Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (32 page)

Frescas were offered all around, and we saw pictures of Marjorie and Frank’s trip to John Day Fossil Beds in Oregon. After all the time we had waited for the moment, it was hard to believe that it was really Charles Whitney finally driving up that road. In preparation for Lillian and her wheelchair, he had recently purchased a van; the registration was still just a numbered piece of paper in the back window. The minister, Chuck Lindley, sat in the passenger’s seat, and when he emerged holding the orange gasoline jug, we discovered that he’d been pulled straight from painting his house; his overalls were paint-splattered, and a quick hand washing had left moons of blue under his fingernails.

Lillian held her hand to her heart when Charles stepped from the car. He wore a denim shirt and a tie, not his usual attire, I guessed, since the top button of the shirt was undone, as if he could no longer stand the strangling. His captain’s beard was paper white and trimmed, his eyes pure beams of joy, sun glints. He greeted my mother, then clasped his hands together and just looked at Lillian for a while with the sweet delight and moment of reverence you feel when you’ve awoken to a snowfall. Then he went to her, knelt down. Took her hands, which were trembling. And then the great man, author of eleven books, masterpieces like
White Rain
and
Hawk’s Daughters
and a collection of poetry of distinction, and two-time national Book Award winner, laid his
cheek down upon the knees of the woman he loved, who was now nineteen and thirty and eighty-two and every age in between. In front of us played the story of a woman and a man, the most simple and most complex story that exists, and she set her hand on his head with the gentleness of a blessing.

It was a beautiful wedding, a radiant wedding. The groom’s voice shook, the minister held his Bible away from his paint-splattered overalls. When Charles bent down to kiss Lillian, we all heard him as he whispered only one word.
Grateful.
Lillian’s face was glowing. Harold cleared his throat again and again to keep from crying. Afterward Marjorie got a frozen Sara Lee cheesecake from her kitchen and put a glass couple in glass earmuffs on the top, and we toasted Charles and Lillian with our Fresca cans. The hot wind from a passing semi-truck made my mother’s hair spin around and catch in her mouth. Chip Jr. caught it all on film.

Behind Charles and Lillian was the backdrop of the ocean, blue and white and both turbulent and serene. The perfect setting for a wedding. Better than a church, even. Because what is more like love than the ocean? You can play in it, drown in it. It can be clear and bright enough to hurt your eyes, or covered in fog; hidden behind a curve of road, and then suddenly there in full glory. Its waves come like breaths, in and out, in and out, body stretched to forever in its possibilities, and yet its heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic.

“That dog,” Chip Jr. said. “I can’t help but think of him.”

“What dog?”

“The one that was thrown across the room when he chewed through the electrical cord. Frank and Marjorie’s dog.”

“They stuffed him,” Harold said.

“Don’t be morbid,” Peach said.

“I’m not the one that stuffed him,” Harold said.

We were heading home. We’d said good-bye to Frank and Marjorie and had gone back briefly to Charles’s house, a shingled cottage with stepping stones making a path to the door, and a back deck that looked over the sea. I didn’t mind leaving Lillian in Carmel. The houses there were out of a fairy tale, lacking only the thatched roofs, and the salty clean air was wet and fresh. Charles had
a birdhouse hanging in his tree, and tomato plants and a dish of milk for the neighbor’s cat. Inside he had a round teapot and a violet plant by the kitchen sink, roomy wood floors, and enough books to make it feel like a wise, warm place. We didn’t stay long, even though I wanted to. We agreed on the drive there that we wouldn’t. We kissed and hugged Lillian good-bye and promised to call the next day. Delores and Nadine would soon be there, and Chuck Lindley would stay for support. Charles’s attorney would be arriving any minute, as would his daughter. This drama, Mom said, was not ours, and we believed, really believed, that all was well. Harold pouted for a while after we were back in the car. He wanted to see the look on Delores’s face when Lillian lifted up her hand to show her the ring they’d temporarily borrowed from Chuck Lindley’s wife’s jewelry box.

“How do you know they stuffed him?”

“I saw him. When Frank showed me his golf trophy after the wedding. The dog was in their bedroom. If you could call it a bedroom.”

“More like a bed cubby,” Miz June said.

“Did they duct tape him down so he didn’t slide around?” my mother said, and laughed. She cracked herself up.

“No, but they should have. He was on his side with his legs sticking out when we went in, and Frank had to set him upright again. He knocked the dog over when he opened the door.”

“So he was electrocuted,” Chip Jr. said. “By Christmas lights.”

Mom busted up. Relief that our mission was accomplished had her in a good mood.

“It’s not funny,” Chip Jr. said.

Miz June stuck her arms out stiffly and opened her eyes wide, frozen-dog-style.

“Nah, he wasn’t electrocuted. He must have survived that. Frank told me that he died of old age.”

We all got quiet on that one. Mom had been right. The old people had grown on me in ways I couldn’t explain. The feeling in my stomach that grew right then, hollow dread, gnawing sadness, made me realize that I loved those Casserole Queens.

DOG WORKS MIRACLES, the sign said when we came home. And for a while that felt true. Our kitchen was fixed, coated with fresh paint, and Poe had become a near gentleman, aside from his one lapse of peeing on the floor from excitement when he first saw us. Four days after we returned home, we had a wedding reception at Miz June’s for Lillian and Charles, even though the honorary guests, who were still in Carmel, were absent.

“Try these,” Mrs. Wong said. “Longevity noodles. It is bad luck to cut a strand, as the noodle indicates long life.” She insisted on being in charge of the food. She had gone over early that morning with her own grocery bags, and rooted around in Miz June’s well-stocked cupboards for the rest of the ingredients. You could live for weeks after a nuclear war with the stuff in Miz June’s cupboards and the overflow onto the shelves in her garage. She’d lived
through the depression, Mom explained. That’s why you could build a fortress with the amount of canned goods she had.

The table was filled with Mrs. Wong’s foods. Red cooked chicken, red for the color of happiness. A whole fish, with buggy eyes, which made Anna Bee shiver. Buns with lotus seeds, indicating many children, though I thought we could have skipped those for Lillian and Charles. Chip Jr. had brought the pictures from the trip and hung them around Miz June’s house. Images from our adventure—Lillian waving, parked next to the newspaper box outside Denny’s; a field of orange trees; the eagle with the red scarf; Mom’s eyes peering over a fan of playing cards—were stuck along the walls and other various places. A row of three heads shot from the back, Miz June’s, then Mom’s, then Harold’s, our view the whole trip, dangled on the stair rail. A nice shot of the Mylar frog hung on one of Miz June’s fringe lampshades. The photo of Harold, caught in reflection at the scenic lookout, was stuck on the toilet bowl. In it, he looked caught in one of those honest and unadorned moments, like when you’ve just woken up, or have come in from the cold after raking leaves. Halfway through the party I noticed that the photo had disappeared, snatched, I first guessed, by Harold himself, as it was a particularly handsome shot, though later I discovered the corner of it peeking from the open zipper of Peach’s purse.

More guests arrived. Joe Davis came, bringing a wedding gift wrapped in white paper with silver bells, which
Mom opened to reveal a box of chocolates later set on the table and pounced on by the Queens like lions on a zebra carcass. Fowler the librarian arrived with a date, a slim woman with long dark hair and dark eyeliner and a shirt with sleeves made of fishnet.
Floozy,
Peach whispered in the kitchen. Bernice Rawlins, who worked at the library, was spotted knocking on Miz June’s neighbor’s door, and Mom rushed out to guide her to the right house, the one with all of the cars parked in front of it. Miz June had invited a new suitor, Mr. Kingsley, who arrived in a hat and suit, and Mom invited Lizbeth and Sydney and Libby Wilson. My heart dropped when I saw Libby, batik skirt swinging in a whirl of color as she came in the door. I focused on a pair of plates of appetizers that had previously been shaped like a dragon and a phoenix and now looked like they’d survived a bomb blast.

Libby was not one for indirect social dramas. She strode directly toward me and took a pinch of my sleeve and drew me to a corner by Miz June’s china cabinet. I studied a cup that looked like it was made from a lettuce leaf, and a miniature tea set with apples on it.

“Ruby,” Libby said. “Look at me. It’s still me.”

“That’s the problem.” Her kindness was doing its work, loosening the tears that had gathered in readiness the moment I saw her. The smallest kindness is an arrow in the heart of a guilty person, that I’d learned.

“Listen,” she said. “Your mother and I have been friends for too long to let this come between us. She called me up on your first day of kindergarten, crying her
eyes out.” She reached out to hug me. “I needed a little time, is all.” I put my arms around her, smelled her cinnamon smell.

“I am so sorry,” I said to her. Tears rolled down my face, landed on her shoulder.

“I know you are.”

“I am so, so sorry.”

“Don’t blow your nose on my dress,” she said, making me laugh. She gave me a squeeze. “Ruby, remember that man I told you about, who I missed my mother’s chemotherapy for?”

I nodded.

“He stole my credit card. I got the bill. He went out to dinner a lot, bought a new computer, and a subscription to
Christian Computing
magazine.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Dead serious.”

“Jeez.” I thought about this.
“Christian Computing?”

“What I want to know is, how is Christian computing any different than any other computing?” Libby said.

“Willing to spend more when the Holy Grail comes up for sale on eBay,” Mom said as she came and put her arms around both of us. “Friends,” she said. She put her cheek on Libby’s shoulder.

Miz June put on some music. A two-record set of Benny Goodman. Chip Jr. watched the needle of the record player collect a ball of dust, and Miz June started to dance with Mr. Kingsley. Anna Bee had worn her hooded sweatshirt with the butterflies on it, and Harold
put things in her hood when she wasn’t looking—a napkin, one of Mrs. Wong’s lotus seed buns. Fowler’s girlfriend sat beside him on the settee, petting Beauty with her foot. Lizbeth waltzed Sydney in a circle, as Sydney stuck her tongue out at me. Miz June and Mr. Kingsley were spinning and dancing hard. Mr. Kingsley bumped into the sofa, which bumped into the wall and tipped to an angle Miz June’s painting of the couple in the boat.

“Oh, my,” Miz June said when the song was over. “You are a marvelous dancer, Mr. Kingsley.”

He pulled her waist toward him as the music slowed. “And you, my dear, are Ginger Rogers,” he said.

Joe Davis took my mom’s hand and led her in a dance. She looked happy, and was talking in that tight-lipped way that meant she was trying not to blow her garlic prawn breath on him. She held him there when the song changed to a fast one, and Joe Davis stomped too hard and skidded the needle of the record player, making everyone miss the beat for a moment. Mrs. Wong took Chip Jr. out on the floor for a spin, and he wiggled his hips and stepped on the cat’s tail when Mrs. Wong spun him around. Sydney, Lizbeth, Mom, and I formed a line and kicked our legs cancan style.

I imagined Lillian and Charles sitting peacefully on their deck in Carmel, looking at the ocean, touched by its salty breeze as we sang and toasted them with champagne and ate a real wedding cake that Harold made. I imagined them holding hands in sweet quiet as we danced, danced.