No Defense

by Rangeley Wallace

  As I passed through the Steak House foyer, walking by the Lions Club plastic gum machine, the orange Birmingham News dispenser, and the black Tallagumsa Times tray, I felt my present collide with my past. I had worked, dated, and celebrated every significant event of my life, from my first horse show to my wedding, here.

  Inside, the smell of fresh coffee, pies, biscuits, and sweet rolls enveloped me. I looked down the wall booth, a single continuous green Naugahyde booth running almost the length of the front dining room and separating that dining room from the hallway to the back. Green plants grew out of the planters framing the top edge of the booth. The wall booth ended like a giant upside-down L at a corner booth where the owners, Mimi and Howard Bledsoe, could usually be found, watching over the restaurant’s activities.

  Neither of the Bledsoes was in their booth, and for a second I worried that they’d sold the Steak House. I’d recently heard from Mother that they were thinking about selling the place and retiring. Mimi’s arthritis was getting worse, and Howard wanted to travel. I sympathized with their reasons, I understood that one day I would come here and someone else would be sitting in their booth, and I knew my heart would break when that day came. I was saddened last year when my parents rented out the family home and moved to a fancy new wood-and-glass house on Clark Lake; I needed more than ever for the Steak House to endure unchanged.

  Estelle, my best friend since first grade and the Steak House hostess, was perched on the stool behind the check-out counter. Her petite figure was barely visible behind the old cash register. Estelle’s blond hair was in the same pageboy cut she’d worn since high school. As Buck always said, she was “as cute as a button.”

  Estelle saw us, squealed “LuAnn,” sprang off the stool, and flittered over to greet Eddie, Jessie, and me; the rest of my family was already upstairs.

  “Y’all are here! Y’all are here!” Estelle cried. “Look at you.” She patted my stomach. “You look wonderful!”

  I turned to hug her in a sideways embrace, the best I could manage with my stomach. “Only a best friend would say that,” I said.

  Estelle hugged Jessie, then Eddie; her head just reached his chest.

  “Jessie, go on and get your candy bar from behind the counter,” I said. “Then you can go ahead upstairs if you want.”

  Jessie looked to Estelle for official permission.

  “Help yourself,” Estelle said.

  Jessie walked around the counter and slid open one of the glass cabinet doors. She surveyed the array of candy bars for a moment, put her hand into the cabinet, almost took a Hershey’s Bar, hovered briefly over a Nestle’s Crunch, and finally landed on a Three Musketeers. She grabbed it and ran upstairs calling “Granddaddy! Glady!” “Glady” was her name for my mother.

  “I’ve been excited all day!” Estelle clapped her hands several times.

  “I didn’t know you cared so much about the courthouse,” I said.

  “That’s not all that’s happening today,” she said.

  “Oh, no! There’s more? What else, Estelle?” Eddie loosened his tie and scowled. “I can’t take much more.”

  “Can’t tell,” she teased. “’Til come upstairs in a while and visit with y’all.”

  She went back to the cash register to ring up the long line of customers filing out of the back dining room. They were mostly women in their fifties and sixties, who, I assumed, were passengers from the tour bus outside on their way to the Grand Old Opry in Nashville.

  I looked around the front dining room. Several people, customers and friends from over the years, waved to me. I waved back.

  “Hey, Chip,” I said to the short stocky man in one of the front booths. He’d been the county prosecutor until last year. “How’s Betty?” I shook hands with him and talked briefly to people at four other tables, then joined Eddie, where he’d been waiting near the cash register.

  He looked irritated as he took a few packs of Steak House matchbooks from a countertop bowl and put them in his pocket.

  “What is it, LuAnn? What is it with you and this place, this town, these people?” He glared at me. “Every time we come here, I get the feeling it’s 1968 and you’re homecoming queen again. I thought you and Estelle might start up with one of your cheerleading routines just now. And if you weren’t so pregnant, I know we’d have to stop on the way out of town and watch you ride your horse. You love this. All of it. You just can’t let it go.”

  Before I had a chance to respond, Mother appeared at the top of the stairs, fiddling with her American flag pin.

  “Are you two ever coming? Your father’s waiting, LuAnn,” she said.

  “Coming,” I said. Happy to avoid another argument with Eddie, I turned away from him and walked up the carpeted stairs and down the hall toward the party sounds: laughter, talking, silver clinking against china.

  The room was full of people—at least one hundred, maybe more. Someone, probably Estelle, had decorated the room with red, white, and blue helium balloons.

  The room dividers were pushed into the wall, leaving one large open area. Straight ahead, the buffet lunch was being served off four banquet tables pushed together and covered with tablecloths. The centerpiece was a bouquet of white gladiolus in a crystal vase. On each of the fifteen round tables placed every few feet and surrounded by six chrome and leatherette chairs was a single red rose in a stem vase. Near the doorway was the bar.

  To my right, at the far end of the room, was the speaker’s dais. Above and behind it hung a huge photograph of my father’s face. Ever since Buck and a few state Democratic party officials decided to push him as the next governor, any event involving my father resembled a political rally.

  I’d heard about, but never before seen, Daddy’s new campaign picture. I studied it, trying to see him as a voter might. Honest but not dull. Attractive but not vain. Self-assured but not too cocky. Governor Newell Hagerdorn. That sounded good to me.

  Standing with Daddy and Ben Gainey near the speaker’s dais was my high-school love, Junior. A former star of the Tallagumsa High Tigers football team, he was six foot five and brawny, his large crooked nose and thick neck souvenirs of long workouts and spirited high-school games. We had been boyfriend and girlfriend beginning in the ninth grade and our senior year had been elected homecoming queen and king. I’d never regretted ending our relationship when we went our separate ways in college, but I still had a soft spot in my heart for this gentle giant.

  Much to everyone’s surprise, Junior had returned home recently as the county prosecutor after nine years out of the state, seven in college and law school and two at the Department of Justice. Rumor had it he had national political aspirations.

  A few of the helium balloons had floated down from the ceiling, and Junior held one in each of his beefy hands. He tossed one balloon into the air, then another. Falling, they cast shadows like fat ghosts across the wall.

  Eddie caught up with me at the door. “You’re in luck, Queen LuAnn: There’s your king, Junior Fuller.” His tone was mocking.

  “Please stop being so mean, Eddie,” I said, pulling him back out into the hall. “I know you don’t want to be here, that you wish you were still in Atlanta, but could you possibly pretend you’re not miserable. Please!” Tears welled in my eyes and I leaned against the wall. “You’re making me crazy.”

  He sighed deeply. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You know I get deranged whenever we come here. You don’t act like yourself, and it scares me.”

  “I think you’re the Mr. Hyde here, Eddie, not me.” I sniffed.

  “Maybe I am. But you’re so drawn to this place, so absolutely and totally happy here, that I can’t help but take it as a slap in the face. I feel like an intruder.” He lit a Salem with one of the Steak House matches. “And it doesn’t help that people here think of me as a loser-Eddie, the political cartoonist. Doesn’t he have anything better to do? When’s he going to get a real job? That’s your father’s opinion, I know.”

  “It is not his
opinion, and no one thinks of you as a loser. They know you’re an artist and a journalist, that you’ve been published in the New York Times, that you’re almost syndicated.” I sniffed again. “Could you get me some Kleenex?”

  He went into the men’s restroom a few yards away and came out with a wad of tissue.

  “They also know I don’t support you and all these children you keep having, that your father’s been sending us money,” he continued.

  I took the tissues and put all but one in my pocket. “I keep having? Excuse me! I had a little help in that department! And who do you think knows about the money? Nobody! You’re getting paranoid, you know that, about everything.”

  “You don’t think Buck and Jane know? Junior too? How much you want to bet?”

  “Junior has no idea where we get our rent, Eddie.”

  “And Estelle? What about her?”

  “Come on, Eddie. This is stupid. The money is between me and Daddy, so let’s drop it. This is Daddy’s big day, and he wants us with him.”

  “Every day is the mayor’s big day around here as far as I can tell.”

  “I guess we’ll have to talk about this later. I’m going in now,” I said. “You’re welcome to come if you stop acting this way. Otherwise, feel free to make your usual escape: Go hide in the kitchen with Roland and talk to him while he cooks.”

  “I can’t-Roland’s in there too, by the bar.” He pointed with his thumb in that direction.

  I heard Roland’s deep heartfelt laugh before I saw him. He was talking to the waitress serving the drinks. Roland, recently made the Steak House chef at age thirty, was a small, thin man and one of the few Tallagumsa-born hippies. Freckled from head to toe, he wore his long red hair pulled back into a ponytail. His sense of humor and his respect for Eddie’s work made him one of Eddie’s favorite people in town.

  “I thought he cooked every weekday afternoon,” I said.

  “I guess they turned him loose for the big event. Look, I don’t want to go downstairs anyway, LuAnn. I want to stay here, with you and Jessie.” His hands were outspread in front of him.

  I clasped his hands in mine and kissed him lightly on the lips. “A truce?” I offered.

  He kissed me back. “A truce.”

  “Do I look okay?” I asked.

  He took a stray piece of hair and pushed it into the root of my braid. “Beautiful,” he said, draping his arm across my shoulder. Together we walked into the reception.

  “A drink might hit the spot,” Eddie said, turning quickly in the direction of the bar.

  I reached for him and caught his forearm. “In the middle of the day?” I said. “Don’t, Eddie. You’re cutting down, remember? You promised.”

  “Come on, LuAnn. I deserve it. You want Eddie happy?” He grinned and shook his arm free of me, then ordered a scotch on the rocks. He took a gulp. “You’ll get Eddie happy.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  After the buffet lunch and the speeches, only the family and a few friends and guests remained at the Steak House. It was almost three in the afternoon.

  Jessie lay sleeping across three chairs I’d pushed together against the wall. Telltale evidence of her Three Musketeers Bar spotted the front of her white sailor dress. Eddie and I sat on either end of our daughter, I at her head, he at her feet, nursing another drink. The rest of the family relaxed at a nearby table, rehashing the events of the day. Ben and Junior were off at a comer table, chatting.

  I was so tired from the day’s activities that I was tempted to push together enough chairs to follow Jessie’s example, but I knew my swollen body lying there wouldn’t be a pretty sight. Instead I slipped off my shoes and propped my swollen feet and ankles up on a chair I’d placed in front of me and watched my shirt pop up here, then there, in an undulating dance caused by the twins in motion.

  I don’t know where the babies found the room, all scrunched up in there, but often when I was very tired and still, as now, they would go at it. A fist, an elbow, a knee. Sometimes I simply relaxed and watched the show. Other times I responded, rubbing whatever was poking out or gently pushing it back in. It was an odd but satisfying means of communication.

  Their activity brought home, as it sometimes did, that there were two babies in there, inside me, two babies who would very soon be Jessie’s brothers or sisters. I knew this, of course, as an objective fact, but at another level pregnancy and childbirth seemed too incredible to be true and had been no less amazing when only Jessie occupied the same space. After she was born, I would often stare at her for hours, marveling that she had lived as part of me, that she had grown into Jessie inside of me. This most common of human experiences seemed at the same time both preposterous and miraculous.

  My father put down his cigar and lightly tapped a spoon against his beer glass. His navy jacket was draped over his chair back, revealing his trademark suspenders. His own likeness loomed behind him, the green eyes Jessie and I had inherited from him staring out at us.

  “I imagine y’all are all tired of hearing me talk, and I’m tired of talking, but I have one more announcement.” He reached around, pulled some papers out of his inside jacket pocket, and unfolded them in front of him on the tablecloth. He put a clean butter knife on the top of the document and a salt shaker on the bottom to hold it open.

  “I have here the deed to the Tallagumsa Steak House,” he said.

  I looked at the others, confused at the non sequitur. What did the deed to the Steak House have to do with the new courthouse?

  Estelle, who was helping two of the waitresses bus the cluttered dining tables, caught my eye and winked at me.

  “And it says here that Mimi and Howard Bledsoe have sold the Steak House to … “ He cleared his throat. “Let’s see now, sold it to …”

  He pretended to search the papers for the name, moving his finger along each line and obviously exaggerating the delay to create suspense. He stopped reading, loosened his tie, and ran his hand back through his hair.

  “Ah-hah,” he said, reading again. “To Ms. LuAnn Hagerdarn Garrett.”

  “What?” I asked, astounded. My feet fell to the floor; I sat up at attention, more alert than I’d been all day. “What?” I said again.

  I wasn’t the only one in shock. Eddie, Buck, Jane, and Mother couldn’t have looked any more dumbfounded had I just delivered the twins on the table next to the remains of prime rib, baked potatoes, and Brussels sprouts. Only Junior and Ben seemed unruffled.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  “That’s unusual,” Buck said.

  “‘Thank you’ would be just fine,” my father said jokingly.

  He walked over, handed me the deed, and kissed me.

  The deed was dated five days earlier: March 31, 1978.

  “Everything’s set up. When you get to town y’all can stay in the old house where you grew up,” he said. “The renters are moving away this month and the house is full of the new furniture we bought when we moved to the lake. I’ve arranged for Jolene to come days to look after Jessie and the babies. Your horse, Glory, has been waiting a long time for you to come home.” He smiled, looking pleased with himself

  Howard and Mimi Bledsoe followed close behind Daddy; he shook my hand, she hugged me. Eddie stood up, leaned over, and snatched the papers out of my hand. He walked over to the bar, filled his glass with the equivalent of a triple scotch, and studied the deed.

  “But, Daddy ...” I began. I was bewildered by this turn of events.

  “You probably need to think about it, honey,” my father said. “Talk with Eddie. You don’t need to say anything today.” He sat down again next to Mother. “I know you’ll do what’s best for you and the children.”

  “Well, I have something to say,” Mother declared, her usually pale, placid face a bright pink. “What on earth do you think you’re doing, Newell?”

  I was shocked at this rare display of boldness on her part. She always agreed with Daddy and, if she didn’t, would certainly never le
t on. I loved her because she was my mother, but I loved her more as an extension of my father, the role she’d played, without deviation, for as long as I could remember.

  “I’m taking care of my family, Gladys, just doing my job,” he said, dismissing her concern.

  Mother walked over to the bar and held out her hand to Eddie. He gave her the papers and looked at me, his face showing a mixture of confusion and anger. Then he turned away, shaking his head slowly.

  Jane’s reaction was equally unenthusiastic. She scooted her chair back from the table and, frowning, asked, “How could you possibly run this place and raise three small children? Why even bother to have them if you’re going to take on something like this? If I had one--even one--you wouldn’t find me anywhere but at home with him … or her.”

  “I work now,” I pointed out.

  “Some people like to work, Jane,” my father said. “You have never been one of them, that’s all.”

  “That’s true,” Buck said, laughing.

  “If Daddy told you I was a bank robber, you’d agree with him, wouldn’t you?”Jane asked petulantly.

  “I would not, Jane,” Buck replied, sulking.

  “And I do too like to work,” Jane said. “I run our home and I do tons of volunteer work: the Junior League, the County Hospital Board, the Garden Club, the Church Guild. Who raised all the money for your new courthouse park, Daddy? Me and the other Garden Club girls, including Mother, that’s who.”

  “I know you do your share, Jane, just like your mother, but some people like to have real jobs,” Newell said. “LuAnn needs to do more than the kind of ladies’ club stuff you do. And she’s too smart and too good to work for other people. This is a great opportunity for her to quit those pissantjobs she’s had to take in Atlanta and have something of her own.”

  I hadn’t complained that much, but my father knew me well enough to know how unhappy I was with my work now, a mishmash of odd jobs: gift-wrapping at Rich’s Department Store, sitting for neighbors’ kids, waitressing at the Steak and Ale. I was working toward a graduate degree in psychology but at the rate I was going-with work and Jessie and soon the babies-I would be a grandmother before I got my M.A. and, with it, any chance for a challenging job.