Bitter in the Mouth (19 page)

Leo and I shared a duplex, the first and second floor of a brownstone on a tree-lined block of West Twenty-second Street. I had bought the place after my second year of practice. I was flush with money, and I needed a way to invest it. I had no school loans to pay off because my great-uncle had made sure that both my college and law school tuition were paid for in full. He said that the money came from one of my father’s many life insurance policies. The Reasonable Man was a financially prepared man. Whenever I went to the ATM, I would look at the amount “available” and wonder whose bank account this was. I couldn’t spend my salary, direct-deposited into my checking account like the proceeds of some secret lottery, fast enough. Perhaps this was why I loved the practice of law.

I had loved it first for a very different reason.

The law gave me an entirely new vocabulary, a language that non-lawyers derisively referred to as “legalese.” Unlike the basic building blocks—the day-to-day words—that got me from the subway to the office and back, the words of my legal vocabulary, more often than not, triggered flavors that I had experienced after leaving Boiling Springs, flavors that I had chosen for myself, derived from foods that were never contained within the boxes and the cans of DeAnne’s kitchen.

Subpoena
kiwifruit
.

Injunction
Camembert
.

Infringement
lobster
.

Jurisdiction
freshgreenbeans
.

Appellant
sourdoughbread
.

Arbitration
Guinness
.

Unconstitutional
asparagus
.

Exculpatory
Nutella
.

I could go on and on, and I did.

Every day I was paid an astonishing amount of money to shuffle these words around on paper and, better yet, to say them aloud. At my yearly reviews, the partners I worked for commented that they had never seen a young lawyer so visibly invigorated by her work. One of the many reasons I was on track to make partner, I thought.

There were, of course, the rare and disconcerting exceptions. Some legal words reached back to the Dark Ages of my childhood and to the stunted diet that informed my earlier words. “Mitigating,” for example, brought with it the unmistakable taste of elementary school cafeteria pizzas: rectangles of frozen dough topped with a ketchup-like sauce, the hard crumbled meat of some unidentifiable animal, and grated “cheese” that didn’t melt when heated but instead retained the pattern of a badly crocheted coverlet. I had actually looked forward to the days when these rectangles were on the lunch menu, slapped onto my tray by the lunch ladies in hairnets and comfortable shoes. Those pizzas (even the word itself was pure exuberance with the two
z
’s and the sound of satisfaction at the end
 … ah!)
were evocative of some greater, more interesting locale, though how and where none of us at Boiling Springs Elementary circa 1975 were quite sure. We all knew what hamburgers and hot dogs were supposed to look and taste like, and we knew that the school cafeteria served us a second-rate version of these foods. Few of us students knew what a pizza was supposed to be. Kelly claimed that it was usually very big and round in shape, but both of these characteristics seemed highly improbable to me. By the time we were in middle school, a Pizza Inn had opened up along the feeder road to I-85. The Pizza Inn may or may not have been the first national chain of pizzerias to offer a weekly all-you-can-eat buffet. To the folks of the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area, this was an idea that would expand their waistlines, if not their horizons. A Sizzler would later open next to the Pizza Inn (
feeder road
took on a new connotation), and it would offer the Holy Grail of all-you-can-eat buffets: steaks, baked potatoes, and, for the ladies, a salad bar complete with exotic fixings such as canned chickpeas and a tangle of slightly bruised alfalfa sprouts.

Along with “mitigating,” these were some of the other legal words that also transported me back in time:

Egress
redvelvetcake
.

Perpetuity
bottledFrenchsaladdressing
.

Compensatory
boiledpeanuts
.

Probate
Reese’speanutbuttercup
.

Fiduciary
Cheerwine
.

Amortization
Oreocookie
.

I wanted, most of all, to say these words to my father. The lexicon of the law had allowed him to be part of a world much greater than Boiling Springs and Shelby, greater than Raleigh, than the state of North Carolina. These words, I knew, must have comforted him as well.

The smell of pancakes cooking and bacon burning rose through the air vents that led from the kitchen straight up to our bedroom. I took a deep breath and found coffee beginning to brew as well. Leo had called in a favor. The attending psychiatrist for the day shift had come in two hours early and covered for Leo that morning. In the Manhattan predawn, Leo had headed home. He stopped at the corner deli and bought a pint of blueberries, a lemon, maple syrup, and peppered bacon. When I came downstairs, I saw these items spread out on the kitchen counter. Over his jeans and white T-shirt, Leo had on an apron, which made him look like a progressive little boy playing house. He put a finger up to his lips and shushed me before I could say anything. He sat me down at the kitchen table and placed a plate in front of me. On the plate was a small robin’s-egg-blue box.

Before I could object to his incredibly poor timing, Leo launched into a dizzying speech about how life, despite our best efforts, was impossible to plan for. How he had bought the ring three months ago and had been waiting to propose. How he had already arranged to take time off from the hospital—a full two weeks—so that we could celebrate at his parents’ cabin in the Berkshires. In true WASP code, the “cabin” was a sprawling compound on 110 acres that included a five-bedroom main house, a converted barn for the grandchildren who had yet to materialize, a swimming “hole”—a lake the size of the Wollman skating rink in Central Park—and an apple orchard that required Mr. and Mrs. Benton to hire a local family to harvest it each fall.

Leo was more animated than usual, which accelerated his already rapid speech pattern. His words were running up against one another as they rushed to leave his mouth. He must have seen the look of confusion on my face and how my eyes kept on darting over to the coffeemaker. Leo poured me a cup and sat down beside me. He explained as slowly as he could that the vacation, which he had negotiated and bargained for and agreed to work the remaining year’s worth of weekend shifts for, was to begin
two
weeks from now. Proposal, ring, acceptance, vacation, all was to happen
two
weeks from now, he repeated. The news yesterday about Baby Harper and Cecil’s passing, and my request that we leave immediately for Boiling Springs had forced his hand.

Did he really say “forced” his hand, I remembered thinking.

Leo, sensing his momentum dissipating, his pancakes becoming cold pucks, the grease congealing white around the strips of bacon, picked up the pace of his proposal.

I said yes.

Leo opened the robin’s-egg-blue box and placed the ring on my finger. It was a diamond solitaire, traditional, multicarat, and expensive. Of course, the ring was a perfect fit. Leo was a planner. He probably had measured my finger while I was asleep.

Leo kissed me. I closed my eyes and opened them up again. I understood in that brief moment of darkness that the apron was very important to me. Leo seemed younger and more vulnerable in the apron. I needed to see him in it. I smiled. He smiled back at me.

Leo then requested three things of me. First, we would keep the timing, if not the destination, of his original plan. We would wait two weeks and drive to Boiling Springs. We could stay with DeAnne for all or some of the time, depending on how I felt, he said. Second, I would quit smoking. Third, I would get a full medical checkup before we officially announced our engagement.

Agreeing to the first stipulation was easier than the second and third.

It seemed suddenly absurd that I had intended to get in a car that day with Leo and head to North Carolina for some indeterminate amount of time. I hadn’t told anyone at the firm that I was planning to be away. I had a conference call scheduled for later that afternoon. I had a meeting in Detroit the following week. Leo and I didn’t even own a car. We would need to rent one, but by the time that I had remembered this detail the night before, I was too drunk to do anything about it. Also, in all honesty, the idea of seeing DeAnne in two weeks as opposed to two days wasn’t that objectionable to me.

As for the rest of Leo’s requests, I understood them for what they were. Leo had made me a conditional offer. If the conditions weren’t met, the offer would be void.

When I arrived at the firm that morning, I telephoned Kelly first and told her that I wouldn’t be back in Boiling Springs for another two weeks. I told her that my work schedule and Leo’s were a tangled mess. I didn’t tell her about Leo’s proposal or whatever it was. She would have asked me the question that we have been carrying within us since we were little girls, waiting for the day when we could answer with an unqualified yes.

Are you in love, Linda?

No.

Will you marry him?

Yes.

Why?

Because the two questions are not one and the same.

Yes they are.

How would
you
know, Kelly?

It was at the edge of such a chasm that a friendship could meet its untimely end.

Then I telephoned DeAnne. I didn’t hear the reprimand that I had expected or the word that I thought she would throw at me. “Selfish” had disappeared from her vocabulary. Her voice echoed on the line, as if she were sitting in the middle of an empty room, as if she were the empty room. DeAnne said that she would wait until I came back home before doing or deciding anything. She said that Baby Harper would have wanted it that way.

At 1:12
A.M
. on February 16, 1998, American Airlines Flight 1520 from Bogotá’s El Dorado Airport, en route to Charlotte’s Douglas International, went down minutes after flying over the city of Santa Marta at the edge of the Caribbean Sea. According to the inhabitants of Santa Marta, some claiming that they had seen the moment in their sleep, Harper Evan Burch and Cecil Tobias Brandon and 262 other bodies transformed into birds. The flock, so large that it blocked out the moon, then flew headfirst into the sea. These inhabitants also reported hearing in their sleep a song that they would later identify as Patsy Cline’s “You Belong to Me.”

Fly the ocean in a silver plane,
See the jungle when it’s wet with rain,
Just remember till you’re home again,
You belong to me
.

Cecil’s last will and testament bequeathed his estate, with one small exception, to his “life companion,” Harper Evan Burch, and if predeceased then to his nephew Clay Tobias Mitchell of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Clay, a thirty-seven-year-old middle school mathematics teacher, immediately quit his job and moved with his own life companion, Gregory Puckett Ames, to Shelby, where the two men saw to it that the Home of Eternal Rest would continue to meet all the needs of the county’s dearly departed. The folks of the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area were comforted by the fact that there was another Mister T to turn to during their time of loss. They welcomed Clay and Gregory to town with an outpouring of Bundt cakes and casseroles, and then they gave them the bodies of their dead to prepare for burial. Trust couldn’t be delineated in a clearer way. These folks also found comfort in reminding one another that it was 1998. What they meant was that life around them had changed. Shelby had a Chinese “bistro”
and
a Thai restaurant, and Boiling Springs no longer had Gardner-Webb Baptist College but Gardner-Webb University, complete with out-of-state students and even some from overseas, mostly from small Third World countries where the Southern Baptist Convention International Mission Board was most active. Cleveland County was more cosmopolitan in other ways as well. The county was no longer dry. Beer and liquor were now available for purchase without ever having to cross the nearest state line. I had meant to ask Baby Harper whether that was the real reason Iris had driven to Spartanburg, South Carolina; whether her glass of Dr Pepper had hid a fifth of something stronger.

Cecil set forth in his will that his body was to be cremated and his ashes kept in a silver urn, which could be found on the mantelpiece in the master bedroom of the Greek Revival. He also wrote that under no circumstance should there be a funeral or memorial service. He’d already been to so many of them, I could almost hear my great-uncle explaining. Cecil long ago had set aside some money—the amount that the average person would spend on a casket, flowers, burial plot, and yearly upkeep of said plot—in a high-interest-bearing account, and he specified that upon his death the interest should be used to fund a yearly scholarship for “any young man or woman from Cleveland County who wanted to study the funerary customs of other countries; travel is most encouraged.” At the time of his passing, the account was worth $1.2 million.

Kelly wrote in letter #1,297 that when Clay and Gregory came to the Greek Revival to pick up the silver urn, the three of them each did a shot of tequila in Cecil and my great-uncle’s honor. They weren’t sure what liquor Colombians drank, but tequila seemed to be in keeping with that part of the world, she wrote. When I read this, I thought about how much my best friend had changed. The Kelly of our youth would have known that Colombia’s alcohol of choice was
aguardiente
, a sugar cane–based anisette, because she knew everything worth knowing in the world. The Kelly of our approaching thirties was an assistant financial-aid officer at Gardner-Webb and was distributing Southern Baptist scholarship money to the smaller, poorer, browner countries of the world that she knew nothing about.