“Julia—?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“How about painting up to here a deep clear red and then putting up a chair rail and white above that?”
“That will look silly without wainscoting, and don’t tell me you can get wainscoting for free, Julia, because I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“I didn’t say a thing.” Juts looked outside the window, saw Mary on the other side of the street, and checked her watch. “What’s Mary doing out of school at one-thirty?”
“What?” Louise followed Juts’s pointing finger. “I’ll soon find out.” She briskly walked to the front door, opened it, and called out, “Mary, what are you doing out of school?”
“They let us out early today, Mom.” Mary crossed the street. “I went home but you weren’t there so I came over here.”
“Why did they let you go early?” Louise was suspicious.
“The boiler broke down so they let us out before it got too cold. It’s only forty-five degrees. You can call Mrs. Grenville and find out for yourself,” she said defiantly.
“Now that you’re here, you might as well go to work.” Louise let the challenge pass.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Where’s your sister?”
“She’s on her way. I asked her to bring stuff.”
About that time, Maizie waddled around the corner carrying two heavy buckets.
“You could have helped her.”
Mary, without reply, hurried back outside, taking one of the buckets from her sister’s sagging grasp.
Juts peered in the buckets when the girls came inside. “Tape, chalk, hammers, nails, oh, here’s a folding measuring stick that’s better than what I’ve got.”
Louise turned up the thermostat on the wall. “It is getting pretty chilly, isn’t it.” The old radiators thumped. “We’re going to have to bleed these radiators.”
Juts grabbed tape and chalk and began marking the space on the floor where the cabinets would go.
“Mary, was this your idea—to help?”
“Yes, Mother.” Mary smiled her biggest, sweetest smile.
15
Yoyo had been under house arrest ever since her Easter worship service. Eyes half closed, the cat sat in the window. Buster’s barking as he rounded the corner sent her off the windowsill to the door. However, Juts knew a cat trick or two, so the minute she opened the door she bent over and scooped up the escape artist before one paw crossed the threshold.
“Gotcha.”
Yoyo meowed in protest but dutifully allowed Juts to place her on her shoulder and pat her back as though she were a baby. She withheld the purrs until she smelled chicken in the sack Juts carried in her right hand.
Immediately following Julia was Mary, who quickly shut the door. She too carried a sack of groceries.
“Aunt Juts, where should I put this stuff?”
“Kitchen table.”
They unpacked groceries, then Juts cut up the chicken, carefully scrubbing each piece of meat before placing it on a sheet of wax paper. Sprinkled over the wax paper were flour and spices she mixed for her fried chicken. Sitting on the counter were two brown eggs, which she was going to crack. She would roll the chicken in the egg, then dredge the chicken through the flour and spices. Fried chicken was her specialty.
Yoyo observed, whiskers occasionally twitching from the enticing aroma. The dog, riveted to the floor, followed Julia’s every hand motion.
Since the girls had gotten out of school early, Juts had asked Mary to help her while Maizie stayed with Louise.
“Cut on the radio, will you, my hands are wet.”
“Sure, Aunt Juts.” Mary clicked on the left dial of the small wooden cathedral radio, which sat under the old clock. The huge radio reposed in the parlor.
The Smiths had little by way of possessions, but Julia loved her music. The kitchen table was wooden with a white porcelain top pinstriped in red. The floors were uneven plank oak. The cabinets were yellow with round red enamel knob handles. White curtains with red teapots hung over the windows. A pantry, big and airy, helped keep the kitchen organized, for Juts, like her sister and her mother, had to have everything pin-tidy. If Chester came home and hung his coat on the back of a kitchen chair instead of on a peg in the mudroom, he heard about it the minute Juts laid eyes on it. All the Hunsenmeirs were fiercely clean.
Julia hummed while she worked.
“Momma says you used to be wild as a March hare, Aunt Juts.”
“Is that so?”
“She says I take after you.”
“I see.” Juts waited for the frying pan to reach the desired sizzling temperature. “What else does she blab about me?”
Mary, who looked like a younger, slightly larger version of her pretty mother, giggled. “She says if I’m not careful I’ll wind up like you, struggling to make ends meet because I married the wrong guy.”
“Your mother is full of—” She caught herself. “Funny ideas. Chessy is a good man.”
“It’s not that, Aunt Juts, it’s that he doesn’t make much money. She says you could have done a lot better—that Walter Falkenroth was in love with you and he’s got tons of money, just oo-scoobs of it, and you turned him down.”
Juts noticed Yoyo edging closer to the chicken, now rolled and dusted with flour. “Don’t you even think about it.” Yoyo returned Julia’s stare. “What a disobedient child.”
Mary laughed. “Guess she’ll have to do the stations of the cross at church, huh?”
“Lutherans don’t believe in the stations of the cross. Ours is checkbook religion. I bequeath to my dear sister all that mumbling, crossing, and getting up and down on the knees. She just eats it up. The more miserable it is, the more she likes it.”
“Mom’s going up to see Diddy again. Orrie’s going with her.” Louise’s best friend, Orrie Tadia Mojo, was the confidante of her secret desires. In fact, every conversation with Orrie began, “Now, don’t you tell a soul.” Then Louise would forget she’d told Orrie, tell someone else, the story would get all over town, and Louise would round on Orrie, accusing her of spilling the beans.
“Means we’re in for another spate of devotion.” Juts placed a juicy chicken breast in the oil. The crackle startled her. “Hot, hot, hot.” She fetched a heavy kitchen towel, spreading it out on the counter. When the chicken was finished she’d put it on the towel to soak up some of the oil.
“Aunt Julia—?”
“Hmm.”
“Do you like Billy?”
“I think Billy is very handsome.”
“He is.” Mary blushed.
“I don’t know if he’ll settle down, honey. His people don’t value stability.”
Her clear eyes clouded over. “Oh, he will. He needs me. I can help him.”
“Mary, every woman since Eve has believed that. I can hear her now, ‘I’ll give him this apple and maybe he’ll get some sense in his head and go to work.’ So what happened? Adam gets some knowledge and blames Eve for it. She didn’t put a gun to his head. He didn’t have to eat the damned apple, the weakass.”
Julia’s thoughts, quite unlike Louise’s orthodoxy, made Mary laugh. “They didn’t have guns then.”
“She could have hit him over the head with a stick. No, he snatched that shiny red apple from her sweet hand. He takes a bite and discovers they’re naked. Now I ask you, Mary, how stupid is that? The man must have been dumb as a sack of nails. Garden of Eden, my foot. It had to get cold at night, even in the Garden of Eden, so he needed clothes at night, right?”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“That’s my point. If you read the Bible and think about it you’re left with more questions than answers. That’s why no preacher ever really wants you to think. So Adam blames Eve and we’re all in trouble. The big oaf couldn’t face what he’d done. And to this day if a man gets in trouble what does he do—blames it on a woman.”
“Extra Billy isn’t blaming his troub
les on me.” Mary swelled with pride.
“Oh, Mary, give him time.” Julia smiled, but understanding how fragile and wonderful first love can be, she quickly added, “I’m glad to hear he’s shouldering the blame.”
“Not only that, he’s going to fix the statue. He asked Donny Gregorivitch to help him ’cause you know Donny’s dad has that big wrecker truck.”
“What’s he going to do with the wrecker truck?”
“Pull the statue upright and shore up the base. He’s got it all figured out.”
“Harmon know about this?”
“Yes, ma’am, the first person he told was the sheriff.”
“Well—good. Now I have one little niggling question, a tiny worm in the apple—guess I’ve got apples on the brain.” She paused and with her cooking fork speared the hot chicken, placing it on the towel, then dropped in more chicken, which crackled as it hit the oil. Yoyo tiptoed along the window ledge over the sink and chose to sit next to the cooked chicken, although she turned her back to it. “Yoyo, I’m on to you.”
The cat flattened her ears, refusing to turn around.
“She’s a real personality.” Mary snapped the stems off Carolina okra, which they’d been lucky enough to buy fresh at the store.
“Everyone in this damned family is a real personality. Now, what I was going to ask you was, why were you and Extra Billy running away? I’ll get to the fun later.”
“We weren’t running away, Aunt Julia.” Mary’s voice rose in self-defense. “Mom said I couldn’t go out until I’d finished all my homework. Billy doesn’t have a phone so I couldn’t tell him that and when he came by the house I walked out to tell him. Anyway, Mom’s standing there and she’s yelling at me and carrying on and I just said, ‘The hell with you,’ which was awful, but I did and I got in the car and said, ‘Let’s go to Baltimore.’ How was I to know she would go crazy and chase me in Daddy’s car?”
“That part I know because your father called here and Chessy and I hurried over to get him.” She took a breath. “Has your father ever spoken to you about Extra Billy?”
“Daddy says that he doesn’t understand girls. He seems to understand Maizie well enough.”
“Maizie’s different from you. She’s more like Paul.”
“Aunt Julia, I love Billy. I want to marry him and spend the rest of my life with him.”
“Oh, the rest of your life is a long, long time.”
“I’ll never love anyone else.” She held the okra under the running water.
Juts wanted to say a number of things—practical, mature, or passing as mature; reasonable. She kept her mouth shut. Why burst the bubble? Life would take care of that sure enough.
“Has Billy asked you to marry him?”
“Not exactly.”
“I see.”
Mary hastily added, “He doesn’t have enough money right now. Really.”
Yoyo coyly glanced over her shoulder. Seeing Juts turn her back to grab a pot for the okra, she delicately hooked a small chicken wing and that fast was off the counter before Juts knew what happened.
Juts turned back to the stove. “Now, Mary, I think what has everyone worried is that you and Billy might be doing stuff out of the way.”
Mary blushed cherry-red and shook her head. “No.”
“That’s good. I’m not as fussy about these things as your mother. I figure we’re animals, after all, so I don’t care if you do everything but—you understand?” When Mary nodded yes, blushing even more, Julia continued, “If you’re going to bring children into this world it’s important to be married and to be prepared for such a big responsibility—so be careful, honey.”
“I am, I mean, I will, Aunt Juts.” She reached for another dish towel in a drawer and patted the fried chicken on top. “I’ll be sixteen in January and I can marry of my own free will then.” She smiled. “I mark off the days in red every day on the calendar. And you know what really makes me mad, Aunt Julia, I just think it’s so mean. Mother can be really, really mean. She says”—Mary put her hand on her hip and imitated her mother’s voice—“‘Ignorance is bliss.’”
“If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t more people happy?” Then Juts noticed a little snail trail of grease across the kitchen floor. Following it, she found a larger splotch of grease around the corner, which Buster was licking. Yoyo was curled up on the sofa as though this had nothing whatsoever to do with her. Juts scowled, then started laughing at herself. “God, it’s terrible to be outsmarted by your own cat.”
16
If you don’t hurry up, we’ll be late,” Juts nagged Chessy as she tied his bow tie. “You’re always late. You’ll be late to your own funeral.”
“I’m almost ready,” he said in a smooth voice.
Chester, prodded and pushed all his life by his mother and now by his wife, habitually showed up a half hour late or more.
The phone rang twice, their signal since they were on a party line, as was everyone in Runnymede except for Celeste and the Rifes. Juts ran to the stairwell, picked it up, then growled, “It’s your mother.”
Chester reached for the phone, his bow tie tied, his shirt crisp and white, his pants pressed with a pleat in the front, his wing-tip, two-tone shoes polished to perfection. After greeting her he listened for a few moments.
“All right. Bye.” He turned to his wife, her hands on her hips. “I’ll run you over to Wheezie’s and you can catch a ride with her. Mom needs me for a minute to fix her back door.”
“For Pete’s sake,” Juts exclaimed in such a loud voice that Buster barked. “She needs you every minute. Why can’t your father fix it?”
“Because he’s at his lodge meeting tonight.”
“Well, Chessy, she can’t shut her back door. Big deal.”
“She’s afraid the wind will tear it out of the doorjamb and she’ll have bigger repairs.”
“Oh, balls.”
“Come on, I’ll run you over to Wheezie’s.”
So mad she couldn’t talk, Juts stalked to the Chevy Roadster convertible built in 1933, which Chessy had bought used. He lavished attention on the bottle-green car until it sparkled as if on display in the showroom.
Juts slammed the door so hard the heavy machine rocked. She had never been invited to set foot in Josephine Smith’s house—her mother-in-law’s revenge for Chester marrying beneath him. Juts hated every minute Chester spent with the woman.
Chessy quietly slipped behind the wheel, placing his straw boater on the seat between them. The soft tan nap upholstery wasn’t even worn thin.
Yoyo and Buster stared mournfully out the front window as the car backed down the driveway.
“You won’t get to Dingledine’s until ten o’clock. I know your mother. First you’ll fix her back door and then she’ll want you to check the boiler and after that she’ll want the blades sharpened on the lawn mower because Rup is too creaky to bend over for that long.”
“Here we are.” He forced a smile as they coasted up to Louise’s house, which was around the corner. “In the nick of time.”
Louise, Paul, Mary, and Maizie were climbing into the car. Without so much as a good-bye, Juts again slammed the door. Chester waved to the Trumbulls and backed out.
“What’s news?” Louise asked, using the old phrase.
“Mother Smith needs her son.”
“Oh.” Wheezie squeezed next to her husband so Juts could fit in the front. The girls giggled in the backseat.
“Never marry a man until you take a hard look at his mother.” Juts called over her shoulder, “Hear me, back there?”
“Yes, Aunt Juts,” came the singsong chorus.
“Daddy, what did you think when you first met G-Mom?” Mary asked.
“I do wish you wouldn’t call her G-Mom. It makes her sound like a gangster,” Wheezie grumbled.
“I thought,” Pearlie said, smiling as he recalled that distant day, “she was the nicest, kindest lady I had ever met—a lot like my own mother.”
Pearli
e’s mother died before the girls were born. Although that was seventeen years ago, he still missed her.
“What a sweet thing to say.” Louise patted his arm.
“Mom, what did you think when you met Mrs. Smith?” Mary pursued the subject.
“Oh—”
“Don’t fudge, Wheezer,” Juts said.
“I thought,” Louise measured her words, “that Josephine Smith had a very high opinion of herself and a low opinion of the rest of us—but then I’d known her since I was tiny. She never has spoken to a Hunsenmeir.”
As Julia predicted, Jo found plenty of chores for her son. Chester fixed the door and then checked a leaky faucet in the back bathroom, replacing a washer. When she nudged him toward the old stable in the back, now serving as a garage, he balked. Chester did not believe in raising his voice, least of all to his mother. She railed about loose morals, about the proliferation of alcohol in social life, about the Dingledines, who charged way too much for a puny azalea, and about Julia Ellen, who wantonly displayed herself while dancing. She reminded her eldest that he couldn’t dance, so what was the hurry?
“Mother, I’m late already.”
“You don’t listen to me. Not a word I say.”
“I do.”
“You came over Easter for exactly one hour. One hour for your own family.”
Knowing there was no way to please her, he kissed her on the cheek and left. She stood in her doorway protesting even as he rolled down the street.
The party was in full swing. He joined Maizie at the table because everyone was dancing but her.
“Hi there, girlfriend.” He beamed at her and she beamed right back at her big, blond uncle. “Are you sitting this one out?”
“Uncle Chessy, only my daddy has asked me to dance.” Her little face fell with the telling.
“Is that so?”
“Won’t you dance with me?”
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