A Forever Thing (11 page)

“It still seems strange not to have some kind of funeral for her
beauty-shop friends and the members of her church,” Gwen said.

“If she didn’t want any semblance of a funeral or memorial,
then you two should abide by her wishes,” Les said. “I’m going to
take a shower and read a spell before I fall asleep. It’s been a long
day, and you two need some girl time to hash this out. I’m here for
you, darling, remember that. Through it all, you’ve got my support
and my heart,” Les said to Gwen as he made his way to the living
room, opened his suitcase, and took out a pair of knit lounging
pants and a T-shirt.

“Bathroom?” he asked.

“First door on the right,” Gwen said.

“Guess we’d better get it over with. The sheets won’t change
themselves, and it would probably be best if we go in before we
turn Les loose in that room,” Fancy said.

Gwen nodded. They felt like they were opening the door to forbidden territory when they carried clean sheets into Hattie’s bedroom. They’d never been allowed to open the door. Gwen said she
remembered the room slightly from glimpses she’d had when she
was a child and her mother inadvertently left the door ajar. Still,
it was odd standing inside the strange room and realizing Hattie was
truly gone.

“It’s eerie, isn’t it?” Fancy whispered.

Les appeared right behind them. He finished towel-drying his
close-cropped hair and threw the towel over his shoulder. “It’s just
a room. Why are you acting like you’ve never seen it before?” he
asked Fancy.

“I haven’t,” Fancy said. Her eyes took in the four-poster bed and
the dresser with a picture of what had to be Hattie and Orville on
their wedding day. Orville had his arm around her shoulders. She
wore a lacy dress, a corsage, and a smile.

Fancy and Gwen removed the chenille bedspread and sheets.

“Why not?” Les asked.

“Because we weren’t allowed in here. It was Momma’s room,”
Gwen whispered.

“What if you had a nightmare or were sick?” Les frowned.

Gwen shook her head. “I sucked up a nightmare. If I was sick, I
knocked on the door, and she came out.”

“Then she came to your room and slept with you?” Les asked.

“No, then she gave me medicine and told me to go back to bed,”
Gwen said.

“Not so many happy memories, huh?” Les asked.

“Not until Fancy Lynn was born. Then I wasn’t lonely anymore,” Gwen said.

“Granny was pretty scary when I was little. I was glad to have
Momma’s skirt-tails to hide behind and was really glad when she
came home from work every day,” Fancy added.

Fancy tugged the corners of the fitted sheet over the mattress
edge. “So, are you going to be all right with no funeral, Momma?
No closure? Just knowing that she’s gone and we don’t have to
come back here to visit?”

“I don’t know. I feel guilty because I’m not mourning. She was
my mother, for heaven’s sake. I should be devastated. When my
friend Linda’s mother died, we both cried for days. We drank
gallons of coffee and wept until our eyes were swollen. Now it’s
my mother, and all I feel is relief. I cannot sleep in this room. It’s
too…”

“I’ll get dressed, and we’ll go to a motel,” Les said.

“I want to go home,” Gwen whispered. One minute she was in
complete control; the next, she was a bag of weeping bones that would have sunk to the floor if Les hadn’t held her in his big strong
arms.

Les looked across the room. “Fancy?”

“I can handle it. Take her home. Catch the next red-eye out of
Dallas or stay at the airport hotel. Send her back to therapy. She
really does need it this time,” Fancy said.

“I can’t leave you in this mess all alone,” Gwen sobbed.

Fancy joined them in a three-way hug. “I’ve got Sophie and
Kate. And the beauty-shop ladies come three times a week. Then
on Sunday I fight with that abominable Theron Warren. I can take
care of this, Momma. Let Les take you home and take care of you.
I’ll be home in time for Christmas, and this will all be behind us”

“Hold her while I get dressed,” Les said.

Fancy led her mother out of the bedroom and into their old room
across the hallway. She patted a twin bed, and Gwen sat down.

“I’m so sorry,” Gwen said.

“Don’t be. I can take care of it. I had you, remember? You were
a fantastic mother, even if I was mad at you for tearing me away
from Chris Miller. Even then you were the smart one. Thank you
again for that. I can’t imagine having Hattie for a mother. Having
her as a grandmother was tough enough.”

Gwen nodded and shivered. “Good feelings don’t live in that
room.”

“We’ll shut the door. I’ll clean it all out later,” Fancy said.
Later, she thought, she’d ask her mother if she’d like to have the
picture of Hattie and Orville. She led Gwen to the living room,
where Les was already dressed and had the suitcases sitting beside
the door.

“You sure about this, Gwen?” he asked. “No regrets later?”

“More sure than I’ve been in years about anything,” she said.
She gave Fancy a long hug and blew her a kiss as they drove away.

Alone in the house, Fancy considered giving Sophie or Kate a call,
but it was well past midnight, and they’d been sweet enough to stay
with her until Gwen and Les arrived. Neither of them should have
to drive twenty-five miles back to Albany just because she didn’t
feel like being alone in the house with Hattie’s ghost. But she’d give half her bank account and all of the ham in the refrigerator to
have someone to talk to right then.

The gentle night breeze might have been pleasant if the temperature wasn’t hovering in the high nineties. Not unusual for central
Texas in late August but not conducive for sitting outside. Still, it
beat sitting in the house after opening the door to Hattie’s room.
Fancy poured a glass of iced tea and carried it to the porch. She
leaned back against a porch post and put one bare foot on the top
step.

A hoot owl sounded in the distance. Crickets and tree frogs
sang in spite of the sweltering heat. A tomcat howled a couple of
yards down, and that set a dozen dogs to barking. A pickup slowed
down but didn’t stop, at least not the first time around. The second
time around the block it pulled into the driveway. Fancy looked
up, half expecting to see Sophie coming back to town to take care
of her. But it was Theron Warren who climbed out of the truck. He
wore overalls and flip-flops, a shirt with ragged armholes where
he’d cut the sleeves away and not finished the seams, and his tousled hair had hay stuck in it.

“You all right?” he asked.

“What are you doing here?” she countered.

“Got the feeding done and hay in the barn. Too hot to sleep.
Uncle Joe put a little air conditioner in his bedroom, so it’s cool, but
I felt trapped and confined with the door shut, so I went for a drive.
Saw you sitting here all alone.”

“Want some tea?”

“Love some. I’ll get it. Don’t get up”

“Ice is in the freezer. Tea is on the counter. Glasses to the right
of the sink.”

Seeing Sophie or Kate get out of the truck would have been better, but she wouldn’t turn down anyone to talk to right then.

He brought a quart jar of iced tea back to the porch and propped
his back against a post on the other side of the steps. “So when is
your mother arriving?”

“Where’d you get that jar?” she asked.

“Back behind the glasses. I like them better. They hold more.”

“Momma already came and left,” she said.

She could feel Theron’s frown even though it was barely visible
in the moonlight.

“Don’t judge, Mr. Warren. It’ll get you in trouble every time,”
she said icily.

“I just asked a question,” he said.

“There’ll be no funeral and no memorial, so why should she
stay in this place?”

“Can’t answer that. You’ll accuse me of judging,” he said.

“You have a history of doing that, so why shouldn’t I expect it of
you?”

“Fancy Lynn Sawyer, I did not tell the school board a thing
about that night you were in jail for a few minutes. I could not
have swayed their vote if I’d tried. On the basis of your resume I
recommended you for the job,” he said, then took a long gulp of
tea. “As far as I was concerned, it was a simple interview and contract signing. When I got to school that day, they’d already made
up their minds to hire the other lady. It was bad timing, that’s all.
So don’t put words into my mouth or attitudes into my heart that
are not there. And I’d looked at so many applicants that your name,
weird as it is, didn’t even ring a bell when I pulled you over for
drunk driving.”

If he’d had it to do over again, he wouldn’t have even made that
second trip around the block just now. He would have kept on going and left her to her own mourning, whatever and however it
was. Every time he got near the woman, sparks seemed to fly.

“Okay,” she said slowly, drawing the word out to at least three
syllables. “Granny was a strange bird. We chalked it up to her having a baby when she was already too set in her ways. But the last
time I went to see her at Bluebonnet, just before she put the ban on
me or Momma visiting her, she admitted that she didn’t want my
mother at birth and never had a maternal instinct toward her.
Maybe it was because she was past forty and set in her ways, or
maybe it was because my grandfather wouldn’t let her give the
child away and then died six months after Momma was born. I just
don’t know how she could have a baby and not love it”

“Like I said, she was strange. A good person but strange,” Theron said. “Who knows what went on in her lifetime to cause such a lack
of feelings for her own child? Now we’ll never know.”

Fancy went on to tell him about the closed bedroom door
they’d opened. “And that’s why I’m on the porch. I can’t go back
in there right now. We left her bedroom door open, and it’s scary,”
she finished.

“I didn’t think anything would scare you.” Theron chuckled.

“That room does,” she said.

“Didn’t you ever want to go in there when you were little? Just
out of curiosity?”

“You ever see those scary movies about Freddy when you were
young? Or those crazy Halloween movies?”

He nodded.

“Those were nothing compared to what I felt was behind that
door. I asked about it once when I was really young, like maybe
five or six. Momma said she’d never been in that room either, so I
knew it had to be horrible.”

“And was it?” Theron asked.

“It’s just a room, but …”

“How ‘bout we both go into the house together, and I’ll shut the
door for you? Would that help?”

She sighed. “Yes, it would.” She was a grown woman, so why
was she so afraid to go into the house alone? Hattie was dead, on
her way to the crematorium by now; her life was over, her pain
gone. Fancy’s feelings didn’t make a bit of sense.

Theron held the door open for her, and once inside the living
room, she pointed down the hall. He found two doors open. One
into a room with twin beds, the other with a full-sized bed and a
Hattie aura about it. He shut the door to that room and studied the
other room for a moment. Fancy was a neat freak, for sure. Not
one thing was out of place in her room.

“Is it done?” She raised her voice slightly.

“It is. Not a single claw came out to grab me. Not even a whisper of a cloudy presence to brush across my face,” he said as he
walked back up the hallway and into the living room.

“Thank you.” Now that the deed was done, she felt awkward in his presence and didn’t know what to do with her hands or whether
to sit or stand. “More tea? Would you like to sit in the kitchen? I
could turn on the air conditioner to cool the place down.”

“It’s late. I’ve got school tomorrow,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Are you afraid to be alone in this house?” he asked.

“No, I’ve lived here the better part of a month alone. I’m not
afraid,” she said.

“I was married once for about six months,” he blurted out.

She stared at him blankly.

For a moment Theron didn’t know why she looked so stunned.
She’d once mentioned his being short; did she think short men
were destined to be bachelors forever? Then he realized how crazy
his comment had sounded. It was totally out of context and had
nothing to do with Hattie Sawyer’s passing or her house.

“It lasted six months, and she left me because I wasn’t as rich as
she thought I was.” It was as if his mouth and his brain were disconnected. He kept saying things that were none of Fancy’s business.

She blinked fast. Surely she was hearing wrong. Why would he
make those two comments out of the hot summer night?

“I guess I’m sharing this with you because of what you told me
about Hattie’s not loving your mother. No one in town really even
knows about my ex-wife, Maria.” Every sentence made the atmosphere even more awkward.

“I see,” she mumbled.

“There were no children-she wasn’t around long enough, luckily. I’m going to be a bachelor from now on-until my dying day.
And now I’m going home before I say anything else that I have no
intention of sharing or that you are interested in hearing.”

“Good night, then. And thank you for shutting the door,” Fancy
said.

“I’ll see you in church on Sunday, then?” he said.

“Yes, you will, and I’m not going to the nursery either,” she countered.

“You’re testing my patience,” he said.

“Maybe so, but you’re testing mine just as badly.”

He left, and she went straight to the bathroom, where she stood under a cool shower for a long time. She turned on the airconditioning unit in the window of the bedroom and stretched out
on her bed. Numbness set in a few minutes before her cell phone
rang. The digital clock she’d brought with her from Florida said it
was 1:59.

“Hello, Momma. Are you at the airport?” she asked.

“Yes, we are. There’s not a flight until morning, so we got a room.
Are you all right? I shouldn’t have left you in that house alone. Did
you call Sophie or Kate?” Gwen sounded breathless and miserable.