Son of a Grifter by Kent Walker

Author:Kent Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

22

FRENCH FRIES AND RANCH DRESSING

I hate this,” confided Ken as we lugged the two suitcases out to the car. “I hate taking Kenny into the D.C. jail.”

Every two weeks in the late eighties, I drove my father and brother to the airport so they could fly off to see Mom. For much of the first three years, Mom was in California, and the round trip wasn’t much of a strain.

In 1989, though, Mom moved to D.C. to begin serving her sentence for the fur theft. When D.C. extradited Mom, Ken cut his visits to once a month. He didn’t like the expense or the cross-country flight, but mostly he loathed the dirty, frightening Washington lockup, where Mom was the lone white female. She had at least eighteen months to go, and Ken and Kenny dreaded those eighteen visits as much as they dreaded her eventual release.

I had accompanied Ken to D.C. several times in my little brother’s stead, and I shared his uneasiness about the jail. In December 1989, though, it was Kenny’s turn to go. I dropped them at McCarran and went back to work. I’d recently opened a vacuum-cleaner distributorship, bankrolled by Ken, and felt uneasy leaving the business for even a few days. Besides, I had a second job, helping Ken with the looming civil suit.

The next day I’d swung by the Geronimo house with a box of legal files for Ken when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and heard his voice.

“Hi, Kent,” he said. He seemed tense.

“What’s up?” I answered.

“I have someone here who’d like to talk to you.”

The next sound knocked me back into a chair. “Hi, honey,” warbled Mom. I couldn’t hear the clanging and shouting that had been the backdrop for our conversations since 1985, and I realized that Ken had simply handed her the receiver. She was free.

“How long have you been out?” I stammered. Instant panic, instant depression, made me say the wrong thing. You’re supposed to be happy when your mother’s released from prison. I forgot to pretend. She could tell.

“Aren’t you glad, number one son?”

“Of course I’m glad,” I fumbled. “It’s a little shocking to find out this way, that’s all. Are you out for good?” I still couldn’t make the words come out right. “I mean, are you on furlough, or what?”

“I am out for good,” she said, and it sounded like a threat.

“When did they let you loose?” I asked.

“Oh, about a week ago.”

The drama had started again. Mom had been released six days before Ken and Kenny arrived, and hadn’t said a word. She’d rented a twenty-four-hundred-dollar-a-month town house in the red brick colonial neighborhood of Georgetown and run up ten thousand dollars in credit card bills, ordering everything that popped into her head, everything she’d been denied for more than four years. She bought expensive clothes and gourmet food and took bubble baths drinking champagne.

The credit card spree had a hostile, punitive edge, directed at Ken. But the missing week was plain scary.

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