by Lee Smith
“I’m sorry too,” I said.
The next day I went to work, watered my violets, then took two of Martin, Joiner, and Perkins’s trust account deposits next door to the bank where I deposited them straight into my own checking account. It was easy. I’ve known the teller at First Union, Minnie Leola Meadows, for years. She goes to our church. “How’s Billy getting along?” she asked as she handed me the deposit slip, and I said, “Better.”
That night I finished paying the bills.
As the months passed, I got good at this. Sometimes I’d take the rent checks from the property we managed. Sometimes I’d write a check to “cash” for something I’d make up, such as “supplies” or a phony repairman. I had everybody’s air-conditioning worked on, for instance. Sometimes I’d dip it out of the tax money. Most often, though, I simply wrote myself a check off the books, which was easiest of all — and why not? Nobody ever checked the books except me, and I kept them as neat as ever. Plus I never took much, mind you, only what we needed to cover those bills. I was not really stealing either. I fully intended to pay it all back just as soon as Billy started working again.
Finally, they took his leg out of the big cast, pulled out the pins, and put it into a lighter cast which closed with Velcro, so at least he could take a shower. Oh, it just killed me to see how little and shriveled up that poor leg had gotten! I massaged it for him every night. But Billy was pepping up some. He started going to physical therapy every day, and then he got on that health kick. He quit drinking so much. He took a long walk every evening, like the doctor said. Sometimes he’d walk for an hour or more.
“I CAN SEE RIGHT where this is going,” Sam Hicks speaks up, grinning. Sam Hicks has a big gray mustache that hangs down on both sides of his mouth.
“Hush, Sam,” Lois Rubin says, writing on her clipboard.
BUT I COULDN’T SEE IT! I still thought Billy Sims hung the moon, and when he finally went back to work, I thought, okay, now we’ll be all right. We’ll be fine again. I was proud of myself for taking care of our financial problems without having to bother him about it. And the power company turned out to be real nice, giving Billy a sales job at their regional office in Boyd since he can’t climb anymore. But it was not the same. Billy was never home now, what with commuting to work and the physical therapy and the health club and all. And it seemed like we still kept getting further and further behind financially, no matter how hard I’d scrimp and save or how many times I’d add up the numbers.
“HE WAS HOLDING OUT on you, wasn’t he? Holding out! Son of a gun!” says Sam Hicks. “Hee, hee, hee.”
“Why you poor thing,” says Lois Rubin.
THIS IS HOW I found out.
My friend Becky Brannon, that I have mentioned before, had just moved into a new town home in the Village Green development, and so one afternoon I decided to ride over there and visit. It was a Sunday afternoon in June. Billy had gone to the lake fishing with Red and Tiny. So here we went, Debbi and me, with a varie-gated geranium from Food Lion as a house gift. They’ve tried to make Village Green look like a real village, with flower beds and picket fences and porches on most of the houses. All the streets have flower names — Becky lives on Primrose Circle. I could tell it was just her cup of tea, she’s always had ruffled curtains and ducks everyplace. She was already planning to stencil her kitchen.
We found her unpacking boxes. She jumped up to hug me. “Don’t you just love it?” she said, and I have to say, I did. Owning a home has always been my own personal dream, but I was real happy for Becky who has always worked so hard and deserves it. All her furniture, which had been too old-timey for her other apartment, fit right in. I was in the process of admiring everything, having fixed Deborah Lynn a Pepsi, when I chanced to look out the kitchen window and received the shock of my life.
For there was Billy Sims, bare chested, wearing cutoff blue jeans, leaning down to turn on a water faucet at the house next door. Then he proceeded to unroll an obviously new, long green hose from one of those spool things, and pull it around the corner of the house out of my view. I walked into the living room where Becky sat on the couch unpacking another box, surrounded by knickknacks and crumpled newspapers.
“Becky,” I said, “would you do me the favor of stepping up to your window and looking over there next door and telling me what you see?”
Becky looked at me like I was crazy, and then she got up and did it. She stared back at me speechless.
For there stood Billy Sims, big as life, watering her next-door neighbor’s grass, while a red-headed girl in a halter top weeded a flower bed around a birdbath. She had long white legs like pipe cleaners.
I knew who she was.
“That is Miss Lonergan, the physical therapist,” I said.
Just at that moment Debbi came into the room and said, “Mama, can we — “ and then, “What’s the matter?”
“Not a thing, sweetie,” Becky said. “Why don’t you go in my bedroom and watch TV until your mama gets ready to go?” She took Debbi by the hand. Becky came back with a box of Pepperidge Farm cookies, which she opened without a word. We ate them while waiting for Billy to quit watering Miss Lonergan’s yard and go in her house so I could leave, which I finally did. Becky’s a big girl too. But the thing about it that just killed me, and kills me to this day, is that Billy never once watered our own yard at home — Billy never showed a sign of yard work!
Now, do you remember what I told you Miss Manners said?
I took Debbi by Wendy’s on the way home and then watched The Little Mermaid tape with her and then put her to bed and went to bed myself. Of course I couldn’t sleep! My mind was in a whirl, thinking of what to do. Finally I decided to lay all the cards out on the table, confront him the minute he got home. But then I heard him dragging that leg up the stairs. And then I heard him in the bathroom splashing water on his pretty face. And then here he came, easing himself into the bed (our bedroom suite is not paid for either). He flung one arm across my stomach, the way he always does, and in about one minute flat, he started that little snuffly breathing.
Then I knew I would not say a word. I wanted to keep him with me as long as I could, you see. I never in the world thought I’d ever have Billy Sims in the first place, and I couldn’t stand to lose him. So I wasn’t going to speed it up, nor do anything different. I couldn’t. I didn’t close my eyes that whole night long. Finally I just punched in the alarm thing before it went off, and waited for dawn to come. I made Billy a pan of biscuits to eat when he got up.
“YOU DIDN’T.” LOIS RUBIN quits writing at this point. “Weren’t you angry?”
ANGER HAD NOT YET occurred to me.
That morning I went on to work as usual, and five more weeks passed by. I was holding my breath the entire time. Billy took me and Debbi out to the lake twice, and we also went overnight to a Garth Brooks concert in Lexington. I even got Billy to go to the church homecoming with me. I took two pans of my three-cheese lasagna, by popular request.
Then — now this is yesterday, of course, Monday morning — I had no sooner got to work and watered my African violets and sat down at my desk than here came two of my lawyers, Mr. Martin and Mr. Perkins, into my little office. They knew. It was written all over their faces. “Dee Ann,” Mr. Martin said, “this is terribly hard for us.” He looked like his heart would break. “You have been a valued employee, as you know. The best we’ve ever had. But on last Friday afternoon, after you left, I had occasion to check the George Pendleton trust account, and I was most dismayed to find that no deposit had been recorded this month.”
“It hadn’t?” I’d kept the check, of course. But I couldn’t believe that I had failed to write it in the book. It was my own dumb mistake. If I’d done it right, Mr. Martin never would have known the difference. He’s an egghead intellectual, not a practical bone in his body. But this time he fooled me.
“So I decided to check on some of the other trusts,” he said. “I took the books home with me this weekend, Dee
Ann, and finally ended up calling Longstreet” — he pointed his long bony finger at Mr. Longstreet, who looked like he would rather be anywhere in the world but here — “and as nearly as we can figure, you’re into us for about six thousand dollars. Would you say that’s fairly accurate?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Actually it is $13,825.
“We realize you have had some difficult circumstances in your personal life, Dee Ann, so perhaps we can work something out here, among us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Embezzlement is a felony offense,” Mr. Martin said kindly. “But perhaps it need not come to that. What would you say if we worked out some sort of a repayment schedule . . .”
“No,” I said. “I could never make it. I can’t make it now. Go on and do whatever you have to,” I said. “I’m through with the whole thing.”
Mr. Longstreet Perkins raised one bushy gray eyebrow. “In that case,” he said, “I’m afraid we’ll need to walk down the street to the police station. I’m so sorry, Dee Ann. Do you want to call Billy first?”
“Hell, no,” I said, surprising myself. “He doesn’t deserve me.”
LOIS RUBIN FLINGS DOWN her clipboard. “Damn straight!” she says.
“Listen,” Sam Hicks says, “there is some men, myself included, that prefers a large woman.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” says Lois Rubin.
THE OLD LAWYERS STOOD there looking at each other. “Well, then,” Mr. Martin said. I stood up behind my desk and looked them both in the eye, first one, then the other. I’m as tall as they are. I knew they hated this. They hated that I had done it, they hated having to turn me in. And in Mr. Longstreet Perkins’s eyes, there was something beyond that even. He understood that anybody could have done what I did in the name of love, anybody at all, that he could even have done it himself. “Ah, Dee Ann,” he said.
“Listen,” I said. “It’s all right.”
And it was. It is. As we walked down the street, my heart got lighter and lighter with each step. I was glad to be caught! Mr. Martin and Mr. Perkins spoke to everybody we passed. A summer storm was blowing up by then, as you may recall. Wind whipped down the sidewalk, clouds tore across the sky. Mr. Longstreet Perkins had to hold on to his famous straw hat. It started thundering. Suddenly I felt the way I used to feel when Sissy and me were kids. We’d run up on the top of the mountain to whirl around and around whenever a storm came up. You can smell the lightning in the air, which is real exciting, it doesn’t smell like anything else in the world. So that’s how I felt, walking down the sidewalk to this jail. Drops of rain as big as silver dollars splattered on the sidewalk. We were getting real wet. My hair lay plastered in strings all down my face. Lightning flashed. It kept on thundering. But my heart rose like a bird with each step we took until I was flying, flying up through the electric air and out among the clouds.
Ultima Thule
You’ll remember to get the Thule put on top of the Volvo, then?” On his way over to the university, Jake turns back to ask her. “And make sure the key works?” He hands her this little bitty key.
“Sure,” Nova says, rubbing her eyes, wearing a black number three muscle shirt that used to be her brother’s, and nothing else. She knows she can get Theron to do it. “The drug boys are coming today,” she says, and Jake nods. He is on the board of Agape, the residential drug treatment program which runs the landscaping and lawn care business that comes to work at their little farm outside Charlottesville, which is not really a farm, any more than they are really farmers, or Jake is an average graduate student, or they are a regular young couple just trying to make ends meet.
No. The big surprise is that Jake has turned out to belong to a very rich family, rich enough to own an entire island in Maine, for instance, which is where they are heading tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn in the Volvo with the Thule on top of it like an enormous coffin filled with their clothes because the dogs will be taking up all the space in the car — Thor, Jake’s old black lab, in the backseat, and Odin, the big husky pup, in the back-back. Everybody in Jake’s family owns big dogs that wear bandannas and go to Maine. Nova has been there once, last year, when she and Jake had just gotten married.
Everybody in Jake’s family called her “The Bride” in a tongue-in-cheek way that made her nervous at first, until she figured out that’s just how they all talk, like they are putting quotation marks around everything. Nova recognizes irony, which is what Mrs. Stevenson, her senior English teacher, defined as, “Irony is when the fire chief’s house burns down.” Part of the irony in calling her “The Bride” came from the fact that Nova was already pregnant, she knew this, too.
“No, this is great, this is awesome, this is seriously great,” Jake’s brother had assured her in Maine. “We always figured he was gay.”
Now Jake blows her a kiss from the yard before he drives off in his old truck. Nova has never known a man before who would blow anybody a kiss, ever, under any circumstances. She rubs her flat stomach, fingering the navel ring. Jake took pictures of her pregnancy, every few days. He used rolls and rolls of film. She lost that baby at five and a half months, and it was a girl, they said. Nova had wanted a girl, she would have taken such good care of it, not like her own mother at all. Nova and Jake had already bought a crib, and gotten Agape to paint the extra bedroom tangerine, her idea. Nova has plenty of ideas, she is not dumb at all. Jake has made her realize this. Now they have closed the door to the little tangerine room, until later.
Good thing they’ve got these two dogs, which keep her busy, sort of. Nova likes the dogs, but she did not like Maine, an entire state that smells like Pine-Sol, especially Blueberry Island, a very cold and foggy place that is far away from everything, especially the grocery store. Nova does like to cook and it drove her crazy not to be able to go to the grocery store every day, which is what she likes to do at home. Also, the water will freeze your ass off and the grocery store does not even carry grits. Also, there is no TV on Blueberry Island, something Jake forgot to mention in all the times he talked about the island like it was paradise. The only positive thing was that all the Maine women turned out to be big and ugly, almost as if they were doing it on purpose, so this made Nova look like a beauty queen. You should see these women! Nobody wears any makeup or nice clothes. Their hair sticks out on one side and looks awful. This is also true of Jake’s mother and sisters, at least in the summertime. Nova does not know if they look any better during the rest of the year or not.
She and Jake did not go up to Connecticut for Christmas, although they were invited, because this is when Nova lost the baby and had to spend several days in the University of Virginia Hospital, very ironic considering that is where she and Jake first met, though Jake was over in Neuro sciences and she was working the cash register in the snack bar on the first floor. Jake had been in the hospital for three months when she met him, this is why he had a blue badge and was allowed to come down to the first floor unsupervised. Later he would get a town pass, and still later a day pass that would allow him to take her to the Boars Head Inn and fuck her eyes out. Yes! His brothers would have been so surprised. Nova had never been to the Boars Head Inn before, although she had lived outside Charlottesville all her life. Their room had a sixty-inch TV hidden away inside an antique hutch, she was so surprised. Also a minibar.
Nova had noticed Jake right away because he was so thin. Most of the mental patients are real fat, it is due to their medications. Jake was also sweet, not usually true of doctors or patients either one. The day they met, he was standing patiently in line behind that heavy woman with the big blonde hairdo growing out black at the roots who was so pushy and bought the same thing every day, a cheeseburger and fries and strawberry shortcake, and had a fit whenever they didn’t have the strawberry shortcake. That day she forgot her money. When Nova handed her the little piece of paper, she started to cry. The woman had a black mustache, which drove Nova crazy, Nova has got sort of an obsession
about facial hair. Maybe she should slip this woman some Nair. “Just go on,” Nova told her, looking all around first. “You can pay me tomorrow.”
“Oh no . . . I . . .” The woman began to flap her hands.
“Here. Keep the change,” Jake said, popping up behind the woman, handing over a ten-dollar bill.
“I’m not allowed to do that,” Nova said as the woman started to cry.
“Just add my bill onto hers, then,” Jake said.
The woman cried louder, big sobs coming up out of her cleavage.
“Here now, ma’am.” He took the woman by the elbow and steered her over to a table, pulling out a chair for her.
Nova rang up the woman’s food again, along with three little bowls of macaroni and cheese, and coffee. “That’s not a very balanced meal,” she said to him when he came back.
“Well.” Jake grinned at her. “I’m not a very balanced man. I’m crazy.”
“What’s your diagnosis?” Nova knew she wasn’t supposed to ask.
“Life,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Nova,” she said. “Named for the car, not the star. My mother got pregnant at a drive-in.”
Nova thought he looked like one of those cornhusk dolls her granny used to make, with thin, thin corn silk hair flopping onto his face and a long thin stick nose and big even teeth like a row of corn on the cob and beautiful huge blue eyes like lakes, swimming behind his thick glasses. Or she was swimming in his eyes, that’s more like it. Suddenly Nova became very critical of Raymond Crabtree who had given her this job for certain considerations, he had steel blue jaws by five o’clock, and lived for Monday Night Football.
“You don’t seem very crazy to me,” Nova heard herself say, though really he was so thin and pale, he was not her type at all.
“I guess you’ll have to get to know me, then,” Jake said, and so she did, and still he never did seem very crazy to her, only too sensitive for this world. Jake used to be a rock musician and play in bands, she learned, but now he was a graduate student in American Studies. He used to do a lot of drugs, but now he does oral histories with people such as lobster fishermen in Maine and the drug boys who work for Agape. He has already taped Theron.