Moonlight on the Palms

Excerpt

Astrid Kent awoke to a distant ringing sound next to her ear. She opened her eyes, and tepid sunlight slanted through her half-closed blinds. For a moment, she thought the sound was a fire alarm from her dream interrupted. She had been back in third grade, walking down the hall with her best friend, Anna Gonzales. Anna's brown eyes shone like amber stars in the girls' sleep motions—just as Astrid remembered them in life. The girls were lost somewhere in the August hot maze of hallways and dingy, green lockers, and now there was this insistent ringing—if she could just get it to stop—
She came to her senses enough to realize the ringing was coming from her cell phone on the nightstand. She punched the green talk button at the end of the last ring as she looked at the bedside alarm clock. At 8:15 a.m., it was certainly not too early for someone to be calling with business. Most people didn't enjoy the life of leisure that she quickly slipped into during the summer months. Still, she didn’t get many calls this early on a summer day.
“Hello,” she whispered, her voice like jagged glass. She wished she had checked caller ID first.
There was a pause as if the caller had given up on anyone answering. “Is this Ms. Astrid Kent?” The voice resonated in a deep bass; a man she didn't know, or didn't remember at least. His slight accent made her heart skip a beat. She swallowed, hoping she was wrong about that accent.
“Yes, it is.” She rolled her eyes, propping up on her pillows, ready to click end if the man turned out to be a telemarketer. They still somehow managed to get her phone number, even with her status on the Do Not Call List.
“Astrid, I'm Mark Manuel; I'm a lawyer in Brownsville, Texas.” At the mention of the city, her heart stopped for a minute, and she woke up a bit more. She had been right about the accent after all.
“Yes?” She heard the high pitch of her voice. She knew whatever he was calling about wasn't good, not if it was news from Brownsville. How long had it been since she had taken a call from that city? Not long enough for her taste.
“I have some bad news for you. Are you sitting down and comfortable?” The man's voice lacked humor, and she knew he wasn't selling anything. Her mouth went dry and her heart thudded. His light Hispanic accent took her back to palm trees and searing heat—summer thousands of miles away on the border of the U. S. and Mexico.
“Yes. What is it?” She gripped her cell phone tightly, fully awake now.
“It's your mother, Maeve. Maeve Garza Kent is your mother, correct?” The words were clipped now, as if speaking them was difficult.
She gurgled a yes, she supposed, because he responded.
“I'm afraid she passed away yesterday morning; she had a massive heart attack. I am notifying you as next of kin because we have some things to discuss. Is it possible for you to come to Brownsville this week? If so, you can come by my office before the memorial service.” His voice trailed off. “If not, we can make other arrangements. Honestly, though, being here would be the easiest way for us to discuss the will and Maeve’s wishes.”
“No, it's not a bad time.” Her response felt surreal. “I would come anyway to make arrangements for my mother's funeral.” Indignation rose and she gripped the blankets around her tightly.
He was silent for a moment. “I don't think that will be necessary. She set all of the arrangements up years before she passed away. Her remains will be cremated next Tuesday.” He cleared his throat. “I'm so sorry for your loss.”
“What? Just like that?” She must’ve sounded ridiculous—like a child—but she couldn't help herself. The quick, clean, finality of it staggered her; it was the idea of a death and memorial like that for a woman who had exhibited such force of will and vigor. She was not and would not be someone easily ignored or forgotten.
“Maeve told me years ago she needed to get things ready, since no one else would be helping her with it. I believe it was ten years ago that she wrote her will this way, changed things up.” His voice grew harder.
“I see.” Astrid's throat tightened.
She thought for a moment. It was Friday morning.
I could be in Brownsville by Sunday evening.
Two days would give her enough time to pack and get the pet sitting service to watch Bertrand, her cat. She would catch a plane out of Seattle and rent a car at the airport.
“I'll be in town by Sunday evening, so I can see you Monday morning if that works for you. Can we meet at your office then?”
He sounded surprised. “Sure. Eight is fine with me if it's okay for you.”
“Eight is fine, too.”
“Great. I'll expect you then. Oh, hang on. Let me give you the address.”
He rattled off a location on Palm Boulevard near her mother's house—her old house, too, she thought, wondering why he sounded so evasive and what other things there were to talk about.
He continued, “Oh, and you can go directly to the house if you'd like when you get here. There's a housekeeper there cleaning things up. That was accounted for in your mother's will as well. An allotment for her and the current gardener to stay on for the next few years is included in the trust and monies left behind. And the house is yours. I can tell you that. So, well, when you come in on Sunday evening, it should be ready for you.” He spoke those last words in a rush.
“Thank you Mr. Manuel. That's good to know. I'll see you Monday.”
Astrid hung up the phone, thoughts clamoring for precedence in her head. She wanted nothing more than to crawl back under the covers. From the dim light coming in through her window, she could see that it was a lukewarm, rainy day in Seattle.
Even summer here is blah. She groaned and then got out of bed.
Her musings turned to her mother as she numbly pattered across her thick-carpeted bedroom toward the bathroom. Maeve had only been fifty-four—her birthday was just last month, in fact. Astrid had mailed a simple card with the requisite “I love you. Happy birthday,” and nothing else. Astrid had not spoken to her mother in five years, not since the day she had graduated from college and left Brownsville, heading to Washington State for graduate school and a PhD in English. Her hatred of her mother simmered in her heart even now. She would never forget the betrayal at her hands, of walking into the house that afternoon as the party was winding down and hearing her mother and Juan in the bedroom laughing and more, then pushing the door open to find them in each other's arms. Her father had died six months before of a sudden heart attack, and the betrayal was all the more painful because of his loss.
Before the party was over that night, she had packed her bags and gone to the Greyhound station. Astrid had been planning to leave for Washington that week anyway. Instead, she just left a day earlier and never spoke to Juan again, ignoring all his calls to her emergencies only cell phone, and the letters and dozens of e-mails he wrote later, when her mother had given him her address. The attempts to contact her had stopped about a year after she left. She had always wondered why and assumed he had found someone else. He certainly had the looks and brains to have any woman he wanted, especially in a town like Brownsville where the women played a little loose and free, poverty was rampant, and youth was the standard.
The hot water ran down her face in the shower, but no tears came. She still felt little for her mother, the lovely artist of dirt-poor beginnings in Mexico. Her mother’s family had immigrated to Brownsville when Maeve was only three, and with her parents' hard work, they had made a life there. Maeve had told her through her childhood of days spent picking cotton in the scorching sun of the tip of Texas, the “Tipotex” as it was called. Her mother had drawn or painted from the time she was in grade school. Her mother saved every spare penny to buy her art supplies. Maeve had taken up with Francisco Merced, a famous local artist, when she was only seventeen, and he had taught her about art—and other things. She had gone on to paint the people and landscapes of Mexico and the Borderlands of Texas.
Some compared her work to that of Diego Rivera with the detail she put into faces and eyes and her subjects’ ethereal but earthbound quality, and she received acclaim from a young age, traveling and exhibiting as a young woman. She had snared Astrid’s father's heart in her travels. As a young accountant, Kris Kent had stumbled into a city art exhibit in Houston. He had just been looking for something to pass the lonely night hours that Thursday evening, and he had found Maeve Garza. Her father said he had never believed in love at first sight until that moment.
“I guess I'd just never felt it before, so that explains that. When I saw your mother, well, I knew what all the poets had been talking about.” His eyes had grown misty.
“I walked in and there she was in the center of the room. She had five men around her easily. It was like something out of Gone with the Wind. She was wearing a tight, puff-sleeved bright yellow dress, the color of a parakeet, Astrid. I'll never forget it. I'd never seen a woman who wasn't on a movie screen look like that in a dress.” Her mother had softened at his description that evening as they sat in the den after dinner.
“She had the shiniest hair I had ever seen, like a river of obsidian. It flowed past her shoulders as it still would if she took her bun down.” Her mother had left the room to go to bed early with one of her increasingly frequent headaches when he said this, his blue eyes looking far away to a time Astrid could not see. “I could see even from my spot near the door how fair her skin was. I knew I had to talk to her.” And he had. He had waited a few moments and told her he was smitten and asked her out to dinner while she was there in town.
“She turned her nose up, literally, and I noticed that it was the cutest ski jump nose I'd ever seen. Like yours, Astrid.” Her father patted her hand. “She looked at me for a long moment, and I thought she was going to say no.” Her father pushed his thick blond hair back with his hand.
“When your mother finally spoke to me, she asked, ‘why would I want to eat dinner with a gringo?’ Her question floored me, so I lied.” I said, “Because I know about art. Apparently, I was convincing. She accepted, and I talked her into moving in with me and marrying me a year later. Your mother never held to tradition. I barely got the ring on her finger at all.” His face looked sad and worn when he said this.
Astrid grimaced as she pulled a towel around her and looked in the mirror, applying makeup. Her honey brown hair kinked, damp on the edges of the shower cap. Serious, hazel-green eyes with forest green rimmed irises stared back at her, nearly identical to her mother's. Only she and her mother had these eyes, at least that she knew of, but to her, their beauty was marred by the light mole next to her mouth. She was no Liz Taylor, though, she thought. This morning, her face looked pale and was missing its usual glow. Sighing, she put on a dash of lip gloss. It would have to do with so many errands to run and calls to make if she was going to leave town soon.
As she drove through a cheerless drizzle a few minutes later, she thought about the timing of this phone call. For her, it was a good time if there was going to be one. She felt a bit ashamed for thinking that way concerning her mother's death, but the truth was that she had been on summer break since last week. A fairly new English professor specializing in Modern Literature at Downing College, she got most summers off unless she wanted to teach a class. This summer, she had been planning to do research for some articles on T. S. Eliot. She could do that just as easily in Brownsville with the local university there and online resources. Astrid was hoping this project would bode well for tenure in a couple years, but she was only in her second year of teaching at the college. At age twenty-nine, she felt quite happy with what she had accomplished so far.
She stopped at the bank and withdrew some money from her account. Next, she made a quick shopping trip to Dillard's for a few outfits that would stand up to the scorching heat of a Brownsville summer. A typical day could certainly hit in the upper nineties. Finally, she went home to make a flight reservation for Sunday morning and call the pet sitter.
When she walked in the door, stowing her umbrella in the rack to the side of the small foyer in the small, but bright and clean, apartment, she noticed her cell phone sitting on the end table in the den, flashing the white message box. She had forgotten to bring it with her, not a smart thing to do as a single woman in the city these days. Bertrand yawned at her, opening one eye from the brown leather couch where he dozed. She picked up her phone and dialed voice mail.
Luke's loud voice made her turn the volume of the phone down. She listened to half of the message that asked her to “please, please call me, Astrid . . .” and deleted it. Luke Marquette was a physics professor at Downing College. She had been taken with him at the College's Christmas party the year before. His quick wit, chocolate brown eyes, and lean physique had certainly helped his case. They had had a whirlwind affair soon after, and he became possessive of her. What had begun with a few dates and no sex had ended in Luke following her around town from time to time. When she had caught him doing that a month ago, she had abruptly broken things off. He had struck her as too desperate from the outset, and she wished she had never said yes to the first request for a date.
She scowled, thinking Luke was another reason she was glad to be getting out of Seattle, even if it was to deal with her mother's death. Shaking her head, she sat down on the couch and called her pet sitter, Marge Jones, a woman who loved all cats, and set up care for Bertrand. It always made trips easier to know he was well cared for while she was away. Then, she pulled her laptop from where she kept it stowed under the end table in the den. The large window in the apartment in front of her showed only rain against the pane.
In minutes, she booked a Sunday morning flight with one stop in Houston, to Brownsville, Texas. Astrid took a few minutes to check her e-mail and finding no pressing messages, checked the weather forecast in Brownsville. Noting the prediction for temperatures in the high eighties to mid-nineties and no rain, she grinned. She could live with that forecast.
She put her laptop away and stood up, stretching, dreading the packing ahead of her, but she was planning to pack light. The trip would only take a few days, she hoped. Astrid thought about Brownsville in June, and the possibility of days on end without rain lifted her spirits.
Padding to her room, she dug her reliable navy blue suitcase out of the closet along with her laptop bag, and began packing. The task was easier than expected, since Brownsville would be hot and required summery clothing. Astrid tossed her bathing suit on top of the pile, wondering what shape the house would be in. In her years there, she had swam almost every day in summer. Thoughts of swimming with Juan Marquez filled her head. He had loved her red bikini that summer she graduated. Pushing the thought of him out of her head, she wondered if he might still be in the area. It was better not to consider that. She had written so many letters to him in her head, but she still had no idea what she would say face to face.
Astrid sighed and sat on the bed. Hopefully, Juan would have reached his dream of becoming a doctor and left the Rio Grande Valley. Many people didn't, though. Family bonds held strong there as she well knew.
Sick of packing, and seeing the anemic sun that had finally come out, burnishing the room with a setting glow, she went back to the den, grabbed her cell phone and slouched down on the couch. Her feet were tired, and her mind was full. Dinner with Meg would be just the thing. Plus, she wanted to say goodbye to her before she left.
Astrid hit send on Meg's name in her contact list. The phone was answered as if Meg were in mid-sprint.
“Astrid! Hey!” She always sounded enthusiastic, and today was no exception.
“Hi, Meg. What's up? Got time to meet me for dinner at The Bistro, or do you have other plans?” Meg was notorious for her popularity with men at the college where she worked as a professor in the business department and in the city at large.
“No, I don't have any plans. Let's do it! What time?” Meg still sounded breathless, and that brought a smile to Astrid's face. She was going to miss her.
“Um, seven o'clock okay?”
“Sounds good to me. Oh, by the way, I’ll be going out of town tomorrow.”
“What? Why? You can’t leave me here now!” Meg whined, and it brought a smile to Astrid’s face in spite of her news. It felt nice to be loved and missed.
“I’m heading to Brownsville.” She realized she was rambling and stopped. “My mother just died.”
“Oh no! I’m so . . . I’m so sorry, Astrid. I don’t know what to say. I know you weren’t close, but still . . .” Meg trailed off.
“It’s okay. There's nothing to say really. I don’t know how I feel about it myself yet.”
“Well, I can’t wait to see you in a little while and give you a big old hug!”
Meg’s pronouncement made Astrid smile again.
“Okay, Megs. I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Bye.”
Astrid stretched out on the cool, leather couch to rest for an hour before her dinner date. She woke up on the edge of a bad dream. Her mother's face floated into her vision near the end, but nothing was clear. Shaking off the strange, disoriented feeling and a budding pit of unease in her stomach, she squared her shoulders and got up to get ready.