Read Online When Venus Fell by Deborah Smith - Free Book Online Page B

parents when he was a little boy,” I reminded Ella. “Don’t imagine he and his family regard Pop as anything other than a fanatic and a terrorist, just like the Irish who did that to them.”
    “You don’t know how they really feel. You always assume the worst.” Ella linked her cool, trembling fingers through mine. “Everyone condemns Pop, except us.” I looked at her angrily, but she was right. “We have to go there and represent Pop’s good side to them. And Mom’s. And not be ashamed.”
    “I am not ashamed.”
    “Good. Then we’ll go.”
    Exhausted and shaky with emotion, I made a shooing motion at the bum who tapped on the RV’s locked door that afternoon. He responded by holding up a Chicago Police Department badge.
    I thought,
What fresh hell is this?
and formed my best Dorothy Parker smirk of sarcasm as I opened a side window vent.
“You
couldn’t possibly have any business here.” I had a problem with authority figures, even cops apparently working undercover in dirty jeans and a three-day beard.
    “Chill out, ma’am,” he said politely. “I just wanted to let you know I’ll be working around here at night. You and your sister can sit out at the picnic table and none of the creeps’ll bother you anymore.”
    I managed a garbled thank-you, then asked bluntly, “Did Gib Cameron use his connections to get this protection for us?”
    “Maybe. He’s got friends in the right places. Have a nice day.” After he walked away I stood in confused silence.
    I knew no other man who would have done this for me. I wasn’t at all sure why Gib had. Ella and I seemed to be under the umbrella of Cameron noblesse oblige already, and we weren’t even in Tennessee yet.
    It was a strange sensation. For years I’d either shoved people away or ignored them. I couldn’t take chances. I’d fought for decent bookings in the early years right after Ella and I disappeared into the boonies. I’d lied about her age to get us into nightclubs, then battled men who tried to hit on her. I’d begged or pilfered meals from the club chefs, even shoplifted petty necessities like shampoo and underwear. Whatever it took to keep Ella and me together, keep us working toward the day when we didn’t have to ask anyone for anything, I’d do it.
    I sat down in the RV’s driver’s seat. The white quartz rock lay on the dash. I scooped it into my hand. The lure of childhood fantasies was proud and seductive and probably disastrous.
    Ella and I finished our contract with the Hers Truly club and turned down the manager’s offer to extend our stay for better money.
    “We’re leaving early,” I announced to Ella. “I want to check out the situation in advance. I think we should go on to Nashville after our visit. I’ve got some feelers out. We could find work there. For one thing, Opryland is hiring for a piano bar in one of its restaurants. We’ll have to come up with some discreet ways to invest our money. We can’t just plop it in the bank as if a customer suddenly gave us a huge tip. The IRS could be watching.”
    Ella stared at me over an issue of her Martha Stewart magazine. “If this were a song,” she said gently, “I’d have to say it has no coherent melody.”
    “I’m just saying we should get a head start in case we end up ditching the whole visit to Cameron Hall.”
    I decided we’d come back for the RV if we found long-term work down south. I left it in a tract-house suburb south of Chicago, at the three-bedroom ranch where an old friend of our grandfather Paolo’s lived with his granddaughter. Fiftyyears ago the friend had been a young trumpet player in Grandfather’s studio orchestra.
    And so, in the last week of August, sticky with heat, fanning ourselves in our tank tops and thin cotton skirts and flip-flops, a blues CD blasting on the car’s high-tech player—all right, we spent money where it counted—Ella and I drove south out of the Windy City, me eating a Polish sausage and Ella sipping