Dust

by Eva Marie Everson

  Instead, two seconds after Daddy said grace, I raised my bowed head and blurted, “By the way, Westley and I are getting married.”

  Unlike Westley’s parents, who ate the last meal of the day in the dining room, we had supper at the kitchen table. That night, our everyday china plates were full of fried pork chops and mashed potatoes cradling a spoonful of gravy and resting beside a mound of English peas. And when I made my announcement, both parents left their concentrated efforts on eating to look up at me; working mouths suddenly stopping mid-chew. My mother reached for her seafoam-green Tupperware tumbler of sweet iced tea, took a gulp, and swallowed hard. I looked from her to my father, who did the same, and waited.

  When they said nothing, I continued. “It’s no big deal really.”

  My mother blinked then. “What do you mean? How can getting married not be a big deal?”

  “I mean the proposal.”

  My father found his voice. “How did he—what did he—” He took another drink from his powder-blue tumbler before adding, “I don’t remember him coming to me about this.”

  “Daddy,” I said with a shaky smile, then placed my fork and knife against the plate and reached for his hand, pale like the rest of him. “I don’t know that men do that anymore.”

  “Well, I think they should,” Mama said. And then, as if we were now ready to move on to the next subject, “But never mind. When is the wedding?”

  “I haven’t approved this—”

  “Of course you have,” Mama said, her words passing in front of me as if I had no bearing on the weight of them. “He’s Westley Houser, for crying out loud.”

  “We haven’t set a date,” I interjected. “Like I said, it was no big deal.”

  Mama stood, walked to the sink, rinsed out the dishcloth, and began to wipe countertops already spotless. “How can you say that? How can you say that the words a young woman hopes to hear—how can you say …” She turned to face us then, crossing her arms, the dishcloth dripping water to the linoleum at her Keds-shod feet.

  I laughed. I had to do something. I was so nervous and giddy and scared, so I laughed. “His father caught us—” I paused, feeling heat rise in me, then thinking I should hurry and finish my sentence lest my father think the absolute worse of his chaste daughter, I said, “—kissing.”

  “Kissing?” My father boomed, then laughed so heartily, the table shook under the heaviness of his forearms resting against the edge. “Well, thank you, God, for small favors.”

  The heat inside intensified, so I picked up the fork and knife and went to work on slicing a bite of pork chop. “Anyway … he caught us kissing and he said Westley’s name and then Westley said my name, only he added his name to the end of it.”

  “Allison Westley?” Mama laid the dishcloth over the faucet and returned to the table.

  I raised my brow at her. “No, Mama. Allison Houser.”

  My father chuckled again. “That’s original.” Daddy turned his attention back to his supper. “When will Westley be here?” He raised a teasing brow toward me. “I will need to talk to that boy.”

  “Tonight,” I said. “I told him you were coming home this afternoon and—this should make you happy—he insisted that he—we—talk to you … both … tonight.” I glanced at the round acrylic clock hanging high over the kitchen sink. “He’ll be here around seven thirty.”

  “An hour,” Mama said. “That hardly gives me time.”

  “For what?” I asked. “It’s just Westley. The same man who came over last Sunday to watch the game with Daddy. The same man who arrives every Friday night at seven thirty on the nose.”

  “But this time he’ll come as your fiancé,” Mama said, then looked at Daddy with pleading brown eyes. “Explain it to her, Darryl.”

  I looked at Daddy, whose square-shaped face registered the same surprise I’d felt after realizing I had become engaged. “Explain it to her?” he asked. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”

  Mama stood from the table, this time with a grunt of frustration. “I’m going to get ready,” she said before leaving the room. “So much to do … so much to do …” Her voice faded the farther into the house she went.

  I looked at Daddy, who now ran a hand over his close-cut white hair. His blue eyes danced a little as he said, “Darlin’ … that mama of yours …” as though the brevity of words were some form of explanation.

  I squared my shoulders. “Well, a wedding should keep her occupied for a while,” I said. “I think now that I’m grown and working and what with you gone so much of the time, Mama needs a project. You know, other than knitting and circle meetings.”

  Daddy pushed his plate an inch away from where it rested. “Ah, but what will she do after the wedding?”

  “Probably run over every morning to wherever Westley and I live to make sure I’ve mitered the corners of the bedsheets.”

  Daddy laughed again. “Look here,” he said directly. He placed his warm hand over mine, which I’m sure was ice cold at the thought of what I’d just said. “Give Mama some space, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And get this kitchen cleaned up for her, will you? Lord knows what she’s doing back there in our bedroom but putting on the dog is probably at the head of it.”

  “Yes, sir.” I stood and began to gather the plates.

  Westley arrived at exactly seven thirty, which was his way. Everything about Westley was calculated. In the short period I’d known him, I’d come to realize that right up front.

  We’d met only six months earlier—which in retrospect meant that we had no business getting married or even becoming engaged. The day we met, I’d come down with a sore throat, called our family doctor who, in turn, told me he’d call in a prescription to the local Rexall. “I betcha it’s nothing more than the weather causing your throat to hurt,” he said. “Weather these days doesn’t know if it wants to turn loose for spring or hang on for winter.”

  “That and what with all the flowers beginning to bloom,” I said as though I had a clue.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “All right, my dear. The prescription will be waiting on you when you get there.”

  “I’ll go over during my lunch hour.”

  I’d graduated high school the year before. After my sister married the bum, my parents had placed all their hope for a college grad in the family on me. Then, as graduation crept closer and closer, and much to my parents’ disapproval, I made the monumental decision not to go to college right away, but to give myself a year off from the world of academics. I’d spent my senior year in a job program the high school offered. Every weekday, instead of staying until three, I walked out after lunch, threw what few books I now lugged onto the backseat of my car, and then drove three miles to a local printing company located on a downtown side street. There I learned the trade of “office work.” There wasn’t a whole lot to it, but I got along well with the owners and the customers. Within weeks I could take job orders like a pro, had learned the art of upselling, and had—as my employer Mr. Foster said—organized the storeroom and filing cabinets into something manageable.

  Before I’d come to work there, the whole operation was a nightmare. Mr. Foster—sixty if he was a day—and his wife innately knew where everything went, but to the rest of the employees (in other words, me), the storeroom seemed a web of confusion.

  Then, as I neared graduation, Mrs. Foster had to have some type of life-altering surgery and Mr. Foster asked if I’d like to stay on during the summer with an increase in hours “until you go on off to school.”

  I explained to Mr. Foster that I had given myself a year off and so staying on wouldn’t be a problem.

  “But why?” he asked, as if I’d told him no. “Why wouldn’t you want to grab your education by the throat as soon as you can?”

  The question jarred me. “I—uh—well, to be honest, Mr. Foster, I don’t have a clue what I want to do with the rest of my life—no idea at all—and I thought that—maybe with a little
time—”

  Mr. Foster removed his readers and dropped them into one of the pockets of the dark-green bib apron he wore at work. “All you’ll do the first year or so is take the basic classes. May as well get them out of the way while you’re deciding.”

  I frowned. “Have you been talking with my parents, Mr. Foster?”

  Mr. Foster’s jawline went slack. “Why, no. I just think that—you young people today don’t know how lucky you are to get to go off to college. Back in my day it wasn’t as easy. It was a different America.”

  I smiled now. “I’ve heard.” If not from my teachers, from my parents. And if not from my parents, from my grandmother, who I called “Grand,” because—oh, she just was.

  “Southern women are strong by nature,” she’d once told me. “We are the true Scarlett O’Haras. We raise our radishes into the air and declare that as God is my witness, we shall never go hungry again.” She squared her eyes with mine. “Remember that when life tries to kick you down.”

  “So, I mean, if you’d like,” I now said to Mr. Foster, “I can stay on as long as you need.”

  “I suppose,” he agreed with a nod, “that your decision—bad as I think it may be—is a good thing for Mrs. Foster and me.”

  He wasn’t kidding. Turned out, Mrs. Foster’s surgery didn’t go as well as the doctors had hoped. She decided time spent “on her feet” had come to an end, which meant that Mr. Foster gratefully offered me full-time employment. He increased my pay to $2.35 an hour, which, in those days of six-cent postage stamps, was akin to making me rich beyond my wildest dreams. Especially if I continued to live at home with Mama and Daddy. And I remained careful of frivolity.

  I disconnected my call with Dr. Carter that afternoon, managed to wait the good half hour until noon, then let Mr. Foster know I was going to run up to the drugstore.

  “You sick?” he asked, looking up from his desk by peering over the readers perched on the tip of a too-thick nose.

  I smiled to keep him from worrying. “No sir. Not really.” I touched my throat. “Just a tickle, but Dr. Carter has called in—”

  “Pick me up some lozenges,” he said, his eyes dropping back to the work scattered on the metal desk. “In case I start to feel it, too.” He smiled without looking at me. “Can’t have both of us feeling puny.”

  I nodded, then turned to leave, but not before he added, “And tell Gladys to put it on my bill.”

  “Yes, sir,” I hollered, then opened the rattling old glass-and-wood door, closed it behind me, and headed a block up and around to where the drugstore sat wedged between a hunting supply store and a shop where all young brides and mothers-to-be registered for pricey gifts. I opened one of the double doors leading into the store and breathed in the scent of candles and incense—something new Miss Gladys had introduced along with a line of American Greetings cards that had nothing to do with birthdays or anniversaries, sympathy or sick days, and thin books of select poetry by Rod McKuen. “Trying to keep up with the times,” she’d told me the last time I’d gone in and studied one of them. She then showed me a new collection of inspirational cards boasting the poetry of Helen Steiner Rice. I ended up purchasing one for Mama, one that spoke of the beautiful yet complex relationship between mothers and their daughters.

  On the day of my sore throat, however, I found Gladys Howard standing in the aisle that offered women’s products on one side and baby items on the other, something I’d always found to be a bit of an oxymoron. “Hey, Miss Gladys,” I said to her.

  “Allison Middleton,” she said. Gladys Howard always greeted the young men and women of our town by their first and last names.

  Miss Gladys was a wonder to me. Her husband of only a few years had been killed early on in Vietnam, leaving her to raise twin towheaded boys. Her parents owned the drugstore, so she went to work for them and had managed it as far back as I could remember. Although a strikingly beautiful woman, she’d never married again—never dated that I’d heard of—but instead dedicated herself to her sons, her community, and the drugstore.

  Thinking back on it now, Gladys Howard had not even hit forty the day I walked into the store for a prescription and some lozenges, but her elegance and life-wisdom made her seem at least a decade older. She was also a woman I wanted to be like, which was why I sought her out each time I came in, hoping maybe a little of her would rub off.

  She straightened an item on the shelf, then turned to me. “How’s your mama? I missed church last week, so I haven’t seen her in a week or so.”

  “Mama’s fine,” I told her. Miss Gladys and Mama were in the same church circle and occasionally met in each other’s homes for coffee and planning. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes. I don’t know what happened Sunday. I completely overslept, and the boys were at a friend’s so …” She smiled broadly then. “Did you hear that the boys have both been accepted to Southern? Thank the good Lord they took after their daddy in the smarts department. So … I guess in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be rambling around in that house all by myself.” She spoke the words as if this were a fate worse than death, but the pride in her voice brought a smile nonetheless.

  “What will they major in?” I asked.

  She laughed lightly as she crossed her arms. “Oh … girls probably.” Then she cleared her throat and said, “I’m just thankful neither of them wanted to follow in Dan’s footsteps and join up.”

  Awkwardness settled around us. I wasn’t a child anymore, but I wasn’t a grown woman either. I had no idea what it meant to love someone and then lose them, especially to something that made no sense. “Well,” I said, pointing to the back. “I’m here to pick up a prescription.”

  Life returned to her eyes and she asked, “Are you sick?”

  I touched my throat as I’d done earlier and said, “No, ma’am. Just a tickle, but Dr. Carter …”

  Miss Gladys touched my arm lightly as she leaned in and half-whispered, “Honey, wait till you see what we’ve brought to town.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “He’s charming. He’s not too bad on the eyes. And he’s single.”

  I looked toward the back of the store, then again at Miss Gladys. “Ma’am?”

  “His name is Westley. Spelled with a ‘t’ in the middle. Westley Houser. He’s our new pharmacist. Graduate of the University of Georgia, but his daddy is a provost over at Southern.”

  I furrowed my brow. “Where do they live?” I asked because I’d never heard of the Houser family. And living in our little town meant knowing everyone in it. And most of their business.

  “Over in Stoneham,” she said, jutting her head back a little toward the south end of town to indicate a community forty-five minutes on the way to Savannah. “I don’t know how we managed to snag him here, but I reckon he wanted to stay close to home. Of course, there’s nothing in Stoneham, so …”

  That much was for certain. A few grand old houses, a couple of stores, and a tiny post office. Two churches with a cemetery each to house their dead, headstones leaning against time behind each one. “Well,” I said, taking a step toward the back. “I’ll just have to check him out.”

  “You do that,” she said with a conspiratorial grin.

  In the end I don’t know who checked out whom, but from the moment we set eyes on each other, life stopped long enough to draw us together as if it had always intended to do just that.

  That evening, right after supper and the washing and drying of the dishes, the phone rang. My father answered as he always did when at home. A second or so later, he called me to the phone and said, “Some young man for you,” then extended the handset in my direction, his expression matching my confusion.

  “It’s Westley,” my caller said after I’d said hello. “Westley Houser.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but words refused to come. After a few seconds he added, “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” I said finally. “Yes … but how did you get …”

  �
��Your phone number is part of your records at the store.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not that I couldn’t have looked you up in the phone book. By the way, did you know you’re the only Middleton in Bynum … or the whole county for that matter?”

  “I—yes.”

  “Hey, I know it’s last minute, but can I interest you in a bite to eat? I just finished up here and I’m starving.”

  I looked around the room, my whole being now completely out of sorts and my sore throat nothing more than a vague memory. My father stared at the television. My mother had picked up her knitting and, feet tucked under her, sat on the sofa. She worked the needles furiously and by instinct. I stood behind Daddy’s chair, aware that even though they were not staring at me, they heard every word being said and would drill me as soon as I got off the phone. Not too many young men called the house. Once upon a time, they called for my sister Julie, yes. Before she met the bum.

  But not me.

  “Sure,” I said. “Do you know how to get—”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  And he had. He’d figured it out at least twice, sometimes three times a week since. And, he’d become my every waking thought. The breath in my lungs. The period at the end of my sentence. From the absolute beginning, I knew—instinctively I knew—that one day he and I would marry. That I would never go to college—at least not anytime soon. That he’d be the father of my children. The reason I’d wake up in the morning and go to bed at night and move through the hours between. Westley Houser was all of life rolled into a big red rubber ball and tied off with a wide ribbon, able to bounce higher than all the others in the bin.

  And—even though my ball was a little low on air—I believed that, with him, I’d soar above the rest.

  Chapter Three