by Jackie Weger
Janie laughed again and bent down to kiss the top of his sweaty head. “That’s a wonderful story. You can tell me the whole thing later.” To Justine, she said, “His teachers said for us to encourage him—that imagination helps in defining cognitive skills. I hope it’s so.”
Justine paused and looked toward her house. “Maybe he saw something he misinterpreted.”
Janie shook her head. “I don’t think so. This morning he had a long tale about a herd of dinosaurs wearing saddles. He stabled them in his room last night.”
Tucker came up on Justine from behind and put his arms around her. “You holding up okay?”
She felt his breath on her neck and sighed happily. “Everybody seems to know my name, but I can’t remember theirs. You should’ve warned me. We should’ve had name tags or something.”
“You’ll know all of us real good by Christmas,” Janie put in. “We get together on Labor Day too, and sometimes at Thanksgiving—”
“Here?” Justine said, shocked, thinking of all the preparations, the cleanup.
“Be quiet, Janie,” Tucker admonished. “You’re scaring the daylights out of my best girl.”
“One good turn deserves another,” Janie retorted easily. “Remember that the next time my darlin’ hits a fly ball and you think to put him out.”
“Mama!” cried Jimmie, pulling on her shirt.
“Hush. How many times have I told you, don’t interrupt when grown-ups are talking.” Janie wiped her hands on a wet cloth. “Y’all excuse me. I got to turn this kid loose on his father for a few minutes.”
Tucker tightened his arms about Justine. “That’s what I’d like to do with you,” he murmured. “Haul you off into the bushes somewhere…”
“Before or after we feed this horde?” she joked.
A very attractive, long-legged brunette, wearing a revealing knit shirt and very short shorts, touched Tucker on the arm. “Can I talk to you a minute?” She ignored Justine.
“Later, Christie. I’m busy.”
“When, later?”
Justine went on full alert. She tried to move out of Tucker’s embrace, but he locked his fingers over her abdomen and held her tight.
“Later,” he said. “As in tomorrow at work.” He stared the girl down until she flounced off, buttocks jouncing.
Justine turned, still within the circle of Tucker’s arms, and looked up at him. “Tomorrow? At work?”
“The telephone company doesn’t discriminate.”
“You mean that…that creature works for you?”
“You’re right on the money.”
Justine’s heart sank. “But, she’s gorgeous.”
“She keeps her warts covered up.”
“What about when you go out of town on jobs?”
“She still keeps them covered up. Say, are you jealous?”
“I’m green!”
“Christie’s not my type.”
“Has she ever been?”
“Nope.”
“Lucky for you,” she said with feeling.
“If all these people weren’t around I’d show you just how lucky I think I am.”
“Tucker, do you have to manhandle my daughter in public that way?”
“Actually, Pauline, I do. Can’t help myself.” He planted a quick kiss on Justine’s lips, grabbed a beer out of the cooler, but stayed within touching distance.
Evelyn hovered behind Pauline. Justine thought the woman was a plump, polyester version of Pauline. But Evelyn was pleasant enough, and she appeared thoroughly taken with Pauline and content in Pauline’s shadow. Both had done volunteer hostess duties, fetching and carrying, but after an hour or so they had moved a pair of chairs under a distant tree and kept to themselves.
Pauline rooted in the cooler for soft drinks. “You need to speak to Agnes. She’s making a spectacle of herself.”
“Oh, Mother, she’s just having a good time.”
“Good time, my foot. She’s inebriated.”
Justine had just the tiniest suspicion that her mother was trying to show off for Evelyn’s benefit.
“I’ll check on her,” she said.
“I thought I’d mention that Evelyn is staying the night with us again. It’s getting much too late for her to make the trip back into the city in holiday traffic.”
“She’s welcome, Mother, you know that.” Justine smiled at the woman over her mother’s shoulder.
“I’ll bunk in with you again, too,” Pauline said pointedly.
There was a slight moan from Tucker. “Two nights in a row?” he muttered into Justine’s ear.
“That’ll be fine,” Justine said.
“Won’t,” said Tucker.
“Sex maniac,” Pauline aimed at him in a disdainful whisper, before she and her new friend retreated to their chairs.
Tucker shook his head. “You get the feeling your mother was trying to pick a fight with me?”
“She was just putting on an act for her new acquaintance.”
In the next few minutes a horde of hungry youngsters descended upon the cooks. Mothers rushed over to lend Justine a hand dishing up burgers, hotdogs, beans, and opening sodas. Wheeler and Agnes anchored other picnic table with slabs of ribs, potato salad, baked beans, and towers of bread. Someone turned on a boom box perched on the hood of a pickup. Sousa marches joined the cacophony of children’s laughter, men talking loud over the music while wives and mothers fetched, wiped up spills, fed lap babies, and chatted among themselves.
— • —
Lottie was stupefied to see that scalawag’s face pressed against the window. She expected that within moments of his running away his parents or Justine would come rushing into the office and discover her bones. Yet no one had come. She reacted to that with utter disbelief.
Fearful her sense of Time was betraying her, she hid her bones inside the deep well beneath Justine’s desk and sat in the kitchen watching the minute hand move on the clock that was a part of the microwave oven.
Ten minutes marched by and seemed more of an eternity to Lottie than all the previous years she had spent in her condition.
There was a clamor on the back porch. She heard two women’s voices. She braced herself for discovery—an end to her dream, the single hope that had sustained her. One of the women stuck her head into the kitchen. Lottie froze.
“Christie, you’d better not snoop. Tucker will have your head on a platter if he catches you.”
“The men are using the bathroom at his place. Why would he come up here?”
Christie stepped into the kitchen. “Look at that table,” she said. “I bet it cost a fortune. Maybe he’s interested in her for her money.”
“Whatever the reason, it’s none of your business.” The other woman grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her outside. “Let’s go! I value my husband’s job even if you don’t value yours.”
The screen door slammed.
Lottie hurried back into Justine’s office. She checked the side porch. Empty.
She pulled her bones out from beneath the desk, checked the gray silk for wrinkles, smoothed out the pleats, and arranged all in the desk chair.
She sat down upon the silk-clad bones and uncoiled the ribbon of copper wire.
She debated praying, but pushed that notion aside. She was still betwixt and between. If He answered, no telling which side of the coin He’d come down on. Better to wait and offer up hosannas once the deed was accomplished.
Then she leaned forward and thrust the copper wire into the outlet above the desk.
Nothing happened.
She jiggled the wire.
A sudden whooshing noise inside her head caught her by surprise. It grew to thunderous proportions until her ears ached with it. Her fingertips were buzzing, her scalp tingled, her spine felt exposed. She was suspended and sucked through a gurgling wash of warmth. Her limbs jerked in every direction. Her tongue floundered inside her mouth. She was on a journey…moving so fast she feared her soul couldn’t keep up. Now
she was tumbling, now sprinting forward, now sliding, now rocking. Oh! She couldn’t see! She had the sensation of being at sea and she was convinced she was going to be violently sick.
Something snapped and she felt herself being hurled across the room. The chair crashed against the opposite wall with a thud. She banged her head. Law! She was being shot straight into the deepest hereafter! She saw stars. Millions of them, a kaleidoscope of colors like nothing she’d ever seen before. Especially with her eyes closed.
Finally she was still. Fear held her immobile, transfixed. The heat she felt was incredible. She cried. Law! She had done it wrong. She had been cast into the deepest reaches of a place she never thought to be.
She fought to open her eyes and, at last succeeded, only to discover that her eyes refused to focus. With lives of their own they went round and round, in tempo with the ceiling fan. Ceiling fan? Ceiling fan!
She wished the roaring in her ears would subside. It interfered with her concentration. She closed her eyes. She was again suspended, but without the rocking sea this time. The sense of dreadful heat leveled off into a warmth more bearable and, when she once again opened her eyes, her vision was clear. The ceiling fan was clearly that. She recognized it. Tucker had installed it. Justine had argued with him. Argued that if it fell it would destroy her computers, not to mention her own head.
With hope and trepidation Lottie looked down and surveyed her immediate self and gasped.
She took a breath. Then another. She held her hands before her face. She had blunt, worker’s hands. They were freckled and had blue veins. She turned the palms toward her eyes. Last time she looked she’d had calluses galore. Now she had none.
She touched her face, her arms, her abdomen, her legs. Her heart beat with a steadiness she could feel with her hand.
She stood up and took a step. After so many years of weightlessness, her limbs felt leaden. Gravity pulled at her. The floor beneath her was cool.
She was scared to think, scared to admit she had extended herself. But she had! She had! She tugged on the borrowed stockings and shoes, and walking with a motion cats spend years trying to perfect, she took herself into the bathroom to stare for long minutes at her reflection in the mirror.
A few minutes later she placed her hands on her Bible. She let Him know her whereabouts. She wanted as much of His attention and help as He could spare now, seeing as the next step would be to present herself to Justine and the family.
She had not met another human being face to face in more than a hundred years.
A chill swept up her spine. Suppose they refused to accept her?
She stepped out onto the back porch. Sound and smell crashed over her. Music and laughter, a myriad of voices came up from the barn, no single word clear. She heard chickens squawk, birds at evening song, crickets. The aroma of good, rich food being cooked over an open fire made her mouth water. She could smell mowed grass, the very earth itself.
She was back. Really back. She’d rest for now and introduce herself when there weren’t so many strangers around.
She smoothed the gray silk over her hips, treasuring the feel of it.
They just have to accept me, she thought again. And this time the thought was as much a plea as prayer.
Chapter Eighteen
Pip shook Justine awake. “Mom! Get up!”
She opened one eye and glared at the bedside clock. Eight ten. “Too early. Give me another hour,” she murmured drowsily.
“Mom, damn it! Get up!”
His frantic tone was edged with an undercurrent of insistence. She turned her head and focused on her son. “Did you just curse? What is it?”
“We’ve got company in the kitchen.”
Justine reached behind her and poked Pauline. “Get up Mother, Evelyn must be wanting breakfast.”
“Surely not,” Pauline murmured and dragged a pillow over her head.
“It’s not Mrs. Ellison,” said Pip, dancing across the room. “You’re in for a surprise, Mom. Wait’ll you see!”
Still partially in the grip of sleep, Justine sat up. “Who?” she asked, but Pip was already out the bedroom door. She could hear his bare feet slapping down the hall.
A surprise visitor in the kitchen? In the middle of a stretch Justine froze. Her pulse rate accelerated. The only surprise visitor that could excite Pip like that was Philip! Her belly tightened with a cold sick dread. Dear God, why now? When she finally had her life on track. Why would he show up now to undo what she’d built for herself, for the children? A life that promised more happiness and security than she had ever known in marriage to Phillip.
“Mother! Get up. Now! We’ve got problems. Philip’s here!”
“You handle him, dear. I’m not up to a scene this morning.”
“What kind of mother are you?”
“A sleepy one.”
“But I may need moral support!”
“You don’t,” Pauline muttered. “You have the backbone of a mule.”
Justine frantically shoved her arms into her robe and finger-combed her hair.
In the kitchen Pip was sitting at the great old dining table…alone.
“Where is he?”
“It’s not a he, Mom, it’s—”
Wearing Agnes’s apron over Pauline’s dress, Lottie stepped from the pantry with a jar of Coffeemate. She smiled at Justine. “Mornin’.”
“—a she,” Pip finished.
Justine took a breath and gathered her wits. “Your father’s not here?”
“Why would Dad be here?”
Legs suddenly rubbery, Justine slid into a chair. Lottie poured coffee and put the cup in front of her.
Trying to make the mental adjustment, Justine looked over at Pip, down at the coffee, then up at the plump, white-haired, elderly woman. “Who are you?”
“Lottie Roberts.”
The coffee aroma penetrated Justine’s brain. Absently she took a sip. “Roberts? Are you any kin to Milo?”
“By marriage.”
Justine smiled slightly. Lottie Roberts was somewhere not far from sixty, with very white hair that was pinned into a bun at the back of her neck. She had a round face and eyes so faded they seemed almost colorless. Her mouth lifted at the corners as if ready to break into a smile. Yet there was something else, and Justine tried to peg it. The woman looked so grandmotherly and old-fashioned she seemed of another age. Milo, she knew, was a certifiable eccentric, probably his wife was too. Had to be, Justine mused, if she was capable of walking into a neighbor’s home uninvited. Not to mention perking coffee and serving it as if she were the lady of the manor.
“Did Milo send you over here for something?” she asked tactfully.
Lottie scoffed. “No.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
Lottie thought that over. “Like as not, he suspects, I reckon.”
Justine noted the apron. Milo put a price on everything she asked him to do. Maybe he was hoping to put his wife to work. “Are you looking for a job?”
“Ask her where she lives, Mom.”
Lottie shot him a withering glance. “Pipe down, you.”
Pip put his hand over his mouth and watched his mother. His eyes gleamed with Machiavellian delight.
Baffled, Justine pursed her lips. “I’m being tricked into something, right? Okay,” she said to Lottie. “Consider the question asked.”
“Here,” came the firm reply.
“Here? You mean here, as in Alabama?”
“Here, as in this house. This is my house. Elmer built it for me.”
Justine took a long draught of coffee. It was too early in the morning for her intuition to be working. The last of Tucker’s guests had not left until the beer ran out and mosquitos swarmed. Washing up took another hour or so. No thanks to Agnes who was loopy on scuppernong wine or Pauline who discarded paper napkins and called herself done. Justine considered she must’ve missed the clue to enlightenment. She just didn’t get it.
“So, who’s Elmer
?” she asked of Lottie Roberts.
“My husband. He got hisself kilt in the Red River Campaign.”
“That’s a Civil War battle,” Pip said. “She told me.”
“I’m game. What’s the joke?”
“No joke, Mom.” Pip was grinning.
“Go back to square one. You just said you were married to Milo,” Justine put to Lottie.
“I said kin by marriage. Milo’s a distant cousin to Elmer—real distant by now, I reckon. I ain’t one to marry the likes of Milo.”
“I’ve rented this house with an option to buy it, and the price has been set,” Justine said in case the woman’s reason for dropping by was to up the price.
“Suits me,” Lottie replied.
Pauline ambled in with a towel over her arm and cosmetic bag in hand. She stopped in mid-step and stared at Lottie, who stiffened perceptibly. Then Pauline’s breath caught audibly in her throat. “That’s my gray silk!” She turned to Justine. “That woman is wearing my dress. And… and … those are my silk stockings from Harrod’s. Look! There’s the trademark on the heel.”
“I just borrowed them,” said Lottie.
“Thief!” said Pauline.
“Mother!”
“And those are my yard shoes,” said Agnes, clutching her robe at the neck and watching from the doorway.
“I needed shoes to accommodate my bunions,” Lottie replied with dignity.
Justine stood up. “Mrs. Roberts. You admit you stole those things? But how did you—? When? Why?”
“While I was betwixt and between my own clothes fair rotted away.”
“Betwixt and between?”
“She means while she was cruising the ozone, Mom.”
“She means…” Goose bumps erupted along Justine’s arms and legs. She sat back down with a thud.
“This ain’t goin’ a bit like I planned,” Lottie told them one and all.
“Because you got caught!” Pauline cried. “Justine, call the police. Your father always, but always, had the servants checked out.”
“Wait a minute, Mother,” she said shakily. “There’s more here than meets the eye.”
“That’s how it used to be,” said Lottie. “Now you can see me, hear me…”