The Ada Decades

by Paula Martinac

  “So why . . .” Ada stopped and bit her bottom lip, but she clearly had something she needed to ask. “Why did you keep her lipstick?”

  Cam fished around in her memory, but chemo had left its toll on her powers of recollection and she couldn’t come up with anything about a tube of lipstick. “What lipstick?”

  “The book club,” Ada said. “The one you started because you wanted to get me to your apartment?”

  “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “Well, I went to the bathroom while I was there—Lu was needling me, the way she has from day one, and I just needed to take a break. And I opened up your medicine cabinet and there was this single tube of lipstick. Which you never wore.”

  Cam’s cheeks felt warm.

  “Oh, no, darlin’, no,” she said sadly. She had to tell her; Ada had been with her through everything, truly in sickness and in health, watching her get thinner and frailer, holding her while she vomited into a bucket. The woman deserved an honest answer. “That was Viv’s.”

  They hadn’t spoken of Viv in twenty years. Ada was her love and her life, but Viv was the one who broke her heart.

  “So it’s always been Viv.”

  “Ada Jane . . .”

  “I guess I’m not surprised. I mean, I was just the skinny little white girl who didn’t care much about politics, and you and Viv were traipsing off to civil rights rallies together. I couldn’t compete with a black woman in your eyes, could I? No wonder you went on a bender when you found out she got married. No wonder you acted so entranced when we ran into her in New York.”

  “Ada Jane,” Cam said, slowly and in a measured tone, “I was foolish to keep that lipstick, but you know I am sentimental. Viv was really the first big love for me, and she hurt me bad. Now I don’t have that lipstick anymore, and you won’t stumble on it when I die. I tossed it out when you and I got together. There’s nothing more being hidden from you.”

  Ada’s forehead seemed to loosen and relax, like she wanted to believe her.

  “The fact is, Viv did me a favor when she left me. If she hadn’t, I might have missed the one I was meant to be with. I wish you could see yourself as I have all these years, your pluck, your resilience, that spark that shows up when you least expect it. You were a girl who wasn’t even sure she was gay, but you swallowed all your fear and took a chance on us. I chose you, but you chose me right back.”

  She had wrapped her hands around Ada’s as she spoke. Ada made a halfhearted attempt to free them, but then she gave in and Cam just held on tight.

  Comfort Zone

  2015

  The day the old man showed up, the thermometer was already topping 80˚ by mid-morning. The trips carrying grocery bags from the trunk of the Buick Century to the front steps of her bungalow left Ada’s light green shift saturated at the armpits. She regrouped after each one, catching her breath and readjusting the strap of her pocketbook, which kept slipping from her shoulder. The checkers at Food Lion didn’t know how to pack anything properly, insisting on putting the cans and milk in one bag, even when she told them not to. Then they’d ask, “You need some help, ma’am?” You gonna come home with me? she wanted to snap.

  With sweat tickling her breasts and plastering her white bob to her forehead, Ada eased her bones onto the bottom step of her porch with a whoosh of a sigh. And that was when she saw him, standing on the sidewalk not ten feet away, staring at her, round-mouthed and dim-looking in his “Property of Steelers” T-shirt. His elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor. He had a few years on her, but the strength still visible in his forearms suggested he’d known a life of manual labor. What kind of man, especially one her own age who was still fit, would let a woman tussle with all those bags and never offer to carry even one?

  “What’re you looking at?” Ada knew better, she hadn’t been raised like that, but still she couldn’t help it—it just popped out of her mouth before she could stuff it back in, as if old age gave her permission to forgo the manners she’d learned as a girl.

  He brushed his hair out of his eyes, which were a shade of blue that reminded Ada of the sky at Folly Beach. “Do you know me?” the old man asked.

  “Don’t recollect so,” Ada replied, thinking it was the oddest question anyone had asked her since she retired as school librarian.

  “Oh,” he said, his chest sinking in a little.

  She waited for him to say something else or to finally come to his senses and offer help getting the bags inside. But then, her niece Junie had cautioned her against letting anyone into the house; she’d read a story about scammers who targeted the elderly by claiming to be financial planners with the inside scoop on some great new mutual funds.

  “They’re mutually funding folks right out of their savings!” was how Junie put it.

  This old man, though, didn’t look like he had anything wicked in mind. Several years past eighty, he surely didn’t mean to rape or murder her, or even steal her pocketbook. His clothes were clean and pressed, like someone was taking care of him, a wife, she guessed, by the thin gold band on his left hand. But he looked a little jumpy, the way he kept drifting from one foot to the other as he stared her down. Maybe he’d misplaced something important, like his keys or wallet or even his dog. People’s dogs and cats were always going loose in the neighborhood and having to be rounded up. Somebody’s orange tabby practically lived in her back yard.

  “You lose something?” Ada decided to ask.

  He looked up and down the street twice, three times, then back at Ada. “This your house?”

  “Free and clear,” Ada said. “My daddy left it to me.” The five-room house with a screened back porch had been a bone of contention with her brother Clay until his dying day. “Would have been fairer to sell it and split the proceeds,” he had complained, seeming to forget he owned a sprawling property on Lake Norman and didn’t need the money.

  “It’s nice,” the old man said. “Needs some work, though.” He had no drawl, and must be a Northern transplant.

  Ada took silent offense at his statement, even though what he said was true. Cam had been handy and had kept the place up, but she’d been gone almost a dozen years. The exterior hadn’t had a coat of paint in that long, and a couple of floorboards on the front porch had rotted away like bad teeth. Some of the screens were so frayed, she might as well have put out a welcome mat for mosquitoes. More worrisome were the furnace and hot water heater—her daddy had installed them so long ago the date had slipped from her memory, and Ada prayed that they would make it through another year. With repairs, the place might be worth some money now. Newcomers were snapping up old cotton-mill houses all over the neighborhood. Two doors down, Mr. Barlow’s sons had fixed up his tumbledown shotgun after he died and then turned around and sold it for well over $200,000—more money than Ada could even imagine.

  But there was no time to chitchat with the old man about improvements to her house. At another time, she might have engaged, but in this heat Ada had to get her perishables inside. “I got to go,” she said to the Steelers fan, and hauled herself up by the wrought iron banister which, she noticed with alarm, was starting to come loose from the steps.

  “You know my daughter?” the old guy continued. “Mimi Finn?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “She’s from Pittsburgh, like me,” he went on. “I live with her and her . . .” He broke off. “I live with her. Right around here.” He glanced around again, giving Ada the impression he was not quite clear on where “here” was. She wondered if she should help him out, but how long would that take? Sometimes, when you tried to assist people, be a good neighbor, you ended up taking on more than you bargained for, and Ada had concerns of her own. Getting old was no Sunday afternoon picnic, and she had the creaking joints and shrinking bank account to prove it. Luckily, she still had all her faculties.

  “Family’s what’s important,” she said, just to say something and have the exchange be over and done with. “You have a nice day.�
�� She adjusted her pocketbook again and mounted the steps with one of the heavier grocery bags in tow. At this rate, her frozen chicken potpies would be thawed before she got through the front door.

  “You want a hand?” the old man asked.

  Ada remembered Junie’s warning, but then, maybe her niece didn’t have to know. Junie didn’t check in more than once a week, so maybe it wasn’t even any of her business. She was quick to tell Ada what not to do, but not so fast when it came to coming around for a glass of sweet tea or sending her son Matt to mow the lawn. Now Ada had an offer of help precisely when she needed it. “I’d be much obliged,” she replied.

  “I’m Harry. Harry Finn.”

  “Ada,” she said. “What’s your shirt mean?”

  Harry looked down at it, as if he’d forgotten what he was wearing. “It means I’m from Pittsburgh,” he said.

  “Then shouldn’t it say, ‘I’m from Pittsburgh’?”

  Harry’s mouth fell into that rounded O again.

  “It’s a joke,” Ada explained, and he laughed like kids did when they didn’t want to seem foolish. “Here,” she said, pointing to the heaviest two bags, the ones with canned beans and a bottle of Crisco oil that she worried might crack her spine like a piece of dry wood. “Bring those two inside. Please.”

  “Glad you added the please,” Harry said, as he scooped up the bags and hauled them across the threshold. “I was wondering about that Southern hospitality I heard about.” It was the longest thing he’d said to her in the five minutes of their acquaintance, and it was surprisingly clear as spring water.

  She watched his eyes scan the genteel tatters of her living room. Ada kept it neat, but the wallpaper she and Cam had hung when they moved in was faded to grays and beiges and curling at the match lines. The sofa looked like you might sink through to China if you sat on it. “It’s not much,” she said, seeing it through a stranger’s eyes. “Kitchen’s right through here.”

  “Nice you got your own place.”

  She switched on the kitchen overhead and the fluorescent bulb flickered before going on full force. Ada placed her grocery bag on the table, set with a single placemat and chair, and motioned for Harry to do the same. He returned to the porch for the rest of the bags, his second trip taking a little longer than the first. The least she could do, she thought, was offer him some sweet tea, show him she was hospitable after all.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Harry replied.

  “Sit yourself down in the other room. Take a load off.”

  She put away the frozen foods, milk, and eggs and poured him a tall glass on ice. As an afterthought, she pinched a sprig of mint from her windowsill herb garden and stuck it in his glass, where it stood up like a soldier at attention.

  “What’s that?” Harry asked, staring at the mint like it was a foreign object you’d never find in sweet tea—a dead bug, maybe.

  “You never saw mint before?”

  “Not like that,” he replied.

  “How else would you see it?” There was her ornery side again. She didn’t mean to sound so clipped, but the guy was mighty peculiar.

  “I like them York Peppermint Patties. My wife used to stick one in my lunch pail every so often.”

  He was sitting on the sofa, on the middle cushion, which was sturdier than the other two and made him rise up like a dignitary. Ada sat down across from him in her TV chair, the La-Z-Boy that had been her daddy’s and that Cam had insisted they keep. Her shift made her descent more of a plop than a sit, because she worried that her hemline might hike up. She resisted the urge to make the chair recline, which would have added to the problem, even though she could feel her ankles swelling from all the standing she’d done while shopping. She would have to soak them in Epsom salt later.

  “You and your wife live with your daughter?” she said, finding it surprisingly pleasant to have a guest, even one who didn’t get her jokes.

  Harry sipped the tea and murmured his approval. “No, just me. Sharon died.” It was startling the way he came out with it, just like that. Ada still couldn’t refer to Cam’s passing, when she spoke of it at all, as anything but that—a temporary crossing until they met again on the other side. May she rest in peace.

  “I am truly sorry to hear that,” she replied. “What was it that got her?”

  “Stroke. Doctor said she didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Well, that’s a blessing,” Ada said. Cam’s ovarian cancer had been ruthless, going away and then coming back. It was like an alien beast that’d been gestating inside her, waiting for the cruelest moment to show up, just when they had begun to live like regular folks again.

  The images still haunted her—the chemo room drip, the “sick bucket,” just in case, the sight of Cam curled up under an afghan on the couch all day, reduced to the weight of a girl. She’d been an imposing woman most of her life, six foot tall in her stocking feet, with the strong legs of an athlete. Ada tried to banish the sickroom Cam quickly so she didn’t take root and keep her awake at night.

  “Nice place you got here,” the old man said, as if their preceding conversation had never taken place. “You own it?”

  What could she say to that? At the senior center, which she went to a few afternoons a month for the free movies, there were plenty of folks like this man, their marbles slipping away one by one. She never knew what to say to them either, when they hopped on the same train of conversation they’d dropped out of, not minutes earlier. Ada was glad to still have her wits about her, but it was a lonely state of affairs, too.

  Luckily, she didn’t have to struggle with re-answering the old man’s question. Just like the folks at the East Charlotte Senior Center, Harry’s attention span seemed to be no longer than about five seconds. “Your husband dead?” he asked.

  “No husband,” she said. “I lived with a . . . friend. She’s gone almost twelve years now.”

  Her eyes darted to a grouping of photos of Cam, given prime place on her mother’s étagère. When Junie came to visit, Ada put the pictures away, replacing them with knickknacks she stashed in a drawer for that purpose. But she hadn’t been expecting company. It was daring to have the photographs out, right in the open like that, but she hoped the old man’s eyesight was as malfunctioning as his brain. Maybe he wouldn’t notice that in one of them, a young Ada and Cam were sitting on the beach with their bare shoulders boldly touching, as if daring the world to see their intimacy. Auggie had snapped the picture and framed it, given it to Ada for Christmas as a memento of what he called a “très gay” weekend, probably back in ’59 or ’60. The year might have slipped from memory, but she would never forget the thrilling press of Cam’s freckled skin against her own.

  Harry’s eyes followed her own to the shelves. “That her?” he said, taking a long swig of his sweet tea. “The friend?”

  She dodged the question, even though a dim bulb like him would probably never put two and two together. “You got good eyesight, seeing that from where you’re sitting. I’m useless without my glasses.”

  “I seen it when I was waiting for the tea,” he commented. “Nice-looking woman. My wife would’ve called her ‘a big girl.’”

  Silence dropped between them again. If someone commented on the looks of your husband or child, you might say thank you, but what did you say about a nice-looking friend, a woman whose only connection to you now was memories? Ada shifted in her chair. She was ready for him to leave, but he went on.

  “My daughter’s got a friend. A woman. She gets mad if I use that word friend. She says wife. I didn’t think it was right when she first told us, but times change and at least they take care of each other.” The rattle of his ice cubes as he drank more tea echoed in Ada’s ears. “You know my daughter, Mimi?”

  This time it was Ada’s mouth that dropped open. She had definitely had enough of the Steelers fan, coming out of nowhere and upending her day, acting like he knew something about her and Cam. She would put the photo of the beach away as soon as he left; the
ir life together wasn’t his business. They had never discussed their relationship in public, hardly even with their gay friends. And strangers? Shoot, Ada would have sooner told a stranger about her bowel movements than admit to having a special woman friend or, heavens, a wife.

  Bile rose in her throat like it did when she ate too fast. Would Harry Finn start running off at the mouth about meeting an old gay gal who lived on her own? He was just demented enough to, not even realizing what he was doing, and she wouldn’t want any hooligans finding out and deciding to bother her. The neighborhood had its share of crime, but so far she’d been spared and she wanted to keep it that way. Ada yanked herself out of the chair and came toward him, taking the glass from his hand. He relinquished it without protest, the tinkle of the unmelted ice like a chime ending his stay.

  “I told you before, I don’t know her,” she said. “And fact is, I got chores to do now.” A lame excuse—there was nothing whatsoever to do until supper, and then she would just zap a potpie in the microwave.

  She knew she should have detained him, tried to figure out where his daughter lived. But some nasty version of Ada Shook whispered in her ear like the devil himself. She would have to pray on it later, ask God and Cam to forgive her.

  At the front door, Harry looked up and down the street as if the terrain were Jupiter and not a quiet urban landscape. She had heard of the state’s silver alerts, like the amber alerts for missing kids but for old folks, poor souls who couldn’t find their way home even if they were just a street or two away. On the porch, as the screen door slapped behind him, the man turned back toward her and reached into his pants pocket. His eyes were dark and hooded, and she flinched, wondering if he was someone to fear after all. Why hadn’t she noticed the bulge in his pocket?

  But what he pulled out was a flip phone, the kind that you could send away for from Parade magazine. She had one, too, with numbers as big as her thumbnail and an old-fashioned ring like the phone that still hung on her kitchen wall. Junie had bought the thing for her but she had used it only once, when she came out of the senior center to a flat tire. The old man held his phone out to her. “Does this thing tell you where I live?” he asked with an embarrassed laugh, more of a snort. “Darned if I can figure it out.”