Hissy Fit

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Yeah, well, that’s one of my lasting regrets. It was Paige. All the other kids heard too. Even the teacher. Mrs. Goggins. She made Paige apologize, but she didn’t make her take it back.”

  “Quel scandale! But you really had no clue she’d taken off with a man?”

  “No. She’d been gone maybe ten days? I really can’t remember too clearly. And up until then, I thought she’d gone to the beach with her girlfriends, like she used to do in the summertime. Only this was wintertime. After Christmas, I know. After Valentine’s Day too, because I remember Mama bought me Barbie valentines to give away. So it was March, maybe. I didn’t believe Paige, of course. But somehow I knew better than to ask Daddy about it. Back then the elementary school was still right downtown. After Mama left I’d walk over here to Glorious Interiors and sit at the table by the window, and color and cut out pictures from House Beautiful and do my homework until Daddy came by to pick me up. So I asked her about it.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Just that Mama was having trouble thinking clearly, and she needed some time away from us to feel better about things.”

  “Did you ask her about this Darvis Kane person?”

  “I did. I can still remember the look on her face when I asked her about it. Her lips went all white. ‘Who told you about that?’ she asked me. ‘Who would tell a child such a thing?’ After I told her, she took me over to Madison Drugs and bought me a chocolate malted. That was a huge treat. Usually you only got a chocolate malted if you’d made an A on a spelling test. We sat at one of those vinyl booths, and her hands were shaking, she was so upset, but she talked to me. She told me that it was true Darvis Kane had left town. And my mama had gone too. But there was no proof they’d gone off together. And she felt sure Mama would call when she got herself settled someplace. Because she loved me very much.”

  Austin set his mug down carefully on the marble-topped end table. “She never called, did she?”

  “No.”

  He got to his feet and went over to a table in the corner of the room. A paisley fringed throw had been tossed over the table, and when he lifted the throw, I could see that there was a computer terminal there.

  Austin started tapping away at the keyboard. In a minute I heard the modem dialing the phone line.

  “Okay,” he said, turning around to face me. “First, more coffee. Stat. Second, I need more information about this Darvis Cole.”

  “Kane. Darvis Kane. I’ll bring the pot of coffee back with me. But I don’t know anything else about him. Just that he worked for Daddy at the car lot, and he was Paige’s uncle.”

  He kept on tapping, and I walked over to my place and got the coffee, and after a moment’s hesitation, a bag of mini Snickers I’d bought half price after Easter, and hidden from myself in case of an emergency that required chocolate. Austin was still working away on the computer when I got back over there.

  I poured him a cup of coffee, and he took the bag of candy and gave me a look. “No peanut M&M’s?”

  I shrugged. “Sorry.”

  He chewed and thought about things. “Was Darvis Kane an uncle on Paige’s mother’s or father’s side?”

  I had to think about that. “On her mother’s side. I never knew Paige’s daddy. Anyway, Darvis Kane was married to Lorna’s sister Lisa.”

  More tapping. “I need his vitals,” Austin said. “Was he from Madison? Any chance he went to school here, something like that? Any family still living here?”

  I shook my head slowly. “I just don’t know. Lisa and Lorna’s maiden name was Franklin. Their family didn’t live right in Madison. They lived way over in Rutledge, in a trailer back off the highway. Lorna was the only one who stayed around here.

  “Wait,” I said, helping myself to another mini Snickers. “Where’s your phone book?”

  He reached under the table and brought out the Morgan-Madison-Buckhead-Rutledge phone directory. I took it and paged over to the K listings.

  “One Kane listed, but it’s a LaTasha Kane, and she lives over there on Jeeter Way. She’s black. Our Darvis Kane was white.”

  Austin raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure?”

  “This was 1979, Austin. My daddy wasn’t a racist or anything, but the only black man who worked at Murdock Motors back then was Eddie, the detail man. Anyway, it was a scandal, not a racial incident. I’m positive.”

  “Who would know something?” Austin asked, impatient now.

  “Paige, I guess. But there’s no way I’m asking her.”

  “Who else, then? What happened to the jilted sister, after her husband ran away with Jeanine?”

  “Lisa? I think she took her kids and moved to Athens, moved in with another one of the sisters. Paige was mad because her girl cousins moved off.”

  “That’s something we’ll have to take a look at,” Austin said, writing on a yellow legal pad beside the computer. “See if Lisa Franklin and Darvis Kane ever got a divorce. And maybe we can track down the ex. Somebody has to know something about these two. Who else can you think of? Think now, Keeley.”

  “Maybe Gloria,” I said reluctantly. “And Daddy. But I couldn’t talk to him about this. Not yet.”

  “You’ll have to eventually,” he said.

  “Maybe. Once I have some answers,” I conceded.

  “Oh, you’ll have answers,” he promised, patting the computer terminal. “All right,” he said. “Tell me some more about your mama.”

  “Like what?”

  “Who were her people?” Austin asked, exasperated at my denseness. “I mean, the woman walked off and never came back. How about her family? Did any of them ever hear from her over the years?”

  I chewed and thought. “Her only family besides us was her cousin, Sonya Wyrick. She was my mama’s maid of honor at her wedding. But I think she and Daddy didn’t get along, because the only time she and Mama got together was when Daddy wasn’t around.”

  Austin pounced on this little family tidbit. “She was your mother’s only living relative? Why didn’t she and Wade get along?”

  “Nobody ever came out and said Daddy didn’t like her. She just didn’t come around that often. She was married and had a couple kids too.”

  “Sonya. Wyrick.” Austin wrote it down on his yellow legal pad.

  “She worked as a stitcher at Loving Cup. When she got laid off, she moved away. I haven’t heard from her in a long time.”

  “All right, I’ll try and track that down later,” he said. He stood up from the computer, stretched, yawned again, and looked at his watch. “Good Lord. It’s not even nine o’clock yet. I can’t believe my brain is functioning at this high a level this early.”

  “Coffee and Snickers,” I said. “The breakfast of champions. I’ve gotta go pretty soon. I’m supposed to take some paint samples over to Will, and Gloria and I have a ton of paperwork to catch up on.”

  “You still haven’t told me what your mother was like,” Will complained. “I’m just not getting any sense of her. Who was Jeanine Murry Murdock? What was she like before she got married and had you?”

  I shook my head in frustration. “She was like any other small-town Southern girl, I guess. She got married when she was eighteen years old, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Before she married your daddy, did she work? Did she go to college?”

  “She went to the community college for about a year,” I said. “And she worked in a dress shop, right here on the square. The Charm Shop, it was called. A woman named Chrys Graham owned it. It’s gone now, but it used to be right over there on Washington Street, where Kathleen Harbin’s antiques shop is now. It had a pink awning out front. Mama always loved pretty clothes, and Chrys Graham let her go to Atlanta to the mart with her and do some of the buying. And Mama always did all the window dressing too. In fact, she did the window dressing after she quit working there. I remember she made a Halloween window once, and I helped her make a scarecrow with hay, and we dressed her in the cutest outfit. People came from all over to s
ee Mama’s windows.”

  Austin smiled. “Well, at least we know where you get your sense of style.”

  That made me laugh. “Yeah, definitely not from Daddy. He’s doing good if he remembers to wear brown shoes with green pants.”

  “Tell me more about the dress shop, about the woman who owned it,” Austin ordered.

  “I’ve really gotta scoot in a minute now,” I said. But I was enjoying myself, thinking about how happy it had made Mama, all those years ago, fixing those windows. She’d spend hours working on them, bringing props from home, painting backdrops, setting up lights. Then we’d get in her Malibu and cruise past, over and over again, because she wanted to make sure people driving by got the full effect.

  “The owner, Miss Graham, let her buy her clothes at a discount, some samples too, because she was a perfect size eight, a sample size. I remember she used to put clothes aside for Mama, even after she quit and got married and had me. One time she got us matching mother-daughter outfits.”

  “What happened to her, after the shop closed?” Austin asked anxiously. “And please don’t tell me she died or moved to North Carolina.”

  “No,” I said. “She’s right here in Madison. She works for Kathleen Harbin in the antiques shop, as a matter of fact. Kathleen is her niece.”

  32

  Supper at Daddy’s looked like it would be what it usually was; quiet and uneventful. We talked about the car business, about the weather, and sports.

  “Braves are gonna make it to the Series this year, shug,” he said, as we were putting the dishes in the dishwasher. “Gonna win the whole shootin’ match.”

  “You say that every year,” I teased. “And they’ve only won it once. Don’t you ever give up?”

  “Nope,” he said, handing me the salmon loaf pan. “They’ve got the talent and the desire. Anyway, I gotta believe in something. Might as well be the Braves.”

  I dried the pan and put it carefully back in the bottom cupboard where it’s always been kept. All during dinner, all during the discussion of new model cars and APRs, and the Braves’ combined ERAs, it was on the tip of my tongue. Where is she? Where did my mother go? And why?

  “You’re kinda quiet tonight,” Daddy said, wiping down the kitchen counter. He went to the refrigerator, got out a Budweiser, and held one up for me. I shook my head no.

  “Something on your mind? Everything okay at work?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Thank God for Will Mahoney. If it weren’t for him, and Mulberry Hill, I might be ringing up groceries over at the Bi-Lo.”

  Daddy took a sip of his beer and frowned. “Maybe I better have a heart-to-heart with Drew Jernigan. What happened between you and A.J., that was just too bad. But it wasn’t none of your fault.”

  “I don’t think the Jernigans see it that way,” I said.

  “Drew’s always been a stiff-necked SOB,” Daddy said. He paused. “You know, I had to quit eatin’ breakfast at Ye Olde Colonial. It got so bad, I’d walk in, and he’d get up, throw some money down, and walk right out the door. Made everybody damn uncomfortable. So I just switched over to the Waffle House. I like their grits better anyway.”

  “Daddy!” I hugged his neck. “Waffle House doesn’t have biscuits. And all your other friends are over at Ye Olde Colonial. I see them, every morning, when I go to work, sitting around that big table in the window.”

  “Not all of ’em,” Daddy said, grinning despite himself. “Anyway, I was getting in a rut. Time to shake things up a little bit.”

  I took the damp dishcloth and hung it on the towel rack rod on the back of the kitchen door, just like I did every Wednesday night after supper. “This is all my fault,” I said. “I should have just kept my mouth shut at the rehearsal dinner, and gone ahead with the wedding.”

  “No ma’am!” Daddy said firmly. “You did the right thing calling it off. The only thing you could do.”

  “It didn’t have to be so public,” I said. “That’s what’s got the Jernigans so worked up, I think. I humiliated them. And myself.”

  I kissed Daddy’s cheek. He needed a shave. “And I embarrassed you and Gloria, and now they’re taking it out on all of us. I made a big old mess of everything.”

  Daddy patted the top of my head awkwardly. “Don’t you worry about me, or Gloria. We’re grown up. And it’ll take a lot more than those stiff-necked Jernigans to run either one of us out of this town. You just take care of yourself. Like you been doing.”

  “A.J. came to see me,” I said. “After he got back from France.”

  Daddy frowned and started to say something. “He was kind of sweet,” I went on. “Telling me how much he missed me, and how sorry he was. He says—”

  I bit my lip, wondering how much I should tell.

  Daddy crossed his arms over his chest. “I wanna hear this!” he said.

  “He says it was all Paige’s fault. He says he was drunk, and they were just messing around, and it got out of hand. And he claims it was the first and only time…they did something like that.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “I kicked him out of the shop. And I told him I didn’t believe him. But I just don’t know.” Tears started welling up in my eyes. “I loved him. And I know he loved me. I just know it. But if he loved me…how could he do something like that to me?”

  Daddy sighed and handed me a dry dish towel. “Here. Come on now. What do you say we go for a drive? Huh? When’s the last time we went for a drive together?”

  I mopped my face. “I don’t know. We used to go for drives all the time, didn’t we?”

  He nodded, got the car keys, and I followed him out the door to the big hulking white Chevy Tahoe parked in the carport.

  Daddy headed the Tahoe down the blacktop. He didn’t say where we were headed, but he didn’t have to.

  On Sundays, after church, there isn’t much to do in a small town like Madison. When we got home from church, we’d change out of our good clothes. Mama would put a roast in the oven, and Daddy would putter around a little bit out in the garage, and then we’d go for our Sunday drive.

  Daddy would have brought home a new model car for us to try out. The seats would have plastic over them, and there would be paper mats on the floor, and the new car smell would be stronger even than my mother’s Joy perfume.

  Our destinations on these trips never varied. We’d take the old Rutledge Road, Highway 12, and turn right when we got to Rutledge. There was a gas station there that stayed open on Sundays, and Daddy would stop and get us all Cokes. Then we’d drive over to Hard Labor Creek State Park.

  I would take little tiny sips of my Coke, wanting to save it for our picnic. Daddy would park in the shade, as far away from any other cars as possible, and then we’d take our drinks and our sandwiches, and picnic around the old mill. If it was summertime, I’d change into my bathing suit and swim in the creek, and the two of them would sit in folding aluminum lawn chairs and watch me splashing around. Sometimes Daddy would swim with me, but Mama didn’t swim, and she didn’t like to mess up her hair, so she always stayed up in the grass, watching and calling for me not to go in any deeper.

  I’d ride home wrapped in a big beach towel, and fall asleep to the sound of the two of them murmuring companionably up in the front seat.

  I’ve driven past Hard Labor Creek Park hundreds of times since I’ve grown up, but to my knowledge, this was the first time I’d gone back since those Sunday drives.

  A chain was stretched across the park entrance, and a sign said the park was closed after nine P.M.

  “We’ll see about that,” Daddy said. He got out of the car, went over to the chain, and fiddled with it until it unfastened.

  “You lawbreaker!” I said, when he got back in the car. “Won’t somebody see us and kick us out?”

  “Nah,” Daddy said. “I play golf with the park superintendent all the time. This late at night, and the Braves game over with? Little Joe’s asleep in the bed.”

  Daddy steered the Ta
hoe into the park and toward the lake. “The old mill’s gone, you know,” he said after a while. “They tore it down when they put in the golf course.”

  I looked out the window at the passing scenery. “It’s all changed,” I said.

  “Lake’s still pretty,” he commented. “You used to love that lake. Back then, that was like the French Riviera to us.”

  “I did love it,” I said, remembering. “Daddy? How come we stopped coming? After Mama left?”

  He was quiet for a while. “Oh, shug. Everything changed. After she left, Sundays were different. I was still working Saturdays at the lot, so Sunday was the only day I had to get the house straightened up, see about meals for the week, do all the things she used to do all week long. There just wasn’t enough time for something like a long drive to the park.”

  Daddy laughed. “I never realized how hard that woman worked until she was gone, and I was left to do all the things she’d been doing all those years.”

  I looked over at him. He had a funny half smile on his face.

  “She made it look easy,” I said. “Even now, I still wonder what she did all day, but of course, I know she was keeping up with the house, and us, and…”

  We parked under a pecan tree at the edge of the paved parking lot and got out. The grass was already wet with dew, so after a moment of hesitation, I slid out of my sandals and left them in the car.

  We found a wooden picnic table facing the lake. “These are new too,” I said, sitting down facing the lake.

  He sat down beside me. “She never complained,” he said suddenly. “We never fought. I thought we were the two happiest people in Madison.” He rubbed my arm. “Three happiest. You were happy, weren’t you, shug?”

  I nodded.

  “People keep things to themselves,” Daddy said. “Sometimes, when things aren’t good, instead of saying something, getting things stirred up, they just keep things to themselves, and keep going along, to get along. But that’s all wrong.”

  He turned to me. “You don’t want to be married to a man you can’t believe in, do you?”