“What are you going to do?”
“It’s awful. I’m so embarrassed.”
“Imagine how Jack Mac feels.”
“He doesn’t know anything.”
“Right, you’re hiding under the bed whispering on the phone, and he doesn’t suspect a thing.”
“No, he doesn’t. It would be nice if you could make me feel better in this situation.”
“How does he look?”
“Oh God. Even better than he looked in Italy.”
“You’re in trouble.”
“It’s like tenth grade. Why couldn’t I go through this nonsense at an age-appropriate level? No, here I am now, in middle age, dealing with this stupidity.”
“It wasn’t that stupid up in the cockerbells.”
“Bluebells.”
“You’ll have to tell Jack.”
“I will never tell him! Never.”
“Don’t you think he’s going to wonder why you’re acting like a fool?”
“I’ll tell him I’m sick or something.”
“Sexual tension isn’t a disease.”
“You’re not helping.”
“Call me later.” He laughs. “Good luck.”
I cannot believe how weird it is to eat dinner with my husband and my summer almost-boyfriend, who with some amazing kisses could have brought down the House of MacChesney entirely. I look across the table at the two of them, doing a compare-and-contrast. They are different, and yet there is an all-boy quality to both of them. They instantly like each other (how bizarre is that!), and they seem to have lots to talk about. Etta interrupts whenever she can think of ways to get Pete’s attention. My daughter is never going to be the town spinster, that’s for sure. She can’t wait to be a grown-up woman. She awaits her first period like it’s the Preakness of Womanhood.
Headlights flash across the living room; we see the end of the beams against the wall outside the kitchen. Jack looks at me.
“Expecting anybody?”
I shake my head and take a look out the window. It’s Iva Lou.
“Sorry to barge in,” Iva Lou says as she throws open the door without knocking.
“Hi, honey. We have company. Pete Rutledge.”
Iva Lou’s eyes roll around as she tries to place the name, and when she does, it’s her turn to have her eyeballs bulge out of her head like rockets. I quickly motion for her to act casual (my first mistake) as she puts a frozen smile on her face that borders on ghoulish.
“Hi-dee. Pleased to meet you, Pete.”
“I spent a lot of time with Peter in Italy this summer, Iva Lou,” Etta says in an accent no one has heard since Grace Kelly used it in High Society.
“Yeah, well, I would’ve too.” Iva Lou winks at Pete.
“Iva, can we get you something to eat?”
“No, no. I just had a chili dog at the Mutual’s. I just stopped by on my way home to tell y’all about Spec.”
“Something wrong?”
“He’s having an emergency triple bypass tomorrow at Holston Valley Heart Center.”
“Oh my God.”
“Don’t worry. He’s okay for now. In fact, he drove himself over there in the Rescue Squad. He said if it got rough, he could give himself his own oxygen. Well, I’ve got to go.”
“I’ll walk you out.”
Iva Lou says her good nights and meets me in the hallway.
“Man alive, and I mean man alive!” she whispers. I motion for her to hush until we get outside.
“What is he doing here?”
“He’s hiking the Appalachian Trail.”
“Well, you tell him to get himself down to the trailer park and practice on Mount Iva Lou.”
I push Iva Lou out the door; when she’s worked up like this, there is no telling what she’ll say or do.
I drive Pete back to the motel; I wanted Etta to come along, but Jack made her stay behind to do her homework. I didn’t want to look suspicious, so I didn’t press it. I cannot explain how strange it feels to be in my Jeep with Pete Rutledge. I am not comfortable entertaining him here at home; he is strictly a European vacation fantasy.
I pull up in front of the hotel. I can see the top of Conley Barker’s crew cut behind the desk.
“Well, have a great hike.”
“Thanks.”
“You want to come in?” Pete asks.
“No,” I tell him so loudly it’s a shout.
“You don’t have to.”
“I can’t. But thank you.” I say this with a cool I didn’t think I had.
“Have you thought about me at all?”
“Pete.”
“Just a little?”
“Here’s the only way I can explain it. I live in a holler here in these mountains, where the weather is pretty good most of the time. And once in a while, a hell of a storm comes through, and it stirs everything up. When it’s over, this amazing blue sky appears, and things become so clear and clean that I actually see better; and from my field in Cracker’s Neck Holler, I can see as far as Tennessee, in such detail that I can make out the veins on the leaves. Without that storm passing through, you’d never get that crystal-clear vision that follows. You came through my life like a hurricane. You stirred me up and made me look at myself. You made me look at what I wanted and what I needed to choose. And there is a part of me that wishes I had thrown you down in that field of bluebells and had the wildest sex I could imagine, just for the thrill of it. But a thrill comes and goes, and we both know that. We did the right thing. I’m happy with Jack MacChesney. I really love the man. And I’m really happy that you’re my friend.”
“Okay, babe. I know when I’m licked.” Pete opens the door of the Jeep and swings his long legs out to the ground. He swivels and looks at me. “Thanks for dinner. And Etta. And Jack. I really like Jack.” Pete leans over and kisses me on the cheek. Then he gets out of the Jeep.
“Pete?” I call after him. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.” He smiles and waves.
I watch him walk into the lobby of the Trail Motel. He has to drop his head under the walkway awning. And he looks to me a little like the great Gary Cooper—Pete sort of rode into town, set things straight, and is gone.
When I get home, the kitchen is clean, Etta is in bed, and Jack is in our bedroom, in the overstuffed old club chair, reading The Post.
“He’s taking off tomorrow morning. He’s meeting the hikers in Asheville.”
“Great.” Jack puts his newspaper down. “How come you were so nervous?”
“Oh, the news about Spec really threw me.”
“No, it was before that. You didn’t want to call Pete at the hotel. How come?” Jack looks at me, and I’m thinking, this is what marriage is. It’s like a giant washing machine. You throw everything in there, and you pour on the soap, and the water gushes in, and you think you’re gonna wash it all away. But no matter what, even after it’s spun around, you open that tub and right there at the top is the thing you tried to bury at the bottom. The thing you tried to deny and walk away from. The truth about Pete Rutledge was bound to come out, because I am not a good liar. And more importantly, I don’t want to keep anything from my husband anymore. The truth is so much easier. (Another thing Mama taught me that has turned out to be true.)
“Honey, when I was over in Italy with Etta, I was trying to forget about you. It was just too painful. I’m not proud of that. I got so tired of the knife in my gut that I just wanted it out. And so I got a haircut.”
Jack laughs. “Okay.”
“It’s insane, I know, but it transformed me. I heard the scissors and I saw the clumps of my hair on the floor and it changed me.”
“How?” Jack leans in and listens.
“I went out that night, and that’s when I met Pete. I felt so good, I forgot about our troubles and danced. Pete saw me in that moment. And he sort of fell for me. But I wouldn’t get involved with him.”
“Why?” Jack asks me this with a catch in his voice.
“The truth?”
“The truth.”
“I’d like to say that it was something noble, like our marriage vows. But the truth is, I didn’t go to bed with him because he thought I was perfect. And as someone who worked her whole life to be perfect, I didn’t want to shatter the illusion. If I had the affair it would have made me a cheater. And I wanted to stay on that pedestal; otherwise I’d just be another summer lay for an American in Italy.”
“Honey?” Jack gets up and sits with me on the bed.
“What?”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Me too.” I put my arms around my husband. “Do you want to know why you … went with Karen? Because I made you feel bad about yourself. I wasn’t there for you when the mines closed, I didn’t get behind your business; I didn’t think that what was happening to you was serious. I treated your crisis like a glitch. And I was holding on to stuff, holding you accountable for things that you had no control over, because I had to blame somebody. Like when Joe got sick, I blamed you, because I wanted you to be the hero who comes in and fixes everything so I didn’t have to worry about it. I was horrible to you. But now I understand what I did. And it won’t happen again.”
“If it did happen again, we’d be able to name it. For the longest time, we just couldn’t name it.” Jack kisses me tenderly. “So that’s the story of Pete, huh? How about a cup of tea?”
“How about Jack Daniel’s? Or did Etta finish the bottle?”
“I meant to ask you, what was with the lipstick?”
“Welcome to womanhood.”
“Great.” Jack groans. He puts his arm around me as we go into the kitchen.
Spec’s triple bypass became a quintuple. When Doc Turner got inside, he “found enough goo to fill a shoe box.” (That’s Spec’s description, not mine.) So as I tiptoe through the halls of the Holston Valley Heart Center, I am expecting the worst. The get-well balloons I bought at L. J. Horton Florists keep getting caught on the pressboard ceiling ducts overhead. I hold them down by my waist. Finally, Room 456.
“Spec, now you listen here. I ain’t sharin’ you with no goddamn whore. You got to choose. You choose me or her. Now that’s that. I didn’t give up my goddamn life since the age of goddamn fifteen to get to this point and be by my goddamn self. If you wanted out, you should’ve gotten out when I could still get me out there and find me another man. Who is gonna want me at sixty-four? You might as well set me on farr right here, right now in this room, and watch me burn. Now that’s the goddamn truth.”
The barrage keeps me in the hallway. Soon I hear the sound of soft sneakers on linoleum.
“Hi, Leola.”
“Hey, A-vuh.”
Leola has a yellow bouffant hairdo and big Oscar de la Renta glasses. Her face is small, so the glasses cover most of it. She has an unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. She is tiny, and you can see the remnants of a great figure from her youth. She was always busty, but now she’s low-busty. She wears tight pink stirrup pants that pick up the pink letters on her oversize sweatshirt, which reads MYRTLE BEACH MAMA.
“Are you okay?”
“I need a smoke. Nice balloons.” Leola walks up the hallway.
Spec is lying in the bed attached to tubes of all kinds. He’s wearing his sunglasses, which I think is weird.
“Hey, Spec. I heard it went great.”
Spec holds up five fingers.
“I heard. Quintuple. Well, might as well unclog all the pipes while the doctor’s in there.”
Spec nods. “Doc Turner split my breastbone in two with an ax. He’s a fine surgeon. The scar is vurry thin, but it’s right long.” Then he whispers, “Is she gone?”
“Leola?”
He nods.
“She went for a smoke.”
“I got caught,” he says quietly, rolling his head back into the groove of the pillow.
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Twyla was over here last night. She come to see me.”
“Oh no.”
“And I got caught.”
For years, Spec has led a double life, seeing Twyla Johnson, his off-and-on girlfriend, while married to Leola, the mother of his five children. Twyla works at the Farmers and Miners Bank down in Pennington. She’s a petite brunette with a gorgeous smile and lots of time on her hands (bank hours are ten to three). She’s probably sixty now, still a young thing to old Spec.
“I’m sure Leola thinks she saw more than she saw. Didn’t she?”
“No, she pert near saw it all.”
“Well, what did she see?”
Spec won’t say.
I press him. “Did Twyla kiss you or something?”
“No.”
“Was she holding your hand?”
“Not my hand.”
“Oh no.”
“Yeah, she was, well, you know what she was doing. It’s been a vurry vurry stressful time for me. Vurry much so. And Twyla come all this way, and frankly, she wanted to make me feel good.”
“Oh, Spec.”
“I know. It’s like your worst nightmare. It’s like your mother catchin’ ye, for Godsakes. It could turn you off entirely. You know what I’m sayin’.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I mean. Is it so wrong? Is comfort so wrong? I mean, let’s say I was about to die in here, which I was, they practically spelled it out, I mean, I was a goner. Every damn avenue to my heart was clogged, Ave. It was dirt nap, Good Night, Irene, and kiss-your-ass-good-bye time. And if I had my pick of ways to spend my last moments, it sure weren’t gonna be with my sorry kids and my hateful wife gaping at me like a carp in a fish tank. I wanted my Twyla.” Spec sounds pitiful.
“Well, what’s gonna happen now?” I sit down on the bed. The movement jostles the cloudy tubes connecting in and out of him like overpasses on Appalachia Strait.
“That remains to be seen. Leola’s not left the room since. Poor Twyla burst into tears and run out of here. I ain’t seen her since. She ain’t called, neither.”
“She’s probably afraid.”
“It’s just a mess.”
“Yes, it is.”
“What ought I do?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want out of this hospital. And then I want to be happy.”
“Who makes you happy?”
“The truth?”
“Yes. The truth.”
“Twyla.”
“Well, then you have to choose Twyla.”
“But what about Leola?”
“Leola can get another man.”
“You think?”
“Yes.”
“But she done took care of me when I was sick.”
“Give her combat pay.”
“That’s true. I can’t believe you’re sayin’ this. You bein’ a Cathlick and all. Y’all ain’t never supposed to go for divorce.”
“Well, Spec, we’ve known each other a long long time. And I think I know you pretty good.” I don’t want to say what I’m thinking, but something tells me I should. “Spec, I think you deserve more than a hand job on a gurney. I think you should be happy all the time.”
Spec is a little stunned at my blunt assessment. He appreciates it, though, and twists the food IV needle stuck in his hand like a sewing needle in a pin cushion. “Well put. Well put.” Spec looks away, but I can’t tell what he’s looking at through the sunglasses. “Thank you for that,” he says, and looks toward the window.
“Spec, I read something once that helped me a lot.”
“What was that?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between true love and lust.”
“Yes ma’am, it surely is.”
“Do you want to know how you tell the difference?”
“I think it would shed some light,” Spec says from behind his sunglasses.
“True love energizes you; lust exhausts you.”
“And women will ruin you.”
“That wasn’t in the book, Spe
c.”
“It ought to be.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Pearl Grimes and Dr. Taye Bakagese are to be married tonight on the stage of the Trail of the Lonesome Pine Outdoor Drama Theatre. Pearl chose the Friday night after Thanksgiving because she knew most folks had the day off and could party into the wee hours. I am rushing around, ironing Jack’s shirt, hunting for Etta’s tights, and trying not to nick my freshly painted toenails on anything.
“Theodore?”
“What?” he says from inside the bathroom.
“Do you see Etta’s tights in there?”
Theodore hands me Etta’s tights through a crack in the door. He drove up to spend Thanksgiving with us. I convinced him that he shouldn’t miss Pearl’s wedding. The entire cast of the outdoor drama is invited, and they all wanted to see him.
Etta grabs her tights. I finish Jack’s shirt and pull the curlers out of my hair. Jack comes in from the kitchen.
“Your hair looks nice.”
“Thank you.”
We decide to go in Theodore’s car, since it’s a four-door. When we get to the theater, it looks like a sold-out show. Pearl Grimes has cast a wide net in her life already: she went to college, then she opened a second pharmacy in Norton, with a third scheduled to open in Pound. She’s amazing. As we join the folks filtering in, Otto sits by the door asking each person for tickets. Of course, everyone laughs at his joke.
“Can you believe my little grandbaby is gettin’ murried?”
“Isn’t life something?” I give him a hug.
“I mean, she’s my new grandbaby, little Pearl, since my son murried her mother. But I can claim her, can’t I?”
“Of course you can.”
As we gather onstage, the ceremony is simple and elegant. It’s a mix of Indian and Bluegrass, two cultures that have some things in common, like love of nature and family. Leah, radiant in a long red velvet dress, takes her place with Worley, who is wearing a new suit. Albert Grimes, hair slicked down, wearing gray slacks, a navy blazer, and a tie, fidgets nervously in the row behind Leah. (I think the insurance claim that the fire at the theater was caused by faulty wiring has taken the heat off of Albert.)
Taye looks at Pearl with so much love, it makes the hardest among us tear up. Nellie Goodloe runs out for more tissue (or maybe she’s jittery because the crowd is too big and she didn’t order enough mints).