by Annie Jones
She drew a shuddering breath and nodded, then tipped her head to the side. “Do you think Fulton knows?”
“Fulton? His very name makes you suspect his mother must have shared the connection.” Riley paused to glance around the room, recalling all the conversations he’d had with the man, the times they’d sat here and talked about raising their daughters, about business strategies, even about the Fulton family.
Not once had Fulton given so much as a hint that he suspected he held any relationship to Dixie’s family at all. Riley folded his arms over his chest and shook his head. “Actually, no, Dixie. In talking with him, I don’t think he knows. But that doesn’t mean it’s your place to tell him.”
“I think Fulton and his little girl, considering that they are heirs to a chunk of the family fortune, might argue with that, Riley.”
“Heirs? How do you figure that?”
“It’s family money, they are family. In fact, of all the people who have reaped the benefit of Samuel Fulton’s fortune, which included most of the start-up money for the furniture businesses, there are only three survivors who are his true blood relations: me, Fulton, and Fulton’s daughter.” She reached up and shut the wall safe slowly, the Bible still clutched close with one hand. “If there is any right thing to do, in this case, Riley, it’s to get to the truth in this matter and then see what I can do to make up for whatever wrongs have been done by my family.”
* * *
“Did you get your phone call taken care of?”
Riley heard Aunt Sis’s voice, but the sole creature he saw in the entryway was Peachie Too, just sitting there, her head cocked to one side.
“I, um...” Riley looked around. The house seemed hushed and deserted, like some old library. Dixie had pushed past him the second they came in the door to go find Miss Lettie and have a long talk with the elderly woman. Riley’s heart was set on having a few words with Momma himself before he tried to contact Fulton and advise him on how to proceed should the lawyer hear from Marcia.
“Well?” Peachie Too sat up, her front paws in begging position. The dog blinked as though it were, indeed, awaiting some kind of response from Riley.
It seemed rude not to answer the question and even though he knew Peachie Too had not asked it, he leaned forward to inspect what the animal was up to as he said, “Yes, I did.”
“Who are you talking to, son?” Momma came into the parlor just off the entryway, her gait hampered by the use of an aluminum walker.
“I, uh...” He pointed to Peachie Too, meaning to ask why the thing was acting so docile and beguiling.
Momma lowered herself onto “her” end of the large sofa, the one farthest from Miss Lettie’s rocker.
In the weeks she’d been in the house, Momma and the others had established their own routines, complete with favorite seats, meals, television programs, and leisure activities.
Sis and Momma had taken up opposite ends of the parlor sofa so that Peachie Too, who had taken a liking to Momma as intense and inexplicable as her seeming dislike for Aunt Sis, could lie between them. The Judge took the high-backed chair that faced the entryway and dominated the room, and Miss Lettie favored her carved, oak rocker. Wendy got the floor; Dixie, the footstool. Riley made himself at home pretty much wherever he could and that was fine with him because of that very thing: he was at home here.
“Stop fooling with that dog and come talk to me,” Momma ordered. “Or better yet, bring that princess puppy-toes over here so I can visit with her.”
Riley gave one last glance around for Sis then reached cautiously toward the poodle.
“You don’t have to tell me about the phone call, Riley, honey, but at least have the courtesy to acknowledge me.”
Riley hesitated.
Peachie Too sneezed right into Riley’s open palms then darted off.
“Come back here you little—” He chose not to call the troublesome apricot-colored, dog-germ spritzer what he really wanted to call her. Momma was in the room and, injury or not, she could still nail his backside from forty paces with a sofa pillow. He glared at the dog. “I’ll acknowledge you—” as opposed to the yet unseen Sis whom he knew he should be addressing “—all right. Acknowledge you as a good place to wipe this snout-goo off of my hands.”
Bending down, he started after the beast, which ran under the rocker and around the footstool.
“Aha!” Riley caught a glimpse of pinkish fluff quivering behind the Judge’s chair. He pounced.
“What are you doing, young man?” Aunt Sis rose from behind the chair and nearly gave Riley a heart attack.
“Nothing! I thought you were...your hair is the color of...” He put his hands behind his back like a ten-year-old with a slingshot caught standing outside a busted window. “Um, did Peachie Too run by here? Momma was wanting to hold her.”
Dixie breezed into the room. “Miss Lettie is napping right now so I guess I’ll have to wait to talk to her.”
“Talk to her about what, honey?” Sis put her hands on her hips, her attitude suddenly as if she had appointed herself Miss Lettie’s social secretary charged with screening who got through to the lady and what they discussed with her.
“Oh, never mind.” Dixie took a side step and slid the Bible she’d kept cradled in her arms all the way from the office onto the end table beside a red, cloth-covered journal. “It can wait until she’s rested and up and around. What are you doing crawling around on the floor, Aunt Sis?”
Riley gave her a thumbs-up nod of approval for the preemptive question. “Yes, what are you doing crawling around on the floor?”
“Oh! That’s something you’ll be glad to hear about!” Her face brightened but it still had a long way to go to rival the thousand-watt glow of her floral-patterned dress. “I have fixed Riley’s precious little cellular phone.”
“You what?” he managed to utter even as his jaw dropped.
“Fixed it?” Dixie threw him an apologetic grimace.
“Yes, I did. I took all the pieces and snapped them back inside and glued the cover back on good as new.” Her hands flew as she reenacted the process of jamming the intricate parts of Riley’s phone together. “It was sort of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle and you know how good I am at putting together jigsaw puzzles. Except that these pieces didn’t quite fit right and there wasn’t a picture on a box for me to follow, you know. So, I figured that I might have dropped a piece or two carrying it from the entryway to the kitchen. That’s when I decided to retrace my steps on my hands and knees, combing the rug for any stray bits and pieces...”
Okay, Sis, come up for air. Riley was hoping against hope for a window of opportunity to speak.
Dixie did not wait for that window, she just barged right in, making her own door then sticking her verbal foot in to make sure Sis could not shut them out of the conversation again. “My! Isn’t that ingenious of you Aunt Sis? Sounds like you’ve really worked hard while we were gone and you know what? You deserve a break!”
“Oh, it wasn’t hard work, honey. Just trying to help Riley—”
“Gee, thanks,” he muttered, his hand over his eyes.
“And who doesn’t want to help Riley, Aunt Sis? He’s done so much for all of us. And now we can do a little something just for him.” Dixie took the older woman by the shoulders. “You do want to do something for him, don’t you, Aunt Sis?”
“Well, I was—” She pointed in the direction of the kitchen where Riley pictured his poor phone laid out on the counter like a victim in a mad scientist’s experiment.
Dixie diverted her aunt away from the kitchen toward the stairway. “What he needs right now is some privacy so he can have a long chat with his momma.”
“I suspected as much.” Momma patted the empty cushion on the sofa next to her. Out of nowhere, Peachie Too appeared to claim that spot.
“What say you and I muster the troops, Aunt Sis, and take Grandpa, Wendy, and ourselves down to the drugstore for a treat?”
“Drugstore?
We going down to the drugstore?” The Judge flung open one of the glass doors to his office.
Sis glared at him, hands propped on her ample hips. “What were you doing? Listening at the door?”
“Wendy, hurry yourself down here, child,” the Judge called out, ignoring Sis with undisguised glee. “We’re going to go get ourselves a treat!”
Wendy thundered down the steps, Baby Belle tucked under her arm.
Dixie leaned in Riley’s direction. “You owe me. When it’s time for me to have my talk with Miss Lettie, it’s your turn to tend to the nut farm.”
Riley scowled and also laughed, a little. “Hey, you’re referring to my child and my mother in that group.”
“Where are we going, Grandpa Smilin’ Bob?” Wendy marched right up and said it like she’d been born to the breed, Riley noted, like she’d lived here all her life. And when the Judge offered her his arm, she took it with her head high, just the way Riley imagined Dixie might have done when she was his daughter’s age. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so bad to find his family included with hers.
“The drugstore, that’s where we’re going!” The Judge grinned then rubbed his hands together. “Now, isn’t that just the thing to liven up a dull Saturday afternoon?”
Dixie nabbed Sis by the arm and prodded her across the room toward the old man. “Grandpa, if you’re going into that drugstore with us, and you are, make no mistake about that, you have got to behave!”
“Oh, he’ll behave all right, Dixie-sugar. He’ll behave like a seventy-something-year-old juvenile delinquent!” Verdi called out with a laugh.
“Momma!” Riley folded his arms, ready to compare her rude outburst to something he might have done as a kid—the ultimate comeuppance for her, he thought, to be sure.
“Now don’t you chide Miss Verdi, young man, she’s only telling it the way it is.” Sis shook her finger as she brought up the rear of the group heading out the door. “And I, for one, have got to just thank you for bringing her to be a part of our lives here. Heaven knows, I welcome one other voice of rationality and refinement around this place!”
The door slammed shut behind them.
“One other?” Riley gave his mother a skeptical look. “Meaning Aunt Sis believes that aside from you, she is the sole arbiter of rationality and refinement in this household?”
“No, arbitration is the Judge’s bailiwick, dear.” Verdi stroked the pink-tinged poodle now curled contentedly in her lap.
“The Judge?” Riley threw up his hands. “Momma, you know why Dixie has to warn him to behave himself when they go to the drugstore, don’t you? He shoplifts!”
“Oh, that?” She batted away the very notion, rolling her eyes. “The whole thing goes way back. Seems ten years ago when Noni Philpot took over the town drugstore, she set everything up her way, which was all contrary to the way it had always been before. People, Smilin’ Bob among ‘em, complained they couldn’t find things, that they liked it the old way. Noni responded by telling them if they didn’t like it to go someplace else.”
“There is no place else, not in Fulton’s Dominion.”
“Precisely. And Noni sure did take advantage of that fact. Raised her prices right through the roof.” Momma jerked her thumb upward.
“And this relates to the Judge’s shoplifting how?”
“He never shoplifted a thing in his life. He just took it upon himself, as a pillar of the community, someone looked upon for guidance and to set a fine example—”
“Now there’s a scary thought.”
“He just took it upon himself…” she was using that stern don’t-mess-with-Momma tone, “…to start his own one-man protest committee. So every time he would go into the store, he’d move items back to their old places, one or two at a time. A box of razorblades here, a bottle of aspirin there. Smilin’ Bob thought that after a few years of that he might just get the place back to its old way all on his own.”
“This has been going on for ten years?”
“Oh no! Five years ago Noni got fed up with his tomfoolery and announced to everyone that things had started to disappear after Smilin’ Bob’s trips to the drugstore. She neglected to mention that they later reappeared someplace else in the store.”
“Why, that old mischief maker.” Riley walked to the sofa, laughing.
“Smilin’ Bob challenged Noni to prove he’d ever taken anything. She answered by issuing the order that the Judge couldn’t come into her store by himself except to go straight to the lunch counter.”
He crossed his arms. “So, you do have some kind of inborn radar for getting all the good gossip.”
“It’s not gossip.” She raised both hands and tapped her ears with her fingers. “It’s personal history, and the reason I know so much about it is not because I seek out dirt on people but because I listen when they talk to me about the things that matter to them.”
“How Noni Philpot arranged her aspirin bottles is something that matters to the Judge?”
“No, standing up for what he thought was right mattered. Not backing down when someone who had the upper hand wanted to use it to bludgeon good people mattered. Making sure that as the newest member of this family, I understood that sometimes what one person called eccentricity another person might know was an ethical stand. That mattered.”
Riley slashed both hands through the air to bring that speech to a halt. “Whoa! As the newest member of what family, Momma?”
She shifted on the sofa, not meeting his eyes. “You know what I meant.”
“Momma, I’m not sure what I know anymore.” He put his head in his hands.
“Love will do that to you.”
“Love?” That went through him with a jolt.
“Yes, love,” she repeated softly.
“Momma, you’ve got this all wrong. I do not love Dixie
Fulton-Leigh.” He turned his back to take a step away from this discussion but in every direction he saw Dixie. He shut his eyes and clenched his jaw. “That is, I am not in love with her. Sure I find her attractive, compelling, funny, exciting...but love?”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking of you being in love with Dixie, son, but by that response I have to wonder—”
“Carol?” This he could deal with, had to deal with, so he might as well dive right in. He went to his mother and slumped into the sofa cushion shaped to the width and weight of Sis’s behind. “Is that who you’re talking about? Did you find out she called me today? Well, restarting that dead-end romance was about the farthest thing from—”
“I was thinking about your love for your little girl, Riley.” She put her hand on his arm.
“For Wendy?” He wasn’t sure he understood.
“And for your dear old mother...and even your...your sister.”
“You know?”
“Not the details, but it’s pretty obvious this has something to do with us. I can certainly see where your struggle to do right by all of us has worn you thinner than the sliced ham on a miser’s smorgasbord.”
Riley chuckled. “Is this another listening thing?”
“This is just plain horse sense. You’re less than two weeks from the hearing to ask to sever Marcia’s parental rights. You get a call from your ex-lawyer that you chose to go outside the home to return. When you come back all sullen faced, you’re so distracted you try to have a conversation with Peachie Too.”
The dog lifted its head, looking at Riley quite indignantly and giving something between a woof and a growl.
“The next thing I know, you’ve allowed Dixie to empty out the house so you and I can talk. What else could that be about but Marcia?”
He dropped his hands to his lap and stared at them. For most of his life he’d been able to help his family with these two hands...to work in the mill, to pay the bills, to carry the burdens for the people he loved. Now the rough and calloused fingers looked unsuitable for the tasks ahead of him. This would be a job too big for him to handle with mere hard work and determination. His chest tight,
he bowed his head and drew in a long breath. “Marcia’s back.”
“Back?” Momma clutched at his arm. “Where?”
“I’m not sure yet.” He dragged his knuckle under one eye then looked up. “She called the sawmill. They put her onto Carol, who referred her to my new lawyer.”
“That mystery man you went clear to Jackson to get?”
“Yeah.” Keeping Fulton’s identity a secret from Momma had presented its own unique set of problems, but Riley had managed. “This being Saturday, it’s not likely Marcia could get a hold of him today I may have to do some fancy footwork to track him down myself. So, I wanted to make you aware of all this before I tell him what to do should he hear from her.”
“Do? Riley, honey, you say that like he has choices.”
“He does. He can tell her we’ll see her in court or act as my representative and tell her what we want and what we expect of her and try to negotiate on my behalf, or...”
He could hardly force enough air through his vocal chords to make the sound. His head was spinning as he contemplated what he must propose. He swallowed hard.
Fear and personal pain had no place here. “Or he can give her this address so she can come home to us, Momma.”
“There’s one other thing he can do, son. Something so obvious and simple, I can’t believe you’ve worked yourself into such a state and overlooked it.”
He lifted his gaze to find his mother watching him with a sobering mix of resignation and resolution shining in her eyes.
“He can ask her what she wants.”
“What?” Riley shook his head.
“He can ask her what she wants, why she’s made contact now. It’s the most natural thing in the world for him to do and if he is a good lawyer, he’ll know that. Until someone asks her what she wants, we really shouldn’t rush to any conclusions or let ourselves assume the worst.”