Dust

by Eva Marie Everson

  But I hoped for better.

  When I pulled into her driveway, I found her standing on the side lawn, bent over, garden hose in hand, wrapping it into a circle on the ground near the azalea bushes. She flung her hair over her shoulder as she glanced at me. “Hey, there,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, crossing the grass, brown mostly but, like a balding man who refused to shave the few hairs crossing over his head, still sporting green patches.

  “I washed my car earlier,” she said, now straightening. “Told Daddy I’d put everything back where I found it, so I am.” She ran her hands along her jeans to dry them, then reached to hug me.

  “I’ve got news,” I told her straight up.

  “Let me guess. Westley asked you to marry him.” Then she laughed. “I’m just kidding. I know you two haven’t dated long enough for that.”

  “Uh—”

  The color drained from Elaine’s face, leaving a sprinkling of freckles prominent across her nose. “Oh, gosh. No. Seriously? Seriously?”

  I nodded. “Seriously.”

  She grabbed my left hand and yanked it toward her. “I don’t see a ring.”

  “I don’t want one. I mean, an engagement ring.” I laughed lightly. “Actually, we haven’t talked about a ring. I assume we’ll buy matching wedding bands or something equally as silly and romantic as that.”

  Elaine pulled me toward the front door. “Come on in. Oh, my gosh. Seriously? But you haven’t dated that long and—oh, my gosh! When?”

  “A few days ago …”

  “No, goofball. When’s the wedding?”

  “Oh. December. Seventeenth.”

  We stepped into the nearly dark living room, one I knew as well as my own. Each piece of furniture. Each framed photo. Each piece of artwork hanging too high on the walls. “Mama,” Elaine called out, closing the door behind us.

  I opened my mouth to quiet her, but her mother stepped into the room as though on cue before I could say a word. “Well, hey, Sugar Foot. Elaine said you were coming over.”

  “Hey, Miss Rose,” I said to the woman whose name fit her, her face flowerlike, her features soft and tiny.

  “Guess what,” Elaine said, still holding on to my left hand. “Guess who’s getting married.”

  Miss Rose had the decency to ask, “Who?” Then, turning to me, said, “You?”

  I nodded. “I came over to ask Miss Blabbermouth if she’ll be my maid of honor.” I swallowed. “I’ve asked my sister and Westley’s—Heather—I’ve asked them to be bridesmaids.”

  “Well, my goodness. When is the wedding?” Miss Rose asked, guiding Elaine and me over to the sofa while she eased herself into an occasional chair covered by soft fabric that boasted peonies in varying shades of pink.

  “December seventeenth,” I answered as she reached over to switch on a rose-tinted table lamp. “One week before Christmas.”

  “So soon?”

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?” Elaine asked.

  “Elaine,” I said and jumped an inch.

  “Really, Elaine,” Miss Rose said with a sigh. “Pay her no mind, Allison.”

  My gawking eyes met Miss Rose’s. “I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.”

  “Well, I mean,” Elaine began in defense of her statement, “why so soon if you’re not pregnant?”

  Heat rushed to my face. “If you must know,” I said through clenched teeth, “We are waiting until we get married and … well—well—we are getting married on the seventeenth of December.”

  “Best to marry than to burn with lust,” Miss Rose said, and Elaine and I turned to her, our mouths fell open. “Or something like that.”

  “What?” Confusion etched along the lines of Elaine’s voice.

  “It’s in the Bible,” I told her. “If you’d paid more attention to the sermons and less to Danny Simmons every Sunday morning when you used to attend …”

  “I couldn’t help it,” Elaine said coolly. “He was adorable.”

  “I wonder whatever happened to him.”

  “He moved to Raleigh, remember? Right after junior year.”

  “Oh.” I shook my head to clear it of the boy Elaine had drooled over from junior high until he disappeared from the class roster. Even while dating other boys, Elaine’s heart belonged to Danny Simmons. If only Danny Simmons had realized it. “Anyway … you’ll be my maid of honor?”

  “I think you’re crazy. You are crazy to get married so soon.” Her eyes filled with sudden knowledge—or at least what she would have called knowledge. Maybe even wisdom. “You know what this is,” she said. “This is you not dating enough in high school. I’ve been studying this kind of thing in my psych class. You should have had more boyfriends. If you had, you wouldn’t be jumping at the first man who came along.”

  Not dating in high school—or not dating much—was true enough. I’d barely gotten a date for prom, much less had a steady. Not that I was horribly unattractive, because I don’t believe I was—or am—but more that I tended to lean to the shy side. Elaine said I was afraid of my own shadow, which bordered on some level of truth. Regardless, I knew—no, I believed—that Westley was more than simply the first man to come along. Westley was … well, Westley.

  “I really wish you’d come to Southern with me,” Elaine continued, nearly bouncing in place. “You still can, you know. Think about it. Put the wedding off for a year and—”

  I gazed into the deep green of her eyes. “I’m in love with Westley Houser and I’m going to marry him.” My brow lifted. “So, please? Be my maid of honor?”

  “Oh, for the love of everything,” she said in defeat. “What do I have to do?”

  “Get fitted for a dress you’ll wear once, show up at a few showers if you can, and be at the church on the evening of the sixteenth and the afternoon of the seventeenth.”

  Elaine pulled her hair over her shoulder and twisted it until it looked like a rope then let it go. “I can do that,” she said as though she’d considered saying no. “But, if you change your mind between now and then, you and I can get an apartment together and you can get your fanny into school.” Her shoulders sagged. “I mean, do you really even know this guy?”

  I looked again to Miss Rose for help. “Like I said, Allison. Pay her no mind. She gets fixated on something and that’s that. I knew her daddy was the man I was supposed to marry not five minutes after we met, and we’ve been together ever since.”

  I turned back to Elaine. “I know it’s soon, but I do know him. And if you’d had the chance to spend a little more time with him, you’d see. He’s wonderful, Elaine. And I love him like mad.”

  Elaine sighed then, relinquishing all debate within her. “All right. I’ll be there.”

  I made it back home with five minutes to spare before Westley arrived. It goes without saying that my mother had managed to work herself into a tizzy by then. “Dear Lord in heaven,” she said as soon as I entered the house. “Do you have any notion what time it is?”

  I did and I told her so. “Mama, for heaven’s sake, please calm down. You act like he’s Prince—what’s his name? Prince Charles, or something.”

  Mama shooed me down the hall all the while muttering, “Well, he’s practically the Prince of the county. Now, go change into something else before he gets here.”

  I stopped at my bedroom door and turned to face the woman whose voice would be the one inside my head and heart for as long as I drew breath … whether I liked it or not. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” I asked, looking down then to my favorite pair of slacks and its matching floral peasant top.

  “You’ve had that on since you got home from church.” She turned me and nudged me into my room. “Why not put on a dress for a change.”

  “Mama,” I laughed. “Westley will think I want to go to church or something …”

  “You’ll be a married woman soon,” she continued. “You’ll want to start looking the part of a grownup and not some child.”

 
“Mama,” I continued in my protest. “Grownup women wear slacks and blouses.” I pointed to her, moving my finger up and down to prove my point.

  Mama walked past me to open my closet door. “I was thinking this would be nice,” she said, reaching so quickly and easily for a wrap-around dress of geometrical shapes in dark tones I knew she’d stood in front of my closet earlier to choose the perfect frock.

  “All right, all right,” I said, taking it from her. “Give me five minutes of peace so I can change, please.”

  Mama made it nearly to the door before reminding me, “We’ll need to go shopping soon for a dress you know.”

  “I know,” I said, waving the backs of my hands at her, indicating she needed to move along.

  “And your trousseau.”

  “Mama—”

  “Have you decided where you’re going—”

  “Mama …” A flash of light from beyond the sheers of my bedroom window indicated that Westley had arrived, his car gliding down our driveway.

  “Oh, there he is,” she breathed as if he’d arrived in a golden carriage pulled by six white horses.

  In less than five minutes, I managed to get into the dress, run a brush through my hair, and apply a touch of spearmint-flavored lip gloss. As I walked toward the voices coming from the den, I heard Westley say, “—thought I’d talk to her about it tonight, but wanted to clear it first with you, sir.”

  Daddy cleared his throat to answer as I stepped into the room. “Clear what?” I asked.

  Westley smiled broadly and stood, then walked over to me and kissed my cheek. “You look incredible,” he said.

  I felt Mama’s smile clear across the room; I hardly had to look to see the gloat on her face. But I gave her a wink to ease the tension. “Mama insisted on a dress,” I said. Then, “So, what were you talking about?”

  Westley took my hand in his and returned us to sit on the opposite end of the sofa from where Mama perched. “My brother and his wife have invited us to their place in Baxter next weekend.” His eyes found mine, drawing me into a desire I thought would slay me on the spot and right there in front of my mama and daddy. My breath became so ragged I wondered if they were aware of the sheer discomfort pushing its way through me, especially with them occupying the same room.

  It seemed to me that since Westley had proposed I’d felt a greater desire to be his wife than I ever imagined. And, at that moment, it also seemed that December seventeenth was a million years away.

  “For what?” I finally said.

  A smile as warm as liquid sunshine danced between us. “I think they just want to get to know you better.”

  I looked at my father, waiting for his reaction. “What are their names again?” he asked.

  “My brother is Paul, sir. His wife is DiAnn. You’ll meet them, of course, at the wedding.”

  The thought of meeting my future brother- and sister-in-law in five short days tightened my stomach. What I knew of them was vague. From what Westley had told me, they both had cushy jobs and lived in a lakefront house. They owned a boat, which they enjoyed taking out on the water most weekends and during the long summer evenings. Paul and DiAnn had been cut from the same cloth, he’d said. Both enjoyed the out-of-doors as much as they loved being inside curled in front of a crackling fire, reading a good book. They were both college-grad smart, but laughed easily at the silliest of things, never making those not nearly as smart feel inadequate. A thought that relieved me to no end. “You’ll really like them,” he’d told me, and I believed it because Westley had said it and I took his every word as gospel.

  “I don’t know them,” I said to my parents then, as if that settled everything. “But Westley—”

  “Baxter is about four hours from here,” Daddy noted. “What are your plans, then?”

  Westley released my hand, leaned forward, and placed his elbows on his knees. “Well, sir … I thought we’d drive over on Friday after work—maybe get off a little early if we can—” He glanced at me, then back to my father. “Paul and DiAnn have a large home, sir. Plenty of room.” Westley’s chuckle fell more inward than out and came without the good sense to blush in the slightest. “What I’m saying is, Ali will have her own room. Her virtue is safe with me, sir. I can assure you of that.”

  Ali. A name he’d never called me previously, but one by which he’d refer to me from that moment on. A name that lent itself to an intimacy far more exquisite and frightening than we’d experienced on any level up until that moment.

  I blinked until my gaze settled on my shoes, a clunky pair of platforms I’d purchased the same day as the dress, their colors complementing each other.

  “And you’ll be back Sunday?”

  “Yes, sir,” Westley answered. I looked to where my father sat, seemingly relaxed under the notion of his virgin child taking a cross-state trip with her fiancé.

  “Mama?” he said then, looking at my mother as though her opinion mattered, even while we all knew that Daddy had the final say in moments like these.

  “I’m sure we can trust them,” she said. “After all, they’ll be married soon.”

  “Well then,” Daddy concluded. “I don’t see why not.”

  And with those words, I unknowingly headed into the rest of my life.

  Chapter Five

  Sometime after my thirteenth birthday, my father’s parents moved from Georgia to Florida. I never completely understood why—something about my grandmother’s oldest sister’s husband dying and them needing to be closer to her.

  Until then, once a month, my parents, sister, and I piled into Daddy’s sedan and drove an hour and a half to their farmhouse. Julie and I spent our time in the backseat drawing an imaginary line and then daring the other to cross it. “This is your half,” Julie said to me. “This is mine. Do not enter into my half.”

  Then Julie looked out the window to the world beyond while I dove headfirst into the first in a pile of books that took up most of my foot room.

  Being at my grandparents’ was an adventure. A vacation from life as I knew it. The rooms of the old farmhouse wrapped around one another. There were secret nooks and crannies and a two-sided wrap-around front porch decked out with a wooden swing at one end, a wrought iron glider at the other, and plenty of rockers in between. My grandparents were retired tobacco farmers, so ashtrays on stands stood in wait between several of them, typically filled with scrunched cigarette butts and graying ashes. The front porch always smelled of old tobacco and roses, my grandmother’s favorite flower. In the spring and summer months the sweet taste of gardenias lay over them both, which made me nearly intoxicated.

  My grandmother—whom we called Granny—had placed an outdoor chaise lounge in the corner of the porch where one side met the other. It boasted blue floral vinyl cushions Granny could wash down with soap and water after rain showers left their muddy and dusty remains. If ever I had a favorite place in the world, this was it. Shaded by the overgrown azaleas, my back to the world, stretched out, a sweating Coca-Cola bottle wedged between my thighs, and with a good book in my hands. And if a decent breeze happened by, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Nothing else mattered in those hours. I was a girl on an island and life was blissful.

  I remembered those days as Westley and I traveled along back roads between Bynum and Baxter in a car that came as a complete surprise. Sometime during the week, Westley had traded his Pinto in for a brand-new Caprice convertible, the color so red I thought it looked like a tube of lipstick shooting down the road. He arrived at my house at two o’clock on the afternoon of our departure for his brother’s, shocking me but thrilling my mother as it bounded into the driveway.

  “What in the world—” I asked. Mama and I stood at the living room window where we’d taken up vigil, waiting for the Pinto to appear.

  “How utterly delightful,” Mama said, a declaration that caused my mouth to gape. “Riding in a convertible. It’s been years …” And then off she went, through the dining room, the family room, and
out the side door to greet her future son-in-law.

  Before loading my luggage into the trunk, Westley took Mama for a spin around the neighborhood, then deposited her back on the driveway and exchanged her for me. By two thirty we were gliding past the city limits. Westley managed to wait that long before his foot pressed hard against the gas pedal. I turned to him with my hand fisted around my hair to keep it on my head and bellowed, “Can we afford this?”

  Westley grinned behind his aviator sunglasses. “What?” he asked, as if he didn’t know. “This?” He took his hands off the steering wheel, throwing them up in the air like a child sitting in the front seat of a roller coaster, heading down the first big dip.

  “Westley,” I screamed, horrified.

  He laughed easily as his foot pressed lightly on the brake and his hands came back down. “Go easy, little girl,” he said then. “I’m just excited.”

  “Can you just make sure you get me there in one piece,” I said, as if my admonition mattered. “I’d like to meet your brother and sister-in-law without cuts and bruises. Or in a casket.”

  Westley laughed again, then slowed the car to a near stop, rolled the car onto the shoulder of the road until it rested between the tall blades of wiregrass and broomsedge. Before I could ask what we were doing, he gathered me to himself as he’d done the day of the engagement, kissed me for all he was worth, then pulled back. “You need a pair of sunglasses,” he said as he reached for the glove compartment latch. After it sprang open, nearly hitting my knees, he reached in for a small sack with the drugstore’s logo printed across the top. “Gotcha something.” He handed the package to me; I opened it and peered inside to find a swanky pair of oversized, tortoiseshell Foster Grants.

  “Hey,” I said, sliding them on, then pulling the sun visor down in hopes of finding a mirror and smiling broadly when my wish came true. “Hey,” I said again. “I like these … a lot.” I flipped the visor up, then turned and gave Westley the same sort of kiss he’d given me.