Saving Grace

  * * *

  I ARRIVED AT the Per-Flo Motel about twelve-fifteen that Monday, having lied to Travis that I had a gynecology appointment. I told him I’d been having some female problems, which was all I had to say. Female problems and gynecology made Travis so nervous that he never wanted to hear any more about them than he had to. If the sisters pressed me for details later, which I was sure they would, I planned to say I had endometriosis, which my friend DeeDee Burgess had had, and that it required a series of dry-ice treatments at the doctor’s office.

  My mood matched the sunshine as I pulled in beside Randy’s truck. It was the only vehicle in the whole parking lot of the Per-Flo Motel, which turned out to be one of the worst-looking places I had ever seen, a nasty one-story cinder-block thing painted baby blue but peeling, with old boxes and trash piled in front of some of the rooms. Even this sight did not dismay me. It was what I had expected. In fact I welcomed it. For I knew that I was about to commit the worst sin a woman can commit, and I did not want it to be prettied up or glossed over. I parked right next to his truck for the same reason. I didn’t care how obvious we looked. Of course it was not likely that anybody from home was going to drive along that ugly stretch of highway out by the chair plant on the other side of Knoxville anyway, but I didn’t care if they did. I didn’t care!

  I may have been bad, but I am honest. That’s the truth. And I cannot honestly say that I had struggled with this decision. I had tried to struggle. I had stood in the side yard in the cold blowing wind the night before and asked Jesus out loud to help me, to give me some sign not to go over there, but He didn’t do a thing. Nothing. The wind kept on blowing and I got cold. So I went back inside and plucked my eyebrows and gave myself an egg facial. For the fact is, I was going to do what I was going to do long before I even knew I was going to do it.

  And I started smiling the minute I got out of the car.

  Then the door of Number Seven opened and there he was, shirt unbuttoned all the way down, holding a long-neck Bud. He drained it and set the bottle down on the sidewalk. “I been waiting for you, girl,” he said. “Get on in here.”

  I went to him like a shot. He closed the door behind us with one hand and started unbuttoning my blouse with the other. We did it all afternoon. It was like Lamar and then some. We did it every way I had ever imagined or heard of and some I had not, in that tacky paneled room with no pictures on the walls and the ugly drapes pulled tight and nothing but snow on the TV. In fact the only light in the room came from the TV, a watery blue that made us look like we were in a movie. A porno flick, I thought, though I had never seen one.

  When we finally quit, it looked like Number Seven had been hit by a hurricane, with the bedspread kicked to the floor and our clothes strewed all over the room. We lay on our backs, not touching, sweaty and too tired to move. Randy was smoking a cigarette.

  “Mmmmm-hmmmm,” he said. “There is nothing as good as a good woman.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” I said.

  “Missy, I’m not. Believe me, I’m not.”

  “My name is not Missy,” I said.

  “It’s not?”

  “No, it’s not,” I said.

  Randy propped himself up on one elbow to look at me through the smoke. “Well, what the hell is it, then, honey?” he asked.

  “Grace,” I said.

  “That’s a old lady’s name. You ain’t a old lady yet, though you might have thought you was.”

  “My whole name is Florida Grace,” I said.

  “Florida,” he said. “I been to Florida.”

  “Well, I haven’t. I haven’t been anywhere much. What’s it like?”

  “Hot,” Randy said. “Just like you.”

  I giggled. I liked to think of myself as hot. Then he reached for me again, just as the whole bed began to shake beneath us. I started screaming.

  “Hush up, hush up now.” He put his hand over my mouth. “Don’t scream like that. Have you done quit now?” I squirmed and nodded, and he took his hand off. The bed was still moving.

  “What is it?” I said.

  Randy laughed so hard he liked to have died. “It is nothing in the world but a Magic Fingers,” he said. “Looky here.” He pointed out the metal box on the nightstand, which I had not noticed before. “I swear, you ain’t seen nothing, girl. It’s like you been living in a time warp.”

  I relaxed then, and lay back and giggled while Randy fed a couple more quarters into the Magic Fingers and did me one last time slow while the bed moved beneath us. Then he stood up and started putting his clothes on. I lay there and watched him, memorizing his body. He swatted me with his shirt. “You better get a move on, girl,” he said. “I’m talking to you, Miss Florida.”

  I did not want to leave that room, not ever, but I knew I had to. When I stood up, my knees felt real wobbly. Randy came and stood behind me and gathered up my hair and kissed it. Then I got dressed and braided my hair and wound the braid back up on top of my head.

  “That turns me on.” Randy was watching me in the mirror, by the dim light. “There’s something about you that really turns me on. I could tell it the minute I saw you.”

  “Oh, you could not,” I said. I knew I had caused all this myself, by looking out the window for him the way I had.

  But, “Yeah I did,” he said. “Oh, yeah. I did.”

  Though I was completely dressed by then, he came over and stood behind me and pulled up my skirt and started playing with my fanny. I leaned back against him as a wave of feeling swept through me. I would have taken off my clothes and laid down again, I would have stayed in that room forever. I would have told Travis and Helen any lie. I would do anything. And I knew I would get away with it.

  “Tune in again next week,” Randy said. “Same time, same station.” He was trying to keep it light, so I did too. I blew him a kiss as I went out the door, something I had never done before in my whole life, but I must say, it came natural.

  At first I was blinded by the sunshine and had to stand still shading my eyes, until I could see. It amazed me to find that Helen’s old car was exactly where I’d left it, that the sun was low in the sky now, that a few more cars were parked down at the end of the motel lot—that the whole world, in fact, seemed to have gone on about its business while I was there in Number Seven with Randy Newhouse. A fat old man came out of the office and stared at me like he knew what I’d been doing, like he knew me. I would learn that this was Percy Odum, who ran the Per-Flo Motel by himself now since his wife Florence had left him. He ran it mostly for traveling salesmen and men who came in by the week to work at the chair plant and for people like Randy and me. Lovers.

  I should have been exhausted but I was not even tired, driving back home. I had more energy than I had ever had, I was sizzling with it. On fire. I sang all the way home, though the only songs I knew were church songs—the old hymns. “If you can’t bear the cross, then you can’t wear the crown,” I sang at the top of my lungs, with the window rolled down and the fresh air streaming in. “Glory hallelujah!”

  I thought I had been born again.

  * * *

  I WAS SURE everybody could look at me and tell, but it was not so. Nobody could tell. Or maybe nobody ever really looks at anybody else. I have thought about this possibility too, that we are just ships passing in the night, as in the song, through a dark ocean. In any case, I got away with everything. It was so easy. The way I did it was by being extra nice to everybody, which made me realize something else. If you are real nice, you can do whatever you want. Anything! You can get away with murder!

  First I said I had to have dry-ice treatments for endometriosis and then I said I was taking a class in first aid at the community college and then I said I was taking a how-to course in window treatments at the Sherwin-Williams store so I’d be able to make some new curtains for the living area. This was Randy’s idea, because Sherw
in-Williams really did offer such a class. I was not in it, of course. I was in Room Number Seven of the Per-Flo Motel with Randy Newhouse, fucking my brains out. Pardon my French. This is what Randy always said—“Pardon my French”—whenever he talked dirty. But actually I didn’t mind him talking dirty to me, it turned me on. Baby, you turn me on. Randy used to say that to me all the time. Randy turned me on. He turned me on so much that I didn’t care about anybody else or anything else in the whole world. I couldn’t even think about anything beyond the next Monday, or Wednesday, or whatever day we had planned to meet at the Per-Flo Motel. I guess I went kind of crazy there for a while. This continued through April and May. I knew it was going to get harder when the girls got out of school for the summer, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t worry about that. I couldn’t worry about them. I know this is awful, but I am trying to tell the truth here.

  * * *

  “HELLO,” I CALLED as I came in from Knoxville late one Friday afternoon in early June and closed the front door behind me. “Helen, it’s me, I’m back,” I called, and then almost jumped clean out of my skin when I looked into the living area and found all three sisters in there dressed up and waiting for me. They sat real still in the semidarkness, sipping ice tea. None of that big old furniture went with the new wallpaper, I realized suddenly. The sisters looked like old statues left out in some wild garden gone to seed.

  “Well, look who’s here,” Minnie said. “Look who decided to come home.”

  “Oh, she knows which side her bread is buttered on,” Helen said in the meanest voice imaginable. “You can count on that.”

  “She thinks she can have it ever which way she wants it,” Minnie said. “Ever way from Sunday.”

  “But she can’t.”

  “Oh no.”

  “No she can’t.”

  I stood paralyzed in the front hall while Helen and Minnie went back and forth. Vonda Louise sat in a great pastel heap on the sofa and didn’t say a word. I couldn’t think what to do. I knew they knew something, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t know how much they knew. Finally I walked in and turned the lights on, which caused them all to blink like three old toads.

  “What in the world are you all doing in here?” I said. “What are you carrying on about now?” I tried hard for the joking tone I used with them.

  “You can quit acting so nice.” Helen spoke to me directly for the first time. “Just don’t bother.”

  “We know all about it,” Minnie said.

  “Everything,” said Helen.

  “You whore of Babylon.”

  “You hussy.”

  “You little slut.”

  I felt like they were hitting me in the stomach. I sat down in the old rocker near the door.

  “Get up from there,” Helen said. “That rocking chair belonged to Mama, a saint on the earth.”

  But I could not move, and said so.

  They showed me no mercy. I sat in their mother’s rocker while they rained hard words on me like hail, like bullets. They told me how Helen had been talking to Garnet Keen after meeting last Sunday, just passing the time of day, and Garnet had mentioned that she was having the time of her life taking a window treatment class at Sherwin-Williams over in Knoxville. “Oh,” Helen had said, “that must be the class Missy is in.” “No,” Garnet Keen had said, “Missy’s not in it. It’s limited to six people, and she ain’t in it.” “Well, maybe she’s in another one, then,” Helen had offered, but Garnet had said no, that there was only the one, and it met on Saturday mornings. Well! Helen said her suspicions had been aroused, and she had said something to me about how did I like my class, and I had lied and said I loved it, that there were fifteen people in it and we were learning to make pleats.

  “Pleats!” yelped Minnie, who couldn’t keep quiet another minute.

  “I would just like to know,” Helen said, spacing her words out in a way that made it clear she had planned this whole conversation all out in her mind, “I would just like to know exactly what you intended to do, Missy, when it got down to where you had to produce some curtains?”

  “Drapes is hard,” said Minnie.

  “Lying bitch,” said Helen.

  “Where is Travis?” I stood up.

  “Laying down in the bed, as you might expect,” Helen said. “He might not ever get up, after what you have done to him now.” Then she told me how they had prayed over it all, and how it had been revealed to them through prayer that they had to tell Travis, which they had done, but he wouldn’t believe them until he followed me over to Knoxville that very day and saw me go in the Per-Flo Motel.

  “Claude Vickers seen it too,” Minnie put in. “Claude Vickers went with him, Travis was too wrought up to go by himself.”

  At this news, my heart broke. I could not stand to think of hurting my poor sweet Travis. I had never understood that it would come to this. I raced down the back hall into our bedroom, and sure enough, there he was on the bed, lying flat as a board on top of that ancient peacock bedspread, with his hands joined in prayer on his chest like a dead person. His long face was as gray as his work clothes. He looked like he was a hundred years old.

  When I burst in the door, he closed his eyes and turned his face away.

  “Travis,” I said, shaking him. “Travis, I know you’re not asleep. Travis, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry you drove over there, and got your feelings hurt. Oh Travis, I never wanted to hurt you. It didn’t have a thing to do with you, honey, it never did. I can’t stand to hurt you, I just can’t stand it!” I threw myself across him, but he did not move a muscle, nor respond in any way. I kissed his face, which was as dark and lifeless as Travis Junior’s had been.

  “Come on now,” Helen said from the door.

  “Too late for that now,” Minnie said behind her.

  She was right. I got up and stuck the barrette back in my hair, which had tumbled down. Then I brushed past them into the hall, where I stopped dead as a sudden, awful thought came into my mind.

  “Where’s the girls?” I asked carefully. Even if Annette had stayed after school for 4-H, they should have been home by now.

  “Never you mind,” Helen said smugly.

  “What do you mean?” I whirled on her, grabbing her shoulders. “Where are my girls?”

  Then Helen said that they were both spending the night out, Annette at the Abernathys’ and Misty with her best friend Heather Burgess, DeeDee’s daughter. They were always asking if they could do this, but usually Helen said no. However, Helen went on to tell me, this time she herself had called up Claudia Abernathy and DeeDee Burgess and arranged it, saying that there was trouble in the home. Trouble in the home! I could just imagine everybody on the telephone already, talking about it. The news would be all over the valley by now.

  “So now, Missy,” Helen said. “What have you got to say for yourself? Aren’t you sorry for what you done? Aren’t you sorry for kicking people in the teeth that’s been so nice to you?”

  At this point, I surprised my own self by saying, “You never have liked me, have you, Helen? Not even after all these years. You never have either, Minnie. You haven’t. You all ought to just go on and admit it.”

  “Shame on you!” Minnie said. “After everything we done for you.”

  “But you never liked me,” I said. “Travis did, but you didn’t.” I thought about going back to see Travis again but decided there was no point in it right then. I went to the kitchen and called Randy Newhouse on the telephone. I knew his number by heart but had never called it, as we had made our arrangements in person so far.

  “Hey now,” Randy said after the first ring. I was so glad to hear his voice. I told him he had to come over right away, that I had to talk to him. No, I couldn’t do it over the phone! Helen and Minnie stood there listening while I talked to him.

  Randy did not hesitate. He said he was on his way. But even wi
th the way he drove, I knew it would take him at least half an hour to get there.

  I left Helen and Minnie standing in the kitchen, and went out on the porch and sat in the glider to wait for him. They did not follow me out, thank goodness. I sat there hovering on the air and watching the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen, all pink and purple and gold streaks in the piled-up clouds over the mountain. I felt like I was seeing everything with brand-new eyes—that sunset, the white picket fence against the darkening fields, the long white curve of the road where it disappeared around the bend. I trembled on the breeze, waiting for Randy Newhouse.

  After a while, Vonda Louise came outside and stood quivering before me in her pale green dress, like a giant moth. “I don’t care what you all done, you and that painter feller,” she said, “that Randy. I don’t care where you went, nor what you done, nor if he kissed you on the lips, nor what you talked about. I don’t want to know a thing about it,” she said, and even though I didn’t say anything to her, she stood right there until Randy pulled up in the road with his brakes squealing. Then Vonda covered up her face with her hands and went inside.

  I was there before he could get out of the truck. I jumped up on the running board and stuck my head in the window and started kissing him. He pulled back. “What are you doing, honey, are you crazy? What’s the matter?” he asked, and then I told him. “You mean your old man knows, then? The old preacher? He knows everything?” and I said yes. I told Randy he had to take me with him now. I said I couldn’t go back in that house tonight.

  “Shit.” Randy pounded the side of the door with his hand. “Oh, shit. Now I reckon I’ll have to tell Brenda.”

  * * *

  BRENDA WAS HIS wife, of course. And she was not even his first wife either! I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it. It simply had never occurred to me that Randy Newhouse might be married. It had never entered my head, due to him acting so young and all, and me feeling so old.

  “But why didn’t you tell me?” I asked over and over on that horrible ride from Piney Ridge to Knoxville.