Temple Secrets: Southern Humorous Fiction: (New for 2015) For Lovers of Southern Authors and Southern Novels (7 page)

“I forgot how dark this room is,” Rose says. “I could never paint in here.”

“So you still paint?” Violet asks. Rose was quite good by the time she went away to college.

“I do still paint,” Rose says. “Mostly Western scenes now, but I’d love to paint more of the landscape around here.”

Violet’s creative side comes out in her cooking and baking. She walks over to the window and tries to open it but it won’t budge. A large crepe myrtle twists upward outside the second story window. At least the blossoms offer a touch of cheerfulness to the drab room. As girls, they rarely spent time here and played in the kitchen or in the garden while her grandmother worked.

“It looks like a museum or something,” Rose says. “No wonder I could hardly wait to leave home.”

Violet resists confessing that she can hardly wait to leave, too.

“I’m surprised a security guard isn’t stationed at the door to make sure I don’t touch anything,” Rose says.

“I can get you one if you want,” Violet says, and they both laugh.

A small photograph of Rose and her mother at Rose’s college graduation sits atop her antique bureau. Rose looks sullen in it, as she always did when photographed with her mother. Miss Temple doesn’t look that thrilled, either, her chin tilted upward in typical Temple fashion. As teenagers Rose talked to Violet about how she was a constant disappointment to her mother. That’s also when their friendship began to fade.

Queenie calls from foyer that the ambulance has arrived.

“Should I go downstairs and greet her?” Rose asks.

“It’s up to you,” Violet says. “She won’t know the difference.”
Or will she?
Violet thinks.

Violet follows Rose downstairs where two men wait with a stretcher next to Queenie. Strapped onto the stretcher covered with a white blanket, Miss Temple appears small and vulnerable, the opposite of the critical force she usually is.

Violet, Queenie and Rose follow the men carrying Miss Temple upstairs. It feels ceremonial, in a way, as if they are practicing for the funeral, not that Violet would be part of the procession. Violet never knew her own mother, so she can’t imagine what this is like for Rose. She imagines it is like witnessing a fire-breathing dragon whose flame is going out. She is surprised her arm isn’t hurting, since it usually announces a death or injury. Does this mean Miss Temple isn’t ready to die?

Two technicians join the crowd in Miss Temple’s bedroom to set up the various machines. A hospital bed sits where the four-poster antique used to be.

“Mother won’t like this,” Rose says to Violet and Queenie. “She would want to die in a Temple bed.”

“I know,” Queenie says. “But this is the only way her doctor would agree to let us bring her home.”

Even the Temple beds have lineages. Miss Temple was born in the same bed in which her grandmother and grandfather died. Working for Miss Temple meant Violet had to know the history of every piece of furniture in the house, as if it somehow might make her dust and polish everything with more care.

Why anyone would want to sleep where numerous relatives have died is beyond me,
she thinks. At the very least, it verges on weird. But to Miss Temple, tradition trumps weird. Tradition trumps everything.

Stories about the Temples are given on every carriage ride tour that passes the house. Most famously, the story of Rose’s great grandfather, one of the more eccentric Temples, who took to his deathbed requesting a final visit from his pet pig, Salty. According to legend, Salty lived on the Temple family’s plantation near Charleston and was transported the hundred miles between Charleston and Savannah and led up the stairs to say his final goodbyes.

Violet overheard Miss Temple tell Queenie one day about how much she liked that “dumb old pig.”

Evidently the same evening the grandfather died, the grandmother condemned Salty to their dinner table.
Revenge for his transgressions
, Miss Temple said, of which there were supposedly many. To this day, Violet is to never serve Miss Temple pork of any kind.

The front bell chimes and Violet goes to answer it. She spies another fancy doggy-do bag on the porch. A nurse arrives, a young woman who introduces herself as Ava. She wears a white uniform, her dyed black hair pulled back in a rubber band. A green lizard tattoo crawls up the middle finger of her right hand, a detail that hints at a different personality hidden beneath the young woman’s professional appearance. Violet knows what it’s like to wear a uniform that’s meant to obscure your personality, but she’s never considered a tattoo. Maybe she should. It would certainly surprise Tia and Leisha.

Just outside the door, Violet, Queenie and Rose wait for the flurry of activity to cease. Rose’s face drains of color and Violet steps closer. On the hospital bed a few feet away is the person her former friend has spent the last twenty-five years of her life avoiding. Even Violet’s chest tightens with the thought. She decides to stay close in case Rose needs her.

The ambulance drivers leave first and then, after several minutes of testing the various machines, the two technicians leave. Ava, the nurse, straightens the sheet over Miss Temple’s body and then motions for them to enter.

“Miss Temple is ready for visitors,” Ava says, sounding older than she looks. If she is aware of the secrets that have caused such a fuss for the last ten days, she doesn’t let on.

Rose approaches the bed and Queenie and Violet file behind her. Queenie rests her hand on Rose’s shoulder, as if to offer emotional support. Queenie can be counted on in a crisis. She was the one Violet called upon when mean darker girls said hateful things to her at school because Violet was lighter-skinned. Queenie was also there when Edward attacked her that time when he was home from college.

“She looks strangely peaceful, doesn’t she?” Queenie says. “It’s like the
Temple
Book of Secrets
never existed.”

Peaceful isn’t a word Violet would ever use to describe Miss Temple. “I guess we’d all be better off if we hadn’t heard of that book,” Violet says, reminding herself to pick up the second batch of dog poop on the porch, and wondering what might come next.

“Look at it this way,” Queenie says, her eyes sporting a twinkle. “It only took a devastating stroke and a coma to achieve this serenity.”

Queenie’s humor helps compensate for the gravity of the moment. Violet is seldom close enough to study Miss Temple’s face. Instead of the usual tight line of irritability, her lips are relaxed and droop slightly. A drop of spittle collects in the corner of her mouth. Rose pulls a red bandana from her blue jean pocket and uses it to soak up the drool.

“It’s so odd to touch her again after so many years,” Rose says. “I half expect her to snap out of the coma and slap my arm away.”

Violet gives Rose’s other shoulder a squeeze, aware that her own shoulder isn’t reactive at all. She turns to look at Violet and Violet wonders if she and Rose might someday renew their friendship.

“You know, I think this is the longest I’ve ever spent in a room with her without getting criticized,” Rose says.

“Iris is one tough cookie,” Queenie says. “That woman should have come out of the womb with a warning label.”

“I hope she can’t hear us,” Violet whispers.

“We listened to her bellyache for years,” Queenie says. “Now it’s her turn to get a little of what she dished out.”

Violet isn’t so sure this is wise. The energy is shifting in the house. The Temple spirits seem to be waking up irritable after a long nap.

Across the room, Ava unpacks a small backpack and arranges different nurse-related items on Miss Temple’s vanity. With this task complete, she steps over and checks the IV drip that flows into Miss Temple’s hand. A thin line of black eye-liner accentuates Ava’s small green eyes, the same shade of green used on the lizard tattoo on her finger.

Nice touch,
Violet thinks. If she gets to know Ava a little better she will ask her about the lizard. There has to be a story there.

Ava sits on a Victorian loveseat in the far corner of the room and pulls a
People
magazine from her purse. Johnny Depp graces the cover. A person her younger daughter admires.

Power and money hasn’t protected Miss Temple from this moment. She is dying just like everyone else, and with a scandal afoot.

The telephone rings and Violet jumps. Until recently, the phone had been unplugged because of all the crank calls they were getting, but with Miss Temple this ill they need a line out. As Violet answers the phone, Queenie gives Rose a brief hug and excuses herself. Violet is relieved to hear no death threats or cursing when she answers.

“It’s for you,” Violet says, handing the cordless to Rose.

Apparently, it is Rose’s daughter Katie on the phone. Rose cuts the call short, but not before telling her daughter how strange it is to be here.

Without looking up from her magazine, Ava smiles, as if she is no stranger to strange.

Rose hands the phone back to Violet and sits by her mother’s side. “You don’t have to stay,” she says to Violet.

Violet appreciates the offer to leave and excuses herself to go make dinner. Rose talking to her daughter reminds Violet that she has two daughters of her own she needs to get home to. She descends the grand spiral staircase with a fantasy of sliding down the banister like she and Rose used to do, until she realizes how many decades it has been since the last time she pulled this off. Long enough for broken bones or traction to result.

Past and present mingle as she crosses the foyer to the dining room and then into the kitchen, her constant refuge as a girl when she came to work with her grandmother. Like a game of hide-and-seek, the kitchen was always the place to run to that was deemed “safe.” Otherwise, she was to stay out of Miss Temple’s sight. A talent she still relies on to get through the day.

When Violet enters the kitchen, she finds Queenie sitting at the large, oval oak kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. The difference between the kitchen and Miss Temple’s bedroom feels like the difference between life and death.

“How are you holding up?” Queenie asks, motioning for Violet to join her. “Can you believe Savannah’s biggest tyrant might actually die?”

“Why limit her to Savannah?” Violet says, and then apologizes. “Rose isn’t anything like her,” she adds and Queenie agrees.

“They say an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but in this case it fell in a totally different forest,” Queenie says.

Violet makes herself a cup of tea. She isn’t much of a coffee drinker—she prefers the smell of it more than the taste and only drinks it if she adds enough half and half and sugar to mask its bitterness.

Rose enters and sits at the table with Queenie. “I’m not sure how long I can just sit there and watch,” Rose says.

Violet pours her a cup of coffee which she accepts and drinks black.

“Would you like to visit Mama tonight?” Queenie asks Rose.

“I’d love that,” Rose says.

“We can go right after dinner, if you’re not too tired,” Queenie says. “I was going to drive over anyway and bring her back. She says your mother’s crossing is tonight and she needs to be a part of the transition.”

Violet has never witnessed one of her grandmother’s end of life rituals.

“Crossing and transition aren’t words I usually associate with death,” Rose says. “They sound more fluid and less final. Although with Mother, the more ‘final’ the better, I suppose.”

“I’m not sure the Temples know when to go,” Violet says. She waits for the resident ghosts to agree or disagree, but they are quiet for now.

“Mama and Iris have quite a history,” Queenie says. “It almost seems fitting that they would be together at the end.”

“Does Mother still believe that Old Sally put a curse on her?” Rose asks.

“Good lord, yes,” Queenie says. “Several curses, in fact. I’m not sure how much of it is true, but Iris is at the effect of something. As I’ve mentioned in my letters, the last place you want to be when your mother is having one of her attacks is downwind. It’s enough to kill a moose.”

“And then have it for dinner,” Violet says, and then offers another quick apology. She is starting to sound like her Aunt Queenie.

“No need to apologize for something that’s true,” Rose says.

“Mama would say that laughter and misery go together,” Queenie says. “They’re flip sides of the same coin.”

Violet wonders how Queenie can still laugh. It’s no secret how badly Miss Temple treats her. Sometimes Violet wishes Queenie would stand up for herself more. This is the part of her lineage she doesn’t understand. The part that thinks nothing of staying under the Temple’s rule. If Violet gets her way this will all come to an end with the next generation and even before that when Violet finally saves enough money to realize her dream. She glances at the spare cookie jar where she keeps her life savings. With the Temple security system this is as safe a place to keep it as any bank. And definitely safer than Violet and Jack’s apartment which was broken into several summers ago.

With fifteen thousand dollars saved in the twenty years she’s worked here she just needs a little more money for a deposit on the modest storefront she found downtown and to buy the equipment and inventory she’ll need. But first, she must say goodbye to Miss Temple.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Rose

The machines keeping her mother alive breathe and beep in an oddly comforting way, a lullaby of technology. Ava, who is stronger than she looks, scoots one of the Queen Anne chairs from the corner of the room to the side of the bed. Rose thanks her and sits stiffly next to her mother as if anticipating complaints about her posture. At first, Rose looks at everything else in the room except her mother: the lavish draperies, the expensive antiques, and a small gold clock ticking loudly on the nightstand near her bed. Then Rose turns her gaze to the body in the hospital bed.

Her mother must have been fifty-five the last time Rose saw her. She is old now. Etched with wrinkles, her mother looks more like Rose’s grandmother who lived in the house when she was a young girl. A woman who scared Rose and always smelled of camphor and mint. Sometimes the old woman would yell at Rose for no reason at all. Her grandmother Temple was a woman who possessed a coldness that made her mother seem full of warmth. Years after she died, the smell lingered in the hallways and in the corners of the rooms. She can almost smell it now.