The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues

by Edward Kelsey Moore

  “I used to have thousands of pictures. But I lost most of ’em in Katrina, along with my camera. I’ve got a lot more than these, though. I just keep pictures of family in the case with Ruthie.” El pushed the second photograph closer to her. “This is at the foster home.”

  Five adolescent children and a middle-aged woman posed on a lawn in front of a two-story brick house. Three boys and two girls stared at the camera with toothy smiles, and angry eyes. They looked as if they were dressed for church, the boys in suits and ties, the girls in floral patterned dresses and shiny Mary Janes. Barbara Jean recognized one child in line immediately. Loretta must have been around twelve or thirteen years old. She had never seen a picture of her mother this young.

  “There they are. My brothers and sisters,” El said of the row of white and black faces in the photo.

  “Your foster home was integrated way back then?”

  “Sure was.” El turned toward her as he spoke, and the movement jostled his bandaged foot. He let out a long hiss between pursed lips. But when Barbara Jean asked if he wanted her to call for the nurse and request more pain medication, he said no.

  “For a long time, that house was the only place in Plainview that was mixed. The second was the Pink Slipper. Folks nobody gave a damn about were always left to mingle as they pleased, long as they didn’t try to associate with decent people.”

  With a slightly trembling hand, El dragged his index finger beneath the faces of the people in the photo. “That’s me at the far end. The chubby white kid next to me is Harold, the foster mother’s real son. The short, light-skinned boy is Bert. He was the original drummer in the band. He died in a car crash on his eighteenth birthday. The tiny blond girl is Lily. Man, could she sing. Blue-eyed soul twenty years before anybody called it that.”

  El’s finger landed below the face in the photograph that Barbara Jean knew well. “That’s Loretta, of course. The foster mother, Mrs. Taylor, is there in the middle. She was truly a piece of work. Batshit crazy and mean.

  “They took this picture right before Easter. I think that was the second year your mama was at the house. Mr. Clancy himself from Clancy’s Department Store came to the house to hand out new Sunday clothes. They lined us up in the yard and took a picture of us looking grateful for what he’d done. The picture ended up on the front page of the newspaper on Easter morning. There was also a picture of Mr. Clancy and a quote from him that said, ‘It does my heart good to visit these poor, desperate children and give them these small gifts to help them celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior.’

  “They couldn’t take pictures of us on Easter morning, ’cause the clothes were back at the store by then, or they were at church on the backs of some kids whose mamas and daddies could actually pay for ’em. That was how Mrs. Taylor worked it. Every Christmas and Easter, we got toys and clothes in front of cameras. Then, when the picture takin’ was done, every bit of it went back to Clancy’s. Mrs. Taylor was the only one who got to keep her clothes. I don’t think she even cut her own son in on the deal.”

  “That’s horrible,” Barbara Jean said.

  “That’s the way it was. I’ll tell you what, it taught us a lesson that none of us forgot. Ain’t nothin’ fair in this life, and ain’t nobody gonna help you but you. Bein’ Loretta’s child, you surely heard that before.”

  Barbara Jean had, indeed, learned that philosophy from her mother. Lessons in facing the realities of a hard world came nearly every day. “There’s only so much to go around in this world, and nobody gives anything away unless something’s in it for them,” Loretta had often said. “You gotta take what you can before somebody else beats you to it.” If Barbara Jean rolled up her sleeves for El or exposed her back to him, she could show him the faint, crisscrossed scars from the belt buckles and extension cords Loretta had employed as teaching aids during her drunken training sessions. Barbara Jean had accepted her mother’s view as the truth, until Odette, Clarice, and Ray—especially Ray—had come along and proven Loretta wrong.

  El said, “I’ll tell you what, Loretta sure shook things up the next spring. Your mama liked that next year’s Easter dress, and she decided to keep it. I’ll never forget the look on Mrs. Taylor’s face when Loretta strutted down the stairs wearin’ that lace dress and new patent leather shoes on Easter morning. Mrs. Taylor hollered, ‘Where’d you get that? Where’d you get that?’ And then down came Lily, wearin’ the dress she’d had to pull off and send back to the store the week before. So Mrs. Taylor screamed at her, too.

  “Lily started cryin’ and she looked over at Loretta. Then Mrs. Taylor turned back to your mama. She grabbed her by the arm and said, ‘Dammit, where did you get those dresses?’

  “Loretta was only thirteen years old, and already tough as an old leather boot. She looked Mrs. Taylor dead in the face and said, ‘I got ’em from Clancy’s Department Store. They took one look at my poor, desperate ass and wouldn’t let me leave without takin’ these small gifts to help celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior.’

  “Mrs. Taylor hauled off and slapped Loretta so hard she hit the floor. But your mama got up and slapped her right back. She was the first one to ever fight back, and it shocked the shit out of us kids and Mrs. Taylor, too. We all just stood there, frozen, watchin’ it. The whole morning went that way, Loretta and that woman slappin’ each other back and forth till neither of ’em could lift their arms anymore.

  “That was just the beginning of the two of them goin’ at it. They fought and cussed each other till the day your mama left the house to come and work at the Pink Slipper with Lily and me.

  “Loretta stole herself a new dress every month after that.” El laughed so hard that he began to cough. When he recovered, he said, “Loretta was somethin’ else. That girl would steal just about anything that wasn’t nailed down.”

  El stopped suddenly, the way most men did at some point when they spoke to Barbara Jean about her mother. He’d reached that inevitable point in a Loretta story when he realized he was about to say something that shouldn’t be said in the presence of the woman’s daughter.

  There was a light rap on the door, and a nurse walked into the room. She announced that it was time for El’s pain medication and then placed a small white paper cup containing two pills next to the water pitcher on the table beside his bed.

  After the nurse left, El said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to call your mama a thief. We all did whatever we had to do back then.”

  “You don’t need to apologize to me. Loretta raised me. Whatever nasty story you could tell me about her, I could tell you a nastier one. My mother was a thief and a drunk and a whore. It’s not pretty, but it’s reality.”

  “There’s reality and there’s truth,” El said. “Truth is, there was more to her.”

  “Maybe,” Barbara Jean said.

  She picked up both photos and looked back and forth between them, taking in the sight of Loretta, first as a child and then as an object of desire. El was slowing down, and she knew that she should leave and let him rest, but she was enjoying their talk and she didn’t want it to end just yet. She said, “They told me at the nurses’ station that you don’t have a next of kin in your file. Are you sure there isn’t anybody they should call to let them know you’re here?”

  “My wife’s dead. I had a son. But I lost him.”

  Barbara Jean said, “I’m sorry. I lost my boy, too.” She reached out and rested her hand on El’s shoulder.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me. Everything and everybody I lost, I didn’t deserve to keep.” El reached for his guitar and pulled it across his lap. Instead of playing, he placed his palms flat on the body of the instrument and held still, as if he were feeling for the lingering vibrations of an old song. He said, “Loretta and Bert were the lucky ones. Goin’ young is the way to do it.” His remaining energy drained out of him then. He fixed his rheumy eyes on his gauze-wrapped foot. Speaking in a voice so low that it sounded almost as if he were humming, he said, “Y
ou understand, don’t you, Loretta? It’s better to be in the grave than to end up like this, hacked up and just waitin’ to die.”

  Barbara Jean stood from the chair. She took the guitar from El’s lap and returned it to the case. Then she put the photos in their plastic bag. She placed the bag alongside some loose sheet music that had been wedged in next to the spotted instrument, snapped the case shut, and leaned it against the wall below the television.

  Before leaving, she went to El’s bedside and whispered, “I’ll be going now. I’ll come by again tomorrow. Thank you for showing me those pictures. I really appreciate it.” She laid her hand softly on his shoulder and said, “You’re a good man.”

  El mumbled, “Mrs. Taylor’s gonna whoop your ass if you keep lyin’ like that.”

  Barbara Jean made a quick stop at the nurses’ station on her way out to tell them how El had been talking. It was never a good thing when a patient mentioned being better off dead. Then she went out to her car and headed for home.

  During her drive, Barbara Jean thought about her chat with El and how she’d nearly fled the room when he’d first called her Loretta. The memory of his music had slowed her down. Escaping his hospital room had lost its urgency after that melancholy wedding march that had made everyone in the church want to cry or kiss, or both, had come to mind. And now Barbara Jean had actually had a conversation about Loretta that hadn’t left her wanting to hide her face in shame, break down in tears, or drink herself into darkness.

  When she walked into the kitchen of her home, Barbara Jean was surprised to find Ray standing beside the breakfast table. He hadn’t been due to return for another day. But there he was, sorting through the mail and smiling at her.

  He said, “Hey, sweetheart. Did you miss me?”

  They were both past their sixtieth birthdays, but they were still newlyweds—newlyweds who had lived out a love story that contained forbidden youthful passion, a tragic parting, a decades-long separation, and a joyous reunion. Theirs was the sort of affair that blues songs, even entire operas, were written about. Barbara Jean ran to her husband and threw her arms around him. She kissed his mouth and cupped his stubbly cheeks in her hands. When they separated, she ran her fingers through his unruly salt-and-pepper hair and said, “You need a haircut.” But as she said it, she thought, All these years and you’re still the King of the Pretty White Boys.

  CHAPTER 7

  Terry Robinson and I became friends in the gazebo that James had built in our backyard as a present for me during my illness. My gazebo is the exact size and shape of the one my father put together for Mama behind our house in Leaning Tree, the neighborhood where I—and every other black Plainview resident over forty—grew up. Inside Mama’s gazebo, Clarice, Barbara Jean, and I shared our deepest girlhood secrets, and James and I first got up to no good as hormone-crazed teenagers.

  One of my gazebo’s eight sides is open, forming an arched entranceway that admits the morning sun. The other seven sides are made of solid cedar on the bottom and latticework that starts about waist-high and continues to the ceiling for the honeysuckle, trumpet vine, and clematis to climb. Built-in benches ring the interior. James and I pretended that the gazebo was constructed purely so that I could relax outdoors during my recovery and relive memories of happy times in Mama’s garden. But James built the gazebo so I would have a place to smoke marijuana to ease my chemotherapy side effects.

  I came into a large store of marijuana as a sort of inheritance from Mama, whose formidable gardening skills had resulted in some very potent and hardy new strains. For years, right in her own backyard, she grew varieties of hemp that weren’t supposed to survive anywhere near Plainview. If Mama had been born in another time and place, or had been more academically inclined, she could have been a prize-winning horticulturalist. She was every bit as much of a plant expert as any of the professors over at the university.

  But Mama was just a country girl from southern Indiana who liked seeing the world through the haze of a sweet buzz. When I was sick, she and Mrs. Roosevelt guided me to a treasure trove of her perfectly preserved goods. Now that I no longer need marijuana for strictly recuperative purposes, like my mother before me, I explore cannabis’s preventative properties. Using Mama’s seeds, I grow my own plants in a secluded spot in my garden. And as Mama used to say, “I’m headin’ glaucoma off at the pass.”

  James, an Indiana state trooper for four decades, feigns ignorance of everything that grows or is consumed in our backyard.

  It was chilly out that morning five years ago when Terry Robinson and I first talked. The grass was wet with dew, and the temperature was frosty enough that I could faintly see my breath. Before heading out the back door that morning, I had slipped into a jacket, put on a pair of red galoshes, and wrapped my head, bald from the medication, in a bath-towel turban to guard against the cold. I wondered if I should go back inside for a heavier coat, but I decided to tough it out for at least a few minutes to see if I got used to the crisp air. I tromped out across the damp grass, carrying my rolling machine and a metal TV tray table to set the machine on. It was my habit to take my machine, papers, and pot out to the gazebo every Monday and roll a week’s worth of joints. I could never hand-roll worth a damn, in spite of having seen Mama do it at her kitchen table thousands of times. I’d purchased a little red cigarette-rolling machine that just required loading and cranking to get the job done.

  Mama was with me that morning, as she often was during that time. She followed me out my kitchen door and sat beside me in a sunny spot opposite the open wall of the gazebo. She watched as I picked the seeds and stems out of the marijuana she had grown in her garden years earlier.

  “They say it’ll be near seventy degrees today, but it’s nippy this morning,” I commented, arranging the first paper in the cigarette roller.

  From a few feet away, someone who wasn’t Mama said, “Yeah, it is kind of cold.” Even though I had grown accustomed to strangers calling out to me, I was startled by this unexpected voice.

  From my seat in the sun, my middle-aged eyes could barely see the boy who sat in the shadowy corner of the gazebo farthest from Mama and me, his feet on the bench, his arms wrapped around his shins. I wouldn’t have noticed him at all if he hadn’t spoken up.

  I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket, laid it over the pile of marijuana on the tray, and said, “Good morning.”

  “Good morning,” he replied.

  He brought his feet to the floor, stood, and took a couple of tentative steps toward me. He was a thin child of fifteen or so, with a narrow face and deep-set eyes. He looked familiar.

  I was on medical leave at the time, but I’ve worked in the cafeteria of James Whitcomb Riley Elementary School for decades. There are only three grade schools in all of Plainview, so a third of the kids in town pass through my workplace. I searched my memory, trying to locate a younger version of this boy’s face among the Riley Elementary students. I came up empty.

  I said, “I know you, don’t I?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He had a girl’s voice. It wasn’t particularly high-pitched, but it was airy and soft. “My mother gets her treatments at the hospital at the same time as you. I’m Terry. My mother is Gail Robinson.”

  I remembered him then. I saw his mother nearly every time I went in for chemotherapy. I’d gotten the impression that she was on a tougher regimen and was there more frequently than I was. The boy was often in the infusion room with her, and I’d seen her husband, Wayne Robinson, once or twice.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Terry,” I said. “I’m Odette.”

  “Odette Henry,” he said. “Mrs. Baker introduced us once. She’s my piano teacher. At least she used to be before Mom got sick. I remember your jacket. I was at the hospital when Mrs. Baker gave it to you.”

  I’d thrown on my leopard-spotted coat before leaving the house. Clarice had bought animal-print jackets for herself, Barbara Jean, and me. “Because nothing can stand in the way of a wild woman,” she’d said
when she’d unveiled them during one of my chemo sessions. Her jacket was a zebra print. Barbara Jean’s was tiger-striped. My leopard-spotted blazer had immediately become my favorite item of clothing. The three of us got more of a kick out of parading around town together in our animal jackets than was altogether healthy for women our age, but we didn’t much care.

  Terry said, “All of the fashion magazines say that animal prints are an important component of the modern woman’s wardrobe.” Then Mama and I listened as he named several magazines and fashion experts that he was certain would approve of my jacket.

  I interrupted his list of periodicals and trendsetters by asking, “Terry, what brought you by here?”

  He said, “I was just stopping for a rest on my way to school.”

  When he saw that I wasn’t buying that tale, he lifted his backpack from the bench behind him and said, “I guess I’d better get going now.”

  He moved toward the open side of the gazebo. In the sunlight, I saw his face more clearly. I saw his delicate, pretty mother in him. I could also see his red eyes and an expression on his face that was a mixture of fear and sadness.

  “Hold up,” I said. An obedient boy, he stopped and turned toward me. “Is your mother okay?” She’d been weak the last couple of times I’d seen her. And I braced myself to hear that she was gone.

  “She’s about the same,” Terry said. “She’s getting better, I think. But right now, she’s the same.”

  “Then what’s going on? And don’t tell me you decided to stop here and take a nap. I know where the high school is, and I know this isn’t on your way.”

  Terry looked like he was trying to come up with something to say, and then he dropped down onto the bench beside Mama. He crossed his legs and let his foot bob in the air as if he were tapping the brakes of a skidding car. After all my years working at Riley Elementary and raising children of my own, I recognized the look of a child who wanted to talk but hated what he had to say.