The door to my oncologist’s office opened and my doctor, Catherine Reese, stepped out. The cheerful look on her face when she greeted us set everyone in my little entourage at ease. James and I followed her into her office feeling good.
Sure enough, Dr. Reese had nothing but positive news. No cancer. All systems in balance. Everything functioning as well as a sixty-year-old woman who was fifty pounds overweight could hope for. James released the painfully tight grip he’d had on my right hand so he could turn in my direction to kiss me. My mother appeared behind Dr. Reese then, clapping her hands with happiness. She wore an orange dress that was the shade of a shiny new traffic cone. The color bounced off every reflective surface around us, and the entire room filled with sunlight. The brightness was so intense that it was hard to believe that James and Dr. Reese couldn’t see it. Almost a dozen years dead, and my mother still shone more brilliantly than anybody I knew.
“Wonderful, wonderful!” Mama sang out. She did a celebratory dance beside the doctor’s desk. She shimmied and shook. Her wide hips gyrated in one direction while her heavy bosom spun in another. My mother and I were built identically, and I made a mental note to never allow myself to do Mama’s unflattering little dance in public. I was thrilled to see her, though.
Mama followed James and me back into the waiting room after my appointment. Unseen by Barbara Jean and Clarice, Mama joined in with them when they surrounded me, leaping up and down in celebration after getting the thumbs-up sign from James.
I enjoyed sharing the happiness with my friends, but I hadn’t seen Mama in months and I was eager to talk with her. She’d been with me from the start of my struggle with cancer. She’d kept me company and advised me. She’d stood beside me through the worst of it.
I said, “I’m going to go to the bathroom. You can decide where to take me out for lunch while I’m gone.”
The one time I’d discussed seeing ghosts with my friends and family was when I thought I was dying and would never be talking with them again. Since then I’d kept my mouth shut about it. The only reason James knew I was still associating with the departed was that Mama liked to keep me company while I did household chores and I tended to forget myself then and speak out loud to her. Otherwise, I kept my conversations with spirits private. At the end of the hallway, in the small one-seater ladies’ room, I said to Mama, “Good to see you. It’s been a while.”
“Has it?” she said.
“Three months.”
“Really? The days get away from me now. I’d have sworn I saw you yesterday.”
“I love your dress. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it before,” I said. Depending on what Mama said about her dress, I might have to break my rule about not passing on what the dead had to say. If there was shopping after death, Barbara Jean would want to know.
Mama twirled so that the hem of her dress flared out around her, practically filling up the cramped room. When she stopped spinning she said, “I’m glad you like it. Your daddy bought it for me years ago. Before you were born. Before your brother even. I used to wear it nightclubbin’ when I was a hot young thing. It seemed like the perfect dress to get good news in.”
She snapped her fingers. “That reminds me. I gotta write this down.” She reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a pen and her “Jump for Joy” calendar from Stewart’s Funeral Home.
I hadn’t seen that calendar for years. “You still write in that thing?” I asked.
“Of course I do.” As she wrote, she said, “This is the fifth-happiest day I’ve ever had. It’s got to go in my book.”
“Fifth-happiest day? I’m flattered.”
“You should be. I had good stuff in here before I died, but since then the competition’s been stiffer than ever.”
Mama put away her book. “How’s Eleanor,” I asked.
The former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt first started visiting Mama in the 1970s. Apparently Mrs. Roosevelt had sensed a kindred spirit in Mama. The two were now having a well-deserved good time in the afterlife, carousing the way marital and parental responsibilities hadn’t allowed them to when they were living. Together, they put on quite a performance, but the Dora Jackson and Eleanor Roosevelt show was best observed from a safe distance.
“I’m not sure where Eleanor is,” Mama said. “She was with me earlier, but your aunt Marjorie popped up and invited her to go shoot craps. They were gone before you could blink an eye. They could be anywhere, those two wild women.”
“Pot calling the kettle black,” I said.
“Thank you much.” Mama performed a curtsy.
Mama asked about my children, and I was happy to brag on them. I told her about Jimmy’s new business, something he and his wife did with computers and money that I didn’t fully understand. I gushed about Eric, finally happy with a partner who seemed to appreciate him. And I told her about Denise going back to college now that her children were in school all day. We didn’t talk about my brother, Rudy. She’d been watching him as closely as she’d been watching me, even if he didn’t know it.
When I told her about Forrest Payne marrying Beatrice Jordan, Mama let out a squawk. “Now, ain’t that some shit,” she said. “I hope he remembered to bring a hammer and chisel along on the wedding night. ’Cause it’s a sure bet Beatrice had a few layers of rust down there.” Then she got the giggles over her nasty joke and howled until she doubled over.
When Mama straightened up, I said, “I should get going before James comes looking for me.” Then, from force of habit, I flushed the toilet and I washed my hands.
Mama and I left the bathroom and headed back toward the elevators. We were halfway there when I saw Wayne Robinson. He was mumbling and grinding his teeth on the unlit cigar in his mouth as if he were softening it up to eat it later. He ran his fingers through the sparse gray hair on the top of his head and shuffled along beside a young nurse. When the nurse turned and stepped into a room, walking right through him, I understood that he wasn’t among the living, at least not entirely.
Wayne Robinson kept coming toward me, still talking to himself. When he was just a couple of feet away from Mama and me, I said, “Hello, Mr. Robinson.”
He dragged himself past me and entered an open door to my right.
He sat in a chair beside an occupied bed and buried his face in his hands. In the bed lay Wayne Robinson, in physical form. The patient was older, thinner, and sicklier than the man in the chair. His breathing was shallow but steady. His eyes were shut. There were no visitors present aside from the near ghost who grieved hard for himself a few feet away from his own body.
“Friend of yours?” Mama asked.
“I knew his wife and his son,” I said. “You met his son, too. Terry Robinson. Cute kid with the soft voice who used to come by my house four or five years back.”
Mama said, “I remember. Sad little boy.”
“Well, that’s who made him so sad. He gave Terry a rough time.”
“Like James’s daddy?” Mama said.
“Kind of. But there’s more ways to cut a child than with a blade.”
A nurse named Darlene Lloyd appeared next to me at the door to Wayne Robinson’s room. Darlene had been one of my favorite nurses during my time in intensive care five years back. A nonstop source of gossip, she had kept me entertained between visitors. She said hello and asked about my health. Then she asked if I knew Wayne Robinson. When I told her I was a friend of his son’s, she could hardly contain herself.
“Just between you and me, it’s a waiting game now,” Darlene whispered. “Does Terry know? I can’t imagine his sister or brother told him.”
“It’s a safe bet they haven’t,” I said.
Calling Terry about this was my job. I’d promised him that I’d call if this happened. Considering what that notification might set in motion, it wasn’t a vow I particularly wanted to keep. The thing was, at the time I’d told Terry that I’d be sure to let him know if his father died, Wayne Robinson had been an energetic, barrel-
chested, athletic man, several years younger than I was. I never thought I’d have to follow through on that promise.
Darlene did her best not to sound excited, but she couldn’t keep the gleam out of her eye. “Of course I’m sorry to see the gentleman in this condition. But I can’t help but wonder what Terry’s going to do when his father passes,” she said, not sounding very sorry at all.
You and almost everybody in town, I thought.
A buzzing noise came out of a nearby room, and Darlene excused herself.
Mama said, “Wait a minute. I remember the whole story about that boy and his father now.” She chuckled and leaned into Wayne Robinson’s room for another look. “This could get real good.”
“Oh, grow up, Mama. There’s nothing funny about this.”
“You have to admit, though, there’s high entertainment potential,” she said.
When we turned down the hallway that led back to James and my friends, I said good-bye to Mama. She said, “I’ll come by later this week.”
Then we blew kisses each other’s way, and she vanished.
The moment Mama was gone, my stomach growled and my mind returned to food. My friends and I met at Earl’s nearly every Sunday and often once or twice during the week as well. I’d stopped in just a day earlier. But in my mood—a mixture of happy, relieved, and nostalgic—Earl’s was where I wanted to be.
When I reached James and the Supremes, who were waiting for me by the elevator, I said, “Pork chops. I’d like to go to Earl’s for fried pork chops and celebrate my good health by eating something that’ll kill me.”
As we entered the elevator, I reached behind my husband and pinched his skinny butt cheek. He wrapped one of his long arms around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. I had an impulse to say something to mark the occasion, maybe take a cue from Mama and tell James, Barbara Jean, and Clarice that their sweetness and loyalty made me want to jump for joy. But that wasn’t my style. I hugged James back and I sighed, “Pork chops.”
CHAPTER 6
Barbara Jean was nosing the front end of her pearl-gray Mercedes into her driveway when she realized that she had forgotten to deliver the flower arrangement to El’s hospital room. Talking with Odette, Clarice, and James in the waiting room, celebrating Odette’s positive test results, and then the raucous three-hour lunch at Earl’s had driven the errand from her mind. Rather than leave the delivery for another volunteer or another day, she backed her car onto the street and returned to the hospital.
He lay asleep when Barbara Jean entered room 426. A low-pitched snore that sounded like a distant drum roll escaped from him with every breath. His white beard, bushier than she remembered from the wedding, quivered when he exhaled. His right leg was elevated, and his heavily bandaged foot was visible. She tiptoed in and placed the flowers on a stand beside his bed, hoping not to wake him.
His eyes opened just after she set the vase down. Barbara Jean was about to say hello when, blinking, El rasped, “Loretta Perdue, you are a sight for sore eyes. What are you doin’ here?”
It was a shock to hear her mother’s name. Gone for forty-three years, Loretta was remembered by very few people. And, for propriety’s sake, many of those who had known her best now claimed never to have met her. Even Barbara Jean rarely spoke of her. She had only recently stopped dreaming of her mother’s final days and the bad things that had happened when they’d lived together in the shabbiest house in the poorest neighborhood in town.
Loretta had died in that run-down house in Leaning Tree, decades before the neighborhood was transformed from the poor, black area of Plainview into a fashionable outer suburb of nearby Louisville, filled with overpriced boutiques and specialty food shops. Liver disease robbed Loretta of the loveliness that had brought a stream of men to her door. By the end, she had the sunken eyes and loose jowls of a poorly preserved seventy-year-old. She was thirty-four.
El rubbed his forearm across his face, trying to shake off the painkiller haze. “Loretta?” he said, less certain this time.
“Hello, Mr. Walker. My name is Barbara Jean Carlson. Loretta Perdue was my mother. I’m afraid she passed some time ago.”
He reached for a pair of silver wire-rimmed eyeglasses that sat on the meal table next to his bed. After putting them on, he stared at her for several seconds. “You’re Loretta’s child, all right. She was one fine-lookin’ woman.”
The few conversations Barbara Jean had about her mother these days followed a similar pattern. Someone would mention that they had known her mother in the distant past. Then they’d go on for a while about how pretty she had been. And then the man—it was always a man—would abruptly stop speaking when he remembered, possibly from intimate knowledge, that Loretta had ended her days trading her diminishing beauty for enough cash to buy the liquor that kept the shakes and hallucinations at bay.
Barbara Jean regretted having said anything at all about Loretta. She wished she had crept out of the room when he’d called her by her mother’s name. What harm would it have done to let him think that he’d had an especially vivid dream of a night with Loretta in the 1950s?
Barbara Jean was about to say good-bye and wish El a speedy recovery when he said, “I used to live with your mama.”
So this old man had been one of the low characters who’d shared the Leaning Tree dump with her mother. Barbara Jean remembered the ones who had caused the most trouble—the hoods who had used and beaten her mother and the vile characters who had made her own life hell by sneaking into her tiny room off the kitchen after Loretta had passed out. But the faces of the men who had stayed for shorter periods of time had blurred together long ago. She didn’t want to know where this man fit in to all of that.
She edged toward the door, making a mental note to ask another of the volunteers to deliver the next arrangement to El’s room. “I’ll be going now. I hope you feel better soon,” she said.
Then he surprised her again. “Me and your mama were in the same foster home.”
“What?”
“Yeah, we were in the home together for about four years.”
Loretta had been stingy with the details of her early life. She said she’d been raised in a Louisville orphanage and that she had come to Plainview for a job when she was a teenager. A foster home had never figured into the tale she’d told of her past. If there were holes in her history, Loretta had made it clear to Barbara Jean that she wasn’t interested in filling them. And it wasn’t safe to pester her once she’d told you that she didn’t want to be bothered.
Part of Barbara Jean thought it wiser to leave, but curiosity and the memory of the exquisite sounds that had poured from El at Miss Beatrice’s wedding tugged at her to stay. Barbara Jean found herself stepping toward the chair beside the bed. “You knew my mother when she was a little girl?” she asked as she sat.
El let out a quick snort of a laugh. “I knew Loretta when she was young, but I don’t think you could ever call her a ‘little girl.’ It was like she was already grown the day she walked into that foster home. She was as tough as they come, and she got tougher every year. But that’s how most of the kids in that house were. All a bunch of sad, beat-up babies tryin’ our best to act big.”
Barbara Jean recalled Loretta’s sadness and how she had tried to defeat it by endlessly scheming to capture the miracle man who would bring love and money raining down on her. But every failed affair brought more depression. Each downturn resulted in more drinking.
“I never knew Loretta was in foster care. She never said a word about it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Nobody ended up there because of somethin’ they’d wanna talk about. There were five kids there while I was at the house. Three turned out messed up and two died young. As I recall, your poor mama didn’t make it to fifty.”
Actually, Loretta hadn’t lived to see forty.
“I’ve got pictures from back then, if you wanna see ’em,” El said.
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Walker. I’d like that.”
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br /> “Call me El. It’ll do me good to hear a beautiful woman say my name.”
He pointed at his guitar case, which was leaning against the wall beneath the television set. “The pictures are in there with Ruthie. Could you bring it over?”
Barbara Jean fetched the case. She set it beside El, who undid the latches and lifted the lid. “That’s Ruthie?” Barbara Jean asked as he pulled the shiny, leopard-spotted guitar from the case.
“Yeah, that’s my girl.” He dragged his fingertips across the strings, stroking the instrument with the tenderness of a newly reunited lover. As he laid the guitar next to him on the bed, Barbara Jean noticed the scarring on the insides of both of his arms. Some of the damage was new, as if his nurses had been forced to make multiple attempts at finding viable veins for his IVs. But most of the marks were the faded tracks of amateur needle punctures. She’d seen the same patterns lined up on the arms, legs, and even the feet of some of her mother’s friends, and she understood what those dark tattoos testified to.
El picked up a plastic grocery bag from where it had been squeezed in beside the guitar. He pulled a large manila envelope from the bag and opened it. A stack of photographs spilled out onto the pale blue hospital sheet. He removed two pictures from the pile and slid one of them toward his visitor.
The photographer had captured Loretta in mid-spin, standing on one foot. Her mouth was open, as if she were howling with joy. Her teeth sparkled as brightly as the rhinestone-encrusted harem costume that clung to her shapely figure. Barbara Jean knew that high forehead, the broad cheekbones, and the round lips that always seemed puckered for a kiss. This was the face she had nearly forgotten. Her mother was in her early twenties in the picture, and so full of strength and energy that she looked as if she were about to become airborne.
“Wow,” Barbara Jean said. “She looks so happy.”
“That was your mama, only happy when she was dancin’.”
In the foreground of the photograph, several men stood with their faces tilted upward, gazing at Loretta. Their arms were raised high, dollar bills clutched in their fists.
The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues Page 6
