The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (39 page)

The dead people in the room with us piped up, yelling that I should tell my friend she was wrong. It was never too late, not until you’ve passed out of this life and maybe not even then.

I told Barbara Jean, “My mama and daddy and Big Earl and Miss Thelma all say you’re wrong.” I left out Eleanor Roosevelt because I knew the mention of her would tilt the whole thing from eerie and otherworldly right over into crazy. Then, just like I’d played the cancer card to send her off to AA, now I played the dying card. “Barbara Jean, you’ve got to talk to Chick and set it all straight. Lay every bit of it out in the sunlight, the whole truth. I won’t rest in peace unless you do this one last thing for me.” I was shameless.

Barbara Jean tugged and twisted the fabric of the loose skirt she was wearing as she sat thinking at the far end of my bed. For a while, I wondered if she still might refuse. Then she walked over to me and kissed my forehead. “Okay, I’ll go.” She didn’t sound eager, but she did at least seem resigned to doing what I’d asked. And that was enough. When she left, Mama, Daddy, and the McIntyres accompanied her, pressed close to her sides like they were propping her up.

I was alone then with Richmond Baker and Mrs. Roosevelt.

Richmond rocked back and forth on his heels, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else on the face of the earth at that moment. He said, “Listen, why don’t I go get the doctor for you.” Then he moved toward the door.

“No, Richmond. I need you to stay.”

Eleanor Roosevelt whipped out her popcorn bag again, preparing to hear more juicy stuff from Richmond.

He slumped back in my direction. “Odette, I don’t know how much of the stuff I said the other day you remember, but let me just say that I know I’ve been a bad husband, and maybe I’ve been a bad friend, too. Can I just tell you I’m sorry for everything and leave it at that? You don’t have to tell me what
they
say.” He looked around the room like he was expecting floating white sheets to emerge from the walls and shout “Boo!”

With the little bit of voice I had left, I said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Richmond. I don’t want to talk to you. I just want your muscles. I need you to close the door and all the curtains. And then, when I get these tubes out of me, I need you to grab that wheelchair out in the hallway, bring it in here, and help me get in it. Then you can take me to your car. And if anybody tries to stop you, I need you to be big, black, and scary.”

A loud sigh of relief escaped Richmond when he realized that I hadn’t kept him around so the two of us could have a heart-to-heart. As he reached for the curtains that were clustered in one corner of the room, he said, “Thank God. I just about pissed my pants wondering what you and your ghosts might come up with next.”

It wasn’t until Barbara Jean walked the short distance from the hospital to the tower where Chick worked and saw the puzzled, slightly alarmed expression on the face of the young woman at the reception desk that she remembered what she was wearing. When James called that morning, she had just gotten dressed for a volunteer shift pretending to churn butter in front of a busload of schoolchildren in the Plainview Historical Society Museum’s frontier farmhouse re-creation. James had hardly been able to get the words out, but he told Barbara Jean that Odette’s doctor had said she was too weak to fight off the infection. She wasn’t expected to live through the day. Without changing clothes, Barbara Jean headed straight over to the hospital as soon as she hung up the phone. Now, hours later, she followed the receptionist’s directions to the elevator through a maze of workstations and found herself on the receiving end of even more curious looks. People swiveled around in their desk chairs to watch her pass by in her high-collared blouse, long gingham skirt, and tight, pointy-toed leather boots.

The ground floor of the tower was so cluttered with small work cubicles, file cabinets, and tall shelving units that the round shape of the building was completely obscured. But when Barbara Jean stepped out of the elevator, the space she entered was as different from the first floor as it could have been. The fifth floor of the tower was one large open room with a fourteen-foot ceiling that was supported by massive rough-cut wooden beams. The tall windows that dominated the exposed brick walls allowed in so much afternoon sunlight that she had to squint for a moment so that her eyes could adjust to the brightness.

She saw a long wooden desk at the far end of the room. It was very old and a little beaten-up, but freshly waxed. Behind the desk, which was crowded with stacks of books, Ray Carlson stopped shuffling papers when he caught sight of her.

Two beautiful and haughty peregrine falcons scrutinized Barbara Jean from inside their large cages as she passed by them on her way to Chick. The plank flooring creaked beneath her old-fashioned boots with each step, providing an accompaniment to the soft rustling noises of the birds flexing their wings and moving along their perches.

Chick stood and came around the desk to greet her. “Hi, Barbara Jean. This is a nice surprise.” A quizzical expression crossed his face as he looked her up and down, taking in her anachronistic outfit.

She saw him staring and said, “I’m supposed to be pretending to churn butter.”

He had no idea what she was talking about, but he nodded as if what she said had made sense.

For several awkward seconds, Barbara Jean stood in front of Chick regretting that she hadn’t rehearsed something to say to him during her walk from the hospital. She was struck now with a strong urge to run back to the elevator. But she thought about the promise she had made and, instead of running away, looked directly into Chick’s eyes, hoping the force that had always moved her to give voice to her feelings when she was near him, whether or not she should, would take over. She said the first thing that came to mind: “Odette—”

He put his hand to his heart and interrupted her. “Is she gone?”

“No, no, she’s not gone. She’s awake, even speaking. But she’s saying some strange stuff.”

He smiled. “Well, being that it’s Odette we’re talking about, saying strange stuff could be a good sign.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Her doctor was sure she wouldn’t make it through the day and I don’t think he’s changed his mind.”

“I hate to hear that,” he said. “Well, let’s hope she surprises him.” He gestured toward two high-backed, copper-colored leather chairs that sat facing his desk. “Would you like to sit down?”

She answered, “Yes, thank you,” but her feet carried her past the chairs and on toward one of the tall windows instead. Chick followed her and stood by her side, so close that their arms almost touched.

From the window, Barbara Jean could see the hospital where Odette lay. She thought about Odette, and she tried to draw strength from imagining how her brave friend would approach this. Odette would get right to it, Barbara Jean thought. So she did the same.

She said, “I’m an alcoholic, just like my mother was. It’s a struggle, but I haven’t had a drink in a while.” That was something she hadn’t meant to say, something she had never said outside of an AA meeting. But, after it had been said, it felt like as good a way to start as any.

He furrowed his brow, as if he were searching for the proper response to what she had just blurted out. He settled on “Congratulations. I know how hard that is.”

“Thank you. I came to see you because they tell us at AA that we have to make a list of the people we’ve harmed and try to make amends.”

His head jerked back a little and he looked confused. “You want to make amends? To me?”

Barbara Jean nodded. “I know how bad I hurt you and—”

He interrupted her again. “You don’t need to feel bad about any of that, Barbara Jean. You were just a kid. We both were.” He paused. “And we were in love.”

“That’s what makes it worse, Ray. That’s the thing I used to think about when I sat up at night drinking. I knew you loved me, or at least that you had loved me once upon a time, and I used that. I think maybe I could have gotten past the guilt if I’d done the honest thing and shot Desmond myself. But, instead, I took your love for me and I twisted it to make you pull the trigger. Now, both of us have had to live with it. I can’t even imagine what that must have done to you.”

Chick remained silent. His only response was to slowly shake his head back and forth.

Barbara Jean wondered why she wasn’t crying or shouting, or something. Lord knows she felt as if she were bursting at the seams. But at the same time, she was strangely calm. Well, not calm, she
thought. More like purposeful. She could feel something, or someone, willing her on. She imagined voices whispering in her ear saying that every word she spoke was moving her incrementally closer to a place she wanted to be.

She went on. “According to the twelve steps, making amends shouldn’t injure the person you’ve harmed. So I hope and pray that saying this and dredging it all up again doesn’t hurt you more. It’s just that I want you to know that I’m sorry for what I made you do. And if there’s a way I can make it up to you, I’d like to.”

Chick’s shoulders slumped and his face looked weary. In a tone of voice that sounded as if he were apologizing, he said, “I didn’t kill Desmond.”

His words took a moment to register and, when they did, Barbara Jean still couldn’t accept them. She found herself focusing on his eyes again. She felt sure that, even after all of the years that had passed, she could still read the truth there if she stared hard enough.

It was there, all right. Her throat went dry and she brought her hand to her mouth to smother an escaping gasp. She whispered, “Oh Lord, you’re telling the truth.”

She took a few steps and fell into the chair he had offered her earlier. Part of Barbara Jean accepted that what Chick had said was true. But another, maybe stronger, piece of her had memorized every second of the morning the police had taken her and Lester to Desmond Carlson’s place. That memory, as vivid to her that afternoon as it had been decades earlier, made her mistrust anything that threatened to alter the script of the movie she had played over and over in her head for years.

She said, “But I saw feathers from those birds in the cages at your house. They were all over the ground at Desmond’s place that day. Gray, white, and red feathers. There was nothing that looked like that just flying around town. You had to have been there.”

Chick came away from the window then and slid the other leather chair closer to hers so that, when he sat, their knees were just inches apart. The room had grown warmer since she had arrived, the air-conditioning unable to compete with the July sun, but her hands
had gone icy. They trembled as if she had laid them onto the surface of the frozen river in her dreams. Chick surprised Barbara Jean by reaching out and pressing her cold fingers between his warm palms.

Speaking quietly and slowly, Chick said, “I was there. But I didn’t kill him. I went over to see Desmond late that night after you left my house. I didn’t really know what I was going to do. In my mind I pictured strangling him with my bare hands. But when I got to Desmond’s place, he was already dead on the porch with his rifle lying beside him. I don’t know for sure what happened, but his girlfriend Liz’s father walked up to me at Desmond’s funeral and bragged right to my face that he’d shot Desmond for beating Liz one time too many. He was falling-down drunk when he said it, so maybe it was true, maybe not. My brother spread a lot of misery in his life, and a long list of people wanted him dead. I suppose it’s even possible that Desmond did it himself, like the police decided. But I doubt it.

“All I can tell you for sure is that what you believed … Well, that’s what I hoped you’d believe. I thought maybe that way you wouldn’t hate me, maybe you would believe I’d done at least that one thing for our son.”

Barbara Jean sat frozen in the leather chair, going over what he had just said. She sat motionless for so long that Chick asked her if she was all right and offered to go get some water for her. She said, “I’m fine, Ray.” But in her mind, she was trying to sort out her new role as an exonerated prisoner. What do you do when your cell door suddenly swings open? How do you embrace freedom when you’ve never known it? How do you forgive yourself for serving as your own jailer for three decades?

The easiest thing—and the smartest thing, she suspected—would have been to leave then. But being cut loose from the familiar ground of her guilt somehow made going further less scary.

She took a deep breath and said, “Odette told me I had to come talk to you and see how this thing between you and me is supposed to end. She said it was time to tell the whole truth, lay everything out in the sun once and for all. And she said Big Earl and Miss Thelma agreed with her.”

Chick looked confused. “What?”

She continued without explaining. “Tomorrow I’ll call my sponsor, Carlo, and I’ll tell him about today. He’ll probably say, ‘Barbara Jean, you should have stopped at making amends. You can’t trust what you’re feeling right now. Years of drinking have pickled your brain and left you stuck where you were when you were a kid.’ Or he might say that I’m like a lot of drunks, nostalgic for a sweet past I just imagine I lived.

“But Odette and Big Earl never led me wrong. And since I know the truth, I’m going to say it. That way I can go back over to the hospital and tell my friend that I did what she told me to do. And if that’s the last thing I get to tell her, I think I’ll be able to look back and not have any regrets. And believe me, I’ve learned about regret the hard way.”

At that moment, Barbara Jean felt that it wasn’t just Odette pushing her to talk. All of that ghost business must’ve gotten under her skin because the voices she had heard whispering in her ear from the time she walked into Chick’s office were louder now. The voices encouraged her. “Tell it, girl.” “Preach!” “Speak the truth and shame the devil.” And Barbara Jean would have sworn on that Bible in her library that had been her companion and nemesis for so many years that one of those voices was Big Earl’s.

She kept her eyes on Chick’s handsome face and said, “Ray, I loved you that day I kissed you that first time in the hallway at the All-You-Can-Eat and I’ve never stopped. I loved you when I was sober and when I was drunk. I loved you when I was young and still love you now that I’m old. I thought it would change, or I’d grow out of it one day. But all these years later, after all kinds of people and things have come and gone in my life, that one fact, foolish or not, hasn’t changed even the tiniest bit.”