Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  “I don’t know. Yet. That’s what I intend to find out.”

  With that, the good Dr. Hodo turned and left the room, and I trailed him out to the hallway. Outside of Shalonda’s hearing, I had to ask him. “Do you ever hear from my dad?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We go fishing together on the rare occasion when I can get away. He is doing fine.”

  “Does he…” I started to ask if he ever talked about me, but stopped.

  Dr. Hodo gave me time to finish, but then, being a trained psychiatrist and all, I guess he figured out I wasn’t going to, and he answered the question I couldn’t ask. “Your father is very proud of you, whether he’s said so or not. He follows your career.”

  “How?”

  “Through Dan.”

  Yeah, Dan the good son, the family conduit, the man who continued to insist upon having a relationship with his distant father and his barricaded mother.

  “You do know Willette would hate having me on her case, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But you can help her, can’t you?”

  “I don’t know. But I will try my damnedest.” Then he all but winked at me. “You grew up just fine. I’m glad for you.”

  With that, Dr. Hodo turned and headed down the hallway, and I slipped back into Willette’s hospital room. I stared first at Willette’s still form, then at Shalonda. “So?”

  “So, white girl, let’s talk ’bout something ’sides Willette for a moment. Anybody tell you where I’m living now?”

  “No.”

  “Out on the part of what used to be your grandmom’s farm. You know, that sixty acres your granddad sold after your grandmomma passed over. All that pasture land he didn’t need since he wasn’t going to run cows no more. Went through a couple of hands ’fore Demetrious got it, built himself a pretty little house on the high part, and then he fixed up the barn real good.” Shalonda paused and studied me. “I sure do miss your granddad and grandmom. They were good people. I looked for you to be at your granddad’s funeral, but you weren’t.”

  “I was in trial. Mid-trial. I asked for a continuance, but the jerk attorney on the other side objected, and the judge denied my motion.”

  “You couldn’t let somebody else take it for a day?”

  “No, I couldn’t. It was my client and my trial.”

  “White girl, nobody’s indispensable.”

  I turned away from her and stared down at the prone body of my mother. Willette hadn’t gone to her own father’s funeral and nobody had raised a hissy fit over that. Besides, it was an important, complex trial, and I was up for partnership that year, and if I’d left matters in the hands of the second chair and we’d lost, I’d’ve been toast in the firm. But there wasn’t any point in trying to explain that to anyone in Bugfest. And for a moment, I thought about how little payment Granddad has gotten from selling the pasture land. When he needed somebody to live with him and take care of him, he didn’t have any money left. Those bills had come to me.

  But I didn’t want my old friend Shalonda thinking poorly of me. “I cared for him when he needed me to, in his life. After he passed, I trusted him to Grandmom.”

  Shalonda came over to me and hugged me. “I know your grandmomma was waiting there for him, help him cross over. And there’s something else I know. I know you loved your granddaddy and your grandmomma. Don’t you ever worry ’bout me not knowing that ’bout you.”

  Shalonda let go of me, and I swallowed a few times, and then physically shook, to shake off that strangling feeling. I needed to get out into the fresh, open air. Right now.

  “You good here?” I asked. “I’m supposed to help Patti Lea clean out Willette’s house.”

  “I’m good here, you go on. Not anything you can do here. I’ll get the cakes and flowers passed around.”

  “I’ll call you later,” I said, “and we’ll get together, hang out and catch up.” Then I fled out of the hospital. Once outside, in the clean, crisp air of an autumn morning, I stood under a sweetgum tree by the side of the parking lot and called Bonita on my cell to check in. After her multilayered assurances, I put my phone up and inhaled deeply. Then I looked at the hospital again, and shuddered. I needed to go back into that concrete-halled collection of germs and viruses and demand to confer with the elusive Dr. Weinstein, check on those ER records, and corner the nurses on duty the night Willette was brought in.

  But I had promised to help Patti.

  So, instead of going back in, I got in my Honda and I drove from the frying pan of germs straight into the fire of filth.

  chapter 11

  Trash. Piles of trash.

  Moldy, smelly piles of trash.

  I actually have nightmares where I am suffocating in trash.

  I opened my mouth to explain this to my brother, who is not otherwise a cruel man, but before I could make sound come forth from within me, he thrust a mask, gloves, and a set of coveralls at me, and Patti Lea slammed and banged in another room.

  “It’s pretty dirty in here,” he said, as if somehow I had been deprived of every single one of my senses.

  Maybe, I thought as my heart thumped against my rib cage in a lurch that made my stomach nearly heave, I had actually died in that crash with the pickup and the Thunderbird. Maybe I was dead. And this was hell.

  “It’ll be all right, Lilly. We’ll get it done,” Dan said, and touched my arm, breaking my rising panic at the thought I might be dead and in hell.

  Hell might be where I was going, but no way that’s where Dan went.

  “Okay, lead the way,” I said, and slipped a mask over my nose and mouth. Inside my head, a hundred little people started kick-dancing, and they were all screaming at me to get out of there.

  “I promised Patti,” I said, “so shut up.”

  “You say something? Hard to hear you with that face mask on.”

  I shook my head and followed Dan through a tour of the house, ending in the den.

  Every surface was filled with piles of papers in rubber bands.

  “Old bills, stuff like that,” Dan said. “Why she kept all this, me and Patti Lea can’t rightly figure out. Thing is, we’d like to find her bank records. She ought to have some money, maybe some CDs or something. I mean she sold Grandmom’s place cheap, but not for nothing, so there’s got to be some bank records someplace. Patti couldn’t find any in that metal box of important papers she gave you, so keep an eye out for something like that.”

  Oh, frigging great, I had to look at this stuff? I couldn’t just throw it out?

  “This den’s about the cleanest room,” Dan said. “Can you look through it to start, for anything like current bank statements?”

  Numbly, I nodded.

  “I got to get over to see the lady lawyer—you know, Bobby’s girlfriend’s mother. Got to see about getting appointed Willette’s guardian, like you insisted.”

  Dan left. Randomly, I picked up a few things. As I looked through the collection of papers stuffed everywhere, I couldn’t help myself—I looked for something of mine that my mother might have saved, some token of an affection she had never otherwise voiced. In a pile of other yellowed papers, with a coating of dead insects, I found my old report cards, secured with a rubber band that broke with age when I started to roll it off.

  That collection hadn’t even made it into the metal box of important papers. Rather, my report cards had just been tossed in next to a pile of old phone bills, dating back twenty years. My report cards were, I realized, not evidence of a mother’s pride—my grades had been pretty bad and the teachers had scrawled out notes about my attitude, which was also apparently pretty bad, by Bugfest standards of the day. Rather, the cards seemed to have been, like the phone bills, kept not for any real purpose but some obsessive need to collect such things.

  Or maybe, as was surely the case with twenty years of old newspapers, my report cards were just so much trash that no one had ever bothered to throw out.

  chapter 12

  Crazy. I’d h
ave to be plumb out of my mind to fall into a mess like this.

  That is, approaching the noon hour, I was pretty certain I would meet any clinical definition of crazy.

  Patti Lea was closing in on crazy right behind me.

  And that from a woman who’d started her own business after she’d come home from Valdosta State with a degree in Southern history to find out that qualified her for exactly nothing vocationally except maybe cashier at the Pig. While Dan was off in the Marines and she found out her college degree meant jack in the job market, she went right down to the vocational school and told them to teach her something that she could make a living at. The counselor gave her an aptitude test, and when she scored highest in small-engine repair, she signed up for the full course work. When she got her certificate, and the only lawn-mower repair shop in town wouldn’t hire her because she was a woman, she went to the bank. And when the bank wouldn’t loan her money to start her own shop, her daddy put a second mortgage on their nice brick house in Country Club Heights and purchased an out-of-business store with a good-size workshop, and her momma ran the books and answered the phone and sweet-talked all her garden-club friends into making their husbands do business with Patti.

  Three years later, the other shop closed down for lack of customers, and the owner ended up selling paint at the Wal-Mart. But when Patti was too pregnant with her first son to squat and bend and fix, she didn’t just hire the man, she made him a partner. They ran that shop together until he turned seventy-five and retired. Patti threw him a big party, and every year she visits him in St. Pete. And as soon as those two boys of hers could toddle out to the garage, both of them became her students. By the time they hit sixth grade, each boy could take apart a top-of-the-line riding lawn mower and put it back together better than it had been.

  “That way,” she once told me, “they can major in anything they want in college, and go anywhere they want to live, but still always make a living.”

  Sometimes I wished Patti had been my mother.

  And, given that history, to see her now, this close to the edge, was unnerving.

  But before I could figure out what I might do, Dan came whistling back with the news that he had an emergency hearing set for twelve forty-five that afternoon, crashing in on the judge’s lunch break, and he fully expected to be Willette’s legal guardian by one. Having reported to Patti and me, Dan started hauling out trash and humming a near-tuneless song that made me wonder if the boy was sipping on some high-juice Prozac in his Cokes. Patti, the practical, told him not to get dirty and to please go get her some food before he left for the courthouse. Dan whistled his way on off.

  Desperate for some fresh air, I stepped outside and yanked my face mask off.

  Then I looked up and saw a pickup truck parked in the front yard, a new one, and a hybrid to boot. That was different, I thought, and watched as a man somewhere in his late fifties or so got out from the driver’s side. He appeared to be robust and solid, with a weatherworn face and a Marine’s close-cropped hair.

  “We been waiting for somebody to come out,” he said by way of greeting. “Given Miss Willette’s ways, we wasn’t sure if we should knock, or what.”

  I was filthy, hungry, and disgusted, and in no mood to chat with the curious onlookers of the town. “This isn’t a good time,” I said.

  But the man grinned. “By God, if you ain’t prettier now than you were as a little gal.” He turned back to the man still inside the truck. “Hey, Hank, get yourself out here.”

  Something about the man began to seem familiar, that is, in a long-ago, faraway sort of way. But before I could place him, I saw a borderline chunky, pleasant-looking man about my age crawl out of the passenger’s side of the truck. He had the look of a man who spent equal amounts of time at the gym and at the all-u-can-eat buffet. The buffet was edging out ahead in that race.

  “I told you we shouldn’t be bothering her,” the younger man said to the older and ducked his head, not meeting my eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be rude, but this really isn’t a good time.”

  The younger man looked me up and down, but I didn’t think his stare was sexual. The soft light in his eyes when he finally looked at my face was only curious, not rude. “You got me in near to the worst trouble of my whole life,” he said. “Fifth grade. You remember?”

  “I remember fifth grade.”

  “You and me got held after class, on ’count we didn’t do our homework. The teacher, old Miss Summerfield, made us wash her car on ’count she said jes’ putting us in detention didn’t do any good with us.”

  “I near whipped him good when I heard what he done,” the older man said. “Till your grandma told me to never mind about it, it was you put Hank up to it, only we called him Little Toot then. Christian name’s Hiriam Williams. Get up here, boy.”

  “You remember?” Hank asked as he stepped toward me, then looked down at his shoes. “You and me,” he said to the ground, “we washed that woman’s car with ever one of her windows rolled down and used them big hoses till we near ruint her car insides. I reckon it took her weeks to dry it out.”

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed. My granddad had gotten such a kick out of that stunt he’d had given me a whole shot glass full of homemade whiskey, and we had laughed and laughed. My parents had simply ignored the irate phone calls from Miss Summerfield. Grandmom had cautioned me on the fine art of not getting caught because of being too obvious, and therein laid the foundation for one of the great truths of my life and the art of litigation—sometimes you had to be sneaky.

  “Hank,” I said, and held out my hand. He took it, but dropped it after a quick but strong shake.

  Reminiscing aside, I stared hard at the man, trying to imagine a skinny ten-year-old face in his beefy middle-aged one. Maybe that was the look he’d just given me—looking for the child we’d known each other to be a long time ago.

  “Hiriam Williams,” I repeated, because it sounded fine to say it.

  “Yeah, by God, boy, I told you she’d remember you. You bein’ her first boyfriend and all. We call him Hank now, ma’am, he outgrew Little Toot.”

  While I was trying to remember if I had ever heard Hank called Little Toot, and hoping for his sake I had not, the older man stepped forward and offered his hand. “Jubal Early Williams, ma’am, glad to be seeing you again after all these years.”

  I shook his hand. “Good to see you again.” Truth was, I didn’t remember being around Jubal much as a kid, but I had a few memories of a brusque man on his way out the door. Hank and his momma had been a little afraid of him, or at least that’s what I remembered my fifth-grader’s mind thinking, and my grandmother had warned me not to cross him. In those days, he’d been a logger. And he was still strong and rugged-looking, but I judged him probably too old to still be cutting down trees for a living. While I was studying both the Jubal in front of me and the one way back in my memory, he squeezed my hand like I’d been more to him than I had, just a childhood friend of his kid’s. A long time ago.

  “Real fine seeing you again,” Jubal said, and pumped my hand like he’d been one to take me out fishing or something.

  “Jubal Early,” I said, and I pulled my hand back. “Any kin to the Confederate general of the same name?”

  “No, ma’am, lest not as far as we know. Though my great-great-grand-daddy served with him. Four year, and he come home not a scratch on him and then up and died of brain fever that first year home.”

  Hank edged his father aside and looked at me with the same sweet eyes I remembered from grade school. “Lilly Belle, so pleased to see you again.”

  Sun-squint lines accented those green eyes now and gray dusted his rust-colored hair, and there were those extra pounds, of course, but otherwise the decades had been kind enough to him.

  Hank caught me studying him and blushed out to his earlobes. “You probably don’t remember, but I’m not kin to the real Hank Williams. No, ma’am, though I near got all
his records. Senior, not the junior.”

  Given my pressing need for a shower and some organic foods, I didn’t want to discuss genealogy, Confederate history, or country music, or play catch-up with my running buddy from grade school. So, I put on my distant, professional expression and asked, “What can I do for you two?”

  “We, ah, we got a kind of a legal problem, and we heard you were in town, and, I tell you what, Dan, he’s always a-bragging how good a lawyer you are, and…” Hank drifted off and took up staring at his feet again.

  “I’m not licensed to practice law in Georgia,” I said.

  “See, what it is, there’s this here resort that wants to buy up our place.” Jubal stopped and looked at Hank.

  “We don’t want to sell,” Hank said. “Daddy’s house has been in our family for over a hundred and thirty years. Since soon after The War. Our family has flat-out owned the property before that, but the original house got burnt down.”

  “Our family been on that piece of property since Andy Jackson ran the Creeks and the Cherokees out,” Jubal tossed in. “A hundred and sixty-five years. You don’t run folks with that kind of claim off their land, now do you?”

  Well, that depended, I supposed, on who did the owning and who did the running off. Those Creeks and Cherokees Andrew Jackson had dispossessed had a claim that out-dated Jubal’s, and if Jubal felt so strongly about ancestral homesteads, maybe he wanted to deed his property back to the remnants of the tribe that still owned a little reservation on the other side of Sleepy Lake. But I doubted this was the time or place for a consciousness-raising session. Instead, I simply said, “So, you don’t want to sell. I can understand that.” And I did, having tried my best to keep my grandmother’s house in the family.

  “But we don’t have any choice,” Jubal said. “That’s what the county is telling us now.”