Page 24 of Road Trip
Hi Mama. Well, this pandemic really sucks. I was up for a part in a Miami Vice reboot, and then BAM, they shut down the shoot. Driving for Uber Eats so don’t know how I’d make it without your help with the car situation. You’re the best dam mama evah. Love, Therese.
Maeve fanned the postcards out on the coffee table. Therese had lived a nomadic existence since high school, but now, looking down at her sparse correspondence with their mother, she saw her sister’s life as a loosely woven string of high hopes and broken dreams. There were no other postcards since Miami, where Mary Helen had obviously stepped in—again—to keep Therese’s dreams afloat.
And after Miami, in those five years, what had happened to unmoor her sister?
For a second, she felt a flash of empathy. Maybe she should extend her sister some grace. And then she remembered the missing hundred dollars and got pissed all over again.
She heard the sound of a car pulling into the driveway, the lurch of LeBeast’s brakes, a car door slamming, and a moment later her sister burst into the living room, both arms wrapped protectively around the portrait of Lady Geraldine. Maeve slipped the stack of postcards beneath a bundle of utility bills.
“Hey!” Therese set the painting gingerly atop the fireplace mantel. Her face was alive with excitement. “Wait until you hear. Our money problems are over.”
Maeve gave her a curt nod. “Where’ve you been?”
“Researching Lady G. Maeve, I know you think Mama made up all that stuff about the portrait, but I swear, this painting is the real deal.”
“And you know this, how?”
Therese pulled out the tiny spiral-bound notebook where she’d scribbled the information she’d uncovered about Valerian DeJongh and the painting and waved it in the air.
“Remember Wyllona Jackson? From St. Mary’s? She’s an art expert. She works for the biggest auction house in New York, but she’s in town this week because it’s her dad’s birthday. I tracked her down and I showed her the portrait. And Maeve, the artist who painted Lady G is really famous. His stuff is exhibited in art galleries around the world. Wyllona says our painting could be worth a shit-ton of money. If we can authenticate the provenance, it could be worth over a million dollars!”
“Riiiight,” Maeve said. “And just how do we do that?”
Therese plopped down on the sofa beside Maeve and grabbed both her sister’s hands. “I think we gotta do what Mama wanted. We go to Ireland.”
Maeve snatched her hands away. “Just up and run off to Ireland. Find someone who can tell us about a painting that came over here, what—a hundred years ago? That’s your solution to figuring out what to do about this house?”
“Well, yeah. You got a better plan?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“Of course,” Therese said, crossing her arms over her chest in her signature pout. “Maeve always knows best. Can’t wait to hear how you single-handedly save the day.”
“I actually took your advice. I went to see Scotty Childress this morning. He says we might have a course of action against Brother Jerome. For elder abuse. And, if we can find any correspondence to Mama from him, or his so-called church, for mail fraud. Also, we might even be able to go after the bank.”
“You actually think we’re gonna get money out of a bank? What was it Mom used to say about getting blood out of a turnip?”
“According to Scotty, the bank had a responsibility to protect their client’s assets. The teller who noticed Mom’s withdrawals and alerted that bank president about them? The bank had a responsibility to investigate.”
“Maeve, aren’t you the one always telling me to ‘get real’? Even if Scotty does sic the law on the church and the bank, that could take months and months. Years, probably. In the meantime, what am I supposed to do for money? I was counting on the money from this house. My inheritance.”
Maeve felt her face grow hot. “Mama’s dead, Terri. She can’t bail you out anymore. So maybe it’s time for you to grow the hell up and get an actual job? And while you’re at it, maybe stop stealing money out of my purse?”
Maeve jumped up and went into the kitchen. She’d picked up a bottle of Chablis at a convenience store on her way home, and now poured herself a full glass. She stood at the sink in her mother’s kitchen, gazing out the back window, gulping cheap wine, shaking her head and wondering how she’d gotten to this point—day drinking and needling her only sister.
Such a useless exercise. Therese was who she’d always been: beautiful, erratic, talented, selfish. Their mother had spent a lifetime defending and enabling her oldest daughter, and now, like it or not, it was just the two of them.
The wine left a sour taste in her mouth, and the one-sided fight she’d just picked with her sister left her stomach roiled.
She dumped the remainder of the wine down the drain and went back to the living room to try to make peace.
Therese slumped forwardon the sofa, stunned and shamed. She and Maeve had bickered in the past, but her sister had never been deliberately cruel before. And the thing was, the words stung so much because they were so true.
She tossed the notebook onto the coffee table, where it landed in the stacks of mail Maeve had been studying. She rested her elbows on her knees and clutched her head between her hands.
Her eyes came to rest on the coffee table. Peeking out from the yellowing envelopes she spied a splash of color. The postcards she’d mailed on her cross-country search for acting gigs.
Reading them now was a humiliating visual reminder of all her many failures. Of course Mary Helen had saved them all. And now her sister had obviously read them too.
