He had one beer in his hand. The six empties on the floor next to him were stacked in a pyramid. The room was thick with smoke. He was plainly furious and very drunk.
I walked past him into the kitchen. “Where’s Jolene?” I asked when I didn’t find her there.
“She’s gone,” he said very quietly. “When I got home from my show I let her go home.”
The show. Oh, shit! I forgot his show. I chewed on my lip.
“Everyone was there. Your entire family, half the college, people from all over. But you weren’t there. I was there. The best work I’ve ever done was there. Goddamnit, LuAnn,” he said. “What is going on?” He knocked over the beer cans with a sweep of his arm.
“I forgot. I’m sorry.” I was sorry-sorry that I was caught and that I didn’t feel as horrible as I should have.
He jumped up, rushed toward me, and started yelling. “You forgot! You are too fucking much! Forgot!”
“Where’s Jessie?” I asked, backing away from him.
“Next door at the Cooks,” he said. “The boys are asleep.”
“I tried to find you,” he continued. “I called all over. You weren’t at work. Your car was, but you weren’t. You weren’t here. You weren’t anywhere. But that’s impossible--isn’t it? to be nowhere. I do know who you were with. There was one other person who was supposed to be at the show who wasn’t. Your buddy, Ben. Where were you two?”
“Talking to Miss Edwina, Eddie,” I said quietly. I stared down at the carpet, unable to meet his fierce look.
“Since this morning? It’s after seven o’clock. Miss Edwina isn’t that interesting.”
“We were talking to her and then we were planning some of Ben’s interviews for next week. Time got away from me. I’m sorry. I really am.”
“I am too,” he said. He turned away and walked toward the stairway, then stopped and looked at me. “I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry you’ve changed so much. I’m sorry you won’t let me touch you. Do you know how many times we’ve made love since we got here? Once. First I thought it was because you’d just delivered twins. Then I thought you were tired from moving, then from your new job. Now I don’t know. You think you can do whatever you want here, that I and everyone else will just adore you no matter what. The Queen of the Steak House. Well, count me out. I’m leaving. I already told Jessie I had to go away for a few days. The twins won’t even notice. They think Jolene is their only parent anyway.”
“Don’t dump it all on me,” I said, meeting his intense gaze. “You haven’t ever really been committed to Tallagumsa, Eddie. You didn’t want to come and you’ve hated every minute of it, hiding at the college or in your studio. You ignore us most of the time. If I need a friend, it’s you who are to blame.”
“You don’t know shit. I happen to like it here. I was surprised as hell, but I do like it. It’s a better place for raising a family. My work is going great. I love teaching. Jolene is a gift from heaven. I think coming here was right. At least that’s what I thought until tonight. But you don’t notice anything I say or do anymore. Like I haven’t bought a Miss Reese’s pie in two weeks, and I hardly drink anymore. Tonight is a well-deserved exception. I have been here for you and the kids, LuAnn, but you are too self-absorbed, too self-important to see outside your little kingdom.”
He walked upstairs to the bedroom and picked up his packed suitcases, then came down to the foyer and opened the front door. “You’re reminding me more of your father every day. If I were you, I’d be real worried about that.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet. By the way, I signed a syndication contract tonight. If you care.”
I cared, just not enough to stop him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
At my office desk five days later, I smiled and waved to Ben as he came through the front door of the Steak House. He sat down with the Coffee Club for their regularly scheduled morning discussion, and they greeted him like an old friend. I restrained my desire to rush out and talk to him, even though I wanted to know what Berta Waddy had said to him that morning.
When he saw me watching him, he smiled-an open, easy smile, the kind of smile you don’t get from someone you’ve known a long time, the kind that isn’t cluttered with everything that has happened to two people who’ve shared years of their lives.
Ben, cheerful and kind, was a welcome contrast to Eddie’s bleak cynicism. I studied the picture on my desk of Eddie and me on our wedding day. Over the last five days I’d thought a lot about the way Eddie acted at the courthouse dedication: his sarcasm, his mood swings, his drinking. That was the Eddie I was glad to be rid o£
When I told Ben that Eddie had walked out, I assured him that he wasn’t the cause, that Eddie’s unhappiness about the move and his career had taken their toll on our relationship. Ben, it turned out, was less than thrilled with his marriage as well. During the first year of his two-year marriage, he’d realized that he had made a mistake, but it had been easier to hit the road than to deal with his mistake. Other than these thumbnail sketches of our other, married, lives, we hadn’t focused on the specifics. Nor did we discuss what was going to happen when Ben’s work was done and it was time for him to go back to Washington. We didn’t even think about it. Instead, we enjoyed our time together, glad to have found each other.
About half an hour passed before Ben left his seat with the Coffee Club, knocked on my office door, and came inside. He left the door open. “Berta Waddy was happy to talk to me until I got to the murders,” he said. “Then she clammed up and refused to talk.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I asked her that. She didn’t really answer my question, though. She said she’d talk about anything but that.”
“Why does she care? He’s dead, after all. And even if he weren’t, she wouldn’t have anything to worry about. I’m sure Floyd didn’t have anything to do with the murders, but he must have known something or heard something. You’d think she’d want the truth out now, wouldn’t you?”
“Not necessarily,” Ben said. “He was her husband, LuAnn, dead or not. Maybe he was implicated in some way. You can’t expect her to be eager to tell me something that would make him look bad.”
“I’m surprised. She usually loves to gossip about anything and everything. Do you want me to call her and try to get her to talk?”
“No, but thanks. It was just a lark anyway. I can’t spend any more time here running down that story and alienating everybody. She was not happy to have it brought up. I’ve told you time and again that’s how people feel.”
“Why’d you bother to talk to her at all then?” I was irritated that he wasn’t committed to the cause. “I thought you were finally going to pursue this.”
“That’s not what I said, and you know it. After what Edwina told us about the FBI, I thought, Why not check it out. But it’s too distracting. At least Berta gave me some interesting information about catfish farming and its effect on the economy here.”
“But it would be so great to get that story.”
“Look, I talked to her for you. Now do something for me. Let it go, LuAnn. Most people want to move on past it.”
Ben shut the office door with his foot. “I’d like to move on,” he said. “On over to my house and bring you with me for an hour or so, if you know what I mean.” He raised his eyebrows several times in a mockingly suggestive manner.
“I wish I could,” I said. I tried but failed to suppress a grin. “Estelle’s off all day. How’s tonight for you?” I leaned forward and pinched him softly on the thigh.
“Fine with me, sweetie pie,” he said, in a mock southern accent.
“By the way, I have big plans for you later this week,” I said. “The Ave Maria Grotto.”
“The what?”
“You were near it today in Cullman. The grotto is a shrine in an abbey of Benedictine monks. One of the monks there created a miniature Jerusalem, the whole city. He’s buried there too, right near
the gift shop. And we have to hit the Boll Weevil Monument in Enterprise soon.”
Ben started laughing. “Only in the South.”
“Yeah, don’t you just love it?”
After Ben left, I rolled a blank sheet of paper into the typewriter and typed: “LuAnn and Ben.” I hit the carriage return two times and typed: “Ben and LuAnn.” Then I put my left elbow on the desk to support my chin and contemplated the couple I had created.
Staring at the names, I was reminded of how as a teenager the girls wrote their names coupled with their boyfriends’ names anywhere they found a blank space. We wrote on schoolbooks (inside the covers, in the margins, and on the edges of the compressed pages of closed books), bathroom-stall walls and mirrors, school desks, the sides of shoe soles, wet cement, and even our hands.
After Estelle broke up with Johnny Bowe during our senior year of high school, she had to buy extra-thick permanent black magic markers to blot out her prolific handiwork. The edges of her textbooks turned so black that an uninformed adult might have thought the books were manufactured with black pages. The bathroom walls were smeared with large blocks of magic marker, as though a mad censor were loose in the school. She bought rolls of paper towels to wipe out their names on lipstick-marked mirrors and a can of red spray paint to obliterate them on the walls of the underpass. Finally, she brought her daddy’s pocket knife to school and scratched out the initials she had carved in her homeroom desk.
By the time Junior and I parted ways, we were out of Tallagumsa High School and I didn’t have to go to such extremes to obliterate signs of him from my life.
Now, with Eddie, I had my wedding ring. Inside the band was engraved “Eddie and LuAnn, June 10th, 1973.” I still wore the ring every day, just as I always had. I wasn’t ready to take it off.
No one knew Eddie had moved out, and I was willing to go on that way indefinitely, keeping Eddie’s departure a secret, telling anyone who asked that he was on City Paper business in Atlanta. It wasn’t long though, only a week after Ben and I visited Miss Edwina and missed Eddie’s show, before the inevitable occurred.
That day Jane and Mother came by the Steak House after one of my sister’s OB visits. They joined me in my booth for lunch. As always, Jane began to reveal every detail of her exam.
Mother listened attentively, even though she’d been there with Jane during the exam.
“What about your weight?” I asked when Jane completed her account. She wasn’t even four months pregnant and already had gained thirty pounds. That day she wore a large and loose green muumuu decorated with pictures of watermelon slices.
“He said I should be a little more careful,” she admitted as she finished the last of her French fries and milk shake.
“This heat will be hard to take if you’re too heavy,” I warned. “And the weight’s not easy to lose.”
“You always did,” Jane said. “The twins were only two months old when you were back in great shape.”
“But it took a lot of starvation,” I said. I didn’t bother to remind her that I was four inches taller, six years younger, and had never gained as much as she would.
“This is so special for me that I can’t worry about weight,” Jane said, dismissing my concerns. “I feel like it must be good for the baby, that if I don’t eat when I’m hungry I could hurt him.” She shrugged and smiled, then reached for another sweet roll and eagerly peeled off its crinkled paper cup.
“It’s hard,” I acknowledged. “Especially with the first. With Jessie I worried about every twitch, ache, and pain. I also worried when there were no twitches, aches, or pains. You can’t win.”
I looked at my watch and stood up. “I have to go upstairs to help set up for the Lions Club, and the twins have their four-month checkup this afternoon, so I’m on a tight schedule today.”
“We need to talk!” Mother said dramatically. She grabbed my wrist and there was a brief, uncomfortable silence, during which she and Jane exchanged meaningful looks.
“What?” I asked, sitting back down. “What’s wrong?”
“I think you need to know that we saw Eddie and Barbara Cox in her car this morning,” Mother said in a conspiratorial whisper. “They didn’t see us.”
“We didn’t want to tell you, but how could we not?” Jane asked. Her tone was anguished. “We were on our way to the doctor’s, and there they were at the light, just ahead of us. We couldn’t miss them.”
“Maybe it wasn’t them,” Mother said hopefully.
“You know better, Mother,” Jane said. “We’re sorry, LuAnn.” She reached over and took my hand.
Only then did I realize that because Mother and Jane believed that Eddie was out of town (as I’d told them he was), they assumed that he was running around with Barbara behind my back. I almost laughed. “He’s not in Atlanta-I know that; he never was. We had a fight last week and he moved out,” I explained. “I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, though. I’m sure everything will be fine.”
“Well, I don’t know which situation is worse,” Mother said, folding her paper napkin carefully and dabbing at the comers of her eyes.
“I told you running the restaurant wouldn’t work out,” Jane said. “Remember? The day of the courthouse dedication. Daddy’s always got to have his way, though. He never listens to me. Now look at the mess you’re in.”
“Oh, Jane, it’s not the restaurant. It’s a lot of stuff we have to deal with. We have our share of problems, that’s all.”
“Such as?” Mother asked.
“Do we have to go into it now?” I asked. “I really need to go upstairs.” I stood up again.
“I’ll pray for you,” Mother said.
“Just don’t put us in the bulletin, Mother,” I said. “Please.” In her church’s bulletin each Sunday was a list of people in need of group prayers: cancer victims, widows, alcoholics, and the like. I’d be humiliated if either Eddie’s or my name appeared in the list.
“And why not? It couldn’t hurt,” Mother said. “More good has come from that bulletin. You wouldn’t believe.”
“It helped me get pregnant,” Jane said.
“I’d give the credit to the fertility drugs you took,” I said.
“Don’t you ever miss the church?” Mother asked.
“Not really,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just don’t.”
“You and your father,” Mother said. “I blame him for your views, LuAnn. You two were out gazing at stars, thinking you could get whatever you wanted in life without the Lord’s help, when you should have been studying the Bible.”
“Different people need different things, Mother,” I said, leaning over to kiss her cheek. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m happy. Really.”
I wasn’t happy the only other time Eddie left me. I was a mess.
One night right after Thanksgiving my senior year of college, he called our apartment an hour after he was due to go with me to a movie. He said he was in Tennessee and told me that he’d needed to get away, not to worry, he’d be back soon.
“When?” I asked.
Soon.
Two weeks passed. I was walking across the quad, fighting a strong, chilling wind, when he appeared out of nowhere, looking as though he’d never left, carrying a notebook and a textbook under his arm.
“You’re back,” I said dryly, looking past him.
“I had to get here for my poetry seminar this morning. It was my turn to make a presentation,” he said.
“That’s the only reason you came back?”
“Of course not.”
I sighed and frowned.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What do you think? You took off. I had no idea where you were or what you were doing, if you were dead or alive, if you would ever come back.”
“I was riding my motorcycle around, very much alive.”
“For two weeks?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee.
”
“With?”
“Nobody.”
I looked at him skeptically. The wind picked up, driving the small piles of autumn leaves into a frenetic airborne dance.
“I have never lied to you,” he said. “And I swear I never will.”
Starting to cry, I snapped my down jacket closed and began to walk away.
Eddie grabbed my arm and guided me to a stone bench next to the sidewalk marking the quad’s perimeter. We sat down.
“Why would you do that, right after we talked about ...” I asked, crying.
“To think about what we talked about. Getting married was not something I’d planned on doing any time soon-until I met you. I needed time to be alone, that’s all.”
Tears ran down my cheeks, onto my jacket and jeans. My head was bent down and my long straight hair fell across the sides of my face.
“You know what my seminar talk was on this morning?” he asked.
I shook my head. “You.”
I eyed him suspiciously.
“No, really. About how special we are. What I feel for you is not like anything I’ve ever known. LuAnn, how many other people do you think have what we do?” He opened his textbook to a paper-clipped page and pointed to a poem.
WHEN YOU ARE OLD
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the sift look
Your eyes had once, and if their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments if glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows if your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd if stars.
“Especially these lines,” he said, underlining with his finger the words “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”
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