In the weeks Joey had been at the ranch, it had become his habit to begin riding before daylight and then have breakfast with Sheila. Somehow he always felt he could take Sheila on after he had gotten in some good riding, although this thought was not clear in his mind. Sheila had breakfast on the rear patio of the big house. This was the time he would report on the condition and progress of her horses. Breakfast usually consisted of sweet rolls and coffee so strong it made a person’s eyes fly open. Sheila made that herself. She added chicory, and Joey really liked her coffee.
He had just taken his second sweet roll when she brought up the subject of him moving into the big house with her.
“You’d be a lot more comfortable,” she told him, a promising light in her eyes that made him squirm in his seat.
That Larry Joe knew about their weekend in Dallas kept going through his mind.
He had been so bothered by this that he had mentioned it to Sheila. She had laughed and said, “Larry Joe is eighteen. He knows about what goes on.”
That was what disturbed Joey most.
“And now that your children know about things, you might just as well move up to the house and be comfortable.”
Joey shook his head and laid the sweet roll on the plate. He looked at his coffee but didn’t take it up. He had the feeling that if he touched her food, he was accepting her offer. “I’d rather stay in the trailer.”
“You can have your own room and private bath,” she said. “Daddy’s room. His bath has a nice whirlpool tub.”
“I really do like the trailer just fine.” He wasn’t touching her father’s room.
“Oh, Joey, don’t be silly. We’d both be so much more comfortable with you up here in the house. I don’t care what anyone thinks.” With an irritated expression, she threw down her cloth napkin and fixed him with a gaze. “What is it? If you don’t want Daddy’s old room, you can have the guest room.”
“Thank you all the same.” He stood and reached for his hat.
“Well, I’m not comin’ out there. You know that. You know you’ll have to come up to my room anyway.”
He stared at her. He didn’t think he should say that he didn’t plan to come up to her room.
They gazed at each other. He thought that he was not moving into the house with her. He wasn’t doing that, even if he had to walk away from this entire place.
Sheila broke the gaze. “Okay,” she said, unfolding from the chair with a coy smile. She wrapped her arms around his neck. “The offer is there, when you’re ready.”
She kissed him, and he broke away, saying he had five more head to ride before the heat got worse. He walked quickly down the stone path, and he heard his spurs jingling, but somehow they didn’t help him much this morning.
Charlene watched a tape of yesterday’s All My Children while she did the breakfast dishes and repeatedly glanced out the window, halfway looking for someone to drive up, but mostly looking at the Suburban parked beneath the elm tree. It was like the Suburban was sitting out there honking at her.
The phone rang, and she let the answering machine get it, while she stood there and listened to see if it was one of her children. She always answered her children, but she sure didn’t want to speak to Joey. She really wished it would be Joey, so she could not talk to him.
It was somebody selling funerals. She erased the message and went back into the kitchen, tuned the television to CMT and watched the latest fifteen-year-old star dolled up to look a seductive twenty-five singing about lost love. Charlene wondered about the world in general, and about women in particular. Why would a mother let her child do such a thing? Why would women still keep using their sex? Maybe because they had to use everything they had to get along in this world, and sex worked so well. She sure hoped she could teach Jojo better.
She switched off the television and walked out to the Suburban and slipped in behind the wheel, leaving the door open for air in the hot truck.
She needed groceries. She could just start the truck and drive down to the IGA. She’d kept her license current. People said you didn’t forget how to drive.
The squeal of tires and the loud crash sounded in memory, and then Rainey sitting there slumped over.
Charlene took a deep breath. It probably wasn’t a good idea to go anywhere near traffic the first thing. Maybe she would simply drive to the road, turn around and come back. She had to start slow and build her courage.
She started the Suburban and sat there a minute with it rumbling smoothly, telling herself there were no other vehicles on her own driveway. She would be fine to drive to the road. She put it in reverse and hit the brake, remembering just then to shut the door. This shook her a little. If she couldn’t remember to shut the door, no telling what she might forget, she thought as she rolled down the window.
She backed the truck a few feet and then put the stick in drive and turned around on the front lawn and headed up onto the gravel driveway.
At that particular moment she saw a big truck coming at her. The MacCoy delivery truck!
She veered over to the barn, turning in a swoop and stopping near the south entry, hitting the brakes a little harder than necessary because she wasn’t used to them. The big truck rumbled past, leaving a trail of dust, and disappeared behind the barn.
Oh, my. She checked her image in the rearview mirror, raking her fingers through her hair to fluff it up, seeing that she still had traces of lipstick, thank heaven. She suddenly wished she had done the full makeup job, and why in the world had she not put on something besides her old clothes? And why in the world was she having such ridiculous thoughts?
Maybe it wasn’t even Mason.
It was Mason. He was out of the truck and walking toward her when she rounded the corner of the barn. Like always, he wore jeans and a short-sleeved shirt that showed his muscles, and a ball cap.
When she got close enough, she saw his blue eyes shone out from his face, just like she remembered.
“Hello,” he said. “If you were goin’ somewhere, I can put the feed in the barn. You don’t need to wait.”
“Oh, no…I was just moving the truck over here.” It seemed like his gaze lingered on her hair, and she raked her hand through it in reaction, then stuck her hand in her back pocket.
He slipped on cotton gloves, lifted the dolly to the ground and began stacking the bags of feed on it. “Eight bags Golden Choice pellets, right?”
She nodded. “Yes…right in here. Since there aren’t any horses in the stalls, we’re just putting it here in the alley. It’s easier for the kids to get to.”
He unloaded the sacks with strong arms and the rhythmic movements of a man in good shape. He was a thick man in the shoulders. She took in his hard arm muscles showing below the short sleeves of his shirt. He glanced at her with his blue eyes. How did anyone have eyes that blue?
She looked away, caught by the ingrained habit of a discreet married woman, as well as embarrassing stirrings inside herself. Well, my golly, Charlene, you cannot just throw him down and have your way with him.
He wheeled the mineral blocks all the way out to the pasture for her, while she walked along beside him and told him the horses’ names and ages, which one belonged to who, and every one of their habits. She was chattering, so on the way back to the truck, she abruptly stopped.
He got the water softener salt, which he not only wheeled into the house and to the utility room, but he emptied two of the bags right into the water softener.
“Could I offer you a glass of tea for all your trouble?” she asked. “I just made it. It’s brewed tea, with lemon and a little sugar.” It seemed the polite thing to offer. And oh, the house was so empty.
“I’d like that a lot. Thanks.” Those blue eyes shone. She turned quickly away to open the refrigerator.
“Maybe you’d rather have a cold drink. I have Coke.”
“Ice tea is fine.” He sat at her kitchen table and removed his ball cap, laying it on his knee.
While Charle
ne got their glasses and ice and the pitcher of tea, she chattered again, about the weather and how it was hot enough to make tea in fifteen minutes in the pitcher out in the sun, and how the trees were beginning to lose leaves, some trees to outright die, and about everyone’s prayers for rain and her view that she was planning for it.
She said all these things while her mind carried on an entirely different conversation. Her mind asked him if he had been married. If he had, what had happened between him and his wife? Or maybe wives. Was he a man who ran off? Or maybe he had never found the right woman, though she couldn’t quite believe this. A man with those blue eyes and that body, and part owner in his own business? Some woman would have snatched him right up. Did he have filthy habits that were not readily apparent? Was he seeing someone now? And what was this rumor of prison?
Of course she could not say any of that, and so for fifteen minutes, while she watched Mason’s rough fingers play up and down his glass on the table and his blue eyes flicker to hers and away, she held her glass with both hands and pressed her legs tightly together and engaged him in conversation about the weather.
Then Mason rose to go. “Thank you for the tea.”
“You are most welcome. Thank you for…delivering.”
Charlene held the kitchen door. At the bottom of the steps, he cast her a wave, and then he disappeared around the corner of the house. She closed the door and went to the table, gazing long at the empty glasses there. She picked them up and carried them to the sink.
A knock at the back door made her about jump out of her skin. She hurried to open it, but then peeked around it instead. When she saw it was Mason, she flung it wide and opened the storm door.
He swept his ball cap off his head and cleared his throat. “I was wondering if I might call on you sometime.” He cleared his throat again. “If you would mind if I came to visit, or maybe we could go out to dinner.”
Shocked, Charlene stared at him. Finally she managed to say, “I enjoy visiting with you.” She couldn’t speak to having dinner, and she felt obligated to inform him, “Joey and I aren’t divorced.”
He nodded, a shadow coming over his features.
“But I’d like you to come to visit,” she said firmly. “I’d really enjoy it.”
He smiled then. “Good. I’d like to do that,” he said, his smile widening as he backed up. “Well, I have to get back to work. I have more deliveries. But I’ll call you.”
Charlene watched him disappear around the side of the house; then she closed the door and leaned against it for a second, realizing she was smiling for all she was worth.
The phone rang. Charlene, with her hair wrapped in a bandana, was dusting in the living room. She raced to the dining room buffet and stared at the answering machine. When the answering machine picked up, whoever was on the other end hung up.
Well, if it had been one of the children, they would have spoken into the machine, she assured herself as she went back to the living room to continue dusting. So would Rainey or her daddy, and if it had been Mason, he should have spoken. Maybe it had been Joey. He did not like the answering machine, had hardly ever used it. It had probably been a salesman. She thought of Mason again, which was the silliest thing ever.
Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. Charlene hurried into the answering machine and waited.
“Uh, Charlene?”
It was Joey. She looked at the phone, raised her hand, but did not answer.
“I wanted to let you know that I deposited money into the account today. It was all I had, but I’ll have more next week when a guy pays me for a horse. That’s all, I guess.”
The line clicked.
Charlene was very glad for the opportunity to not talk to him.
Rain came that evening. Charlene and Danny J. and Jojo were eating a late supper when the wind began to gust. There came the sound of the horses’ hooves pounding as they galloped from the west pasture to the east, instinct compelling them closer to the house and their owners.
Danny J. got to his feet, saying, “I’m gonna go open the gate so the horses can come up to the barn if it hails,” and rushed out the door.
Charlene motioned to Jojo. “Turn on the TV and flip over to the local channel. Let’s see what the weatherman says.”
She looked out the window and realized she didn’t have to move the Suburban from underneath the tree. It still sat over by the barn. On the local television channel, a few strong storm cells were indicated west and north, but nothing right near them, and no tornado activity. Still, Charlene went out back and made certain the tornado shelter door was ready to open. She called Larry Joe at the Texaco, to hear his voice and remind him not to hesitate to get down in the hole for the lift, not that he would pay her advice one bit of attention, but giving it made her feel better. He said in an excited and wondering voice that the Texaco sign was making a great deal of noise and sand was blowing down the street.
All over town, people stopped what they were doing. They got up from in front of televisions and left supper tables and business counters and went outside to stand and watch the sky with wonder and hope and a little worry. Winston and his neighbor brought in their flags; it was near sundown anyway. Ruthanne sat beside the open window in her bedroom, sinking back in time and becoming a little girl who would do the same on the Oklahoma prairie. Mildred watched the Weather Channel for a tornado alert. Joey and Primo hurriedly shut anxious horses into corrals and brought others into their stalls. Sheila tossed hay into feeders to calm them. Mason gave up working on his grand-father’s car and struggled to shut the barn doors, while over in the pasture his old horse kicked his heels and ran, and the old mule ambled into the shed.
At last darker clouds came. Standing in their front yard, Charlene announced loudly, “It is going to rain. It is going to soak the trees and flow down the gutters.” Hearing a rumble of thunder, she urged her children inside, safe from any evil bolt of lightning looking for a path to the ground. They stood at the glass front door, anticipating.
The rain came first as big drops splatting on the hot concrete and dusty dirt. It made a sweet, musty smell even through the window glass. The drops got bigger and hit harder. Tiny hail mixed in. And then rain came in a flood from the sky. Oddly, with almost no thunder, no visible lightning, just a solid sheet of rain pouring down, pounding the roof, rushing down the gutters and flowing over the concrete walk.
“Hallelujah!” Charlene said, grinning at her children, who grinned back.
Five minutes later it stopped. Completely, as surely as if someone had turned off the faucet. The clouds lifted and broke apart. Orange sunlight filtered from the western setting sun.
“Is that all?” Jojo said quite righteously.
“I guess so,” Charlene said, shaking her head and looking sadly at the sky. “I’m sure the Lord knows best. It’s enough for now.”
Three times while the children were gone, once one afternoon and twice the next, Charlene drove the Suburban up the drive to the highway and back. She turned around on the grass, not daring to go out on the road. When she would pull the Suburban to a stop under the elm and lift her hands from the wheel, they would be wet with sweat. The first time she had to sit there for a full minute to quit shaking.
She told herself it was silly, but she could not seem to get control over the fear. Would it never go away?
She put off going shopping for the children’s school clothes. Larry Joe was working more hours, and she hated to inconvenience him to take her, and besides, she didn’t feel up to shopping. Rather than admit this, she threw herself into cleaning out closets. “We have to make room for your new clothes before we buy them,” she told her children.
She told each of them what time she would clean their closet, in order that they could remove anything they didn’t want her to see. Still, she found surprising things, such as a lacy bra in Danny J.’s closet, which he said was Curt’s sister’s, and what looked like part of a carburetor in Larry Joe’s.
; Late at night, when she could not sleep, her fingernails were perfection and she had seen all the old movies on television, she cleaned out hers and Joey’s dresser drawers. She sat on the floor and looked at things such as a birthday card he had given her and a picture of them at one of his horse shows, and a T-shirt that she had given him years ago that said No. 1 Dad. He had left that behind. When she got up, she had a wet face and a bulging plastic bag that she took out the back door and plopped into the trash can.
She would not answer the telephone, but when home alone, she raced to listen to hear who spoke over the answering machine. She avoided three calls from carpet cleaners that way.
Joey called twice. Charlene hovered over the machine, listening breathlessly to his voice.
“Charlene, uh…I put some more money in the account this mornin’. Uh, that’s all, I guess. Bye.”
The next time: “Charlene? Can you give me a call. Call my pager when you get time. Okay?”
She took up the phone, and then she put it back down. She couldn’t call him. She didn’t know what to say to him. The pain was too much for her.
She wanted to run away. She tried to hide in the house, to not answer the phone and to watch television to distract her troubled emotions. One afternoon, upon passing the bed, she lay down and was there for three hours, until Danny J. came in, calling he was hungry.
“Mom? Are you okay?” he asked, his face worried.
“Yes, I’m fine. I’ll make hamburgers for supper. How ’bout that?”
She dragged herself off the bed. She wanted to please him. She wanted to be what she used to be. Or what she’d hoped to be, only she didn’t know what had happened to that woman. She sensed that she was on the wrong road, but she could not turn around and go back, and she didn’t know which way to go, anyway.
Then Rainey called to say that she had been confined to bed for the duration of her pregnancy.
“I almost lost him,” Rainey told her, and there were tears in her voice. “It is a him. And he’s goin’ to be okay, but I have to stay in bed. Stay off my feet. If I get stronger, they’ll let me up, but right now, the only time I can get up is to go to the bathroom.”
Driving Lessons Page 17
