“I’m sorry, Richmond. I shouldn’t have yelled at you, or thrown that walnut either. You’ve been a good friend, and I appreciate it.”
Sensing that the danger had passed, he came closer. Then he sat down next to me in the shade of the walnut tree. The summer afternoon heat was getting to him and he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief he’d pulled from his pocket. “Umm, so do you want me to carry you somewhere else? If you point out the sycamore, I can take you to it.”
I pondered what I should do and couldn’t come up with a decent answer. “I’ve gotta tell you, Richmond, I’m not quite sure what to do. I’d only planned the day as far as this. I had it on what I’d taken as good authority that I’d be dead by now.”
I turned my face up toward the top of the tree and cut Mrs. Roosevelt a dirty look. I was happy to still be a part of the world of the living, but I’d gone to a fair amount of trouble to get myself to my sycamore tree—no, walnut tree, thanks to dumb-ass Richmond—so I could pass in peace. Now it looked like it was all for nothing.
I looked around and saw my sycamore tree about fifty yards away, as twisted and beautiful as ever.
Richmond saw where I was staring. “You want to go over there?”
“I don’t think so. It appears I won’t be dying just yet. Let’s go back to the hospital. If we’re lucky, we might make it before James gets back. If he finds out about this, I might die on schedule after all.”
Richmond chuckled.
“I wouldn’t laugh if I was you. After James is done with me, he’ll want a piece of you, too.”
“Well then, we’d better get a move on.” Richmond got up on one knee and then bent and scooped me up from the ground.
“Really, Richmond, I don’t think you have to carry me. I can probably walk, if you help me.”
He began to climb down the hill with me in his arms. “No, no, you’re as light as a feather,” he lied, grunting with every step.
“You know, Richmond, I see why all the women love you so much. You talk a bunch of shit, but you make it sound good.” I wrapped my arms around my accomplice’s thick, muscular neck and enjoyed the bouncy ride.
Over Richmond’s shoulder, I smiled up at my mother in the walnut tree. She gazed back at me, looking as pleasantly surprised as I was to see me leaving this place alive. Then I focused my attention on that bothersome Eleanor Roosevelt, who had caused me so much concern and vexation throughout the year. I wanted her to know, before Richmond carried me out of sight, that she might have had me worried, but she never had me scared.
I balled my hand into a fist and shook it at Mrs. Roosevelt. And, just before Richmond and I reached the tall reed grass at the back end of Mama’s garden, I shouted as loud as my hoarse throat would let me, “I was born in a sycamore tree!”
Chapter 38
My first Sunday back at the All-You-Can-Eat came three weeks after I didn’t die beneath my tree. The restaurant was packed. Every chair in the place, except the ones waiting for James and me, was occupied. And from the unusual amount of trouble even skinny James had squeezing between the patrons, it seemed to me that Little Earl had added some tables to the dining room to handle the increased numbers.
As we made our way through the crowd, folks greeted me like I’d just returned from the battlefield. Erma Mae rushed up to me and kissed me on each cheek. Ramsey Abrams hugged me—a little too tight and a little too long, as usual. Florence Abrams shook my hand and contorted her face into that wince she believed was a smile. Every step we took, somebody stopped me to say how glad they were that I was on the mend. People had done the same thing when I’d returned to church that morning, and I have to admit I was flattered by the attention.
When we finally got to our window table, I took my seat between Clarice and Barbara Jean. James sat down at the men’s end of the table, and we both launched into conversations with our friends.
It was like things had never changed, and it was completely different at the same time. Clarice, bold and braless in a gauzy, shapeless white dress that she wouldn’t have been caught dead in six months earlier, was still the most dedicated gossip I knew. But, courtesy of the Unitarians, she wasn’t so filled up with fury now that every story or observation had to have a bite to it. And Barbara Jean was as beautiful as ever in a pearl-gray dress from her new toned-down and sobered-up collection, but she had a way about her that said maybe her soul was truly at peace for the first time in all the years that I’d known her.
I could hear the usual sports talk coming from the other end of the table. But they’d shuffled up things a bit there, too. Richmond had moved over one chair and now sat in the space that Lester had occupied for years. James sat where Richmond used to sit. And Chick Carlson sat in James’s old spot.
Barbara Jean didn’t talk about the future. She said she planned to take each day as it came. But if you got her alone and pressed her about it, she’d tell you that what was happening—her and Chick together, trying to learn to be happy—was a miracle.
I didn’t argue with Barbara Jean, but I’d grown partial to Mama’s take on that topic. What we call miracles is just what’s supposed to happen. We either go with it or stand in its way. It seemed to me that Barbara Jean had just finally stopped getting in the way of what was meant to be. But what did I know? I’d chosen to go with the flow and I’d ended up letting the drunken ghost of a former first lady convince me that I was about to die.
When we headed to the buffet line, we found the pickings pretty slim. Erma Mae saw me spooning the last of the braised short ribs from a tray. She said, “We’ll have some more soon. We thought we’d have a busy day today, but we didn’t plan on this kinda crowd showin’ up. It’s like they all marked the date on their calendars and ran straight over here from church to see the show.”
That was when I remembered. One year ago, Minnie McIntyre had announced to everyone that her spirit guide, Charlemagne the Magnificent, had put her on notice that she had a maximum of 365 days to live. Now the All-You-Can-Eat was full of people who’d come to see how Minnie was going to deal with waking up alive a year later.
Little Earl hustled out of the kitchen with an overflowing tray of short ribs. He saw me and said, “Hey, Odette, good to have you back.” He put the tray on the steam table with one hand while sliding out the empty tray with the other in one smooth, practiced motion. He said, “It’s crazy in here today. Sorry I can’t stay and talk.” Then he rushed back into the kitchen.
Erma Mae shook her head. “He’s not sorry at all. He’s tickled pink to have this crowd. Maybe we can persuade Minnie to predict her death every Sunday. That way we could retire in another year.” Then someone waved at her from the cash register and she hurried away.
All six of us filled our plates and headed back to our table. As soon as we sat, Clarice said, “I talked to Veronica last night.” Veronica had started speaking to Clarice again immediately after everything went so wrong at the wedding. She’d been calling Clarice just about every day since then to vent some steam about what Minnie had done to her with her bad predictions.
“Is Veronica doing any better?” Barbara Jean asked.
“A little. She’s still too embarrassed to leave the house, but she got a new prescription for nerve pills and she doesn’t talk about murdering Minnie quite so much. Now she does a fair amount of inappropriate giggling instead. It’s creepy, but I suppose it’s an improvement.”
“I’m surprised she isn’t here today. I’d think she’d want to be on the scene to hear Minnie try to explain being alive. It might give her a bit of satisfaction,” I said.
Clarice said, “No, she’s determined to lay low until people forget about the wedding.”
“She’ll have a hell of a long wait on her hands,” I said. “I heard a rumor that the wedding photographer was selling his footage to America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
Clarice and Barbara Jean both squealed, “Really?”
“Well, no,” I confessed. “But a girl can dream.”
Clarice said, “Not so good. I haven’t seen her, but, according to Veronica, she’s locked herself in her room and only comes out to shoot evil looks at her mother. On top of that, her hypnosis is wearing off, so she’s struggling to stay away from the sweets. It’s not easy for her, depressed as she is, living with three hundred servings of wedding cake in the deep freezer down in the basement.”
Then Clarice said, “Excuse me for a second.” She lightly rapped on the table with her knuckles and cleared her throat. When she had everyone’s attention, she said, “Richmond,” then she extended her right hand, palm up.
Richmond tried his unconvincing innocent look for a few seconds. Then he slid a large serving of banana pudding out from beneath his napkin where he had been hiding it. He stood and brought the pudding to the other end of the table, depositing it in the hand of his part-time wife.
Chick and James laughed at him and started in with the teasing as soon as Richmond sat back down in his chair. But Richmond just grinned and said, “What can I say? My woman wants me to live.”
Clarice and Richmond seemed to have come to an understanding. Clarice had gotten over worrying about going to hell for wanting love without misery, and Richmond had given up fighting for a return to the life they had led before she left him. I was happy to see it. I loved Clarice, of course, and Richmond Baker was all right by me, too.
The main reason I’d chosen Richmond to take me out of the hospital and to my sycamore tree was that he was physically the strongest person I knew. Fifty-seven years old and every inch of him still bulged with muscle. Also, of all my friends, Richmond had shown himself the most willing to do things that other people thought were wrong. But it turned out he had some other valuable qualities.
For one, years of sneaking around had taught Richmond how to keep his mouth shut. We made it back to the hospital that day before anyone else returned. I did some apologizing to my doctor and Richmond did some flirting with the nurses. And by the time James, the Supremes, my brother, and my kids came back, an agreement had been struck with the hospital personnel to pretend my escape had never happened.
I thought about telling James what I had done. But I decided it would be better for everyone, especially me, if I didn’t. The way I figured it, James had enough on his plate. He was a good husband whose wife had cancer. He was a lawman who had to go on pretending, at least a little while longer, that he didn’t know I was smoking marijuana every day. And now James also had to deal with having a chorus line of dead folks dancing in and out of his life. No, that whole thing about my escape to Leaning Tree was something me and my new buddy, Richmond, would keep to ourselves.
Someone shouted, “There’s Minnie,” and Clarice lost any concern for Richmond’s diet, Barbara Jean quit gazing at Chick, and I stopped mulling over my own little secrets. Along with everybody else in the All-You-Can-Eat, we stared out the window at the house across the street.
I scanned the front of Minnie’s house and still didn’t see a thing. “Where is she?” I asked.
“Look up,” Barbara Jean said. “She’s on the roof.”
Sure enough, there was Minnie. She was crawling, rear end first, out of a second-floor window and onto the wedge of roof above the front porch.
“What on earth is she doing?” Clarice asked as we watched Minnie gain her footing on the slanted shingles. Balancing up there had to have been a tough task since, in addition to her purple fortune-telling robe with the signs of the zodiac pasted all over it and her white turban, she was wearing her satin Arabian slippers with the curled-up toes.
“I believe she’s fixin’ to jump,” I said.
Barbara Jean said, “That’s a long way to go to make a prediction come true. If she goes through with it, you have to admire her dedication to her work.”
Clarice rolled her eyes. “Oh please, she’ll never jump. You know as well as I do that Minnie McIntyre won’t die until she contracts some lingering mystery disease that she can whine about for decades till somebody snaps under the strain of listening to her running her mouth and smothers her with a pillow.” She snatched a chicken finger off my plate and bit into it.
I said, “Sounds like you’ve given this a bit of thought, Clarice. What happened to that fresh, mellow outlook on life you said the Unitarians were giving you?”
“I haven’t been a Unitarian long,” she responded, waving the stub of the chicken finger. “I’ve still got some work to do.”
Always the most charitable of the Supremes, Barbara Jean said, “Someone really should go over there and talk her down.”
But no one moved. I’m sure Barbara Jean knew even as she said it that she’d be hard-pressed to find a soul in town who would try to talk Minnie McIntyre out of leaping. In that very room was an assortment of people who would gladly climb onto that roof with her, but only to give her a shove, convinced that they were doing the world a favor by hastening her departure. No, these folks were not a crowd of likely suicide prevention counselors.
Minnie stood now with her arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross, her purple robe billowing in the breeze like the sails of a ship. A particularly strong gust came along and snatched the turban off her head. When she tried to grab for it, she pitched forward so awkwardly that everyone gasped. Minnie wobbled for a few seconds, but soon righted herself. Then she stuck her arms out and struck her martyr pose again, looking angry and defiant as the little wisps of gray hair that poked out from the hairnet she’d worn under her turban danced in the wind.
We all watched for a while longer. Then Little Earl, who had been summoned from the kitchen by his wife, let out a groan. “I guess I better go have a talk with her.” He took off his apron and came out from behind the steam tables. But he halted at the front door when he saw that someone had appeared on Minnie’s lawn and was having a lively conversation with her.
A slim young woman carrying a pale pink cardboard box labeled “Donut Heaven” under her left arm stood in the center of the lawn. She was wearing a long white dress that looked like it had seen better days. Strips of cloth hung from the ragged hem of the dress, like somebody had taken scissors to it. Stains of assorted sizes and colors dotted the fabric. At first it seemed she and Minnie were having a casual conversation, but then the young woman began to shake an upraised fist in Minnie’s direction. Suddenly it was clear that the exchange they were having was anything but casual.
Clarice said, “I can’t believe it. It’s Sharon.”
I squinted and saw that it was, indeed, Sharon, the almost-wife of the now re-incarcerated Clifton Abrams. As I watched, Sharon’s movements graduated from testy to furious. Now, instead of a fist, she jabbed her middle finger up toward the old woman.
Clarice said, “I should call Veronica.” She twisted around to get at the pocketbook that hung on the back of her chair and fished inside until she found her phone. Then she dialed her cousin.
“Hi, Veronica, it’s me. I’m having supper at the All-You-Can-Eat and Sharon just showed up … No, she’s not having supper with us. She’s across the street and it appears she’s having words with Minnie … Uh-huh … And, Veronica, she’s in her wedding gown … Really? Every day? … Well, right now she’s just standing there yelling at Minnie with a Donut Heaven box under her arm.”
The shriek that came from the other end of the phone line at the mention of Donut Heaven was so loud that Clarice jerked the phone as far away from her head as the length of her arm would let her. When the wailing subsided, Clarice put the phone back to her ear. She listened for a moment and then told Veronica, “I can’t really say for sure from this distance, but my guess would be it’s the family-size box.” Another shriek. This one came and went too quickly for Clarice to pull the phone away. She listened for a few seconds longer and then turned off her phone. Then, to us, Clarice said, “She’ll be right over.”
We continued to watch the spectacle across the street. The restaurant w
as so quiet now and Sharon was yelling so loud that we could hear an occasional word even though she was dozens of yards away and separated from us by a thick pane of glass. Her gestures got bigger as she became angrier. She escalated things by opening the donut box, removing a long chocolate éclair, and lobbing it at Minnie like a javelin, which drove the audience in the restaurant to hoots of amusement and shock. The pastry sailed wide of its target and missed by two feet. Minnie made an obscene hand signal back at Sharon and then they screamed at each other for a while longer. Little Earl sighed again and opened the restaurant’s front door to go outside and play referee.
Clarice, Barbara Jean, and I glanced at each other, each of us trying to come up with an excuse for following Little Earl across the street that didn’t seem like pure nosiness.
Barbara Jean got there first. She said, “I hope Veronica gets here soon. Sharon needs family with her.”
Clarice said, “I would love to offer her a shoulder to cry on, but I’m afraid she’d believe I was just butting in. And I wouldn’t want Veronica to think I was overstepping. You know how she can be.”
“Nonsense,” I countered. “When you’re a blood relative it’s not butting in. It’s a family responsibility.”
“And a Christian duty,” added Barbara Jean.
Clarice asked, “Do you really think so?” She said it like she still had to be persuaded, but she was already standing up to leave, her eyes fixed on the front door.
Barbara Jean said, “I’ll go with you … for moral support.”
Not one to be left out of a mission of Christian mercy, I tagged along. In fact, I nearly beat Clarice to the door.
When we got to Minnie’s yard, Little Earl had taken off his All-You-Can-Eat cap and was fanning his face with it. He said, “Miss Minnie, please, just go on back inside the house. We can have a cool drink and work this out.”
The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat Page 32