by Tamara Leigh
That makes me sad, especially since I didn’t know about her troubles. Maybe I haven’t come as far I’d like to think. Maybe I’m still just as self-centered—
“Now, no frettin’.” Skippy pats my hand. “Nothin’ you coulda done, and nothin’ she woulda wanted you to do. ’Sides, now she doesn’t have the stress of runnin’ her own business, and she seems happy enough waitressin’.”
Enough. And I just had to talk her down from twelve dollars a pie to ten. Well, Martha is going to receive a nice, big tip.
“If you done decided on what you want, Maggie, we can order with our drinks.”
I look from Skippy to the waitress who has materialized beside the table. Shortly, the young woman trots off with our orders.
“Any more quarrels with Devyn?” Skippy asks.
I make a face. “I’ve pointed out that if all she needs is a father, I can accept Seth’s proposal, but she’s as opposed to him filling her void as I am to him filling mine. We both want more.”
“Love.”
Yes, love—a four-letter word that, in the context of someone with whom to spend the rest of my life, is more alien to me than those four-letter words that call for a mouthful of soap. Hating the lump in my throat, I say, “That would be nice.” More than nice—warm and full and forever. “But possible?”
“Well, not if you don’t make an effort.”
Now she sounds like Devyn. “Are you saying I haven’t?”
She puts up her hands. “When’s the last time you went on a date?”
I can’t answer that, not only because it would be incriminating, but because I don’t recall.
“See?”
I shake my head. “It’s not that I’m against—” Aha! “Though Devyn would probably disagree, I am not a misogamist.” Having supplied Skippy with a means to tease me about my vocabulary quest, I smile in anticipation of her reaction.
But her brow rumples. “Well, of course you’re a mi…mis…you know. Or will be, once you’re married.”
“What?”
“A one-man woman.”
Oh. “I didn’t say monogamist. I said misogamist: ‘one who hates marriage.’”
Her frown dissolves. “Is that today’s daily word?”
“It is.”
“Well, I’d like to know what kind of person chooses somethin’ like that for Valentine’s Day. Misogamist!”
“Pessimistic,” I agree.
She laughs. “Well, I’m glad we cleared that up.”
I laugh back, liking the sound and wishing I heard it more often…liking the way it unrolls from me like a red carpet rolled out for a visiting dignitary…liking its sweet and airy taste.
“Uh-oh.” Skippy touches my hand. “We got us an audience.”
I follow her gaze across the dining room to my mother, who glares from Skippy to me, mouth compressed so tightly she’s practically lipless. She doesn’t care for my friend, and all because Skippy was there for me when she wasn’t. Because Skippy has been more of a mother to me than Adele Pickwick. Because, though I love my mother, I don’t always like her.
Devyn sits opposite my mother. Spooning up soup that sends tendrils of steam up around her small face, she appears oblivious to the emotions that walk the invisible tightrope strung between our tables.
Skippy nudges my elbow. “Go say ‘hi.’”
I’m grateful to turn back to her. “We spoke at church.”
“As in ‘hi/bye’? Come on, Maggie, do it.”
“With her glaring at me like that?”
“It’s just ’cause she’s wishin’ she were the one laughing with you.”
And, of course, now she knows why I bowed out of brunch, and it doesn’t sit well that I chose Skippy over her.
“She’s your mother, Maggie.”
“I think she needs more reminding of that than me.”
She grimaces. “You say you’ve forgiven her, but have you really?”
How did we get here? It was my dilemma with Reece I wanted to talk through, not my soap-opera relationship with my mother. “Yes, I’ve forgiven her, but I can’t…I…” Oh no. I am not going to cry. I scrunch my nose against the prickling and blink against the stinging.
“Darlin’.” Skippy pulls my hands into her lap and squeezes them. “I know you’re no longer big angry with her, but you are holdin’ back.”
I am, though I tell myself to stop. I can’t forget those months leading up to Devyn’s birth, when there wasn’t a day my mother didn’t warn me that if I didn’t abort, my life would be ruined. And then the fit she threw at the hospital when I told her I was keeping my baby. She refused to hold her granddaughter and, on the way out the door, said I was on my own. But Skippy took me into her home until I was able to afford my own place. For two years, she sheltered Devyn and me, mothering away the pain and showing me Jesus’s love.
I swallow. “Every time I see my mother with her, whether she’s being kind or snooty, I can’t help but remember that if she’d had her way, there wouldn’t be any Devyn.”
“But there is, ’cause you made the right choice. And your mother did come around.”
Three years after Devyn’s birth, and not the way I longed for her to come around. No hugs or tearful reunions, no long unburdening talks, and not a single “I’m sorry.” Just…around.
“She had no idea what a blessing that little girl would be,” Skippy continues. “She knows now, even if she ain’t too good at showing it. Do you really think she’d prefer to be sittin’ over there all by her lonesome?”
I steel myself for more glaring, but when I look around, my mother is leaning toward Devyn, her attention on something my daughter is saying. Thankfully, my mother’s mouth has loosened up—not a smile, but her lips are once more visible.
Yes, she cares for Devyn. Though it seems grudgingly so at times, I have caught the tender moment and pride in her eyes when her granddaughter’s name appears in the newspaper for straight As or winning an essay contest. But it isn’t enough for her. She wants Devyn to be a beauty and often gets on her—and me—for not putting more of an effort into her appearance. She’s even said that when Devyn is old enough, a nose job is a must. Thankfully, my little girl wasn’t present for that blowup, and I declined to tell her why my mother and I didn’t talk for two months.
“All right,” Skippy says, “I won’t say any more, but you think on it, hear?”
“I hear.” I sigh. “So, what am I going to do about Reece Thorpe?”
Her smile is naughty—er, salacious. “Like I said, Maggie, when’s the last time you went on a date?”
“Not funny, Skip.”
She sobers. “You’re right. Serious business is what this is.”
I shake my napkin into my lap. “So?”
“So you ain’t gonna like what I have to say.” She pats her hair, which is so stiff her fussing has little effect. “I know you don’t believe Reece is likely to have fathered our little Devyn, but what better time to find out?”
My appetite deserts me. What in the world am I doing here?
“Now, Maggie, settle down. I know how much you liked Reece, so much that if he hadn’t broke it off and moved away, you might still be on fine terms with him.”
Not likely. Regardless, he did break it off—after he saw me at my ugliest, and with Skippy’s daughter, no less. I fight the memory that hasn’t visited me in its full-length version in so long its pages are dusty and yellowed, but it fans open almost gleefully, causing the memory to flicker to life…
Yule Baggett, a miniature of her mother, has a tardy coming to her. As do I and one of my best friends, Vicky, who couldn’t decide which miniskirt best showed off her backside this morning when I swung by to pick her up in my car.
“Man, oh man,” Vicky says loudly as Yule bypasses our leisurely ascent of the school steps. “What’s the hurry, doofus?” Vicky throws me a look that I throw back, as is my duty to a fellow cheerleader. And yet I regret it the moment my eyes return to my head.
Vicky, Bethany, Mimi-Sue, and Cindy have all given me a hard time about my “little guilt trips,” blaming my reluctance and fits of remorse on the influence of Reece Thorpe, whom I’ve been dating for five months—a record for me.
“A tardy is a tardy,” Vicky calls as Yule approaches the glass door on which a sign is taped: “Tardy? Obtain a tardy slip from the office before proceeding to class. No exceptions.”
Actually, there are exceptions—unless you break up with the principal’s son as I did last year.
Vicky snorts. “Come to think of it, what are we doing here, Maggie? Why, we should have gone all out with our tardies and stopped at Martha’s for a muffin.”
And a hot chocolate with a splash of coffee. Of course, we could always jump back in the car and—
Yule screeches and, as she falls down on the top step, one of her spiky shoes shoots off her foot and hits the glass door.
I mumble something that sounds like, “Oh no,” and take the next two steps as one. But that’s as far as I get before a clawed hand sinks into my forearm.
“You’re kidding, right?” Vicky demands. “You aren’t going to rush to the aid of that…reject!”
I look at where Yule is scrabbling to get up, her face contorted and brilliant red. I was going to help her, much like I saw Reece do last week when a drunken Elmore Gass stumbled out of the bushes and passed out near the park bench where Reece and I were making fine progress in the “relationship department.” It took five days to get back to where we were—and beyond.
Vicky’s nails sink deeper, her pretty face not so pretty anymore. “What in tarnation is wrong with you?”
Is there something wrong with me? There never was before. In fact, you can’t get much more popular than me.
Yule is whimpering and, strangely, I hear the pitiful sound all the way through me. There is something wrong with me. I think.
“I declare,” Vicky spits out, “you either get yourself right, or you’re gonna be on the outs with your kind.”
My kind. I don’t know why that doesn’t sound right. After all, my mother has always said there’s a difference between people like us and people like Yule Baggett. And it’s seemed pretty clear to me, but now Vicky is saying my friends might turn on me—friends who’ve looked up to me and sought my approval and company. Is she right? If so, where would that leave me? At the back of the line?
Suddenly, Yule’s whimpers are drowned out by imaginings of my friends’ disgust as Vicky tells them—No! I’m still one of them, the one who says what is and what isn’t. I will never be the outcast that Yule or my cousin Piper is. Will never suffer the humiliation of being at the back of the line, which my mother and I narrowly avoided when charges were brought against my daddy and Piper’s father for illegal activities in their joint bid to be elected mayor of Pickwick. In fact, I’ll die before I let Vicky usurp my place as my mother has warned she’ll do, given the chance.
I pull my arm free. “There’s nothin’ wrong with me, Vicky Dixon.” I march up the steps to where Yule has made it to her feet. “Quit your snivelin’,” I practically shout to be certain Vicky catches every word. “You deserved that, wearin’ those tight pants and walkin’ around on stilettos that make you look like a hussy on a street corner!”
“At least she isn’t one,” a steely voice says over my shoulder.
My body jerks, and I look around into Reece’s green eyes that bore through me from behind those dark floppy bangs I like to pull my fingers through. The worst of it isn’t that he caught me being ugly. It’s how I was ugly—making Yule out to be a hussy, as if my walls weren’t made of glass that has been shattered time and again. More unfortunately, Reece has firsthand knowledge of this from what happened between us the other night. What I made sure happened.
Movement past his shoulder pulls me back to Vicky. She’s watching me, sizing up my crown, itchin’ to get her hands on it.
I doll up my face with a smile sure to wipe from memory any picture of my ugliness. “Why, darlin’,” I drip honey from every vowel, “you’re late again. What was it this time? That scrap metal sculpture of yours? A paintin’?” I gasp. “Or was it that charcoal drawin’ of me you’ve been working so hard on?”
Not a glimmer of softening. But as I stare at him, I notice it isn’t just anger he’s wearing. There’s something else, evidenced by bloodshot eyes and hair that isn’t just mussed but messy. Sorrow? Weariness? “Are you all right, Reece?”
He brushes past me, puts an arm around Yule’s shoulders, and leads her forward. “Here’s your shoe.” He picks it up and hands it to her. “You okay?”
She sniffs. “I’m okay. Thanks.”
The two disappear inside, and I feel sick at the realization of what I’ve done. To my detriment—and Yule’s—I only know how to apply peer pressure, not deflect it.
“Good for you,” Vicky says as I near. “You handled that just fine.”
“He hates me,” I whisper.
She puts an arm across my shoulders. “I say, good riddance. He wasn’t your type.”
Or my kind?
“So, Martha’s for a muffin?”
I shake off her arm. “I’m going home.”
“Whatever for?”
I ignore her question and say over my shoulder, “Tell Coach for me, will you?” No after-school pompom pumping for me. Even if my stomach wasn’t roiling, I couldn’t do it today.
“Okay,” Vicky calls. “Love ya.”
Five months later, she was the first of my “best friends” to turn her back on me when I could no longer hide my pregnancy. Most of the others followed, and on the day I graduated from high school with a basketball-size baby bump, I felt even more alone than Yule could have. After all, her mother came to her graduation. Skippy Baggett, for all of her tight clothes and teetering high heels, was loving and forgiving.
This I learned on the day I skipped school to drive to Asheville for counseling about my unwanted pregnancy. At the outskirts of town, I got a flat and was left at the mercy of the woman who pulled up behind me in a battered convertible. She knew who I was, not only because the town of Pickwick was relatively small then and the Pickwick family prominent despite bouts of scandalous behavior, but because several times over the years, she had complained to school officials about the way my friends and I treated her daughter.
And yet that day, Skippy greeted me kindly and got down on the cold asphalt to change my tire. That should have been the extent of our encounter, but as she bounced a high-heeled foot on the tire iron, she asked why I wasn’t in school. For some reason, I told the truth, and instead of going to the clinic in Asheville, I followed her to Martha’s, and we talked for hours over muffins. So I guess I wasn’t entirely alone the day of graduation. Skippy was there for me too…
I look to the woman beside me, and she grins. “Welcome back.”
“Hmm?”
She juts her chin, and I see that our meals have arrived, and Skippy has started in on her French dip.
“Sorry.” I pick up one of the quarters of my Monte Cristo. “I was remembering the day at school when Yule fell and Reece—”
“That’s what I figured.”
I take a bite. The sandwich is a mouth-watering combination of ham, cheese, bread, egg, and powdered sugar, but my taste buds have gone over to the dark side of the moon. I swallow. “I don’t know why you have anything to do with me, Skip. Why you give a hoot after what I—”
She shakes her au jus–drenched French dip at me. “Nuh-uh, missy. That’s behind us, and it’s gonna stay there. Yule’ll tell you that herself.”
Yes, she forgave me, but that doesn’t mean we’re friends. Rather, she accepts me, though I don’t think she had much choice, seeing as every time she came home from college those first few years, she couldn’t get to her mother without going past my baby and me. Too, Yule is a good Christian like Skippy, and while there’s no longer a wall between us, I sense the fence and don’t begrudge it. I’m just glad that when she leaves he
r physical therapy practice in Knoxville to visit her mother, she’s willing to talk to me over the rails. She really is an incredible woman. Now, if she’d just stop having babies for others, find a nice guy, and give Skippy some grandchildren of her own—
That’s another story. I summon an apologetic smile. “I know it’s behind us, but I can’t help but think of it now that Reece is back and how cool he was toward me.”
She waves for me to eat, and I take another bite. “Well…” She dunks her sandwich into the au jus. “It seems to me you’ll just have to show Reece how the Lord has worked in your life since he left town.”
I would protest if my mouth weren’t full, which is how she planned it. I chew faster, but in the meantime let my eyes do the talking. I swallow my mouthful. “Listen—”
“It’s time you knew who your baby’s father is.” She sets her sopping sandwich aside. “Even if you’re set on keepin’ it from Devyn.”
“I don’t see what difference—”
“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to.”
We’ve gone around about this before, beginning with Devyn’s birth, when Skippy tried to convince me to seek support for my child, and most recently when Devyn started asking about her father.
I push my plate away. “Things are best the way they are.”
“And if you ever need to know her father’s medical background?”
That does worry me. Though Reece looks healthy, I haven’t seen the other two in years. When Gary Winsome left for college, his parents moved to Florida, and he hasn’t been back. As for Chase Elliot, I saw him a few times those first couple of years when he came home from college to visit his mother, but not since.
“I don’t know, Skip.”
“Well, I say you take the opportunity God has pried open your fingers to put in your hands and ask Reece Thorpe to be tested—”
“No!” The word shoots from me, and I regret it even before hurt flashes across my target’s face. Not that it makes me any more receptive to her advice. For one thing, I see no advantage to disproving Reece is Devyn’s father. For another, the thought of asking him to submit to testing makes me nauseous. Of course, I doubt he’d be surprised that I lied to him about being sexually active with other guys so soon after our breakup, but better suspicion than confirmation of my promiscuity.