by Anne George
I shook my head no to Mitzi who nodded and continued the scratching.
“He’s at University Hospital. Meemaw Turkett had what they think is a stroke and he’s down there.”
“Meemaw had a stroke? A bad one?”
“I don’t know any of the details except she’s at University.”
“Well, Lord, I hate to hear that.” He sounded like he truly was upset. Sometimes I like Jed Reuse.
“I hate it, too. She was here this afternoon and looked terrible. I never should have let her go out in the heat.”
“You let her go out? It’s a hundred and two right now.”
Sometimes I dislike Jed Reuse.
“Well, you can find them down at University.”
He thanked me and I hung up. “Jackass.”
“The sheriff?”
I nodded. “Thank the Lord he and Haley didn’t hit it off. Gives me the shivers to think she might be marrying him tomorrow instead of Philip.”
“Speaking of which, what are you wearing to the wedding?”
“I haven’t decided other than a whole lot of green makeup.”
“It’ll be fine.” Mitzi got up, gave Muffin a final pat, and hugged me. “Call me if you want some company.”
“I’m fine,” I said. The truth was I was so teary I could hardly see the celery I was trying to cut.
After the salad was in the refrigerator, though, I knew I had to make some decisions about the wedding. At least about what I was going to wear. I went into the middle bedroom and opened the closet door. This is where Fred and I keep what I still think of as our “dress-up” clothes.
I’ve never been able to figure out why people who built houses fifty years ago didn’t think closets were important. One little, and I do mean little, closet in each bedroom. I’ve read articles on organizing them, bought shelves and rods from Kmart so I can hang skirts above blouses. But it boils down to three little closets. And in the one where I was looking, nothing looked like what I needed for a daughter’s wedding during a heat wave. Not that anybody would notice anything about me except the knot on my head—I looked in the mirror—and oh, God, the black eye. Definitely the left eye was much darker than the right. I rushed into the bathroom and turned on the fluorescent light. No question about it. My daughter was getting married and moving halfway around the world, I had nothing to wear to the wedding, and I had a black eye. Well, hell. Time for some regrouping here.
I went to the freezer and got the last box of Girl Scout chocolate mint cookies and turned on the Movie Channel. Fort Apache was playing, with Henry Fonda, John Wayne, and Shirley Temple. Imaginative casting. I sat back, watched the movie, ate cookies, and simply waited for whatever was going to happen next in my life.
Which, of course, was a call from Sister. She was stuck at the hospital since Ray had gone to see Sheriff Reuse. She would be waiting outside for me in fifteen minutes. Fifteen. It was too hot to be kept waiting on the sidewalk in the sun.
“How’s Meemaw?” I asked.
“Not too good. I think they’re about to settle on a heatstroke. Fifteen minutes.”
Okay. I turned off Fort Apache. It hadn’t been hard to figure out what was going to happen to the Indians. Then I got my keys and headed for University Hospital.
No Mary Alice. I cruised slowly down Nineteenth Street past the front of the hospital, checked my watch. Maybe she had meant the emergency room exit. I turned on Sixth Avenue. A couple of ambulances were parked under the emergency room portico with people scurrying around, but no one was standing on the sidewalk. I went around the block. I went around the block five times, slowly. This is one of the most heavily traveled blocks in Birmingham. Consequently, I received several obscene gestures, a couple of them very imaginative, from other drivers. The sixth time around, I turned, came back the other way, and pulled in beside a valet parking sign. A man sat in a little booth furnished with a chair, a TV, and an air conditioner that was chugging rusty rivulets down the outside wall. Behind him were rows and rows of keys.
He raised a window and said, “Lady, I’m full up.”
“So am I,” I said. As I got out of the car and left it, I saw he was watching Fort Apache.
I jaywalked across Nineteenth, causing a few more gestures. My sandals stuck to the hot pavement with each step, pop, pop, against my heels. The cool lobby of the hospital was a blessing.
The woman at the information desk looked up in alarm. “The emergency room’s down yonder, honey.” She pointed toward a corridor clearly marked EMERGENCY. “You need some help getting there? It’s a pretty long way.”
“I’m fine,” I assured her. “I just had a fall last night.”
“You sure did. What happened?” She wasn’t being nosy; she really wanted to know. And if I had told her, not only would she have understood, but would probably have had an aunt who had the same thing happen to her: “Right over a turkey, smack in the middle of a family reunion.”
I swear I love this place.
But I didn’t have time for conversation. “Fell on my sister’s steps,” I said. “And I’m okay.”
“Stove up, I’ll bet.”
“You got that right.” I moved my shoulders stiffly to assure her that I was, indeed, stove up. “I’m looking for my sister. She was supposed to be out on the sidewalk for me to pick up and I’ve been around the block so many times I’m getting dizzy.”
“Could be a concussion.”
“No. I’m okay. I just need to find my sister. She’s here with a woman named Mary Louise Turkett. They brought her in this afternoon. Heatstroke, they think.”
“I’ll check.” The woman, whose name tag identified her as Grace Oliver, picked up her phone. “Myrtice? It’s Grace.” A pause. “Lord, don’t I know it. A hundred and four last I heard.” She settled back for a good talk.
I unstuck my sandals from the tile floor. The noise reminded her of the reason for her call.
“Listen, I’ve got a lady here looking for her sister. Name’s something like Turkey. Heatstroke. She in the emergency room?”
“Turkett,” I said. “Mary Louise Turkett. She’s the patient. My sister’s with her.”
“Mary Louise Turkett,” Grace relayed. She smiled at me and mouthed, “Just a minute.” Then, “Out of the emergency room? Okay. Thanks, Myrtice.” Grace hung up the phone. “She’s in intensive care on the seventh floor.”
“Thanks.” I headed for the elevator, slightly worried about Mary Alice. She had been so emphatic about the fifteen minutes and usually she’s punctual. But as I walked into the intensive care waiting room, there she sat at a card table, playing gin rummy with Kerrigan and Howard.
Kerrigan saw me first. “Good Lord, Mrs. Hollowell. What happened to you?”
“I fell last night.”
Sister looked up. “Is it fifteen minutes already?”
“Many fifteen minutes.”
“Gin.” She put her cards down; Kerrigan and Howard groaned.
“She’s been whipping our tails off,” Howard said.
I sank down on a sofa. “How’s your mother?”
“Pretty sick,” Howard said. “They’re pumping her full of stuff.”
Sister shuffled the cards. “Doing something with electric lights.”
“Electrolytes?”
“Whatever. I’m no doctor.” Sister handed Kerrigan the cards. “Nora, Eddie’s wife, is in there with her now.”
Kerrigan began to deal the cards. “Nora was at the house when Mama showed up sick. She and Eddie are temporarily separated, but she was there picking some clothes up. She was the one who called 911.” Kerrigan stopped. “You want me to deal you in, Mrs. Hollowell?”
I shook my head no.
“Personally,” Kerrigan continued, “I think Nora was there looking for Sunshine. They’re real close. Nora’s the one who helped her in the Miss Alabama contest.”
This caught my interest. “Sunshine was in the Miss Alabama contest?”
Kerrigan nodded. “Last year an
d this year. Last year she was a brunette and didn’t make the finals. So this year she went blonde. Still didn’t make the finals.”
Everybody picked up their cards and started sorting them.
“What’s her talent?” I asked.
“Fly-fishing,” Howard said. “She’s great at it.”
I thought about the stage at Samford University where the Miss Alabama contests are held. Fly-fishing?
“They play the music from A River Runs Through It and Sunshine does a little dance while she flips the rod and hits targets. This year she and Nora decided to do away with the waders and have her wear a bathing suit, but she still didn’t make it to the finals.” Kerrigan reached over and drew a card. “She wasn’t too disappointed. She had the trip to Bora Bora coming up.”
I got up and walked to the window. Everything seemed normal down there on Nineteenth. Across the street my car was gone from the valet parking booth. And I had no parking ticket, no way to identify it.
“Has anybody heard from Sunshine?” I asked.
“Nope. Gin.” Howard slapped his cards down.
“Where are Pawpaw and Eddie?”
“Eddie had to go back to work, and we decided not to tell Pawpaw until we know what’s what because of his spells,” Kerrigan explained.
“How did you do that so soon?” Sister asked Howard. “You really got me that time.”
A young couple pushed an elderly woman in a wheelchair into the waiting room.
“We’ve got to go, Sister,” I said. “By the time we locate my car, we’re going to be in rush hour traffic.”
“Okay.” Mary Alice pushed back her chair. “Y’all call us if we can do anything or if there’s any change.”
“We will,” Kerrigan promised. “And you let us know if Junior Reuse wanted anything important with Ray.”
“I will. I doubt he did, though. That man just likes to have people roll over when he says to.”
“God’s truth,” Kerrigan agreed.
I apologized to them both for letting their mother go out in the heat.
Howard smiled. “Don’t blame yourself. I’d like to have seen you try to stop her.”
This assuaged my guilt slightly. Enough so that in the elevator when Mary Alice turned to me and said, “Fly-fishing?” I burst out laughing. We were laughing so hard when the elevator opened in the lobby, we were hanging onto each other. Everyone, I’m sure, thought we were crying. Which was more appropriate, given the location.
We jaywalked back across Nineteenth and rapped on the window of the valet parking booth.
“I need my car,” I said. “A blue eighty-eight Chevy.”
“Where’s your ticket?”
“You know I don’t have one.”
“Gotta have a ticket.” He shut the window and turned back to his TV. Mary Alice opened the window, lifted several sets of keys from the wallboard, and dropped them into her purse.
“A blue eighty-eight Chevy?” the man asked. “I think I remember.”
When he brought the car up, Mary Alice rewarded him with the keys she had snitched and a five-dollar bill. Then we got in and hauled.
“What did Meemaw want to tell you?” I asked her as we headed up the mountain.
“I don’t know. All she kept saying was ‘Sunshine turkey.’ Just over and over, ‘Sunshine turkey.’ Didn’t make sense.”
“Well, maybe it did. Maybe she was saying that Sunshine left the turkey on your front porch. When I mentioned the turkey, she said that was what Gabriel had sent her to find out.”
“Find out what?”
“Gabriel wanted her to know that someone left a turkey on your front steps. I think.”
“Why?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I’m not a channeler.” I thought for a moment. “And this whole thing is tacky. I hate to say it, Sister, because they’re your in-laws, but I think our dear mother would have said that whole Turkett bunch is common as pig tracks.”
I didn’t get the reaction I had expected. “You’re right,” Sister agreed. “But you’ve got to admit our holidays are going to be interesting from now on. Think about it.”
I didn’t want to.
Every sprinkler was on in the Redmont area where Mary Alice lives. Hers are timed to come on, rain or shine, as I assume most of the others are, too. It’s disconcerting during a thunderstorm to see water shooting up from the ground.
“Want to come have supper with us?” I asked. “Shrimp salad.”
“Thanks, but Bill and Ray and I are going somewhere. Maybe that new Chinese place at Brookwood.”
I pulled into her driveway and stopped. “This time tomorrow, Haley will be married,” I said.
“And maybe by this time tomorrow Sheriff Reuse will know which one of the Turketts killed the Indian, and Sunshine can come home.”
“You really think it was one of the Turketts?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Which one is your money on?”
“Howard.”
“Why?”
“He’s the quietest one. That’s always the way it works, Mouse.”
“And why did Howard kill him?”
“Now that I don’t know.” Sister opened the door and got out. “But I was watching him while we played gin. He’s the one, all right. Even his eyes are a little shifty.”
“Call the sheriff and tell him. Make his day.”
“That martinet? He can do his own work.”
I drove back down the mountain, past the statue of Vulcan with its huge bare butt reflecting the late afternoon sunlight, down streets lined with trees somnolent in the heat. Fred’s car was in our driveway; I was home.
Fifteen
Fred greeted me when I opened the door with “That cat was on the table when I came in.” He was reading the paper in his recliner, an open beer on the table beside him. Across from him, on the sofa, Muffin, erect as an Egyptian cat, sat watching his every move. “He didn’t get down when I told him to.”
“It’s a she, and don’t scare her. She’s bound to be nervous in a strange place. I’ll teach her not to get on the table.” I sat down beside Muffin who immediately jumped down and disappeared into the hall.
“Ha.” Fred put down the paper and looked at me. And then looked more carefully. “Your eye’s getting black.”
“I know. Down at University Hospital, they thought I belonged in the emergency room.”
Fred looked alarmed. “You’ve been to the hospital?”
“To get Mary Alice.” I told him about Meemaw’s visit and her heatstroke, about driving at least twenty times around the hospital waiting for Mary Alice to show up, and—at this I teared up—about having nothing to wear to the wedding tomorrow and looking awful.
Fred straightened his chair with a clunk, dropped the newspaper onto the floor, and came over to hold me. “Don’t cry, honey. That won’t do a thing but make your eye swell up more.”
Which was true. Sad but true. I burrowed my head against his chest. He smelled like sweat and Gain detergent and the metals in his warehouse. I could hear the loud thump and the softer thump of his heart, steady, rhythmical. I could go to sleep, I thought. Right here. Right now.
“Let’s go look in the good closet and see what we can find. How about the dress you wore to Debbie’s wedding? That was pretty.”
“Too dressy.”
“Your red suit?”
“Too hot.” Yes, indeed, I could go to sleep right here.
“Well, let’s go look. Or we can go down to the mall tonight and get you something.”
“Okay.” But I held on to him for a few more minutes before I let him move.
“What about this?” He pulled a green linen jacket from the closet while Muffin and I sat on the bed and watched. “Don’t you have a white skirt?”
“An off-white.”
“That’ll look good.”
I was beginning to feel more interested. “And I’ve got an off-white blouse. Almost the same off-white as the skirt.”
&nbs
p; “Let’s see it.”
In a moment, my wedding outfit lay on the bed.
“Now you can help me,” Fred said.
“How about a navy jacket and khaki pants?” I was safe; that’s what he always wears.
I don’t know why I thought the night would be busy. As it was, it was very quiet. I went out and walked Woofer around the yard a little and then brought him into the house for a visit and to meet Muffin. The cat bristled a little when she saw Woofer, but he couldn’t have cared less that a cat was in his house. He drank some water and went into the den to lie across the air-conditioning vent, ignoring her.
We ate our shrimp salad and watched the ball game. Around nine o’clock Haley called to say she was still doing last-minute things. I didn’t tell her about Meemaw.
“You need me to come over in the morning?” I asked. “Help you get ready?”
“Maybe get to the church a little early to check me out. We’re not making this a big deal.”
But it was a big deal. A very big deal that would change all of our lives.
“Haley,” I told Fred as I hung up. He nodded but didn’t say anything. Wise man.
The Braves trounced San Francisco but Fred didn’t see it. Sometime during the seventh inning he began to snore. After the ten o’clock news (the weather was the number-one story), I woke him up to go to bed. I thought I would have trouble going to sleep, but the steady hum of the air conditioner was soothing. Muffin joined us, but Fred didn’t know. As for me, I liked her purring.
The sound of the doorbell was part of my dream. I was at a wedding and a bell was ringing.
“What’s that?” Fred grumbled. “The doorbell?”
It rang again. This time both of us came straight up. I turned on the light. Three o’clock. “Don’t open it,” I said to Fred who was looking for his robe. “It could be one of those home invaders. Some of them ring the doorbell.”
“Home invader, hell. It better be an emergency.”
Oh, God. An emergency. I grabbed my robe and followed.
Fred turned on the porch light and looked through the peephole.
“It’s Sunshine,” he announced.
“At three o’clock in the morning?”