No Defense (10 page)

“I get congratulations too,” Jane said
coyly.

I looked at her, puzzled.

“I think I’m pregnant,” she squealed.

“Oh Jane, that’s terrific!” I said softly.
“How long?”

“Just two weeks since I missed my period, so
I shouldn’t have said anything. Don’t tell anyone,” she said. She
held a finger to her lips. “Mum’s the word.”

“You didn’t tell Buck?” I asked.

“Oh, I couldn’t keep it a secret from him. I
know what you’re thinking: If I have another miscarriage it’ll
upset him. But I won’t have one. Besides, he’d figure it out. Every
month we mourn my period, so he knows when I’m even a few days
late. And guess what-I threw up this morning. Isn’t that great?”
She giggled and patted her tummy.

“It’s wonderful, Jane. What’s Buck up to
today anyway?” I asked her.

“He’s busy planning some big political thing
for Daddy.”

“It’s a very exciting time in Tallagumsa,
don’t you think, LuAnn?” Barbara asked. She sat with her ankles
crossed, her hands clasped in her lap. “If your father’s elected
governor, it would be a big boost both to the town and the
college.”

“If he runs,” I said. “Last I heard, he
hadn’t decided.”

“He’s close--Buck said so last night,” Jane
said.

“I almost wish he wouldn’t run,” I said.
“Eddie’s not that thrilled about our moving back, and if we have to
do a lot of campaigning he’ll be even less happy.”

“Well, maybe he’ll feel a little better
about moving after he and Barbara have their meeting,” Jane
said.

“What on earth are you talking about?” I
asked.

“Is Eddie here?” Barbara asked. She pulled a
leather note- book from her handbag.

I didn’t answer, but I must have given her a
funny look.

“Don’t you know why I’m here?” Barbara
asked.

“We’re a few minutes early,” Jane said,
looking at her watch. “Didn’t Eddie tell you we were coming?”

“I haven’t seen him much since I got home
from the hospital,” I said. “Whenever I’m asleep he’s awake, and
vice versa.”

Will began to cry. Upon hearing the sound,
milk began leaking through my nursing bra, and two wet spots spread
across my nightgown. “Excuse me.”

I picked Will up from his bassinet in my
bedroom and nursed him in my bed. Hank continued sleeping quietly
in his tiny bed. After a few minutes Will quieted down, and I lay
him down on the improvised changing table: my vanity with a piece
of foam padding on top. When I took off his diaper, he peed all
over my neck and chest before I had a chance to shield the general
area with my hand. I laughed. I still had not gotten used to this
basic difference in changing boys’ and girls’ diapers.

I put Will in the middle of the bed while I
took off the nightgown, wiped my neck with it, then pulled on a
pair of sweatpants and one of Eddie’s T-shirts. I brushed my hair
and put on some lip gloss, then looked in the mirror. Hopeless.

“Where’s Jolene?” Jane asked when I returned
to the living room with Will. Once again he started screaming his
lungs out.

“The grocery with Jessie,” I said. “So
what’s going on?”

I stood with Will resting on my shoulder,
bouncing him gently in a futile attempt to relieve what I’d decided
the night before at three A.M. must be colic.

“Barbara’s a big fan of Eddie’s work,” Jane
said. “And when she heard y’all were moving to Tallagumsa and that
Eddie had taught journalism before, she called him. Was it
yesterday?”

Barbara nodded. “We talked twice yesterday.
I told him that we have an immediate opening because, I’m
embarrassed to say, my journalism professor ran off with one of his
students. I also mentioned that I’m hoping he can teach a politics
and the arts course this summer.”

“What did Eddie say?” I asked.

“That he’d think about it and talk to me
today. Since I spoke with him I found out from your father that
Eddie’s been trying to get his work into syndication, so I wondered
if maybe we should do a show of his work at the college. I’m good
friends with the head of the Tribune Press Syndicate, Willie
Caldwell. I know he’d come.” She raised her palm, as if to stop
herself “I should talk to Eddie before I go on about this. Maybe he
wouldn’t like the idea.”

“I think he’d love it!” I said.

He did. That afternoon, while I bathed Hank
in the plastic baby tub next to the kitchen sink, Barbara hired
Eddie to teach two courses, one in journalism as soon as we moved,
and one in politics and the arts that summer. A show of his best
work would follow a few months later. Best of all, Eddie could
continue to work for the
City Paper
.

Perfect, I thought. Everything was turning
out just perfect.

On our last morning in Atlanta, Buck picked
up Jolene early and drove her to our new house in Tallagumsa, where
she could prepare things for our arrival. Before we left the
apartment_, we had our landladies, the Crawfords, and our neighbor,
Adrienne, in for coffee and pie. Eddie bought two Miss Reese’s pies
for the event, one strawberry, one pear-apple. I’d attributed my
initial favorable impression of the pie in the hospital to
postlabor starvation, but in fact Miss Reese’s pies were the best
I’d ever tasted.

We all cried over our pie, especially Violet
and Iris Ann, who weren’t too happy that we were taking the “lights
of their lives” away. They gave Jessie a pair of white gloves and a
string of beautiful pearls. The boys received ornately monogrammed
sterling-silver mint julep cups like the one the Crawfords had
given Jessie when she was born. Adrienne presented each child with
a personal astrological chart.

The twins were two weeks old the day we left
Atlanta with a U-Haul full of everything worth taking with us
attached to the car. Looking out the car window, I watched the
chinaberry tree in the front yard recede from view.

We passed the Glad Bag Man on his park bench
as we drove out of town.

I waved good-bye, relieved that we were
leaving behind all the hassles and concerns of big city life.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Before the move, the Bledsoes and I had
agreed on a leisurely turnover of the restaurant six weeks after my
return to Tallagumsa. That would give me the time I needed to
unpack, recover from too many sleepless nights, and get
reacquainted with Steak House activities.

At the end of the six-week transition
period, I would be on my own. I might have panicked if my friends
Estelle and Roland hadn’t been so knowledgeable about the
restaurant, but both had run the place when the Bledsoes were out
of town, and I figured I hadn’t forgotten everything I’d learned
during my years working there.

The Bledsoes, having spent their entire
married lives running the Steak House, admitted they were
ambivalent about retiring, and I suspected they would have resisted
leaving at all if they hadn’t been booked on a six-month
round-the-world cruise. Although they expressed confidence in my
abilities, it was clear that neither Mimi nor Howard believed the
restaurant could survive for more than five days without them: they
had never been off the premises longer than that.

Eddie didn’t take any time off after the
move. I’d hoped we could spend some time together, alone, but once
the U-Haul was unpacked, he was either in his studio-the large open
space on the third floor of the four-bedroom Tudor house I’d grown
up in-or at the college.

All the years my parents, my sister, Jane,
and I had lived in the house, what was now Eddie’s studio had been
used for Daddy’s hunting equipment and his extensive gun
collection. In place of the familiar gun racks, trophies, and
cases, there was now a desk, where Eddie worked at his typewriter,
a utility table, where he drafted cartoons, and floor-to-ceiling
shelves across one long wall, where he put his work-related library
and piles of papers.

Eddie nailed a six-by-six-foot bulletin
board to the other long wall and stuck a strip of red duct tape
straight down the middle. On the left side he tacked his recent and
upcoming
City Paper
cartoons. On the right was the work he
was considering for his show, the proposed contents of which
changed regularly. There were cartoons about David Frost’s
interview of Richard Nixon, Billy Carter’s endorsement of Billy
Beer, Daniel Schorr’s suspension from CBS, the federal antitrust
suit against AT&T, and the many other events of the last ten
years that had caught Eddie’s attention and lit his
imagination.

Eddie had always been happiest when he was
busy and productive, and he seemed almost content in Tallagumsa,
where for the first time in years he had the time, space, and
opportunity to accomplish his goals. He turned out some wonderful
political cartoons for the
City Paper
and took over the
journalism course at the college without missing a beat. Barbara
Cox told me that he had quickly become something of a hero with the
kids at the college, in part because he spent so much of his time
working individually with them, and in part because he had the kind
of real-life experience often lacking in teachers. His show had
been set for Wednesday, July 12, in the college social hall, and
Barbara was working hard to include on the invitation list people
who could help Eddie get syndicated.

Despite his seeming contentment, however,
Eddie was true to his word and never missed a Friday night with a
Miss Reese’s pie, an unspoken but pointed reminder of the
provisional nature of our stay in Tallagumsa.

One Saturday a few weeks after we’d moved in,
I was in the den, a bright, cheerful room painted yellow and
decorated in floral fabrics. I was unpacking books, dusting each
one as it came out of the box, and arranging them in the built-in
bookshelves. It was quiet. Jessie was with her grandparents at the
lake, where she spent many weekend days, and Eddie was walking Will
and Hank in their double stroller.

I had just dusted hardback copies of
Ragtime, All the President’s Men
, and
Final
Payments
, sliding them into place on the shelf, when I heard
Eddie return and put the boys in their cribs. He stayed in the
nursery for fifteen minutes, then came into the den.

“The boys asleep?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. “Even Will.” He lit a
cigarette and watched me. His look was mildly contemptuous.

“What?” I asked.

“Isn’t it a little strange for you being the
wife and mother in the house you grew up in? Sleeping in your
parents’ bedroom? Cooking in your mother’s kitchen?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t you feel any of the ghosts here?” he
asked.

“You sound like Adrienne, Eddie,” I
said.

“I thought she just did astrology,” he
said.

“Same kind of thing. But no, I don’t. All I
feel is incredibly lucky that we have this house, great jobs,
wonderful, healthy children, and Jolene.”

“They’re here, LuAnn,” he said.

“Who?”

“The ghosts,” he said. “You just won’t allow
yourself to see them.”

I laughed. “Don’t be silly, Eddie. You can’t
have ghosts without dead people. Here, help me with these books and
stop looking at me like that.”

He shrugged and sat down next to me.

I handed him a dust rag.

Once the unpacking was finished, I had more
free time than I’d had in years, and more than I’d have after I
took over the Steak House. Jessie was in nursery school each
morning, and Jolene watched the twins whenever I was out. Will and
Hank could survive without me for increasingly longer periods of
time as they began to get more of their daily nourishment from
bottles. I took advantage of my freedom, taking long walks, riding
my horse, and hanging out at the Steak House, reviewing with the
Bledsoes the many details involved in running a restaurant.

My horse, Glorious Gloria-or Glory, for
short-had been a gift from my father not long after Glory was born
to a champion show mare at a Tennessee horse farm. She was an early
college graduation present, according to Daddy. A bribe to keep me
in Tallagumsa, according to Eddie.

I’d trained Glory weekends before Jessie was
born. After that I’d tried to ride and jump her at least once a
month. Between my visits, a trainer worked with her, and a local
teenage boy who lived nearby exercised her almost every day.

We kept Glory and my father’s horse, Balzac,
outside of town close to Clark Lake in one of Edwina Frickey’s
barns. Miss Edwina had lived outside Tallagumsa since the day she
was born there, in 1885. Her grandchildren maintained her property
and her horses. Because Daddy had done her some favor or other
years before, her family took care of our horses for free. One of
her two barns housed ten horses; in the other barn were her
parakeets.

A light drizzle began to fall during my
first trip out to Miss Edwina’s after the move. There was just
enough rain to warrant windshield wipers, but I didn’t turn back.
I’d been looking forward to riding Glory for too long.