Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle

by Reinhardt, Susan

  “You’re shivering. You scared?” he asked, slipping an arm around me as I sipped the beer, tasting my youth, my virginity, the woman I used to be before I’d come to the crucial fork in the road and married the man I thought could make me better, whole again. But if I hadn’t taken that wrong turn, I wouldn’t have my babies. I’d have other kids or no kids. How could I get as mad as Mama, as mad as the therapist demanded, when I had those babies’ faces to hold against my heart every single night? How could I hate the man who gave them to me, who made it possible for me to be their mommy?

  I tried to hate, but I couldn’t. I felt a lot of things toward Bryce. Anger, pity, depression, shock and denial. I did not like him. I would have kicked or spat on him if I saw him. But my days were not filled with despising Bryce Jeter. I hated the event, the aftermath, the letters I’m still too afraid to show my parents, but I didn’t hate the man, which totally confused my therapist and made her want to toss me out a window or reach for her big teeth.

  Croc spread the blanket on the tall grass, moving the rocks from beneath it so we had a comfortable view of the stars, all of them spraying the sky like a quilt with peepholes to heaven. We played the ridiculous game of trying to count and name constellations, which is nothing but a ruse, a preamble to the real reason for being on a blanket in the dark of night, deep in the woods.

  He reached over and stroked my cheek, and I trembled, not so much from desire but from the feel of a man’s hands being tender for the first time in many, many years. He let his hand trail farther down, to the ridge of my collarbone, my neck, to the indentations where his fingers rested. I didn’t stop him. I let him move from scar to scar, the valleys of near-death, lightly tracing around them, fingers dipping and bumping before finding smooth turf again.

  “Prudy,” he said, his voice cracking. “Purdy, Prudy.” He did not try to kiss me but continued his inventory, unbuttoning my shirt as I lay there and felt the tears, cool compared to the heat in my skin, fall from my face and onto my neck. He traced the outline of my white bra, a Victoria’s Secret indulgence with laced and patterned straps. Aunt Weepie had bought it, thinking it vastly important I have pretty underthings. More so now than ever. “They’ll go a long way to helping you forget the scars.”

  He touched the straps, the edges of my curves, and then his long gentle fingers swept soft tickly patterns across my chest, finding every one of the stab wounds my husband carved in his rage. My skin beneath the tight jeans and 85-degree night rose with goose bumps.

  “How many are there?” I asked, knowing but not remembering. Not recalling any pain or Bryce’s busy hands as he did this. “I found 12,” he said, and began rebuttoning my shirt, disappointment washing over me.

  “Try 15.”

  He scooted his thin body close to mine, as if it were wintertime and we had to share our heat to keep from freezing. We held hands as I sipped my beer and he drank his Coke, neither of us saying much. We clung to each other the way people do who are falling, not who’ve already fallen. It was a tight hold, a non-sexual grasping of each other’s bodies, and while I never openly sobbed, the tears pooled like silent dew and he kissed them away, his full lips soft.

  We must have fallen asleep. I awakened covered with the other half of the quilt he’d vacated and noticed the frame of flower blossoms he’d placed all around me, every color, every variety. I scanned the lake’s bank and saw Croc sitting near its edge, the half-moon hanging off-kilter over the water. Quietly, I approached. His shoulders rocked with an anguish I’d never witnessed in a man.

  “Croc,” I said, placing a hand on his head.

  “Sit, Prudy. Watch how the water always changes. Light will change it. A rock will change it. It’s never the same.” His wet face revealed regret and grief.

  “You miss her.” Why had I said this?

  He sighed deeply and threw gravel in the lake, rippling the surface and shooting plipping sounds across the water.

  “I killed her.” He stood to leave.

  “How can you say that? You loved her. You were married 10 years. You had a—”

  “I was drinking. We’d gone to a party at my company. I had a music recording business in Nashville and we were working with some really big groups. Huge potential. We had a party and were celebrating the finish of one of the CDs. I drank too much, three, maybe four drinks. I told her I was fine to drive and she trusted me. She believed I was okay and I guess I believed it, too.” He grabbed more gravel and threw it into the water, one rock at a time as he spoke. “We were almost home when the truck, an oil rig type of thing, came flying from some dark side road and hit directly on her side of the car. I’ve never heard a louder noise, like an explosion.”

  I reached for his hand, squeezing it and the remaining rocks, shaking them out and putting both our hands to my lips.

  “All I got from it was a stiff neck, a few cuts on my knees from hitting the steering column, this chipped tooth I feel too guilty to fix. She died in 10, maybe 15 seconds.” He released his hand from mine and sucked in a breath of inky, night air. “She turned to me, her neck twisted and all wrong and she smiled. She mouthed a little kiss to me and then closed her eyes and died. Her lips stayed puckered like that, too.”

  I led Croc back to the blanket as he broke down and wept, four years of keeping the demons at bay now rushing out over Lake Bowen and my cotton blouse. I rocked him as I’d done Jay, as I rocked my own body when no one was there to do it for me.

  “I blew a .07. Almost drunk. Got probation for involuntary manslaughter.”

  “That wasn’t why she died and you know it. The truck didn’t stop like it was supposed to. The driver ran the sign.” I had read the reports on the Internet. “Nothing you could have done would have prevented this.”

  “I could have left the party earlier.”

  “True. You also could have skipped the party or not married Shannon or not done a million other things that over time lead us to these moments we can’t stop or predict. I could have left Bryce the first time he sent me into domestic orbit. I never even told Mama.”

  “Did he hit you?” Croc asked, and my first reaction was to become defensive. People always ask that; they assume you’ve done something bad enough to elicit a beating.

  “It had been building. Years. He thought because I enjoyed sex I was immoral. Eaten alive with sin. He used to say no woman should pursue a man for sex, that I was marked. He used to say after sex I was the Devil’s Whore. He sure played up to it before it was all over with.”

  “Sick,” he said. “How many times did he hit you before he tried to kill you?” Croc and I lay back on the blanket, staring again at the full-leafed summer canopy throwing patterns on a half-lighted sky.

  “Once, but he swears it was an accident and that he was thrown off balance and fell into me. I gave him one more chance.”

  After a few minutes, Croc rolled over onto his back and pulled me into him. “You were a little wild woman,” he said, changing the subject to the past, smiling and brushing the hair from my eyes. “I remember those nights on the golf course. You don’t hear me complaining. Sounds your ex was one big nut job.”

  “It got worse every year. The paranoia. The imagining I was having an affair. I was thinking about it in the hospital and figured it started after Jay was born. I devoted all my attention to that little baby. I neglected Bryce. I had what I needed all along right in my arms. And it wouldn’t call me the Devil’s Whore. I’d never felt any kind of love from him after I had Jay. I guess that’s selfish, but it’s how things were, and it only got worse when I had Miranda.”

  “It’s odd how children can affect a marriage,” Croc said. “It can go either way. With Shannon, our son brought us closer than ever. We couldn’t believe what we had. We’d tried for so long . . . never had any more after Sam. He’s great.”

  “I can’t wait to
meet him.”

  “You will,” Croc said, and he took my hand and kissed the fingers, making me wish I’d at least not chewed my nails to shreds. He sat up and wiped the sweat and dew that had wet his back, then he rolled a few times off the blanket toward the trunk of an oak. There was nothing beneath him but earth and weeds, grass that grew wild without any tending. We stayed in those woods by the lake until after midnight, then drove home, holding hands the entire way and saying nothing.

  The kids were asleep. So was Aunt Weepie, in the middle of their room on a Power Puff girl sleeping bag on the floor. I loved that woman. I woke her up and Croc offered to drive her home. He thought she was too sleepy to drive herself and he insisted. He promised he’d get Aunt Weepie’s car to her first thing in the morning.

  “No problem, darling,” she said through the fog of sleep. “Morning to me starts up around lunchtime or shortly thereafter. Nighty-night, Prudy. I’ll call you tomorrow. I got a funeral at 3, wish you could be at this one, honey. Then I’ll be home.” She paused in the living room, giving Croc a chance to tell me goodbye in semi-privacy.

  “I know it wasn’t like you thought it would be,” he said, reading my mind concerning our reunion date.

  I shook my head. “No. But it was what had to come out first. For both of us.” We hugged, had a hard time parting. He promised to call and I believed him. I had no reason to doubt him.

  The next morning my son woke up early, came into my room hyperventilating and hysterical. He had two letters in his hands. Both addressed to me and unopened. He had been so brave to hold them, so good not to open the envelope and set evil free. The return address was from an unknown law office, the postmark Charlotte.

  “It’s all right,” I told Jay, taking the letters. “Don’t worry because Mama will take care of everything.” How many times had I said that? How much longer could I really pull it off?

  “He’ll rot, Mommy,” my boy said. “He’ll rot in prison.”

  “Who told you such a thing?”

  “Mama Millings is always saying it to Grampy. ‘Let him rot.’ I hear them. They hate him.”

  “Well,” I said, bringing him close and brushing popcorn crumbs from his pajama top. “How do you feel about your daddy?”

  He shrugged. He wiped his eyes. “I don’t want to say.”

  “Okay. How about a glass of milk?”

  “Can I have a cookie?”

  “Only if you brush your teeth and eat cereal later.”

  He smiled and hugged me, a small gift from the heavens, each hug an assurance that he didn’t hate me, blame me, for his not having a daddy.

  “Mama?” he asked, dipping his cookie into the milk.

  “What, precious?”

  “When I grow up, will I be like Daddy?”

  Kids always ask things a parent is never prepared to answer.

  “Honey, you are a wonderful boy. You will grow up, and people will be amazed at your goodness and kindness. Daddy got real sick. Something was wrong with his brain. Let’s brush our teeth and then I’m going to tell you funny stories, the funniest batch yet.”

  “I wanna hear them, too,” Miranda squealed from the room. “I want the one about the pink bird that has drippy Popsicle wings.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I chirped, the happy mother with a troubled son and a screwed-up life. “We’ll have a great morning. Hold your horses.”

  I’d give the children the impression of a calm and well-balanced mother, then I’d go in the bathroom, lock the door and read the letters, see what Satan’s Twin was cooking up from prison.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Listen up, Prudy: Putting confidence in an unreliable man is like chewing with a sore tooth or trying to run on a broken foot. Proverbs 25:19

  Mama’s Moral: Careful where you chew and step. I’ll bet you and that Croc character have some repenting to do. I just hope you remembered your morals and didn’t pull a Carla Tisdale. By the way, you’re famous. All my bridge biddies love your radio show.

  P.S. Here’s a bonus. Don’t long for the “The Good old Days,” for you don’t know whether they were any better than these! Ecclesiastes: 7:10.

  Mama’s Second Moral: Don’t regress. Go forward.

  After my radio show, which has been a sweet success, I got to work today in a horrible state of mind and tried to do my best to find a way to act friendly, not all hormonal and bitchy. It had been two weeks since my date with Croc, and I’d received nothing but a bouquet of roses the day after, yellow for friendship, saying what a fine time he’d had. Nothing more. It was as if he’d taken one look at me and thought “been there, done that” and poof! Had no desires to return to the “good old days.”

  Maybe Mama was right. Putting my hopes in him would be like chewing with an abscess or trying to run on a boneless foot, which is more or less what I have.

  If I had wanted relations with him, which I did not, because our date was about releasing feelings, not lust, then I might understand his sudden withdrawal from my life. All I could figure was he needed a shoulder to cry on and mine proved quite absorbent, so much so he wouldn’t need it again. It’s one thing to be rejected by Brad Pitt. It’s quite another when the concave likes of Croc Godfrey, Ichabod Crane, Jr., won’t even call you for a second date.

  Well, his loss I told myself, unloading a few bags of beauty supplies left over from collecting toiletries here and there for the old women at the home. A beauty supply shop had donated a huge assortment of overstock and discontinued dyes and shampoos, brushes and sprays, hair dryers, just about everything a woman would need to recreate her looks and mood. I decided Top of the Hill’s beauty shop needed a major upgrade, as did its wash-and-set residents who’ve been wearing the same shrink-wrap hairdos for the better part of 60 years.

  Today, thanks to all the fine donors of beautification products and to my unbalanced mood due to Bryce’s new lawyer’s threatening letters about getting paroled, and my skeletal ex-true love dumping me, the women would get new cuts and styles straight from the pages of “Hollywood’s Hottest Cuts,” a magazine I’d picked up featuring the styles of the most glamorous stars. It is therapeutic doing hair when one has been slammed with a heaping serving of hell, first from Satan’s Twin, then from Ghandi.

  Oddly, the letters were addressed to me, not Jay, and they were type-written from some lawyer and threw out a bunch of legal terms I didn’t understand very well.

  I did comprehend the parts about Bryce’s suing for “alienation of affection” and “seeking monetary damages” for his suffering brought on by the dissolving of the marriage. This fancy pants lawyer said in the letters that my “affair” with the professor, the poor old man who was trying to help me enter nursing school, is what caused Bryce’s mind to snap and thus the ensuing carnage at BI-LO.

  How in the world could he sue me from prison? Why wouldn’t he just leave us alone?

  I had called my attorney, hearing the dollar signs chi-chinging in my head as I sought advice.

  He said Bryce’s threats were nothing but legalized extortion and a tactic used to keep emotion stirred up rather than allowing “all parties to come to terms with the dissolution of the relationship.”

  “Stay calm, Prudy,” he said, hearing my voice rise with emotion. “As a matter of law, he has the right to file an action against you if there is fact to support the claim. And, of course, assuming that he meets the procedural and substantive requirements to file for the lawsuit. Still, I really don’t think he’s going to follow through. He has no case. There have to be facts to support his claim, and you and I both know there aren’t any. This supposed affair was two or three lunches eaten in pursuit of your education.”

  “What about this ‘seeking of monetary damages?’ How does he expect to get a dime from me when he left us broke?”

  The at
torney sounded irritated, as if I were just another woman who couldn’t straighten out her own mess. I could tell he’d rather be chasing ambulances or other more lucrative cases, talking to Demerol’d up accident victims whose whiplash would pay for his new beach house.

  “The plaintiff,” he said, referring to Bryce, “is asking a jury to put a price tag on the value of the relationship, assuming the factual grounds even exist for a jury to decide alienation of affection did, indeed, occur.”

  “Well it most certainly did,” I said, sounding exactly like Lucinda Millings. “It occurred on our wedding night, and if you’ve got an hour, I’ll be more than happy to sit down and tell you all about what Mr. Jeter pulled the night and days following our wedding. He wants to sue for alienation? I’ll give him some alienation.”

  The attorney must have sent his secretary their secret cue, for she cut in on the line and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Whittington, you have a client waiting.”

  “Mrs. Jeter, I have to run, but there’s one more thing—”

  “Millings. It’s Millings. And it’s Dee now. Not Prudy.”

  “Yes, pardon me, I forgot. In any regard, Mrs. . . . uh . . . Ms. Millings, I’ve been told there’s been a pretty serious illness your ex-husband is fighting, so why don’t you rest on it. Don’t concern yourself at this point,” he said. “If anything more is done legally or medically, I’ll know about it and be in touch.”

  Serious illness? I wanted to ask more but the cheapskate had already slammed down the phone. What could possibly be wrong with Bryce?

  Was it a scam? And here I was thinking prison would keep them away. The bad guys. I’d see court trials, similar to my own, families clapping and crying and carrying on when the guilty verdict is read, when the sentence handed down is the maximum as was served in my case.