by Cathy Holton
Leonard watched Lavonne sentimentally. “I'd forgotten how good you were with children,” he said.
Lavonne thought, I ought to be good with children. I was married to you for twenty-one years. Christy looked at Leonard the way George Washington might have looked at Benedict Arnold after he surrendered West Point to the British.
Too drunk to sense danger, Leonard continued on. “You look great, Lavonne. How much weight have you lost anyway?”
“Ham sandwiches okay?” Lavonne said. “Or I can make tuna.”
“Tuna gives me gas,” Christy said sullenly.
“Ham it is then,” Lavonne said.
Christy patted one of her ample hips. “I'm still carrying the baby weight,” she said to Lavonne.
“It's been ten months,” Leonard said. “How long you planning on carrying it?”
Christy's sharp little eyes sliced through him like surgical scalpels. “As long as it takes you to regrow some hair,” she said.
“I can pack a cooler,” Lavonne said, “if you'd rather eat on the road.”
“I'll have another beer,” Leonard said to Lavonne, sucking despondently at his Corona. Before they were married, Christy had called him Sweet Cheeks. Now she called him Hey you. Hey you, the cat just barfed on the carpet or Hey you, the baby needs a diaper change.
“Sorry, I'm out of beer,” Lavonne lied. She hoped he hadn't noticed the old Philco out in the shed stocked with Coronas. “Joe's coming over later and maybe he'll bring some with him but you'll be gone by then.”
Leonard set his empty bottle down on his leg. He looked at Lavonne with a dazed expression. “Joe?” he said.
VIRGINIA INVITED NITA TO GO TO THE BEACH FOR SPRING break and Nita almost accepted. Redmon had a condo in Destin, the Redneck Riviera, and Virginia was taking Whitney and one of her friends on a “girls' trip.”
“It'll be fun,” Virginia said, clapping her little hands together. “We'll go out to dinner and go shopping and maybe even play some tennis.”
“Well, it does sound like fun,” Nita said. “But I promised Jimmy Lee I'd spend some time with him. Maybe next year.”
She felt a little guilty about turning Virginia down after she had been so nice to Whitney, even though Nita didn't exactly agree with the way Virginia went about showing her love. Virginia's fondness for her granddaughter revealed itself in overtly materialistic ways: shopping trips for Whitney and her friends, new clothes, a decorator hired to redo a spare bedroom in Virginia's house where Whitney slept when she visited. Virginia had even promised Whitney a new car once she turned fifteen, which, of course, Nita had immediately vetoed, incurring the everlasting wrath of Whitney. Virginia, contrite, had apologized repeatedly to Nita over this. “I am so sorry, Nita. I know I should have asked you first before promising the child any thing so extravagant.” She sighed. “It's just that I never had a little girl of my own so of course I have a tendency to want to spoil my only granddaughter rotten. She is such a lovely girl.” Nita found it hard to stay angry with Virginia after this confession.
“Maybe Virginia just wears an evil mask to protect her inner child,” Nita said to Loretta one sunny afternoon after Whitney had left for the beach with her grandmother. She'd been reading some of her psychology books again, trying to get a handle on Whitney. “Maybe she's just trying to get over a bad childhood.”
“Virginia's inner child is about as helpless as Attila the Hun,” Loretta said. They were sitting in Nita's small kitchen, peeling potatoes for supper. “Her inner child makes Vlad the Impaler look like Cinderella.”
“Now, Mama, people can change.”
“A snake by any other name would still be a snake,” Loretta said darkly. Loretta James had grown up in Vienna, Georgia, and she had her own way of talking. Most of the time Nita understood what she was trying to say. She figured her mother had trust issues when it came to Virginia Redmon. Nita herself had once had trust issues, but they were being slowly eroded away by Virginia's newfound warmth and friendliness. Still, it had taken some work on Nita's part, too. When she first found out that night at bunco that Jimmy Lee had gone into business with Redmon and Virginia on the Culpepper Plantation project, she had felt sick to her stomach and had stayed in bed the next day.
When she finally worked up the strength to talk to him, she asked Jimmy Lee, “Why didn't you tell me you were going into business with them?”
He was distraught. This was the first time in their relationship he hadn't been honest with her and the guilt had nearly killed him. “I didn't tell you, honey, because I was afraid you wouldn't lend me the money. I knew it was a good deal. I knew we could make some money, but I had to have some capital, too, or they would have found somebody else. It was a once-in-alifetime chance, and I just had to take it.” He tried to stroke her hair but she turned her face away. “Just tell me the truth, Nita. If I had told you who it was I was going into business with, would you have lent me the money?”
Nita thought about the six hundred thousand dollars she had put away in her bank account as insurance against Charles filing for child custody. She shook her head. “No,” she said coldly. “I wouldn't have.”
“See?” Jimmy Lee said, spreading his hands like he was trying to make her see reason. “I knew you wouldn't. And you were so caught up trying to finish your paper and all, and you didn't really seem to want to discuss it, so I just made the decision by myself.”
That much was true. She had been too distracted to think about anything else. She had given him the money without asking any questions, and it was too late, now, to go back and regret her decision.
Still, she was relieved that things seemed to be going so well with the project. The bridge was in and the surveyors had begun plotting the lots. The asphalt road was laid. The utilities were going in over the next few weeks and with any luck, and good weather, they'd begin the foundation of the first spec home sometime in June. Jimmy Lee went around the house whistling, just like he had when they first fell in love and the world had seemed bright and full of promise. He worked hard, from sunup to sundown, making sure the subs showed up and the work progressed ahead of schedule. When her bank account got down to twenty-two thousand dollars, Nita stopped checking it. The dwindling balance made her feel abandoned and fearful. It reminded her of a reccurring nightmare she'd had as a child, one in which she'd found herself alone on the prairie with a tornado coming and no place to hide, just miles and miles of flat, unprotected country. Jimmy Lee put his arms around her and told her everything would be all right. They'd be starting on the first house soon and once it sold, Nita would get back a big chunk of her investment. And it might even be sooner than that if Redmon was able to work out the complicated leveraging deal he was trying to swing with the bank.
Outside the kitchen window, a hummingbird hung motionless. Cypress and mimosa trees reflected in the slow-moving water of the Black Warrior River. Nita giggled. She was thinking about what her mother had said earlier. “Vlad the Impaler?” she said.
“Just watch your back, is all I'm saying,” Loretta said grimly. “Around Virginia, you got to be as careful as a toupee wearer in a windstorm.”
Down the hallway, Logan picked up his electric guitar and began to practice a song he had written for his ex-girlfriend.
“Cut me with your stiletto eyes,” he growled.
Loretta dropped a peeled potato into a ceramic bowl. She indicated Logan's room with her thumb. “He still going out with that Gilley girl?”
“No,” Nita said. “They broke up.”
“Stab me with your lies,” he sang. When the Gilley girl broke up with him, Logan had decided to get revenge the only way he knew how. He had decided to become a musician.
“You know her grandmama was a Starr from over by Vienna,” Loretta said.
“Really?”
“Beat me with your discontent, “ Logan crooned.
“Her granddaddy's people come from over by Oostanaula. James Edward was his name.”
Behind them the g
uitar wailed like a banshee. Logan's voice rose above the guitars. “Slash me with your indifference,” he sang.
“He had red hair and freckles.”
“Crush me with your loathing,” Logan growled.
“He was a good-looking man, but bad to drink. Had a brother with a clubfoot by the name of Stump.”
The guitar shook the rafters. “Kill me, you bitch!” Logan screamed.
Nita shrugged and looked at her mother. “It's a love song,” she said.
“Naturally,” Loretta said.
ON SATURDAY, NITA WENT OUT TO THE NURSING HOME TO SEE Leota Quarles. She was not in her room when Nita arrived but the nurse was making up her bed. “Miz Quarles is still at lunch, but she'll be back any minute.”
“Oh what lovely flowers,” Nita said, looking at an arrangement that sat on the bedside table.
“Aren't they pretty?” the nurse said. “Mrs. Redmon had them sent over yesterday.”
“Virginia Redmon?”
“Yes. She comes to have lunch with Miz Quarles every Friday, but she couldn't come this week because she's down in Florida.”
Nita sat down by the window to wait. Sunlight splashed the red-brick façade of the building and rolled across the neatly manicured lawn like a carpet. Traffic passed busily in the street. In the top of a tall fir tree a wren built a nest. Nita heard Leota's voice and she turned her face to the door just as a young orderly wheeled her into the room. Her eyes were clear and bright and she was giggling at something the orderly had said. She seemed surprised to see Nita. “Is today Tuesday?” she said.
Nita stood up. “No, Miss Leota, remember, I had to move our appointment from Tuesday to Saturday. Is that okay?”
“Oh, yes, honey, of course.”
The orderly helped her stand. She indicated with her hand that she wanted to sit by the window. “Shouldn't you be in bed?” he said.
“I've been in bed,” she said. “I want to sit where I can see the sun.”
He got her settled in her favorite rocking chair and then he went out. Leota listened while Nita read back what she had so far. Then she turned her head toward the window and began.
“After that first night at the movies, Miss Virginia and Hampton Boone starting going around together. He'd wait for her at the landing in his mama's big Chrysler New Yorker and she'd have one of the colored hands row her across the river and she'd meet him there. They were quiet about it, at first, but it was a small town and word got out pretty quick. Maureen Hamilton went to see Miz Boone, his mama, and she put her foot down, but you know how it is when a mama puts her foot down—any boy worth his salt will do just the opposite. Mr. Boone had been dead for years by then, and it had been just the boy and his mama, and he was used to doing as he pleased. He was good to me, always speaking to me respectfully if he run into me in town, always sending me little presents through Miss Virginia. But I could see the kind of man he was behind his handsome face and manners. He was the kind of man used to having his own way. When he went back to school at the end of Christmas break, Miss Virginia laid in her little bed and looked at the ceiling and wouldn't talk to nobody.”
Leota pulled a Kleenex out of a little box on the bedside table and blew her nose.
“We can stop now if you're tired,” Nita said, but the old woman shook her head, no. She looked out the window at the traffic passing in the street and after a few minutes, she went on.
“And then it was summer again, and Hampton Boone was back from college and Miss Virginia was a new person. She went around laughing and singing and her face glowed all the time and she was prettier than any of the actresses you saw up on the movie screen, the kind of girl who could make your heart ache just looking at her. She and Hampton would drive around town in his big car and go swimming at the country club and have picnics on the river. You never saw a girl as crazy in love with a boy as Miss Virginia was with Hamp Boone. She came home late one night and I was sitting on the porch waiting for her. I'd heard her go out, soon after her mama and daddy went to bed. She came home later, walking down the sandy road in the moonlight, carrying her shoes in her hand. When she saw me she run up on the porch and hugged me and said in her fierce little voice, ‘Leota, I'm going to marry that boy or die trying.’ It made me sad, hearing her talk like that and seeing her little bare feet so pale and fragile-looking. The week before he went back to school, I held her in my arms again and this time she was crying and saying, over and over, ‘Leota, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? I love him.’ And I said, ‘You have to tell him,’ and she said, ‘I can't unless I know he loves me.’”
Leota sighed and blew her nose again. The sun had reached its zenith and under the noonday glare the landscape looked flat. Bees moved in lazy circles among the azaleas. A white cat stretched out on its side in the shade of a boxwood hedge. Leota looked tired and Nita knew she should stop her, but she couldn't. She had to know what happened.
“After he left, she stopped eating and she got so small and frail I was afraid she had whatever you call that disease that Mary Lee Hamilton died from.”
“Anorexia nervosa?”
“Yeah, that one. I tried to get her to eat but she was sick all the time and all I could do was make her lie down so I could put cold cloths on her forehead like I'd done when she was a little girl and the town kids had teased her about not having indoor plumbing. She went by the post office every day after school but the letters didn't come as often as they'd come before. Then in December, two weeks before he was supposed to come home for Christmas, there was an announcement in the paper that Hampton Boone was engaged to be married to Maureen Hamilton. They were getting married in April. It was to be the social event of the county. Miss Virginia never said a word, she just clipped the article and took it up and put it in her little cigar box where she kept all her other treasures since she was a little girl, the pottery pieces and spear points she'd dug up on Big Ridge, the corsage she'd worn to her first cotillion, all her love letters from Hampton Boone. Later, I went into her room to hug her and try to get her to cry about it, but she never cried, her little face was flushed and hot to the touch and her eyes glittered like shards of broken glass, but she never cried. Something gentle had gone out of her and something hard took its place.
“When she went away in January I was crying, and her mama was crying, and her daddy was crying and saying, ‘Poor little Queenie, poor little Queenie,’ over and over, but her eyes were dry and hard as bone. She sat down in the bow of the boat and held on to the sides with her little gloved hands and looked straight ahead like a woman who knows what it is she has to do.”
Leota was crying now. Tears streamed down her cheeks and dripped over the edge of her chin into her lap. She wiped her face and blew her nose, and Nita got up and hugged her for a long time. Her shoulders shook for a while and then slowly subsided. Nita could feel the old woman's brittle bones through her clothes, like kindling wrapped in burlap, and for some reason Nita felt like crying, too, although she couldn't say why.
TWO WEEKS AFTER EADIE MET HIM AT BALD HEAD ISLAND, Trevor showed up at Lavonne's house unannounced. She had talked to him nearly every night on the telephone, and she liked that, but when she heard the rental car pull up in the drive and, a few minutes later, he came through the back gate shouting “Anybody home?,” she felt more than a little annoyed. It was one thing to communicate with him via telephone; it was something else entirely to find him encroaching physically on her newfound creativity and freedom.
Trevor saw her and stopped. “Hey, baby,” he said, grinning.
“What are you doing here?” she said flatly.
She was working back in her garage-shed studio. “Is that anyway to greet your husband?” he said, strolling toward her. He didn't seem to notice her annoyance. He put his arms around her and kissed her hungrily.
“You'll get paint on your shirt,” she said.
“I don't care.”
“I thought we agreed no visits while we're working.”
&nb
sp; He shrugged and let her go. “I missed you,” he said.
It was a warm sunny day and Eadie had the studio doors thrown open to catch the light. She was working on one of the canvases she had started when she first moved in with Lavonne. Trevor stood in front of the easel looking at her work. “This is wonderful,” he said. “It reminds me of one of Modigliani's Jeanne Hebuternes.”
Eadie dropped her brush into a jar of turpentine. “Just what every artist wants to hear,” she said. “That she paints like someone else.”
“I meant it as a compliment,” he said.
“Would you take it as a compliment if I told you that you write like Hemingway?”
“Hell, yes,” he said, kissing her again.
Later, they went out to dinner with Lavonne and Joe. Joe and Trevor got along like they'd known each other all their lives. They had the same dry sense of humor and both counted Lewis Nordan as one of their favorite writers.
“The Sharpshooter Blues is just about the best novel ever written,” Trevor said. They were at the Pink House Restaurant and had just ordered their fourth carafe of martinis.
“I don't know,” Joe said. “It's pretty hard to beat Music of the Swamp.”
“Y'all need to slow down on those martinis,” Eadie said. “That shit'll eat right through your liver.”
“This coming from the Tequila Queen of Ithaca County,” Trevor said, lifting his glass for a refill.
“Bite me, Trevor.”
“I intend to, my dear.”
After the restaurant closed, they took a cab out to the country club and slow-danced to Perry Como and to Nat King Cole singing “Mona Lisa” and “A Blossom Fell.” Eadie had to admit, it was nice having Trevor's arms around her again. When he kissed her neck, she almost forgot about all this foolishness, this separation that she had insisted on. When he sang “When I Fall in Love” in her ear, she knew she could never be happy without him, and it seemed then that her own need for success and independence didn't matter at all. But when the music stopped and she stepped away from him and her mind cleared, she realized her marriage could not continue unless she figured out some way to carve out a separate existence for herself. She could never be happy submerging herself in Trevor's life, painting herself into the background. She just wasn't that kind of woman.