“I saw the Bel Air,” I told her. “Drew showed it to me.”
“He would.” She looked vexed, then continued. “Her friend John knew an old-car dealer who had connections. It had, I believe the story is, been on display at ParkGate, their failed community, back in its heyday when they were selling lots at sky-high prices. They drove it to the farm. Where, I was told, it looked right at home.”
“But you sweetened the pot with the Piaget watch—”
“Piguet. I intended Andrew to have that all along. It had been his grandfather’s.” She compressed her lips. “I had no idea the whole affair would appear an out-and-out bribe. My only thought at the time was guaranteeing your safety.”
“He said she was going to sell off all the land if he left.”
She put a slice of cheese on a wedge of apple. “I told my son that if he planned to divorce Mary Virginia he must consider that she would take every acre available at the present inflated price. I wanted him to know the probable cost.”
I drank some tea, ate some apple and cheese. Lila Beth was right: food helped. “Then you aren’t trying to stand in his way?”
“No, my dear, not now.”
“May I tell him?”
“Let Andrew make the decision for himself. He has to claim his own life. Grow up or grow old: those are a man’s choices. I would hope he has more backbone, more determination, more decency than his father.” She reached into the pocket of her gray shirtwaist. “You must excuse me,” she said. She put a tiny tablet in her mouth. “It was not you who drowned on that road.” Her eyes filled. “The rest of it—doesn’t matter anymore.”
I picked up a crumb of cheese from the rug, still worried that I’d spill something, still wondering if she’d selected apple and cheese because neither would stain the fabric of the sofa. “I’ve bought a house,” I said.
“I hear this from my grandsons.”
I hesitated. “An old place, on Huckleberry.”
She supplied the street number. “I know the house. I know every old house in town. That used to belong to—” She gave me the history of the Gingerbread, naming names and dates. “I have never had the pleasure of seeing the inside of it,” she said, looking at me as if afraid she’d been too forward.
“My home is your home,” I told her, beginning to weep in earnest.
“And mine is yours.”
Then, awkwardly, timidly, as if all manner of things might break at the touch, Lila Beth comforted us both.
THE TOTALLY CLOUDLESS sky continued, a blue chambray shirt after a thousand washings. The stillness made me uneasy. It was the rule in our part of Texas that weather was a sort of cosmic grandfather clock, each extreme followed by an equal pendulum swing in the opposite direction.
For example, the year Eben and I moved to Waco, with two toddlers, was the year of the worst heat wave on record. Sixty-three days that summer the thermometer registered over a hundred degrees; a hundred thirteen in Dallas. Then, when everyone had got back what was left of their soil, sorghum, skin, yards, rivers, lakes, the region was gripped in the “big chill,” the bitterest winter on record in the twentieth century, with fifty days of temperatures below thirty-two that froze solid winter crops, livestock, cisterns and ponds.
I was in hopes that the ferocious flash floods across central Texas did not mean a summer drought equal to that of the thirties, fifties and seventies. My house had ceiling fans but no air conditioning. I hoped the walls, thick because old, would provide insulation. But my worry was not for myself or the girls, but for the students I might be tutoring. Any kid, I figured, whose parent was paying one-on-one hourly rates for a good score on the SATs, was going to come from a house that went from cool to frigid in the summer months. It might be that I’d have to offer my sessions at Circleburgers. Not a bad idea, actually, getting the student into a friendlier, less academic atmosphere. A little jukebox wailing in the background.
In this frame of mind, then, I didn’t take it amiss when the next weekend a warm front rolled in on a fog the likes of which I’d not seen before. The girls and I stood in the yard, holding up our hands in front of us, amazed, truly, that we could not see them.
We joked that people should say potato soup fog instead of pea soup fog, as this looked a lot like what we were going to have for lunch.
I called Shorty, to give him a chance to bitch about missing out on his fishing, the river levels having finally fallen enough to set out lines again. I said it wasn’t foggy under the water, and anyway, if it was, the fish wouldn’t be able to see the hook, just those luscious goggle-eyes. He said it wasn’t the fish had to drive across the bridge.
It might be we all needed an excuse to lie low, stay in, do nothing. That the fog was weather’s way of redressing the griefs and damages of the previous weeks. A downy compress to bind the bereavements of May.
THE NEXT WEEKEND, with the sun out and the wind nice and steady, house stripping was the first item of the day.
I’d rented ladders, borrowed a set of heavy-duty tools from Shorty, and got six T-shirts, extra large, printed up in purple letters on maroon, saying SAVE THE GINGERBREAD. Those, plus promising to fetch the state’s third best barbeque for lunch, constituted my wages.
Daddy Bledsoe had dropped his girls off Friday night so they could be on site for breakfast. He’d given me a sly wink, as if to say he’d seen this separate-dwelling business coming ten years ago.
At eight o’clock in the morning, I was standing at the curb, in cutoffs, my straight hair held back with combs, in an old white shirt, no makeup, taking “before” photos with my Polaroid, when a silver Riviera snaked up to a full stop. Behind the wheel sat a Dallas girl.
“Hi, Cile,” she said. “Hope we’re not too early. Boy, was I glad to see you standing out front. I told the boys that you’d be asleep and they’d just have to sit on the steps and talk to the paperboy. Carrier we say now that they’re girls, too, don’t we? But it was now or never, bringing them. I’m in the middle of a million last-minute moving chores. You can’t believe how much stuff—”
“Hello, Mary Virginia.” It seemed the most natural thing in the world, visiting with her at the curb. We’d always dealt about the kids, and here we were doing it again. If I felt anything at all, it was that I hoped we’d be doing it for a lot of years to come. And not feeling too certain about that. Once hers were officially Dallas boys, welded into their tennis whites, I might never see them again. This might be our last Play Day.
“Listen—Get on out, guys. Let us talk here a minute, hear?” She punched the button that opened the back doors.
Trey and Jock exited the Silverado, wearing black shorts, black hightops, and shirts worn wrong side out. I allowed myself a smile. Trey had his gaucho hat in hand, very unobtrusive; no doubt Jock had tucked a rubber band for his hair in his pocket. They gave me high fives and strolled over to inspect the job.
“You’re not mad or anything, are you, Cile? About that birthday party stuff?”
“Looks like you’ll be settled in Dallas in plenty of time for your big Four-Oh in December,” I said. I wasn’t so much avoiding a direct answer about Drew’s party as lost in trying to imagine what sort of complete-with-snow-flown-in-from-Aspen, skiing-down-reconstructed-Swiss-slopes-in-the-Park-Cities kind of party she might have. Deciding she must have been frantic to get this move accomplished before her birthday; terrified she’d be stuck here with some small-town picnic at the horseshoe pits or backyard neighborhood cookout.
“This has been such a mess,” she confided, “this whole spring. I thought I’d go out of my mind. But everything has worked out, I have to say. The Japanese—one industrialist, actually, not even a consortium, can you believe that?—bought ParkGate for sixty-one point five. Million, I hate to say. The papers reported it billion. Too bad. Nueva Osaka we’re calling it. That’s a joke. Started out we thought we were getting seventy thousand an acre. No way. But John—that’s my friend, not Bitsy’s John—says he lost his shirt but not his shorts, a
nd at this point that’s great news.”
“Good for you.” Bending over to talk to her, I saw her dark hair was highlighted with a silver color not far from the car’s, that she had little diamond studs in her ears, a nice gold belt on her yellow linen shorts, half a dozen beaten gold bracelets and, on the seat, a yellow leather bag. Definitely a Dallas girl.
“You always were the greatest with the boys, Cile. I swear, I don’t know what the Lord was thinking of—I guess I don’t have to watch myself around you anymore, do I, about all that—when He sent me boys. It’s so great that John, my friend, had brothers; I mean it will make it so much easier. He can talk to boys just like they were anybody. It’s a gift.”
“You’ll be glad to move, I know.”
“I have to say I don’t mind getting out of this antediluvian town, although Dallas is sort of anti-diluvian now, if you get the joke.” She repeated it. “I won’t mind, I have to say, living where you can see a few dozen buildings taller than ‘the largest skyscraper west of the Mississippi and south of Kansas City.’ ” She laughed. “That still fractures me; they can’t believe it up there. I won’t mind, either, hearing somebody brag about something besides ‘six Confederate generals and three and a half governors.’ ” She looked up, embarrassed. “I don’t mean to offend you.” She gestured toward the campaign sign in my yard for the woman candidate, courtesy of Theo.
“I’m glad for you,” I said. And I really was. People should end up where they want to be.
“You tell those big girls of yours I said ‘hi.’ I missed them Easter.”
“We missed you.”
She turned the ignition on. “I’m going to leave them with you, then. Bring them back whenever you get tired of them. The good thing is that in two years they’ll both be off at school and I won’t have to carry them back and forth. John, my friend, plays hard on the weekends and he likes me to be free to play with him. It won’t be the greatest move in the world for the boys, leaving their friends. But I guess they’ll be doing that anyway, when they go off, won’t they? At least they have their tennis. Dallas is definitely a tennis town.”
“They’ll do fine,” I told her. Smiling about her sweet boys.
“And summers, they’ll have the farm. Outdoors and all that, although you do have to watch out for Pasadena tick disease, I know. Drew’s up there right now. He couldn’t wait to go. I think he thought we were going to turn the farm into a weekend resort.” She pushed her shades up on her frosted hair, stuck her head out the window as she started to pull away. “I guess we’ll keep in touch, one way or the other, won’t we?”
“Sure we will,” I promised. “It’ll be just like Baby Days all over again, only now they’re big enough to pack their own pajamas.”
THE ALPINE-AWFUL siding was coming off, with the greatest of ease, tacked up apparently by cheap labor in a hurry. When Theo called, the six kids, my basic family unit, had stripped the whole front, except for the part under the eaves, down to the original. Small wonder; how could anything long resist the combined tugs of two Taits, two Bledsoes, and the two Williams boys with their outrageous Ts turned right side out?
They had a cassette player blasting out the music of their generation, a pitcher of lemonade on the porch and three sacks of Eva Lee’s smoky pit-barbequed pork and ribs waiting in the kitchen.
“We’re unveiling the Gingerbread,” I told my old teacher on the phone. “No cream cheese and olive today. Besides, I’m on a twelve-step program to give your specialty up.”
“It’s your daddy,” she said. “His heart.”
“I thought he’d be baiting out, hours ago.”
“He’s here.”
“Is this serious, Theo? What are we talking about? You want me to call an ambulance?” At Shorty’s age and weight I wasn’t going to give him odds.
“Just come.”
“On my way.”
The assembled day labor seemed glad to see me leave; there was a lot of exaggerated yawning and stretching. Maybe they’d take a long lunch break, they said. Maybe they’d get wild and drink Coca-Colas instead of Dr. Peppers; the Bledsoes had brought six-packs.
“I won’t be long,” I told them. “If there’s real trouble, I’ll call.” I had to tear my eyes away from the house. “Did you know it would look this good?” I asked Trey and Jock. “When you first decided it was siding?” How had they known they’d uncover these beautiful old dark colors, stain soaked deep into vertical boards? What a gem I’d found—they’d found for me.
It was foolishly hard to get in the Pontiac and leave them there. I was having an attack of fear-of-loss I guess, a springtime virus. But looking at the sextet of them, all of whom were a part of me, all of whom were making this old eyesore into a dream, I had a moment of panic they might disappear if I drove away. That maybe they were a mirage, like Cow’s Party at the farm; Cile’s Family on Huckleberry. Something I’d been looking for forever that was going to recede from my life when I turned the corner.
Not true as it turned out.
Not true that Shorty was on his last heartbeat, either. I’d been set up. When I pulled onto Nightingale (in the center of Birdville, quick as you could say W-L-G, Where Lives Guest), there was Drew’s Chevy pickup right there in the drive. The sight of which caused a deep flutter of excitement to run right up my legs to my stomach.
He was at the kitchen table, and I’d never been so glad to see anybody in my whole life.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked him. “I thought you’d be out waxing your birthday present.”
“I’m having a Garden of Eden,” he said, holding up a gummy peanut butter and butter on wheat, an oil-ruffled lettuce leaf daintily dripping out one side. He had on boots, his longhorn belt, his birthday T-shirt—STOP TOPSOIL DESTRUCTION—and was grinning at me like crazy.
“Boy here came to ask for your hand,” Shorty explained with his mouth full. “I said I thought you were going to need both of them to keep the wolf from the door.” Wheeze, wheeze.
“A man’s supposed to ask her daddy for her hand,” Drew said. “The book says.”
“Man’s supposed to ask her first.” I pulled up a chair. I still looked a mess, but I had got my face on and a fresh white shirt.
“That’s right? It didn’t say that, book I read.”
“I saw Mary Virginia this morning,” I told him.
Drew began to whistle “All My Exes Live in Texas.”
“What happened?”
“I went by your house—”
Theo, looking like the canary who killed the cat, pushed half a cream cheese sandwich into my fingers, which were still sticky from a strip of barbequed pork I’d grabbed on the run.
“Iced tea?” she asked.
“Coffee.” I was overcome with Drew showing up in his old truck instead of his new vintage toy. At the sight of his brick red head, his once-freckled farm face. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for us to be sitting here together at this table. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why I’d ever thought he wouldn’t get along with my folks. How could he not?
“Your house,” he said. “I went by.”
“When?”
“You were at Eva Lee’s getting to-go.”
“This morning?”
“You want to hear about it?”
“I want to hear about it.”
Theo handed me a hot cup of strong brew and stood hovering over us. She’d dressed herself in a flowered flour-sack housecoat, the kind that zipped up the front and had lace around the collar, in an aqua print that harmonized with the tablecloth she’d got out in Drew’s honor. It was a new concept in accessories: matching tablecloth and clothes. Her chubby face scrubbed, she looked softer, younger. This was the just-us-family Theodora Moore I hadn’t seen before.
Shorty was every once in a while giving Drew’s arm a sort of tap, not a real shoulder clip, just a sort of punch. A hey-sonny sort of punch. He looked a little like a man who’d just caught a ninety-five-pound big yellow c
atfish and was weighing it in. (I guess he and Eben hadn’t been what you’d call close.)
“I went by the house—” Drew said.
“The Gingerbread.”
“The house on Huckleberry.”
“How’d you find it?”
“I got a map. You want to hear?”
“You went by my house—”
“I got a load of stuff from the farm in the pickup. A table—you said you needed a table. Did you buy one?” He looked suddenly anxious.
“Not yet.”
“And the six Stickley chairs. We don’t need them up there, who cares what we sit on up there? We can use the hall benches. Something else, too.”
“What?”
“See, so I drove by, and what I saw were these vandals ripping your place apart. On ladders, with crowbars. There were these big black kids and these two hoods in shirts with messages so crude I thought I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing.” He waved his arms, trying to act out his story for us. “I got out of the truck and almost ran into that Chinese tallow tree you’ve got—nice, they’ve got a lot of trees over there in the Berries—not looking where I was going, and I shouted, ‘Listen here, you, get down from there or I’m calling the cops. This is my woman’s house and if you touch another board of it, I’ll have you in juvenile court by lunchtime.’ Naturally, I was forgetting it was Saturday. I was ready to haul them all in.”
I smiled to imagine the scene. No wonder my kids had all been yawning and faking stretches when I left. They must have been popping with their secret. Busting to keep it to themselves.
“Then these big girls, linebackers, came over to where I was standing and they lifted me off the ground—can you believe that? One on each side of me, bigger than me with their hair up in those rooster combs and wearing stilts, it seemed like. One of them said, ‘You must have made a mistake, Mister, no man has been hanging around with the woman in this house.’ That put me in my place all right.
“Then a couple of big white girls rounded the side of the house, laughing fit to kill and—you know what’s coming—it was Ruth and Martha. You could have knocked me over. Wearing these T-shirts that said cows ‘R’ us, that was Martha, looking pretty as ever, and Ruth had one that said MAKE LOVE NOT—” He faltered, trying to recall.
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