Last Dance at Jitterbug Lounge

by Pamela Morsi

“Uh…well sure,” she answered, not having any idea what else she could say.

  “Thursday’s my day to get her out of the center and drive her around town, feed her family dinner and all that,” Mena explained. “But my husband’s doing roofing work out of town and my fifteen-year-old is arriving home from 4H State in—” the woman glanced down at her watch “—in about fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll just roll her right up here on the porch,” Mena said. “She won’t be any trouble and I’ll be back in just a few minutes. Let me just get her out of the car.”

  “Sure, I’ll help.”

  Claire had no idea which of the sisters might be in the car, but it didn’t really matter. She was sure all these people had spent time taking care of Bud and Geri. It was a great opportunity for her to return the favor.

  In the front seat of the minivan Aunt Sissy sat wearing a less faded version of the same muumuu she had on last time Claire had seen her. Her hair was freshly coiffed—probably from the local beauty shop.

  Claire opened the door.

  “Hi.”

  “Oh, I hope I’m not too much trouble,” the old woman said in her tiny, childlike voice. “I just wanted to see you so much and Mena is so very busy.”

  “Please come sit on my porch,” Claire said. “I was just getting ready to take a break.”

  Mena retrieved the wheelchair from the back of the van and opened it on the ground in front of the passenger door, locking it in place. With her granddaughter holding her around the waist, Aunt Sissy managed to lower herself from the car seat to a standing position. Once she got her hands on the arms of her chair, she easily seated herself. Mena lowered the footrests and placed her dainty size four-and-a-half shoes on them.

  “There we go,” Mena said.

  The rough ground between the drive and the front porch was not easy on the wheels, but both women seemed accustomed to the terrain. Mena maneuvered the wheelchair backward up the one step to the porch and then moved a chair out of the way to put Sissy in a nicely shaded spot next to the swing.

  “Thanks,” Mena said to Claire and then added to Aunt Sissy in a higher voice, “I’m just going to run out to the school and I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay, honey,” Aunt Sissy told her. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Mena repeated as she hurried to the car.

  Claire seated herself on the porch swing and flashed Aunt Sissy a smile. She thought, not for the first time, that the name suited her. She appeared to be a tiny, vulnerable person with a natural expression that was forlorn.

  Mena was backing out of the driveway almost as soon as she turned the ignition key. As she headed up the street, she waved.

  Aunt Sissy returned the gesture, the small wrinkled and weathered hand seemed not quite big enough to support the plain gold band on her third finger. As the van disappeared up the street, she glanced over at Claire.

  “Are you wearing a watch?” she asked.

  Claire wasn’t, but as Aunt Sissy continued, Claire realized the question was rhetorical.

  “Take note of the time,” the old woman said. “If that girl is back here in less than two hours, I’ll give you one hundred dollars.”

  Claire’s mouth dropped open, but she didn’t know what to say.

  “I don’t take any offense of it,” Aunt Sissy explained quickly. “The poor girl has her hands full. Working full-time with two teenagers in bloom. She and her husband are divorced.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t say I told you,” Sissy suggested. “They don’t think I know about it. They pretend that he’s out of town working, but the fact is he moved to Tulsa last year. The kids are heartbroken about it. And you know they say two can live as cheaply as one. But when two who used to be one start living separately, that’s something no family can really afford.”

  Claire nodded. “You’re probably right,” she said. “It’s too bad, marriages don’t last the way they used to.”

  Aunt Sissy laughed. “Oh, they never lasted the way they used to,” she said. “Marriage has never been easy. Because neither husband nor wife is ever a saint. And if they were, well, that would just make it worse.”

  “But people stayed together back in your day.”

  She nodded. “Mostly, but not everybody,” she said. “And even among those that did there were couples who hadn’t given each other the time of day in twenty years. It’s just back then they couldn’t get a divorce. Too much shame.”

  Claire nodded as if she understood.

  “I’ve got a friend at the center who’s getting a divorce right now.”

  “Really? In the nursing home?” Claire was surprised.

  “Yep,” Aunt Sissy answered. “Her kids are fit to be tied about it. They say, Why do that when you’re both living at different places and you’ll probably never have to see him again?”

  “That makes sense,” Claire said.

  “It does to the kids,” Aunt Sissy answered. “But Belva, that’s my friend, Belva says she couldn’t bear to die with the whole world thinking she never had enough sense to leave that man.”

  “I suppose she has a point,” Claire admitted.

  “I told her that if she really wanted people to know how she feels, we should get ourselves a gun, go over to his nursing home and she should shoot his gonads off.”

  Claire’s jaw dropped open and a shocked sound emerged from her throat.

  “The old S.O.B. has got no use for them anyway,” Aunt Sissy said. “The story would get splashed all over the six o’clock news. And what are the police going to do to Belva? Once you’re in a nursing home, you pretty much lose your fear of prison.”

  “Oh my gosh, what did Belva say?”

  Aunt Sissy’s face broke into a wide grin. “We had a great, good laugh just imagining it,” she said.

  She managed another one just by recalling the first. After a minute of enjoyment, her expression sobered.

  “Seriously, I’m thinking that sometimes a couple just needs to break up,” she said. “In marriage, where two souls are entwined, there can be things that can never be forgiven or forgotten. And that’s just the truth. But most of the time it’s just one disagreement that goes awry and two people who won’t give in. They let it build and build on itself until they can’t see any of the good they’ve got. And they let their anger destroy everything they ever made.”

  “Well, yes, I guess that’s so,” Claire admitted. “But sometimes people can just discover that they are at cross-purposes on what they want to achieve in life. They got married thinking they felt the same about things and then find out that the other person is not who they thought.”

  Aunt Sissy nodded sagely. “No husband ever turns out to be exactly what his bride thought,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” Claire said. “But when your core values are not compatible, it would seem like you’re doomed to divorce. So better sooner than later.”

  Aunt Sissy reached over and patted Claire on the hand. “Your mother is very far away these days, isn’t she?”

  The question momentarily caught Claire off guard. “Ah…well, they’re posted in Moldova, but right now I think they’re on vacation in the south of Spain.”

  Aunt Sissy clutched Claire’s hand as if to imbue her with strength. “I don’t think you and Jackie are doomed to divorce,” she said.

  Claire felt the blood drain from her face, just to come rushing back in an embarrassed blush.

  “Oh, I wasn’t talking about us,” she insisted.

  “Aren’t you?” Sissy asked. “We couldn’t help but notice that there’s a distance between you two. And what was that boy thinking coming up here to Geri’s funeral without you by his side.”

  “Well, there were the children….”

  “Who would have been perfectly welcome and made to feel at home with their cousins,” she said. “Your husband needed you and you should have been here.”

/>   Claire felt as if she’d been slapped. “No, he said that he didn’t need me. And he didn’t want me to come. He didn’t even want me to come this week.”

  Aunt Sissy shook her head. “Don’t pay him any mind when he’s like that. He doesn’t know what he wants.”

  “Well, he knows he doesn’t want me.”

  She hadn’t meant the words exactly as they’d come out. She quickly tried to take them back, but Aunt Sissy would have none of it.

  “Just spit it all out,” she said. “Before it eats you up inside.”

  Claire hesitated, but found herself wanting to say it aloud.

  “He’s built a new house,” she said.

  “A new house? How nice.”

  “It’s not nice,” Claire said. “It’s a huge palace of a place. It’s showy and vulgar, designed just to impress. I swear the man would like nothing better than to paper the walls with hundred-dollar bills.”

  “A lot of women would love a nice, new house.”

  Claire nodded. “I’m sure they would, but I love the house that I have. It’s not big or fancy, but it’s ours. We bought it on a shoestring and I’ve painted and washed and waxed every surface in it. We brought our children home from the hospital to that place. And we’ve celebrated every birthday, every anniversary, every Christmas there. We know all the neighbors and it’s in a great school system. We’re close to everything. And the best part, we can afford it. We can afford it easily.”

  Aunt Sissy was listening intently.

  “The new house is way out in a new area, surrounded by other giant Garage Mahals. The school district is only so-so and it’s very overcrowded.”

  “Maybe you could send the children to private school,” Aunt Sissy suggested.

  “Jack says the same thing,” Claire told her. “Just think how much that will cost. Jack works long hours now. So what happens when our mortgage triples and we start paying school tuition? The kids will never see him. I will never see him. I’ll be living alone in a giant house that I don’t want.”

  “Have you told him this?”

  “We fight about it all the time,” Claire said. “The thing is, it’s more than just a house to him. It’s like proof that he’s a success. He wants everybody to see that he can make money. The people who love him don’t care if he makes money.”

  Aunt Sissy chuckled. “I guess the people who love him aren’t the ones he’s worried about,” she said. “He must have it in his head that some very important people don’t love him.”

  That statement caught Claire up short. She gathered her thoughts for a moment before she spoke.

  “It’s really funny that you should say that,” she told Aunt Sissy. “Because on the way home from the hospital today, Jack confessed to me that he didn’t believe that Bud and Geri loved him.”

  “Why that’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” the old woman said. “Why would Jackie think something like that?”

  Claire shrugged. “Because they never came down to San Antonio to see him. And they wouldn’t let him put in a pool for them?” Her answer was as much a question as a statement.

  Sissy shook her head. “Bud and Geri never did any traveling. She always said that he liked to sleep in his own bed. And I don’t think he cared much for the water, either,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him go swimming.”

  “That Jack would even think that is just completely crazy,” Claire said.

  Aunt Sissy agreed. “It’s sure crazy all right,” she said. “About as crazy as thinking you don’t share anything important with the man who’s a loving father to your three children.”

  Claire had the good grace to blush.

  “Pick your battles, girl,” Aunt Sissy advised. “Where you are is not as important as who you’re with.”

  Claire didn’t openly agree with that, but she did consider that Aunt Sissy might know what she was talking about.

  She sure knew about Mena. After an hour and a half together on the porch, Claire asked her if she was hungry.

  “It has been awhile since lunch,” the old lady said. “And if you feed me, well that will be one less thing that Mena has to do.”

  Claire wheeled her inside the house back to the kitchen.

  “You can have your pick of the leftovers,” she told her. “The Shertz family has been sending over food like there’s an army of eaters here. We’ve got ham and roast beef and even some very tasty tuna casserole.”

  Aunt Sissy glanced through the bedroom doorway and noted all the boxes scattered on the floor.

  “Are you sorting things out in there?”

  “Oh, I was looking at the pictures and reading through the old letters and mementos,” Claire said. “That’s all right, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely,” Aunt Sissy assured her. “I’m sure Geri saved all that for you and Jack and the children.”

  Claire nodded. “That’s what I thought, too. I really hoped that I’d find Bud’s war medals,” she said. “Jack’s never seen them, and Toni told me that they were very impressive.”

  The expression that came over Aunt Sissy’s face was both shock and sadness.

  “Oh, honey, you’re not going to find them here,” she said. “They were buried with J.D. I saw Bud put them in the coffin myself.”

  Bud

  Something bumped the raft and startled me awake. I hadn’t really been asleep, but I’d been in that in-between place, that void of safety where neither the living hell nor the terror of dreams was in full control. I was still alive and I was trying to stay that way.

  I’d managed to fix the hole in the raft, though I wasn’t sure how well it would hold. Among the “provisions” stowed on the raft was a roll of adhesive tape. It was white and sticky and I think it was more for patching up flesh than rubber, but I got the leak stopped which freed me to move.

  But I wasn’t moving much. The sun was low, the oppressive heat was waning, but I was stiff and aching, sore and thirsty. There was no reason to lift my head up to gaze across the never-ending stretch of water on every side. I don’t know what made me look up at that exact moment. Momentarily, I was startled by a man in the water. But it was only Randel. The body of Lt. Randel was still bobbing on the water. I should have taken off his vest.

  He’d drifted away, but now he was drifting back. The day had not been a good one for him. The hot sun had done a lot of work. He was very much a dead man. Shrunken, sun-bleached, flesh missing. I might not have even recognized him as formerly human if I had not known he was there.

  Maybe I’d have another chance of letting him go, I thought. It was what I should do. I didn’t want to imagine his family, his wife, his mother thinking about him, praying for him and his body just stuck atop the water. It was like being trapped between heaven and hell. He deserved last rites. He deserved to have his body consigned to the deep. It was my duty to him as a fellow human being.

  If I was going to do it, I couldn’t wait. The sun was sinking and I’d lose sight of him. Paddling, I could get alongside in minutes. My decision was made, but my intention was never realized.

  Everything happened so fast. At first I didn’t realize what was going on. It was as if an errant wave rose up and swamped Randel. Then I realized the wave had teeth.

  “Shark!” I screamed as the raft tottered atop the violent movement in the water.

  It rocked back and forth for an instant that seemed like an eternity. Then just as quickly the water stilled. It was as if an unholy quiet had settled upon the spot. I held my breath, waiting for the next horror. And I was not disappointed.

  A minute after the eerie stillness settled in, Randel’s vest popped to the surface. I gagged. Too frightened to lean my head over the side, I vomited all over myself.

  No, I was trying to vomit, but there was something in my throat. I struggled to free myself from it, choking. Then I realized it was the breathing tube. I was in the hospital. I remembered now. But how real the raft had seemed! I wondered if that was what death was
going to be for me. I’d believed that I had died out there in the water. Perhaps all these intervening years, the years with Geri, had been a gift and in the end I would find myself back there. Back in that most beautiful horizon of hell.

  It was as good an explanation as any. Of course, death couldn’t really be explained. You could see it, hear it, touch it, taste it and smell it. But humanly it somehow couldn’t be understood, just endured.

  Or maybe we can get a glimpse of comprehension by staring at its opposite: the spring that J.D. graduated high school.

  My son became his own man that spring. He was strong and good-looking, funny and smart, hardworking and kind. He was captain of the basketball team and president of the senior class. Two girls took top spots in academics, but J.D. came in third with straight A’s in all his classes.

  He’d decided that he wanted to go to the Air Force Academy and he’d written a letter to Senator Mike Monroney asking for a recommendation. Military life would certainly not have been my first choice, even as an officer, but J.D. knew his own mind and what he wanted. He went after it.

  He was working both early morning and after school at Stark’s IGA. Old Man Stark had died and left the place to my stepbrother, Jonas. Mama retained enough influence to get her grandson a job.

  J.D. was like his mother in the way that he scrimped and saved. You’d never catch him throwing away good money on beer or cigarettes or even flashy clothes. That spring he bought a brand-new Ford pickup. He paid cash for it and just drove it home. Geri and I were flabbergasted.

  “It’s not that I didn’t want your opinion on this,” he told me as he leaned over the big six-cylinder and listened to it purr. “I just felt like it was something I needed to do on my own. Do you understand that?”

  I smiled at him and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. “Sure I do,” I told him. “When I was your age I got married without even giving your grandma a hint. It’s your money, you worked hard for it and it’s a fine vehicle.”

  “I thought I might start doing more grocery deliveries,” he said. “I make as much in tips as I get in hourly wage. And then I’ll have it to drive up to Colorado Springs in the fall.”