Whiskey Sunrise

by Missouri Vaun

  “Royal, I’m so sorry. I never meant for you to find out that way. I never wanted to hurt you.” A lump was forming in her throat, and Lovey was having a hard time talking around it.

  “So it’s true. You are seeing Joe.” Royal dropped into the chair near her desk. Her posture defeated.

  Lovey stepped close and lifted the partial glass of whiskey that Royal had obviously poured for herself and took a few small sips. The warm liquor helped lessen the lump in her throat. She sat in the upholstered chair opposite Royal.

  “Royal, I don’t really know what to say to you.” She looked around the sparse room for something to focus on besides the crushed look on Royal’s face. “Joe is a good man and he has asked me to marry him.”

  “What?” She could plainly hear the hurt in Royal’s voice.

  “I haven’t said yes yet. I told him I needed some time to think.”

  “I’d say so. We were only just together Friday night, here in this room. We made love, right here in this bed. Was I the only one who felt something?”

  “Royal, you know I feel something for you.” She brushed a tear away from her cheek. “I feel something I’ve never felt before, but we can’t really be together, can we? Not the way we want to be. The world doesn’t work that way.”

  “So you’re just giving up? You’re going to just play by the rules, because you can, because it’s easy for you? I can’t do that.”

  “This, what we’re doing, it isn’t real, Royal. Marriage is a contract, an arrangement. Marriage is what society tolerates. Not this. Not what we’re doing.”

  “I know that deep down you don’t believe that, Lovey. It’s like you’re channeling your father’s voice. This…what we have…it is real. More real than anything I’ve ever felt before.” Royal placed her open palm over her heart. “This is the only thing that is real.”

  “What do you expect me to do? Turn my back on my entire life up to this point? Turn away from my father, my faith?”

  “If what you’re proposing is to live an empty life with someone you’re not in love with, then yes, that is what I expect you to do.” Royal moved so that she was kneeling in front of Lovey. She held both her hands. “What worth does love or faith hold if it doesn’t accept you fully, for who you truly are? That is a false love. A false faith.”

  Tears started to slowly trail down Lovey’s cheeks as Royal spoke to her. Lovey believed that what Royal was saying might be true for her, but Lovey knew she could never go down that path.

  “I’m not brave the way you are, Royal.”

  “Lovey, I’m not brave. I’m in love. With you. Don’t do this to us.”

  “Please don’t say that.” Lovey wiped at the tears on her cheeks and turned away. She couldn’t look at Royal. “Royal, I’m not like you. I care what people think. I can’t just be in the world and not notice what people think of me. I don’t know how you’ve managed to not care, but you clearly don’t.”

  “It’s not that I don’t care what people think, Lovey. But I can’t be anyone but who I am. If people don’t like me for who I am then they don’t really like me and I’ve got no time for them. Does that make sense?”

  “Our worlds are just very different, Royal.” Sadness settled over Lovey as if her heart was weighted down with heavy stones. “You’ve managed to somehow create a life that allows you to be who you truly are, to defy society’s conventions of who you should be. I wish I was that strong, but I’m not.”

  “Lovey, come share my life with me.”

  “Don’t…I can’t.”

  “Lovey, I’ve never felt for anyone what I feel for you. Please don’t let us go.”

  Lovey shook her head as the tears streamed down her face.

  “Lovey, this can be real. If you’ll let it be real. We don’t have to settle for less. We don’t have to live our lives in hiding. You deserve to be whole. We deserve to be whole.”

  The walls of the room were closing in on Lovey, the air suddenly thick, making it hard for her to breathe. She stood and moved away from Royal’s kneeling position. She paced the room, and for a few minutes attempted to visualize a different path.

  She pictured herself telling her father that she was in love with Royal. She tried to see the two of them living together, going about their daily lives. She couldn’t see it. Everything she attempted to visualize seemed completely incongruent with her experience of the world. She didn’t see how it could ever work. Royal was a dreamer, an outlier for whom an unconventional life might work. That sort of path obviously didn’t frighten her the way it did Lovey.

  She tried to imagine cutting off all ties with her father and the congregation. Even though Lovey disagreed with many of their collective views, there was safety and comfort in blending in. If she married Joe she’d be protected and cared for. His family was supportive and accepting. She knew with Joe she could have what most would define as a good life. No doubt she would grow to love Joe over time. And what she was feeling for Royal would burn out like a shooting star, despite the brilliant light of it across the night sky.

  She needed to end this. She was doing neither of them any favors by drawing this out. She knew what she had to do.

  “Royal, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t see each other anymore.” She looked at Royal, who regarded her with a dumbfounded expression on her face. “Believe me when I tell you that this is as hard for me as it is for you, but I’m doing what I believe is best for both of us.”

  Royal stood up, but didn’t speak. She walked across the room running her hand through her hair, her shoulders drooping in defeat.

  “You’re not doing this for me, Lovey. You’re afraid. You’re afraid to allow yourself to love me. Don’t make this about anything else but what it is. Fear.”

  “When you’ve had time to really think this through you’ll know I’m right. There’s no place here for a love like ours. We have to let it go.”

  Royal faced Lovey, with a trail of tears on her tanned cheeks. “What if I can’t let it go?”

  “Royal, you have to. We have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Lots of reasons.” Lovey struggled to articulate the jumble of conflicted thoughts in her head. “We would be ostracized if we were to openly declare our love. I’m not ready to bear the weight of that. Are you?”

  “For you? Yes. Yes, I am.” Royal took a few steps toward her. “Not everyone feels the way you think they do. My family would grow to love you. Don’t give up on us before you even try to make it work.”

  “And if we tried and failed, then the damage would already be done. We couldn’t take any of it back. I’d rather stop this before the damage actually happens.”

  “Don’t let fear run your life. Lovey, this doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.” Self-loathing was settling like a dense fog in her chest. What sort of person hurts the woman they love for a friendly arrangement of marriage? A coward, that’s who. She was a coward. Was she? Or was she just being mature and judicious?

  She covered her face with her hands. After a minute, she felt the warmth of Royal’s hands on her wrists.

  “Lovey, please don’t do this,” whispered Royal. “Give us more time to figure it all out. Just a little more time.”

  She wanted to sink into Royal’s arms. She wanted to cry and say it had all been a horrible mistake. But somewhere, deep inside she heard her father’s voice. This was one of those defining moments when a deliberate act was required. Like swallowing a bitter medicine, she knew this was for their own good. If Royal couldn’t see that then she would have to see it for both of them.

  If she’d known this was going to happen, if she’d known this was going to be the end, would she still have come? Probably not. But here she was, and she knew what she had to do. She felt the conservative paradigm of her entire life constricting around her like a vise, giving her only one choice.

  “I can’t see you any more, Royal. I’m sorry. I should never have let things
go this far.”

  She waited for Royal to say something, and when she didn’t, Lovey let herself out, shutting the door slowly behind her. Her chest seized with heartache as she leaned against the closed door.

  She’d never done anything so difficult in her life as walk out of that room. But she knew she had to. She knew that she wasn’t ready to love Royal so openly and risk the ridicule of the community. When she said she wasn’t brave, she’d meant it. She didn’t think she’d be able to withstand the judgment from her father if he ever discovered the truth.

  An excruciating pain now would save both of them from the lingering heartache of a world conspiring against them if they tried to be together.

  ❖

  Royal turned around slowly in the center of the room. She was adrift. She knew she should have held some of herself back with Lovey. But she hadn’t. And now Lovey had shut the door and carried her heart away.

  She slumped back into the chair and was about to take a sip of whiskey when she noticed the faint imprint of Lovey’s lipstick on the rim of the glass. Rage surged in her chest. She threw the glass at the door, sending a spray of whiskey and broken shards all over the floor and the wall.

  She leaned forward, holding her face in her hands. After a minute, she couldn’t breathe. She stood and began pacing the room from end to end. What was she going to do now? She’d let herself hope. She’d allowed herself to dream.

  Dreams were terrible things if you let them take hold, if you truly believed them. A dream could change your world. The death of a dream could destroy it.

  ❖

  An hour or so later, Lovey was walking down the driveway when she saw her father sitting on the porch. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have a chat with her father so she said hello to him with every intention to breeze past him and go bury her face in her pillow and cry herself to sleep.

  “I need to speak with you for a moment, Lovey.”

  Lovey paused with her hand on the knob of the screen door. She let the door close again and turned toward her father. “Yes?”

  “Deacon Wood said something rather disturbing to me after the luncheon today.”

  She didn’t prod him to explain; she just stood stoically watching his face, trying to brace herself for whatever it was he was about to reveal.

  “He said that the night of the revival he passed by here and saw a strange car in the driveway. He said the car belonged to Royal Duval.” He paused, as if he was waiting for her to say something. When she didn’t, he continued. “I told him that he must have been mistaken. I told him that while you had once accepted a ride from Miss Duval that you would not socialize with a woman who was a known moonshine runner and a person of general ill repute.”

  During her walk back to the house, all Lovey wanted to do was cry; now she found that heavy sadness shifting to anger. She was enraged that some busybody deacon had taken it upon himself to spy on her. In her own house! Despite the fact that this very revelation proved her recent rationale to be true, it still made her angry.

  “I invited Royal over for dinner.”

  “You didn’t mention that to me.” Her father seemed angry too.

  “I’m a grown woman, Father. I didn’t think it was necessary to ask your permission to have a friend over for dinner.”

  “Lovey, I do not want you spending time with Miss Duval. I know you probably feel that your friendship might have a positive influence on her, but I must advise against it.”

  “Don’t worry, Father. I’ve made it very clear to her that I cannot be her friend.” If anything, she’d been a horrible influence on Royal. She’d shown Royal what it meant to be duplicitous and hypocritical.

  “Well, I’m relieved to hear it.”

  “If you don’t mind, Father, I’m going to go lie down for a while.” She pulled the door open and was inside before he had a chance to respond. She didn’t really care what else he had to say. She was emotionally raw and exhausted. She just wanted to hide in her room and wait for the world to go away, or change.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Royal sat in front of the window, trying to write. Nothing was coming to her. She’d started out at the desk, then moved to the bed, and finally had ended up at the window. As it turned out, her position in the room wasn’t the problem. She was the problem.

  She gave up and headed downstairs and out of the house. She found her grandfather in the barn moving empty glass jars to crates padded with hay for transport later up the trail to the still. Royal joined his effort and then carried some of the crates to the back of the horse drawn wagon.

  “You seem really out of sorts lately, Royal. Somethin’ you want to talk about?” Her grandfather paused his labor and leaned on the side of the buckboard.

  Royal debated whether she wanted to talk about Lovey or not. Before she could decide, her grandfather spoke again.

  “Is this about the gal that stopped by the other day? The reverend’s daughter?”

  Royal stopped shuffling crates and looked at him. “Yeah, I suppose it is.” She tried to sound nonchalant when she was actually anything but.

  “What happened?”

  “I guess I thought we had something going, but she didn’t see it that way.” She sniffed, determined not to cry in front of her grandfather.

  “It’s a terrible thing when your happiness depends on another. Sometimes they let you down.”

  “What do you do about it?” Royal was struggling to feel like herself again. Losing Lovey had rocked her center and completely thrown her. Normally confident and focused, she felt out of balance and unsure of herself. She was miserable. It was as if Lovey had taken the part of her that knew what she wanted and now she was flailing in deep water, as if she forgot how to swim.

  “The thing I usually do is remind myself of what makes me happy, and I focus on doing that.” Her grandfather pulled a handkerchief free from his pocket and wiped his forehead. The interior of the barn was shaded from the late morning sun, but the temperature was climbing, even in the shade. “In your case, that’s driving or writing.”

  “I haven’t been able to write.”

  “Then driving is where I’d focus.” He took a seat on an upturned crate. “Remember the first time I put you behind the wheel of a car?”

  Royal’s mind traveled back to childhood. She’d pulled herself up as tall as she could on the bench seat beside her grandfather. She had a tiny bit of visibility through the narrow space between the top of the giant steering wheel and the dashboard of the old truck. Golden hay almost as high as the doorknob swished against the steel door of the Model A Ford as Royal and her grandfather had bounced through the back pasture.

  Only a month earlier, Royal’s father had died in a car accident after tumbling into a ravine. Royal’s mother had been upset that this was the time her grandfather had chosen to teach Royal to drive. But Royal had been surly with everyone and listlessly hiding in her room. The suggestion of a driving lesson had been the first time she’d smiled since the funeral. Royal was ten years old.

  “Yeah, I remember. It’s one of my favorite memories.”

  “Remember how I told you to listen to the engine? When it got to a certain pitch, if it started to sound like it was straining, you should shift.” Her grandfather had leaned over and tapped the speedometer with his finger. She could visualize the scene as if it were yesterday. His teeth were so white against his tanned features every time he smiled down at her. The gearbox had complained loudly when she missed the slot.

  “I told you that you couldn’t force it.” He leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees. “You can’t force this either.”

  “I know.”

  “She has to find her own way. You can’t help her find it. And if you try to force your way on her, it likely won’t take.”

  “I know that too.”

  Royal walked toward the opening of the barn. She hesitated for a moment in the sun, scuffing the dirt with the toe of her boot. She looked back at her grandfathe
r, partially hidden in shadow, and gave him a halfhearted smile.

  “Thanks for talking to me. I think I’ll go for a drive.”

  As she walked toward her car, she called forth again the memory of her first drive with her grandfather. How he’d pulled open the gate and ushered them out on the winding dirt road down the mountain. The feeling of elation she’d had in that moment came rushing back as she settled behind the wheel of her car and cranked the engine. She figured a long drive through the hills would do her some good. She eased onto the dirt road and headed north, into the mountains.

  ❖

  Lovey lifted several garments and inspected them for rips or tears. She and a few other women from the church were sorting donated clothing that would end up being delivered to the children’s home in Gainesville. The task today was to repair any small imperfections, like rips or missing buttons, before delivering the garments for dispersal to needy kids. She held up a tiny dress and felt a pang that she and George had not had a chance to have a child. If they’d had a child, at least she wouldn’t feel so alone.

  As soon as she formulated the thought, she realized her loneliness was her own choice. She’d not felt alone with Royal, but because of her own fears, she’d pushed Royal away. She let her hands, holding the small pink dress, drop to a heap in her lap and gazed down at it.

  “Are you all right, Miss Lovey?” She heard a young woman’s voice and looked up to see Laurel Lee regarding her.

  “I’m fine.” She remembered that Laurel was the woman she’d seen with Royal that day at the church when everything had gone so wrong. She’d wondered ever since that day what Laurel and Royal had talked about. But how could she ask? She didn’t know Laurel except distantly as a fellow church member. They’d never spoken more than a few words to each other. And to question her about Royal would likely only give the gossip mill fuel.