Now she told me her father was in a nursing home and when she went to see him, he thought Flora was Darva and Darva was his wife.
“And my poor mom’s so arthritic it actually hurts her to hold the baby,” said Darva, and for the second time she wiped tears from her eyes. “On top of that, my sister-in-law is dying of cancer and my nephew has got a drug habit that put him in his third treatment facility.”
“Wow,” I said. “If I were you, I think I’d go back to France.”
“I’d love to,” said Darva. “God, not only did I love living there—I mean, it’s France!—but family duty’s pretty easy when it’s confined to writing letters and making a monthly phone call.”
The baby stirred, and finally I relinquished her to Darva’s outstretched arms.
“But now,” she said, her voice wistful, “now it’s time to dig in and get my hands dirty. Right, Flora?”
The baby’s eyes were open now, and looking up at her mother, she smiled. I did the same.
Fourteen
Hey, Buddy,
Check out the attached. I almost wish I could have seen it with my own eyes, but Florida’s a big state, and fortunately I was down in Cocoa Beach while she was way up north. Good God—does she have to go by her real name? My old roommate lives up there and sent me the article. (Geez, I’ve got a lot of friends in this state—how many others are gonna make the connection that I’m related to her?) I’m choosing to find the whole thing funny, or else I’d be projectile vomiting, and since I’m going on a dive this weekend, that’d clog up my scuba mask….
Other than my frickin’ sister saving souls, things have been going well. Nance is a little bit nuts with all this wedding preparation crap, which I go out of my way to ignore. I mean, what answer can she possibly expect when she asks me stuff like, “Should we have the off-white chair covers at the reception or the eggshell?”
I’m glad you’re coming down. It’ll be great seeing you at a frickin’ wedding (even if it’s my own—ha!) instead of a funeral.
Nance is tapping her watch and giving me the fish eye—I gotta go get my tux fitted. Man, am I psyched!…Not.
Anyway, take some Pepto-Bismol before you read the article—believe me, you’ll need it.
Kirk
The letter had been attached to a news clipping, and I unfolded it with a mixture of curiosity and what I could only describe as trepidation.
* * *
From The Ft. Frederick Chronicle, May 20, 1983:
CAN I GET A WITNESS?
By T. M. Tomaczek
Hands were clapping and tambourines were shaking as Rev. George Darrel returned to his hometown, kicking off the beginning of his Hallelujah Revival traveling road show. A crowd of more than three hundred people gathered yesterday in the hot and dusty fairgrounds, cooling themselves with the complimentary fans (“Rev. George Luvs U!”) that were passed out by two beaming young girls in puff-sleeved dresses.
The Rev. George Gospel Choir sang “Jesus Loves Me” and “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” there were several testimonials, and Rev. George and his son, Ernie, both preached in fiery manners. In other words, the usual we’ve seen from the reverend, that is, until the audience was jolted in their seats by the loud bangs of a bass drum, a bass drum strapped to a comely young woman by the name of Kristi Casey, who proceeded to do a little preaching of her own.
Rev. George, in a homage to his hometown, claims Fort Frederick is known as “the town that God has smiled on,” and certainly God was smiling all the brighter with the addition of the young woman who brought the crowd to its feet with her words of redemption and excellent rhythm.
This reporter spoke all too briefly with Miss Casey after the revival.
“I wasn’t always on a righteous path,” she remarked as chairs were being folded up and programs picked off the ground. “But until we’ve found the Lord, we really never are, are we?”
Queries as to her background were met with the simple phrase, “I’m here now, with God.”
The Hallelujah Revival begins its five-state tour starting tomorrow,
and with its new addition, the Lord has blessed it.
* * *
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered after I read it. I wasn’t trying to be funny, not even when the next words to fall out of my mouth were “Holy shit.” I put the letter and article on top of the rest of the mail, so Darva would see it as soon as she got home.
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” said Nance as her eyes teared up.
“Wow,” said Kirk, “I’m blown away. And what does it say down there?”
“Rapturia,” Darva said.
“She says she wanted a name that described how you feel together,” I put in.
“Oh my God,” said Nance, and a tear spilled down her cheek as she looked at the artwork. “It’s the best wedding present—no, the best present ever. Thank you so much.”
The bridal couple had picked us up at the airport and, seeing the flat wrapped package, begged to open it early.
“You won’t even be here when I open gifts at my parents’,” Nance had said.
“Lucky,” Kirk had muttered in an aside.
Darva had shrugged at me. “It’s okay with me.”
“Me too,” I’d said. “How about you come up to our hotel room and you can open it there?”
After the present opening, the four of us hit it off so well that after the rehearsal dinner, Kirk and his bride-to-be continued the party with Darva and me. We were into our second pitcher of margaritas, and if there had been pain to feel, we weren’t feeling it.
“So let me get this straight,” said Kirk. “You guys are living together but you’re not together?”
“Well, I couldn’t resist his offer,” said Darva. “He let me set up a studio in his attic—it’s got great southern light.”
“You should see the stuff she’s doing,” I said. “It’s phenomenal.”
“Thank you,” said Darva, and blowing a kiss at me, she added, “You inspire me.” She raised an eyebrow. “Anyone who changes diapers inspires me.”
“The baby’s,” I said. “Just in case there’s any confusion.”
Darva pressed a finger against the rim of her glass and then sucked the salt off. “We love each other, but we don’t love each other.”
“I hate it when she talks like that,” I said. Pretending to cry, I buried my head in my arms.
“So do you really wish it was something more?” asked Nance, putting her hand on my back.
“Yeah,” said Kirk, “do you? Or is it just that Darva won’t have you? And if that’s the case,” he said, raising his glass to Darva, “I commend you for your good taste.”
“Speaking of good taste,” I said, sitting up and looking pointedly at Nance, “did you abandon all of yours in the name of love?”
“Yup,” said Nance as she tucked a strand of Kirk’s bleached hair behind his ear. “There’s not an ounce of good taste between us.”
Kirk growled. “Now you’re talking, honeybunch.”
The couple, twelve hours away from legal matrimony, leaned toward each other and kissed. Darva and I, on the other hand, helped ourselves to more margaritas.
I thought Darva was beautiful, in her angular, pointy-featured way, and I appreciated her brain and her humor and her heart, but our relationship had never made that leap from the solid ground of friendship to the spongier marsh of love. At least that’s how Darva explained it now.
“Spongier marsh!” said Nance. “Is that what we’re jumping into?”
“Well, it is Florida,” reminded Kirk. “Probably lots of alligators in there too.”
Laughing, Darva shook her head, and her earrings jangled in accompaniment. “That’s just my point. When you fall in love, because you’re in love, you’re willing to sidestep the alligators, or sink in the muck a bit. Joe and I are best friends, but we don’t have that passion shield that protects us from all the other stuff.”
“Now, I’d think passion is less a shield than…”
I thought for a moment. “Than a saber.”
“Shield or saber,” said Darva, “we don’t have it.”
I shrugged. “She’s right. Whereas you guys”—I doled out the remaining contents of the margarita pitcher into our glasses—“are both shielded and sabered.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Kirk, raising his glass. “To shields and sabers.”
“My hero,” said Nance, clinking his glass.
“My hero,” said Darva, clinking my glass.
“Who’s totally unarmed,” I answered, clinking hers.
It was a beautiful wedding, although the sun shone a little too brightly for someone whose liver was pickling in tequila. France had added an elegance to Darva’s style, so she looked now as if she was a cover girl for French Hippie Gypsy magazine. And the bride and groom—well, I have yet to see the bride and groom who’ve looked hung over at their wedding ceremony. Must be the excitement burns all traces of alcohol right out of them. Even behind my sunglasses, I could see Kirk and Nance were giving the sun a run for its money as far as dazzlement goes. They were both working on their master’s degrees in marine biology and had been part of a research team studying manatees, which not only sounded cool but also bleached their hair the same sun-streaked way and gave them killer tans. Grocery store lighting doesn’t do the same thing to a body.
Nance’s family had a lot of money, which explained why the yacht the ceremony took place on belonged to Nance’s father and why the reception was at the yacht club, whose Admirals’ Hallway featured a picture of the selfsame father and the dates of his service as club president. (Twice—1958–59 and 1969–1970.)
Wealth hung in the air like a cologne sold at a counter I’d never get service at. Waiters did slow rumbas through the room, offering from their trays bites of seafood and flutes of champagne; diamonds weighted the fingers and scalloped the necks of blond thin women of a certain age whose husbands whose preferred ascots over ties; and a jazz trio I had actually seen on the Tonight Show played in the background.
The people representing Kirk’s side of the guest list—mostly college and work friends—were without exception diamondless, at least honking-big-diamondless. One woman wore a wedding band with a stone that might have been a diamond, but it was so small I could hardly tell, and it was at this woman’s table Darva and I found our place cards.
“Hey, Mrs. Casey,” I said, sitting next to her, “pretty fancy party, huh?”
“I’d say fancy’s the word for it,” said the bridegroom’s mother after she’d exhaled a long plume of smoke. “Christ, how much do you think this whole shebang is setting them back?”
“Probably the gross national product of some small country,” said Darva, touching a petal of the orchid centerpiece.
“Like Trinidad or Tobago,” I said, reaching for the little box wrapped in silver paper on my plate. “Come on, guys,” I said, “what are you waiting for? Let’s open ’em up.”
The boxes held silver picture frames engraved with the names of the wedding couple and the date.
I whistled. “Make that Austria or Belgium.”
Mrs. Casey smiled and turned to Darva. “So how are you doing? Have you talked to Flora yet?”
“Oh, just once…today.”
“Our long-distance bill is going to be—” I held up the picture frame. “Well, at least as expensive as this.”
“It’s tough being away from your kids for the first time,” said Mrs. Casey. “I remember when Jack and I went up north to go fishing and we left the kids with my mother. It was a piece of cake for Kristi—hell, she’d been having sleepovers with my mother since she was a baby. But Kirk—we could still hear Kirk wailing not only when we got into the car but as we drove down the block.”
“She seems to be doing fine,” said Darva with a little catch in her throat. “Of course, she loves Joe’s mom. Carole’s like a grandmother to her.”
Another couple—of the diamond-drenched, ascotted variety—sat down, their tanned faces trying to hide their disappointment over having been exiled to our table. Introductions were made, and the fake smiles they wore blossomed into real ones when a couple of their kind joined us.
Fancy salads made with a dark lettuce that I, as a grocer, couldn’t identify were served, and I was suddenly lonesome for Flora, who had declared all green food “yucky.” She was a whirling dervish of a two-year-old for whom I was “Horsey” (while giving her a piggyback ride), “Monsto Man” (when I chased her around like Frankenstein), and simply “mon Joe,” when she wanted me to read to her, to play dollies with her, or to drink imaginary tea with her.
I snuck a look at Mrs. Casey, who was eating her salad with great care and occasionally checking, with her pinkie, the corner of her mouth to see if any bits of the dark and mysterious lettuce had landed there. Mr. Casey had died a couple of years ago, and the day after his funeral, according to Kirk, she’d joined AA. Kirk had asked me to check on her once, and that visit led to the occasional ones in which I’d bring along Darva and Flora. She wasn’t hard to visit—she had a wicked sense of humor and made good coffee—but she was lonely as hell and seemed to think a two-year-old tearing through her house was sort of a gift.
“I don’t suppose Kristi’s going to show up,” I said as our salad plates were being taken away.
Mrs. Casey looked like she was just about ready to choke, but instead of a piece of lettuce, a laugh escaped from her.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. Leaning toward me, she whispered, “You heard how she’s turned into some kind of religious nut, haven’t you?”
I nodded. “Kirk sent me the newspaper clipping.”
She shook her head and laughed again, which caused a little frisson of laughter between the three of us.
“Something funny?” asked one of the tan diamond ladies.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Casey, “you have no idea.”
What had happened? Kirk had no idea; distance and a general antipathy had done his relationship with his sister no favors.
“I thought we might, you know, get closer once we got older,” he had told me. “But it didn’t happen. She just wasn’t interested.”
I’d seen her a couple of times after that weekend northern lights extravaganza, but it seemed as if our relationship, or whatever it was, had peaked, and she didn’t come back to Minneapolis after she graduated. In fact, I don’t know where she went; the random phone calls and postcards had virtually stopped.
She did come home for her dad’s funeral but left immediately afterward.
“I think she’s avoiding me,” I’d told Kirk.
“She’s avoiding everybody,” Kirk had said bitterly. “You’d think she’d stick around for a day or two—I mean, our dad did just die. But no, she’s got more important things to do.”
What those more important things were, she wasn’t telling. Mrs. Casey told me every now and then that Kristi called her, but never offered many details.
“Honestly, I’d love to tell you, Joe, but I can’t tell what I don’t know. It’s like she checks in to make sure I’m still breathing, and then says she’s gotta run. The last phone call I got, she was in California.”
“What part of California? What’s she doing for work?”
“I don’t know, and all she said was that she was temping.”
As much fun as I’d had with Kristi, her absence in my life wasn’t an aching one. She was sort of like a carnival—a lot of fun, but if I spent every day with her, I’d be exhausted. And probably have a stomachache.
As I watched Nance waltz with her father and Kirk dance with Mrs. Casey, I felt sorry for Kristi, who couldn’t be bothered to quit drumming for Christ or whatever it was she was doing now to come to her only brother’s wedding.
The big surprise in my life, besides getting Darva and Flora as roommates, was that I was warming up to my life as a grocer. It was like being mayor of a little town—a little town of food—and my goal was to keep everything running smoothly while pleasing my c
ustomers, who complained just like constituents. But they didn’t just complain, they confided—man, they told me things that turned my ears red, and all during conversations that had started with a question about the best roast to serve their mother-in-law or whether there was a toilet bowl cleaner that really worked.
It was the tameness I had been so afraid of, the way the words “I run a grocery store” fell like lead weights when asked by women I met in bars what I did for a living. Not that I hung out in bars much; before Darva I went out once in a while with friends from high school or the U, but I seemed so busy with the store, with Ed in those last weeks, and with the house I had just bought (a mile from my mother, six blocks from my aunt, and three blocks from the store—man, I was knotted in apron strings from all directions), and after Darva and Flora moved in, my search for the one seemed propelled by an idling engine rather than one turbo-charged. I had had a couple girlfriends over the years, but our relationships always seemed to have the heft of a feather pillow and never became more, as my mother said, than passing fancies. Since Kelly the weirdo, I hadn’t dated anyone who wanted to reenact a movie with me, although I’d had to break up with Marcia, a dental hygienist, when she flossed her teeth one too many times in front of me (“Don’t come crying to me,” she said when I gave her the it’s-time-to-see-other-people speech, “when you’re wearing dentures and I’ve still got all my beautiful clean teeth”), and Rhonda was as needy as a rescued dog, only you couldn’t wrestle or play fetch with her. Sandy, who had scored a perfect mark on her math SATs and was a member of Mensa, liked to remind me of both, and dropped me after we played our third chess game.
“Hey, just because I beat you doesn’t mean I cheat,” I said. “Maybe you’re not as smart as you tell me you are.”
I was resigned. I still thought the perfect woman was waiting for me somewhere; I just hoped she wouldn’t give up waiting, because I sure was having a hard time finding her.