by Dan Dillard
***
“Robyn?” Sue said, “Your momma’s on the phone. Want me to take a message?”
“No. Thanks, Sue. I’ve got it right here.” She leaned over the bar and grabbed the cordless handset from its cradle and pushed the talk button. “Hi momma,” she said and then heard the click of the line in the office as Sue hung up.
“Hiya, Squirt!” her mother said. “How’s things?”
“Oh, fair I suppose. Just got some disturbing news.”
“Uh oh. What’s that?”
“Do you know Shrimp?”
“Theo? Sure. Known him for years.”
Robyn paused a moment, looking for proper phrasing. She concluded there wasn’t any way to sugar coat murder and just said it. “He was killed last night.”
“That is disturbing,” her mother said.
Sheila Scott Pendleton was an odd, but well-loved old bird. She had buried three husbands, one of which was an abusive drug addict. When one career managing the local newspaper wasn’t good enough, she started a second working in hospital administration. She quickly fell out of love with that one, retired, and started teaching theater in Smithville for the community playhouse. Sheila was never boring.
Her outlandish clothing and multicolored hair paved the way for her vocabulary which was reminiscent of a US Navy greatest hits album. She also claimed her house was haunted by a fiddle playing slave from the 1800’s. In other words, it was difficult to disturb her. “What the hell happened?”
“Greg Stafford says Thomas Bledsoe beat him to death with a tire iron over some stupid argument. Money, cards. Something like that. I don’t have all the details yet.”
“A shitty way to go. Shitty way to send someone off,” Sheila said. “Though, knowing Theo, I can see it. He could offend, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure, momma…but murder?”
“Well, that’s true. Extreme, but sometimes the right mix of atmosphere and alcohol calls for the devil…and the devil always answers his calls, Squirt.”
“I guess he does,” Robyn said.
For one second, there was silence in the whole restaurant. Not the clink of a fork on a plate, an ice cube in a glass, no conversation at all. It was as if the whole room had decided to take a breath at the same time. The closest table of tourists were still eyeing Robyn, still listening for tidbits of information they might take back to the beach and discuss the small town doings over a local wine in their rented cottage. Robyn turned around to face the kitchen.
“I was calling to see if you were busy for lunch today. I know your class reunion is coming up and I wanted to chat about it. I’d love to see some of your old friends if they aren’t too busy to stop by a crazy lady’s house for a spell.”
“Come on by, momma. Or do you need me to come pick you up?”
“Hell no. It’s a beautiful day out. I can hoof it.”
“I did see Rusty Clemmons. He’s staying here. Do you remember him?”
There was silence on the line, then a rhythmic clicking. She pictured her mother tapping a freshly pressed-on and probably hot pink fingernail on the telephone’s mouthpiece.
“Clemmons,” Sheila said. “Lots of that family name around here. He wasn’t the one who lost his sister back in high school?”
“That’s him. How did you know that?”
“Oh, squirt, you were young. What, fourteen? It was big shit news in our little town. Shame. How is he doing?”
“He’s good. Looks good. Sweet fella.”
“Do I detect a hint of dreaminess? You haven’t slept with him already, have you?”
“Momma!” She wasn’t embarrassed and as soon as the words came through the receiver, Robyn knew she should’ve expected them.
“Well, I have to ask. I might not be here much longer, and I need to know you’re being taken care of. At my age, you have to jump right in or you might never get laid.”
Robyn snickered and shook her head. “Well, I think I’m young enough to be somewhat ladylike.”
“Shit. Why wait? Look, I hate these phones. I’ll just see you in an hour or so.”
“Okay, momma.”
Robyn waited for the line to disconnect, but Sheila interjected once more. “Can you hear it?”
“What?”
“Big Jacques is playing the fiddle. Can’t you hear it?”
Robyn listened carefully, but there was only static on the line, the same sound people called the ocean in a conch shell. She’d never witnessed Jacques’s playing, a phenomenon which began sometime in the mid 1990’s, but Robyn had seen some strange things while visiting her mother’s. The strangest was one spring afternoon when she and Kelly were visiting. Kelly was only five or six years old at the time. The swingset out back began swinging on its own. Robyn would never forget it because aside from the eeriness of it, it had sparked a huge fight with her daughter because Kelly wanted to swing and Robyn was terrified to let her go out there. The thought led her to a dozen other thoughts.
Robyn’s husband, Alan, had installed that swingset when Kelly was a toddler so there would be something to do at Grandma Sheila’s house. It was one of the Wal-Mart specials from the weekend flyer. A hundred and fifty dollars got you two huge cardboard boxes, a weekend of busting knuckles and swearing. It was cheap. They didn’t visit often—not often enough for Robyn—and that fact was one part of why she and Alan had divorced. The other part was Alan’s inability to distinguish between her vagina and other vaginas.
Robyn had always been spitting distance from her mother and all three of Sheila’s exes before they died. She missed her own father the most, but liked the other two fine—even the druggie. She missed the family, the community, hated the bustle of the city and the loneliness of not really knowing anyone. They had friends, she and Alan, but no one close enough for Robyn’s taste.
When they split, Kelly was only twelve, and Robyn stayed in their house for five more years because Kelly had friends and school and a life. Alan begrudgingly paid the bills and was the dutiful father—a good father to Kelly. He and Robyn just hadn’t been headed in the same direction. Five years had been enough time to allow Kelly to graduate high school and afterward, they were both ready to move on.
The summer before they moved back to Smithville, Robyn and Kelly came home to visit Sheila. They hired a couple of high school boys to tear down the old swing set, but when the boys showed up, Robyn just couldn’t do it. The swing set was like a monument to happier times. Sheila loved it, too.
“One day, maybe Kelly will have children.” Sheila had told Robyn.
“Let us pray that’s years away. She’s only seventeen. The old swingset won’t last that long, do you think?”
Sheila considered it and then shrugged with her face. Originally it had been blue with white swings. That day, it was rusty and the paint had peeled and faded to a sad shade of gray. “We should paint it, maybe. That might at least keep the rust off of the thing,” Sheila said. “Like the fresh coat of spackle I put on my old face each morning.”
And that was what they did. Kelly, Robyn and Sheila had gone to the Ace Hardware and bought five cans of neon spray paint—three green, one orange, one pink, one blue—and painted the swingset green with multicolored polka dots. It stood out like a clown suit in her yard.
“Hideously beautiful,” Sheila called it upon completion.
Daughter and granddaughter had agreed.
The spray paint gave the old metal tubing some new life but the rust was quick to seep back through and once again it began to eat. Less than a month after their conversation, Robyn had gotten the first phone call about Big Jacques’s music and it reminded her of the one swing swaying to and fro, even while the other was still. She immediately began to worry about her mother and the process of moving home accelerated.
Robyn made some phone calls and found out the Admiral was looking for a new manager and that the owners were old friends of her mother’s. They offered her the job and she accepted with no regrets. Sh
e wrapped the house key like a tiny present and dropped it in the mail to Alan on their way out of town. Inside was a note which read simply, I’ll get you our new address as soon as I know where we’re living. For now, we’ll be at mom’s. It was the day after Christmas when they left.
All day she drove and even though Kelly was a crabby bitch the whole way—I miss my friends, I miss my job—they’d gotten there early in the afternoon and spent the evening with Sheila eating a leftover turkey and crying and laughing along with “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
They’d been home for six months. Time she was glad to spend with her mother, but she was no less worried about her and the legend of Big Jacques, the fiddle playing ghost or that swing. At that moment, Robyn wondered if the decision to keep the swingset was less about Kelly and more about Jacques. She wondered about her mother’s sanity. If she hadn’t seen the swing move for herself, she would have worried a lot more.
“Is the swing moving?” Robyn asked.
“I can’t see it from here. But I’m sure it is, Squirt. I’m sure it is.”
She never quite understood how her mother knew the ghost’s name, but didn’t ask too many questions. She knew it brought Sheila peace and joy to have visitors, even ghostly ones, and she knew Sheila had no fear of the situation.
“So, I’ll see you soon?” Robyn said. There were a few seconds of silence before her mother answered.
“I’m sorry, I got distracted by the music. Are you sure you can’t hear it?”
“Nope. Maybe next time I’m at the house.”
Is it was more unsettling to actually hear a ghost, or just to think you heard one when no one else had. Robyn didn’t know if Sheila had ever spoken to anyone else about it.
“All right then,” Sheila said. “Love you.”
“Love you, too, momma. I’ll see you shortly.”
The line clicked in Robyn’s ear and she leaned back over the counter to hang up the handset.
“How is old Sheila?” Sue asked, passing by with a tray full of salads.
“Same as always,” Robyn said.
“I love your momma,” Sue said.
“Me too.”