A Forever Thing (14 page)

Fancy tossed her sweaty shirt and jeans into the dirty-clothes basket and took a quick shower. She wrapped a towel around her head
and another around her body and padded barefoot back to her
room. The door across the hallway remained shut, and she went so
far as to put her hand on the knob but couldn’t open it. Kate and
Sophie would have to help, because she could not do it alone. She
was so grateful to have good friends.

When she was dressed in a nightshirt, she went to the kitchen for a snack. She found grapes and cheese in the refrigerator and put
them on a paper plate. She sat down at the kitchen table, then stood
up and carried the food to the living room. It was her house now, at
least until it sold, so she’d eat in the living room if she wanted. She
felt a little guilty, but she sat on the sofa and ate her snack by the
light of the moon filtering in through the lace curtains. That kiss
had knocked her socks plumb off her feet, but she’d learned that
physical attraction didn’t bring about lasting relationships. Look at
how her relationship with Chris had turned out.

Fancy went back to the kitchen, tossed her empty plate into the
trash can, and went to bed. She laced her fingers behind her head
and, to take her mind off Theron, thought about the last night she
had spent on her beloved Florida beach. The ocean had been tempesttossed that evening. The salt spray from the turbulent winds had
plastered her loose-fitting cover-up to her skin as she walked barefoot through the sand.

Gulls with their white underbellies flew in a V as they tried to
ride out the fierce wind. She felt like she was going backward as she
battled against the wind that bent the sea oats and saw grass as well
as the palm trees. The gods of the ocean were angry with her for
leaving and telling her that she had no business forsaking them and
going back to nothing but mesquite trees, heat, and mosquitoes.

An old couple, tired of walking against the head wind, sat down
on the beach, laughing and talking about the huge waves. A couple
of newlyweds sat not far from them. Their eyes were only for each
other, and the man picked up the woman’s ring finger and kissed it.

Past and future had been right there before her, and she hadn’t
fit with either. Her perfect world was changing, and if the weather
was an omen, it wasn’t a good one.

She looked at the clock. Three in the morning; thank goodness it
was Saturday. No beauty-shop duties. No Sunday school to teach.
She could sleep until she awoke. She finally slept, only to dream of
Theron walking toward her on the white sugar sands of the Florida
beach. His hand was outstretched, but the wind kept pushing her
backward, closer and closer to an angry ocean.

Kate parked behind Sophie’s truck and shivered when she got
out of the cab. The first norther of the year hit early that morning,
plunging temperatures from the eighties down to fifty-five in less
than two hours. Fall had arrived, and the chilly wind whipped a
long dark braid across her eyes.

“Y’all in the kitchen?” she yelled from the front door.

“No, we’re in the hall,” Fancy hollered back. “Get a cup of hot
chocolate from the pan on the stove, and come on back here.”

Kate found a mug, dropped a handful of miniature marshmallows
into it, and poured in steaming hot chocolate. She carried it gently
down the hall, blowing on the floating marshmallows the whole way.
“So y’all waited on the boogeyman before you opened the door?”

“That depends. You the boogeyman?” Sophie asked.

Kate eased down to keep from spilling the hot liquid. “In the
flesh. We going to have prayers or a seance or something before
we blast in the door? Oh, rats, I forgot my ghost-buster apparatus.
It’s too early for cold weather in Texas.”

“Global warming,” Sophie said.

“Tell me about your week before we start this job,” Fancy said.

“Procrastinating?” Kate asked.

“You bet I am”

Kate sipped the chocolate. “Okay, this week I had three nights of
work at the police station. They asked me if I wanted to apply for
the dispatcher’s full-time job, but I turned it down. I can make more
working as a waitress than that, and I want to be a policeman, not a
dispatcher. Skip Anderson came into the cafe and flirted with me”

“Skip hasn’t grown up, has he?”

“Not a day since high school. Still pretty and still has gorgeous
blue eyes, but, darlin’, one-was-a-borderline-fool ain’t that big of a
fool,” Kate said.

Fancy frowned as she attempted to figure out what Kate meant.

“Oh,” she said after a few seconds.

“Remember, you’re the one-was-pretty, Sophie is the one-wassmart, and I’m the other one,” Kate reminded her.

“I’d almost forgotten that conversation,” Fancy said.

“It’s because you’re stressing over opening Hattie’s door and
emptying out her room,” Sophie said.

Kate set her cup down and quickly slung the door open. “Breckenridge police,” she announced. “Open the door, or we’ll break it down!”

Sophie and Fancy hopped to their feet, leaving their mugs on
the floor.

Sophie peeked into the room. It didn’t look as formidable as
she’d figured it would. “You didn’t even count to three before you
opened the door, Kate.”

Fancy peeped around Sophie’s side. Nothing popped out of the
room. Not an evil spirit. Not a wicked laugh. Not even a faint apparition with short gray hair and lifeless eyes. A cold breeze did
flow out into the hallway, but that was because the room had been
closed off from the heat.

“You going to open the closet, or am I?” Kate asked.

“Go ahead,” Fancy said.

Sophie threw her arm around Fancy’s shoulders. “This room
really does terrify you, doesn’t it?”

“Granny disappeared into this place every night after supper.
Momma and I watched television in the living room, did homework, or played games at the kitchen table.”

“What about the nights when your momma went out? She was a
young woman. Surely she dated, no? Although, come to think of
it, I don’t remember her ever not being here when we came over to
hang out,” Sophie said.

“Momma never dated. Granny kept me in the beauty shop when
Momma went to work at the bank, but when she got home, I was
her responsibility.” Fancy shivered.

Kate opened the closet door and threw hangers full of clothing onto the bed. “Box ‘em up. I’ll put them in the truck and take them
to the church clothing bank over in Breckenridge. There’s needy
folk who’ll be glad to have them.”

Sophie removed shirts, skirts, slacks, and dresses from hangers
and folded them into boxes that Fancy brought from her room
across the hallway. She tied hangers together a dozen at a time
with twine and put them into another box.

“Sit on that side of the bed, Fancy. There are things up here on
the shelf you have to go through,” Kate said.

“Just throw it all away.”

“No, ma’am. There could be money or insurance papers or
deeds up there,” Sophie said.

Fancy sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed with boxes at
her feet and clothing all around her. “Bring it on then, Dr. Psychiatrist Miller.”

“That’s a woman talking, rather than a scared little girl,” Sophie
said with satisfaction.

Fancy opened the first box as Kate sat before her. “No philosophizing. Let’s just get the whole thing over with.”

The box held pictures. Neatly organized in manila envelopes and
labeled. Gwen’s school photos. Fancy’s school photos. Hattie’s family. Orville’s family. Fancy started with Hattie’s family. She’d never
even known her grandmother had family. Somehow in her mind
Hattie had been born an old woman with gray hair who lived to fix
hair. There was a baby picture of Hattie sitting on her mother’s knee
with her father standing proudly behind them. Then there was one
of Hattie when she was probably about eight with her mother, who
looked very sad. That would have been after her sister, Gwen, had
died. The next one in the stack showed Hattie with other children.
Fancy turned the picture over to see Hattie, 12; Audra, 5; Mary, 7;
Robert, 3; Milford, 2 on the back.

“Momma needs to see these,” Fancy said. “I wonder what happened to all of them”

Kate set a shoebox on the bed. “You might find out in this box.
It’s marked LETTERS.”

Fancy opened it to find yellowed envelopes. It didn’t take long to discover that Milford had died in World War II and Robert in
the Korean War. Their parents were gone long before that, and her
two sisters died during the polio epidemic, leaving Hattie the sole
survivor in the family.

Her phone rang, and she dug it out of her hip pocket. “Hello,
Momma. We’re knee-deep in Granny’s room. Kate and Sophie are
here with me. They’re packing everything into boxes and toting
them to Kate’s truck. Is there anything you want? I found pictures.
Your school pictures. Mine. I always wondered what she did with
the ones we gave her. She kept them in a box on the shelf in her
closet. The only picture out to see is the one of her and Grandfather on the chest of drawers.”

“I’d like to have any pictures,” Gwen said. “I have so few. Hattie
never took any, so I have very few photos of the time before I started
dating your father. There’s one of me and him that I’ve saved for
you, and, other than that, all the others were taken after you were
born. Once I went to work at the bank, I bought a simple little camera, so there’s more after you were two years old, but not many from
before that”

“Okay, I’ll box them all up and bring them to you. Anything
else you want?”

“Just for you to get that place sold and come home. I miss you. I
figured it would take a few weeks, but you’ve been there forever. If
the place hasn’t sold by Christmas, burn it down and come home,”
Gwen said.

“Will do” Fancy giggled, said good-bye. and hung up.

“That was a nice sound,” Sophie said.

Fancy looked up quizzically.

“A giggle,” Kate said.

“She said if this place hasn’t sold by Christmas, I’m to burn it
down and come home.”

“I can see her point, but I’m hoping it doesn’t ever sell. I don’t
want you to leave,” Sophie said. “These Sunday afternoon sessions
are the best therapy for me”

“You can both come with me. You’d love the beach. You can
buy a big fancy house right on the oceanfront, Sophie. Kate, you can be a detective for the Panama City Beach police department.
We might all even live together in Sophie’s house,” Fancy said.

“Remember what your momma said that summer when we were twelve and spent every waking minute together? We’d started bickering, and she sent me and Sophie home. Said we always got into
some kind of trouble when we were together, so we couldn’t play
together for a whole week,” Kate said.

Fancy put pictures into a shoebox to take to her mother. “We’re
grown now. We could do it.”

`Aunt Maud has brain cancer that’s inoperable. She’s got a year at
the most without treatment. Two, with it. She’s decided she doesn’t
want to spend her last months sick as a mule-those are her words-so
we’re looking at a year,” Sophie blurted out.

“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.” Fancy popped up onto her knees and
scrambled across the bed to give Sophie a hug.

“Me too. You’ve got to stay to see me through it, Fancy,” Sophie
said, tearing up.

“A year?” Fancy said.

“If she makes it that long. If this house sells, you can move in
with us on the ranch. I’m calling in your debt. You said you’d owe
me for helping clean out this room,” Sophie said.

“Are you serious?” Kate asked.

“It’s a lot to ask, but I’d ask it of you if you were talking about
going back to New Iberia,” Sophie said.

“Can I go home for Christmas?” Fancy asked.

Sophie nodded. “But you have to promise you’ll come back. I
can’t get through this without you two. The thing with Matt was too
difficult all alone. Aunt Maud pulled me up out of the mire and set
me on solid ground. I’ll need you both to do the same thing when
she’s gone”

“Then we’ll do it.” Kate picked up a final box of clothing and
carried it to the truck.

“Thank you,” Sophie whispered. “I know it’s asking a lot, but
you don’t have a job and .. “

“I’ll stay. It’s a small price to pay for what you’re doing for me
today. And what you’ve been doing. Besides, this old house isn’t
going anywhere for a long time, from the look of the economy. I’ll tell Momma we might have to give it a year. If it doesn’t sell by
then, we’ll invite everyone we know and have a marshmallow roast
when we burn it down”

Kate returned and took a long look around the room. “Y’all
ready to load all the rest of this stuff into Sophie’s truck?”

“Sure. We’re tough and mean as your Louisiana gators, chere,”
Fancy said with a laugh.

“And don’t you forget it, ever,” Kate said.

The storage unit Fancy had secured was a mile from the house,
and they stacked the bedroom furniture against its back wall. Fancy
would add to the pile later as she cleaned out other rooms in the
house. After that, she could decide what to give away or sell. Maybe
she’d open the big garage door and have a sale right there.