When I woke up the next morning, Grandma was sitting at my place at the table and Mom was already on the phone.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked Grandma.
“He’s already left. Poor man, he’s wearing his suit and trying to act like he still has a job. He doesn’t fool me, though.”
I raised my eyebrows at Mom and she just shook her head at me with the receiver still at her ear. Eventually, she said good-bye and hung up the phone. “What’s up with her?” I whispered to Mom, jerking my head toward Grandma.
“I have no idea. Your dad just went to work as usual.” Mom gave me her wry smile that said, “Just go with it.” “Anyhow, I was talking to your grandmother’s doctor,” she continued. Turning to Grandma, she put her own hand over my grandmother’s wrinkled one. “We think that maybe your medication is too strong. The doctor is going to see what he can do.”
Grandma nodded but didn’t seem to be paying a lot of attention, instead staring out the window at the squirrel dangling off the bird feeder.
“Did you talk to Lucy this morning?” I asked.
“Yes. She’s coming home as soon as she can get a leave. She didn’t want to say what was wrong, but she definitely needs to talk about something. She said she could catch military planes across the country and eventually get here.”
I yawned and stretched; then Mom said, “You’d better get dressed. Father Whippet will be here soon.”
“Mom,” I said slowly, “I saw something kind of strange at the church yesterday.” I told her about the papers with sex acts drawn on them and Father Whippet and his secretary, Shirley, coming out of the bathroom together. Then I told her about the “secret” meeting at St. Peter’s.
I waited for Mom to reprimand me for gossiping. I should have counted on her naturally suspicious mind. “Father Whippet has recently started a meeting group for women over the age of sixty,” she mused, “but I’m not sure why they would all get their hair done just to needlepoint pew cushions. And at Evan’s wedding . . .” She trailed off there. I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. We sipped coffee in silence until Mom started thinking out loud. “The old gals have been looking pretty good lately. Even that Sophie Mearston. She’s lost weight and started dyeing her hair.” Then she shook her head. “No, it’s just not possible. This town is too small. If something were happening it would be all over the place and I haven’t heard a word.”
I went to get dressed thinking that if I were having an affair with snaggle-toothed Father Whippet I wouldn’t be advertising it either. I came downstairs and almost tripped over Buddy.
“Did anyone take Buddy out yet?” I hollered into the kitchen. Mom came into the hallway and handed me the leash. Of course no one had walked the dog yet. Hey, it was only 11 a.m. He had probably been dancing around for hours. I clipped his leash on and he dragged me out the door and down the steps. Once he had relieved himself, we walked at a slightly more sedate pace. It was a sunny, humid day. Muskegon never got too hot because of what is called the “lake effect.” The winds blew across Lake Michigan to cool us. We never got tornadoes, either. The theory was that they blew in over the lake, hit the sand dunes, bounced up and over us, and then landed in Kalamazoo. I’m not sure I believed that, but the fact remained that we hadn’t had a tornado in my memory.
I walked down the tree-lined street enjoying the wind rustling the leaves above my head. Ahead of me, there was a group of kids playing street hockey. One of them was using a skateboard to hustle back and forth with his stick.
“Hey, no fair,” I said good-naturedly. “You can outrun everyone.” The kid stopped and I recognized him as the little brother of one of my friends.
“Can I borrow your dog?” he asked.
“What for?”
“So he can pull me around on my skateboard.”
This seemed like a fair request, so I turned over the leash and went to sit on the curb. Buddy pulled the kid up and down the block while the other kids leaped and hollered next to them. Finally they pulled up next to me, Buddy panting, his mouth pulled back in a dog grin.
“Want a turn?” the kid asked.
I considered. It sure looked like fun, and nobody was around to see me doing such a childish thing.
“Okay.” I got to my feet.
“Just hang on to the leash and try to stay on the skateboard,” my munchkin instructor informed me. I got on the bright orange board and took Buddy’s leash. The dog started out at a slow trot. Hey, this is pretty fun, I thought. We were just passing the Worthingtons’ house when Buddy spotted a squirrel in the street. He took off like a rocket. Our speed was building at an alarming rate. The skateboard was vibrating violently under my sneakers.
“Let go of the leash!” the kids yelled after me.
My wrist was firmly looped through the leash and I couldn’t get my hand out. The squirrel decided staying on the street wasn’t the best course of action. It veered up the curb and across the sidewalk. Buddy followed him, and that was the last thing I remembered.
I woke up sprawled on the grass between the curb and the sidewalk. Little heads came into focus above me. “Hey, lady, are you alive?” one of them asked. “We called nine-one-one for you. Somebody will be here soon.”
Bright blue stars were pinging in front of my eyes. I idly thought, Wow, you really do see stars.
“Why did you put your hand through the loop on the leash?” the little kid said reproachfully. “You’re not supposed to do that.”
That would have been a good tip to give me before I got on the skateboard.
“You hit that curb going about a hundred miles an hour, and boy, did you fly.”
Marv Carson arrived with his siren blaring. He took one look at me sprawled in the grass and sighed. “You okay?” he asked, leaning out of the driver’s-side window.
I sat up and rubbed my head. “Yeah, I think so. My knees are pretty skinned up.”
Marv opened the car door, got out, and extended a hand to me. I hauled myself up with it. “Why is it I always find the Thompson girls knocked out cold on the street?”
I wobbled to the car. “Oh, come on. It’s been a good ten years since that happened.”
Marv let me in the front and then pushed Buddy into the back. “Maybe. But it doesn’t seem to happen to any other family. You never see the Keene girls flattened out like road kill.”
The last such incident had started with clothes and a crush. It was Sammie. In a town that boasted only J. C. Penney and Sears, it was hard to find clothes to express your individuality, so Sammie took to embroidering her faded Levi’s with elaborate, colorful stitching. Every girl in town copied her style. Finally, a clothing boutique called JayJay’s opened up downtown and Sammie was first in line to get a job there. She took most of her payment in clothing. All this was to win over a cute senior nicknamed Poodle because of his bushy hair. Sammie would sashay around the high school twitching her tiny butt and enjoying the fact that her platform shoes made her five feet five instead of five feet tall. Poodle never seemed to notice her, not even when she batted her blue-mascara’d eyelashes at him. She was a lowly sophomore and he was an almighty senior. Sammie’s best friends, Diana and Jenny, tried to tell Sammie she was acting like an infatuated idiot. Even practical Elizabeth, who was also a senior, warned Sammie that the guy just wasn’t interested. Nothing sank in. Sammie was in love.
One fine spring day she was walking home from school. She knew that Poodle would soon be taking the same route home in his Trans Am. She heard a car behind her and concentrated on trying to swish her nonexistent hips. Unfortunately, what happened next still makes Sammie blush to this day. Just as Poodle was passing her and she raised her hand to give a casual wave, her baby blue suede platform shoe caught in the hem of her gigantic elephant bell-bottoms. She flipped forward and hit her head on the curb. She woke up with her notebooks scattered around her, to find a concerned Marv Carson standing above her. Poodle had never even slowed down. We would have liked to think that he hadn’t s
een the incident, but we knew better. He was just as embarrassed as Sammie at her graceless exhibition.
Marv started toward my house. “That dog is dangerous,” he said as he pulled into the driveway. “You okay to make it inside?”
“Yeah.” I grabbed the door handle.
“I’m pleased you had Buddy on a leash.”
“That leash almost killed me,” I said as I pulled Buddy out of the backseat.
Mom, Father Whippet, and Grandma were sitting in the living room holding cups and saucers. The only time I saw a saucer in our house was when we had company. I waved but they all just stared at me.
“Jeannie, what on earth happened to you?” Mom gasped.
I looked down at myself. My knees were bleeding, my shorts were ripped, and there was grass in my hair.
“Nothing, why?” I fled up the stairs and sat on the toilet seat. I picked the gravel out of my knees and applied Bactine and bandages.
“Jeannie? Jeannie? Come down and say hello to Father Whippet,” Mom called from the bottom of the stairs. I rolled my eyes up at the bathroom ceiling. I changed into jeans and a clean shirt and made my way into the living room.
“Hi.” I gave a brief wave to the good Father, who was sitting on Mom’s uncomfortable Eastlake chair. He lifted his coffee cup to me in response. The four of us fell into a strained silence.
“More coffee?” Mom offered.
“No, thank you,” Father Whippet demurred. He probably wanted this torment to end as soon as possible, too.
“Do you find me attractive?” Grandma piped up. Mom and I exchanged a startled look. Grandma had been paying more attention to our conversation this morning than we had thought. I noticed Grandma had unbuttoned a few too many buttons of her housecoat and was now displaying an alarming amount of long bosom. She squeezed her arm against the side of her breast to perk it up and leaned toward Father Whippet with a faint leer.
There was no right answer to that question. Buddy solved Father Whippet’s problem by wandering into the living room and puking at his feet.
“Oh Lord.” Mom got to her feet. “Jeannie, get that dog outside.”
I hauled Buddy by his collar to the back door and pushed him out. He meandered next door to the Longs’ lawn. When I got back to the living room, Mom was scrubbing the carpet and apologizing to Father Whippet.
“Don’t be silly.” Father Whippet rose and put his coffee cup on the table. “I’ll just see myself out, if you don’t mind.” He was clearly relieved that he could make his escape.
“How did he act?” I asked Mom after he departed.
“Just like he normally does,” Mom said as she cleared the coffee cups.
“Ill at ease and kind of sanctimonious?”
“Jeannie, don’t say unkind things about people,” Mom said, opening the dishwasher. “We did get into a bit of an argument though. He probably thinks I’m an opinionated old lady.”
Mom always imagined she was doing something wrong. If she had an opinion, she thought of it as an insult to any person who might have a differing point of view. She’d speak her mind but then worry it to death for the next week. Or the next decade. “Oh, they must think I’m just awful,” she’d say. For a person who had so much iron resolve, it was odd how much she worried about what everybody thought of her. The flip side was that she realized when she was being a bit neurotic and then would say, “Well, I’d rather be talked about than ignored,” lifting her chin defiantly in the air. I’d find it amusing if I hadn’t inherited these exact same traits. So if Mom said she got into an argument with someone it most likely meant that she had offered a mild disagreement.
“I just don’t agree with his stance on having women in the church,” Mom continued.
I turned to her, startled. “Having women in the church?”
“Yes, as ministers.”
“Oh. I thought you meant something else.”
The innuendo drifted over Mom’s head as she continued, “He doesn’t think women have any place in the pulpit. Why, what if one of you girls had chosen that profession, only to be denied?”
Fat chance, I thought, but realizing that wasn’t her point, I didn’t interrupt.
“Women have as much right as men to minister to people. He says that it’s in the Bible that men, not women, are the ones chosen to lead the church. Well, of course the Bible says that. Men wrote it. And God knows, Father Whippet’s sermons are just a good excuse to sleep. I never have any idea of what he’s talking about.”
“You just told me not to say unkind things about people.”
“You know what I mean.” She paused at the sink and then giggled. “I just loved the look on his face when your grandmother asked if he thought she was attractive.” She wiped the counter and then, clearly feeling like she had said something not nice, added, “Of course, your grandmother in her day was just beautiful. You look just like her.”
“Could you tell her to stop telling me that either I’m going to die soon or somebody close to me is going to die soon? It’s getting kind of disconcerting.”
Mom turned to me. “Is she doing her readings again? I think she’s going overboard on that stuff. But she really can be uncanny about her predictions.”
“That’s not real comforting, Mom,” I said. “It’s getting late and I have to go to work pretty soon. Are you going to be okay here with Grandma?” I asked.
Mom said, “Sure.” I went upstairs for my third clothing change of the day. My work uniform consisted of a Bear Lake Inn T-shirt and a jeans skirt. Jeans were acceptable, too. Pretty much any attire was acceptable. As long as you had on the logo-imprinted T-shirt, you were okay.
Dad and Evan were in the kitchen when I came back down. They had something spread out on the kitchen table and were reading instructions.
“Evan, can you give me a ride to work?”
“Yeah, as soon as we’re done here.”
I sat down to watch them. It was yet another “squirrel-proof” bird feeder. Every year it was the same thing. Dad had tried bird feeders on slippery poles, hung from tree branches with a barbed wire hanger, every damn thing in the world, and always with the same result. The squirrels managed to get to the feeder and eat every bit of seed meant for the birds. Dad waged a steady and losing war against them.
“Why do you even care if the squirrels eat the seed?” I asked.
“It’s the point of the thing,” Dad said around his cigarette. “It’s called a bird feeder. If I wanted a squirrel feeder, I’d buy one of those.” He held up the house-shaped feeder. “And this one is going to work. See here? There’s a perch for the birds. But the clever part is that it’s actually a lever. If a fat squirrel sits on it, it pushes it down and triggers a Plexiglas piece that comes down and covers the seed.”
I pushed on the perch and the Plexiglas smacked down from under the roof and sealed off the seed. Still, I regarded it doubtfully.
Dad and Evan went outside and mounted it atop the waiting pole. Then they sat back in lawn chairs and waited for an unsuspecting squirrel.
“Evan, it’s almost four o’clock. I don’t have time for you to wait to fool a squirrel. Can I get a ride now?”
Evan grudgingly got up and I followed him out to his car. “What’s your show about this week?” I asked.
“I’m not sure yet.” He turned onto Ruddiman Drive and headed for the Blit.
“Your show seems kind of flat lately. Is something wrong?”
“Yeah. Anna is making noises about moving to Florida and some other stuff is bothering me.”
Why in the world would Anna want to move to Florida? I decided not to ask.
“Thanks, Evan,” I said as we pulled up in front of the Blit. “Damn it, I forgot Buddy. He was over at the Longs. Would you check on him?”
“Nope. He knows his way home.” Evan grinned and gunned out of the parking lot.
In the summertime the Blit was always packed. There were a lot of to-go orders from boaters who would pick up their dinner and a six-p
ack of beer and head out to Muskegon Lake. It was common for friends to meet out there and tie their boats to each other. There could be as many as ten or twelve boats hooked together like a giant floating raft. It was kind of a progressive picnic. Each boat would have a different featured drink and food and people would clamber in and out of each other’s cabins. Someone usually cranked up a stereo and everyone danced until the boats were rocking. I knew that was where most of my friends would be that night. Walker had already called to say that he’d be on the Worthingtons’ boat if I got off work early. I looked at the packed room. There was no way that was going to happen.
One of the bad things about a small town is that everyone knows your name. And they were using it liberally that night. “Jeannie! Over here! Jeannie, can I get another Stroh’s? Jeannie, this burger has mayo. I said no mayo.”
I ran outside to deliver an order to a boat at the BLT’s private dock. Music was playing somewhere in the distance. The way sound traveled over water, it sounded like the stereo speakers were in the parking lot instead of two miles away across Muskegon Lake.
Tommy hollered at me from behind the bar. “Jeannie, phone for you.” The restaurant phone was popular. If you couldn’t be found at home the next call would be to the Blit. Chances were good that you would be there. When I went behind the bar to take the receiver, he grumbled, “Keep it quick. We’re swamped.”
“Hello?”
I heard sobbing.
“Lucy?”
There was a muffled “Noo” from the other end.
“Sammie?”
“It’s Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth, are you okay?” I asked, even though it was obvious she wasn’t. I put a finger in my other ear to hear her better over the din.
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