made. Accidents happen. Walls and floors cave in and trap people.”

  Which was exactly what had happened to Jay and a couple of men in his crew. They’d come very close to being killed. “Call me dumb, but I’m tired of offering up the people I love to the great Fire God.”

  She and my aunt were quiet for a moment. “Well, I’m not a bit sorry I married your father,” she said after a moment.

  I just looked at her. “I’m not sorry you married him either, Mom, but it would be nice to have him around. You know?”

  Aunt Trixie covered one of my hands with hers.

  My mother folded her arms on the table and leaned closer. “You practically lived at that firehouse the last year your father was alive. You ate there, and you would have slept there if I hadn’t forced you to come home and do your schoolwork.”

  Trixie patted my hand. “You were a daddy’s girl, that’s for sure. Why, I don’t remember a parade when you weren’t riding next to him in a fire truck. The man seldom left this house without you straddling his shoulders.”

  “You’re interrupting me, Trixie,” my mother said. “The point I’m trying to make is that Kate knew, even when she was nine and ten years old, how the department worked, and she attended more than one fireman’s funeral. She practically grew up with Jay, and it was his dream to go to college and study fire science and become a great fireman like his daddy and—” She stopped. “And your daddy,” she added, looking directly at me.

  “What are you trying to say, Mom?” But I already suspected.

  “You knew exactly what you were getting into when you agreed to marry Jay.”

  That’s the thing about my mother. She doesn’t beat around the bush, and she’s about as diplomatic as Mona. Meaning she always tells me the truth, whether I want to hear it or not.

  Finally I shrugged. “So blame me, but I have no desire to white-knuckle it every time Jay races to a burning building. And I have no intention of becoming a widow before my time or raising a child without a father. Like you had to do,” I added.

  “You had Uncle Bump,” she said.

  “Right. How could I forget?” Uncle Bump’s real name was Harry, and he used to drink. A lot. One night he got loaded and mouthed off to a biker named Fist. By the time the cops showed up, Uncle Harry had three cracked ribs, a couple of missing teeth, and a badly broken nose. The doctor could never get the nose to set straight, so Uncle Harry was forced to live with a small knot along the bridge, earning him the nickname “Bump.”

  You’d think Uncle Bump would have given up the booze after that, but I was forced to endure his bone-crunching bear hugs and Wild Turkey breath until I was twelve years old.

  Then he met and married my aunt Lou. She chain-smoked nonfiltered cigarettes and carried an ice pick in her purse. My mother credited Aunt Lou with putting Uncle Bump on the straight and narrow. She and Uncle Bump quickly produced a son named Lucien. Aunt Lou bought Lucien a BB gun when he was seven years old, and he became known as Lucifer to the neighbors.

  I did not want Lucifer to be the father figure in my children’s lives.

  “I just have one piece of advice,” my mother said. “No marriage is without its share of problems.”

  “I know that.” But Jay’s and my marriage had been pretty close to perfect. There’d been so much sex going on, we’d added Antonio’s Pizza Parlor to our speed dial, because nobody had time to cook. It took more than great sex to make a marriage, though. After a day of listening to everybody’s problems, I need some kind of order. And security. I’d had little of either growing up.

  Which was what I told Jay after his twenty-four-hour stint at the hospital where he’d been treated for a dislocated shoulder and a host of smaller injuries. I wanted him to take Uncle Bump’s offer to come in as a full partner in his security company.

  Jay stood his ground, even as I tossed my suitcases into the trunk of my car and slid behind the steering wheel that day.

  My mother and aunt quietly cleared the table and put the bucket of chicken in the refrigerator. When I looked up, they were smiling. Something told me they weren’t finished adding confusion to my life.

  “We brought you a surprise,” my mother said, and motioned me to follow them outside to their truck.

  “It’s not more furniture, is it?” I asked. “I don’t have room in my house for anything else.”

  “You’ll see,” my mother sang out.

  They opened the tailgate and pulled out something that had been wrapped in old moving blankets. At the very back of the truck were a dozen pots of rust-and burgundy-colored mums. “Give me a hand,” my mother said as Trixie grabbed a shovel.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s for your flower bed,” she said. “Help me stand it up.”

  I held the top section as she unwrapped it, and Aunt Trixie began digging. It was a sculpture formed out of tin and wire and various other materials. I cocked my head from one side to the other. “What’s it supposed to be?”

  “Step back and look at it,” my mother said.

  I did as she said. I circled it several times, checking from all angles. “I guess I’m not much of an art expert.”

  Aunt Trixie hurried to the back of the truck and pulled out a small a bag of concrete mix. “We call it First Man and Woman.”

  It suddenly became crystal clear to me: a man and a woman formed together, vines encircling them. I looked more closely at the man—specifically, at his groin. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “You’re supposed to draw your own conclusion,” my mother said, “but I’ll give you one hint. It’s not a fig leaf.”

  I turned to find my aunt dumping dry concrete mix into a hole in my flower bed. She reached for the hose. “Wait!” I said. “You’re going to put it in my front ya
rd?”

  “Dixie, I told you she’d be surprised,” my aunt said, squirting water on the concrete and mixing it with a stick.

  “Honey, I wish you could see the look on your face,” my mother said. “I wish we had brought the camera. Consider it a late housewarming gift,” she said.

  “But you’ve already done so much. I don’t feel right accepting this. Really,” I added.

  The telephone rang inside. “I should get that,” I said, hoping it was Mona. “Don’t do anything till I get back.”

  I hurried inside and answered the phone. Sure enough, it was Mona calling from the ladies’ room at the restaurant to see whether I was feeling better. “We have to talk,” I said. “What time will you be home?”

  “I might not go home tonight,” Mona whispered.

  “Oh.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking he’s too young. Well, he’s almost twenty-five.”

  “Why are you being so defensive?”

  “Because I don’t like it that people think it’s okay for a man to go out with a younger woman, but it’s not okay for an older woman to go out with a younger man.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You’re thinking I’ll look foolish, is that it?” She sighed. “Oh, crap, I probably shouldn’t go home with him. I’m thirty-four. I can’t possibly take my clothes off in front of a twenty-four-year-old man.”

  I could not imagine someone like Mona being self-conscious. She was blond, petite, and perfect. “Maybe you shouldn’t rush into anything.”

  “I really like this guy, Kate. Actually, I’m pretty sure I’m in love with him. Now that I think about it, I care about him way too much to sleep with him on the first date.”

  I gave a mental eye roll. To Mona it probably made perfect sense.

  “Plus, he hasn’t come on to me. Uh-oh.”

  I could barely keep up with her train of thought. “What?”

  “What if he isn’t attracted to me? Oh, God, what if he’s only going out with me because I’m rich?”

  “Mona, you’re talking in circles. You definitely need to slow down and reconsider.”