No Dark Valley (73 page)

Standing in line at Cracker Barrel, behind a woman wearing fuzzy brown earmuffs, Bruce Healey prayed that God would give him a good woman
. That's how he would write it in a story someday. As the cashier gave him his change, he wondered how loudly she would laugh if she knew not only that he had just prayed for a good woman but also that he actually felt something he could describe only as absolute confidence that God had heard his prayer and was already making plans to answer it.

He wondered if this was a new-Christian phenomenon. Maybe after time Christians got used to praying anywhere and being filled with anticipation over seeing those prayers answered. Maybe it was like anything else—maybe it got old with time. Like the way most married couples seemed to look right past each other without seeing the miracle of being husband and wife. Like the woman with the fuzzy earmuffs, who had stopped to look wistfully at a set of Christmas glasses with holly berries hand-painted on them, her husband pushing at her elbow impatiently, a toothpick sticking out of each side of his mouth. Bruce felt like saying it to him, “Buy her those glasses, you fool! Can't you see the look in her eyes?”

Whenever he saw a woman with that defeated look on her face, wishing yet knowing it was useless to wish, Bruce felt sad. A man should understand how much pretty things meant to a woman. He should devote his life to getting them for her, even if she had let her figure go, as the earmuff woman had, and even if her face was as plain as a round of corn bread in a cast-iron skillet. Maybe she would have a little more motivation to keep herself looking nice if her husband made her happiness a priority.

Oh, the things he could tell husbands if he could gather them all in one place. But as he walked out the door behind the earmuff woman and her husband, he thought of how he would be laughed offstage if he ever were to stand before all the husbands of the world to give a speech. “Come back and give us your advice after you've been married a few years!” they'd shout. Yes, he had it all figured out on this side of matrimony, just as he could see, from his childless vantage, all the things parents did wrong. He should plan a double seminar while he was at it: How to Be the Perfect Husband and Father.

And then it happened. He lifted his eyes and saw her pulling into the parking lot at Cracker Barrel. At the first instant Bruce was so shocked that he didn't connect her with the prayer he had prayed only a couple of minutes earlier. His first thought was to wonder why God was playing a joke on him. For one thing, he had prayed specifically for a good woman—not necessarily one with a spotless past, but certainly one who had heeded the call of God to come and receive his grace. And though he had never spoken with her about it, he felt sure that Celia, with her sad eyes, was a stranger to God's grace. Besides that, he thought God understood that he wanted a woman who would enjoy his company, not one who went out of her way to avoid him.

But the second thought was that maybe he himself was supposed to be the messenger sent to acquaint Celia with God's grace. But then the very next moment, he remembered the lessons he had learned from Loretta Vickery and wondered if maybe Celia was placed in his path to test his sincerity. You didn't try to change a woman, he knew that. Had he really learned anything, or was he as ready as ever to fall for a pretty face?

There he was, standing by one of the rocking chairs under the covered sidewalk in front of the Cracker Barrel along I-85 a few miles outside Greenville, watching his next-door neighbor open the door of her Mustang. He knew it was Celia before her left foot touched the pavement. He knew her car—not only the make, model, year, and color, but also the tires, the hubcaps, the Triple-A bumper sticker, the license plate.

And, strangely, before he had time to argue with himself that no way, this couldn't be happening to him, that the split-second timing was too unreal, that God didn't pull rabbits out of hats, he suddenly remembered something out of the blue from a book Elizabeth Landis had brought him six or seven weeks ago.

It was from a book a friend of Elizabeth's had written. He had even met this friend, who was at C. C.'s Barbecue with her husband the night he had eaten there with Elizabeth and her husband. And the words that came to him now were from the epilogue of the book Elizabeth had lent him, in which her friend Margaret had set down the moral of her story: “Given sun and rain, a flower
will
bloom. To the human heart, love is irresistible. Though I have not solved the mystery of suffering, I have felt the healing work of love.”

So what did it mean? He understood the words clearly enough, but what did it mean for him right now, and did it relate in any way to Celia? Could it be connected somehow to his prayer? If God was going to answer a person's prayer, he wouldn't try to confuse him and trip him up, would he?

“To the human heart, love is irresistible.” Were these words sent as a message to Bruce? Did God mean for him to keep knocking at Celia's door time and time again? But wasn't it a dangerous thing, a campaign like that between a man and a woman? Was he capable of simply being a friend to a beautiful woman like Celia? God wouldn't hear a Christian's prayer, then deliberately send a temptation instead, would he?

Well, at least he could be cordial to her right now. After all, he did owe her a lot. Once again he thought of her swooping down on Matt, tennis racket raised like a club, with the fury of a mother defending her young. And wasn't there a verse in the Bible that was relevant here—“inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these”? She hadn't really saved Madison's life, of course, but she would have if she had needed to. So in God's sight, maybe it was credited to her account anyway. If somebody could commit adultery in his heart, surely somebody could do something good in his heart like save a life.

And then she saw him. Bruce would have time later to wonder what innovative techniques a good movie director would use to illuminate and enlarge the moment, but right now as it was happening, the only thing that came to his mind was one short sentence, something you might read in a book, though totally devoid of the sweeping diction and syntax such a moment warranted:
They looked at each other across the parking lot
.

She didn't exactly stop, though she did hesitate almost imperceptibly in the middle of a step. But she kept coming, and as she did Bruce couldn't help thinking of all those dreams he sometimes had of being the main character in a play yet not knowing his lines, but the moment was there and it was his turn, so somebody pushed him out onstage under the bright lights, and there was nothing to do but take a deep breath, open his mouth, and start ad-libbing.

They both spoke at the same time, and when they talked about it later, neither had really heard what the other said. Bruce knew exactly what he had said, of course. It was the first thing that came to mind—a line from
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, spoken by Puck to one of the fairies in act 2: “How now, spirit! Whither wander you?”

Somehow in the awkwardness of the moment, it was agreed upon—or maybe Bruce simply announced the plan—that, though he had already eaten, he would sit back down with her inside and maybe have another biscuit and some tea, maybe even some apple cobbler. He was relieved when they were shown to a small table close to the fireplace, a considerable distance from Grace and Willy-boy, who were still there.
Take it slow and careful
, Bruce told himself as Celia studied the menu.
Weigh your words before you open your mouth. And if you can't think of what to say, just be quiet
.

He thought of how a man could so easily mess up because of the smallest details. One of the math teachers at school had told everybody in the teachers' lounge about her husband's bright idea of paying all their bills online, for example, which wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't forgotten to enter the decimal in his sixty dollar payment to the phone company, which was transacted as six thousand dollars, which in turn led to “checks bouncing all over the place,” as she put it—a significant inconvenience here at Christmastime. What a difference a little dot could make.

Celia ordered a grilled chicken sandwich plate with a Coke but requested some corn bread on the side. “I really like the corn bread here,” she told Bruce, and he nodded. He asked the waitress for more tea and told her he would have some corn bread, too, and dessert later. After the waitress left, Celia opened her purse and appeared to be looking for something. She pulled out a postcard and handed it to him. “You asked not long ago about the gallery,” she said. “Here's the mail-out for the show that's up now. It's coming down right after Christmas.”

On one side of the card was a reproduction of a painting: an old woman sitting on a porch shelling peas. The sordid details were astonishing—the frayed holes of her dingy tennis shoes through which her bunions protruded, the clumsy patch over the rip in the sagging screen door, the peeling paint on the uneven floorboards, a huge beetle on its back, the rusted chair legs, the chipped bowl, the woman's swollen knuckles, a blackened fingernail, her smudged apron over her rounded belly, three flies feeding on the pile of discarded hulls, a messy stack of newspapers beside the door, the headline on the top one reading
Fire Guts Old Mill
.

And yet, the focal point of the picture—the old woman's very wrinkled face—completely reversed the bleakness of the setting, for her jaw was clinched with determination, her eyes steady with the satisfaction of useful work. The expression wasn't anywhere close to smiling, but it clearly said, “I am a contented woman.” There was a light in her face that was both surprising yet altogether convincing. Her hair was pinned up loosely, a couple of straggly gray strands hanging down over one ear. The whole picture, in fact, seemed to be executed in shades of gray, one of the few touches of color being the blue bowl.

On the back of the card was the title:
The Last Time I Saw Her
. Beneath it was the artist's name: Macon Mahoney. It was identified as oil on canvas, thirty by twenty-four inches.

“Let me guess—his grandmother?” Bruce asked.

“Yes.”

Bruce turned it back over and studied it again. “It's . . . honest, isn't it?”

“Yes, that's a good word for it.”

“This artist, this Macon Mahoney, he must be good,” Bruce said.

“Oh, he is.”

He handed the card back to Celia. “Wouldn't you hate to think of a world without grandmothers?”

But before Celia could respond, Bruce heard another voice. “Hey, isn't that that
funny
man who was sitting by us a while ago?” He looked up to see Grace standing by the coatrack, pointing straight at him, the other arm thrust through the sleeve of her coat, into which Willy-boy was trying to assist her.

Bruce smiled up at her and shrugged. “Just can't get filled up,” he said. He was ready for the giggles, which spewed forth like a sudden leak, and for some parting banality, which came in the form of “That guy is an absolute
scream
!” Looking back at Celia, it struck him that he should thank Grace. If it hadn't been for her, he might have taken more time to eat, and Celia might have been shown to a table on the opposite side of the trellis-like partition, where he never would have even seen her. And though he knew there was no limit to the number of ways God could have arranged for their meeting, he liked the way it had worked out.

“So . . . where were we?” Bruce said. “Oh yes, grandmothers. I had a great one. Very Old South, but not so much that she couldn't see the humor in that whole way of life. She could do a very funny parody of a tea party.” To demonstrate, he pitched his voice higher. “‘Mildred, where
ever
did you find this darling chintz for your tablecloth? Oh, at Bennington's? Well, I'm going to send Marie around tomorrow to pick up a bolt so Irma can whip me up some little curtains for the sunroom.'”

Celia smiled as she tucked the postcard back into her purse.

Bruce almost didn't ask the next question, but something gave him the go-ahead. “Do you have a grandmother still living?”

She shook her head, but not in a way that warned him to stop.

“Did you ever know either one of your grandmothers?”

“Yes, I knew them both,” she said.

The waitress brought their drinks, along with a plate of corn bread and butter pats.

“And . . . do you remember much about them?”

“Oh yes. Yes, I remember quite a bit.” She paused, then added, “Especially my grandmother in Georgia.”

This might have been a good place to call it off, but again Bruce had a strong sense that it was all right to proceed, that it was something he ought to do in fact.

“What was she like?” he said. “Was she a good woman?”

36

Deeper Than the Mighty Rolling Sea

The first thing Bruce heard when he woke up on Valentine's Day, which fell on a Saturday this year, was the sound of a stump grinder. He looked out his bedroom window to see Milton Stewart standing in the middle of the backyard next door observing another man who was operating the machine on the stump of the large oak they had lost during the ice storm back in December.

Not the most romantic way for Celia to start such a special day, with a sound like that outside her front door, but at least he knew now that she would be awake in plenty of time for his first move. He had been plotting this day for several weeks.

All he had told her was that she needed to stay home today, that she couldn't be dashing in and out all day. Though she had pretended to object, claiming to have dozens of errands to run, she had finally given in. “You'd better have an awfully good reason,” she had said. He hoped he would remember to ask her later if she thought his reason was good enough.

Nor was he going anywhere himself. He needed to stay home to make sure everything went according to schedule. He looked at the clock—not quite two hours before things got started—plenty of time to wash and wax her car and his truck, then vacuum them both out. He needed to check with Kimberly about a couple of details for this afternoon, too. He didn't want any last-minute glitches after all the time he had put into this. He ran through the day in his mind, hour by hour. He didn't care if the whole world thought his plan was corny to the hilt. He was forty years old and could be as corny as he wanted to.