Bittersweet Creek

by Sally Kilpatrick

  From the minute I pulled into the driveway, he stared in awe at the old farmhouse I called home. “Are you sure you can’t stay for a minute? Come in and see my father? Get a drink of water? Maybe a bio break?”

  He chuckled. He liked how I had picked up his more polite expression “bio break.” There was a time I might’ve shouted, “But dontcha need to pee?”

  “You know I’m running late, and Dad will kill me if I’m not there on time and in a tux.” His hand traveled to my cheek, and his dark eyes turned serious. “I’ll come back for your birthday when I can stay longer. Between that inexplicable jam just before the river and your sheriff’s little production, I have to go now.”

  I leaned into his palm. He was right. “Are you sure? I don’t want you to get tired and end up in an accident.”

  He kissed me gently. “For you, I will be a model driver. Pop the trunk, and I’ll get out your suitcases.”

  Gentleman that he was, Richard carried my luggage to the porch and then gave me a better kiss to remember him by.

  “Be careful.” I hugged a banister on the porch and felt the peeling paint crackle beneath my fingers.

  “No, you be careful,” he countered as he hung on the driver’s side door.

  “Just a little farmwork,” I said with a shrug. “I’ve done most of it before.”

  He arched an eyebrow as he often did when cross-examining a witness. “Call me if you need anything. I’m sure there’s someone we could hire to help you with all of this.”

  It was cute how he waved his hand around. He clearly had no idea what to do with this foreign place where I’d grown up. Of course, even after all this time, I had only the most rudimentary knowledge of his multi-fork world. I shook my head as he settled into the roadster, but he popped out almost immediately. “And don’t turn into Elly May on me, either!”

  He eased into the driver’s seat then popped out again. “Now, Daisy Duke on the other hand . . .”

  “Richard, git on out of here and go to Nashville!” I laughed as I said it then clamped a hand over my mouth as my country-accented words echoed back. I’d worked hard to get rid of my accent. Ten seconds on my own front porch, and it was already seeping out. I’d never hear the end of it if I went back to the inner-city high school where I worked and attempted to teach English with an accent like that. Those hungry sharks would smell blood then eat me alive.

  He started the car, blowing me a kiss as he eased down the driveway.

  Be careful? How hard could it be?

  Julian

  I wanted a beer, but I wasn’t going to find one of those in Ellery.

  Instead I hobbled over to Calais Café for a cup of coffee. I had too much work to do to get rip-roaring drunk even if I made a habit of getting soused, which I no longer did.

  As usual, the café was full so I could either wait for a seat or see if there was someone I knew. There Ben sat, half-hidden behind his laptop. A couple of the girls from the tiny local college sneaked glances at him, tittering. Of course it would have been a modern-day Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? if they ever brought Ben home to Daddy.

  “Saw you almost got flattened out there,” Ben said without even looking up.

  “That’s a neat trick, considering you were sitting here doing whatever it is you do.”

  “Lawyering. Squealing brakes and expletives have a way of making a man look up.” He snapped his laptop closed and moved it to the side. “How you holding up, cowboy?”

  “Do you have to call me that?”

  “Weren’t you just wearing a cowboy hat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you own cows and ride horses?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you’re a cowboy. Otherwise you would have swallowed your pride, followed Romy to Nashville, told her what a sorry, miserable son of a bitch you are, married her, made pretty babies, and saved us all from your misery.”

  “Shut up, asshole.”

  “So that’s the best you’ve got when faced with the truth. I rest my case.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Why did I come in here to listen to your legalese again?” I leaned back as the waitress poured my coffee and took my order.

  “Probably to lick your fresh wounds after being run over by the love of your life. I keep telling you there are other fish in the sea.”

  “Ellery’s more of a pond,” I said.

  “Well, then maybe you need to swim downstream to the Gulf, find some fish gone wild by the sea.” Ben picked up his mug and took a sip.

  “Like you have?”

  Ben frowned with his mug suspended in midair. I knew why Ben didn’t leave. He still blamed himself for putting the grandmother who raised him in a nursing home. She only agreed on the condition she wouldn’t have to leave the town where she’d grown up. So Ben had made it through law school and bought one of the pretty old houses on Crook Avenue. His grandmother’s dementia prevented her from being proud of how her grandson had made something of himself, but he could be near her. Being in a small town didn’t give him a lot of dating options, tittering experimental college students aside.

  I kicked myself. “That was low, Ben. Sorry.”

  “I’m going to strike that from the record.” He sat up straighter and grinned because he knew it annoyed me when he spoke like a television lawyer. “I think we can better conduct this conversation tonight at The Fountain. Maybe Beulah could help you forget all about this morning.”

  I’d heard Beulah could make a man forget about a lot of things if she was willing, but I wasn’t. “No, thanks.”

  “Jay, you have watched every movie in Redbox and at least half of what Netflix streams. You need to get out and live a little because I’m getting tired of having everything we do remind you of a movie.”

  I had been about to tell him that sitting in a diner booth talking about nothing kinda reminded me of the end of Chasing Amy, but I didn’t want to prove him right. “It’s karaoke night, isn’t it?”

  Ben grinned. He’d never met a Sinatra song he didn’t like. Of course, I knew another karaoke devotee, a certain petite woman with curly black hair and enigmatic green eyes. “You’ve got me. I want to sing Marvin Gaye and stir up the masses.”

  “Yeah, I’ll go. But this time I’m not singing ‘Ebony and Ivory.’ ”

  “Ha! That’s what you always say.”

  I drank deeply from my coffee. If Ben noticed I hadn’t been to The Fountain in six months, he wasn’t mentioning it. He’d been there the night I busted up the only tavern in a ten-mile radius. Fortunately, Bill, the proprietor of the establishment, was a forgiving sort. Well, that and I’d started paying him back for the damage I’d done.

  Might be good to have a beer, though. Just to see who’d show up.

  Romy

  The front door was locked. I started to knock loudly, but I could see Daddy reading the paper in the kitchen, ignoring me. He had to know I was outside.

  Walking around to the back of the farmhouse, I trailed my fingers along the rough pebbled surface of the green shingle siding Granddaddy Satterfield had chosen. He had loved that stuff because it meant he never had to paint again. Granny had thought it the ugliest thing she’d ever seen, but she’d secretly loved it, too, because it gave her something to complain about until the very day she died.

  Mercutio, the guard cat, sat on the back step, tail switching. He meowed at the sight of me and started kneading the edge of the concrete stairs, what my granny used to call “making biscuits.” I reached down to pat the scruffy gray Persian with the scrunched-up face. “You know you’re not supposed to go into the house. Daddy claims he’s allergic to you.”

  He mewed piteously and purred as he leaned his head into my hand. My fingers came away wet and warm. His ear was missing a chunk and still bleeding. “Did you get into a fight again?”

  I relented and let the cat in as far as the closed-in back porch, bile rising in my throat. Damned McElroy dogs. For as long as I could remember, we Satterfields had owned cats: barn ca
ts, pet cats, and many an adopted throwaway like Mercutio. The McElroys, on the other hand, always had dogs, usually mean ones. I poured out some food for the cat then looked at his ear a little closer. Not as bad as I had first thought, but it still wasn’t pretty.

  And Len had told me to stay out of trouble. Maybe he needed to go talk to the McElroys and tell them to do a better job of tying up their dogs.

  I heaved my shoulder into the heavy door that led from the back porch to the kitchen, prepared to tell Daddy about poor Mercutio, but he addressed me first. “Couldn’t even make it twenty-four hours, could you?”

  My eyes darted to the cordless phone on the table beside his wheelchair where he sat hiding behind the Ellery Gazette. He looked like a weird papier-mâché project with only a Memphis Redbirds hat showing above the paper and his full-length leg cast jutting from underneath.

  “I got distracted by how the Merle Norman building had burned, didn’t see the light, and accidentally ran over Julian.”

  He folded the paper with as much rustle as he could and my own eyes stared back at me, green Satterfield eyes that squinted with scrutiny. “When you drive, you aren’t supposed to be looking at buildings. You’re supposed to be looking at the road.”

  It was hard to look away when the world snatched another piece of your mother, but he wouldn’t know that. He wasn’t there in the Merle Norman that smelled of mulberries on the day my mother held my hand while they pierced my ears. It was one of the last things we’d done together, and now the place was gone forever.

  Shaking away my melancholy, I got a glass from the cabinet and went to the sink. Knowing he was right didn’t lessen the sting. Just once, would it hurt him to say, “Good job. Next time hit the McElroy boy straight on—that’ll teach him to look where he’s going”?

  You could tell him how you feel.

  Yeah, right.

  My head pounded. It was too much. It was all just too much.

  My kingdom for a skinny venti Caramel Macchiato. Or better yet an appletini.

  Well, Starbucks wasn’t happening anytime soon out here in the boonies. And good luck finding anything alcoholic in this dry county—especially something other than a contraband beer.

  Resigned, I took a gulp of water and looked through the window to the flat patch of land Daddy’d once told me he’d give me for a wedding present. A house would be pretty on that sloping hill. Of course, it would have been much smaller than Richard’s mansion, and the cows were the only ones with a gated community out here. He kept telling me his cavernous house needed a woman’s touch, and he had just the woman in mind.

  “Rosemary.” My father said the word softly, almost like he used to say it to my mother, for whom I was named.

  I turned to face him because I couldn’t not turn around, not when he spoke like that. “What, Daddy?”

  “Just be more careful.”

  I nodded, not sure if he was talking about traffic laws or staying out of Julian’s way. I could promise him I would be more careful on the first. As to the second, I was going to have to speak with Julian McElroy whether either one of us liked it or not. And it’d probably be best not to ask him for a divorce on the same day I ran him over.

  Julian

  Mama leaned out the back door as I was getting out of the truck. “Baby, you want some tea cakes? I’m about to take them out of the oven.”

  Baby, my ass. I surveyed the flagstone path between the mildewed, weed-choked trailer where I’d grown up and my house, the older clapboard one that used to belong to my mamaw. I’d never planned to live so close, but I’d missed the boat on college and needed somewhere to live. Besides, someone had to look out for Mama since she wasn’t in the habit of watching out for herself. And she did make some damn fine tea cakes.

  The minute I shut the truck door Curtis’s pit bulls started barking. He kept them tied to an old oak tree and did everything under the sun to make them mean. We’d always had dogs, usually mutts that roamed free. This time, though, Curtis had spent a great deal of money he didn’t have to buy the meanest dogs he could find. His greatest pleasure in life was “training” them, and he had delusions of taking them to Memphis and making a ton of money at dog fighting.

  Something whimpered to the side of me, and I looked down at the beagle someone had thrown out down in the dip of the road. She only emerged from under the porch when I was outside, scraping the ground with her belly and begging for attention. Ignoring the others, I reached down to scratch between her ears before stepping into my parents’ house. Mama was already fussing around the oven and bending over to get the tea cakes. As she turned around, I saw the hump at the top of her back. Mama was getting old. Too old to hobble around in the orthopedic boot she still wore from where Curtis had broken her foot a month before.

  “Mama, I think you ought to get your foot looked at. Shouldn’t it be getting better by now?” I asked as I stepped over to the sink to wash the dog off my hands.

  She waved away my concerns and fished through the kitchen drawer for a spatula. “No, no, it’s done this before. I know it looks a little purple now, but it’s going to be fine. I guess it’s lucky the insurance paid for this boot last time.”

  Mama and I didn’t share the same definition of lucky.

  Curtis was too smart for me to catch him in the act, but I knew he was responsible. Mama might blame ripped spots in the carpet or molehills in the yard or even her own clumsiness, but I knew better. What I didn’t know was how to stop him.

  Mama’d left him many times before, but he always played nice to win her back. Once when I was in kindergarten, I made the mistake of telling my teacher a little too much about our family dynamics. She called a social worker, who called the police. That didn’t end well for any of us once Curtis got back from the police station. Later in high school, I asked Mama point-blank if she wanted me to make him leave, but she told me no.

  Many’s the time I wished I’d kicked his sorry ass out first and asked her permission later, but Curtis was a sneaky sonuvabitch. He’d rigged everything so all of the expenses and income from the farm came through his bank account. If I got rid of him, I wouldn’t be able to run the farm. And he knew it.

  Mama slid me a chipped plate with three steaming tea cakes, then bustled about the fridge looking for sweet tea. I let her carry on. Sometimes if I let her fuss over me enough, she’d hum the way she used to when I was a little boy.

  The back door slammed shut. She started, and I tensed up. Today was turning out to be one helluva day.

  “Well, well, look what the cat dragged in.”

  I knew he was drunk before I turned around. I could smell him, and I could tell by the way he slurred his words he was dangerous drunk. He could head to the recliner and fall asleep, or he could snap and start yelling at the first person he saw.

  He wouldn’t hit me, but he might decide to see if Mama needed another boot to match the first one. I had an assload of things I needed to do before meeting Ben, but I wasn’t moving from my chair. Not until I saw what Curtis was up to.

  It took him two tries to slap a meaty hand on my shoulder. He wasn’t completely blind yet, but he was closer. I turned my head enough to see the ragged, grease-stained fingernails that needed to be cut. “Why don’t you have a seat, Curtis?”

  He scowled. He didn’t like it when I called him by his first name, but he wasn’t going to make anything of it. He’d ceased being anything more to me than a sperm donor on a certain night in May ten years ago, and I didn’t give a rat’s ass how he felt about it. My birth certificate might claim him as father, but that didn’t mean I had to.

  “Those hot, Debbie?” He pinched her behind harder than necessary, and her eyes widened. She scuttled off to get cookies and tea for him, too. She knew we were in the danger zone.

  “Heard you got ran over in town today.”

  “Almost did.”

  He crammed an entire tea cake in his mouth, either not noticing or not caring it had to be hot enough to scald all the
skin from the roof of his mouth. “I was thinking we could sue the Satterfield girl. You could even make enough to buy some of those damned rescue horses you’re always fooling around with.”

  “I’m not suing anyone.”

  “Hell, son, did you know that each year over a thousand pedestrians get hit by cars in the state of Tennessee alone? I learned that from the TV the other day. And your uncle Charlie’s a right fine ambulance chaser. We could make a pretty penny and put that Satterfield bastard out of business. Little bitch deserves it after she sneaked off in the middle—”

  Suddenly, I had my father by the collar, his swollen drunken face just inches from mine. I didn’t remember laying a hand on him, but it was a good reminder that hot McElroy blood flowed through my veins, too. “I’m not suing anyone. And you don’t talk that way about Romy.”

  For a second I saw a flicker of fear pass through his squinting eyes. Good. I pushed him into a chair. He laughed. “This one’s still sweet on the girl next door. Even after she left him cold. Debbie, what do you make of that?”

  “She’s not worth his time. Too big for her britches,” my normally timid mother spat. This was the one safe topic for her, where she could air her opinions without worrying about making my father mad. “You don’t leave someone you’re about to marry. That ain’t right.”

  Mama would’ve exploded if she’d known Romy left after we got married.

  Curtis pulled her into his lap and planted a wet one on her. Apparently, he’d progressed through remorse and headed straight into lovey-dovey drunk. I sure as hell didn’t want to see that. “Don’t mind me. I’ll see myself out.”