The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion

  A few months ago, Sookie had been at the store and in a hurry, and she had tried to hide, but Marvaleen had spotted her and cornered her in the frozen food department. “Sookie, do you journal?”

  “What?”

  “Do you journal? Write things down?”

  “Oh, like lists. Yes, I have to. I went to the store four times before I remembered to buy Parmesan cheese.”

  “No, Sookie, I mean seriously journal. Write down your innermost thoughts. Edna Yorba Zorbra says it’s essential to maintain a healthy psyche. I can’t tell you what a difference it’s made in my life. I would never have divorced Ralph if I hadn’t started journaling. I didn’t realize how much I hated him until I saw it written down in black and white. Oh, you must journal, Sookie. I didn’t know who I really was until I started journaling.”

  Well … that was fine for Marvaleen, she guessed, but she couldn’t imagine anything she would rather not do than write about her innermost feelings. And besides, she already knew exactly who she was and, unfortunately, so did everyone else within a five-hundred-mile radius.

  Driving home, Sookie passed by the cemetery, and sure enough, there was Lenore’s car parked at the entrance. Every Monday, she put fresh flowers on her Grandfather Simmons’s grave and inspected the grounds and made sure to call anyone whose relative’s blooms were fading and lecture them about honoring the dead. Most people had moved on and were more interested in the recent dead. But not Lenore. The woman was obsessed with her ancestors.

  Lenore’s own mother had died in childbirth, and she had been raised by her grandmother. That probably explained a lot about Lenore and her propensity to live not just in the past, but in the distant past. Sookie’s Great-Grandmother Simmons had been born during the Civil War, and her memories of that time were still raw and somewhat bitter. From early childhood, the message given to Lenore almost daily at her grandmother’s knee was that in order to survive in this world, she was to remain strong and proud. The South had been bloodied and defeated, yes, but never bowed. They had lost everything but their pride and their good name.

  At seventeen, Lenore was sent to Judson College and became president of her sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and valedictorian of her class. It was at Judson where Lenore had met Sookie’s father, Alton Carter Krackenberry. He had been a cadet attending the Marion Military Institute nearby. And from the first moment he met her in the receiving line, he had been blinded by love for life.

  During World War II, Sookie’s father had commanded an entire unit of men in Brownsville, Texas. But at home, Lenore always ruled the roost. He spoiled her terribly and did pretty much whatever Lenore wanted him to do. No matter how many insane things she did, he would just look at her and exclaim to his children, “Look at her—isn’t she just wonderful?” To the day he died, he said that Lenore had been the most beautiful girl at the Senior Military Ball, a fact that Lenore had agreed with most wholeheartedly. And often.

  AFTER SOOKIE GOT HOME and put the groceries away, she went into the sunroom with the paper and sat down to read when Peek-a-Boo jumped up in her lap. Oh, dear. She was perfectly happy to keep her until Ce Ce came back from her honeymoon, but she didn’t want to get attached to her, so she picked her up and put her down on the floor. But the cat jumped right back up again. Sookie sighed and said, “Oh, Peek-a-Boo. Honey … don’t make me like you. Go on now,” and she put her back down again. But she jumped right back up. The poor thing was obviously starved for affection, and so against her better judgment, Sookie started to pet her. After a minute, Peek-a-Boo was purring and kneading Sookie’s legs, looking up at her, happy and content. “Oh, well, bless your heart.… You miss your mother, don’t you? But she’ll be back, don’t you worry. Do you want me to get you some more bites? Is that what you want, precious? Do you want to play with your little toy?”

  Oh, Lord. She had only had the cat forty-eight hours, and she was already talking baby talk to it. But what could she do? She couldn’t just ignore the poor thing … and she was so cute.

  When Earle came home from work, Peek-a-Boo was happily chasing her mouse on a string that Sookie was pulling all through the house. Earle said, “Hi, sweetie. What did you do today?”

  Sookie had been waiting for years to say this: “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  THAT NIGHT IN BED, Earle was fast asleep, and so was Peek-a-Boo, who was now cuddled up next to her, but as usual, Sookie was still wide awake. Earle’s big surprise was that he was going to take her on a second honeymoon and she was so happy about it. She wanted to spend as much time with Earle as she possibly could, while she still could. With her future being as uncertain as it was, Sookie really didn’t know how much time she had left.

  It was the curse of the Simmonses. When they reached a certain age, some of them (her Aunt Lily and Uncle Baby) had to be sent to Pleasant Hill Sanitarium. As the doctor said, “When a fifty-eight-year-old man goes downtown dressed up in a Dale Evans cowgirl outfit, complete with a skirt with fringe, it’s time,” and after Aunt Lily’s unfortunate incident with the paperboy, it was obvious she needed to be committed. But with Lenore, it was hard to tell. When Sookie had called Dr. Childress in Selma about her mother’s latest exploits and asked what he thought, he sighed and said, “Sookie, honey, I’ve known your mother all my life, and the problem with Lenore has always been trying to figure out what behavior is just ‘delightfully eccentric’ and what’s ‘as batty as hell.’ I know it’s not an official diagnosis, but every Simmons I ever knew had a loose screw somewhere.”

  Dr. Childress had been the family doctor for years, and Sookie wished he had told her this before, not after, she had had four children. Who knows what wacko genes she may have passed on? Being second-generation, the children could be safe, but she was a genetic time bomb waiting to go off any minute. She lived in fear and dread of one day embarrassing her husband and children, and at one of the weddings, having someone point at her and say, “That lady in the corner talking to herself and batting at imaginary flies is the mother of the bride.”

  When she tried to tell Earle how worried she was about the Simmons curse, he had always dismissed it. “Oh, Sookie, don’t be silly. You’re not going to lose your mind. You’re as sane as I am.” She hoped he was right. But a few weeks ago, she had gone for a dress fitting in Mobile and had left the dress at home. Hopefully, now that she was almost sixty, it was just a normal senior moment and not the beginning of something worse. She didn’t know, but she had written her family a letter and put it in the safety-deposit box at the bank, just in case.

  She also wished Carter would get married sooner rather than later. He had always been popular. A couple of his old girlfriends still called her, wanting to know about him, so she was hopeful. The other day, he had said, “Mom, I want to get married … it’s just that I haven’t found anybody, yet, and it’s getting pretty discouraging.”

  “Oh, I know, darling, but I promise one day, you’ll meet the exact right one, and when you do, you will know it.”

  “How?”

  “You just will, that’s all.”

  Sookie knew it was a stupid answer, but it had happened to her, sort of. She’d known Earle Poole, Jr., since grammar school. She just hadn’t known he was the right one until years later. Granted, her life had not always been a bowl of cherries—but then, whose had? Even if her life were to end tomorrow, she still had so much to be grateful for. First and foremost, for Earle.

  And her children had mostly been a joy. The twins, Ce Ce and Le Le, had never given her a minute’s trouble. They had always been happy, probably because they had each other. From the moment they could talk, they just chattered away together. They were like their own separate little unit, and she was amazed at how well they got along. She had read that some twins hated to dress alike, but not hers. They loved it and had to have matching underwear and pajamas. They even spoke in stereo. One would start a sentence, and the other would finish it.

  Raising Carter had been easy. He was just like her bro
ther, Buck. Send him outside with a ball to play with, and he was fine. Dee Dee was the one she worried about the most. She had never been a particularly happy young girl, and her teenage years had been especially painful. She had always been a little on the chunky side, and unlike the twins and Carter, who had inherited Lenore’s perfect complexion, she’d had terrible acne all through high school. Each new pimple brought on a new set of histrionics. Almost every afternoon, Dee Dee would come home from school, run to her room, and fling herself across her bed in tears, because some boy hadn’t spoken to her or she hadn’t been invited to some party or something equally as devastating. Sookie had spent hours sitting with her, holding her hand, while she cried and sobbed about how terrible her life was. “Oh, Mother,” she would sob. “You just don’t know how it feels to be me. Everybody’s always telling me how cute and darling the twins are. All my life, people have fallen all over them and just ignored me.” Then, inevitably, she would wail, “Oh, Mother … why did you have to have twins? Why couldn’t you have just one like a normal person!”

  Sookie tried to explain. “I’m sorry, honey. It wasn’t anything I planned. It just happened. It was a surprise to me, too. They are the first twins on either side of the family. It was just a fluke.”

  “Well, I hope you’re happy! You’ve ruined my entire life. I will always be some ugly fat lump with bad skin that nobody wants.” And so it went, on and on. She tried to give Dee Dee special attention and be patient with her, because, unfortunately, what she said was true. Whenever the girls went anywhere, especially when they were younger, people made a huge fuss over the twins and left poor Dee Dee standing there, having to listen to them ooh and aah about how absolutely adorable they were. It broke Sookie’s heart to see her suffer so. And she did know how it felt. Growing up with Lenore, she had always felt like a little brown wren, hopping along behind a huge colorful peacock.

  TUESDAY

  JUNE 7, 2005

  THE NEXT MORNING, SOOKIE WOKE UP EARLY, PREPARED TO TRY TO solve her bird problem. Earle had just walked out the door when the phone in the kitchen started ringing, and she wondered who in the world was calling her so early. It couldn’t be Lenore; she was on her way to water therapy at the senior center. Oh, dear God, please don’t let it be Dee Dee saying she was moving back home. She knew she was having marital problems again and today’s horoscope had warned her to “Expect the unexpected.” Sookie looked at the phone with trepidation and read the number on the readout. It wasn’t Dee Dee. It was that same area code as yesterday, probably the same phone solicitor, so she didn’t pick up. She didn’t have time to talk to anybody now. She had to concentrate on her bird-feeding plan. It was going to be tricky. She’d seen how those blue jays could go through all their food in just a matter of minutes, so she was going to have to move very fast.

  Sookie quickly rinsed off the breakfast dishes and stuck them in the dishwasher, but whoever was calling wouldn’t hang up, and it was distracting. They used to have an answering machine, but Lenore thought it was an open mike for her to speak into on any subject at any time and had left fifteen- and twenty-minute messages on it, sometimes in the middle of the night, so they had to get rid of it.

  As she finished up in the kitchen, she debated whether to put the sunflower seeds for the blue jays in the front yard or the back. If she put the sunflower seeds in the front, someone driving by might see her and want to stop and talk, and she didn’t have a second to spare. So she decided she would start at the back and run to the front. Her success depended on how long it would take the blue jays to finish the sunflower seeds before they discovered the bird seed in front and how fast she could run from one yard to the other.

  But what shoes should she wear? She looked down and realized she shouldn’t try and run in her flip-flops; it was too dangerous. She went to her closet and found nothing suitable—practically every shoe she owned had a little heel.

  She went down the hall to the twins’ bedroom closet and started rummaging through a box of their old shoes. She found a pair of worn-out pink sneakers with pom-poms. Unfortunately, they were two sizes too large, but they’d be better than trying to run in flip-flops and breaking an ankle.

  She put them on and laced them up as tightly as she could and went out to her greenhouse and filled her two large ceramic polka-dotted bird seed containers, one with sunflower seeds and the other with the wild bird seed. She went out and placed the container with the wild bird seed on the side of the house, ready to be picked up as she ran by, headed to the front yard. She then went back to the greenhouse, picked up the container with the sunflower seeds, took a deep breath, and ran to the backyard, filling up the feeders as fast as she could.

  After Sookie finished filling the feeders in the backyard, she dropped the container on the ground and ran to the side of the house and picked up the other polka-dotted seed container and was running toward the front yard when she stepped in a gopher hole and lost her left shoe. She couldn’t stop so she just went on without it.

  And of course, the very same moment she hit the front yard, the new Methodist minister and his wife were driving by the house and saw Sookie, wearing one pink shoe with tassels, hopping around on one foot, throwing seeds from a large polka-dotted container at her feeders. They slowed down and, as a matter of courtesy, were going to stop and say hello, but thankfully for Sookie, decided against it and quickly drove on. They were from Scotland and didn’t know if running around wearing one pink shoe with tassels while carrying a large polka-dotted container and throwing seeds was some kind of Southern bird-feeding ritual or not, but they were afraid to ask.

  Sookie’s neighbor Netta Verp was sitting out on her side porch in her robe, having her morning coffee, when she suddenly saw Sookie flying around the yard like a bat out of hell, with her polka-dotted bird seed container, slinging seeds every which way, and she wondered what in the world she was doing. Netta had never seen anyone in such a hurry to feed their birds in her life.

  After Sookie had filled all the front yard feeders, she ran back into the house and stood looking out the living room window, waiting to see if her smaller birds would come to feed. She waited, but none came. Where were they? There was not a bird to be seen anywhere. She then ran down the hall and looked out the kitchen window and saw the blue jays happily gobbling up all the sunflower seeds in back, while as usual, all of her smaller birds flittered around in the bushes below. Oh, no. Those little birds didn’t know what was waiting for them in the front yard. Oh, Lord. She hadn’t planned on this. Now she didn’t know what to do. She ran out on the back porch and started waving her arms and yelling at the top of her lungs, “Go to the front, little birds—go around to the front! Hurry up, little birds!” But how do you communicate with birds? It was so frustrating. Now not only were her little birds not getting anything to eat; all those sunflower seeds seemed to have attracted every blue jay in the entire area, and more were flying in by the minute.

  Netta observed her neighbor out on her back porch, jumping up and down and waving her arms around like a crazy person, and she didn’t know what to think. It was certainly peculiar behavior. She just hoped poor Sookie hadn’t flipped overnight, but with the Simmons family you never knew.

  After a moment, Sookie ran back to the living room window to see if, by chance, any little birds were there, but now a whole new gang of big blue jays were in the front yard, eating all the bird seed. It was so frustrating. The only other thing she could think of to do was to get Carter’s old baseball bat and run out and try to scare the blue jays off. But she didn’t want to get reported to the humane society for cruelty to animals, especially since she was on the board. Oh, God, the phone was still ringing off the hook. Whoever it was must have her on some computer redial. Between the blue jays and the phone, she was getting a headache, so she went in and picked it up.

  “Hello!”

  The person on the other end seemed surprised that someone had finally answered and said, “Oh, hello! Ahh … to whom am I speaki
ng, please?”

  “Well, whom were you trying to reach?” asked Sookie, as she saw three more blue jays swoop in.

  “I’m trying to locate a Mrs. Earle Poole, Jr.”

  “Yes, this is she.” As soon as she said it, she knew she had made a mistake. She should have pretended she was the maid and said Mrs. Poole wasn’t home. She was stuck now. As she stood watching more and more blue jays show up at the little birds’ feeder, she suddenly remembered that old BB gun of Carter’s in the closet and wondered if she could fire off just a few warning shots from the porch without being seen.

  The man on the phone was asking another question. “Are you the former Sarah Jane Krackenberry?”

  “Yes, I was … am.” Sookie realized that the idea that she would even think about shooting a gun at a helpless bird was not her normal way of thinking, but those blue jays made her so mad—the way they pushed the smaller ones around.

  “Was your mother’s maiden name Simmons, middle name Marion, first name Lenore?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Did your family live in Brownsville, Texas, from the years 1942 to 1945?”

  “Yes, uh-huh.”

  “Is the current mailing address for Mrs. Lenore Simmons Krackenberry 526 Bay Street, Point Clear, Alabama?”

  “Yes, all her mail and bills are sent to me.” Sookie was still thinking whether or not she should get Carter’s old BB gun and try and scare the blue jays away, but decided not to. If she were to accidentally hit one, she would never be able to forgive herself.

  “Is your zip code 36564?”

  Peek-a-Boo walked over and rubbed up against her leg. Then it suddenly occurred to her: Maybe Peek-a-Boo would like a big fat blue jay for breakfast. She could let her out. But on the other hand, if Peek-a-Boo ran away and anything happened to her, Ce Ce would have a fit.

  “Ma’am? Are you still there?”