Flies on the Butter

by Denise Hildreth Jones

  “Then I picked the perfect place for a snack, huh?” She smiled and winked back.

  She laid one crisp dollar bill in Herschel’s hand. Before she could withdraw her hand, he wrapped his fingers around it. Startled, she lifted her eyes to meet his own, coal black and gazing at her deeply. “It’s nice every now and then to find yourself a reminder of home. But I bet getting home will be even nicer.”

  He didn’t know her home.

  “And I hope when you get there, you find it better than you left it.” He gave her one more gold-illuminated smile and released her. A chill ran through her. She didn’t look back as she walked out the door and back to her car.

  After she nestled herself into the plush leather, she eyed her bottle once more. She brought it to her lips with near reverence and drank long and hard. By the time she pulled it from her lips, her eyes and her throat were burning.

  She’d almost forgotten what it tasted like. But odd how when lost things returned, remembering why you loved them in the first place didn’t take long.

  She moved her gaze to the little paper bag. It had been so long. And you couldn’t find boiled peanuts in her neck of the woods. She pulled one out and cracked it open with her teeth. The pleasure came back to her immediately. She removed half of the shell and placed the other side full of peanuts and salty juice into her mouth. She sucked on those peanuts long and determined. They were perfect.

  She cracked another one open, pulled out a large peanut, and examined it. The size was similar to the fat piece of crayon she had lodged up her nose when she was four. She had simply wanted to see if the crayon would fit. Thank the good Lord it didn’t. But it did squeeze in there just far enough that neither her mama nor her daddy could get it out without help. She considered for a moment the wonderment that led a child to see if a fat crayon would fit up her nose. Rose looked around to make sure no one was watching her. Then she studied the peanut again, wondering. And then she laughed. No one heard her. But she heard herself. And that was enough.

  She sat there in her car, enjoying each salty and juicy peanut, until she finished the entire bag and her entire Coca-Cola, all while the little red light blinked on the top of her BlackBerry.

  Inside the store, Herschel took a dollar rose from the vase beside the register. He laid down the single bill the stranger had handed him next to the vase. The roses had been delivered yesterday by the sweet lady who owned the flower shop a quarter mile up the road. They were beginning to open. He picked up one that seemed to be the largest among them, a red one looking powerful and proud. He brought it to his nose and inhaled deeply of its fragrance. Then he cut off the stem and tucked the rosebud inside the pocket in the front of his overalls. The pocket hung slightly with the weight and covered up the H of his name. But he didn’t mind going through the rest of the day as “erschel.” No, not today. Because there was something about that little lady who had just passed through that made him feel she might need some praying-for today. And for some reason he felt this flower wouldn’t let him forget to do just that.

  4

  Did you get it?”

  Rose turned on her blinker to pass the slow-moving car in the fast-moving lane. “Get what?”

  “You did not just say, ‘Get what,’” Helen responded in bewildered amusement. “Rose, did you get the document I sent you?”

  Had poor Rose still been eating peanuts, one would have lodged itself in her nose all by itself. She became suddenly aware of the BlackBerry in the small pocket inside her door. It looked as if it were smoldering. Rose didn’t forget e-mails. Rose didn’t forget anything. “I haven’t had time to pull over yet,” she lied. Lying had become easier the more she did it. It seemed to be increasing in frequency.

  “Oh, well, thank goodness. Because I thought you had forgotten, and if you forgot to check your e-mail, then I might as well quit and move in with my sister. Because neither you nor I can keep our jobs if you’ve become bipolar. Of course, my sister wants to set me up with a preacher. So maybe that isn’t such a good idea.”

  “For you or the preacher?”

  “Funny, but don’t change the subject.”

  Rose laughed that spit kind of laugh, the one where the sound comes out through your teeth, like Phhhh. “I didn’t forget,” she said. “Just trying to make good time. And if these slow people would quit driving in the fast lane, I might actually get somewhere.”

  “Now, that’s the Rose I know. Focused. Diligent. And irritable.” Helen said the words as if they were simply the truth to be told. “So call me when you get it, and we can figure out what I need to have prepared for your meeting. By the way, what color do you think I should paint my nails next week? Did you see that new shade of red in In Style that cute Reese Witherspoon wore to that hoitytoity awards show?”

  “I do not care what color you paint your nails, Helen.”

  “Like I said, an irritable little creature you are.”

  Rose cut off the phone with no good-bye. People defined Rose all the time. Behind her back. To her face. On the streets of Washington. Even on the Hannity and Colmes show the other night, so she heard. People didn’t care. Everyone had an impression of her. But was she really irritable? I mean, focused and diligent, sure. Even tenacious, maybe. But irritable? She wasn’t sure she liked irritable. In fact, she wasn’t quite sure when irritable arrived. Of course, that’s how it usually happens when something has been your companion for awhile. You have absolutely no idea how long it’s been there or when exactly it showed up.

  “Don’t be a whiny butt, Charlotte,” Bobby Dean said, bopping his sister on the top of the head.

  Bobby Dean and Charlotte were blocking Rosey’s view, and who knew just when they might start tussling for real. She scooted over on the couch to get out of the way.

  “Mamaaaw . . .” Charlotte whined, throwing her hand on her hip in perfect Southern drama. “Bobby Dean called me a whiny rutt . . .”

  “No, I called you a whiny butt,” he corrected.

  His interjection stopped her whining. Momentarily. “Mamaaaaw . . . he called me a whiny butt,” she said, stomping into the kitchen.

  Mamaw called from the kitchen. “Bobby Dean, we’ll have none of that, now, you hear?”

  “But she’s always so irritable. Can’t you make her not be so irritable?”

  “Charlotte,” Mamaw responded, “you need to quit being a tattletale and stop ruining a perfectly good Saturday morning.”

  Charlotte could ruin a perfectly good anything with one of her tantrums. And she had just about ruined their cartoon. This one had Scooby wrapped around Shaggy as if they were Siamese twins while a ghost hovered over their heads. Rosey and Christopher shared a pillow. He was still in his Superman pj’s, and she was still wearing her Cinderella nightgown. Bobby Dean didn’t like pajamas, so he was running around in his Underoos.

  The smell of fresh-baked cookies wafted into the family room. Of course, it wasn’t that far for the aroma to travel in Mamaw and Granddaddy’s twelve-hundred-square-foot, five-room house. With only two bedrooms, one bathroom, a family room, and a kitchen, it was small and cozy. But it felt like a mansion to Rosey.

  Her mamaw and granddaddy had been born and raised in Mullins. And Rosey’s family lived within spittin’ distance. Mamaw often said that life couldn’t get any better. They had their own baby girl and son-in-law close by, and their grand-babies were “the center of their universe.” That meant Rosey. And Charlotte.

  Granddaddy had worked tobacco fields all of his life. And Mamaw had cooked three meals a day for him and his crew, until he decided to retire. Now she cooked only for her own crew. Rosey later figured that nobody else bothered to cook because no matter what they made, it wasn’t as good as Mamaw’s cooking.

  “Who wants to lick the spoon?” Mamaw called from the kitchen. She was standing in front of the table that sat in the center of the room. The cookies were supposed to be their treat after lunch. But Mamaw had trouble waiting for such things.

  They w
ere all takers. Charlotte, however, was perched atop the table, already working on her spoon. “I need some more, Mamaw,” she said, cramming the full spoon into her mouth.

  “You will wait until everyone else has some.” Rosey loved Mamaw. She gave each of them a whopping spoonful of flour, sugar, eggs, and milk. Each time they ate a heap of that raw dough, they risked getting worms—at least that’s what Rosey’s mama told her eating raw dough would do to you, but apparently Mamaw didn’t worry much about their getting worms. So why should Rosey worry?

  Mamaw had enough spoons for everyone. Even Charlotte got a little more. As irritating as she was.

  The day passed with only one bloody nose, three Charlotte tantrums, and one bruising game of tag. By nightfall Rosey had convinced her daddy to let her spend the night at her mamaw and granddaddy’s—again. Everyone else headed back to their own homes.

  After Mamaw tucked Rosey into bed, she heard Mamaw pad back into the family room. She knew the creaking of Mamaw’s knees meant that she was kneeling beside her recliner.

  Rosey got up and sneaked over to the door that Mamaw always left cracked for her so she could get some light streaming into her room from the kitchen. She listened as Mamaw named each one of her nine children and their spouses and all her thousands of grandchildren by name. Rosey thought it was a miracle that Mamaw could remember all those names.

  And at the end of Mamaw’s list, just when she thought Mamaw might have actually forgotten the grandchild sleeping in her own house, she heard Mamaw add, “And, dear Jesus, bless our little Rose. She’s such a sweet girl. Please don’t ever let that sweetness be taken from her.”

  Rosey slipped back into bed. Nestling her face against her pillow, which smelled like Mamaw’s rose water, she fell fast asleep.

  Irritable. The mere thought of the word made her irritable. “I’m not irritable,” she assured the silence in the car. “Charlotte was the irritable one. Always whining and getting her way. I always did everything right.” She stopped herself there. She had lied enough.

  Anyway, she wasn’t irritable. She was just easily frustrated. “Yeah . . .”

  No, that wasn’t good either. Okay, here it was: she had high expectations, and not everyone was willing to meet them, because not everyone was as tenacious as she was. Yeah. That was it. She was certain that was it.

  She drove in silence until she could no longer stand the incessant noise of her own thoughts. She clicked on the radio and began to flip through the stations.

  “Our soloist who will be initiating the chant is Nellie Ryanockov. We will give the interpretation.”

  Rose pressed the search button. “No chants today. It’s Thursday. I’m absolutely certain this is my no-chant day.”

  “Great is thy faithfulness . . . Great is thy faithfulness.”

  “No more religion today. Helen’s mention of a preacher was enough,” she said, pressing the button. She was feeling irritated.

  “Tequila makes her clothes fall off,” the country singer crooned.

  “Now, that’s visual,” she said, laughing to herself, the irritability lifting as suddenly as it had come. She listened for awhile, tapped the steering wheel a time or two, then hit the search button just as the song closed with whooping and hollering.

  “I can’t fight this feeling any longer.”

  Rose felt her breath slip away. She hadn’t heard that song in years. A lot of years. All the way back to Billy Monroe years. Now, that was a place she hadn’t traveled in, well, years.

  “Have you met your pastor’s brother-in-law?” Rosey’s best friend, Jenny, asked her one day as they were walking back up to Jenny’s house from Mamaw’s.

  The Church of God that Rosey and her family attended was right next door to Mamaw and Granddaddy’s. In fact, they pretty much shared a parking lot with each other. And apparently seeing the church had caused Jenny to remember the new arrival in town.

  “What’s a brother-in-law, exactly?” Rosey inquired, swiveling to look at Jenny.

  “It’s Pastor Coleman’s wife’s brother.” The mouthful came out surprisingly clear. “He’s here visiting from Florence for awhile.”

  “How do you know what a brother-in-law is?”

  “You know,” said Jenny, her little mind processing, “I have no idea how I know what a brother-in-law is. I guess I’ve just heard my mama talk about it.”

  “Well, how does your mama know all of this? Y’all don’t even go to our church.”

  They’d stopped at this point and were staring at Rosey’s church.

  Jenny’s family went to the AME church three streets over. She was the chocolate to Rosey’s strawberry and Charlotte’s vanilla. Together they all three made up the perfect napoleon ice cream! At least that’s what they called it.

  “We live on the same street. What do you expect?” Apparently same-street dwelling brought extra information. “Plus, my mama knows everything about everybody else’s mama. Probably knows things about your mama that your daddy doesn’t even know.”

  Rosey examined Jenny’s face to see if she was as serious as she sounded. Because there was no way someone knew more about her mama than her daddy. No way at all. “What’s he look like? The brother-in-law guy?”

  A glint of mischief appeared in Jenny’s eyes. “I think I saw him go in the church when I was headed down to your mamaw’s.”

  “Who? My dad?”

  She slapped Rosey. “No, silly, the brother-in-law guy.”

  She had Rosey going good now. “Oh, really?”

  “You wanna sneak around back and see if we can see him?” She giggled, covering her mouth as if giggling might undo her suggestion.

  Rosey’s gaze met Jenny’s at the same time. Without any more words they snatched each other’s hand and headed to the back door of the church.

  “What if someone finds us?” Rosey asked, trying to catch her breath.

  Jenny’s small hand reached for the door handle. “If they catch us, I’ll just let them know that you’ve been sinning again and we needed to get you saved before Sunday. You know, so you can come to church and all.”

  Sounded good enough to Rosey. The door creaked as they opened it. Rosey snickered, and Jenny nudged her. “Shh.” Then the brightly colored baubles that held Jenny’s braided pigtails kept knocking into each other. The sound was so loud that Rosey finally grabbed her pigtails and held them together to prevent all the clanging. But it was about then that they heard clanging of another kind coming from the front of the church.

  “What’s that?” Rosey whispered.

  Jenny didn’t seem to hear her. “Let’s sneak into the pool.”

  “You mean where they dunk people?”

  “Yeah, the baptist pool. Let’s sneak in there and see what’s making all that racket.”

  The baptismal pool still had a few water remnants from Sunday’s baptism of a family of four. Rosey and Jenny perched themselves on the top step and peered over the small acrylic divider that prevented the water from splashing the choir.

  What eleven-year-old Rosey saw was about to change her world. She saw the back of the brother-in-law’s long, sun-streaked tresses. They bounced with each beat of the bass drum, and when he went to hit the snare, she could see his profile of perfection. Now, to anyone else, Billy Monroe might’ve looked like a lanky fourteen-year-old. But to Rosey and Jenny, he looked like a dream.

  They stayed squatted on the top step of the baptistery until their legs fell asleep. And when they finally got their legs to working again and left the church that day, Rosey knew that Billy Monroe was the man she would marry. And had it not been for the kiss that never happened and Rosey’s interaction with a bird, it just might have come to be.

  Billy and Rosey caught each other’s eyes the next Sunday at church. Rosey always sat on the second maroon velvet– cushioned pew next to her mamaw and granddaddy, while her mother played the church piano and her daddy led the choir. Her entire family was musical. Even Christopher. But Rosey couldn’t carry a tune
in a bucket. And Christopher reminded her every time she tried.

  He would say, “Mama, don’t let Rosey sing. One day someone is actually going to hear her, and she’s going to embarrass us all.”

  But Billy didn’t seem bothered about Rosey’s lack of musical talent. Or perhaps he couldn’t hear her sing from across the aisle. Instead, he seemed interested in Rosey’s other abilities.

  On her way out of church, Rosey heard his voice. “Want to meet me down by the river after lunch?” Billy asked through smacking rubber bands that were attached to his double layer of braces.

  Rosey stopped on the bricked bottom step of the church and tried to look at him. She didn’t care that he hadn’t so much as introduced himself.

  “You can bring Jenny if you want,” he offered.

  Obviously Jenny or Jenny’s mama had already introduced the two of them.

  “Um, yeah . . .” She fiddled with the edges of her cape, which matched the trim of her dress. For some reason at this moment, she was feeling a tad juvenile in the ensemble. “I’ll see you there later.”

  “Yeah, well, later then.” And off he went lankily. Hands in pockets. Braces causing his lips to protrude, and shoes scuffing the sidewalk. He was perfect.

  Rosey had to wait for another hour to call Jenny, because Jenny’s church ran a bit longer than the Church of God. And if the Spirit got to moving down there, well, you could kiss Jenny good-bye until time for Sunday night church. Because the women in the white dresses and white hats would snatch a child by her pigtails and wedge her back in her seat before they let the moving of the Spirit be interrupted. Rosey knew because Jenny had endured multiple retractions.

  When Rosey finally got through to Jenny, she whispered into the receiver, “Hurry up and eat so you can go with me to the river.” Rosey had stretched the small curly cord all the way into her closet. She pulled a pair of jeans in front of her face to try to muffle her sounds even more. “You don’t have to stay, but I have to be able to tell Mama and Daddy that we’re going together.”