by Sharon Short
I started several loads—one of my stuff, two of Chucky’s, plus a small one of Sally’s towels.
An hour later, I had leftover soup beans and corn pone warming in my apartment, and Chucky’s clothes folded and outside the spare apartment door, which I let him know of with an abrupt knock.
And fifteen minutes after that, Chucky was at my apartment door, and I had to disguise my shock at how he looked. He was clean and in his clean jeans and T-shirt. He’d shaved the scruff from his jaw and upper lip. He’d even trimmed off his ponytail. He’d have to have his hair shaped up at the barber, but still, he’d done a decent job. Chucky looked again like the kid I remembered, although he was thinner, even with a bruise mark on his left eyebrow from the matching clip-on earring he had worn, Trudy wearing the other one. I wondered, with a pang, if she was still wearing hers, if she was okay, and what she’d meant by Paradise being phony.
Chucky tucked into his supper. I’ve never seen anyone so grateful for a meal as simple as corn pone and soup beans. And he had three big glasses of chocolate milk, finishing off my milk supply. Which was fine. I was having breakfast the next morning at Sandy’s, and I could always get milk sometime that day.
By the time we got to Breitenstrater’s Pie Company, it was dusk, nearly eight o’clock, and I knew I’d be lucky to get over to the theatre by nine. Even with all the laundry she’d gotten done, Sally would be sore at me, especially since she’d done me a favor by watching my laundromat all day. I remembered the two months of free laundromat use I’d promised her, though, and pushed aside my guilt, and tried to focus on the good I was doing for Chucky and his daddy. Never mind that I hoped to get a few moments of searching Cletus’s office out of it.
Chucky jiggled nervously all the way out of town and out to the pie company, sitting on his hands, his knees bopping up and down. I pulled into the employee parking lot, and he gazed toward the employee entrance. The shadowy figure by the door was his daddy.
“You’ll be okay,” I said.
Chucky looked at me, his eyes wide and mournful. “What if he doesn’t want me to come back home? I mean, I did fail him and everyone else at that baseball game, and I know he wanted me to be the big league player he never got to be, but I just don’t want to be a baseball player, even though everyone keeps telling me—”
“Chucky, what do you want to be?”
He hesitated, looked down, and mumbled so I could barely hear him, “A pediatric nurse.” Then he looked up at me, that defensive glare back in his eyes. “I met one at career day last spring, and she was so excited about what she does,” the defensive glare quickly gave way to a look of glowing excitement, “and somehow it just clicked for me, and I knew—”
“Chucky,” I said firmly, “you’ll make a great pediatric nurse.” He was also going to get teased unmercifully at school, but, somehow, I did have a feeling that if he could withstand that and stick to his goals, he’d be a good pediatric nurse. “But right now what you need to be is a son. That’s all your dad really wants, much more than baseball.”
As I grabbed the bag with the tablecloths and we got out of Sally’s truck and started toward the employee door, I prayed I was right.
And I was. Chuck Sr. stared for a moment at his son, and then father and son fell into each other’s arms. Even as I got teary-eyed, I had to grin, watching them. It’s a beautiful thing when people let go of their notions about how they’re supposed to act and just let their feelings flow.
Within a few minutes, though, the testosterone surged in both Chucky and Chuck Sr., and they split apart and stuffed their hands in their pockets.
Chuck Sr. looked at me. “Josie—thank you—where did you find him—”
“I’ll tell you all about it later, Dad,” Chucky said quietly.
Chuck Sr. looked at Chucky. “We have a lot to talk about,” he said—not words kids usually love to hear from their parents, but Chuck Sr. said it so gently and kindly, Chucky and I both knew he meant that they really would talk. Chuck Sr. looked back at me. “How can I repay you, Josie?”
“There is one thing,” I said. “Cletus has disappeared, it seems.”
Chuck Sr. nodded. “That’s what everyone was talking about when the shift ended. That, and Mr. Breitenstrater’s death, of course.”
“Well, Cletus also borrowed something from the historical society that the society needs back. It’s possible he left it in his office.”
Chuck Sr. looked skeptical.
“Mrs. Beavy really wants those documents back. The Paradise Historical Society needs them for the, um, Founder’s Day play.” Okay, I was exaggerating. But if it worked . . . “Could I just take a peek around Cletus’s office?”
“Well, now, Josie, I don’t know, the executive offices are strictly off limits,” Chuck Sr. started.
“Dad,” Chucky said gently.
Chuck Sr. sighed. “Well, Mr. Cletus hardly ever came in anyway. Now, Mr. Alan, many a night he’d still be here at this hour. But Mr. Cletus, he likes the fireworks outlet a lot more than this place, I think.”
Well, of course, I thought. Alan wasn’t there to boss him around and tell him what a goof he was.
“All right, I’ll let you in, give you the key to Mr. Cletus’s office. You can look around for ten minutes.”
I got the key and directions up to the second-story office.
The first floor of the company was where the pies were actually made. Chuck Sr. turned on the lights for me, and then stepped back outside to be with his son.
I looked around, stared across the company floor, filled with conveyor belts and mixing machines and other equipment I couldn’t quite figure out.
I left the bag with the tablecloths on the table just below the punch clock. It was, I realized, the first time I’d actually been on the company floor. I’d always delivered the linens to the guys at the receiving dock, around back. Before I left, I’d write a note for Chuck Sr. to leave for Ted, the guy at the receiving dock who usually signed for the laundry orders.
I stared around, breathed in slowly the heady aroma of sugar and fruit and flour, still filling the air even though the place was spotlessly clean, the machines still and silent. It was, I realized, just how my Aunt Clara had come home smelling every night. I’d thought of her as doused in some exotic, fruity, sweet perfume, but the scent came from here. Bouquet of Pie.
So this was where my Aunt Clara spent her life, making pies, earning a small wage to go with the proceeds from the laundromat, saving every dime possible to make sure Guy had a decent life after they were gone.
Tears pricked my eyes. I wondered which machine Aunt Clara had used. Had she done the crusts? The fillings? I’d never asked her, and she’d never talked about it. Guy wouldn’t know. I couldn’t ask now. How easily family history gets lost, pieces forgotten and left behind, eventually pieced together into a new whole from the few scraps that are kept.
Like a town’s history? A voice whispered in my head.
The history of Paradise had been drilled into our heads. But Trudy had said it was phony—and that the Breitenstraters were to blame—and it had upset her enough to run away, leaving Chucky and Slinky behind. And death—quite likely murder—had visited itself upon the elder Breitenstrater brother, while the younger was missing.
And somehow, ginseng and health-food pies and a health-food conglomerate wanting to buy the pie company and old letters and a diary all fit together into that picture, too.
I went on up to Cletus’s office.
Cletus’s office at the Breitenstrater Pie Company was as different from his bedroom at the Breitenstrater mansion as day from night. Whereas his bedroom was a happy jumble of books and papers and magazines and such—a reflection of his many interests—his windowless office here was stark and neat: a desk, the top bare except for a memo from Alan to all employees about attending the pie-eating contest to hear the big announcement which he never got to make; a chair, a filing cabinet; an old-fashioned rotary-dial phone; a silk ficus tree t
hat was fuzzy with dust; a fine powdering of dust elsewhere. Not a single bookshelf, book, or magazine. No pictures on the desk. No mementos. Not even a company-issued coffee mug.
The only picture on the wall was a large framed black-and-white print of Rodney Breitenstrater, Alan and Cletus’s daddy, from twenty years before. In the background was the banner announcing the annual company picnic—Rodney shaking a much younger Alan-with-hair’s hand, Alan beaming. Cletus—with his left shoulder and ear cut off in the picture—watched Alan and their daddy. There was a small, etched bronze label—THE PASSING OF THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM. I reckoned this referred to the day Alan took over the pie company from his daddy.
The photo seemed an odd choice for Cletus’s office. Maybe he wanted to remind himself of his place at the company, a strange sort of justification for his eclectic flitting from interest to interest outside of the company.
Or, maybe Alan had insisted the print be part of Cletus’s office décor—a different kind of reminder.
I shuddered at the thought.
The only spark of individuality in the office was a plastic M&M character, the red one.
I opened the desk drawer and found assorted office supplies—rubber bands, paper clips, pencils, and the like. I opened the file drawer and found files of neatly organized clips of Breitenstrater Pie advertisements. I particularly liked the one from 1954, showing a kid who’s just gotten a cream pie in the face, happily licking off his lips: BREITENSTRATER PIES, TASTE SO GOOD, IT HITS YOU, ‘TWEEN THE EYES.
It was nice to know there had been a time when people didn’t take what they ate so seriously. A time before lemon ginseng health-food pies.
But there was nothing even close to what Mrs. Beavy had described Cletus taking from the Paradise Historical Society Museum.
As I left the building, Chuck Sr. barely noticed me handing him a note for Ted and Cletus’s office key. He was too busy listening to Chucky, who was animatedly explaining the courses he’d have to take to become a pediatric nurse, how he was going to find a part-time job and research loans and scholarships to pay his way through college.
Chuck Sr. looked bewildered, as if he wasn’t truly sure I’d returned his son to him, but to his credit, he was listening.
As I started up Sally’s truck, I thought about Cletus and Dinky. Alan and Jason. And Rodney and Cletus and Alan.
Then I thought about Chuck Sr. and Chucky . . . and my aunt and uncle and Guy. It was nice to know some families eventually got it right.
16
I had the best of intentions to go straight from the Breitenstrater Pie Company to the Paradise Theatre. I really did.
And what happened that night at the Fireworks Barn would have happened anyway, even if I hadn’t changed my mind and gone there.
But later, when I tried to explain that, Chief Worthy didn’t seem to believe me.
See, I was driving along in the dark, the window partly down, enjoying the rain-freshened breeze, thoughts of fathers and sons pushed to the back of my head, humming along to a new Patty Griffin tune, “Making Pies,” which seemed fitting, given where I was coming from, and which came in beautifully clearly on Sally’s truck radio, when the thought struck me:
The Fireworks Barn.
Of course Cletus didn’t have the papers for his revised play at the Breitenstrater mansion. Alan lived at the mansion, when he wasn’t living at the company. Of course
Cletus didn’t have the papers at his office at the Breitenstrater Pie Company. Alan lived at the company, when he wasn’t living at the mansion.
Where was the one place Cletus could go that Alan would never go because he despised it? Called it an embarrassment to the Breitenstrater name? Hated it because it was right across from the bend where his son Jason had died?
Why, the Fireworks Barn, of course.
That’s where Cletus would keep his papers. And maybe himself.
All I did, as I tried to explain to Chief Worthy later, was turn left off of Sweet Potato Ridge onto Mud Lick Road.
I passed the Hapstatter farm, noting the distant light on the front porch. I smiled at the thought of Mr. and Mrs. Hapstatter (who go to my church, Paradise United Methodist) sitting out on the porch to enjoy the songs of the June bugs and a tall glass of homemade lemonade and maybe some handholding.
Then I slowed to go around the nasty hairpin curve that had conspired with Dinky’s fast driving to take Jason’s life. I saw the Fireworks Barn, just a shadowy smudge up ahead of me, and came within a hundred feet of it, when suddenly it exploded.
No warning. No sizzle, crackle, or pop forewarning: Danger, Josie! Turn around, Josie!
Just a sudden, booming explosion of fire and sound, as if someone had buried a supersized cherry bomb beneath the Fireworks Barn, and finally set it off.
Sometime later, I sat on the Hapstatter’s front porch swing, still shaking and shivering—even though it was a warm night—sipping at my glass of lemonade, which Mrs. Hapstatter insisted on fixing me, saying “it’ll be good for your sugar, Sugar,” meaning (with the first sugar) my blood sugar, because she was hypoglycemic, and was always fussing about other people’s blood sugar levels, and (with the second sugar), that she felt sorry for me.
Mrs. Hapstatter was back in the house, fixing more lemonade, while Mr. Hapstatter stood on the porch, glaring at Chief Worthy as he grilled me.
“You mean to tell me, Josie,” said Chief Worthy, “that you were just driving around the bend, and suddenly the whole Fireworks Barn blew up?”
I took another sip of Mrs. Hapstatter’s sweet lemonade. The ice clinked around in my glass, I was shaking so badly.
”That’s exactly what happened. And I don’t know anything else, I really don’t.”
The Fireworks Barn had exploded. In what I guess was an instinctive reaction, I’d slammed on the truck brakes and jerked the wheel to the right, all at the same time—and so had plowed into the ditch along the road by the cornfield.
Then I’d opened the truck door, which wasn’t easy given the angle at which the truck was jammed into the ditch, and crawled out, and started running, feeling the heat of the burning, exploding Fireworks Barn against my back.
I had a vague memory of looking back over my shoulder, pausing for what seemed like minutes in my memory, but which was probably just a split second in reality, to stare in shock at the barn in flames, an occasional firework spiraling out of the top of the flames and exploding in the dark summer sky.
Then I turned and ran toward the Hapstatters’ farm.
I don’t think I’ll ever look at fireworks in quite the same way.
By the time I was on their porch, panting, Mr. Hapstatter was already calling 911. Mrs. Hapstatter took one look at me, just mildly lifted her eyebrows in surprise, swatted away a bug unwittingly on the way to its death in the blue bug zapper that hung on the other end of the porch and doubled as an outdoor light, and said, “Why, Josie Toadfern, is that you? You look a sight, Sugar. Let me get you some lemonade for your sugar, Sugar.”
Then she’d hefted her considerable girth, loosely covered in an oversized housedress, out of the porch swing, and went calmly inside for the lemonade.
Which was when I started shaking.
Now, still shaking, I took another sip of lemonade. I liked the smell of it as much as the sweet, tart taste—we were close enough to the Fireworks Barn that the smoke had drifted over the Hapstatter house, casting a haze and a smoky sulfuric smell that masked out the scent of the lilacs that grew all around the front porch of the farmhouse.
Chief Worthy said to me, “Try and remember, Josie. You didn’t see anyone running away from the Fireworks Barn? Didn’t pass any cars or trucks speeding away from the barn? Things don’t just explode on their own, you know—”
Mr. Hapstatter cleared his throat. “Now, Chief, if this little girl says she din’t see no one running or driving away, then she din’t. For what it’s worth—although I know you ain’t asked us yet—me and the missus din’t see nary a soul dri
ving up and down the road, until Josie here drove by right before the explosion.”
Chief Worthy glared at me, a question coming to his eyes. Another bug flew by and buzzed to death in the bug-zapper-light. I stuck my nose in my glass.
Mr. Hapstatter said, “’Course now, Josie was driving right proper, well within the speed limit, and me and the missus commented on that, not even knowing it was Josie at all, saying how it was nice to see someone going the speed limit around that curve for a change, how it’s shameful no one does and some kid will wreck out here again like those Breitenstrater boys—”
I moaned. I felt myself start to spin.
“—anyway,” Mr. Hapstatter was going on, “Josie was driving toward that barn as law abiding as you please, and—Josie? Sugar?”
Lights were dancing before my eyes. Like the shoots off of little sparklers. I heard another bug go zip zap. Must-not-go-to-the-light . . .
“Josie? Sugar?” Mr. Hapstatter was on the porch swing with me, giving me a little shake, taking the glass of lemonade from me. “C’mon now.” I looked at him. Smiled. The Hapstatters were salt of the earth people, I thought. That’s what my Aunt Clara always said about people who were good folks. Salt of the earth. So were Aunt Clara and Uncle Horace, though they never saw themselves that way. I reminded myself to compliment Mrs. Hapstatter on her lemonade and Tuna Tetrazzini Casserole at the next church carry-in.
Mr. Hapstatter was looking at Chief Worthy, though. “This little girl is done for the night,” he said. “She din’t see anything that can help you figure out what happened. And neither did we.”
Chief Worthy snapped his notebook shut, gave a terse thank you, and walked off.
I heard more sirens in the distance. Fire trucks coming from volunteer fire stations from all over the county to help put out what had to be some kind of record fire for Mason County.
Then I saw a tow truck slowly going down Mud Lick Road, away from the Fireworks Barn. It was pulling Sally’s truck.
I pointed and moaned. “They’re taking the truck in to Elroy’s?”