Tied to the Tracks

by Rosina Lippi

  The truth was quite simple, if she could only make the words come out of her mouth: she wanted John, she had always wanted him, and he wanted her, too. The connection had stretched over five years and many miles, but it hadn’t snapped. It was still strong enough to draw them together, against everyone’s wishes and expectations and maybe even against their own best interests. But there was no going back now, no way to pretend the conversation in the emergency room hadn’t happened.

  She was hoping that she would be able to say even part of this to Rivera, enough to make her understand that she knew what she was doing, but now Rivera had something to say.

  “John isn’t right for Caroline.”

  That was enough to jolt Angie out of her preoccupation with herself. She looked hard at Rivera and saw an expression there that, she realized now, must be a great deal like the look on her own face. Desperately hopeful, lovesick, pessimistic that anything so crucially important could possibly go right. The signs had been there, but Angie, caught up in her own mess, hadn’t taken them in. Rivera was in love with Caroline Rose. Suddenly Angie found herself in the middle of a minefield.

  “So,” she said slowly, “what are you trying to tell me?”

  “There’s nothing to say,” Rivera said, very clearly. “Not a thing.”

  A hundred questions flooded Angie’s mind, but none of them could be asked outright; she could no more force a confidence from Rivera than she could stab her. And still she couldn’t let things go as they stood.

  She said, “What does Caroline want, do you know?”

  Rivera made a face. “I’m not sure she knows what she wants. The only thing she seems clear on is her prime directive. Which is, not to disappoint her mother or sisters.”

  Angie’s mouth closed with an audible click. “She’ll go ahead with the wedding no matter—”

  “Listen,” Rivera interrupted her, “I am not going to discuss this, okay? I can’t. Even for you.” She looked at her watch and pulled herself, groaning, up off the floor. “Mangiamele, up and at ’em. Miss Maddie and the picnic baskets await.”

  Angie looked around the mess on the kitchen floor and felt suddenly deflated. She said out loud what she had been thinking for so many weeks. “I knew we shouldn’t have taken this job.”

  Rivera said, “I’m starting to think you were right.”

  Miss Maddie’s neat kitchen was Angie’s favorite room in all of Ogilvie. It had white-painted cabinets that reached up to the ceiling and closed with small silver thumb latches, an ancient speckled linoleum floor, a sink deep enough for a three-year-old child to take a bath in, a cookie jar made to look like a gingerbread house, and a green Bakelite radio. The stove was squat and black and came to life with a hiss and a hint of gas.

  Just now the kitchen was in chaos. Marilee and Anthea Bragg were busy chopping a great pile of onions, peppers, and cabbage while Harriet stood at the sink squeezing water out of cooked tomatoes. All three of them were wearing aprons with their names embroidered across the chest in swirling blue letters.

  Food was everywhere: covered bowls and plates on the counter, pots on every burner, the oven glowing. Wicker picnic baskets with leather straps were stacked in a corner. An official-looking numbered ticket was tied to each with a piece of string.

  Marilee pointed with an elbow. “Auntie’s put out aprons for y’all, right there on the door hook? She’ll be right in, she just went out to the garden to get some parsley.”

  “What are we feeding, the Second Fleet?” Angie slipped her arms into a huge red apron scattered with fat rosebuds. “How many days ahead of time do you start cooking for the Jubilee?”

  Anthea laughed. “Two is cutting it close. You haven’t seen the whole Bragg family together at once. And then there’s the basket auction.”

  “Okay,” said Rivera. “I need more information.”

  Harriet said, “We do it every year, to raise money for next year’s Jubilee? You eat supper with your high bidder. It’s an honor, you know. Auntie had to pull some strings for you to be Basket Girls. Most years they give out twenty tickets by lottery, and five more go to the baskets that brought in the most money the previous year. This time that’s Miss Maddie, Caroline Rose, me and my sister, and Nan Ogilvie.”

  “And how did we score tickets again?” Rivera asked.

  “The committee voted you honorary Basket Girls. The last time they did that was for Anita Bryant, the summer she was here visiting with Ben-Linda Stillwater and them.”

  Angie said, “I had no idea.”

  “You’ll pardon me for saying so,” Rivera said with a barely straight face, “but this is way Mayberry.” She lifted the napkin over one of the bowls to sniff at it. “What is this stuff?”

  “Granny Louisa’s piccalilli,” said Anthea. “And there weren’t any black people with names in Mayberry, did you ever notice that?”

  “They did send somebody from Atlanta one year to write us up for the paper,” said Harriet. “We amuse them.”

  “Well, let them laugh. I don’t care. I love the Jubilee.” Anthea wrinkled her nose and then rubbed it with her wrist. “I plan on finding a husband this year. Or at least a really good time.”

  “You’re all talk,” said her sister. “But you do make me laugh.”

  Rivera wanted to know how often people hooked up at the Jubilee, and if that was the real purpose of the whole undertaking.

  “Our folks got together at the Jubilee, back in the days before it was integrated and we had our own party on the other side of town,” said Marilee. “But I met my George in Atlanta, when I was a resident.”

  Harriet said, “The first time I ever really talked to Tab was over my picnic basket at the Jubilee supper. That was the year I decided fried chicken was too country and I made mackerel cakes with dill sauce, but a disaster? Sick as dogs, the both of us. I thought he’d never forgive me, but as soon as he could pick himself off the bathroom floor he came by Old Roses with a bunch of flowers and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. I fell pregnant with Tab Junior that same night.”

  “You’re not the only one who tells a story that ends like that,” said Marilee. “Nine months from now labor and delivery will be hopping, let me tell you. We got a lot of April babies in Ogilvie, always have had.” She nudged her sister with an elbow. “Sometime I’ll get up the nerve to ask Mama if it’s just coincidence I was born in April.”

  That made Harriet laugh. “Don’t be mean to your mama, Marilee. She didn’t do so bad for herself, marrying Calvin Bragg. I should never’ve married Tab, pregnant or not, no matter what Mama and Father Bruce had to say.” She shook herself slightly and gave them both a brilliant smile.

  Anthea was watching her closely. She said, “You come and see me when you’re ready, Harriet, and I’ll draw up the papers for you.”

  At that Harriet looked at first confused, and then surprised.

  “I’m not going to divorce him,” she said. “I couldn’t do that. Mama would just about die, and Father Bruce—” She shook her head. “But I am going to get a place of my own. We can live apart and still be married.”

  Angie said, “Anthea, you know the difference between a Catholic mother and a Rottweiler? Eventually the Rottweiler lets go.”

  Harriet hiccupped a soft laugh, and then she put her hands over her mouth and let go, her shoulders shaking. Rivera made a face at Angie, but she was grinning, too.

  Miss Maddie stood at the end of the table, fists on hips and her head cocked at a thoughtful angle. Her apron fluttered a little in the breeze from the fan, and Angie wondered why it was that she had ended up yet again in one of the few unair-conditioned houses in Ogilvie on an afternoon as hot as this one.

  “You girls are going to have the best picnic baskets,” she said in an approving tone. “Wait and see if one of you don’t walk away with the blue ribbon.”

  “Auntie,” said Anthea. “The year you get knocked off the Basket Girls throne, hell has long since froze over and been sold for Popsicles.”

 
“And when that day comes, it will surely be Caroline who takes your place,” said Marilee.

  There was a long discussion about Caroline’s sweet-potato pie, followed by a debate on the proper packing of a picnic basket. By late afternoon Miss Maddie wasn’t trying to hide her worry about her sister anymore. “I can’t understand what is keeping them. Caroline has always been here when we start to put the baskets together, always.”

  Marilee said, “Most likely Miss Junie wanted them to stay for dinner, Auntie.” But right then they heard Louie galloping down the hall toward them. Harriet said, “There, you see?”

  Miss Zula stood in the kitchen doorway, smiling at her sister. “No need to get all flustered, Maddie, here I am. Louie, you are making a mess of that water bowl. Remember your manners.”

  She looked weary and more drawn than Angie had ever seen her, but Angie knew that her own expression had to be less than composed. She had the almost irresistible urge to jump up and ask about Caroline, who was nowhere in sight. She wondered if that was good news, or bad, and most of all she wondered how she could ask even the most innocent of the questions she wanted to ask. Rivera looked as jumpy as Angie felt.

  Miss Zula didn’t seem to take note. She let her sister fuss about her while she greeted each of them, spending the longest time with Harriet and holding both her hands in her own.

  “Junie is just right as rain,” she told Harriet. “Your mama is not the kind to fall into the faint at the first sign of trouble, and didn’t I say so?

  Your Uncle Bruce is going this evening to fetch her down for the Jubilee, and I expect she’ll spend most of the day at Tab’s bedside.”

  “That’s good news,” said Harriet. “Because I’m going to be busy running the children’s games. What did keep you so long? We expected you hours ago.”

  Miss Zula cast a glance at Angie, and smiled. A small, quiet smile but a smile, nonetheless, and what did that mean? Was it sympathy, or support, or nothing but good manners?

  “Didn’t you bring Caroline back with you, Auntie?” Anthea asked, and Angie thought, Thank you.

  “Caroline is why we took so long,” Miss Zula said. She took a sip from the wineglass her sister had pressed into her hand. Then she sat down and patted her lap. Louie jumped up and settled there with a contented sigh.

  “Harriet, your sister decided to go to her bridal retreat, after all,” she said. “So we dropped her off there on the way home.”

  “She what?” Harriet squeaked.

  Rivera shot Angie a look. “A retreat? Like to a convent?”

  “The Benedictine order has a retreat house about eighty miles from here,” Miss Zula said. “She’ll be back in a few days.”

  “Days?” Harriet looked like she was about to choke to death on the word.

  Miss Maddie said, “It’s a tradition, isn’t that so, Harriet? All y’all went on bridal retreats before your weddings.”

  “Well, yes, but not five days before, not with so much to do. And she’ll miss the Jubilee, and what about the bridal shower? What would make her do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know, dear,” said Miss Zula, completely absorbed in the massaging of Louie’s ears. “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”

  “I would,” said Harriet. “If they had a telephone. You’d think those nuns would have an emergency line at least. I’ll have to cancel the shower. What am I supposed to tell people?”

  “I expect Caroline trusts you to handle all that.” Miss Zula gave her a serene smile. “You’ve done this four times before, after all. Exactly the same wedding, for all of you.”

  “But this is her wedding, not mine,” Harriet wailed. And then an expression of complete dismay came over her face. “What about her picnic basket and her auction ticket?”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” said Miss Maddie. “Neely Ogilvie is next on the list, and if I know her, she’s got a basket together just on the hope one of us would drop dead.”

  Kai said, “A time of quiet reflection before a wedding seems to me a very good idea.”

  She was pulling books down from shelves and sorting them into piles. John thought again, as he often did, that Kai’s approach to the world was as elemental and clear as water. He wondered about living in Japan, what that would be like; he thought of a quiet room on a mountaintop somewhere. Isolation seemed like a good idea just now, but then that would mean leaving Angie behind, again. He glanced at the phone, and then forced himself to concentrate on what his brother was saying.

  “So what do they do all day long on a bridal retreat? I take it the nuns don’t put on a lingerie show.”

  Kai said, “Nuns don’t wear underclothing?”

  “I have no idea,” Rob said, straight-faced. “In fact, I don’t particularly want to know.”

  “There is a bridal luncheon for Caroline on Thursday,” Kai said. “Do you think it will be canceled?”

  “And the bachelor party,” said Rob. “What about that?”

  “Hell if I know,” John said.

  He felt vaguely nauseated and completely hollow, in spite of the fact that he had eaten the entire dinner Kai put before him. He spent more than five hours behind the wheel today, which was part of it, but mostly his mental state had to do with Caroline, and the fact that he had never had so much as five minutes alone with her all day. Not even when she had announced her intention of going off to the retreat for the rest of the week. Junie Rose had been delighted, Miss Zula had seen it as a reasonable thing to do, and thus it had been settled.

  There had been a moment, a mere fraction of a second, when Caroline had looked at him and he could have objected. For any number of reasons he could have objected, the first and most important being the fact that they were getting married on Saturday. He could have asked to talk to her in private for a few minutes—he should have done just that—but instead he had met her gaze and then let his own slip away, across the parlor of Miss Junie’s summer cottage to fix on the view out the window and a single sailboat on the lake.

  Two hours later she had climbed out of the car in front of the convent with a small suitcase—John had time enough to wonder when she had packed it before she had come around to his side of the car and kissed him, a brief touch of her mouth.

  “Thank you,” she said to him. “Thank you for understanding. This is what I need just now.”

  But he didn’t understand, and how could he? The last real conversation he had had with her was at Rob’s open house, which was less than twenty-four hours earlier and seemed at least a year. Because, of course, that party had been before the disaster on the baseball field and the mass exodus to the emergency room. It had been before he kissed Angie. Just now the world and all time could be qualified by the direction in which it flowed: up to the moment when he kissed Angie and she kissed him back, and then away from that moment.

  As he turned the car toward Ogilvie and home, he realized that he remembered very little of that conversation in the crowded living room when Caroline had wanted to dance. He searched his mind and came up with no more than fragments: bridal jitters and everybody has doubts.

  He had wanted to confess his own doubts to her; it had been his sincere intention to tell her everything. Caroline Rose, utterly meticulous and uncompromising in her scholarship, would ask hard questions and he would answer them honestly, and when that conversation was over, he would no longer be engaged. That would be the worst of it, though he knew the week would bring many difficult conversations: with each of the Rose sisters, with Miss Junie and Father Bruce and every male in Ogilvie who was in any way related to Caroline. But together they would come to an agreement on how to handle that, he and Caroline. They could work together still.

  “John Grant,” said Miss Zula. She was sitting beside him in the car and he had been so lost in his thoughts that he had forgotten her completely.

  “Yes, Miss Zula?”

  “You know I love Miss Junie like a sister, and her girls are like daughters to me. Caroline most especially.”


  He cast her a quick glance and saw that she was sitting as she always did, straight of back, hands folded. He had never seen her in anything but neat dresses, most of them in somber colors; he had known her all his life, and he had the idea that he didn’t really know her at all. Now Miss Zula was looking straight out the window, and didn’t turn her head toward him.

  “Yes, ma’am, I know you do.”

  “You did a good thing today, letting her go without making a fuss. You did the right thing.”

  There were many questions that came to mind, but John couldn’t think of where to start without revealing too much of his own mind-set, something he could not do out of fairness to Caroline. Something he would not be able to do until Friday, when she came home. The day before the wedding. Until that time he would have to pretend that everything was just fine, which would be one of the harder things he had ever done.