“I thought we’d start with taking the innards out. Do you know if Timothy is partial to gizzards?” she asked.
“Don’t we have time for a glass of iced tea first?” I wasn’t in any hurry to be sticking my hand up a dead chicken.
“I expect we do.” She grabbed the ceramic pitcher of tea from a shelf in the refrigerator. Meemaw prides herself on her iced tea. The only brand she uses is Luzianne, the leaves, not the bags, and she makes a special syrup from sugar and honey to sweeten it and garnishes it with bruised mint leaves.
“So what did you think of Timothy, Meemaw?” Timothy and I’d had dinner with Meemaw and Boomer the night before. She’d made her company meatloaf with ground sirloin and veal and she’d worn her sterling silver earring bobs for the occasion.
“I still don’t think young folks should rush pell-mell into marriage.” Meemaw turned around to face me. “But I do have to say that Timothy seems like good people. You’d never guess he comes from all that money.”
“He was wild about your peach cobbler. I believe he had two helpings.”
“Three,” Meemaw said, with a smug smile. She couldn’t resist a hearty eater.
Meemaw’s kitchen is one of my favorite places. The bear cookie jar still sat on the same shelf it did when I was a girl. I knew without looking that its belly was filled with oatmeal-and-raisin cookies, just as I knew that her freezer was packed tight with bags of snap peas, string beans, and butter beans.
“Where’s Boomer?” I asked as Meemaw poured some tea.
“Saturday is his day with his mama. He takes her to get a comb-out and a blow dry and then they go to the Chat ‘N’ Chew and have a cup of chicken noodle soup. They’ve been doing that now for thirty years, ever since Boomer’s daddy died. Once the Chat ‘N’ Chew changed their Saturday soup from chicken noodle to split pea, and Boomer’s mom made such a stink that they changed it right back.”
For a moment we sat in silence, except for the clinking of the ice against our tea glasses.
Meemaw’s dark eyebrows hung low on her forehead and she stared into her ashtray. “Is there anything you wanted to ask me about married life?” she asked. Her eyes were still fixed on the ashtray and her knuckles had turned white around her tea glass.
“No, Meemaw,” I said quickly. “Not a thing.”
She relaxed back into her chair and glanced through the kitchen window into the backyard.
“I see the Bradford pear tree is about to bloom. Seems it was just last week that I swept the last of the pollen off the screen porch and here spring’s coming around again.”
She squinted at something outside. “Oh, shoot. Here comes Patsy Ann. Headed straight for the back door.”
Patsy Ann Dinkins had been Meemaw’s neighbor ever since I could remember, and she was also my godmother. She worked as a baby nurse at the hospital in Augusta where I was born and was in the room when I was delivered.
The screen door squeaked as Patsy Ann pushed it open. “I got some black-eyed Susans for planting as well as some wisteria, and I thought I’d share the—” She spotted me and grinned. “Would you look here? I swear, Elizabeth Delores, you get prettier every time I see you.”
She sauntered over to kiss my cheek and then looked at Meemaw.
“Isn’t she a blond, blue-eyed vision? I saw this classified ad in the Crier: Models wanted for glamorous career opportunities in Atlanta. Contact the Spotlight Modeling Agency.”
She snitched a Hershey’s Kiss from Meemaw’s candy bowl. “You ought to think about applying, Elizabeth.”
“Maybe I will,” I said, although at five-foot three inches and 125 pounds I wasn’t anyone’s idea of a fashion model.
Patsy Ann scraped a chair to the table.
“I can’t believe you’re having a visit with Elizabeth and didn’t call me over. I never get to see my godchild anymore,” she said, rapping her knuckles on the table. “I’ll tell you the God’s-honest truth, many babies have come through my nursery, but there’s never been a baby that could hold a candle to our Elizabeth. Isn’t that right, Glenda?”
“She was a sweet little thing,” Meemaw said.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Patsy Ann continued. “Not a hair on that scalp, but eyes so big, you were afraid you’d fall into them and—”
“Patsy Ann!”
It was Patsy Ann’s husband, Edward. Edward had been frail and ailing for so many years I was surprised he was still alive.
“Patsy Ann!” he called again.
“Here I thought we could all have us a hen talk and—” Patsy Ann said.
“Patsy Ann!”
“Coming, Edward!” Patsy Ann screeched so loud that both Meemaw and I flinched.
“Lord, that man can’t blink without me around. Elizabeth, it’s a joy as always. Glenda, I left them plants outside the door.”
When she left, Meemaw exhaled.
“God love her, but that Patsy Ann is something of a trial,” Meemaw said. “She’s always had a soft spot for you, though. The way she still talks about the day you were born, you’d think she was the one who gave birth to you.”
“Speaking of which. The anniversary of mama’s death is coming next week. Are you planning to go out to the cemetery?” I asked.
Meemaw squirted some lemon into her tea. “I don’t know that I will. Darlene doesn’t need me there and I don’t get comfort from sitting by a headstone and talking to it.”
“Something’s been gnawing at me since I read her diary.”
I watched Meemaw’s face closely, a little afraid that I might be bringing up something she would just as soon see dead and buried. But she didn’t seem at all upset. She just shook another cigarette from her pack and lit it. She exhaled, and watched a cloud of gray smoke hover near the ceiling fan.
“I thought you might ask. I was biding my time until you were ready.”
I dipped my finger into the ring of moisture the tea glass had left on the table. “Are you saying that you know something?”
Meemaw shook her head. “Don’t know a thing more than what that diary says.”
“Oh.”
“But I have my own ideas about what’s written there.”
“And what are they?”
Meemaw pointed her cigarette at me.
“Just hold your horses a minute, girl. This is serious. I’d be the last person to throw your daddy a life vest if he fell in the drink, but you’ve thought of him as your daddy as long as you’ve been alive. Are you sure you’re ready for something that might change all that?”
I didn’t answer.
She didn’t say anything at first, just pulled her sweater on tighter and looked away. I could hear the whir of the ceiling fan and the clicking of Pierre’s toenails on the linoleum as he paced underneath the table, hoping we’d drop some food on the floor.
Finally Meemaw looked at me. Her shoulders were hunched and she appeared small and dried-out in her oversized sweater, like something the wind could carry away.
“I have never once thought that weasel Dwayne was your father,” she said finally.
Once she began, the words tumbled out like beans spilling from a bag. She said my mama had known Dwayne for a year. They’d both worked at the What-A-Burger near the mill, and my daddy had taken to slipping my mama notes into the pocket of her uniform and buying her cheese crackers and cans of root beer on her break. But she didn’t give him a flicker of attention and had gone so far as to make fun of him, calling him Dwayne the Pain, even though all the other girls would have gladly peeled off their clothes and dived into the back seat of his Maverick at the snap of his fingers.
Besides, at the time, Meemaw said, my mama was keeping company with that mysterious “B” of her diary.
“Darlene was a talker, but she didn’t want to say noth
ing about this one.” Meemaw scratched her elbow, which was poking out of a hole in her sweater. “I can’t tell you how long it went on. A month, maybe more. All I can tell you is when it ended.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“One morning Darlene called in sick at her job. She didn’t go to work or anywhere else for three days, just stayed locked in her room. I found a gold bracelet that “B” must have given her in the wastebasket. It was all twisted out of shape. I knew then what had happened.
“We’d decided to leave her be, your granddaddy and I, but on the afternoon of the third day I was going to make her come to supper that evening. Just before we sat down to eat, Dwayne came by the house, wondering why Darlene hadn’t been at work the past few days. I told him she was ailing, but no sooner had the words come out of my mouth when your mama came breezing out of her room, wearing a fresh coat of lipstick and making a fuss over Dwayne as if he’d been away at war, instead of flipping burgers at the What-A-Burger. She took off with him and from that day forward, the two of them were hardly ever apart. It was as if there had never even been a boy with the initial “B.”
Meemaw leaned across the table and her eyes narrowed.
“When she and Dwayne came to your granddaddy and me, telling us they were off to the courthouse to get married—after dating less than two weeks—I didn’t even try to talk them out of it, because I knew a young’un was on the way. I just didn’t know who was the true father of the young’un—Dwayne or that boy in the diary.”
She stubbed out her cigarette, which she had smoked clean down to the filter. “But my money was on that ‘B’ fellow.”
“Didn’t you ever ask Mama about it?”
“Never.” She got up from her chair and rinsed her tea glass in the sink. “And I didn’t say a word when you were born eight months after they got married,” she said over her shoulder. “You weighed eight pounds and five ounces, but I kept quiet.”
I got up and stood behind her. “But why, Meemaw? Why didn’t you ask?”
She turned around and leaned back against the sink. “If that other boy was your daddy, your mama went to a whole lot of trouble to make it seem like you were Dwayne’s child. It just seemed best to leave things be.”
We were silent. I took a sip of my tea and studied Meemaw, who had a fresh cigarette burning in her hand.
“All my life, I wanted a different kind of daddy,” I said. “I used to wish for a daddy like Charles Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie. But I got Dwayne instead.”
“A water moccasin would have made a better father,” Meemaw said with a grunt.
“Maybe. Dwayne hasn’t been the best of dads, but he has been a daddy, something that ‘B’ person hadn’t ever been.”
Meemaw folded her arms across her chest. “What are you saying?”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t know. I guess I’m saying it doesn’t matter so much one way or the other where I came from. Maybe it did when I was little, but it doesn’t now.”
Twenty-Three
Even Jesus had a fish story.
~ Sign outside the Bait Box and Tanning Salon
When I got home Timothy was sitting on the couch, reading and scratching Maybelline’s belly. The dog was ecstatically thumping her leg on the couch. Timothy was so deeply absorbed that he didn’t glance up until I’d shut the door behind me, just in time to see him shove his reading material behind the sofa cushion.
“Hi, Elizabeth, did you have a nice time at your grandmother’s?” he asked.
He looked up at me in a completely innocent way, as if I hadn’t caught him in the act of trying to hide something from me.
“I did.”
I paused in the middle of the room, cradling my big container of soup to my chest. “What’s going on?” I stared hard at the cushion.
“Nothing much. A little tummy rub is all. It took a while, but Maybelline and I have finally made our peace.”
“Well, I’d still keep an eye on my boxers and socks if I was you. That dog would cozy up to the dogcatcher if she thought she’d get a belly scratching out of it.”
I walked into the kitchen to put my soup in the refrigerator, wondering over Timothy’s secretive behavior. I guessed he’d been reading one of them nudie magazines like Playboy or Pent-house. Clip had kept stacks of them beside his waterbed and didn’t even bother hiding them when I came over. I wouldn’t have figured Timothy as the type to be looking at girlie pictures, but I could be wrong.
I heated up the soup for supper and when I served it, Timothy was so complimentary that I almost forgot his earlier sneakiness. He also insisted on helping with the dishes, which is a chore I had never seen any man do.
Over at Taffy and Daddy’s house, me and Taffy would be in the kitchen after dinner scraping the dishes and loading the dishwasher while Daddy and Lanier were plopped in front of the television, gnawing on toothpicks.
It never even occurred to Taffy or me to ask them to pitch in. And if we had, my daddy would surely say that washing dishes was a job for pansies, which is what he said about most household chores, with the exceptions of weed-whacking, killing bugs, and slapping a coat of Turtle Wax on his pickup truck.
After the dishes, we took our coffee into the living room and Timothy asked me how I felt about going house-hunting this coming weekend.
“This place is cozy, but too small for the two of us,” Timothy said. “I’d like a home with a study; you need a bigger kitchen; and I think Maybelline would enjoy a nice big, fenced yard where she could frolic, chase butterflies, and dig holes or whatever it is that dogs like to do.”
Timothy wasn’t going to get a whole lot of frolicking out of Maybelline—she was more the snoozing-on-the-couch and licking-her-bottom kind of pooch—but I was thrilled to bits at the idea of a house of our very own.
I wanted a place with a bathtub—a step up from my shower with its scummy tile floor covered with stick-on daisies that had been there so many years, they were brittle and black with mildew. I was imagining myself in the tub, with my hair piled high on my head like in those bath-bead ads, covered up all the way to my neck in bubbles and resting my head on one of those shell-shaped inflatable pillows, when I heard a voice outside my front door say, “Toughen up, Dwayne, there’s just three steps. You act like we’re climbing up the Empire State Building.”
I felt like someone had dumped a Slushee down my back. The voice belonged to Taffy. Obviously she had dragged my daddy over here for a surprise visit. I felt like grabbing Timothy’s hand and escaping out the back door, but unfortunately there was only one entrance to Casa Elizabeth.
“Knock, knock, Betty D. You got some visitors. Get yourself decent, if you ain’t,” Taffy said outside our door.
Timothy shot me a quizzical look and I whispered, “It’s my daddy and his wife.”
I opened the door and there they stood. Taffy must have told Daddy what to wear, because instead of his usual Dickey work pants and Budweiser T-shirt, he was wearing a golf shirt with a tiny little horse on the breast and a pair of khaki pants stiff enough to have come straight off a mannequin. Taffy, on the other hand, was wearing a bright red pantsuit with epaulets and elaborate gold braiding. The only thing she needed to top off her look was a matching pillbox hat.
“Betty D., I hope we weren’t interrupting anything.” Taffy’s neck craned to see behind me, hoping to get a peek at Timothy. I noticed she was holding a package in her hand.
“No, we just finished up our supper. Y’all come in.”
Maybelline chose that moment to shoot out from her spot under the coffee table. Her teeth bared and her chest hair ruffled as she growled at Taffy.
Taffy backed away, the blue vein in her forehead throbbing. “Lord, Betty D. Would you call off Revlon, for God sakes? Why does she always do that to me?”
My daddy picked Maybe
lline up by the scruff of her neck and said, “Shoot, this is more rat than dog.” He let Maybelline loose, and she crawled back to her spot under the table, with her tail between her legs.
“Now a pit bull, that’s a dog,” he said, directing his comment to Timothy, who was standing by the couch, holding his coffee cup and staring at Taffy and my daddy, open-mouthed, as if rubbernecking at a traffic accident.
“Taffy and Dwayne Polk,” I said. “This is Timothy Hollingsworth. My husband.”
Whatever trance Timothy had been in, he immediately snapped out of it and dived right into all the social niceties.
“An honor to finally meet you, sir,” he said, pumping my daddy’s arm. “Mrs. Polk, so good to have the pleasure of your acquaintance. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable. Could we offer you a beverage? Coffee, perhaps?”
My daddy made a face, most likely because of the offer of coffee during his usual happy hour. He sprawled out on the sofa, spied the remote in between the cushions, turned the television on, and began flipping through the channels.
“Dwayne, what are you doing?” Taffy said.
“Looking for the motor cross races on ESPN. What do you think I’m doing? You a motor cross fan, son?” my daddy asked Timothy.
Timothy was standing in his stocking feet, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Uh, motor cross. I don’t think—”
“Your cable is out.” My daddy tossed the remote aside. “All I’m getting is a lot of fuzz and the local stations.”
“Daddy, I don’t have cable,” I said.
My daddy looked shocked, as if I had told him that I didn’t have indoor plumbing. He shoved his hands in his pockets and shot Taffy a stormy look.
“I bet now that they’re newlyweds, they’ll get cable. Maybe even a few of those premium channels too,” Taffy said.
I nodded vaguely. No point telling them that neither Timothy or I had much use for television. It wasn’t a notion they’d understand.
Bet Your Bottom Dollar (The Bottom Dollar Series Book 1) Page 14
