The young father’s reaction to the racket his son made was to grin with pride as if his infant had recited a Shakespeare soliloquy.
Veronica and Clement waited for us to express our admiration. Barbara Jean and I chose that moment to fill our mouths with food. The proud grandparents turned to Clarice. “He really is sweet,” she said.
Clarice didn’t have to elaborate because Veronica’s attention was suddenly drawn elsewhere. “Madame Minnie’s free,” she squealed. She rose, shook out the ruffles of her dress, and stomped over to Minnie’s table.
With Veronica gone, we resumed our conversation. We talked grandchildren, clothes, and recipes, each of us carefully avoiding the subjects that were eating away at us.
Clarice might have been annoyed with her husband, but I was thankful he was there. For most of the time I had known Richmond, his infidelity and vanity had irritated me so much that I’d had to devote a considerable amount of energy to restraining myself from throwing whatever I might have been holding at his head. That afternoon, I was glad to see him being his usual big, blustery self, talking louder than anyone else in the room and enjoying his own jokes enough to make up for James’s gloominess. Richmond couldn’t quite coax a chuckle from James, but his brazen good humor temporarily took away the sour, angry look that had lingered on my husband’s face for the past week.
Clement, who had joined the men at the other end of the table after Veronica marched over to Minnie, was showing them the video of his grandson and son-in-law. I heard Richmond, the most accomplished liar I’ve ever known, begin to gush over the handsomeness of little Apollo. The video was passed to James. He held the phone in his hand and examined the image as if he were trying to memorize it. Eight days ago, I wouldn’t have tried to read anything into James’s behavior or his facial expression. Today, I wondered if this intimate moment on the screen, as well as the thousands of others like it that James had witnessed or been a part of as a father himself, had prodded at a spot of pain inside him. Being the hard woman I was, that thought made me furious at El all over again.
CHAPTER 20
I knew something was wrong when I arrived home from work and found James standing beside his car in the garage. Even when I worked full-time, instead of the limited summer schedule I was on, James never beat me home on a weekday. He was always out the door before I was in the mornings and came back an hour or so later than I did in the evenings. If something major was going on at the station, he dragged himself in late at night and slid into bed next to me as I pretended to sleep. But there he stood, home two hours early, hands on his hips, looking around the garage as if it were an uncharted planet he’d just landed on.
I pulled my car in alongside his. When I stepped out, I asked, “What are you doing home?”
He tried to make a joke out of my question. “You sound like you’re disappointed to see me,” he said.
I asked again, “What are you doing home?”
James’s eyes wandered to the floor, then to the ceiling. His gaze fixed at a point high on the wall behind me. Then he said, “I’m taking the week off. I’ve got some sick days coming, and there’s a lot of stuff I’ve been meaning to do around the house. I’d like to organize the basement so the grandkids’ll have someplace inside to play when they come. Maybe I’ll get the Ping-Pong table set up and hang the dartboard. And that retaining wall in the backyard could use some patching. This would be a good time to start.”
He rattled off a long list of the household tasks he had in mind to accomplish over the coming days. All the while, I thought, This man is talking horseshit.
James loved being a state trooper. He never wanted to miss a day of work. In a week and a half, he and I were planning to meet our children and their families in Chicago for Clarice’s concert. Then we would all come back to Plainview to spend a few noisy, hectic days together here at the house. It had taken countless hours of manipulating, cajoling, and threatening just to persuade James to take time off for a few days of sightseeing in Chicago and for the family visit afterward.
Dozens of his half-done projects, some dating back to the early days of our marriage, leaned against our garage walls or were lashed to the dusty brown pegboard that hung above the work table. His inability to finish them was a running joke between us. There were bookshelves he’d never gotten beyond sawing the wood for, a bunk-bed frame he’d started building for our sons when the boys were twenty-five years younger and two feet shorter. We were inches away from a rocking chair he’d begun making for me so that I could soothe grandbabies who were now far too big to fit on my lap. Today, this man who never wanted to miss a day of work and happily left his household masterpieces incomplete claimed to have taken a week off for chores he had avoided for years.
James rocked back and forth on his heels. He mumbled something about drill bits and waved his open palm at a flying insect I didn’t see or hear. Then he said, “I’m going to change the oil in the Honda.” He moved to the front of his car and began to feel around for the hood latch.
My husband is no one’s idea of a mechanic. Still, if he’d been thinking clearly, he would have remembered that it had been ages since we’d owned a car with a hood that could be opened that way. I let him keep at it. I hoped he would soon get uncomfortable enough that he would tell me what was going on.
The phone rang then and he said, “Would you mind getting that while I get started here?”
I left my relieved husband groping at the front end of his car and hurried into the kitchen to answer the phone.
The call was from Calvin Bayless, who had shared a highway cruiser with James in their younger days. The two of them had maintained a good relationship over the decades, in spite of being drastically different. Calvin was heavyset and several inches shorter than James. Blond and fair-skinned, he was so pale that three minutes in the summer sun turned him the color of a pickled beet. As long-winded and gossipy as James was quiet, Calvin was a man who couldn’t keep a secret. In my information-starved state, there were few voices I would rather have heard on the other end of the line than Calvin’s.
He said, “Hey, Odette. I was just calling to check on James. Is he okay?”
“No,” I said. “What happened?”
The way Calvin told the story, the trouble began when a man was brought in for domestic abuse—fourth time. The man had roughed up his wife and tossed his ten-year-old daughter against a wall when she’d tried to stop him. The woman and the girl were bruised, but not badly hurt. The wife had refused to cooperate with the police, and they’d had to release the man after a night in lockup. It was after the release that the incident occurred.
Calvin said, “James and I were coming back to the station after lunch, and the man and his wife were on their way out. Apparently his wife said something that the fellow didn’t take kindly to. They started shouting at each other, and the guy hauled off and slapped his wife so hard she ended up on her backside on the sidewalk. Then the little girl ran at the guy, throwing punches. Before I could take two steps, James was on him, fists swinging.”
I tried, but I couldn’t imagine it. James wasn’t the type to punch someone, no matter what they’d done. I came close to telling Calvin the story of ten-year-old James and the bullies who had called him “Frankenstein” to illustrate that he had to be wrong about the fight.
Calvin said, “It took me and another trooper to pull James off that asshole. Excuse my language.”
So that was why James was at home. My quiet, peace-loving husband had beaten a man. “How bad was the guy hurt?” I asked.
“Not bad. He had a swollen lip. His eye’ll be black tomorrow, and he’ll ache for a while. But he’ll be all right. Everybody at the station was more worried about James than that loser. That wasn’t the sort of thing you expect from James, you know? Some of the other guys around here are hotheads and get in tussles pretty regularly. But I’ve worked with James for forty years, and the man I saw today was a total stranger to me.”
“I kn
ow what you mean,” I said. “Is James going to be in trouble?”
“I don’t think so. The guy James knocked around isn’t going to be making a fuss about it. He’s dumb, but he’s not that dumb. He knows we’ll be picking him up again the next time he gets drunk and starts in hitting somebody. He won’t want us to be pissed off at him from the get-go. I’d say James doesn’t need to worry.”
Calvin told me that James had walked into the station after the fight and taken a week of sick days. Then he talked for a while longer about how everyone at the job was worried about James and wished me good luck.
I thanked him for calling and headed out to see my husband.
When I stepped into the garage from the kitchen, James was staring into the engine of his car. He had opened the hood, but he seemed totally confused by what he saw in front of him. The perplexed expression on his face suggested that he had just discovered that his car was powered by a horde of hamsters on a treadmill. He said, “These modern motors don’t even look like car engines anymore. This might as well be a rocket ship.”
I said, “Calvin just called and told me what happened.”
James shut the hood of the car. He turned around and sat on the front corner of the passenger side with his heel propped up on the car’s bumper. Looking exhausted, he slumped forward and dropped his chin to his chest.
“I didn’t intend to hit him. I saw him hit her, and I thought I’d try to get him to simmer down. But the little girl was on him and the woman was on the ground, and the guy was telling them both to shut up. I remember hitting him the first time and then I remember Calvin pulling me off him. The in-between part, it’s like that was somebody else.”
James brought his hand to his face and rubbed his scar. “I beat that man in front of his wife and his daughter. When Calvin stopped me, the guy’s wife was screaming and the man I hit was crying. Their daughter had her hands pressed over her ears so she wouldn’t hear it. Odette, I gave that little girl a terrible memory to take with her for the rest of her life. And believe me, that child already had enough ugly memories without my help.”
He used his left hand to massage the knuckles of his right. “Why did that old man have to come back?” he said. “I was doing fine thinking he was dead. Now I’m a sixty-one-year-old man getting into fistfights like a hotheaded boy.
“After all these years, you’d think it wouldn’t matter anymore. But you pick at that old scab and it still bleeds.”
He saw me looking at the rough line along his jaw and said, “I’m not talking about this old scar. I mean all of it, that whole father thing. It’s hard to explain, but when your father takes off, it’s like you get to be a member of a club that you don’t wanna be in. At first, you and everybody else in the club talk about how your old man’s gonna come back and make everything good. When you figure out that he won’t be coming back, you get mad. You get mad because you know you got cheated. You wonder if maybe everybody else is better than you because their fathers stuck around.
“I know that’s stupid. I know it’s something I have to let go of. I thought for sure I had let it go. I had Big Earl, and he was like a father to me. But Big Earl had his own kids. Like a father and a real father are two different things.
“So here I am, almost an old man myself, and I can’t sleep at night, and I’m as pissed off as if that son of a bitch walked out on Mama and me yesterday. I can’t stop feeling that way, no matter how hard I work at it.
“I think about what Big Earl would have wanted me to do. He used to tell me, ‘The way to be a good man is by always being the bigger man.’ And I’m trying. I really am.”
“Maybe you should stop trying,” I said. “Aunt Marjorie used to say that you can’t be good all the time. She said sometimes you have to do what’s right for right now, and clean up the mess later.”
“Your aunt Marjorie was a crazy woman.”
“True enough, but she never fretted over the past, not that I ever saw. And she slept like a rock every night till she died.”
“That was the moonshine,” James said.
I couldn’t argue with that.
“The worst part is that I see you looking at me like you don’t know me anymore. I want to turn back and be myself again before I scare you off, but I can’t. Not yet, at least.”
I moved forward until I was standing between James’s knees. I reached up and grabbed the hand that was still rubbing against his scar. I pulled that hand away, then kissed his face again and again from his earlobe down to the corner of his mouth. I wrapped my arms around his skinny waist and squeezed him.
“James Henry, did you forget I was born in a sycamore tree? There isn’t a power on this earth that can scare me away from you.”
James rested his chin on my forehead. He said, “I don’t deserve you.”
“I know you don’t,” I said. “But I didn’t think I should be the one to say so.” I held him tighter and pressed my cheek to his sharp collarbone. Then I stepped into the topic he had warned me a couple of days earlier to stay away from.
“I’ve been thinking. Maybe we can go face El Walker together. I really believe it will make things better for you if you have it out with him.”
James said, “No.” I felt his body stiffen. His arms loosened around my shoulders, and he went back to squinting at the garage walls.
I patted him on his back and said, “Wanna come inside and help me start dinner?”
He followed me toward the door to the kitchen. As we stepped into the house, he said, “I was thinking maybe I’d build window boxes for the living room windows while I have time. Would you like that?”
I tried to recall the name of that nice handyman who had come by last summer to finish the Adirondack chairs James had started and then wandered away from. That same man had also pieced together our spice rack a few years back, after James had given up on that project in frustration. He would probably do a good job on the window boxes, too, once James lost interest in them.
“Window boxes sound wonderful,” I said.
CHAPTER 21
When the ringing of the telephone woke me, the first thing I did was look at the clock on the dresser across the room. I wanted to know just how deep a breath I needed to take to be prepared for the shock that was surely about to come. I saw that it was nearly three in the morning, so I inhaled big.
Clarice was crying when I picked up. “It’s Richmond,” she said between sobs. “He’s had a heart attack. I’m in the emergency room at University.”
I didn’t want to ask if he was alive, so it was a relief when Clarice said, “They just took him into an exam room.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said. And after waking and frightening Barbara Jean and Ray, James and I were on our way to University Hospital.
We found Clarice in the emergency room. She was alone, except for a few very drunk college students who seemed to be suffering from fight-and fall-related injuries. After an exchange of embraces, Clarice said that she had no new information. No one had been able, or perhaps willing, to tell her anything so far. She had to repeat herself just a few minutes later when Barbara Jean and Ray arrived. Then she began to tell us the details of what had led to her 911 call and the arrival of the paramedics.
It had begun when Richmond stopped by to see Clarice at her place in Leaning Tree.
“He came over to visit me after dinner,” Clarice said. “We were talking, and he started to sweat a lot. Then he couldn’t catch his breath. He said his chest hurt.” She squirmed uncomfortably in her chair. She was wearing a terry-cloth robe, and the fluffy fringe of a black negligee was peeking out beneath the robe’s hem. I began to get a clearer picture of what kind of activity had led up to Richmond’s heart attack. Ray and James noticed the negligee, too. Ever the gentlemen, they excused themselves, saying they were going to find coffee for us.
After the men left, Clarice reached out and grabbed my hand and Barbara Jean’s. “It’s my fault,” she said. “You know that problem I’ve be
en having with Richmond? Well, tonight he showed up at the house carrying a stack of old pictures of the kids and a bunch of scrapbook supplies, talking about all the wonderful memories we had and how we should paste the pictures into books to give to the kids when we see them in Chicago. I called the man to come see me at eleven at night, and he showed up prepared to do handicrafts. I almost shoved those crinkle-cut craft scissors he was holding right into his forehead.
“Then I noticed that he had a little jewelry box in his pocket, and I panicked. Before he could say another word, I ran upstairs and changed into this.” She lifted the hem of the robe and showed more of the black negligee to Barbara Jean and me. “Then I jumped him. An hour later, he was on the bedroom floor, clutching his chest.” She readjusted her robe to hide the negligee. “I’ll never forgive myself if he dies.”
Local skirt-chasing legend Richmond Baker might finally have been screwed to death. It was just the way anyone who’d known him since he was thirteen would have assumed he’d go. Not one of us would have thought his own wife would be the woman responsible, though.
I wanted to tell Clarice that my ghost-seeing ability was hinting that there was cause for hope. I often observed Mrs. Roosevelt hovering in the vicinity when someone was about to cross over. It was a positive sign for Richmond that she hadn’t seen fit to show up that morning. But I hadn’t talked with the Supremes about my communications with the spirit world since my near-death experience five years earlier, and this didn’t seem like the right moment to start.
Barbara Jean, who had always found comfort in well-made articles of clothing, said, “That really is a beautiful negligee.”
Clarice wasn’t ready to take consolation in admiration for her outfit, especially not when she saw it as a potential murder weapon. She began to cry again as we muttered well-intended, useless phrases. “No news is good news.” “It’s all in the Lord’s hands.”
The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues Page 16
