Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

  Denise ignored her, ironing Donny’s other set of whites so hard the ironing board shook.

  “Don’t you go sulky on me, Dee. Why can’t we have a candlelight dinner—or breakfast—and fool around?”

  “I want to go out on the town before we lose our friends! We never leave this place. If I didn’t go to the beauty college I’d be jumping out of my skin. This is nothing but four walls, woman, and a sooty old sky, and those trains! Sometimes I think I’m going to get a gun and shoot those trains off the track.”

  Donny collapsed on the sofa. “Ouch!” She scooted off the damn spring that she hit every time.

  “Why don’t you want to take me out?” Denise pushed. “You ashamed to be seen with me? I’m ugly now?” She leaned over the sofa. “You afraid somebody’s going to give me pretty things and lure me away?”

  The woman was swinging at her heart with a sledge hammer. “Somebody could do that? Tempt you like that? Someone who’s not putting all her cash into this apartment?”

  “I’m not saying what will happen if we don’t get out of this place once in a while.”

  Shaking her head, Donny said, “I’m too tired. It takes me a week to catch up on my sleep after we go out, you know that. Let’s get a picnic lunch at the store and go eat it at the lake. You can call in sick to the school.” Subway cars rolled by at full creaky speed. She could see the people hanging on straps, swaying.

  “I can’t call in sick. My state tests are coming up. Besides, that’s not my idea of celebrating, Donny Donalds, and you know it. Once a week, that’s all I’m asking. I’m compromising.” Denise walked to the side of the room where the small stove and refrigerator stood. “I’ve got some nice greens and that leftover chicken for your lunch. Or do you want an omelet before I leave? Sit down, I’ll make you one.”

  The sky had looked smaller from across the room, its blue hemmed in by white window frames. That, Donny remembered as she sat 2,000 miles west at the window over Natural Women Foods and looked down on empty, dark Stage Street, was the beginning of the end with Denise Clinkscales. But it had lasted long enough to give her a taste for permanence, something she hadn’t had since her father, a shoe repairman and hotshot at the church, had tossed her out on her ass at sixteen for being an abomination.

  Chick snorted, a high sleeping mound back in their bed. It was only two o’clock. At five every morning but Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, Chick slept in while Donny started the day’s baking. She’d run a hand along the patchwork quilt that lay over Chick on her way out. She’d made that damn quilt as fine as her mother could have. Their friends at the Waterfall Ladies’ Quilting Club had taught her.

  She stifled a laugh. The Don in a ladies’ club! She should have sent a picture to her evil father. Her and the old white country ladies who held down their permed hair with baseball caps from diesel shops. And a picture of her presenting Sheriff Sweet with the quilt they had all made for the jail fund-raiser. They liked Donny. They loved teaching. And they loved that her and Chick made them mad money by selling their quilts, displayed on the rafters at Natural Woman Foods.

  Two truck rigs, rattling empty, blasted through the sound barrier this quiet time of night. A car with a hole in its muffler whizzed by the trucks. Hurrying fools. There wasn’t a thing wrong with going slow and staying put. Down on the sidewalk the flowers in planters exhaled their fancy perfumes up at her.

  “What happened to my Don Juan?” Denise had cried that hot Chicago morning, putting on her perfume before she left for school.

  Donny had come to like the time she had alone after Denise left. She’d switch to an Ahmad Jamal tape, read the paper, putter, walk the neighborhood, daydream about saving up enough after Denise finished hairdresser school to buy a little travel trailer and see the world.

  “You’re a mean dancer,” Denise reminded her, “a jazzy dresser. You’re The Don!”

  That was the morning she’d realized that she didn’t want to be The Don, not anymore. The Don had been a wild thing, born raging to get out from under her father’s heavy foot and away from the frosty bitch, her mother, who didn’t have time in her day for an oddball kid.

  “What am I supposed to do with this child?” her mother would ask the ladies at the church, or sometimes just a mother in the street who had a little girl in beribboned pigtails and a dress. Mrs. Donalds would complain, “Her hair’s like my mother’s. It won’t grow long enough to put up, and when I put a skirt on her it looks like a dirty rag before the day is out.” She would look accusingly down at Della, hands on her hips. “I can’t dress her in anything but her brother’s hand-me-downs.”

  Donny didn’t see a problem. She loved her brother Marcus Junior’s soft, old elastic-waisted pants and striped jerseys. The minute her mother tried to humiliate her by ordering her to put them on she’d feel free. It was the Sunday dresses that felt humiliating.

  “Donny?” Denise said, putting her face up close. “Is anybody home?”

  “I’m here,” she said, but as Denise went back to clattering over at the stove, she’d found herself in a clammy sweat. Her mother had been so pretty. She’d had a laugh like a little girl’s giggle and had used it often. At the church the ladies loved her. She’d volunteered for everything, dressed to the nines in the latest styles. Mama had sewn all her own clothes, first pinning fabric to rustley tissue-paper patterns, then cutting with big pinking shears. She could sew any of the other women under the table and often wished aloud that she’d been blessed with a little doll of a daughter she could dress up.

  The women teased her momma by asking if the lost-looking little girl who followed her around was hers. “That’s Della,” Momma would say, “a poor little motherless ragamuffin we picked up on the streets.” Then she’d laugh to show she was joking and pat Donny on the head.

  She could remember the feel of her mother’s tentative touch, like someone feeling in the dark, afraid of what she might find. In time, she’d learned to recite the poor little ragamuffin response before her mother could, grabbing the church ladies’ laughs and getting hugged.

  “Sometimes I think you don’t care about me, Don,” Denise was saying from the stove.

  “Of course I care,” she replied. Denise, now, she did love to show off her tall handsome Donny. She’d made Donny two dancing outfits, elegantly butchy, and she kept their clothes pressed right down to jeans and polyester uniforms. Donny felt so proud to have this pretty woman on her arm. All her girlfriends had been lookers, but flighty, more interested in a wild time than in settling down, more in love with the idea of Donny the charmer than with Donny herself. Denise had outlasted them all. “I’m tired, is all.”

  “You’re always tired these days. You feeling okay?”

  “I’m getting old, woman.”

  Denise looked away real quick. So she was worried about their age difference too. Getting up there scared Donny—who would love her? At the same time she looked forward to it. Her Grandma and Granddad Weatherbee had been old, and she’d never known happier people. They’d had a little this-and-that shop where Donny’s mother would leave her while she did her fund-raising or brought food baskets to shut-ins. Grandma and Granddad always let her do some little job, very carefully pricing and piling pomades and small boxes of rice up on shelves. They let her wait on customers and make change by the time she was six, and she’d worked with them right into her early twenties, along with whatever job she had, when she wasn’t out partying. They weren’t making ends meet by then, and the landlord wanted more rent. Grandpa got prostrate cancer; Grandma died soon after. They’d always been laughing with each other or with the customers. People with little money came in to buy things they hardly needed, just to hang out and laugh.

  “Dee,” Donny had said after arguing all through their morning meal, “go out on your own tonight. Have a fine time. The Don’s hanging out a while, and then she has a date with the clean sheets. You took up with an old dog too tired to maintain a thirty-eight-year-old’s speed. I swear I’ll take
you out to celebrate next time I get two nights off in a row.”

  “Forty-five isn’t old, Donny,” Denise had said. She’d gotten all dressed up for school in tight black pants, a scoop-neck white pullover, and a pink smock. “You’ll feel friskier when you wake up.”

  Yeah, Donny had thought, and Hank Aaron didn’t just beat out Babe Ruth’s home run record. She had kept busy all morning fixing the drip in their shower, then fallen asleep half-scared, half relieved to know she was going to lose Denise.

  Now she was fifty-seven. Chick loved her the way she was. Whatever messed with them—women, moods, bigots—there wasn’t an endless road in front of her any more. She was finally playing for keeps. It had taken a while, but she had come to see that what Chick was going through didn’t have a thing to do with her. Chick still wanted her, and Joan had been right. She’d said, “Sometimes all you can do is stand aside while they go through their changes.”

  Donny remembered answering, “You think I should try to get her to talk about it? I’m scared if I do, she might jump ship because she feels crowded.”

  “It’s better to leave her alone and hope.”

  At the time she’d told Joan, “I don’t know if I can do that. You know, I’ve been lucky enough to have been over the rainbow more times than I can remember, and I’ve chased more rainbows than I can count, but here, with Chick, I’m under the rainbow and we’re the pot of gold. I won’t risk losing her when, if I do something, anything, it might help.”

  She shut the window on Stage Street, then padded to the patchwork quilt and snugged her back up against Chick’s for a few more minutes of rest before the alarm went off. Maybe for their anniversary she’d whip up one of those spice cakes Chick loved so much. It would be nine years next week.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Grandma Chick

  “Don’t forget to grind more beans for the espresso monster!” Chick called from the front step.

  “First things first, babe. Look at all these outdated tofu wieners and sprouted breads,” answered Donny from the frozen case, waving her away.

  Chick stepped onto the sidewalk, a freed woman. She poked a finger into the soil in the wooden planters to test for moisture. Donny’s signature portulacas were gorgeous and bloomed in a rainbow of colors. Soil always smelled like spring to her, but it was full-fledged, mind-boggling summer now, hot and dry. There was plenty of snow pack on the mountains, though, so they might not have to suffer through forest fires this year. That was the worst of living around here; every couple of years the air turned yellow with smoke, and you couldn’t go outside without smelling the burn.

  Today she was going visiting on her afternoon off like a regular citizen and not a lesbian hippie who’d sold out and worked in a store sixty plus hours a week. She couldn’t get over having become respectable. Of course, being respectable out West was different from being respectable in the Midwest, but who’s counting, she thought. They weren’t getting rich off the store and, until the seniors had started coming in, hadn’t known if they would make it, but now they were comfortable enough to consider buying the building they were in.

  Donny had told her she was taking the transition from outlaw to capitalist pig too hard. “The world isn’t all black-and-white like you and me. It’s not like you’re selling insurance or wedding dresses.”

  “Still, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with all this. I probably need to accept what I am—a small businesswoman,” she’d told Donny. She’d been doing their quarterly taxes, looking for write-offs to reduce their income.

  “Every time I turn around you’re giving away cash to some vagabond or to a stranger collecting for charity. And babe—”

  “Hush. I’m trying to find the receipt for that check I wrote to the Girl Scouts.”

  “—you never have to be worried about turning into a small businesswoman.”

  With a laugh, she’d reached to smack Donny’s rump, but she didn’t feel that cheerful. There were times she had to wonder if her depression wasn’t the symptom of some kind of growing pains, if that’s what you called them in middle age. She was growing a new self, and that had to be painful.

  She plunged across Stage Street. Through the plate glass windows of Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard she caught sight of Sheriff Sweet raising a coffee mug in greeting. The sheriff’s big spotted mare Gal was tied outside, next to a planter of lupins, snapdragons, and spicy-smelling carnations. There were a lot more horses downtown since the sheriff had taken to riding Gal. It made up in local color for some of the traffic from the casino. The tribe had their own police and state-of-the-art security vehicles for casino problems.

  “Hi there, Marshall Dillon!” she called to the sheriff, letting the screen door slam behind her. She hadn’t seen Joan since the Fourth of July concert on the green. “Nice barbershop singing last week. Whew! Who’s been trying to burn this place down?”

  Mother Hubbard, smudged apron tied like a girdle across a plump middle, gestured to a blackened patch of wall. “Grill fire.”

  “John on the road?” Chick asked, nimbly spinning a blue vinyl stool with one crooked finger, peeking to see if the sheriff noticed her peach-painted nails. John Hubbard usually worked beside his wife.

  “He’s hauling logs over to the coast today. With the casino taking all my tourist trade, somebody’s got to keep food in the Cupboard.” Mother Hubbard laughed at her own joke.

  “Did you save the town, Sheriff, and put out the fire?”

  Sheriff Sweet took a slug of coffee and tipped her hat back. She had the black hair of the local Native Americans and the cornflower blue eyes of her leggy California mother, a frail beauty whose various illnesses had brought her to Natural Woman Foods for herbal boosters when she’d still been able to get around.

  “Not much a good cup of black coffee won’t cure,” said the sheriff.

  Chick looked at the dark drippings down the front of the grill. “I see you doused it with the stuff.”

  “She about put it out too. I didn’t even need to use up the fire extinguisher,” said Mother Hubbard.

  Chick’s heart always got a little fluttery around the taciturn, mysterious sheriff who’d been beanpole Joanie Sweet home from college for the summer, shooting hoops in her driveway one day, and disappeared down south to college the next. Five years later she ran for sheriff when her dad, injured during a chase, turned in his badge to care for Mrs. Sweet. The sheriff’s smile always spoke of secrets she’d never reveal, but Chick, had she and Joan been free, thought she knew how to get them out of her.

  Mother Hubbard scraped loudly at the grill.

  Chick announced, “I’m trucking up to meet my grandson-to-be. That is, he’ll be mine once my friends get the paperwork approved. Jeep and Cat are trying to adopt him and they’ve asked me to be one of his grandmas. Can you believe it? I never expected to do the grandma trip.”

  “Congrats,” the sheriff said with a nod of approval.

  As if the sheriff didn’t know the whole story from Cat. As if Chick didn’t know the sheriff and Cat were in the hottest closet in Waterfall Falls.

  “Catch you later!” Chick said. Sweaty-faced Mother Hubbard winked and went back to work. Joan sipped her coffee and watched her. Chick gave her a once-over and answered the secret smile with one of her own and a quiet, “Yum.” She hoped the sheriff heard, though she knew better than to expect acknowledgement.

  Up sunny Cliff Street she stepped, humming a little Pooh Bear song: “Yum, yum, a hot bum on that one. Yum, yum.”

  Goddess, she felt good. It was only in the mid-nineties today; a lick of light wind cooled her damp forehead. She always looked forward to the four o’clock summer breezes to cool things down, but four o’clock wasn’t anytime soon, and she planned to enjoy this little sweat lodge of an afternoon. She wasn’t even going to give her depression the time of day. If it showed its nasty head she’d slam it with a laugh or gulp air into her lungs like someone rescued from drowning. “Exercise and deep breathing,” Dr. Wu h
ad instructed her. “Breathe in peace, breathe out your cares.”

  “Señorita Cheek!” her friend Fina called from the doorway of Fina’s Finery. They’d met at a Chamber of Commerce meeting and become friends in the drumming group that met after hours in the back of Natural Women Foods.

  Chick bent to hug the warm little fireplug and smelled baby talc. Her nerves twanged with anxiety at the thought of babies. She’d never been drawn to them. But little Luke was four. “Any new Guatemalan vests? Donny’s birthday is coming up.”

  “Next month, Chick, I promise, if I have to go down there to get them myself. I ordered some Donny’s size.” She held her hand up high to indicate Donny’s height.

  “And Hernando?” They liked to joke about their two “old men.” Fina was an ex-biker mama, retired from the Angelino gang she’d run with.

  “He looks so slick the way the casino’s dressing them up in old-time dealer clothes, like a gambler in a Western movie.”

  “That casino’s putting a bunch of beans in some local pots.”

  “Thank God,” said Fina, blessing herself. “After all the years he couldn’t get work because of his leg when he sold firewood off the truck. Where are you going in such a hurry?”

  “I’m checking out my grandson today!”

  “Did they give him to your friends already?” Fina asked in a shocked whisper. She gestured Chick into her shop doorway under a pink and yellow donkey piñata. “It’s official?”