Queen Bee Goes Home Again

by Haywood Smith

  Maybe he would know about the Mame’s finances. “Tommy, do you know how Mama’s doing financially? Paying for Daddy must be costing a fortune.”

  His brows lifted. “I thought the same thing, but when I try to get her to talk money, she reacts very negatively. I think she sees it as losing control over that one last responsibility.” He shook his head. “I tried to make her understand that I only wanted to help, but it was like trying to get a pit bull to let loose of a wild boar. Ain’t gonna happen.”

  Just as I’d feared. “We really need to find out where she stands. I don’t want all three of us to end up homeless.” There I went again, mothering, martyring, and managing. And projecting the worst. But I came by it honestly.

  Tommy leveled an open expression my way. “I know this is the last place you want to be, Lin, but it’s good to have you back. It’ll be nice to have somebody to talk to about the General and Miss Mamie. We’re losing them by daily degrees, and that’s hard to face alone.”

  It dawned on me how selfish I’d been to run away from my family, only calling Tommy when I needed something fixed, never just to talk, so immersed in my work that I’d never offered to take some of the load with my parents. “Boy, I really left you holding the bag, didn’t I?”

  He nodded, but his smile didn’t falter. “You did the best you could. That’s all any of us can do.”

  How often had I felt the same thing about him? Never.

  Maybe it was time. Maybe there was some divine providence in this particular replay.

  “I’m here now,” I told him. “What can I do to help?”

  Tommy brightened. “Go see the General and Uncle Bedford with me, as soon as you’re all slept out.”

  “I can do that.” I was too tired to tell him about what I’d found in their room that morning. Later.

  He sobered. “And talk to me. I’m your brother. It’s safe, I promise.”

  That was a new one. Tommy, asking me to talk to him?

  “I can do that, too,” I said with less conviction, remembering when the drunk Tommy had blabbed my secrets, but wanting to believe he could keep them now that he was sober.

  I saw him looking around and suddenly I realized … “Oh, Tommy. You were living out here, weren’t you? I didn’t mean to put you out of—”

  He shook his head with a look of contentment. “It’s okay. Miss Mamie needs somebody in the house now that Daddy’s gone. I’d already decided to move back before you sold your house. Miss Mamie needs somebody she can take care of.” He grinned. “Frankly, I don’t mind being waited on one little bit.”

  He had a point.

  You should be the one helping your mother, not Tommy! my inner Puritan fussed. You need to make up for all that neglect.

  But my inner hedonist countered immediately with, Hey! We can still help out from here. We need some peace, space, and air-conditioning to get through this.

  A guilty “Are you sure it’s okay for me to live here?” escaped me.

  “Yep.” Tommy stood. “Place looks good. All I had out here was a blow-up bed.”

  I got up yawning, then gave him a hug. “Bed looks good.”

  “Hit the hay. I’ll tell the Mame you can’t make supper.”

  I gripped his upper arm. “Oh, now, don’t do that,” I hastened to say. “I’ll sleep much better on a full stomach.” I’d swear off all the fat and carbs after my welcome-home dinner.

  Tommy crooked his fingers like outspread talons. “Nya-ha-ha! The fried chicken.” He laughed, then imitated Al Pacino in The Godfather movies. “Just when you think you’ve gotten out, they pull you back in.”

  I pushed him toward the door and the tiny stoop beyond. “Get out of here so I can take a shower.”

  When he was gone, I locked the door, then turned to the tiny apartment and sighed. “Welcome home again, Lin Breedlove Scott. We’re in for a mighty bumpy ride.”

  But not before I hid in my bed for a few days with the covers pulled over my head.

  First, I needed a shower. Then a nap. Then food. Lots of fried chicken and corn and pole beans and rice and gravy. Yum. Then I could face the future.

  I kicked off my shoes, flopped onto my white plissé blanket cover just to rest for a few seconds, and fell sound asleep.

  Five

  Maybe it was the aroma from the kitchen, but I woke just in time for a quick shower before supper.

  The meal turned out to be fun. The three of us laughed and sated ourselves, swapping stories about Daddy and his brothers from our childhoods, and Miss Mamie definitely perked up.

  Our funny recollections had brought Daddy and Uncle B to the table in spirit, if not in body, and I could see that it helped my mother. I resolved to apply the same therapy on a regular basis.

  Then, stuffed with my mother’s country cooking, I took home the two huge bags of leftovers Miss Mamie had forced on me. Time to sleep off my exhaustion and all those carbohydrates.

  It took three days, but it sure felt good.

  Shaded by the giant oak above it, the air-conditioned garage apartment was cool and comfy, as was the fancy, cool-engineered space-foam mattress I’d splurged on during the building boom.

  The only times I got out of bed were to go to the bathroom or eat leftovers. Yum. I didn’t even raise the shades. But the food was eventually gone, and I finally grew weary of hiding from my life.

  We type As don’t do well with leisure for long. So when I found myself awake and ready to get up at seven A.M. on day four, I punched the button on the side of my recharged prepaid cell phone and croaked out, “Call Tommy.” My eyes were bleary from too much sleep.

  “Call Tommy mobile?” the automated female phone voice asked.

  “Yes,” I answered, dragging out the s so she would understand me.

  Apparently, I dragged it out too long. “Call Tommy mobile two?” she chirped.

  There wasn’t a Tommy mobile two in there, and she knew it!

  “No,” I corrected, “call Tommy home.”

  I had a serious love-hate relationship with technology.

  But the recording was already saying, “No listing for Tommy mobile two.”

  Annoyed, I hit hang up, but pressing a button did nothing to express my frustration.

  I looked around the room for my reading glasses, but didn’t see them. So I tried the voice-dial again with better results, and Tommy answered in a surprisingly chipper voice. “Hey. I was beginning to wonder if you were still alive in there.”

  “Alive and ready to stop running away from my life,” I said in a gravelly voice, then yawned.

  “Throw some clothes on,” Tommy instructed. “I’ll take you to the diner for breakfast. My treat.”

  “Sure.” The diner. How long had it been?

  Not since I’d gotten my house near Braselton.

  The Mame had told me “the Koreans” had bought the diner, so I wondered if it was still the same place as of old.

  My little house had been closer to Pappy Jack’s out on Sunshine Springs, so I’d been going there for my daily fix of eggs and caffeine till I couldn’t afford it anymore.

  “Pick you up in fifteen,” Tommy offered.

  I could do that. Pull my Shy Fawn blonded hair back with combs, cover the deep circles under my eyes. Rub some bronzer on my cheeks. Mascara, lipstick, and I’d look decent enough not to scare the children.

  Not that I was dressing up to impress anybody.

  After my last dating fiasco, I’d given up. A crumby social life quickly pales in the face of bankruptcy and destitution.

  The really ironic thing was, Legal Aid doesn’t do bankruptcies, and the lawyers who do wanted thousands to represent me. What’s wrong with this picture?

  But I digress.

  Tommy picked me up exactly when he’d said he would, and five minutes after that, he pulled his pickup into the last available space among the SUVs, minivans, panel trucks, and other pickups at the Mimosa Branch Diner.

  On rainy days, you couldn’t get in with a c
rowbar for the tradespeople, but this morning was a fine one, though already in the mid-eighties.

  I got out, reading the same old signs on the brick exterior: WE MAY LOOK FULL ON THE OUTSIDE, BUT THERE’S PLENTY OF ROOM INSIDE. NO SHOES, NO SHIRT, NO SERVICE. CASH ONLY. “Just like it used to be,” I told Tommy.

  “Pretty much.” He held open the door. Inside, the stools at the soda bar had been re-covered in green vinyl instead of red, but the rest of the place looked just the same as it had when we were kids, except for the Asian staff.

  Conversation lagged as all the regulars immediately zeroed in on me.

  A somber, middle-aged Korean woman said from behind the register, “Ged morning, Tommih, wecome to dinah.”

  I didn’t recognize any of the men taking up all the stools at the long brick lunch bar, but my gaze caught on a pair of aluminum Sheetrockers’ stilts, then shot upward to find them attached to a full-busted midget (correction: little person) in tight jeans and a low-cut top, all bosoms, with way too much makeup and a saucy blond ponytail.

  As if she’d felt my stare, she turned and gave me a haughty look. “What?” she demanded, prompting a wave of protective defensiveness from the men at the bar. “Haven’t you ever seen a little person before?”

  Flustered, I glanced to Tommy for help, but he was talking to a guy at one of the single tables and doing his best to avoid the woman.

  “Sorry,” I told the tiny tart, “I just haven’t met one who was so ingenious.”

  The tradesmen at the bar roared with laughter, and so did the midget/little person. “All right,” she said, giving the plumber next to her a high five, then laughing my way. “You’re okay.”

  Tommy tugged at my elbow. “Let’s go to the back. It’s too hot in here.” As always in the summer, the biscuit ovens in the front overwhelmed the ancient air conditioner.

  In the back room, the same old zinc-coated ductwork dragon alternately blew the place too cold with great noise, or fell silent and let the place get too hot, in maddeningly irregular rotation.

  We took the sole remaining table at the far end of the room, our progress inspected just as thoroughly by the backroom regulars as it had been by the ones up front.

  Mimosa Branch was still enough of a small town for everybody at the diner to think everybody else’s business was grist for the mill.

  A young waitress I didn’t recognize slapped two bagged setups on the plastic place mats covered with local ads. She went all flirty with my brother. “Git y’all somethin’ to drink?”

  “Unsweet tea for me,” I said, happy to see that they had Splenda on the table. That was a welcome innovation.

  “Coffee,” Tommy told her.

  The waitress leaned closer to him, displaying her cleavage in the sleeveless V-necked T-shirt blazoned with MIMOSA BRANCH DINER over her D cups. “You havin’ the usual?”

  Tommy cocked her a winsome grin. “Yep.” Then he turned to me. “What’ll you have, sis? Or do you need more time?”

  When he called me sis, whispered conversations erupted among the regulars, doubtless about my recent reverses. Or was I just being paranoid? Or an egomaniac?

  Ears burning, I focused on the waitress. “I’ll have three over medium and bacon, flat and crisp. No sides.” Atkins, here I come. “And please make sure the whites of the eggs are done, and the yolks are creamy, not runny.” I shivered. “Runny whites make me gag.”

  The waitress didn’t write a thing, her eyes still glued to Tommy. “I’ll tell her.” Then she went for our drinks.

  Once we had them, Tommy settled back to chat. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to go by the nursing home on the way home.”

  I’d meant to tell him about my visit, but dared not do it there. Everybody in town would hear about it before lunch. “Sure.”

  Tommy nodded. “Uncle Bedford and the General are usually a lot better in the morning, but by the end of the day, there’s not really any point in going.”

  How well I knew. “They call that sundowning, don’t they?” Right after the General had moved into the Home, I’d gone to see him at four in the afternoon, and he hadn’t even known me. Same thing happened the next day. And the next. Seeing how much that upset me, the nurse had explained that it would be better to visit before lunch.

  But instead of going back earlier in the day, I’d copped out and stayed away for months, telling myself Daddy wouldn’t know the difference, and Tommy would be there.

  What a coward. Never mind that I’d been working night and day in an effort to keep my home. As usual, I’d let myself get caught up in the urgent and neglected the important.

  “I should have gone to see him a lot more,” I confessed.

  Miss Mamie was so guilt-ridden about having him committed that she hadn’t been able to make herself go see him, even once.

  I went on making my excuses. “But the smell was so awful there, and he looked so bad. They never shave him properly.” My father had always been meticulous about his grooming.

  “He wouldn’t sit still,” Tommy explained. “Kept getting cut. So I bought an electric razor and started doing it myself, first thing after breakfast. He holds still for me.”

  Guilt surged. “Every day?”

  Tommy smiled. “Not every. But most.” Except for that morning I’d gone to find them out cold and naked. “It’s such a small thing to do,” my brother said with absolute sincerity, “but he really appreciates it.”

  Maybe Tommy had become the life guru.

  Internally, I heard that still, small voice mimic the one on my GPS. Redirecting. Redirecting.

  The better part of me vowed to open my eyes to the needs of my family instead of being so obsessed with my own problems, but to be honest, the rest of me would rather have headed for the hills, far and fast.

  Would that I could, but blood’s thicker than my mother’s sawmill gravy. She and Tommy needed me. And so did Daddy. He might be homicidal and crazy as a rabid raccoon, but he was still my father.

  I had thought of moving back home as a penance, but it just might be my chance at redemption.

  The waitress brought our food, and I was surprised to see the diner’s signature smooth, flat brown biscuit—with lots of flaky crust around its shallow, fluffy insides—beside Tommy’s scrambled eggs and grits.

  I’d caught a glimpse of the cook on the way back, and she was definitely Asian. “How could she make that biscuit?” I challenged my brother. “I’ve tried to make biscuits like that all my life, and they come out like hockey pucks. With freckles.”

  “Estell, the old cook,” Tommy said, “taught the new owner’s sister how to do it before she retired.”

  Miss Mamie had tried to teach me, but even when we worked side by side with the same ingredients and the same oven, mine had flopped, while hers rose high and light as they always did.

  Maybe it was my electromagnetic field.

  I bowed my head and murmured the blessing over the food. Then, with perfectly acceptable diner etiquette, I cut up my fried eggs and mixed them well to coat the whites with thick, creamy yolks—perfectly over medium.

  A lot of people had been upset when the previous American owner had sold out to the current “foreigners,” but our breakfasts proved that a good cook’s a good cook, the world around.

  To my chagrin, I heard my voice say, “I saw Daddy and Uncle B the morning I moved in.”

  Tommy stopped eating. “How were they?”

  Ears pricked up all over. I leaned closer to my brother. “I’ll tell you when we get to the truck.”

  Clearly annoyed that I’d brought it up only to put him off, he frowned.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. It’s private. But I feel like I’m on display here.”

  He regarded me with assessment. “Only till they get used to you. They’re good people.” He grinned. “For the most part. We always have a sprinkling of scoundrels, just to keep things interesting.”

  I leaned forward again to ask, “Do y
ou know anybody in here?” I scanned the room. “I don’t recognize anybody.”

  Tommy smiled and nodded toward a nice-looking couple sitting side by side in the far corner, facing a white-haired guy with a sunny expression beside a mountain of a middle-aged man. “That couple’s the Dotsons. He’s retired military, slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. Bought a house in town and restored it. She runs a flower shop and doesn’t put up with any of his guff.”

  He took a sip of coffee, then wiped his mouth with a paper napkin from the dispenser on the table, never looking at the people about whom he spoke. “Guy with the white hair retired from being a lineman at the GM plant in Doraville, when there still was one. Wife told him he’d have to get out of the house at least half the day to keep from driving her nuts, so he comes here, then goes to the old men’s club at Hardee’s. Fella beside him owns all kinds of stuff, including rental property and land all around here.”

  The players had changed, but the place was still the same.

  I wondered how long it would take me to reacquaint myself with the town’s occupants—not the thousands of exurbanites out by the mall, just the townies.

  When I’d first moved back to Mimosa Branch ten years before, it had been a small town of about six thousand, expanded from three. Now it had sprawled across the interstate to take in the new mall and scads of apartments, over sixteen thousand households in all, mostly people from other places.

  Tommy stirred his grits. “Did you hear? Donnie West isn’t going to run for mayor again next year.”

  A major item Miss Mamie had neglected to mention. “Why not?”

  Ever since we’d overthrown our corrupt mayor ten years before in favor of Donnie West—the most down-to-earth, honest Gospel preacher we’d ever known—things at City Hall had straightened up and stayed that way.

  Who knew what would happen here without him?

  Tommy exhaled. “Said the Lord was calling him to a church in Pittsburgh, so how can you argue with that?”

  “You can’t.” If Donnie said so, it must be true.

  Hamm Stubbs, Donnie’s crooked predecessor, had gone to jail for racketeering and laundering drug money, so we were safe from him, but I had no idea who could replace a man as good as Donnie. There’d be plenty of politicking going on in town, for sure, so at least the gossip at the diner would be interesting.