by Pamela Morsi
“You’re right,” he said. “That’s what I’ve always been trying to give him, the choices that he might not have.”
Their conversation continued an hour or more. Until Piney’s phone began its low-battery warning.
“Do you think we might talk tomorrow?”
“If you don’t call me, I’ll call you.”
It turned out to be a beautiful cell-distance friendship. Piney found himself whistling through the day, taking note of interesting things to tell her. And stepping outside the gym door during time-outs to call and report the basketball score. He was anxious for the weekend, for the time that he could get away to meet her, hold her, kiss her.
That turned out to be not as straightforward as he’d hoped. He’d mentioned to Tree about sending out more packets. His son thought they needed updates. There was that great double-clutch, one-handed shot that Phil Swann had caught on his video camera. And Coach Poule’s brother had taped his great performance in the Black Rock game that the scout had seen. If he was sending anything, he definitely wanted to send that.
So after several weekend patients at the clinic, they needed to drive to the copy store in Newport to edit the DVD and burn new copies. By this time, Tree had gotten his senior photos back, where he looked serious and studious. He added it to the face of the disc. Then he decided it would be a better production with music. It all took a lot of time.
Although Tree had insisted that he needed Piney’s help to do this, he quickly found that Tree knew far more about what he was doing than his dad. Piney’s main contribution turned out to be pulling out the cash to pay. Then he discovered there were even further plans.
“We can’t drive through Batesville without stopping for pizza at Mazzio’s,” Tree said incredulously.
Piney saw his Saturday night clearly. Instead of snogging next to the fire in Aunt Will’s cabin, he’d be eating pepperoni and pineapple pizza with his son.
From the uncomfortable plastic chairs next to the windows of the copy store, he called Jesse.
“I don’t think I’m going to make it there today.”
“Okay.”
He explained, probably in more detail than necessary what he was doing and why he wouldn’t be available.
“I totally understand,” Jesse said. “You and Tree need time together, especially after our…our coming out party. I miss you, that’s all.”
“How’s Aunt Will?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse answered. “She seems unreasonably tired today. She was out of bed early, but she’s been napping on and off since ten o’clock this morning.”
“Her body is going through a lot,” he said. “If she doesn’t get up on her own soon, prod her to sit up in the rocker for a while. And, of course, Tree and I can drop this and come up there if you think you need us.”
“No, no. It’s okay. I’m sure she’s all right. As long as you’re coming up tomorrow.”
Piney grinned into the phone. “I’ll be there if I have to chain this teenager to his basketball net.”
37
Saturday morning brought the same seven-days-a-week, fifty-two-weeks-a-year farm chores that were becoming the norm for Jesse. She was especially cheered by the idea that the clinic was only barely open on the weekends and that Piney would come up the mountain to see her.
Cussy munched at the tall grass around the fence rows. Arthur the rooster still treated her with the same mean-minded misogyny that worked with his hens. The pigs gathered around her like a pack of playful puppies, dirty oinking puppies, but still, it saved her the necessity of taking up hog calling. Jesse found this minor brush with farm life not completely antithetic to her nature. And the mountain people were simply a different version of the same mixed bag found in any city.
She still hadn’t quite taken in the discussion with Earline, Madge and Walter Lou. The concept of herself as the heartbreaker was a new one. She looked back on her dating history, especially her engagement to Greg, and she could not remember one time when she felt as if she held the cards. Greg had chosen to ask her out. He’d taken her places that he wanted to go. When he thought the time was right, he’d proposed. And even his proposal had included a conventionally long engagement of his choice. None of that even scraped the surface of the issue of him insisting that she give up her job because it was the most convenient choice for him.
Yet somehow this whole thing with Piney, it had been her idea. She’d been attracted to him, interested in him. She had tamped down modesty and fear and thrown herself in his bed. It had made her feel powerful. It had made her feel sexy. And then he’d made her feel sexy. She blushed and grinned at the memory of her own brashness.
In all of that, she’d never thought about creating more heartbreak. She was already in pain. An affair would make her feel better, she was sure. And if she’d worried about any emotional damage, she’d assumed it would be her own.
Did she think that men didn’t get heartbreak? That they weren’t the ones to get hurt? Of course she didn’t think that, she assured herself. She’d had male friends who’d gone through divorces and breakups and she’d seen them devastated.
Somehow she had just never thought that she could inflict that kind of pain. She was always the one who fought for the relationship while the guy’s interest was waning. She’d always been the one who believed in love and marriage and happily-ever-after.
It was a heady feeling to think that, for once, she was in control of her future. She had a say in where things were headed between them. And a breakup, though it was an integral part of their plan, was not at all the direction that she wanted to head.
Jesse heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the road. She’d already learned that there was no such thing as too early in the mountains, so she had mastered the art of being washed up and company ready as soon as the sun peeked over the horizon.
She was surprised to see her little blue car pull into the clearing. Camryn was behind the wheel.
Jesse shoveled the last of the feed mix into the trough and walked down to meet her. The cheerful grin on the girl’s face looked incongruous with the Goth-ish getup she was wearing. But she would hardly fault anyone for wearing a smile.
“Good morning.”
“Hi. Sorry I’m here so early. I needed to see you all and Mom needs me in the store today.”
“No problem,” Jesse assured her. “Have you had breakfast?”
“Pop-Tart,” she answered. “I know you can do better than that.”
Inside, the teenager greeted Aunt Will with a kiss. She drank a cup of heavily creamed coffee and munched on a slab of ham as Aunt Will ate her cornmeal mush.
“You might want to take a basket of eggs down to your mother,” Aunt Will told her. “Those chickens keep laying. I suspect Piney forgot to tell them that I can’t be eating that much protein anymore.”
“Sure,” Camryn said. “Mom’ll put them out in the store with a sign like Fresh Organic Farm Fed and they’ll all be gone by closing.”
“Good.”
“Of course, she’d make a lot more money marking them as Fresh from Aunt Will’s Chickens. They’d pay twice as much with the hope that you’d sneaked something a little extra inside those hens.”
Aunt Will laughed, delighted. “Promote them however you like,” she said. “Nutritious Eggs ought to be prize enough for anybody. But folks never think about health until they’ve lost it. They’re always looking for a charm to find love or get money.”
“And there aren’t really charms for that,” Jesse finished for her.
Aunt Will smiled broadly. “Oh, there are charms,” she said. “The question is, do they work?”
She turned her attention to Camryn. “So, Cammy, have you been ruminating on your future?”
“Yeah,” she answered. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you two about. I was talking with Tree last week—”
“Are you two back together?” Jesse asked, hoping to verify Piney’s perception.
“Not exactl
y,” she answered. “We’re taking a break until after basketball season. But we’re not mad at each other or anything.”
Aunt Will nodded approvingly. “If a couple are going to be fighting,” she said, “they need to be fighting for the same thing.”
“Maybe so,” Camryn said. “And maybe that’s what we were doing. Both fighting for the best way to move on after school is over.”
Jesse noticed that the teenager seemed inexplicably older. As if a week had somehow given her wisdom and confidence that had before been absent.
“I tried to do what you told me, Jesse,” she said. “I tried to pick out a future that kind of fits me. I imagined myself doing all kinds of different jobs. And the truth is, I like working in my mother’s store. It’s interesting work, it helps people. That’s all cool. But still, I hate it. So I started wondering what I really hate about it.”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s not really about the job. The job is pretty fun. It’s about the nightmare of living the rest of my life upstairs, with no chance or no skills to go anywhere else.”
Aunt Will nodded.
“I thought, what if I could do something like this, but not have to do it here? I think I would like it.”
“I think that’s a breakthrough,” Jesse said.
Camryn agreed. “I still have the mess of not being able to train for a job, because I can’t afford to go anywhere and make a living. I thought about trying to live with relatives or getting a roommate to go share a place with me. But I think I’ve come up with something better.”
The young woman looked first at Aunt Will and then as Jesse. She took a deep breath as if dredging up her strength.
“I’m going to join the army.”
“What?” Jesse asked incredulously. She could hardly imagine the pierced, Goth-girl suddenly appearing in green camouflage.
“I could get into basic training right after graduation,” she said. “If I’m accepted into the Pharmacy Tech program, I’d get to do nineteen weeks of training in San Antonio, Texas.”
Camryn said the last as if such a distant place were as magical as the Land of Oz.
“Now it’s not like I don’t understand,” she said more evenly, “that if I commit to the army, I commit with no guarantees. But I test really well in chemistry, and if I spend the rest of senior year buffing my grade point, I think I’d have a very good chance. I get to go someplace, see some things and learn a skill that I can always use to support myself.”
Camryn sat before them, bright and eager with expectation. Jesse and Aunt Will simply sat there.
“What do you think?” the teenager finally asked.
Jesse deferred to her elder. “Cammy,” Aunt Will said. “I think that our opinion doesn’t matter. If this is what you want, then this is what we want for you.”
“Will you help me with my mom?”
“Is she against it?”
“I haven’t told her yet.”
“Then you’ll have to do that,” Aunt Will said. “You don’t need me to plead your case.”
Jesse agreed. “It’s a big step into your adult life, Camryn,” she said. “You’re going to need to face your mother in a mature, adult way.”
The teenager sighed and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “But, Aunt Will, could you make me a potion that will improve her temper?”
The old woman laughed. “Cammy, you’ve got to state your case and stand your ground. If there are fireworks, keep your powder dry and your temper in check. It’s your own life and Marcy knows that as well as you do.”
Camryn left a few moments later, leaving Jesse’s car and hiking down the mountain to help her mother at the store.
“I believe I’d like to lie down for a bit, DuJess,” Aunt Will said.
Once she got her aunt back in bed, and with no visitors on the horizon, Jesse dragged out a bucket and began to seriously clean the inside of the cabin. The roughhewn nature of the place had the duality of always looking dirty, even when clean. She managed to wash down the floors and wall and whisk away the cobwebs caught in the rafters among the hanging herbs.
Aunt Will got up for a bit of lunch, but went back to bed right after. Jesse was beginning to get nervous about that when she heard her stirring in the bedroom.
“I need to wash up and get myself presentable,” she said.
Jesse gathered up the essentials for the sponge bath and went in to find her aunt had laid out a tweed two-piece suit.
“Are we going somewhere?” Jesse asked.
“No, but I’m talking some business this afternoon and I need to be taken seriously. If I look like a crazy, dying old woman, someone is likely to mistake me for one.”
Jesse brushed out that long white hair that she’d so admired, only to discover that there was little left of it. The illness had thinned it to the point that it was hard to pin up.
Once she was clean and neat and seated in her rocking chair by the fire, she seemed perfectly in control of the situation.
“Bring me that box of papers,” she told Jesse. “Granny Meg’s wedding box.”
“Sure,” Jesse agreed.
She found it exactly where it had been and carried it to her aunt. Jesse was a little concerned. Aunt Will seemed okay. But was this something real? Was she truly prepared for business or had the ammonia fogged up her brain again?
“Do you have…uh, an appointment or something this afternoon?”
Aunt Will looked at her clear-eyed. “I told Alice Fay to have the judge come see me,” she said. “I figure there’s no better time for him to show up than today.”
“But you don’t know that he’s going to show up?”
“You’re the one with the phone,” Aunt Will pointed out. “Did he call and say he was coming?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Then he might not.”
Jesse thought it was a rational admission. But then, of course, the judge did show up, parking his gleaming silver Navigator next to her little blue car.
Roy Gluck was as big and blustery as a used car salesman in a late-night TV ad and as sincere as a televangelist. But his affection for Aunt Will seemed to be as genuine as anyone else’s.
“Well, aren’t you the pretty young thing,” he said to Jesse. “What’s this I hear about you not being married? Boys in Oklahoma must be a mass of slow-tops to let you get away to Arkansas.”
Jesse felt more embarrassed than praised by the compliment, but she managed a polite smile for the man.
Once he’d taken a seat and Jesse had provided them both with a hot drink, Aunt Will was ready to get down to business.
“I suspect Alice Fay already told you that I’m wanting you to be the one to speak over my grave.”
“She did, Aunt Will. And I can’t tell you how honored I feel at being chosen.”
She picked the box off the floor and held it on her lap.
“DuJess,” she said. “Could you make yourself scarce for a bit? I’ve got some things I need to talk over with the judge.”
“Sure,” Jesse answered. “It’s nearly time for me to catch the cow anyway. I’ll get an early start. Call me if you need me.”
Aunt Will nodded appreciatively.
Jesse got her coat and boots on. As she opened the cabin she overheard Aunt Will say to the man, “These are the papers your daddy put together for me forty years ago.”
Jesse closed the door behind her and walked away from the cabin. It was kind of sad that at the end of life when people felt weak and sick, they were still obliged to set their affairs in order. Then she remembered her dad. Dead so young, so quickly, so tragically that everyone was unprepared. The thought made her reconsider. Perhaps living long enough to dot the i’s and cross the t’s was a gift. And one that Aunt Will deserved.
38
His day with Jesse was both the best of times and the worst of times for Piney. He was able to see her, talk to her, listen to her laugh and drink in the pleasure of her smile. But he had not so much as a single momen
t alone with her. The day was literally overrun with visitors. Virtually every person on the mountain, in the valley and in the county thought a bright sunny Sunday afternoon the perfect time to catch up with the old granny woman.
But the cabin was so small and close that people were obliged to wait for their turn out in the yard. Some of those who couldn’t stand idle busied themselves raking leaves, cleaning the yard or splitting wood. Most stood around chatting with old friends about everything from politics to dewberry pie.
Piney’s interaction with his neighbors was expected. They either wanted free medical advice on the spot, or they wanted to talk basketball. The Ozarks Bi-State Invitational began on Tuesday. Twelve teams from north central Arkansas and south central Missouri would compete in three short, busy days.
“This is the place for that boy of yours to shine,” Myron Ramsgate said. “And it wouldn’t do our community any harm to bring home a trophy for a change.”
Everyone agreed with that.
Piney predicted as honestly and knowledgeably as he could about the prospective play. But many of the teams they had never gone up against. And in tournament play, nearly anything could happen.
The first time he’d had this conversation was fine. The second and third time, it was getting old. By the fifth time he’d commented on the same speculation with the same information, he was sick of it. He headed to the barn to get a rake. They were all in use. So he spent the afternoon whacking weeds with an ancient scythe.
He was determined to outlast them all, neighbors, friends and relatives, inviting himself for supper. He examined Aunt Will. The day had obviously been an exhausting one for her. But she seemed no worse for it and insisted she would rest as soon as she’d eaten.
That sounded very good to Piney, both for her and for himself. An evening alone with Jesse sounded perfect, even if they were stuck within four hand-hewn log walls, making out in an old lady’s rocking chair.
But just as they were finishing the last bites of the meal his cell buzzed. Lorelei Trace was in labor. Twyla Gluck had planned to drive her to the hospital, but with contractions less than five minutes apart, it didn’t seem likely that they’d make it there before the baby came.