A Common Life (12 page)

She would go to Sunday School and the eleven o’clock, then come home and ice the cake and let it sit’til she carried it to church at four. She and Gene would do what they usually did when hauling around a three-layer—put newspaper on the floor of the cargo area, and while Gene drove, she would sit back there on a stool and hold the cake to keep it from sliding around in its cardboard box. Without a van, there was no way on God’s green earth to follow her calling unless you were making sheet cakes, which she utterly despised and would not be caught dead doing. The icing would go on at home, but she’d put the pearls and lilies on at church in one of the Sunday School rooms. Then she’d take the shelves out of the church fridge and pop the whole thing in ’til just before the thundering horde hit the reception.

She removed the hair net from her head and stuck it in the knife drawer.

Four blocks north, Uncle Billy Watson took the wire hanger from the nail on the wall and squinted at the black wool suit, inherited from his long-dead brother-in-law. Its heaviness had bowed down the arms of the coat hanger, giving the whole thing a dejected appearance.

“Dadgummit,” he said under his breath. There was a spot on the right lapel as big as a silver dollar; it looked like paint—or was it vanilla pudding? In his pajamas, he shuffled to the kitchen, where he could see in a better light.

Miss Rose was sitting in her chair by the refrigerator, peeling potatoes with a knife too dull to cut butter. “What are you doing, Bill Watson?”

“Cleanin’ my coat.”

“You’ll not be getting
my
goat!” she said, indignant.

His wife was going deaf as a doorknob, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. She wouldn’t even discuss hearing aids, let alone ask the county to buy her a pair.

“What are you wearin’ to the weddin’?” he shouted.

“What wedding?”

“Th’ preacher’s weddin’ this evenin’ at five o’clock!”

“Five o’clock!” she squawked. “That’s suppertime!”

“Well, I cain’t help if it is, hit’s th’ preacher’s weddin’ an’ we’re a-goin’.” Hadn’t he talked about this wedding ’til he was blue in the face, even picked out three dresses she had bitterly rejected? And now this.

He wagged his head and sighed. “Lord have
mercy
.”

“What about Percy?” she demanded.

The old man scrubbed at the lapel with a wet dishrag. Some days he could put on a smiley face and go about his business just fine, some days Rose Watson tested his faith, yes, she did. He’d have to trot to church this morning and sit there asking forgiveness for what he was thinking. He’d also be thanking the Lord for the joke. Don’t tell him that God Almighty didn’t answer foolish prayers!

Four blocks northwest, Hessie Mayhew lay snoring in her double bed with the faded flannel sheets and vintage Sears mattress. She had taken two Benadryl caps last night to dry up her sinuses after a day of messing with lady’s-mantle and hydrangeas. Hydrangeas always did something to her sinuses, they had drained like a tap as she plowed through people’s yards, taking what she wanted without asking. She’d even ducked behind the Methodist chapel, where a thick hedge of hydrangeas flowered magnificently every year, and took her pick of the huge blooms.

People knew who she was, they knew whose wedding this was; if she’d stopped to ask permission, they’d have said help yourself, take all you want! So why stop and ask, that was her philosophy! People should be proud for her to rogue their flowers, seeing they made so many people happy.
I declare,
she once imagined someone saying,
Hessie Mayhew stripped every peony bush in my yard today, and I’m just
tickled
about it!

For her money, the hydrangeas were a week shy of the best color, but did people who set wedding dates ever stop and think of such things? Of course not, they just went blindly on. If she lived to marry again, which she sometimes hoped she would, she’d do it in May, when lily of the valley was at it peak.

On her screened porch, a decrepit porcelain bathtub boasted a veritable sea of virgin’s bower and hydrangeas.

In her double kitchen sink, Blue Mist spirea, autumn anemone, Queen Anne’s lace, artemisia, and knotweed drank thirstily. Inside the back door, buckets of purple coneflowers, autumn clematis, cosmos, and wild aster sat waiting. On the counter above the dishwasher, a soup pot of pink Duet and white Garden Party roses mingled with foxtail grass, Jerusalem artichoke, dog hobble, and panicles of the richly colored pokeberry. A small butterfly that had ridden in, drugged, on a coneflower, came to itself and visited the artemisia.

At seven-thirty, Hessie Mayhew turned on her side, moaning a little due to the pain in her lower back, and though a team of helpers was due to arrive at eight, she slept on.

In her home a half mile from town, Puny Guthrie crumbled two dozen strips of crisp, center-cut bacon into the potato salad and gave it one last, heaving stir. Everybody would be plenty hungry by six or six-thirty, and she’d made enough to feed a corn shuckin’, as her granpaw used to say. She had decided to leave out the onions, since it was a wedding reception and very dressy. She’d never thought dressing up and eating onions were compatible; onions were for picnics and eating at home in the privacy of your own family.

Because Cynthia and the father didn’t want people to turn out for the reception and go home hungry, finger foods were banned. They wanted to give everybody a decent supper, even if they would have to eat it sitting on folding chairs from Sunday School. What with the father’s ham, Miss Louella’s yeast rolls, Miss Olivia’s raw vegetables and dip, her potato salad, and Esther Bolick’s three-layer orange marmalade, she didn’t think they’d have any complaints. Plus, there would be ten gallons of tea, not to mention decaf, and sherry if anybody wanted any, but she couldn’t imagine why anybody would. She’d once taken a sip from the father’s decanter, and thought it tasted exactly like aluminum foil, though she’d never personally tasted aluminum foil except when it got stuck to a baked potato.

She thought of her own wedding and how she had walked down the aisle on Father Tim’s arm. She had felt like a queen, like she was ten feet tall, looking at everything and everybody with completely new eyes. Halfway down the aisle, she nearly burst into tears, then suddenly she soared above tears to something higher, something that took her breath away, and she knew she would never experience anything like it again. Later, when she called Father Tim “Father,” she was struck to find she said it as if he really were her father, it wasn’t just some religious name that went with a collar. Ever since that moment, she’d felt she was his daughter, in a way that no one except herself could understand. And hadn’t he been the one to pray that parade prayer that brought Joe Joe to the back door and into her life forever? She had been cleaning the downstairs rectory toilet when Joe Joe came to the back, because she hadn’t heard him knocking at the front. When she saw him, her heart did a somersault, because he was the cutest, most handsome person she’d ever seen outside of a TV show or magazine.

“Father Tim said he might have a candy wrapper in the pocket of his brown pants, if you could send it, please.”

She knew immediately that this policeman had been raised right, saying “please.” Not too many people said please anymore, much less thank you, she thought it was a shame.

She had invited him in and given him a glass of tea and he perched on the stool where Father Tim sat and read his mail, and she went upstairs and looked in the father’s brown pants pockets and there it was, wadded up. Why anybody would want to carry around a wadded-up candy wrapper . . .

“’Scuse my apron,” she remembered saying. She would never forget the look in his eyes.

“You look really good in an apron,” he said, turning beet red.

She’d never been told such a thing and had no idea what to say. She handed him the candy wrapper and he put it in a little Ziploc bag without taking his eyes off her.

She thought she was going to melt and run down in a puddle. Then he bolted off the stool and was out the door and gone and that was that. Until he came back the very next day when she was cooking lima beans.

“Hey,” she said through the screen door as he bounded up the steps. By now, she knew that the whole police force was working on the big jewel theft at Lord’s Chapel.

“You’re under arrest,” he said, blushing again.

For a moment, she was terrified that this might be true, then she saw the big grin on his face.

“What’re th’ charges?”

“Umm, well . . .” He dropped his head and gazed at his shoes.

She thought it must be awful to be a grown man who blushed like a girl.

He jerked his head up and looked her in the eye. “You’re over the legal limit of bein’ pretty.”

She giggled. “What’re you goin’ to do about it?” Boy howdy, that had flown right out of her mouth without even thinking.

“Umm, goin’ to ask you to a movie in Wesley, how’s that?”

“Is it R? I don’t see R.”

“I don’t know,” he said, appearing bewildered.

“You could look in the newspaper, or call,” she said. She could scarcely get her breath. She had never noticed before that a police uniform looked especially good, it was like he was home on leave from the armed forces.

“Will you see, umm, PG-13?”

“Depending.” Why on earth was she being so hard to get along with? Her mouth was acting like it had a mind of its own.

“My grandmother’s th’
mayor
!” he exclaimed.

“That’s nice,” she said. This was going nowhere. She felt she was fluttering around in space and couldn’t get her toes on the ground. Suddenly realizing again that she was wearing her apron, she snatched it up and over her head and stood there, feeling dumb as a rock.

“So, just trust me,” he said. “We’ll find a good movie if we have to go all th’way to . . .” He hesitated, thinking.
“Johnson City!”

“Thank you,” she said, “I’d enjoy goin’ to th’ movies with you.”

After he left, she felt so addled and weak in the knees that she wanted to lie down, but would never do such a thing in the father’s house; she didn’t even
sit
down on the job, except once in a while to peel peaches or snap string beans.

She walked around the kitchen several times, trying to hold something in, she didn’t know what it was. She ended up at the back door, where it suddenly came busting out.

It was a shout.

She put the plastic cover on the potato salad bowl and smiled, remembering that she’d stood at the screen door for a long time, with tears of happiness running down her cheeks.

Having had their flight canceled on Saturday due to weather, Walter and Katherine Kavanagh arrived at the Charlotte airport at 11:35 a.m. Sunday morning, following a mechanical delay of an hour and a half at La Guardia. They stood at the baggage carousel, anxiously seeking her black bag, which contained not only her blue faille suite for the wedding, but the gift they’d taken great pains to schlep instead of ship.

“Gone to Charlottesville, Virginia!” said the baggage claim authority, peering into his monitor. “How about that?”

From her greater height of six feet, Katherine surveyed him with a look capable of icing the wings of a 747.

“Sometimes they go to Charleston!” he announced, refusing to wither under her scorn. He was used to scorn; working in an airline baggage claim department was all about scorn.