Good Buddy

by Dori Ann Dupré

  Buddy never realized that there were so many ways and places in which a woman could make him feel so good. While he might’ve been thirty in years, he was more like an inexperienced seventeen-year-old boy sexually and perhaps even a twelve-year-old boy when it came to matters of the heart.

  His mother had been so happy to learn that Buddy and Jennifer were seeing each other.

  “I knew you would like her!” Loretta hollered at him from the front porch, with a large cup of coffee in her hands, on the morning after Joe’s birthday party, as he tried to quietly sneak away in his car without being seen.

  Buddy had just thrown his hand up in a quick wave, mortified, and sped out of Welby.

  Later the next day, when Loretta called him to see if he and Jennifer would like to come by for some banana cream pie, Buddy decided it would be easier for everyone if he just did what his mother wanted. So, he called Jennifer and they met at Joe’s house for some banana cream pie. Then afterward, he followed Jennifer back to her apartment where they proceeded to make love to each other some more until the next morning.

  As he drove home on that Monday morning with his man parts in a good kind of pain from overuse – a feeling he never knew before – and a level of exhaustion that he hadn’t experienced since those Bar Exam all-nighters, Buddy realized how pissed off Bo would be for leaving him alone overnight. He decided at that point, he was just going to see where this situation with Jennifer would lead him.

  However, that nagging feeling underneath his conscience wouldn’t go away – the one where he knew he didn’t like her enough to be continuing along this path and exploring a relationship, the kind of one that he knew he really wanted to attempt with the daily jogger. The one where he was certain he was choosing to do the wrong thing mostly because the sex was so damn good – and frequent.

  When they got to the swinging bridge on Grandfather Mountain, Jennifer pulled out her camera. She walked across the bridge along with all the other lookie-loos also in town, experiencing the wonder of the Appalachians in the Fall. She wore a yellow fleece pullover with her collar up around her beautiful, flawless face. Her long hair fell along the back, shiny and bright in the sun. She took photo after photo, probably going through the whole roll of film in just a few minutes. Buddy walked up behind her on the bridge and wrapped his arms around her waist. He put his mouth on her neck and kissed her. Jennifer didn’t respond to it, only walked away with her camera, shooting the endless sea of yellow, orange, red and green specks of natural art spreading out before them.

  Jennifer seemed quieter than usual this morning. Buddy noticed that she hadn’t been as talkative for the past couple of days, either on the phone or when they were together. They woke up naked this morning in a cozy mountain room in Blowing Rock, and after having a rather extended sexual interlude – the only way to fully wake up properly, Buddy has since decided – she got out of bed and showered. There was no holding and talking, like usual, which Buddy had grown to enjoy during their brief involvement.

  Jennifer threw on her clothes and announced to him, as he still laid in bed, “I’m heading down the street to see if I can get some coffee. Do you want some?”

  “Okay,” Buddy said, a little bewildered. She seemed a little short with him. “Is everything okay?” he asked her, starting to feel concerned. She seemed stressed out. Law school is very stressful, so maybe she was feeling out of sorts.

  “Yeah, all good,” she said, shutting the door behind her and heading down the sidewalk on Main Street.

  As he watched her walk away from him on the swinging bridge, Buddy knew in his gut that she wasn’t just stressed out from school. He knew this feeling too well. The few times he had tried to be in relationships, tried to make something be more than what it was, he eventually got kicked to the curb. Because he had always been the “nice guy,” he never felt right about kicking any of them to curb first. So, he’d go along, enjoying the benefits, hoping that the elusive magical feeling he’s heard about so many times from other people would at last happen to him. Kind of like that feeling he gets when he sees that jogger go by his house every day around two o’clock.

  He didn’t say anything about his gut feeling to Jennifer as they drove back to Chapel Hill. As she got out of the car, he asked, “Do you want me to come up for a bit?”

  She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Not this time, Buddy. I really got a lot of work to do. But thanks for taking me to the mountains. I can check that off my North Carolina sight-seeing list now.”

  With that, she got out of his car and walked up the steps to her apartment. She didn’t even turn around and wave goodbye to him.

  Wife, Interrupted

  “Molly?” Julie Saint whispered in sing-song to her little girl who was sleeping soundly in her bed. Not in her own bed – but Julie’s bed. For the past year and a half, Molly used her own bright yellow walled bedroom for changing her clothes and housing her rather large and elaborate stuffed animal and ceramic elephant collection…but not for sleeping. She also had a nice set of books in there for first and second grade readers, even though she was reading at a fifth-grade level.

  “I’m glad she’s so advanced, but why would you bother reading something like Tuck Everlasting when you’re barely seven years old?” Julie asked Mrs. Topper, Molly’s first grade teacher, during a parent-teacher conference last April. “Good point,” Mrs. Topper responded. “Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business is perfectly fine for her reading log. But maybe the two of you can read something together, something more on her level, just to keep her challenged.”

  Julie rubbed her daughter’s mousy brown hair away from her face, revealing the legion of freckles that smattered along her milky white skin, her head resting peacefully on the pillow. She hated to wake her early on a Saturday, but it was a big day at Frederick Morrison Elementary School. Today was the Fall Festival, the huge annual PTA fundraiser, and they were in charge of the dunk tank from Noon to two o’clock. It was on the warm side of a Carolina October, and even if it hadn’t been warm, the school celebrities: Mr. Godwin the Principal, Miss Cole the head lunch lady, Mrs. Paladino the librarian, Mr. Mertyn the lead janitor, and of course the ever-popular (with the ladies) gym teacher, Mr. Holland, would all be on standby for their afternoon of getting dunked by excited students – whether they could hit the target or not – for the bargain price of a dollar donation.

  The Fall Festival was always a lot of fun and was turning into quite the annual tradition. For the past four years, Julie taught Kindergarten in the mornings. She split the school day with another teacher, who taught the second half of the day. It worked out for them both because they each had a young child to care for in addition to teaching.

  Julie learned rather quickly in life that career choices are always different for mothers, especially when the children are young. But last year, it was a God-send for Julie to have a solid part time job when her husband Gabe died in an Airborne training accident on Post. Julie needed to work – anything to keep herself going from day to day and keep her from not losing her mind. But she needed to grieve, too. She kept her head occupied with work because she had a little girl to raise, but she also needed the afternoons to herself while Molly was still in school. That was when she would be with Gabe, grieve for Gabe, attempt to sort through the range of emotions and heartache that occupy the heart of a woman who has suddenly lost the man she loves, in addition to the life they were building together. Forever.

  She ran with Gabe every day, her heart melted with his, quiet step after quiet step, along the sanctuary of working middle class homes in Fayetteville. People here in the towns surrounding Fort Bragg were busy families. They were military. They were transient. They were special. They were their own breed of cautious but hardened – optimism coupled with the indescribable underlying fears that go with being the family members of soldiers on a highly deployable post, even during relative peace time. It was these nuanc
es about this town, sometimes called Fayettenam…that made her stay around…at least for now. She found comfort in having been a part of a military family, and this had been the longest Molly ever lived in one place. She never realized how important some semblance of stability was to her own sanity when their lives had been thrown into chaos by Gabe’s untimely exit from this world.

  The only time Julie tried a widow’s support group, part of an area church’s ministry, the women in the group appeared to be in their sixties and older. Julie felt that perhaps she had been pointed to the wrong group of widows for help and healing. After all, how could a woman who got to raise her family, have grandchildren and have her husband for more than thirty-five years possibly understand what she was going through?

  But when one of the older widows described her beloved husband’s passing as, “an atomic bomb going off in my life,” Julie realized that she may have had more than a few things in common with these ladies. So, she stayed for a while, learned a bit about her feelings and the bond they all shared, and then came to terms with the fact that she was simply a different kind of widow. She was, in some ways, lucky to not be locked into one way of life for so long that she had no identity of her own remaining. So many of those women had no recollection of their lives before their marriages. She wasn’t too old to have another baby someday. Those women were all post-menopausal grandmothers with grown children who’d invite them over for Christmas dinner. She was still young enough to start over…or at least start again.

  Julie had…really…another whole lifetime ahead of her. She was twenty-eight. Some of those women were barely married the first time at twenty-eight.

  Julie would remind herself, on those rides home after listening to these women, what kind of mother would she be if curled up into a ball on her bed for the next eleven years until Molly went off to college? No matter how hard it was, she still had a daughter to raise. So, she found her own space in coming to terms with the loss of her husband, apart from the widows of the little Fayetteville basement church group, and instead ran with him. Literally. Every day. And continued to work in her career field. And raise their daughter. Julie decided she would find a way to live. And she knew that was what Gabe would have wanted her to do.

  Molly stirred in her sleep, and Julie started to lightly tickle her to get her moving. She opened her eyes and said, “Is today the dunk?”

  “Yes, Pudge. Let’s go. We need to get ready and you need some breakfast.”

  Molly rolled out of bed and hopped over to her own bedroom, skinny white freckled legs sticking out from underneath a huge tee shirt – one of Gabe’s old ones from when he ran the Army Ten Miler years ago.

  Julie put her feet on the wood floor of her bedroom and started to get ready for the day. She pulled on her denim Bermuda shorts and the elementary school’s official red and blue tee-shirt. She brushed her thick blond hair into a high ponytail and clipped a red bow in the back. She brushed on some concealer – damn the McVicar Women’s curse of early crow’s feet – and she dotted some lipstick over her thin lips. Looking down at her wedding photo: she, barefoot, in a simple white dress from Dress Barn and a straw hat with a makeshift veil from a craft store and Gabe in his dress blues carrying her up into his arms over the walkway bridge outside of the Venetian in Las Vegas, Julie rubbed the glass frame with her finger into a heart shape. This was not supposed to be how her life would be.

  “I told you not to marry him! That he would only end up hurting you!” Julie could still hear her big-mouthed mother yell at her through the phone, when she called in the worst hour of her life to tell her that Gabe died. How does a person respond to the death of their son-in-law with, “I told you so?” Julie never got to ask her that because she hasn’t spoken to her mother since that day.

  After a bowl of Captain Crunch for Molly (only allowed on Saturdays) and a piece of toast and coffee for Julie, the “Us Against the World” duo headed off to the school to begin their day of community involvement and fun. There would be vendors and crafters from town set up inside the cafeteria and games and contests going on throughout the school with donated prizes. The silent auction included a three-night stay at a resort in the Bahamas, donated by a friendly dry cleaning businessman in town. Julie wished Gabe was here to bid on that. They sure could’ve used one last getaway together before he was gone for good.

  There were arts and crafts for the children in the art room, balloon making and face painting on the playground with a local clown named Marcie, the Humane Society was coming for dog and cat adoptions, and a few food trucks would be there with hot dogs, sodas, cotton candy, and snow cones. The volunteer fire department was bringing the fire truck with Dallas the Fire Safety Dalmatian. Outside there was a yard sale, with all proceeds going to the PTA. The big blue dunk booth sat ready, full of water, waiting for its first celebrity victim. It was going to be a great day all around. For the first time in quite a while, Julie was feeling on the upbeat and positive side of the mood spectrum. Her heart was singing not quite a happy song…but one of quiet contentment for the moment.

  Matt Holland, the adorable twenty-six-year-old PE teacher, walked up to Julie and Molly in his gray Army tee shirt and gray issue Army PT shorts. He was average height but big in personality, with a sweet baby face and a smile that would light up the Crown Convention Center all on its own. His brown hair was cropped high and tight, like he must’ve had it cut just this morning…and then realized he wasn’t in the Army anymore.

  “Miz Saint and Good Golly Miz Molly, how are you ladies this fine Saturday?” he asked, with his signature crooked grin, causing all female teachers, staff members, and even the little elementary school-aged girls to swoon.

  Julie smiled, wishing she had the level of swoon for Matt that all the others had. It would’ve made his shy pursuit of her easier to deal with if his feelings were reciprocated. He was cute, the same age as her childhood best friend’s younger brother, and she couldn’t get passed thinking of him as one of those little brother types of friends. So, the few times he asked her out, she politely turned him down…“Sorry Matt, I’m just not ready to date anyone.” He understood, of course. What else was he supposed to say? The benefit of being a young widow was that no one knew quite what to say to her under any circumstances, so she was always right.

  Julie wondered what the hell people thought was a proper grieving period when you’re widowed so young. Was it so different for twenty-eight year olds than for sixty-eight year olds? Julie thought that maybe it was.

  Molly jumped up and down in place and yelled out, through hopping breaths, “Mr. Holland, when are you going to be dunked?”

  “I’m first Molly Berry. Are you gonna cheat and press the button when I’m not looking?” he asked, bending down.

  “No, I promise,” she answered, averting her eyes, indicating the bold-faced lie.

  “Molly Wolly Doodle…” he said slowly, waiting for her to laugh. That was her favorite nickname out of all his nicknames for her.

  “Julie, how are you doing these days?” he asked, looking up at her, squinting his eyes in the bright sunlight. His face was so boyish, so pinch-able.

  “I’m good, thanks Matt.”

  He stepped toward her, and then stopped himself. It looked like he was going to hug her and then thought better of it.

  “You sure look pretty, like always,” he uttered quietly, so only Julie could hear him. “I guess I’ll see you two later.” He turned and walked off toward the door from the cafeteria, leading to the playground area, gray shorts marching back and forth with each step.

  Molly looked up at her mother. “Mrs. Cooper told Mrs. Flinch that Mr. Holland has a crush on you. I heard them talking in the lavatory.”

  Julie laughed. “Those two are just a couple of gossips, Molly. Don’t pay them any attention.”

  Fall Festival

  Jasper Ray taped a small sign over his old wooden display table, h
andmade years ago to drag along with him to the flea markets around the state of North Carolina. “Jasper’s Wood Works” it read in neatly printed magic marker. As Jasper pressed down on the tape to make sure it took, Buddy walked up to him with a cup of coffee in his hands, shaking his head.

  “Mr. Cochran, why you shakin’ your head at me like that?” he asked, noticing a subtle sarcasm to his young lawyer friend.

  “Jasper, that sign could be taken the wrong way. This is a school for Christ’s sake.”

  Jasper looked at his sign and winced. He rubbed his forehead with his right hand and stated, “Well, all these years ain’t nobody never said nothin’ about my sign bein’ taken the wrong way.”

  “You need to remove the space between ‘Wood’ and ‘Works’ and have it read ‘Woodworks’ instead,” Buddy explained, thankful for so many hours of his life spent editing his own writing and even some of his classmates’ writing as a student.

  He looked over at Jasper, whose face registered that he still did not quite understand what Buddy was talking about. Then he started to feel a little guilty, which quickly morphed into outright embarrassment. What the hell is my problem? Buddy thought, almost out loud.

  Just because his mind has been consumed with the revelation that he got dumped without much warning or even a real goodbye by a girl who he was dumb enough to believe liked him – and all while he was just trying to be nice and go along with things to see where they’d lead – he was now also having to accept the fact that his sex life was, once again, dormant. But it doesn’t mean he needed to take out his frustrations onto an old southern gentleman like Jasper. Buddy’s ego was bruised. He needed to get over it. It wasn’t like Jennifer, as a person, would be missed. Jennifer’s lovin’, however, would indeed be missed.