Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (37 page)

“Brake-dancing,” Willie called this.

Roxy herself wasn’t much better, also terrified by his driving, always telling him to slow down, or pointing out whatever was happening on the road ahead, just in case he didn’t see it,
backseat driving
even when she was riding shotgun in the front seat — but Willie was such a scary driver that she just couldn’t help it. It was mostly a matter of his driving
style,
she had to admit, since he’d never had a real accident although he’d had plenty of fender-benders and gotten a lot of speeding tickets and even lost his license once for a year. But Roxy, like Miss Rowena, just couldn’t control herself whenever she rode with him. She couldn’t shut up. She couldn’t stop shouting out; she couldn’t stop giving pointers and issuing warnings. It got to be a real problem. Finally Willie had rescued them both by making a game out of it.

The game had started about ten years ago when they were
driving up to the North Carolina mountains for MerleFest, Doc Watson’s bluegrass festival held in memory of his son, Merle. Roxy and Willie had never missed it.

They were barreling up I-77 north of Charlotte in his old white Dodge Dart convertible, taking the curves like a piece of cake, when all of a sudden the giant red tractor-trailer ahead of them slowed down to a virtual stop in its lane, without putting its turn signal on. “Willie,” she yelled, “Watch out! This truck is going to turn, or get off, or something. Look out, honey! Slow down! Or maybe you should try to switch lanes — “ which Willie obviously couldn’t do because the other lane was clogged bumper-to-bumper with traffic.

“You’re going to hit it! We’re going to hit it, honey — “ Roxy’s whole life began to flash before her, as it often did on a car trip with Willie. The last actual thing she saw before she ducked was the Ohio license tag of the truck, close up.

“Is that a fact, Mama? Is that right? You got to hep me, Mama, I can’t see a thing. I’m blind, Mama. Don’t you forget I’m blind. Now where is that truck? I swear I jus can’t see a thing out here on this highway, where is we, Mama? Where we going?” Willie went into his best Stevie Wonder imitation. Roxy sat back up to see that the truck had turned off and Willie was rocking back and forth, head cocked and bobbing, grinning from ear to ear. “Did you say they is a truck out here, Mama?” he hollered. “Where that truck at? You got to tell me, Mama, I can’t see nothing, I blind, Mama. I be just blind as a bat out here.”

She started laughing and fell right into it. “Stevie, you crazy thing! You slow down now, you just slow down and listen to yo Mama.” Even in Roxy’s own opinion, she sounded great. Willie wasn’t the only one who could do Stevie Wonder.

“Yas, Mama. Anything you says, Mama. Little Stevie gone get you there, you don’t got to worry about a thing. Little Stevie sure gone get you there bye and bye.” Willie threw back his head and started singing “I Was Made to Love Her.” Roxy joined him on “Work out, Stevie, work out,” singing at the top of her lungs.

Willie had explained that if she was going to treat him like a blind man, he might as well
be
one. After this, they played Mama and Stevie every time Roxy started backseat driving. It always slowed him down, and it took the pressure off too.

T
HE
S
TEVIE AND
M
AMA
routine still cracks Willie and Roxy up, though it scandalizes their three politically correct, super-high-achieving children, whose major rebellion lies in their straightness.
Oh well, at least they aren’t Republicans.
Roxy sighs, starting to clean. Or at least not
yet,
though nobody is really sure about this Kyle fellow. He’s brand new . . . Jesus, this living room looks like
archaeology
with its layers and layers of clutter: papers, clothes, books, shoes. Oh well. Roxy will just have to do the best she can, and the hell with it. She moves into higher gear. She puts the rest of the cushions out on the deck furniture, then sweeps the winter’s sand off the deck, then goes back inside and puts sheets on their bed and on the double beds in two of the other little rooms, who knows? Maybe Lilah and Kyle will make a pretense of sleeping in separate rooms. They are
so straight.

Roxy shakes her head, remembering herself and Willie at the same point in their relationship, about two months after she started taking that poetry class. Because Willie
was
the love of her life — she knew it immediately too. She had never met anybody like him — anybody so brilliant and wild and funny, yet so educated — why, she was just
crazy
about him! She couldn’t believe
that he actually seemed to like her back; she knew she didn’t deserve him. She is still convinced that she doesn’t deserve him, especially after losing Alice. If Roxy actually had to say what her best trait is, she would say, reliable.
Hardworking
. That’s pathetic, isn’t it? Even
mules
are hardworking. Horses! Even dogs. But she has a good bust-line too and a good heart which is capable of intense love, so much love that it has surprised her and even scared her to death upon occasion when it has caused her to do the wildest things, things she would have thought nobody her age would ever do, especially a realtor. She has never been his equal. She is just a normal person who got hooked up to a genius, sort of like a car that gets its battery charged by a Rolls Royce. This is a metaphor, which means saying one thing in terms of another, such as, “My love is like a red, red rose.” This is one thing she learned in Willie’s class.

They met for a cup of coffee to discuss the poem she had written for her first assignment, and after that, she couldn’t help it. Any of it. They were immediate soul mates,
old souls,
Willie called it. Roxy had never had a soul mate before. In fact, she hadn’t had any fun for years either, and Willie was so much fun. They snuck around. They had picnics out in the silent, secret black-water swamp. They spent afternoons at the Bambi Lynn Motel in Montezuma, where all the pictures on all the walls showed the same thing, the same locomotive coming around a bend. The Bambi Lynn Motel must have bought a truckload of those pictures. They made love on the new Oriental rug in Roxy’s living room while the boys were off at school and Livingston was at the legislature; they got rug burns, at their age.
Rug burns!
Roxy looked at them in the mirror and giggled. “Oh, that’s eczema,” she told Livingston when he asked. Sometimes they made love in Roxy’s own king-size bed with its dual controls of mattress firmness;
she is not proud of this. Sometimes Roxy wore her old majorette uniform, which still fit, and one time when Livingston was at a meeting in Washington, she met Willie at the door wearing nothing but white high heels and her Miss Rose Hill banner and her rhinestone tiara.

They were crazy, and of course they got caught. But the big surprise was that Livingston did not appear to care too much one way or the other, certainly not as much as Roxy would have thought. In fact, this almost hurt her feelings, at least until his bland little administrative assistant, Miss Porterfield, came forward and stepped right into Roxy’s shoes without missing a beat. Claudia Porterfield had graduated from Sweetbriar College and gotten a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown. She was much more suitable for Livingston in every way. They had actually
done him a favor,
Willie said, which must have been true, since Livingston was reelected easily the next two terms, and then ran for attorney general.

Now Livingston remains just as stuffy as he ever was, but whoever thought their own Lilah would turn out to be more like him than her own real biological father? Lilah works incredibly long hours and has her calendar and address book and 401(K) plan and long-range plans and God knows what all on her blackberry or raspberry or whatever that little thing is that she carries around with her all the time.
Lord!
Roxy’s got so much to do before they get here: Lilah has such high standards, who would have thought it, this child of their hearts?

Roxy glances up at the Elvis clock on the kitchen wall, which says 4 p.m. already. Elvis’s pelvis swivels, his black and white checkered legs swing back and forth, back and forth, beneath his cool blue sports jacket. Lilah has called this clock retro and
offered to sell it on e-Bay for them. Roxy and Willie have said no thanks. But now Roxy will have to get something ready for dinner, won’t she? She’ll have to go to the store. At least she brought that big tin of chocolate chip cookies along.
Thank God.
Roxy decides to take all these old magazines and newspapers to the dump on her way to the grocery store — and she’ll leave Willie a note too, so he’ll know what’s going on. He might get here sooner than she thinks. But first she’d better put clean towels out in the bathrooms, she might forget later. Roxy is very dismayed to find that there’s no overhead light in the tiny guest bath; this is a fixture she hates, you have to take the whole damn thing down to put in a new bulb. She gets a bulb and stool to stand on. Well,
shit!
Now she remembers. You have to have a Phillips head screwdriver too. Damn. She knows they’ve got one someplace. Roxy looks in the bottom drawer in the kitchen, then in the tool chest on the shelf above the washer and dryer where she finds every kind and size of screwdriver in the world except for a Phillips head. Wouldn’t you just know it? Meanwhile Elvis swivels on, tick tock tick tock tick tock. If you wind him up, he sings, Down at the end of Lonely Street, it’s Heartbreak Hotel.

Finally she looks in Willie’s rusted old tackle box, jammed into the back of their bedroom closet. It’s not in the top layer, filled with hooks and lures and pliers and knives and loose change and God knows what all. She starts to close the top, then — she will never know why she does this — she lifts that tray out and finds the stack of letters in the bottom of the box, bound with a rubber band.

T
HERE ARE MANY LETTERS
, written in a large, loopy though somehow feminine hand, all addressed to Willie at a
post office box — since when does he have a PO box? Roxy goes hot, then cold. She picks up the entire tackle box and goes over to sit down on the blue rocking chair in the corner beneath the cross-stitched sampler on the wall, made by her grandmother up home. It says, “Peace be with you while you stay, God be with you on your way.” Roxy can hardly breathe. She takes an envelope at random — not the top envelope — and smooths the letter out on her knees. It’s dated September 18, 1990, five months after Alice died.

Honey

You have just left and I am laying here on the bed still thinking about you and everything we do together and I can tell you, it means the world. I don’t know what I would of done if it was not for you, me or Ricky, ether one. I am so glad he is out of here now he is doing so good isnt he. I do not know what would have happened to him if he would not have met you. If I would not have met you ether. I just hope he can stay off the drugs, what do you think about that. Oh honey I hate to get up from here I can still smell you in this bed and feel your arms around me. You are so good to find some time for me I know it is hard for you to get away. You know I want you when ever I can get you honey but don’t worry I do not expect a thing, I am just so happy to see you whenever you come in this door with your big smile. I am just going to lay here for a wile and think about you honey then I am going to get up and take a bath and go over to the rest home and see Bill as it is Sunday thogh he don’t know it of course. But then sometimes I think, well he might, so I will go over there and take him some potato chips, he loves potato chips, and feed
them to him one by one and tell him things just like he can hear me such as how the Atlanta Braves are doing, because who knows? Who knows a damn thing in this world? not me that is for sure ha ha except I am just happy that you are in it with me ever minute that I can get with you it makes all the difference. I will see you when I see you

I love you love you.

Love you

Mary Etta

Roxy’s hands are shaking so much that it’s hard for her to fold this letter back up and put it back in its envelope, one of those cheap oblong envelopes from the dime store. The return address reads

1104 Peach Road

Holly Springs

GA 30456

Which Roxy knows to be a country town someplace south of Macon, an old mill town she thinks, but definitely below the gnat line. A sleepy dead little redneck racist mill town, lots worse than Rose Hill. She grabs up another letter and reads

Bo,

Sometimes I think, well, what if I had never met you? What if Ricky had not gone up before that nice lady judge who sent him to the special school where you taught him music and saved his life? what if he had just went straight to prison instead, which he probably should of. Then he never would of met you, I never would of met you. What would
of happened to us then, I wonder? and now Ricky is doing great at Ga. Southern, he has got a 3.5 average, did I tell you that, and a nice regular girlfriend and the band has got as many gigs as they can take while still in school, it sounds like too many to me tho. Sometimes I worry that there is something real bad out there waiting on Ricky around the bend but lord I hope not. I know I have got to quit thinking like that. I worry that he will go crazy because Bill was pretty crazy you know, even before the accident. I have not told you the half of it, the accident was just the last straw. Though I can not say that I did not love him, I did with all my heart, tho we was just kids of course at the time. And at least he got me out of that house. And Bill done the best he could, I will have to hand it to him. He did not deserve what has happened to him but then nobody does.

Bo?
Where did that Bo come from? Roxy feels like she doesn’t know Willie at all, like she never knew him. Furiously she tears through the pile of letters, lines jumping out at her.

I wish you could come over here more but I know you can not Believe me I apreciate every minute of your time I can get I know it is hard