by Robert Inman
“How’s Rex?” he asked.
“Did Clarice tell you the big news? He got engaged last week.” Rex was a year older than Palmer, graduated a couple of years before from North Carolina State with an engineering degree.
“Hadn’t heard, Chuck. That’s great. Local girl?”
“He met her in Guatemala while he was down there on business. Good family. They’re in palm oil or something like that.”
“Dang, Chuck. You’ll be a granddaddy before you know it.”
Chuck fingered his thinning gray hair. “Already look like it. And look at you, Will. Still pouring on that Grecian Formula.”
“Nah, just good genes.”
“Come on.”
“I swear. Listen, tell Rex I said congratulations. Can’t wait to meet her.”
“Palmer doing okay?” Chuck asked.
“Up to his fanny in alligators, so he says. We don’t see much of him. Hoped he’d be home this weekend, but he called last night and said he’s studying for an exam.”
“Yeah, but one of these days he’ll be a rich doc and he can keep you in the style to which you’d like to become accustomed.”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe you’ll just stay over there and do the weather until they carry you out of Channel Seven feet first.”
“That sounds more like it.”
Will reached for the starter cord of the Honda and gave it a vigorous pull. It caught on the first try and settled into a smooth, deep-throated hum as he eased the control from “choke” to “run.”
“Really like your new anchor gal,” Chuck called out over the engine noise.
“Binky? Yeah, we think she’s gonna work out okay. Came from Toledo.”
“She does a good…presentation.”
Like most people, Chuck Durkin didn’t know exactly why he liked or didn’t like somebody on television. There might be something obviously negative, like a mannerism or a hairdo or wearing jewelry that called attention to itself. (Viewers tended to be harder on female personalities than male, maybe because women watched TV more than men.) But the positives seemed mostly intangible and undefinable. You either liked somebody on TV or you didn’t. Binky didn’t wear oversized jewelry or have irritating mannerisms or a goofy hairdo. As Chuck said, she did a good presentation. Binky would stay in Raleigh for three or four years and then be off to the big-market job in Boston or Cleveland or maybe even something with a network. And Will Baggett would stay right here in Raleigh because he had found his niche and he was in a groove and things were pretty darn right with his world.
He gave Chuck a wave and turned the Honda toward the lawn.
*****
Will Baggett was not a gardener. A gardener planted things, fussed over what he planted, dug it up and replanted, and engaged in endless conversation with other gardeners over the relative merits of various perennials and ground covers. That didn’t interest Will. A garden was blooming chaos. Give him a little green shrubbery and a healthy stand of fescue grass any day -- things that could be mowed and clipped and then left alone until they needed mowing and clipping again. A well-tended lawn said that nice people lived there, the kind of people who voted, paid taxes, went to PTA meetings, recycled. And a TV weatherman who tended his lawn must be a regular kind of guy, right? The kind you’d invite into your home every night.
Every so often, Clarice would bring up the idea of hiring a lawn service. There seemed to be hundreds of them in Raleigh, rumbling across town in their pickup trucks, towing trailers loaded with power equipment: huge mowers, trimmers, edgers, leaf blowers. They would guarantee a well-manicured lawn -- neatly mowed and edged, fertilized and aerated. No muss, no fuss. Many of Will’s neighbors, including Chuck Durkin, employed lawn services. Will resisted. Clarice called him mule-headed. She and Palmer had presented him one Father’s Day with the CAPTAIN SATURDAY baseball cap. He had laughed about the cap. They hadn’t. But that had been years ago, when Palmer was still at home and Clarice wasn’t off selling real estate night and day. Nowadays, he could be Captain Saturday without feeling guilty about it.
Will liked the muss and fuss that went with a well-tended lawn -- grass neatly clipped, the shrubbery marching in a soldierly row across the front of the house. The work produced immediate, visible results -- even more so than doing the weather on television. The weather changed by the millisecond. Mow a lawn and, by God, it stayed mowed. For a few days, anyway.
Yard work was also something of an escape. It wasn’t like woodworking, where you had to pay close attention or you’d cut your fingers off. Just follow the self-propelled mower, remember to turn around at the other end of the lawn. And don’t get the cord caught in the electric hedge clipper. You could let your mind wander across the other things in your life, or you could just let it idle. And after a hectic week of dashing about, being Raleigh’s most popular TV weatherman, you could use some idling.
Not that he was complaining. It was, hands down, Raleigh’s best job. He made a fine salary and provided well for Clarice and Palmer. They had a nice house and drove nice cars and had a little stashed away for emergencies. There were intangibles, too -- the hundreds of perks, large and small, that went with being recognized and thought well of. The woman behind the meat counter at Winn-Dixie made sure you got a choice cut she’d been saving for a special customer. The guy at the Amoco station dashed out to clean your windshield, even though you were filling up at the Self-Serve pump. People wrote nice letters and stopped you on the street and complimented your work, even if they complained good-naturedly about bad weather. All in all, it made a fellow feel like he was okay. As long as he worked hard at it and kept the customers coming, he could keep all that for as long as he wanted -- until, as Chuck Durkin said, they carried him out feet first.
*****
He was sitting on the back deck about five-thirty, sipping on a scotch and water, when he heard her car pull into the driveway out front. After a moment she appeared at the back door, opened it, peered out. “Salud,” he said, raising his glass. “Fix you a drink?”
“Stiff.” She was wearing black slacks and a red blouse, a strong, rich color, almost burgundy. Despite a long day at the real estate wars, she looked smashing -- trim, long of leg, hair the shade of honey framing her angular face. The color was high in her cheekbones.
“How was your day?”
“Great. Just fine.”
“Tell me.”
“Five minutes,” she said, and disappeared back into the house. By the time she returned he had her vodka tonic ready. “Ummmm,” she said, taking a long sip and then leaning back in the lounge chair, stretching her legs, cradling the drink in both hands.
“Well?”
“What?”
“Your day.”
“Greylyn. New development out Six Forks Road. Past where they’re building the Outerbelt.”
North Raleigh. A creeping sprawl of subdivisions, apartment complexes, shopping centers, parking lots and four-lane roads where there had been, not too many years ago, pine and hardwood forest. North Raleigh just kept oozing north, devouring land. The state was building a new circumferential highway out on what had been the fringes of the city. By the time it was finished, the fringes would have long since moved on. North Raleigh, Will had joked on the air not long ago, might someday take in the state of Virginia.
“Nice? The development?”
“Four hundred thousand and up. Golf course, water, clubhouse. The place was run over with people today. We could have sold the model a couple of times.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because it’s a model. People want to see what a four hundred thousand dollar home in Greylyn looks like. A month from now, after most of the lots are sold and several homes are up, we’ll sell the model.”
“And what happens after Greylyn is sold out?”
“Fincher’s negotiating to get us an exclusive on a two-hundred-acre development about five miles on past.”
That would be Fincher Sniveley
, co-owner of Sniveley and Ellis, which had grown from a two-man boutique realty firm into one of Raleigh’s largest. They had actively courted Clarice a year ago, hiring her away from the small firm where she had gotten her start. Already, she was Sniveley and Ellis’s second-best producer. Only Fincher sold more. He was a man of abundant energy and almost-too-good-to-be-true cheerfulness. Will! Damn good to see you, buddy! Will thought he wore too much cologne.
“I can’t imagine why people want to live so far out,” Will said.
“A lot of them come from places where they’ve had to commute an hour to work each way. Or more. They’re used to it. Not everybody has to live right in the middle of town.”
“It’s good for the real estate business that they don’t,” he said.
It was a sore point, and he was careful. They had been in the house here on LeGrand since they moved to Raleigh twenty years before. They had loved the location -- a tree-lined street of older, mostly two-story homes not far from the Channel Seven studios. It was inside the Beltline, the perimeter road that was then taking shape around the city. Will loved LeGrand, and especially his particular house on LeGrand, because it looked like it had some history and some permanence to it. It was a solid, well-built house with real plaster walls and a slate roof on a quiet street of well-kept houses and lawns and people who were neighborly but not intrusive. LeGrand was Old Raleigh -- not the oldest, but old enough. And that’s what he wanted to be: Old Raleigh. So essentially connected to the heart and soul of the place that people thought of him as a fixture. Old Raleigh people stayed put. They weren’t likely to move off to Poukeepsie or Houston next week. Once you wooed and won Old Raleigh people, they stayed won. They were the core of his audience.
They had been in the house for about ten years when Clarice began to speak wistfully of something newer, with more closet space and a real den and a modern kitchen and a central vacuum system and maybe a back yard pool. A couple of times, it had gotten to the point of heated argument. Will dug in his heels. It wasn’t just the matter of being ten minutes from Channel Seven. It was the house itself. He could not imagine giving it up. It was Clarice who eventually surrendered. She resigned herself to LeGrand and began to do some refurbishing, using the generous checks that her parents, the Greensboro Palmers, sent each Christmas. She started with paint, wallpaper and curtains and moved on to ripping up carpet and refinishing the hardwood floors underneath. And then four years ago, just after Palmer had started college at Duke, she had sprung the big one on him.
They were in bed on a Sunday afternoon following an especially vigorous hour of sex. She rose, naked and magnificent, and went to the closet, wiggling her butt at him. My God, what a woman -- passionate, uninhibited, multi-orgasmic. I am blessed among men. She came back to bed with a cardboard box from which she withdrew architectural drawings, contractors’ estimates, even samples of tile for the bathroom and paneling for the den. Will was taken aback. She had assembled it in meticulous detail, all quite without a hint to him. She went through the plans, showing him how the addition would be tied into the present structure, how the plumbing and electricity and heating and air conditioning would be upgraded, how the den would be arranged with a sweeping curve of leather sofas and armchairs that would give them simultaneous view of both the new fireplace and a massive entertainment center flanked by bookcases. Upstairs, the bath would be almost as big as the adjacent bedroom, complete with bidet and separate potty room. And a two-person Jacuzzi.
Will kept quiet while she flipped through the pages until she reached the last. His eyes went to the bottom: GRAND TOTAL: $87,265.94.
“Holy shit,” he said softly. “I mean, gee, Clarice.”
“It’s very reasonable,” Clarice said. “I got multiple estimates on everything.” She tapped the page. “These are the low bidders.”
“It’s almost as much as we paid for the house,” Will said.
“That was sixteen years ago, Will. With all of the improvements we’ve made, the house is worth triple that. At least.”
Will stared. He shook his head. “Eighty-seven thousand dollars? We can’t afford that, honey. And if you’re thinking…”
“No,” she said firmly, “I’m not. I know how you are about that. You know, Will, I wish you’d just be honest and say you don’t like my parents.”
He could feel a nibbling at the back of his skull, an old familiar thing. He sighed. “Clarice, let’s don’t go through this again. I don’t dislike your parents.”
“You think they’re snobs.”
“I just,” he said, trying to keep his voice from rising, “want to take care of my own family. I can. I do. That’s important to me.”
“You’ve never turned down one of their Christmas checks…”
“I think they’re great, honey. And you’ve used the money just the way you wanted.”
“…or them paying Palmer’s tuition.”
“Duke? Med school? It would have strapped us.”
“But you get this look, Will.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll try not to get any more looks.”
She turned away from him. He picked up the papers and looked through them again -- the architect’s plans, the detailed description of materials, the estimate sheet. He studied the row of figures tumbling down the page like a snowball, gathering size and momentum until they came to a crashing stop at the final verdict. But then, it wasn’t really final, was it. “Honey, where does it say ‘Furniture’?”
She didn’t answer. She was studying something on the wall, somewhere between the closet and the bathroom door.
“How much?”
“Another twenty-five. Or so.”
“Thousand.”
She nodded.
“It’s really a great idea,” he said gently. “You’ve done a terrific job. But it’s…we just can’t do it. Not now. Maybe later. Let’s think it through. We’ll start saving. Maybe after I sign a new contract…”
Clarice turned back to him then and looked at him for a long moment and he could see the muscles along her temples tightening. “I’m not going to argue with you. I never get anywhere arguing. You’re too glib for me.” She took the set of plans from him, rolled them up, climbed out of bed and stood there, her magnificent breasts, still lusciously firm at forty-four, rising and falling as she took deep breaths, clutching the plans like a family heirloom she had just saved from a fire. “You’re on an entirely different wave length, Will.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you hear what you just said? ‘Let’s think it through.’ Think. That’s the problem, Will. I tell you how I feel and you tell me what you think .”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?”
“Sometimes, you’re supposed to do things simply because you feel something.”
“Maybe,” he offered, “you could feel something a little less expensive. Say, a bay window?”
“I don’t want a bay window. I want this. I feel this. I feel strongly about this.”
“Clarice, you’re really an incredibly handsome woman.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Please…come back to bed. Let’s talk about this later.”
“No.” She glared at him for awhile longer and then she said, quite calmly, “I’m getting a job.”
“You’re what?” He regretted immediately the way it sounded, so patently incredulous. But the notion of Clarice with a job just didn’t compute. She had a degree in elementary education, and she had taught for a year in New Bern when they were first married, but once Palmer had come along she had stayed home. It was what they both wanted. They scraped by at first, and then they moved to Raleigh and the paychecks from Channel Seven kept getting larger and he was able to support them comfortably. Now, here she was in middle-age, with no work experience to speak of, contemplating the job market. And what? Some menial clerk’s position, selling greeting cards from behind the counter at a gift shop? He felt chauvanistically disloyal for even thinking it. It wasn’t that Cl
arice wasn’t capable. She was smart and clever, even if she was a bit disorganized. But there were plenty of smart, clever women who didn’t really know how to do anything practical.
Clarice read him. “You think I can’t.”
“It’s just that…you haven’t.”
“Well, I am. I’ve enrolled in a real estate course. I’m going to get my license and sell real estate.”
Will was dumbfounded -- both at what she had decided and what she had done about it, quietly and entirely on her own. It was the first time in their marriage she had done anything so momentous without a word to him. Of course, she had never done anything remotely resembling momentous before, not since the very first when she had chosen him and married him despite everything.
“Real estate is hard work, Clarice. Long hours, odd hours…”
“Oh,” she made a wry face, “I know all about odd hours.”
“Yeah, I guess you do. Look, honey, this happens to a lot of women. The kids grow up, the nest is empty, you have a lot of time on your hands…”
“What do you know about women, Will? I mean, really?”
Will smiled. “My experience is limited to one.”
She didn’t return the smile. “Men work, retire and die,” she said. “I read the other day in the News and Observer that there are 185,000 widows in North Carolina.”
“I don’t believe widowhood is an imminent danger for you,” he said drily. “And I don’t believe you’ve given this business of real estate enough thought,” he added, trying to move things back on track. “Is it you? I mean, if you want to try something new, why don’t you think about…” he searched, “…law school. Did you read the story in the paper about the woman judge in Charlotte? She got into law school at Chapel Hill after her kids got grown, practiced for a couple of years, and then won a district court judgeship. The paper said she’s pretty darn good at it.”