6 Posts. 1 Mother Daughter Tale.

This post combines the first six installments of a fiction series. I’m reworking a discarded chapter from my existing WIP manuscript and sharing it in pieces here. Come back next Monday for another installment.

Jewel Betancourt never wanted to be a mother to a daughter.

If her husband Richard had only listened to her, they never would’ve been saddled with a child in the first place. Let alone such a willful, embarrassing daughter.

But Richard was always I need a son. I need a boy. Give me a son.

Seven years of that whiney nonsense before her birth control pill failed, magic sperm-killers she swallowed in secret, and for what? Her accidental baby popped out a gory eleven-pound daughter, leaving Richard equal parts devastated and determined to try again. Men will have their copies, their replicas, their legacies.

Jewel slides a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses up her straight nose and sighs. “Shows what men know,” she mutters and switches on her turn signal. Richard never suspected she asked the doctor to tie her tubes before he sewed her up.

She is proof of one thing: Women who don’t want to be mothers should not be forced.

Jewel steers in front of an oncoming truck. It passes her rear bumper by inches, giving her a rush of tingling nerves and indecent heat. She glances in the mirror and sees her daughter’s rattletrap Toyota sitting behind the white line, awaiting her next green light. Susan is such a mousy old pushover.

If she couldn’t recall every second of pregnant agony, she’d wonder whether Susan was her daughter.

Richard was never part of her plan, either. Jewel Albright had PLANS. ALL CAPS. And they did not include being a teenage bride, marrying some hick boy going no place.

Jewel bloomed from a round (read obese) girl of six to a slender vision by twenty. Creamy, firm skin. Silky light blonde curls framing her oval face. Her gray eyes were exquisite tractor beams. They mesmerized everyone they landed upon. She’d just been crowned Miss Longhorn Queen of Cinderella, Texas. Ironic, right? And she had her pick of any eligible man for more than a hundred miles.

And boy, did men line up to woo her.

Unlike her awkward seventeen-year-old daughter who couldn’t buy a boyfriend, Jewel juggled four oblivious suitors in tandem at Susan’s age. Quite a feat in a dusty, microscopic town where everyone knew everyone else’s business five nano-seconds after it happened. At twenty-three, she spent a whole week engaged to two men at the same time, but she broke it off with one after he gave her the pearl necklace she demanded for her birthday.

Jewel strung every man along, working as a file clerk for a drilling company and running to the post office for the letter that trumpeted, “You have officially been accepted to a Dallas secretary school!” She spent too many years crammed up America’s rear end. In her mind, she had too much potential.

Breaking men’s hearts was a way to pass time. Until she met Richard.

What might Jewel’s life have been if she hadn’t met Richard Betancourt? 

Richard blew into Jewel’s two-bit Texas town to train the local mortician – her father – on the latest embalming techniques. Jewel was still engaged to one mooney-eyed boy, but that didn’t stop her from noticing the fine cut of Richard’s suits or the way they clung to his fit, delicious frame. Modelesque and mysterious, he smoldered more than any man she’d ever seen.

And he was from another state – Virginia – not a neighboring backwater full of redneck bubbas. When his brown eyes burned into her and he shot her his lopsided smile, she actually had to go to the bathroom and wipe between her legs.

The nerve of that Richard. Weeks passed, and he never asked her out.

Never requested her phone number. Never brought flowers or left badly written love poems – An Ode to Your Cornflower Eyes, ick – outside her door. Richard Betancourt had the gall to ignore her.

Instead of appreciating her, he spent hours locked in the funeral home’s basement with her father, draining smelly fluids and sawing into bodies and other nasty things she didn’t want to think about. They always emerged from their morbid dungeon near suppertime. Jewel made sure to be home from work before they came up the stairs. She timed her walk through the foyer just as Richard was leaving, even if she had to go outside and return ten times.

No matter how much she hinted, he never suggested a date.

Jewel was undone by six weeks of his coolness. Ultimate destruction was her thoughtless abandonment of one simple dating rule: Never make the first move.

“Why don’t you ever invite me to supper, Richard Betancourt?” She kept her tone light and teasing, but her heart galloped beneath her Camelot silk shift while awaiting his reply.

“Your father told me you’re engaged to be married,” he responded.

“Oh. That. Well, not anymore. I ended it a while ago.”

Richard stood a little taller. His jaw ground against inscrutable emotions, like he dared to think her a liar. She held her breath until he said, “Hm. Seems your father would’ve mentioned it.”

Jewel resisted the impulse to giggle or toss her hair or touch his arm. She blushed at the thought of touching him, breathed a little faster. Richard was a man, at least a decade older. His woman would not be flighty or overly flirtatious. She kept her pretty face open, sincere, ravishing. “He doesn’t know. I didn’t want to break Daddy’s heart because he really likes the guy.”

Forty-five minutes later, she and Richard had sex for the first time.

She flushes now, how sinful and shameless they were, but sin feels so good. She gripped the bathroom sink in the mens room at the Woolworth Diner. He ground into her from behind, purposely positioning them in front of the chipped mirror, two bodies a merging pornography.

And that was only the appetizer. They fled the diner without paying, their clothes still partially undone. In the privacy of his hotel room, he served her at least twelve courses, a dizzying procession of heat and acrobatics and unbridled pleasure. Together, they were molten lava, a nuclear explosion of passion the likes of which Jewel had never experienced in her podunk life.

Richard screwed Jewel like a longhorn bull mounts a female, always wary of her matching horns. Maybe that’s why he left the next morning without saying goodbye.

Jewel didn’t wait a week. She tracked him to his mama’s house in western Virginia. Oh, she didn’t follow him. How desperate and unladylike and sad, totally unbefitting a beauty queen.

No, she used her connections at the local telephone company to find out his parents’ telephone number. An address came along with it. She wrote to that address telling Richard she loved him, she’d never met anyone like him, she’d do anything to have him between her legs again, she’d move anywhere to be with him. He was exquisite and refined and oh so sexy, and she missed him.

Richard had the audacity to wait a whole month to reply. That’s when Jewel should’ve said goodbye to the whole business.

Two months later, they married in a small Texas ceremony. Two witnesses. They were late to their own wedding because they had sex in the car en route and hoped neither the preacher nor the witnesses could smell it as they reverently stated their vows.

Twenty-six years later, Jewel studies her reflection in the rearview mirror. Her face is a bit fuller, but it softens her edges in all the right places. No double chin sliding down her neck because she always sleeps on her back without a pillow. Skin still flawless.

No one suspects Jewel is a decade older than most mothers at Glory Evangelical Church. It’s not her fault most women try too hard to prove they are good mothers and wind up with baggy, haggard eyes, swollen over themselves from lack of sleep. “Johnny, don’t do that. No, Johnny, you shouldn’t touch that. Johnny, when I say no, I mean no.” Over and over, ten thousand times a day. Every day. For at least a decade. Maybe two. Exhausting. Of course, boys DO matter more in the eyes of God, so maybe they are worth the effort. Since Jewel only has a daughter, she does not know.

And Jewel refuses to do that old stuff for her daughter. She won’t ever let a girl-child make her matronly.

Still, she’s always known how to control Susan, at least until now. She blames Richard for their daughter’s every weakness. He’s the one who left her, alone and seven months pregnant in New Orleans, to watch the Sugar Bowl with her sister Irene. If he had controlled his football addiction, she might have stayed home that night, and who knows where they might be today?

Jewel twirls a curl around a finger and eases into another intersection. “He’s been paying ever since, but I predict today’ll be the turd juice on top of his ice cream sundae.”

Poor little Susan’s destiny was set the night Richard knocked on the bathroom door at her sister’s. “Jewel? You okay in there?” 

She stopped breathing to fool him into thinking she might be dead. Wouldn’t he be sorry for doing this to her? But dear Richard was always a bit lacking in the attentiveness department. He refused to read her mind. Instead, he rapped obliviousness even louder and called, “Can I get you anything?”

Yes. An illegal abortion. Some desperate woman to adopt this child. A team of professionals to whip her into the slender beauty she’ll never be again.

Jewel leaned over the sink, splashed her face with cold water, and barked, “I’m fine.”

Seconds trickled past, water dripping from the faucet. Richard cleared his throat. She can still picture him beyond the solid wood of the bathroom door, shuffling his feet and rubbing the back of his neck and looking heavenward, like God would tell him what to do to make his wife happy.

Some requests God can’t grant, not even after a lifetime of begging.

Richard’s fingernails brushed the stained wood. “Okay. Your sister’s opening a bottle of wine before we head out to the Super Dome for the Sugar Bowl. Don’t suppose you want a glass?”

Jewel’s frame grew a couple of inches in the bathroom mirror. When she flung open the door, her face was a twisted mask of fury and pique. Ignoring his clueless-man-gape and his big outstretched hands – she used to love his hands, touching her, teasing her, groping her everywhere – she pushed past him. Through the living room. Into the microscopic kitchen at the back of the New Orleans house.

Her older sister Irene was a foot shorter than Jewel, a schoolteacher spreading into early middle age. Jewel used to be proud of her sister for avoiding marriage, devoting herself to her classroom. But she grew to resent Irene’s singular focus on her career. It didn’t matter that nobody’d marry Irene because she was honest about the fact that she couldn’t have children. Her insides weren’t plumbed right, leaving a fertilized egg no place to land. Jewel craved that gift, and she hurled her ire at Irene every chance she got. Without a hint of struggle, she grabbed the open wine bottle from Irene’s hand and marched past her frozen husband to the bathroom.

Catching his eye, she held the bottle over the toilet and started pouring. “Our mother was a drunk, Richard.”

He leaned against the door frame, his Hollywood face a question mark. “You never told me that.”

“Doesn’t matter. I won’t have my baby’s father wind up a drunk, too.” She tossed back her head and yelled, “Like my dear sister, who’s well on her way.”

The last drops of red wine stained the toilet. Jewel plopped the empty bottle in the trash and brushed her hands together to signal the finality of no more booze. To further drive her point home, she put her hands on her hips and announced, “From now on, Richard, I expect you to give up alcohol.”

Jewel bites her lip and speeds through a green light without a care for whether her daughter Susan is behind her. The stupid child knows her way home. She can’t avoid her reckoning forever, much like Richard never side-stepped his. Oh, he’s lived with the consequences of her fury every second since that New Years Eve.

Jewel still feels the power of controlling another person’s life. She sharpened her teeth that night on her husband, and she sinks them into weakness whenever she can. 

Richard left Jewel that night. He and Irene went to that old ball game. They abandoned her, standing triumphant beside the commode, its bowl stained as wine-dark as the brewing storm of her temper.

How dare they prance off to do God-only-knows-what and leave her alone?

Yes, she told them she didn’t want to go to a stupid football game, but they were supposed to succumb to the unspoken wishes of the too-many-months-pregnant woman and stay home. Couldn’t they read her mind from the constant hints she trotted out since she and Richard arrived? How she asked Richard to rub her swollen feet? Massage her aching back? And bring her a cold glasses of water while she lay down for a rest? And hold her after she threw up for the umpteenth time that day? They were supposed to be too busy babying Jewel to go anywhere, because if life wasn’t fun for her, it wasn’t fun for anybody.

Jewel still tingles with the memory of what she did. She showed them, is still showing them the layers of her power, broken open and peeled away like a Russian doll. Susan never had a chance. Jewel made sure of it from the beginning.

Alone in the quiet house, Jewel stripped off her dress and slip, her stockings and garters, her bra and girdle – because vanity was voodoo more important than smushing the baby – and eased her cumbersome bulk into a scalding bath.

The rat Susan knocked against her insides, growing more frantic as heat penetrated her skin, but Jewel soaked until the water cooled. The loathsome baby was cowed into quiet submission. Toweling off, Jewel padded naked from bathroom to guest bedroom at the front of the house, not even bothering to close the curtains as she flipped on a lamp.

New Orleans people liked to see it all, didn’t they? Wasn’t that why they chose to live with constant iniquity?

She rifled through her scuffed suitcase for her prettiest dress, a sapphire silk confection with sheer sleeves and a full skirt. Once she slid into two girdles and knotted the belt under her breasts, she could barely tell she was seven months pregnant. Satisfied, she pushed her feet into black patent pumps and picked up her makeup case.

Nothing has ever made Jewel happier than painting her face, because it justifies gazing at her beauty without seeming vain.

That night, she took her time.

She moisturized her pale skin until it gleamed under the harsh bulb of the sink. A light coat of foundation. A touch of concealer under her bright blue eyes. A dusting of powder on her nose. The palest pink blush along her perfect cheekbones.

The party happened with her eyes, though. Makeup should highlight one feature, the best one, not compete for precedence. She worked with shadows and liners, false lashes and mascara to make her eyes the Broadway showcase. After smudging a square of toilet tissue over a touch of pink lipstick, she tugged a wig over her damp hair, teasing and spraying its brown curls into a glorious halo crowning her unparalleled head.

She was ready.

Her heels clomped on the heart pine floors of Irene’s house, down the front steps, into the back seat of the waiting cab. Holding her black patent purse in her lap, she pulled on a pair of white leather gloves and ordered the driver, “Take me to the House of Voodoo on Magazine. I have an appointment.”

Irene and Richard, and especially the unborn baby, paid the ultimate price for abandoning her. She made sure of it. As the car shuddered along sketchy French Quarter paving, she snapped open her purse and took out a card.

Curses for a fee it read.

Lawsy-mercy, her girl would die if she knew her upstanding Christian mother haunted a voodoo establishment. Jewel glances in the rearview mirror again, finds her daughter following close behind, pudgy disappointment of a face stained with tears.

“You never had a chance, little girl,” Jewel mutters.

Jewel cursed on the sidewalk outside the New Orleans House of Voodoo.

The stuccoed one-story building wasn’t what she expected. Crooked walls marched up to a jagged slate roofline. Here and there, bricks peeked through cracks in the stucco, made more glaring by the spotlights shining on the ramshackle facade. She imagined darkness. A forgotten building hidden in the heart of a city block. Not this establishment, center-of-the-block, its /House of Voodoo/ sign lit up like New York City.

Jewel felt satanic energy pulsing in the air.

Ah yes, she needed a good dose of Lucifer, and she didn’t care what he cost. Holding her head high, her heels clicked up the brick walkway and through an open door draped in black velvet. A bell’s tinkle drowned in the heavy air. Burning incense singed her nose hairs and clotted in her lungs. With all the street noise, revelers and whores and degenerates weaving their way on the sidewalk steps from where she stood, inside the building was like what she imagined King Tut’s tomb must’ve been like before it was disturbed.

She always wanted to see Egypt.

“I know what you’re here for.”

Jewel cursed at the voice behind her. Turning, she came face-to-face with a pale blonde woman. Her child-like features were unadorned, no makeup anyplace, and her knee-length hair framed her waif-like body like a cape.

Jewel stiffened. “But I need a professional, um, voodoo person. You can’t be more than twelve.”

The right corner of the girl’s mouth turned upward slightly as she tilted her head. “Age is relative here.”

When she showed Jewel her back and headed down a dim hallway, something – stupidity? desperation? – compelled Jewel to follow.

“What’s your name?” Jewel wondered, but the girl never answered, didn’t even slow her pace as she passed through a doorway and disappeared. Jewel hurried to catch up, the blasted fetus awake and kicking her lungs and diaphragm all the while.

Beyond the door, she found herself standing on an enclosed porch at the back of the house. A fabric shop’s worth of black velvet hangings covered the windows, spangled the wooden ceiling, even crept over the table in the corner where the voodoo girl sat with her eyes closed. Jewel saw the outline of the veins in her hands as she approached, uncertain what to do. The girl’s cursed lips moved faster than Jewel ever thought possible but no sound escaped. And since she cound not find another chair to relieve herself of the cumbersome hulk of her baby, she stood a few feet from her. Waiting. Willing something, anything, to happen.

“You don’t want what you think you want.”

Jewel started backward. The girl’s former soprano was a deep, rich bass, the boom of a man four times her size. Jewel shielded herself with her purse but she stood her ground. “How’d you change your voice like that?”

“Why kill your daughter when a curse can be so much more satisfying?”

TO BE CONTINUED…..

To see what else I’ve been writing in series fiction, visit The Aftermath of Death, She Was Venus in Fur, Grief Out of Balance, For the Love of a Gun, Death by Toilet, Biscuits, Gardenias and a Funeral and Everything Dies. I’m also on Medium HERE.