After all the years they could still make her feel like the kid. “I need someone younger than me that I can beat up on,” she’d told Li’l Bit once. She didn’t say there were times when she felt jealous of the bond between them. Neither of them would have understood; they came from a time that didn’t believe in that kind of soul baring.
“We have to think about the funeral,” Li’l Bit said, by way of bringing the meeting to order.
“I worry about that girl,” Maggie mused.
“Laurel?” Li’l Bit said. “I don’t think there will be any problem. Ed doesn’t want to follow up on what she told him.”
“I’m not talking about last night. She told that writer everything she knows about the night her father died. It weighs on her, I think.”
“That’s not our problem.”
“She’s troubled, Li’l Bit.”
Peggy watched as Li’l Bit’s lips pulled back into a thin line. “We can’t blame ourselves for that,” she said stubbornly.
“Who else?” In spite of the bond, it seemed to Peggy that they got on each other’s nerves more these days than they used to.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
“I’ve just been thinking, maybe it’s time. . . .”
“No.”
“But now that Vashti’s gone. . . .”
“We have nothing to explain. Nothing to apologize for.”
“Don’t we?”
They were tired and grieving. That, more than anything else, was why they were getting into this. It was Peggy’s cue to step in. “Maggie, what about Lottie?” she asked gently. “What would it do to her if we told?”
The mention of Lottie’s name had the effect she’d known it would. Maggie bowed her head. “I don’t know,” she said.
Peggy breathed a sigh of relief. The crisis had been averted for the moment. But it would come back, she knew. Because their lives were drawing to a close and unspoken agendas were pulling them in opposite directions. Maggie wanted to tie up loose ends; Li’l Bit wanted to protect a legacy. And in the middle, there she was, the youngster who just wanted to keep things moving along with no changes. Dear God, don’t let either of them get hurt, she prayed silently. I can’t lose them yet.
“We need to talk about the funeral,” she said.
Ten minutes later, after Maggie had taken charge of the whole thing, church and all things religious being her domain, Peggy stood up. Her head was aching, and both Maggie and Li’l Bit looked exhausted. It was time to go.
At the edge of the porch, Li’l Bit and Maggie gave each other the same air kisses they’d been exchanging for fifty years, no matter how cross they were with each other. And then, in the shorthand that they had developed over the same fifty years, Maggie said to Li’l Bit, “Maybe we have to trust, just a little.”
Li’l Bit shook her head; her voice was begging. “No one today will ever understand how it was, Maggie. They can’t!” There was a pause when Peggy thought Maggie might start the fight all over again, but then, mercifully, she left it alone.
Peggy took her arm to help her down the porch steps and over the lawn to her car. Maggie looked back at Li’l Bit watching them from the porch. “She had so little and she lost so much of it,” she said softly, to herself. “She lost too much.” Then she turned to Peggy, who was holding the car door open for her, and reached up to give her a hug. “Try to eat something, Doodlebug,” she said gently. “You have to take care of yourself, you know. Li’l Bit and I would be lost without you.” She got in her car, started it, and crept erratically down the driveway, a little old lady whose head barely reached above her steering wheel.
Chapter Fifteen
PEGGY’S FAVORITE DISC of golden oldies was playing on the car’s CD player. She lit a cigarette, cracked open the window, and pushed the gas pedal to the floor. The headache was threatening to become a monster and she needed to get home, where she could pull down the blinds and put cold cloths on her forehead. That was still her treatment of choice—along with regular nips of Gentleman Jack, since she was the kind of old-fashioned girl who believed in sticking with the fellow who had brought her to the party.
Maggie said Li’l Bit’s loss was too big. Ever since they’d had the final call about Vashti, Peggy had been thinking about losses. She, Li’l Bit, Maggie, Nella, and Vashti had all paid a price. And in spite of what Li’l Bit said, Laurel and her mother had paid too.
She didn’t like to dwell on sad thoughts. Letting yourself get blue was as bad as letting your roots grow out or your lipstick wear off. There were certain things you owed the world around you, like a smile and looking good, and any woman over the age of twenty-two who thought she looked good fresh-faced was either an idiot or blind. But for the past few days smiling had been hard. She had regrets on the brain.
On the CD player, Doris Day was singing about the future not being ours to see. Well, old Doris didn’t know the half of it.
WHAT NO ONE EVER KNEW, especially Li’l Bit and Maggie, was how much she had cared for Dalt in the beginning. What she felt wasn’t the romantic sexy love other girls her age dreamed of, but that kind of love had never been in the cards for her, and not just because of what Grady had done. She’d never had the luxury of being a romantic about sex, not since the day her mama bought that first push-up bra. Or maybe Mama didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe there had always been something chilly at her core. Once she had worried about that.
Now Patti Page was crooning about waltzing with her darling the night they were playing the beautiful Tennessee waltz. Peggy sighed and stubbed out her cigarette. There had been times, especially in the days before she had discovered the benefits of going through life with a slight buzz on, when she had wondered what it would feel like to be knee-knocking heart-racing hot for a man. She’d gotten glimmers of it when she watched love scenes in movies, and there was a book by James Michener of all people that had made her twitchy and discontented for days. But that was years after the rawness from the rape had healed, and by then she had made the second big decision of her life and become Mrs. Dalton Garrison.
WHEN SHE FIRST MARRIED DALT, when she was still just a traumatized kid, all she’d been worried about was pleasing him. For all the flirting she’d done before Grady took her into the woods, her knowledge of sex was sketchy. Afterward, she’d pretty much shut down all interest in the subject. She knew Dalt liked looking at her pretty body; that was a familiar male reaction. He didn’t seem to expect her to admire him the same way, although when she said he was handsome in his wedding suit she could tell how much it pleased him. But he didn’t excite her in the way she knew a girl was supposed to be excited by the man she married. And she didn’t know how she was going to hide that when she was alone with him in a room with a bed and with his wedding ring on her finger.
She needn’t have worried. A lot of smiles, a sigh or two, and “I’m so happy I could die,” whispered to him when all the heavy breathing was over, seemed to please him just fine. He hugged her, called her his little sweetheart, and then rolled over and fell asleep. The man she had married was not one who looked beneath the surface. “I don’t like trouble. I keep things simple,” he told her years later, when she no longer saw it as an asset.
When she got older she wondered what he had made of the fact that she wasn’t a virgin when he took her to bed that first time. Maybe he hadn’t realized it, which was the best argument she’d ever heard of for a repressed Baptist upbringing.
Whatever he thought or didn’t, when she told him she was happy she hadn’t lied. He was going to be as easy to handle as any of the boys she had tortured in high school, and the relief made her downright giddy. After that first night she was sure she would have him eating out of her hand in six months.
She had underestimated herself. By the time they were halfway through their honeymoon he was delighted, with himself and with her, in spite of feeling guilty because they’d gotten married just two months after Myrtis died and because Peggy was young
enough to be his daughter.
She figured out real fast that Dalton had a dirty little secret. He didn’t really want to be the great man Myrtis had made him into. He had a gift for making money, and he liked to be generous to people he cared about as long as he was giving them things he wanted them to have. Charity in the abstract left him cold. It had been Myrtis who insisted on the good works that made the Garrison name famous throughout the state. Dalton wrote the checks and let her fill in the amounts.
He had appreciated Myrtis’s goodness. Actually, he’d been in awe of it. But something about the way he laughed when he described her “fussing” at him to support her pet causes made Peggy decide she would never fuss at him about anything. He was the son of a domineering man who had married a good woman, and though he loved them both they had made him feel inadequate. Peggy would not repeat the pattern.
When they were deciding where to go for their honeymoon, he offered her a choice of genteel locations in Charleston and Savannah. But then, almost as an afterthought, he suggested Miami Beach, and the look in his eyes told her that was what he really wanted. They stayed at the Fontainebleau Hotel in the most expensive suite they could book on short notice. The first night there, he looked out the window at their endless views of water and manmade beach and said, “Myrtis would say this is so tacky.” And Peggy knew she had done the right thing.
So her honeymoon was a breeze. She ate the thick steak dinners he loved to order, and she squealed over the presents he bought her. She went with him to nightclubs where the showgirls’ costumes were just this side of vulgar and giggled at comedians who were just raunchy enough to shock but not really offend. Tennis was Dalt’s game, but she didn’t know how to play, so she encouraged him to find other partners and sat on the sidelines cheering him on. But mostly she listened to him and agreed with him. When he said something she knew Maggie and Li’l Bit would not approve of, usually about colored people keeping their place, she let it go. And if that made her less of a person, so be it. Dalt was good to her, and generous beyond anything she had ever imagined. He had fallen in love with her in spite of the fact that she was maimed on the inside, and he had solved the problem of what she was going to do with the rest of her life by marrying her. She owed him.
On her last night in Florida she had a glimpse of something else, a kind of love she felt she could have with Dalt. She sat across the table from him in a hotel dining room that was so expensive that after two weeks it still gave her goose bumps to swallow the food. She’d spent the afternoon buying the luggage she needed to carry the pretty new clothes she’d bought in the hotel shop without once looking at the price tag. Around her neck she was wearing Dalt’s most recent present, a heavy gold necklace with a big diamond in the center that Mama would say was not appropriate for a girl her age, but who cared? Through a haze of well-being she studied her husband. His short gray hair was thinning, and he was getting ready to lose the fight to keep his waistline. But the squint lines that creased his tanned face spoke of an outdoorsman who was still vigorous and full of life. And when he looked at her, his eyes had a way of shining that made him seem younger than any boy she had ever known.
As if he had read her mind, he suddenly put down his knife and fork and took her hand.
“Sweetheart,” he began, then stopped and turned red under his tan. He looked off at a silver-haired couple doing intricate footwork on the dance floor. “When Myrtis died, I never thought I—” He stopped again. Then he turned back to face her squarely. “I love you, sweetheart,” he said. “And if I ever forget to show it, even for a couple of days, you remind me. Hear?”
She said, “Oh, Dalt,” and started to laugh it away, but he held her hand tighter.
“Just don’t let me forget. Ever,” he said. Then he quickly went back to cutting his meat. And for a moment a window opened inside her heart and she saw how possible love could be.
Two nights later, when they got back home, Grady had already moved in.
PEGGY DROVE THROUGH THE STONE GATES and started down the driveway, home at last. It felt like she’d been gone a million days. On the CD player, Eddie Fisher began singing “Oh, My Papa,” and how in the world that fresh-faced young man had turned into the desiccated old fool she saw on her television screen she’d never know. Liz and Debbie were both in far better shape, even with Liz’s brain surgery. It was clearly one more demonstration of the superiority of the female sex.
She drove around to the side of the log cabin and let herself in through the kitchen entrance. The dogs danced around her, barking and jumping, thrilled out of their sweet canine minds to see her again. And, as sometimes happened when God was in a really good mood, she could feel the headache start to retreat. Figuring she should follow doctor’s orders and help a good thing along, she checked out the fridge. Loving hands from the resort kept it stocked with a variety of cheeses and cold cuts as well as fruits and vegetables. She decided to risk a couple of slices of ham and an apple; then, to be on the safe side, she poured herself a medicinal dollop of Jack, settled back on one of the kitchen chairs, and closed her eyes. The dogs swirled about for a few seconds and then flopped down around her.
DALTON WAS BESIDE HIMSELF with joy at having Grady back. Peggy made herself smile and swallowed back her terror. She managed to say if Dalt was happy, she was too. Grady didn’t even try to hide his hostility. It seemed to ooze out of him, until finally even Dalt couldn’t ignore it any longer.
“We’re gonna have to be patient, sweetheart,” he said to Peggy, as they got ready for bed on their first night home. “That boy has been through so much. His mama turning on him like she did and dying before he had a chance to say good-bye.” He paused. “I used to ask her all the time what he did. I thought if she’d just tell me I could make it right, but she would never say. Just told me she didn’t want him home. Her own son.”
“I’m sure Miss Myrtis had her reasons,” Peggy heard her voice saying, from a long way off.
He shook his head. “She was always too hard on him. She was a good woman, but she never understood. Some people need things a little . . . light. We can’t all be perfect. . . .” He stopped. “The boy was hurt by what she did. He doesn’t show it, he acts so hard, but I know after she died he was torn up inside. And then I went and got married . . . you know that didn’t help. And now . . . I want to make him feel this is his home again, sweetheart. For as long as he wants to stay. Do you understand?”
She nodded, in spite of wanting to scream. And she got into bed next to him. And when he bent down and kissed her breasts she made herself give a little sigh of pleasure.
The next morning she waited until Dalt was up and out of the house before she got out of bed. She dressed herself carefully in a dark-green silk dress with a high neckline that had cost so much it made her gasp, and pulled her hair back into a bun at the nape of her neck. She put on the emerald ring that Myrtis had kept in a safety deposit box because she thought it was too big to wear. She called the resort and told Housekeeping she needed some people to come over and help get the house back in order because they’d been away. Two of the maids and a gardener showed up twenty minutes later. She set the women to work in the pantry next to the kitchen and told the gardener to prune the shrubs outside the kitchen window. Suddenly she was freezing. She went to the cabinet in the living room where Dalt kept his liquor and poured herself a shot glass of bourbon, like the one Li’l Bit had given her the day she came out of the woods beaten and bruised. It got inside her bones and warmed her the way she remembered. Then she went into the kitchen and sat at the table with a cup of coffee in her hands to give her something to hang on to. And she waited.
Grady rose a little before noon and came into the kitchen. He stood still and stared at her, and she clutched the coffee cup so hard she thought it would break in her hands. But when she spoke, her voice was steady.
“Before you say anything to me,” she said quietly, “there are two women working in the next room and there’s a man right out
side that window.”
“You think I give a shit?”
“You should.”
“What do you think they’re gonna do? They work for my father.”
“They work for my husband.” She could see that stop him. “The women are named Molly and Etta Mae; the man is Frank. They work here a lot. They know me.” She could see him try to take in what she was saying. Unwelcome facts were registering for the first time. “You have to get out of this house,” she continued. “I want you gone before Dalt gets home.” He moved across the kitchen fast and loomed over her, and for a moment she thought he was going to hit her. She made herself stay put and looked him in the eye. “If you touch me, I will scream and Molly and Etta Mae and Frank will come running, and you’ll have to explain to your father. Dalt already knows how angry you are. We talked about it last night after we went to bed.”
The suggestion of intimacy got to him. He hadn’t thought about this new reversal in their positions. He backed up, just enough to put the table between them.
“This is my home, and I’m not going anywhere, you little bitch,” he said, but she noticed he was keeping his voice low.
“If you don’t go, I’m going to tell Dalt what you did to me,” she said evenly.
“He’ll never believe you.”
“I’ll take my chances.” If the coffee cup had been one of the thin ones from the good china she would have broken it by now, she was holding it so hard, but she went on. “Dalt’s always wondered why Miss Myrtis turned you out. When I tell him, a lot of pieces are going to fall into place.”
“I’ll tell him you wanted it. That you were begging for it.”
“Did you ever wonder what happened to me that day? Who saw me?” He hadn’t, of course, so she paused to let the thought sink in. “I went to Miss Li’l Bit’s house. Dr. Maggie stitched me up where you cut my forehead.” She said “Doctor” and “Miss” deliberately, to remind him that they’d be impressive witnesses. “I still have the scar; it’s right up by my hairline.” She thought about lifting her hair and showing it to him, but she wasn’t sure what her hands would do if she took them off the coffee cup. “Dr. Maggie and Miss Li’l Bit will be glad to tell Dalt what I looked like.”
The Three Miss Margarets Page 17