Southern Girl

by Lukas,Renee J.

  “That’s what you think,” Danny teased under his breath. “I think it explains a lot.”

  Jesse gave him a shove. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” she said, taking another piece of cake. “And you’d know that if you weren’t so stupid.”

  Danny was a year older than Jesse, with light brown hair like their father’s and a grin a mile wide. The trouble was, he seemed to think everything he said was funny, but to Jesse it wasn’t. She decided that big brothers weren’t funny. All they were good for was making poop jokes and dumb faces behind their parents’ backs when they were talking.

  Before the accident happened, Jesse’s older brother and sister had gotten to visit their grandmother, Rose, in Boston a few times. But she died a year after Jesse was born, so she was sad that she’d never known her. Jesse wished she knew what it was like to have a grandmother to eat cookie dough out of the bowl with. Her mother told her that Rose would have said batter will kill you if you eat it raw like that. But Jesse didn’t care. She preferred to imagine her that way. She might have a grandmother on her dad’s side, but he had no idea where she was. So Jesse would imagine what she would be like, round and gray-haired, like a character she’d seen in one of her children’s books, pulling cookies out of the oven with a smile. She didn’t know why, but grandmothers and cookies seemed to go together.

  * * *

  Jesse spent every morning of first grade throwing up before heading off to school. She knew throwing up wasn’t good for you, but she was good at it, able to projectile vomit all the way from the bathroom door to the toilet. If there had been an Olympic competition for hurling, she could have taken the gold.

  This was one of many reasons why living in a small town wasn’t so good. All the teachers knew her parents, some of their kids went to school with her, and nearly all of them went to her church. So everyone knew about her problem. People came up to her parents after services and asked if they should pray for her.

  She didn’t like everyone knowing about her problem. But in a small town, everybody knows your business, and they continue to know it until you died…or moved. A lot of people had died before having a chance to get out of Greens Fork.

  Jesse didn’t know why she threw up. Nobody did. Some thought she was simply a nervous kid. Her parents worried she might have had something wrong with her intestines, something that might be connected with the accident before she was born. They took her to a Nashville hospital where she had an endoscopy.

  “They’re going to take pictures of your stomach with a camera,” her mom told her.

  “Why would anyone want to do that?” asked the precocious six-year-old.

  “So they can help you feel better,” her mom replied with a forced smile to prove she wasn’t worried.

  After the procedure, when they didn’t find anything, the doctor politely told her parents that it was probably all in Jesse’s mind.

  When they got home, there was a lot of closed-door, loud whispering. The no-fighting-in-front-of-the-children rule her parents had didn’t mean there wasn’t any fighting. There was such an undercurrent of tension in the Aimes’ household at this time that it was a wonder everyone in the family wasn’t vomiting. No matter how hard they tried the stress would come bubbling up to the surface, usually during mealtimes, giving everyone indigestion.

  The stress, Jesse decided when she was older, was created by her father’s need to keep everything under control and her mother’s need to vent. Carolyn was the kind of person who believed it was okay to fly off the handle and spew her feelings from time to time. Such behavior only made Dan uneasy, though, so he’d do whatever he could to “fix” it.

  In this case, her dad eventually sat Jesse down and told her that she’d have to learn to calm herself down because she couldn’t live her whole life hunched over a toilet. As it turned out, she didn’t have to. It turned out Jesse was allergic to dairy products. The discovery was made by accident when Carolyn noticed that Jesse, immediately after having her daily glass of milk with breakfast, almost didn’t make it to the bathroom. They took her to their family doctor in Greens Fork, Dr. Jay Henderson, otherwise known as Dr. Jay, who decided to test her for allergies.

  All the way home, Dan praised his hometown. “See, those big city doctors couldn’t find anything,” he told Carolyn.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Don’t miss the turn.”

  “Lived here all my life.” His voice had a sharp bite as he turned the wheel. “I’m just sayin’, whenever something big happens, you and everybody else think the only good doctors must be in Nashville. Turns out that wasn’t true, now was it?”

  Knowing he’d persist until she admitted that Dr. Jay was a wise sage or something to that effect, she praised him emphatically, doing what it took to make Dan stop talking. She had an instinct for what people wanted or needed, something invaluable for a preacher’s wife. She somehow could always make others feel at ease around her, even if she didn’t always feel the same around them.

  Jesse thought her mother was mysterious. Sometimes she was very emotional for no apparent reason, and sometimes she was incredibly calm and cool, like the time Danny ran into a wasp nest. She quietly told Dan to “Call Dr. Jay,” as she tended to his stings. She was a real enigma, a woman with so many layers she put onions to shame. Jesse thought she’d never fully know or understand her.

  Chapter Three

  It was a deceptively beautiful summer day—not the kind of day Jesse would have expected for what seemed to be the worst day of her life. It was a day that began with so much promise, but ended in disaster. It was sunny and bright with the trees and sky illuminated in deep shades of green and blue like crayon colors. Decades later, Jesse could remember everything from that day, especially the sweet smell of honeysuckle lining the gravel road where she walked alongside her best friend.

  “Are you scared?” Stephanie asked.

  “No,” Jesse lied. Her innocent blue eyes were bright and unsuspecting, and she had platinum blond hair that almost didn’t look real. She was so perfectly gullible, especially where Stephanie Greer was concerned.

  Stephanie could make Jesse do anything, and she seemed to know it. With long dark hair and gray, smoky eyes, she was a movie star in Barbie sneakers. Jesse had never seen anyone with gray eyes before. She thought Stephanie was the most fascinating creature who ever walked the earth. She would follow her anywhere—even to the river’s edge.

  “There’s water there, but we ain’t goin’ in it.” Even Stephanie’s reassuring voice couldn’t drown out the warnings of Jesse’s mother, who had made it clear that nothing but death by drowning awaited them at the river. Jesse had had to promise a million times she wouldn’t go there unsupervised.

  Something about being with Stephanie made it all right. She seemed an old soul with all this wisdom packed into her six years. Whatever it was, Jesse suddenly didn’t care about the warnings. Stephanie was worth the risk.

  The girls walked under the sun, their shadows stretching and merging across the quiet road toward the river. Leaves rustled as they got closer. They could hear the spray of a waterfall deep inside the forest. It was like stepping into a fairy tale, with rays of sun beaming down through centuries-old trees. In a single moment, Jesse believed God was there. She’d never felt that before, especially not in church. Everyone in church was too busy sticking their noses into everyone else’s business to pay attention to God, whispering about who was sitting with whom or whose outfit didn’t match. As for Jesse, she couldn’t pay attention because the lacy dresses her mom made her wear were always too itchy or scratchy.

  Here, though, as a gentle wind blew through the trees, she could almost feel spirits from the past and present encircling her and her friend, as if they knew them. It was a strange feeling that lasted only seconds, but it felt real.

  When the trees parted, the path led them to where clear water rushed over the tops of protruding rocks and sparkled like liquid diamonds in the sun.

  “See? Nobody�
�s drownin’.” Stephanie flashed a grin.

  For at least an hour, they sat on a large flat rock at the river’s edge. Jesse could smell the fresh earth under her shoes. Something about this day was so special, she wanted to hold on to it somehow. She reached beside the rock and picked a bunch of the green, leafy plants growing there and presented them to Stephanie like a bouquet.

  “Silly,” Stephanie said dismissively. “Girls don’t give other girls flowers.”

  Jesse’s face turned red, and she quickly dropped the bouquet. She felt embarrassed, although she wasn’t sure why.

  “Come on.” Stephanie proceeded to show her how to find a properly sized walking stick to navigate the rocky trail that ran beside the river.

  As Jesse followed, she kept wondering what she’d done wrong.

  Stephanie’s footsteps in the dirt led them farther into the forest.

  “I’m not supposed to go this far,” Jesse said anxiously, knowing she shouldn’t have been there at all.

  “The trick is to find a stick that’s the right size. You don’t wanna get one too big or too little.” Stephanie handed her a stick that was about her size and kept on going.

  “Why do I need a stick?” Jesse asked.

  “It’s for hikin’.”

  “We’re hikin’?”

  Stephanie stopped and watched her friend stepping gingerly over uneven, rocky ground. “Not if you go that slow,” she said.

  Jesse threw down her stick. “I’ll go as slow as I want! You’re not the boss of me!”

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” Stephanie said, resuming the pace. “Geez.”

  As they walked, Jesse picked up some brown stones she’d never seen anywhere but there. They were smooth and perfectly round. She turned them over in her hand and chose to keep one as a souvenir of this day. It was about the size of an egg with a reddish tint that looked like clay. That would be her treasured rock. At age six, everything was of monumental importance. For her, this rock would signify everything magical she had felt in the forest that day.

  Eventually they came to a place where the water seemed to stand still, expanding like a lake, surrounded by green and sounds of buzzing here and there.

  They stopped walking when they saw their reflections in the standing water.

  “You’re pretty,” Stephanie said suddenly. Jesse said nothing. While Stephanie seemed to have no problem stating what was what, Jesse was used to keeping most of her thoughts to herself. The sun swept across the water, making light dance all around them.

  “Stephanie! Time for supper!” Arlene Greer’s voice echoed throughout the forest. Her tone was so loud and sharp that Jesse was sure she must have spooked all the animals.

  The two girls darted down the trail, then began crossing the undefined rock pathway to get to the other side of the river. Stephanie had already made it, while Jesse was on a rock in the middle of the river, trying to keep her balance. As she stepped off it, some slime on it made her foot slip. She started to go down, but right before she hit the water, Stephanie caught her, hanging on to her arms, helping her regain her balance.

  “I’m gonna die,” Jesse kept saying, feeling certain that this was the punishment for disobeying her mother.

  “No, you’re not. You know how to swim, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The water’s not even that deep!” Stephanie laughed, then led her back over to the other side.

  “I swear, you’re gonna kill me,” Jesse said when she successfully reached the riverbank. She wiped sweaty hands off on her shorts and caught her breath. As they continued making their way through the forest, there was a loud rustling close behind them. Jesse grabbed Stephanie’s arm. “What was that?”

  “Could be a bear.” Stephanie couldn’t hide her smile; she liked to tease her.

  Jesse shoved her playfully, but she hadn’t let go of her fear. “Don’t say that to me. You know how I get.” She’d told her friend about the stuffed black bear keychain she’d gotten in a gift shop during a family trip to the Smoky Mountains—never mind that she had no keys. Since discovering that black bears roamed around east Tennessee, she’d been worried about whether or not they’d show up in middle Tennessee.

  “I can’t guarantee, Jess. This is North America.” Stephanie sounded like an authority on everything, even when she was kidding.

  “You said it was safe!”

  “It is,” the wise-looking brunette said with great confidence. “The only bears in Tennessee are those black ones that don’t hurt nobody.”

  “What about the ones that can hurt you?” Jesse asked. “Are you supposed to play dead or run? I saw it on a nature show, but I can’t remember which bears you do what with.”

  “I don’t know,” Stephanie admitted. “I’d probably run no matter what.”

  “Yeah.” That seemed the most sensible thing.

  They continued down the road, wiping any traces of mud off their shirts and scraping their shoes against the gravel to hide all evidence of their secret adventure.

  Carolyn Aimes waved tiredly at Arlene through the car window when she came to pick up her daughter. She and Arlene always exchanged the tired smiles of two mothers who understood each other. They seemed to Jesse like friends, but Carolyn rarely got out of the car.

  When the girls reached the front yard, Ms. Greer gave Jesse a big hug. “You come back any time, y’hear?” Ms. Greer resembled an older Stephanie, the same gray eyes, even the same dimples in her cheeks.

  “Thanks.” Jesse turned to Stephanie and gave her a hug. It was nice having a secret just between the two of them.

  “You’re welcome.” Stephanie winked at her. It seemed that she was always making Jesse do things that scared her. And almost every time, it turned out to be okay. No one drowned in the river that day.

  A Helen Reddy song was playing faintly on the AM station as Jesse climbed into the car. “That ain’t no way to treat a lady, no way to treat your baby…”

  “Did you have a good time?” her mother asked, pulling out of the driveway.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Put on your seat belt.”

  Jesse did as she was told, taking one more backward glance at the trees hiding the enchanted river. She felt sure their secret would be safe.

  “We have to get groceries,” her mother said.

  Jesse was thinking about her adventure with Stephanie, paying little attention to the mundaneness of ordinary life. She’d slipped into an other-worldly existence, one that nothing could pull her out of…not until The Great Grocery Store Meltdown, as it would come to be known.

  Chapter Four

  Carolyn liked to buy seafood because it reminded her of home. She grew up on the North Shore of Boston in an old Victorian house on a street that was lined with old Victorian houses. Her family was used to eating lobster two or three times a week. They even fed it to their cat, who was named Hank. They later found out she was female, but the name stuck anyway. Hank would sell her furry little soul for a piece of lobster meat.

  One time they kept putting out bowls of lobster right after the cat reached the bottom of the back staircase. Once she caught a whiff of more lobster, she’d climb the stairs again and clean out the bowl. Hank finally got so full she lay on her back with all four paws up in the air. They thought she was dead. To see exactly how gluttonous she was, Carolyn’s mother put out another bowl with the last few chunks of lobster and one more time set it outside the back door. Amazingly, that cat found a way to roll herself upright again, dragging herself up each step as if it were her last. But she made it. If there was lobster, Hank would eat it, even if it killed her.

  In Greens Fork, Carolyn had no choice but to shop at Rooster’s Food Emporium, the only grocery store in town. It was right next to the Stop ’n Slurp, a place you went to get snacks or sodas when you were in a hurry. Kids mostly went there.

  The décor inside Rooster’s Food Emporium hadn’t been updated since the 1950s. The walls were a sickly pale green, which clashed te
rribly with the faded red, now pink, rooster painted on the back wall. It was as though the owners had given up years ago.

  Carolyn went there to order live lobsters, though they only kept a small few in the tank since most of the locals didn’t know—or want to know—what they were. Carolyn pointed at the tank like a woman on a mission.

  “You want to get the liveliest ones,” she explained to her daughter. “They taste the best.”

  Jesse preferred to picture her lobster as something red on a plate, not green and black, and certainly not moving.

  When Carolyn indicated which ones she wanted, they were always packaged inside a cardboard box. The box wasn’t big enough, so their antennae poked out at the corners, each one moving. To the untrained eye it probably looked as though she was carrying around a giant insect. As Jesse made her way down the aisles with her, she saw the women who were there pointing at the cardboard box and whispering to each other with the same sense of urgency as if Jesse’s mother was rumored to be a serial killer. It was the first time she’d really noticed it, but it seemed her mother must have gone through this every time she bought lobsters.

  Everyone has a breaking point. Even Carolyn, who, at first glance, seemed as proper and refined as mothers on old TV shows. On this particular day, though, she’d had enough. The whole town was about to see June Cleaver blow.

  They reached the cashier, who was a girl of about seventeen. She dragged the items over the scanner, popped her gum and clicked her long fingernails until she got to the box with the waving antennae. She stopped, giving Carolyn a face of disgust.

  “You gonna eat that?” she asked with a sneer.

  Carolyn, the woman with more layers than an onion, didn’t appear to have anger issues. In fact, no one had ever seen her have a temper tantrum, which made the next few moments all the more shocking and memorable to Jesse. And everyone else within hearing distance. The outburst her comment provoked might have rated a raised eyebrow or two in Boston, but in Greens Fork it was tantamount to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.