Down and Out in Bugtussle (7 page)

Jalena is a fellow fat girl from sunny Florida with a heart as big as her behind and she’s just as proud of one as she is the other. When I met Jalena, she had a horde of online dating accounts and a romantic history jam-packed with Mr. Wrongs. She said she’d never leave that beautiful swampland she called home—an area known as Frog Bayou located on the north side of Pelican Cove, where she held the prestigious and enviable title of Frog Giggin’ Queen of Escambia County—but I brought her up to Bugtussle one weekend and one weekend was all it took to change her mind. She met my pal Ethan Allen Harwood, who has always had the worst luck with the ladies and, well, everyone pretty much agrees that they’re a match made in frog-giggin’, tractor-drivin’ heaven. They aren’t engaged yet, but we all know it’s only a matter of time.

Jalena waltzed into the life she’d always wanted here in Bugtussle just as I was leaving mine in a heaping pile of smoke and ash in Pelican Cove. We packed up our vehicles on the same day and convoyed up Highway 45. She moved into her dream home, which just so happens to be a farmhouse, with her dream man, who just so happens to be a farmer who also owns a bar right next door to where she plans to open the diner she’s always wanted. It’s currently under construction, which is why I show up on Saturdays and do whatever needs to be done to help her.

“Gotta pick out some curtains,” she says cheerfully when I join her at the bar, which looks so different during daylight hours.

“Have you decided what color to paint the walls?” I ask because I really want to make some suggestions but don’t want to be overbearing.

“I want to pick out my curtains first because they need to have just the right personality, and then I’ll pick a shade from those.”

“What if you change the curtains?”

“Then I’ll repaint the walls,” she says without looking up.

“Okay, then,” I say, thinking that sounds good to me.

We look through the catalog and she shows me several different styles and colors of curtains, all of which I like, and then she stands up and stretches.

“Lordy, I need to get back to work,” she says, rubbing her back. “I just got that in the mail today and had to sit down a minute to take a look.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“C’mon, let me show you what we got done this week,” she says. I follow her down the hallway and through a door that used to go outside but now opens into her mini-restaurant. “I can’t wait for opening day!” she says, walking around in the wide-open space. She points out a few things, rolls off what’s left on the to-do list, and then starts telling me about the new kitchen appliances. “We’re finished in here,” she says. “Just needs to be stocked!”

“Well, put me to work,” I tell her. “I’m ready!”

“You’re gonna have to start taking some money from me, Ace,” Jalena says. “This ain’t easy work.”

“All I want is a year’s supply of fried gator,” I tell her. She laughs and hands me a broom. We pick up and clean up for a couple of hours and then walk over to Pier Six Pizza for an early lunch.

“I remember you used to complain about the pizza down in
Pelican Cove, and I thought you were crazy until I moved up here and got addicted to this fine stuff,” she says with a grin.

“Pier Six deserves some kind of global award for excellence. That’s for sure,” I tell her as I serve us both another slice.

After lunch, we hit the fabric shops around town and she eventually finds just what she’s looking for. She tells me that Ethan Allen’s grandmother has volunteered to sew the curtains. All Mrs. Harwood needs is the fabric and a picture big enough for her to see without having to squint.

“Now we can pick out the paint!” she says as we leave the store, each of us toting large sacks of fabric. I’m so happy for Jalena, but her enthusiasm is starting to get me down. I look at the bags I’m carrying and feel a pang of misery when I think about my art gallery. I poured my soul into that place before I found myself horribly disappointed by the reality of my dream. Part of me still can’t believe that I packed up and left it empty except for a For Sale sign in the window. In an effort to cheer myself up, I remind myself that I have made a small amount of progress in coming to terms with the dissolution of my dreams. I’ve stopped wishing things had turned out different and I’m trying to stop wishing that I could have been different, but I do wish it wasn’t so tough to see Jalena hopeful and excited while I’m scraping the bottom of the emotional barrel. I want so badly to be as happy and carefree as she is, but a lot is going to have to change before that happens.

The worst part of my situation is having to work so hard to reassemble the life that I so casually walked away from. I never imagined I would be back in Bugtussle—not even a year after I left—working as a substitute teacher and hoping against hope to recoup my old job, my old life, my old sense of comfort and stability.
I look at Jalena who is humming as she carefully arranges the bags in her trunk, and I certainly hope she has better luck with her dreams than I did. I wouldn’t wish how I feel right now on anyone. Not even on Cameron Becker.

We go to the paint store and I’m delighted that Jalena asks for my input. When she finally decides on a color, even the man helping us agrees it perfectly matches her swatch of fabric. Or maybe he is just ready to get us to the register and out of what little hair he has clinging to the outskirts of his head. Who knows? Jalena buys five gallons of paint, along with paintbrushes, long handles, and a stack of sturdy paint pans. She signs the receipt, and we head back to the diner and get busy.

No matter what kind of mood I’m in, I love to paint—anything; it doesn’t matter what—so I enjoy the next few hours chatting with Jalena as we roll bright yellow paint onto pale gray Sheetrock, slowly transforming the walls of her diner into something radiant and beautiful.
This is just what I needed today,
I think as I dip my brush into the paint again and again, fantasizing about rolling it over my soul, covering the dull gray with vibrant strokes of sunshine. If only it were that easy to fix.

By the time we finish the large rectangular room, I’m covered with paint splatter, thoroughly exhausted, but in a much better mood. Gramma Jones used to say that hard work was the best way to cure a troubled mind. While that may be true, I think I’m going to require some heavy-duty ibuprofen for my aching back. But I don’t care. This has been the most enjoyable afternoon I’ve had since moving back home.

“You should let me paint a mural right there.” I point to the long wall that backs up to Ethan Allen’s bar.

“Of what?”

“Whatever you want,” I say, walking over to the windowless wall. “Maybe something to remind you of home.” I can see that she’s considering it, so I continue. “I could do some marshy-looking grass along the bottom half, or I could fade in a bay scene and then glaze it. You picked a really great color, very versatile. I could do a lot of things with that, and I promise it would look very cool.” I look at her. “If you want, I can paint Ethan Allen in the nude standing beside his big green tractor.” I raise my eyebrows. “I think that’d be a real crowd pleaser. Especially on the days when you serve those Italian sausage dogs that I’m convinced are going to make you famous for miles around.”

“You know, Ace, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that having a penis painted on the wall of my family diner might be bad for business,” she says with a smile. “Especially on Italian sausage day.” She starts gathering paint cans, so I start picking up trays. “Let me think about it,” she says. “Not my future husband’s sausage dog, but the marsh grass.” She gives me a wary look. “It’s gonna take a heck of a lot of pictures to cover that area, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to have the lower part of the wall a shade or two darker.”

“I could add a lot of texture with the marsh grass,” I say, “and I assure you that it would add an ambiance that would blend nicely with the personality of the curtains.” I reach down to pick up a paintbrush.

“Ace, you have no idea how much I appreciate you. Not just for this, but for everything,” she says, and I pray she won’t start talking about how happy she is again. “I can’t believe how happy I am, and it’s all because you talked me into coming up here last year for an
impromptu visit.” I look over and she’s got a tear in her eye. I think about crying, too, but not tears of joy. I think I just pulled something out of whack when I bent over to get that last paintbrush.

“I couldn’t be happier for you, Jalena,” I tell her, rubbing my lower back. We say good-bye, and I give her a stiff hug and then hobble out to my car. On the way home, my phone starts buzzing and it’s Lilly Lane. Her boyfriend, Dax, is on patrol tonight, so she wants to hang out at the bar and catch me up on the latest gossip. I tell her I’ll be there just as soon as I go home, soak in a hot bath, take a nap, spend some quality time with Buster Loo, take another hot bath and possibly another nap. She tells me we don’t have that kind of time, so I tell her I’ll forgo the second nap and see her in a few hours.

At nine o’clock, Lilly and I squeeze in at the bar at Ethan Allen’s. We order an appetizer and a round of drinks, and I can see that Lilly is ready to start talking.

“Okay,” she says after we get our drinks. “So I told you Cameron Becker started sleeping with Coach Wills as soon as she got here, right?”

“Yeah, but she flirts shamelessly with anyone else with a twig and berries.”

“Uh, yeah,” she says, giving me a look that tells me she didn’t think that was as funny as I did, “and she’s always hanging out in the athletic department, which makes Wills’s day because he’s dumb as a stick and the only thought in his head when she’s around is ‘I’m hittin’ that,’ so it doesn’t even register with him that she’s throwing herself at the other coaches.”

“Poor Wills.”

“Poor Wills nothing! He couldn’t have been any happier until she dumped him two days ago!”

“See? He’s poor Wills after all.” I look at her. “How did you come by this information?”

“How do you think? Hatter told me at lunch yesterday,” Lilly says with a sly smile, and my spirits drop because I want to be back on third lunch with the two of them so bad I can’t stand it. My old classroom is right across the hallway from Coach Hatter, and we’ve been friends—occasionally with benefits—since he moved to Bugtussle from the Delta nearly ten years ago. “He said Wills called him Thursday night, bawling and squalling!”

“Please tell me you’re lying.” I look at her. “About the crying. Not the breakup.”

“No,” she says, glancing around to make sure no one is eavesdropping even though it’s so loud in the bar I don’t see how anybody could. “According to Hatter, Wills is pussy-whipped beyond belief and he mistakenly assumed Cameron to be equally smitten, so he bought her a ring, invited her over for a candlelit dinner, and then got down on one knee in the dining room.”

“What? Are you serious?”

“Yes,” she says. “And according to Hatt, when Wills got down on one knee, he couldn’t get the ring box out of his pocket, and she just stood there and looked at him like he was stupid.”

“What a bitch!”

“When he finally pried the box out of his pocket, he flipped it open and she just kept standing there, looking at him. Didn’t say a word, not even after he popped the question.”

“Now that’s just cruel.”

“Yes, it is,” Lilly says. “Then Hatt said Wills told him she walked into the kitchen and got a bottle of his vodka out of his liquor cabinet, hollered and told him it was over, and then walked out the door.” She shakes her head. “All while he was in the dining room down on one knee.”

“Class act, that girl.”

“Oh, but that’s not all,” Lilly says. “Yesterday morning, she pranced into the coaches’ lounge like she always does, completely ignoring Wills, and started flirting with Coach Spears right there in front of him. Hatter said it was awful and that Wills was crushed.”

“So Coach Spears didn’t know what had happened?” I ask, and she shakes her head. “What did he do?”

“Just sat there and ate it up like all men do when she shakes those big fake melons their way. Hatt said he was flirting like crazy and Wills was just sitting there looking at the floor.”

“He wouldn’t have done that if he knew what she’d done to Wills. Coach Spears isn’t like that.”

“No, he’s not and I’m sure when it all comes out, he’ll feel bad, but Cameron Becker stays in that coaches’ lounge all the time, so I’m sure he just assumed it was business as usual. According to Hatter, everyone in the athletic department starts thinking with the wrong head the minute she wiggles into the room,” Lilly says, then adds, “Which, of course, she loves. Skank. Slingin’ that cooter around like it pays her bills.”

“Maybe it does,” I say.

“Ew!” Lilly exclaims.

“So poor ol’ dumb Wills just sat there?”

“Hatter said if anybody had bothered to look over at him, they would’ve known something was wrong. Wills just got up and left.
Hatter followed him to his office and tried to talk to him. He’s heartbroken. Poor thing.” She takes a sip of her drink. “And that’s all the story that I got because Chloe came and sat down at the lunch table with us and we had to stop talking about it.” Dang it! I need my seat back at that table!

“Do you think Hatter would sleep with Cameron Becker?”

“Oh hell yeah!” she says, laughing. “In a minute! He is such a horny toad. It’s like his brain hasn’t evolved since he turned fourteen.”

“You’re right about that,” I say, and wonder if I need to start sleeping with Logan Hatter again just to entertain myself while simultaneously saving him from the wiles of Cameron Becker. Or maybe I should give Coach Wills a little rebound action just for the heck of it. After all, it doesn’t take much attention to the ding-a-ling to get a man’s mind off his worries, and it would surely piss Cameron Becker off if I started having an affair with her ex. Or maybe it wouldn’t. It’s fairly obvious from what Lilly just said that Cameron doesn’t care too much about Wills, so maybe I’ll just pass on that because every girl in the world knows that the worst sex of all is with a guy who’s just been dumped. Ugh. All Cameron Becker seems to care about is being the center of attention, so that’s what I need to try to take away from her. Maybe I could steal some of her thunder if I started hanging out in the athletic office every morning and telling dirty jokes. That might work, but, dammit, she’s got a lot of thunder packed into those D-cups.