Bittersweet Creek

by Sally Kilpatrick

  “What about me?”

  “I looked up your records,” he said with a smug smile. “Did a credit search. You almost didn’t pass high school and don’t have a dime to your name.”

  My left hand curled into a fist, but I saw what he was doing. I forced a smile. “That’s all true, but I do have . . . other things.”

  He laughed this ugly bitter laugh, and I thought for a minute I’d got the best of him. Then he started recounting all the places and all the ways he’d had my wife. Blood rushed through my ears, and I had a flashback to Pete Gates’s diatribe in The Fountain.

  Only this time, everything Richard said was probably true.

  “You’re gonna shut up now,” I said as I stepped closer to him, now nose to nose with clenched fists at my side.

  “Yeah, but you’re going to remember every word I said.” He stared me down for a moment, but then he smiled and walked away, straightening the cuffs of his suit as he went. He knew what he’d said was far more painful than a punch.

  Romy

  I was so intent on Julian and Richard’s conversation that I didn’t notice Mrs. Paris had sidled over. “I see what’s going on here.”

  I met her gaze. “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Paris. I never meant to hurt Richard; you have to believe that.”

  “Oh, I believe it. And that young man is a tall drink of water,” she said as her gaze went out to Julian. “I tried to warn Richard that you were a money-grubbing country bumpkin.”

  The hell? “I don’t need your money, and I’m not a bumpkin.”

  She shook her head in the direction of the Mustang with a simpering “Mmm-hmm.”

  The keys to the new car bit into my hand from how I was clutching them. Now I pressed them on her, and she raised her hands to her chest in a show of mock terror. “No, no, I couldn’t!” before leaning down and saying in a stage whisper, “That’s how it’s done.”

  I gaped at her through a mixture of shock and fury.

  “Mother! We’re going.” Richard stalked to the car, but the smile on his face was both grim and evil. As he walked past me, I tried once more to hand him the keys.

  “No means no,” he snapped as he opened the door. “Title’s in the glove compartment.”

  He peeled out of the driveway, and the horse Julian led danced around uncomfortably. I walked toward Julian to see what this was all about. He looked positively green. I could guess some of the things that Richard had told him. Just a few weeks before, I might’ve told Julian myself in order to inflict upon him the same kind of hurt he’d inflicted on me. But now . . .

  “So what’s this, Julian?”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes, reaching over to rub the mare’s nose instead. She was a gorgeous palomino, but her eyes were filmed over.

  “This is Beatrice.”

  I remembered the other day when he’d said he had to go back and get his horse, Benedick. My chest got tighter.

  “You always wanted a horse, so I got Beatrice here for a wedding gift, but I never got to give her to you, so happy birthday instead.”

  Tears came yet again, and I swiped at them. Dammit. Why hadn’t I come back from Vandy at least one more time? I was fortune’s fool.

  Julian mistook my tears. “I know she ain’t much to look at, up in years, and moon blind on top of that. I should’ve put her down, but I couldn’t bear to part with her. Not when I got her for you.”

  “She’s perfect.” And I was not despite all those years of trying.

  “And you named your horse Benedick?” I tentatively reached forward to rub the mare’s long nose. She sighed, her eyes half-closed.

  He nodded. “That play’s your favorite, isn’t it? I finally saw the movie.”

  He had remembered.

  I tried to imagine Julian watching Much Ado About Nothing, but I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have passed a single test on any of Shakespeare’s plays if I hadn’t read them to him, often translating Shakespeare’s English to a more . . . country version.

  He scuffed his boot across the grass. “I can take her back if you don’t want her. Maybe get you a better horse—”

  Beatrice flicked her ears forward and snorted at him. I tended to agree with her. I rubbed her long nose with more confidence this time. “No, you won’t. I love her just the way she is. Thank you.”

  He smiled, finally meeting my gaze.

  “I don’t know the first thing about horses.”

  “ ’Course you do. I’ll teach you the rest.”

  I’ll teach you the rest. Thank God. He wasn’t going to run away again.

  “If you give her some apple pieces, she’ll love you forever.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Think Hank would mind if I patched up the old stables in the barn?”

  Another sign Julian wasn’t going to bail. Maybe.

  “Probably, but you go ahead. He’ll just have to get used to my money-pit-horse-that-only-an-idiot-would-buy.”

  We stared at each other until a lump took up residence in my throat. “Julian, about Richard—”

  “I ain’t talking about that right now.”

  Not right now wasn’t never, but still. I opened my mouth to ask him if we were okay, but my father chose that moment to yell for me out the back door.

  “You’d best go talk to him.”

  I nodded. So far this hadn’t exactly been the birthday I’d had in mind.

  Julian

  As I watched Romy go, I asked myself if I wanted her to come back. I couldn’t blame her because I hadn’t done a damn thing to tell her I was still in love with her. I’d actually done anything and everything to discourage her. Then there was the fact I’d come awfully close to sleeping with Shelley Jean myself. But knowing facts was a sight different from overcoming feelings, and her asshole ex had put some pretty vivid pictures in my mind, pictures designed to remind me of how much money he had as well as how he’d had my girl.

  Yeah, but in the end she chose you on both counts.

  And I knew she wouldn’t have left me in the first place if I hadn’t made her.

  But, sonuvabitch, I didn’t want to touch her right then or even look at her. I sure as hell didn’t want to talk.

  It’d be best if I got to work, so I might as well show Beatrice her new digs.

  “Beatrice, old gal, I’ve got someone I’d like for you to meet.”

  She stomped and unloaded right there in the middle of the front yard.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” I continued as I led her to the barn. “I should’ve sent you to the glue factory already.”

  She tossed her head at that.

  “I know. I’m a sappy sonuvabitch. Ain’t you lucky I am?”

  About the time we came up even with the little pen, Star poked her nose through the slats in the gate to bawl at the horse. Beatrice whinnied back at her. She actually started to stamp and rock a little as I opened the gate, and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of this sooner. Horses and cows weren’t known for getting along, but it could still work. I’d heard of horses keeping a cow from eating or getting water, but Beatrice couldn’t see where the water was. I’d seen a calf chew off a chunk of horse tail once, but little Star was desperate for companionship. As with people, we’d just see if the two of them could get along—at least while I finished the broken-down stalls inside the barn.

  Walking inside to survey the damage, I saw where a couple of crude stalls had been. Faded fragments of flowery wallpaper curled on the wall, left over from when the barn had been a house. Putting my hands on a couple of the boards and testing them, I decided a trip to town would be in order. Those rotten boards wouldn’t hold in a drunken llama.

  Beatrice nickered and Star bawled in response. I almost tripped myself getting to the edge of the pen to make sure the twosome weren’t hurting each other. Nope. They were playing. Then the calf did the damnedest thing: She led Beatrice to the trough full of water.

  “Well, well. I guess you can lead a horse to water and make her drink,” I
murmured as Beatrice gulped up water. “You two behave now, and when I get back I’ll see if I can open this pen into the barn a little more so you can both get into the shade.”

  As I walked down the side of the yard and toward the road, I looked back to the house and wondered how things were going between Romy and Hank.

  Romy

  When I walked into the kitchen, I could feel Daddy’s anger. If he’d been a teakettle, he would’ve whistled. “Rosemary Jane, we need to have a talk.”

  I crossed to the Keurig and turned it on. Coffee, sweet coffee. “So, talk.”

  “What in the hell are you thinking? When I—”

  “I’m thinking that I belong here. I don’t belong in Nashville. And I don’t belong with Richard, always feeling uncomfortable at his soirées, always wondering if I’ve dressed well enough or if I’m eating with the right fork. I don’t have to teach in an inner-city school to do good when my own alma mater has a significant free-and-reduced-lunch percentage. I want to teach English here, to introduce Shakespeare to kids who live in trailers or drafty farmhouses and who think they’ll never get any farther in life. I want to come home. And I don’t give a damn if he has more money than Julian or not.”

  There. I’d said it. And I didn’t even know for sure I had a relationship with Julian. I wasn’t going to make any more decisions about where to live or work based on men. Not even my father.

  I popped the cartridge into the machine and put a cup underneath. It was a black coffee kind of morning. Coffee in hand, I finally faced my father.

  “You finished?” Daddy’s eyes had narrowed dangerously, and his ears were bright, bright red. I hadn’t seen him this mad since I was six and put the ladder against the tin roof of the barn and climbed up top. That was one of the three times he’d tanned my hide.

  I swallowed hard. He wasn’t going to spank me, but his disappointment weighed much heavier than it had when I was six. “I’m done.”

  “I could give a rat’s ass about whether you marry Richard or not. And if you want to move here permanently, I’m all for it, but the next time you stay out all afternoon and all night and don’t answer your phone, I’m calling the police.”

  I blanched, instinctively reaching for my phone, but it wasn’t in my back pocket. “Daddy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you. My phone must’ve slid out of my pocket in the truck when we were hauling hay.”

  “Don’t do it again.” His voice cracked, and tears threatened. I might be twenty-eight years old, but I’d scared the shit out of my father.

  “Really, Daddy, I’m sorry. I was finally getting Julian to talk, and I let time get away from me.”

  “I’m sure ‘talking’ is all you were doing, too,” he harrumphed.

  My whole face burned. Then I remembered something. “Yeah, just like you were ‘talking’ with Delilah the other afternoon.”

  He had the good grace to clear his throat and turn a little pink himself. “Fair enough.”

  I took my cup of coffee and popped in another cartridge for him. “Thank you for taking care of Julian. Back then.”

  “Hardest thing I’ve ever done was not telling you what happened,” he said. “ ’Course I didn’t even find him up there until you bolted out of here so fast. I thought you were sure enough ready to get rid of me.”

  My heart squeezed in on itself. “Oh, Daddy, I’m so, so sorry,” I said. “I never thought beyond how much Julian had hurt me by standing me up.”

  “I can see that now,” he said as he reached across the table and patted my hand. “But you’d better let me know where you are. I can’t be worried you’re off somewhere on the back forty getting eaten by coyotes.”

  “I’ll go find my phone and charge it now,” I said.

  As I walked past him he grabbed my arm. “I should’ve told you.”

  Yeah, I really wish you had. “So I guess I’d better go see if there’s a job opening in town, huh?”

  Then Daddy grinned wide enough for me to see the gap just before his molars. “Damn straight you should!”

  He shook my hand, pressing in who knew how many twenty-dollar bills, just like he always did. “And happy birthday, Rosemary.”

  He let go of my hand when Mercutio came out of nowhere to land in his lap.

  “Thanks, Daddy.” I shook my head at the two of them. If anyone had told me a month before that I’d be living in Yessum County and that my father would have both a cat and a girlfriend, I would’ve laughed in her face.

  And then there was the question of Julian.

  All I could think of was Tennyson’s suggestion that it was better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. I’d recited those words at my mother’s funeral, and I’d hoped to never have to repeat them.

  I still had that hope.

  From Rosemary Satterfield’s History of the Satterfield-McElroy Feud

  Romy, this is the part of the book that you’re going to have to hold on to until most of my generation is dead and gone because the next chapter of the feud is much more personal, much closer to home.

  None of us knows for sure if he started acting up before his granddaddy’s death, but Curtis was definitely acting up by the time he was ten. Your granny caught him trying to set fire to the old home place that day. She grabbed him by his ear and dragged him up the road to the McElroy place. By that time, Matthew, Julian’s grandfather, had taken over the farm. He said he didn’t believe his boy would do such a thing, but your granny said the glint in his eye suggested he did.

  Julian’s grandmother, on the other hand, started spanking Curtis before your granny got halfway down the driveway. Even knowing that, your granny could never sleep well after that. She was too scared Curtis would come back and set fire to the house while they were all asleep.

  So far as your granny knew, that was the only time Curtis tried to set fire to the house, although part of a barn burned down in the late sixties. Even more disturbing, she’d find squirrels shot out of trees and left lying around the yard. Some of the Satterfields’ favorite pets mysteriously disappeared, too.

  And then there’s what I know about Curtis McElroy.

  Julian

  I’d been to town and back and was working as hard as I could on the stable for Beatrice. She and Star were getting along famously, but I had to work the next day and needed to get everyone squared away before then.

  When I heard the rustle of grass behind me, I surprised myself with the hope that it was Romy, but then I heard the creak of a wheel.

  “Afternoon, Hank,” I said without even looking over my shoulder.

  “Afternoon, Julian.”

  I paused hammering long enough to say, “Hope you don’t mind I’m fixing up a couple of stalls here for the horse I gave Romy.”

  He snorted and muttered something under his breath about idiots and horses. “I reckon it’s your lumber. You go right ahead.”

  I turned around to face him, wiping sweat from my brow as I did. “Then what can I do for you?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, managing to look ominous in spite of sitting well below me. Kinda reminded me of Patrick Stewart as Professor X.

  “Well, seems you and my daughter have rekindled your romance.”

  “Yessir.” Well, maybe, sir.

  “And you remember how I wasn’t too keen on the idea to start with?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And you remember how I was right and it all went to shit?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Don’t fuck up again.”

  “Yessir.” He could’ve added an “or else” to the end of that threat, but leaving it wide-open seemed worse.

  Hank took out his pocketknife and a piece of wood and started to whittle. “You see, when you did your little thing, she hightailed it to Nashville and left me out in the cold, too. I’m getting old, Julian. I want to spend time with my daughter, maybe even play with some grandbabies one of these days.”

  “Perfectly reasonable, sir.”

&n
bsp; His eyes met mine as he flicked the pocketknife closed. “But that doesn’t mean I want to see any grandbabies before the two of you work out whatever it is you still have to work out.”

  “Yessir.”

  He muttered under his breath about all the “yessir bullshit,” then turned his wheelchair with a grunt and rolled off.

  The minute his wheelchair was out of earshot, I grabbed a nearby five-gallon bucket and turned it over to make a seat. Plopping down, I reached for the Coke I’d bought in town.

  Don’t fuck up again.

  Yeah, I’d fucked up. When a man had been fucked up, it stood to reason he would fuck up. Ironically, Hank’s little talk cheered me up. He hadn’t told me to stay away from his daughter. In fact, didn’t his warning mean he cared? Don’t fuck up again was as close to getting Hank’s blessing as I’d ever come. Now, how sad was that?

  Not too sad.

  And Hank had reminded me of something: If I’d fucked up, Romy had kinda fucked up. I mean, not really, but still. Didn’t that make us pretty even? Except for the part where you didn’t run after her like you should have, sure. But she could’ve come after me, too.

  Aw, hell. We both messed up. Like people do. Wasn’t what we did from this point forward more important than anything we’d done before?

  Both Beatrice and Star ambled over to the fence to see what I was doing. Star peered at me through the slats, and Beatrice sniffed in my general direction. Already thick as thieves.

  “What are you two looking at?”

  I knew she was speaking horse, but it sounded all the world to me like Beatrice said, “One happy sonuvabitch.”

  And I’ll be damned if I wasn’t smiling.

  Romy

  That night I rushed Hank through supper and through the dishes. He hollered, “What’s your hurry?” but there was enough of a twinkle in his eye that I knew he was only feigning irritation. I’d given Julian about all the time I could stand to give him. I needed to know where we stood. The last day or two had been too full of ups and downs.