Chin Up, Honey

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  Just then a movement beyond the window caught his attention.

  A figure was walking along the side of the road in the distance. A young man, wiry and with a bare torso, what must have been his shirt hanging down from the waist of his jeans. He was moving at a fast pace and kept looking back over his shoulder, then up and down the road, in a curious manner.

  All of a sudden, in one swift motion, the fellow jumped over the barbed-wire fence around the pasture across the road and disappeared.

  Winston jutted his face closer to the window. His vision was not what it once had been, of course, which was why he couldn’t drive any longer. Yet he knew he had seen someone, and now he was gone. Just disappeared right before his eyes.

  He was about to check his own pulse when he saw a head pop up from the tall grass along the fence line. Yes, it was a head. It turned from side to side, looking up and down the road. The growing sound of a siren reached Winston’s ears.

  The head disappeared into the weeds. A few seconds later, a sheriff’s car came speeding past, lights blinking and tires throwing up dust. The siren faded.

  Thrilled that he had not gone round the bend and started imagining things, Winston thought of telephoning the sheriff’s office, but he wanted to see if the head popped up again, so he kept staring at the spot.

  No head showed. He looked as far as he could up and down the road. He wondered if the figure had moved on in the cover of the sand-plum bushes to the cedar trees.

  There came a rap. “Winston…you okay?”

  He jerked open the door. “I’m fine. Things get slower when you get older. You’ll find that out. Everything you got is gonna drop south and get slow as molasses in January.”

  Jim Rainwater shook his head and turned, heading back to his controls.

  Winston followed, thinking again about telephoning the sheriff’s office, when the door to the building opened and Willie Lee came through it.

  “I am here,” he announced and came straight over to Winston.

  “And so you are.” Winston gazed in surprise at the boy and his dog. The boy’s eyes were very blue behind his thick glasses.

  “Willie Lee insisted on comin’ down here early and waiting for you,” said Tate Holloway, the young boy’s stepfather, who followed the boy and the dog through the door.

  “Well, that’s fine…I appreciate you, buddy.”

  “Winston—you ready?” called Jim Rainwater.

  “I’m comin’ straight away.”

  Willie Lee slipped his hand into Winston’s larger one, and together they went into the studio, where Winston sat back down, put on the headphones and pulled the microphone close.

  Willie Lee and his dog took their accustomed places, while Tate pulled up a stool and opened the Sunday paper.

  Winston drew himself up. “Gather ’round, children. We’re ready for the anniversaries.”

  Finding his voice, in fact all of him, returning to full strength, he read clearly from the listing in front of him, sending congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Ryan Showalter, who were to celebrate their third anniversary on Monday, and to Frank and Lisa Ruiz, celebrating a whopping six months, and to Herbert and LaVerne Riddick, who the past week had celebrated fifty-four years of marriage.

  “I’ve known little LaVernie since Herbert brought her up from down in Hennrietta, Texas,” said Winston. “I asked her the other day what was her secret for her lengthy marriage. She said it was because Herbert never forgot their anniversary. Herbert told me that LaVernie never let him forget it. Now that’s what I call two sensible people—a woman who says what she wants, and a man smart enough to listen.”

  Vella was in charge of the altar f lowers that month at the First Methodist. She had bought pots of blooming bromeliads on special from the Home Depot and saved the Ladies Circle some twenty-five dollars. Actually, she saved herself some twenty-five dollars, as she bought them through the Blaine’s Drugstore account and donated the f lowers, thereby transferring the expense in part to Uncle Sam. So she was doing her part and keeping the economy going. Things just passed along in life.

  “Let me help you.”

  She was a little surprised to see Jaydee Mayhall coming forward. He took one of the pots right out of her hand. “Well, thank you, Jaydee. Please set that one over by the piano.” She wondered what he wanted; Jaydee was not a man to do something for nothing.

  The church was filling up. Inez Cooper came f littering past and stopped to point out that the pot in front of the pulpit was off-kilter. Vella didn’t think so.

  “Well, it is,” said Inez as she bent to shift it a micro-inch.

  Vella opened her mouth, then closed it and pivoted, going to take her normal place in the third pew. As she adjusted her skirt, she looked up to see Jaydee approaching.

  “Hope you don’t mind if I sit beside you today,” he said, giving her his winning smile. He was a handsome man. He had always put her in mind of Douglas Fairbanks Jr., not that she ever wanted to tell anyone that. Not only would she be showing her age, but most of the time Jaydee was too annoying to compliment.

  “Well…no,” Vella answered, in something of a confused state, but for some reason stopping herself from saying that the spot was saved for the Peele sisters, Peggy and Alma, who sat there every week. There were no nameplates on the pews, after all.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jaydee settle himself and smooth his sharply creased trousers. She wondered what in the world was going on with him. His behavior was hardly customary. The memory clicked in of him being somewhat disgruntled two months previously, when she had purchased the old oil-field building and lot west of town, getting to the property ahead of him. He might now know of someone who wanted to buy it and was hoping to get it from her cheap, then resell it. She had been in financial dealings with Jaydee before. He never could go at anything directly.

  The Peele sisters showed up and were affronted at having their space taken. They could have squeezed between Jaydee and Bingo Yardell, who held down the other end of the pew, but instead Peggy Peele said, “We’ll just move back,” and hauled Alma after her, while Alma whined that she was too short to see from the back.

  It was rather nice to have a man sitting beside her at church, Vella thought, taking note that Jaydee was a good-smelling man. One thing that she had always appreciated about her now-departed husband was that he had always smelled good.

  Then here came Belinda and Lyle.

  “Lyle and I thought we’d like to sit with you today, Mama,” Belinda said. She looked right at Jaydee and all but told him to move.

  He did—closer to Vella—saying, “Good mornin’. Nice to see you, Miss Belinda.”

  “Yes, you, too,” Belinda replied after staring at him a moment.

  Lyle said he didn’t think they would all fit in the pew, but Belinda went right ahead, working her way in and pulling Lyle behind her. Vella moved her feet out of the way of her daughter’s little crystal spike heels that could possibly take out a toe.

  Vella knew well that it was Jaydee sitting there that had brought her daughter. She felt in a very odd place, with people who rarely had much to do with her suddenly coming at her like magnets.

  Belinda leaned around Jaydee and said, “Mama, do you know why the First Methodist Church is called the ‘First’?”

  “No…no, I really don’t.”

  “Jaydee, do you know?”

  “No, can’t say as I do.”

  Vella thought her daughter was about to give the punch line to a joke, but instead Belinda said, “Well, I don’t, either, but I’ll bet Daddy would have known. Don’t you think so, Mama? Daddy knew all sorts of details like that,” she told Jaydee. “He came to church here with Mama for over forty years.”

  “I remember that,” Jaydee said.

  Then Belinda added, “How many times have you been married now, Jaydee?”

  “Three,” he replied. “I’ve been lookin’ for just the right one.”

  Emma saw the clock as she pitched th
e ham into the oven. Grabbing her purse, she raced out the back door.

  John Cole was at her car, slamming the hood. “Got your oil changed.” He wiped his hands on a rag as he stepped back.

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  He nodded. “Do you need me to check on anything in the kitchen?”

  “No. The ham will be fine, and I’ll throw everything else together when I get back.”

  “Have a good time.”

  “I will.” She thought they sounded like she was going on vacation, rather than to church services.

  They were being exceedingly polite, tiptoeing around each other. Two strangers under the same roof. But still in separate beds.

  John Cole wasn’t even in the bed. He had taken to sleeping in his recliner.

  She fought with herself about that all the way to church. She really should make the first move and suggest that they both move back to their bed. After all, if they were working on their marriage, it wasn’t a good idea to sleep separately. Another voice countered that John Cole was perfectly capable of making the first move. But she thought that she really should at least bring up the subject.

  By the time she pulled into the church parking lot, all of the voices inside of her admitted that both she and John Cole were being childish.

  The opening music had started. She went up the steps along with the stragglers who had been catching last-minute cigarettes out on the front lawn. Stepping through the door, she paused, running a speculative eye over the sanctuary, seeing it with her new status as mother-of-the-groom. If the wedding took place in the morning, it would be beautiful like this—graceful and joyous. In late September it would be warm, but not too hot. The fans would stir softly, and the light would fall in an ethereal glow through the stained-glass window over the altar, much as it was at that moment.

  Then she saw her mother leaning out into the aisle with a hurry-up expression. Emma did, and her mother smiled in welcome and passed her a hymnal with all the service’s songs efficiently marked by bits of paper.

  A moment later her mother leaned over and whispered, “Why do you think they call it the First Methodist Church?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Emma, who was still preoccupied with visions of the wedding. Then, noting her mother’s questioning expression, she offered, “I guess because it’s on First Street.”

  “I don’t think that answers why there are First United Methodists Churches all over the country. They can’t all be on a First Street…can they?”

  Pastor Smith stood on the altar steps and offered up the ending prayer to send the congregation out into the world with love and peace in their hearts. At the piano, Lila Hicks played “Pass It On.”

  Emma bowed her head and thought about hurrying home to make the dinner. She thought of all the food she would put on the table and her family gathered around it, and how she was welcoming a new woman into the family. She raised her head and there was light streaming in through the high windows behind the pulpit, and it was as if the light streamed right at her, filling and overflowing her heart with gratitude. She was suddenly starkly aware of what she and John Cole had been about to throw away.

  When she got home, she hurried to the guest room and bath, and gathered up all her things and took them back to the master bedroom. A lot of the warm emotion that she had experienced at the church had already begun to wear off, but she sure did not want Johnny or Gracie to see her things in the guest room. What sort of example would that set for them?

  7

  Mother of the Bride

  Sylvia Kinney was a beautiful woman of forty-five who could, and often did, easily pass for ten years younger, even though this would have had her giving birth to her one and only daughter at fourteen. She would rather have people think she had gotten caught up in youthful foolishness than know the truth of her having made a big mistake at twenty-two, when she should have known better. She was desperately trying to save Gracie from making the same mistake.

  Gripping the telephone receiver, Sylvia Kinney paced the white carpet of her bedroom in a fashionable apartment in Baltimore and tried talking sense to her daughter. She tried cajoling, threatening and, uncharacteristically, pleading—everything she could think of to convince her daughter two thousand miles away not to marry that bubba with whom she thought she was in love.

  Finally, thoroughly frustrated, Sylvia came out with, “My God, Gracie, he’s nothing but a redneck boy with no future beyond the possible ability to acquire a lot of junk cars up on blocks in the yard.”

  She knew instantly that she had made a serious error.

  “Yes, Mother, I know,” came Gracie’s cool reply. “I’ll always know where he is at night, right out in the backyard playing with our children.”

  “Oh, Gracie…I didn’t really mean it like that. I didn’t. I just don’t want you to do something that…”

  “I’m going to marry Johnny, Mother. I wish you could be happy for me. Goodbye.”

  There came a loud click and the line hummed.

  Sylvia slowly set the phone aside. Her gaze went to a gilded frame holding the smiling face of her daughter. She picked it up and gazed for a long moment at the image. She swallowed back tears and breathed deeply. As far as she had ever seen, crying did nothing but cause wrinkles. She could not afford wrinkles. Not in the modern business world. Looking into the mirror, she finger-combed her dark hair that still did not need dyeing.

  On closer inspection, there was a white hair. She plucked it out.

  Then, hopping up, she tossed off her slippers, quietly opened the door and tiptoed down the hall to peer into the living room at her lover, Wadley Johnson, who was asleep on the couch where he had retreated last night, because she would not let him sleep in the bed with her. She had not let another man sleep in her bed since her idiotic blunder with Gracie’s father, which she still blamed on the fantasy of Paris. These days, when she went to Paris, she always wore dark glasses and never drank wine.

  The sun was coming in the wide windows, and Wadley had pulled a pillow over his face. He was still in his dress slacks and shirt, his coat and tie thrown on the floor.

  She and Wadley had been to a club to listen to Wadley’s jazz-playing friends and had not gotten in until nearly three in the morning. Wadley very often slept until noon, anyway. As he would say, his career as a rich playboy required certain habits.

  Wadley R. Johnson was forty-eight, handsome, charming and rich. He had three ex-wives to attest to this. He wanted to make Sylvia number four and last, so he said. Sylvia, however, believed that his record was against him and that her own was not promising, either.

  For a brief moment she considered waking Wadley and asking him to make breakfast—he could cook, and she did not—or to go down to the breakfast shop and get them something.

  But he was always so chipper and loving in the morning. He would probably get all amorous and ask her again to marry him, and she was feeling especially vulnerable.

  She went back to her room and threw herself into bed.

  The conversation with Gracie played back over her mind…right out in the backyard playing with our children.

  Oh, good Lord. She would be a grandmother.

  She pulled the covers over her head and tried to figure out how she was going to face the mess she was in.

  Just over twenty-two summers ago, right after graduating college, Sylvia had flown to Paris and gone a little crazy. Intellectually, she understood it well. She had spent the better part of her life being super-responsible. Her parents, Albert and Margie Kinney, had been of an irresponsible and distant nature. Their entire world had been each other. They had hardly noticed they had given birth to a child. At an early age, Sylvia had learned to take care of herself, as well as the difficulties of her parents.

  When Sylvia was thirteen, her mother died. Her father went on to run even more quickly through his large family inheritance. What money was left now was thanks to Sylvia’s shrewdness. Her father and his new wife, Giselle, were livin
g comfortably, even enjoying yearly trips to Europe and Florida. Whenever anything came up, such as a glitch in air-f lights or a gallbladder operation, Sylvia was called to handle the matter.

  But that summer after her college graduation, where she had graduated with the highest grade-point average of any student for the five previous years, Sylvia escaped this pattern for a short period and went off with fast friends all over Europe. She finally had time to fall in love, for the first time in her life, with Paul Mercier, an American who was in Paris studying art. She became pregnant and married him.

  Sylvia had explained all about her rashness in marrying Gracie’s father and how impossibly different they had been from the beginning. She had not painted Paul as an ogre, just very irresponsible, and far more in love with art and the free-and-easy life than he had been with Sylvia or with Gracie. Artists were like that, Sylvia had explained. Paul had eventually faded from their lives, and they did not need him. End of story.

  In fleeting honest moments, Sylvia admitted to herself that she wanted to bury that part of her life so deeply as to make it seem that it never happened. The problem was that in doing so, she also buried Gracie’s history. This fact had not seemed too important at the time, nor for years afterward. As Gracie grew older, Sylvia convinced herself that nothing about Paul mattered and those memories were better left alone. So, for a million reasons that she was at a loss to explain, Sylvia had never mentioned to Gracie the small fact that Paul Mercier was a black Creole.

  8

  Gracie

  She was glad to have a few minutes after the phone call with her mother to put herself back together before Johnny arrived to take her to Sunday dinner with his parents.

  Her gaze fell on the card Emma Berry had sent her. Gracie had cried when she had received it, and now, looking at it, she had a fantasy of her mother calling back and saying something like, “Oh, Gracie, I’ve just been so silly. You’ve made a good choice, and you are going to be so happy. I’m proud of you, and I support you all the way.” She imagined it so thoroughly as to even listen for the phone to ring. It did not.