by Julie Kibler
I failed.
Then the ring of the shop phone yanked me from my thoughts.
“Dorrie? Are you packing?” Miss Isabelle barked, and I snatched the receiver away from my ear, almost flinging it across my tiny shop in the process. What was it with old folks shouting into the phone as if the other person were going deaf, too?
“What’s up, Miss Izzy-belle?” I couldn’t help myself sometimes, playing with her name. I played with everyone’s name. Everyone I liked anyway.
“Dorrie, I warned you.”
I cracked up. She breathed hard, like she was leaning on her suitcase to zip it closed. “I think maybe I can clear my calendar,” I said, “but no, I’m not packing yet. Besides, you called me at the shop. You know I’m not at home.” She insisted on calling the shop’s landline if she thought I’d be there, though I’d told her a hundred times I didn’t mind her calling my cell.
“We don’t have much time, Dorrie.”
“Okay, now. How far is it to Cincinnati anyway? And tell me what to bring.”
“It’s almost a thousand miles from Arlington to Cincy. Two good days of driving each way. I hope that doesn’t scare you off, but I hate flying.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ve never even been on an airplane, Miss Isabelle.” And had no plans to change that anytime soon, even though we lived less than ten miles from the Dallas–Fort Worth airport.
“And what you’d wear anywhere else will do, mostly. There’s just one thing. Do you even own a dress?”
I chuckled and shook my head. “You think you know me, don’t you?”
In truth, she’d rarely seen me in anything besides what I wore for work: plain knit shirts paired with nice jeans, shoes that didn’t kill my feet when I stood in them eight hours a day, and a black smock to keep my clothes dry and free of hair clippings. The only difference between my work and not-work clothes was the smock. Her question was valid.
“Surprise, surprise, I do have one or two dresses,” I said. “Probably wrapped in cleaner bags and mothballs and stuffed way in the back of my closet, you know, and maybe two sizes too small, but I’ve got a few. Why do I need a dress? Where are we going? To a wedding?”
There weren’t many events these days where a nice pair of slacks and a dressy top wouldn’t do. I could only think of two. Then Miss Isabelle’s silence brought the foot I was gnawing into the spotlight. I winced. “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. I had no idea. You never said—”
“Yes. There will be a funeral. If you don’t have anything appropriate we can stop along the way. I’ll be glad to—”
“Oh, no, Miss Isabelle. I’ll find something. I was mostly kidding about the mothballs and such.” While her packing noises continued in the background, I tried to remember exactly what I owned that would do for a funeral. Exactly nothing. But I had just enough time to run by JCPenney’s on my way home. Miss Isabelle had done plenty for me—big tips every time I did her hair, bonuses whenever she could think up an excuse, greeting me with a pretty sandwich when I didn’t have time to eat before her appointment, acting as a sounding board when my kids were making me crazy—but no matter how close we felt, I would never let her pay for this dress. That crossed some kind of line. But why hadn’t she mentioned we were going to a funeral? That was an important detail. Make that a critical detail. When she said she needed to tend to some things, I’d assumed she meant papers that needed to be signed in person, maybe for property to be sold. Business. Nothing as big as a funeral. And she wanted me to take her. Me. I’d convinced myself I knew her better than any of my other customers—she was my special customer, after all. But suddenly, Miss Isabelle seemed a woman of mystery again—the one who’d eased into my hair chair all those years ago carrying burdens so deep inside, I couldn’t even speculate about them.
Miss Isabelle and I had spent hours in conversation over the years—more hours than I could count. But it occurred to me now, as much as I cared for her, as much as she trusted me to accompany her on this journey, I knew nothing about her childhood, nothing about where she came from. How had I missed it? I had to admit I was intrigued, though I usually left mystery solving to television personalities—figuring out how to pay my bills was mystery enough for me.
Miss Isabelle apparently got things all zipped up, and she startled me out of 007 mode. “Can we leave tomorrow, then? Ten A.M. sharp?”
“Absolutely, young lady. Ten A.M. it is.” It’d be tight, but I could manage it. Not to mention, what’d felt like technicalities before seemed weightier now.
“We’ll take my car. I don’t know how you young folks tolerate those tin cans you drive these days. Nothing between you and the road at all. Like navigating a ball of aluminum foil.”
“Hey, now. Tinfoil bounces. Kind of. But sure thing, I’ll relish driving that big boat of yours.” Too bad CD players were still mostly options back in 1993, when she’d purchased her fancy Buick. I’d tossed all my cassettes. “And Miss Isabelle? I’m sorry about—”
“I’ll see you in the morning, then.” She cut me clean off, mid-sentence. She obviously wasn’t ready to discuss the details of this funeral yet. And me being me, I wasn’t going to dig.
* * *
“FUEL?” SAID MISS Isabelle the next morning as we prepared to pull out.
“Check.”
“Oil? Belts? Filters?”
“Check. Check. Check.”
“Snacks?”
I whistled. “Capital C-H-E-C-K.”
I’d arrived at Miss Isabelle’s an hour earlier than we planned to leave, so I could run the car by Jiffy Lube. They gave it a once-over; then I stopped for gas and other necessities. Miss Isabelle’s list of road snacks had been well over a mile long.
“Oh, shoot,” she said now, snapping her fingers. “I forgot one thing. There’s that Walgreens down the road.”
What on earth could she need so fast it required a detour before we ever left town? I shifted into reverse and eased the Buick down Miss Isabelle’s driveway and into the street. At the corner, I waited an extra long time, patiently allowing cars to pass until I had a long, clear space to enter.
“If you drive like this the whole time, we’ll never get there,” Miss Isabelle said. She studied me. “You think because you’re accompanying an old woman to a funeral, you have to act like an old woman, too?”
I snorted. “I didn’t want to get your blood pressure up too early, Miss Isabelle.”
“I’ll worry about my blood pressure. You worry about getting us to Cincy before Christmas.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I touched the tips of my fingers to my forehead and pressed down on the accelerator. I was happy to see she was as ornery as ever—death wasn’t a happy business, after all. She still hadn’t given me all the specifics—just that she’d received a call, and her presence was requested at a funeral near Cincinnati, Ohio. And, of course, she couldn’t travel alone.
At Walgreens, she pulled a crisp ten from her pocketbook. “This should be plenty for two crossword puzzle books.”
“Really?” I gaped at her. “Crossword puzzles?”
“Yes. Wipe that look off your face. They keep me sane.”
“And you plan to work them riding in the car? Do you need Dramamine, too?”
“No, thank you.”
Inside, I surveyed the magazine racks and wished I’d asked for more details. To be on the safe side, I chose one puzzle book with large print—“Easy on the eyes”—and one regular. I figured I had things covered either way, and I’d only have to make one trip inside the store. Who’d ever heard of people actually buying those crossword puzzle magazines unless they were sitting around in the hospital? Though come to think of it, I remembered my granny working them when I was a little girl. I guessed it was an old-people kind of thing to do.
I carried them low, against my hip, as if I were toting a giant-size box of feminine products to the lone male checker in a grocery store. But the cashier didn’t even look at the magazines as she slid them across the scanner. Or, fo
r that matter, at me. I waved away her monotone offer to bag them. It seemed wasteful, in spite of my shame.
Back in the car, Miss Isabelle eyed my purchases at arm’s length. “That’ll do. Now we’ll have something to talk about on the road.”
I imagined the topics crossword puzzles might inspire: Four across: “a pink bird.” Flamingo.
We were going to be on Interstate 30 a long, long time.
We were quiet on the road the first hour or so, though, me trying to navigate midmorning Dallas traffic without cussing too much, each of us a little awkward in this different environment, each of us still mired in thinking of other things, other places.
My mind was on the night before, right about when things had calmed down. My new dress, tags removed, hung in a clear bag on the door of my closet. Bebe had settled into bed with her book. Stevie Junior was keeping company with a video game, as usual, except when his fingers were busy texting his girlfriend a hundred miles per hour.
And my mind was on Teague—on why I’d felt so nervous about calling him. Maybe, just maybe, it was that little voice chanting in my mind, Teague, Teague, out of your league!
But my phone had gone off, the ringtone I’d assigned him a few weeks after our first real date. Let’s get it on …
Oh, yeah. Corny.
“How’s my special lady?”
I know, I know. With anyone else, I’d cringe and head for the hills. What a line. But with Teague? I could hardly explain how it made me feel.
Okay. I’ll try.
Special. It made me feel special.
“Doing good, doing good. Yourself? Kids all settled in for the night?” I said. I tried to be all chill whenever he called me, tried to let him know he couldn’t melt me with a few words, slurp up whatever he wanted from the puddle, then leave the leftovers for someone else. I’d kept men at arm’s length for years now after so many mess-ups—theirs and mine. But where other guys took my attitude as a brush-off and my reluctance to get physical as some kind of kinky game, eventually calling me a prude and running the other way, Teague kept hanging in there. And I’d let him see past my cool a few times. The littlest peek at the woman who longed for a real man in her life. Somehow, I felt like he was willing to wait for that woman to make up her mind.
When I hung up ten minutes later, I pinched my arms and slapped my cheeks. Was I awake or sleepwalking? “I understand,” Teague had said. “You’re doing the right thing, helping your Isabelle out this way. I’ll miss you, but I’ll see you when you get back.” And: “Give your mom my number. I’m used to dealing with kid stuff.” True! He was a single dad of three! “If she needs help with Stevie or Bebe or anything at all while you’re gone, I’m a phone call away.”
I wanted to believe he would be there if they needed something. I almost could. Almost.
I hadn’t known what to expect when I told him I was leaving town out of the blue. I knew exactly how Steve, my ex, would react, even before I dialed his number. I had to let him know, in the event the kids needed something—in which case I wished them good luck. Steve whined. He berated me. Asked how I could up and leave my kids for days. Funny how he never seemed to take a good, hard look in the mirror, right?
And other guys in the past? When I left with the kids for a little visit somewhere, it was always “Oh, baby, I can’t survive without you. Don’t leave me.” But as soon as I passed the city limits, I swear someone fired the starting gun: Gentlemen (in the loosest sense of the word), start your engines! Then they’d run to the nearest whatever to pick up a substitute girlfriend. When I got back, spied the lipstick on their collars, and smelled the knockoff perfume in their cars, they’d be all “I’m sorry, girl, but what am I supposed to do when you go and leave me? You know it’s really you I want, but I just didn’t know for sure.”
Right.
But Teague had surprised me. Again.
There was something different about a man who called after a first date to see how you were doing and to make sure you’d had a good time. Now, not too desperate. It’s not like he called five minutes after I turned the dead bolt, all pitiful because I hadn’t invited him in, already shooting me signals I’d made Yet Another Bad Choice. No, Teague had waited a respectable twenty-four hours, and then he hadn’t even acted like we had to set up another date immediately, though he’d said he wanted to see me again. And now, more than a month and several dates later, whenever I thought of him, a single word still came to mind: Gentleman. The real kind.
Well, okay, two more words—Wayne Brady. Because Teague reminded me of the Let’s Make a Deal game-show host with his goofy smile and sense of humor and hot-in-a-geeky-hot-kind-of-way looks.
Other men had held doors for me on first dates. They’d even offered to pay, though I always insisted on splitting the check—me and my independence, we are joined at the hip, the shoulder, and the elbow. But this went beyond the basics. We were well past first-date status, which I’m pretty sure surprised both of us, and the new had worn off some. Yet he still held doors, still picked up the check unless I managed to snatch it first and hold on tight. Still treated me, in every respect, like a lady.
With Teague, I suspected, the gentle went all the way to the bone.
But I wasn’t sure I trusted myself. Could I recognize a real man? A trustworthy one? Like they say, Fool me once, shame on you.… Fool me ten times and I am plumb stupid.
* * *
ON THE BRIDGE over Lake Ray Hubbard, we were still crawling through heavy traffic, but Miss Isabelle finally piped up. “You met Stevie Senior in your hometown, right?”
He was just plain Steve, but I never bothered to correct her. And I tried to remember what I might have told her. Steve was forever calling me at work, interrupting my appointments, and if I didn’t drop everything, next thing I knew, he’d show up in person. How well that went depended on his mood and choice of beverage the night before, so I tried to keep him on the phone and out of the shop. I figured a customer came in for a nice, relaxing getaway along with a hairstyle, even if only for an hour. I made every attempt to keep my personal history and problems low on the radar, but it didn’t always work. And, because things with Miss Isabelle were different—she’d listened to me gripe about my kids’ dad for years—she had at least a piecemeal picture of him. It seemed she would have picked up all the details in the process, but maybe not. After all, I’d been surprised to realize how little I knew about her childhood, right? But I didn’t really want to start over at the beginning.
“Yep. High school sweethearts,” I said, hoping my simple answer would refresh her memory.
“And you married right out of high school.” She paused expectantly, as though she wanted the whole enchilada all over again. I scraped a fingernail back and forth across a tiny rough spot on the otherwise-cushy armrest.
“What’s three down, Miss Isabelle?”
She fumbled to bring her readers back to her nose and peered at the puzzle she’d started. With a triumphant smile, she read the clue. “It’s a seven-letter adjective for ‘much adored; favorite.’”
“Uncle.”
“Uncle? That’s only five letters.”
“By ‘Uncle,’ I mean I give up.”
“You can’t give up. You didn’t even try.”
“Trying to drive is what I’m trying to do.”
“Beloved.”
“Beloved?”
“Yes. That’s the answer. Used in a sentence—Stevie Senior was your high school beloved.”
So much for the crossword puzzle book steering us away from uncomfortable topics.
“Maybe Steve was be-loved at one time. Now he’s downright be-noying.”
“That’s so sad.”
“Tell me about it.” I sighed, and I felt my resolve to keep it simple weaken. “I always thought he’d be the steady one. A good husband and father. He was our school district’s star athlete, racking up touchdowns in the fall and three-pointers all winter. And championships. Everyone figured he’d go off to col
lege on a scholarship and make something big of himself. And I figured after he graduated, we’d get married and ride off into the sunset. House, babies, picket fence. Everything.” My voice trailed off, and I listened to the echo of my disappointment.
“Things don’t always work out the way we expect, do they?”
“Shoot, Miss Isabelle. You know how it turned out. I got the babies. I have the house. But I figured wrong on the picket fence. And Steve.”
A little later, I said, “What about you, Miss Isabelle? Did you have a high school sweetheart? Your husband—was he yours?” I knew folks back in her day usually did marry young and stick with it for decades. I wondered if the men were different back then, or if the women were just more patient with them when they acted like idiots.
Her answer just then was a sigh, and it seemed filled with pain. Rib-cracking, chest-expanding, larger-than-life pain. I felt I’d said the wrong thing, but I couldn’t take it back.
She flipped to a new page in the crossword puzzle book and proceeded to fill in answers as though her life depended on it. Presently, she said, “My high school sweetheart … that’s a story.”
It all started and ended with a funeral dress.
3
Isabelle, 1939
NELL RELEASED A lock of sizzling hair from the iron and smoothed it into a wave that dangled in front of my ear. “You might be the prettiest girl at the party,” she said, distracting me from scrutinizing my plain black dress. I tilted my head to study her handiwork, then shook it, carefully, so as not to disturb the style she’d struggled more than an hour to perfect. Stubborn and wiry, my dark hair curled on its own in inappropriate patterns. For now, the crimped waves hung around my face like a neat fringe of prisms on a lamp shade, but soon it would resemble fuzzy rickrack instead. I’d have to tuck a ribbon in my pocket to tie it back later.