At the Corner of Love and Heartache

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  “Stuart is dying,” Marilee said.

  “What?” said Tate, feeling hit out of left field.

  “What?” said Charlotte, clearly feeling the same. Apparently her crying was not about the same thing that Marilee’s was.

  “Stuart told me last night that he is dying.” She began tearing up and took deep breaths. “I was so thoughtless in how I responded, and then I came in here and looked at Charlotte, and thought about her leaving…” She looked down at the tissue in her hand and began tearing it to pieces. “I haven’t done well in either circumstance. I haven’t said straight to Charlotte that I don’t want her to leave.”

  She leaned toward Charlotte. “I haven’t been there for you. I’m so sorry, Charlotte. I have been so caught up in my own life. I’ve been racin’ around, trying to avoid so many feelings and doubts, that I simply couldn’t be there for you. I haven’t been there for you to talk things over, like a friend does for another. I should have been willing to step in and speak to you about this situation with Sandy and your mother, and to say that I understand—but you do need to open your mind to other options,” she added, more like the normal Marilee.

  “I have not seen any of this. I have just felt like I had more than I could handle, dealing with myself,” she went on. Her shoulders and her tone dropped, and she pressed the shredded tissue to her breast. “And then last night Stuart told me about…his situation, and I saw how he needed me, and I was so awful to him. I was angry at him for needing me.”

  She began to tear up again as she turned to Tate. “Oh, Tate, we have to find him.”

  Tate’s mind was still trying to catch up to all she had been saying. This was one of those horrible times in life when reality seemed totally unreal.

  “Stuart told you he is dying?” Maybe he had misunderstood.

  But Marilee nodded. “Yes.” She swallowed and breathed deeply. “He told me that he has cancer of a fast and consuming variety, nontreatable. He probably has only a couple more months. That’s why he came here. Because he has nowhere else to go, and he doesn’t want to be alone.”

  It was sinking into Tate with the full force of a sledgehammer. All the pieces being pounded into place.

  He watched Marilee’s magnificent struggle to keep from sobbing. “He wants me to be there for him,” she said, reaching over and squeezing Charlotte’s hand. “Like Charlotte is for her mother.”

  A cold shiver of understanding went down Tate’s back.

  Then Marilee added, her voice rising, “But now he’s gone off, and I can’t let him leave like that. I have to speak to him.”

  “Stuart’s gone off?” His mind was now separating and dissecting the matter.

  “Yes. I called the Goodnight earlier, and they said he had checked out. He’s just run off again, like he always does.”

  Tate was somewhat glad to see her flash of anger.

  “We have to find him, Tate. We have to.”

  Tate and Charlotte looked at each other in a moment of coming together as one mind, knowing what must be done.

  “We’ll find him, Marilee.” Then, to Charlotte, he said, “He was drivin’ a Hertz rental car. You take that end, and I’ll make some calls.”

  Instantly Charlotte was on her feet and striding out the door on her long, purposeful legs.

  Tate went to his desk and took up the phone, punching in the numbers for the sheriff’s office. He looked over at Marilee.

  “We’ll find him,” he said, thinking about how he had wanted to beat out the guy with all his new appliances, and all the time the guy was dying. Maybe. Maybe the guy was working another angle. Tate didn’t think he should overlook that possibility until he knew for sure.

  Marilee came over, put her arms around his waist and laid her head on his shoulder. He held her against him, feeling the need now to hold on tight to keep her from slipping away.

  “The rental car has not been turned back in to Hertz,” Charlotte reported to him an hour later.

  “It’s early yet. He hasn’t had time to get back down to Dallas…if that was where he was goin’.” He mused that James could take the rental car anywhere. Still, Dallas seemed the best bet. He did not think James would go very far from good comfort, whether truly dying or not.

  “I’ll check back with them in a couple of hours,” Charlotte said. “I don’t want to wait for another shift. I told the girl I was from the sheriff’s office. She bought it, so I want to try to get her again.”

  He breathed deeply. “Well, Sheriff Neville has made some calls to request friends to keep a lookout, but he won’t put out any all-points. James has only been gone a few hours and hasn’t committed any crime. We’ll just have to wait and see what turns up. I called a buddy down in Houston who knows how to find people.”

  Charlotte began going through a stack of papers and files on the corner of his desk.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “My resignation. I’m retracting it.”

  Waa-hoo!

  “I tore it up,” he admitted.

  “You tore up my resignation?” She regarded him with indignant eyes from behind her dark-rimmed glasses.

  He felt mildly ashamed. “Yes,” he said, falling back on the strength of honesty. “I told you I would not accept it.”

  She turned on her heel and strode away, saying, “A person does not get the respect due around here.”

  He jumped up from his chair and hurried after her, catching up with her just before she got to her desk and grabbing her to him in a big hug.

  “How’s that for respect? I’m darn glad you’ve changed your mind, Miss Charlotte…. So glad that I’m willin’ to make a fool of myself and get slapped for it. This paper can’t run without you. That’s it, plain and simple. I’m indebted to you for stayin’.” There, he couldn’t be more humble than that.

  Applause came from the other desks in the big room, getting louder and louder, until Charlotte’s co-workers were on their feet. Sandy Conroy’s long, tall frame came out from his glass cubicle and into the middle of the big room, where, clapping, he called out, “Yee-ha!”

  Charlotte, her face flushed, swept her gaze from Tate to everyone, then primly sat herself at her desk and went to work on her computer.

  “Charlotte!”

  Marilee ran to catch up to the tall woman, who was walking home to check on her mother during her lunch hour. The two walked together along the older sidewalks that led into the neighborhood of small clapboard boxlike houses dating from a brief boom in the fifties. Most were painted white, many needing repainting. Some had been fortunate not only to have been kept up, but to have received improvements along the lines of vinyl siding, picture windows and enclosed porches. The limbs of great elm trees stretched above yards where one was neatly tended and daffodils poked forth, and another had worn patches in the grass and was littered with plastic toys.

  “Thank you for trying to find Stuart,” Marilee said, annoyed at herself for finding conversation so difficult.

  “Mmm.” Charlotte nodded.

  They walked in silence for a long minute, while Marilee formed what she wanted to say.

  Finally she came out with, “I don’t have many friends. Oh, I know a lot of people, but I don’t think of them as friends. I just never have been able to open up and let other people into my life much.”

  She found understanding on Charlotte’s face.

  “I think of you as about my best friend, and I’m so glad you aren’t leaving the paper. Thank you for being there for all of us. I don’t think you know what you do, but everyone there relies on you. And I really want you to stand up for me at my wedding. It means a lot to me.”

  Despite feeling that she sounded a little incoherent, Marilee felt a sense of freedom coming over her at the effort to speak her heart.

  “I think of you as my only real friend,” Charlotte said slowly, without looking at Marilee. “And I’m looking forward to being your bridesmaid. I have never been a bridesmaid.”

  They
smiled at each other, shyly, and then they began to speak of the wedding, deciding to have a shopping spree for choosing a new dress for Charlotte. Marilee, who had never in her life been shopping with a woman friend, wondered what the experience would be like. She dared to say as much, and Charlotte replied that she, too, had not ever been shopping with another woman, besides her mother. “And that was years ago,” she added.

  “We have led inhibited lives,” Marilee observed.

  Charlotte chuckled at that. “I’ve been having an affair with a younger man. That does not seem so inhibited…but you are right,” she added, breathing a deep breath. “My life has been quite inhibited. I don’t know how it happened. Just one day I woke up and here I was in this place, thirty-five, having tended Mama for nigh on ten years, and with day following day of always saying, ‘tomorrow.”’

  Marilee nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  At that, for some reason, Charlotte laughed more gaily than Marilee had heard her laugh in a long time.

  Charlotte’s house had not undergone any grand remodeling from its original state, but it was kept nicely, a small white cottage with a climbing rosebush, bare yet, but promising to climb up a trellis onto the porch. It was a picture out of a children’s book, thoroughly feminine, having been inhabited only by Charlotte and her mother for some twenty years.

  The inside continued with the same cottage atmosphere, with chintz curtains and flouncy pillows, everything in shades of pink, mauve and blue. The decor seemed too cute for Charlotte, not to mention long, tall Sandy. It was the reflection of Mrs. Nation, who was as small as Charlotte was tall. Obviously Charlotte took after her father, who, it was reported, had been tall and robust and had run off when Charlotte had been in grade school.

  Marilee said hello to Mrs. Nation from the bedroom door; the tiny room was so crowded with frills as to discourage entering. In any case, Mrs. Nation, a shrunken figure in the hospital bed, simply looked at her with rather vacant eyes. Although she nodded, it was the day nurse who said brightly, “Mrs. Nation is havin’ a good day today.”

  Marilee followed Charlotte with her gaze, watched her friend tenderly kiss her mother’s pasty cheek, fluff the pillow upon which she reclined, touch her lifeless hand, all very quickly, one motion and seeming to go ever faster, so that she was in the room and then out of it again and on into the kitchen, where she made Marilee and herself glasses of ice tea with sprigs of mint from a pot on the sill.

  The thought sprang into Marilee’s mind: run through life, busy, busy, busy, and then we don’t have to stop and face the hungry lions.

  “Tate and I can come and sit with your mother sometimes,” she said, taken by impulse. “I don’t really have experience, but I think Tate and I together can handle it. Tate is quite good at such things. You should see him with the children.”

  Gazing at Charlotte, who did not sit down, but stood at the kitchen sink, one arm across her middle and the other clutching her glass of cold tea, Marilee felt shame in not offering months ago. She, like everyone, considered Charlotte able to handle everything. Just as everyone had always thought about Marilee herself. Both of them hid their weaknesses quite well.

  Charlotte observed her.

  “Let Sandy help you, Charlotte. I’m learning how much Tate can help me. I’m always amazed, how much he wants to do. I simply never knew there were such men.” The faint shadow of her distant father crossed her heart. “It isn’t often a woman finds a man who’s willing to help with things like mothers and children. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by just because of a silly few years’ difference in your ages. Tate was worried about growing old the other day. I told him we had enough worries to think about today, without projecting so far into the future.”

  She thought of Stuart and how he would not grow old. He only had today.

  Charlotte said only, “If you’re ready, we should head back,” and set her glass in the sink.

  Twenty-Two

  Smoothing the knots in the skein of time…

  When they came home from school, Willie Lee headed straight around the house to the backyard, to see his bird. Corrine went up on the front porch, drew over the stool and climbed up to stick her hand in the mailbox and fish around.

  She brought out a phone bill, a sale postcard for JCPenny’s, and a Victoria’s Secret catalog. There was no small box addressed to herself. Likely her mother was not going to send the present. Likely she had forgotten. There had not been a card from her in weeks.

  Corrine went over to sit on the swing for some minutes, not wanting to face her aunt or anyone when she felt so close to tears. What was wrong with her? Why did her mother not care about her?

  Then her gaze was diverted by the Victoria’s Secret catalog and the almost naked woman on the front cover. The women in the catalog fascinated her. Corrine had lately been examining her chest and finding she had breasts growing. She wasn’t sure she wanted them. She always wondered how the women in the catalog got shaped as they were, since she had never seen any women like them in real life. She would have asked Aunt Marilee about this, but she was too embarrassed to speak of such private things as the shape of a body.

  Maybe she would ask, she thought, feeling a flicker of daring as she gathered up the mail and her and Willie Lee’s backpacks and went inside.

  She was a little surprised to find Aunt Marilee and Mr. Tate—Papa Tate—sitting close together on the couch. They turned and looked at her, quite suddenly smiling at her in that way grown-ups smiled when wanting to hide their discussion.

  “Hey, pumpkin, how was school?” said Mr. Tate.

  “Okay, Papa Tate,” Corrine replied. She had been making an effort to try out the new name, to see how everything set with it.

  Mr. Tate seemed pleased.

  All evening, Corrine did her best to please while she listened carefully to the adults and caught snatches of whispers but not what was going on that they did not want to talk about in front of her and Willie Lee. Aunt Vella came after supper, and she and Aunt Marilee and Papa Tate—the name was growing on Corrine—sat at the dining-room table and wrote out the invitations. Aunt Vella was told whatever was going on. Corrine caught Aunt Vella saying Stuart’s name on several occasions, and she decided whatever it was, was something to do with him. She came to the conclusion that he was not there, and he was supposed to be there.

  She was a little relieved to be satisfied that whatever the trouble was, her mother had not caused it, for once.

  And she had known Mr. James would be the cause of trouble. She took it as a good sign that her aunt Marilee was making out the wedding invitations; surely this meant the marriage was to take place. Still, Corrine had learned a long time ago not to count on something too much, or it would not come about.

  She thought Papa Tate looked especially worried, even if he did still smile a lot like normal. She brought him a glass of fresh ice tea, hoping to make it all better.

  Stuart checked out of the hotel room he had only hours before checked into. He went down the elevator and out into the starlit night. The wind coming off the plain and whipping around the tall buildings of the city tugged at his hair, and he shivered in the falling temperatures. Halfway across the narrow lot, he dropped his duffel bag, his grip seeming to give way. In the process of trying to pick it up, he dropped one of his camera cases. A man coming from a pickup truck helped him pick up his bags.

  “Thanks.”

  “You bet.”

  Stuart went on to his rental car, threw the bags inside, got behind the wheel and headed off, directing the vehicle west on the interstate, heading back to Valentine.

  Marilee and his son were the only loose ends of his life, one carefully lived without ties. Now, suddenly, he didn’t want to be without ties. It would be as if he had never lived at all, and that was too hard to take. Somehow, some way, he wanted to tie up the loose ends, so there would be a knot on the skein of time with the name of Stuart James written on it. The only way to do that was not to run out on
Marilee in the end. It was now the single purpose for him.

  Charlotte debated about telephoning Sandy all evening. She actually picked up the telephone twice but did not dial.

  Then, like a gift from heaven, she heard his TransAm pull up out front. Instantly she flew to the front door and out of it into the soft, cool night. She stood on the edge of the porch and watched him round the hood of his powerful car. He carried a bouquet of flowers. He walked head down, as usual, and did not see her standing there until he was halfway up the walk.

  The streetlight fell on his face, showing his surprise, which was followed quickly by determination in the quickening of his long strides.

  “I brought you these.” He jutted the flowers at her, as if daring her to refuse.

  She found his unusual sense of firmness very attractive. “Thank you, Sandy,” she said softly, reaching for the flowers.

  “Can we just start seein’ each other again?” he asked. She had always appreciated how simply he spoke.

  “Come inside. The night nurse will be here in another hour, and then we can go off and talk.” She took his hand. It was warm and moist in her own.

  Just before entering, there in the deep darkness of the porch, she paused and kissed him, and was rewarded by his answering passion.

  She led him into the kitchen, where she put the flowers into a vase. He stood over by the refrigerator, watching and definitely ill at ease, a long, tall hunk of a man in a dainty kitchen.

  “Do you still want to marry me?” she asked, pausing to look at him.

  He swallowed and tucked his hands up under his armpits. “Yes, I do.”

  She arranged the flowers in the vase.

  “I don’t have much money,” he said, “but I think together we could rent a house big enough to accommodate you, me and your mother. I’ve looked at several.”

  He had been looking at houses!

  She finished getting the flowers correct to please her and brought the vase to set in the middle of the table. “There. They sure are pretty.”