“Sure did. You’re always right.”
Halfway back to the house, we passed the field with the two emus. Usually, they were out of sight or on the far side of the field, but now they were walking along the fence line right by the road.
“Look,” I said. “They want to meet us.”
“Mom would call it a sign,” Liz said.
We stopped to watch the emus. They moved slowly and deliberately, their long necks swaying from side to side as they cocked their heads. They had curling turquoise stripes on the sides of their heads, tiny stunted wings, and big, scaly feet with these sharp-taloned toes. A gurgly drumming noise that didn’t sound like any birdcall I’d ever heard came from deep in their throats.
“They’re so weird,” I said.
“Beautifully weird.”
“They’re too big to be birds. They have wings, but they can’t fly. They look like they shouldn’t exist.”
“That’s what makes them so special.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When we showed up at the Maddoxes’ on Saturday, Cindy answered the door. I started to say hello, but she turned away and called out, “They’re here.”
We followed Cindy into the house. The living room was filled with boxes and appliances, including a portable black-and-white TV on top of a console color TV. Both TVs were on and tuned to different stations, but the sound on the black-and-white TV was turned down. A pregnant woman with mousy blond hair sat on a black Naugahyde couch, nursing a large baby. She looked up at us and shouted, “Jerry.”
Mr. Maddox came out of the back, introduced the woman as his wife, Doris, and gestured to us to follow him down the hall. One of the funny things about the Maddox house was that there wasn’t a single thing up on the walls: no pictures, no posters, no bulletin boards, no family photographs, no happy sayings or Bible verses, just these bare hospital-white walls.
Mr. Maddox led us into a bedroom that had been converted into an office, with more boxes and putty-colored metal filing cabinets and a metal desk. He sat down behind the desk and pointed at two folding chairs in front of it. “Take a seat, ladies,” he said. He picked up a stack of folders, tapped them on the desktop, and slipped them into a drawer. “A lot of people work for me,” he went on, “and I always ask them about their backgrounds.” He was a foreman at the mill, he explained, but he also had outside business dealings that involved complicated and sensitive financial and legal matters. He needed to be able to trust the people who worked for him and had access to his home and this office, where he handled the outside dealings. In order to fully trust the people who worked for him, he needed to know who they were. Due diligence, he called it, standard operating procedure for savvy businessmen. “I can’t have some surprise come out and bite me in the ass after I’ve hired someone. It’s a two-way street, of course. Any questions about me or my qualifications as an employer?” He paused. “No? Well, then, tell me about yourselves.”
Liz and I looked at each other. She started hesitantly explaining the part-time jobs we’d held, but Mr. Maddox also wanted to know about our backgrounds, our schooling, our chores, Mom’s rules, Mom herself. Mr. Maddox listened intently, and the moment he sensed Liz was being evasive about something, he zeroed in with pointed questions. When Liz told him that some of the information was personal and irrelevant, he said that lots of jobs required security clearance and background checks, and this was one of them. He would treat everything we told him with the utmost confidence. “You can trust Jerry Maddox,” he said.
It seemed impossible not to answer his questions. The funny thing was, nothing seemed to surprise or disturb him. In fact, he was sympathetic and understanding. He said Mom sounded like a talented and fascinating individual, and he confided that his own mom was a complicated woman herself—very smart, but boy, did she run hot and cold, and when he came home at day’s end, he never knew whether he was in for a hugging or a whipping.
That really got us talking, and soon Mr. Maddox had wormed the whole story out of us—Mom taking off, the bandersnatches, the cross-country bus trip. He wanted to know exactly why Mom had left and exactly why she’d had a meltdown, so I ended up telling him about Mark Parker, the boyfriend who kind of, sort of didn’t really exist. I also told him how we’d dodged the odious Perv in New Orleans, thinking that the way Liz and I had handled it would impress him.
That was the very word he used. “I’m impressed,” he said. He was leaning back with his hands clasped behind his head. “I like people who know how to deal with difficult situations. You’re hired.”