I nodded, not really sure I did.
“Look at me, Lisa Leann. Whether you believe it or not, I am your friend. I never gossip, and that’s saying a lot because I know more secrets in this town than anyone.”
I felt my eyebrows arch, mainly because I knew she was speaking truth.
She placed her hands palms-down on the lace. “Plus, I’m a pretty good listener, a little skill that comes with my badge.”
I looked into her unblinking eyes. She was serious, but still a cutie with the way those tiny freckles kissed her nose and her curls had grown to frame her face. No wonder all the young men around here were wild about her, especially now that she wore a hint of that blush and lip gloss I’d sold her.
I looked down at my pink manicured nails. “Donna, I wish I could tell you, but some things, well, there are secrets you have to carry all by yourself. It’s safer.”
She almost whispered, “You mean a secret like having an affair turn sour?”
I looked up and opened my mouth to protest, but couldn’t find my voice.
“That’s what I thought.” She started to rise.
“Wait,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. “Nobody knows. I
. . . I made a mistake, the biggest mistake of my life, and, well, it’s followed me here.” My eyes focused on a smudge of dirt on the floor, which my mop must have missed. “I feel so ashamed.”
Donna sighed and sat back down. “Well, if you tell me more I might be able to help you get this creep to leave you alone.”
I shook my head, my voice low. “I . . . I can’t tell.”
The phone rang and I jumped. Donna stood and walked across the floor to check the caller ID. “It’s the hotel. Want me to pick up?”
“No!”
She answered anyway with the handheld receiver. “Potluck Catering. Who’s calling? . . . Clark?” Her eyes sparked. “The Clark I met at church a couple weeks ago, from Texas? . . . I remember you. I met your wife too. What was her name? . . . Jane. How is Jane? . . . She seems like such a nice woman. . . . Tell her I said hello. . . . Why, it’s me, Donna Vesey. . . . Yep, the deputy.”
Donna turned her back to me. “No, Lisa Leann’s not here. Stepped out with her husband, you know, for their afternoon date. I don’t think she’ll be back for hours. Gotta message? . . . Yeah, I can remember that. . . . Okay, then. See you around. . . . Oh, sure, at the hotel for the shower. . . . Oh! You’re the new sales manager there; I didn’t know. How nice. Bye now.” She hung up and stood staring at the phone. Finally, she turned and walked back to where I was sitting. She climbed back on her stool without speaking.
“What did he say?”
“He said he’d call you later.”
I stood then sat down again. “Will this never end?”
Donna nodded and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m on your team, Lisa Leann, and I’m going to have a word with this Clark person.”
“No, you mustn’t. He’s threatened to tell Henry if I don’t, ah, play along. Though, so far, I’ve kept him at bay.”
Donna’s brows furrowed. “Just wait till I get through with him.”
“Donna, no. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
She gave a low laugh. “Well, neither does he. Besides, not to sound corny or to shock you or anything, but thanks to Vonnie, I’ve recently learned how to pray. I suggest you do the same.”
“I have prayed.”
She stood. “Then it’s settled.”
“I don’t know, Donna. I . . . what are you going to do?”
Before she could answer the back door swung open and Henry came whistling in, hauling a long piece of PVC pipe. “Hello, ladies!” He stopped and looked at us. “Is something wrong?”
With every ounce of acting skill I possessed I said, “No, Henry, I just remembered I forgot to call the florist. It may be too late to get the ivy Lizzie wanted, but I’ll take care of it.”
Henry’s grin stretched across his handsome face. “You always do.”
Evangeline
23
Sweet Understandings
“Evangeline.”
The voice came toward me from the recesses of what felt like a hot tunnel.
“Evie.”
And there it was again, stirring me from something I couldn’t quite determine.
“Evie-girl.”
Only one person in the whole world called me that. I opened my eyes to see Vernon staring down at me, his hair a silver fuzzy mess and his eyes sleep crusted.
“Evie-girl?”
My tongue felt as though it were glued to the roof of my mouth. After a few seconds of dislodging it, I asked, “What’s wrong?”
“You were having a bad dream.”
I squinted my eyes as I tried to remember what I had been dreaming, but nothing registered. “I was?”
“Sounded to me like it.” He rested on his side next to me.
“Oh.” I stared up at the ceiling, then ran my fingers through my tussled hair. “What’d I do?”
“You were just breathing really fast.”
I looked over at him. “I didn’t say anything?”
“No.”
I shrugged my shoulders, then sat up. “I have no idea what I was dreaming.” I blinked my eyes a few times and the room came into view. Though I’d lived in this house alone from the day of my parents’ death until Vernon and I had returned from our honeymoon, I had not changed the décor from my mother’s touch. She was a no-nonsense woman, and though her home was Victorian, it was practical. There was a wrought-iron bed with its headboard against the far wall, floral wallpaper that never seemed to go out of style, and only necessary pieces of furniture placed along the walls. A large oval gold leaf mirror hung from a wide satin ribbon over the bed’s headboard, and clusters of small framed prints brought the room together. The wardrobe was topped with a stack of quilts dating back from my great-grandmother’s day. When Vernon moved in, he said it was a little froufrou but that he’d learn to live with it as long as I came with the package. That thought alone could keep me smiling forever.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll make the coffee. Maybe it’ll come back to me later.”
“Sounds to me like it’s best forgotten,” he called after me as I slipped into my terry robe and out the bedroom door.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in my home office, buried behind a maze of thick stacks of papers along the floor and atop the desk, and preparing the taxes of Buddy and Geneva Youngblood, that I felt that stirring of memory that attempts to draw our nighttime dreams into the daylight hours. Though I tried to dismiss it, I couldn’t.
Finally I pushed away from my computer and desk and walked into the kitchen, where I made the day’s second pot of coffee. While it brewed, I called my sister Peggy in West Virginia.
“Is something wrong?” she asked after I greeted her.
“No, why? Does something have to be wrong for me to call my favorite sister?”
I shuffled into the family room with the cordless clutched at my ear.
“I’m your only sister,” she said as I sat on the three-cushion sofa. “And it’s a Wednesday. You never call on a Wednesday.”
I sighed at her candor. “Okay. I had a dream last night and I . . . Peg, do you remember when we were kids? How much time we used to spend over at Doreen Roberts’s house?”
“Doreen Roberts? Of course I remember. What is it she’s calling herself these days?”
“Dee Dee. Dee Dee McGurk. And you know her daughter is living here with her too.” I heard the last gurgle and sputter of the coffeemaker, so I rose from my comfy spot and returned to the kitchen. “The two of them have started a bartending business.”
“Really? The freelancers around here do very well. Several of the bartenders at the country club have their own businesses on the side. For private parties and such.”
“Yeah, yeah. The point is,” I said, pouring the coffee into my mug, “they are causing a bit of a stir around here and somehow managing to
wreck my family and seep into my dreams.” I returned to the family room and peered out the frosty window while giving her the lowdown on the latest. When I’d finished with the necessary information, I concluded with: “Which leads me to my dream.”
“I’m listening.”
“I dreamed we were all children again. We were playing that game where you fold a piece of paper this way and that, then write numbers and names under the flaps. Do you remember that?”
“Huh . . . I haven’t thought about that in years. We’d stick our fingers into the folds, then go back and forth after asking questions about our futures.”
“And we’d find the answers under the folds.” I shook my head. “I can’t remember exactly how we made them, but we made them. And what I dreamed was that Doreen and I were playing the game and that it said she would marry a lawyer named Robert and that she would have three children and live in a wooden house.”
Peggy giggled. “Well, that just goes to show you that we should put our faith and hope in the Lord and not in origami.”
“I just think it’s sad, Peggy. I mean, Doreen—or Dee Dee as she now likes to be called—had the same opportunities as the rest of us. And she’s really a sad example of life gone bad. I mean, she’s been in jail, she’s estranged from her firstborn, and she’s done things I don’t even want to think about.”
Peggy didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “So what are you thinking, Evangeline?”
“I think the Lord wants me to do something more than respond to her in the way I’ve responded for so many years.”
“Since you were twelve years old, I’d say.”
“Forty-six years is a long time to hold a grudge for something a child did to me.”
“Stealing Vernon away from you.”
I got up and returned to the kitchen for a second cup. “Now it all seems so silly. We were children.”
Peggy cleared her throat. “Well, one thing I’ll say for Doreen Roberts. She always knew what she wanted and she went after it and the devil be danged. But I suppose she went down the wrong road at some point and met her match.”
“Who would have thought it would have turned out like it did?”
“So what are you going to do?”
I poured coffee into my cup and thought for a moment. “I’m going to go see her. I think it’s time we really talked. And I do mean talked. No more accusations from me. I just want to talk.”
“Are you going to tell Vernon?”
That was a good question, one with an answer I didn’t have quite yet. “I’ll think about it,” I said. “And I’ll let you know how it goes.”
I thought about it as I prepared the tuna fish pie for dinner and decided to call Vernon to tell him of my plan while on my way to the trailer park where Dee Dee and Velvet live. Of course, by then it was the same time as the shift change over at the sheriff’s office so it wasn’t much of a surprise that Vernon didn’t answer his cell phone.
I elected not to call his office line.
I drove my car down the snowy path to the trailer Dee Dee and Velvet called home. It was an old single-wide with turquoise siding running around its base and cream-colored siding from there up. The small and dirty windows were book-ended with fading black shutters. There was a rickety latticed porch that rested beneath the peak of the trailer’s center and front door. Lying catty-corner across it was a mop that appeared to be frozen stiff, and along the back of the steps were potted plants that had long ago tasted the bitter pill of death.
“Oh, Lord,” I prayed. “Why have you brought me here?”
Not waiting for an answer, I opened my car’s door and exited its warmth for the chill of the day. I looked up for a moment, hoping for any sign of sun in the gray sky, but found none. Heaving a sigh, I walked toward the porch, keeping my gaze on my feet, careful of where I stepped. Seconds later I was knocking on the door with my leather-gloved knuckles, then standing back in wait.
When Dee Dee opened the door and saw me, she sighed so deeply her shoulders visibly sagged. “What in the . . . what do you want, Evangeline?”
I arched my back so I stood a bit taller. “Do you have a minute?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head, then looked back at me. “For what? Another fight with you?”
“No.” I swallowed. “Actually, I’d just like to talk to you. Like we used to do . . . when we were kids.”
“When we were kids?” She coughed a laugh. “Evangeline Benson, you do beat all.” She ducked her chin a bit. “Excuse me. Evangeline Vesey.”
“Seriously, Dee Dee. I want to talk to you. Are you alone? Is Velvet here?”
“Velvet’s at Wal-Mart working.”
“Then may I come in?”
Dee Dee looked at me long and hard before stepping away from the door. “By all means. May as well warn you: it ain’t Buckingham Palace, but it’s a roof.”
I stepped over the threshold. She was right. It wasn’t Buckingham Palace. The place was clean but with stained green and yellow shag carpet someone must have stolen from the set of the Brady Bunch and furniture that screamed of the Spanish hacienda motif era. The pictures on the walls were mostly replicas of oil landscapes, no doubt purchased at a thrift store. Still, it was clean.
“I just made some coffee. Want some?”
“No.” I watched her walk into the open kitchen of orange Formica and off-white linoleum floors that buckled here and there. “Thank you, though.”
“Well, why don’t you have a seat there in the living room?” She poured a cup of coffee into a chipped mug and then made what I felt was too big a production out of adding sugar and non-dairy creamer.
I moved into the living room and sat in the first chair I came to. I sat up just a bit to tug my coat tightly around me as I glanced at the oversized maple end table next to me. There was an ashtray with the telltale sign of a recently smoked cigarette (as though the trailer reeking of it wasn’t enough), several five-by-seven and wallet-sized framed photos, and an old Bible.
When Dee Dee joined me, I jumped.
“That’s some of my family.” She moved to the other side of the table, then squatted down, holding the coffee cup with both hands. “That there,” she said, pointing to the frame nearest her, “is my boy Darrin.”
I looked at the handsome young man made all the more dashing by his army uniform.
“He’s over in the Middle East right now. Not a day goes by but what I don’t pray for that boy, even though I don’t know him real well.”
I remembered Vernon telling me that one of Dee Dee’s children had been raised in a foster home. I nodded once in acknowledgment.
“He was mine and Danny’s son. Danny was my fifth husband.” She looked at me with a sharp eye. “I suppose you know I was married a bunch of times.”
Again I nodded. “I’ve heard.”
“Six times.” Again she pointed to a photograph, this time of a man who looked old enough to be our fathers’ age. “My husband Neil McGurk. Neil was my last husband. He died right before Velvet and me moved back here.” I looked from the photograph to Dee Dee, who blinked back tears. “He was a good man, Neil was. That man loved me and he didn’t care what my past was about. He just loved me.”
“How’d he die?” I nearly choked on my words.
“Heart attack. Then a stroke. Velvet and I nursed him like he was a baby, but he died anyway.”
“I’m sorry, Doreen.”
“Yeah, me too.” She paused before continuing. “Anyway, Danny and me had Darrin, but he was taken by the state when Danny and I were busted for selling marijuana.”
I opened my mouth to ask how a woman got involved in such as that, but then closed it when she pointed to another photo of another young man, this one with a woman and small boy who appeared to be about four or five. “That’s Dion.”
“Dion? Like DiMucci? The singer from the fifties?”
“I got pregnant with him while listening to ‘The Wanderer.’”
“It’s am
azing you can know that,” I commented. I felt my shoulders relax, and I briefly wondered how she could squat for so long. Women our age—in our late fifties—can’t usually stay down for that long.
“Well, it was a one-night stand in the back of a club.”
I frowned and felt myself tense up again.
“Those weren’t my best days. Anyway, I never married his daddy, whose name, for the record, is Paul. Paul actually owned the club, and I was his bartender, and one thing just led to another, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t, but I just nodded.
“Paul was a pretty good guy, and he and his wife—”
“His wife?” The words flew out of my mouth before I had a chance to mull them over.
Dee Dee all but sneered at me. “Like I said, Evangeline, those were not the best of times. I was divorced, I had a child to feed, and I was lonely. Sometimes, when you’re young, you think that men mean what they say when they say it and then you grow up and find out they rarely do.” She took a sip of her coffee then. “Leastways, not when they’re married, they don’t. But, like I said, Paul wasn’t all bad; he was just hot for me. In those days a lot of men were, but Paul was the only one who could make things happen for me, or so I thought. So I had this one-night fling with him, and he told me the next day he’d made a mistake and that he loved his wife, he really, really loved his wife and that I had a job as long as I wanted one.” She barked another laugh. “Sure I did. As long as I didn’t tell his wife. And I never did, even when I handed her Dion to raise.”
“Oh, Doreen.”
“Don’t feel bad for me, Evangeline. I made my choice out of love and a little desperation. Paul knows, of course, that Dion is his. He knows but we never discuss it.”
“What do you mean? How can he know if you never discuss it?”
“Because I named him Dion. That’s all it took for him to know that I hadn’t been with any other man. Anyway, I told Paul there was no way I could raise another child and asked if he and his wife would take Dion.”
“How old was he? Dion?”
“About six months. Cutest thing you ever did see.”
I smiled at her.
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