Mrs. Tobias’s eyes widened. “Oh dear. What happened?”
“I flunked pin curling,” I said with a sad shake of my head. “I just couldn’t get the hang of it even though I practiced on my mannequin late into the night. Mrs. Tippet, the cosmetology teacher, said pin curling always separates the wheat from the chaff. I could rattle off all the parts of a hair follicle and I was a whiz at skull anatomy, but I was chaff all around when it came to actually doing hair.”
“I see,” Mrs. Tobias said.
“Luckily, I saw a ‘Help Wanted’ sign in the Bottom Dollar that very day coming home from school. I marched inside and began my new career in retail sales working part-time. Since then, I’ve been promoted to manager and I’ve been here now going on ten years. It’s not just a job to me. Mavis and Attalee are like family.”
Mrs. Tobias glanced nervously at the back room. “I just wondered if you ever wanted something... more,” she said. “You’re still young and clearly quite bright. College, perhaps?”
“College?” I shook my head. “Oh no, Mrs. Tobias, that’s not for me. We Polks don’t do college. We’re a hands-on people. Now, I have thought of taking a bookkeeping course or two out at Kerr Business College in Augusta so I could streamline Mavis’s accounting system. But a place like the University is out of my league.”
“Well, I declare,” she said. “I’ve never heard such a thing.” She seized random items off the shelves. “Not going to the University just because none of your people have.” Into her basket she tossed scouring pads, pigskin work gloves, and a tin of Lick Your Whiskers cat food.
“I didn’t know you had a cat, Mrs. Tobias,” I said.
She inspected the can. “Land, I thought this was tuna.”
She replaced it on the shelf. “I almost forgot. I also came in here today to ask you a favor, Elizabeth. Did I ever mention to you that I have a grandson about your age?”
“No ma’am.”
“His name is Timothy, Timothy Hollingsworth, and he’ll be moving to Augusta from San Diego, California, in a matter of days. He’s going to take my son-in-law’s place at Hollingsworth Inc.,” said Mrs. Tobias.
Mrs. Tobias’s son-in-law Bettis Hollingsworth had died a couple of months ago. He got struck by lightning on the sixteenth hole of the Augusta National. He’d refused to leave the golf course, despite the lightning warnings, because he was five under par. It had been all over the newspaper, seeing how the Hollingsworths owned the paper cup factory in Augusta.
“Timothy’s been away from his friends so long that he’s lost touch,” Mrs. Tobias continued. “I thought you might like to go out with him a time or two, on a friendly basis. Both of you are the same age and I think some company would do him a world of good.”
“Oh, Mrs. Tobias, I just don’t know.” I toyed with my locket. “I’m not getting out a lot these days.”
Her voice sharpened. “Don’t tell me you’re still pining over that soda salesman?”
“No! I mean...” I rocked on the balls of my feet. “Well, maybe just a little.”
Mrs. Tobias had met Clip a time or two and hadn’t been particularly impressed with him.
“I just don’t think I’d be the best of company for your grandson,” I continued.
“I see.” Mrs. Tobias’s lips were pressed together tightly like a woman’s compact. Her blue eyes glittered during the silence between us. “And you couldn’t set aside your feelings for just an evening or two to help me out in a pinch?”
“Mrs. Tobias, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea as to what to say to a fellow from a big place like California. I’m sure I’d bore your grandson to pieces.”
“Nonsense. Timothy is...” Her hand fluttered around her face like a moth. “Well, let’s just say he’s... different. And I’m convinced the two of you would get along famously. But if it’s too much of a bother—”
“It’s not a bother, it’s just that—” I sighed. I knew when I was licked.
“I’ll be glad to show him around town, Mrs. Tobias,” I finally said.
She smiled. “Wonderful. I’ll bring him by to meet you.”
Mavis and Attalee returned from the stockroom and Mrs. Tobias brought her purchases to the checkout for Attalee to ring up. As Mrs. Tobias went out the door with a merry wave of her hand, Attalee watched her saunter to her car.
“That woman has the best skin I’ve ever seen,” Attalee said. She tugged at the turkey wattle below her chin. “I’ve used Oil of Old Lady religiously for twenty years and my face looks like a stick of beef jerky. What do you suppose she puts on her face?”
“Oh, probably lots of those fancy department store face creams that cost fifty dollars for a tiny pot,” Mavis said. “And she’s likely had a nip and a tuck or two. Those rich women from The Hill go to their plastic surgeons so often, the doctors need to install revolving doors.”
Attalee shook her head. “And I’ll never figure out why she drives that Cadillac of hers all the way from Augusta to Cayboo Creek just to come to the Bottom Dollar Emporium.”
Mavis looked up from the broom she was pushing across the floor. “She tells me we have the best deals on cleaning supplies in the whole area,” she said. “But it does seem odd that she’d drive twenty minutes every week or so to save a nickel or two on a box of Brillo pads or a bottle of floor wax. Besides, there must be a half a dozen dollar stores in a city the size of Augusta.”
Mavis glanced at me. “Mrs. Tobias comes in here because of you, Elizabeth. She dotes on you.”
I shrugged. “I can’t imagine why. It’s not like I’m anyone special.”
Five
My aim is to keep this bathroom clean. Your aim will help.
~ Cross-stitch sampler in Taffy Polk’s powder room
On the night of my birthday, I drove to Augusta to visit my daddy. My half-brother Lanier had just been released from jail after serving six months for stealing a Camaro, so we Polks were throwing a celebration supper.
My daddy lives in a gated community called Brandywine. The place is on the swanky side of Augusta, but he’s no blue blood. For years after my mama died, he was a no-account drifter. He worked every now and then in the mills or the granite mines until my granddaddy passed on and left a little furniture store on the Aiken-Augusta Highway, which runs outside of Cayboo Creek.
It wasn’t much of a business then, just a collection of dusty dinette sets and ugly plaid sofas that my granddaddy sold to folks on a fixed income. But when my daddy got hold of the store, he turned it into a rent-to-own place called the Bargain Bonanza.
He had a grand re-opening and bought a slew of television spots making himself the spokesperson. He called himself “Insane Dwayne,” and he’d blow something up in every commercial. His slogan was “Get on down to the Bargain Bonanza, where the savings are explosive.” He’d even talked me into appearing in some of them.
I regretted that decision, because his commercials were the most obnoxious ones on the airwaves and too often I was recognized on the street as being the daughter of Insane Dwayne. But the TV ads sure did lure in the customers. Business got so good he had to move to a big warehouse up the road. He even added televisions, stereos, and DVD players to his inventory. And though I was glad that he’d finally done well for himself, I hated that his business robbed folks silly. A TV console that would normally cost a person about a five hundred dollars ended up costing them three times as much when they got done with Bargain Bonanza’s rent-to-own plan.
Soon as my daddy got his first platinum American Express card in the mail, a gal named Taffy beamed into his life, just like on Star Trek. Two weeks after he met her at the Tuff Luck Tavern on karaoke night, he was saying “I do” in front of an Aiken County justice of the peace.
My stepmother Taffy doesn’t talk much about her past, and I guess she’s got her reasons. Meemaw’s bo
yfriend, Boomer, swears that she looks a lot like one of the exotic dancers in the girlie clubs in Augusta he used to frequent. Boomer says if a body has a name like Taffy, she’s either a stripper or a horse.
I don’t know about that, but I do know that as soon as Taffy got the diamond on her finger, she insisted my daddy buy a house in Brandywine. It was a move my daddy would never have made on his own. Dwayne Polk might have the bank account of a doctor or a lawyer, but he has the soul of a South Carolina redneck. The sight of him sitting in their patio home on one of those velvet-padded chairs that Taffy bought from Ethan Allen looks stranger than a bulldog wearing a tiara.
I drove up to the gate at Brandywine and gave the security guard my name. Taffy’s in charge of calling the gate when company comes, and she always manages to forget when I visit.
“What was the name again?” The man wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Even though it was mid-October, the thermometer read 80 degrees and he was cooped up in a gatehouse with no air conditioning.
“Elizabeth Polk. I’m kin to Dwayne Polk, who lives on Cordial Court.” All the streets in Brandywine were named for after-dinner drinks.
He squinted at his list. “Wait a minute. I have a Betty Delores Polk. Would that be you?”
“Yessir.”
He handed me the cardboard pass to hang on my rearview mirror and I drove on through. That Taffy. No matter how many times I tell her that my name is Elizabeth, she calls me “Betty D.”
I poked my elbow out of the car window and drove over the sloping roads of Brandywine, admiring the way the landscapers managed to get the shrubs into shapes so perfect they looked like they’d jumped off the pages of an elementary school math textbook.
It had been so long since I’d visited, I almost took a wrong turn onto Grand Marnier Place. We Polks aren’t a getting-together family; usually someone has to die, or in this case, get paroled.
I pulled up and parked on the street in front of their patio home. Taffy didn’t like living in the patio-home section of Brandywine, which was called Phase III. She wanted one of those estate-type houses in Phase I or, at the very least, a big colonial house in Phase II. My daddy, who grew up in a mobile home made of little more than particle board and nails, said he wasn’t spending that kind of cash just for a place to hang his hat.
Daddy’s truck was in the driveway with his gun rack on the back, and so was Taffy’s candy-apple-colored Trans Am. I walked up the sidewalk and mashed the doorbell. It played the song “I Got Friends in Low Places.” Taffy’s something of a catalog nut, and she’s always buying doodads like musical doorbells or toilet paper that’s got jokes written all over it.
As I stood by the door, my nose prickled at the delicious smell coming from behind it. Taffy is one heck of a Southern cook. She pounds out biscuits that are as light and buttery as croissants, and her flour gravy feels like silk on the tongue. Daddy always says that just about anyone can pull off decent fried chicken or black-eyed peas, but the true test of a country cook lies in her biscuits and gravy.
Taffy answered the door wearing a dress gleaming with a dozen or more brass buttons. She liked clothes with lots of buttons and braid trim, almost as if she’d been a bellhop in another life.
“Betty D. Glad you came. Happy birthday.” She turned her back to me and hollered into the house. “Dwayne, your daughter is here!”
Taffy was forty-four years old, almost twenty years older than me, but she didn’t look it. Her bland, baby-doll face seemed untouched by time.
“Damn, Taffy, I’m right behind you.”
As my daddy rounded the corner, I saw his lip curled beneath his mustache. He was meaning to grin, but his expression came out looking like a sneer. My daddy is fifty-five, and he looks every second of it and then some. You can see the two-packs-a-day Benson and Hedges habit in the hollows of his cheeks, and his nose is battered with broken blood vessels from swilling Old Milwaukee every night.
From what I’ve heard, my daddy used to be one of the best-looking fellows in Aiken County, ever. My meemaw said he couldn’t walk two feet without some girl throwing herself in his path.
“Hey there, who’s my baby girl?” he said. His eyes looked as dark and rich as root beer in a mug and he was hiding something behind his back.
“Hi Daddy, Lanier here yet?”
“Lizzie. You didn’t answer my question,” my daddy said.
My finger traced the flocked fleurs-de-lis pattern on the wallpaper in the foyer. Meemaw had sweet tea coming out of her nose when I told her Daddy and Taffy had flocked wallpaper.
She howled, “I’ve lived in Cayboo Creek all my life and even I know that flocked wallpaper is tackier than sin.”
“Daddy, please,” I said. It was a game that he’d played with me ever since I was a little girl. He’d say, “Who’s my baby girl?” and I was supposed to run into his arms and say, “I am, Daddy, I am.” I was getting a little old for such silliness.
“Come on, Lizzie. Who’s my baby girl?”
“The Queen of Sheba. Where’s Lanier?”
“I sent Earl after him.” Earl was Daddy’s best friend and fetch boy.
“Happy birthday, Sugar,” my daddy said. He brushed my cheek with his lips. Then he handed me a plastic bag. “Hope you like your gift.”
I opened the bag and found I was the proud owner of a tool called the Ding King.
“It pops dents right out of your car,” Daddy said. “They claim it’ll pop out a dent the size of a grapefruit.”
“Thanks, Daddy. I’m sure this will come in handy.” I turned to Taffy. “Something sure smells good. Can I give you a hand in the kitchen?”
“Why don’t you sit with your daddy in the library and keep him company while I cook,” Taffy said.
The “library” was a den that contained over a hundred Harlequin Temptations paperbacks and a collection of back copies of the National Enquirer.
My daddy and I were strolling toward the library when the front door opened and Earl stuck in his gray head. “I got that boy of yours, Dwayne.”
“Darn it, Earl,” Taffy hollered from the kitchen, “I told you a million times you need to knock first. This ain’t a boarding house. What if I was in my panties?”
“You heard the lady, Earl,” Daddy said with a wink.
“Boy, get yourself in here.” Daddy grabbed the knob of the door and opened it. My half-brother was crouching behind it.
“Shoot, Daddy, I was gonna surprise you.” Lanier stood up tall and jammed his hands into the pockets of his blue jeans.
“Taffy, Lanier’s here. Get out here and hug this boy’s neck,” my daddy said.
Taffy came streaming down the hall, her bracelets clanging together as she ran. She reached Lanier and gave him a big lip-smacking kiss, leaving a red splotch on his cheek.
Daddy cuffed Lanier on the shoulder every few seconds. It was obvious he wanted to wrap his arms around his boy and hug him, but the Polk men didn’t get mushy with one another.
My daddy glanced at Earl, who was standing in the corner rubbing the bill of his John Deere cap.
“I’d ask you to stay, Earl, but this is kind of a family dinner. Understand?” my daddy said.
Earl nodded dumbly and slipped out the front door. Taffy grabbed a strand of Lanier’s long, brown hair and fingered it. “Look at all the hair on this boy, Dwayne. I think you favor Keith Urban. Anyone tell you that you favor him, Lanier?”
Lanier wore his hair long in the back and cut close on the sides. The style had the unfortunate effect of making his narrow face look as skinny as a weasel’s. Lanier didn’t inherit Daddy’s good looks or his sleazy brand of charm. My half-brother’s complexion was the color of meat gone gray, and he held his mouth loosely like a toddler who lets his strained vegetables slip from his lips.
“Made your favorite dessert,
Lanier. Peach cobbler,” Taffy crooned.
“Just when is supper going to be on the table?” my daddy snapped.
Two spots of color bloomed high in Taffy’s cheeks, but she knew better than to sass my daddy back in front of his boy.
“Come on, Betty D. We’ll let the boys get reacquainted,” said Taffy.
Lanier’s head jerked in my direction as if seeing me for the first time.”Hey, Sis.”
“Hey Lanier,” I said. I barely knew my half-brother. He was five years younger than me, and the product of a short affair my daddy had with a frizzy-haired woman named Nadine.
I tagged behind Taffy, knowing she wouldn’t let me touch anything in her kitchen. I hopped up on one of the swivel bar stools while Taffy chopped onions on a butcher board on the kitchen island with a faux marble finish.
“Your daddy dotes on that boy. Some men dote on their daughters, but not Dwayne. The sun rises and sets on Lanier.” Taffy was chopping so hard that her helmet of hair bounced on her shoulders. She glanced at me quickly.
“Sorry. Guess that wasn’t a very nice thing to say.”
I swiveled my chair back and forth. “It doesn’t matter.”
“How’s things at the Bottom of the Barrel?”
“Things are fine at the Bottom Dollar.” I wasn’t up to telling her about the Super Saver store coming to Cayboo Creek.
“You need to get out some over here in Augusta. It’s not healthy for a girl to be cooped up in her house every night in a hick town with a mutt dog. ‘Specially now that you’re getting up there in years. Hell, by the time I was your age, I’d already run through two husbands. And you haven’t snared you a one. When’s the last time you’ve been out with a man?”
“One of my customers is setting me up with her grandson soon,” I said, hoping she’d let me be.
Taffy leaned down to get the biscuits out of the oven and I felt my stomach rumbling. Just one biscuit, I vowed. My blue jeans had lately been cutting into my midsection.
Bet Your Bottom Dollar (The Bottom Dollar Series Book 1) Page 4