Fortunately, glass didn’t shatter around her too often in public places, though she always carried several Clip’n’Drips in her purse just in case. But tonight, with her being so dog-tired her normally strong resistance was low, and the sound of the smash had shot deep, like a shard of memory shrapnel.
Years ago she had seen a shrink, but the treatment didn’t do much for her and she backed off when she started thinking about going into politics, worried that her depressive tendencies could kill her chances stone cold if they leaked out. Instead, she taught herself some quick-acting meditation tricks which usually worked but, when they didn’t like tonight, a private jab from a Clip’n’Drip did the job.
The episodes were monotonously the same… if horror could ever be monotonous… She is back in the grim trailer her mother rented…
Isabel had long suspected her mother paid their rent by offering “favours”, though it took two decades to admit that tasteless morsel of her family history to herself. And she’d never revealed it to anyone else; not even to her husband.
Ed Loane knew about the rape, though only the fact, not the details. Before they married, she had confided that it was why she could never have kids. He also knew about her dad’s photo and how much comfort she got from it, since it sat on her bedside table no matter where she was. But he knew little about her mother; only that she’d been poor, a widow and Bolivian.
Isabel had never quite grasped why her mother soaked her once sweet soul with that sleazy swamp of “boyfriends” and bottles. Poverty was an easy yet unsatisfactory answer since most of Isabel’s trailer-park friends’ mothers, even the single ones, lived quite differently. None of them had Isabel’s daily chore of tidying up and stacking their mother’s empties outside, flanking their trailer like a glass wailing wall, a kaleidoscope stabbing green, bronze and yellow-white needles into her sad green eyes. It drove Isabel’s determination that never, ever would she be her mother’s daughter. For starters, she didn’t touch alcohol.
4
ISABEL’S HEAD FINALLY hit her hotel pillow. It was close to midnight in Chicago, especially late since she always got up at 5 AM local time, no matter what. Waking early was ingrained, a habit from years of working the breakfast and every other shift. But it wasn’t just that; the memories that washed over her every morning were a refreshing ritual she liked to take time over. Whether they were to remind her of who she really was, or because she couldn’t forget, she could never fathom.
BY the time she had arrived at Half Moon Bay as a broken fifteen-year-old, the roadhouse diner’s once bold, optimistic paisley swirls had been washed out by the torpor of year after harsh year of the Californian sun and the flagging energy of the couple who “ran” the place, Annette and George Hicks.
Originally called Big Bad Burgers, later rechristened by her as BBB, the restaurant was a tottering pillar of the second law of thermodynamics, the rule of inevitable decay that her physics teacher had once explained was why iron rusts and old eggs stink. But to Isabel, then so fragile, this tawdry diner was paradise.
The air had been languid that day, she recalled, so thick she could still lick it. The morning hung as lazily as the brown pelicans drifting on the bay’s flat waters. A straggle of flies lurked around the plastic doorway ribbons, once a rainbow but now so drab and limp they couldn’t even pretend to defend the entrance.
Isabel had prodded the door open with her walking cane. The sticky odour the flies had been soaking up glugged over her, sour though not quite rancid, like fat that had fried too many tomatoes. Yet strangely, even that had welcomed her.
The battered girl didn’t know it then, nor did the Hickses, but their shabby 24-seat Cabrillo Highway ex-speakeasy would be the seed of the successful nationwide chain that the three of them, though mostly Isabel, would build up and sell almost thirty years later, reaping a fortune of over a quarter of a billion dollars.
A few days earlier, the old spinster sharing her hospital room had winkled out of Isabel her unspeakable story and, with the girl only just walking again, the long-retired librarian slapped a Greyhound bus ticket and fifty dollars into her shaky hand, urging her to flee as far away as she could, even with her limp and her cane.
Isabel had bussed west from New Mexico, not caring where she was headed so long as the Cactus Flower Trailer Park and her mami’s sleazy boyfriends, especially that one with the wolf tattoo… and the broken bottle… shrank deep into distant memory.
THE white sheet pulled away from Isabel’s olive skin as she leant over to the bedside table and wondered what the public or the media would say if they knew. “Candidate Wacko – keeps shrine to dead dad on nightstand,” popped into her head before she could dismiss it.