Читать книгу Intertwined - Myrna G. Raines - Страница 4

“That you, Mylia?” she heard the minute she opened the door.

“Yeah, it’s me, Mom.” Who else would it be? But her mom always asked that same question any time she came in the door. “What are you doing awake? I thought you’d be asleep long before now. Are you feelin’ okay?” Mylia strode over to her mom’s bed, and checked her head with her hand and felt her arm, pinching up her dark skin to make sure she was well hydrated.

“Where you go? You meet somebody? You have fun, no?” The woman lay on the bed, pale, with her thin arms lying on top of the ragged quilt that covered her.

“Oh yes, Mom, I did have fun,” she said excitedly, hugging her jacket to her chest. “I went downtown and found out all the kids cruise down the main street on Saturday night. I met some girls who will be in the same school I’ll be going to and of course they wanted to cruise in the big Mercury. I’m glad you made me go. I would have just sat around here all evening. I’m so thankful Uncle Warren is letting me use that car. It’s a beauty, all right. Drives like a dream.” She hung up her jacket and walked over and sat down on her mother’s bed, knowing her mom would want to hear everything.

“The girls yelled at me, Mom, called me ‘Blondie’, and I stopped the car. They actually came over and asked me if they could ride with me. I’d never even seen them before, but everybody is in town on Saturday night, and they didn’t have a car. Took me a while to get the hang of that Mercury. It’s so big! Every car is different, but you don’t drive, so you don’t know. And, Mom, you’re not going to believe this, but there was a boy who introduced himself to me.” She smiled that elfish little smile that her mother loved so well. She knew that her meeting a boy would please her mother, but she would keep to herself the fact that she had let him know there was no future in getting to know her. God, she’d hated to be impolite to him. He was a gorgeous hunk if she’d ever seen one, and she’d never had a guy come up and introduce himself like that. But circumstances prevented her from having close friends, and especially boyfriends. It broke her heart, but she’d die before she’d let her mom know it.

“He came to you? Good sign. He like what he see. You not hurt car? Your Uncle Warren say you can use car as long as you no hurt it. I want you be able to use car.”

“I know, Mom, and I didn’t do anything to the car. It’s fine.” The only reason her uncle had let her have the car was so the mighty Trenton’s wouldn’t have to come into contact with them. Probably thought they might have to take them somewhere. She wasn’t stupid. She knew which way the ball bounced. Raising herself up off the small bed, she cleaned the used glasses off her mom’s nightstand, wondering why her Uncle Warren called the Mercury an old car. It was only a couple of years old, but of course, with his new Jaguar, his wife’s Mercedes, and the Rolls Royce in the garage, it probably would be old to him.

“Do you need anything before I go to bed, Mom? Do you want some water? Tea? Did you take your pills?”

“I take them, my sweetheart. And drink lots of water.” She smiled at Mylia. “How you say? Float the battleship?” And Mylia reached over and kissed her cheek, giving a small chuckle. “Turn out light when you read enough. We can’t up power bill.”

“I will, Mom. Goodnight.” But her mother didn’t answer. She did that. Went to sleep at the drop of a hat. Ever since her mother had gotten that fever, she’d done that. Would go to sleep almost in the middle of a sentence. Mylia had learned to expect it and paid no attention to it now.

The bathroom for their use was a shower and commode only and they were so old and worn they could not be cleaned. Mylia resorted to pouring bleach in them hoping some of the germs would die, anyway, even though the stains clung to the worn off porcelain. If they wanted to wash their hands, it was done in the kitchen area of the combination living room and kitchen. After washing her face and hands, studying her face in the mirror over the sink, she wondered what the boy had seen that made him so interested in her that he would get out of his car and talk to her. Jenny was pretty, and so was Barb. Why hadn’t he gone to them? Well, Jenny did have that other guy after her.

Only reading for a few minutes, Mylia reached over and turned out the lamp. Her mom would sleep better without the light, but the bedroom was still lit to a certain degree from the many floodlights her uncle had strategically placed around his palatial home. Thank God they didn’t shine directly on their beds, but overhead, mostly. The rooms they lived in were on the second floor of the garage and although there were other rooms up there, this small two room apartment were all they were allowed. She considered them lucky to have that, especially from the Trenton’s.

Mylia’s father had been her Uncle Warren’s brother. Taylor Trenton had married her mother when he’d been a liaison officer stationed in Cambodia, and the family had never forgiven him for it, nor accepted May Li into the family. And although the only resemblance Mylia had to her mother was her slightly darker complexion, she was still a ‘Chink” as far as the Trenton family was concerned. No one would have ever taken her for a foreigner, and no one but the Trenton family would ever think of her as a ‘Chink’. The word was slang for Chinese, and May Li was neither Chinese nor Cambodian. She was born in a small country in Indochina that was not a part of Cambodia or Laos. A border country, but independent, Chalay was neither. But the Trenton bunch did and said what they wanted. She was from the Orient, so she was a ‘Chink’.

And Mylia would never forgive the Trenton’s for the way they had treated her wonderful father. Harold Trenton had written his son out of his will the minute he heard he’d married a Chalayan orphan. Being disinherited had forced him to try to make a living with his own father blocking job after job that paid anything, evidently hoping Taylor would send the girl home and come back to the family. Her father had told her all about it, many, many times while she was growing up. But he had held onto May Li and Mylia, doing the best he could for them. Mylia felt it had destroyed her father, being estranged from the wealthy family he was born into. He became a sad and bitter man, but not once did he take his indignation out on her or her mother.

Lia’s father had told her that when May Li had seen what was happening, that the Trenton’s were not going to accept her, she decided to return to Chalay so her husband could live the life he had been meant to live. She would not come between him and his family, and she felt if she and Mylia went back to Chalay, Taylor would be taken back into the bosom of his family. But her father would not hear of it, choosing to sell vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias, shoes, anything to feed May Li and Mylia. While Mylia was growing up, and after her grandfather died, her father’s brother and sister lived in the luxury that had been left to them, with her father’s share being divided between them. Evidently her father had loved them very much, Mylia thought, to allow them to keep him from his inheritance. He’d told them that he’d rather have his wife and child than to buckle under to his father’s demands. Mylia realized how badly it had hurt May Li to see that life was very difficult for her husband, both physically and mentally, especially since she felt she was at fault.

But everything changed drastically when Mylia’s father had been killed in an automobile accident one foggy night when Mylia had been thirteen years old. Besides being devastated, she and her mother found themselves in a position with no husband, no father, and no income. The only Trenton that had bothered to come to Taylor’s funeral had been his brother, Warren. He made the trip to attend the service, did not sit with May Li and Mylia, but did bend over them on the way out of the church and say he was sorry they’d lost Taylor. May Li stoically acknowledged his sympathy, telling him she was also sorry that he had lost a brother. He stood near them at the cemetery, said a few words to May Li that Lia did not hear, and left shortly after they laid his brother in the ground.

They lived frugally on her father’s insurance for a while, and when that money was almost gone, May Li attempted all types of employment. She understood English very well, having been brought up in an English orphanage. She’d been a waitress, did piece sewing in a dress factory, and worked in a meat processing plant, but after a while, her employer would come up with some excuse to let her go. Then she came down with rheumatic fever, damaging her heart, leaving her weak and not able to do much of anything. For three years she had provided for Mylia, living in places not fit for humans to inhabit. But since she could no longer work, they were evicted from their small apartment, and were actually sleeping in a church when May Li gave up her pride and called Warren Trenton, begging for help. At least he had spoken with her. Candace, the youngest Trenton, had never once acknowledged her existence.

Mylia remembered the day her mother had told her they would be moving to a new town, to her Uncle Warren’s house. She recalled her mother coming back from the doctor who gave her the medicines she was to take. Small sample pills in small white envelopes that kept her alive.

May Li walked slowly up to the bench where Mylia had been waiting for her. Her mother would never allow her to visit the doctor with her, but made her wait outside.

“I make phone call. We go to live at Warren Trenton’s house. It is small apartment over garage, but it is out of cold, and winter is coming. I hate you to change schools, but we have to do something, my Mylia. I have enough for bus fare. And we must be very good to him, Mylia. He not have to take us in.”

Mylia was very upset that her mother had lowered herself to call Warren Trenton for help. She could work. She was sixteen and didn’t have to stay in school. But her mother most adamantly put her foot down and would not allow her to leave school to get a job. The small Social Security and Veteran’s checks that she received from Mylia’s father would keep them in groceries and necessities. It just wasn’t enough to pay the rent on a place to live.

When May Li and Mylia had arrived at the Trenton estate, they had only what they could carry. And when May Li had seen the rooms in which they were to live, her small shoulders slumped, but she straightened herself up, and Mylia had taken on the task of cleaning the place that had not been occupied in years. Warren’s wife, Patience, told Mylia, not acknowledging May Li at all, that Warren had said there were some things in the attic that she could use to furnish the rooms. Mylia was very grateful, as they had no furniture at all, having left all they had owned in the small town from which they’d traveled. Mylia had thanked the woman, and did all the work herself, lugging the heavy things down the attic stairs and out to the garage apartment, if one could call it that. It had taken her quite a while, but they each had a small bed, a dresser, along with a table and two chairs, plus a small sofa. The chair that her mother sometimes sat in was especially heavy, but inch by inch, Mylia had gotten it up the outside stairs to the room. The stove and small refrigerator were thankfully already in place as the apartment had been the rooms for the man who had taken care of the cars when there had been a fleet of them before her grandfather passed on.

Mylia lay in bed, watching the lights play on the ceiling when the wind blew, and thought about the boy who had come to the car to talk with her. Thick dark hair, not short nor long, curly nor straight, dreamy eyes that in the lights from the drive-in looked to be green, but they could have been gray. God, she loved smoky gray eyes. And he’d wanted her to go for a walk with him and she thought how very special that would be. To walk with a boy, maybe holding hands. But she couldn’t. It would only lead to other things, and she was not about to let him know what she was or where she lived. That they were outcasts who depended on the charity of her uncle to even survive. The tears came, quietly, as she would never let her mother know that she cried to be a normal person who could have friends and especially a boyfriend.

Deterring any boy who’d ever spoken to her, she’d never had a boyfriend and she wondered what it would be like to be held and kissed by the handsome boy who’d said his name was Darian Wilks. Imagining all sorts of romantic scenarios with Darian, after a while, she finally fell asleep.

The next morning, after seeing to her mother, she drove the Mercury across town to the only market that was open on a Sunday. How could she have let her mother run out of the special green tea she loved so well? She’d used the last for her mother’s breakfast tea. Luckily this store carried it and it was pure luck that she’d found it. As she was ready to get back into the car, she heard someone call her name. Looking around, she saw it was Jenny, one of the girls who had been cruising with her the night before. Having evidently stopped at the store on their way home from church, Jenny’s family waited while she ran and spoke with her friend.

“Hey, Lia! Fancy seein’ you here. What are you doin’ this afternoon?” Jenny ran toward her, her mouth going all the time she was running. “Butch wants me to go to the movies with him this afternoon, and I really want to go, but he was hoping I could get another girl to go with us.”

“He wants two girls?” she laughed. “Don’t you find that a tad odd, Jenny?”

“Oh, Lia, not that way! Goofball.” And she laughed knowing Lia was joking with her. “He has a friend that needs a date. You know. A double-date. He asked me to ask around and see if I could find someone to go with his buddy. And lo and behold, there you were.”

“Like a blind date?” She’d never been on a regular date, much less a blind date or even a double. She couldn’t go. The more she got in with these kids, the more they’d find out about her.

“Not really. You’ve seen the guy.” Jenny batted her eyelashes and said, “It’s that good looking Dari Wilks. The one who was sure as shootin’ after you last night. God, Lia, any of us girls would give our eyeteeth if he even looked at us and what does he do? Comes over to the car and introduces himself to you. Now that took some nerve. But he’s so cool he can get away with doing things like that. Just wish it was me he wanted to get to know. I tried my best to get his attention when we were crusin’ but he couldn’t take his eyes off you, honey.”

Lia’s heart went into overdrive. Darian? The one she had laid awake dreaming of for half the night? Oh, how she’d love to be with him, just for a little while. What would it hurt? One movie. Thank goodness Mallory, her cousin who was away in a private school, had gotten a new car and didn’t want the ‘old’ Mercury anymore, so she could meet them there. They didn’t have to see where she lived. Only a movie. And her mother would be so happy that she had a real date. Her mom was always trying to get her to go out, have a good time, but she never would in the town where they’d lived before. But with the car, she could, and still keep her life from being broadcast all over the school as it had been where they’d lived before coming to Speesburg.

Remembering back to the years after her daddy was killed, the way most of the kids laughed at her dilapidated house, her foreign mother, and had practically shunned her, she knew there was no way she could ever go through that again. Having only one or two friends who were as poor as she was in all that time, no one here would ever see that apartment that she and her mother called home.

“One condition, Jenny. I’ll go with this Darian guy, if I can meet you there.” At Jenny’s lifted eyebrows, Lia’s brain was going crazy trying to come up with an excuse as to why she had to meet them at the theater and finally hit on an idea that might work. “My mother’s pretty strict and if she knew I was with a guy, she’d ground me. She’s from overseas and she’s so old fashioned.” God, she hated to lie about her mother, but it was the only thing she could think of at the time.

Making a face, Jenny sympathized with her. “Boy, do I know how that can be! Sometimes I think my mom lived back in the Ice Age. Okay, I’ll tell Butch you’ll meet us. One-thirty at the Orpheum. Right on the main drag. You can’t miss it. Bye.” And she ran back to her family who waited in the car for her.

She’d seen the Orpheum when she’d been out last night. And Jenny had called Darian, Dari. Evidently they shortened his name like she did hers. Mylia was such a strange sounding name, but Lia was better and everyone assumed it was Leah until they really got to know her, or she was in class with them. Pleading with her teachers to call her Lia, there was always that one who refused and called her by her full name. Maybe it would be different there. Maybe she could be halfway normal. Because of the car, things were definitely looking up.

So excited she could hardly drive home, she was extra careful with the car. She had an honest to goodness date with someone who was tough as nails! And she couldn’t wait to get home and tell her mother!