Sweet Hush

by Deborah Smith

  I struck home. Davis chewed his tongue for a few seconds, then nodded to Jakobek. “Consider yourself invited, Lt. Colonel. I’ll go upstairs and tell Eddie.”

  After he left the kitchen I settled my gaze on the wineglass. I heard the clink of Jakobek’s glass as he set it aside and the soft rustle of his khakis and flannel as he stood. “Quick thinking,” he said.

  I raised hard, tired eyes to his somber ones. “Please go and take care of my son. What he thinks his own father would have done is a fantasy I want him to keep.”

  Jakobek touched a single blunt fingertip to my cheek, stole the tear there, and nodded.

  NO ONE—least of all Hush—asked me to play daddy to Davis. Davis sure as hell didn’t want to admit that anyone but his old man had a place in his mother’s life. Listen, I’d have been the same way, if my mother had lived. So I cut Davis a lot of slack.

  Racers, the bar’s name said in big, gold-neon letters. The décor was an ad for NASCAR—racing memorabilia and posters, with a few hanging ferns thrown in for the ladies. The bar sat just off the main drag in Buckhead, a section of Atlanta that had gone from quiet and old-money rich to noisy and new-money show-off. On a cold weeknight in November the crowd was fairly tame—well-dressed students from the universities, a couple of recognizable Braves outfielders, some rap-music execs wearing heavy platinum chains, and a sprinkling of good-looking girls trying hard to be Britney Spears. The music was loud and the beer was imported. I sat by myself at a small corner table, sipping something dark and Irish while I read a book I’d borrowed from Hush’s library. Apples. A History Of The World’s Oldest Fruit. I was engrossed in a chapter on horticultural grafting methods when some drunk kid young enough to be my son walked by and yelled over the music, “Jesus Christ, dude, you’re reading about apples in here?” and laughed.

  In the meantime, Davis slouched over a table across the room with his buddies, ignoring a ten-dollar hamburger and a six-dollar beer, and generally looking miserable. The buddies were whacked enough not to notice, and spent their time whooping at racetrack videos on the bar’s billboard-sized TV.

  So it was an uneventful night for the first hour or so, until Davis’s crew got the bright idea to move on to louder pastures. “Get the limo, Jeeves, my dear man,” the buddy named Marcus said to me, grinning and throwing a pudgy hand onto my shoulder. Buddy Marcus looked like a little black Buddha wearing glasses. He was a law student from New York. Buddy Bill was a skinny, Lutheran economics major from the Midwest, and Buddy Simon, also an economics major, had been the only Jewish guy in his California town to win a state wrestling tournament. “Yeah, Jeeves, our dear man,” the three echoed.

  I liked them. They were harmless and cheerful and had never had to hurt anyone. I felt like a hundred-year-old sergeant in charge of baby recruits. “Shut up and try not to puke on your way to the car, assholes.” In return I got a happy chorus of “Yes, Sir, Lt. Colonel Sir,” and one-finger salutes as they staggered out a side exit. They were so drunk they forgot Davis, who stayed behind to pay the bill. “Follow your platoon and make sure they don’t get run over,” I told him. “I’ll take care of the bill. Happy birthday.”

  “What’s happy about it? My wife’s mad at me, I don’t have anything in common with my buddies anymore, and my mother is just waiting for me to admit I should never have left college and come back home.”

  “Tired of loading crates of fried apple pies for a living? Good.”

  “No, I’m tired of my mother not taking me seriously as the heir to the family business. Last week I handed her a ten-year company goals outline and she said “That’s nice. Can you have the new caramel kettles scrubbed out and set up by nine in the morning?” I gave her a master’s thesis on small business management and she gave me a scrub brush.”

  “Ever notice that your mother’s usually up to her elbows in work? That she falls asleep in front of her fireplace at night with a heating pad on her shoulder? That she’s out in her office before dawn? Pay attention to what she’s trying to show you, Davis. She works like a dog. She’s probably scrubbed more caramel kettles than you can count. Are you willing to work that hard? Do you love the farm that much? That’s what she wants to know.”

  “I see you’ve paid an awful lot of attention to my mother’s daily schedules. Especially how she falls asleep and how early she gets out of bed. Back off, Lt. Colonel. A lot of men have tried to get close to my mother. She’s ignored all of them. Nobody can live up to my father, in her eyes. So don’t try to bullshit her or me. Your motives are showing.”

  “Hey, it is him,” someone yelled. “Yeah, that’s him. Hey, you. Aren’t you Eddie Jacobs’ husband? Hey, Mr. Jacobs.” Laughter followed.

  Davis and I did a slow half-turn toward a table full of knuckle-draggers in college jerseys, including the young dumbfuck who’d laughed at my reading choices. “They’re not worth the trouble,” I said. “Let’s go. Now.”

  “No. I’ve been a joke in public for months. At least here I get a face-to-face rebuttal.”

  “There’s no point in wrestling with a pig. You get dirty and the pig just likes it. One of your mother’s sayings. Let’s go.”

  “Stay out of this. And don’t quote my mother to me.”

  “You’ve got a pregnant wife who doesn’t need to see you with your teeth kicked in. Words don’t mean shit. Take the abuse like a man.”

  “Dammit, you don’t listen, do you? Don’t tell me how to take abuse—and don’t tell me how to take care of my wife, either. You don’t know what a wife needs. You treat women like a special forces mission—quick in, fix their problem, quick out. And don’t tell me what a man does. My father was a man—he knew people looked up to him, and he took care of us, and he gave his life to make his name mean something to people. You haven’t got the heart to be a man like him.”

  He walked over to the group. I debated my next move and decided to stay put. I faced a lose-lose situation, at that point. “My name is Thackery,” Davis said to the strangers, his voice dropping into a mountain drawl. “And if you dazzlin’ mental giants can’t remember that, it’s your dumbshit problem, not mine.”

  “Don’t get pissy, man. Hey, you’re famous, that’s all. You fuck the President’s daughter. Hey, man, is her ass smaller than her mama’s?”

  End of conversation. It was all fists, after that.

  “NICKY, YOU WERE supposed to take care of him.”

  Eddie glared at Jakobek as she held a washcloth to my son’s bleeding mouth. We sat in the kitchen. Bloody ice water dripped on the floor. I carefully planted two icepacks on Jakobek’s outstretched hands. Other than raw, swollen knuckles, Jakobek didn’t have a mark on him. Davis, however, had a bloody mouth and a black eye. “I got to him after the first two punches,” Jakobek said. “No one laid a hand on him after that.”

  “Because they couldn’t reach me,” Davis mumbled. “I was on the floor.”

  “They knocked him out?” Eddie moaned.

  “Down, not out,” Jakobek said.

  Davis coughed. “Same difference.” He squinted through his swollen eye. “Thank you, Nick.”

  “No problem.”

  Nick. We’d made a step forward. I looked at Jakobek gently. “You left six young men clutching various injured parts of their bodies and dragged Davis out before the police came. But the fight won’t be any secret. People recognized Davis. I’d better call a lawyer.”

  I started to get up, but Jakobek slid an ice-covered hand over my arm. “I’ve got a good one lined up already. I made a call on the way home.”

  “Who?”

  “Al. And he called the Attorney General.”

  I sat back down. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Wherever my first lawyer, Fred Carlisle, rested in some bourbon pickled afterlife, I hope he appreciated that moment.

  Later that night, after Eddie led Davis off to b
ed, Jakobek and I sat across from each other at the harvest table. Under the low light of an overhead lamp I guided Jakobek’s big, beaten hands into a crockery bowl filled with a warm gruel of apple vinegar and crushed tobacco leaves. “The old people swear this concoction will pull the sting out of a hurt. The stang. That’s how they say it. The stang.”

  “Maybe I need all the stang I can hold onto.”

  “Oh, you’ve got plenty of stang left, take my word for—” I stopped, the flirtatious words censoring themselves, but also silenced by Jakobek’s serious expression. “Jakob, what’s troubling you?”

  “I let Davis walk into that fight. He was giving me some shit, so I let him take a couple of punches before I jumped in. I apologize.”

  I bent my head and considered my words carefully. Then, “Nobody else would have taken on six beefy drunks for my son’s sake. Thank you. You’ve got nothing to feel bad about. You’ve shown a lot of patience with him. Thank you.”

  “My job is to protect people. That’s all I’m good at.”

  “You make it sound simple. It’s not. And it’s not all you’re good at.”

  A potent silence grew between us. Jakobek cleared his throat. “On the way home, Davis said his old man would have fought for him the way I did.”

  I made a soft sound. “He paid you a great compliment, then.”

  “I don’t think we’re ever going to be pals. He believes I’m moving in on his father’s territory.” He looked at me meaningfully. “Says you’ve never looked twice at another man, and I’m wasting my time.”

  I felt the heat rise in my face. “I’ve had plenty of offers. I accepted a couple of them, here and there. Davis doesn’t know that.”

  “Bernard Dalyrimple.”

  I sat back. Managed not to stammer. “Sweet, divorced. Decided I was too scary behind closed doors.”

  You can see yourself put a gleam in a man’s eyes that, in return, sinks down where you live and melts you open. I saw that look come into Jakobek’s eyes. “Let me make up my own image,” he said.

  “You’ll have to. I’m blushing.”

  “Then there was this J. Chester Baggett I’ve heard about.”

  I sagged. Chocinaw County’s state representative had been sweet, and widowed, and very religious. But he was very lonely, like me, at the time. “I lured him into sin and felt bad about it later. We’re still friends. Stop. I won’t discuss this anymore.”

  “Not all men are scared or religious.”

  “But most men want to run my business for me. They think they know best. Or they think they deserve more of my time than the farm does.” I paused. “Are you, by the way? Chasing me?”

  After a moment, Jakobek said quietly, “I thought that was obvious. Are you chasing me?”

  I pulled my hands from the bowl and got up from the table. “I think that’s pretty obvious, too. But I also think it would be a mistake for us to catch each other. In a lot of ways, we have nothing in common.”

  “Nothing. Right.”

  I hurt him. He hurt me. We looked at each other for a second, full of regrets, then both of us retreated. “Goodnight,” he said grimly.

  “Goodnight.”

  I bumped my bad shoulder on the door frame to the back hall on the way out, rushed to my bedroom, and sat on my shower floor a long time, hugging my knees and wincing. I couldn’t love any man wholeheartedly. Or couldn’t admit it to him, if I did. Davy’s stang was still inside me.

  But I wanted Jakobek. He wanted me. Without a word of invitation or a hope that the situation would ever be simple enough for us to indulge ourselves. I laid in my bed, curled up tight, then stretching out, touching myself, touching myself again, crying into my pillow a minute later. I could only imagine what Jakobek was doing to himself in the small bedroom directly above mine. In the morning, we’d be polite, again.

  But that night wouldn’t be forgotten.

  UPSTAIRS, I WAS DOING exactly what she imagined me doing. And thinking of her, all the time.

  Chapter 16

  “YOU’LL WORK OR I’LL KICK YOU OUT!” Orders Eddie’s Va-Va-Voom Mother In Law. Read Haywood Kenney’s Column and See Exclusive Photos Of Eddie Jacobs Slaving In Bakery Of New Husband’s Family Business.

  “THE MANAGER AT THE GROCERY store told me about this before the newspaper ever hit the racks,” Smooch said in a high whisper, waving a copy of the headline from the doorway to my office. “Oh, Hush. This had to be an inside job. Look at the pictures of Eddie! Someone was only ten feet away.”

  I took the newspaper in my fists. “Buy all the issues you can find,” I said. “And burn them.”

  Then I was out the door to take revenge.

  “HURRY, LT. COLONEL,” a man called as I jumped down from a Sweet Hush Farm delivery truck. “She looked mad.” The crowd standing in front of the autumn pumpkin decorations and rocking chairs under the sidewalk awning of the Dalyrimple Diner backed away from me and pointed inside. “Her brother’ll be here in a minute,” someone else called. “He was way out near the north end of the county on a call. That’s why we phoned the farm. Figured you’d get here faster.”

  I shoved my way past double doors sporting flyers for the high school production of Bye Bye Birdie and a string quartet concert sponsored by Sweet Hush Farms. I dodged empty tables covered in plastic, red-checked cloths. Thank God, the lunch crowd had already left and only a few employees had been on hand when a middle-aged McGillen cousin named MerriLee had run inside screaming, with Hush following at a calm, deliberate walk.

  “Like Arnold in a Terminator movie,” the phone caller had warned.

  Two waitresses and a manager stood by a door to the kitchen. “The walk-in cooler,” the manager said, and pointed. “Hush herded her in there and slammed the door. Hush knows the layout of this diner, you know. Her mama waited tables here years ago. And Hush is a half-owner now, along with Bernard Dalyrimple. They dated some, but we don’t think you have anything to worry—”

  “Tell me the gossip later,” I said. Jesus, Hush and I were an item. By then I was already in the back storage room. Hush, dressed in dusty jeans, loafers, a flour-dusted plaid shirt, and a cinnamon-stained apron, braced one hand against the cooler’s closed steel door and bent her head close. “MerriLee, you tell me who else was involved in taking and selling those goddamned pictures of my daughter-in-law to Haywood Kenney, or I’ll turn this thermostat so far down they’ll have to thaw you with a blow torch.”

  From inside the cooler came muffled sobs. “If we hadn’t taken a few pictures, some stranger would have, sooner or later. We didn’t tell Mr. Kenney what to say about them. At least, I didn’t. Daddy talked to him.”

  Hush leaned closer, bent her head to the cooler’s steel door, and shut her eyes. “That greedy, vindictive son of a bitch. And Kenney, too.”

  I put a hand on the lock. “Davis and Eddie are still over in Dahlonega having lunch at the college?”

  “Hmmm. Lucille’s with them.”

  “Good.”

  She slid her fingers under mine and pushed the pin further into the door’s lock. “MerriLee?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t ever want to see you or your family at the Hollow, again. Never.”

  “Hush, you can’t banish us, you can’t banish your own—”

  “I have to take shit from strangers, but not from my own kin. You betrayed my trust. No second chances.”

  “Hush!”

  Hush walked out with me behind her. “Leave MerriLee in there for another ten minutes,” Hush told the manager. “I don’t want her on the phone to her daddy right away. I plan to surprise him.” We went out the front doors. The crowd parted. “Did you put the fear of God in her?” a woman asked.

  “No. The fear of me,” Hush said. She halted. “Jakob, there’s no point in adding more public contro
versy to what you’ve already got. Stay here. No hard feelings.”

  “Those photos of Eddie are my concern, too. So no, I won’t let you go, alone. If this is about family, then . . . I’m part of it.”

  After a quiet, potent moment under the avid scrutiny of the crowd, she nodded. “I’ll do the talking. You stand behind me and do the scowling.”

  “Agreed.”

  I steered the big red-and-white delivery truck through a town square draped in big shade trees turning gold in front of little shops and park benches and all the things we like to believe small-town America looks like. Sometimes, a town fits the image. Historic Dalyrimple, a sign said. Coated with Sweet Hush Farm enterprise and the money lured in by visitors to Sweet Hush apple country, Dalyrimple was real.

  “That way,” Hush said, jabbing a flour-dusted finger up a knoll. A modern complex of handsome brick courthouse, the county jail, and the county library shared the hilltop among more big, golden trees, lawns being mowed one more time for the season by an old man who waved at us, and a lifesized bronze statue of a pretty pioneer woman in long skirts striding into the unseen future with a bronze basket of bronze apples in her arms.

  Plant. Grow. Harvest.

  Donated by Hush McGillen Thackery for Sweet Hush Farms.

  I read that inscription as Hush strode up the steps ahead of me into our own unseen future. “You look good as a statue,” I said.

  “I paid for it, and I posed for it.” She paused. “And next week the grocery store tabloids will probably say I’m as hard-hearted as it.”

  I followed her inside the courthouse and down a hallway honeycombed with little offices behind doors with open blinds. God Bless America and Chocinaw County decals dotted the hallway windows. “My daddy’s first cousin, Aaron McGillen, is the county commissioner,” Hush explained. “I got him elected because he’s a tightwad and a sly manager, and that’s a good thing in county government. But not in a family.”

  She threw open a pair of double glass doors and strode into an anteroom where a young secretary said, “Cousin Hush, ma’am, uh, ma’am,” to which Hush said, “Take a bathroom break, Chancy. You never saw a thing.”