by Lee Smith
“Well! Babe, you look great,” Willie says, squeezing Lilah’s shoulder a bit tentatively, as if he’s testing to make sure she’s real. They haven’t seen her for, how long now? Four months, maybe? And there’s something different about her tonight, for sure. Lilah is, well, beautiful. She wears a long-sleeved T and black pants, a pink sweater tied around her waist, her long blonde hair springing out all around her shoulders. She’s curled it, or something. She looks animated, like she’s giving off sparks. “See?” she says, grabbing Kyle’s arm. “Isn’t this place just like I told you, just exactly?”
“You nailed it, hon,” he says, looking around. “I’m so happy to be here.”
Roxy is glad she had time to clean up. Still, she can’t imagine exactly what Lilah has told him. And she’s not sure she likes that “hon.” “I’ve got dinner all ready,” she says brightly. “But why don’t you take your stuff on back, settle in, and we’ll all have a drink first?”
“Mmmm. Ham, right?” Lilah says. “I can smell it. And some banana pudding for me, I hope?”
Kyle clears his throat. “Actually,” he says in the deep noncommittal voice of, say, a news broadcaster, “I’ve got a little surprise for Lilah. I’ve already made reservations for the two of us down at the Ritz-Carlton for dinner. It’s going to be a special night. She didn’t know anything about it,” he adds, seeing Roxy’s surprised face. “And I know we’ll want some of that ham for sandwiches tomorrow.”
“Oh, Kyle!” Lilah claps her hands, a favorite gesture from childhood. “You are too sweet! He’s just crazy,” she tells Roxy and Willie. “He’s always springing these surprises on me, I just never know what he’s going to do next.” Her hand flies up to her mouth. “Oh no,” she says. “I think that’s a really fancy place, honey. I don’t have a thing with me that I could possibly wear.”
But Kyle, it seems, cannot stop grinning. “Look in your bag.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just look in your bag,” he says. “And why don’t you go ahead and take a shower, too? While I run a quick errand. Our reservation is at eight thirty, we don’t want to be late. This is going to be a very special occasion.”
Lilah grabs up her bags and runs down the tiny hallway, giggling.
Kyle turns to Willie. “How about taking a little ride with me, sir?” he asks. “I want to buy her some flowers.”
“You can get some over at Food City,” Roxy suggests. “They’ve got plenty. I just saw them, I was just there. In the display case right next to the produce. Or you could just pick some of that forsythia blooming right next door, by the Connors’ garage. They’re not even here, they’d never know. They’re real nice anyway.”
Over Kyle’s head, Roxy sees Willie grinning at her, then making a kissy face with his mouth.
“No,” Kyle says. “I mean real flowers. Roses. And actually there’s a florist at 311 Hatch Street. Do you know where Hatch Street is, sir?”
“Willie,” Willie says.
“Sir?” Kyle blinks. “Do you know where that is?”
“Call me Willie, I mean,” Willie says, “and hell yes, of course I know where that is. Come on, Romeo, we’d better get a move on.” He grabs two beers from the refrigerator and throws one to Kyle, rolling his eyes at Roxy as they leave. Roxy sinks down on the davenport, feeling like a hurricane has just hit this little house. Down the hall she can hear water running and Lilah singing at the top of her lungs, belting out “Angel from Montgomery” in the shower. She’s got a great voice, just like her dad.
Roxy tries to relax and act normal but then suddenly she just can’t stand it, she jumps up and rushes back to their bedroom locking the door behind her and takes the tackle box back out and shuffles through the letters like a deck of cards, looking at the dates. Actually they’re all a long time back, aren’t they? The most recent ones she can find are dated 1991. Roxy takes a deep breath and smooths them out on her lap.
Bo,
I saw you there in the back at Bills funeral honey, you were so sweet to come. I wish I could of spoken to you. Did you see Rita? And little Billy and Vicki and the kids came in from Panama City, did you see them? She is getting sort of fat. My daughter Lisa is the one that is beautiful and cried real loud. And of course Ricky, I bet you would not of reconized Ricky if you had seen him in the street, now would you? Doesn’t he look good thogh? And that sweet girl, could you tell she is pregnant? Ricky jumped all over my brother Wayne for saying Bill’s death is a blessing, but I told him, this is just what people say at a funeral. And of course it IS a blessing after all these long years but it is so sad too, Lord I don’t know what I will do with myself, without Bill laying over there in the VA to tell you the truth. He never showed a sign that he could tell I was there, but I belive he did know it somehow, it was just something I felt way deep down always.
Well goodbye for now,
Mary Etta
Bo,
I appreciate yr letters and yr concern. I am sorry I did not write or call you back, I could not. I just went all to pieces when Bill died if you want to know the truth, I did not expect that to happen but there it is. Seems like I could not see you any more, nor write, I can not explain this ether, thogh you have been so good to me. But do not worry, things have turned out for the best after all. I have a suprise for you! I have married Mr. Souci, that I used to tell you about, that owns the motel where I used to clean, his wife had died some time previous. He will not let me clean any more, and treats me great! We are running this motel together now. And I am wishing you the very best Bo now and always. You know you saved my life.
Yr. grateful friend for ever and ever,
Mrs. Mary Etta Souci
Way to go, Mary Etta! A part of Roxy is cheered up by this news. She admires Mary Etta, she can’t help it. She ruffles through the stack again to make sure there are no more recent letters. But that’s it. Shit! Twenty years ago. This whole thing was over twenty years ago. Over and done with. Ships that passed in the night, water under the bridge. The only problem is Roxy’s problem now, the only problem is that she knows. That her heart is broken, that she is devastated, that’s all.
She knows.
THE DOORBELL RINGS, a sound Roxy hasn’t heard in years. Usually everybody just bursts in here. It rings again, a tinny blast from the past. Shit! Why are they ringing the bell, why don’t they just come on in the house? Hastily she stuffs the letters back in the tackle box and shoves it back in the closet. She runs a brush through her hair and slashes on some lipstick (Red, God damn him!), then hurries out into the tiny hall where she almost collides with Lilah, enveloped in a cloud of perfume and wearing a low-cut black dress, where did she get that? Lilah has never owned such a dress in her life. And where did that cleavage come from?
The doorbell rings again.
“You answer it.” Lilah pushes Roxy down the hall. “You get it . . . please?”
Roxy gives her a quick fierce hug and strides to the door. “Hel-lo there!” She sings out flinging it open and there stands Kyle holding the biggest bouquet of red roses in the world and smiling a goofy smile. His hair looks wet, slicked back. Somehow he has acquired a jacket and a tie. “Good evening, ma’am,” he says like a boy in a play.
“Good evening, Kyle.” Roxy feels like she’s in the play too. She peers over his shoulder to see Willie out there in the shrubbery drawing an imaginary knife across his throat and rolling his eyes back in his head like he’s dying, this would be funny if Roxy didn’t hate him so much and wish he were dead.
“Come on in.” She steps back.
Kyle comes in then stands there like a deer in the headlights holding his ridiculous roses as Lilah walks forward to greet him. “Oh wow, you look beautiful, hon,” he says. One thing about Kyle is, he’s sincere. Or he certainly seems to be. Actually he looks like he’s going to pass out. He thrusts the bouquet at Lilah.
“Oh Kyle, how gorgeous,” she says. Her blonde hair bounces all around her shoulders, her lips are glistening with some of th
at wet-look lipstick. Everybody looks wet these days.
Suddenly Kyle sticks his hand in his pocket and comes up with a shiny little camera. “Can you take our picture, ma’am?” he asks Roxy. “See, just hold it out and look in here. You can see us. That’s it. Okay.” He shows Roxy how to do it then springs back over to Lilah’s side, pulling her close. She smiles brilliantly — they both smile brilliantly — into the tiny camera, into the future stretched out before them.
“Oh, it worked!” Roxy cries. “Look at this, it’s perfect!”
“Thanks,” Kyle says. “Now I guess we’d better get going.”
“Okay, but I . . .” Clearly Lilah doesn’t know what to do with the enormous roses until her daddy takes them from her, kissing her lightly on the forehead.
“Have fun, bunny,” he says, his old name for her.
“Don’t wait up for us,” Lilah calls back, laughing. Her perfume still hangs in the air.
“Bye,” Roxy yells out the door.
“Whew.” Willie slams it. “Oh honey — “ He goes straight to Roxy and hugs her tight, a big long bear hug. “He’s going to marry my baby,” Willie says into her hair. “He’s going to fucking marry her.”
“What? Are you sure?” Roxy pulls back to get a good look at him.
“Yeah, fuck yeah, he is. He really is.” Willie is sort of grinning and sort of crying at the same time. “He’s going to ask her tonight.”
“You’re kidding. How do you know?”
“Because he asked me first, damn it. He asked me for her hand in marriage. That was the whole point of making me go on that little ride with him. He told me he would always love her and protect her and cherish her. He did everything except get down on one knee.”
“Cherish? He said cherish?”
“Yeah. Cherish.” Willie puts the roses down on the old oak table.
“So then what did you say?”
“Well, what could I say? I said yes, damn it, sure, if that’s what she wants to do. I said it’s all up to Lilah.”
“Then what?”
“Then he started grinning, then he hit me on the back so hard I almost fell down, then he hugged me.”
Roxy can’t even picture this. Willie is not a hugger of men.
“Then he shook my hand for about a half an hour, liked to kill me.” Willie goes into the kitchen and makes himself a gin and tonic. “I see you’ve been hitting the bottle here.” He grins at Roxy.
“Well, just a little. I guess I was nervous, I could tell something was up the minute she called.” Roxy follows him.
“Wait, I didn’t even tell you the punch line.” Willie takes a long swallow. “Then he gets out this little box and opens it up and shows me the ring.”
“He did?” Suddenly Roxy’s getting light-headed, she’s got to sit down. “So what does it look like?”
“Hell, I don’t know. It’s just a regular engagement ring, all right?” Willie pulls a chair over next to hers and sits down too. He puts his hand on her thigh.
“I mean, does it have a round diamond? Or an emerald cut, or is it square, or what? Is it gold or white gold?” Roxy hears herself rattling on and on.
Willie starts laughing. “Damned if I know. It’s pretty, though. It’s real big, real sparkly and everything. The works. The real thing.”
“Oh my.” Roxy can hardly breathe now.
Willie’s massaging her knee, almost reflexively. “Seems like he’s a real old-fashioned, stand-up kind of guy. He even offered to help pay for the wedding, what do you think of that?”
“Really? What did you say?”
“I said hell no, of course. I’ve only got one baby, damned if I won’t pay for her whole wedding. Then he said, ‘Well sir, I appreciate that, and of course I haven’t discussed this with Lilah yet, but we may want a pretty big wedding,’ and I said, ‘Well then, we’ll have the biggest goddamn wedding you’ve ever seen.’ “
“They are grown-ups,” Roxy reminds him. “I’m sure they have a lot of friends and business associates, and just think of all the people we might want to ask, too. Not to mention Kyle’s family and their friends.” Roxy has always, always wanted to run a big wedding, maybe because she didn’t really get to have one herself. The first time, she was pregnant, and the second time, she and Willie got married by a justice of the peace wearing a Gamecocks cap under a hanging lightbulb in Darlington, South Carolina. Seth and Todd both had nice weddings, but she did not get to run them because she was only the mother of the groom, not the bride, everything would have been very different if she’d been in charge. For instance she would never have a sit-down meal because that is the kiss of death, it just stops the flow of a party dead. Roxy would have a lot of little feeding stations instead, each one with a different kind of food so everybody can move around and mingle and visit with each other. And fireworks! She’s always thought a wedding should end with fireworks, though of course that would mean an evening wedding instead of afternoon.
“Be right back, honey.” Willie squeezes her thigh and disappears down the hall.
Actually Roxy won’t mind if Lilah and Kyle choose autumn instead of summer, autumn weddings can be so much more colorful, not to mention comfortable. The weekend after Thanksgiving would be perfect for a wedding. Or even Christmas. What about the weekend just before Christmas? The decorations could be so cute, so original. Red and green. Glitter — Roxy loves glitter. But what is she thinking? She and Willie will be split up by Christmas, God damn him, she’ll be long gone. She might have another life in another town. Lilah will have to hire a wedding planner. Maybe Roxy won’t even be invited.
But she can still plan Alice’s wedding, can’t she? as she has planned all of Alice’s birthday parties and Halloween costumes and trips and school clothes and Christmas presents over the years. Alice was born on Christmas Eve 1987, they put a Christmas angel and a gold star on her crib at the hospital. She died April 20, 1990. She was almost two and a half. It was a picnic at Highland Park for all the families of the girls on Lilah’s soccer team. Willie, in an apron, was grilling burgers while Roxy kept an eye on Alice and chatted with the other mothers as they set out all the food on the long table. Roxy was opening a box of paper napkins when all of a sudden she couldn’t see Alice anywhere among the other kids, and then the screams went up. Alice had run out into the parking lot after a ball just as Dave Bridges backed up his SUV, going after more ice. Somehow, Willie was there already, covering the small body with his own, while Alice’s blood pooled out all around him. “She’s dead,” he said to everybody. “Go on home, please, take the girls. Just remember Alice, just remember how she was.” Roxy has relived this moment over and over and over, thousands of times. She was watching Alice and then Alice wasn’t there. Everybody said it was not Roxy’s fault, again and again. It was not Dave Bridges’s fault either, he couldn’t see her at all. It was just one of those things. But Roxy can’t let it go. She has kept this terrible doubt in her mind, just as she has kept the Christmas angel and the gold star all these years, wrapped in tissue paper in the secret pigeonhole of Mama’s old desk from up home. She has kept all of Alice’s baby clothes too.
And over the years, she has kept on imagining Alice — little Alice here at the beach, walking hand in hand with her dad, making sandcastles, flying her kite, feeding the seagulls; sturdy Alice at eight, strong square knees and flyaway red curls; Alice a tomboy in ragged jeans at ten, surveying the world from her clubhouse up in the apple tree behind the house in Macon; Alice at thirteen, pigtailed, crazy about horses, leaning forward in her stirrups to ride through a golden field; Alice a high school cheerleader, turning cartwheels across a floodlit football field; or Alice right now, at twenty, a very good student at a very good school somewhere in New En gland, she’s still wearing jeans and those kind of combat boots like they all wear now, all the smart girls, she’s got little old-fashioned granny glasses and dreamy blue eyes and a sweet look about her, like an old-fashioned girl, like an angel. She’s biting her lip as she writes
in the notebook on her lap, she’s sitting on the grass under one of those huge old trees that they have up there on campuses in New England. Alice hasn’t even thought about getting married yet! And she’s got plenty of time — all the time in the world.
“Honey? Honey? What’s the matter?” Willie’s behind her now, he’s nuzzling her neck with his prickly beard, bringing her back, as he has done time and time again. Oh how she will miss him.
When Alice died, Roxy’s grief was like a big dark, windy place that she was lost in, like the old abandoned Preston mine shaft that they used to sneak up the mountain to visit when she was a girl — its long twisting corridors opening into a cavern so vast that the beam of your flashlight finally disappeared into darkness, illuminating nothing, while your voice bounced back and forth, back and forth, fainter and fainter. She had stayed in this cavern for months, refusing therapy and drugs and all Willie’s attempts to divert her, even for a little bit, until finally he let her be, and just tended her, waiting. For a long time Roxy was dedicated to that darkness, that intensity, sensing that to lose it would be to lose little Alice forever. This has proved partly true. But finally she went out and got a pedicure, she got her hair streaked again, she and Willie went to MerleFest, then he took her on that blues cruise. Lilah graduated from high school. Seth was accepted into law school at UVA, Todd got married. Livingston ran for governor, Roxy saw his big face every day on the billboard at the turn off the interstate to the Reliable Real Estate office where she worked.
“Honey? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she says, setting the table. “I guess we’d better go on and eat.”
Willie slices the ham while she puts a piece of corn bread and a helping of potato salad on each of their plates. She grabs the honey mustard from the refrigerator. “Okay, then,” she says. He puts on a CD and they sit down where they always sit, facing each other. The seashell cat smiles its iron smile at the end of the table. Elvis’s legs swing back and forth. “Time’s the revelator,” sings Gillian Welch. Roxy pushes potato salad around on her plate. Actually she’s the revelator, she is, Roxy.