“Eben told everyone, too.”
“You mean the girls?”
“I mean—everyone. He stood up in the pulpit and told the congregation.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish.”
“How’d they take it?”
“Nobody seemed surprised. That was the worst. I think Eben’s who told Lila Beth. She was in a crowd and wouldn’t look at me. They all hurried out front to shake hands and then went off to Fellowship Hall to eat. I hope they said good things about my potato bake; this was their last batch of it.”
“How’d the girls take it?”
“He must have told them, too. ‘See you, Momma.’ ”
“God.”
“I know.”
“Maybe we should have waited until summer. But I couldn’t stand the idea of Mary Virginia doing the whole surprise Four-Oh birthday party number on me.”
“They would have done the same thing whenever we told them.” I could hear over the line the sound of traffic in the background, and that pay-phone hum. “I may arrive at the farm with a moving van. Eben is kicking me out.”
“Wait till we see if I’ve got a farm.” Drew made a swallowing noise. “I’m supposed to see Mother tomorrow.”
“Lord.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s she going to say?”
“I don’t know. Bad boy.”
“Eben’s seen a lawyer.”
“A lawyer? I didn’t know he knew about that stuff.”
“He’s filing.”
“Shit. Mary Virginia’s probably already got a lien against my collar stays and shoehorns.”
I laughed. “You’ve still got your pickup.”
“I’m steaming up the phone booth, talking to you.”
“I’m steaming up the study on this end.”
“I’ve got to see you.”
“What time is Lila Beth’s?”
“Noon. She said, ‘We’ll have a salad.’ ” He groaned.
“You want red beans and rice for dessert?” I was suggesting Eva Lee’s, a barbeque café across the Brazos.
“Too many business types go there. Homestyle gives them nostalgia.”
“We’re not hiding.”
“We’re not hiding but we’re not advertising. Mother doesn’t need to get a report from some banker just now.”
“Circleburgers?” This was a place we’d never been together, a landmark diner south of town, where a cluster of highways came together like the spokes of a wheel.
“Best hamburgers in the county; second best jukebox. Great. Nobody but truck farmers uses those old roads anymore.”
“What time?”
“Two? Two.” He sounded scared to death.
“It’ll be okay,” I said.
“Sure it will, honey, it’ll be fine.” He laughed. “Are we lying to ourselves or each other?”
“Hold out for the shed and bikes.”
“That’s the bottom line.”
I listened to the hum for a minute before breaking the connection.
THE GIRLS CAME right to the table and sat down for a bowl of soup and some corn bread. They didn’t seem to be avoiding me; they’d waved the Bledsoes good-bye, not asking them in.
I sat across from them, feeling a familiar ache, a dull sense of repetition. Of their being pulled away from the dailiness of me, of a looming absence where once presence had been. An echo of the years in my life when people were always leaving and being left. I’d washed my hair and put on jeans. Already I had the sense that I didn’t quite live here anymore, although I tried to shake that off, tried not to be defensive. “I gathered that wasn’t news to you,” I said, “this morning in church. About your dad and me.”
“He said not to tell you till you brought it up.” Ruth dipped her spoon in the thick soup. She had on a T-shirt that said BE GREEN-SPIRITED: STOP DEFORESTATION, and striped shorts with a fly front which looked like men’s boxer shorts. Maybe they were. (Where did my kids get clothes that I’d never seen before? Where did they appear from? Where did they live? Was there a garment clearinghouse, something like a lending library, proceeds going to Clean Air Fund?)
Martha had on the same sort of shorts and a T reading SAVE THE DOLPHINS. She took a big swallow of milk, getting herself a white mustache which she quickly wiped away. She made a wavering dimpled smile in my direction.
Maybe they were as nervous as I was.
“You and Drew going to live on his farm?” Martha asked me.
“I think so.”
“Does he have a lot of cows?”
Ruth snapped to attention. “I hope he’s not part of that genetic engineering project they’re running up there. You know they produced four calves that have genes from three other species, including humans. That is obscene; that is direct chromosome manipulation. It’s Frankenstein.”
Martha came to my defense, to the defense of cows everywhere. “For your information, those are dairy cows on those farms, Ruth. They’re vegetarians just like you are. You can sit out in the pasture and eat clover with them. They’re milk cows. And the farmers sell this absolutely pure milk, completely free from growth hormones or sulfa drugs or anything else like that. Milk doesn’t happen to be a crime.”
She took another gulp from her glass, this time leaving the mustache on.
The matter of my exodus had been derailed by a familiar argument. What had I wanted? For these fair daughters, whose existence still filled my heart, to fling themselves on me and beg me not to go? Beg to go with me? Your people are my people and your farmhouse is my farmhouse? Probably I had. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to be eating soup with them this same way until they put on their backpacks and went off to seek the world’s fortune; I wanted their blessing on me and Drew. I said, “You can stay here during the week, so you can walk to your schools.”
“Dad told us that.” Ruth looked as if this was old news. “He said we’d work out summers and stuff like that.”
Martha reached across and patted my hand. I must have looked the way I felt: at a loss. At a lot of loss.
“You know what, Momma?” Beautiful deep-eyed Ruth made her own sort of rescue effort.
“What?”
“Dr. Song is going to install a computer here for us, in the study. She doesn’t need it anymore. She’s on a mainframe in Austin and she’s going to be part of the information highway, you know, the gigabit network that does billions of bits of data per second. She says we’ll be knowbots by next year.” She tugged on her clumps of hair, as if sending signals. “It’ll do graphs and everything, ours will. You can show that two hundred sixty thousand acres of forest have already been cut to support a meat-eating society, and show that every single individual who switches to a vegetarian diet saves an acre of trees. You can show that. It’s fantastic. I’m going to do some charts for Earth Day. For school.”
Dr. Song? Could that be the chiding Jae-Moon? Or someone else from Eben’s new Korean sister church, perhaps the reason for the sister church? He had been busy indeed, the pastor, making sure my leaving was definitely minor news on the home front.
Angry, I spoke before I could stop myself. “How does that compare ecologically? Trading a mother for a computer?”
Ruth leaned her curving GREEN-SPIRITED self toward me. “Gee, Momma, you don’t have to take it like that.”
Martha came around the table and gave me a squeeze, burying her soft face in my hair. “We didn’t want to make you feel bad, talking about the divorce. You know, acting like we were upset.”
I shook my head, apologetic. “I was out of order. Sorry. I just wanted—” If they argued cows and forests, who was to say that was not the constancy in their lives they required now. And if they had technology to help them along, so much the better. I needed to recycle my response. “I only wanted you to know that my leaving your daddy doesn’t mean my leaving you.”
“Sure, Momma.” Ruth seemed impatient with my speeches. Maybe Eben had said the same things; maybe s
he had a harder time hearing them a second time, having to put up her defenses twice.
She carried our bowls to the kitchen. When she came back, still standing, she said, as if it wasn’t important, “That’s what Dad said. He said that you all splitting and them getting together didn’t have anything to do with us. We know that.” She crossed her arms over her chest, looking at the two of us. “How about if we go get some Bluebell ice cream?” She stared at her younger sister, her face sending the message that this was the concession of a lifetime. “Ice cream, Mart.”
“Can we?” Martha jumped up, beaming. “Really? Can we, Momma? I want fresh peach.”
MONDAY MORNING I decided I’d better bite the bullet. It was clear that I was going to need my next of kin.
Before I could dial, though, while I was having one cup of coffee too many and trying to psych myself up, she beat me to it. My unfavorite teacher, also known as my daddy’s wife.
“I hear you’ve got yourself in a big mess,” she said.
“Hello, Theo.”
“I’ve come up in the world. Last time it was ‘Miss Moore.’ ”
“Come on.”
“It wasn’t? Worse than that?”
“How’d you hear?”
“Little birdie.”
“Teachers always have their spies.”
“Come for lunch.”
“Why don’t I?”
“Shorty’ll be pleased.”
“How come he’s not fishing?”
“Folklore. Fish don’t bite on Monday. Besides, you must not have been out. There’s a tornado watch.”
“Watch? I don’t have the radio on.”
“Watch, not warning. That just means it’s officially April.”
“Give me half an hour.”
“Don’t get lost this time, girl. Remember R-O-B-I-N.”
“Right.”
Theodora Moore and Shorty Guest had lived in Waco now for three years come summer, their arrival preceding me and Drew at the Czech Fest by a couple of months. I hadn’t been a bit glad at the time to hear that she’d got Daddy to retire and was moving him back to her old home grounds. I hadn’t wanted to claim kin to them, for one thing; for another, I couldn’t bear for Lila Beth to have any inkling that I could be related to a couple whose house with filled with objet knickknacks and whose car had a bumper sticker saying DOO-DOO HAPPENS.
Once a month maximum I dropped by for coffee. Theo taught at Waco High, English same as always, and sooner or later Ruth and then Martha were going to have her, and then she could announce that these girls were her secondhand grandbabies, but they could deal with that. They went over with me once or twice a year, for birthdays, somebody’s, just often enough that I didn’t have to feel guilty for keeping my only kin in a closet. Eben had come along at a time when I was scarcely speaking to them, had actually not met them until two weeks before our wedding. They weren’t churchgoers, and one reason I had them on my mind now was that they might be the only people in town that Eben hadn’t got to first.
R-O-B-I-N was an acronym designed to help me find their house. It was clear I had a block of some sort, because I never headed over there that I didn’t get hopelessly lost. I could find any street at all in our area; weaving around Lake View, Loch View, Lago Vista, Laguna Vista was no sweat, they presented themselves to me without a wrong turn. Or the woody section where Baby and Sugar Bledsoe lived—the Wood Oaks, Oak Wood, Forest Oaks, Oak Forest fell into formation for me. But let me turn into Shorty and Theo’s part of town, an area reclaimed, like Holland from the sea, from the marshy shores of Lake Waco, and I was instantly lost.
The first time I went calling, map in hand, to welcome them to town, I never found their house. All the streets were named for birds (Whippoorwill, Thrush, Falcon, Wren, Finch), and each street curved in a circle or semicircle or cul-de-sac, most of them winding back around on themselves, so that it was worse than a maze. They were junky, new, expensive places, freestanding condos close to all Shorty’s favorite fishing spots, and near lots of his retired fishing buddies. R-O-B-I-N was the order of the streets I was to take off Lake Shore. The trouble was, no matter how good my intent, it was impossible to tell if I was on the right route until it was too late. Both Redwing and Redbird ran into Oriole, and Oriole opened out into both Bobolink and Bobwhite, so that if I got to that point and didn’t find Ibis, then I knew I’d taken the wrong turn. Once I found Ibis, then it was a choice between Nighthawk and Nightingale, and if I took the wrong one I ended up back on Redbird, and had to start over.
“You made record time,” Theo said at the door.
“I’m educable.” I’d made it in fifteen minutes flat, no errors. It was a piece of cake. All I had to remember was -wing, -link, -gale. W-L-G. Where Lives Guest? Absolute cake. It just went to show how much resistance there’d been to ending up on this doorstep.
“That I know.” Theo smiled a proud teacher’s smile. She was a dumpling of a woman with chubby cheeks and curly hair and always some sort of flowery flour-sack kind of dress, over, I was sure, an underwired pushup bra.
“How come you’re home at noon?” I asked her.
“I’ve got such seniority I have my two free periods back-to-back. Gives us time for a bite and a nap.”
Shorty was in the carport on a stool, working on what looked like a funnel made of close-weave chicken wire. A bait trap. “I’ve got a wager going,” he said, nodding to acknowledge me. “Buddy of mine runs a trotline, he uses bluegills. Me, I use goggle-eyed perch. I wouldn’t bait out with anything else. For big yellow cat they’re the best. They’re soft; catfish like that. Little ones, two inches. Plus goggle-eyes stay alive on the line for the best part of a week. Bluegills, bream, they die whenever they feel like it. I got him beat last year, six yellows over forty-five pounds. One big yellow weighed seventy-six. But he caught an eighty-five pounder. So we’ve got a wager.” He stood and gave me a kiss. Not smelling of beer the way he always used to. Smelling maybe of mouthwash. “Go on in. I’ll be there.”
“Campaign posters in the yard.” I gestured as Theo and I headed for the flowered kitchen hung with wall sconces and potted ivy.
“Runoff’s tomorrow. Our hometown girl better win.”
“Will she?”
“Be nice to have governor number four from Waco. Be even nicer to have a woman in that mansion, somebody with a little backbone. I’ve been calling every name in the book, canvassing. I’m taking a day of sick leave to drive folks to the polls. But I don’t know. It’s pitiful, just pitiful how nasty the campaign got there at the end.”
Shorty came in and pulled out a chair. “Sit,” he said. “Let me look at you.”
“We’re having a sandwich,” Theo said to me. “What’ll you have?”
“What are my options?”
“I’m having a Cream Cheese and Olive on White. Your daddy is having a Garden of Eden on Wheat.”
“What’s that?”
“Peanut butter mixed with butter on both slices, a leaf of lettuce dipped in French dressing in between.”
Shorty said, “I named it. They haven’t let us eat like that since the Garden of Eden.”
“Give me cream cheese,” I said. “Cut the olives.”
Looking at my daddy always gave me hives, right off. Because he resembled me a whole lot, but was double the size, and had an attitude of insubordination to the universe in general, which seemed a total mismatch to Theo’s reverence for the system. What I did like about him, a lot, was that he never reproached me for the fact that we lived in the same town and didn’t set eyes on each other for a couple of months of Sundays at a time. Mother was in the way between us, and I guess he knew that.
He was recounting now his latest trip to the doctor, for, he said, a little “prostrate trouble.” Wheezing laughter at his joke.
“Iced tea?” Theo said.
“Fine.”
“Sweetened?”
“No.” I looked at Shorty. His hair and eyebrows were a sort of tan-white and bush
y. He had a million laugh or sun lines around his eyes and mouth. It felt somewhat like looking at myself down the road. I hoped I wasn’t going to be rotund. “So how’s it going?” I asked him. “Your plumbing and your gums?” He’d also been on the periodontist circuit.
“Ask the wife.” He waved a hand at Theo. “No booze, no smokes. She’s got me on a health regime.”
“Obviously not a diet.”
“Trade-off. All the food and nookie I want, no other vices.” He lifted the top of his sandwich and took a peek at the oily ruffled lettuce leaf inside, then stirred a pudgy finger around in the creamy peanut butter. He took a bite. “You know how you can tell old folks in bed?” he asked with his mouth full.
“How?”
“He lifts her nightie, gets his hardware out, and after they’re done, he says, ‘Did you aerobic?’ and she says, ‘It was cardiovascular for me.’ ” Wheeze, wheeze.
Theo sat down, bringing my sandwich and hers.
“What did your little birdie tell you?” I asked her.
“That there was a particle physicist in the churchyard.”
“The wife is the last to know,” I said mildly. I was recalling Eben saying he’d asked Jae-Moon to help with Easter. Seeing the Korean woman with the high cheekbones and glossy black hair seize my hands in obvious joy on Palm Sunday. Hearing the girls report that Dr. Song was moving in a computer. It was clear I’d handed the pastor a bow-tied gift.
“And that you’ve hooked up with your old school days’ boyfriend.”
“Drew. Drew Williams.”
“He changed his name,” Shorty said. “Used to be Andy.”
“His wife did that.”
“You going to change it back?”
“If we get around to it.”
“His old man was a doctor, friendly with your mother.”
“Yes, he was the head clinician—” I looked at Theo, always making the mistake of thinking she was going to be jealous of somebody who’d been dead for twenty-plus years. When she actually owed my mother a lot, namely Shorty.
“Nice boy.”
“His mother was a Jarvis.” Theo said. She’d polished off her cream cheese and sliced olive sandwich with mayonnaise, and was looking at the remains of mine with hurt feelings. “I was in school with her. What a priss. Everything was monogrammed. Most likely even her heinie. Lila Beth Jarvis. LBJ this and LBJ that, on her notebooks and her hankies and her Ship ’n’ Shore blouses. Most likely her boy’s got that monogram somewhere. She going to let him go?”
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