“Put that away,” she says to Cricket. “Now let’s have a nice dinner, okay?”
Dinner runs smoothly except for Cricket pushing her food around her plate. One little insect, and she can’t enjoy the meal it took Kitty B. two days to prepare. Honestly.
The Benningtons compliment Kitty B. on the food, and she is delighted when they go back for second helpings. After she serves the pecan pie, everyone clears out pretty quickly and Kitty B. is left to do the dishes by herself. Her daughters are so used to her running the kitchen that they don’t seem to give the sink full of dishes a second thought, and she’s not about to say anything to them. She’d just as soon do them herself than have Cricket grading her washing technique or the insides of her china cabinet.
Just as she clears the pecan pie plates, LeMar stumbles down the stairs in his boxers and his T-shirt.
“Kitty B.,” he calls. “I’m telling you I need some ibuprofen. Not some of this decrepit aspirin from Tidemann.”
“Well, why don’t you go and get some, LeMar? I’ve got an entire holiday dinner to clean up after and then I’ve got to go see about Hilda.”
He walks into the dining room clutching his neck. She looks up from the pile of teacups she’s stacking to see his eyes squinting at her.
“You are going to be the death of me,” he says. Then he turns and storms back up the stairs.
Kitty B. lets out a deep sigh. She drops the china on the table, grabs her keys, and drives the twenty miles into town to buy some packets of ibuprofen from the only place open on Thanksgiving Day—the Exxon station. Then she drives back home, walks up the stairs, and puts them on his bedside table with a glass of water.
“I’m going to Hilda’s,” she says. “Maybe you’ll feel better with me out of the house, since I am the one responsible for all of your misery.”
She packs up some leftovers and heads toward town. She’s so mad at LeMar she can’t see straight. As she speeds down the dirt road, the small brown oak leaves swirling behind her, she must admit that she’s been mad at him for over twenty-five years now.
~ DECEMBER 21, 1979 ~
LeMar and Kitty B. waltzed to the big band at the Sally Swine Christmas party at the Azalea Club outside of Bluffton. Kitty B. had just stopped nursing Baby Roberta—no one nursed babies past a couple of months back then—but her breasts still ached, especially at night, and they pounded when LeMar pulled her close before he dipped her. A teenage girl from the other side of the island was watching Cricket and the baby, and Kitty B. was anxious to get home to see about them. However, LeMar had recently been promoted to regional manager of several stores in the Lowcountry, and they needed to stay a good while at the party and visit with the executives and their wives.
“Sing for us, LeMar,” Mr. Bouton asked. He was the president of the Sally Swine Company, and LeMar wouldn’t dare turn him down. Not that LeMar ever minded having a turn in the spotlight. He went over and whispered to the pianist, and then he launched into a solo of “O Holy Night ”
They didn’t pull into Cottage Hill until around midnight that evening. The babysitter was snoring on the couch in front of the television, and Cricket was asleep, curled up in a ball in the center of her bed with all of the covers kicked off.
When Kitty B. rounded the corner into the baby’s room, she thought Baby Roberta was sleeping soundly on her belly, and she didn’t want to disturb her. She leaned in close and gently touched her diaper to see if it needed changing.
As she patted the infant’s backside she noticed that her chest was not rising and falling. Then she felt her plump little legs and they were cool to the touch. She quickly turned her over and pulled her to her chest. She patted her baby’s back over and over as LeMar stood in the doorway and cocked his head to the side.
“Something’s wrong,” Kitty B. screamed. “The baby’s cold! I can’t tell if she’s breathing.”
LeMar grabbed the infant out of her hands. “What? My word, Kitty B.! What did you do?”
She ran downstairs to the telephone and called the hospital and then Angus and when she went back up, LeMar had barricaded the door. She could hear his wails from inside.
“An ambulance is on the way!” she yelled as she pounded on the door. “Let me in, LeMar! Let me in!”
“No!” he wailed from behind the thick door. “I will not!”
Kitty B. fell to her knees, grabbed her aching chest, and prayed, “Lord, help us!” just as a sleepy-eyed, six-year-old Cricket stumbled out of her room.
The weeks and months that followed were a blur. Cricket couldn’t understand what had happened to her baby sister, and Kitty B. couldn’t bring herself to voice the lies the elderly ladies in the church had told her. “One of God’s sweet angels took her in the night.”
No, she thought. It was something awful that stole her away. Something darker than the pitch-black fields on the country road.
LeMar wept silently for weeks on end as Kitty B. tried to comfort Cricket and warmed up the stacks of casseroles that the ladies of Jasper kept bringing over.
He wouldn’t look at Baby Roberta’s room. He couldn’t even walk by it. And when the gals came over to help her pack up the clothes and the baby blankets, he drove away from the house and didn’t return for two weeks.
Mr. Bouton from Sally Swine called and his parents called and Cricket asked, “Where’s Daddy?”
“On a trip,” Kitty B. said. “He’ll be back soon.”
“Has an angel taken him away?” Cricket asked.
It was Cousin Willy and Angus who brought LeMar back. They went to New York and found him sitting out in front of the Metropolitan Opera House in the same clothes he left in.
When he came back, Kitty B. tried everything she could to make him feel better and keep her family intact. She cooked his favorite foods and rubbed his back as he stared into space and listened to Wozzeck by Berg over and over.
Her parents gave them the house at Cottage Hill, and they sent them money each month until LeMar could get himself together.
When Katie Rae was born a few years later, he did seem better, and he even went back to work for several years. He wept quite often during Katie Rae’s infancy, and he checked on her several times during the night. Then somewhere along the way his tears turned into rants, and they were always directed at Kitty B.
He blamed her. He blamed her for Baby Roberta’s death, but she can’t for the life of her understand why.
Kitty B. pulls up to Hilda’s. She has some index cards so she can write her friend a sweet note. Something like, “Thinking of you on Thanksgiving.”
However, when her pen hits the card, she can’t help but write down the thoughts that have been bubbling up inside of her for decades now.
Sometimes I look around and wonder how my life got to be this way, Hilda. I married a difficult man. I live in my parents’ old summer cottage and eke by on their inheritance. I’m overweight. I drive a crappy car. I have children who don’t pay me a lick of respect.
But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is how life just seems to happen to me, you know? It’s like I have no control over it. I couldn’t stop the tragedy twenty-seven years ago, and I can’t stop the misery today. All I seem to know how to do is just stand here stunned as life thrusts itself on me.
Take it. That’s all I’ve ever done. And I’m sick of taking it.
Love, Kitty B.
She puts the letter through the mail slot and rings the doorbell. “I’ve got a nice Thanksgiving dinner for you, Hilda. I’m going to run back home to my Aunt Ruby’s for a few minutes so you’ll have plenty of time to come out here and pick it up and enjoy it. Be back in an hour. I’m not going to leave you alone tonight.”
Kitty B. drives around town several times to give Hilda a chance to discreetly get the food. Aunt Ruby moved out to the retirement home on Seabrook a few weeks ago, but Hilda doesn’t know that. As she passes the Baptist church, she sees all of the wedding guests filing out of their cars and into the sa
nctuary. Ray and Sylvia are on the church steps manning the guest book, and Cousin Willy stands by Angus, who is pacing in the parking lot. This is the second time Willy will serve as his best man.
Oh, Hilda, Kitty B. thinks. You do know what I mean. You have to take this union, and you don’t want to. I don’t blame you for putting up a fight. In fact, I kind of respect you for it. It’s more than I ever would have had the guts to do.
She thinks about the letter she wrote, and she wonders if Hilda is reading it right now. She can’t help herself from driving back out of town and toward Cottage Island, thinking of LeMar all the way.
When she pulls up in front of the house, LeMar is sitting on the rocking chair with a heaping plate of leftovers and a Co-Cola.
“Back already?” he says as he stares beyond her at his rosebush.
“No,” she says. “I’m not back, but I have something to say to you.”
He winces and grabs his neck, but he does not look her in the eye. She takes the plate out of his hands and dumps the food over the porch railing and into the azalea bushes where the dogs come running up to sample it. She leans against the rail right in front of him and stares him down until he is forced to look up.
“LeMar,” she says. “Maybe you will never go back to work. And I don’t expect you to touch me or hug me or share a bed with me. I don’t even expect you to ever feel good again. To ever wake up and say, ‘I’m feeling good today.’ That’s a decision you’ve made. To feel awful all the time. And I don’t expect that to change.”
She looks down at the wagging tails in the azalea bushes and catches her breath. “But I do expect you to treat me with decency. To treat me like a human being. Not your cook or the face you yell at when you’re frustrated or the Grim Reaper who has come to destroy you.
“You can treat me decently, and it’s not too much to ask. And I’m here to tell you this today: If you can’t, then I’m leaving. I’ll move in with Sis or Ray, and you can take care of your own self. You can fix your own food and listen to your own whining and change your own bed sheets. You hear me?”
He grabs his Co-Cola and takes a sip. Then he cocks his head and stares back at her.
“I’m not bluffing,” she says. “You try me.” Then she turns back toward the car.
When Kitty B. arrives back at Hilda’s, she sees that the food is gone. She walks up to the piazza and rings the doorbell. “I’m just going to sit here on the piazza and study some cake recipes,” she calls.
She sits down on the bench and just as she’s arranging her cooking magazines, the light flips on above her.
“Thanks, Hilda,” she says with a smile. “Glad to see you’re still moving around up there.”
Kitty B. can’t remember when she’s felt so at peace. She’s not scared and she’s not anxious and she’s not even hungry like she usually is after a confrontation. She means what she said to LeMar, and it’s up to him whether or not to heed her words. Now she breathes the soft air in and out again before letting out a satisfied sigh. She stays this way on Hilda’s porch until midnight, studying the cake recipes and clipping her favorites to try for Katie Rae’s wedding.
TWENTY-ONE
Sis
“Well, your baby girl’s wedding is upon us.” Sis holds up a piece of wire and Kitty B. snaps it with the pliers. It’s the Saturday after Christmas, and the gals are decorating the flying-purple-people-eater cathedral.
“I know,” Kitty B. says.
Ray paces back and forth, examining the poinsettia arrangements, then goes to her pocketbook and writes something in her notebook. Sis looks at Kitty B. and rolls her eyes. Then she whispers, “Ray can’t seem to focus.”
“I know,” Kitty B. whispers back. “I wish Hilda were here. She’d keep her on task.”
“It was twelve weeks last Sunday.” Sis shakes her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe she hasn’t let us in to see her for that long.”
“Or at least called us so we could hear her voice.” Kitty B. holds up the pliers and snips another piece to go around a magnolia leaf Christmas wreath.
Sis can see that Ray’s mind is on Priscilla’s big day. She keeps writing in that blasted “ideas” notebook as if she’s critiquing Katie Rae’s wedding before it even happens.
Hilda told Sis that Ray is secretly growing gardenias behind the screen of bamboo in her backyard, and Sis has half a mind to sneak over there and see for herself. Who knows what other special touches she’s been concealing?
~ APRIL 5, 2004 ~
Sis and Hilda dropped by Ray’s one afternoon to see if they could borrow a few more wine glasses for Little Hilda’s engagement party. Ray was at Sylvia’s getting her hair done, so Justin led them to the shed next to the garage and said, “Try in here.”
There were boxes and boxes of china plates and wine glasses and fluted champagne glasses stacked to the ceiling that read, “Pris” on them, and they knew she must have purchased them somewhere along the way and was saving them for her daughter’s wedding.
“Think you should ask Ray if we could use some of those?” Sis asked. They were low on champagne glasses too. It was going to cost a fortune to rent them from the party store in Charleston, and Ray knew it.
“No.” Hilda crossed her thin arms and crinkled her nose. “She would have offered if she’d wanted to. That crafty little hoarder.”
On the walk back, Hilda lit a Virginia Slim and said, “Ever since Ray moved to Jasper, she’s been looking for an angle to trump everyone else, and I can’t say I’m all that surprised she’s been withholding that stuff.”
“Really?” Sis’s eyes grew wide. “I am. She’s the one who pulls us all together to make these things happen.”
“No doubt.” Hilda exhaled and walked through the cloud of smoke before her. “Ray does roll up her sleeves on behalf of all of us. That’s true, Sis. But she’s always holding a little something back for herself.”
Sis considered the notion. Ray seemed like a tireless worker to her. Just the day before she was ironing all of the linens for the engagement party. “I don’t know if I believe that, Hilda.”
“I’m not saying she doesn’t work hard. I’ve never seen someone polish silver the way she does or iron a linen tablecloth.” Then Hilda leaned in and said quietly as they rounded the corner of Third and Rantowles, “It makes me wonder just what she did growing up. That kind of thing comes from experience, you know?”
“What do you mean?” Sis asked.
“I just mean it’s important to Ray to trump everyone else—in the etiquette department, in the happy marriage department and most importantly, in the offspring wedding department. She’s got something to prove. Think about it.”
Sis has thought about it. She knows Ray grew up in the Pringle home on South Battery, but they all kind of have the feeling that she actually worked there instead of residing there as a member of the family.
Of course after the beach house scene last September, she’s not going to dare bring it up. But what she wants to say to Ray is, “Do you think that matters to us? ’Cause it doesn’t.”
Now Ray marches down the purple carpet in the center aisle and checks the placement of the four trees of vibrant red poinsettias that all but cover the bandstand and the acrylic altar. “All I can say is, thank the good Lord this is a Christmas wedding. A whole lot of poinsettias and greenery can upgrade even the tackiest of places.”
“Hush, Ray,” Sis says. She looks around to make sure the Benningtons haven’t entered the sanctuary.
“Oh come on.” Ray swats her hand at Sis. “It’s the truth.” She walks over to one of the magnolia leaf wreaths they made last night at her house and readjusts its thick red velvet bow. “Let’s go to the conference room to see how the decor for the rehearsal dinner is coming, gals.”
“No,” Kitty B. holds her hands up. “You know the rehearsal dinner is out of our hands, Ray. Let’s just let it go.”
“But I hear they have M&M’s that say ‘Katie Ray and Marshall’ on them.�
� Ray chuckles. “Don’t you think we should drop those in the sink and say it was an accident?”
“What’s got into you, Ray?” Sis puts her hand on her hip. “Lack of taste is not a character flaw. Even you should know that.”
“You’re right.” Ray picks up an extra velvet bow and ties floral wire around it. “I’m just so wound up about Priscilla and Donovan.” She attaches the bow to the center of Roscoe’s podium. “Donovan was going to propose today during a cruise along the Annapolis harbor, and they’ll fly into Charleston tomorrow morning just in time to make the wedding.”
“We’re very excited for you,” Kitty B. says.
Sis nods and adds, “But we need to fry one fish at a time, and the fish of the day is Katie Rae.”
Ray checks her cell phone for messages and excuses herself for a moment. When she returns, she outlines the altar with a fresh garland she made out of pine needles and says to Kitty B., “Shawna invited me in to see the rehearsal dinner set-up when I went to the bathroom.”
Sis scoffs. “Ray! Have you not heard one word I’ve said this afternoon?”
Kitty B. walks over and says. “How bad?”
“It’s worse than dyed green carnations.”
“Now how can that be?” Kitty B. whispers.
“Artificial.” Ray nods her chin, leans over a little closer and adds, “White artificial roses with dewdrops.”
The microphone must be on because her voice echoes throughout the sanctuary, and all they can hear is the disapproving tone of the words “dewdrops, dewdrops.”
“Shh,” Sis says. “Y’all are terrible.” She imagines that the sound system pipes into every room in the entire facility, including the conference room where poor Shawna Bennington is frantically setting up. Heck, for all Sis knows the videographer could be catching Ray on tape!
Ray just swats Sis away. She doesn’t even seem to care. She’s on such a high about Priscilla’s engagement that she’s not even thinking straight. Sis has never seen her unconcerned about how she appears, even to folks like the Benningtons.
The Wedding Machine Page 22
