by Pamela Morsi
“A secret? I don’t think you can have any secrets from me.”
They seemed to consider that. Finally Brent spoke.
“We think that Wilma has a beau,” he said.
“She doesn’t have a bow,” Jet corrected. “She’s got a boyfriend.”
“I don’t believe it,” Amber said.
“You’d better,” Brent answered. “She meets some guy for lunch Monday through Friday at the Empire Bar.”
“You’re serious.”
“Never more so.”
“Who is he?”
“We don’t know,” Brent said. “Jet and I have never been invited to meet him. We just drop her off at the curb in front and pick her up there an hour later.”
Jet was nodding in agreement.
“How long has this been going on?”
“A couple of weeks,” Brent answered. “And she’s looking better every day.”
“Why is it a secret?”
Brent shrugged. “I don’t think she wants Ellen to know.”
“She’ll never hear it from me,” Amber assured him and the waiter arrived, loaded down with hot, hearty food.
Lunching with Max Roper was a surprisingly pleasant pastime. Wilma had, in all honesty, anticipated the kind of relationship she usually had with a man. A couple of chats, a couple of drinks and then a carefully veiled suggestion about his place or, if he was married, a cheap motel.
She might be in her sixties, but she wasn’t beyond sex and in her experience, men might scrimp on blood pressure pills or heart medication, but they always had money to pay for their Viagra prescription.
Her time with Max didn’t run in the usual direction. They didn’t talk in suggestive innuendo, but rather as two thoughtful experienced adults.
“I love my work,” Max told her. “It wasn’t my first choice as a vocation, but I’m good at it. And it gives me a lot of personal satisfaction.”
“That’s a fine thing,” Wilma told him. “Truthfully, I’m about half envious. I never did anything in my life that I’m particularly proud of.”
Max chuckled. “Wilma, I can never tell if you’re serious.”
“I’m serious, all right,” she said. “I never worked at a job I cared about and never cared about a job where I worked.”
“What kind of work did you do?”
“Waitressing mostly,” she answered. “I’ve worked in a five-and-dime, been a barmaid. I got on with the telephone company once, but ended up quitting to move to a new town. That’s what I did, mostly. I never stayed anywhere very long.”
“Following your husband?”
Wilma didn’t want to reveal much of the truth. “More often chasing after him!” she joked.
Max laughed as she knew that he would.
“I guess you just never found a job that you were really cut out for,” he said. “Not every woman wants a career. Managing a home, rearing some fine children, that’s a more impressive accomplishment than building a Fortune 500 company.”
Wilma had been deliberately vague about who she was and what kind of life she’d led. That was partly designed to add an aura of mystery to her presence. But she also didn’t want him to find out that she was Ellen’s mother. Not before the man was too smitten to just walk away. There was an old adage against mixing business with pleasure and men were usually pragmatic enough to follow it. At least when it was fairly convenient to do so.
So she related only the most generic of truths about herself.
“Honestly, Max, I wasn’t interested in keeping house or raising kids.”
He raised a surprised eyebrow.
“That’s not saying I didn’t do it,” Wilma clarified. “I’ve got a boy and a girl. They turned out all right. But it was more despite their upbringing than because of it.”
“I’m not sure I believe that,” he said.
“You might as well,” Wilma countered. “’Cause it is the truth. My son has a wife and three kids. They live in Luling because that’s where I was when he graduated high school.”
“It’s not that far,” Max said. “Luling’s only an hour’s drive or thereabouts.”
“He might as well live in Australia,” Wilma said. “They come to see me once a year. It’s kind of like an annual dental checkup. They stay one hour and are pretty much openmouthed and uncomfortable the whole time.”
Max chuckled.
“What about your daughter?”
“She’s here in San Antonio,” Wilma answered briefly, turning the question. “What about you? Do you have kids?”
“A boy,” Max answered. “Of course, he’s not a boy any longer. I’d say we’re friends, we see each other frequently, but we’re not really as close as a father and son might be.”
“The young bulls and old bulls don’t run together?”
“A little bit of that,” Max admitted. “But more that we just don’t know each other. His mother and I were never married. I was a young cowboy and she got pregnant or as I said in those days, she got herself pregnant. I didn’t want to marry her, but I did my best to support her and the boy and I kept up with them. When he was four she married somebody else. She thought having me around would be more confusing than helpful. At the time I was glad to step out of the way.”
“So you did.”
“Mostly,” Max answered. “She never tried to deceive him or anything. I always remembered his birthday. His mother got divorced when he was in high school. He had to pretty much make his own way working nights at the grocery store. I helped him pay for his college. He owns his own company now. He’s done very well.”
“That must make you really proud,” Wilma said.
Max thought about that for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m impressed with all that he’s accomplished. But I don’t take any pride in it. I suppose I feel much like you do. His success is his own. My part in it was as much handicap as help.”
Wilma smiled at him. “At least we won’t get accused of living vicariously through our children,” she said.
“Or at least we won’t get accused by each other,” he agreed. “But I’m not letting you get away that easy, Wilma. You’re going to have to tell me what you do best. Everybody does something best, even if it’s not any better than anyone else would do.”
“Okay, well let me think for a minute,” Wilma said. And then she laughed. “You know what I do best,” she told him. “I pick out the best produce.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “It’s the only thing that I really know and understand. If they’ve got a stack of melons as high as a house and only three of them are ripe and sweet, I can find those three every time.”
“How did you learn to do that?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t really know. My mama always had a big garden when I was a girl. But I always hated having to work in the dirt. And I’ve never so much as planted a petunia since I left home at seventeen.”
“No green thumb, apparently,” he said.
Wilma held up her hand as if verifying his statement. “Seems not. I always loved those roadside fruit stands. I was young and poor. And of course, the stands were usually cheaper and fresher than the store. Sometimes the farmer would show me how to tell if sweet corn was crisp or milky just by looking at the silks on the husk. Mostly I learned by trial and error. There’s nothing that makes me madder than a pithy orange or a tomato that tastes like sawdust.”
“I’m with you there,” Max said.
“So anyway,” Wilma said with a shrug, feeling strangely embarrassed as if she’d shown way too much of herself. “That’s my best, my only best.”
“I’d say that’s an interesting skill to have,” Max told her. “And very practical.”
“Not as much as you’d think,” she said. “When I see wonderful produce at its peak, I just can’t resist buying it.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“It is if my refrigerator is already stuffed full of yesterday’s perfect veggies,” she sai
d.
Max nodded, understanding. “You can’t eat it up as fast as you buy it,” he clarified.
“I don’t really cook much at all,” she said. “But I buy like I’m feeding an army. Can’t seem to help it. Emelda Marcos has her shoes. I have asparagus and eggplants.”
She’d made a joke of it and he laughed on cue, but it didn’t deter him from the seriousness of his discussion.
“What you need to do, Wilma, is figure out a way to utilize your special skill in a way that’s productive for you and helpful to others.”
There was nothing that Wilma could think of, in her whole life, that was particularly productive or helpful for anyone. Nervously she fumbled for a cigarette in her purse. She tried not to smoke much in front of Max. They were of the same generation and much more tolerant of tobacco use than their off-spring. Still, he didn’t smoke and Wilma didn’t want him to know how much she did. Or what kind of toll it was taking on her.
“Oh, I’m sure there’s lots of ways I can utilize my talents,” she said, sarcastically. “I could buy kumquats for shut-ins.”
Max gave a low, deep-throated chuckle, but he wasn’t distracted from the discussion.
“You can joke your way around this,” he told her. “I’m willing to let you get away with that. But I’d speculate seriously on how you could use the skill you have in some fulfilling way.”
Wilma didn’t want to speculate on it. She didn’t want to have to imagine what she had undoubtedly missed.
“Maybe I could have done something with it,” she admitted. “I could have worked at a market or been a buyer or some such. But those are jobs for young people. Produce managers need to be able to do a lot of lift and carry. It’s too late for that now.”
“Too late?” Max sounded skeptical. “That’s what people think when they’re in their forties—that they’ve waited too late. But by the time you get to our age, and although you, my dear, are quite attractive, I believe that you’re not all that much younger than me. By the time you’re our age, you understand that it’s only too late when you’re dead.”
Wilma laughed.
“Am I right?” Max asked.
“You’re right,” Wilma agreed.
“So let’s think of some way you could use your talent.”
She nodded and was thoughtful for a moment. “Of course, I could teach what I know. I take my little granddaughter to the store with me and we go through the produce and I show her how to pick things out.”
“How old is your granddaughter?”
“She’s almost four,” Wilma answered. “Actually she’s my great-granddaughter. I keep her while her mother works.”
Max nodded as if filing the information away.
“Maybe I could do a show-and-tell at schools or storytime. Explain to the little ones about produce.”
“That might be fun,” Max agreed. “If you like children a lot. Do you enjoy them? Get along with them well?”
Wilma shrugged. “More so now than when I was younger,” she admitted. “But I like my own better than other people’s.”
Max seemed to appreciate both her honesty and her lack of pretense.
“Kids aren’t the only ones who might need to learn about this,” Max said. “There are plenty of adults who don’t know anything either.”
“That’s true,” Wilma said. “I could teach classes. But produce isn’t the kind of thing people would sign up for a course in. I’m not sure you could even drag it into a couple of hours. It’s something you need to learn, one vegetable at a time over years.”
Max agreed with her on that.
“Maybe you could have an information booth in the produce department,” he suggested. “You could be there to answer people’s questions. Perhaps have a fruit of the day that you’re pushing. Teach the customers one vegetable at a time.”
Wilma thought about that.
“I couldn’t work a whole day though,” she told him. “Who would take care of my granddaughter?”
“That’s why they invented day care,” he answered. “She’s going to start school soon anyway.”
“I don’t have the stamina,” she admitted.
“You look healthy to me,” Max said.
“It’s the cigarettes,” Wilma admitted. “I can’t breathe as well as I used to.”
She wouldn’t say any more. She would cut her tongue out before admitting that she needed oxygen to walk to the curb in front of her house.
“Quit,” Max suggested.
Wilma rolled her eyes and gave him a dubious look.
“I’ve been smoking since I was fourteen,” she told him. “I kept it up through two pregnancies and bought cigarettes when there was no money for food. I’m more likely to sprout wings and go flying across the room than to give up cigarettes now.”
Max didn’t look as if he quite accepted her answer, but he chose not to argue.
“Okay, you can just work a short while,” he said. “You could do the after work rush when everybody’s trying to find something for supper and get home with it.”
“Would somebody hire me to do that?” Wilma asked. “I could work two or three hours a day. That would be great! Oh, I wish I could work at Dilly’s. I love Dilly’s, it’s my favorite. Best produce in town.”
Max was suddenly looking at her very strangely.
“What?” she asked him.
He hesitated. “Nothing, I was just thinking,” he assured her. “It might not be cost effective to have you actually working in the produce department. They’d have to sell $150, maybe $180 more in produce per hour to justify having you there. And that doesn’t even take into account the workman’s comp, which considering your age might cost them a considerable amount.”
“Oh.” Wilma felt suddenly deflated.
“That doesn’t mean that the right store chain in the right situation wouldn’t have a way to utilize you,” Max added quickly.
“Sure,” Wilma agreed, not sure at all.
“We’ll just have to think about it,” Max said. “Talk about it.”
Wilma nodded.
He glanced down at his watch. “I’ve got to get back to the office. Can I give you a lift somewhere?”
“Ah…no,” she told him. “You go on.”
Max took leave of her and caught the waitress to pay their tab. Wilma watched him curiously as he headed out. She’d made some kind of misstep and she didn’t know exactly what it was.
What she did know was that she’d strayed way far from her agenda. Here she’d been talking for an hour about herself and what she wanted in the world, when even the stupidest, most naive females clearly understood that when you’re courting, you always let the man do the talking, and the talking is most always about himself. The openness of Max’s manner had gotten her off the track. She’d have to do a lot better tomorrow.
In the sliver of window between the neon beer signs, she saw Brent’s Tahoe double-parked at the curb. She gathered up her purse and made her way out there.
The very well-mannered young man got out of the car to help her, as always. Today it was very welcome. She was completely exhausted by the time she got into the car.
“Hand me my headdress, honey,” she said to Jet, pointing toward the plastic hose draped upon the oxygen tank in the back seat. “I’ve got to get some air going.”
Her little granddaughter helped her get the tubes in her nose and hooked over her ears before turning on the valve. By the time Brent got into the car, all that was left to do was supervise.
“How was your lunch?” he asked her.
Wilma had closed her eyes, lying back against the seat, relishing the relief of breathing.
“I don’t know,” she answered, honestly. “There’s more going on than I can figure out.”
Brent chuckled. “Sounds like you had the same lunch I did.”
9
Cleo Payne’s tax problems were every bit as complex and convoluted as Ellen had feared. It was really no problem writing an involved expla
nation to the IRS. Just stating the facts concisely took two single-spaced pages. And she was able to explain the circumstances and elaborate on the details for twenty more. She spent several paragraphs dwelling upon his age and confused mental state. As she was writing, her thoughts were more upon Mrs. Stanhope than Mr. Payne.
Yolanda’s revelation that Mrs. Stanhope was, in her ineloquent words, the local crazy lady, had caught Ellen by surprise. That the woman might be mentally unstable, delusional, had never occurred to her. It was a little unsettling, although Ellen couldn’t have said why. A mental health problem was a mental health problem. But somehow if the etiology happened to be old age, the victim seemed more sympathetic. It didn’t make sense. Mrs. Stanhope was the same woman that she had been before Ellen knew about her past. But the very fact that she had a history of emotional problems suddenly made Ellen more wary and less willing to be involved.
There was a light tapping on the door and before she could answer, Yolanda peeked in.
“Marvin Dix called,” she told Ellen. “He said he’d have to cancel this afternoon, but he’d get cracking on your case real soon. Get it, cracking your case?”
Yolanda apparently thought that was hilarious.
Ellen was not as amused. “He’d better get cracking on it soon,” she told Yolanda. “We’re really running out of time.”
Yolanda’s expression immediately turned to concern. “Next time I won’t let him get by with just relaying a message,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Ellen waved away her apology. “Believe me, it’s not your fault,” she assured the other woman. Deliberately she planted a brave smile across her face. Worrying wasn’t any help at all. And causing other people to worry only made things worse.
“Things are going to work out fine,” she said.
The last was a fair imitation of the woman that she used to be. Positive, upbeat, optimistic. She didn’t feel it, but at least it felt better to say it.
“Have you got a minute to talk?” Ellen asked, deftly changing the subject.
“Sure,” Yolanda answered enthusiastically. “Let me get us some coffee. We’ll have a real klatch for a change.” She took Ellen’s cup and headed back out into the main office. Within a couple of minutes she returned with a tray bearing two coffees, a couple of packets of creamer and sweetener and a green box of Girl Scout cookies.
