Ella in Bloom

by Shelby Hearon

  He cracked his knuckles, then turned, facing me. “I lost her,” he said, “and it’s hard to say when.”

  I tried to loosen my tight shoulders. I mopped my neck with a Kleenex. “How’s that?” I ventured, cautious.

  He studied my face as he spoke, stopping to see if he was getting through. “I spent all those years working downtown at that firm, making the kind of name or money or both that allowed the kind of life Terrell expected. Then, I don’t know, one day I faced up to the fact I wasn’t working for myself anymore, and not for her and my boys either. I was plain flat-out working for Agatha. I guess I figured when I got Terrell to leave that house and marry me, I’d won. But I hadn’t.”

  I didn’t know what to answer. It gave me a knot in my stomach to think that he’d gone through that, too. To think what it must have been like for him to have impersonated an attorney-at-law down to the tailored suit and rolled leather belt all those years, almost a quarter of a century, trying to be what they expected. It was as if I’d stayed in Texas, having to show up every afternoon in some borrowed, stolen, begged linen dress, my hair properly kempt, my temperament also. I wanted to say to him: My God, how did you do it? “Yes,” I said, and wished I could let him know I understood the way they tried to keep you all your life the person they wanted you to be.

  He took off his glasses and cleaned them. “I told Terrell I had quit the firm. I walked in to where she sat, working out the menu for another sailing weekend supper, and told her. I told my sons. Borden was in his room, trying to polish up an essay that would get him into Yale; Bailey was in his, cramming for his Kaplan SAT course. I told them all. I said, I’m picking up the pieces where I left off. I’m setting up my own practice in my old man’s house. You can stay here, I told them, keep all this.” He looked at me, stricken, his hands flat on his knees as if holding himself in place. “I never dreamed that the boys would end up there, with me, and hating the place.” He sat silent so long I thought maybe I was supposed to comment. But then he went on, in a low voice. “She turned her back on me in bed. She said she’d kill herself before she’d tell her mother I was moving out and going to live with the cedar-choppers north of town.” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “I have to ask myself: did she?”

  I put my hand on his arm. “No,” I said. “No. Everybody feels guilty when someone dies.” Hadn’t I reproached myself again and again for not talking my sister out of that West Texas trip? Not telling her to wait.

  “My boys won’t get over it,” he said.

  “Let’s walk around,” I suggested, pulling down my skirt, wriggling into my sandals and getting up. “Henry says they’ve received a large donation for a hummingbird garden. I’d like to see the area. Besides, it’s a bit cooler when you move around.”

  “How did you feel when Buddy died?”

  “That’s too complicated.” I shook my head. How could I talk about that? “We lived apart longer than we lived together. He never knew his daughter, not really. It’s not the same.”

  “Unresolved?” He took my arm, as if to help me down the path to the lily-pad pond, but more, I suspected, to keep me from turning away.

  “Yes, of course. How can losing someone be otherwise?” But, as he sensed, I didn’t want to deal with the subject anymore.

  “This place have a bathroom?” He looked toward the main house.

  “Inside. And a gift shop where I need to buy a box of notepaper. Let’s clean up a bit here, and then I’ll show you our boundary waters, and the stone church I wrote Mother about.”

  Back in the car, out of the air that felt damp enough to wring out, out of the steamy afternoon sun, I gave a meandering tour of our big muddy Mississippi and of Lake Pontchartrain, with pools of water in between. I wasn’t truthin’, as they said here, but I wasn’t lying either: Terrell might have had this same tour. Between the two high levees that held back the tons of water, it was easy to get a sense of our below-sea-level lowlands, and to feel how temporary and chancy it was to set up residence here.

  “I’d like to tell you what I’m doing,” Red said, after I’d run out of commentary.

  “Do,” I kept hearing a phoebe sing its name over and over.

  “That’s what made the rift, not so much the decision to give up my partnership, but to do full time what she thought I could do pro bono. If I had to get it out of my system, as she put it.”

  I remembered Terrell saying that Rufus had gone strange, that he’d had a midlife crisis.

  “When we were in high school, a bunch of us, kids who thought ourselves activists, went to meet the army of Valley Citrus Workers who walked all the way from the fruit orchards down there in Hidalgo, Cameron, and Willacy Counties—down at the tip of the state—to Austin to petition the governor for better working conditions. Nothing happened, naturally. They got met on the outskirts of town and sent back on their way, to walk the three hundred miles home. We got outraged, drew up petitions. We were going to do something about the workers. Then, you know the way it went, the war came. Nam gave us something worse to protest. Then, after law school, well, their march, and I guess everything we’d said we were going to do, came to seem like all the rest that had gone on in those days—history.”

  I nodded, moved to get this glimpse of him, young, a high school boy, a law student, in a different way.

  “When the killer freeze of 1989 crippled the fruit trees and knocked us out of being one of the top three citrus states in the country, I followed it daily, the thousands out of work, the orchards closed, nobody getting hired back. I wanted to stop what I was working on then, those dozens of ways of keeping and passing on money, and do something. But—” A low sound came from his middle, as if he’d been holding his breath. “By then, my boys were going off to camp. Terrell and I had”—he seemed to choke—“taken up sailing.”

  “I remember the freeze—,” I said.

  “You do? Nobody else paid the least attention. All I got was griping because the price of orange juice had gone up.”

  “Well, but by then I was working to keep a roof over my head, and my small daughter’s head, tending plants. My heart broke for those fruit pickers. If you made a living growing things, you were totally at the mercy of whatever water, sunlight, and weather came along. I read every scrap about that freeze, the ice-coated limbs breaking off when the sun hit, trees dying every night. I still feel it here”—I pressed my chest—“every time some gusty rain upgrades to a tropical storm and upends itself on some cotton field or rice paddy or small truck garden.”

  By this time I’d pulled into the parking lot of the immense old Episcopal church that was a stone-by-stone copy of St. Bartolph’s in Cambridge, where I’d claimed Terrell and I had taken early communion. I was finding it hard to talk about all this while watching for stop signs and fallen branches.

  Red rolled down the passenger window, as if to get some air, although the air-conditioning had kicked in with a dry, chilled breeze. “The catalyst, you could say, was a little item I saw in the paper, about a year ago. Somebody with tech money—more than likely Dell, but it didn’t say so—wanted to provide citrus workers with computers. To enable not just the growers, the owners, but the pickers and packers to trade information with their counterparts in the U.S.—California, Florida—and also in Brazil, China, Spain, and Mexico. They needed a lawyer. I kept reading the thing, just an item. I carried it around. I slept on it; I wrestled with it. I tracked them down, and within a week I’d made up my mind.”

  I tried to get my head around Terrell receiving this news. Rufus deciding to work for citrus farmers. Rufus quitting his gilt-edged firm. I tried to even imagine her, getting in her car, crossing the low-water bridge from West Lake Hills, gunning up the hill to the yellow frame house, to tell our mother the news. “You have to understand,” I said, turning to Red.

  “I think I do.” He leaned against the door, the window rolled back up.

  “You don’t,” I insisted, nearly in tears at how my sister must have felt. �
�Look at me,” I told him. “I’m on the outs with Mother; I don’t see her but twice a decade. But for Terrell’s funeral, at the idea of showing up there for that, even though I knew Mother would be wild with grief, I stole a dress.” I couldn’t believe I was telling him this. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Birdie, who never asked about or even mentioned that black dress. “I did. I walked up the stairs of my favorite client’s house and I took a dress out of her closet.” I could feel my face grow hot. “Don’t you see, Red? If I did that, so as not to upset Mother at a time like that, don’t you see that Terrell just couldn’t tell her about you? She just couldn’t.”

  Red sat staring at me, his face blank. For the longest time he didn’t speak. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. “You sure fooled me, all right,” he said. “I remember thinking, at the service, that you didn’t look like the kid sister I remembered. You looked exactly like the rest of them.”

  I laughed, too, in relief. “I did a pretty good job, didn’t I?”

  14

  My dinner reservation got us a small table in the back corner of the intimate, clearly costly, cafe, done in shades of pink from cameo to salmon, a single tea rose on each white cloth. I hadn’t been out on a real dinner date since Karl sold two houses back-to-back, and despite the serious things Red and I had talked about, or maybe because of them, I felt more than a bit giddy to be there at the Pink Cafe, which I had more or less come to believe I’d invented. But here it was, real, candlelit, and here I was as well. I let out my breath and smiled at Red.

  “This dinner’s mine,” he said. “I invited you.”

  “Thanks,” I told him, then looked up, as we now had a waiter.

  We got a drink, a real drink. Red ordered Scotch on ice, and I, trying to even recall what was out there besides cheap white wine by the glass, ordered a gin and tonic. We considered the menu, where, sure enough, they featured the crab cakes Mayfair had suggested. Also fresh tuna. Also sole and grouper. Just as Terrell had told him: delicious seafood. I chose the chicken with lemon-caper sauce, my mouth actually watering as I read about it.

  “What do you recommend?” Red asked, the question hanging in the air between us.

  I looked up, meeting his eyes. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been here before.” And, as I spoke, I knew I’d already decided to tell him the truth.

  He let his shoulders sag in relief. “Thank you, Ella.”

  Meeting his eyes, I asked, “What do you want from me?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “His name.”

  Of course. The lover’s name. All this had been about that. About the other man. I felt betrayed, though that was foolish. But I did. Felt the way you do in junior high when some guy is hanging out with you, waiting for you between classes, happening to be on his bike in your neighborhood. And then he finally asks you if you think your best friend would go out with him. Felt the way I used to, in Red’s scruffy Peugeot when we’d just started chewing on our hamburgers, at that ratty drive-in by the campus, and he’d ask me: Do you think she’ll ever marry a mutt like me?

  Somehow, in the course of the long afternoon, I’d talked and listened to a lot of stuff, and now I’d thought, I really had, that we were having dinner because we’d done a lot of working through of our somewhat common family, and this was our reward: a cozy table for two, a good strong drink (the gin burned a pleasant path down my throat), a nice dinner to follow, then some rich dessert—with pastry, fruit, a special sauce. Something that, in my world, was scarcer than dry weather on the coast. And we could linger. After all, we were paying for the chairs. We could let the candle burn down, let its smoke mingle with the odor of tea roses.

  But no. With the bird-dog personality of the true lawyer, R. Rufus Hall must have been working toward this request since the moment he waded to my back door. Giving in to anger, not thinking of the consequences, I flared up, “Why? So you can cut his nuts off?” Being crude, realizing too late that I had trapped myself. And Terrell.

  Red flushed. “Help me out here, Ella. Put yourself in my place; no, put yourself in his place.”

  “In his place, I’d change my name and leave the state.” I ran my hand over the heavy white tablecloth, as if patting it. Across the crowded room, happier couples leaned together, hands touching by their butter plates. Damn. Damn me for being lulled.

  “Someone must’ve contacted you when Buddy died.”

  “You think the guy doesn’t know? Of course he knows. She was on her way out there to meet him.” But I was only getting into it deeper.

  “I’m sure he knows. It was in all the papers,” Red agreed. “Those small airplane crashes make the news; chartered planes are the main mode of travel in West Texas.”

  “He could even have come to the funeral. If closure is what you’re thinking about.”

  “He could have. The church was packed.” He faltered, then continued. “She had a great many friends.”

  “She did. More people than I’ve spoken to in my entire life. Let’s leave it, Red. Say the guy came to the service. Say he’s dealing with it the same way we are: as best he can.”

  We stopped and thanked the waiter for my lemon-caper chicken and Red’s fresh tuna, both savory and tender. We poked around at the food with our forks.

  After I’d calmed down, I asked, “Why’d you go through the charade of taking me to dinner, why’d you do the garden show, the boundary-water tour, if you knew about him?”

  He drained his drink and signaled for another. “I didn’t plan it this way, believe me. I suppose I hoped I was wrong, that I’d find she had been here.”

  “You knew better when you drove into my driveway.”

  He raised his hazel eyes to mine. “Tell me about him.”

  “Are you nuts?” I wanted to scream it at him. I could feel very wet tears leaking at the corners of my eyes. How had I got myself into this? “Look,” I bargained, “let me eat my nice chicken dinner—” I wiped my face with the heavy napkin. “Let me spend a lot of time deciding which rich French dessert I’m going to eat. This isn’t a daily thing in my life, Rufus.”

  “Tell me his name.”

  “I don’t know his name.”

  “She had to have told you something, for you to provide her with an alibi—”

  Alibi. Such a lawyer word. “Give me some time,” I said.

  Red called the waiter over and told him that we’d like coffee and to see the dessert menu. I considered everything. The chocolate-covered profiteroles, the caramelized tarte tatin (Mayfair’s choice), the almond crème brûlée. Settling on the pear tart with crème anglaise. Red selected the flour-less hazelnut chocolate cake. Neither of us considered the raspberry, apricot, or guava sorbets.

  We ate our sweets slowly; we drank our hot, strong coffee. We talked about our children.

  “How will it be for Borden,” I asked, “going off next year?”

  “He isn’t bothered, though I would have been, at that age, much as I thought I wanted out of my folks’ house. I guess Bailey’s the one to worry about, suddenly stuck with just his dad.”

  “Maybe that’s why I ran off first—I can’t even imagine being the one kid left at home.”

  “Your daughter,” he said, “is certainly serious about her cello.”

  “She loves it.”

  Red paid the bill; I thanked him.

  When we got outside at the car, I broke down and wept, leaning my head against the driver’s door, unable even to open it. “I betrayed my sister,” I sobbed. “I broke my word.” I could hardly see, and might have stood there all night, but the sky opened up and it began to pour.

  Behind the wheel, I got myself together, put on lipstick. Red slipped out of his damp jacket and shook it. “Don’t think of it that way,” he pleaded. “Don’t, Ella, please. I don’t wish the guy any harm, can you understand that? I got to thinking, after the crash, after I could think straight enough to wonder why she’d chartered a small plane, why she’d gone out in that weather. I made a call; the Odessa Chamb
er knew nothing of a furniture mart, Mexican or otherwise. There had to be somebody she was meeting. That’s all that made sense. It fit. Then, after I got a grasp on that, I thought, what hell, to lose someone and have to go on about your business. You and I, we had a right to grieve. Don’t you see?”

  I took out the barrettes and let my soaked hair loose.

  “This is what I know,” I said at last, worn out with it. “This is all I know. Don’t ask me for any more. She called him … Mr. Emu.” My voice shook and I swallowed twice. “His … daddy grew beef and farmed emus out in Ector County. That’s where our daddy is from. He came from a town called … Notrees.” I bit my lip, trying to see his expression in the dim light. “It began—last summer.”

  Red leaned back against the seat. His eyes were closed. He made a sound in his throat. “His name is Skip Rowland,” he said. “He’s a rancher. They sail on our lake.” He gave the facts in a flat voice, as if working to keep control. “I didn’t—have that figured.”

  For a minute, I felt really sorry for him. I knew how that was. Even if, as he had, you’ve decided to move out on her, or, as I did, you’ve decided to kick the guy out, nevertheless, there is always something in the nature of their choice of someone who isn’t you that drives a knife straight to the heart. It’s as if—the nature of what has gone wrong between you—they need to select that which you don’t possess, have rejected, no longer set store by, and say: This is what I most want. I’d seen it time and again. A woman thinks she can handle it if her husband wants to run off with a bubblehead bimbo half his age, and instead he picks an older woman with a doctorate in a field the wife long ago abandoned. Or a man puts all his energy into making money and buying designer toys and his wife runs off with some kid playing unplugged guitar, the very same instrument her husband sold to buy his first suit. This Mr. Emu, the rancher named Skip, must somehow be the very sort of person that Red had least expected, and could least bear.