Saving Grace

by Lee Smith

  I hung up.

  I went in and washed my hair and put on my makeup real careful. I meant to look good. I wore some new jeans and my red high-heel boots and my white angora sweater with sequin snowflakes on it and took my car coat in case it actually did snow. Then I got in my car and left immediately, hoping my old Toyota would make it over the mountains to Gatlinburg, where Randy and I had been together in better days.

  * * *

  GATLINBURG IS A resort town with everything that you can think of to do there such as restaurants, shopping, mountain crafts, chair lift up the mountain, a giant needle, movie theaters and souvenir shops and outlet stores and fudge factories and even a Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

  They call it the jewel of the mountains.

  I got over there in the early afternoon but then I didn’t know where to start looking. Somehow I had forgotten how many motels there were, plus I had not expected the town to be so packed with people in the middle of the winter. There were big banners saying SANTA DAYS stretched across every street, and big Christmas sales going on in every store. It was a real winter wonderland too, with Christmas decorations everywhere, including the cutest automatic angel choir singing carols right in the middle of town. Gatlinburg sits in a ring of mountains, and all of them were topped with snow. But it was hard driving through town—lots of traffic, lots of people. You had to keep stopping for jaywalkers. All of the people looked red-faced and happy, their arms full of packages. I drove slow, looking for Randy—looking for his new black Stetson with the silver band. Time after time my heart would race wildly as I thought I saw him, but it always turned out to be some other cowboy. Some other cowboy with a blond mustache and a big grin like Randy Newhouse, with some other girl by his side.

  I’m not sure where the time went, but before I knew it, it was starting to get dark, and beautiful Christmas lights came on all over town, including lights strung all the way up the chair-lift cable. A big star on top of the mountain shone over everything. Now it was getting colder, and my breath hung in the air like a cloud when I stopped to buy gas, which took just about every cent I had. I was real hungry by then, but I only had enough money for a Tab. I had decided to go on a diet anyway. The guy that waited on me at the gas station was dressed up like an Indian, so I asked him if he was a Cherokee, but he said no, he was from Charlotte. I finished my Tab and got back in the car, my heart hammering. I figured the best thing to do was to drive around Gatlinburg looking for Randy’s truck in motel parking lots, and so this is what I did for the next two or three hours, with no success. Motel after motel—TraveLodge, Alpine Chalets, Holiday Inn, Howard Johnson’s, Rocky Top Motor Lodge, Bear Village, Park Vista, you name it. Even when it started snowing, I didn’t stop.

  I had given up everything for Randy Newhouse, and I was determined to get him back. I still believed that if I acted nice and tried hard, I could have anything I wanted. So I kept driving around. I drove past the tiny wedding chapel just in time to see a bride and groom come out the front door smiling while another wedding party waited in the parking lot at the back. By then it was snowing steadily. Somehow I lost track of the time. When my car slid into a snowy bank in the turn-around at the Mountaineer Inn, I was amazed to look at the lighted dial of my clock on the dashboard and find that it said ten-thirty. How did it get to be ten-thirty? My tires spun around and around on the ice, and I could smell rubber burning. I turned off the ignition and got out of the car, stiff from tension. My nerves were shot.

  I went into the Mountaineer Inn and found the bar, where I ordered a vodka on the rocks.

  Two men sitting on the bar stools next to mine quit talking to each other and turned around to look at me. They both wore leisure suits and name tags.

  “Well hello, honey,” one of them said. I thought, I’ll show that Randy Newhouse a thing or two!

  “Hi there,” I told them, smiling.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING when I woke up, I felt the worst I have ever felt in my whole life, both spiritually and physically. I went in the bathroom and threw up and then got dressed and got out of there, carrying my boots in my hand all the way down to the lobby, where I sat next to the big Christmas tree to put them on. It was still dark outside, and I was the only one in the lobby, thank God. The boy at the desk was watching me real close.

  “Is there anything I can do to help, ma’am?” he asked.

  I hate it when anybody calls me “ma’am.”

  Also I was having some trouble getting my boots on as my feet had swollen up in the night, but finally I succeeded and then walked over and put one of the twenty-dollar bills down on the desk. “Well, yes there is,” I said. “I believe my car is stuck.”

  When we went out there to look at it, the cold wind hit me in the face like a fist. At least it woke me up.

  “You’re not stuck too bad,” the boy said. “Why don’t you get in and start it, and let me get in front here and push? If that don’t work, we can call the filling station.”

  It worked. I set off real slow around the driveway and picked up speed once I got out to the main road, which had been cleared pretty good. It was just starting to get light. A glow seemed to rise from the snow all around, and the silver sky was streaked with rose, then gold, and then the sun itself came up like a fried egg over the mountains, and the snow turned dazzling, like diamonds. I could see clearly then. I knew I would never find Randy. I knew I had lost him forever. I drove past all those motels with snow on their roofs and still-dark rooms where men and women lay tangled together on king-size beds.

  I had lost my gloves, and my heater didn’t seem to be working. Just before I got to the highway, I pulled off at a little café which was lighted up and friendly-looking. UNCLE SLIDELL’S DINER, the sign read: A CHRISTIAN RESTAURANT.

  All right, I thought.

  I went inside and ordered a cup of coffee and two sausage biscuits to go, paying for it all with the other twenty-dollar bill. No matter what is wrong with you, a sausage biscuit will make you feel better.

  “Ma’am, are you all right?” the young girl behind the counter asked me when she handed me my food. “I don’t mean to bother you or nothing, but you don’t look too good. You could come in the back room here and lay down for a little while if you wanted to.” Her broad freckled face was serious, and her brown eyes shone out big and honest behind her glasses. A nice girl. A good girl. I used to be a good girl myself, about a million years ago.

  “Thanks but no thanks,” I said.

  “Well, you come on back if you change your mind,” she said as I went out. “We’ll be here.”

  The door closed behind me. I took one bite of a biscuit and then threw both of them into a trashcan. The wind had died down. I looked to the east where that glorious sun hung right over Gatlinburg, shooting out rays like the spokes of a golden wheel. Sunlight glanced off the windshields of the cars and the windows of the diner. Sunlight danced on the snow everywhere, blinding me.

  I stopped dead in my tracks as suddenly—over the sound of the trucks rumbling past on the road and my own heart banging in my ears—I heard it, very faint—a baby’s cry. I looked all around. I was alone in the parking lot except for two boys that came out of the diner at that moment and got in a black pickup and drove off. I heard it again. There were five other vehicles in the lot, two cars and three trucks. I went and looked into each one, shading my eyes with my cold hands pressed against the glass. No baby. But as I headed across the packed snow to my own car, I heard it again, louder. If you have ever been a mother, you cannot stand to hear such a cry. So I walked around the side of the diner to the back, where they had several trailers and a putt-putt golf course, closed for the winter. A man came out of one of the trailers and got in his truck and pulled out, stopping long enough to roll down his window and say, “You got a problem, lady?”

  “No,” I said.

  He shook his head and rolled his window back
up, the chains on his tires crunching into the snow as he left. It looked like nobody lived in the other trailer, which had sheets of wavy plastic, like you see over carports, stacked against the door. But then I heard the cry again. The blinding light from the snow was giving me a headache as I walked over to the putt-putt course, which had a big sign that said UNCLE SLIDELL’S CHRISTIAN FUN GOLF. This was a homemade sign, and it looked like it might have been made by Uncle Slidell himself. I pushed open the chain-link gate and walked in. THE LOVE TOUR, another sign said, STARTS HERE. Hole Number One was the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve painted on plyboard and a red rubber snake coiled halfway up a plastic palm tree which had plastic fruit such as bananas fastened all over it. The bananas had icicles hanging off of them. Hole Number One was beside this tree, full of snow.

  I heard the sound again, closer now. I walked on, picking my way over little walls and around shrubs and plyboard structures. It was all very confusing and the sun was so bright and the air was so cold and my head hurt and the holes didn’t seem to go in any order and I couldn’t figure it out. Number Six was The Cross. It featured a huge wooden cross made of railroad ties with barbed wire wrapped around it and a hand-lettered sign that said HELLO MY NAME IS OLD RUGED CROSS, CAN YOU PICK ME UP? On Hole Number Eight, The Ten Commandments, you were supposed to hit the ball up a mountain and then it would bounce down a series of steps that had a commandment printed on each one—no ADULTRY, NO OTHER GODS, NO SWEARING. I didn’t think NO SWEARING was really a commandment, but I was so cold and I had such a headache and I couldn’t think good.

  The girl from the diner stood by the Fun Golf gate. “Ma’am,” she was saying.

  I ignored her and went on because I could hear that baby real clear now. Real clear and real close. I walked past Number Three, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, and Number Eleven, The Wedding at Cana, and Number Four, The Tomb. Here you hit your ball past the centurion into the tomb and it came out on the other side, where the big stone had been rolled away and the angels were waiting. The baby cried like he was hungry or like his little heart would break. And then finally I was there, Number Ten, The First Christmas, with enormous plyboard cutouts of the Wise Men and ceramic barnyard animals such as chickens and ducks and a sign that said TO:YOU FROM:GOD and the whole heavenly host of angels hanging from a clothesline over the manger. Dirty snow dripped into His face as He lay in Mary’s lap, but the glory of God shone all around as He held out His chubby little arms to me, still crying.

  I remember the girl from the diner saying, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you will have to get out of there now,” but I don’t remember leaving Him or walking back through the snowy Fun Golf to my car, where a man stood waiting with his arms folded, watching us come toward him. He opened the car door for me.

  “Are you Uncle Slidell?” I asked him as I got in.

  He laughed shortly. “There ain’t no Uncle Slidell,” he said, and turned away. I do not remember the drive back onto the interstate, or the longer drive across the snowy mountains as I headed back toward home.

  * * *

  I DIDN’T NEED much time to pack up. Me and Randy Newhouse never had taken to housekeeping in a big way, as I said. There wasn’t much of me there in Creekside Green to start off with, and when I got finished, there wasn’t anything left. Misty and Johnny came over and helped me load up my car, while John-Boy toddled around the apartment. He is the most precious child, with white-blond hair just like the girls had when they were little. It seems like only yesterday when they were that small themselves and I was Misty’s age, sitting out in those lawn chairs in the Words’ side yard. Now Misty is so grown-up you can’t believe it, all serious and sensible. She went from being a girl to a wife in no time flat, just like me. When Misty is smiling, she’s still beautiful, but when she’s not, her eyes are sad, too old for her face, which is already tired-looking. It’s real hard, what she’s doing. Going to school and being a mother both. I had it so easy myself, I swear I don’t see how she does it. How any of them do it. Modern life is a lot harder than it used to be.

  “Why don’t you take the toaster oven?” I told her. “Go ahead, take it. Randy’ll never use it. Take the Crock-Pot too.”

  “Well, I don’t know if you ought to do that now, honey,” said Johnny, who is even more serious than Misty.

  With her arms full, Misty stopped in the doorway and looked back at him. “Are you kidding?” she said. “After what he did to Mama?”

  “Well, shoot.” Johnny shook his head.

  Misty grinned at him. “Honey, don’t let John-Boy get on the steps,” she called back over her shoulder.

  “Excuse me a minute,” I said.

  I left Johnny and John-Boy playing pat-a-cake in the living room, and went in the bedroom and pulled open the dresser drawer and cut up all of Randy’s underwear into ribbons with the scissors. He always liked to wear these nasty little bikini briefs in different colors. I also cut up a whole box of rubbers which I found under the underwear. Ha! He had never used them with me. Then I put the scissors in the last box of odds and ends from the bedroom, including the clock radio, which I had bought myself from Stereo Sound only a week before, and carried the box to my car. I left all my Olde English outfits in a pile in the corner, along with my red boots, which were worn-out anyway.

  “I reckon that about does it,” I said. “But don’t forget the coffee table.”

  Misty had always loved our coffee table, which was nothing but this Indian-looking ceramic elephant from Pier 1 with a big thick sheet of glass on top of it, one of the things I had gone out and bought when she showed up to live with us. They had already put the papa-san chair and the armchair and the end tables and Misty’s white wicker dresser in their truck. I am almost gone, I thought. It was the funniest feeling. I was leaving Randy with the TV and the couch and his tape deck and the waterbed, about what he had to begin with. I went down the steps real slow, holding John-Boy’s hand. Johnny passed me as he went back up for the elephant. When John-Boy and I got to the bottom of the steps, Misty threw herself on me and started crying.

  “Now, honey,” I told her, “you quit that. You have not got a thing to cry about. Not a thing! Come on now.”

  “Oh Mama,” she said. She said it again and again. Johnny came over and patted her hair, while John-Boy clung to her thin legs.

  “Don’t, baby, don’t,” I said. “I am going to be just fine. In fact, I am going to be a lot better off.”

  “But where will you go?” Misty wailed. “What will you do?” She acted like it was the end of the world. Misty is still dramatic, in spite of nursing school.

  “The first thing I am going to do is drive over to North Carolina to see Ruth and Carlton Duty,” I told her. “I already called them. They’re expecting me.”

  At this, Misty sniffed and gulped and looked at me. Her face was all streaky from crying. “They are?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll probably stay over there for a while. Then I’ll let you know what I’m going to do next. I’ll call you.”

  “Promise me you won’t go back to Randy! He’s so trashy. I never could see why you married him in the first place.” Because of you, I did not say. And you used to like Randy just fine before you went to school and got so uppity, I did not say. I wasn’t going to get into all that.

  “Honey, right now Randy Newhouse is the last thing on my mind,” I told her honestly.

  “Okay then,” Misty said. She let go of me. “I still wish you’d stay here with me and Johnny and John-Boy and get some peer counseling. Plenty of other women have dealt with these same problems. Plenty of other women have been in your shoes.”

  I patted Misty’s shoulder and tried not to smile. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her, but there is some conditions that counseling can’t cure.

  And I had to do what I had to do, a thing that did not involve counseling or Randy Newhouse either one.

  �
��I’ll be back over here before you know it,” I said lightly. “Somebody’s got to keep an eye on this mean little boy!” I picked John-Boy up. “Give Mamaw some sugar now. I’ve got to go.” He gave me the biggest, wettest kiss. He loves to kiss people. I handed him over to Johnny.

  At that moment, I meant every word I said. I expected to be back in Knoxville before long, to get another place to live and another job and another divorce, but I wasn’t worried about it. A good waitress can always find a job. Plus I had cleaned out Randy’s and my bank accounts, which gave me four thousand two hundred and ten dollars in cash, some of which he had been saving toward a bass boat. Ha!

  So I figured I’d take me a little trip, and consequently I was leaving in kind of a hurry, before Randy got back. “I don’t think he would have the nerve to call you all,” I said to Misty and Johnny. “But if he does, don’t you tell him a thing.” They nodded.

  “Be sure to get your oil changed and your antifreeze checked when you stop for gas,” Johnny told me. “You’d better stop on your way out of town.” He is one of those boys that is so earnest he looks cross-eyed. His ears were red in the cold. John-Boy was waving and waving. He loves to wave. All of them were waving, Misty and her family. They were so young and sweet and hopeful and determined, it just about killed me. They were the only people in the parking lot, dwarfed by the huge buildings of Creekside Green. They got smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror as I drove away. Then I turned into the street and they were gone.

  * * *

  NOW YOU MIGHT think it is pretty pitiful if everything you own in the whole world will fit into your car, but I didn’t mind it. In fact I felt surprisingly good, better than I had in months, maybe years, as I drove out of town. I stopped for gas at an Exxon station. I did need oil and antifreeze both, as it turned out.