Leaving Eden (15 page)

After the funeral Goody started in on Daddy about how I should go back to Florida with her, so I wouldn’t turn cheap and get myself in trouble. I could only imagine what she’d think if she ever heard about what I’d done with Spy. She’d probably fly straight up to Virginia and haul me personally back to her stupid gated community.

Well, I had no plan to be heading off to Florida. Or staying for the rest of my life in Virginia. I was going out to Hollywood. I was going to follow Mama’s dream.

Tallie’s Book

Daisies stand for beauty, roses for love.

If you can dream something, you can do
it.

Even if your heart is broken, you can
make yourself not cry.

fourteen

The Tyree sisters weren’t in their usual spot on their porch when I went by, and there was no sign of Easter Davis at her place either, no laundry hanging on the line, like the heat had driven even that inside. The dirt road off High Tower was nothing but pure dust. The Raleigh kicked it up, coating me and leaving a little cloud as I passed. It was a good thing I didn’t have asthma. All that dust would have about killed Rula Wade.

I was on my way to Martha Lee’s for another driving lesson, though I was torn about in half between wanting her to be there, so I could have another lesson, and wanting her to be off, so I could help myself to one of those pictures of Mama I’d found in her dresser drawer. Those pictures had been occupying my mind ever since I’d seen them. Daddy and I only had two photographs of Mama, an old grainy one taken before I was even born, and the yearbook one they put in the newspaper with the obituary. Goody had all the others. So they’ll be safe, she’d said when she’d packed them up after Mama’s funeral. When I die they’ll be yours, she’d said. Like she didn’t even consider that maybe I’d want one before then or wouldn’t know how to take care of it if she did give me one. She took everything of Mama’s that had value. She wasn’t having Daddy sell Mama’s stuff for beer money, she said. She’d put a stop to that plan before it got started, she said. When I asked her who’d want to buy Mama’s pictures, she told me not to be fresh-mouthed. When I saw she meant to take everything, I hid the silver syrup pitcher and Mama’s red sweater and scrapbook or she’d have taken them, too. That’s why I’d been thinking about the photos in Martha Lee’s bottom drawer. For sure, she’d have given me one if I asked, but if I did, she’d know I’d been snooping around.

Martha Lee was home when I got there, hauling a hose around the garden. “We could sure use some rain,” she said. It’d been weeks since we’d had even a shower. All traces of her Glamour transformation were gone, and she’d reverted to her usual self. Her hair was shoved up under an old Orioles cap, and she was wearing a pair of denim shorts, displaying legs that revealed every doughnut she’d ever eaten. I hadn’t seen her since
Glamour
Day,
so I told her how, after she’d left, Raylene had fixed it so I could get the makeover, too. I would have told her about Daddy taking the money from the silver pitcher, but that might have led to questions about how I’d managed to get twenty dollars in the first place, so I let it go. Instead, I told her in detail about all the clothes I’d worn for the photos, and how Patty, the photographer, had given me the rhinestone hair clip. If I were talking to my mama, that would have been the time I’d have told her about losing the clip and about Spy. Because I’d told Mama everything, I would have told her what had happened, even about the vodka and kissing, and I would have gotten some advice about what to do next, but Martha Lee wasn’t Mama and she wouldn’t be any help with matters of love or sex. As far as I knew, Martha Lee had zero experience in the man department. Instead, I told her the company was due back that week with the photos.

“This week?” she said.

“Thursday,” I said. Then I told her she was the last person on earth I expected to see at the Kurl for the
Glamour Day
. She said it was my fault and that all the carrying on I’d done about it had made her want to see for herself, which sounded like a flat-out lie. I knew it had to be something more than that that got her to the Kurl, that got her to let Raylene fix her hair and call her honey, and some stranger pile on makeup, but I could see whatever the real reason, she wasn’t about to tell me. Mama always said people were full of surprises, but I didn’t think she meant someone like Martha Lee. As a rule, I thought most people were predictable. Especially adults.

I helped with the hose. She’d rigged up her own personal irrigation system using empty liter Coke bottles and gallon-sized bleach bottles that she’d half buried neck side down beside the tomatoes. She’d sawed off the bottoms and filled each one with water. “Water the roots,” she said. “That’s what you want to do.” She explained how watering the leaves could cause mildew and leaf rot and was wasteful, too, because so much water evaporated.

After we finished up, we took turns splashing our legs and faces with the hose, then we got ourselves a couple of Cokes, hopped in the pickup, and drove out to the place where she let me practice my driving. It was my third lesson and I was shifting smooth as lemon pie, no bucking. I could go up a rise riding the clutch just right, so I didn’t stall, not even on the steep ones. Martha Lee said I was getting to be an old pro. We practiced going in reverse and doing three-point turns, something I’d need to do on the driving exam.

On the way home, she pulled into Shucks Discount and when she said she was taking me shopping, I about fainted. She said it was time I got some clothes that fit. First thing we picked out some bathing suits for me to try on. I selected a turquoise one, another in black, and a hot pink one. All three had built-in bras and high-cut legs, not a bit like the ugly ones we used for swim team. When I came out of the dressing room in the black suit, Martha Lee whistled right out loud. “Jesus, Cookie,” she said. “You’ll be swatting the boys off like flies from molasses.” I was afraid that meant she wouldn’t let me keep the suit, but she didn’t say a word when I put it in the cart. Next I picked out a blue skirt with tiny white flowers on it, the kind I’d imagined myself wearing when I rode in Sky’s Camaro, and two cotton T-shirts with narrow straps. One blue and one white. Martha Lee also threw in some sandals. On the way to the checkout, she picked out a tube of lipstick in frosted pink, but I told her that color didn’t look good on me. You could have laid me flat with a chicken feather when she told me the lipstick was for her. I thought she was teasing, but her face said no. Mama was right, I thought. People are full of surprises.

We swung by her house to get my bike, then she dropped me off at home. I told her I could ride the Raleigh, but she said it was too hot for anyone to be pedaling around. I wanted to hug her or something to thank her for the lesson and the clothes, but Martha Lee wasn’t the hugging kind, so instead I asked her if she wanted to come in. “Thanks, Cookie,” she said, “but I’ve got to be going.” She hadn’t set foot in our house since Mama died. Sundays and Mondays, when the Kurl was closed, I usually did housework, but it was too hot to think of dusting or doing laundry. I put on my new suit and checked myself out in the mirror. Martha Lee was right about the way it made me look. The high cut made my legs seem longer, and the built-in bra made my tits look bigger. Goody’d have a stroke if she saw me. Even the Queen of the Universe would be impressed, though she’d probably think of something mean-spirited to say. I thought about riding out to Elders Pond where everyone hung, but then I decided on the creek. What I was really thinking was that maybe Spy’d be there. A girl could hope. In the black one-piece, I definitely didn’t look like a baby, so maybe he’d remember the kissing part and forget about me puking, just like I was trying to forget about the gun part with him.

The creek was deserted. I swam for a while, not laps or anything that required real effort. Just cooling down. When I’d had enough, I spread out the old blanket near the willow and stretched out, still hoping Spy would show. After a while I noticed the birds weren’t singing. It was too hot for even that. Lying there, in the total silence, I could almost believe I was the only one existing on the planet. Rula would have hated it. She wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. She always was asking me how I could stand spending so much time alone. I didn’t mind. Being alone gave a person time to get their thinking straight. Rula couldn’t go a minute without talking or cranking up the radio. She got a Walkman last Christmas and about kept the battery company in business the way she played it night and day. I guess you could say Rula was my best friend, but I knew we wouldn’t be friends for life, like Mama and Martha Lee. I guess we’d become friends because we were the only ones whose mamas had died and that set us apart, even if she had a step-mama.

The thing about Eden was that anything that made you different meant you had zero chance of being in the popular group. Even before Mama died, I wasn’t exactly winning medals in the popularity department. It wasn’t ’cause we didn’t have money. Half the families in Eden were poor. When I asked Mama, she said what set me apart was that I had imagination. In Mama’s book, imagination was right up there. She said it was their capacity for dreaming that led most people to Hollywood, not any excess of good looks or talent. According to Mama, imagination and luck were the unbeatable combination. She said imagination had power, like electricity. Both were invisible, she said, but they had energy and could make things happen. She said when you think about it, all the mighty forces in the world were imperceptible to the eye. Like love. And hate.

Mama believed it was a lack in the imagination department that led most people to keep their expectations for life too low. As a rule, folks didn’t allow themselves the pleasure of a dream, she said. They
settle.
“Your daddy’s problem is he doesn’t have aspirations,” she told me once. “He was born without the imagination gene, the gene to dream.” It was the only time I ever heard her say anything bad about my daddy. Then she said that was all right because she had enough dreams for both of them.

“Hey, Tallie.”

I jumped about ten feet. “Jeez, Wiley, you about scared me to death.”

“Didn’t mean to. You sleeping?”

“No,” I said, cross at being startled.

“What were you doing?”

“I was thinking, if it’s any of your beeswax.”

“Penny for your thoughts,” he said.

I hated when people said that.
Penny for your thoughts.
A person’s thoughts were worth a hell of lot more than one copper cent. “Nothing special,” I said. “Where’s Will?” I hardly ever saw them together anymore. I wondered if they’d had a fight.

“Working.” He sat down on the blanket and started poking at the ground with a stick. “Hot, isn’t it?”

“Well, duh,” I said.

He flushed red. “Well, isn’t it?”

“Yeh,” I said.

“Nice suit,” he said, still working that stick into the ground.

“It’s nothing special,” I said.

“Looks new.”

“It isn’t.” I didn’t know why I lied.

“You look good in it,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“You always look good.” He about buried the stick, he was digging so furiously.

“Martha Lee’s teaching me to drive,” I said. Anything to get off the subject. I used to feel comfortable around Wiley, like he was a brother or something, but lately things had changed.

“You always look good,” he said. “With or without a suit.”

“Wiley, what the hell are you talking about?” He was freaking me out.

“You know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“A couple of weeks ago,” he said. He poked at the ground some more, avoiding my eyes. “I saw you.”

“You saw me? What does that mean?”

“You know.”

“Wiley Bettis, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

He swallowed hard. “Here. At the creek. When you were skinny-dipping.”

“Jesus, Wiley, you were spying on me?”

“I didn’t mean nothing. I came for a swim and you were here and I didn’t want to spook you. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Wiley saw me naked. Jeez, it was like letting your kin see you. My face heated at the thought of the way I’d posed, proud and showing off, thinking it was Spy watching me.

“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” he said again. He looked like he was going to cry.

Just at the moment, a ladybug landed on my knee. Like fireflies, ladybugs were really beetles. I thought about how Mama’d said beetles signify change. It seemed like change flew into your life whether you wanted it or not. It didn’t matter one whit if you were prepared. Change just happened. Nothing you could do to stop it. Wiley was changing from the friend I’d known my whole life into some nervous creature who spied on me and couldn’t look me in the eye. Martha Lee was buying lipstick and changing in some other way I couldn’t figure. Daddy’d changed from a man who was proud of his daughter and took her to his job to a person who didn’t even know she was alive. I was changing, too. I thought of how I’d lied and stolen and strutted naked. I remembered the bold way I’d acted with Spy, kissing and such. And then I thought how one of the things that had made me bold was that I’d believed he’d seen me the day I’d been skinny-dipping. But it had been Wiley all along. Then I reflected on how it could change your whole life if you acted on something you thought was true and it turned out to be false.

Tallie’s Book

Imagination has power.

Water the roots of tomatoes, not the
leaves.

People are full of surprises.

Add mulch to clay soil. Mulch is the
secret.

There’s nothing you can do to stop
change.

fifteen

Breaking a one hundred-year-old record,” the radio weatherman said. He was all worked up, exactly like Mr. Baldock when he got on the P.A. system to announce that the football team won a game or that the junior class test scores were higher than last year’s. Mr. Baldock spit when he talked, and you could hear his germs splatting all over the mike. When it was your turn to read the absentee list, he watched you like a hawk, like you were going to steal the goddamn P.A. system or something, so you couldn’t wipe the mike. It made you want to puke.

“Crops are being lost,” the announcer was saying, “which means a bad year for the farmers.” Well, duh. Like we couldn’t figure it out. He said nearly a thousand chickens had perished over at the poultry farm in Duncan. He didn’t mention what they did with all the dead chickens. I’d heard they ground them up for dog food, which I thought must be against some law. Next the man said two people had died of heat prostration. It was amazing to think a thing as natural as heat could kill a person. It wasn’t like it was a disease or anything. You’d have to be as old as Easter Davis or the Tyree sisters to die of something like heat. It was slowing me down, for sure. It’d made me oversleep and I was going to be late for work. At least the Kurl was air-conditioned. All we had at home were these lame fans in the windows that only stirred the air but didn’t cool it one degree.

Daddy’d made coffee, and the pot was still on the stove. I swear he’d drink hot coffee if the thermometer read two hundred, but all I wanted was iced tea. I poured a large glass and stirred in some sugar, watching it swirl around the ice. Just the thought of food made me queasy. Outside, heat was rising off the road in waves thick enough to walk on.

It was Tuesday, Seniors’ Day at the Kurl, and I prepared myself for the usual bowel complaints. Gas, indigestion, constipation. Last week Hattie Jones said it was getting so she had to order Metamucil in the industrial size. She said things like that flat-out without a trace of embarrassment, like we were sincerely interested in the state of her intestines, like getting laxatives by the barrel was something to brag on.

“Sorry,” I told Raylene. “Overslept.” She was busy talking and hardly looked at me.

“Some families attract tragedy,” Raylene said. “They just
draw
it to them.”

“Like the Millers,” Lenora Mallows said. She was soaping up Easter Davis. “Remember the Millers.”

The Miller family moved to Louisiana years ago, but whenever someone was having a string of misfortunes, people always brought up the Millers. Misfortune dogged that family to such a degree that they were famous for it. Even children knew their history. First off, their baby died of pneumonia, and one year later they lost their house in a fire. They didn’t save one stick of furniture. Nothing. Chief Newman said they were lucky to get out alive. After that, the linen factory over in Redden closed down, so Mr. Miller was laid off and they’d had to live on charity. Like Raylene said, they seemed to attract bad luck. Even their good luck had a way of turning bad. Like when the oldest boy, a running back for Eden, got news of a full scholarship to Georgia. The next day, he was hitching home on 29—which everyone knew was dangerous, cars whizzing through like there was no tomorrow—and he got hit by a truck. His football scholarship was crushed as flat as his hip. “Some people just draw it to them,” Raylene said again. “Seems like they got a lightning rod for misery.”

Raylene’s theory seemed dangerous, like just believing in something could make it true. Mama always said you had to be careful of your thoughts. She said they had power. They were on that list of invisible stuff like love and prayer and imagination. Imagination, she said, was just another kind of thinking. She said the first place anything existed was in our minds.

It made me exhausted to even think of having to police my mind all the time, watching what I thought, thinking of how an idea could just shoot out like a piece of lightning to take up residence in the world. If thoughts had power, why hadn’t they cured Mama? Did some thoughts hold more power than others? What made that so?

“Who found him?” Cora Giles was saying.

“His wife,” Hattie said.

“How dreadful,” Cora said. “Imagine. Discovering him like that.”

“Who?” I asked.

“It wasn’t more than four years back the daughter died,” Hattie said. “Swimming accident, wasn’t it?”

“Well, that’s what the family said,” Cora said. “If I remember, there was talk.”

“That’s right,” Easter Davis said. “There always was something funny about it. Her drowning and all. Wasn’t she supposed to be a crackerjack swimmer?”

Cora turned to me. “She was in your class, wasn’t she?”

I was still playing catch-up. “Who?”

“The Reynolds girl,” Cora said. “Can’t think of her name to save my soul.”

“Sarah?”

“That’s right,” Raylene said.

My mind finally caught on. They were talking about Spy’s family.

“Lawd, that poor woman,” Cora said. “Imagine. First her daughter, and now her husband.”

“Mrs. Reynolds?” I said.

“That’s right.”

“What happened?”

“Her husband’s dead.”

“Mr. Reynolds is dead?” I remembered when I’d called the house and how angry Mr. Reynolds had sounded, how he’d threatened to call the police. Maybe it was a heart attack. All that anger couldn’t be healthy. Or an accident. Then I remembered what the radio had said about people dying of heat prostration. “Was it the heat?”

“What, honey?”

“Mr. Reynolds. Did he die of the heat?”

“Lawd, no, child,” Hattie said.

“He was murdered,” Cora said.

“Sheriff Craw must be in his glory,” Lenora said. “I imagine those TV people will be arriving with their cameras. First murder in the county in I can’t count how many years.”

“Mr. Reynolds was murdered?” I said.

“Last one was back in the fifties,” Easter Davis said.

“I remember that,” Lenora said. “Lillie Grigsby.”

“The husband did it,” Easter said. “John, his name was. Accountant for some company over in Lynchburg. Little squirrel of a man. You wouldn’t think he had it in him.”

“It’s surprising what people are capable of,” Cora said.

I was picturing Mr. Reynolds at the school picnic all dressed up in a three-piece suit, wearing a hat similar to the one he’d worn in the picture on the front of the
Eden Times
when he was cutting the ribbon at the new chamber of commerce dedication. I was remembering how Sarah had said her mama’d had a face-lift, with stitches behind her ears, ’cause her daddy wanted her looking young.

“The fifties?” Hattie said. “You sure it was that long ago?”

“Summer of fifty-six,” Easter Davis said. “I remember Swannie was busy campaigning for Eisenhower, doing the phoning for the county, and Sissy couldn’t get through on the phone. Six months along and she walked all the way over to tell us.”

“Wasn’t there one after that?” Hattie said.

“You’re thinking of that hippie they found in the woods up by the Pedlar,” Lenora said. “They never did determine that was murder.”

“Mr. Reynolds was murdered?” I repeated.

“Right in his own office,” Cora said. “Sheriff’s looking into it. Thinks it musta been some drug-crazed kid, looking for money. Or maybe a client.”

“Must have been someone he knew,” Hattie said. “He wouldn’t let a stranger in his office.”

“No,” said Easter. “Especially not one with a gun.”

“A gun?” I said. “Mr. Reynolds was shot?”

“Right through the head, I hear,” Lenora said. “Close range, rest his soul.”

“That poor woman,” Raylene said. “All the money in the world can’t heal the wounds she’s having.” Even though Mrs. Reynolds had never once set foot in the Kurl and drove all the way to Richmond to get her hair done, I could tell Raylene was genuinely sorry. But that was Raylene for you. Heart as big as Texas.

“Wonder if they’ll have the funeral here?” Hattie said. “Aren’t his folks from Roanoke?”

“That’s her kin. His hail from Lynchburg.”

“I suspect the funeral will be here,” Lenora said. “They’ll bury him next to the daughter.”

“Isn’t there another child?” Easter said. “Lawd, it’s getting so I can’t keep up.”

“I don’t think so,” said Hattie.

Spy, I thought. Then I remembered the thing I’d been working hard to forget.

“There’s the boy,” Cora said. “You know the one. Drives around in his car like he owns the road. Going up to Charlottesville in the fall. Studying to be a lawyer like his daddy.”

“Tallie?” Raylene said. “You okay, honey?”

“Yep,” I said.

“You look peaked.”

“I’m okay.” I was picturing Spy taking out the gun, and I was hearing it go off, hurting my ears. I concentrated on stopping the thought in its tracks, stopping it before it flowed like electricity all the way to Sheriff Craw.

Hattie let out a long, satisfying burp. “Bacon,” she said. “Bacon and doughnuts for breakfast. In this heat. I should know better. Raylene, you got any Tums around here? I got so much gas in me, I could blow the place up.”

I got busy straightening out the magazine table, relieved the conversation had reverted to the usual Tuesday topics. I didn’t really believe Spy had anything to do with his daddy’s death any more than I’d had anything to do with my mama’s. When I looked up, Lenora was looking at me funny, like she could read my mind as easily as she divined soap bubbles. Like she knew all about Spy and his gun.

Tallie’s Book

Thoughts hold power.

It’s surprising what people are capable of.