Aggie
Aggie dropped raisins into her oatmeal and talked to Ugly in pig Latin.
Ood-gay orning-may.
Ant-way ome-say una-tay?
Then she pushed aside the sponges and spray bottles and garbage bags under the kitchen sink, looking for the laundry detergent.
Ugly watched her with his one eye, the tip of his tail twitching on the worn orange carpet.
“Maybe I left it in the laundry room,” Aggie said.
She gathered a bundle of towels and headed outside. Shuffling up the sidewalk in her bedroom slippers, she took a deep breath. The air smelled sweet and clean.
And then something hit her.
Hard.
Not a real thing she could touch.
But a feeling.
A feeling caused by a thought.
This was the thought: These mountains are a part of me, like my arm or my hand or my heart. And in just a few days, I will be leaving them forever.
Aggie sat in the chair outside of Room 3 and clutched the bundle of towels against her.
Out by the water spigot, Loretta and Willow were washing plastic lawn chairs and singing a song about finding a peanut.
Loretta was wearing her cowboy vest over her bathing suit. Her jangly charm bracelet danced up and down her arm as she washed. Willow wore her pink plastic sandals and held her chin up in the air while she sang.
Aggie smiled, forgetting all about the thought that had caused the feeling that had hit her hard.
Then she gathered up the towels and headed on over to the laundry room.
The morning seemed to fly by. Aggie hung curtains in Room 8 and changed lightbulbs in Room 3. She washed the coffee mugs and put extra soap in every room. She held the stool while Loretta’s mother fixed the window blinds in Room 7. She showed Clyde Dover where to turn off the main water valve so he and Loretta’s father could work on the plumbing.
Out in the parking lot, Kirby tossed weeds into the wheelbarrow, while Loretta and Willow dragged the clean chairs back out to the pool.
Birds hopped around the filled-up bird feeder and the flag fluttered in the breeze at the top of the flagpole.
The little motel was beginning to hum.
Willow
Willow watched her father spread grape jelly on bread. He had made a little kitchen on top of the dresser in their room. A toaster. A microwave oven. A tiny refrigerator. A milk crate filled with saltine crackers, bread, peanut butter, cans of soup.
“How many people are coming in the tour group?” Willow asked, pulling the crust off her cheese sandwich.
“About nine or ten, I think.” Her father tossed the jelly knife into the bathroom sink.
“It sure is nice of Aggie to help us,” Willow said. “You know, since the motel’s not hers anymore.”
Her father nodded, humming as he studied the To Do list on his clipboard.
Willow got a little fluttery feeling.
Her father wasn’t closed up tight anymore. She could tell he had opened a tiny crack.
More than anything, she wanted to say, Daddy, please let Aggie stay here with us.
But she knew she had to be careful. That tiny crack could snap shut at any minute.
Like a mousetrap.
Snap!
So she said, “I’m going to look for Loretta.”
Willow ran to Room 6. When she got there, Loretta came out and handed her a paper cup full of blackberries.
They raced out to the swimming pool and sat on the steps, eating their blackberries and talking.
About school.
About their friends.
About their favorite cereal.
About whether Loretta should go to Niagara Falls or Disney World.
About what they wanted for their birthdays.
And about Dorothy.
Willow loved how easy Loretta was to talk to. Even easier than Maggie. But the best thing was that no matter what Willow said, Loretta always had a good idea about it.
Like, when Willow told her she wanted to go visit Dorothy down in Savannah, Loretta said she should take one of those maps from the office with her and put a big red circle around the spot where the motel was.
“That way,” Loretta said, “she can come visit you and she won’t get lost.”
And when Willow told Loretta that Dorothy’s birthday was July 27, Loretta squealed, “Her birthday’s in July?”
Willow nodded.
Loretta grabbed Willow’s shoulders and gave her a little shake.
“That’s ruby!” she said.
“What’s ruby?”
“July. The birthstone for July is ruby,” Loretta said. “You can send her one of those rubies I got in Cherokee!”
Willow could hardly believe Loretta was going to give her one of those shiny little rubies she had found up in the ruby mine in Cherokee. She made up her mind right then and there that she was going to give Loretta one of her china horses. Maybe the gray mare with the flowing white mane. That one had a tiny baby horse that went with it. Willow might even give her the baby horse, too.
Kirby
It was nearly noon when Aggie came out to the parking lot and gave Kirby a sandwich. The morning mist had burned off and the air was still and hot.
Kirby’s hands were blistered and his shoulders hurt. He had filled up that old wheelbarrow about a hundred times, making trip after trip around back to dump the weeds into the burn pile by the garden.
“I got sweet tea, too,” Aggie said, holding up a thermos.
Kirby followed her out to the picnic table. He wiped his dirty hands on his shirttail and sat next to her.
“Ain’t that a beautiful sight?” Aggie said, gazing out at the gray-green treetops in the distance. “I just love these mountains.”
Kirby nodded.
He was on his second cheese sandwich when Aggie said, “What’s that?”
She shuffled over to the edge of the grassy patch by the flagpole and reached for something up under the bushes.
She came back and sat next to Kirby.
“Where in the world did this come from?” she said.
Kirby looked down at what she was holding.
A postcard.
A postcard of the Smoky Mountains.
A postcard that used to say Greetings from the Great Smoky Mountains.
But now it was a postcard that said Greetings from Nowhere.
The word Nowhere was scrawled across the front in big angry letters.
Aggie’s hands were shaking.
Kirby’s heart was pounding.
“Thank you for the sandwiches,” he said.
He hurried back out to the parking lot to chop weeds in the hard, dry earth.
He glanced over at Aggie. She slipped the postcard into the pocket of her apron and cleared the paper cups off the picnic table.
He kept chopping.
Chop.
Chop.
Chop.
That poodle dog pin so heavy in his pocket.
And then Aggie was standing next to him. “It must’ve been my lucky day when that car of yours broke down,” she said.
Kirby stopped weeding and looked at her.
“I mean, besides being a dern good weeder and a champion yo-yo-er, you’re a fine young man,” she said.
For a flicker of a minute, Kirby felt like he was in the wrong life. Like somehow he had gotten plucked out of Kirby Tanner’s life and plopped right down into somebody else’s.
Somebody who didn’t have to steal and lie to make people notice him.
Somebody who was a fine young man.
And in the next flicker of a minute, Kirby wished he hadn’t kept that pin that was so special to Loretta, who was always nice to him.
And he wished he hadn’t written that angry word about the Smoky Mountains that Aggie loved so much.
He wished he really was a fine young man.
Loretta
Loretta dumped the things out of the box and spread them on the bed. She refolded the
blue handkerchief embroidered with a P. She opened the silver pocket watch engraved with WKL. She smoothed out the creases on the hummingbird picture.
“Mama?” she said.
Her mother looked up from her magazine. “Hmmm?”
“Do you think my other mother would be mad at me for losing her poodle dog pin?”
Her mother put down the magazine and gathered Loretta in her arms. Loretta pressed her face against her mother’s warm, soft body and breathed in her talcum powder smell.
“Lulu,” her mother said, “I think she’d know you’re the best little girl in the whole world. That’s what I think.”
“But what about the pin?”
Her mother took her by the shoulders. “I think she’d know that people make mistakes and that accidents happen,” she said. “Don’t you?”
Loretta shrugged. “I guess.”
Her mother put her arm around her and led her over to the window. “Look at those mountains, Lulu,” she said.
Loretta looked out at the gray-green mountains. A layer of smoky clouds hovered over the tops of them.
“Your other mother looked out at those very same mountains,” her mother said.
Loretta took in every inch of the scene outside the window, imagining her other mother seeing the very same thing.
The same pine trees.
The same puffy clouds.
The same winding roads.
And somewhere out there along the mountaintop, Loretta found a piece of herself. Like that last missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, snapped into place with a sigh of satisfaction, making the picture whole.
Loretta hugged her mother and said, “I love you.”
Then she wiggled her hand, making her charm bracelet jingle up and down her arm, and said, “I’m gonna go take Willow one of my rubies.”
Loretta skipped up the sidewalk toward the office. She peered through the screen door. Willow sat on a stool at the counter, watching the little television her father had put there that morning.
“I brought you a ruby,” Loretta called through the screen door.
Willow jumped off the stool and came outside. They ran and sat on the picnic table. Loretta gave Willow the ruby and Willow gave Loretta the little china horses. The mama horse and the baby horse.
When the lightning bugs came out, Loretta and Willow took turns catching one, making a wish, and then letting it go again.
Then they sat on the steps of the swimming pool and looked around them at the little motel.
The lawn chairs, clean and tidy around the pool.
The parking lot without the weeds.
Room 3 with the freshly painted door.
Room 2 with the broken window fixed.
“Your motel looks nice,” Loretta said.
Willow smiled. “Thank you,” she said.
They sat there on the steps, shoulder to shoulder, and watched the sun disappear completely behind the mountains.
The MOUNTAINVIEW INN sign glowed.
VACANCY flashed on and off.
On and off.
Aggie
Aggie put Harold’s plaid slippers on top of the other things in the box.
“There,” she said to Ugly.
Then she put on her old canvas sneakers and grabbed a hat (the big straw one she got in Florida) and went around back to the garden.
Ugly trotted along behind her.
Grasshoppers sprang up out of the weeds as she made her way to the tomato garden.
“Well, Harold,” she said, “I’ll be heading over to Evelyn’s this week and …”
Aggie took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Then she continued. “I hope you don’t mind if I gave that boy, Kirby, your patch from the war, but he seems kinda needy. You know? Seems like his kin are so busy waiting for him to do something bad that they miss out on him doing something good.”
She picked a fat, green tomato worm off one of the plants and tossed it into the weeds.
“And Loretta. Lawd, that little thing is just a bundle of sunshine, skipping around here with that bracelet of hers jangling away.”
Aggie chuckled. “You know, I think she came here to these mountains looking for a little piece of herself, and I have a feeling she found it.”
Ugly rubbed against Aggie’s legs, purring.
“And then there’s Willow.” Aggie smiled up at the sky. “Pining away for her mother and missing that love so much. Seems like most of what she needs is just a good hug once in a while.” Aggie looked down at her dirty sneakers. “But then, never having children of my own, what do I know, right?”
She looked skyward again. “Oh, and thanks again for getting them letters to Willow. I knew I could count on you.”
Then she went over and sat in the lawn chair at the edge of the garden and told Harold all about the tour group. How they’d be here any minute now. How they were coming on a bus from down in Atlanta.
Then she told him about all the things they had done to spruce up the motel. The painting and hammering and washing and all.
“You should see it,” she said. “But then”—she chuckled—“I reckon you can.”
She pushed herself out of the chair and headed down the path out of the garden. But before she rounded the corner of the motel, she looked up at the mountain sky and said, “This has been one heck of a parade, ain’t it, Harold?”
Willow
Willow made sure the guest book was on the counter and the coffee mugs were lined up and the little silver bell was ready in case one of their guests needed something. Then she looked out the office door for about the millionth time to see if the tour bus was there yet.
But it wasn’t.
So she went outside to look for Aggie. She looked in the laundry room and out by the flagpole. Then she ran up the sidewalk past the rooms with the freshly painted doors and went along the path toward the garden. But before she rounded the corner, she heard someone talking.
Aggie.
Aggie talking to Harold.
Aggie saying, “This has been one heck of a parade, ain’t it, Harold?”
And then Willow had a moment.
A lightbulb moment.
One of those moments when the light goes on with a click and everything is suddenly clearer than it had been the minute before.
Kirby
Kirby stuffed his dirty T-shirts into the duffel bag and zipped it up.
“ … better not be getting no calls from that school …” his mother was saying.
“ … if you were more like Ace …”
“ … I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but you …”
On and on and on.
His mother telling him all those things he already knew because he’d heard them so many times before.
“ … ain’t gonna tolerate your lying and …”
Kirby went outside and put his duffel bag in the backseat of their car.
And then a bus pulled into the parking lot, sending up clouds of red dust as it came to a stop in front of the office.
The bus doors opened with a hiss and folks ambled down the steps and out into the parking lot, carrying backpacks and tote bags and cameras.
Mr. Dover rushed out of the office, grinning. He shook their hands and helped them with their bags and pointed out the ice machine and the soda machine and the laundry room.
Aggie came out and gave them each a map and introduced them to Ugly.
Willow stood just inside the office door with the guest book in her hand.
Kirby ran over to help.
Loretta
Loretta put the two little china horses into her box with all her other mother’s earthly possessions.
“I’m going to go say goodbye to everyone,” she said.
Her mother smiled and nodded as she folded clothes and put them into the opened suitcases on the bed.
Outside, a bus was pulling into the parking lot. A big bus with Holiday Tours on the side.
“The tour group!” Loretta squealed.
Every
one was scurrying around like ants. Mr. Dover and Aggie were showing folks to their rooms, unlocking the doors, opening the blinds, handing out extra soaps. Willow was making sure everyone had a pen to sign the guest book. Kirby was helping folks with their bags.
So Loretta ran over to help, too. She told the ladies in the tour group all about the spelunkers at Tuckaleechee Caverns. She told the men about the cowboy town over in Maggie Valley. And she showed everyone her rubies.
Willow
Willow looked down at the guest book opened on the counter.
Dave and Lillian Klinger from Belton, South Carolina
Ollie Branson from Athens, Georgia
Hattie Norris from Dayton, Ohio
Mr. Frank T. Dodd from Fairfax, Virginia
Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey Hix from Baltimore, Maryland
Augusta Russell from Cleveland, Mississippi
Felton Nisbet from Fountain Inn, South Carolina
Roy and Doris Gilmer from Cedar Bluff, Alabama
The motel would be full!
Willow and Aggie were going to hurry and clean Kirby’s and Loretta’s rooms after they left.
Kirby and Loretta.
Willow had been so busy with the tour group that she hadn’t had time to think about them yet.
But now she did.
She thought about them leaving.
She thought about how quiet it was going to be without Kirby bouncing out there on the diving board.
Boing. Boing. Boing.
She thought about how boring it would be without Loretta skipping around in her cowboy vest.
She thought about sitting in the bottom of the swimming pool without anyone to talk pig Latin to or do yo-yo tricks with.
And then her father came into the office and she remembered what she had to do.
She stood up straight and squared her shoulders and said, “Daddy, Aggie can’t leave. We need her to help us in the motel and our family got all messed up so now she can help make a family for us and we’ll still have plenty of rooms for guests. Ugly won’t like it in a condominium and he can’t even go outside or anything.”
Greetings from Nowhere Page 10