by Ninie Hammon
Chapter 6
I got up early the next morning, determined to start setting routines, scaffolding I could stand on to build a life here. Running was a good place to start; I had run three miles every day for years.
I crossed the slat porch, veered through the yard to pass beneath the dangling weeping willow boughs, then punched the button on my running watch, setting its insides twittering with artificial synapses. My running shoes sang a rhythmic slap-slap-slap melody on the concrete sidewalk. My ponytail danced back and forth to the same tempo. My breathing matched the beat, huffing in and out in harmony. Ah, running; how I loathed it.
I’d always hated to run, despised every step I took. If I’d enjoyed it, I’d have given it up years ago. Running was a rebellious act, a singular mutiny against the tyranny of my rigid life. It was also a strict discipline I clung to as a piling of order on the days when I felt adrift in a sea of emotional chaos.
It was odd to run up and down streets teeming with ghosts, through a world I’d occupied for years and a universe of memories that were now lost to me. Did I fall off my bike in that driveway or play hide-and-seek in that garage? Did I skin my knee on this sidewalk or roller skate here with the other neighborhood children—with Wendy maybe?
The ghosts were silent. The ancient stone houses I’d passed on the streets of Oxford sparked more memories than these.
When I got back to the house, Bobo was puttering around the kitchen, her hair a skimpy bird’s nest of disarray. She wore a cotton dress that was either spotted or checked—hard to tell which because she had it on inside out. I stared at the frayed tag dangling from under her collar and the row of buttons that marched all the way down the front. How did she get the dress on? Did she fasten the buttons from the outside? Or pull the dress over her head inside out with the buttons already fastened?
She glanced at me when I came into the room but her eyes didn’t quite focus, and she couldn’t locate the cereal bowls stacked on a shelf in an open cabinet three feet from her nose.
I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a glass of orange juice and sat down at the table to drink it.
“I’ll pass on the cereal this morning, Bobo.” I took a big gulp of juice. “I’m going into town later and I’ll pick up a box of my brand—Grape Nuts.”
She set a bowl down in front of me, wordlessly filled it with Rice Krispies and poured milk over it from a white plastic carton.
“What’s the matter, Bobo? You don’t seem yourself today.”
“If I ain’t me, God help whoever is.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“When you get to be my age, something’s always wrong.”
“Are you sick? Do you hurt somewhere?”
She lifted her eyes to meet mine. “I’m 84 years old … or 85, I forget. I figure I’ve earned hurt.”
Hard to argue that. I wondered if I should mention her clothing or just let Julia handle it.
“She done it again yesterday.” Bobo said.
“She who did what?”
“That woman who steals my food. She took my tuna sandwich.”
“Are you talking about the snack Julia made for you to eat while you watched Oprah?”
“Who’s Oprah?”
I looked at my wrist—and I did have a watch on it. The blinking, neon-green digits made it clear I needed to get busy.
“I’m going into town in a little while to run some errands. Do you need anything?
“Yeah. Get me some toothpaste, the kind that fights cavities.”
After my shower, I stood in front of the steamy mirror putting on makeup with trembling hands.
“Oh come on; this is ridiculous,” I said to the pale blonde woman who needed mascara so desperately she was willing to risk putting out an eye.
How could I possibly be tense about a meeting at lunchtime when it was only ten o’clock? Maybe because I had invited the immediate world to the reunion of an organization that never existed. But I’d had to call it something in the classified ad I put in the Goshen News:
“Were you a member of the Wathen Street Gang? When you were a child, did your family live on Wathen, Phelps, Thomas, Richards or Burkhead streets? If you played in that neighborhood between 1974 and 1981, you are cordially invited to attend our 30-year (give or take a little) reunion celebration. Even if you’ve lost your magic decoder ring and don’t remember the password or the secret handshake, join the other gang members at noon Friday at R’s Steak House.”
I had a childhood to recreate. I’d placed the ad hoping I could find somebody who’d shared that childhood to help me fill in some of the blanks.
It took me an hour to decide what to wear.
Jeans and boots?
Sure, this is Texas.
But I’m not a Texan. I’ll look like a poser.
A skirt?
Too dressy.
Shorts, then.
Are you kidding? With my albino legs—not a chance!
I stepped out of the car two hours later into sunshine that made me squint even with sunglasses.
This was a bad idea, a really bad idea. Nobody’s going to be here. Or maybe a whole bunch of people are going to show up, which will be worse. I bet I’m the only one in khakis.
The interior of the small restaurant Roger Reynolds and his wife, Ruth, had opened in the 1950s was extraordinarily dark until I remembered to take off my Foster Grant wannabes. Half a dozen bar stools sat in front of a counter on the far wall of a long, narrow room beneath a sign proclaiming: “R’s Steak House” in large red letters, and under it the slogan: “If the steak’s bad, it ain’t R’s.”
Booths lined the other walls and a handful of tables occupied the center floor space. The red-and-white checkerboard design of the curtains, tied back from the windows along the wall by the door, matched the plastic tablecloths. A metal pail full of peanuts sat in the center of each table, and the floor was an inch deep in sawdust and shells.
Haven’t these people ever heard of a peanut allergy? You could drop dead of anaphylactic shock just pulling into the parking lot.
A sign on a metal stand in front of the unmanned cash register proclaimed “Please wait to be seated” on one side and “Please seat yourself” on the other. It was flipped to the seat-yourself side, so I picked a table by the door and studied the cardboard menu that had a picture of a bull on the front. Every food item listed was some form of steak—sirloin, rib-eye, T-bone, New York strip. There was even a chart to help you select how you wanted the beef cooked. Rare was the color of recent road kill.
Even though I was a few minutes early, it was clear my idea had completely bombed. The restaurant was empty except for two old ladies in the back and a young couple with a baby up front, and a policeman who sat on a bar stool at the counter talking to a redheaded waitress.
Nobody’s coming!
I was so relieved that I was positively giddy. A Hispanic waitress brought me a glass of water and I ordered a cup of coffee. While she got it, I searched the menu for something light—a salad, maybe. All I saw was meat.
The policeman got up from his seat at the counter and started for the door. But he stopped at my table instead. He had his hat in his hands.
“Amy and I figured it had to be you. You’re the only person in here we don’t recognize.”
I looked up into an open, smiling face—and froze. My entire vocabulary drained out of me like water out of a cracked pot, and I couldn’t manage to snatch a single word from the torrent before it was all gone.
“Besides, the hair’s a dead giveaway. It looks the same as it did when you were 10 years old. I never met anybody with hair as pale blonde as Annie Mitchell’s.”
I just looked at him.
He must think I’m mute.
“It is you, isn’t it … Annie? Remember me? Dusty. Dusty Walker. I lived on the other side of the street at the end of the block.”
He wasn’t a big man, probably not more than three or four inches taller than I was, but he was power
fully built, as thick and dense as a fireplug, his arms and shoulders so heavily muscled they strained the fabric of his shirt. His hair, cut “high and tight,” was deep, chocolate brown with gray at the temples and in a streak like a lightning bolt above his left eyebrow.
“Dusty?” I croaked.
His smile broadened, a wide, engaging smile, the kind that showed gums above his teeth. He turned to the waitress at the counter. “It’s Annie, all right. You owe me five bucks.”
He looked back down at me. “Amy was sure it was Sarah Pritchard put that ad in the newspaper. Just as a joke.”
So far, I’d managed to choke out a single, two-syllable word. That did not a conversation make.
Say something!
“You lived at the end of the block?”
“Yeah, next door to that crazy old coot who waved his shotgun at us every time we walked across his grass.”
I could tell he had begun to feel a little awkward standing there. My face glowed hot enough to set my hair on fire.
“Well, Dusty,” I stammered, stumbling to my feet. “It’s … so good to see you … again.” I stuck my limp, sweaty hand out in front of me like a dead fish on a stick. He ignored it and grabbed me in a friendly bear hug. It must have felt like hugging a lamp post.
“Good to see you, too, Annie!”
“Please, sit down.” I pointed to the chair across from me.
As he pulled out the chair, he spoke again to the waitress at the counter. “You got time now, don’t you? To talk for just a little while?”
She looked a question at the other waitress, who nodded, then she took off her apron, put it down behind the counter and joined us at the table.
“Here’s your five.” She handed Dusty a folded bill and stood with her arms crossed in front of her, wearing a look of mock disapproval. “Isn’t gambling against the law in Texas?”
He grinned and slipped the money into the pocket on the other side of his shirt from the spot where a shiny gold star proclaimed: Rutherford County Sheriff.
“I’d a’sworn Sarah Pritchard was the one did it,” the woman said, and gave me a bright smile. “I’m Amy Douglas. I’m not an official member of the Wathen Street Gang, though, 'cause I lived over on Bonham. But I used to sneak across the tracks to play with ya’ll every chance I got. There weren’t any kids my age where I lived.”
“You don’t remember the secret handshake, then?” Dusty teased.
“I don’t see no decoder ring on your finger.”
I sat as speechless as a door stop, unable/unwilling to hold up my end of the conversation. They exchanged a glance, then Amy said, “Well, Annie, I haven’t seen you since … when was the last time?”
Since I had absolutely no memory of this woman whatsoever, it was a little tricky to come up with an answer. I indicated the chair between Dusty and me—”Have a seat, please.”—and danced a jig around the question. “I don’t remember exactly when, do you?”
She sat down as the other waitress brought my coffee.
“You want anything?” the waitress asked the two of them. Both shook their heads no and Amy turned back to me.
She’d been pretty once, 20 years and 50 pounds ago. She had a round face and dimpled elbows, and a bust that strained at the buttons on her black waitress uniform. Silver rings with Indian reservation turquoise stones adorned her pudgy fingers and big hoop earrings danced beneath her ears when she talked. Her hair was a color Bobo would have called “Sears red,” shoulder length and teased into a classic, Texas big-hair style.
“I was a year older than you, and it was before I went into junior high. When did you move away?”
“In 1982, I was about 12, but I didn’t get out much the last year we lived here, so 1981 maybe.”
“You were in a wreck, weren’t you?” Amy said slowly, as the memory formed in her head. “It happened out by the grain elevator south of Lariat didn’t it? And your little sister--"
“Wendy was killed in the wreck,” Dusty finished for her. “I remember. Her death—that’s when I realized I wasn’t bulletproof, that a little kid could die just like somebody’s grandmother. It hit me hard. I thought about her for years—and she was just my playmate, not my little sister. “
He looked at me with such compassion I couldn’t meet his gaze. His eyes were striking, disturbing. A pure, light green, with long, black eyelashes beneath a thick unibrow.
“I don’t remember seeing you much after that,” Amy said. “Then you moved away.”
That was as good a segue as I was likely to get, so I grabbed it.
“The accident, that’s sort of why I put the ad in the paper.”
I steadied myself and tried very hard not to sound like the chairman of the board of the lunatic fringe.
“I was in the accident that killed Wendy and the wreck caused amnesia.” I watched their faces; so far they were merely curious. “Of course, that was years ago, but there’s still a big hole in my childhood memories.” Roughly the size of Belgium. “My grandmother still lives here, in the old house on Wathen Street. And my mother died recently—”
“I know, I’m sorry for your loss,” Dusty said. He sounded like he actually was sorry.
“So I’ve come here to live with Bobo for a while.” I burped out a nervous little laugh. “I guess ‘Bobo’ is a weird name for a grandmother, but that’s what everybody always called her. I don’t remember anymore why.”
“I always liked Bobo’s name.” Dusty reached into the metal bucket in the center of the table, took out a peanut, shelled it and tossed the shell on the floor. “I thought it was a whole lot better than Mee-Maw or Mam-aw.”
Amy punched him in the shoulder. “My grandmother is Mee-Maw, thank you very much.”
I plowed doggedly ahead.
“I thought since I was here, well maybe I could, maybe it would be a good time for me to …" Focus! “I put the ad in the newspaper hoping I’d find somebody who still lived in Goshen who had been one of my playmates when I was a little girl,” I blurted out in a rush. “So maybe they could help me, maybe you could help me remember things.”
Dusty didn’t buy that it was that simple. I could see it in his eyes. Without being intrusive, he was studying me, trying to read me. But Amy obviously had no reservations at all.
“What do you want to know?” Then she paused. “Oh, I guess if you knew that, you wouldn’t be asking us, would you?” She laughed at her own humor, but the silence that followed her laughter grew quickly awkward.
They were both looking at me, but I could think of nothing to say to fill the quiet air around us, and I could feel color begin to rise back up my neck and into my cheeks.
“Why don’t we just play remember-the-time-when,” Dusty suggested. “Amy and I’ll reminisce, and you can chime in or ask questions or whatever you want.”
Dusty had deftly taken the spotlight off me and focused it on the two of them. Amy was not aware of what he’d done, but I was and I was profoundly grateful.
He looked around for the other waitress and spotted her on the other side of the room. Pointing to my cup of coffee, he pantomimed that he wanted some, too, and she nodded.
“OK, Amy, where do you want to start?” Dusty handed her a peanut. “How about that time you stole your father’s driver out of his golf bag and clocked me on the side of the head with it?”
“You always blame me for that! You should have watched where you were going.” She glanced at me and turned back to Dusty. “I don’t think Annie was there that day, though, do you?”
“Maybe not. Then how about—?” Dusty began.
“I know! Remember the time we tried to drown out ground squirrels!”
Dusty’s face registered instant recognition. “We liked to never figured out whose garden hose was whose afterward,” he said.
I was totally lost, had no idea what they were talking about.
“The whole thing was your idea, you know.” Dusty smiled at me, warmth in his green eyes.
“Shoo
t, just about everything we did was your idea,” Amy said.
“You don’t remember … ?” He saw my blank look. “OK, here’s what happened.”
He described how the three of us and Wendy, plus four or five other children whose names painted no faces in my mind, had been sitting on my front porch, in the swing and on the porch steps one summer morning.
“We were bored,” Amy said. “Then you got that look in your eye.”
Dusty nodded and popped open another peanut. “Soon as I saw it, I knew I was about to get in trouble. I always got in trouble if I went along with whatever you were planning. But I always went along.”
Amy leaned toward me. “You never got in trouble though, 'cause you looked so angelic.” She pointed to my hair. “Your hair was even paler then"-- she paused, saw no recognition, "--and you wore it in braids that hung all the way down your back.” Still no recognition. “And you never got dirty.”
“Oh, she did too. She got as dirty as the rest of us.”
“Well, she never looked dirty, then. I just remember Annie all prim and neat, and when we got our butts in a sling about something we’d done, the grown-ups never believed that such a little princess was the ringleader.”
Clearly, they have me confused with somebody else.
“And this one was your baby all the way.” Dusty chucked the shell onto the floor and fished around in the pail until he found another peanut that suited him.
“You sent us all home, said that every one of us had to come back with a garden hose,” he said.
“The Sutton boys didn’t do it; they just blew you off, got on their bikes and rode away,” Amy said. “But the rest of us did.” She looked at Dusty. “We all did, didn’t we?”
He nodded, but she didn’t wait for his confirmation. “We must have, because I bet we had a hundred yards of hose.”
The waitress came to the table with Dusty’s cup of coffee and warmed up mine, though I’d only taken a couple of sips.
“You sure you don’t want any?” she asked Amy.
“Well, OK. Sure. Why not? And bring some creamer, too, will you? A lot. Like in a bucket.” She laughed good-naturedly, then took up the story again when the waitress walked away. “So we all came back later, dragging garden hoses we got out of our garages.”