“Jasper, what have you done to yourself?” Buddy asked him, pointing at the bandage.
He looked at his arm and answered, “Cut it real bad yesterday on my day off. I was working in my shed. Shay had to take me to the hospital for stitches. Blood everywhere.”
“What you been working on?” Buddy asked. Jasper was a wood carving master. He made beautiful furniture and artwork and trinkets and sold his creations at the flea market on Sundays, along with his wife Shay, who sold her crocheted crafts and baskets. The two rocking chairs resting on Buddy’s front porch were made in Jasper’s shed. It was a nice little side business for him, and when he retired from the postal service, he planned to do it full time.
“A crib this time,” he said.
“A crib?”
“Yeah, Melanie is expectin’. We just found out.”
“Wow, so I guess, ‘Congratulations,’ is in order,” Buddy added. “What is this – your third grandchild?”
“Yes, it is. Shay is just beside herself happy.”
Just then, Buddy saw her go by. His jogger. She was running at a decent pace on the side of the street, wearing a plain gray tee-shirt and hunter green runner’s shorts. Her blond hair was pulled tightly back into a long ponytail, and it bobbed gently with each touch of her shoes hitting the pavement. His eyes followed her as he remained in a trance. She kept going, steadily, not looking anywhere in particular but directly in front of her feet. She ran by Buddy’s house almost every day at this same time. And she was the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.
Jasper stopped talking as he noticed Buddy’s vacant stare and turned around to see what he was watching. Then he snickered. “You have it bad, Mr. Cochran. Real bad. Maybe you should stop hiding in your house all day and go say, ‘Hey,’ to her.”
Buddy blushed. His face got hot and sweat beads began to form around his mouth. He just didn’t know how to talk to women. If they were his clients, he was fine. If women were answering his questions in the jury box during voir dire, he was fine. If women were checking his groceries out at the Food Lion, he was fine, as long as they weren’t too talkative or too pretty. If women were giving him paperwork at the Clerk’s Office, he was fine. But that was only because the ladies in the Clerk’s Office were closing in on retirement age. If women were serving him a plate of pasta at Ragazzi’s Fine Italian Dining down near the Courthouse, he was fine, as long as he only looked at the food. But if they were just women…out and in the world…standing in line next to him or walking on the sidewalk by him or sitting in a church pew around him, his nerves overwhelmed his stomach, his hands got sweaty, and he couldn’t speak. The only thing he’s mastered in this domain is the ability to look just past their eyes when he absolutely must talk to them. They might think he has something wrong with his vision, but it’s the best he can do to manage this awkward situational anxiety inflicted upon him by the mere existence of the fairer sex.
As much as he would like to initiate a conversation with the daily jogger, he didn’t know the first thing to say to her.
A couple of weeks ago, Buddy was walking Bo on the sidewalk. He heard the familiar thump-thump of her adorable jogging rhythm coming up behind them. Normally, she was on the side of the road when she went by, but for some reason, she was jogging on the sidewalk.
“On your left,” she blurted out to Buddy. She came by him on the left, turned her head toward him and smiled. Her eyes were sky blue. Buddy couldn’t respond at all because his vocal chords closed, like he had just swallowed a bee, and it was all he could do not to fall over his own feet or get himself tangled up in Bo’s leash. When he could eventually breathe again, he was relieved she was long gone and headed to wherever she ran to each day.
That was the closest he had ever been to her, and the only communication they ever shared up until then. He had watched her jog by for several weeks, like a slightly disturbed voyeur with absolutely no harmful intentions. When she smiled at Buddy, he could smell the faint scent of creams and lotions, the kinds of things that women put on themselves, even when they are going to go work out.
Ever since then, if he’s not in court or if he doesn’t have somewhere else he needs to be, Buddy is outside with Bo, hoping just to get another whiff of her or another smile sent his way.
Loretta and Joe
Loretta Cordova walked into the cute little crafty knick-knack store on Hillsboro Street, hoping to find something different and interesting for Joe’s birthday. What do you buy a man who already has everything he’d ever want or need? Which is just his TV remote, a good book, a comfortable chair…and her?
Wandering through the store, a hippy-ish lady with long gray hair and a colorful dress that looked like she took it off an actor in a Native American history reenactment, asked Loretta if she could help her with anything.
“No thank you,” Loretta replied. “It’s one of those things where you don’t know what you want ‘til you see it.”
The Hippy nodded, indeed understanding what she was talking about.
Loretta took a gander at the gag gift section, mostly for her own amusement. She loved gag gifts. She thought that if she got to come back for another round of living, she’d like to be someone smart and witty enough to make gag gifts.
Joe was turning sixty-five in two days, and she was putting together a party for him at the homestead. Buddy was going to come up for it, and she was hoping that he might like the new young lady from the Methodist Church she met last week during the eleven o’clock service. She was very pretty, single, and on exchange from a law school up north, spending the semester studying over at the Carolina Law School. Loretta invited the young lady over to the party, hoping that maybe Buddy would break out of his shell, welcome her to the area, and talk to her a bit about practicing law and his own experiences at Carolina.
“Mother, really, you need to stop doing this sort of thing to me,” Buddy deep-sighed over the phone when she called him about the party and the young lady.
“You are thirty-years old, and no girl has ever had that big beautiful heart of yours!” Loretta scolded him.
“You’re right. No girl but you. It will happen when it’s supposed to happen, not when my mother is setting me up!” Buddy stated in frustration. “Now I’m going to feel all stupid talking to her, knowing what you’re trying to do. And I would’ve felt stupid enough as it is without all the added pressure!”
“Well, just talk about the law with her. Talk about the Constitution. Should keep your hands from clamming up and your nerves taking over.”
“The Constitution? Really, mother?”
Buddy was the best son a mother could ask for, but the way things were looking, he was never going to fall in love and get married and give Loretta some grandbabies. And she wants some damn grandbabies before she’s too old to play with them.
Joe Horton walked down the freshly installed wooden steps, which led from the rickety front porch, up on deck for the ‘Honey Do’ list. Loretta sure liked her lists. He sat on the bottom step, holding a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade in his hand and wearing his finest khaki slacks and his finest collared polo shirt – which also happened to be his only khaki slacks and only collared polo shirt. Joe grinned at Loretta as she put white plastic table cloths over some eight-foot tables that she borrowed from the church.
“You want some help, sugar?” he asked.
“No, sir. You sit there and sip that lemonade and watch me make this special day happen for you.”
Joe Horton was one of the kindest souls Loretta ever had the good fortune to meet in her entire life. Today was his sixty-fifth birthday, and folks from all over this rural small town, the place she called home for about twenty years or so now, were coming over to the two-acre plot of land to celebrate this milestone with them. Joe was already retired from when he sold his longtime family-owned feed store, but now he could collect social security and go on Medicare and sit around out front
of the General Store and play cards on Fridays like all the other old people who lived in Welby, North Carolina.
When Loretta congratulated him that morning for officially being “an old man,” he pulled her into him, kissed her with more force than he had in quite a while and murmured, “As long as I have you, I’ll never be an old man, sugar.”
All these years that Loretta knew him, and it wasn’t until the past five that he made her feel like a young woman again. She wasn’t sure exactly when or how it happened, but one day, love just snuck up on her like a warm blanket, a prize she had been without for so long and was finally able to wrap herself inside and cure the lost deserted feeling of so many cold, dark nights. Her heart would feel fluttery whenever the word “sugar” would drop from his lips. Although he had always called her “sugar,” it amazed her that she took so long to get to this point – this point where she’d let herself love a man again. And so completely.
She continued taping down the white plastic cloths over the tables and then started putting out metal chairs, also borrowed from the church. Joe continued to watch her quietly. After several minutes, he said, “Thank you for the birthday gift.”
Holding a chair, Loretta turned around and replied, “I haven’t given you anything yet, mister.”
“Yes, you did,” he stated, looking down at the ground, blushing. “This morning. And then there’s the fact that you are my gift every single day.”
Loretta blushed herself and relished in this feeling of just simply being in love with someone kind and thoughtful…and knowing that she was loved back…probably even more than she knew she deserved.
Loretta had only known this feeling once before in her entire life, and it had been with Buddy’s real father. Only that time, it was feverish, fast, hard and so strong. People called it “young love.” They had been so consumed with each other, infatuated really, and it was war time, which always had a way to add a certain desperate spice to love affairs.
At barely eighteen years old, then-Retta Scarpelli up and left her poor mother in New Jersey and ran off with Private Danny Kaspar to Fort Hood, Texas. She didn’t even take a suitcase with her. It was the first time in her life that she had done something unplanned and on a whim – she had eloped with a young soldier she met at the movie theatre, who had just finished his training at Fort Dix and would eventually head off to Vietnam.
Since Danny, Loretta never knew love quite like that again. But who is that lucky in life after all? To experience such a flood of happiness where you believe that everything you do is right…just because it’s with him? They were so young and in a time of difficult circumstances – it seemed like the imminent danger of war in a foreign land, and Retta’s own frantic need to get out of her impoverished life and hometown, just added to the mountain of ever-growing feelings for each other.
But Joe Horton, the love that now-Loretta Cordova had for him, was the same as it was with Danny – but different at the same time. It was the same because there was a simmering passion, the kind that bubbles underneath your bones like a pleasant flu most days, and then comes out from time to time in a boiling rage, but a good kind of rage. Danny and Retta had been like that too, after the initial frenzy. Their love had settled into genuine contentment.
Joe and Loretta shared a slow growing and respectful love, one similar to long-term marriages that withstood the test of time and the harshest trials. Joe was widowed himself and had been on his own for a few years by the time Loretta and Buddy were driven up onto his land and into his life.
She knew Joe for twenty years now, and their genuine friendship came long before the rest of it. They built upon the foundation of their relationship in a mature way, an older person way, the way that life’s cruel experiences teach you to calm the hell down, begin and grow in life – and then in love – with another person. Be a person first. Then after you got that figured out, and if you meet someone, be friends, companions…and then if you feel it…lovers. And even though Joe was a lot older than Loretta, she had lived the hardened years of a woman well beyond her age.
When Loretta first met Joe, she knew he found her and Buddy to be curious creatures. She could tell soon after their arrival that he was very fond of her, found her to be attractive and probably developed romantic feelings toward her. But he never said anything about it or acted on anything, and he never asked her any intrusive questions. So, she told him no lies. She did not want to compromise Joe and his integrity in any way, and she figured that he never asked her too much about her past because he didn’t want to become compromised himself. He was one of those people who accepted that there was a bliss to a certain amount of ignorance.
It was easier for him to just not know about why he was really helping them…and why she was in hiding. Besides, he knew what really mattered about Loretta: she was a good mother and had a good heart and Buddy was a good boy. The rest of her untold story was just an ugly large dead flower print window dressing, and she supposed that just made her more interesting than all the other ladies in town who took a keen interest in Joe after his wife died.
A blue catering van pulled into the long dirt driveway and parked in front of the house. Bobbi and Kelly, the mother-daughter duo caterers who also attended the Methodist Church, began unloading and setting up the good old fashioned North Carolina summertime spread.
Soon after, several guests started to arrive. Joe was up and talking with all the women and their husbands from town, some of whom had known him since he was born. It’s funny how a place full of people who never left forget nothing of its town and the people in it. They might forget to turn off the stove when they leave the house or the lights when they leave a room or even their wives’ birthdays, but they don’t forget what it was like “way back when.” They don’t forget the time that Don Martin fell into the Haw off his new bike and got bit by a copperhead in 1973. They don’t forget the time Misty Wells and Tommy Gibbs ran away from home and got hitched down in South Carolina back in 1949, breaking her mother’s heart so bad it sent her into a tizzy and then a deep depression for a year. They don’t forget when Billy Ray Day stole Jane Moody away from Gil Tart during the Winter Ball at the high school back in 1956. They are like a cult of sorts. Their secrets, their inside jokes and stories, their own intimate language. Loretta used to be jealous of it, but now she just let it run over her like a warm bath. It’s Joe – it’s a part of who he is and why he is who he is and another reason Loretta loved him so much.
The Young Lady
Pulling up to his second childhood home, a large off-white farmhouse with a huge wrap-around porch and open windows, Buddy parked his green Pontiac Grand Prix behind Mr. Murray’s old rust orange Chevy pickup truck, which held the center space in a line of several other old pickup trucks – the standard for country living here in his adopted North Carolina hometown.
Buddy’s mother and Joe had been living in sin for several years now, and while they acted like they still lived in separate quarters, people weren’t stupid, even when they have thick country accents and say things like “y’aunt to?” It’s almost as if his mother and Joe were afraid to admit to everyone that they were deeply in love and have been having old people sex for a long time. There’s still that subtle keeping up appearances thing going on between them. And while all the proper southern people knew the truth, everyone politely pretended otherwise, as proper southern people do.
The last time Buddy was up visiting with them, they went out to eat in downtown Welby. As they sat down in their booth and looked over the menus, Mrs. Cady, a seventy-something year old widow who watched Buddy grow up since he and his mother arrived in the Fall of 1975, asked Loretta if she wanted some lovely curtains for her apartment, a small one-bedroom place which sat neatly on the top of a small barn on Joe’s property.
“I just finished them last week for my daughter’s spare bedroom, but she already got a set that she’s gonna use instead,” Mrs. Cady explaine
d.
“No, ma’am, but thank you Mrs. Cady,” Loretta said to her, grinning shyly and slightly hiding her embarrassed face behind her menu.
Buddy and his mother lived in that apartment since he was a boy, and while he had no doubt Mrs. Cady knew that his mother and Joe were indeed living in sin, she acted like Loretta Cordova still lived in that small one-bedroom apartment on Joe’s property like a proper unmarried woman who sang in the choir at the Methodist Church.
When she walked away with her rather massive hand-sewn purse engulfing her small shoulder and arm, Buddy just started to laugh. His mother kicked him under the table.
“Buddy, stop it. You know I’ll still slap your behind no matter how old you are.”
Joe has told Buddy several times that he wants his mother to marry him.
“I love your mother very much, and I’d like to make an honest woman of her. It’s a bit unnerving for me to share my home with a woman and live like a married couple when we aren’t married,” Joe explained a few years ago, as they sat on his porch on a chilly Fall evening.
“I’m sorry, Joe, I don’t understand her sometimes,” was all Buddy could say in response to him.
But he did understand his mother. Too well. She couldn’t marry Joe or anyone else. She was too afraid of being found out if she did. If Kenny Bellinger was still alive somewhere out there, then she was still married. It was better to be an independent woman with a lingering mystery. And the longer she stayed in this small town and lived how she had been living, the more a part of the decor and background and the way of life that defined this place she became. No one asks questions when everything is the same as it’s always been. People are comfortable with the status quo.
“Well, I wasn’t raised to live like this, Buddy. My wife – God rest her soul – is probably rolling over in her grave, wondering what’s gotten into me,” Joe confided.
Good Buddy Page 3