Authors: Donna Sturgeon
Olivia (46 page)
Carla was more than just the woman who erased the empty corners of Eugene’s world. She also filled the gaping holes in Olivia’s. Carla was the mother Olivia had been waiting her entire life to meet. She listened, she comforted, she advised, she scolded and she loved unconditionally. She gently wiped Olivia’s tears and erased her doubts and strengthened her confidence. Carla portrayed every characteristic of the kind of mother Olivia wanted to be one day, and her heart took careful notes and tucked them away, keeping them safe and saving them for the future.
The three of them made up an odd little family, but they were the perfect family for Olivia, created in a very unique way. As Olivia had always suspected, Camille Marie Logan was not her mother. She had simply been the vessel of creation, crossing the boundaries of time and space, bearing in the past the child born from Eugene and Carla’s love for each other in the present. God did want Carla to be a mother after all, and when He decided the time was right, He gave her a child who was fully-potty trained and old enough to drive her to the liquor store.
* * *
The nights grew longer, the days a little colder, as summer slipped into fall. On an overcast day not long after the leaves had started to change color, Olivia pulled on a sweatshirt and went for a walk. Her heart still ached with every step, but as she placed one foot in front of the other and traveled the road, she discovered she had remembered how to breathe.
She drew in a deep, cleaning breath of the crisp autumn air, slipped her earbuds into her ears, and hit shuffle on her iPod. As she walked up and down the old familiar streets, she felt as though her eyes were opening to a South that was different than the one she had seen all of her life, and she kind of liked what she saw. The meat-packing-plant-scented air didn’t smell any sweeter, the rabid dogs charging at her from behind rusted, chain link fences were still as ferocious as they had been the day before. The train whistle still blew its long, lonesome song every eight minutes without fail, but as she walked she realized it was all part of her, part of what made her Olivia, and it was all ok.
She wandered down the Valley View lane, to Lot 14, where she had once lived, a lifetime ago. The shell of her 1950-something Atlas mobile home was gone, replaced by a doublewide, the once-scorched ground still scarred in places but blanketed in green everywhere it had already healed. Another spring, another summer, and the land would have all but forgotten about the fire. But she never would. Its heat had made her stronger.
She passed by Mitch’s apartment as well. Whether or not he was still living there, she couldn’t tell. The curtains in the windows were different, but he may have been the one who had changed them. The charges against him had been dropped, the evidence insufficient, but she knew what he had done, and so did he. It would be his burden to carry, one that would either tear him down or make him stronger. It was up to him to control which way his fire burned. Olivia had burdens of her own to carry from their relationship, but they didn’t weigh her down. She looked up at the curtains dancing in the breeze and wished him well, and then she turned her back on him for the final time and officially put that part of her life behind her.
As she headed deeper into South, she took the reins as director of her own life’s movie, and scrolled through her iPod. After a few false starts, she found Gary Allen’s melancholy “Life Ain’t Always Beautiful” fitting to play as the backdrop of her journey. The pace of the music controlled the pace of her walk, the color of the song blending seamlessly with the cloudy skies and the cool, damp concrete, with the splashes of vibrancy coming from the spattering of mums tucked into planters and the graffiti decorating the buildings along the way. The South surrounding her was grey, drab in places, but it was alive, the pulse of it steady with enduring optimism. Its perseverance was a thing of unrivaled beauty, and for the very first time in her life, she felt proud to have been born from it.
Her feet and her heart eventually brought her around to the destination she had been headed to all along. She paused in the street in front of Clete’s house and drew in a few deep breaths, exhaling the last shadow of the old, inhaling the fresh new. The butterflies fluttered and she gave herself a little pep talk to calm them down before taking that first step up his driveway. She gave herself another pep talk as she rang the doorbell, and she was still talking to herself when he opened the door. When their eyes met the music stopped, her heart shuddered, and he smiled.
“Took you long enough.”
“I have a tendency to run a little late.” As her heart returned his smile, the first ray of sun broke through the clouds, leaving her breathless. “You’re just going to have to learn to deal with it.”
“What else am I going to have to learn to deal with?” Clete asked, still smiling.
“I’m a slob. And I hate vegetables.”
“Really?” he asked, feigning surprise.
“Really. And I’m not going to eat them, but I
am
going to have my dessert anyway. Cake might even be the only thing I eat for supper sometimes, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” She took a step toward him, challenging him, daring him to argue with her.
“Well, I’m a neat-freak and I love vegetables. And some nights they’re all I eat for dinner,” he said, standing a little taller, returning her challenge with one of his own.
“I can forgive you,” she said. As she took another step closer to him, the sunlight intensified in brilliance, filling her with radiant heat. “So… if I step inside your little neat-freak den, do you promise not to eat me when I shed my shell?”
“I don’t know… That depends.”
“On what?”
“How tasty you look without it,” he answered, and she squealed as he yanked her through the doorway.
Chapter Twenty-One
Olivia didn’t know exactly when because George kept it a secret from her, but sometime in the beginning of October, right around the same time Olivia had been drawing in that deep breath and taking that first step up Clete’s driveway, Juliette got a new Speedee Delivery guy. The old one had been fat and bald and named Ben. The new one was young and hot and named Joel. And he was gay. Every Tuesday, right after the noon rush, Joel delivered a case of barbeque sauce to Kitty’s, and then he stayed for lunch. He and George got to talking, and a few deliveries later they got to flirting. Another week or two passed, and they broke free of the Tuesday afternoon schedule. Soon after, they fell in love.
George told his mom about Joel before he told Olivia. Even though Olivia was disappointed she wasn’t the first to know, she understood why she wasn’t. A week after George told Olivia, he told his dad. It didn’t go well, at all, but George had anticipated as much. You can’t exactly rob a man of his Cheez Doodles and not expect the guy to go through a painful period of withdrawal. Some things take time to adjust to. Pretending otherwise would have been a disservice to their relationship. George gave his dad a little space and remained optimistic, and eventually Greg Valish started to come around. Six months or so after George first introduced his dad to Joel, Greg invited the couple out for a round of golf. It was a very quiet, somewhat-tense eighteen holes, but when Joel ended the day at four-under-par, Greg smiled. He was far from ready to call Joel ‘Son,’ but he was more than willing to play another round whenever Joel so desired, and that made George smile.
George’s dad may have initially been a little undecided about his son’s choice in a life partner, but Olivia had no qualms. From the moment Olivia first met Joel, she knew with absolute certainty he was George’s ultimate perfection. Not only was Joel easy on the eye, he was also easy on the ear. He was soft-spoken, smart as hell, and had a laugh that was infectious. What Olivia loved most about him, though, was the way he loved George—genuinely, selflessly, and absolute. In Joel, George had found that lost little bit of himself that he had all but given up looking for, and once he had it back his entire soul came to life, shining with an inner light that was gorgeous to behold.
Olivia liked Joel right away. Surprisingly, Joel felt the same way about Olivia. Shocked the hell out of her, but she didn’t dare question it, lest he change his mind. George, of course, had been open and honest right from the very beginning and had given Joel the entire story about him and Olivia. And even that hadn’t scared him away. But then again, Olivia had Clete, and the world around her tended to cease existing whenever she gazed into his omniscient blue eyes, so maybe Joel sensed he was safe to trust the crazy girl with the crazy hair and mad dance skills around his man. At any rate, Olivia and Joel liked each other, and that made George over-the-moon happy.
Clete and Olivia were as perfect for each other as mashed potatoes and gravy. From the moment he dragged her into his neat and tidy lobster den and she turned it upside down and inside out, they were in heaven. Their passion for each other insatiable, they fought like crazy and loved like crazy and drove each other just a little bit crazy, and it was perfection.
They married on the last Friday of April in 2010 at 11:07 a.m., just after the farm report, with George, Izzie, Allie and Juicy Fruit by their side, all of South and most of the Juliette P.D. in attendance, and Reverend Delany presiding over the ceremony as 97.9
The Breeze
broadcasted the vows live on location from the little white church on Chicory Street. As Kenny had predicted, the reverend never did forget Olivia, or her stupid hammock comment, but he wasn’t the kind of man to hold a grudge. Reverend Delany was a good man—a real good man, as Mel had said—and he proved it once again by agreeing to perform the circus of a ceremony. Of course, Olivia had become a member of his church (the same church to which Clete and Allie had belonged all their lives), and, not to brag or anything, had added a welcome bit of pizzazz to his six-member choir, making it quite the talk of the town, so it was only fitting that he would agree. But even with all that in mind he still could have said no, and he didn’t. For that, Olivia was eternally grateful.
Eugene didn’t walk Olivia down the aisle, but when he saw her in her wedding dress he did smile his firework smile, and that was even better. When Clete said, “With this ring, I thee wed,” he slipped his wedding ring onto Olivia’s finger until it rested on top of George’s eternity band. The two rings nestled together perfectly, exactly as Clete and George did in her heart, and those two pieces of jewelry were the only two that Olivia ever wore again.
Someday soon Olivia planned to use her and Clete’s insatiable passion the way Nature intended and fill in the last remaining piece of her two-point-five that already included Allie and Juicy Fruit, but for the time being she was enjoying simply breathing in life one memory at a time. On the nights Allie was at her mother’s, and Clete and Olivia felt like leaving their cozy lobster den for a night out on the town, they would head over to Kitty’s for dinner and a couple of beers with George and Joel. Just like Clete, Joel couldn’t dance worth a crap—at least, not the way George and Olivia loved to dance. So, after the other customers and employees had left and the lights had been turned low, Clete and Joel would sit on opposite sides of a booth and drink and bullshit and leave George and Olivia to dance. Olivia planned to dance with George forever, even if she had to use one of those walkers with little tennis balls on the legs to do it.
“I love you, Baby Girl,” he would always say as he pulled her into his heart and held her close.
“I love you, too, Georgie,” she would always answer. “I’ll love you for always.”
And, as their hips began to move in perfection to the groove of the music and the rhythm of their hearts, George and Olivia danced.
The End
About the Author…
Donna Sturgeon lives in rural Nebraska with her two sons and her handsome husband who keeps trying to sweet-talk her into going camping. Given her deep adoration for indoor plumbing and pillow-top mattresses, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon. She loves the smell of puppy breath and takes her coffee with cream and sugar.
Olivia
is her second novel.
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