“I meant what have you two decided to do about your marriage? Are you two discussing things?”
“No…” Charlene spoke low into the receiver. “We haven’t discussed anything. I thought to write him a letter, but I didn’t want to mail it and have Sheila see it. I really don’t know how to start talking to him. I’m afraid we’ll get in another fight. I don’t want the kids to see us fighting anymore.”
“You both need to get away to a neutral place. Why don’t you meet out at the lake?”
Charlene sat up straighter. “Yes…we could do that, I suppose.”
She pictured it: the lake sparkling in the red light of a setting sun and her wearing her sundress, with no panties. He would turn to her and say, “I made a terrible mistake, and I want you and won’t leave you a divorced woman.”
The idea of the lake seemed promising, although by the time she and Rainey finished their conversation and hung up, all sorts of doubts had crept into the picture. She would have to have Joey come pick her up, and what if they got into a fight on the drive over there? And the lake was about to go dry, so the setting sun would be shining on mud, which dulled the picture quite a bit. And it was really hot, and the heat and sweat led to tempers, and she would have to wear panties, because there were chiggers at the lake.
And she just didn’t think she could call and ask him to do it. What if he said no?
The City Hall thermometer reads 82°
Just after midnight Mary Lynn called to say that Jojo had had a bad dream. “She wants to come home,” Mary Lynn said. “I’ll drive her down.”
Charlene smacked down the receiver and raced immediately out the front door and stood beneath the elms swaying violently in the wind, peering at the road for headlights. She saw the minivan come slowly down the drive, and when it stopped, she jumped forward, snatched open the passenger door, and Jojo fell crying into her arms.
“She woke up screaming and hasn’t stopped crying,” Mary Lynn said, coming around the minivan and raising her voice over the wind. “She said she’s had this dream all week.” Her tone had questions and suppositions vibrating in it.
Charlene cuddled Jojo close. “Thank you for bringin’ her, Mary Lynn,” she said, and carried Jojo to the house without a backward glance.
Larry Joe came down the hallway, wearing only boxer shorts and scratching his head. Jojo reached out for him, while still holding on to Charlene’s neck. She hugged them both, and then Larry Joe managed to take her so Charlene could get her a glass of warm milk. Jojo insisted that the three of them settle together on the couch. Jojo curled in her lap, and Larry Joe ended up reclining on Charlene’s one outstretched leg. Long after her two children fell asleep, Charlene lay awake, feeling the beat of their pulses against her. She might have gotten up and gone to get Danny J. to be with them, if she hadn’t been afraid of rousing everyone.
The City Hall thermometer reads 103°
Her father came to see her. Charlene didn’t hear him arrive, because she was out back watering her garden. He came through the house and out the back door and said, “Here you are.”
“Yes, here I am,” she said.
“What are you doin’?”
“I’m waterin’ the garden.”
After a moment, her father said, “Honey, those plants are dead. I don’t think a little water is gonna bring them back.”
“Maybe it will. Then, when it’s cooler, the tomato plants will produce a bit before winter.”
Her father stood there looking at her, so after a few minutes Charlene shut the water off, and they went into the kitchen to have ice tea.
“Where are Mildred and Ruthanne today?” It was rare these days to see him without the two women. It struck her suddenly that her father enjoyed feminine company and always had. Losing their mother had been very hard on him. He had hardly spoken for weeks after she’d died, until that Mildred had started going over and visiting him.
“They went off to a Country Home party down at the Senior Center.”
“That’s a decorator party. People buy pictures and things to decorate their houses. Where will they put anything they buy?” The idea of the two women decorating her mother’s home was disconcerting to Charlene, but her sister-in-law Helen was likely to go into a tizzy.
“Naw…soon as Mildred heard they were havin’ it catered from an outfit up in Lawton that serves a double chocolate fudge cake, she was hot to go. Where are my grand-kids?”
“Larry Joe went to Lawton for a car part, Danny J.’s over at Curt’s again, and Jojo is sleeping. She was awake a lot last night.”
She spoke as she reached for the television remote; it was about time for Father Knows Best to come on. She hoped her father wouldn’t stay long enough to make her miss the program.
“I went up to see your brother Freddy yesterd’y.” He always said your brother Freddy, as if they didn’t know which Freddy he spoke of.
“How’s he doin’?” She told herself to pay attention. She had been neglectful about her brother.
“He’s about the same. Paintin’ some of those paint-by-number pictures most of the time. The nurse said he started watchin’ a baseball game the other afternoon, but he switched it off in the middle, got a bunch of fellas mad at him.
“Mainly he don’t want to come out of there. And he says Helen’s probably gonna divorce him.”
“Oh.” Charlene felt a pain in her chest. Everyone had halfway waited for years for Helen to divorce Freddy, but now it seemed too cruel. “Do you think she means it? I mean, she didn’t divorce him when he had his girlfriend.”
“Helen’s tryin’ to shake him up, she told me. Thing is, I’m not sure anything can shake Freddy up. He’s hidin’ in a hole, like.”
Winston gazed at his ice tea glass, running his finger up and down the beads of sweat, seeming a little lost.
“I should go to see him,” Charlene offered. She had gone several times weeks ago when he first went in the hospital, but she and Freddy barely knew each other. Freddy was not a man to have close friends, which made all the more reason why she should make an effort, she thought.
“He’d appreciate that, I imagine,” her father said.
Charlene had doubts about her brother caring one way or another, but that was no reason not to try. For long seconds memories of their youth flitted across her mind, and in each one of them was her mother.
“It’s sort of like we all went to pieces when Mama went to heaven, isn’t it, Daddy?”
His eyebrows rose, and a pained look shot across his eyes, and then he nodded sadly.
Charlene remembered them, her mother and father together, how her father would put his hand on the back of her mother’s neck, and they would gaze at each other with a certain look that blocked everyone else out. The look that had made her feel all lonely.
“What did Mama do to make you stay with her, Daddy?”
He looked startled. “What did she do?” he repeated.
“Yes…what was it that kept you comin’ back after you stomped out? What did she do that made you want to stay married to her, even though she had an affair and a baby?”
The question gripped Charlene. She had long wondered it, deep inside, and now that she had at last given the question voice, hope pushed her to sit a little forward and to hold her breath so she wouldn’t miss anything he might say.
“Oh, I don’t know, Daughter.” Her father dropped his gaze to his glass. “That was a long time ago. People didn’t get divorced as easily then as now.”
Disappointment washed over her. He was hiding from her. Unavailable to her, just as he’d been all those years ago when he and her mother had left her to make her way through their arguing as best she could.
She blinked and tried to breathe.
Then he said quite firmly, “I never thought of Rainey as another man’s baby.”
“I know that, Daddy. And Rainey knows it.”
Charlene got up and took a pitcher of tea from the refrigerator and refreshed their gla
sses.
“It wasn’t really what your mother did,” her father said quite suddenly.
She looked down to see his eyes all pale and pained on her.
“It wasn’t a matter of her knowin’ some special secret, like her chicken pot pie, or the way she always smelled of Chanel. It wasn’t some special trick she had that made me stay.”
He nervously broke the gaze and fiddled with his glass. Charlene lowered herself into her chair.
“Honey, I wish I could tell you exactly what it was, how we did it, but there’s so much I myself don’t understand about what happened.” He sighed deeply and stretched one of his legs, saying, “We just sort of kept on goin’, each of us. Sometimes I’d get mad and quit, and sometimes your mama would get mad and quit, but it just worked out that neither of us quit at the same time. Maybe that was because neither of us wanted to lose each other, but consciously there didn’t seem to be any design in it, not on our part, except to ask God for help.
“Oh, your mama wanted to drag me to church, and she got pretty aggravated that I mostly wouldn’t go, but that wasn’t my way then. It didn’t mean I didn’t talk to Him, though. I did.”
She was staring at him, trying to find hope but not quite doing so.
He cleared his throat. “I guess what it amounted to mostly was that I finally came to terms with myself and what I wanted. That was it mostly…I got where I trusted my own self so that I could trust myself with your mama. What you have to come to is that you know people are always gonna let you down because they’re only as human as you are, but that all of that is okay. You’ll be okay because you trust the God inside you and them.”
Charlene gazed into his glistening eyes. Then she looked long at her own glass of amber ice tea.
“I don’t feel like I’m going to be okay,” she said, feeling tears trying to come. “I just don’t know what I’m goin’ to do, Daddy.”
“You’re doin’ it, Daughter. All you need to do is take it a day at a time. And pray for strength to keep goin’ on.”
“Well, I can’t hardly pray, Daddy. I feel all stopped up.”
“That’s okay. God knows it all anyway. Prayer doesn’t have to be much.”
Again the silence came over them. She glanced at her father, and he looked helpless.
Charlene put her hand over his on the table. “Thank you, Daddy.”
He looked a little anxious. “Can I do anything to help you, Daughter?” he asked, pushing forth the question.
Charlene didn’t think she should say, “Hold me, Daddy. Make it all go away.” He couldn’t make it go away, and her crumpling like that would be hard on him.
“Well, Daddy…you might see if you can get the cable connected back correctly to the hook-up. I got aggravated and pulled it out too hard yesterday, and the reception’s been poor ever since.”
Thirteen
The City Hall thermometer reads 125°
The digital thermometer on the City Hall building was responsible for a four-car pile up on Main Street, when it went crazy and not only reported an abnormally high temperature, but it began blinking on and off like an emergency announcement. Vella Blaine and Minnie Oakes, coming out of the drugstore, eating ice-cream cones, saw the accident happen before their eyes and gave a thorough report for the Valentine Voice.
“Everett Northrupt caused it,” Minnie said. “He slammed on his brakes right there in the street so hard he squealed the tires and liked to have scared me to death.”
“That’s right,” Vella agreed promptly. “We had just come out the door, and I was trying to open a napkin for Minnie to catch the drips from her ice-cream cone. She’d already got a drop on her dress—it was chocolate, but I told her I had this stuff that would get it out. It’s called Zip, best stuff. Then Everett squealed his tires, and Minnie jumped, and I almost smacked her ice-cream cone, and then that green little van of colored…of people of color slammed into Everett. Minnie screamed, too.”
Everett’s story was that his wife Doris, an excitable woman, had looked up and seen the thermometer and given out an exclamation. Everett, vigilant because his wife had had a poor heart for twenty years, looked over and saw her mouth open and her hand on her chest, and slammed on the brakes.
The car behind him, a family in a green minivan—turned out they were an army family checking out the town to settle in, so they were really looking around—slammed into the Northrupts’ Mercedes hard enough to throw Everett and Doris against their seat belts but not really give them whiplash. That came when Iris MacCoy in her red Cadillac, driving fast and dreaming dreams as usual, couldn’t get stopped in time and hit the minivan, shoving it up a second time very unexpectedly into the Mercedes.
Coming behind Iris were Odessa Collier and Lila Hicks in Odessa’s big black Lincoln. Odessa, flat out honest about being a little careless in driving, said that she was not going especially fast but that she and Lila were discussing the necessary evils of mammograms, and that she saw the Cadillac stopped in the road at about the same instant that she hit it. She hit it hard enough to move all the other cars up another inch and spilled her cup of Hardee’s coffee all over her lap.
“The next thing I knew,” Vella said, “is that people were yelling all over the place. They were just coming out of ever’where.”
“Iris’s Cadillac was honking,” Minnie said. “I think that’s why nobody could hear Neville hollering for people to be quiet and calm down. He was right there first thing. He’s always first one there.”
“Everett and Doris were really goin’ at it,” Vella put in.
Everett Northrupt was getting out of his Mercedes and holding his neck and yelling at his wife, who he had discovered was not having a heart attack after all. And then came Mason MacCoy and Deputy Midgett to Doris’s door to see if she was okay. Neville Oakes, Minnie’s grandson, passed them and went on to the minivan, where the mother was getting out, a foreign-looking woman, heavy but really pretty. She obviously wasn’t hurt, but she was angry.
“She looked like she could spit nails, and she was jerking her kids up out of the van,” Vella reported.
Then there was Winston Valentine getting Iris MacCoy out of her Cadillac. Minnie said she saw him come bursting out of the cafe, and he went right to Iris.
“I didn’t think you were supposed to move people who’ve been in an accident,” Minnie said. “But Winston got her out, and she was slumped over him, and he had his hands all over her.”
Then Neville got there to help him. They got Iris lying down on the sidewalk beside where Mildred had come out and ended up sitting down. They put Mildred’s purse under Iris’s head.
“That Odessa was a sight,” Vella said. “She was still in a bathrobe, just like she always is half the day. Polyester. I doubt that coffee stain’ll come out.”
“Winston went to help her, too,” Minnie observed.
Everybody kept remarking on the thermometer, and Neville Oakes sent Deputy Midgett to go into City Hall and pull the plug. Told him to use his gun for authority if the mayor’s nutty secretary stood in the way.
Traffic was piling up, and Larry Joe went running up to the west end of the street to divert traffic around town. Danny J. followed and took up a position right beside his older brother, watching his hand motions and doing the same.
The next vehicle to come along was their father, towing a horse trailer, and with Sheila Arnett sitting beside him. He stopped and stared, and Larry Joe waved him on like everyone else, like he was a stranger. He was embarrassed to have his little brother see his father with that woman and really glad his mother had not seen.
Joey went on and pulled off the road at the first available place. Leaving Sheila, with the engine going and air-conditioning blowing, he jogged over to Main Street, where he joined in to push Odessa’s car out of the way so the ambulance could come up closer. He found himself pushing on a fender right beside Larry Joe, and across from him was Mason MacCoy. Larry Joe would not look at him, acted like he didn’t even exist.
The ambulance took Iris and Everett and Doris off to the hospital. Iris had come to as much of her senses as she ever possessed, and her only wound was a broken fingernail, but the medic wanted her head examined. Everett thought his neck should be looked at for insurance purposes, and Doris had started crying hysterically. Everett, who was now horribly embarrassed about their public row, was beginning to worry that she might be so upset as to precipitate a true heart attack.
The commotion had pretty much emptied the cafe, leaving only Ruthanne and Charlene and Jojo in the corner booth. Having heard the all too familiar screeching and banging sounds, Charlene had grabbed her daughter from racing out the door after Fayrene, the waitress. “You are not goin’ out there. You are liable to get run over yourself.” She did let Jojo go stand at the window.
“Are you all right, sugar?” Ruthanne asked her. “You look so white. Here, drink a few sips of water.”
Charlene said she was okay. She did drink the water, though.
“There wasn’t anyone seriously injured,” Fayrene reported when she came striding back inside. “But it’s horribly hot. People need water.” She got a pitcher of ice water and a stack of white foam cups, and Charlene let Jojo go to help pass out the water.
“You and I should just sit here,” Charlene told Ruthanne. “There’s no need for you to get overheated.” She felt a little guilty that she herself didn’t go, but she just couldn’t stand to see the wreck.
When everything was finally calming down and people straggling back into the cafe, the army family—the dad was a really big man in camouflage—came in to sit down and gather themselves together. Charlene watched Fayrene bring them all drinks on the house. Their littlest boy was crying. Jojo came in and said the boy had lost a tooth—a baby one set to come out—during the accident. They had searched the van but hadn’t found it. The mother told him that he should have been in his seat belt. The mother was scared of what could have happened, Charlene knew, but she wished the woman would hug the boy, who kept crying about not having his tooth for the tooth fairy. His little dark face was just awash with tears.
Driving Lessons Page 12
