Summer in Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”

  I locked myself in the bathroom and wept for the You too? I’d never find again.

  I had a full and beautiful life, and even if I did not trust anyone to be my best friend, I did have a friend for every occasion. My life had turned out just fine, thank you. Fine. A loving husband, three beautiful children, good health. And I, at least, had remained in Mossy Creek after college, unlike Carolee, who left in shame, along with my boyfriend.

  She had become, through the years, a scapegoat for all things unplanned, for all things gone wrong. She had become less real, more a cartoon-like character of betrayal than the event itself. Carolee and I were more than the silly BFF (best friends forever) of Mossy Creek High School. More than the “What are you gonna wear today?” kind of best friends. We knew, really knew each other. What is better when you are seventeen, or any age for that matter, than knowing another person understands you perfectly? Neither of us needed to escape a cold, cruel world or divulge deep dark family secrets. We didn’t have them. We were, plain and simple, loved by our families and each other. We were the fortress of friendship that others wanted and most never have. I observed life, she described it.

  We had that rare bond C.S. Lewis talked of. The You too?

  It was as if she became a black-ink outline of childhood faith. She was the reason I never truly trusted a best friend, again.

  CAROLEE AND I were seniors at Mossy Creek High School the year before it burned to the ground. BJ Carter lived south of Mossy Creek and thus attended Bigelow County High, instead. He played football, quarterback to be precise, but we did not care that he played for the enemy. No one did. He was loved by all with his James Dean coolness, his languid blue eyes and deep, slow voice. It all came easy to him, or seemed to, and that was all that mattered. He and I dated all through senior year. Carolee and I graduated. BJ didn’t.

  He blamed his non-graduation on the rigors of football and academia together. Oh, he was so cute in his football pants. He’d have to repeat senior year, but he was cute. Carolee’s grades were respectable but not good enough to get her into the university, so she entered Bigelow Community College. I went off to the University of Georgia and left her behind to take care of BJ.

  BJ and I wrote every day. I avoided all fraternity parties and all hints of impropriety in the college scene. I was a promised woman. I belonged willingly and lovingly to the best-looking, smartest, most-adored boy in all of Bigelow County. All of those were my own evaluations—none of which were wholly true.

  We planned a life that included BJ playing pro football while I indulged my pottery hobby by running a chic craft store in whatever big city was lucky enough to get BJ for their football team. Of course we would eventually return to Mossy Creek, but only after our major victories out in the real world. We would retire with a fortune acquired through football and pottery and I would open a pottery store in Mossy Creek.

  I came home that frigid winter quarter with a raging case of the flu. I could not stand even one more day of the barren campus trees, the drunken roommates, the laboring midterms. I bundled up in my Chevy and made the long drive home for some chicken noodle soup, a grilled cheese sandwich and some clean laundry that would smell like my mother’s house, like my own bedroom. And, of course, I headed home to surprise the love of my life, the future, my only man: the one I pledged my body and soul to.

  How silly of me.

  I’m still not sure why I didn’t recognize Carolee’s car in the driveway of BJ’s house. Maybe it was the 103-degree fever. Maybe it was the dehydration. I should have gone to my own home first. If I had gone home first, I would not have known about them. Turn left here, turn right there—we don’t realize that the small turns in life may be a disaster averted or met head on.

  I met this one, well, head on.

  I didn’t knock on the cut-glass door of his parents’ porched home. I never did. I was family, or at least promised family. I stood on the white painted boards of the front porch and picked a dead leaf off his mother’s dead resurrection fern. She, in her beautiful, hippie-like beauty couldn’t garden worth a damn. Not a good skill to lack in Mossy Creek. She tried. I covered up for her often, bringing living plants from mother’s garden to replace her own brown and wilted ones. I loved BJ, I loved his silly mama and I adored his big construction worker daddy.

  As I opened the front door I could tell his parents weren’t home. If they were, there would be the blaring sound of Janis Joplin from the stereo, the smell of Gardenia perfume radiating from the parlor, the soft swish of his mother’s cotton broomstick skirts across the floor as she came to sweep me in her arms and offer me a Coca-Cola with a cherry in it.

  A wave of nausea and dizziness washed over me. I closed my eyes to balance, reached for the banister of the foyer stairs, then heard a soft noise. I turned, blinking slowly, and looked into the living room. There they were, Carolee and BJ, caught in a compromising situation, all opened buttons and hidden hands.

  The yelp that came from me was animalistic.

  BJ jumped up. “Sarah-Beth.”

  Carolee did not move. She covered her face and moaned.

  I ran out the front door. Neither of them followed me.

  After I stayed in bed for five full days, my mother told the university I would not return to finish the semester. They did not know what was wrong with me . . . they had thought it the simple flu, she told them, but I was still not well and they were running some tests. I did not care what the doctors did to me as long as I never had to see my best friend or boyfriend again. Both Carolee and BJ tried to visit me, but Mother turned them away at my request.

  In the weeks and months after I found them, life blurred between the solid and the vaporous. I finally transferred the stone in my gut and lodged it in my heart where trust had once resided: a rock set in memorial to Carolee and BJ’s betrayal. I went back to college and told no one I was a different person, now.

  It was easier to forget BJ’s betrayal than Carolee’s.

  CAROLEE—OR A stranger who looked very much like Carolee must look at thirty-seven—now stood beneath the trees in the middle of Mossy Creek’s town square, as real and solid as the blister forming inside my new shoes.

  I froze outside Goldlilocks Hair Salon, feeling seventeen-years-old again and betrayed. I stared. I didn’t want to, but I did. She was beautiful in a white linen dress, her long brunette hair falling over her shoulders. She looked around with a nervous smile.

  “Sara-Beth . . . are you all right?”

  My friend Izzy Mullins prodded me with her shopping bag.

  “Izzy . . .” I lowered my voice. “I think that’s Carolee Langford.”

  Izzy squinted and leaned forward. “No. Carolee . . . hasn’t been seen in what? Thirty years?”

  “Twenty.”

  “I’m going to walk right on up there and prove to you that that is not her.”

  Izzy bounded across Main Street. A Mossy Creek police cruiser screeched to a halt inches from her Capri pants. Sandy Crane poked her head out the driver’s window and yelled, “Izzy, I oughta give you a ticket for not wearing your glasses!”

  Izzy smiled. “Sorry.”

  Sandy harumphed her best harumph and drove off. She was not the first, nor would she be the last to melt a tire or two trying not to kill Izzy.

  I was still staring at The Woman. She turned her back to me and headed across the square toward Hamilton’s Department Store. A mixture of disappointment and relief settled inside me. Izzy threw up both hands in defeat and followed me up the sidewalk. “I need a glass of wine,” I said. I rushed into O’Day’s Pub. Michael Connors came out from behind the bar, said something about me looking a little flushed, and led Izzy and me to a table near an air conditioning vent.

 
We sat down and I shoved my purse under the seat. Izzy began a rambling dissertation on laser eye surgery, which she was considering as a solution to her nearsightedness and forever-lost glasses. I bent my head over the pub’s menu and tried to concentrate. Until I heard the unmistakable sound of high-heeled shoes on the pub’s wooden floor.

  “Sara-Beth,” a dulcet female voice said. “Is that you?”

  The Carolee lookalike in white linen stood there.

  “Carolee,” I said. Amazingly, I smiled and rose to shake her hand. Ah, how deep and wide politeness can be, when needed.

  She hugged me. I knew then that every etiquette class, every yes ma’am and no sir, every snip and snap from my mother and me-maw had been embedded marrow-deep, because I hugged back and retained my smile. A Creekite woman must not be rude. Strong, yes. Smart-ass, more so. Carry a loaded gun, often. But never, ever rude.

  “How are you?” I heard my own voice asking.

  “Fine, just fine, thank you. I was hoping I would run into you.”

  “What are you doing back in my Mossy Creek, Carolee?” I hoped she noticed that I called it my Mossy Creek, not our Mossy Creek.

  “My great aunt died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Her funeral service was this morning at First Baptist. I’ve just been walking around town since then. Remembering . . . looking around. It doesn’t look much different, you know? It looks a little smaller to me, but I know that is because I am bigger. Taller and . . .” She laughed, a nervous silver tinkle that fell quickly at our feet. “. . . bigger.”

  Yes, she was bigger. Not obese at all, but not the slim-waisted, waifish girl of high school, either. I even saw a hint of silver in her chestnut hair, and a few fine lines around her eyes.

  Izzy looked back and forth between us, then at her watch. She opened her mouth in very poor acting style. “You know, I have got to get home. I had no idea what time it was . . . Carolee, here you take my place.” Izzy stood and patted the worn wooden seat of her chair.

  “Oh, no . . . no.”

  “Really, I have just got to go. Carolee, don’t let Sara-Beth eat all alone. Time just got away from me . . . along with my durned glasses. I think I left them at Goldilocks. I’ll go there first.” Izzy turned to Carolee. “So good to see you. Y’all take care now.” Izzy picked up her bag and left me there with Carolee.

  “May I?” Carolee asked and pointed to Izzy’s chair.

  “Please.” I sat back down. I would eat fast, pay the bill, go home, forget about all this. I would not let her bring up the past. This was all definitely twenty years late and a teardrop short.

  “Sara-Beth, you look great. How are you, really?”

  “Fine, just fine.” I began to rattle off the statistics of my life that proved how fine I really was. The names of my three children, including pictures of them at the beach. I told her about my husband, James, and his prominent position as a doctor down at Bigelow County Hospital.

  As I talked I could see the air between us as if it contained the energy force of betrayal. I wanted to reach my hand to the middle of the table and swipe at it although I knew it was just the air-conditioned air mixing with the pressed and shaken humidity of the day. I wanted to go home.

  “And now, Carolee . . . how are you?

  “I’m good. Well . . . doing okay. My husband . . . died . . . this year and . . . it’s been hard. My kids are still young, at home and all.”

  “BJ died?” My heart began a slow roll, a nauseating lurch that brought my hand to my throat.

  “BJ? God, no.” She leaned forward. “You thought I was still married to BJ?”

  “Yes.” My voice was small, tight.

  “Oh, Sara-Beth. No.”

  “What?” I was as confused as if I had found myself on another planet. I was blinking, blinded.

  “Okay . . . okay. Let’s start over here. Sara-Beth, I thought you knew. We were only married a year.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.” My voice seemed to come from far away.

  “I knew I should have called you. I needed to talk to you so long ago . . . oh, God, why haven’t I called you? You thought I was still married to BJ?” She choked on the end of her sentence and put her head in her hands.

  Okay, so now the conversation began. BJ’s name hung above us, bloated and full of enough poison to fill the conversations at all the pub’s tables, much less just ours. She looked at me and I saw her eyes fill with tears. I stared back in genuine shock. Tears. “I’m sorry. So sorry . . . about your husband . . . the one who died.” Nothing was coming out right.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Sara-Beth. I do. I would be the same: what goes around comes around . . . all that . . . karma.”

  “No . . . no.”

  “Yes. I came here for my great aunt’s memorial, but I really came to look for you. I tried to get up the courage to call you over the years. I wanted to talk to you. Really.”

  “To tell me that you and BJ were only married for a year . . . you sought me out for that?”

  “No. No. Not that. I have, for so many sad years, wanted, needed just to hear your voice. But, what would I say when you answered? Hi . . . it’s me, the friend who stabbed you in the back?” She sighed. “The longer I waited to call, the more impossible it became.”

  Michael appeared with a bottle of wine and two glasses. “You look you need this,” he said simply. As he set the drinks down and returned to the bar I rubbed my forehead, trying to ease skin that had pulled painfully tight. “We don’t need to rehash this. Why don’t you tell me about your kids, your husband—we do not, I mean it, do not need to talk about BJ.”

  “But you don’t know what happened.”

  “I know exactly what happened.” I lowered my voice, “I came home from college sick as a dog and found you wrapped around BJ. That is all I need to know. Please, please drop this. It really is all so simple at its base, Carolee. You two fell in love. Beginning of story. End of story.”

  She started to cry. “It’s not that simple. Please, let me tell you. You never have to talk to me again, or . . . but let me tell you.”

  I leaned back in the chair and forced a swallow of wine.

  “I’m listening. That’s all I can promise.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  Carolee took a long swallow of her own wine. “Here goes . . .” She sighed and looked up at me. “I missed you so terribly when you went off to the university. Here I was, stuck at Bigelow Community College because I needed to improve my grades. There was a hole of disappointment inside of me I could not seem to fill up with your letters and phone calls. I was missing all the fun of a real college. I missed you. I began to resent you. I know that doesn’t make much sense. But it’s an honest description.”

  She paused. I said nothing. I wanted to hear the rest, I wanted to know the final destination of this rushing river of words and confessions.

  Carolee continued, “Daddy came home from work one miserable day to tell me that we would be moving—that the army was making us go back to Fort Bragg. He couldn’t afford for me to live here and stay in the community college. I’d have to move with the family. I called you right away, called your dorm to sob, cry, tell you about it. I needed you to fix it . . . I don’t know, I guess I just needed you to understand. I thought you would know what to do, what to say.” She choked on a small cry. “But I couldn’t find you. Your roommate said you had left for Mossy Creek hours earlier. I ran to BJ’s house thinking you might be there.”

  “I hadn’t told anyone I was coming home. I was sick . . . the flu.”

  “BJ was home and I told him my tale of woe, and how I needed to talk to you about it, but I couldn’t find you at the university. BJ said you were probably out with some guy.”

  “What?”

  “Sara-Beth, he was
so insecure about you going to the university. So jealous. He was often in a rage, especially after a few beers, about you away at college with all those boys and the frat parties. He hated the wild college stories that other Creekite kids came home with . . . I was constantly soothing him in those days . . . telling him that you weren’t doing any of those things.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “I know you weren’t. But that day when I couldn’t find you, when I desperately needed a friend . . . BJ and I found some bizarre common ground in missing you, in envying you, in feeling left behind. I accepted BJ’s offer from his parents’ liquor cabinet, and . . . Sara-Beth, these are not excuses, just facts. I want you to know I am not giving you excuses. I have none left for anything in my life, for any of my choices.”

  I held up my hand in defeat but her words were beginning to cover me with the slow blanket-warmth of the truth. She leaned closer, across twenty-plus years, to let me see her stark, urgent eyes. “Sara-Beth, we got drunk and talked about how you were getting on with your life . . . how we were stuck here without you, how we really had no idea what your life was like or what you were doing. BJ began to imagine, really imagine this life of yours, and he went into a downward spiral until . . . between his imagination and his daddy’s Jack Daniel’s, we had you . . .”

  “Had me what? Going to school getting my physical therapy degree . . . driving home with the flu?”

  “No . . . we had you living and loving without us.”

  “What then?” Almost yelling, I slapped the table top. “You decided it was time to live and love without me?”

  Carolee put her face in her hands and sobbed. Around us at the pub tables, the bar and the dart boards, the lunchtime crowd began to stare.

  “Stop crying,” I whispered.

  “I can’t help it. Doesn’t any of this make you sad? Ever make you cry?”

  “No, I don’t cry about this anymore, Carolee. Did I then? Oh, yes. For days, weeks, months. Does that make you feel better? That I cried? That I almost died in a pity party of immense proportions? Does knowing that make you feel better?”