Ella in Bloom

by Shelby Hearon

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Red said. “Each one a Henry.” He turned out the light, checked that everything was shut down. Outside, in the dry dusk, the oaks cast long shadows on the parched, rocky ground.

  “This is exciting work,” I told him, “what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t want to talk about how my wife wouldn’t hear about it. How she’d leave the room, slam the door. How she kept the house filled with people to avoid the issue.”

  “I don’t want to, either, Red, talk about my sister. I don’t want her here, in this room.”

  “She isn’t here. She never set foot in this house, even when my folks were alive. She put them on a dairy farm, my grandparents’ dairy farm, near the Blue Bell Creamery.”

  “Upgraded them.”

  “For Agatha.”

  “I guess we all remade ourselves for Mother.” I felt a hot burning in my throat, not tears, but their echo. It had never ever dawned on me that Terrell, too, the favored daughter, had felt compelled to falsify portions of her life.

  “Ella, I want to think of you the way I knew you twenty-five years ago, a high school girl I felt embarrassed to be attracted to. I want to pretend I kept up with you through your family, and then ran into you again this summer.”

  I knotted my hands together and turned to him. “I wish it had been that way,” I admitted. “I wish I hadn’t seen you since we ate those grubby hamburgers and then one day you showed up at my door—” I bit my lip. “But you heard the children.”

  “I got their message.” He sighed.

  I turned to him then, and put my hand on his cheek, and, in the dim light, his face felt familiar, known. I put my mouth on his and parted my lips, our bodies not touching, his hands braced on the shelf behind him. I kissed him until I felt his tongue, and then drew awkwardly away.

  In the kitchen, afraid to get too close, we opened another beer and talked about his plans for the old house, about how my plumbing was doing in Old Metairie, cooling down until the kids reappeared with our supper. They’d gone to fetch it in Red’s car, and I gathered Birdie had got to have a say in the selection but not a veto. As they hauled the sacks and cartons in, I heard Bailey grumbling that if he had to live out here with the cedar-choppers, he at least ought to have a pickup, and inferred he wouldn’t hate driving a truck.

  I couldn’t believe the food. If I’d shut my eyes and waved my hands to make my dream meal appear, this would have been it. Slabs of beef barbeque and spicy pork ribs, from Tuffy’s Bar-B-Q, Borden said, very tasty and chewy, and from Dodge City Steakhouse, Bailey’s choice, a double order of fried chicken livers and gizzards, plus Birdie’s pick, three small peach cobblers and one large coconut buttermilk chess pie, which she cut into five equal slices. Too much. Actually, not too much at all. I had thirds, along with the boys, and then Red and I moved into the kitchen proper to make a pot (perk pot) of coffee.

  And to listen a bit to our young.

  “So what do you want to be, Borden?” Birdie asked. “I mean, that’s great about Yale and all. So you must have a lot of ambitions.”

  Her older cousin made a few throat-clearing noises, then responded without a lot of conviction. “I may get an M.B.A. Mom—Mom said you could go in a lot of directions with an M.B.A. But I haven’t decided for sure. I may do law school. Dad says that you can go a lot of different ways with a law degree.”

  “Do you want to go in a lot of different directions?” Birdie sounded like that was okay, if he did.

  “I don’t know. Mostly, duh.” He cleared his throat. “Mostly I wanted to get my acceptance letter.”

  “What about you, Bailey?” Birdie, my daughter, the gracious conversationalist.

  “I guess I’ll probably, more than likely, I suppose, drop out for now.”

  “A lot of guys do that,” she told him. “Computer guys. They don’t even do college.”

  “I’m not into computers,” Bailey said. “I’m just—ummmm—I’m just going to take some time off?”

  “From what?”

  “I mean, I’m going to investigate my options.” His voice rose with anxiety. “Maybe help Dad out with his fruit pickers or something. I guess, probably.”

  “While you live at your daddy’s house and he pays for your Abercrombie clothes with his credit card? That’s not dropping out, Bailey.”

  He leaned across the table in her face. “I don’t want to go to school here and I can’t go back over there, where all my, where everybody—”

  Borden smoothed back his hair, looking guilty. “Listen, dumbo, just be somewhere so you can get your applications in.”

  “What do you know? You’re going off. You don’t have to stay in this—this fleabag town.”

  I imagined him spelling it in his mind: pfleabag. Beside me, Red hunched his shoulders, intent on watching the percolator perk.

  “Here’s the thing,” Birdie said, as if she could help by informing him, “about school. You don’t go to school because of who’s at your school, you go to school to find out what you already know. You find out that half the people there are ninety-five percent smarter than you. So what’s the five percent you have over them? That’s what you go to school for, to see what you have that’s special.”

  Bailey finished off the last bite of his coconut buttermilk chess pie and half rose out of his seat. “You are a dumb, dumpy girl with hairy legs. What do you know?”

  Red moved as if to whack his son across the face, but I held him back. Our children were treating each other like siblings, something my daughter sorely needed and maybe his boys did, too. I wasn’t worried about Birdie taking care of herself.

  Standing up, she announced, as if it was time, as if her cousin wasn’t sitting there glowering at her, “I brought us something for after supper. Our granddaddy let me pick it out from the CDs in his library. I like this a whole lot. It’s Brahms’s Double Concerto for Violin and Cello in A minor, and the cello player, Mstislav Rostropovich, who plays with Itzhak Perlman, is the best ever. I guess you know that’s what I play? In the String Project?” She looked at the boys, and in her loudest voice said, “And someday I’m going to play like that.”

  Borden, ever polite, unfolded himself from his chair and showed her where the CD player was. And then all three of them sat, sprawled, and we joined them with our coffee, no one making a sound. Clear through to the last movement. By which time we had all lost ourselves in the heart-plucking strings that filled the old rooms of Red’s daddy’s house in Pflugerville.

  18

  Daddy fixed us a big breakfast, bacon, two eggs each, for Birdie and me, also him. English muffins with berry jam, since Mother wasn’t up to baking her sweet-milk biscuits. He told us again how butter was back; did I know men had more strokes on oleo? He couldn’t remember what he’d said before, only that the good news was he had his wife home, and, thanks to his careful reading of all health bulletins, she would soon be good as new. Good as before, he amended.

  He wore his favorite bedroom slippers, worn down at the heels, felt-lined, but showed us proudly a shoebox containing his new Topsiders, the leather boat shoes with hard-rubber soles supposed to be better for old feet to walk in. What did I think?

  I told him they looked good, were a good idea. Maybe he was going to start walking around the block?

  “One of these days,” he agreed. “I’m getting set.”

  Birdie thanked him for the Brahms concerto, and he said he set a lot of store by somebody who knew what was what, as far as music was concerned. Though at one time, his daughter Terrell—. He clouded up, looked away, but then turned his attention to matters at hand. “You go have a listen now, Girlie,” he told his granddaughter. “I have a little matter to discuss with your mother. Pull the door to.”

  “Okay,” Birdie said, wiping her mouth, thrilled to be sent off with full liberty to explore the music. She gave her granddaddy a massive throat-choke hug before she left.

  “Daughter,” Daddy began, not getting up to clear the plates,
a clue that he had something on his mind. “I need to broach a certain matter with you. The hospital, as you know, not being a proper surrounding for personal matters.”

  I felt something go flip-flop in my middle. Was he going to talk about Red? Had he, somehow, seen something between us the day I arrived? Had he, being, after all, my daddy, picked up on a new distractedness, heard something in my tone when I told him what a fine feast we’d had with his grandsons at their daddy’s house? I blushed despite myself. “Is everything all right?”

  He dug out his reading glasses from the pocket of his blue shirt. “You may recall my mentioning, when we had that scare about your mother, that she’d got what was, to my way of reasoning, good news.”

  I had to shift my thinking, still with damp palms, a dry mouth, trying to decide, if confronted, what I would, or could tell him. “When you called—” I did recall his saying my mother had got—some news. But I’d been frantic to find out what exactly had happened to her. “—You might have—”

  “I think you ought to be brought into this matter,” he said, “included in what is, you might say, family history.”

  And then I thought, somehow, that he had his will or rather their will on his mind. Mother’s stroke, her likelihood of another. Perhaps some trust he had in mind.

  He walked into his study and returned with a leather folder, from which he produced a letter on thick white paper. But even when he showed me the envelope, addressed to AGATHA ADAMS HOPKINS, I still didn’t get it. My mind, in fact, went back to the hanky letter, and I wondered if this were something from that time in her life. When I just sat there, not sure what I was supposed to do, he opened it for me. “Here,” he said, “this came for your mother, the day she—fell.”

  I read, but the first time, nothing registered.

  Dear Mrs. Hopkins (although it is most difficult not to address you as Miss Adams),

  I’m writing to inform you that my sister, whom you will remember as your student Molly Clark, has recently become principal of the little school where you taught. You may not know that your preschool program, which meant so much to all of us in Angelina County at a turning point in our young lives nearly fifty years ago, has been incorporated into the kindergarten program today.

  It is my sister’s wish, on her first public occasion, to celebrate the past of the school with an AGATHA ADAMS DAY in your honor. I will call on you in person in the coming week, to answer any of your questions, but we hope you will be pleased, and that your health is such that you can be present at this landmark event.

  Sincerely yours,

  Your former student,

  Sadie Clark (Grimes)

  I looked up at Daddy.

  “Your mother took this hard, harder than I saw at the time. I have myself to blame, going on with my desk work, not understanding her upset.”

  “This came to Mother?” I tried to clear my head. “Mother was a teacher?”

  “When we met, indeed she was, a fine inspiration to her young charges. Hard to believe—fifty years.” He tugged at his beard, looking puzzled. So much time gone by.

  I tried to get my mind around it. Agatha, the nice girl from the nice family in sleepy, southern East Texas, the girl who collected lace-trimmed hankies from her pen friends, and sachets, and valentines. “I didn’t know,” I said. Had Terrell? I tried to picture her, the woman who became my mother, as Miss Adams, in a nice lilac linen dress, a lace-edged handkerchief in her pocket for drying childish tears, serving juice and cookies to the children of her hanky friends. Perhaps it was a churchy job, something they took turns doing.

  “She’s not one for bringing up the matter.” Daddy sighed and scratched his head.

  “It was this letter, this fine honor, that upset her?” Had she not wanted to be reminded of small girls such as the letter writer, Sadie, and her sister, Molly? Had that brought back the years when she had two small girls herself? Perhaps one of these students had been a favorite. Little blond girl in a sundress.

  “Being reminded of the past is a disservice, you might say, in the view of your mother.”

  “What can I do?” I asked him.

  “I got myself into a bucket of hot water here, I’m afraid,” Daddy confessed, retrieving the letter and returning it to the folder. “I promised that woman, Mrs. Grimes, who is making the trip to Austin expressly to see your mother and deliver her invitation in person, that she is welcome to come by our home this coming Friday morning, although naturally she did not wish to impose at this time.” He looked at me, his pale face stricken. “Do you reckon you and your girl could delay a couple of days, stay the weekend?”

  Daddy’s hands shook a bit as he tried to stack our plates. I always forgot, for all his talk about his diet, and his general medical savvy, that, at seventy-five, he led a sedentary and a stressful life.

  “I don’t know—” I said. How would Birdie take that? Missing the opening days of school—Thursday and Friday—when everyone flocked back and got their classrooms? Yet the idea of having a reason to stay, of seeing Red again and having, perhaps, a chance to figure out if there was any way, if we had a right, if we could be anything to each other, overwhelmed me. “If Birdie agrees. It’s her say.”

  “Let me talk to her,” he proposed.

  Just then we heard Mother making her way slowly down the sunporch. “Judah?” she called. “I thought I might have a cup of tea, if you wouldn’t mind?”

  “In here,” he answered, lumbering to his feet. All but dropping our plates. “You shouldn’t have tried, by yourself. Here, let me—” He held out an arm to her. “I was visiting with our daughter while she ate.”

  “Ella,” Mother said, looking down, her tone flat. “Oh, yes.” She let herself be settled into a chair with a cup of tea and lemon. She’d done her own hair, and wore an apricot silk robe and slippers. Except that she was a little short of breath, her skin a little sallow, she looked herself again. Controlled, sad. The girlishness of her hospital stay vanished.

  She began a yard story, a distraction for herself, if not for us. “Did I tell you, Ella, about my encounter with the new dog across the street? Last week, it must have been—” She took a sip of tea. “Yes, before—my fall. It belongs to the young couple, he’s a banker, who fixed up the Prather place? I’d been watching it for days, a wiry black dog, I don’t know the breed. They have so many these days, you never see cocker spaniels anymore. Well, it’s been trained to chase after a soft sort of Frisbee, that looks almost like a cloth watermelon slice. It’s nothing short of amazing, I have to say, the way that dog can run down the lawn, no matter how far the toy is thrown, and catch it in its mouth—” She paused, short of breath.

  “Mother,” I interrupted, before she could go further, knowing that once she got into it, the account running like a home movie before her eyes, I’d never get to speak. “That’s quite wonderful, your old school having an Agatha Adams Day. You must be quite pleased.”

  She stopped short and stared at me. Shaking her head as if to clear it, she frowned. “I suppose your father couldn’t keep the news to himself.” She looked at Daddy, a forced smile on her lips. Indicating the slim reading glasses tucked in the pocket of her robe, she said, “I was just composing a proper thank-you to that school principal for her kind gesture, when I thought to have a cup of tea. Although I’m sure there were many more significant teachers in her later life.”

  “That’s quite an honor,” I told her, still trying to reach that earlier woman, setting out fingerpaints for preschoolers, blowing sniffly noses, tying the sashes on pinafores.

  “I was half your age, Ella,” she snapped, “a girl not looking to the future.”

  Daddy reached out a broad hand and attempted to pat her shoulder. “It seems to me,” he suggested, “that our daughter could act as a sort of surrogate hostess when Mrs. Grimes comes to call. I was enlisting her help. It mustn’t be a strain for you. Your task is to take it easy for a spell.”

  “That woman is not coming here.” Mother
stood, holding on to the back of her chair.

  “Sweetheart, if you remember, we already agreed to give her a few minutes, and put the matter to rest. I consider that a courtesy, on account of she is fetching herself all the way from Angelina County to call upon you. And most certainly they can’t expect you to make that trip under the present circumstances—”

  “I have never gone back there and I never will. As far as I am concerned, and you are concerned, Judah, my present life began with our marriage and the birth of our first daughter.” She turned on her heel, giving the chair a sharp shove. Her voice catching, she added, “And that is no business of Ella’s.”

  “Hello, Grandmother,” Birdie said, coming in from Daddy’s study in her baggy shorts, her hair about her shoulders. “How are you feeling?”

  Mother waved her away with a hand. “Robin, dear, you needn’t feel you have to listen to an old woman. I’m sure you’d prefer to enjoy your grandfather’s music.” She pulled herself together, squaring her shoulders and patting her hair. Looking at me, she said in an amused tone, “That little dog dashed across the street and dropped the Frisbee at my feet, so I could have a throw. Wasn’t that the dearest thing?”

  19

  Late that afternoon, I called Red from the upstairs phone at Mother’s, nervous as a goose. It felt exactly the way it had the first time I sat here and called a boy in high school, my palms sweaty, my chest heaving, notes on the bedspread of what I was going to say. My voice raspy from practicing my opening: Hi, this is Ella. Hi, is this ______? Hello, I was calling _____. Hello?

  But when he answered, all I said was, “Red?”

  “Ella,” he said, “hello.” His voice had a bit of a high school touch itself. Perhaps he’d been talking to the mirror in the bathroom: Hel-lo, El-la.

  The idea made me smile. I took a deep breath and lay on my back on the bed, my legs crossed, swinging one foot. “Is this a bad time?”