Chapter 20
The best thing about helping out at
Amanda’s place was that Cissy got to quit her job at the realty
office. At the beginning of the year, she had taken the job doing
data entry for the County Realty office three afternoons a week,
but as the months passed she arrived late more and more often,
slipping into the office long after everyone had left. There is
nothing worse in the world, Cissy decided, than typing page after
page of abbreviated notes, square-foot measurements and endless
bland repetitions of the same few dozen sentences. Over and over
she typed, “Secluded, 2 BR/2bth, fp, fixer-upper, grd vw, motivated
seller, new roof, hdwd flrs, real sweetheart, new fixtures.” Prices
changed, brokers passed on different parcels, new properties were
listed, and always there were the irritating little notes from the
various real estate agents. Cissy forgot to include outbuildings,
or the den that doubled as a guest room, or the decorative
shutters, or the special enticements like the so-called English
garden, which Cissy decided must mean a wild tangle untamed by
Southern propensities for lawns and flower beds. Always there was
something—spelling errors, missed measurements, a “special”
property not put in the “special” category listings. Things were
tight in the county. Property was not selling. There had to be a
reason, and the notes made it clear that the problem was the way
Cissy put in the data.
Cissy wondered if waitress work might not be
easier. She hated creeping into the back of the realty office,
trying to avoid the staff and sitting down to face the big jumble
of marked-up forms and multicolored taped inserts. “You forgot.”
“You did not.” “Please do not ...” It was supposed to be an easy
job, a favor to Delia’s girl, who after all was living at home and
just needed enough of an income to keep afloat at the community
college, but there had turned out to be more buildings for sale
than Cissy would ever have imagined, more lots and farms and
abandoned shanties. All of them required Cissy to type and track
and update their listings. Better, far better, to sit on Nolan’s
porch after turning the boys over to Michael, to drink seltzer with
orange slices and listen to Nolan play music and repeat stories his
relatives had told him.
Nolan had his prized clarinet on his lap, a Buffet
R13 with a Selmer mouthpiece. He was rubbing the black surface of
the instrument with a soft cloth, smiling with pleasure as the
grenadilla wood polished up. “African black,” Mr. Clausen had
called it when he gave it to him. “Grenadilla and sterling silver.
You keep it clean and polished, and it will last forever.” The
first time he played the new clarinet, Nadine had beamed at Nolan
with such pleasure, the image had become imprinted on his brain.
The weeks when he had to count quarters to meet the bills, Nolan
would remember that smile when he looked over at the clarinet. He
had sold his old one, the Vito Leblanc made of black plastic.
(“Resonite, Nolan, Resonite.”) It had brought in a desperately
needed $200 the year before. He learned that the secondhand Buffet
had cost Mr. Clausen and the group around $1,000, and as tight as
things were, Nolan had only once considered selling it. That he had
not been forced to do so was among the few things for which he was
infinitely grateful.
“Is your mama all right?” he asked Cissy. “She
looked so strange at the funeral.”
“She’s fine. Delia doesn’t change. A mountain could
fall on her, and she’d get up and go to work at the Bonnet.”
Nolan nodded. “I got another audition coming up,”
he said. “Next week. I’m going to drive over to Atlanta for the day
and meet with the director at Emory.”
Cissy looked at Nolan. His eyes were trained on the
clarinet, his voice careful. Why was he mentioning this audition?
Nolan did lots of auditions, and she rarely went with him anymore.
“You asking me to come?” Cissy frowned. She and the girls were
supposed to make another try at Little Mouth next week.
“No, no.” Nolan shook his head. “Just telling you.
Just saying I’m going.” He was quiet for a moment, buffing the wood
of his instrument. “It’s different, this time,” he said suddenly.
“If they offer me a job, I might consider taking it.”
As often as she had encouraged him to do just that,
Cissy was still dismayed at the idea of Nolan leaving her behind.
“You’d leave Cayro?!”
Nolan looked uncomfortable. “Maybe. I might.” He
rolled the instrument between his fingers. “If I could figure
things out, get a nice place down there, and get Mama set up. Of
course it all depends on Dede, whether she likes the idea. She’s
been so restless lately. Been out practicing with that gun Craig
gave her. She’s taken to keeping it under the front seat of her
car.”
Nolan paused. He began the lengthy process of
disassembling and cleaning the clarinet before putting it away.
While slipping the reed into its case, he said, “Dede’s unhappy,
you know. Or maybe scared. We’re happy, but ...” He paused. “I
think she’s getting tired of the store and the same stuff all the
time. Sometimes she talks about doing something different. She
wants to learn about car engines, she says. Wants to do some
driving. All kinds of things she could be doing. I want her to have
the chance, and I could make good money in Atlanta. Play my music
and get us a good place.”
“You have lost your tiny mind.” Cissy shook her
head. “Dede an’t going to move to Atlanta. And you don’t know that
you can get a job there.”
“I can get a job,” Nolan said. “If not this one,
then another one. I’m good and I’m going to be better, and I know
how to work for what I want.” He looked thoughtful but determined.
“I want to see Dede be happy the way she deserves.”
Nolan sighed and closed his eyes. When he opened
them, he looked directly at Cissy. “You’re my best friend in the
world. I just wanted to tell you what I was thinking. Wanted you to
know. It an’t like I’m leaving tomorrow. It an’t like nothing has
happened at all just yet. I just wanted you to know what I was
thinking.”
Cissy looked down at the shadows on the steps and
then up at Nolan’s wide-open, hopeful face. “Well,” she said, “like
you say, it an’t happening tomorrow. And when it does happen, we’ll
sort it out.” She stood up and pushed her hair back. “You’re my
friend, Nolan Reitower. That an’t going to change ’cause you’re
thinking of doing something different, but you talk real careful to
Dede about this. She an’t the kind of person likes surprises. And
she an’t that easy to predict. She might not want to go nowhere,
you know. Then what would you do?”
“Stay in Cayro,” Nolan said with a smile. “For
Dede, I’d stay in Cayro and bake biscuits till the flesh falls off
my bones.” He made it sound like a cheerful prospect. He made it
sound like the happiest thing he could imagine doing with his
life.
Cissy spent every afternoon picking up
after little Michael and Gabe and worrying about Amanda. She was
still adjusting to the changes in Amanda since she’d come home from
the hospital. Michael was pink and uncertain when he asked Cissy to
stay a bit longer to help with the boys because “Amanda is not
quite herself yet.”
“You sure Amanda wants me to stay?” Cissy could not
believe it.
“Yes, yes,” Michael said. “She’s a little
fuzzy-headed right now. I’m sure she’ll be fine once she catches up
on a little sleep. If you could come over during the day for a
while, it might help.” He looked deeply troubled. “The doctor
thinks Amanda needs a little time to rest and recover.”
“She needs more than sleep,” Cissy muttered, but
the look on Michael’s face was too tentative for her to confront.
“Of course, I’ll help,” she promised. “At least it will give me a
reason to take a break from typing for the realty company.”
The week before Amanda went into the hospital, she
and Cissy had run into each other at Delia’s on a Saturday morning,
and Amanda had made a caustic comment about Cissy’s caving trips
with “those strange girls.”
“It an’t debauchery we’re engaged in,” Cissy said.
“It’s exploration. We’re mapping the system from Little Mouth to
Paula’s Lost.”
“Uh-huh.” Amanda put on her saintly expression.
“And what’s the use of that?”
“Well, then we’d know.”
“And then?” Amanda asked. “What will you do
then?”
“Plant seeds between my toes and grow marigolds!
Mind your own damned business,” Cissy shouted, and stomped out of
Delia’s kitchen.
As it turned out, that argument was the last
conversation the two of them had before Amanda wound up in the
hospital and Granddaddy Byrd died. Cissy worried that Amanda would
return to their argument at the first chance. But the Amanda who
came home from the hospital seemed to have no energy for arguing.
She could barely be persuaded to get out of bed in the morning.
Only when little Michael climbed up on Amanda’s lap and demanded a
story did Amanda show any spark. She had perked up enough to start
retelling the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, but when her son
bounced excitedly beside her, she stopped and clenched him so
tightly to her neck he had yelped. She had let him go with a
heartfelt “Lord!”
“You all right?” Cissy asked. Amanda’s color was
odd; bright red circles stood out on her pale cheeks. She was
staring at little Michael with enormous stricken eyes, and an
expression that bordered on horror.
Amanda shook her head. “Going for a drive,” she
announced, and left before Cissy could ask her when she would be
back.
Caught between resentment at being left with the
demanding boys and relief that Amanda seemed not to want to argue,
Cissy spent the day cleaning the already pristine house and
preparing what she would say when the subject of her future came up
again. She canceled everything on the schedule on the fridge—the
home visits and the baking—and concentrated on caring for the boys,
but it was still too much. In the late afternoon she realized she
had managed to miss little Michael’s judo lesson. He had been in
the class only two months, taking it up after his Sunday school
teacher suggested it would be a good way for him to work on his
little problem with acting out.
“Kick butt,” Dede laughed when she called to check
in. “Amanda’s boy needs to kick a little butt to even himself out.
Makes sense to me.”
Amanda came home shortly before Michael Senior and
went immediately back to bed, where she pulled the sheet over her
head. “Is she all right?” Michael asked Cissy. “Far as I know,”
Cissy told him. The next morning she came over a little late and
found Amanda fully dressed, sitting at the kitchen table while the
boys cried in the back room.
“Going out,” Amanda said when Cissy opened the
door. She was out the door before Cissy could catch her.
“When will you be home?” Cissy called after her.
Amanda did not even look back.
“She leaves as soon as I get there,” Cissy told
Delia, but Delia merely nodded.
“Let her go,” she said. “Amanda’s never given
herself a minute of her own, let her have a bit of time for
herself.”
“And what if she never settles back down?” Cissy
demanded. “I can’t watch these boys forever.”
“You can watch them for another week,” Delia said.
“Give your sister that. What else did you have to do?”
Cissy grumbled, but not very seriously. She had the
time. Mim and Jean were pressing her about another trip down Little
Mouth, but Cissy put them off. “Next week,” she promised Mim. “I
told Delia I’d watch Amanda’s boys one more week.”
What she was thinking about was not the next week
but the next year. Tacey bragged about what she would do at
Spelman, and Cissy admitted to herself how pointless her classes at
the community college were. The future was as unknown to her as the
connecting link from Little Mouth to Paula’s Lost. The guidance
counselor had asked her what she wanted to do, and Cissy had stared
at him blankly. She had no fixed goal in her life. The only thing
that excited her was going caving, and no one took that seriously,
not even her. She couldn’t make a life out of crawling around
underground.
“You could join the army,” Dede told Cissy one
Thursday night at Goober’s. For months Dede and Nolan had been
going over to Goober’s at least two nights a week, ordering a
pitcher of beer and a big basket of fried vegetables, and sipping
whiskey shots out of Dede’s bag when the waitress wasn’t looking.
Dede swore she didn’t trust bar whiskey, though it was the price
she truly resented, not the quality of the unlabeled bottles. It
was like their fried vegetables. No one could guess exactly what
those shapeless, crispy objects were before being deep-fried and
covered with hot sauce.
“Get real, Dede. I am not going to join the army.”
Cissy was tired and irritable, more convinced than ever that she
never wanted children.
“I would,” Dede announced. “If I was you, just out
of high school, with a clean record and all, I’d sign up in a
minute.”
“You wouldn’t!” Nolan was appalled. “There’s no
telling where they’d send you.”
“You wouldn’t follow me?” Dede sipped at her beer.
“You saying you wouldn’t follow me wherever I’d go?”
“Course I’d follow you.” Nolan poked at the pitcher
between them. “I’d follow you to hell if need be, but I hate the
idea of you going in the army. I’ve met some of those army boys,
and they tell terrible stories about what happens to women in the
army.”
“What you expect is going to happen to me, huh?”
Dede was red-faced and belligerent. Cissy wondered how many shots
she had sneaked from the bottle in her purse. “You think I’m going
to fall in love with some big old dyke drill instructor?”
Nolan’s mouth fell open. “No, no,” he said. “I was
thinking about how much you’d hate it.”
“I might like it. You don’t know.” Dede stood up
suddenly. She swayed on unsteady legs. “I might like it a hell of a
lot more than hanging out in Cayro till the day I die.”
When Nolan said nothing, Dede headed for the
bathroom, barely missing Sheila, the new waitress, who was bringing
another basket of crispy vegetables.
“Oh, she’s had a little, I guess,” Sheila laughed,
and set the basket in front of Nolan.
“I guess,” Nolan said. He looked at Cissy with a
mournful expression. “If you ask me, both your sisters are going
through changes.”
“Dede I understand,” Cissy told him. She speared a
fried mushroom out of the basket and chewed it thoughtfully. “It’s
Amanda I thought would never change.”
Nolan picked through the basket. “Everything
changes.” He looked toward the bathroom. “Everything and everybody.
Except me, of course. Dede told me that she wishes I would change,
wishes I would show her what I’m made of. But I have, and she don’t
seem to know it. This is all I am. Hard work and taking care of the
people I love, making a little music and being steady. That’s all I
know.” He sighed. “I’ve asked her to marry me three times, and she
won’t say no, she won’t say yes. She tells me I’m crazy, and then
she fucks my brains out.”
Cissy wiggled uncomfortably. “She loves you.”
“Oh yeah, I know she loves me.” Nolan took a drink
of his beer. “I just wish I was sure Dede knew what that means,
what love is really about. Some days I get the feeling she thinks
sex is love, or craziness is love. That love has to be some big
strange amazing thing, not the everyday all-my-life-and-then-some
it is for me.”
He picked up a nub of fried batter. “I think love’s
like this zucchini. Zucchini is what keeps Goober’s in business,
you know. Everybody thinks they know zucchini. Some like it, some
hate it. They don’t really know it. It’s completely unrecognizable
once they cook it up. Oh, they throw in a mushroom now and then,
but you pay more for the mushrooms, so not too many of those go in.
Put in a green pepper sometimes, or a carrot, but mostly it’s all
zucchini. Perfect cheap bar food, nondescript and usual. Half the
people who eat this can’t tell you what they ate. Always think it
is something else.”
“Whatever.” Dede took her seat next to Nolan. “I
eat it for the grease anyway. So I can drink more. Grease coats
your stomach. You gonna drink beer and whiskey shots, you need lots
of grease.” She put her arm around Nolan and nuzzled his ear. “Why
don’t we go home?”
Nolan wiped his mouth and gave Cissy a warning
glance, then stood up. “See you,” he called back as they
left.
“Whatever.” Dede waved her hand at Cissy.
When they were gone, Cissy looked at the debris on
the table, the empty pitcher and the greasy scraps. A pile of mushy
zucchini lay on the salty wax paper at the bottom of the basket.
Dede had picked the batter off her vegetables and eaten only the
fried dough. Wherever possible, she stuck to fried bread and meat;
her mainstay was hamburgers, pancake sandwiches, and the vitamins
she still swallowed in quantity. “She’s skinny now, but you wait,”
M.T. always said. “The way Dede eats, that girl is going to blow up
like a walrus one of these days.”
“If she don’t die of a heart attack,” Cissy said
out loud.
“You want anything?” Sheila started clearing the
table.
“Salvation,” Cissy joked. She was thinking about
what Nolan had said, that Dede did not know what love was.
“Well, you won’t get that here,” Sheila told her,
and wiped the table clear.
The next morning Cissy went to Amanda’s
house early. She had fried eggs with sliced tomatoes on the table
when everybody got up. Michael exclaimed over the plates and
spooned soft-cooked eggs into plastic bowls for Gabe and little
Michael. Amanda blinked down at her plate as if it held something
unknown and strange. Before her illness, Amanda was down to eating
only vegetables, fruit, and eggs. She would bake bread when the
spirit moved her, using recipes from a cookbook published by a
women’s church group from Nashville—egg bread and cheese loaves
mostly. Everything had to have some biblical reference or it was
off Amanda’s list. As she got sicker, Amanda would eat only eggs
and bread, bread torn in half with a prayer and a blessing, and
eggs almost runny on the plate. The eggs Cissy had made were
soft-cooked but wholesome and sat on the plate next to creamy
slices of white bread bare of butter or salt.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” Michael said, but Amanda
only sipped her milk and watched the boys smear egg into their
hair.
There was some way in which the old Amanda
associated eggs with Jesus, though Cissy had not quite figured that
out. She thought it might have something to do with Easter. She had
talked about it with Dede the night before.
“You can’t figure these things,” Dede said. “She’s
not rational like you and me. If it were me and I was thinking on
Jesus, I’d be out butchering lambs. Or leading some women’s group
in prayer vigils out at the Piggly Wiggly, but with Amanda you
can’t predict. What’s she doing now?”
“She’s not doing anything,” Cissy told her sister.
“I mean, nothing. She gets up in the morning and goes out of the
house. She comes home late in the afternoon and goes right back to
bed. She don’t talk to me even to complain, and it’s making me
nervous. I can’t figure what she is doing. Makes me think about
those people who go crazy and shoot up post offices or set off
bombs in clinics. I can’t figure what the hell is going on.”
Dede’s face went blank for a moment, and then she
gave a bitter laugh. “Maybe she’s finally living in the real world
with the rest of us,” she said. “Maybe Amanda’s finally starting to
see things clear.”
Watching Amanda drink milk and ignore the plate of
eggs, Cissy found herself remembering Dede’s face in the bar. They
were looking more alike, she realized. The night before, Dede’s
face had been so tense and strained that she looked more like her
older sister than herself, and the blank-faced Amanda drinking milk
and staring listlessly at her boys looked younger, like a girl who
had fallen into a dream of having a family and did not know quite
how to contemplate what to do with it all.
Before Michael could leave for his Friday home
visits, Amanda grabbed her purse and was out the door and
gone.
“Where’s she going?” Michael asked Cissy. He had
egg yolk all over the sleeve of the arm he had been using to prop
up little Gabe.
“How should I know?” Cissy tossed Michael a dish
towel. “You’re on your own,” she told him. “I got to have a day off
or I’m going to drown your sons.”
Cissy was used to seeing Amanda
everywhere—at the sewing shop on Main Street or the day-old bread
store on Weed Road or the Quick Stop near the high school. Amanda
had always had a set routine. A woman who was both wife to a
minister and raising two boys had to have a system. Child care,
prayer meetings, vacation Bible school, Sunday school, music
lessons—with all that, Amanda was never on time and never where
anyone thought she would be. Grocery-store runs were scheduled
every weekend, but there was always something that Amanda had to do
at the last minute. Casserole dishes had to be delivered to the
sick and the bereaved. Clothing drives meant loads of laundry to be
picked over and ironed nice and folded. The women’s family
committee had to have photocopied re $ports on abortion statistics,
and grainy pictures of mangled fetuses in porcelain basins. The
girls’ auxiliary had a music group for which Amanda had even penned
an original composition. Written in the voice of an aborted fetus,
it was titled “I Forgive You but the Lord Does Mind.”
Amanda’s dirt-brown Honda plowed back and forth
from the Christian Academy to the Kmart, from the A&P to the
Little People’s Music Emporium. Amanda was always stalking down the
sidewalks of Cayro or angling through the doorway of the Bonnet in
the afternoon, or even shoving through the midday crush at the
junior college. Where does she get the time? Cissy had complained
when she tried to keep track of Amanda’s schedule. Where in the
world had Amanda ever found the time?
On this Friday afternoon, Cissy saw Amanda’s car in
the one place she would never have expected to see it.
“M.T., stop!” Cissy yelled.
“What for?” M.T. was impatient. She didn’t often
run Cissy around, and resented doing it at all. Why couldn’t Cissy
just get her license and start to drive? “You got one good eye,”
M.T. was always saying, “which is more than you can say for some of
the people driving around Cayro.”
“An’t that Amanda’s car?”
“How would I know? You mean that muddy Honda? That
could be anyone’s car. Look, you want me to drive you over to those
girls’ place or not? I thought you said you had to get there by one
o’clock.” M.T. shifted uncomfortably. It had been a hot spring. She
hated driving in the heat, hated it more that she couldn’t afford
to run the air-conditioning all the time. It used so much gas. And
besides, people noticed. They’d say she needed the air-conditioning
because she was so fat. M.T. was not bothered at all by being fat.
She was bothered by people talking about it.
“If Amanda is going to Goober’s in the afternoon, I
need to know that too.”
“Well, I an’t got time to be checking on Amanda and
running you all across town.”
“Then let me out.”
“Dede, Dede, Dede.” Nolan nuzzled into the
back of Dede’s neck, his hands sliding around her middle to link
over her belly. “You’re my heart, girl. You’re all my heart.” He
sighed happily, his hips flexing into hers and his toes curling in
delight.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Dede abruptly flexed her legs
and pulled Nolan’s hands open. “Let me go.” She kicked at him. “I
said, let me go.” She half fell off the bed and stumbled to her
feet. Nolan sat up with a confused expression.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, damn it. Can’t I get up when I
want to?” Dede lit a cigarette angrily and kicked at the pile of
discarded clothes on the floor. “Christ! Sometimes you just get all
over my nerves, you know that?”
She pushed her hair back off her face and glowered
at Nolan. Her body glowed in the sunlight pouring through the gap
in the gauzy blue bedroom curtains. Nolan swung his legs over the
side of the bed and tried a tentative grin. “Sometimes you like it
when I get all over you.”
“And sometimes I don’t.” Dede fished her underwear
out of the pile of clothes. She dressed with rough, impatient
movements. “Sometimes, you know, a woman needs a little time to
herself. Not always having a man all over her butt.” Dede pulled on
her cotton shirt without bothering to put on her bra. It was a
snap-front western shirt in yellow plaid with the sleeves cut off.
She clicked the buttons together with the cigarette gripped between
her lips. The smoke drifted up and made her squint.
“If you need some time to yourself, you know you
can have it,” Nolan said. He watched Dede hunt for her shoes. One
sneaker was under the bench by the window, the other by the side of
the dresser. When she had them both, she dropped to the bench and
put them on, not bothering with socks. “Maybe we could go visit
that place in Nag’s Head that you went to that time?” Nolan
suggested. “Have ourselves a few days’ vacation.” Nolan climbed off
the bed and gathered his clothes. He pulled on his underwear,
keeping an eye on Dede, and then stepped into his jeans. “You
haven’t any time off this year, have you?”
Dede blew smoke and hung her head. “I haven’t had
any time off in this life,” she told him, and then reached behind
her to put out the cigarette on the window ledge. “But I don’t want
to go to Nag’s Head.” Her mouth was flat and hard.
Nolan pulled his T-shirt on over his head. “You
still mad at me?”
“Don’t start.”
“Dede, I told you. The way I feel about you, of
course, I’m going to ask you to marry me. You know you can tell me
no, you can tell me to go to hell.”
Dede put her hands up in front of her face.
“Now, honey, I told you if you don’t want to get
married, I understand. You want things to go on just the way they
have, that’s fine with me.” Nolan caught Dede’s hands in his own,
“I’ll go on this way forever, I told you. And if you want I’ll try
harder not to get so gushy on you.” He grinned ruefully.
Dede shook her head. “Nolan.”
Nolan leaned forward and put his face down into her
tangled hair. He breathed in deeply. “Oh, you smell so good,” he
whispered.
“Damn.” Dede almost sobbed. She pushed him
away.
“What? What is it?”
“Nothing.” Dede wiped her eyes.
“Dede?”
“Shut up. Just don’t say nothing, all right? Just
leave me alone for a bit.” She wiped her face again and ran her
fingers through her hair. Her eyes searched Nolan’s blank face.
Abruptly Dede bent forward and pushed her mouth on Nolan’s. She
kissed him fiercely, her hands gripping his neck. “Damn you,” she
whispered to his mouth. She kissed him again.
“Oh, baby,” he whispered back. “All my heart.” He
put his arms around her, kneading the tight knot of her shoulder
muscles and massaging down her back to her hips. Dede pushed into
him desperately, her mouth bruising his.
“Oh God!” Nolan moaned. He half lifted Dede,
pulling her toward the bed.
“No.” Dede pushed at Nolan until he stumbled. She
swayed as he fell back on the bed.
“I got to go,” she said.
“Lord! Dede!” Nolan’s voice was shaky, his hands
balled in fists on his knees. “Don’t do me this way. Tell me what’s
going on.”
Dede smoothed her shirt and stuffed her shirttails
into her jeans. “I’ll tell you later,” she said. “I’ll talk to you
tonight.”
Nolan sat on the bed and tried to catch his breath.
He listened as she went out the kitchen door and pounded down the
stairs. “I don’t understand,” he said out loud. “I just do not
understand.”
He heard the car door slam shut and visualized Dede
slipping into the turnip-purple Volkswagen’s bucket seat, her
bright hair glowing against the dusty upholstery. He remembered her
behavior at Goober’s last night. Her mood swings seemed more and
more extreme lately, though she said she was doing no drugs. He
suspected he knew what was going on, but he dared not speak it. He
would wait. He would let her tell him. He wiped his face and
sighed. His pants felt too tight and sticky with sweat. Thank God
Tacey had taken Nadine out to buy some new nightgowns in the
handicapped van that made runs to Beckman’s on Fridays. He had
desperately needed to hold Dede closely, to make love to her and
feel her wanting him the way he wanted her. It never stopped, that
aching need for her, but lately it seemed they were both desperate
all the time.
“She could be,” Nolan whispered to himself. “Could
be.” He wiped sweat out of his eyes. He would not think about it.
There was nothing he could do until Dede decided to talk to
him.
Nolan scooped up the damp sheets and dirty clothes
from the floor. He’d do a load of laundry and pick up a bit. It was
still mid-afternoon, and he was not tired. He would get the house
cleaned up some before Nadine and Tacey got back. Maybe for dinner
he would get them all some fried chicken from that place Nadine
liked on Yarnell Road. Tacey had been cooking all the time lately,
she needed a night off.
When Sheila’s pickup pulled into the driveway,
Nolan was running hot water over dirty dishes. The washer was
going, and all the windows were. standing open.
“You doing housework?” Sheila asked with a laugh.
“You are one major piece of work, Nolan Reitower, you know that?”
She pushed open the screen door and gave Nolan her biggest smile.
“I brought you that music book you left at Goober’s last night.
Thought you might need it.”
Nolan nodded his thanks. He had soap bubbles all
over his arms and hands, and a line of sweat running off his nose.
“I appreciate it.”
Sheila put the book on the table and looked around
the kitchen. “You sure are industrious.”
“Got to do it sometime,” Nolan told her. “Place
gets messy.”
“And you’re the type, aren’t.you? You see a thing
needs doing, you just get to it, don’t you?” She wrinkled her nose
prettily. “Like I said, you are one piece of work.” She stepped
over to Nolan, looked up at him from heavily mascara’d eyes, and
pushed up on her toes to kiss his mouth.
Nolan gasped and froze with his soapy hands in the
air.
“Oh, look at you!” Sheila giggled. “I an’t gonna
bite you. And I know you’re taken. Whole world knows that.” She
kissed him again, vastly amused at how he blushed and
trembled.
When Sheila turned to go, Dede was standing in the
doorway watching them. She had a bag of groceries in her arms, and
a face as pale as the moon in the night sky.
“You son of a bitch,” Dede said, “you goddamned
son-a-bitch!”
Nothing in Cissy’s life had prepared her
for the sight of Amanda sitting at the bar at Goober’s, her cheeks
flushed and her eyes bright and glittering. Was she drunk? Was
Amanda drunk in the middle of the day? She had one of those great
big glasses in front of her, half full of one of Goober’s famous
fruitoholic drinks. Vodka, Cointreau, coconut milk, ice, pineapple
juice, and slices of pineapple filled the tall, sweating
glass.
Cissy sat down next to her. “So, what are you
doing?” She was surprised to hear how much her voice sounded like
Delia’s. Mama voice, she thought. Here I am, talking Mama
talk.
Amanda swung her head slowly to face Cissy. “Why
aren’t you watching the boys?”
“Michael has them.” Cissy took a deep breath. She
could smell the Cointreau.
Amanda shrugged. “Well, all right then.”
“What are you doing at Goober’s?”
“Becoming a regular.” Amanda took a sip of her
drink and rolled her eyes at Cissy. “You look shocked,” she
said.
“I am shocked. What’s come over you? You been
running out every day, staying away from home, barely looking at
your boys when you are there. Is this what you’ve been doing?
Sitting in Goober’s every day, getting drunk on your butt?”
“No.” Amanda shook her head. “This is only my
second time. I’ve been to the mall. I’ve been to the peewee golf,
and the video-games center down in Marietta. I went and had my
nails done, and one day I drove all the way to Chattanooga to look
at their bridge before I drove back home.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I never saw it. Started thinking about how many
things I had never seen, and just decided to go.” She paused and
took another sip. “And on Wednesday I was arrested,” she said, each
syllable distinct and precise.
“Arrested?”
“And released. The deputy wouldn’t hold me no
matter what I said. And I said something about it. I said a lot,
but they just drove me around and ignored me. Put me out back at my
car. Told me to go home and talk to God a little more.” She leaned
forward slightly and sucked at the pink straw that was stuck
through one of the pineapple slices.
“I didn’t know that deputy. I never saw him before
in my life, but he knew me. He told me he knew all about me.” She
looked at Cissy. “When I wouldn’t get out, he pushed me out. He got
in the back beside me, laughed real mean, and wiggled over until he
shoved me out on my butt.” She rocked her glass on the bar for
emphasis. “Rude,” Amanda said. “The man was rude.”
Cissy twisted on her stool. “I don’t understand,”
she said. “Where were you when you were arrested?”
“Over at the Planned Parenthood Center.” Amanda
sipped briefly and sighed. “I tried to bust up one of their
typewriters. Didn’t do any good. They were ready for me, I think.”
She sat quietly for a minute, eyes on her drink, and then spoke
again very softly. “I felt like such a fool.”
There were tears in Amanda’s eyes, Cissy could see.
She was not letting herself cry, but she was wet-eyed, sweaty, and
limp. She looked like she had been wrestling somebody. She also
looked like a woman who had never taken a drink before today.
“You know, I’ve never felt like a fool before.”
Amanda’s voice was calm and slow. She seemed to be genuinely
puzzling out what she was saying. “I’ve done foolish things, and
I’ve done things that other people said were foolish, but I never
felt like it was anything that had much to do with me, with what I
was really doing. I always felt I knew what I was doing. Always
felt like God was taking care of me, putting me where I needed to
be, showing me what was to be done.”
“Are you all right?” Cissy was unnerved by the
spectacle of Amanda sitting at the bar sipping and talking.
“I’m fine.” Amanda sipped again. “I’m just fine.”
Her right hand patted gently at her abdomen. “Gallstones all
reduced to ash and guilt.” She grinned as if she had not meant to
say that, then took another sip and looked around the bar. She
frowned at the framed photographs on the wall, all pictures of
local girls in bathing suits.
“You know, it’s intentional that God does not make
things easy.” Amanda’s face became focused and sad. “Things are
supposed to be hard. If they were easy, what would be the point? I
always thought I knew what hard was about.” She frowned and pressed
her lips together. “I always thought it was like praying and
climbing a hill. You just keep your focus and keep moving, asking
God to help but keeping on. That kind of hard.” She took a healthy
suck on her straw, then pushed the glass toward the back of the
bar. When she spoke, her voice was full of regret.
“When I thought I was dying, I thought it was all
God’s plan. All I had to do was do it right. Thought God was making
me a living lesson. Thought I had cancer like Clint or something
worse, eating me up from the inside out. Being proud and stubborn
and suffering.” She laughed bitterly. “Then to have gallstones.
Just to hear the word about took my heart right out of me.
Gallstones.” She licked her lips and gave a little whistle.
“You think maybe God’s got a sense of humor?”
Amanda asked. She skimmed sweat off her forehead with two fingers
and laughed again. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot, about
God’s sense of humor.”
“I think you should go talk to your doctor.” Cissy
tried to keep her voice level but she could hear the crack in it.
This was crazy. In Amanda’s long, crazy life, this was the craziest
yet.
“Well, anyway, this kind of hard,” Amanda said,
ignoring Cissy’s comment, “seems to me it’s a whole different kind
of thing. This hard where you don’t know what you’re doing, what’s
the right thing to do, when you can’t be sure you’re not really a
fool. I didn’t know nothing about that. And I never wanted
to.”
Cissy sat there silently, her eyes fixed on
Amanda’s profile.
“I guess I am going to have to learn,” Amanda said.
She used the bar napkin to wipe her eyebrows. She looked at Cissy
with an expression of great composure. “Guess I’m going to have to
learn,” she said again.
The bartender leaned over the almost empty glass.
“You’re the Byrd girls, an’t you?”
Cissy stared at the man. She felt like she had just
emptied Amanda’s glass, like her blood was full of alcohol and
confusion. She managed a nod and turned back to Amanda, but the man
put his hand on the bar.
“Well, I hate to tell you this, but your sister’s
been arrested. She took a shot at Sheila, one of my barmaids.
Missed, thank God, but she did shoot that old boy runs Biscuit
World. Shot him two or three times, they say.”
Cissy gaped. Dede had shot Nolan? ,
“She shot him?” Amanda said. She was right beside
Cissy, her mouth mere inches away.
“Tried to kill him,” the bartender said. “They just
hauled her off to the jail. Had a call from Sheila’s mama. Said
that Dede went completely insane and shot up Nolan’s house and
all.”
“She didn’t kill him?”
“Well, not yet, but he might be dead by now for all
I know.”
“I’ll drive,” Amanda said. She seemed entirely
sober. “Come on.” She picked up her bag and her keys from the bar.
“Come on,” she said again, and took Cissy by the arm and led her
out.