Cold Tea on a Hot Day

by Matlock, Curtiss Ann

  “The walls are apparently holding,” Charlotte said, “and he’s hanging them with all sorts of pictures. He has one of him with President Nixon. I don’t know why he’d want to advertise it,” she added.

  “He has one of him with Reba,” Reggie put in with some excitement. “He did a feature piece on her for Parade Magazine.”

  Reggie had every one of Reba McEntire’s albums. She suddenly grabbed up a pen to hold in front of her mouth like a microphone and began singing one of Reba’s songs. This was something she often did, pretending either to be a singer or a television commentator. Reggie was every bit pretty enough to be either; however, she could take clowning and showing off to the point of annoyance, as far as Marilee was concerned. Right then was one of those points, and Marilee felt her temper grow short as Reggie kept jutting her face in front of Marilee’s and singing about poor old Fancy.

  “Reggie, would you keep an eye on Corrine and Willie Lee for me?” she said, thus diverting the woman to more quiet childishness, while Marilee went to their publisher’s solid oak door and knocked.

  The sound of hammering drowned out her knock, and she had to try again, and when still no answer came, she poked her head in the door. “Mr. Holloway?” She was unable to address him as Tate, being at the office.

  He turned from where he was hanging a picture. “Marilee! Come in…come in. Just the person I’ve been waitin’ for. You can come over here and help me get this picture in the right place.”

  It was a picture of him with Billy Graham, black-and-white, as all the photographs appeared to be. He placed it against the wall and waited for her instructions, which she gave in the form of, “Higher…a little to the left…a little lower. Right there.”

  Having, apparently, a high opinion of her ability to place a picture, he marked the spot and went to hammering in a nail.

  In a flowing glance, Marilee, wondering how an accomplished journalist of Tate Holloway’s wide experience would manage in tiny Valentine, took in the room. The sedate, even antiquated office that had belonged to Ms. Porter was gone. Or perhaps a more accurate description was that it was being moved out, as pictures and books and boxes full of articles, a number of them antiques, were in a cluster by the door. Next to that, in a large heap, lay the heavy evergreen drapes, which had been ripped from the long windows, leaving only the wooden blinds through which bright light shone on the varied electronic additions: a small television, a radio scanner, a top speed computer and printer, a laptop computer, and one apparatus that Marilee, definitely behind the electronic times, could not identify.

  The major change, however, was to the big walnut desk, which had been moved from where it had sat for eons in front of the windows, facing the wall with E. G. Porter’s portrait. Marilee had always had the impression that Ms. Porter would sit at the desk and look at her father on the wall and worship him. Or maybe throw mental darts at him.

  Now the desk sat in front of that wall, looking away from it, and behind, where E.G.’s august portrait had hung, was an enormous black-and-white photograph of Marilyn Monroe in the famous shot with her dress blowing up.

  After eyeing that for a startled moment, Marilee’s gaze moved on to the clusters of photographs already hung—the ones of Tate Holloway with Reba and President Nixon, and ones of him receiving awards, and with soldiers, and a curious one of a boy plowing with a mule. She stepped closer for a better look at that one. Next to the faded snapshot of the boy and the mule was one of a lovely blond woman in the front yard of an old house, her arms around two boys.

  “That’s my mother,” Tate told her, coming up behind her. “With me and my brother, Hollis. I’m the older, skinnier one.”

  “And that’s you, plowing with a mule?”

  “Yep. Farmin’ in East Texas in the fifties. My mother took that picture. Mama liked to take pictures.”

  He had come to stand very close behind her. Close enough for his breath to tickle her hair.

  “This is Mama in front of the house me and Hollis bought her.” His arm brushed her shoulder as he pointed at another photograph. “And this is how my daddy wound up.”

  He tapped a photograph of a mangled black car stuck to the front end of a Santa Fe Railroad engine.

  “I like to see where I’ve come from and how far I’ve journeyed and remind myself where I don’t want to go,” he said with practicality. Then, the next second, “You smell awfully good, Miss Marilee.”

  That comment jerked her mind away from the horror of the mangled car. She turned, and her shoulder bumped his chest, because he didn’t move but stood there gazing at her with a light in his clear, twinkling blue eyes that just about took every faithful breath out of her lungs.

  His gaze flickered downward, and hers followed to stop and linger on his lips.

  The next instant she stepped quickly away from him and said as casually as possible, “And just what does that picture mean in your journey?” She gestured at the photograph of Marilyn Monroe.

  “Well—” he sauntered to the desk and laid down the hammer “—I like the touch Marilyn gives the place.”

  “What touch are you going for, exactly?”

  “Oh…I think a photograph like that sets people off balance, for one thing.” He folded his arms, and his strong shoulders stretched his shirt. “And it is lively. I might come in here feelin’ a little too serious about myself and things in general, and I’ll look up there at that beautiful woman—” he looked up at the picture and grinned “—with a laugh like that and those legs goin’ to heaven, and it makes me remember the true secret of life.” He gave a little wink.

  Marilee took that in and took hold of the solid walnut back of the visitor chair, feeling the need to have the chair between herself and Tate Holloway.

  She looked at him, and he looked at her in the manner of a man who was intent on having what he wanted. It was both flattering and unsettling.

  Breaking the gaze, she said, “I need to discuss my job here.”

  His eyebrows went up, “Well, you go ahead, Miss Marilee…as long as you aren’t about to tell me you’re gonna quit.”

  Marilee reacted to this with a mixture of gratification and annoyance. There was something very commanding in the way he spoke, as if he would not allow her to quit.

  “Do you want a raise?” he asked before she could speak. “I can spare twenty more a week—okay…I’ll go to thirty.”

  “I don’t want a raise…but I’ll take it.”

  “I won’t force it on you, if you don’t want it.”

  “I want it. I only meant that a raise wasn’t what I was going to discuss, but now that you’ve offered, I will take it.”

  “Well, since it isn’t a question of a raise, there’s no sense in talkin’ about it.”

  “But we are talking about it now, and I’ll take it. My workload has greatly increased since Harlan and Jewel left.”

  “Okay, twenty dollars a week it is.”

  “You said thirty.”

  He cocked his head to the side and regarded her. “What was it you wanted to discuss about your job, Miss Marilee?”

  Keeping her hands pressed to the chair back, she told him of her decision to remove her children from the final weeks of school and therefore her need to work from home. That she had been so bold as to take the raise before explaining this, and the glint in his eye that showed admiration, gave her courage.

  She explained that until this year, when she had enrolled Willie Lee in school, her arrangement with Ms. Porter allowed her to often work from home, and she had managed very well.

  “I have made arrangements with a high school girl to help me in the summer,” she told him, “but until school ends, I will only have her occasionally in the evening hours.”

  “Well now, I don’t see any problem at all with you workin’ from home,” said her new boss and publisher. “I already have laptop computers coming for everyone, and we’ll be installing a networking system so that any of us can work from anywhere in town, or in
the nation, if need be.”

  Marilee thought that The Valentine Voice was suddenly on a rocket, being blasted into the twenty-first century.

  Moving purposefully, her boss went to stand behind his desk, placed his hands on it and leaned forward. “I want you to keep this to yourself for a few days. I’ll tell everyone shortly, but for now, I’m just telling you.” He paused. “We’re going to have to cut the paper to a twice weekly.”

  She took that in.

  He said, “I don’t imagine that comes as any shock to you.”

  “No…it doesn’t.” It saddened her, but it was no surprise. Everyone knew that Ms. Porter had been subsidizing the paper for years, and Marilee, having taken over for Ms. Porter, had consulted a number of times with Zona and knew the great extent to which that subsidizing had run.

  Tate Holloway eyed her with purpose so strong that he leaned even farther forward. “It is my intention to get this paper to be payin’ for itself. I’m out to build somthin’ here, Miss Marilee. And I’m going to need your help to do it.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “I’m countin’ on that, Miss Marilee…. I sure am.”

  Gazing into his twinkling baby-blue eyes, Marilee kept tight hold on the chair back, as if holding to an anchor in the face of a rising, rolling sea.

  Six

  Maybe She’s Human

  Marilee came out of Tate Holloway’s office and closed the door firmly, then held on to the doorknob for some seconds. Behind her, through the door, the low tones of music began—Charlie Rich singing from Tate Holloway’s stereo.

  Pushing away from the door, Marilee wrestled with high annoyance at her new boss. Tate Holloway was way too full of himself.

  The next instant Reggie was sticking a pen in front of her face, saying, “Tell us the news, Ms. James. Are we all goin’ to be swept out to make way for new employees to go with the new publisher?”

  This had been a major worry of Reggie and Leo’s, both being employed at the same place. Mainly it appeared to be a great worry of Reggie’s, since Leo wasn’t given to worrying over steady employment. Before coming to work at The Valentine Voice, he had held various positions in automobile sales, insurance, cattle brokering, photography, trucking and a half-dozen others, several for no more than a week or two before either quitting or being fired. While Reggie defended her husband as trying to find himself and being a victim of too much feminine attention, it had been fact that he had not been able to keep a job of any secure endurance, until he had landed the one of sports reporter at the Voice. He proved excellent at it, and the one time he had shown any inclination to quit, Reggie had come in behind him and finagled a job of her own, thereby being on the scene to make certain he kept his position.

  A part of Marilee’s brain tried to be sensitive to all of this, but seeing everyone’s eyes, even Willie Lee’s and Corrine’s, turned in her direction made her very irritated.

  “Don’t put that thing in my face, Reggie. I need both my eyes.” She pushed Reggie’s hand aside and strode to her desk and began shuffling through files to take home.

  “Okay. So are you pissed off because you do not want to tell us that we are all about to be fired?”

  The breathlessness of the question struck Marilee, and she looked up to see Reggie’s thoroughly uneasy eyes. The precariousness of all their positions came fullblown into her mind, and she felt sorry for her short temper.

  “Of course we aren’t all going to be fired. Who would he get to replace us? The paper can barely pay for itself now.” Just a mild fib. “He can’t afford to be hauling in a whole new crew of Pulitzer prize winners to Valentine. Right now he’s dependent on us. We are all he’s got.”

  She felt as if she were withholding from her friends, being unable to tell the entire truth about the change from a daily to twice weekly. Darn him for confiding in her.

  Turning from this dilemma, and from Reggie’s searching eyes, she said, “He said it will be fine for me to work at home,” and went on to briefly explain about Willie Lee and Corrine not going back to school. “I want to be home with them, like I used to be with Willie Lee, and this will work fine, because Mr. Holloway is getting us all laptop computers and a networking system.”

  “Wow,” Reggie said. “Guess there’s more money than we thought.”

  She jumped from Marilee’s desk and went over to hug Leo, who said quite practically, “Doesn’t mean money. Just good credit.”

  “I finally got my machine working how I like it,” Charlotte said, frowning. She had gotten so furious with the technician who had first set up her computer that she had refused to allow him to touch it again, read the manual front to back and now knew enough to maintain her machine herself.

  Marilee, who was gazing at her typed up notice for Lost and Found, crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the trash. The dog was Willie Lee’s now, she figured, and she was going to let it be.

  “Let’s go get some ice cream,” she said to the children. “You, too, Munro,” she added, when Willie Lee opened his mouth to remind her.

  With Willie Lee holding one hand and Corrine the other, and Munro running along beside them, Marilee headed directly to where she went whenever she felt her spirits in disarray—to her aunt and uncle’s drugstore.

  Blaine’s Drugstore and Soda Fountain had been in business for over seventy years, in the same spot on Main Street. There was a rumor that the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde had once gotten lemonade and bandages from the distant relative of Perry Blaine who had opened the store in 1920. Perry had taken over from his father in ’57, when he had come home from Korea. Things had been booming in Valentine in the fifties, with oil pumping all around, and farming and cattle going okay. That same year Perry had installed the sign with the neon outline that still hung between the windows of the second story.

  Ever since the fateful summer of ’96, when it had been featured in both the lifestyle pages of the Lawton paper and then on an Oklahoma City television travel program, Blaine’s Drugstore had received visitors from all over the southern part of the state. People, enough to keep them open on Friday and Saturday evenings in the summertime, came to order Coca-Colas and milk shakes and sundaes in the thick vintage glassware. Some of the glasses were truly antiques, and to keep the visitors coming, once a year Vella drove down to Dallas to a restaurant supply to purchase new to match. She would covertly bring the boxes into the storeroom and place them behind the big boxes of napkins and foam to-go containers.

  When taken to task by her daughter Belinda for perpetrating a hoax, Vella said with practicality, “People like thinkin’ the glasses are old, and they would rather not be apprized of the truth. Besides, they will be antiques in another fifty years—and I sure pay enough for them to be looked at.”

  As Marilee and the children entered the store, the bell above the door chimed out. Immediately Marilee was engulfed by the dearly familiar scents of old wood, simmering barbecue and faint antiseptic of the store that had not changed since she was a nine-year-old child and so often came running down the hill to escape the sight of her father sitting in his cracked vinyl recliner, beer in hand and glassy eyes staring at the flickering television, and her mother in the kitchen gone so far away into country songs on the radio that she would not speak.

  “We have come for ice cream,” Willie Lee said as he went directly to his Great-Aunt Vella, who was sitting at the rear table, with glasses on the tip of her nose so she could more easily read the IGA ads in the newspaper spread wide before her.

  “You’ve come to the right place then, mister,” said Winston Valentine, who was sitting across from their aunt and who nudged an empty sundae dish that sat in front of him. Being yet spring and midmorning, the place was empty except for these two.

  “Hel-lo, Mis-ter Wins-ton,” Willie Lee said.

  “Hello, Mister Willie Lee.”

  Willie Lee extended his hand, as Winston had taught him, and Winston shook the small offered hand with great respect.

&nb
sp; Marilee saw that Winston’s big, gnarled hand, when it released Willie Lee’s, shook slightly. The blue veins showed clearly when he used that same hand to push his tall frame up from the table.

  “If you ladies and gentleman will excuse me,” he said, polite as always, “I have to walk on home and make sure Mildred has not drowned Ruthanne in her bath this mornin’. The nurse has the day off.” He checked his watch. “They ought to be done by now.”

  Mildred Covington and Ruthanne Bell, two elderly ladies, shared Winston Valentine’s home. Since Winston’s stroke the year before, a home health nurse came in to check on all three of them three times a week. Aunt Vella had once told Marilee that on the days the nurse did not come, Winston, after making certain the women had breakfast, tried to leave home at midmorning, so as to not be present when the women were getting bathed and dressed; Mildred seemed to have a penchant for running around naked in front of him whenever she had the chance.

  “Winston’s really aging now,” Marilee said, watching the old man lean heavily on his cane as he went out the door. He was eighty-eight this year, and only since his stroke had he slowed any.

  “There’s more life in him than many a man I know,” Vella said, and in a snapping manner that startled Marilee a little. It only then occurred to her that her Aunt Vella was not getting any younger, either; no doubt it was distressing to her aunt to see a dear friend declining and heading for the border.

  Marilee found the fact depressing, as well. She felt as if her life were going down a hole, and she could not seem to find the stopper.

  “Now, what’s this about my darlin’s wantin’ ice cream?” Aunt Vella asked.

  “We want sun-daes,” Willie Lee told her and scampered over to haul himself up on a stool at the counter.

  “We’ll have three chocolate sundaes, please,” Marilee said, slipping onto a stool.

  She set herself to getting into a better mood. Children learned by example and picked up on things easily. She did not need to add to any of their numerous wounds by being in a poor mood.