Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter (23 page)

“I’d shake your hand but I won’t.” Jeb snickered and showed her his covered-in-soot right hand.

Alice jumped right in with Virginia and laid the accent on thick. “Why, Jayeb, you certainly are
quite
the entrepreneur. Aside from your work here, I’ve heard all about your snow business and especially Jayeb’s Computer World. We sure would love a tour when you get a second,” she said. Bless Jeb’s heart. He had no idea what he was in for.

A loud static noise interrupted their conversation and Jeb grabbed the
walkie-talkie that was clipped to his belt and placed it right up to his ear. “Hang on a minute, would yous?” he said to the girls.

His mama’s voluble voice boomed for all to hear. “I need a Three Musketeers,” she said. “Go on up the street and get me one, would you? Over.” Jeb kept that thing turned up so dang loud.

“Roger that, but it’ll have to wait a while, I’m not finished here yet. Over.”

“Then make it a large, and put a Mountain Dew with it. Over.”

“Roger. Over and out. Now, what was you saying?” Jeb said, resuming his chat with Alice. “Oh yeah, you want a tour of JCW, that shouldn’t be no problem to arrange.” His slightly cool demeanor was just a cover-up for how thrilled he was inside.

“I can already see that this place would fall apart without you, Jayeb,” Mary Jule said, buttering him up for the yet-to-be-tackled chores of the day.

I rolled my eyes and wondered how his head would ever fit back up the chimney.

“Jayeb, we’re here to help Leelee,” Mary Jule continued. “She’s been having a hard time lately, as you know. We’re gonna be changing things around a bit to make her feel better. We can count on your help, can’t we, darlin’?”

“Sure, that’s my job. I’m the
o
fficial handyman of the Vermont Haus Inn.” Jeb pulled nervously on his beard.

“Well, in that case, what are we waiting for?” Alice said. “Come on, sugar.” She patted Jeb on the back, playfully yanked on his beard, and led him by his soot-covered hand out to the red-checked dining room.

The rest of us followed behind and Virginia whispered to Mary Jule and me under her breath, “Bless his heart, he’s got a stenis.”

“Shhh,” I whispered back. “He might hear you.”

“He’s not listening to us. He’s ga-ga over Alice.”

Virginia made up the word “stenis” one day when we were all lying on the beach in Destin, Florida. This poor obese man strolled by and bent over to pick up a shell. He had one of those really big stomachs. Not the kind that spills out over the top of a man’s belt, but the kind that seems to have
another piece that hangs really low underneath. After studying him up and down she got the idea for a brand-new word that she fully intends to submit to Webster. She turned to all of us and said, “You see that low-hanging part of that man’s gut? It’s not his stomach, and it’s not his penis, it’s his stenis.”

“Okay, first things first,” said Virgy, clapping her hands. “Where’s the boom box?”

“Back in my apartment,” I said.

“Go get it. And bring plenty of fun tunes with you. I’m feeling like I need a little Mickey J. this morning.”

“Which album?”

“Bring
Hot Rocks
. It’s got everything on it.”

“Got it!”

Next thing I knew, the place was hopping and Mick Jagger’s voice was blaring “Gimme Shelter.” We were having the best time. Dancing whenever we moved and singing at the top of our lungs while redoing this and changing that. Mary Jule and I hung pictures while Virginia bopped through the house with a big trash bag, throwing away the clutter. Alice, as the ringleader, was bossing everyone—in her nice Alice way—on what to do. It’s not like she wasn’t helping, she was—but someone had to be the director.

Seeing Virginia with that trash bag in her hand made me cringe. What would Helga say? But the dancing and singing took my mind off it and, for the moment anyway, I really couldn’t have cared less.

There was one thing my friends didn’t know about Jeb. Unless someone was watching over him and lighting a fire to his bottom, Jeb Duggar was as slow as a bottle of Heinz ketchup. He was used to taking work at his own pace with frequent breaks. Every time he’d take a seat, one of the girls would lean over him and say, “Can you please help me with this, Jayeb,” or “Jayeb, darlin’, these draperies need hanging over here.”

Alice reached out her hand when he was sitting on the bottom step resting and pulled him up to be her dance partner when “Brown Sugar” came on. “Jitterbug with me, sugar.”

When I saw Jeb step on her toe with his big ole foot, and she dropped his grip and boogied away from him, I couldn’t help but laugh.

Virginia shimmied right on up to him and broke into a twist. Jeb tried as hard as he could to twist along with her, but when he tried squatting down to equal Virginia, the poor thing’s feet spilled right out in front of him. He tottered over backward and, well, that was the end of that.

That man had never seen anything close to the likes of these three Tennessee girls. And I’d never seen anything like Jeb Duggar’s sudden productivity. Beads of sweat trickled down his cheeks. He was a-heaving and a-hoeing as he carried the Schloygins’ old, tattered furniture upstairs to the junk room, and hauled my antique furniture down to take its place.

“It’s a good thing you don’t live in Tennessee,” Mary Jule told him, “we’d all be fighting over you.”

At some point during the morning, Alice slipped out to the hardware store and came back with buckets of peach paint and plenty of drop cloths. The girls had talked Jeb into helping them paint both the parlor and the entrance hall a fabulous shade of pale peach.

He had to call in a helper though, when Virginia presented him with the new rolls of wallpaper. I caught him grumbling under his breath. Something about not seeing what was wrong with the old stuff, but with my best friends egging him on, he papered anyway. It took all of us two days to transform the dowdy red-checked dining room into a lovely Southern showplace.

Once the paint was dry, Virginia rearranged all the bookshelves and placed my knickknacks around the room. She could make any room look like it belonged on a page straight out of
Veranda
.

“Don’t throw anything out,” I reminded her. “Let’s just repack Helga’s castoffs inside my old boxes and we’ll give it all back to her. Trust me, we’ll never hear the end of it if we don’t.”

After three rigorous days of cosmetic surgery, my inn had a brand-new face. By the time we were finished, the Vermont Haus Inn was cute, cozy, comfy, and definitely Southernized. When you walked in the front door, you couldn’t help but feel you were south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The draperies from my house in Memphis were hanging on the windows in the parlor. Sarah’s and Isabella’s portraits hung in the foyer and the rest of my paintings were scattered all over the place. The red checks on the dining
room walls had disappeared and were replaced with parrots and toucans, palm trees and tropical plants on a peach background.

Antique books from my family’s collection had replaced the twenty-year supply of
National Geographics.
The dozens of old, half-burned red candles were in the trash, and Helga’s vast collection of gewgaws were finally out of the bookshelves and packed away.

My cushioned sofas and chintz easy chairs had taken the place of the old torn-up musty Schloygin furniture. My porcelain Herend animals replaced Helga’s hippo collection on the mantel and that, I was sure, would be the final blow.

All the inn needed now was a fresh coat of peach paint on the outside and a brand-new sign that said
PEACH BLOSSOM INN
. Whether I would really change the name or not remained to be seen, but I loved the way it looked on the inside. And the new paint certainly helped the fusty smell, let me tell you.

With only two days left before the reopening, the four of us strolled around the downstairs admiring our feat of excellence. Jeb, still clad in an old one-piece work suit, was so worn out that he dragged behind hardly able to speak. We were pooped, too, but so ready to savor our new creation and revel in our achievement. Seeing my old things again gave me a huge lift and I couldn’t stop smiling. Mary Jule and I ran our hands over the crisp peach walls and I even stuck my nose alongside, just to smell the fumes of the new paint. Jeb complained about the vapors but I told him he was crazy to wish for that rank odor back for even a second.

Alice, who had probably done the least amount of work, stood in the center of the freshly papered dining room and declared, “We are missing the boat, here, y’all. The Designing Women don’t have a thing on us. I’m ready to start up our own interior design firm and hire Jeb to be our Anthony.”

“And I’ll be Suzanne Sugarbaker. Lord knows I’ve always wanted to be in a beauty pageant,” Virginia said, and faked like she was fixing a crown on her head.

“Who’s Anthony?” Jeb asked.

“The Vee Eye Pee!” Virginia told him, and went up to where he was flaked out in a chair and readjusted his mustache.

Jeb beamed with delight.

We had all changed out of our paint clothes—freshly bought from a tag sale just down the street—into jeans and light sweaters. As we lounged around in my comfy furniture in the parlor that now looked like my living room back home, Virginia got a devious look on her face.

She looked over at Jeb with her notorious impish grin, and upon seeing it I knew we were in trouble. “You look like you could use a drink, Mr. Duggar. How would you like for us to treat you to an ice-cold brewski for all your hard work? Surely, y’all have somewhere up here to get an ice-cold beer.”

As worn out as he was, Jeb perked up like he had just been told he’d sold his first computer. “We sure do. Gut lots of places around here to get beer. How about the Moose Head? They have about twenty different kinds.” He glanced over at me for assurance.

“That sounds
peachy
to me,” Virginia said. (She had never said “that sounds peachy” about anything, but she was trying to act silly for Jeb’s benefit.) “I’ve got another great idea, let’s all go in
Jayeb’s
car. You wouldn’t mind taking us for a spin in your cute
pink
car, would you, Jayeb?”

Virginia Murphey loves an oddity more than anyone I know. And the quirkier the better. The idea of riding in a rusted-out pink Chevy Chevette with
JEB’S COMPUTER WORLD
on one side and
MARY KAY
on the other was as exhilarating to her as riding in an eighty-thousand-dollar Mercedes convertible would be to a normal person.

“I wouldn’t mind at all, but I think you’d like my truck better. It’s a newer model and it’s gut two jump seats in my extended cab.” He thought about it for a second and stroked his beard. “I haven’t had a chance to remove the plow in the front, though.”

“Oh,
no no no
,” Virginia said. “We would much rather ride in your Jeb’s Computer World
pink
car. Right, girls?”

Everyone nodded with glee. The pièce de résistance of the trip had arrived.

“Alreet. I’ll go start her up. She seems to be a little slow on the take these days, but once I get her goin’, look out!”

Before heading out to the Moose Head, the girls just
had
to tour Jeb’s Computer World and get their pictures made out front. Jeb posed eagerly, arm in arm with each of my friends as I snapped the pictures they desperately wanted as souvenirs and would probably send out for Christmas cards.

“Can we take a quick peek inside, Jayeb darlin’?” Alice asked him.

“I suppose. Are you in the market for a computer?”

“I might be,” Alice lied. “You’ll have to show me your stuff and I’ll call my husband.”

“In that case, step into my showroom.” Jeb gestured his right arm toward the door. “Only two people at a time, though.”

We disregarded that last comment and all crammed in at once. I don’t know what I thought I expected, but seeing the inside of Jeb’s Computer World in person was a
lifer
moment for me. The lone, off-brand computer was set up on top of an old wooden desk. A space heater was in the corner and he couldn’t close the door all the way because of the big orange extension cord that ran from his mama’s house to the lean-to. A crinkly poster of Peter Fonda in
Easy Rider
was thumbtacked to one wall and on the back of the door hung a poster of a scantily clad girl in a bikini, which barely covered the girl’s breasts. The only thing in the room related to computers at all was the computer. It looked more like the inside of a teenager’s tree house, to tell you the truth.

Jeb started to give Alice the big sales pitch and after about a minute or two of that Alice waved her hand and cut him off. “I’m not interested in all that technical stuff, just tell me what colors they come in and I’ll make my decision later.”

“My computers only come in one color,” he told her, “and you’re looking at it.”

“I’ll have to think about it and get back with you, sugar. I’m not really a beige person. Hey, I’m ready for a cold one. Outta here, let’s go, y’all,” she said, and scooted us back out the door.

Once outside, I told everyone to go on to the Moose Head without me.
I had work-related phone calls to make and I sure wasn’t going to bring Sarah and Issie to a bar. Mandy had been watching them for me while we decorated but couldn’t stay the evening. I waved good-bye to all of them and crossed the street back to our apartment.
They are some kind of crazy
, I thought. Although, I’d be doing the same thing, I’m sure, if the situation had been reversed, and I was visiting one of them in a foreign corner of America.

Toot toot.
The horn startled me as I was turning the doorknob to get inside. Pulled right up alongside the picket fence was the pink, weather-rusted Chevy Chevette with Jeb in the driver’s seat, Virginia (wearing his top hat) in the passenger seat, and Alice and Mary Jule in the back.

“Leelee, what’s the name of the gas station we wanna stop at?” Virginia yelled, and stuck her head way out the window. “We’re gonna fill up Jeb’s Mary Kay—I mean JCW—car for him as a treat.” She shot me an “are you believing this” look.