At the Corner of Love and Heartache

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  Ricky Dale took hold of Beau, who wanted to sniff the cat. Munro pressed up close to Willie Lee, who said hello to the cat and then showed the cat to Munro. The cat seemed too sick to be worried about the dogs. He just lay in Willie Lee’s arms. Ricky Dale said it hadn’t eaten in two days.

  Corrine watched her cousin pet the animal. Willie Lee’s eyes looked closed, but she wasn’t certain. She looked carefully to see if he glowed, but the sun was very bright, and she thought it might just be the sun shining on him.

  “Are you done, Willie Lee?” Ricky Dale asked after what seemed a long time, and Willie Lee was still petting the cat.

  “O-kay,” Willie Lee said, looking upward with a smile. “He is a nice cat.”

  “Did you make him better?” Ricky Dale asked.

  “May-be.” Willie Lee shrugged.

  Ricky Dale took the cat back inside, and then they went over to Mr. Winston’s to see the horses. Ricky Dale led the way on a path that cut through yards. Corrine had a daring feeling, as if she were entering a new part of her life, beginning to learn about the neighborhood, where she had lived for over two years and yet had not before ventured beyond her aunt’s and Mr. Tate’s houses.

  Taking hold of Willie Lee’s hand, she told Ricky Dale to take the other, and they began to run, lifting Willie Lee, who giggled in delight, off the ground. They ran until they fell, all at once in a heap and laughing, then got up, lifted Willie Lee, and ran again.

  When her gaze lit on the horses, Corrine hurried on ahead of the boys, forgetting about Willie Lee in a rare moment of rapture. The mare came slowly forward, put down her nose, and Corrine exchanged breaths with her.

  The recent rain had caused the three-sided stall to be overly wet. Totally disgusting to Corrine, who did not like messy, and she would not have had anything to do with it, but Ricky Dale was her friend. Loyalty, which Corrine possessed in abundance, compelled her to help.

  They worked side by side, shoveling the old urine-and rain-soaked shavings and manure into a wheel-barrow, which Ricky Dale, the biceps of his skinny arms bulging, would then push outside to a compost pile. He was thorough and intent on pleasing his employer, whom he said was very particular about her horses having a clean stall with fresh pine shavings. Corrine wanted to please both the horses and her innate desire for neatness.

  Just then, hearing Willie Lee’s laugh, she looked up to see him atop the mare. Her heart leaped in her throat. Throwing down her manure rake, she hurried forward, but Ricky Dale grabbed her arm.

  “He’s okay. Let him be. Don’t scare the mare.”

  She held her breath as she watched. If anything happened to Willie Lee, Aunt Marilee would die. Corrine was supposed to look out for him. She would die, too, if anything happened to him.

  Her eyes fastened on to Willie Lee, she watched him be carried around by the mare, who walked in a lazy manner, while Willie Lee gripped her mane and grinned happily. The filly, prancing, followed at the mare’s hip.

  Willie Lee looked over and saw them. “Look at me,” he said, proud as could be.

  Winston, inside at the kitchen sink, glanced out the window and saw the small boy atop the big paint mare. “I thought you said that mare was barely green broke,” he said to his niece, who was at the table, painting her fingernails.

  “She is. She’s only been ridden maybe twice.”

  “Well, it’s three times now.” Winston watched Willie Lee in the act of getting the mare to move over beside the rail fence, while Corrine climbed up to get on behind him.

  “Oh my god! She’ll kill them,” said Leanne, who had come to peer beside him. “I told Ricky Dale…I told him not to try to ride her.”

  “Well, apparently no one told Willie Lee,” Winston said. Seeing the stricken expression on his niece’s face, he added, “Honey, there ain’t nothin’ you can do but trust God right this minute. And it looks like it’s all okay,” he added, returning his gaze to the corral and watching the two figures, the small boy and the taller girl, be carried around by the big horse in a perfectly gentle manner. He was not so amazed as Leanne, who, he noticed, stood there with a baffled expression, still carefully holding her fingernails out, as if doing some sort of Chinese Kung Fu stance. He was older and had seen his dead wife reappear, so he didn’t think anything could surprise him.

  “That mare might want to throw you off,” he told her, “but she knows those are kids. She’ll take care of ’em. Kids and animals are closer together. They’re closer to the Lord in their innocence.”

  Still watching the children in the sunlight, he remembered back in time to his own children, who had ridden in that same corral. “Not much prettier than kids and horses, is there?” he said.

  He didn’t think Leanne heard him, though, as she was through the back door before he finished. He watched her stride toward the corral, checking her pace as she neared, mindful of not scaring the mare.

  “Corrine!” Aunt Marilee called. “Telephone for you. It’s Ricky Dale.” She raised an amused eyebrow.

  Corrine took the telephone. “Hello.” She had never spoken to a friend on the phone. And Ricky Dale was a boy.

  “I wanted to tell you that my grama just called and said that her ol’ cat ate half a can of food tonight. Grama’s real excited.”

  “Well, good.” She breathed easier because her aunt Marilee moved away.

  “Maybe it will live.”

  “Maybe. I hope so,” she added, wanting to let him know that she hoped the best for his grandmother and her cat.

  “Well, guess that’s it. Tell Willie Lee.”

  “Okay.”

  “See you tomorrow at school. Want to do the horses with me again?”

  “Oh, yes. If I can.”

  They said goodbye, and Corrine happily replaced the receiver.

  When Aunt Marilee tucked them into bed, Willie Lee said, “I ride-ed a horse to-day.”

  Corrine held her breath. Thus far, in telling the story of his ride, Willie Lee had not slipped up and revealed that they had ridden without permission, and that Leanne Overton had forbidden them to ride anymore. Likely her aunt would worry and not let them go to the corral.

  “Yes, you did,” her aunt said with a smile and kissed Willie Lee.

  “I guess I can-not fly, but I can ride a horse.”

  “That’s right, honey. A boy cannot fly, but a boy can ride a horse.”

  Thankfully Willie Lee just said, “I am glad I am a boy,” and turned over.

  Aunt Marilee said she was glad Willie Lee was her boy, kissed him, and then came over to hear Corrine’s prayers. She said, tucking the covers around Corrine, “A girl can ride, too.”

  Corrine nodded, careful not to say anything. That was the best way not to slip up with a wrong word.

  Her aunt turned out the light and left the room. Cor-rine listened to her aunt’s footsteps go away into the kitchen, then she whispered a fresh caution to Willie Lee not to talk a bunch about riding the horse. “Aunt Marilee won’t let us go over there if she finds out we rode the mare without askin’.”

  After a minute Willie Lee whispered back, “I rid-ed, Cor-rine, just like a nor-mal boy.”

  Corrine blinked and knotted her hand in the covers. “You sure did. You were good, too.”

  A rage took hold deep inside of her. People thought because Willie Lee was a little backward that he couldn’t understand that they made fun of him. That he didn’t hurt like everyone else. Anytime Willie Lee suffered, she did, too, because of her immense desire to protect him and her frustration at not being able to do so. She wanted to beat up the entire mean world.

  Nineteen

  Family ties…

  Moving out of the bedroom was not too hard. Presuming he could leave his clothes in the closet, he took himself off to sleep in the third bedroom down the hall. The bed was old and lumpy but would suffice. His mother brought him the Pledge and a dust rag, both of which he used on the nightstand, leaving everything else untouched.

  Tate’s definite dilemma
, however, was how to keep Marilee away from his house and from seeing the work being done. He didn’t want her to see anything until it was finished. He wanted it to be a great surprise. What if she decided to repeat her fanciful effort of bringing him morning coffee?

  There was nothing else to do but head off all possibility of her coming to him by going to her first. Just before daybreak, he went hotfooting it across the backyards, bearing two bags from Juice’s bakery at the IGA, where he had gotten the best French roast coffee and sweet rolls.

  He crept in the back door and was instantly met by Munro, who blocked his way into the dimly lit kitchen. “It’s me, Munro.”

  The dog wagged his stub of a tail.

  Tate got Marilee’s favorite mug and one for himself from the cabinet, and emptied the steaming contents of the foam cups into them. He arranged the sweet rolls on two plates.

  Seeing Munro sitting there, gazing up at him, Tate broke off a bit from one roll and gave it to the dog.

  He left one plate of sweet rolls on the table for the kids, put the other on a tray, along with the coffee, and headed through to Marilee’s room. Outside it was growing lighter at a rapid rate. There was enough light coming in the windows for him to clearly see Marilee’s tousled dark head of hair on her pale pillow. She did a little wuffling snore.

  Standing there, gazing down at her creamy cheek, Tate’s heart swelled with so much feeling as to bring a lump to his throat and cause him to forget himself and begin to sit on the side of the bed.

  Just in time, he froze in midsit, as he remembered that Marilee didn’t much care for mornings. He feared she would get aggravated at him for waking her.

  Looking around, he quickly reviewed his options, which seemed few. Simply leaving his offerings might not keep her away from his house.

  He decided to sit in the small chair and wait a few minutes. Maybe he would be lucky, and she would wake up on her own, he thought. He took a chance to edge the tray onto the table underneath the window, the tabletop already crowded with photographs, fancy glass bottles, books, and other odds and ends. He just about knocked over a bottle but caught it before it clattered.

  Setting the bottle on the floor seemed the best choice.

  Marilee snored loudly, and he practically jumped.

  He had to move some clothes draped on the chair in order to sit. He looked over the room, seeing the dresser top crowded with paraphernalia. Clothes, on hangers and off, hung over the closet door, and shoes were scattered about.

  It was instructive, looking over her bedroom. He noted that rose was a repeated color. He would have to tell that to Honey Moon.

  He was a neat person about clothes. He liked to put all his shirts of one color together in the closet. His mother had shaken her head at this. He said it was easier to get dressed with his clothes in such order. He wondered what Marilee would think of this habit. Separate closets appeared a must, another thing to mention to Honey Moon.

  This room was all woman. It was frilly. It even smelled like a woman.

  He liked the smell.

  His gaze returned to Marilee. She was doing that little wuffling sound again.

  He leaned back in the little chair, carefully, because it seemed dainty and perhaps could collapse under his weight. He watched the steam spiral up from the cups in the fresh light falling through the open window blinds.

  Tate did not realize he had fallen asleep until he opened his eyes and saw three pairs of eyes staring at him.

  “Good mornin’, Tate,” Marilee said, a slow, sultry smile playing across her lips. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, she sipped coffee and ate a sweet roll.

  “Mister Tate, you snore.” Willie Lee was peering right at Tate’s nose.

  “So does your mother.” He took up his coffee, which was no longer steaming, rose and went around the bed and climbed in, positioning himself against the propped up pillow.

  Marilee and Corrine were staring at him as if he were some apparition.

  “I do not snore,” Marilee said.

  “Yes, you do, and sweetly, too.”

  “You snore a little bit, Aunt Marilee,” Corrine said, and then, apparently deciding retreat was in order, headed for the door, saying, “I’m goin’ to get us some milk, Willie Lee.”

  They all ate together in the bed.

  “I can get used to this,” Tate said happily.

  Marilee gazed at him, as if wondering if he told the truth.

  Tate ushered the children out the door to his BMW, leaving Marilee gathering her purse, keys and tote, as usual.

  “Look, can you kids keep a secret?”

  Corrine nodded, and Willie Lee said, “Mun-ro will, too.”

  “Okay. I need your help. I’m havin’ a bunch of work done over at my house as a surprise for Marilee, for her wedding present. I don’t want her to see any of it until it’s done. Now, I need you two to either head her off or call me, if you find out she’s about to come over to my house. Just for the next couple of weeks or so. Do you think you can help me out here?”

  Corrine, bottom lip caught between her teeth, nodded eagerly, her dark eyes holding a rare sparkle.

  “I will try, Mister Tate,” Willie Lee said in an elaborate whisper.

  “How about you just callin’ me Tate? Would that be all right with you?” This did not seem quite right, but it was all he could think of.

  The boy blinked his eyes behind his thick glasses. “Yes. That is all right.”

  Then, as they got into the car and Marilee was joining them, Willie Lee asked from the back seat, “Ta-ate, you are going to marry my mother, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “But you will not be my father.”

  “No, son. Stuart is your father.” Tate looked at Willie Lee in the rearview mirror, then glanced at Marilee. He felt on uncertain ground.

  “Tate will be like your father, though, honey,” Marilee said. “You will have two fathers. Why don’t you call Mr. Tate Pa?” She seemed quite happy, as if having been very clever to think of this.

  Tate wasn’t certain he liked the sound of Pa. It seemed like that was a name for an old man.

  Corrine piped up to ask, “What am I going to call you?”

  What indeed?

  “Why don’t you call him Pa, too?” Marilee suggested. She was definitely pleased.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Corrine’s mouth moving, practicing the word. They were all going to sound like a family from the backwoods addressing their grandfather.

  “How about Papa Tate,” he said. It was marginally ally better, somehow. As he repeated it to himself, he found it had a certain ring to it, rather reminiscent of Papa Hemingway.

  The discussion of the morning of what to call Tate got Marilee to thinking. She was Willie Lee’s mother, but aunt to Corrine. Tate would be Willie Lee’s stepfather but Corrine’s…what? Stepuncle? Neither title carried any legal responsibilities.

  Corrine, she thought, was like a little raft, adrift, having neither father nor mother. Certainly Marilee had no legal standing at all. This concern had passed across her mind so many times since the day she had brought Corrine home from Anita’s. Not having a solid idea of how to cope with the fact, she kept putting off doing anything at all.

  In an instant her mind had drawn up the distressing picture of having to bar the front door of the bungalow, holding off state officials with chiseled faces, but knowing she was doomed because the state, total strangers, had more rights than she did. The next instant, she saw the bungalow empty, lifeless, because she had moved away to Tate’s big house and Corrine had been taken away.

  The hard facts remained, as true today as the day Anita had given her Corrine’s care—Anita could come at any time and take Corrine away, or they could be faced with a health catastrophe, because Corrine, not being Marilee’s legal daughter, was not covered under Marilee’s health insurance, and Anita did not have any health insurance at all.

  When Marilee married Tate, likely she would go under his he
alth insurance policy, as his wife, but this left Corrine and Willie Lee, no legal relations at all, out, drifting on their little raft.

  Something had to be done.

  “No, I won’t accept your resignation.”

  Tate’s loud voice jerked Marilee out of her troubling thoughts. She looked over to see him standing in the doorway of his office and shaking a paper at Charlotte, who strode to her desk.

  “You can quit,” he said, “but I won’t accept it.”

  Marilee had never heard Tate yell. She had heard him annoyed with Charlotte and arguing with her, but never yelling.

  Tate disappeared back into his office. There came a somewhat familiar clanging sound. He had kicked his trash can. Tate did not yell, until now, and he did not slam doors, but he had been known to kick his trash can.

  Marilee’s gaze swung over to Charlotte, sitting at her desk in the bright light falling through the plate-glass window.

  Charlotte quitting? She had been with the Voice longer than any of them, for fifteen years, since she finished junior college and decided she liked working at the paper more than anything else and would not go on to higher education.

  Marilee pushed up from her chair and hurried forward to her friend’s desk. “You aren’t quitting the paper?”

  “Yes.” Charlotte’s mouth was an implacable line. “I’m going to head Molly Hayes’s office. She’s expanding her tax service.”

  “Charlotte.” She stared at her friend, who finally raised her eyes. They were red-rimmed, Marilee saw. “Oh, Charlotte, don’t do this.”

  “I have to,” Charlotte said in a faint voice.

  “No,” Marilee said, quite suddenly angry. “You choose to.”

  Just then, as she walked away, she saw Sandy turning from the doorway of his glass cubicle. He was slumped as if someone had shot him.

  They went to lunch at the Main Street Café.

  “I’m not all that hungry,” Tate said, as they slipped into one of the newly covered green vinyl booths.

  Fayrene Gardner, with the passion of new ownership, was updating the café, and green was her favorite color. She had gone with a breezy and soothing fern-leaf-sprigged paper for the walls.