Pearl takes Fleeta’s opinions seriously because Fleeta works the most hours. Ever since her husband, Portly, died from the black lung two years ago, she’s been able to work more. Fleeta’s kids are grown too: her son Kyle moved to North Carolina because he couldn’t find a job here; her son Pavis moved to Florida because he passed bad checks in North Carolina, where he was working with Kyle. Fleeta’s daughter, Dorinda, had a baby, but Fleeta told her that she wasn’t raising another “damn kid.” “You had the fun, now you have the baby, she’s yorn, you take care of her and visit me on Mother’s Day,” Fleeta told her; so went the story around town. She didn’t mean it, though. She takes care of little Jeanine every chance she gets. Dorinda gave her a necklace that says WORLD’S BEST GRANDMA on a little gold plate in cursive letters. Fleeta never takes it off.
“Fleeta. I think it’s a great idea.” I look at Pearl.
“You would,” Fleeta growls. “How much more change we gonna have ’round here? Purty soon we’re gonna be the Fort Henry Mall. If I wanted to work at a mall, I’d git me a job at the mall.”
“With the mines closing, we need to look at ways to expand. If the fountain takes off, Pearl will be able to hire people. More jobs. Here. In town.”
Otto and Worley emerge from behind the building, carrying their tools and balancing a long pipe on their shoulders (proof that Pearl’s decision was made long before she asked me). Otto walks with a limp; he swears his bones got short in the one leg due to old age. He has a bright smile, thin white hair, and clear blue eyes. Their new truck has a sign on the door that says OTTO OLINGER & SON, lest anyone forget that they are father and son, not brothers, as all of the Gap believed for so many years. I notice that Worley looks good, well dressed with a certain stature. His red hair has lots of white in it. And he’s had some work done on his front teeth.
“What’d Miss Ave say about reopening the soda fountain?” Otto wants to know.
“I love the idea.”
“Do either of y’all two give a rat’s ass about what I think?” Fleeta pats her smock, trying to locate her cigarettes.
“Not really.” Otto smiles at Worley.
“You can kiss it, Otto,” Fleeta barks.
“Okay, guys. That’s enough,” Pearl says with a smile.
“I remember old Fred Mulligan’s soda fountain,” Otto says wistfully. “There was a mirror on the back wall and them green leather stools that used to spin. And the cherry floats! Lord, they was good, them cherry floats.”
“I ’member it too. But if I want a cherry float, I go to Bessie’s in Appalachia. Let’s get on it, Daddy-O,” Worley tells him. (Back when Otto confessed to Worley that he was his father, Worley stopped calling him plain Otto and invented Daddy Otto.)
I take my place behind my counter and tack up the prescription orders for the day. Pearl has left her peanut-butter ball recipe on my desk. Etta pleads for them so much, I figure they’re good leverage when I want her to do something.
COUSIN DEE’S PEANUT-BUTTER BALLS
Blend: one box of confectioners’ sugar
18-oz. jar of crunchy peanut butter
2 cups of graham-cracker crumbs
2 sticks of melted butter
Roll into bite-size balls.
Melt: 12-oz. package of semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/4 box of paraffin wax
Dip balls into melted chocolate and wax and place on wax paper.
“Is this it?” I wave the recipe at Pearl.
“It’s easy.”
Fleeta grabs the recipe and reads it. “I don’t use the graham-cracker crumbs in mine, makes ’em mealy. I use crushed pea-nits. Gives ’em weight plus crunch.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Try the crackers, then be the judge.” Fleeta shrugs. “ ’Course, nobody round here cares what I think.”
“Pearl, can I talk to ye?” Worley asks.
“Sure.”
Worley’s tone is serious, so Fleeta and I look at each other. I tug on her smock and move toward the office to give them privacy.
“You can stay, Miss Ave. In fact, I’d like ye to,” Worley says. Worley doesn’t say anything to Fleeta, who takes this as permission to stay. She turns her back to us behind the counter, lightly dusting the outgoing prescription envelopes. Her head is cocked with her good ear toward us, so I know she’s eavesdropping.
“Is something the matter?” I ask Worley.
“No ma’am. I got me a full heart is all.”
“Sad-full or happy-full?” From Worley’s somber expression and the deep crease between his eyes, I can’t tell.
“Oh, very happy, ma’am.”
“Does this have something to do with my mama?” Pearl asks.
“Yes, it do. I’d like to murry Miss Leah if it’s all right with you.” Worley looks at Pearl and then, struck with shyness, looks at the floor. Fleeta and I look at each other. We’re stunned.
“Did you ask her yet?” Pearl asks Worley.
“We have talked.”
“Did she say yes?”
“She said if you said it was all right, then she’d murry me.”
“Well, it’s absolutely all right with me.”
Worley smiles. “I always wanted me a nice Melungeon girl like my mama was. And now I got me one.” He goes back to the storage room.
“Your mama and Worley have been dating?” I ask Pearl.
“I wouldn’t call it dating. You know how things are at the house—it’s old, and pipes go, or something goes wrong with the wiring, and Otto and Worley know where everything is, so they come over and fix it. And then it’s rude not to ask them to stay for dinner or lunch or whatever.”
“Put milk out and you ain’t never rid of a cat,” Fleeta says under her breath.
Fleeta’s got a point. Before I got married, I had so many repairs on the house, Otto and Worley practically lived there. They’d take in my mail, close the windows when it rained, and sometimes even start dinner before I got home.
“I guess Mama and Worley evolved sort of naturally.” Pearl sighs.
“Why on God’s green would your mama want to murry him? What does he got that’s worth having?” Fleeta demands.
“Companionship,” Pearl says over her shoulder as she walks back to the storage room.
“Leah will see how she likes companionship when she has him hangin’ ’round all the time. She’ll get tarred of that directly. A man can crowd a woman worse than a bunch of kids.” Fleeta cracks a roll of quarters into the register like an egg.
“Do you think you’ll ever fall in love again?” I ask.
“I had me Portly. I don’t need to be goin’ down that road agin. I’m old. Or haven’t you noticed?”
“Love doesn’t have an age.”
“Yes, it do. If you heard the way my bones creak of the night, you wouldn’t be tryin’ to get some old man to come into my bed and creak around with me.” Fleeta grabs her cigarettes and goes outside.
Falling in love with Jack Mac was almost an accident, so fleeting a moment I almost missed it. I was thirty-five and figured I’d be alone for the rest of my life. But Mrs. Mac knew better. She wanted me for her son and set about to make it happen, practically ordered me to go to the house when he would be home and she wouldn’t. And I did—I went up there and waited at the old stone house with four chimneys. I often think of that night when he told me he loved me for the first time. I was so scared of it, of him, of everything. What if I had gotten back in the Jeep and driven down the mountain before he got home? If he had decided not to come home that night to find me waiting there? If he hadn’t seen in me what even I didn’t know was there? How did he know I could love him back when I never gave him a single sign? How fragile love is. How delicate and small in its first buds, when it’s just an idea, a wish filled with hope. It is so easy to turn away from it entirely and choose to live alone in your own private fear. I had one moment of courage, and it changed my life. I didn’t turn to love out of loneliness. Or out of hab
it. I let love change me. I see why Fleeta doesn’t want a new man. She doesn’t want to change.
The bells on the door ring merrily.
“Saw your Jeep outside.” Spec Broadwater saunters in, leans against the counter, and starts fiddling with the viewfinder key chains hanging on a wire by the register. Spec, well into his sixties, is like a tree, seeming to grow higher and higher with age. Everything about him is oversize, his big head (mostly forehead, etched with crisscross lines from the smoking), his mighty hands, even his gold aviator eyeglass frames are so big they seem like windshields on his face. “Bad news about the mines.” Spec exhales like a cartoon cloud that grows a face and blows gusts of wind. “How’s Jack Mac?”
“He’s okay.”
“The situation stinks.” Spec tears a stick of gum in two and offers me half. I decline. He chews one piece and puts the other in his shirt pocket. “You know they got this new thing now.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a new way to get coal out. Instead of digging it, you start at the top of a mountain and mine from the outside. Kindly like peelin’ an apple. You mine down the outside of the mountain and then through.”
“What happens to the mountain?”
“Eventually, it’s gone. It disappears.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Yep. It is. If a bunch of ferriners come in here and mow our mountains flat, what will we be? Indiana?” Spec leans across the counter and shakes the March of Dimes coin canister. “A job’s a job, though. Maybe this here new technology is the answer.”
“I don’t know.” I smile at him, but he knows and I know that new technology isn’t going to help us. The companies have decided that they can go elsewhere in the world and mine coal more cheaply. There isn’t anything we can do.
“I don’t neither. Maybe some of these politicians ’round here will get off their arses and get the tourism thing going.”
“Maybe they will.”
“We got a lot around here to offer folks. The mountains. The beauty. Huff Rock. The Valley. Keokee Lake. Big Cherry Lake. You been up ’ere lately? Oh, it’s a beauty. The Dickensons put in a boat launch—no motors up there. Only manual. It’s something.” Spec neatens the rack of cough drops.
“Spec. Do you need something?”
He looks at me and laughs. His laugh turns into a hack. He clears his throat. “I need you to come back on the Rescue Squad.”
Spec has got to be kidding. Volunteering on the Rescue Squad when I was single was a natural thing; I was the town pharmacist trained in CPR and first aid, so soon I was assisting Spec. But it’s been almost ten years since I was on board. I don’t have the time anymore. “You know I can’t. I’ve got the kids—I mean, Etta.”
Spec looks away at the reference to Joe. I’m not offended by that, it happens a lot. Whenever I talk about Joe (and that’s rare), folks quickly change the subject. It’s not that they’re being rude or insensitive, they just don’t know what to say. Maybe it’s too painful for people to look into the eyes of a mother whose child has died, so they’d rather pretend it didn’t happen. Or maybe they think if they mention Joe, it will hurt me all over again. Joe’s life was so brief, just a small piece of the landscape of our long lives in these parts. Except maybe for Spec. I believe Spec remembers Joe the way I do.
Spec was Joe’s godfather, even though he isn’t Catholic. In fact, I found out later that Spec had never set foot in a “Cath-lick” church on account of the way he was raised. Catholics were strange and mysterious and not to be trusted. But he bucked up the day Joe was baptized, and made it to the church, even though he was shaking so bad from nerves he almost dropped the baby.
“I hate to turn you down.”
“Then don’t. I can’t keep nobody. I had that Trudy Qualls running shotgun with me for a while, and she just didn’t work out. Tried to boss me. You know how I am. I don’t mind living with one bossy woman, but I ain’t gonna work with one too.”
I’d like to help Spec. I would. He’s been there for me on some of the worst days of my life.
“Come on, Ave. For old times’ sake.”
There were lots of good times with Spec on squad detail: cat rescues, setting off confiscated fireworks for all the kids in town when there was no other means to destroy them, decorating the Rescue Squad wagon to ride in the parade at the state capital when Big Stone Gap’s own Linwood Holton was elected governor. And when it came to Etta and Joe, there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do. He used to let Joe ride around in the Rescue wagon with the siren going and the lights flashing.
When I took my son to the hospital for the first time, it was one of those bleak January days. We came off the elevator and ran smack into Spec. It was a Snow Day, and Etta was home from school, so she came along. Spec made a big fuss over them, threw them both up in the air, then sent them off to look at the newborn babies behind glass.
“What the hell you doin’ here?” Spec asked with a smile.
“Joe has a bad bruise.”
“Did he get in a fight?”
“No.”
“Well, you know boys, they fall a lot. Who’s his doctor?”
“Dr. Bakagese.”
“The Indian? He’s right good. I ran Myra Poff over here the other day, and he caught the first start of pneumonia in her chest.”
“That’s good to know.”
Spec put his arm around me, which, in all the years I had known him, he had never done. I assisted him for eleven years on the Rescue Squad; in the face of sickness and accidents, I never flinched. I followed his instructions and never panicked. I think he appreciated that I could deal with things without emotion.
“Why are you gittin’ yourself all upset?”
“What if it’s serious?”
“Good God a-mighty, Avuh. You can’t be the mother of a son and hit the panic button every time he takes a tumble. Boys are a mess. I got me two; one was a head-banger in the crib and the other one set fires. It’s just how they are.”
Somehow the thought of Spec’s sons, one a self-flagellator and the other a pyromaniac, soothed me. I had been fighting feelings of doom for months; maybe the long winter had me in a state. Hadn’t I read that folks get depressed this time of year? That the short days and overcast skies can chemically alter the brain into sadness? Hadn’t I noticed that the mountains surrounded us like brown metal walls and the sky, a dismal patch of faded blue flannel, had made everything seem worse on the drive up to the hospital that day? I thought then, as Spec looked at me like I was crazy, that there was a chance I was making the whole thing up. How I wanted to believe Joe was fine. For those few seconds, I did. I gave Spec, the Mighty Oak, a big hug. He pulled away quickly, embarrassed, and said, “See ye,” then off he went. That was the last time I felt hope throughout Joe’s entire ordeal.
I owe Spec. He knows it and so do I. How can I say no to Spec Broadwater now?
“Okay, Spec.”
“You’ll come back on?”
“Yes sir. But only one week a month. I’m a mother. I can’t be hightailing it all over Wise County with you.”
“I’ll take you. Even one week a month. Better than nothin’. See ye.” Spec goes out the door, whistling.
“You’re a fool.” Fleeta clucks and reloads the candy bar display.
“I know.”
“You got enough on your plate.”
As I load Mary Lipps’s insulin into a plastic case, I am sure that Fleeta is right.
“Oughtn’t you check with Jack Mac? Don’t he have no say?”
“I never once heard you say you checked with Portly about anything, so lay off,” I tell her pleasantly.
“I may never have said it, but I done did it,” Fleeta says as she stuffs overflow Goo Goo Clusters into a basket. “I done did it.”
It’s dark in Cracker’s Neck Holler as I drive home from work. I stopped at Buckles for milk and talked too long with Faith Cox, who is taking names for the bus trip to the revival of Carousel starring J
ohn Raitt next month. (Etta would love it, so I took a flyer.)
I take the curves of the roads gingerly. I’m crawling along so slowly, you’d think that I don’t want to go home. Truth is, I’m tired and don’t want to take a dip over the side. I don’t drive as fast as I used to. (I don’t do a lot of things since I became a mother.) I love my time alone going to and from work. It’s my time to think and sort things out. Right now I’m reconstructing all the little day-to-day decisions I’ve made that led us to our present situation. It’s what I always do when I have a big problem to contend with and feel stumped. I’ve been doing this a lot since Jack told me about the mines closing. I wonder if things would be different if I hadn’t given Pearl the Pharmacy and the Mulligan house on Poplar Hill.
When I sold Pearl the business for a dollar (the technicality made it legal) years ago, it wasn’t just to keep it from falling into the hands of my Aunt Alice Lambert. I did it because it was time for me to move on and start my new life. I shed the reputation of town spinster; I didn’t know what I would replace it with, but it was going to be something! I had big plans. I was going to travel the world and find the place where I fit. I had lived my life taking care of my parents; at thirty-five, I felt half of my life was over, and I hadn’t lived one day of it for myself. Folks were shocked when I sold Mama’s car, then gave Pearl the store and the Mulligan homestead on Poplar Hill. I knew if Pearl and Leah moved into town, it would give them a new worldview, the very thing I was seeking. It seemed crazy to others, but I saw potential in Pearl and knew that, with a little encouragement, she could make something of a business that I merely maintained. I never felt like Mulligan’s Mutual was mine, even though it said so in Mama’s will. I never felt like anything but an employee. Once I knew that Fred Mulligan wasn’t my father, I didn’t have to hold on to the things he had built. And I didn’t want to.
I never intended to become a pharmacist. After I went to Saint Mary’s and got my degree, I came home because Fred Mulligan had gotten sick and couldn’t run the place, and if he lost the business, what would happen to Mama? Then he died, and she got sick. I don’t regret staying home to take care of my mother. She had peace of mind when she died, knowing I was secure financially. I wonder what she thought up in heaven when I sold the Pharmacy to Pearl.