The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (18 page)

She said, “Hi, Chick,” and then pulled Barbara Jean down the hallway, stopping only long enough to give Barbara Jean a chance to pick up the coat she had cast off in order to show her scars. As she grabbed her coat, Barbara Jean glanced back for one more look at Chick’s beautiful, smiling face. Then she was off to take her first ride in Lester’s blue Fleetwood.

The chairman of the museum’s Christmas auction committee was Phyllis Feeney. She was a nervous, pear-shaped woman who used her hands so much when she talked that she looked as if she were speaking sign language. When Phyllis came to get the Cadillac, she brought along her husband, Andy, who was stocky and jumpy like her. Phyllis was even more animated than usual that day, fidgeting and playing with her hair. She relaxed quite a bit when the title to the car was handed over and she was assured that Barbara Jean wasn’t going to back out of the deal at the last second.

Barbara Jean escorted them to the garage, where Phyllis handed the keys to Lester’s blue Cadillac over to her husband. Then Phyllis climbed back into the Ford they had arrived in and drove off. Andy slid behind the wheel of the Fleetwood and brought the giant engine to life. He rolled down the window and said, “She purrs like a kitten.”

He put the car in reverse and drove out of the garage. Just as he got to the end of the driveway, Barbara Jean called out, “Andy, hit the horn!”

“What?” he asked.

“Hit the horn. It’s the best part.”

He did it, and when he heard the three notes of the horn rise and fall he said, “Oh man, I love this car. I’m gonna have to bid on it myself.” He waved at Barbara Jean and turned down Plainview Avenue.

For a good five minutes after he was out of sight, Barbara Jean could still hear Lester’s car off in the distance singing, “Ooo, Ooo-ooo.”

Odette, Barbara Jean, and Clarice sat talking in the infusion room of the hospital. Clarice, who couldn’t resist judging décor wherever she was, approved of the room. It was pretty, if you ignored the medical equipment. The lighting was less harsh than in the rest of the hospital. And the muted pastel flowers on the wallpaper complemented the comfortable cherry wood and brown leather chairs that stood beside the treatment lounges. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much that could be done to beautify an IV pole. Looking in any direction reminded you of precisely why you were there.

It was just before Christmas, but the room wasn’t decorated. The only signs of the holidays were the red Santa Claus hat worn by the gum-popping duty nurse who kept watch from a desk in the corner and the blinking Christmas tree pin on the collar of Barbara Jean’s yellow hospital volunteer smock.

Barbara Jean wore her smock even though she wasn’t working that day. There was a limit of one visitor per patient during chemo, so Barbara Jean wore her volunteer outfit to look official enough to get around the rule. Clarice sometimes borrowed the smock from Barbara Jean so she could visit along with James on the days he came with Odette.

To pass the time that morning and to distract Odette during her treatment, Clarice showed the other Supremes the twelve fabric swatches Veronica had dropped off at her house the previous evening. Veronica had begged and flattered Clarice into agreeing to assist her in planning Sharon’s wedding, and she had given Clarice a list of tedious chores to perform. In spite of herself and in spite of Veronica, Clarice found that she was pleased to have this wedding-related work
to do. She needed as many diversions as possible to keep her from dwelling on Odette’s health and Richmond’s errant penis. And there were only so many hours a day she could practice the piano before her knuckles complained. Her latest job was to submit her written opinion on each of the fabric swatches Veronica had brought to her. Every single one of the swatches was a subtly different shade of green crushed velvet.

Clarice said, “I’m supposed to help choose the material for the bridesmaids’ dresses from these. Can you imagine? Wrapping up Veronica’s unfortunate-looking daughters in any of these fabrics is just plain cruel. And green is Veronica’s favorite color, by the way, not Sharon’s. Sharon wanted peach, but Veronica told her nobody could tell the difference between peach and pink, so it would look like just a run-of-the-mill pink wedding. Veronica decided the wedding would be green and white, and that was that.”

Odette and Barbara Jean agreed that slapping green crushed velvet on the homeliest girls in town was an insane notion. Barbara Jean pronounced it “child abuse” and Odette, enjoying her curious-bystander-to-a-highway-pileup role, said, “I can’t wait for that wedding.” Even the duty nurse, who had been pretending not to listen in, stared at the swatches as Clarice waved them in the air. She stopped chomping her gum long enough to mouth “Pitiful.”

Clarice explained that she had to get the fabric judging out of the way quickly in order to concentrate on a more complicated chore. She was supposed to find a flock of white doves to be released as Sharon walked down the aisle.

“Veronica saw it on TV and now she just has to have it. Have you any idea how hard it is to find trained white doves? And of course it’s all because I had that bubble machine at Carolyn’s wedding. Everything’s like that with Veronica. Carolyn had bubbles; Sharon has to have white doves. Carolyn had a broom-jumping; Sharon’s going to have laser lights that spell out ‘Clifton and Sharon’ above their heads during the ceremony and then switch to read ‘Hallelujah!’ when they’re pronounced husband and wife.”

Barbara Jean said, “Lasers? Really? You’d think she’d want to
steer away from special effects after that Easter pageant went so wrong.”

“I guess she feels like she’s safe since there are no plans for any of the wedding party to fly through the air. Not yet, at least.”

They were laughing so loudly at the memory of poor Reverend Biggs hovering in the rafters of First Baptist that they just barely heard the hiss of the automatic door to the infusion room announcing that someone had entered. Odette looked up and smiled. Barbara Jean and Clarice turned around and saw Chick Carlson.

Chick wore a tan overcoat with a university ID clipped to the collar. He lifted the ID in the direction of the nurse when she approached him to ask who he was there to see, and she nodded at him and let him pass. He walked toward the Supremes until he stood at the foot of Odette’s lounge. He said, “Hey, everybody,” greeting them as if it were just another day at the All-You-Can-Eat in 1968.

Odette said, “Hey, Chick. I can’t get up and hug you, so you’d better come to me.” He stepped closer to Odette, leaned down, and kissed her on the cheek. He turned toward Clarice and she reached out and shook his hand. Then, after a pause that was just a little too long to feel comfortable, Barbara Jean said, “Hello, Ray. It’s been a long time.”

Odette sat up as much as she could on the infusion lounge and took in her old friend, getting her first good look at him in almost thirty years. He reminded her of a seasoned hiker who had just stepped in from a brisk stroll on the mountainside. His cheeks were red and his gray and black waves of hair had either been tousled by the wind or he had spent hours with a stylist that morning to give him the air of a gracefully aging action-movie star. Odette caused his cheeks to redden even more by saying, “All these years and you still look good enough to eat.”

She told him to pull up a seat, but he claimed that he was already running late and couldn’t stay long. Chick said he had seen James on his way in to work that morning. James had filled him in on Odette’s condition and told him where he’d find her.

Odette asked, “So what brings you back to us after all this time?”

“I’m in charge of a research project,” he said. “We’re working with birds. Raptors, actually—hawks, owls, falcons. They converted the old tower for us.” He waved his hand in the direction of the tower even though there was no window in the room and in spite of the fact that the Supremes, like everyone else in town, knew exactly what tower he was talking about.

The tower was all that was left of a tuberculosis sanatorium that had once occupied the land where the hospital now stood. TB patients had been brought there to take the fresh air cure. Five stories tall, it stood atop a rise at the edge of the campus and was visible from nearly any vantage point in town. Now Chick, the boy who had always been covered with feathers, kept birds there.

“You really should see what the university has done with it,” he said. “The facility is incredible. Twice as big as the space I had in Oregon.”

“Oregon?” Odette said. “I thought you went off to school in Florida.”

“I did, but I only lasted a few months there. Too hot for me. After a year, I transferred to a graduate program in Oregon. The college offered me a teaching job after I finished and I ended up staying till I came back here.”

Odette, who was never shy about obtaining information, proceeded to grill him. Within a minute or two, she’d found out that Chick had lived in Plainview since the summer, had been married and divorced twice with no children from either marriage, and lived in one of the new houses in Leaning Tree.

Chick felt himself beginning to sweat. Since the day he accepted the job that meant returning to his hometown, he had thought about what he would say when he crossed paths with the Supremes. He prepared a short speech, a few sentences about his life in the Northwest followed by a brief description of the work that had brought him back to Plainview. But he had envisioned reciting his carefully practiced patter to the Supremes in a safe environment like a grocery store loaded with distracted, chatting customers or a busy street corner. Now, because of a chance meeting with his old buddy
James that morning, he found himself fumbling through a scattered version of his little speech in a hospital room whose walls seemed to be inching toward him more quickly with each passing second. He had been thrown hopelessly off balance by Odette’s questions, this place, and the presence of Barbara Jean, still painfully beautiful after what seemed like a million years and like no time at all.

Chick veered away from his prepared remarks, speaking faster and faster. He described, floor by floor, the state-of-the-art veterinary facility that was housed in the tower. He told them about the two graduate-level courses he taught at the university and how the brightest of his students now formed the eager young staff that assisted him in his work with the raptor project. He detailed the plans for releasing the first breeding pair of rehabbed falcons sometime that coming summer. After he had listed the names of each of the eight birds in the project and related the story of how each name was chosen, he realized that he had been talking for ten minutes straight and he stopped himself. He said, “I’m sorry. You get me started talking about my project and I don’t shut up.”

Odette said, “No need to apologize, it’s nice to hear that you like your work.” Then she laughed. “But tell me, Chick, what is it with you and birds?”

He grinned, then stuffed his hands inside the pockets of his coat and shrugged his shoulders. For a moment, he was once more the shy, pretty boy they had met almost forty years earlier.

No one said anything for a few seconds. Barbara Jean, Odette, and Clarice did some throat-clearing and fidgeting. Chick stood staring down at the floor, making it apparent that he had prepared only a few lines of dialogue for this meeting and, having exhausted them and followed them up with some nervous rambling, had no more conversation left in him.

Barbara Jean filled the silence with something that surprised them all. She said, “I saw you after Big Earl’s funeral.”

Startled by her own words, Barbara Jean let out a little gasp and her eyes grew large. She looked back and forth from Odette
to Clarice several times in quick succession. Clarice thought for a moment Barbara Jean might ask which one of them had spoken. Of course, it would never have crossed either of her friends’ lips. Clarice and Odette had carefully avoided discussing the day of Big Earl’s funeral—the day of Lester’s death—for months. And they had never once told Barbara Jean that they had seen her staring out of the window at Chick just before Lester decided to perform those ill-fated electrical repairs.

Chick and Barbara Jean locked eyes, but said nothing. Clarice began to prattle on about what a good friend Big Earl had been to all of them. Odette nodded in agreement. Barbara Jean clasped her hands together in her lap to stop them from shaking.

Finally, Chick said, “Well, I’d better get going.”

Odette made him promise that he would come by her house for a visit, and polite goodbyes were exchanged. Then Chick took a couple of steps in the direction of the door that led out to the hallway. Before leaving the room, he turned around and added, “It’s really nice to see you all looking so lovely.”

It seemed to both Clarice and Odette that his last remark was aimed directly at Barbara Jean.

As soon as Chick left the room, Barbara Jean slumped forward in her chair and buried her face in her hands. She took two or three deep breaths and then sat up straight again. She announced, “I’m going to get some coffee. Anybody else want some?” Before either of her friends could answer her, she rose and rushed toward the door. Odette gestured with her head for Clarice to follow, and she did.

Clarice found Barbara Jean standing with her forehead pressed against a window just down the hall, her breath fogging the glass with each exhalation. She walked up to Barbara Jean and stood beside her.

Clarice asked, “Are you all right?”

Barbara Jean replied, “He looked good, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did look good. Grew up to be a handsome man.”

“No, I mean he looked like his life was okay. He didn’t look like his life was sad or ruined or anything.”

Clarice said that yes, Chick looked as if his life had been fine, not knowing where Barbara Jean was going with all this.

Barbara Jean said, “Yes, he’s done all right. He’s done real well. Works for the university now. Teaches. Likes his work. Ray’s all right.” It sounded to Clarice as if Barbara Jean were trying to convince herself.

It is truly a wonder, Clarice thought, how that old devil inconvenient love can rear its head and start messing with you when you least expect it. She’d have bet a million dollars Barbara Jean didn’t want to feel anything for Chick, the man she’d loved before she was old enough to know any better. But it was written all across her face. Game over, story ended. Barbara Jean was stuck with affection that just wouldn’t die, no matter how hard life and time had tried to kill it. Oh sister, Clarice thought, I know just how you feel. Barbara Jean and Clarice stayed there for several minutes gazing out of the window. They had a view of the hospital parking lot and the redbrick tower where Chick was presumably now settling in for a day of tending to his birds. Clarice watched clusters of students walk up the hill toward the main part of the campus, the vapor of their breath rising around them in the cold December air. In the distance, she could see the crosses atop the steeples of First Baptist and Plainview Lutheran. She saw the preening copper rooster on the weather vane that capped the turret at the northeast corner of Barbara Jean’s house rising over the tops of trees that had lost all but the most tenacious of their leaves. Further off, she could see the remains of Ballard’s Wall and the tidy roofs of the new houses of Leaning Tree.