A Place Called Wiregrass (9 page)

W
hile Cher washed Miss Claudia’s car for its proper return to Elm Drive, I walked to the mailbox. I wanted to spin around when I saw Miss Trellis. One hand held the edge of her glasses while the other was propped on the side of her red polka-dotted tent dress. Her stance and complaints to an older man with gray whiskers on his chin made her seem every bit the authoritative figure I knew she wanted to be.

Just as I walked up, the old man looked mercifully at me and smiled. “Have a good one,” he said and hobbled off towards his cream-colored trailer.

“Hey. I seen a new car yonder in your lot.” She hadn’t even waited long enough for me to get my key in my mailbox.

“Mine was tore up.” I snatched the mail and tried to think of an excuse to skip away.

“You and Claudia must be regular Mutt and Jeff. I sure wouldn’t let any of my help ride off with my vehicle.”

“She’s a fine woman.” This time I shot Miss Trellis one of my looks and hammered down on the word
fine
.

“Oh, yeah. Bless her heart. And I seen that Peterson boy haul your car off last Tuesday evening.”

I actually felt a little sorry for the poor old thing. I saw Miss Trellis every evening when I drove into the trailer park. You couldn’t help but see her, sitting in the small block apartment tacked on next to her office. Her blinds were always wide open, and the knobs behind her TV stuck out under the
blinds. She probably kept a journal next to her easy chair and, in between orders on QVC, noted each entrance and exit of her kingdom.

Miss Trellis rested both hands at the base of her back and stuck her round stomach out. “You talk of another poor old soul. That Peterson boy had it something awful. His wife getting killed on the road like that. They tell me after that drunk hit her, the Peterson boy laid in bed three weeks, not eating, not speaking. Nothing.”

When a black truck jacked up with big tires and a loud muffler idled past us, I moved closer to Miss Trellis. For once, I did not want to miss a single word.

“A great big man like him, I had an idear he’d go beat the tar out of the trashy thing that killed her. And, honey, he was trash. He was a Driggers, the whole outfit just public nothings. Anyway, the Peterson boy just stayed there in bed, staring at the ceiling. They tell me the doctor had him so high on nerve pills he looked plumb scary at the funeral.”

“Did you know his wife?” I regretted asking her, but the nosy side of me won out.

“I just can’t talk about her or I’ll go to crying.” She looked down at the ground and shook her head.

Why was I so stupid to take the bait?
I thought of Kasi’s warning about Miss Trellis.

“Poor, poor thing.” She looked sideways and then glanced at me. “You might near say we was kin. Her mama was my husband’s brother-in-law’s cousin.”

Before Miss Trellis could suck in enough air to renew momentum, I fled back towards the sound of spraying water hitting car metal.

“You gonna let me go skating if I clean the inside out too?” Cher asked as I flipped through bills and money-saver coupons.

“I thought riding you around in that fancy Lincoln would be payment enough.”

“Yeah, and now I’m back in that piece of junk,” Cher said and propped her cut-off jeans hip out. “When we gonna get a new car like…”

I never looked up from the mail and walked past her. “When you go to college and get a good job. Then you’ll buy us whatever you want.”

Once inside, the kitchen counter served as my makeshift desk. I sorted the mail and ripped check after check out of my wallet to meet the collectors’ due dates. Giggles and squeals vibrated against the door. Laurel had come over under the pretense of helping wash Miss Claudia’s car. The only help she offered was luring Cher into a water fight.

I looked out the kitchen window and shook my head in amusement at the sight of them running around Miss Claudia’s Lincoln with Laurel holding the water hose. When I opened the phone bill I lost my grin.

That girl,
I cussed. Another bill over seventy dollars. On top of the unexpected car repair and the monthly payment to the divorce lawyer, I didn’t know how I was going to pay it. I tried to teach her a lesson last month by having her work off the charges. “I have had it,” I yelled.

And who in the world did she even know in Shreveport anyway? I quickly ran my finger down all the charges to the 8774 number. All the calls were made after three o’clock in the afternoon and before I got home of an evening. Those evenings I had opened the door and saw the phone cord bouncing, she told me she had been talking to Laurel. All I could think was that she had gotten connected with some pervert off that Internet she worked on at school. I had seen all sorts of horrible stories on TV about how weirdos seduce kids.

I hammered my finger on the phone numbers and waited. It took six rings for him to pick up. By the time he said hello the second time, I knew it was him. The worst monster I could imagine. Much more corrupt than any pervert off the Internet.
This couldn’t be LaRue. He is supposed to be locked away,
I reminded myself. I slammed the phone down.
You only thought it was his voice.

The second time I called, he answered the phone all smart-alecky, like he was part of the prank phone call. No doubt it was him. The worst piece of trash that I could ever imagine. My heart began to pound, and my breath grew shorter. I wanted to scream obscenities at this unwelcome intruder; to tell him he had no claim on Cher. The words bubbled at the base of my throat.

I slammed the receiver down and leaned against the wall, wishing this day had never happened. I always thought she would be older when I would face this.
Let this be a bad dream,
I wished, but her laughter rolled in tides from outside the door to remind me what I had to face. I had successfully hid her from LaRue and his seedy life for twelve years. Now Cher had found him. Pages from the phone bill shook in my hand, and my first instinct was to whip Cher and then flee again. Atlanta. That was a city big enough to hide from LaRue. Cher had disrupted our new life. She had turned over a rock and discovered the very slime that shared his seed to create her.

“W
hat’s the matter with you?” Cher seldom saw me idle, and for a second I was touched that she thought I might be sick. Sick all right, but not from any ailment of a physical nature.

I looked up from the couch and saw drops of water falling on the plastic green welcome mat. Normally, I would have chased her with towels and told her she would catch cold coming into the air-conditioned trailer all wet. Her sopping gray T-shirt clung tightly to her flesh, reminding me once again of her development into womanhood.

I could only manage to hold up the telephone bill.

“What’s that?” She stepped closer, drops of water landing at her feet.

“I want to talk to you.” I patted the couch, knowing full well her cut-off jeans were too wet for her to sit on furniture.

She sat on the edge of the checkered couch like she was at a tea party instead of the courtroom I hoped to create. “Is something the matter with Pop?”

I shook my head. Part of me wanted to knock her beside the head and scream words like
disgusting
and
stupid
to her. Instead, I silently counted to ten like some head doctor had recommended on a radio talk show.

“Whose number is this?” I tossed the pages of the phone bill at her, and two pages floated to the floor.

She examined the pages and sniffed a couple of times. I wasn’t sure if she was crying or if it was the cold I’d failed to warn her about now settling into her system. “Oh, that’s Becky Pitts.”

“No, not the Cross City number. The numbers for Shreveport.”

She closely studied the page and wrinkled her brow. She shrugged her shoulders and got up. My mouth dropped as she prissed down the hallway.

Right when she reached to open the towel cabinet in the bathroom, I blocked her. Standing in the doorway with my hand against the cabinet, I decided she would not turn me off like her clock radio. She looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, but I just continued to look at the side of her wet head.

“Gah, all I need is a towel,” she moaned.

“All you need is to tell me the truth.” I decided to count to twenty this time. I watched specks of water drop from her ear lobe.

“I know who it is. Did you think I was so stupid I wouldn’t check the number?”

She folded her arms and looked down at the floor.

The words I should have said earlier to LaRue erupted onto his offspring. “I’m surprised he even has a phone. Probably just for his drug deals. I wish I could’ve had five minutes with that parole board. Oh boy, they’d be sorry.”

“He’s not like that anymore. He’s got his own business now,” she said in an unsteady tone.

I wondered how many times she’d practiced that line, hoping to convince herself of his truthfulness. If I wasn’t so mad, I wonder if I would have laughed. The idea of this three-time drug offender owning anything other than a pharmacy was too ridiculous to even waste breath on. And so much for that white-haired judge telling him twelve years ago LaRue would never see the wickedness of a crack house again.

“How did you even get his number?” The very mention of his name seemed to harass something vile in my soul. I tried hard not to say his name, choosing instead to use only pronouns and filthy words not fitting for polite conversation.

“The library, okay?” She looked up and then withdrew once again. And there I was thinking she was spending those days after school seeking out books about horses, not searching phone books for a jackass.

We stood our ground, still and silent. She broke first by reaching up to open the towel cabinet. I moved outside to the door frame and allowed her access.

I decided to take the sympathetic route. “Baby, I love you and just want the best for you. You know that. There’re just some things you don’t know…”

“You just try to control me. Why can’t I call him? Why? He is my daddy, you know.”

Controlling accusations. The questions. This was all too familiar. LaRue’s influence once again. He put Suzette up to that kind of talk too. “I don’t care if you talk to him,” I lied, not wanting a rerun of another life pushed towards disaster because of my objections. “It’s just the calls cost so much. And well, I just don’t want you to get all confused.”

“It’s too late,” she screamed and slammed the door.

I stood outside the pine door and heard the lock click. I didn’t even try to knock. I’d let her count to whatever number she needed to to cool off. As if we were playing a game of hide and seek, I dashed into Cher’s bedroom.

The picture was still zipped inside her pillow. I glared at LaRue holding my baby on his lap. Had it not been for my fear of completely losing Cher, I would have ripped the cheap celluloid into a zillion pieces. No amount of counting could harness my anger towards that thing, that LaRue LaRouche.

Even though I thought the world of Missoura, I was not pleased to see her sitting in Miss Claudia’s living room. I had waited all weekend to tell Miss Claudia about Cher’s calls to her biological father. My nerves were just about shot, and now I had to wait that much longer for some guidance.

“Erma Lee, I want you to look. Dedrick Aaron Jackson, Missoura’s grandson.” Miss Claudia held up a photo. I had just hung my pocketbook on the coat rack.

I sighed, remembering the fine line I walked between employee and friend. I held the photo of the Army captain and remarked he was nice-looking or something to that effect.

Missoura talked about how good he was doing and how he liked Fort Benning. “So lucky to be stationed close to home,” Miss Claudia added and sipped her iced tea.

I guess I was not the only one who found Miss Claudia to be a good listener. I swear, I had washed three loads of clothes, mopped the kitchen, and cut three roses and put them in a vase by Miss Claudia’s bed before Missoura left. Right when I opened my mouth to ask for my own guidance, the phone rang.

“Why yes, she is. Who may I say is calling?…Oh, I liked to not have recognized your voice.” She nuzzled the phone against her blouse. “Come on over here. It’s Gerald.”

I wiped my hands on my pants and grabbed the receiver. “Hello.” I was conscious of Miss Claudia standing next to the kitchen sink.

“This’s Gerald.” The clanging in the background would have given him away. “You want to uh…” Louder clanging. This time I heard a muffling sound and Gerald’s voice yelling something undetectable. The clanging stopped. “Yeah…uh, like I was saying. They having a fish fry this Saturday at the Moose Lodge. Well, I mean, with you not knowing a whole bunch of people yet, I thought…Do you want to go?”

Not now,
I thought.
This is not a good time
. “Well, I might
need to help Miss Claudia that day. You know, do some stuff for her and everything.” Dead silence. I always had a tendency to talk more whenever the other person dropped the conversation. “Her with her hip and all.” Miss Claudia turned to look at me. I was sinking with each second. “Just let me call you back.”

“What in the world was all that about?”

I knew she had every right to ask since I brought her name into it. “Nothing.”

“Sure didn’t sound like nothing to me.”

I went back to the sink and finished washing casserole dishes. She kept her perch next to me.

“Erma Lee, what did you mean, doing things for me?”

“Saturday. I told you I’d go get you some fabric on Saturday, remember?” I didn’t look at her, concentrating instead on the scorched corners of grime on the dish.

“I declare. We can pick up that old fabric anytime. I hope you weren’t using that as an excuse for whatever it was Gerald wanted?”

I looked at her. Both her hands were propped on the cane, and her head was slightly turned. Sometimes she was so dramatic that I thought she could’ve acted on one of those afternoon stories.

“Just some fish fry at some lodge or something.”

“You don’t mean the annual fish fry down at the Moose Lodge?”

Right then I hated the fact she knew every nook and cranny of Wiregrass. I decided she must rank right up there with the courthouse as a Houston County institution.

“Well, if he asked, you have to go. Richard went a little while last year. Stayed as long as he could. His nerves, don’t you know. But anyway, he said they had the biggest crowd he ever did see.”

I blew up at the loose strands of hair that were hanging over my eye and continued washing the casserole dish. “Yeah? Well, I don’t think it’s good right now.”

“Now, Erma Lee, I sat right in that living room a week ago and heard you talking about that man.”

I sighed, realizing how a horse had to feel after being ridden on a long journey.

“I certainly hope it’s not because you’re afraid of still being a married woman. You’re for all intended purposes divorced. Just a matter of…”

I scrubbed the brush on the last remaining bits of scorched food. “It’s not that. I just…”

“Well, I hope you certainly don’t think you have to babysit me. And speaking of that, Cher can stay with me. We’ll cook us some popcorn and…”

The thud of the dish crashing to the sink made her jump. “Look, I got too much on my mind to decide right now.”

She blinked hard and looked over my right shoulder. “I see,” she said and then patted the silver top of her cane.

“I’m sorry,” I said, brushing suds of dishwashing soap on my forehead.

Her expression never changed. She just reached over and put her blue-veined hand on my arm.

“I just found out this weekend that when Cher said her daddy was coming, she didn’t mean Bozo. She meant her biological father.” I never used the phrase
real daddy,
because LaRue could never reach this standard no matter how hard he tried. “Me and her had it out, and now she won’t even talk to me.”

Miss Claudia wiped the suds from my forehead. “When did all this happen?”

I laid out the naked details and was even sort of honest about his time in prison. I told her he was in for drugs and left off the charges of child abandonment.

“When I was a girl going through all that mess with Old Man Maxwell, I used to daydream what my daddy would’ve looked like if he’d still been alive. How many wrinkles would
he have around his eyes? How many streaks of gray would he have around the temples? I even made up an image.”

“This is different. You had a good daddy. Hers ain’t worth squat.”

“Makes no difference. Sometimes a fantasy is easier to face than the truth. Especially about the person you’re supposed to love.”

Miss Claudia didn’t ease my worrying, but she did help me understand what Cher might be thinking. That night when Cher got in the shower, I called Gerald back. It was such a brief conversation I wondered why I had picked up the receiver three times before finally dialing his number.

“I hope that fish fry ain’t dressy,” I said with a chuckle, knowing I was scared to death I would be out of place.

“Ain’t nothing but a bunch of boys frying fish and having a little fun. I’ll pick you up at seven,” Gerald said.

After he hung up, I held the receiver against my chest and wished life could be as easy as Gerald made everything out to be.