“And another thing, as much as this shocks me to admit it, you are right, Arthur,” he said, winking at Arthur. “I’m sure glad I’ve brought in someone to begin taking over for me.” Doc picked up a spoon and stirred his coffee, which was black. “I guess none of us ever knows when our number’s up, do we,” he said rather than asked. He took a sip of his coffee and held the cup an inch from his lips as his eyes studied the brew. He hoped Rick hadn’t seen it coming, or that he hadn’t suffered. Although he hadn’t read the autopsy report (young Doctor Neilson handled the call), he’d heard Rick’s death was instantaneous. Dr. Neilson had reported that fact to Sadie, but it was Doc she’d asked about the suffering. “When you’re drifting into the arms of the Lord, Sadie, I can’t imagine you’d feel anything but awe.” She’d whispered a much relieved yet gut-wrenching “Thank you!” before her body was racked with sobs. He’d wiped her tears with his hanky, then dabbed at his own eyes. Doc had lost his wife years ago, but the wound suddenly felt fresh. Funny how new death could so quickly resurrect old pains.
“You got that right,” Eugene said in response to Doc’s statement about the randomness of death. “What with Rick so busy being our only lawyer and all, I just hope he took the time to get his own papers in order before . . .” Lester slid his usual saucer of poached eggs in front of Eugene, cutting off his sentence. Eugene looked up and thanked him, put his napkin in his lap and reached for the salt, even though he’d all but lost his appetite. “I do know one thing Rick had in order,” he said as he slid his fork tines through one of the eggs.
“Well, ya gonna tell us or jist think ’bout it?” Arthur asked.
Eugene swiveled and looked Arthur right in the eyes. “He had his priorities in order, Arthur. He loved his God, his mother and the people of this town more than anything else. I can’t think of a time that man didn’t go out of his way to answer a legal question, or work late, if he had to. Due to my line of business, over the years I surely did impose on him more times than I’d care to remember, often at the close of a business day, and never once did Rick complain about it. He just did his job. Every day that man got up and did his job, and every night he went home and took care of his mother.”
He swiveled and looked toward the cash register. “You know how you’ve usually got that collection jar out on your counter, Lester?” Lester took note of its absence, then nodded. “I was sitting right here at this counter one day when I saw Rick passing by on his way to work. You know what he did? He walked in, looked at the name on the jar, nodded his head, opened his wallet, peeled out a few bills, stuck them in the jar and went on to work. I saw it with my own eyes.”
While Lester flipped the bacon, he glanced at Doc. “It’s who the man was.” Lester was far from the mushy type, but it sounded like his voice cracked. The grill was silent for a few moments.
“I need a warm-up, Lester,” Arthur said, raising his half-filled cup in the air. “And speakin’ of pri-orities, Lester, what do ya think is gonna happen ta this grill one day when yer gone? Huh? Who’s gonna git us our breakfast and serve us liver and onions on Wednesdays?” Gladys harrumphed. Arthur was tactless. The two men had barely gotten over their last flare-up, and now Arthur seemed to be poking another of poor Lester’s sore spots, Lester having no extended family.
Lester picked up the coffee pot, glared at Arthur and began topping off cups—at the farthest end of the U from where Arthur sat—slowly, ever so slowly, working his way toward Arthur. He made sure he’d poured the very last drop out of the pot, which had caused him to all but overflow Gladys’s cup, before he got to Arthur. Still, he moved in front of Arthur and held the empty pot in the pour position for quite some time over Arthur’s raised, and by now completely empty receptacle, since he’d been waiting so long.
“I do believe, Arthur, I’m going to leave the grill to that magician from Champaign we had here in town one time.” Questioning eyes turned in unison toward the slender man who continued pouring from a now empty pot.
Arthur, whose arm was tired from holding his cup in the air, moved it toward his mouth and took a pretend sip. “Because?”
“Because, Arthur,” Lester said, turning to grab a mug and pouring himself an imaginary cup of coffee, then clinking it with Arthur’s cup as though proposing a grand toast, “because I always admired the magician who could make someone disappear.”
Everyone busted out laughing. It was a joke that had been used at the grill before, but this time Arthur’d walked right into it. When Arthur realized he’d been bested, again he raised his cup toward Lester in a “good one” gesture and even he couldn’t help but to laugh.
“I’ll tell you,” Doc said after they’d finally collected themselves, “laughter is indeed one of life’s great healing balms.”
After the morning crowd was gone, Lester got out the big collection jar. “Sadie Lawson,” he wrote on the piece of paper he had taped around the jar. He reached in his wallet and tossed in a twenty, then phoned the Floral Fling and ordered cut flowers for the funeral, plus a living plant to be sent to Sadie. He wished he’d long-ago thought to spend the twenty on a new pair of suspenders for Rick. But then, Rick probably wouldn’t have worn them anyway. He’d been satisfied with the good old suspenders—with the very life—he’d had.
7
Wednesday evening newly retired Bob Del Vechia folded Sunday’s Partonville Press, set it down on the end table and sighed. What a shock, to read about the sudden passing of an old college roommate, one of the few people with whom he’d kept in contact after graduation from law school, aside, of course, from the one he’d married. Back in their strenuous days at The University of Chicago Law School, before he and Louise got married and Rick returned to the hometown he’d spent so much time talking about to anyone who would listen, Louise had enjoyed hanging around with Rick as much as Bob had. Rick was funny, smart as a whip, quirky as they come and the most loyal friend they’d ever met. Yes, the trio had shared three years of some of their longest study days and wildest party nights.
For months before graduation, Bob and Louise had tried to talk Rick into coming back to Atlanta and opening a law practice with them. The closer graduation got, the more they pressed Rick to please reconsider, but he would hear none of it. As much as he adored both of them and knew they’d make a dynamic legal trio, he couldn’t imagine living his life anywhere else but in his little town and with the people who had helped make him who he was. “They need somebody looking out for them who they can trust,” he’d told Bob over a brew one evening. “It’s hard for a small town of people like that to warm up to strangers, and besides, I hear they still need a saxophone player in the community band,” he said with a grin.
Throughout law school Bob had heard Rick play in more than a few pickup bands, knew how good he was, how much he loved the instrument, and in particular jazz. Bob had laughed, feeling pretty assured jazz would not be a community band’s forte, but he envied Rick’s strong sense of belonging, his kind heart, his earnest quest to not only serve the people, but to return and be a part of them.
Hardly a phone conversation had passed (they’d taken turns calling each other at least every couple months all these forty-odd years) when “that night at Billiards and Beverages” didn’t come up. “Oh, it was the merriest of times!” Louise would say. How many games of 8-Ball had they played? Wonder whatever happened to that cute shrimp boat (Lordy, Lordy she was tiny!) of a redhead who kept grabbing the cue ball right off the table and not giving it back until Rick gave her a smile, for which she’d kiss his cheek? If Rick actually ever did call that sassy little redhead, he never told a soul about it, not even Bob or Louise—although most speculated he’d at least tried, maybe was even engaged in a “secret” relationship so as not to endure questions, since he’d always been pretty private about his personal life.
About a year after their graduation, Rick flew to Atlanta to serve as Bob’s best man. The next time they saw each other, Bob and Louise had ventured an extended weekend
to Partonville for their first wedding anniversary. “We just had to see the place,” they’d said. After the dime tour—Rick called it that because, he’d said with a grin, “it only takes ten minutes to see everything from my office to the cemetery, which is as high and as low as you can get in these parts”—they’d dined at the new (but ill-fated, short-lived and now long-gone) Partonville Country Club.
A surprise to almost nobody but the St. Louis Investors, the club went bankrupt a little more than a year after its opening. It was then purchased in its entirety by Challie Carter, the area’s largest land-holding and leasing farmer—the very same guy who had sold the investors this chunk of his property to begin with. (Challie swore the first two years after he replanted the rest of that acreage that the corn was always at least two inches shorter in the circles where the greens had been. “Looks like a band of aliens stopped by and swirlygigged two inches right off the stalks,” he used to say.) After repurchasing his old property for not much more than those investors had paid him to begin with, he sold off the clubhouse and a bunch of acres to the park district, which barely had to do any renovating to the cement block building to make it what it still is today: Partonville’s largest gathering place.
Louise had been completely taken with the quaint little town, both she and Bob having been born and raised in large metropolitan areas. They’d utterly enjoyed reading the Partonville Press while they were there, laughing about “news” like who was visiting who, the corn reports and a police blotter that was made up of one item that week: “During his 8 P.M. rounds Tuesday evening, Sergeant Phillip McKenzie spied a Banty Rooster wandering the sidewalk in front of Richardson’s Rexall Drugs. A chase ensued. The rooster was ably apprehended and taken to the station where he was later claimed by Red Cline Jr. who thanked Sgt. McKenzie for saving his 4-H project from a sure demise on square traffic.” Bob and Louise were hysterical with laughter by the time Bob finished reading the item to Louise and Rick, the three of them drinking a cup of coffee at Rick’s kitchen table.
“Laugh if you want,” Rick said, “but Red Jr. has worked hard with that little Banty. Would have been a shame for him to lose it so close to the fair.”
“Apologies and point well taken,” Bob said, clearing his throat. “What do we city folks know about roosters anyway?” The Del Vechias decided on the spot it would be fun to get a subscription for a year. “Maybe it will help us learn about life in the country.”
Every year since their visit, the three of them talked about how they just had to get together again (“Your turn to travel next time,” Bob and Louise said), but it just never happened. The one year Rick was on the verge of purchasing his airline tickets ended up to be the year his mother moved in with him and he didn’t feel right about leaving her alone so soon, no matter how much she insisted he go. So Rick never traveled and Louise never canceled the subscription. In fact, she and Bob had appeared in the paper twice: once for being the longest-running, never-lived-in-Partonville subscribers, and once in an ad they placed. In a raucously energized three-way phone call, Bob and Louise had asked Harold Crab, the Press’s editor, if he could please run their birthday greeting for Rick’s sixtieth right next to Rick’s ad which had never once in all these years changed. They wanted the ad—complete with a photo they were mailing—to be twice as large as Rick’s business ad. Harold laughed so long after he heard what they wanted to say and do that he decided not to take a dime from them; the fun would be worth the space. Not only that, he told them, if it was a slow enough news day, he’d give them the headline—unless there was some actual big news, which there hadn’t been.
ATLANTA LAW FIRM CHALLENGES PARTONVILLE ATTORNEY the headline read, with a small SEE PAGE FIVE following it—which definitely got folks curious and caused Rick to choke on his coffee. The ad, printed in bigger and bolder print than Rick’s, read Del Vechia & Del Vechia, an Atlanta-based law firm, challenges Partonville attorney Rick Lawson to: LIVE ANOTHER SIXTY YEARS! Happy Birthday, you old goat! The picture was one Rick had never seen before. It was a black and white from their law school days. It was taken from over the couch upon which Rick had fallen asleep, a newspaper spread over his face and upper chest. Even though nobody could see his face, they knew it was Rick by the suspenders and that wild shock of hair sticking straight up from under the paper. The caption to the photo read “Rick Lawson studies for the bar exam.”
As his gift to Rick, Harold had the headline and both ads framed in a sort of collage. It still hung in Rick’s office.
Bob placed his hand on the top of the paper and gently patted it. He retrieved the hanky from his back pocket and wiped tears from his eyes. Not only had he read Rick’s obituary, but also the details of the accident that had been reported by Sharon Teller (other than Harold, the Press’s only staff reporter) which included a photo of Rick’s car upside down in the ditch—a photo Bob wished he’d never seen. He wiped his nose, leaned forward and tucked the hanky back in his pocket. Such a typical day up until he’d read the paper, he thought: he’d played a round of golf; the fragrance of fried chicken was in the air; the radio played softly in the background—the discovery their good friend had been dead for five days before he knew about it.
“Louise, honey,” he hollered into the kitchen where Louise was making dinner, “you haven’t read the Partonville Press yet today, have you?”
“No, dear,” came the reply.
“I didn’t think so.”
Her husband’s voice sounded so strange that Louise walked into the living room. That’s when he gave her the terrible news and encouraged her not to view any of the photos. After they spent a few minutes consoling each other, Louise said she felt like they should try to go to the funeral, say . . . good-bye. Bob was in agreement. “I’ll get online after dinner and see if we can find some last-minute tickets to get us into Hethrow Regional Airport by late Friday afternoon.”
“I don’t know how Earl and I can thank you enough, Jacob,” May Belle said, swallowing down the urge to shed happy tears. “This has been such a wonderful treat.” Dinner dishes cleared, crumbs adeptly removed, she smoothed the linen napkin lying across her lap, admiring the fineness of the fabric, then gazed at the delicacy of the chandelier in the center of the room and the crisply pressed seams in their waiter’s trousers as he approached the table to refill their crystal goblets. When Dorothy’d called to extend Jacob’s dinner invitation and told them to “gussy up” in their Sunday finest, she had no idea they’d be eating at The Driscoll in Hethrow! “The ultimate in fine dining,” their radio advertisements touted, and now she knew why.
When they’d arrived at The Driscoll and Jacob helped May Belle shed her coat for the coat-check, Dorothy noticed May Belle’s uneasiness. Dorothy whispered, “I see you’re wearing your beautiful pin.” The gold filigree dove was about the size of a half-dollar. May Belle’s parents gave it to her for her high school graduation, her mother saying she believed May Belle was now “officially ready to soar into life with the grace and peace of a dove.” The pin, which she wore at her neckline over the top button of her white dress blouse, was not only a touchstone to her parents’ love, but it was May Belle’s finest piece of jewelry, in fact the only piece of jewelry she ever wore aside from her thin wedding band and a Timex Dorothy’d given her for Christmas several years ago. May Belle gently fingered the pin now, her eyes twinkling with joy and mischief. “You know, we haven’t had this much excitement since our Dearest Dorothy took us for our last ride in The Tank, have we, Earl?”
Earl shook his head. Although there were too many strangers, too much activity and too many knives and forks on the table for Earl, he had nonetheless eaten most of his roast beef and Yorkshire pudding before he’d returned to rolling the seam of his napkin between his fingers.
“Well, Mom,” Jacob said, leaning back in his chair, “dinner at The Driscoll doesn’t hold a torch to a road trip, but it’s a nice high-on-the-hog respite from what’s turned out to be a busy week. I’m glad Earl’s here
to help me enjoy the company of two such lovely ladies.”
“Go on,” Dorothy said. “Don’t stop now! We oldsters can use all the compliments we can get, right, dearie?” she said, nodding her head at May Belle.
“Right. But since he’s the driver and insists on treating us, I say we let him off the hook.”
“Would you like to see the dessert menu?” the waiter asked as their chuckling died down. Jacob nodded. The waiter handed them each a leather pad containing the day’s selections. May Belle leaned toward Earl and quietly read each one aloud, one sounding more delectable than the next. Then she noticed the prices and gasped. “Goodness!”
“Find your favorite, May Belle?” Jacob asked.
“I think I’ll pass on dessert,” she said, figuring she could make ten trays of brownies, if not more, for the price of one piece of chocolate cake.
“Nonsense,” Jacob said. “I’ve never known you or my mother to pass on dessert.” He turned his head toward the waiter. “We’d like the Extravagant Sweets Tray, please, and coffee all around.” May Belle caught the price of the Extravagant Sweets Tray just before the waiter whisked her dessert menu away. As much as she wanted to protest, she also wanted to claim dibs on the Chocolat Éclair that was part of the mix.
“Jacob,” Dorothy said, “the meal was de-lish, the dessert tray is on the way and we thank you, son.” She gave her hands a gentle clap, then threw her eyes upward. “And thank You, Lord,” she all but cheered, “for the gift of family—every single one of them at this table!”
8
With papers spread before her, Katie waited for the architect to arrive. She was working on a weathered sign resting on two sawhorses, her green case off to one side. The makeshift table had been the only thing left behind in this old building. It was still sitting exactly how and where she’d found it: precisely in the middle of the first floor. She wondered if the Taningers had simply been too sad to take it with them after Hethrow’s mega-furniture stores had finally dried up their business and forced them to sell out. She ran her fingers across the peeling block lettering, FAMILY OWNED AND OPERATED SINCE 1923, and wondered if they’d maybe eaten a tearful last supper on it before departing. Such an odd and sentimental notion for her, she thought, right before another hot flash caused her to fan herself with her legal pad.
Dearest Dorothy, Merry Everything! Page 6