Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  But first I needed to see the judge.

  The very judge, I might add, that Dan and his lady lawyer had utterly failed an hour before to convince to sign the same simple order. This, despite the fact that no one objected. When Dan had caught me at his house and told me that Judge Parker had declined to appoint him as his own mother’s legal guardian on the spot, I’d bit my tongue to keep from cursing. Reserved ruling, that was what Dan had said the judge had done.

  No matter how many questions I had thrown at Dan, I couldn’t get any better answer than that he just thought the judge wanted to think about it overnight.

  What was there to think about? Frustrated, I had hopped into my car, gone to the hospital, signed those papers for Simon, and popped my head in to visit with Shalonda and Willette.

  Not that I was getting any fonder of the hospital, but compared to cleaning out Willette’s house, it had a certain appeal. Plus, I’d had the chance to unload on Shalonda about Judge Parker not signing the order. Which was when Shalonda had sparked our current adventure.

  “He’s just in a hurry to go and see his mule,” Shalonda had said.

  “His mule?”

  “Boards her, Faith’s her name, with Demetrious. This is his regular visiting day. Plus, Judge Parker, truth be told, ain’t one to make snap decisions.”

  Snap decisions? He’d had an hour to mull on it by now. He just needed a little push. Obviously, Dan’s lawyer might have had the home-court favorite status in a courtroom that I didn’t, but she lacked my motivation. And my persuasive talents. So, how hard could it be to convince this judge to sign up Dan to take over Willette’s legal decisions?

  And before Shalonda could say “No, thank you,” I had her in the passenger side of my Honda, bouncing her along the dirt road to the barn.

  We had left Willette temporarily in the care of Patti Lea, who had just stopped by to check on her and pick up a pound cake, and she said seeing as how it was cool and clean in Willette’s room, she’d stay as long as I needed her, and for us not to hurry.

  Frankly, I think Patti was looking forward to sitting and doing nothing. After all the work she’d done, I didn’t blame her, and off Shalonda and I had sailed, to bend the good judge to my way of thinking.

  And that’s why we were crashing along the dirt road to Demetrious’s barn, with Judge Parker the big thing on my mind. Banging my Honda about on the backest of the back roads, I’d just been turning where Shalonda told me to turn. Instead of paying attention to my surroundings, I had been formulating my presentation to Judge Parker. Until a series of canal-size ruts in the dirt road forced me to slow down near a turnoff to an even narrower road with a NO TRESPASSING sign on the gate of a long fence. At once, I recognized the ancient live oak tree with the long, drooping limb that scraped the ground parallel to the roadway. I skidded the car to a halt, and then backed up, Shalonda snapping her neck and giving me the eye like I was a crazy woman.

  I jumped out of the car and stared around me. I took in the distinctive sweep of the live oak with its draping branch along the road. Resurrection ferns fanned themselves green in the breeze, telling me it had rained of late and they had unfurled in the showers.

  “That’s the way to my grandmother’s place,” I said, and felt like someone had just put their hands around my throat and squeezed.

  “Sure is,” Shalonda said, having gotten out of the car to stand by me. “I think ’bout her a lot. You and me and Delvon sure had some fun hanging out with her. She was one cool lady.”

  I thought about her all the time. Sometimes I even talked with her, but I never mentioned this to anyone. Just a secret between Grandmom and me, this talking. No reason to let a little thing like her being dead stop the bond between us.

  “You know who’s living there now, don’t you, in your grandmomma’s house?” Shalonda asked.

  Yeah, Lonnie Ledbetter, ex–high school heartthrob, almost country music star, and now the county commissioner that had sold out Jubal and Hank. Ever since he’d bought that house from my mother three years ago, I’d written Lonnie every three or four months, trying to buy the house and property back from him. But without educating Shalonda on that history, I said, “That Lonnie Ledbetter owns it.”

  “Nope, not anymore,” Shalonda said. “He sold it. No more, I don’t reckon, than two weeks ago.”

  “What? Who to?” I asked, shouting so that Shalonda shot me that look of concern again. Then I wondered why Dan hadn’t thought to mention this.

  “To that Simon McDowell, the hospital administrator,” Shalonda said.

  “Simon?”

  “Yeah. Simon.”

  It took me a few gulped breaths to get my mind fully around the notion that Lonnie had sold my grandmother’s place, even after he had personally and in writing promised to offer it first to me if he ever even just thought about selling it.

  Then I had to say “damn” with a few variations, while Shalonda studied me. Then I had to grill Shalonda. “Simon? The hospital Simon? What’s his story? I mean, why’s he want to live out here in the country? In my grandmother’s house?”

  “You got to ask him.” Shalonda shook her head. “Those folks that hired him think we were real lucky to get him to come here and run our hospital, but I’m not so sure ’bout that. Used to be head of the sales part of a drug company out of New Jersey, ’fore he came down here. Now I want to know how that qualifies him to run a hospital?”

  But for the moment, I couldn’t worry about Simon’s resume. I was still working on calming down.

  Hellfire and damnation. Lonnie had sold that house not to someone who knew Grandmom and would cherish the property and honor the house as a shrine, but to a former pharmaceutical sales rep who had probably never even lived in the country in his whole life. A damn drug rep from a city up North. He wasn’t going to know squat about tending those blueberries Grandmom had prided herself on, or the peach trees.

  “You being a lawyer, I want you to tell me, how’s selling drugs make that man a hospital administrator?”

  Maybe Shalonda had a point about qualifications. Still, I guessed small-town hospitals like the one in Bugfest couldn’t be too choosy; I mean, a Harvard-educated M.B.A. with experience running a Chicago hospital probably wouldn’t apply for the job. And what did I know about Simon anyway, other than he wore gold and just missed being a good-looking guy because of that goofy hyper thing he had going. Oh, and those unnaturally long arms. Maybe he’d run a few hospitals somewhere after he’d quit peddling drug samples.

  So, I jerked my mind away from Simon’s track record and back to the main issue, that being my grandmother’s place. My quest to regain her house had just been yanked one rung further out of my hands. With Lonnie, I figured I would wear him down, or he’d go broke again and need to sell it in a hurry, and I’d get the house back. Now that didn’t seem so likely.

  Stunned, I stood, looking down the road to the house where my grandmother had given me the closest thing I’d ever had to a happy family life. I was thinking about the red brick arch on the front porch, and the warm wood floors, and the stone fireplace, and the kitchen where she could cook up just about anything without ever looking at a recipe, and the cool, dark den, with rows and rows of her homemade jellies and jams lining the bookcases. And thinking of her sitting in the living room in the evening, in her low red Naugahyde chair with the matching footstool, when the day’s chores were done, telling me stories, Granddaddy sipping his whiskey and keeping time with the rhythm of her voice with his “Un-hum, that’s right.”

  When my grandfather died, years after Grandmom had already crossed over, he left the house and the remaining forty acres to my mother, his only child. And despite the best efforts of Delvon and me, and a real estate agent, Willette had sold my grandmother’s house out from under me. Probably out of spite, I’d always thought. And now, damn it all, that Lonnie, that snake, had sold it to a hyper New Jersey guy.

  My grandmother’s house, in the hands of a carpetbagger.


  “You all right, white girl?” Shalonda asked.

  How did I explain to Shalonda that the house down that road was the only place I had ever felt safe. “Hey, let’s go take a quick look at the old place.” I tried to force a chipper quality I didn’t feel into my voice. The idea of poking around while Simon was not there to interfere had a lot of immediate appeal.

  “I wouldn’t mind ’cept we need to get on down to the barn. Judge Parker’s habit is to check on Faith, take a quick ride, gossip with Demetrious, and head back for a few more rounds of being a judge at the courthouse.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, letting go of the notion slowly. “I guess I can get Simon to show me around later. I’ve got kind of a date with him.”

  Shalonda made a rude noise deep in her throat, and I turned to stare at her. “Okay, spit it out. What’ve you got to say about Simon? Doesn’t sound much like you like him.”

  “I don’t,” Shalonda said.

  “Why?”

  “Man got me fired, that’s how come.”

  “Fired? From the hospital? For what?”

  “No, I didn’t work for the hospital, I worked for the county mental health department. Simon got me fired ’cause he said I ‘sassed’ him.”

  “Sassed him? Did you?”

  “Hell, yeah, I sassed that man. He came in a patient’s room and started telling me how to do my job, and he ain’t no doctor and he ain’t no social worker, and he ain’t no boss of mine.”

  “And he got you fired for…asserting your rights? This is what, 1950?”

  “He’s a big important white man from up North, and he got my ass fired, okay?”

  We got back into the car and I started driving, mulling over this new information in my tired brain. Let’s see, a big important white man from up North. What was the operative issue there, I wondered. Race? Gender? Up North? I opened my mouth to ask Shalonda, but she said, “I don’t want to talk ’bout it, okay?”

  “But how did he—”

  “Hey, white girl, the old cemetery. You remember?”

  Good change-the-subject move by Shalonda. And hell yeah, I remembered that cemetery. Right there, backed up to my grandmother’s place. Shalonda knew that cemetery had always fascinated me, and I slowed the car down, stopping this time without hitting the brakes. I had been scared silly of the place as a young child, what with the stories everybody told about the Confederate dead buried there that got up at night and prowled around, looking for Yankees to kill, and the man they hung back in the 1880s, supposed to rise out of his grave on full moons and eat little children.

  “Can you believe what the grown-ups used to tell us to keep us out of there?” I said, just a smidgen mad at the recollection of being frightened away from what we later discovered was prime real estate for having youthful indiscretions in.

  There was a high fence, and a locked gate around the graveyard now. Things sure change. When I was a kid, nobody around these parts bothered with a fence unless they were running cows. Even then, you were as likely to find a cattle guard across the road as a gate.

  Just inside the gate was a battered but still legible sign, which I read out loud: “No burial without permission. See Jubal.”

  “Yeah, got to watch them unlawful burials,” Shalonda said. “I know that keeps the high sheriff real busy.”

  “Jubal Williams?” I asked.

  “Yep. Nobody’s been burying anybody here in, oh, I reckon thirty years or more. Not officially anyway. No telling what goes on unofficially in these red hills. But Jubal convinced the county to take care of the place, so he’s the caretaker now. That man’s purely making a profession off part-time jobs,” she said. “Yet, hear him talk, he’s not making enough to live on.”

  “Well, I don’t reckon Hank’ll let him go hungry,” I said.

  “Man’s got his pride,” Shalonda said.

  “Well, looks like he’s doing a good job,” I said. The old place had always had a kind of crumbling gloom about it, what with the Confederate dead and all those rows of tiny stones covered with moss and giving way to the elements, marking the burial sites of the children dead from diverse fevers and the hard lives and hunger of Reconstruction, followed by the more publicized poverty of the Great Depression. But now the old grounds seemed better tended.

  “What about the church?” I asked.

  “Yep, that church’s still down there. Least the building. The county bought out the church and the cemetery last year, now that the church folks meet inside Johnson’s Hardware, what went out of business after that big Lowe’s opened over to Thomasville,” Shalonda said.

  As I gave the Honda the gas, I had to ask. “Is the place still haunted?”

  “White girl, it’s a graveyard, what do you think?”

  I laughed.

  But as we sped away, I had to wonder if those Confederate haunts could ever find any peace.

  chapter 15

  As the cosmic forces had surely decreed that I would not meet any of my set goals for the day, naturally we completely missed the good judge.

  Demetrious was currying a beaut of a black mule when we drove up, and he kissed Shalonda and shook hands with me. But the judge was gone, he said, and then explained that Judge Parker had been running behind because of an emergency hearing—I figured that was Dan’s—so he’d just had time to feed Faith a few carrots, chat a spell, and hightail it back to town.

  Well, damn.

  “Since you’re here, you might as well take a look around,” Shalonda said.

  “Would you like to take Faith for a little ride, since the judge didn’t get to?” Demetrious asked. “I’d go with you, but I’ve got a lot of work still to do with BB, getting him ready for those blue ribbons at Mule Day.”

  “Some other time,” I said. “It’s a nice offer, really, but I left Patti Lea with Willette, and I’ve got a ton of things to do, and—”

  “Sure,” Demetrious said, and I had the notion he was relieved.

  So, after a quick spin around the barn and a promise to come back and see their house, poof, back into my little Honda car we piled, and I thought, well, hell, that was a waste of time.

  Going out the same way we’d come in, I jammed on the brakes again by the live oak that marked the turn to Grandmom’s house.

  “You game?” I asked. “I mean, now that we’re not hurrying to catch the judge?”

  Shalonda was definitely up for the trip down memory lane, notrespassing sign or not. I mean, after all, what’s a little transgression like trespassing between friends? Naturally, the gate was locked, and it seemed easier just to park the car and climb over that gate rather than bust the lock so we could drive in.

  Okay, yeah, this was sort of like playing hooky. But then Patti Lea was probably still enjoying the peace and quiet of sitting in the hospital room, not having to chat a bit with her mother-in-law or tote out rank garbage.

  Walking down that shaded, narrow road, I might have gotten all weepy and weird about being on the way to my grandmother’s house, but I was distracted by a loud mechanical noise that roared up from the other side of the road.

  Turning toward the noise, I saw a hint of a trail and a woman with a big head of blond hair riding on an ATV. Shalonda said a very loud “oh, shit,” and before I could ask her anything, I heard the big-haired woman yelling over the sound of her big, noisy motorized tricycle. She was yelling racial slurs aimed at Shalonda.

  I jerked back around to Shalonda, whose face was turning an unbecoming shade of purple.

  “That damn Yankee woman with her trash mouth, I can’t believe Lonnie married her,” Shalonda said. And she bent over and picked up a big chunk of a fallen limb. “You better get you a stick,” she said. “A big one.”

  While I was trying to register exactly what Shalonda could possibly mean by that, a pack of dogs came howling toward us from around the loud woman and her louder ATV. And thrashing through the brush, right directly at me, the innocent bystander on a quest to visit my grandmother’s home, were t
wo truly ugly, mean-looking curs.

  And me without a dog cookie.

  chapter 16

  If a swanky Miami trial attorney had come at me with a scurrilous motion for anything, even disbarment, I would have known precisely what counterattack to make.

  If any of my cowboy law partners had come at me with anything even vaguely resembling sexual harassment, I would have known precisely where to kick.

  But there I was, on a dirt road, utterly clueless as to the best evasive action to take in the face of two big, mean dogs.

  As I scrambled for my own big stick, the alpha dog—a huge pit bull–looking animal—grabbed my left pant leg with such ferocity that I tumbled down into the dirt. Luckily, what Pit Bull Dog had in its mouth was my blue jeans and not skin, but I saw another cur advancing, teeth bared. As I tried to pull free and roll away, I saw I was aiming myself right at a big patch of poison ivy on the side of the road.

  Trapped between a pit bull and poison ivy, another dog advancing. There was, of course, in all of this, the perfect analogy to modern litigation with Miami attorneys, but I was too busy tussling around with the mad dog to work out the nuances.

  Shalonda, who’d been forward enough in her thinking to have already armed herself, thumped Pit Bull on the head with her stick, and then, for good measure, thunked the beta-dog cur. Sensing, no doubt, a will much greater than their own, the dogs yipped, spun, and ran off.

  Shalonda helped me to my feet. “You all right there, Lilly Belle?”

  All right being a relative term, I decided to go with the definition that loosely translated into doesn’t need CPR or blood transfusions, and I said I was.

  The mean-mouthed woman, apparently afraid we might have missed the point of her rage toward us, shouted out, “You black whore, get your ass out of here.”

  But proving herself a coward, the woman called in the dogs and they all ran away.

  “Colleen, Lonnie’s wife,” Shalonda said to me, as if introductions could smooth over the anger. Her face was still purple. “You sure you all right?” she asked me again.