by Fran Baker
As she reached to pluck another tomato, a clang of the dinner bell drifted from the porch. One ring meant that Grandpa needed to talk to her, but it wasn’t an emergency. Anymore than that meant that he was having trouble breathing and she should run like a cat with her tail on fire. They’d devised this system because his voice wasn’t strong enough to carry over the noise from the rig, and so far, it had worked real well.
She waved to signal she’d heard the bell, then headed back to the house.
“Chance just called.” Grandpa looked as happy as a heifer in the corncrib, which was a welcome change from the hangdog expression he’d been wearing all week.
“What did he want?” Joni tried to keep her voice on an even keel, but a note of excitement jiggled it nonetheless.
“He wanted to know what time the parade started.”
She grabbed hold of the porch railing for support. “And?”
“When I told him three o’clock, he said he’d pick us up at two.”
Her heart did handstands, knowing he hadn’t left them in the lurch. She linked her arm through Grandpa’s and, laughing, led him toward the screen door. “What are we standing around here jawing for? Time’s a-wasting.”
Joni fed Grandpa a light dinner, then helped him into the tub in the downstairs bathroom and scrubbed him up one side and down the other. He decided to take a short nap before he put on his suit, which left her free to shower and shampoo and get dressed.
They were ready and waiting when Chance turned into the driveway a few minutes before two. He looked so handsome in creased jeans, a mint-green polo shirt with the collar unbuttoned, and that gorgeous raw silk jacket, Joni’s stomach pulled all sorts of crazy shenanigans when she opened the screen door for him.
“Hi,” she said shyly, wishing she had something a bit more eloquent in the way of a greeting.
“Hi,” he returned, his mobile mouth splitting into a smile as he surveyed her outfit with obvious relish.
Joni had taken Grandpa at his word and raided the cedar chest in the attic again. Her grandmother’s dress, a drop-waisted delicacy of ivory chiffon and intricate lacework, had required only the mandatory tucks in the bodice to fit as if it were made for her. With it she wore matching stockings as sheer as a spider’s web and a pair of low-heeled pumps she’d bought on sale several years back.
But it was what she wasn’t wearing that most intrigued Chance.
She wasn’t wearing her wedding ring on her left hand anymore.
His glance flicked from her bare left hand to her right, where the plain gold band now claimed its proper place. Then his eyes sought hers and he wanted to drown in the fathomless depths of her.
“You’ve come a long way, baby,” he quipped, but his expression told her he wanted to take her the rest of the way.
“I’m taking it a step at a time,” she whispered, and her expression begged him not to rush her.
But time was their enemy, flying by on Mercury’s wings without regard for their hearts’ wishes.
As if they needed a reminder, the long-case clock in the entryway chimed out the musical prelude to the hour, and then the hour itself. One … two.
“If we don’t get moving pretty soon,” Grandpa prodded as he tottered out of the living room in his shiny blue serge suit and old straw boater, “I’m going to be sneezing dust.”
Chance got Grandpa settled in the Thunderbird and put their picnic basket in the trunk while Joni ran to get the posterboard-sized signs she planned to display during the parade.
“I was going to tape them to the doors of my pickup,” she explained when Chance asked to see the signs. “But now that we’re going to ride in the convertible, Grandpa and I can just hold them in the air.”
Chance thought he came a little closer to understanding what made Joni tick when he read what she’d printed in red and blue Magic Marker on the white posterboard.
The first sign declared: AS LONG AS WE HAVE ONE SEED LEFT, WE’LL PLANT.
And the second proclaimed: AS LONG AS WE HAVE ONCE OUNCE OF STRENGTH, WE’LL PLOW.
“Those are old sayings around here,” she told him, never dreaming he’d find them as meaningful as she did.
“Well, I can think of a lot better use for your arms than wearing them out waving signs.” His expression was altogether too sexy for her not to know what he was talking about. “Go get the masking tape so we can show them off properly.”
“But the finish on your car—”
“The tape marks will rub off.”
She loved him so much, she ached with it. “I’ll be right back.”
They taped one sign to the passenger door and one to the driver’s, then got into the convertible.
Chance told Grandpa to hang on to his hat and away they went.
Grandpa had been elected grand marshal by the parade committee because he was the oldest and best loved resident of Redemption County, so Chance steered the Thunderbird into line directly ahead of the mayor’s long black Lincoln and right behind the high school band.
The majorette raised her baton. The band struck up an off-key rendition of “Yankee Doodle Boy.” And the parade started down a Main Street straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
All across America people celebrated the nation’s birthday. Veterans marched with flags and heads held high. Backyard chefs in funny hats and burlap aprons fired up their grills. Umpires shouted “Play ball!” and families converged for their annual reunions. But nowhere in the Land of the Free did the patriotic fever burn brighter than it did in Redemption.
Sure, farmers were hurting. In addition to the always capricious weather, they were faced with specific problems, including their own overproductivity. A surplus of food had caused prices to fall. Shrinking foreign markets, tumbling land values, and increasing debt had fueled bankruptcies and foreclosures galore.
But farmers fought, bought, and thought American. And one day a year they showed the world that they believed they lived in the greatest country on God’s green earth.
The way Grandpa waved his boater, a body would have thought he was running for governor. Nobody waved back because everybody was in the parade. That didn’t bother him. He just waved to the people behind him.
No sooner had the high school band gotten the hang of George M. Cohan’s classic song than the parade turned in to the city park and began dispersing. Several participants stopped by to congratulate Grandpa on a job well done, and more than a few of them commented favorably on Joni’s signs.
Chance parked the convertible in the shade of a big old cottonwood tree and got Grandpa situated at a picnic table while Joni took their basket from the trunk.
She flagged Dr. Rayburn down and invited him to join them when supper was served. His wife had died a couple of winters ago and he depended on the largess of his patients at occasions like these.
“Are you sure you’ve got enough to go around?” Mustache fluttering, the physician eyed her cake carrier with what could only be termed a gluttonous gleam.
“I’m sure,” she said.
“You know how Joni is,” Grandpa added as an incentive. “She always cooks enough to feed Coxey’s Army.”
Dr. Rayburn hooked his thumbs in the bright red suspenders that held up his rumpled white pants. “In that case, I’d be pleased to join you.”
Supper was scheduled for six o’clock, which left almost two hours for fun and games.
But first, the formalities.
The band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” making up with heart what they lacked in harmony. Everybody stood and everybody sang.
Then the mayor made his usual long-winded speech. And as usual, nobody listened.
Finally, the potato sacks came out, and the ropes for the three-legged races, and the horseshoes appeared for pitching.
The hot sun had the picnickers begging for their next breath.
Chance shrugged out of his jacket and went in search of something cold to wet his whistle.
Joni saw Loret
ta West sitting by herself on a blanket on the ground and wandered over that way.
“Two small steps in the right direction,” Loretta said when she noticed that Joni had moved her wedding ring.
“Three,” Joni corrected her friend, and went on to describe her scaffold ride, skipping the details of her fight with Chance.
“You went up against your fear and it worked.”
“Surprised the heck out of me too.”
Loretta looked at Chance, who stood head and shoulders above the other men gathered around the beer keg. “He’s been good for you in ways that Larry never was.”
Joni turned a puzzled glance on her friend. “How so?”
“Understand, I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead.”
“I understand.”
The blonde pursed her heavily glossed lips, as if trying to think how to phrase it. “Larry took the sparkle out of your eyes and the smile off your lips long before he died.”
“I felt so guilty because I couldn’t make him happy.” Joni plucked a blade of grass and split it in two with a smooth oval thumbnail that had profited from regular exposure to an emery board. “I still feel guilty sometimes.”
“But some people are just born unhappy.” The cut-out arms and straight, tight skirt of Loretta’s red leather body skimmer set off her curves to full advantage. Now she tucked her legs under her and settled into a more comfortable position. “It’s part of their genetic makeup or something.”
“It’s an interesting thought, I’ll grant you that.”
Loretta nodded in the direction of the picnic table. “Look at your grandfather.”
A smile curved Joni’s lips when she saw Grandpa stacking the deck against Dr. Rayburn, who’d joined him for a game of pitch. “He’s really something, isn’t he?”
“If anybody ever had good reason to put a gun to his head, it was him.”
“I remember him saying once that he’d been dusted, busted, but never rusted.”
“Why do you think he’s one way and Larry was the other?”
“The difference in their personalities, I suppose.”
Loretta smiled her butter-almond smile. “I rest my case.”
She then gave her spindrift hair a proud pat. “Who says all blondes are airheads?”
The two women looked at each other and burst out laughing. When their mirth subsided, they whiled away the afternoon talking about this and that.
Loretta had a new boyfriend, but she wasn’t naming names. “I’ve had such bad luck in my relationships, I’m afraid I’ll jinx it if I say too much.”
“He’s single, I presume?” Joni remembered the supposedly divorced truck driver whose wife and three children had shown up on Loretta’s door-step one revealing spring day. As it had turned out, Loretta was just one of several girlfriends along the guy’s route.
“For sure,” Lorette said fervently. “One thing I learned from that last jerk is that a man who’ll cheat with me will probably cheat on me.”
Joni played Twenty Questions, trying to guess the identity of the man who’d captured the perennial bridesmaid’s interest, but she didn’t know any more about him when the supper call came over the loudspeaker than she had when she’d started.
“Keep me posted,” Joni said as she stood and turned toward her picnic table.
“You’ll be the first to hear,” Loretta promised.
Joni lifted their platter of fried chicken from the basket and almost dropped it when Chance came up behind her and began nuzzling her neck right there in front of God and Grandpa.
She set it down and spun around, only to find herself trapped between the concrete table and his long, equally hard body. “Have you been drinking, for heaven’s sake?”
“No, ma’am.” He handed her his paper cup and she took a tentative sip.
“Lemonade!” she exclaimed, surprised.
“Yes’m.” His smile packed a hundred-proof wallop all its own. “I want to be in full control of my faculties tonight.”
The minister asked everyone to bow their heads just then, and Joni was only too happy to comply. She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed for guidance, but she knew that something that felt this right couldn’t be wrong.
“Amen,” the picnickers said together, then sat down at their individual tables and dug in.
“Pass the tomatoes,” Dr. Rayburn requested when he had some of everything else piled on his plate.
Grandpa pointed a well-gnawed chicken leg at Chance. “You know the only two things that money can’t buy?”
Chance smiled, expecting a joke. “Can’t say as I do.”
Grandpa glanced at Joni, then back at Chance, as if silently bestowing his blessing on them. “True love and homegrown tomatoes.”
The lemonade in Joni’s cup sloshed perilously close to the rim as she lifted it to her lips.
“Haven’t heard that one in a blue moon,” Dr. Rayburn said as he reached for another bread and butter sandwich.
Chance noticed that Joni had been doing more sipping than supping. He placed a deviled egg on her plate, his eyes making promises galore, and said matter-of-factly, “Gotta keep your strength up.”
Joni looked down at the paprika-sprinkled egg all alone on her plate and smiled. She knew exactly what he meant. “Pass the chicken, please.”
But if she thought he was going to leave her to eat in peace, she had another think coming. His leg touching hers under the table, their thighs brushing when he leaned forward to reach for the salt shaker, his fingers skimming along her sensitive palm when he handed it to her—by the time she finished supper, even the fine hairs on her arms were attuned to his covertly erotic signals.
Exhaustion and excitement finally caught up with Grandpa. Dr. Rayburn offered to run him home and help him into bed, and by way of thanks, Joni gave him the rest of the angel food cake.
“Grandpa seemed stronger today then he has since I’ve been here,” Chance remarked when they were gone.
“Don’t expect it to last.” Joni’s voice quavered as she explained that Dr. Rayburn had recently warned her that Grandpa’s old heart couldn’t with-stand too many more of those terrible coughing spells.
Chance drew her into his arms, hurting for her, and buried his face in her cascading hair. “Cry if it’ll help, little darlin’.”
Joni laid her cheek in the warm hollow of his wide shoulder, but the tears she badly needed to shed just wouldn’t come.
They stood for a long time in the cricket-stitched silence, just holding each other.
“I owe you an apology,” she finally whispered against his muscular chest.
“For what?” He sounded perplexed.
“For what I said when I slapped you.”
“But not for slapping me?”
“No.” She raised her head and met his mildly amused eyes. “You deserved that.”
“I guess I did,” he admitted with a rueful smile.
Twilight lay like a gray velvet mantle over the park as they broke apart and began clearing the table.
Joni packed up their basket and Chance put it back in the trunk of the Thunderbird. Then he took out the soft blue blanket he’d brought, spread it under the lacy branches of the cottonwood, and drew her down with him.
The fireworks weren’t scheduled to start until full dark, and everyone seemed to have the same idea as Chance.
Mothers sat and rocked fussy babies. Fathers called the older children back to the family fold. Young couples necked in dusk’s accommodating shadow.
“Didn’t you want children when you were married?” Chance smiled when a rebellious little boy reached over and pulled the pigtails of the cute little girl on the next blanket. Damned if it didn’t remind him of something he’d have done at that age.
“We discussed it.” Joni made out a man’s shape on Loretta’s blanket. He looked familiar to her, but she couldn’t see his face in the deepening twilight. Silently she wished her friend good luck in her new relationship.
“But?�
�� he prompted softly, sliding his hand up her slender back and under her rich red hair.
“We never got beyond the talking stage.” And she wouldn’t have felt right about bringing an innocent baby into their foundering marriage.
“Never?” he asked teasingly, trying to lighten the maudlin moment he’d unwittingly promoted.
The answering tinkle of her laughter told him that he’d succeeded. “You know what I mean.”
Someone produced a fiddle then, someone else a guitar, and soon the strains of “Old George Gans” made time roll by. The music arose in Scotland, followed its migrant people across ocean and mountain, and finally settled in Redemption, Oklahoma.
Everyone raised their voices in song for “Blue-tail Fly” and “Frère Jacques,” then one of the picnickers requested “Red River Valley.”
From this valley they say you are going.
We will miss your bright eyes and your smile …
Chance kept one hand lightly on the back of Joni’s neck as he sang along. Ripples skipped up her skin as she joined in, her husky contralto in perfect accord with his clear, resonant baritone.
Come and sit by my side if you love me,
Do not hasten to bid me adieu;
But remember the Red River Valley,
And the girl that has loved you so true.
Seesawing between sensation and sadness, Joni looked at Chance. Butterscotch drops of moon drizzled down through the cottonwood branches, the golden light glancing off his high-planed cheekbones. She could smell his evergreen soap and see the wanting in his eyes. And she realized she couldn’t let him leave Redemption without showing him how much she loved him.
“Let’s go home.” Were they her words or his? It didn’t matter, for two minds had the same thought.
Silently they stood and folded the blanket, their fingertips grazing as they brought the corners together. Arm in arm they walked to the Thunderbird, their pulses setting the pace.
