Praise for the novels of
Curtiss Ann Matlock

“A wonderful cast and a perfect setting make for a gentle and reassuring story.”

—Booklist on Sweet Dreams at the Goodnight Motel

“I have loved every visit I’ve ever made to Valentine. This wonderful place is full of lovable eccentrics who live together in harmony, most of the time, and welcomes newcomers…. Curtiss Ann Matlock’s extraordinary characters are so three-dimensional you embrace them and wish them well, and look forward to seeing them again.”

—Reader to Reader at www.NewAndUsedBooks.com

“Once again, Matlock delivers a gentle, glowing tale that is as sweet and sunny as its small-town setting. Readers will be delighted by this deft mix of romance and…slice-of-life drama.”

—Publishers Weekly on At the Corner of Love and Heartache

“Matlock’s down-to-earth characters and comforting plot will please many.”

—Booklist on Recipes for Easy Living

“This is a delicious read for a lazy summer day. It’s not overly sweet, and it has enough zing to satisfy readers thirsting for an uplifting read.”

—Publishers Weekly on Cold Tea on a Hot Day

“With realistic characters and absorbing dialogue, Matlock crafts a moving story about a woman’s road to self-discovery.”

—Publishers Weekly on Driving Lessons

Curtiss Ann Matlock
Chin Up, Honey

For my two mothers

Anna Marie Henderson and Frances Kinsey Matlock

and for

Timothy James Matlock

Contents

Home Folks

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Family Album

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

We Are Family

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Home Folks

1

1550 AM on the Radio Dial

The Home Folks Show

He put his mouth close to the microphone. “Goood mornnnin’, Valentine-ites! It’s ten-O-five once again in southwest Oklahoma, and time to take a break with Brother Winston and the home folks. That was the legendary Mis-ter Bill Monroe singin’ us in with ‘Bluegrass Stomp.’

“I played that tune for my neighbor Everett Northrupt. His wife, Doris, told me last night that she wants him to get some juice flowin’. So that one’s for you, Everett. If you can keep your feet still to that, you’re dead.”

In his tenth decade—his final decade, as he saw it—Winston Valentine found himself smack in a new career as a radio personality. He was happy as a dog with two tails.

“School’s finally out for the summer, and my little buddy is here with me again. Say hi to the folks, Mr. Willie Lee.” He swung the microphone lower for Willie Lee, who was a little short for his twelve years of age.

“Hel-lo, ev-er-y-bod-y. This is Wil-lie Lee and Mun-ro,” he said in his careful speech that did not come easy.

Munro, paws up on the desk, barked once, then hopped down and followed after the boy, who returned to sit in a nearby chair. Munro laid his chin on the boy’s untied tennis shoe.

Winston continued. “We are brought to you by…uh, Tinsley’s, your hometown IGA grocer, where they’re offerin’ a spectacular special of $3.95 a pound on top-choice Kansas City strip steaks. Great price, but seems a long ways to go just to get a steak.

“Oh, the boy here didn’t appreciate that one. He’s shakin’ his head.”

The boy was twenty-five-year-old Jim Rainwater, who worked the electronics across the room.

“Just so you out there can get the picture, this young man is as full-blood Chickasaw as they come nowadays, with long hair in a ponytail. Girls, he’s handsome and single. But he has a tongue ring, and I don’t know how that works out with kissin’.”

Winston grinned at the blush stealing over the young man’s high cheekbones.

“Let’s see…the weather…well, we got some. Sunny skies and headin’ for a high of ninety-five. Whoo-eee, that’s pretty hot for the end of May. There’s a chance of storms on Friday to cool things off.

“Now, our topic of discussion today is ‘Signs Around Town.’ I’m startin’ off with the sign at the railroad crossing on the north highway. Hasn’t anyone but me ever wondered about it? It says: No Stoppin’ on Tracks Due to Trains.”

He paused a moment. “I ask you—due to what else on a train track?”

Jim Rainwater cast him a grin. Winston was off and running.

“Who would think you are not supposed to stop on the tracks because a dog or a chicken or any-thing other than a train might come along? In fact, why would anyone stop on the track, if he could help it? Just to hang out while dead lice fall off ’im?

“The phone line is open to take your comments. And don’t forget, this is birthday celebration day. We’ll take calls while we listen to some music—big John Cash with the answer for the blues: ‘Get Rhythm!’”

The music started as Winston pushed aside the microphone and mopped his face with a handkerchief. Jim Rainwater gave him a worried eye.

“I’m not expirin’ yet, so relax,” Winston said and winked.

Willie Lee, who had disappeared around the corner, returned with a cold bottle of water and handed it to him.

“Thank you, Little Buddy.” He unscrewed the bottle cap with gnarled hands that he often felt surprised to see as being so aged and upturned the bottle in his mouth. His eye noted a missing tile in the old ceiling.

The low-wattage AM station was located in a small block building at the end of the dirt road behind the car wash. It had long sat abandoned until Tate Holloway, publisher of the Valentine Voice, had bought it last winter and put it back on the air from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. This endeavor had been financed by Holloway, hitting big bucks when his semi-autobiographical novel about a poor boy growing up in East Texas stayed in the top ten of the New York Times best-seller list for eight weeks. At one point the book reached number two, topped only by the ever-popular author Nora Roberts. The station was run by Jim Rainwater, the only paid employee, who oversaw a staff of volunteer disc jockeys putting forth an eclectic format, everything from classic jazz to automotive discussion to French lessons on Fridays.

Each mid-morning, all over town and within a twenty-five-mile radius, radios in kitchens and barns, shops and vehicles were tuned to Brother Winston’s Home Folks Show at 1550 AM on the radio dial. People loved Winston Valentine, and he loved them back.

Over at Blaine’s Drugstore, Vella Blaine was working behind the soda-fountain counter. She called to her niece’s boy, Arlo, who was entertaining three teenage-girl admirers by flexing his immense muscles as he served up ice-cream cones. “Break loose from those girls and turn up the radio,” Vella told him.

She wanted to hear the birthday announcements. Specifically, she wanted to see if Winston remembered that today was her birthday. He was her best friend, mostly by being her oldest friend. They had what could be called tenure, which she felt gave her every right to certain expectations.

It was silly at her age to want to hear a happy birthday on the radio. Sillier still not to tell anyone it was her birthday if she wanted birthday wishes. She thought of all this as she halved lemons for the fresh lemonade—the Wednesday summer special—and kept an ear tuned to the radio, unconsciously swaying her hips to the good old country-western music.

Her sultry hip movements were noticed by Jaydee Mayhall, who sat at the counter and happened to look up from his cup of latte. He blinked in surprise at the sight, and also at feeling a stirring of manly response. As he sipped from his cup, he did some calculating. He had to be younger than Vella by what…? Ten or twelve years, at least.

This thought brought Jaydee’s eyes to his image reflected in the mirrored wall behind the sundae dishes. Jaydee was fifty-six, but he didn’t look it. Everyone said so. He had used that Just For Men on his hair until the past few months, when he couldn’t seem to keep up with it. He wondered if he might be letting himself go.

He removed his glasses and dropped them inside his coat pocket.

Vella looked into the mirror, too. It was right in front of her face, as it had been for the better part of her life. Mature? Old. She closed her eyes. Her husband of nearly forty-eight years had finally died, and her boyfriend, who had seemed so promising, had gone off with another, younger, woman, something she was sad or glad about, depending on the moment. Right then, she experienced a slice of fury at the desertion and sent the knife in a swift chop through a lemon.

The next instant she had the clear imagination of Winston’s voice, announcing her true age out over the air waves.

She grabbed a towel and, wiping her hands, found the telephone number for the radio station on the card beneath the phone. It’s my birthday, Winston…just say happy birthday. I will never speak to you again if you say my age.

Buzz, buzz, buzz, came the busy signal.

Over the radio, Winston started in with the birthday announcements. Vella tried the phone number again.

Buzz, buzz, buzz.

Plunking down the phone, she returned to making the lemonade. With each of Winston’s celebratory announcements, she threw a half a lemon into the manual juicer and brought the handle down, hard.

At the very last, when she had thought Winston was finished and without mentioning her, and she was both disappointed and relieved, here he came out with, “There’s one more birthday that wasn’t called in, but I happen to know it. Ever’ body go by and wish my good friend and neighbor Miss Vella Blaine a happy birthday.”

Vella paused with her hand on the thick handle of the juicer.

“I have known Miss Vella all of her life, and I happen to know that she is sixty-five today. Happy birthday, Miss Vella!”

Oh, Winston, you dear old friend!

Vella, heart full and eyes misty, smiled while happy birthday wishes rang out all around the soda fountain. Vella found herself near tears. Jaydee Mayhall even lifted his cup and said gallantly that she was a fine-looking woman, for her age. He was a pompous ass, but she appreciated the backhanded compliment.

“I didn’t know today was your birthday, Aunt Vella,” Arlo said. “I woulda’ baked you a cake.”

“Oh, sugar, that’s sweet, but I don’t need any cake.” Vella was again rapidly punching numbers for the radio station into the phone. This time the call went right through, and when she got Winston on the line, she said in her most sultry voice, “Thank you for my birthday present.”

“You’re more than welcome, darlin’.”

When she hung up, she turned to see little old Minnie Oakes approaching from over at the pharmacy, her purse swinging on one arm, while her opposite hand swung a bottle of Milk of Magnesia. Minnie was a childhood girlfriend who was actually two years younger than Vella but had always seemed twenty years older.

Minnie came up to Vella and shook the blue bottle at her. “You are not no sixty-five years old!”

And Vella replied, “I know it’s hard to believe, sugar, but I am. You heard it on the radio.”

“That was Randy Travis, singin’ ‘Satisfied Mind’ right here at 1550.” Winston pressed the left earphone tight against his ear. His hearing, like other parts of his body, let him down on occasion. “We got Wynona Yardell on the line, to tell us about a right absurd sign. Go ahead, Miss Wynona.”

“Hi, ever’ body…I’m callin’ about the sign on the highway goin’ east. It says…” She started giggling. “…well, you may not think it is funny, but it seems funny to me. It says…Caution, Wet Pavement When It Rains.”

She went into gales of laughter, and everyone listening to the radio laughed as much at her laughter as at what she’d said.

Out on the highway heading into town, Belinda Blaine turned up the volume of the radio in her champagne-colored Cadillac, saying, “My word, one thing about Winston’s show—it is a never-ending source of entertainment.”

Receiving no comment from her passenger, Belinda glanced over at the woman. Emma had seemed distracted all morning. A little pale, actually, when usually Emma Berry was one of the most bright and shining women in town.

Then Winston drew Belinda’s attention again, with an advertisement for the Merry Male Maid Service, which was offering a special all month.

Belinda’s thoughts went from musing about hiring the Merry Males to the fact of her mother having six years shaved off her life right on the radio, which put Belinda back in her early thirties, and because it was on the radio, everyone was going to believe it.

“We can get you interviewed on Winston’s show,” Belinda said, the idea coming suddenly. “He loves to do that, and then we’ll be gettin’ advertising for free.”

Belinda and Emma Berry were on their way back from a gift shop up in Lawton, where Belinda had placed Emma’s greeting cards and framed calligraphy on consignment. Emma’s cards had sold so well at the drugstore that Belinda had decided to branch out. She was having energetic fantasies of a line of cards, calendars and framed prints, then on to tea towels and teacups and T-shirts. Marketing was the key, and that, Belinda knew, was her own specific and golden talent.

Her rapid thoughts caused her foot to press on the accelerator. She whipped around vehicles as she came to them. Basically, Belinda drove with the attitude that no one would dare challenge her.

“And there’s the Fire Department Auxiliary’s summer craft fair comin’ up. I’ll check the dates on that. We’ll have to stock up for it.”

Realizing Emma had still not said a word, Belinda glanced over to see her looking out the side window.

“Sugar, did you hear me?”

Emma’s head nodded. “I…”

Belinda glanced over again and saw that her friend had pressed a tissue to her face.

Crying? Was Emma crying?

As if in answer to the unasked question, the woman burst into sobs.

The next instant a siren sounded from behind.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Belinda knew even as she glanced in the rearview mirror that it was her husband, Deputy Lyle Midgett, f lashing his patrol car’s lights.

She might have ignored him, but he tended to get into such a sulk when she did that. He drove up right up beside her, indicating she needed to pull over. She shot him a warning look. He knew that she did not like to take her Cadillac off the pavement and expose it to more dust and dirt than absolutely necessary. She went on another quarter mile and turned onto a small paved road.

“Now, honey, how do you think it looks for you to always be speedin’, and me the first-deputy?” Lyle said right off, bending down to her window. He was tall. “I really, really wish you wouldn’t speed, darlin’. Oh, hello, Emma. How are you today?”

“Fine.”

“I don’t speed on purpose, Lyle. I don’t think, I’m gonna speed and make Lyle look bad. And no one thinks a thing when I speed, ’cause I have been drivin’ this way my whole life—every bit of those years we lived together—and you never felt it reflected on you. Now I’m stopped, and in fact, Emma and I are gonna sit here a minute and discuss some things, so you can go on. I want to put the window up. This wind is messin’ up my hair.”

“Okay, darlin’,” he said in his gentle tone. “But please don’t speed anymore. At least not anywhere near town.”

“I won’t, sugar,” she said, blowing him a kiss as the window slid up. “Until next time,” she whispered. Belinda knew herself well and without apology.

In her side-view mirror, she watched Lyle as he walked back to his patrol car, running her eyes from his broad shoulders downward over his lean hips. She had not married Lyle Midgett for his brains. It was for everything below his neck, all of which was quite large and strong, and that included his heart.

Then she turned her attention to Emma. In Belinda’s estimation, blue-eyed pale blondes were generally really high-strung, even if they were not natural blondes, which Belinda knew that Emma was not. Every six weeks, Emma came into the drugstore and bought L’Oreal No. 9.

“I’m all right. It’s nothin’…I was just…” Emma gave her a wan smile, then broke off, her gaze going to the radio. Her eyes widened, and then her face crumpled.

Belinda looked at the radio, which seemed innocent. Don William’s voice was singing out, “…another place, another time…”

She reached over and punched the Off button, then pulled tissues from a box in the backseat and shoved them at Emma, who was bent over and just boo-hooing her heart out.

A practical woman, Belinda checked her watch and waited. After a minute and a half, Emma was coming back to herself.

“You have mascara smears, sugar,” Belinda said. “Here’s some lotion. There’s a mirror over the sun visor.”

Emma repaired herself. “I’m sorry…it was hearin’ Don Williams. You see…John Cole…and I…went to see him in concert once for our…anniversary.”

Oh, dear, she might go again. Belinda handed over more tissues, and Emma took them but managed self-control, which Belinda both admired and appreciated. Displays of emotion wore on her nerves.

“John Cole and I have separated,” Emma said. “We’re gettin’ divorced.”

Belinda, who was rarely surprised about anything, was stunned. “Oh, honey… I’m so sorry to hear that.”

She shut up, not wanting to say anything to get Emma started again, and to calm her own emotions. Good Lord, if this could happen to Emma and John Cole, two simply lovely people who seemed like the perfect couple, what did that say about her own chances as a fairly new and somewhat reluctant married woman?

“Thirty-two years. We’ve been married thirty-two years.”

Emma’s voice was a hoarse whisper filled with so much sadness that Belinda felt struck to the core.

“Well, these things happen,” Belinda said at last, swallowing down a lump. “What is it? Another woman? Men just lose their minds when they get middle-aged.” She had seen it time and again, although she was quite certain her Lyle never would. It was the really intelligent ones who did. Women were so stupid about intelligent men.

“Oh, no! At least I don’t think so. John Cole isn’t like that.”

Belinda thought the wives were always the last to know.

Emma said, “It might be easier if it was another woman, because maybe I could fight that. It’s just that we don’t have anything in common anymore. We don’t talk. We don’t…relate.” She broke off and f lipped down the visor again to look in the mirror. “John Cole has decided to be married to his job, and I’ve decided I’ve had enough of being his cook and maid at home.”

Despite her good sense, Belinda felt depressed. The situation was exactly why she had resisted marrying Lyle for so long. She had feared that once they married, complacency and boredom would settle in. She had set herself not to let that happen, but maybe there was nothing she could do. Reality of life on earth was just too big.

Just then, Emma’s purse began ringing, startling them both. Emma dug for her cell phone. Immediately upon answering, her face brightened. “Hi, sweetie!”

A boyfriend? Belinda f lipped down the driver’s visor to check her own appearance and repair her lipstick, while keeping an ear tuned to the conversation. It wasn’t like she could help hearing. Everyone said she was nosy, but she wasn’t. All she did was pay attention to people.

She heard Emma tell whoever it was that she was heading home and would be there to meet “Honey,” whoever that was. She would make lunch for “us.” Belinda imagined a very handsome man, but then, as she f lipped her sun visor back up, her gaze went out the windshield to the main entry of the Valentine cemetery directly up ahead.

“That was Johnny,” Emma said. “He’s on his way. I have to get right home.”

Johnny was Emma’s son. Belinda was both relieved and let down at that mundane fact, but her attention was mainly on a sign to the right of the wrought-iron arched entry to the cemetery.

“Do you see that sign? I have never seen that before. I don’t think it was there when Daddy was buried.”

Emma looked in the direction Belinda pointed. “Well…my goodness.”

The two women looked at each other, and Emma laughed, her face just lighting up.

Belinda pulled out her own cell phone and called Winston.

“I have a sign for you, Winston. Out at the entrance to the Valentine cemetery, at the front. Yeah…it says…now, it’s right beside the entrance, and it says…All Donations Welcome.”

When Belinda let Emma off at her house, Emma said, “Belinda, please don’t tell anyone about me and John Cole.”

“I won’t, sugar.”

“I mean really. I don’t want a lot of talk to get back to Johnny until I have a chance to tell him myself.”

“Well, of course you don’t, and there’s no reason for me to say a thing to anyone.”

Belinda felt a little hurt that Emma would think even for a second that she would go and blab.

Many people considered Belinda a gossip, but she was not the one who blurted out anyone’s intimate secrets. Just as Emma had done, people were all the time telling her stuff. She didn’t know why. And she didn’t know why she would be called the gossip, when it was others who were the ones telling her everything.

Why, if she told even a fourth of what she knew, before nightfall there would be two marriages that would be broken up and several people losing their jobs and uncountable people fighting mad with each other.

Gracie rode in the passenger side of Johnny’s new Mustang convertible. Her left hand was captured in his, and she held her hair with the other. They came over a hill, and there was Johnny’s hometown. She looked ahead to read the town sign as they flew past: Valentine, OK, Small Town in a Great Big World.

Johnny pointed out the school he had attended—all grades in one group of connected buildings. Quite strange to Gracie, who had gone to enormous schools in Baltimore. And there, down a gravel lane, was the source of the program coming from the car radio. Gracie had never heard anything like it: jokes and people’s birthdays and really old-timey country music. And Johnny knew the lyrics to most of the songs.

He drove down Main Street and pointed out his family’s convenience store, reminding her that there were three stores, and that he and his father were planning to open a fourth next year.

Then right in the middle of Main Street, he stopped, jumped out and ran over to grab a bouquet from the bins of f lowers outside the florist shop. He did nothing more than call through the door to have it put on his bill, then returned to plunk the f lowers in Gracie’s hand. Traffic backed up behind the car, but no one honked. In fact, the guy driving a pickup truck that had to stop when Johnny ran in front of him waved and called hello.

Johnny drove on through town to the other side and down a road to show her an acreage they might consider buying to build a house. She liked it, and then she reminded him that his mother was waiting.

“Okay, just one more place,” he said, and drove her down a short road to see a sign.

“We got Mr. Johnny Berry of the Quick Shop on Main on the phone. I did a bit of a plug for you, young man. You have a sign you’d like to point out to us, Johnny?”

“Thank you…and yes, sir. There’s a sign that says Dead End, Thirty-five Miles an Hour.”

The man on the radio laughed and asked the location of the sign, which Johnny gave and went on to tell how Dead End was on the top, with the speed limit right below, both on the same post. As he spoke into the phone, he cast Gracie a grin, his teeth all even and white. Gracie loved his pretty teeth. She loved everything about Johnny Berry.

He snapped his cell phone closed and leaned over to kiss her. When they broke away, she saw his eyes searching hers.

She took his face in both hands. The ring he had placed on her left hand just that morning sparkled in the sunlight.

“I am the luckiest girl in the whole world to be marrying you, Johnny Ray Berry,” she said, looking deep into his blue eyes. “Now, let’s go tell your mother.”

“O-kay.” Shifting into gear, he pressed the accelerator and headed the flashy convertible back out on the open road and toward his family’s home, which was a sprawling ranch-style house in the middle of acres of grass and tall trees. Gracie’s heartbeat picked up tempo when she saw it. She wondered what his mother would think. She knew Johnny was certain of his mother’s reception but worried about his father’s. He hadn’t said this, but Gracie had learned to listen to things Johnny did not say. He had chosen a day when his father was out of town to tell his mother of their engagement and to show her the new car, of which his father had disapproved.

They had no sooner stopped at the end of the drive when a woman came flying out the back door to throw herself at Johnny. Standing there, Gracie watched him lift the woman clean off the ground and whirl her around. Gracie could hardly breathe. She actually felt a little jealous.

Then Johnny looked at Gracie. “Mom…I’ve brought Gracie.”

He had not told his mother about bringing her, Gracie realized hard and fast. But smooth as anything, Mrs. Berry said, “I see that,” and the next thing Gracie knew, she was being hugged.

Then, after releasing Gracie, his mother went all around the car and all but hugged it, too, saying over and over again how red it was, how sporty it was, how perfect it was for him.

Gracie saw Johnny get this really silly grin on his face, and on the way into the house he asked for a peanut butter and banana sandwich, which apparently was a lot more important than setting up an opportunity to tell his mother about being engaged.

As it turned out, Mrs. Berry already had her son’s favorite sandwich made, along with a plate of grapes and cold sweet tea. Then Mrs. Berry queried Gracie as to her favorites and was able to produce them—a turkey sandwich with romaine lettuce, and Keebler Pecan Sandies and a cup of hot Ceylon tea with lemon and sugar. It was as if the woman had some sort of magical pantry. And she seemed thrilled to please Gracie, who had the impression that if she had asked for a steak, Mrs. Berry would have produced one and cooked it right up for her. It was amazing.

Winston leaned close to the microphone.

“To close out the show, we have been notified of another rather curious sign. Our young caller, who did not give a name, brings our attention to the sign out near the juvenile detention center on the north highway. It says: Be Aware—Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Inmates. Nothin’ unusual about that, but, folks, this sign is shot up with so many bullet holes that you can hardly read it.”

He paused.

“On that note, we’ll close out today’s show with this favorite by Ray Stevens, ‘Everything is Beautiful,’ going out from Willie Lee to Gabby. Remember Isaiah 41:10, and God bless and keep you until tomorrow…and don’t go pickin’ up any of those hitchhikers out on the north highway, ’cause they’re obviously armed.”

2

Emma

Just as soon as she waved Johnny and Gracie off, Emma raced back inside to the kitchen wall phone and called John Cole on his cell phone number.

While listening to the rings, she tucked the receiver into her neck and began to clean the dishes. It rang five times, and then voice mail picked up. It wasn’t even John Cole’s voice, because he had never put a message on it.

She jammed the receiver back onto the base and finished cleaning up in a vigorous manner. As she considered her options for reaching her husband, she all but wiped a hole in the counter.

John Cole had mentioned plans to drive to Oklahoma City. This did not mean he had gone, because he rarely made hard-and-fast plans. But he was a man of a few habits, and one of those was to stop into his office at the end of each day. She could call him there, but John Cole never did answer the office phone. It would be answered by Shelley Dilks, his secretary. Office manager, as the woman had made a point of saying.

It was annoying as all get-out to have to go through the woman to reach her own husband, Emma thought, again reaching for the telephone. She paused with the receiver in hand. The possibility that John Cole might have told the woman about their…situation caused a sort of short circuit in Emma’s brain. Then she remembered guiltily that she had told Belinda Blaine.

Taking a deep breath, Emma dialed the office number. It rang twice before the woman answered.

“Berry Enterprises offices, Shelley Dilks speakin’.”

“Hello, Shelley. This is Emma. Is John Cole in?”

“Well…yes. Just a minute and I’ll see if he can get the phone.”

And why would he not get the phone for his wife? Emma squeezed her eyes closed. If Shelley Dilks knows and spreads the word about me and John Cole, I will snatch her baldheaded.

“Hey. Emma?”

At John Cole’s voice, her eyes flew open.

“Yes…hello.” She thought his tone actually seemed welcoming, as if happy to have her call him. Although maybe she imagined it. She had not felt at all certain about anything with him for a long time.

“Are you in your office?”

“Well, yeah. Why?”

Just then the receiver was about jerked out of her hand, as she had become so agitated that she was walking right out of the kitchen and had reached the end of the phone cord.

“John? Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

She lowered herself on the kitchen stool to prevent further accidents. “Are you in your office alone?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, I have somethin’ important to tell you. I don’t want you distracted by Shelley or somebody and stuff goin’ on. Why don’t you close your office door?”

“It is closed, Emma Lou. What is it?”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Suddenly the fact of Johnny’s engagement was too big and tender for words. She pressed a knotted hand to her chest, as her memory f lashed back through the years and she recalled telling John Cole of having gotten pregnant at last, after their years of desperate trying. She had done this same thing, gotten him on the phone and not been able to say a word.

“Emma?” he said with a bit of alarm.

“It’s good.” She reached for a tissue.

“O-kay.”

She imagined that familiar patient expression he got when he settled in to out-wait anything and everything. John Cole could have the patience of Job. It was annoying.

She swallowed, took a deep breath and got it out. “Our John Ray is gettin’ married.”

“He is?” His tone was more confused than surprised. It generally took John Cole some time to absorb news of such magnitude.

“Yes, he is.” She doubled over and stared through blurred eyes at her red-painted toenails.

“I just saw him yesterday mornin’.” He still sounded confused. “I took over some cases of oil for the Lawton store. We’re runnin’ a special this week, and I let him have a case that I got from the supplier as complimentary. He didn’t say anything about gettin’ married.”

“He talks to you about money and business. He talks to me about life and love. Besides, I don’t think he had asked her then. I kinda’ got the idea it all happened last night…that he got the ring just yesterday.”

“He just bought a car.”

“I don’t think there’s a limit on these things.”

The line hummed with disapproving silence.

She said more gently, “Our son is a man, grown and fully capable of makin’ good decisions for his own life.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Then, “Who is he marryin’? Is it the one with the long, dark hair—Gracie? Is that her name?”

“Yes,” Emma said, with some impatience at his question. Who else could it have been? John Cole just didn’t pay attention to anything besides business.

“She is the only girl he has been datin’ for the past six months, at least…but I think he’s known her since way last fall, when she moved to Lawton and came into the store up there. They met when he helped her get her keys out of her locked car. She’s the really pretty one that you said looks a little foreign and has all that hair. She wears clothes like something out of a fashion magazine. Lots of black, like they wear up north. They haven’t broken up once in all these months. He’s brought her out here twice this spring to Sunday dinner…oh, but the second time, you were gone to the NASCAR races down in Dallas.”

That her son had only brought Gracie twice, now three times, in those months seemed a telling commentary. Gracie was special.

“I’ve seen them together a number of times,” John Cole said in a defensive tone. “I dropped by his place and took them to lunch at Wendy’s once. She seems a nice girl.”

“All of his girlfriends have seemed nice. Well, except for that one that had the line of earrings not only in her ears but in her nose and eyebrows, too, and it wasn’t that she wasn’t nice, she just seemed a bit obsessed with poking holes in her body.

“But Gracie is a woman, John Cole, not a girl. She’s a lovely, intelligent and solid young woman. I knew from the first time I saw her that Johnny was ready to settle down. I told you that, remember? Johnny never had a girl like her before. We talked about that. She’s young, but she is an assistant manager for the M. Connor store—her mother is an executive of some sort for the entire M. Connor chain,” she supplied, refreshing his memory with important facts.

He said, “I don’t know what those stores are.”

“It’s a chain of very upscale women’s clothing stores in malls from coast to coast. The one where Gracie works just opened last fall.”

John Cole avoided the mall like the plague. He bought most of his clothes at Tractor Supply or Wal-Mart stores. Emma didn’t necessarily see anything wrong with this; they had once seen a famous country-western star wearing the same shirt as John Cole down at the Dallas airport. The man had even laughed and pointed at John Cole. The shirt was a real nice Panhandle Slim, no-iron and all. Still, refusing to go into a mall did limit one’s clothing choices.

“You will probably have to go to the mall to get a good suit for the wedding.” Her thoughts raced on. “It may be that you will need a tux. I think Gracie comes from a right well-to-do family. The wedding may end up being real fancy. We might have to go down to Dallas to get you a suit.”

This was met with silence that she only barely noticed, because her mind was running along with possible contingencies. She went on to tell him that the kids wanted the wedding sometime in the middle of September, but were in consultation with Gracie’s mother and all their friends about the exact date and location.

Gracie’s mother might want to hold the ceremony in Baltimore, although the kids seemed to favor a wedding right there in Valentine, which would be the most practical thing. Johnny’s friends and family were all within driving distance, and most of Gracie’s friends were in Dallas. There wasn’t but Gracie’s mother up in Baltimore. Apparently Gracie’s mother had been divorced since Gracie was a baby, and her father was not in the picture. From what Emma had gathered, the only other family was Gracie’s mother’s parents, who spent a lot of time in Paris.

“I can understand if her mother would want to have her only daughter’s wedding up there where she is, but it will sure be a mess tryin’ to haul everyone up there. Your daddy won’t go, because he is never gonna step on a plane.” John Cole’s daddy said that if a plane broke a fan belt, there was no place up there for it to pull over.

“We could all drive up,” said John Cole.

The image popped into her mind, all of them in a long caravan, like a bunch of gypsies. She thought of the luggage her mother would require. Her mother practically took her entire home when traveling.

“Mama said somethin’ about a writers’ conference in September. I hope it won’t be on the wedding day…or if it is, that she hasn’t already paid for it.”

“We’ve got the big Convenience Store Expo up at Oklahoma City in September,” said John Cole. “The second week in September.”

To which Emma instantly replied, “I don’t think that is near as important as John Ray’s wedding. You can miss it one year.”

“I was just mentionin’ it, Emma Lou.”

She bit her bottom lip.

Then she said, “We’ll know more about everything on Sunday. The kids are comin’ for dinner—we’re gonna have a little family engagement celebration and talk over the wedding plans. I think it would be good for you to be here on Sunday, if you can.”

“I’ll be there,” he said instantly.

“Well, good.” Then, “John?” When heart-stopping serious, she used his first name.

“Yeah?”

“I think it would be a good idea for you to come on home. We just can’t do the divorce now. It would tear Johnny’s world apart at a time that is supposed to be filled with joy—his and Gracie’s special time. We need to just drop the idea and make everything seem normal, at least until after the wedding. Don’t you think so?”

She squeezed her eyes closed.

“Yeah, I think you’re right.”

Everything just melted inside of her. She had always been able to count on John Cole’s excellence as a father.

It was a lot to take in. First she was getting divorced from her husband of thirty-two years, then her son was getting married, now her husband was coming home.

What about sleeping arrangements?

She entered their bedroom and gazed at the bed—king-size, solid cherrywood. She had bought it back when they got their first home. John Cole never had paid much attention to the interior of the house. Every time she bought something, he would grouch about her spending money on it, but then, when the piece was in the house, he always really liked it.

There was no way John Cole could manage sleeping in the guest room. He would end up making the family room his bedroom and his recliner his bed.

She entered the walk-in closet, where one side still contained most of his clothes, with a line of boots and shoes below. She gathered up her nightgown and robe and slippers, carried them down to the guest room, then threw them over the end of the bed. She wasn’t going to move her clothes, because she could not have anyone know she wasn’t still in her own room. Then she returned with two large wicker baskets to the bathroom, where she swept her things off the counter and out of the drawers, carrying them down to the guest bath and tucking them in the cabinet.

Subterfuge was going to be a lot of work.

3

Emma and John Cole

She kept watch and saw his truck coming up the drive. She hurried to the back door to meet him, but stopped in the kitchen doorway.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” He carried his duffel bag and shirts in a bag from the cleaners. “I’ll put these away—I’ll be right back,” he added, as if she might think he was never returning.

Emma watched him go off down the hall, then turned and flew around the kitchen, pulling the bowls of chicken salad she had already prepared from the refrigerator, closing it with her foot as she ripped the plastic wrap from the dishes. She arranged the salad—made John Cole’s favorite way—with sunflower seeds and halved grapes on a bed of lettuce, with celery sticks and cherry tomatoes on the side. The effect was something as pretty as a magazine cover.

Maybe John Cole would see what he had been missing.

Realizing her train of thought, she yanked out the celery sticks, as if to tone down the inviting food. He likely wouldn’t eat them, or even notice, anyway.

Studying the prepared plate of food, she thought that she was in a most frazzled state. But then again, what other state was natural for a woman in her situation?

Hearing the sound of the television, she went to the entry of the family room. John Cole was standing there in the middle of the room, remote control in hand, staring at the television. Headline News was on—a report on a disaster somewhere.

Emma was not certain what she expected of him, but she did think he could have thought of something better than to turn on the television at that particularly significant moment.

She said, “I have your supper ready. Do you want to eat in here?”

“Yes…that’d be nice.”

She didn’t know why she had bothered to ask.

They sat in their respective chairs, a large table in between them, facing the big-screen television, where NASCAR highlights flickered on the screen.

Emma had for so long wanted to buy a regular couch, so that they could sit side by side. She thought if they could have sat close together, held hands and touched more intimately, they might have revived their passion for each other. But John Cole had refused to give up his chair.

She wondered what he might have done if one day, when he arrived home, she was burning his chair out in the yard. She imagined the scene. The hardest part would be getting the chair outside. John Cole had a heavy-duty dolly in his garage, though. She probably could use that. Or else smash the chair apart with a hammer and take it out piece by piece, about like one did a cooked chicken.

Then she began to imagine shooting out the television with a shotgun. They did not have a shotgun. She would have to borrow one. Vella Blaine had a shotgun; that woman’s prowess with a gun had been written up in the newspaper. Perhaps Vella would lend Emma the shotgun—or maybe Vella hired out as a crack shot. The television would be an easy target.

Just then, she realized that John Cole had begun talking, telling her how good the chicken salad was.

“Thanks for makin’ it,” he said. “I was more hungry than I imagined.”

“You’re welcome.”

Their eyes met and skittered away from each other.

Emma tried to think of something else to make conversation. Her conscience pricked, and she said, “I told Johnny that we would give him and Gracie money toward a nice honeymoon—I didn’t say how much, just that we would.”

John Cole nodded. “Okay.”

More NASCAR watching.

“Do you want to call your daddy and ever’ body tonight and tell them about Johnny and Gracie?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “I guess…if you want to.”

“It’s up to you. He’s your daddy. I thought of callin’ Mama, but she’s up in Oklahoma City at one of her writer things, and I imagine she’s really busy up there and won’t hardly hear a word I say. You know how she is. Unless she calls here, I’ll just wait until she gets home on Saturday.”

John Cole, looking really tired all of a sudden, said he didn’t feel like calling. “We might as well wait until we have a date and details to tell ’em, anyway.”

She said okay. They finished their meal without further conversation, while NASCAR continued on the television.

Later, Emma sat at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad, and a wedding etiquette book and wedding planning magazines that she had bought over the past few years, knowing that this day was bound to come. Dreaming about it. Actually trying to prepare herself for the change to being the mother of a man married to a woman.

John Cole came in and said what he so often did, “Oh, there you are. I wondered where you’d gone.”

“I’m right here. I’m workin’ on a preliminary list of people on our side for the invitation list. There’s more than I had imagined. If the wedding is here in Valentine, I imagine that most all of your side will come over. Well, maybe not Violet—I think she’s still got the agoraphobia. But I know Charlie J. and Joella will come and bring your daddy, and most everyone else will come, too.

“Then there’s quite a few Berry employees and some other business people it would be nice to invite. With just my first thoughts, I’ve come up with over seventy people, and that is not including the church congregation. It’s customary to invite the entire church where the ceremony is held, and I think we would do best to prepare for about a third of them to actually show up, especially the ones that have known Johnny from childhood.”

“It might be enough to cause them to decide to have the weddin’ up north,” John Cole commented, bending into the refrigerator.

Emma gazed at the list. “Well, we can easily keep it to just family. That isn’t so many…and I think Johnny will want his family there.”

The idea of having the wedding far away from home about made her sick. But then she reminded herself to be glad that Johnny had not run off and eloped, as he had often said he would do.

She looked up and saw John Cole, a Coke in hand, leaning against the kitchen counter, gazing at the floor.

He was here—home—she thought, running her eyes from his head to his boots.

His eyes met her own. She felt a little silly, getting caught looking at him, but she couldn’t just look away now that he had seen her.

He said, “You know, I just keep thinkin’ about how small he was when he was born and yet he had those really big feet.”

“Oh, my gosh…” She remembered, too, and smiled. “…They didn’t fit any of the booties that came in the newborn sets.”

John Cole gave a small grin, then tipped up his Coke and drank deeply.

Emma looked back at the list of names in front of her. She could not believe that John Cole remembered any of that, much less spoke of it. Tears welled in her eyes. And for some odd reason she was afraid for him to see.

“I guess I’m goin’ on to bed,” he said.

“Good night.” She saw him pause uncertainly. “I’ll come later,” she said. “I’m sleepin’ in the guest room. I…thought it might be best.”

There, it was said. She checked his face for his reaction. There was nothing.

He nodded and said, “Good night.”

Her chest felt crushed. But then, “John Cole?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for comin’ home.”

“He’s my son, too, Emma.”

His words struck hard. She opened her mouth to reply, to say that she well knew that. But he was already out of the room, and for some reason, she couldn’t figure out exactly what to say to stop him.

Lying against the pillows in the darkened guest room, Emma gazed out into the hallway and saw the dim silvery light shining from the television down in the master bedroom. She could faintly hear voices. It was funny how so small a light and soft a sound could go such a distance in a silent and dark house.

She fluffed her pillows, lay back again and breathed deeply. Over the past few days, she had often felt that she just could not get enough air. She felt that way now, tried inhaling deeply again, then repositioned the pillows and herself. Accepting that she was as comfortable as she was going to get, she lay staring up at the ceiling and recalled the conversation in the kitchen.

It was rare for John Cole to reveal any deep emotional thoughts as he had in speaking about Johnny as a baby. Sometimes she didn’t think John Cole even had any deep emotional thoughts, nothing beyond a fondness for television, car racing, making money and Coca-Cola.

He’s my son, too. As if she did not know that, as if to say that she tended to act like Johnny was all hers.

She supposed she did, a little. After all, she had so desperately wanted a child.

And John Cole had done his very best to give her one, too.

4

1968—1971

It’s a Boy!

After two years of marriage, they decided to have a baby.

Actually, Emma decided. John Cole did not seem to care one way or the other, although he did get a little anxious to accomplish having any children they wanted while he was in the Navy so they could let Uncle Sam pay the medical expenses.

So Emma went off the birth-control pills, which so many women of her generation had believed to be the way of life, totally disregarding the popular margarine commercial of the time: It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Things did not quite go as planned.

When she did not get pregnant that very first month, she was quite surprised. A few more months, and she still did not get pregnant. It seemed like more women than she had ever seen were pregnant all around her, but she was not.

She began to read books about getting pregnant, started to take her temperature and try various sexual positions conducive to conception. Once, she threw her back out and therefore missed two perfectly ripe chances to conceive.

Finally, after a year, she sought medical help. Time was wasting, and she needed to take advantage of what the Navy medical services could do for her, free of charge. After checking her over, putting her through all manner of tests and having her try a number of the things she had already tried, to no avail, the doctor said that John Cole needed to be examined.

John Cole, who rarely said no straight out, looked at her like he would rather eat live frogs.

Emma was ready for her persuasion, which was that she didn’t think an examination or any test was too much to ask. After all, she got a Pap smear every year. That wasn’t any fun. And she herself was willing to go to great lengths to cure their childless state, so she expected John Cole to do his part.

This reasoning, along with Emma crying a lot about wanting a baby, compelled John Cole along.

The day of John Cole’s appointment, Emma waited outside the clinic in the car with all the windows down. It was summer at the naval station in Florida and hot as blue blazes. After a little while, John Cole came out, but he didn’t get in the car. He stood by her open window and told her that he had to undergo a sperm-count test. He looked disgusted and as if he might refuse to do the test, or as if he might ask Emma to go in with him to help. She hoped he didn’t do either and just sat there, not saying anything.

Finally, he went back inside for what seemed a long time, while she waited, sweating in the car and feeling guilty about making him do something he didn’t want to do. She promised herself to make it up to him, and that night and in the following weeks, she cooked his favorite foods, waited on him hand and foot, even left the air conditioner on high all night and never complained.

The test results arrived. John Cole’s count of live and volatile sperm was in the extremely low category. It said right on the results that his ability to impregnate her was in the bottom percentile.

It was hard news. John Cole got more quiet than usual, and Emma went in search of finding out what could help a man’s sperm count. She ran up a bill of twenty-five dollars just on long-distance phone calls to her mother, who excelled in research and who could also ask the other women in the family. She scoured the library and read long into the night, then started feeding John Cole protein drinks, vitamins E and C, and putting wheat germ in every recipe that she cooked—hamburgers, meat loaves, oatmeal, even salads.

When it came to chocolate cake, John Cole balked. “Good God, Emma. You’re gonna wheat me to death.”

She begged him to go without underwear, so that his little sperm wouldn’t be overheated and would be able to swim correctly. She followed her ovulation carefully and figured out how to prop her legs up on the headboard for ten minutes after sex, although John Cole really got afraid she might have a stroke from such antics. His fear over this, coupled with Emma’s demands on him, caused him to lose a lot of sleep and risk getting into great trouble during the day at his duty post, because he tended to nod off if he sat anywhere too long.

A little over three years later, after she had finally given up trying and reluctantly decided to seek an education for some sort of career, she turned up pregnant. By then, John Cole was out of the Navy and they had returned to his hometown in Eastern Oklahoma, where he worked at the Berry Hardware Store and Emma spent her days keeping their tiny apartment over the elder Berrys’ garage spotless and making cute crafts. John Cole had set his sights on buying one of the big fancy vans so popular at the time. He had to change that idea and accept a baby instead, along with paying a lot of the medical bills out of his own pocket, as their medical insurance was poor.

The evening Emma went into labor, John Cole had fallen asleep in front of the television. She had been engrossed in reading a magazine article about tie-dyeing when she began to feel odd. Her back hurt, and she thought she felt contractions. She checked the instructions from the doctor and wondered if she was truly in labor.

She woke John Cole and told him what was happening, then asked, “What do you think?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he replied to her question, gazing helplessly at her. He lay back again in the recliner and dozed off, until fifteen minutes later, when Emma shook him again and said that she was fairly certain she needed to get to the hospital—and quick.

Going into something of a panic, John Cole called his parents, who came running over from their house. They all got into Papa and Mother Berrys’ big Plymouth and headed through pouring rain to the hospital. Every couple of minutes throughout the drive John Cole would ask her, “Are you all right?”

How did one answer, when one’s body was seized with a wave of constricting pain at about the same time as the question was asked?

Just before they got there, Emma began to feel that she was about to deliver. She hiked up her dress and began to remove her panties.

John Cole grabbed her hands. “We’re not at the hospital!”

“I don’t care!” she cried. “And neither does this baby!”

John Cole moved to the far side of the seat, plastering himself against the door, while Emma removed her panties and tried to remember her Lamaze breathing.

Then her father-in-law called out, “Hold on, Emma, we’re here!” He hardly ever said anything, and his voice startled her. She was swung to the side as he turned into the emergency drive. Before the car had even stopped, Mother Berry was out and running inside. John Cole helped Emma work her way out of the backseat, leaving her panties stark white against the dark velour.

In front of them, the emergency room doors parted, and here came Mother Berry pushing a gurney, with a nurse and orderly following and trying to catch up. There ensued a great deal of fumbling and arguing in the effort to get Emma up on the gurney. This ended when she stalked off—as best as she could stalk while bending over in a contraction—leaving the others to follow her into the emergency room.

After all the rush, Emma was in labor for thirty-six hours, in which they told her that her contractions were just not strong enough, and she told them they weren’t the ones having them.

For most of those hours, John Cole stood by her bed, holding her hand. A point came when the doctor gave her something to make her drowsy so that she could rest. John Cole was led away to an adjacent room—to let him lie down. To this day, Emma was quite certain the reason for the delay was that the surgeon had not wanted to be disturbed on a weekend. He arrived on Monday morning.

John Cole was once again beside Emma, holding her hand. “You have to let go now,” the nurse said firmly, prying Emma’s grip loose. “He cannot go into surgery.”

“Blow, honey…blow….” John Cole called in a tired voice, as they rolled her away to surgery.

“Oh, God, my blow’s done gone. Would y’all just hurry the hell up and give me somethinnnn…”

The next thing she knew, someone was patting her cheek and calling her name. “Mrs. Berry…Mrs. Berry, can you hear me? Do you know what you had?”

She thought someone must be speaking to her mother-in-law, and she wished they would shut up.

A little while later, “Mrs. Berry…wake up. You had a baby boy.”

“I know,” she managed to get out.

“She’s awake…she knows she had a boy.”

Oh, you idiot, I knew all along I was going to have a boy, she thought, and went back to sleep again.

When she next came awake, she heard voices, someone telling John Cole to call her name. He said it softly, “Emma…Emma…”

She got her eyes open, and there was John Cole’s face, only inches away. He was smiling at her like he’d lost his mind. “We had a boy,” he said, and he kissed her gently and took her hand again.

“Oh, God, Emma, I was scared you were gonna die.”

The idea was a little shocking. She had not even thought of it, and she had not realized John Cole’s anguish.

Her heart flooding, she reached up and placed her palm to his warm cheek, saying, “Honey, it’s okay. I’m just fine…it’s okay.”

The next instant, her sweet baby was placed into her arms. She looked down at him and fell totally, indescribably in love in a way she had never before known.

5

Together Again

The next morning, when Emma peeked out into the hallway, the television was silent and John Cole was snoring softly.

She hurried into the bathroom, where she washed and moisturized her face, gazed at her image for a few seconds, then applied more moisturizer under her eyes and a bit of blush to her cheeks. She gave thanks to her mother and grandmother for high cheekbones and good skin.

In the kitchen, the coffeemaker with its timer set last night already held a full pot. Emma got her mug from the cabinet.

John Cole’s mug was there, pushed a little to the back. Pulling it out, she held it in both hands for several long seconds. Then she sat it next to the coffeepot.

Smiling and humming a bit, she took her coffee through the shadowy living room to her workroom at the far end of the house, where she rolled open the Florida windows to the sweet morning air and watched the sun come up at the end of the long driveway. As she gazed at the sight, her mind traveled back over the years.

“Oh, John Cole, I love it!” she had said of the house the first time they had driven up the drive.

“Don’t get carried away until we see the inside.”

She knew that so many times her high emotion had embarrassed him. She would try to hold herself down. She had not succeeded too well on that particular day, as she went from room to room. “Look at this…oh, look at this.” Poor John Cole had stood helplessly, knowing that he did not have a chance of saying no.

Turning from the bittersweet memory, she switched on the lamp over the worktable and sat on the tall swivel stool. Neatly arranged at the right were various calligraphy pens, pencils, color and glitter markers and glue, and stacks of papers in a myriad of hues and textures.

After several minutes of sipping coffee and thinking, she chose crisp, white card stock, on which she drew a racing-red sports car. She added two stick figures holding hands, round faces with smiles, sunny-brown hair for the boy and long dark hair for the girl. Inside the card, she wrote in a fine script: Congratulations, sweet heart. I’m so happy for you.–Mom, who loves you. She added a decorative flourish, her bit of trademark.

She carefully set the card aside to let the ink dry before inserting it into an envelope.

Next she chose ivory linen paper. Gracie’s card would need a touch of elegance. First sketching in pencil, then filling in with colored pen, she drew a door decorated with a plaque that said Welcome, Gracie. She added a tiny, shiny, red-checked ribbon from her box of trims. Inside the card, at the top, she drew another plaque that said The Berrys. After staring at it for a long minute, she quickly drew berries on the plaque. And then bigger berries beneath, turning them into people. She was a blueberry, John Cole a strawberry, clusters of cranberries behind them. Did cranberries grow in clusters? Her mother, who technically wasn’t a Berry, was off to the side—a raspberry with bright purple hair.

Possibly Gracie would find Emma’s cards a rather poor effort at art. Perhaps she was one who preferred something elegant and store-bought.

“Good mornin’.”

“Oh!” She jumped and almost f lung aside the pen. “I didn’t hear you.” She felt silly.

“I’m sorry. I tried not to scare you. I knocked.”

“Oh…I was…you know.”

She swallowed as she watched him come fully into the room, in careful steps, as if still trying to ease in. Golden sunlight streaming through the windows made patterns over his face and body, causing her to realize that she had been lost in her work for some time. Her heart tumbled over itself with gladness at seeing him in their home once again.

And then she thought that, still, he was handsome. His eyes in the warm morning light were very blue, which never ceased to affect her. He seemed happy to be home. She averted her eyes to the paper in front of her.

“I see you got a fancy new coffeemaker.”

“Yes. It was on a great sale.”

John Cole was scanning the stacks of cards along the edge of the table, flipping through them. “You’ve been busy,” he said.

“Yes.” There had been so much time when she couldn’t sleep.

Reading the inside of one, he chuckled and held it up in an appreciative manner.

It was a card with a drawing on the front of a frazzled woman and a quote that read: Thanks for loving me just as I am. Inside it read: It took a whole lot of time and difficulty to get this way.

“It’s one of the most popular ones,” she said, feeling foolishly pleased. “I also draw it with a man, or a boy or a girl. Belinda’s sold all that she had for the drugstore, and now she’s putting them into a gift shop that she owns with another woman.”

Did he even recall that Belinda had taken some to sell at the drugstore? A thrill sliced through her with the telling—and satisfaction when his eyebrows rose in surprise.

“It’s not all that much money, really, but it’s nice to have people want them.” She suddenly felt very shy.

“I’m glad you’re doin’ so well with them. I told you when Belinda took some, that I’d be glad to put them in the Stops. You seemed like you didn’t want to do that. You said it would be too much work.”

“I guess I didn’t think they would sell. And I didn’t realize how easy it was to get them printed. It’s nice, too, that Belinda handles the business part. All I have to do is the creating then. I’m not so good at business things.”

He gazed at her, then sipped his coffee. “You were when you worked at Berry Corp.—good at business.”

She was surprised by his compliment and didn’t know what to say to it.

“You can tell Belinda to count the Stops as another outlet. It’s silly not to. You own the Stops, too, you know.”

“That’s true,” she said. “I just didn’t think of it, and I guess Belinda didn’t, either. She’ll be excited when I tell her. She has all these plans.” She was a little embarrassed by Belinda’s elaborate plans, to tell the truth.

John Cole told her the best location would be at the larger Berry Truck Stop and suggested places for display. He said he would alert the clerks. She simply nodded to everything, while drawing a birthday cake.

Quite suddenly, she was gazing straight into his blue eyes.

They broke the gaze at the same time.

John Cole said, “Well…I guess I’d better let you get to it…and I’d better get on to work. I’m already late.”

He went out the door, and she reached for her mug of coffee, finding it empty. She felt self-conscious about going into the kitchen. He might think she was finding an excuse to follow after him.

She felt like crying…silly, silly.

And then, suddenly, there he was in the doorway.

He said, “Would you have a minute to talk…about us?”

Emma managed to get out, “Well…yes. Of course,” and had to clear her voice in the middle of it.

Did he want to talk about a divorce?

Panic swept her. She didn’t think she could talk about divorce. She would just say she had to focus on the wedding. Dear God, keep me sensible.

John Cole came back into the room and straddled the chair, then sat there gazing downward. The little-boy-lost expression came over his face and shoulders. It was an expression with which Emma was thoroughly familiar, and not so impressed anymore.

In fact, he did this so long that she began to get annoyed. She wanted to say, Will you get to it, already? I have things to do, and I am not takin’ over your emotions on this thing.

Just when she was at her last nerve, he said, “I’ve had a lot of time to think the past few days.”

He paused, and something seemed required on her part. “I have, too,” she got out.

Another moment’s pause, and he said, “I’ve missed it here…. I’ve missed you, Emma.”

She was surprised by his direct and intense gaze. “I’ve missed you, too.” Her voice cracked.

“I know we’ve had some difficulty for a few years. I know I’ve been busy…and that you haven’t been happy.”

He paused yet again, but she had nothing to say.

He continued then, going on to say that he knew he kept getting too busy with his work, and that he just wasn’t too good at talking. As he went on in this manner, she began to get impatient again. It was all of a similar vein to what he had said in the past, whenever she had tried to motivate him to see they had problems in their marriage that needed to be addressed—namely that he needed to take part in the marriage.

The idea struck her, though, that his speaking voluntarily just now was taking part.

“I’ve really missed us, Emma.”

“I have, too.”

Silence stretched again, while they each sat there as if waiting to see what the other was going to say or do.

“I was thinking…”

“I’m glad you…”

They both stopped.

John Cole said, “You go ahead.”

“No, you go ahead.”

He shifted and gazed at her, and she had about decided he wasn’t going to say anything when he came out with, “I was thinking that…if you are willin’…maybe we could go see a marriage counselor.”

“What?”

“I thought we could go to a marriage counselor. I got this card from the bulletin board at the Stop.” He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and passed it over to her.

She looked from the card to John Cole, and then back to the card again. “You want to go to a marriage counselor?”

“Well, you said once that you wanted to do that. I think it would be good to try.”

She gazed at him.

“Okay, you said it a lot of times.” He got to his feet. “I wasn’t ready to do it before. I apologize for that. But…look, I’m ready to give it a chance, Emma. Are you?”

Well, of course, she had to say yes. Heaven help her, though, because she also had to stop herself from rolling her eyes.

And somehow, during the course of it all, she ended up agreeing to be the one to make the appointment.

“New Hope Counseling. Catherine Owens speaking. May I help you?”

Owens? Emma checked the business card. New Hope Counseling Center, Theodore M. Owens, Ph.D. and Catherine Owens, Ph.D., LMFC. Individual, Marital and Family Counseling.

The therapist was answering the telephone?

“I would like to make an appointment, please,” Emma said. “But first, can you tell me something about the therapists?”

“Certainly. There are two of us—myself and my husband, Ted Owens. I am a licensed clinical psychologist, and licensed marriage and family counselor. I’ve been practicing for twenty-five years. Ted is a licensed clinical psychologist and has been practicing for thirty-four years.”

Emma felt at once reassured by their ages and a little put off. They might be worn out.

“We both counsel all manner of issues, but I generally handle women’s issues, and Ted handles anger management and all addictions. What sort of difficulty are you having?”

Emma said, “Uh–we would like marriage counseling. My husband and I.” She had the idle thought that maybe they needed anger management, too.

“All right. I would be glad to help you with that,” the woman said in a positive manner that Emma instantly appreciated.

The woman gave Emma several choices for appointments, and Emma chose Thursday afternoon the following week.

Later, when she told John Cole the time of the appointment and the name of the therapist, he said with a note of alarm, “Therapist? I thought we were seein’ a counselor.”

“We are. That’s what marriage counseling is. Therapy.”

“Oh. And it’s a woman?”

“Yes,” Emma answered.

After several seconds, he said, “Oh,” again and let it go at that, demonstrating that he was learning when to shut up.

6

1550 AM on the Radio Dial

The Sunday Morning Gospel Hour

The music faded, and Winston came on. “That was Barbara Mandrell’s rendition of ‘Amazing Grace.’ Glad to have you here with us this bright mornin’, where our generous sponsors this week are the Valentine Voice, the area’s award-winning newspaper, and the good folks of the First United Methodist Church.”

He paused for a thoughtful moment. “We have a First Baptist Church, too. As far as I know, those are the only Methodist and Baptist churches in town, so I don’t know why they don’t just call themselves the Onlys—the Only United Methodist or the Only Baptist.

“Anyway, the folks at the First Methodist invite you all to join them this mornin’ for services. Sunday school is about to commence over there, I think…ah, I can’t find my listing…”

He felt odd. A little swimmy-headed. He saw Jim Rainwater shoot him one of his worried looks.

Averting his eyes to the tune list, Winston looked through his reading glasses and read, “And now here’s Ricky Skaggs, givin’ us some bluegrass gospel.”

His chest felt a little tight. But a man did not get to his nineties and not have a lot of odd-feeling moments. Not wanting the kid getting his shorts in a knot with worry, he pushed up from his chair, saying, “I’m goin’ to the john. Don’t get worried.”

He tried not to shuffle his steps as he left the room. He had a sudden and odd longing for Willie Lee. Sunday mornings were the one time since school had gotten out that his little buddy did not accompany him. Willie Lee’s mother insisted on a quiet family gathering around the breakfast table on Sundays.

But in that moment, Winston wished so much for the companionship of the boy that he had the disconcerting sense of being close to tears. It rather rattled him. It was said that when a body went into a heart attack, emotions got all mixed up. He had experienced a heart attack a number of years previously, but mostly what he recalled was waking up and people annoying the hell out of him.

In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face and dried it with a paper towel. He purposely avoided looking in the mirror. These days the image in the mirror was some strange old man, not himself at all.

He threw the paper towel in the trash and stood bracing himself on the windowsill, trying to summon the memory of the man he had been in his prime, tall and straight, with steelgray hair and a chiseled jaw. It wasn’t so much what a person looked like. It was more how a person envisioned himself—that was what a person projected.

Just then a movement beyond the window caught his attention.

A figure was walking along the side of the road in the distance. A young man, wiry and with a bare torso, what must have been his shirt hanging down from the waist of his jeans. He was moving at a fast pace and kept looking back over his shoulder, then up and down the road, in a curious manner.

All of a sudden, in one swift motion, the fellow jumped over the barbed-wire fence around the pasture across the road and disappeared.

Winston jutted his face closer to the window. His vision was not what it once had been, of course, which was why he couldn’t drive any longer. Yet he knew he had seen someone, and now he was gone. Just disappeared right before his eyes.

He was about to check his own pulse when he saw a head pop up from the tall grass along the fence line. Yes, it was a head. It turned from side to side, looking up and down the road. The growing sound of a siren reached Winston’s ears.

The head disappeared into the weeds. A few seconds later, a sheriff’s car came speeding past, lights blinking and tires throwing up dust. The siren faded.

Thrilled that he had not gone round the bend and started imagining things, Winston thought of telephoning the sheriff’s office, but he wanted to see if the head popped up again, so he kept staring at the spot.

No head showed. He looked as far as he could up and down the road. He wondered if the figure had moved on in the cover of the sand-plum bushes to the cedar trees.

There came a rap. “Winston…you okay?”

He jerked open the door. “I’m fine. Things get slower when you get older. You’ll find that out. Everything you got is gonna drop south and get slow as molasses in January.”

Jim Rainwater shook his head and turned, heading back to his controls.

Winston followed, thinking again about telephoning the sheriff’s office, when the door to the building opened and Willie Lee came through it.

“I am here,” he announced and came straight over to Winston.

“And so you are.” Winston gazed in surprise at the boy and his dog. The boy’s eyes were very blue behind his thick glasses.

“Willie Lee insisted on comin’ down here early and waiting for you,” said Tate Holloway, the young boy’s stepfather, who followed the boy and the dog through the door.

“Well, that’s fine…I appreciate you, buddy.”

“Winston—you ready?” called Jim Rainwater.

“I’m comin’ straight away.”

Willie Lee slipped his hand into Winston’s larger one, and together they went into the studio, where Winston sat back down, put on the headphones and pulled the microphone close.

Willie Lee and his dog took their accustomed places, while Tate pulled up a stool and opened the Sunday paper.

Winston drew himself up. “Gather ’round, children. We’re ready for the anniversaries.”

Finding his voice, in fact all of him, returning to full strength, he read clearly from the listing in front of him, sending congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Ryan Showalter, who were to celebrate their third anniversary on Monday, and to Frank and Lisa Ruiz, celebrating a whopping six months, and to Herbert and LaVerne Riddick, who the past week had celebrated fifty-four years of marriage.

“I’ve known little LaVernie since Herbert brought her up from down in Hennrietta, Texas,” said Winston. “I asked her the other day what was her secret for her lengthy marriage. She said it was because Herbert never forgot their anniversary. Herbert told me that LaVernie never let him forget it. Now that’s what I call two sensible people—a woman who says what she wants, and a man smart enough to listen.”

Vella was in charge of the altar f lowers that month at the First Methodist. She had bought pots of blooming bromeliads on special from the Home Depot and saved the Ladies Circle some twenty-five dollars. Actually, she saved herself some twenty-five dollars, as she bought them through the Blaine’s Drugstore account and donated the f lowers, thereby transferring the expense in part to Uncle Sam. So she was doing her part and keeping the economy going. Things just passed along in life.

“Let me help you.”

She was a little surprised to see Jaydee Mayhall coming forward. He took one of the pots right out of her hand. “Well, thank you, Jaydee. Please set that one over by the piano.” She wondered what he wanted; Jaydee was not a man to do something for nothing.

The church was filling up. Inez Cooper came f littering past and stopped to point out that the pot in front of the pulpit was off-kilter. Vella didn’t think so.

“Well, it is,” said Inez as she bent to shift it a micro-inch.

Vella opened her mouth, then closed it and pivoted, going to take her normal place in the third pew. As she adjusted her skirt, she looked up to see Jaydee approaching.

“Hope you don’t mind if I sit beside you today,” he said, giving her his winning smile. He was a handsome man. He had always put her in mind of Douglas Fairbanks Jr., not that she ever wanted to tell anyone that. Not only would she be showing her age, but most of the time Jaydee was too annoying to compliment.

“Well…no,” Vella answered, in something of a confused state, but for some reason stopping herself from saying that the spot was saved for the Peele sisters, Peggy and Alma, who sat there every week. There were no nameplates on the pews, after all.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jaydee settle himself and smooth his sharply creased trousers. She wondered what in the world was going on with him. His behavior was hardly customary. The memory clicked in of him being somewhat disgruntled two months previously, when she had purchased the old oil-field building and lot west of town, getting to the property ahead of him. He might now know of someone who wanted to buy it and was hoping to get it from her cheap, then resell it. She had been in financial dealings with Jaydee before. He never could go at anything directly.

The Peele sisters showed up and were affronted at having their space taken. They could have squeezed between Jaydee and Bingo Yardell, who held down the other end of the pew, but instead Peggy Peele said, “We’ll just move back,” and hauled Alma after her, while Alma whined that she was too short to see from the back.

It was rather nice to have a man sitting beside her at church, Vella thought, taking note that Jaydee was a good-smelling man. One thing that she had always appreciated about her now-departed husband was that he had always smelled good.

Then here came Belinda and Lyle.

“Lyle and I thought we’d like to sit with you today, Mama,” Belinda said. She looked right at Jaydee and all but told him to move.

He did—closer to Vella—saying, “Good mornin’. Nice to see you, Miss Belinda.”

“Yes, you, too,” Belinda replied after staring at him a moment.

Lyle said he didn’t think they would all fit in the pew, but Belinda went right ahead, working her way in and pulling Lyle behind her. Vella moved her feet out of the way of her daughter’s little crystal spike heels that could possibly take out a toe.

Vella knew well that it was Jaydee sitting there that had brought her daughter. She felt in a very odd place, with people who rarely had much to do with her suddenly coming at her like magnets.

Belinda leaned around Jaydee and said, “Mama, do you know why the First Methodist Church is called the ‘First’?”

“No…no, I really don’t.”

“Jaydee, do you know?”

“No, can’t say as I do.”

Vella thought her daughter was about to give the punch line to a joke, but instead Belinda said, “Well, I don’t, either, but I’ll bet Daddy would have known. Don’t you think so, Mama? Daddy knew all sorts of details like that,” she told Jaydee. “He came to church here with Mama for over forty years.”

“I remember that,” Jaydee said.

Then Belinda added, “How many times have you been married now, Jaydee?”

“Three,” he replied. “I’ve been lookin’ for just the right one.”

Emma saw the clock as she pitched the ham into the oven. Grabbing her purse, she raced out the back door.

John Cole was at her car, slamming the hood. “Got your oil changed.” He wiped his hands on a rag as he stepped back.

“Oh. Thank you.”

He nodded. “Do you need me to check on anything in the kitchen?”

“No. The ham will be fine, and I’ll throw everything else together when I get back.”

“Have a good time.”

“I will.” She thought they sounded like she was going on vacation, rather than to church services.

They were being exceedingly polite, tiptoeing around each other. Two strangers under the same roof. But still in separate beds.

John Cole wasn’t even in the bed. He had taken to sleeping in his recliner.

She fought with herself about that all the way to church. She really should make the first move and suggest that they both move back to their bed. After all, if they were working on their marriage, it wasn’t a good idea to sleep separately. Another voice countered that John Cole was perfectly capable of making the first move. But she thought that she really should at least bring up the subject.

By the time she pulled into the church parking lot, all of the voices inside of her admitted that both she and John Cole were being childish.

The opening music had started. She went up the steps along with the stragglers who had been catching last-minute cigarettes out on the front lawn. Stepping through the door, she paused, running a speculative eye over the sanctuary, seeing it with her new status as mother-of-the-groom. If the wedding took place in the morning, it would be beautiful like this—graceful and joyous. In late September it would be warm, but not too hot. The fans would stir softly, and the light would fall in an ethereal glow through the stained-glass window over the altar, much as it was at that moment.

Then she saw her mother leaning out into the aisle with a hurry-up expression. Emma did, and her mother smiled in welcome and passed her a hymnal with all the service’s songs efficiently marked by bits of paper.

A moment later her mother leaned over and whispered, “Why do you think they call it the First Methodist Church?”

“I don’t know,” answered Emma, who was still preoccupied with visions of the wedding. Then, noting her mother’s questioning expression, she offered, “I guess because it’s on First Street.”

“I don’t think that answers why there are First United Methodists Churches all over the country. They can’t all be on a First Street…can they?”

Pastor Smith stood on the altar steps and offered up the ending prayer to send the congregation out into the world with love and peace in their hearts. At the piano, Lila Hicks played “Pass It On.”

Emma bowed her head and thought about hurrying home to make the dinner. She thought of all the food she would put on the table and her family gathered around it, and how she was welcoming a new woman into the family. She raised her head and there was light streaming in through the high windows behind the pulpit, and it was as if the light streamed right at her, filling and overflowing her heart with gratitude. She was suddenly starkly aware of what she and John Cole had been about to throw away.

When she got home, she hurried to the guest room and bath, and gathered up all her things and took them back to the master bedroom. A lot of the warm emotion that she had experienced at the church had already begun to wear off, but she sure did not want Johnny or Gracie to see her things in the guest room. What sort of example would that set for them?

7

Mother of the Bride

Sylvia Kinney was a beautiful woman of forty-five who could, and often did, easily pass for ten years younger, even though this would have had her giving birth to her one and only daughter at fourteen. She would rather have people think she had gotten caught up in youthful foolishness than know the truth of her having made a big mistake at twenty-two, when she should have known better. She was desperately trying to save Gracie from making the same mistake.

Gripping the telephone receiver, Sylvia Kinney paced the white carpet of her bedroom in a fashionable apartment in Baltimore and tried talking sense to her daughter. She tried cajoling, threatening and, uncharacteristically, pleading—everything she could think of to convince her daughter two thousand miles away not to marry that bubba with whom she thought she was in love.

Finally, thoroughly frustrated, Sylvia came out with, “My God, Gracie, he’s nothing but a redneck boy with no future beyond the possible ability to acquire a lot of junk cars up on blocks in the yard.”

She knew instantly that she had made a serious error.

“Yes, Mother, I know,” came Gracie’s cool reply. “I’ll always know where he is at night, right out in the backyard playing with our children.”

“Oh, Gracie…I didn’t really mean it like that. I didn’t. I just don’t want you to do something that…”

“I’m going to marry Johnny, Mother. I wish you could be happy for me. Goodbye.”

There came a loud click and the line hummed.

Sylvia slowly set the phone aside. Her gaze went to a gilded frame holding the smiling face of her daughter. She picked it up and gazed for a long moment at the image. She swallowed back tears and breathed deeply. As far as she had ever seen, crying did nothing but cause wrinkles. She could not afford wrinkles. Not in the modern business world. Looking into the mirror, she finger-combed her dark hair that still did not need dyeing.

On closer inspection, there was a white hair. She plucked it out.

Then, hopping up, she tossed off her slippers, quietly opened the door and tiptoed down the hall to peer into the living room at her lover, Wadley Johnson, who was asleep on the couch where he had retreated last night, because she would not let him sleep in the bed with her. She had not let another man sleep in her bed since her idiotic blunder with Gracie’s father, which she still blamed on the fantasy of Paris. These days, when she went to Paris, she always wore dark glasses and never drank wine.

The sun was coming in the wide windows, and Wadley had pulled a pillow over his face. He was still in his dress slacks and shirt, his coat and tie thrown on the floor.

She and Wadley had been to a club to listen to Wadley’s jazz-playing friends and had not gotten in until nearly three in the morning. Wadley very often slept until noon, anyway. As he would say, his career as a rich playboy required certain habits.

Wadley R. Johnson was forty-eight, handsome, charming and rich. He had three ex-wives to attest to this. He wanted to make Sylvia number four and last, so he said. Sylvia, however, believed that his record was against him and that her own was not promising, either.

For a brief moment she considered waking Wadley and asking him to make breakfast—he could cook, and she did not—or to go down to the breakfast shop and get them something.

But he was always so chipper and loving in the morning. He would probably get all amorous and ask her again to marry him, and she was feeling especially vulnerable.

She went back to her room and threw herself into bed.

The conversation with Gracie played back over her mind…right out in the backyard playing with our children.

Oh, good Lord. She would be a grandmother.

She pulled the covers over her head and tried to figure out how she was going to face the mess she was in.

Just over twenty-two summers ago, right after graduating college, Sylvia had flown to Paris and gone a little crazy. Intellectually, she understood it well. She had spent the better part of her life being super-responsible. Her parents, Albert and Margie Kinney, had been of an irresponsible and distant nature. Their entire world had been each other. They had hardly noticed they had given birth to a child. At an early age, Sylvia had learned to take care of herself, as well as the difficulties of her parents.

When Sylvia was thirteen, her mother died. Her father went on to run even more quickly through his large family inheritance. What money was left now was thanks to Sylvia’s shrewdness. Her father and his new wife, Giselle, were living comfortably, even enjoying yearly trips to Europe and Florida. Whenever anything came up, such as a glitch in air-f lights or a gallbladder operation, Sylvia was called to handle the matter.

But that summer after her college graduation, where she had graduated with the highest grade-point average of any student for the five previous years, Sylvia escaped this pattern for a short period and went off with fast friends all over Europe. She finally had time to fall in love, for the first time in her life, with Paul Mercier, an American who was in Paris studying art. She became pregnant and married him.

Sylvia had explained all about her rashness in marrying Gracie’s father and how impossibly different they had been from the beginning. She had not painted Paul as an ogre, just very irresponsible, and far more in love with art and the free-and-easy life than he had been with Sylvia or with Gracie. Artists were like that, Sylvia had explained. Paul had eventually faded from their lives, and they did not need him. End of story.

In fleeting honest moments, Sylvia admitted to herself that she wanted to bury that part of her life so deeply as to make it seem that it never happened. The problem was that in doing so, she also buried Gracie’s history. This fact had not seemed too important at the time, nor for years afterward. As Gracie grew older, Sylvia convinced herself that nothing about Paul mattered and those memories were better left alone. So, for a million reasons that she was at a loss to explain, Sylvia had never mentioned to Gracie the small fact that Paul Mercier was a black Creole.

8

Gracie

She was glad to have a few minutes after the phone call with her mother to put herself back together before Johnny arrived to take her to Sunday dinner with his parents.

Her gaze fell on the card Emma Berry had sent her. Gracie had cried when she had received it, and now, looking at it, she had a fantasy of her mother calling back and saying something like, “Oh, Gracie, I’ve just been so silly. You’ve made a good choice, and you are going to be so happy. I’m proud of you, and I support you all the way.” She imagined it so thoroughly as to even listen for the phone to ring. It did not.

Gracie told herself that she should not be surprised at her mother’s attitude. She and her mother had been at odds for all of Gracie’s life. Gracie could still recall being six years old and wanting to wear a certain pair of pants that her mother did not want her to wear.

“You won that fight, Mother, and you have won just about all of them since—but you are not going to win this one,” she said aloud to herself in the mirror as she got herself ready to go to the home of her future in-laws.

They were very different, she and her mother. Her mother was keenly intelligent and exacting. Gracie was of average intelligence and easygoing. Gracie’s teenage years had been spent in hard attempts to please her mother. She had even pressed herself through constant study and tutoring to get into Bryn Mawr, where her mother insisted she go. She had gotten into the prestigious college by the skin of her teeth and had made it through two years, when, thankfully, illness had given her an excuse to drop out before being kicked out. She spent six months in bed, suffering an indefinable form of chronic fatigue. After she recovered, she refused to return to school. She had gotten away with that by allowing her mother to get her a job as a clerk with the local M. Connor store. This was intended to last only until Gracie was stronger physically, but as it turned out, Gracie had loved it and excelled.

She found her talent in clothing sales. She enjoyed helping people be happy. She succeeded so well that she was awarded an impressive number of promotions and cash bonuses. Finally she had pleased her mother.

In fact, her mother had been so pleased and encouraged that she had wanted Gracie to move on up into a buyer position at the corporate offices, or perhaps even into design—both more respectable, as she saw it. That would require Gracie finishing college, of course.

Gracie had refused. Adamantly. She was saved from a further fight when she was promoted to a management position that handled store openings, and by an executive quite high up in the company. Her mother recognized that it would be poor policy to try to change another executive’s directive. She acquiesced, but was clearly disappointed.

That was when Gracie perceived that her mother was a perpetually disappointed woman, and that she, Gracie, was more or less a contented one. She did not desire the same things as her mother, and she also possessed a certain assurance that what she did desire would come without a lot of striving.

She looked for an excuse to move as far away from her mother as she could manage at the time, which turned out to be the opening of one of the company stores in Dallas. There, she gave in to following her own natural inclinations, which resulted in an amazing happiness. When she moved to open the new store in Oklahoma—even farther from her mother in terms of travel—and met Johnny Berry, she recognized in him someone who was also quite happy and whose desire was the same as her own: namely to be happy, and to be so with her. She knew she had found the man of her dreams.

As a gift for Mrs. Berry, Gracie bought a pot of daisy mums in a basket. She held it on her lap on the drive down to the Berry home.

“I don’t want to get into my mother’s objections to our marriage with your mom and dad,” she informed Johnny. “My mother will eventually come around, and there’s no need to mention anything about it now and get feelings hurt.” She was not at all certain that her mother would come around, but she was a lot happier to hope so.

Johnny said, “Okay.”

“We’ll just say that my mother is really busy at this time, and that you and I want to do the wedding ourselves—that’s the truth, anyway.” She saw a wilted daisy bloom and pinched it off.

“Okay.”

“And we’ll ask your mother to help. She’ll like that, don’t you think?”

“Uh-huh,” Johnny said, with a nod.

She rather wished he would speak in more than one-word sentences. Then she took his hand, very grateful for his smile in return and for his pleasing nature.

Spying another small broken bloom, she pinched it off and thoroughly examined the entire plant, pinching off any f lowers that were not perfect. Maybe she was a lot more like her mother than she’d realized.

Gracie volunteered to set the table. The silverware was real silver, handed down through five generations of Emma’s family. The china and crystal were silver-rimmed and handed down through three generations.

There was an arrangement of f lowers as a table centerpiece, the napkins were linen, and a silver coffee and tea set sat ready on the polished sideboard, where Gracie’s gift of daisies also sat. Emma had raved over them. They really did look pretty there, especially with the window blinds that were arranged so that light filtered through.

The entire effect was like something off the cover of a Better Homes and Gardens magazine, and Gracie almost sent Johnny off to locate a camera in order to take a picture to send to her mother.

Although her mother was likely to say, “Good grief, have you ever seen so much old clutter?”

As she carefully placed the table settings and filled the crystal water glasses from an iced pitcher, she could hear the drone of the television in the adjacent family room, where Johnny and his father sat with eyes glued on the television set and the broadcast of a car race. Once or twice a shout went up.

Gracie loved the sound. She felt delighted that her man liked to be at home and to enjoy something with his father. That he had a father, a real family.

She kept an ear tuned toward the kitchen, as well, listening to Emma and her mother, Mrs. Jennings. The two women were physically so different as to not look at all related. Mrs. Jennings’ voice was deep, from at least fifty years of the cigarettes that she stepped outside to enjoy every so often, and her accent was a very long Southern drawl. Emma sounded Southern, too, but her voice was lighter and often laughing. Mrs. Jennings was a good head taller and thicker all around than her daughter, with dark eyes and steel-gray hair, while Emma was blue-eyed, fair and petite. Both women had really nice complexions, although Emma wore a lot of makeup. In Gracie’s opinion, Emma could have done without.

Mrs. Jennings was apparently not as inclined to domesticity as was her daughter. The entire time Emma was preparing the meal, her mother sat on a stool in the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking about an incident at a writers’ conference that she had attended the previous week. Her upset appeared to be with a woman who had told Mrs. Jennings that she could not be from the South because she lived in Oklahoma.

“And it wasn’t so much what she said, it was her attitude, standin’ there with her hand on her hip, sayin’, ‘Oklahoma? That’s not in the South.’ Like she was the last word.”

She was now in about the third full telling of the tale. The first time, Emma had said, “Did you tell her you were from North Carolina?” and that was when Gracie learned that both Emma and her mother were from way over on the East Coast. The information aroused the somewhat unsettling realization that there was so much she did not know about this man with whom she intended to join her life.

This time Emma said, “What did she say when you told her you were from North Carolina?”

“Not really anything. Perhaps she didn’t believe me…or has no concept of the fact that people move around. Bless her heart, she apparently has no idea that the Five Civilized Tribes that made up Oklahoma in the beginnin’ were all from the South. She’s from Georgia. She ought to know how her bunch pushed the Cherokees out here and stole their land, then Sherman sent half the inhabitants of three states runnin’ out this way.”

She spoke with the correcting tone of a history teacher, which she had been. Now retired, Mrs. Jennings wrote essays on social and historical perspectives that were carried in several small-town newspapers.

“I always thought Oklahoma was in the South.” This was Mr. Berry’s mild voice. Gracie looked through the entry to see him standing in front of the open refrigerator. “Maybe she has us confused with Nebraska on the map. Where’s the Coke I put in here a while ago?”

“Well, I don’t think many people know exactly where Oklahoma is,” said Mrs. Jennings. “The weathermen all stand in front of it when givin’ the national weather. And with the sorry state of education in this day and age, no one seems to know that Oklahoma was Confederate during the Civil War. They just rewrite history all the time.”

“That was a long time ago, Mamaw. Western’s the style now,” came Johnny’s playful voice. He called his grandmother Mamaw.

Observing the two through the doorway, Gracie tried to imagine one of their future children calling her mother “Mamaw.” That would happen once.

There was so much food. Sliced ham, potato salad, a vegetable gelatin salad arranged on the salad plates, lima beans—Mrs. Jennings called them butter beans—and corn, candied yams, a cold plate of sliced tomatoes and broccoli and celery sticks, a basket of rolls and rich cornbread of a sort Gracie had not before seen, and several saucers of soft butter and something called chow-chow. Johnny leaned near her ear and whispered that she wouldn’t like it.

“Good mercy, Emma, you cooked like it’s Christmas,” said Mrs. Jennings.

“Well, it is a celebration,” said Emma, with a smile at Gracie and Johnny. Then, to Gracie, “Now, honey, anything you don’t like, you just don’t eat.”

Emma was up twice to get things from the kitchen for Mr. Berry and Johnny. Whenever Johnny ate over at Gracie’s apartment, he got up and got his own salt and pepper and whatever else he might need. She made a mental note to speak to him about doing the same at his mother’s home. She would need to teach him before he got to his father’s age.

Then Mrs. Jennings was addressing her, saying something about knowing a family of Kinneys when she was a child and lived in Washington, D.C. during the war. She meant World War II, Gracie realized.

“Myrna Kinney…I haven’t thought of her in years. I don’t remember her daddy’s name, but they were from somewhere up near Baltimore. I wonder if they could be some of your kin. Stranger things have happened.”

“I don’t recall a Myrna. My mother is an only child—she’s Sylvia Colleen. Her father was also an only child, and so was my great-grandfather. I don’t know about before them.”

“Oh, I was speakin’ about your father’s family. I must be confused. I thought your last name was Kinney.”

Gracie looked at the woman. “Yes, it is. Kinney is my mother’s name. My father’s name was Mercier. Paul Mercier. He and my mother divorced when I was a baby, and my mother returned to her own name. I never knew him.”

She prepared to answer questions as she watched Mrs. Jennings take this in, but then Emma was returning to the table with a basket of fresh hot rolls and saying, “Mama, lots of women started keepin’ their own names back when Gracie was born…or to do like Julia Jenkins-Tinsley down at the post office and use both names.”

“Well, I know that…but it plays havoc with genealogy.”

“Are you goin’ to keep your last name, Gracie?” Emma asked. “I know in business it is sometimes easier.”

Gracie saw Johnny’s eyes widen slightly. She replied that they hadn’t talked about it, but she thought just for the first months she might go by Kinney-Berry and then change all the way over to Berry. “What do you think, Emma?” Johnny’s mother had told Gracie to call her Emma or Mom, but Gracie wasn’t ready yet for Mom. She did want to start by building a bridge with the woman, though.

“That sounds very sensible,” said Emma. “And we are very excited about you two gettin’ married…aren’t we, John Cole?”

“Yes, we are.” Mr. Berry always seemed a little shy but really nice.

Gracie found Johnny’s hand under the table, and he smiled at her.

“I look forward to meetin’ your mother,” said Emma, smiling at Gracie in a way that required a reply.

“And she looks forward to meeting everyone here, too.” Gracie folded her napkin in her lap. “In fact, she wanted to come today, was going to fly down for the weekend. But at the last minute an emergency came up at headquarters—something about the French division. She’s going to have to fly over there in the morning. To Paris. She goes a lot. She’s the only one in their office who can speak French. My grandparents were always taking her over there when she was a child.”

She could hardly believe she had come out with all of that. She looked to see Johnny’s reaction, fearful that he would betray her lying, but he was scooping up chow-chow with a roll, as if it was going to be gone in a minute. And all of what Gracie said could have been true. Her mother did speak fluent French and for that reason handled much of M. Connor’s business in Europe.

“Perhaps I could call her,” Emma said. “I’d like to introduce myself.”

“Oh, she’s hard to catch when these emergencies come up like this. Her hours get erratic. And she might already be gone. She wanted to get the first f light that she could. She said that for the next few weeks she’ll be out of pocket but would be calling me to touch base.”

“Well…I can send her a note. Before you leave, I’d like to get her address. And when you speak to her, please let her know that I look forward to gettin’ to know her.”

“Oh, she wants to meet you, too. She’ll be coming out soon…right after she gets back from France.” She averted her gaze, and her eyes fell on her glass. “This iced tea is delicious. Might I have some more?”

As Emma rose to reach for the pitcher on the sideboard, Mrs. Jennings said, “That’s ice tea, honey. Iced might be grammatically correct, but it isn’t said that way down here. If you want to be grammatical, you could say cold tea.”

“Oh,” Gracie said.

Emma refreshed everyone’s tea, and when she was once more seated, she brought up the subject of the date for the wedding.

“We were thinking the third Saturday in September, if that would work for you.” Gracie watched Emma’s face.

Mrs. Jennings put in that perhaps the church should be consulted to make certain it was available.

But Emma replied that she had asked Pastor Smith that morning, and he had said it was available the entire month of September. “He also said that he is going to check, but he believes the Catholic Church will recognize your marriage in a Methodist Church. Just in case this is important for the future.”

“There’s the Episcopal Church here,” put in Mrs. Jennings. “It’s really pretty…dates from the twenties and has stained-glass windows on either side.”

“Episcopal isn’t the same as Catholic, Mama. Gracie is Catholic.”

“Well, it isn’t so different. They have priests and wear a collar and robe and all that hoo-rah.”

“Some Methodist ministers wear collars and robes and all that stuff, too. It doesn’t make them Catholic.” Emma looked at Gracie with some excitement. “The church is small. It holds about two hundred and fifty, maximum. Do you think that will be okay?”

“I don’t think Methodist ministers wear collars,” Mrs. Jennings interjected. “I’ve never seen one wear a collar.”

Gracie waited to see if Emma would respond to this comment, but she didn’t. Feeling a little uncertain as to which thread of conversation to follow, she said, “We are not planning a very big wedding. We just want family and a few friends. We are going to pay for it ourselves, aren’t we, Johnny?”

“Uh-huh.” Johnny nodded as he finished off a roll.

“Well, we are plannin’ on helpin’ you with the wedding,” said Emma. “We want to…and anyway, it is tradition for the parents of the groom to pay for the weddin’ ring, the groomsmen’s gifts, the bouquet, the mothers’ corsages, things like that.”

Gracie took this in and felt a little apprehensive.

“Okay,” Johnny said, reaching for the last roll in the basket. Gracie had never seen him eat so much. He loved his mother’s cooking. She had been trying to pay attention to the dishes and was going to look everything up in a cookbook.

Emma began talking of the various relatives who were likely to come into town for the wedding and making plans for booking a block of rooms at the Goodnight Motel.

“My mother will stay up at my apartment,” Gracie said quickly, thinking that her mother would come unglued at the idea of staying at the aging motel on the edge of town. Her mother was particular about amenities.

Gracie explained that one of her friends was going to give her a wedding shower. Emma proposed giving them a couple’s bridal shower to introduce Gracie to the family and a few neighbors in Valentine.

“That way you can get to meet the family before the weddin’ in a relaxed atmosphere,” she said. “I read all about it in one of the weddin’ magazines.”

Gracie was touched by the idea and getting more nervous by the minute about the woman’s enthusiasm. She felt it likely that things could get out of control.

They did. Somehow the event ended up turning into a backyard barbeque, with Johnny’s father cooking steak and pork ribs in his secret sauce, a soda-fountain machine from one of the Berry stores, and possibly tap beer. Mrs. Jennings put in the suggestion of where to get plastic cups and paper plates at discount.

Gracie didn’t think it was going to look much like the lawn-party bridal shower she had attended once in Philadelphia.

9

Mother of the Groom

Emma remembered her camera before the kids left. “We have to get a picture for the engagement announcement!”

The late golden sunlight was perfect. She positioned them at the front fender of the Mustang. “Yes, yes, I want you in front of the car.”

When she got through taking Johnny and Gracie’s picture, she had John Cole get in with them. He was always reluctant to have his picture taken. He liked to be cajoled, and Emma did so. After this, she had her mother join in. Her mother then took a picture of Emma and John Cole with Johnny and Gracie. It was all so much like old times, when Johnny had lived at home.

Finally Johnny called a halt. He hugged and kissed Emma, and hugged his father and grandmother, and Gracie was hugged by everyone, too. Then the two young people roared away in the Mustang, down the lane, and it was as if they took a lot of the air with them when they went.

Emma’s mother followed, driving away much more slowly in her aging and faded Impala, going to her garden apartment over at MacCoy Senior Living Center.

Watching her mother’s car until it was out of sight, Emma was struck with a wave of melancholy. Her mother had moved out to live near them in Oklahoma two years ago, because most all of her immediate family—the Macombs—had died. The exceptions were a couple of aunts who were mentally out of this world and one sister with whom Emma’s mother had never gotten along. Even most of the Macomb cousins had died or gone off out of sight. Somehow the Macombs tended to lose members of the family. They seemed to go off to the grocery store or away on vacation and never return. They had not been especially close people, yet they had been Emma’s people. She barely knew her father’s family and didn’t count them at all.

Now, here were Emma and her mother, the end of that branch of the Macomb family tree. Emma thought about how someday her mother would be gone, and she, Emma, would move up into her place as the last matriarch. It appeared Gracie would be the one to move into Emma’s place. She felt sad and grateful at the same time. She had prayed for years for a daughter. It appeared that Gracie was the answer to that prayer. Thank You, God.

With high emotion filling her heart for the second time that day, she walked back into the house, which seemed starkly empty and silent, as it always did when Johnny left. Except, of course, for the television that John Cole was once more watching.

She finished tidying the kitchen, then sat at the kitchen table with a yellow tablet to compose the engagement announcement for the newspaper. She went through five pages before she got it exactly how she wanted it. She ended with the line: A September wedding is planned in Valentine, where the two plan to make their home.

She imagined it. The voices and laughter of grandchildren would fill the house. She would have children around her again, to cook for and kiss boo-boos, sing lullabyes, read books. They would need to get another calm riding horse to join Old Bob, and the children would ride in the afternoons. They would have to get a permanent dog, and not just the stray hound who passed by on occasion to be fed out the back door. And build a tree house. She could still do something like build a tree house. On rainy days she would bake cookies and make blanket forts in the living room.

She was in the midst of imagining all of these wonderful things when John Cole came in to get a Coke and bag of corn chips, and asked her what she was doing.

“Writing the engagement announcement,” she told him happily, and then read it to him.

His response when she finished was, “Have they said they are makin’ their home in Valentine?”

“Well…not straight out. But a house down here in Valentine will be much less expensive than one up there in Lawton. Where do you think they will live?” She did not know why John Cole always had to make comments that just threw cold water all around.

“I don’t know. I just asked.”

“I’m lookin’ forward to them livin’ nearby and to havin’ grandchildren to enjoy. Aren’t you?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I guess so.”

She found that answer unsatisfactory. “Don’t you want grandchildren?”

“That isn’t what I said, Emma. I haven’t even thought about it. We only found out a few days ago that Johnny was gettin’ married.”

“Well, it certainly isn’t like a big surprise. He’s a grown man…lots older than you and I when we married. It has been a fair assumption since he was a baby that one day he would be grown and havin’ babies of his own. That is what people do. I’ve imagined it.”

“That is not somethin’ I have done, okay? I’m not like you, Emma. I don’t go imaginin’ all sorts of things.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t sit around and think like you do, that’s all.”

“What is wrong with thinkin’?” She did not appreciate him criticizing her, which she knew he was doing, no matter how innocent he tried to make it out to be. He had always accused her of imagining things.

“Nothing. I just am not like you, Emma. I don’t spend a lot of time thinkin’ everything six ways from Sunday.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with thinkin’ about the future and plannin’ for it. You can’t have anything if you don’t plan for it. Everything that is here was planned first.” She gestured, indicating the surrounding kitchen.

“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it, and I didn’t say I don’t plan. I just don’t think about the same things that you do.” He was edging out the door.

“Obviously,” she said, annoyed and a little embarrassed, because the entire argument was stupid. She couldn’t even figure out how they’d gotten into it.

Later that night, she got all excited about an idea that came to her. She went to the family room to tell John Cole, which likely was a mistake, since he was watching the replay of a NASCAR race.

“Why don’t we have a pool put in for the barbeque? The younger people would really like that, and then we’ll already have it for when we get grandchildren.”

John Cole looked startled. “That’s a big project. I don’t know if you could get a pool and the yard all finished in time for the barbeque.”

“Oh, sure we can,” Emma said, delighted to have a rebuttal for that excuse. “Charlene MacCoy got one put in last summer. She said it was amazing how quickly it all got done. I think she said it only took about a month.”

John Cole’s response was to throw around a lot more cold water by pointing out the expense of a pool in addition to the expenses of the wedding and the gift of the honeymoon, and all sorts of things that could come up, such as having to go to Baltimore for the wedding.

Emma, who had also been thinking all day about having the inside of the house painted, said, “Well, a pool will be an investment. We’ve talked about one before, and I want one for when we have grandkids. I’ll just look into it. It won’t hurt to see.”

She really wished John Cole would have confidence in her good sense. She had not once in all their married years gone overboard with spending. She had pinched pennies as much as he had for many years, and as a result he now enjoyed a comfortable home. He just could not seem to see that they did not have to pinch pennies anymore. Of course, when he wanted something, he darn well got it. It all just made her so mad that she had to go clean the kitchen sink, then move on to scrubbing the floor.

As she was getting ready for bed, she went to the window and looked out into the dark expanse of the yard, imagining a pool sparkling beneath the moon.

The thought came: she and John Cole might like to sit out beside the pool at night, or even go skinny-dipping. Maybe that would get him away from the television.

Then she suddenly realized that in the background of all her fantasies of their growing family was John Cole. He was there in her images—supervising the building of the pool—and a new patio, of course—the purchase of a horse for the grandchildren, sawing the wood for the tree house, dragging blankets from high shelves and putting together tricycles.

Sitting with her and talking, holding her hand, kissing her…making love.

She tried imagining life without John Cole. Family suppers, grandchildren, the living room with his recliner and him not in it. She could not do it. In fact, she felt a little panic about it.

It suddenly occurred to her that she was doing exactly what John Cole had said she did: thinking everything six ways from Sunday.

And a very good thing that one of them did some thinking, she thought, going into the closet and putting on her slinky silk nightgown that she liked to wear to remind herself—and hopefully John Cole—that she was a woman.

She fluffed the large bed pillows and settled herself against them in an artful, womanly manner. She wanted to present an attractive picture when John Cole came through the door and found her there. She imagined a number of compelling things to say to him.

It turned out not to matter, though, because John Cole did not even come to bed. He fell asleep in his recliner and slept there all night. Probably not thinking at all.

10

Winston and Willie Lee

Earlier in the spring, when elderly Winston Valentine came upon an old electric wheelchair at a yard sale, he bought it and began using it to help him get around town. The wheelchair’s electric motor shortly proved unreliable, however, so Willie Lee often ended up pushing. Quite quickly the pair became a familiar sight on the streets of Valentine—the old man wearing a straw cowboy hat and riding in a wheelchair pushed by a boy with a Dallas Cowboys ball cap, invariably on crooked, and followed by a spotted dog.

Most days after their morning radio program, Winston took Willie Lee to the Main Street Café for lunch, because Willie Lee’s mother hounded them both about eating vegetables. Afterward they would go across the street to Blaine’s Soda Fountain to get ice cream.

Winston insisted that Willie Lee abandon the idea of the extra distance required to use the crosswalk and cut across in the middle of the block, often holding up traffic. Winston often quite boldly used his advanced age and Willie Lee’s position as an eternally sweet mentally challenged person to do just what he wanted to do.

No one minded except First Deputy Lyle Midgette, and he had given up trying to get them to quit the illegal and hazardous practice. Deputy Midgette would much rather face any criminal than Mr. Winston’s sharp tongue. Half the time he was not even certain what Mr. Winston was saying. Whenever he saw the two crossing illegally, he would turn around and go in the opposite direction, so that he did not have to feel he was derelict in his duty. It was a comfort to know that the sheriff had admitted to the same thing, saying, “There’s no one who can tell Winston what to do.”

The boy would push Winston in the wheelchair through the door of the drugstore, and the old man would rise and call greetings to everyone as he walked across the room to the soda fountain. There he would spend half an hour or so holding court and pretty much pretending that he was at least twenty years younger. He would hand out cold sweet tea and latte and barbeque and banana splits, along with advice and opinions. On good days, Claire Ford would come in, slip up on a stool, smile at him and ask for a strawberry milkshake, her favorite. He would make it extra thick and watch her rosy tongue savor the sweet pink cream off the long-handled spoon. On really good days she would be without her husband, and Winston would imagine himself at least thirty years younger, and sometimes he almost got some excitement in his pants.

During this time when Winston was occupied, Willie Lee, with Munro quietly at his heels, would occupy himself in the magical world of the magazine section. The plate-glass windows of the drugstore had wide wooden windowsills just right for sitting and reading, which was why Belinda Blaine kept insisting the magazine section needed to be moved, but she could not figure out where else to put it. Willie Lee would sit on the windowsill, and look at magazines about bicycling and skating and skiing and car racing. He could not read the words, had even quit longing to read the words, but he looked at the pictures and dreamed of doing these things himself, just like a normal boy.

“Where’s your mama?” Winston asked Belinda on that afternoon’s visit to the drugstore soda fountain.

“She’s gone off with Jaydee.”

“With Jaydee?” This was a surprise. Startling, even. “Gone off to where?”

“I don’t know, just off.” While he was dealing with this, she added, “And Claire was already in earlier. You missed her. She and Larkin were goin’ off this afternoon to Dallas.”

Everyone was off, and here he was. His Claire had not even informed him about a trip to Dallas. There had been a time when she told him just about everything. Now, more and more, she was slipping away from him.

That day’s visit to the soda fountain proved a total disappointment. Not one person he even faintly wanted to see appeared. Lillian Jennings, who was always going on about something in history, came in and wanted to know what Winston knew about the War Between the States. He told her, “Nothin’. I’m not that damn old.” And then Deputy Lyle Midgette came in and said that they had not yet nabbed the thief who had made off with two wrenches and a cash box containing fifty-five dollars from Sybil Lund’s perpetual garage sale.

Winston had not told anyone about seeing the young man that the deputy had been chasing jumping over the pasture fence and hiding, and he didn’t want to speak of it now, because he didn’t want to appear old and forgetful. That he was becoming old and forgetful was too much to bear.

He realized that he wasn’t only forgetful, but that he was being forgotten. His two best friends were Vella and Claire, and they were at that moment occupied with other men. Younger, livelier men. And it was not too hard to be younger and livelier than him, who was in the very twilight of his life.

Over on the windowsill, Willie Lee felt Munro get to his feet and press against his leg. He looked at the dog, who looked back with dark eyes.

In his familiar manner of knowing things without hearing words, Willie Lee immediately put the magazine back in its correct place on the shelf, then went straight to the wheelchair and rolled it to the end of the soda fountain counter, where Mr. Winston was leaning on the freezer.

“Ah…buddy,” Winston said, taking note of him. “Let’s get our ice cream and blow this joint.”

He started to make their ice-cream cones, but Belinda said that she would do it and told him to sit down.

Vaguely aware that Belinda had ordered him and that he didn’t have the gumption to go back at her, and that she had never before offered to make him anything, he allowed her to do so and settled himself heavily into the wheelchair.

Willie Lee could not recall ever seeing Belinda make ice-cream cones. He stood nearby and watched. She was skimpy on the ice cream, but he didn’t think it a wise thing to say so to her.

With Winston carrying the desserts in a cardboard container on his lap, Willie Lee rolled him out onto the sidewalk and over to a bench beneath the shelter of a redbud tree, where they sat side by side and ate their cones, Munro licked his treat from a dish, and vehicles and people passed by. Most everyone cast a wave or called a greeting.

One of these was pretty little Gabby Smith, who waved enthusiastically out the passenger window of her mother’s minivan as the vehicle slowed in a line for the stoplight. “Hi, Willie Lee! Hi, Mr. Winston!”

There was in this feminine enthusiasm enough energy to cause Winston to smile and wave in return.

Willie Lee reacted by scrambling to his feet as fast as he could. Winston saw the boy’s ice cream tilting precariously on the cone.

“I heard you on the radio this mornin’,” called Gabby, pushing her curls out of her face as the minivan began to roll forward.

“I…I…hel-ped.” Willie Lee was on tiptoe at the edge of sidewalk.

“I listen every day. Come see me, Willie Lee!” Gabby called, leaning out the window as the minivan rounded the corner of Church Street and disappeared.

Winston reached out just in time to catch Willie Lee’s ice cream. It plopped into his hand. Willie Lee, blinking behind his thick glasses, looked from the now-empty cone to the mound of ice cream in Winston’s palm.

“Here ya’ go,” Winston said, and dropped the melting ice cream back on the cone.

“Thank you.” Willie Lee positioned himself back on the bench.

“You’re welcome.” Winston slung the excess ice cream from his palm, then held his hand out away from his clothes while he finished his own ice-cream cone. A man with his years behind him no longer worried about small inconveniences.

“Miss Gabby is still right sweet on you, I see.”

Willie Lee shrugged. Winston detected some gloom.

“Is there a problem?” Having a sense of great disappointment in his own life at the moment, he felt irritated at life for bothering the boy.

Willie Lee shrugged again. “I am not…grow-ing.”

“Well, yes, you are. Your mother had to buy you new jeans just last month, said you’d grown a foot.”

“She was ex-ag…ex-ag…”

“Exaggerating.”

Willie Lee nodded, then said in his practical manner, “People do not grow a foot in a month. Pa-pa Tate said.”

“But you have grown into larger pants,” Winston pointed out. “And you’re not done growin’ yet. Not by a long shot. Besides, even if Gabby grows taller, that doesn’t matter. Lots of tall gals go with shorter boys.”

He tried to think of an example and came up short, which seemed a funny pun. He hoped to remember it for his radio show. He liked to write down his thoughts, but his hands were busy at that moment.

Willie Lee said, “I mean…in-side.” He looked solemn. “I am re-tar-ded. I can-not have a girl-friend.” He hung his head, holding out his melting ice-cream cone.

“Eat your ice cream,” Winston said. Then, “Who told you that you cannot have a girlfriend because you are retarded?”

“Just some-one.” Willie Lee focused on licking his ice cream. It had been Mrs. Pruitt, the librarian at the Valentine library, who scared a lot of the children. Mrs. Pruitt had the idea that all the books in the library were her very own, and she would just as soon that children not be allowed to handle them.

“Yeah, well,” said Winston, “that someone is all wrong. Of course you can have a girlfriend.”

Winston considered pressing the boy to get the name of this someone and go set the person straight. Such a person was the type who liked to make other people feel small, mostly because they themselves were shriveled up.

Willie Lee interrupted Winston’s thoughts by saying, “I know I am slow, aannd I will ne-ver be fast-ter. At scho-ol I go to the class for spe-cial ed, but it means slow. Men-tal re-tar-da-tion. There is no cure.”

Winston couldn’t recall ever seeing Willie Lee so sad. He found himself upset at the boy’s pain and unable to form an instant comeback, something that did not often happen. Thinking on it, he finished his ice-cream cone, took napkins from his shirt pocket and cleaned himself up.

“Yes, my little buddy,” he said finally, “I’ll admit that you do not think just like everyone else, and the term slow is used and quite accurate by many standards. Nevertheless, as in all things, it is a matter of perspective. Maybe the world and people in it go too fast. Did you ever think of that?”

Willie Lee looked up, frowning in thought. In Winston’s opinion, and that of a number of observant people, the boy had pockets of rare understanding inside of him that had nothing to do with intellect.

“Being slow is not such a bad thing and has nothing what soever to do with havin’ a girlfriend. Girls prefer boys who are not so fast.”

He reached over and began to wipe up Willie Lee. Suddenly becoming aware of his actions, he handed the napkin to the boy, saying, “The female human is somethin’ I know a bit about. I’ve had a bunch of girlfriends from the time I was younger than you, and two wives, and the first of those was a doozie. I’ve learned from experience that as long as you speak to a female’s heart, she isn’t gonna care how well you think or how tall you are.”

“I can-not re-ad. I will not be a-ble to take the test and get a dri-ver li-cen-se and take my girl-friend on a date. That is what a boyfriend does.”

“Aw, you got somethin’ better than readin’, Little Buddy. You have that trust fund, son. You can buy a car and hire someone to drive you on a date. You won’t ever need a driver’s license. You could go on a date right now, if you wanted.”

“I co-uld?”

“Yes, sir, you could.” Winston was proud to solve that problem. He was counting up Willie Lee’s assets and became happier by the moment.

“I can absolutely assure you, son, that you are more than qualified to have a girlfriend.” He rested a hand on the boy’s small shoulder. “You have everything going for you. You’re a healthy and even handsome young man with a secure future, and there are pitiful few people who can say that at any age.

“But most importantly, Little Buddy, your heart overrules your intellect, and that is the main necessity for gettin’ along with girls.” Then, after a moment, he added, “Really, for successful living, I’d say.”

11

Mothers and Daughters

From the Valentine Voice:

June 3, 1998

Kinney—Berry

Mr. And Mrs. John Cole Berry of Valentine are pleased to announce the engagement of their son, Johnny Ray Berry, to Miss Gracie Louise Kinney, daughter of Mrs. Sylvia Kinney of Baltimore, Maryland.

The prospective groom serves as a manager and vice president of the Berry Quick Stop Enterprises.

The bride-elect is a regional manager for the M. Connor chain of women’s apparel.

A September wedding is planned in Valentine, where the two plan to make their home.

When young Paris Miller, who was clerking at their Quick Stop No. 1, called to let Emma know that the Wednesday after noon edition of the Valentine Voice had arrived, Emma went right down to get four copies. John Cole had wanted to know why she didn’t just make copies from one clipping, but she said it wouldn’t be the same. Men simply did not understand these things.

Just as she entered the store, a boy running out about knocked her down, followed by Paris yelling after him. Emma stood there watching the dark boy in a baggy T-shirt, with a girl with splotchy-crimson spiked hair hot on his heels, disappear around the corner of the building.

Emma went into the store, which was totally vacant, and realized that Paris had abandoned the cash register. She forgot about the register, though, as her gaze lit on a newspaper lying on the counter, folded back to the engagement announcement. Paris was a kind girl.

As Emma started to read, Paris came huffing back through the door. “Oh, Miz Berry—I’m sorry I forgot about the store! I didn’t really…I just wanted to catch that little creep. He shoplifted a handful of candy bars. I gotta call the sheriff.”

“Oh, no, honey. Let him go. He’s only a little boy, and it was just candy bars. All children want candy.” Emma generally did not believe in pursuing children, and in any case, her attention was totally on the picture of Johnny and Gracie. “Didn’t their picture come out great?”

Paris agreed about the picture, and then protested that it wouldn’t be right to let the boy go. “He is old enough to steal, and we might be the ones to save him from prison when he’s older.”

Taking full note of the girl’s upset, Emma looked up to see Paris’s frowning furrowed brows—each one pierced through with a gold ring. She was such a lovely girl. It was a shame that she felt the need to poke so many holes in her body.

Emma said, “Perhaps he’ll return, and you can catch him in the act and instruct him. That would be the best thing. I doubt if the sheriff could find him now.”

“Yeah…I guess.”

Emma’s attention returned to the announcement. Reading it aloud, she winced. “Oh, dear. I used the word plan twice.”

Paris peered at the paper. “No one’ll notice.”

“My mother will,” said Emma. “But maybe no one else. Their picture just captures attention.” She grinned at the teenage girl. “Johnny is just so cute.”

“Yeah, he is,” said Paris, grinning back.

Emma took up four copies of the paper and headed out the door, then came back and got two more.

Paris waved as the woman left. She wished that she had a mother who thought as much of her as Mrs. Berry thought of Johnny. For an instant, in which she blinked hard and looked downward, she wondered what having such a mother would be like.

Paris’s mother had left her years before, just gone off and left Paris, who had not yet turned ten at the time. Not even knowing who her father was, Paris lived with her grandfather, a Vietnam vet who was in a wheelchair. Because she was only fifteen now, she’d had to talk Johnny Berry into giving her the job at the Quick Stop, and it was only part-time for the summer. But Johnny had already given her a raise and said she did a real good job. It was a start on her goal to pull herself and her grandfather up out of poverty of the sort where that little thief probably came from, by the look of him.

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