“Elizabeth, you’re not really going to throw yourself into the arms of Orson Hobbs, are you?” Mavis asked. “Can’t you give Timothy just a little more time?”
“He’s had four whole months!” I strode out the door, and let it slam with a noisy jingle. Then I plodded in the direction of the bait shop, with my hands in my pockets and my head ducked against the stinging wind.
Halfway to the Bait Box, my bravado evaporated in the frigid air and tears splashed my cheeks. I didn’t really want to lean over the cooler filled with night crawlers and make calf eyes at Orson Hobbs.
Besides, it wasn’t right to trifle with his affections when the only thing I really wanted to do was wrap my arms around Timothy Hollingsworth’s neck and cover his face with soft kisses. Trouble was, I just didn’t see that happening anytime soon, if ever.
I turned around and headed home. Everything in my life was catawampus. There was no solution in sight for the Bottom Dollar Emporium and my love life was about as titillating as G-rated movie.
As I wearily put my key in the lock, I could hear the phone ringing inside. I sprinted to answer it, nearly tripping over Maybelline, who was splayed out in front of the door.
To my surprise, Timothy was on the line. He sounded panicky.
“Elizabeth, I’m glad I caught you,” he said.
I tried to calm Maybelline, who was repeatedly flinging herself against my leg.
“I just got home from work.” I scooped up the dog, who immediately started bathing my face with her sandpaper tongue.
Timothy cleared his throat in a nervous manner. “I was looking at my calendar and I realized that this Saturday night is Valentine’s Day. Did you have any idea it was coming up so quickly?”
“No,” I lied. “I’ve not given it a single thought.”
“Neither did I.” His voice cracked slightly. “I was looking through my appointment book and the date just jumped out at me. I said to my secretary, ‘Valentine’s Day is two days away and I haven’t even bothered to make dinner plans with my girlfriend.’ She said I’d better go ahead and call you right away if I didn’t want to be in the doghouse.”
“Your girlfriend?” I asked softly.
“Yes, Elizabeth. That’s what I said, ‘my girlfriend,’” he said in a husky voice. “I hope it’s not too late. Please tell me that you’ll go with me and that you’ll forgive me for not calling sooner.”
My heart had stopped at the word “girlfriend.” He’d never called me that before.
“What time will you pick me up?” I asked.
Thirteen
Why is there always so much month left at the end of the money?
~Sign tacked to the bulletin board in the Bottom Dollar Emporium
Mello Vickery stormed into the Bottom Dollar Emporium, spitting mad. She was wearing her fox pelt, and the beady eyes of the limp beast appeared to glare at me menacingly under the fluorescent lights of the store.
“Elizabeth, please get Mavis.” She rapped her knuckles against the counter. “I have a bone to pick with her.”
I was surprised to see Mello in the Bottom Dollar. She usually sent her ancient maid, Petunia, on her shopping errands. Mello lived in the biggest house in Cayboo Creek, a sagging, Victorian-style structure that had a yard choked with overgrown camellia bushes.
“Hi, Mello,” I said. “Mavis is in the back office. Is there something I can help you with?”
Mello leaned over the counter. She smelled like mothballs and camphor. “No. I must speak with the person in charge.”
I reluctantly walked back to Mavis’s office. She’d been spending a lot of time in there lately, and I got the impression she wanted to be left alone.
“Mavis,” I called outside the door. “Mello is here and she insists on seeing you.”
The door cracked open and Mavis slipped out. Her eyes were puffy and red, like she’d been crying.
“Hey, Mello,” Mavis said. “What can I do for you?”
Mello plunked a cellophane package of spoons down on the counter. “Petunia brought these home from your store Tuesday last week. What does this label say?”
Mavis held the package at an arm’s length and squinted at the letters. “Fifty-one Pieces Heavy Duty Spoons,” she read.
“Exactly,” Mello said with a brisk nod of her head. “But imagine how I felt when I counted out the spoons and discovered there were only forty-eight. Forty-eight spoons! This package is three spoons short.”
“Mello, I’m so sorry,” Mavis said, clucking in sympathy.
“You should be,” Mello said. “Every time I turn around someone’s trying to cheat me. Why only last week a fellow called saying I’d won a free cruise to the Bahamas. All I had to do to hold my prize was give him my credit card number. I told that shyster that Mello Vickery wasn’t born yesterday. The only way he’d get my American Express number was by prying the card out of my cold, dead hand.”
“Good for you, Mello. You shouldn’t let folks get the better of you,” Mavis said. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a refund on the spoons and I’ll call the company who makes them and chew them out for shorting my customers. And for your trouble, why don’t you pick out anything in the store with my compliments?”
Mello, who’d obviously been poised for a squabble, relaxed her face into a half smile. “Well, that’s very nice of you, Mavis.” She scanned the shelf near the checkout stand. “Since you offered, I believe I’ll take this three-pack of fly swatters.”
“Can’t have enough fly swatters in the South,” Mavis remarked. She opened the cash register and counted out a dollar and some change into Mello’s outstretched palm. Mello rolled up the bag containing the fly swatters and tucked it under her arm. Her boxy black shoes clattered on the wood floor as she strode toward the exit.
“That woman is dotty,” Attalee muttered after she’d left. “I heard she’s taken to calling the psychic hotline nearly every day for spiritual guidance. Bert down at the post office says her phone bill is so thick it could choke a horse.”
“Bert shouldn’t be gossiping about other folks’ mail,” Mavis snapped. “And Mello hasn’t always been so eccentric. It was only after she lost her business that she seemed to come unhinged. Who could blame her?”
It wasn’t like Mavis to be so testy. I remembered how upset she looked when she came out of the office. Something must have happened.
“Mavis, what’s wrong?” I asked softly.
She slumped into a chair. “I called the real estate agency today,” she said in a thin voice. “They’re going to put my house on the market next week.”
“Oh, Mavis, no,” I said.
“I should be grateful,” Mavis said. “At least I have a family member to take me in during my time of need. Madge called last night. She said if I could get to South Dakota by the end of March, I’d still have a whole month or more to learn how to ice fish.”
At the word “fish,” Mavis’s face crumbled. “Attalee, Elizabeth, what am I going to do?” she whispered. “Cold weather gives me chilblains. I don’t want to live like an Eskimo.”
Attalee and I rushed to Mavis’s side.
“You could always move in with me at the Shady Elm,” Attalee said, patting Mavis’s hand. “I ain’t supposed to have overnight guests, but we can sneak you past the front desk attendant while she plays solitaire on her computer.”
I hugged her shoulder. “Please don’t cry, Mavis. It’s not over yet. You never know what might happen.”
Although truthfully I, too, was beginning to feel defeated.
Mavis shook her head. “I’m sorry, Elizabeth. We’ve fought the good fight and we lost. Now it’s time to cut my losses and move on.”
I continued massaging Mavis’s shoulder, wishing desperately that there was something I could do. The thought of my de
arest friend moving so many miles away was too much to bear.
“I don’t care what you say,” I said. “I refuse to give up just yet.”
Fourteen
Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.
~Sign outside the Dazzling Do’s Beauty Shop
On Valentine’s Day I drove over to Meemaw’s house to borrow my mama’s fourteen-carat gold earrings for the evening. Meemaw lived about a mile away from me in a neighborhood called Dogwood Commons. A few months before, a practical joker had spray-painted an “F” over the “W” to make the welcome sign read “Dogfood Commons.”
As I pulled up in her driveway, I noticed that her Christmas icicles were still dangling from the roof of her house. Meemaw had been fussing with Boomer for weeks to take them down, but obviously he hadn’t gotten around to it.
I rang the doorbell and heard Pierre, Meemaw’s miniature poodle, yipping inside and Meemaw’s tobacco-cured voice grumbling a reply. My meemaw had been smoking Pall Mall unfiltereds for over forty years, yet with her cast-iron lungs she hardly ever coughed or cleared her throat.
She opened the door and peered out from behind the frames of her large glasses.
“Yeah?” she asked. She stood in the frame of the door and gave Pierre little pushes with her foot so he would stay back.
“It’s me, Elizabeth. Let me in.”
Meemaw opened the door wider and then took off her glasses and rubbed the lenses on her slacks.
“Darn glasses. They’re brand new and the optometrist must have ground the lenses wrong. You looked like one big blur standing on the step. Couldn’t tell if you were the UPS man or a Jehovah’s Witness.” She squinted at me underneath eyebrows that looked like black, furry caterpillars.
“Whatever you do, don’t ask me about Boomer, because I don’t want to talk about that man,” she said. She plucked a cigarette from the pocket of her oversized cardigan and stuck it in the corner of her mouth.
I followed her into the family room, where Animal Planet blared loud enough to make the windows vibrate. Meemaw turned down the volume a notch with the remote and flicked her ashes into an ashcan filled with sand, one of eight that she had bought from the municipal building after they went smoke-free. The heavy drapes and the thick carpets had soaked up years of tobacco smoke and the walls were the color of old piano keys. Even Pierre had a smoky, yellowish tinge.
“I won’t tell you what he did. There’s no point talking about him, because he’s never coming back.” She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another.
“Was that the phone?” she demanded.
I shook my head. “It was just the television.”
Meemaw plopped down on the sofa and folded her hands on her lap. She stared at the rings of smoke that hung in the air like a canopy. I sat down beside her.
“What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What did he do this time?”
Meemaw shot up from the couch. Her fists curled into tight balls. “His mama called me a floozy to my face and he didn’t say a word to defend me. He just sat there sucking on his teeth.”
I forced back a laugh. Meemaw was as far away from being a floozy as I was from being an astronaut on Mars.
“Boomer’s mama is just slipping. She’s bumping up against her ninetieth birthday,” I said.
“Don’t you believe it,” Meemaw said. “I’ve seen her in action. That woman is a whiz at Wheel of Fortune.”
The handset chirped in its phone and Meemaw lunged for it.
“Yeah?” She listened for a while and then said, “Yes, you just do that then.”
She slammed down the handset on the phone and glanced up at me, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her cardigan.
“Boomer says he’s coming by in an hour to take down those Christmas lights. I’ll believe it when I see it.” She paced across the floor. “I’m not letting him step foot in the house. Pierre will guard the door, won’t you, Pierre?”
At the sound of his name, Pierre bared his gums. He was missing all of his teeth in his upper jaw.
“I won’t be keeping you,” I said. “I was just wondering if I could borrow my mama’s gold earrings. I have a special occasion coming up.”
Meemaw grunted and headed for the guest room, where she kept mama’s things, and I trailed behind her.
The guest room used to be my mama’s room when she was growing up and some of her possessions were still lying about. Meemaw kept the white dresser with gold trim and the four-poster bed that my mama had gotten when she was fourteen. On the dresser sat Mama’s graduation picture in a large gilt frame, surrounded by smaller snapshots taken after she was married. Meemaw had cut my daddy out of them.
I picked up the photograph of my mama, taken about a year before she died of meningitis just shy of her twenty-first birthday. She was grinning like someone who’s been given the keys to the world. Nothing in her face forecast that fate would soon whittle her down to no more than a stick.
I looked at the picture. My mama favored Meemaw, with her strong jaw and dark hair and eyebrows. I, on the other hand, had hair the color of cornmeal (thanks to monthly touch-ups with Nice ‘n Easy), and my eyes and lips faded into my face if I didn’t smear on a little color.
I returned the framed photo to the dresser. My mama died just before my first birthday, so whenever I looked at a photo of her, it was like staring into the eyes of a stranger. Although Meemaw had told me some details about her, trying to figure out what kind of person she’d been was like doing a dot-to-dot puzzle and not coming up with any picture at all.
From the top drawer of the dresser, Meemaw took out the blue velvet box that held Mama’s earrings. My late granddaddy had bought them for my mama to wear on her wedding day. The last time I’d asked to wear the earrings was the night of Clip’s and my engagement party.
That night, the moon had hung in the twilight like a big white thumbprint. Mavis had brought pink champagne, and it was a sight to see Clip’s hunting buddies in their camouflage hats making toasts with plastic flutes and nibbling on cucumber sandwiches sliced as thin as tissue paper.
Clip had raised his glass in a toast and looked me in the eyes and said, “To the woman of my dreams.”
I blinked to chase away the memory. How much time had passed since I’d last been sentimental about Clip?
Meemaw must have remembered, too, because she looked at me queerly and said, “Why did you say you wanted to borrow these?”
I hadn’t said, as I had been waiting for her to ask.
“Just a date with a nice fellow,” I said quickly.
Meemaw’s eyes narrowed to dark, glittering slits. She had some Indian in her, and I swear sometimes she looked like she was sizing a person up for a scalping.
“You aren’t getting near these until I hear all about this boy.”
“Oh Meemaw, you’d really like him. He’s so nice and polite. Real religious too,” I said. ‘Course I wasn’t going to mention what religion, not just yet.
“Boomer mentioned you’ve been keeping company with a new fellow. Is he one of those boys from the Methodist Church?”
“No, he’s not from the church,” I said. “He’s the grandson of one of my regular customers. And he’s from California. He’s moved to Augusta to work at the paper cup factory.”
“Mmmm, California,” Meemaw said. The corners of her mouth turned down. She harbored suspicions toward any place west of the Mississippi. “And he’s a factory worker? On the line or a foreman?”
I twisted the hem of my blouse. “Actually, he’s the chairman of the board of Hollingsworth Paper Cups. His daddy left it to him. His name is Timothy Hollingsworth.”
Meemaw gripped a poster of the bed and sat down. “I just had me a flash of that d
aytime voodoo.”
“You mean déjá vu?” I asked.
She nodded her head.”Yes.”
I plunked down on the bed beside her. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve never told you this, but your mama dated some rich fellow from Augusta.” Her gray eyes darkened to black. “Never knew who he was. Darlene wouldn’t bring him home to meet us. Instead she’d sneak around with him. I’m guessing she didn’t think we were up to snuff for an introduction.”
“I’m sure that’s not true, Meemaw.”
“I’m sure it is. Your granddaddy and me were as far away from being rich as a pigeon is from being a peacock. In the South, folks tend to stick with their own kind. But Darlene was at that age where she thought love could conquer all.”
“Are you saying her story didn’t have a happy ending?”
Meemaw didn’t answer me, but rose from the bed and walked to the dresser and withdrew a small book.
“See for yourself. I found this in the bottom of a box when I was sorting through some of your mama’s things. It’s Darlene’s diary.”
“Have you read it?” I touched the cracked, leather cover.
“I looked through it. I thought you might want to have it, seeing how you’re always asking me what she was like.”
I opened it to the first page, with Mama’s name on it in cursive with big, round loops.
“My mama’s life, right here in this book?”
“A year or so of it, anyway.” Meemaw wrinkled her nose. “It ain’t a Danielle Steel novel, you know. Darlene wasn’t a deep thinker.”
“I don’t care.” I cradled the book in my arms. “This is a gift, Meemaw. Thank you for giving me this.”
Meemaw fumbled in the pocket of her sweater for another cigarette. “So what’s the story with this boy?”
“Nothing much.” I tucked the diary in my purse. “Timothy and I are just buddies.”
Bet Your Bottom Dollar (The Bottom Dollar Series Book 1) Page 9
