No Defense (17 page)

“Don’t dump it all on me,” I said, meeting
his intense gaze. “You haven’t ever really been committed to
Tallagumsa, Eddie. You didn’t want to come and you’ve hated every
minute of it, hiding at the college or in your studio. You ignore
us most of the time. If I need a friend, it’s you who are to
blame.”

“You don’t know shit. I happen to like it
here. I was surprised as hell, but I do like it. It’s a better
place for raising a family. My work is going great. I love
teaching. Jolene is a gift from heaven. I think coming here was
right. At least that’s what I thought until tonight. But you don’t
notice anything I say or do anymore. Like I haven’t bought a Miss
Reese’s pie in two weeks, and I hardly drink anymore. Tonight is a
well-deserved exception. I have been here for you and the kids,
LuAnn, but you are too self-absorbed, too self-important to see
outside your little kingdom.”

He walked upstairs to the bedroom and picked
up his packed suitcases, then came down to the foyer and opened the
front door. “You’re reminding me more of your father every day. If
I were you, I’d be real worried about that.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet. By the way, I signed a
syndication contract tonight. If you care.”

I cared, just not enough to stop him.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

At my office desk five days later, I smiled
and waved to Ben as he came through the front door of the Steak
House. He sat down with the Coffee Club for their regularly
scheduled morning discussion, and they greeted him like an old
friend. I restrained my desire to rush out and talk to him, even
though I wanted to know what Berta Waddy had said to him that
morning.

When he saw me watching him, he smiled-an
open, easy smile, the kind of smile you don’t get from someone
you’ve known a long time, the kind that isn’t cluttered with
everything that has happened to two people who’ve shared years of
their lives.

Ben, cheerful and kind, was a welcome
contrast to Eddie’s bleak cynicism. I studied the picture on my
desk of Eddie and me on our wedding day. Over the last five days
I’d thought a lot about the way Eddie acted at the courthouse
dedication: his sarcasm, his mood swings, his drinking. That was
the Eddie I was glad to be rid o£

When I told Ben that Eddie had walked out, I
assured him that he wasn’t the cause, that Eddie’s unhappiness
about the move and his career had taken their toll on our
relationship. Ben, it turned out, was less than thrilled with his
marriage as well. During the first year of his two-year marriage,
he’d realized that he had made a mistake, but it had been easier to
hit the road than to deal with his mistake. Other than these
thumbnail sketches of our other, married, lives, we hadn’t focused
on the specifics. Nor did we discuss what was going to happen when
Ben’s work was done and it was time for him to go back to
Washington. We didn’t even think about it. Instead, we enjoyed our
time together, glad to have found each other.

About half an hour passed before Ben left his
seat with the Coffee Club, knocked on my office door, and came
inside. He left the door open. “Berta Waddy was happy to talk to me
until I got to the murders,” he said. “Then she clammed up and
refused to talk.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I asked her that. She didn’t really answer
my question, though. She said she’d talk about anything but
that.”

“Why does she care? He’s dead, after all.
And even if he weren’t, she wouldn’t have anything to worry about.
I’m sure Floyd didn’t have anything to do with the murders, but he
must have known something or heard something. You’d think she’d
want the truth out now, wouldn’t you?”

“Not necessarily,” Ben said. “He was her
husband, LuAnn, dead or not. Maybe he was implicated in some way.
You can’t expect her to be eager to tell me something that would
make him look bad.”

“I’m surprised. She usually loves to gossip
about anything and everything. Do you want me to call her and try
to get her to talk?”

“No, but thanks. It was just a lark anyway.
I can’t spend any more time here running down that story and
alienating everybody. She was not happy to have it brought up. I’ve
told you time and again that’s how people feel.”

“Why’d you bother to talk to her at all
then?” I was irritated that he wasn’t committed to the cause. “I
thought you were finally going to pursue this.”

“That’s not what I said, and you know it.
After what Edwina told us about the FBI, I thought, Why not check
it out. But it’s too distracting. At least Berta gave me some
interesting information about catfish farming and its effect on the
economy here.”

“But it would be so great to get that
story.”

“Look, I talked to her for you. Now do
something for me. Let it go, LuAnn. Most people want to move on
past it.”

Ben shut the office door with his foot. “I’d
like to move on,” he said. “On over to my house and bring you with
me for an hour or so, if you know what I mean.” He raised his
eyebrows several times in a mockingly suggestive manner.

“I wish I could,” I said. I tried but failed
to suppress a grin. “Estelle’s off all day. How’s tonight for you?”
I leaned forward and pinched him softly on the thigh.

“Fine with me, sweetie pie,” he said, in a
mock southern accent.

“By the way, I have big plans for you later
this week,” I said. “The Ave Maria Grotto.”

“The what?”

“You were near it today in Cullman. The
grotto is a shrine in an abbey of Benedictine monks. One of the
monks there created a miniature Jerusalem, the whole city. He’s
buried there too, right near the gift shop. And we have to hit the
Boll Weevil Monument in Enterprise soon.”

Ben started laughing. “Only in the
South.”

“Yeah, don’t you just love it?”

After Ben left, I rolled a blank sheet of
paper into the typewriter and typed: “LuAnn and Ben.” I hit the
carriage return two times and typed: “Ben and LuAnn.” Then I put my
left elbow on the desk to support my chin and contemplated the
couple I had created.

Staring at the names, I was reminded of how
as a teenager the girls wrote their names coupled with their
boyfriends’ names anywhere they found a blank space. We wrote on
schoolbooks (inside the covers, in the margins, and on the edges of
the compressed pages of closed books), bathroom-stall walls and
mirrors, school desks, the sides of shoe soles, wet cement, and
even our hands.

After Estelle broke up with Johnny Bowe
during our senior year of high school, she had to buy extra-thick
permanent black magic markers to blot out her prolific handiwork.
The edges of her textbooks turned so black that an uninformed adult
might have thought the books were manufactured with black pages.
The bathroom walls were smeared with large blocks of magic marker,
as though a mad censor were loose in the school. She bought rolls
of paper towels to wipe out their names on lipstick-marked mirrors
and a can of red spray paint to obliterate them on the walls of the
underpass. Finally, she brought her daddy’s pocket knife to school
and scratched out the initials she had carved in her homeroom
desk.

By the time Junior and I parted ways, we
were out of Tallagumsa High School and I didn’t have to go to such
extremes to obliterate signs of him from my life.

Now, with Eddie, I had my wedding ring.
Inside the band was engraved “Eddie and LuAnn, June 10th, 1973.” I
still wore the ring every day, just as I always had. I wasn’t ready
to take it off.

No one knew Eddie had moved out, and I was
willing to go on that way indefinitely, keeping Eddie’s departure a
secret, telling anyone who asked that he was on
City Paper
business in Atlanta. It wasn’t long though, only a week after Ben
and I visited Miss Edwina and missed Eddie’s show, before the
inevitable occurred.

That day Jane and Mother came by the Steak
House after one of my sister’s OB visits. They joined me in my
booth for lunch. As always, Jane began to reveal every detail of
her exam.

Mother listened attentively, even though
she’d been there with Jane during the exam.

“What about your weight?” I asked when Jane
completed her account. She wasn’t even four months pregnant and
already had gained thirty pounds. That day she wore a large and
loose green muumuu decorated with pictures of watermelon
slices.

“He said I should be a little more careful,”
she admitted as she finished the last of her French fries and milk
shake.

“This heat will be hard to take if you’re
too heavy,” I warned. “And the weight’s not easy to lose.”

“You always did,” Jane said. “The twins were
only two months old when you were back in great shape.”

“But it took a lot of starvation,” I said. I
didn’t bother to remind her that I was four inches taller, six
years younger, and had never gained as much as she would.

“This is so special for me that I can’t
worry about weight,” Jane said, dismissing my concerns. “I feel
like it must be good for the baby, that if I don’t eat when I’m
hungry I could hurt him.” She shrugged and smiled, then reached for
another sweet roll and eagerly peeled off its crinkled paper
cup.

“It’s hard,” I acknowledged. “Especially
with the first. With Jessie I worried about every twitch, ache, and
pain. I also worried when there were no twitches, aches, or pains.
You can’t win.”

I looked at my watch and stood up. “I have
to go upstairs to help set up for the Lions Club, and the twins
have their four-month checkup this afternoon, so I’m on a tight
schedule today.”

“We need to talk!” Mother said dramatically.
She grabbed my wrist and there was a brief, uncomfortable silence,
during which she and Jane exchanged meaningful looks.

“What?” I asked, sitting back down. “What’s
wrong?”

“I think you need to know that we saw Eddie
and Barbara Cox in her car this morning,” Mother said in a
conspiratorial whisper. “They didn’t see us.”

“We didn’t want to tell you, but how could
we not?” Jane asked. Her tone was anguished. “We were on our way to
the doctor’s, and there they were at the light, just ahead of us.
We couldn’t miss them.”

“Maybe it wasn’t them,” Mother said
hopefully.

“You know better, Mother,” Jane said. “We’re
sorry, LuAnn.” She reached over and took my hand.

Only then did I realize that because Mother
and Jane believed that Eddie was out of town (as I’d told them he
was), they assumed that
he
was running around with Barbara
behind
my
back. I almost laughed. “He’s not in Atlanta-I
know that; he never was. We had a fight last week and he moved
out,” I explained. “I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it,
though. I’m sure everything will be fine.”

“Well, I don’t know which situation is
worse,” Mother said, folding her paper napkin carefully and dabbing
at the comers of her eyes.

“I told you running the restaurant wouldn’t
work out,” Jane said. “Remember? The day of the courthouse
dedication. Daddy’s always got to have his way, though. He never
listens to me. Now look at the mess you’re in.”

“Oh, Jane, it’s not the restaurant. It’s a
lot of stuff we have to deal with. We have our share of problems,
that’s all.”

“Such as?” Mother asked.

“Do we have to go into it now?” I asked. “I
really need to go upstairs.” I stood up again.

“I’ll pray for you,” Mother said.

“Just don’t put us in the bulletin, Mother,”
I said. “Please.” In her church’s bulletin each Sunday was a list
of people in need of group prayers: cancer victims, widows,
alcoholics, and the like. I’d be humiliated if either Eddie’s or my
name appeared in the list.

“And why not? It couldn’t hurt,” Mother
said. “More good has come from that bulletin. You wouldn’t
believe.”

“It helped me get pregnant,” Jane said.

“I’d give the credit to the fertility drugs
you took,” I said.

“Don’t you ever miss the church?” Mother
asked.

“Not really,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just
don’t.”

“You and your father,” Mother said. “I blame
him for your views, LuAnn. You two were out gazing at stars,
thinking you could get whatever you wanted in life without the
Lord’s help, when you should have been studying the Bible.”

“Different people need different things,
Mother,” I said, leaning over to kiss her cheek. “Don’t worry about
me. I’m fine. I’m happy. Really.”

I wasn’t happy the only other time Eddie left
me. I was a mess.

One night right after Thanksgiving my senior
year of college, he called our apartment an hour after he was due
to go with me to a movie. He said he was in Tennessee and told me
that he’d needed to get away, not to worry, he’d be back soon.

“When?” I asked.

Soon.