The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (33 page)

Big Earl stared down at his feet and slowly shook his head. Then he looked up at Barbara Jean and told her the address. As she left, he said, “Be careful, baby. Be careful.”

Chick lived on a block near the university that was mostly student housing, little square boxes painted dinner-mint colors. Was he in school? She didn’t really know anything about his life since he’d returned to Plainview. Was he married? Was she about to awaken a family? She sat in her car across the street from his house, staring at the place until a light came on in back. She decided that was her signal, just like the light in the storeroom of the All-You-Can-Eat she had once watched for from her bedroom. She crossed the street and knocked on the door. The noise of her fist striking wood was the loudest sound on the street at that late hour.

Chick opened the door and drew in a sharp breath when he saw her standing in the harsh light of the yellow bulb that hung over the front stoop. “Barbara Jean?” he said, as if he thought he might be seeing things. He didn’t move, so she opened the screen door and walked in, brushing past him.

She stepped into a small, tidy living room that was furnished with two metal folding chairs, a beaten-up old couch upholstered in cracked brown patent leather, and a desk that was piled high with neatly stacked papers and books. Against one wall were two tables that supported six cages and an elaborate system of lights. Each cage contained an identical small bird with gray, red, and white striped feathers, pretty little things whose sad cooing echoed in the quiet room.

Chick saw her looking at the birds and said, “I’m studying them at
the university. I’m working on this project …” His voice tapered off and they stared at each other.

There he was, just inches away from her again after all those years. Ray Carlson. Ray of light. Ray of sunshine. Ray of hope. Ray, who had danced naked for her to an old, dirty blues song.

The room was hot, warmed by the lights over the cages, and he was shirtless. He was still thin, but broader across the chest than he’d once been.
He’s still beautiful
, she thought,
just like our son was
. She turned her back to him, afraid all of a sudden that she wouldn’t be able to say what she had come to say if she was looking at him.

“Barbara Jean,” he said, “I heard about your—”

Still with her back to him, she interrupted. “I just want to know one thing. Did Desmond kill him because of us? Did he kill Adam because he was your son?”

She waited for his answer, but he said nothing. After several seconds, she turned around and looked at him. His mouth hung open in a face that was slack with shock. His jaw twitched with little movements, but no words came out. When he finally said something, it was so quiet she could hardly distinguish it from the cooing of the birds. “I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know?” she cried out, surprising herself that she had any more anger left inside of her. “How could you not know? Didn’t you ever look at him?”

Every time Barbara Jean looked at Adam, she saw Chick. His profile, the shape of his body, the way he moved. It was all Chick. Clarice and Odette saw it, too. She could tell by the way they stared at Adam sometimes. If other friends and acquaintances didn’t see the resemblance, it was probably because they couldn’t have imagined a man doting on a child who wasn’t his the way Lester had doted on Adam. And Barbara Jean understood Lester’s family not seeing it. They had taken their cue from Lester’s late mother, who saw her light-skinned grandchild and thought of nothing but rejoicing over the new infusion of café-au-lait-colored blood into the veins of her family line. But how Chick could not have known that Adam was his son was impossible for Barbara Jean to comprehend.

Chick said, “I couldn’t look at him. When I came back and heard
that you and Lester had a son, I couldn’t look at him. Or you either.” His voice growing more tremulous, he said again, “I didn’t know.”

She knew then that she should just go home. She knew that words could only make things worse. But Barbara Jean couldn’t stop herself from speaking the truth to Chick, just like she couldn’t stop herself from telling him the story of her life in the hallway of the All-You-Can-Eat back when she had first realized that she loved him.

“I married Lester because you took off and I had to make a life for myself and your child. I married him because it was that or die because I couldn’t be with you. Maybe I was wrong to marry him. Maybe I was cruel to you. Maybe this is my punishment for spending nine years waiting for you to knock on my door and come take me and Adam away, even though Lester loved our son as much as any father could and loves me more than I deserve. Maybe this is God’s judgment for every bad thing I ever did.”

He stepped toward her then and wrapped his arms around her. He pulled her into his body and she inhaled the scent of him, familiar and strange, perfect and wrong. She wanted to embrace him and squeeze him to her, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. She stood stiff and straight with her arms crossed over her chest like a corpse inside a coffin.

He asked in a voice ragged with sorrow, “What can I do, Barbara Jean? What can I do to make it better?”

It just came out, the simple truth of what she wanted at that moment. “Kill him. If you want to do something for me, if you want to do something for our son, you’ll kill Desmond.” Barbara Jean twisted out of his arms and stepped away from him. Brushing off the stray gray, red, and white feathers that had transferred from his body to her black sweater, she said, “I’ve got to get back to my husband. He’s not well.” She left him standing with his arms reaching out for her.

The police were back at Barbara Jean’s house the next day. They were Plainview police officers this time instead of the Indiana State Police.
They talked to Lester for a while in the foyer and told him they wanted him to come with them. Barbara Jean refused to let him leave the house without her. She made such a fuss that they put her in the squad car along with her husband. The police drove them out of downtown Plainview and onto Wall Road. She closed her eyes as they passed the place where Adam had been found.

The Plainview chief of police stood in the side yard of Desmond Carlson’s house, one of a dozen cops milling around—the entire Plainview police department back then. Three of the policemen were loading Desmond’s body onto a stretcher when the car carrying Barbara Jean and Lester drove up. At least Barbara Jean thought it was Desmond. She hadn’t seen him up close in nine years. And he was barely recognizable now, with half of his face gone.

They separated Lester and Barbara Jean then. The chief of police talked to Lester ten yards away from her while a patrolman asked Barbara Jean where her husband had been the previous night and early that morning.

That was when James drove up along with the white state trooper who’d come to the house with him to tell Barbara Jean and Lester about Adam. They moved fast, their police cruiser skidding in the mud. The questioning ended as soon as James approached. Lester came over and stood next to Barbara Jean while James spoke with the police chief for several minutes. Then James walked over to his friends and said he would drive them home.

On the way back to the house, James apologized for the trouble and explained that he didn’t hear about it right away because Desmond’s neighborhood was part of the Plainview cops’ jurisdiction, while Wall Road, owned by the university, was the territory of the state police. He assured them that, after the investigation, it would be concluded that Desmond, overcome with guilt, had killed himself with a shot to the head. James said, “That’ll turn out to be the best thing for everybody.”

When the car pulled up in Barbara Jean and Lester’s driveway, the white trooper shook Lester’s hand and whispered, “I would’ve done the same thing if it’d been my boy.”

It began that day, the rumor that Lester had killed or engineered the death of Desmond Carlson. Eventually, Lester seemed to believe it himself. But Barbara Jean knew the truth. Out at Desmond Carlson’s place, while the policeman questioned her about her husband’s whereabouts, she had stared down at her feet and watched several delicate gray, red, and white feathers, just like the ones she had brushed from her sweater at Chick’s the night before, float across the ground.

That night was the first Barbara Jean spent curled up on Adam’s little bed and the first time in her life she had been drunk.

When she finished talking, Carlo looked at Barbara Jean with an expression of pained empathy on his face. “Whatever happened to this guy Chick?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean did he get arrested or anything?”

“No. He just disappeared. I found out later that he went to Florida, but I never heard from him. And I didn’t see him again until this past summer.”

“Is he here now? In Plainview?”

She nodded.

Carlo reached across the table and patted her hand. “You can do something about this, you know. You can work your eighth and ninth steps.”

When he saw that, even after months of going to meetings, Barbara Jean had no idea what the eighth and ninth steps of AA were, he sighed with exasperation. In a voice that made his annoyance clear to her, he said, “Make a list of all persons you have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all. Then make direct amends to those people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

“This Chick guy seems to be on your list, so you should go see him.”

She agreed that she would, not knowing if she meant it or not.

Carlo said, “I’ll see you at the ten-thirty meeting tomorrow.” Then he got up and left the coffee shop. She watched her sponsor walk away, this chunky man who was so comfortable doling out unpleasant
truths. Barbara Jean thought, not for the first or last time, that she must have some special kind of bad luck. She’d gone searching for a witty shopping companion and ended up with a gay Italian version of Odette.

Two nights after her meeting with Carlo, that moment of clarity Odette had tried to knock into Barbara Jean’s head after she had embarrassed herself so badly outside the All-You-Can-Eat finally came. And to her amazement, it came in her library, in her Chippendale chair.

Without alcohol, her body fought sleep. Feeling ants crawling beneath her skin and unable to even imagine rest, she returned to her beautiful Chippendale chair and the Bible Clarice had burdened her with decades earlier. She did what she had done more times than she could count. She opened the book to a random page and dropped her finger. Then she read what she had landed on.

John 8:32. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Common as salt, as the old folks used to say. And Barbara Jean had found her fingertip pointing to this passage often enough over the years that it ordinarily held no meaning for her. But that night, John 8:32 started her thinking.

Maybe if she’d had a couple of good stiff drinks in her at that moment or if she’d had one more day of sobriety, she would have ignored this familiar verse. In either case, Barbara Jean might have simply closed up the book and gone back to bed for another stab at sleep. But she was freshly dried out and ready for a revelation. She thought later that it was likely any verse would have done the job, but that night it was John 8:32 that rolled around in her mind until it transformed from an adage into a command. Before she returned to her bed, that verse demanded and received a promise from her that she would face Chick. She would acknowledge out loud that she had used him, that she had transformed him, the father of her child, from the sweetest man she had ever known into her instrument of vengeance against his own brother. Then she would have to ask him, “What can I do to make it better?” just as he had asked her all those years earlier.

Before things turned ugly, Clarice, Veronica, and Sharon sat enjoying iced tea and friendly conversation beneath a patio umbrella on the enormous redwood deck that wrapped around the back of Veronica’s house. The deck was the first in a long series of alterations Veronica had inflicted upon her redbrick ranch house after she and her mother split the money they received for the property in Leaning Tree. It occupied two-thirds of her backyard and rightfully belonged on the Pacific side of a California oceanfront mansion. The other changes were fashioned after Barbara Jean’s huge Victorian. She had added on a small turret, two colorfully painted front porches, and a widow’s walk. The result of the renovations was a structure that combined the worst aspects of a Southern California beach house and a San Francisco bordello. Behind her back, Clarice called Veronica’s home Barbie’s Malibu Whorehouse.

With the words “Sharon, there’s something I have to tell you,” the atmosphere of conviviality evaporated. After Clarice told Veronica and Sharon the story of finding Clifton Abrams nude with a woman in the gazebo, she was called a liar in stereo. Then Veronica began to pace the deck, her heavy footsteps echoing like hammer blows as she stalked across the redwood beams.

Veronica recited a list of offenses Clarice had committed against her over the years. She started in 1960 and worked her way forward, spelling out just how Clarice had wronged her in each decade of her life. The most heinous crime, Veronica said, had been Clarice keeping her at arm’s length while publicly embracing Odette and Barbara Jean as if they were her sisters. “It says a lot about your character, if you ask me, throwing over your own family for a foul-tempered, smartass fat girl and a whore’s daughter.”

Sharon said, “Mmm, hmm.”

Clarice knew from experience that a young woman in love could derive great comfort from sticking her head in the sand. So instead of addressing Sharon, she said to Veronica, “This relationship between Sharon and Clifton has come along pretty fast. I’m just saying that there are things she hasn’t learned about him yet, and she should learn those things before she marries him.”

Veronica shrieked, “Minnie warned me you would try to interfere with things. I bet you’ve been itching to pull this for months. You can’t stand for anybody else to be important. It always has to be about you.” She singsonged, “Clarice and her piano. Clarice and her football star.” Then she coughed out a rough-sounding laugh and said, “You’re a fine one to come around here with marriage advice. Why don’t we ask Richmond how he appreciated coming in third on your list behind
the Supremes
?” She put her finger to her chin, pretending to be deep in thought, “Oh yeah, that’s right, we can’t ask him. He put you out. Didn’t he, Miss Marriage Expert?”