Wedding Bell Blues

by Julia Watts

  “Two eggs, Mother.” He sank into a kitchen chair.

  Mimi pulled herself to standing and leaned against Ben’s knee. She grinned up at him with her jack-o’-lantern teeth. “B-Jack,” she crooned.

  Jeanie looked up from her cooking, delighted. “What was that she said?”

  Lily laughed. “I think she just called him Benny Jack.”

  Jeanie grinned. “Now, Mimi, honey, you don’t call him that. You call him daddy, just like always.”

  Mimi gave Jeanie a puzzled glance. Daddy was not a familiar concept to her. She looked back up at Ben, giggled, and repeated, “B-Jack.”

  Ben slammed down his coffee mug in exasperation. “Ben! Why can’t everybody just call me Ben?

  It’s just one little syllable! Is that too much to ask?”

  “Now, now, honey,” Lily cooed with mock affection. “I think Benny Jack is an adorable name.” She thought it only fair that if she had to suffer the indignity of being named Lily McGilly, Ben should also be saddled with a name he hated.

  Jeanie brought Ben’s breakfast to the table. “Your daddy wants y’all to meet him down at the mill at eleven. He’s got y’all a one-thirty appointment with Buzz Dobson, but first, he’s got a little surprise.”

  Lily wondered with some trepidation what the surprise could be. Surprises weren’t really what she craved these days.

  “And I was hoping,” Jeanie said, “that you might leave Mimi with me. I’d just love to show her off and maybe take her shopping. The poor little thing barely has a stitch of clothing to her name.”

  Lily looked down at Mimi, who was wearing a plain white T-shirt and a pair of tiny denim shorts.

  Lily had bought most of Mimi’s clothes at Goodwill, and her main criteria for selecting infant wear was that it would not be permanently stained by milk, cereal, spit-up, or pee. “I’m sure she would love to go shopping with you,” Lily said, against her better instincts.

  At five after eleven, Lily and Ben pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Confederate Sock Mill.

  As they went in the side entrance of the building, with Lily toting Mimi and a bag full of baby supplies, the all-female clerical staff descended on them and crowed, “Oh, is this the new grandbaby?” “I want you to look at her!” “Isn’t she the sweetest thing?”

  When Jeanie rose from her desk and approached them, the other women cleared a path for her.

  “There’s Mamaw’s little sunshine!” she called, opening her arms to receive Mimi. “Benny Jack, your daddy’s out on the floor if you want to go get him. You can take Lily, too — show her the production

  The production area of the Confederate Sock Mill hurt Lily’s ears and nose. The clicking and chugging of the machinery was deafening, and the smell of the textile fibers caused her to have a sneezing fit. The two dozen mill workers, engrossed in their repetitive tasks, didn’t seem to notice the sounds or smells at all.

  Big Ben, who had been deep in conversation with a machine operator, spotted them and waved.

  “Hey,” he yelled over the rumbling machinery “Y’all ready to go for a ride?”

  As they walked to the parking lot, Big Ben said, “Well, I reckon we could go in Benny Jack’s car or my truck.” He grinned. “Or Lily, we could go in your car.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Big Ben cackled and nodded toward a long, shiny silver car parked in the rear of the lot. “That’s for you.” He pressed the keys into Lily’s hand. “A little wedding present from Jeanie and me.”

  Lily’s vocabulary failed her. “Uh...I...uh ...”

  “Now I know it ain’t as nice as Benny Jack’s Lexus,” Big Ben apologized. “But you really sprung this marriage thing on us, and a New Yorker was the best we could do on short notice. I tell you what, Lily. You stay married to this rascal a year, and we’ll get you any make of car you want!”

  “Big Ben, it’s a beautiful car, I ... I just couldn’t accept it.”

  “Of course you can,” Big Ben said. “It’s just our way of welcoming you into the family. This car’s a piece of shit compared to what we got Sheila and Tracee when they married our other boys. But we had a little more notice then, so we could go to Atlanta and pick out somethin’ nice, you understand.”

  “Well, uh ... thank you.” Lily felt as though she were on some bizarre game show, an updated version of The Liar’s Club, where the gay person who put up the most convincing pretense of heterosexuality could win a snazzy new car.

  “So, little lady,” Big Ben boomed, “how ’bout taking us for a ride?”

  “Sure...okay.”

  The plush interior of the Chrysler New Yorker had that unmistakable new-car smell. It was an undeniably gorgeous vehicle, and yet it wasn’t a car Lily would ever have picked out for herself, even if she had possessed the funds to buy it. While she was sure that in Big Ben’s eyes, the New Yorker’s roominess made it a good family car, to her, a big car meant nothing but bad gas mileage and more exhaust fumes to pollute the environment. Besides, weren’t gays supposed to be boycotting the Chrysler company?

  Damn it, Lily warned herself, if you’re going to pull off the happy hetero bit, you’re going to have to start thinking less. She turned the key in the ignition. “Where to?” she asked brightly.

  “Hang a left out of the parking lot,” Big Ben said from the backseat. He had insisted on sitting in the back so the “newlyweds” could sit in the front together.

  Lily hung a left as instructed and drove past barns and fields of cattle. This was her first real experience with country driving, and she had to admit it was much more pleasant than dealing with the stressful, stop-and-go traffic of the city.

  “Now turn right at this church over here.” Lily turned right at the Free Will Baptist Church — a name which she considered an oxymoron.

  “Now you’ll wanna go down this road a piece,” Big Ben said.

  The road was a rural residential area, dotted with well-maintained brick ranch-style houses.

  “Now turn at that mailbox that says 104,” Big Ben directed.

  Lily did as she was told, but had no idea why she was pulling into a strange house’s driveway.

  She didn’t begin to catch on until her hapless husband said, “Now Daddy, what have you gone and done?” At that moment, Lily saw the realty company sign in the yard with the banner across it announcing, SOLD.

  “I know it’s nothing fancy” Big Ben said, “but it’s a good house — built solid — and it’ll do ya till you can build the house you really want.”

  “But, Daddy,” Ben said, “we were just going to rent an apartment.”

  “Now, Benny Jack,” Big Ben said, “you know there ain’t an apartment in Faulkner County that’s worth living in. And besides, you remember that broken-down old trailer you and your mother and me had to live in back when I was first starting the company?”

  “No, I don’t remember it. We moved out of that trailer when I was two years old.”

  “Well, it don’t matter whether you remember it or not. It was no place to raise a child. And soon as the money from the company started rolling in, I swore that no son of mine would ever have to live without a decent roof over his head.” He produced a house key from his jeans pocket. “So whaddaya say, kids? You wanna take a look at her?”

  The house had a garage large enough to hold both Ben’s Lexus and Lily’s new monstrosity of a sedan. Architecturally, the dwelling resembled a brick shoe box. Everything about the house bespoke a normal, heterosexual respectability. Lily hated it.

  Inside, the walls were white and the carpeting beige. Each room was square, pristine, and sterile.

  The only thing Lily liked about it was that there were three bedrooms: one for Mimi, one for Ben, and one for her. “So what kind of monthly payments are we gonna be making on this place?” she asked.

  Big Ben looked puzzled. “Payments?”

  “Yeah,” Lily said. “I mean, you made the down payment, right, but then Ben and I will pay —”

  Big Ben
hooted. “You and Ben won’t have to pay a dime! I bought this house outright — with cash money!”

  Lily leaned against a white wall to steady herself. She couldn’t imagine having the kind of money where you could just buy a house, any house, on the spot and pay for it all in cash. These people really were loaded.

  “I know it don’t look like much right now, since there ain’t a stick of furniture in it,” Big Ben said.

  “But picking out furniture’s a woman’s job.” He checked his watch — a Rolex, Lily noticed. “Lily, if you’d drive us on into town, you’ll have plenty of time to pick you out some stuff over at American Home Furnishings before we meet ole Buzz for lunch at the Bucket.”

  Lily, still leaning against the blank wall, smiled wanly. All her needs were supposedly being taken care of, and yet she had never felt so empty.

  CHAPTER 7

  Lily and Ben had just finished a grueling forty-minute shopping spree at American Home Furnishings, during which Lily kept protesting that Big Ben was spending too much money on them, and Ben the younger kept complaining that all the furniture in the store was too tacky to go in any house of his. “It’s bad enough,” he said, “that I have to live in a ranch-style house. Now I have to furnish it with crap that’s just a cut above cardboard!”

  “Oh, for godssake.” Lily sighed. Her furniture preference was for antiques and junk-store finds, but if somebody was gracious enough to buy her a houseful of furniture, she wasn’t going to be rude enough to complain about the store’s limited selection. “Okay,” she announced, “we’ll take that sea-foam green sofa and armchair and the coffee table that goes with it. We’ll also have that round table and chairs over there for the dining room, the oak bedroom suite, the Jenny Lind nursery set, and the maple bedroom suite for the spare room.”

  The oversolicitous furniture salesman grinned at Ben. “There’s something to be said for a lady who knows what she wants.”

  Every item on the Dinner Bucket’s lunch buffet was represented on Buzz Dobson’s tie. The fact that he seemed to have trouble conveying a forkful of food to his mouth didn’t exactly fill Lily with confidence in his legal abilities. Could a man really have mastered the art of Socratic dialogue if he had never learned how to feed himself?

  “So,” Lily asked, “where did you go to law school, Mr. Dobson?”

  “Oh, call me Buzz,” he said, trailing his too-short tie through his mashed potatoes as he reached for his iced tea glass.

  “Buzz,” Lily corrected herself. While trying not to stare at his gravy-soaked tie, she found herself focusing on Buzz’s toupee, a dark brown, vaguely hairlike mass that was perched on his head like a jaunty hat.

  “Ahh, I went to law school at your old stomping ground... down in Atlanta.”

  “Emory?” Lily asked, picking at her overcooked macaroni and cheese.

  “Naw I went to the Bushrod Washington School of Law...it’s off of Peachtree.”

  “Oh, yes, I know it.” Under the table, Lily used her index finger to trace the letters l-o-s-e-r on Ben’s thigh. Spelling out words in this way was a method of communication Dez had invented in order to sit through dull plays and lectures.

  Ben traced back on Lily’s thigh: It’s okay.

  Lily wasn’t sure she believed him. The Bushrod Washington School of Law was housed in a dilapidated, graffiti-sprayed office building. It was widely known as the Last Resort School of Law, an institution whose only entrance requirements were a pulse and a checkbook.

  “Yup,” Buzz said, discarding a thoroughly gnawed chicken bone, “took me six years, but I finally graduated.”

  Lily was trying to calculate how quickly she could gather Mimi and her belongings and return to Atlanta when Big Ben said, “Yup, me and Buzz go way back. Ole Buzz was the best running back, Faulkner County High School’s ever seen.”

  Buzz grinned, clearly enjoying the compliment. “You tell that to my poor ole, broke-down knees.” He pushed his plate away. Lily expected him to wipe his mouth with his tie, but he didn’t. “So,” he said, clasping his hands on the table. “I hear you young people are in a spot of trouble. Why don’t you tell me a little about it?”

  Ben launched into the story he’d concocted, devoting equal detail to the truths, half-truths, and outright lies. When he finished, Buzz turned to Lily. “You got a copy of Charlotte’s will on you, honey?”

  Lily winced at the unsolicited endearment, but retrieved a photocopy of the will from her bag.

  Buzz scanned the document, sucking his teeth. “Well,” he said finally, “it’s all here in black and white, ain’t it?” He slipped the document back into its envelope. “Well, first I’m gonna tell you kids what I always tell people. If you got a problem, the best way to settle it is out of court.”

  Particularly with a lawyer like you, Lily thought, but she kept her lips clamped shut.

  “My advice,” Buzz continued, “is invite Charlotte’s momma and daddy up to Versailles. Have ’em to supper at your new house, or even better, invite ’em over to the big McGilly place that oughta impress the hell out of ’em. Grill ’em some steaks, let ’em see that Mimi’s being taken care of and that y’all are just regular folks like anybody else. My hope is that when they see their granddaughter in a normal, family atmosphere, they’ll give up on this foolishness and let you alone.”

  Lily looked Buzz in the eye. “And if they don’t?”

  “If they don’t, then guess we’ll see ‘em in court.” Buzz glanced over at Big Ben, then looked back at Lily. “Let me put it to you this way, honey. When Big Ben and me played on the same team back in high school, we never lost a game.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Lily,” Big Ben said, as they got into Lily’s new ship of a car.

  “Really?” She didn’t mean to sound snippy, but she still did.

  “Uh-huh,” Big Ben said, “you’re thinking you and Benny Jack woulda fared better if you’d stayed in Atlanta and hired you some hot-shot lawyer.”

  “Well,” Lily admitted, “when I look at Buzz Dobson, hot shot isn’t exactly a phrase that pops to mind.”

  Big Ben laughed. “Well, I reckon not. The ole boy can’t even hit his mouth with his fork about half the time. But I’ll tell you this, Lily. He’s a fine feller, and he means well.”

  Lily pulled out of the parking space and aimed her new tank in the direction of the Confederate Sock Mill. “I’ll try to bear that in mind when I lose custody of my daughter.”

  To her surprise, Big Ben laughed. “She just don’t get it, does she, Benny Jack?”

  Ben joined his father laughing. “She’s a city girl, Daddy. She’s not used to how things work in Faulkner County.”

  “You see, Lily,” Big Ben intoned, “it don’t matter that Buzz Dobson barely graduated from a fourth-rate law school. We could hire a damn chimpanzee for a lawyer, and we’d still win. We’re McGillys, Lily. Me, Benny Jack, you and Mimi, we’re all part of the most powerful family in Faulkner County. And besides, me and Judge Sanders play golf together every Wednesday, and half the time I let him win. His son-in-law got himself in a spot of trouble a few years back, and I helped him out of it.

  People in this county don’t forget names nor favors, Lily. There’s no way ole Jake Sanders would go against a McGilly.”

  Lily pulled into the sock mill’s gravel parking lot. “I hope you’re right.”

  Big Ben grinned. “Honey, in Faulkner County, I’m always right. I’m a McGilly.”

  When Ben and Lily walked into the sock mill’s office, the clerical workers were abuzz, whispering

  “here they come” and “won’t they be surprised.” One of them went to the restroom door and hollered,

  “Jeanie! They’re here!”

  “Just a second,” Jeanie called from behind the closed door. “We’ll be right out.”

  “What’s going on?” Lily asked one of the office workers.

  She smiled. “Let’s just say that somebody’s mamaw took her shopping.”

  Jeanie
opened the door, cooing, “Come on, let’s show Mama and Daddy.”

  Mimi stood in the bathroom doorway, steadying herself against the door facing. She was wearing a cake-frosting-pink dress, the skirt of which was so tiered with stiff, lacy ruffles that the little girl was unable to lay her arms flat at her sides. Instead, she stood with her arms sticking out, like Mr. Potato Head. Her tiny feet were encased in stiff white patent-leather Mary Janes, and a lacy headband with a pink bow clued in anyone who might not yet have picked up on the fact that this was indeed a female child.

  “So, what do you think?” Jeanie asked, beaming.

  Lily started laughing — a more socially acceptable reaction than crying, which had been her other impulse. “She’s...she’s...a sight.” Mimi looked mad as hell, just like Charlotte used to look when she had to wear a dress and high heels.