Prewitt had died without having much noticed that that’s what he was doing, just as her day children had driven off with whatever possessions of Prewitt’s they wanted (Ronny took his golf clubs and his yellow and pink cashmere V-necks; Julie took his Toyota) without having really noticed that their father was gone for good. If Prewitt had known he’d be dead within hours, presumably he would have destroyed the evidence of his adultery with Amorette Strumlander, since marriage vows and commitment were so important to him. But apparently Prewitt Rhoads had persisted in thinking life a bowl of imperishable plastic cherries to the very last. Apparently he had never seen death coming, the specter leaping up and grinning right in his face, so he had died as surprised as he could be, eyes wide open, baffled, asking Lucy, “What’s the matter with me?”
Amorette Strumlander had been equally unprepared when she’d heard about Prewitt’s sudden demise from their Gardenia Club president, Gloria Peters, the next morning. She had run up the lawn shrieking at Lucy, “I heard it from Gloria Peters at the nail salon!” as if getting the bad news that way had made the news worse. Of course, Lucy hadn’t known then that Prewitt and Amorette had been having their long affair; admittedly that fact must have made the news harder on Amorette. It must have been tough hearing about her lover’s death from Gloria Peters, who had never once invited Amorette to her dinner parties, where apparently Martha Stewart recipes were served by a real maid in a uniform. In fact, that morning after Prewitt’s death when Amorette had come running at her, Lucy had actually apologized for not calling her neighbor sooner. And Amorette had grabbed her and sobbed, “Now we’re both widows!” Lucy naturally thought Amorette was referring to her own dead husband, Charlie Strumlander, but maybe she had meant her lover, Prewitt.
Honk honk honk pause honk honk. Honk honk honk pause honk honk.
Amazingly it was two in the afternoon, and Lucy was still standing in the middle of the kitchen with the yellow coffee mug handle still dangling from her finger. She quickly shoved the photographs she’d found in the bathrobe pocket as Amorette came tapping and whoohooing through the house without waiting to be invited in. She had never waited for Lucy to open the door.
“Lucy? Lucy, oh, why, oh, good Lord, you’re not even ready. What are you doing in a robe at this time? Didn’t you hear me honking?” Mrs. Strumlander was a petite woman, fluttery as a hungry bird, as she swirled around the table in a summer coat that matched her shoes and her purse. She patted her heart as she was always doing to remind people that she suffered from a murmur. “I have been scared to death with this maniac on the loose! Did you hear about that on the radio?”
Lucy said that yes she had, and that she felt sorry for the young man.
“Sorry for him! Well, you are the weirdest thing that ever lived! You come on and go get dressed before we’re late to the play. I know when you see that poor little blind deaf-and-dumb girl running around the stage spelling out ‘water,’ it’s going to put your own troubles in perspective for you, like it always does mine.”
“You think?” asked Lucy flatly, and walked back through the house into the bedroom she had shared with Prewitt. She was followed by Amorette, who even went so far as to pull dresses from Lucy’s closet and make suggestions about which one she ought to wear.
“Lucy,” Amorette advised her as she tossed a dress on the bed, ‘just because this maniac goes out of his mind at the Annie Sullivan Mall, don’t you take it as proof the world’s gone all wrong, because believe me most people are leading a normal life. If you keep slipping into this negative notion of yours without poor Prewitt to hold you up, you could just slide I don’t know where, way deep. Now, how ‘bout this nice mustard silk with the beige jacket?”
Lucy put her hand into her dead husband’s bathrobe pocket. She touched the photos and squeezed the key to the secret letters into the fleshy pads of her palm. The key opened a green tin box she’d found in a little square room in the basement, a room with pine paneling and a plaid couch that Prewitt considered his special private place and called his “study.” He’d gone there happily in the evenings to fix lamps and listen to vinyl big band albums he’d bought at tag sales, to do his homework for his correspondence course in Internet investing in the stock market. And, apparently, he went there to write love letters to Amorette Strumlander. Lucy had never violated the privacy of Prewitt’s space. Over the years as she had sat with her black coffee in the unlit kitchen, watching the night outside, she had occasionally fantasized that Prewitt was secretly down in his study bent over a microscope in a search of the origins of life, or down there composing an opera, or plotting ingenious crimes. But she was not surprised when, the day after her children left for Atlanta, she’d unlocked the “study” door and discovered no mysterious test tubes, no ink-splotched sheets of music, no dynamite to blow up Fort Knox.
What she had found there were toy trains and love letters. Apparently Prewitt had devoted all those nights to building a perfect plastic world for a dozen electric trains to pass through. This world rested on a large board eight feet square. All the tiny houses and stores and trees were laid out on the board on plastic earth and AstroTurf. In front of a little house, a tiny dad and mom and boy and girl stood beside the track to watch the train go by. The tiny woman had blond hair and wore a pink coat, just like Amorette Strumlander.
Lucy found the love letters in a green tin box in a secret drawer built under the board beneath the train depot. There were dozens of letters written on legal pad paper, on pink flowered notepaper, on the backs of envelopes, hand-delivered letters from Amorette to Prewitt, and even a few drafts of his own letters to her. They were all about love as Prewitt and Amorette had experienced it. There was nothing to suggest to Lucy that passion had flung these adulterers beyond the limits of their ordinary personalities, nothing to suggest Anna Karenina or The English Patient. No torment, no suicidal gestures. The letters resembled the Valentines Prewitt sold in his gifts, cards, and party supplies shop in downtown Painton. Lacy hearts, fat toddlers hugging, fat doves cooing. Amorette had written, “Dearest dear one. Tell Lucy you have to be at The Fun House doing inventory all Sat. morn. Charlie leaves for golf at ten. Kisses on the neck.” Prewitt had written, “Sweetheart, You looked so [great, scratched out] beautiful yesterday and you’re so sweet to me, I couldn’t get through life without my sunshine.”
Beneath the letters, at the bottom of the box, Lucy had found the two Polaroid pictures she now touched in the bathrobe pocket. One showed Amorette in shortie pajamas on Lucy’s bed, rubbing a kitten against her cheek. (Lucy recognized the kitten as Sugar, whom Prewitt had brought home for Julie and who, grown into an obese flatulent tabby, had been run over five years ago by a passing car.) The other photograph showed Amorette seated on the hope chest in her own bedroom, naked from the waist up, one hand provocatively held beneath each untanned breast. After looking at the pictures and reading the letters, Lucy had put them back in the box, then turned on Prewitt’s electric trains and sped them up faster and faster until finally they’d slung themselves off their tracks and crashed through the plastic villages and farms and plummeted to the floor in a satisfying smashup.
Now, in the bathroom, listening to Amorette outside in the bedroom she clearly knew all too well, still rummaging through the closet, Lucy transferred the key and the photos from the bathrobe pocket to her purse. Returning to the bedroom, she asked Amorette, “Do you miss Prewitt much?”
Mrs. Strumlander was on her knees at the closet looking for shoes to go with the dress she’d picked out for Lucy. “Don’t we all?” she replied. “But let time handle it, Lucy. Because of my murmur I have always had to live my life one day at a time as the Good Book says, and that’s all any of us can do. Let’s just hope this crazy man keeps on shooting people he knows and doesn’t start in on strangers!” She laughed at her little joke and crawled backward out of the closet with beige pumps in her hand. “Because there are sick individuals just opening fire whenever and wherever they feel like it, and I
’d hate for something like that to happen to us in the middle of The Miracle Worker tonight. Here, put that dress on.”
Lucy put on the dress. “Have you ever been down in Prewitt’s study, Amorette?”
“Ummum.” The dainty woman shook her head ambiguously, patting her carefully styled blond hair.
“Would you like to see it now?” Lucy asked her.
Amorette gave her a curious look. “We don’t have time to look at Prewitt’s study now, honey. We are waaay late already. Not that jacket, it doesn’t go at all. Sometimes, Lucy . . . This one. Oh, you look so pretty when you want to.”
Lucy followed her dead husband’s mistress out to her car. Amorette called to her to come along: “Hop in now, and if you see that mall shooter, duck!” She merrily laughed.
As they drove toward the interstate to Tuscumbia through Painton’s flower-edged, unsafe streets, Lucy leaned back in the green velour seat of her neighbor’s Toyota (had Amorette and Prewitt gotten a special deal for buying two at once?) and closed her eyes. Amorette babbled on about how someone with no handicaps at all had used the handicapped-parking space at the Winn-Dixie and how this fact as well as the Mall Maniac proved that the South might as well be the North these days. Amorette had taken to locking her doors with dead bolts and might drop dead herself one night from the shock of the strange noises she was hearing after dark and suspected might be burglars or rapists. It was then that Lucy said, “Amorette, when did you and Prewitt start sleeping together?”
The little sedan lurched forward with a jolt. Then it slowed and slowed, almost to a stop. Pink splotched Amorette’s cheeks, until they matched the color of her coat, but her nose turned as white as a sheet. “Who told you that?” she finally whispered, her hand on her heart. “Was it Gloria Peters?”
Lucy shrugged. “What difference does it make?”
“It was, wasn’t it! It was Gloria Peters. She hates me.”
Lucy took one of Prewitt’s left-behind hidden cigarettes out of her purse and lit up. “Oh, calm down, nobody told me. I found things.”
“What things? Lucy, what are you talking about? You’ve gotten all mixed up about something —”
Blowing out smoke, Lucy reached in her purse. She thrust in front of the driver the Polaroid picture of her younger self, flasheyed, cupping her breasts.
Now the car bumped up on the curb, hit a mailbox, and stopped.
The two widows sat in the car on a residential avenue where oleander blossoms banked the sidewalks and honeysuckle made the air as sweet as syrup. There was no one around, except a bored teenage girl in a bathing suit who Rollerbladed back and forth and looked blatantly in the car window each time she passed it.
Lucy kept smoking. “I found all your love letters down in Prewitt’s study,” she added. “Didn’t you two worry that I might?”
With little heaves Amorette shook herself into tears. She pushed her face against the steering wheel, crying and talking at the same time. “Oh, Lucy, this is just the worst possible thing. Prewitt was a wonderful man, now, don t start thinking he wasn’t. We never meant to hurt you. He knew how much I needed a little bit of attention because Charlie was too wrapped up in the law office to know if I had two eyes or three, much less be sympathetic to my murmur when I couldn’t do the things he wanted me to.”
“Amorette, I don’t care to hear this,” said Lucy.
But Amorette went on anyhow. “Prewitt and I were both so unhappy, and we just needed a little chance to laugh. And then it all just happened without us ever meaning it to. Won’t you believe me that we really didn’t want you to get yourself hurt.”
Lucy, dragging smoke through the cigarette, thought this over. “I just want to know how long?”
“Wuh, what, what?” sobbed her neighbor.
“How long were you screwing my husband? Five years, ten years, till the day Prewitt died?”
“Oh, Lucy, no!” Amorette had sobbed herself into gasping hiccups that made the sound eeuck. “No! Eeuck. Eeuck. We never ... after Charlie died. I just didn’t think that would be fair. Eeuck. Eeuck.”
“Charlie died a year ago. We’ve been in Painton fifteen.” Lucy squashed her cigarette butt in the unused ashtray. She flashed to an image of the maniac smashing the glass storefronts that looked out on the concourse of the shopping mall. “So, Amorette, I guess I don’t know what the goddamn shit ‘fair’ means to you.” She lit another cigarette.
Amorette shrank away, shocked and breathing hard. “Don’t you talk that way to me, Lucy Rhoads! I won’t listen to that kind of language in my car.” Back on moral ground, she flapped her hand frantically at the thick smoke. “And put out that cigarette. You don’t smoke.”
Lucy stared at her. “I do smoke. I am smoking. Just like you were screwing my husband. You and Prewitt were a couple of lying shits.”
Amorette rolled down her window and tried to gulp in air. “All right, if you’re going to judge us —”
Lucy snorted with laughter that hurt her throat. “Of course I’m going to judge you.”
“Well, then, the truth is . . .” Amorette was now nodding at her like a toy dog with its head on a spring. “The truth is, Lucy, your negativity and being so down on the world the way you are just got to Prewitt sometimes. Sometimes Prewitt just needed somebody to look on the bright side with.”
Lucy snorted again. “A shoulder to laugh on.”
“I think you’re being mean on purpose,” whimpered Amorette. “My doctor says I can’t afford to get upset like this.”
Lucy looked hard into the round brown candy eyes of her old bridge partner. Could the woman indeed be this obtuse? Was she as banal of brain as the tiny plastic mom down on the board waving at Prewitt’s electric train? So imbecilic that any action she took would have to be excused? That any action Lucy took would be unforgivable? But as Lucy kept staring at Amorette Strumlander, she saw deep down in the pupils of her neighbor’s eyes the tiniest flash of self-satisfaction, a flicker that was quickly hidden behind a tearful blink. It was a smugness as bland and benighted as Painton, Alabama’s, history.
Lucy suddenly felt a strong desire to do something, and as the feeling surged through her, she imagined the maniac from the mall bounding down this residential street and tossing his gun to her through the car window. It felt as if the butt of the gun hit her stomach with a terrible pain. She wanted to pick up the gun and shoot into the eye of Amorette’s smugness. But she didn’t have a gun. Besides, what good did the gun do the maniac, who had probably by now been caught by the police? Words popped out of Lucy’s mouth before she could stop them. She said, “Amorette, did you know that Prewitt was sleeping with Gloria Peters at the same time he was sleeping with you, and he kept on with her after you two ended things?”
“What?”
“Did you know there were pictures, naked pictures, of Gloria Peters locked up in Prewitt’s letter box too?”
Mrs. Strumlander turned green, actually apple green, just as Prewitt had turned blue on the ambulance stretcher after his coronary. Amorette had also stopped breathing; when she started up again, she started with a horrible-sounding gasp. “Oh, my God, don’t do this; tell me the truth,” she wheezed.
Lucy shook her head sadly. “I am telling the truth. You didn’t know about Gloria? Well, he tricked us both. And there were some very ugly pictures I found down in the study too, things he’d bought, about pretty sick things being done to naked women. Prewitt had all sorts of magazines and videos down in that study of his. I don’t think you even want to hear about what was in those videos.” (There were no other pictures, of course, any more than there had been an affair with Gloria Peters. The Polaroid shot of Amorette’s cupped breasts was doubtless as decadent an image as Prewitt could conceive. Every sentiment the man ever had could have been taken from one of his Mylar balloons or greeting cards.)
“Please tell me you’re lying about Gloria!” begged Amorette. She was green as grass.
Instead, Lucy opened the car door and stepped out
. “Prewitt said my problem was I couldn’t stop telling the truth. And this is the truth. I saw naked pictures of Gloria posing just like you’d done and laughing because she was copying your pose. That’s what she said in a letter, that he’d shown her the picture of you and she was mimicking it.”
“Lucy, stop. I feel sick. Something’s wrong. Hand me my purse off the back seat.”
Lucy ignored the request. “Actually I read lots of letters Gloria wrote Prewitt making fun of you, Amorette. You know how witty she can be. The two of them really got a laugh out of you.”
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