What I Came to Tell You (4 page)

“Daddy said he’d meet us here,” Sudie said.

Tippy and Merlin, Jessie’s two cats, rubbed against their legs. Tippy was strictly an indoor cat. Merlin spent the day outside but came in at night. Merlin liked to slip into neighbors’ houses when they weren’t looking. He’d tried slipping into Grover’s house but stopped after Biscuit had chased him out a few times.

“If y’all will set the table and fill the tea glasses,” Jessie said, checking the rice in a pot on the stove.

Grover and Sudie went to work, knowing which drawer held the silverware, which cabinets held the plates and glasses. Jessie and their parents had been friends so long that he felt like one of the family. They’d always eaten at Jessie’s on Saturday nights. Over the past six months, they’d eaten even more at Jessie’s, at least Grover and Sudie had.

Grover’d gotten down the plates and filled the tea glasses and Sudie’d set out the silverware and napkins, when their father walked in. He had on his tweed coat and a loosened tie. His face was dark with evening stubble, and he frowned to himself. He bent down and absentmindedly petted the cats.

“Help yourself,” Jessie said, nodding to the refrigerator.

Their father took a brown bottle of beer out of the refrigerator and opened it with the
First Baptist of Asheville Church
church key magnet on the side of the refrigerator.

“Daddy, Grover’s making his best weaving yet,” Sudie said.

“Another amazing one,” said Jessie, who stopped by Grover’s workshop now and then. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t seen anything quite like Grover’s weavings.”

Their father smiled vacantly as he pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table. He sipped his beer, then set the bottle down and looked at it. He’d always had circles under his eyes, but they’d become almost black, like all his worries had pooled there.

“How are things at work?” Jessie asked, lifting the lid on the pot of rice, then replacing it.

Their father looked up. “Hmm?”

“How are things at the Old Kentucky Home?” Jessie asked. That was the name of the Wolfe house, the boardinghouse that Thomas Wolfe’s mother had run and where Wolfe had lived some as a boy. Wolfe had divided his time between his father’s house and his mother’s boardinghouse a few blocks away.

“I met with the county manager last week,” their father said, taking a sip of beer. “She says that with the economy the way it is, they have to make cuts where they can, and that they can’t cut schools or essential services.”

“Essential services?” Sudie asked.

“Like the fire department or the garbage pickup,” Grover said.

“The Thomas Wolfe house is an essential service!” Sudie said.

“I’d like to think so,” their father said, smiling that vacant smile again. “But the county manager said if we can’t get attendance up by the end of the year, they’ll have to cut our budget in half.”

“In half?” Jessie asked.

“I’ll have to lay off staff, and if I lay off staff, we’ll have to cut back hours, and if we cut back hours, we’ll have even fewer visitors and pretty soon they won’t just be cutting our budget, they’ll be closing us down.” He took another swig of his beer. “And I, along with a lot of other folks, will be out of a job.”

“It won’t come to that,” Jessie said.

“Delbert Lunsford has been talking to the other commissioners about replacing me.”

“Nobody listens to him,” Jessie said.

“
Somebody
must,” their father said. “He manages to get elected every couple of years.”

The upstairs of the Wolfe house had burned several years ago. Somebody, they never found out who, had thrown a burning rag through an upstairs window in the middle of the night. Grover’d been too young to remember the fire, but he did remember the big blue tarp that stayed draped over the burned roof for years. Delbert Lunsford, a longtime commissioner and a realtor, had had it in for their father ever since he’d organized opposition to Lunsford’s idea to bulldoze the burned house and sell the land to a hotel chain.

Instead of being bulldozed, the house had been restored with money their father had raised over several years. Before the fire the house had been a plain, ugly, run-down old white house. Grover’d seen pictures. The restoration, which came some years after the fire, brought new life to the house. His father had worked hard to bring the house back to how it first looked. Outside, it had been painted bright yellow, and inside, all the furniture, all the walls, all the floors had been restored to their new old selves.
Their mother liked to say it was a
reincarnation
. Still with the house closed so long, attendance had never recovered.

Jessie served everyone’s plates in the kitchen. The four of them sat down to eat. Jessie reached for Grover’s and Sudie’s hands. And their father took their hands too. Everyone bowed their heads except Grover.

“Lord,” Jessie said, bowing his head, “we thank you for this sustenance. Amen.”

Grover liked Jessie’s blessings—short and sweet. Not like Aunt Paula, their father’s sister. Her blessings went on so long that food would have to be taken back into the kitchen to be reheated. But it had been good to have Aunt Paula around for their mother’s funeral, breaking up the weepy silence of all the red-eyed mourners with her loud sobbing, her swooning and swaying over the coffin and her crying out for Jesus to welcome her precious sister-in-law into His sweet embrace.

They’d been eating a while, and Jessie had their father cracking up with a story about a wealthy widow who was twenty years older and whose yard he’d landscaped for years. The other day she’d said her house was too big to be alone in and asked Jessie if he’d like to “shack up” with her.

Their father laughed. “ ‘
Shack up
’?”

“Her very words,” Jessie said, raising his hand like he was taking an oath.

“And what’d you say?” their father asked.

“I said I appreciated the offer but that I was looking for more of a commitment.”

Their father laughed again. Grover’d always liked eating at Jessie’s. Since their mother died, he’d liked it even more. Jessie could always make their father laugh.

“Someone put stakes in the Bamboo Forest,” Sudie said.

Stunned at his sister’s timing, Grover glared at her across the table.

What?
she silently mouthed.

“I haven’t seen any stakes,” Jessie said.

“Well, they’re not there
now
,” Sudie said.

Grover let his head drop to his chest.

“I wonder if he’s finally selling?” their father said, setting down a drumstick and wiping his fingers with his napkin.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Jessie said. “I’ve heard his daughter might be pressing him for the money. She has two kids going to college.”

“With the price of land in Asheville these days,” their father said, taking a swig from his beer, “it’s got to be worth at least a hundred thousand.”

“I’d say twice that,” Jessie said.

“Wait a minute,” Grover said. “Somebody
owns
the Bamboo Forest?” In all the years he’d worked in the Bamboo Forest, never had it occurred to him that anyone might own it. How could anybody own the Bamboo Forest? It was like someone owning the sky or the clouds or the sun. Even today when he’d seen those stakes, it hadn’t registered that anyone might own the Bamboo Forest.

“Maybe he’s just having the property reappraised,” Jessie said.

“Who owns it?” Grover asked.

“Lunsford,” Jessie said.

“The commissioner?” Grover asked, looking at their father.

“He owns a lot of land around Asheville,” their father said.

“He can’t sell the Bamboo Forest,” Grover said, sounding panicked.

“He owns it,” their father said. “He can do whatever he wants with it.”

Grover watched their father sip his beer. “Is that all you have to say?” His voice trembled. “Is that all you have to say about the most important place in our neighborhood?!”

“Whoa there, Son,” their father said, holding up his hands. “I didn’t mean to shortchange your ‘Bamboo Forest.’ ” He gave Jessie an amused look.

“You always make the Bamboo Forest sound silly,” Grover said.

His father scraped at the label on his beer bottle.

“Anybody like another one?” Jessie said, passing the basket of biscuits to Sudie.

“The thing is,” his father said, looking up at Grover, “you’re getting too old to spend so much time down there, doing those little … art projects.”

There it was, what his father had been waiting to say to him in all the months since their mother had died.

“They’re not little art projects,” Grover said. “They’re my work!”

“Work?” their father said.

“How about some pie and coffee, Walt?” Jessie said.

“If you spent half the time on your studies that you spend fiddling around in that patch of bamboo,” his father said, “you’d be a straight-A student. Like your sister.”

“Daddy.” Sudie shook her head at their father.

“It’s true,” their father said. “Grover’s a smart boy.…”

“Not the way you want me to be,” Grover said, his heart pounding.

“What’s that?”

“You’ve already taken away my afternoons in the Bamboo Forest!” Grover said. “The one thing I look forward to during the day! What else do you want from me?”

“I want you to grow up,” his father said. “It’s time you learn you can’t go running off to the bamboo whenever life gets hard.”

“But it’s okay for you to run off to the Wolfe house?!”

“Grover, I have a lot of people counting on me.”

“What about Sudie and me?” Grover said. “We count on you too!”

His father pushed himself up from the table. “I work my fingers to the bone, supporting you and your sister,” he said quietly. “You think I like working late? You think I like working on weekends?” His voice rose.

“Walt,” Jessie said.

“With your mother gone, my job is all we have! If it goes away, who’s going to make a living for us? Can you tell me that, Grover? Who’s going to pay the bills?”

“Walt,” Jessie said, standing up and putting his hand on their father’s shoulder and whispering. “He’s just a boy.”

Their father kept his eyes on Grover, but as he did, the anger seemed to drain out of them.

“How about some pie and coffee?” Jessie said again.

Their father sighed and sat back down.

“Grover, why don’t you help me make the coffee?” Jessie said.

Grover stood shakily and walked with Jessie into the kitchen, while Sudie cleared the table.

“And, Walt,” Jessie said over his shoulder, “I’ve got a box of kindling outside the back door and there’s a pile of seasoned wood. It’ll be our first fire of the fall.”

Their father stared at the beer bottle in his hands. After a few moments he got up and went outside. They could hear him out back picking through the wood. The one thing their father loved about as much as he loved Thomas Wolfe was making fires.

“He’s not himself these days,” Jessie said in a low voice.

Grover measured out the coffee into the coffeemaker, his hand trembling so much he spilled coffee all over the counter. He started to clean it up.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jessie said as he finished measuring the coffee.

“Lately he’s gotten so uptight about me going out to the Bamboo Forest,” Grover said, keeping his voice low. “And he’s on me all the time now about my grades. You’d think I was flunking.”

“It’s not you he’s upset about,” Jessie said.

“It sure feels like it’s me.”

“If your mama was alive she’d know how to make him feel better. He misses her.”

“Who doesn’t?” Grover snapped. But he knew Jessie was right. Their mother had kept their father’s spirits up after the Wolfe house burned, during the long hard years when it looked like it might never reopen. He’d worked even longer hours than he worked now and traveled to Raleigh sometimes two or three times a week to raise money.

After the coffee was made and dinner dishes left to soak in the sink, they carried their pie and their father’s coffee into the den. Their father, looking more like his old self, shifted the wood with a poker in the roaring fire he had going. He set the poker by the fireplace, making a metal rattle.

Sudie handed him his piece of pie. “Here you go, Daddy.”

Their father sat on the couch, and Grover set his father’s mug of coffee, which he always took black, on the coffee table in front of him.

“Thanks,” their father said quietly and looked up. Grover saw the old softness in his father’s face and the new lines in his forehead that had appeared in the last six months. He remembered how once every week or two, Jessie would come over to stay with Grover and Sudie, while their parents went out to supper alone. He remembered how his father would always be in a good mood on those nights, laughing and joking with Sudie and him. He remembered how his mother would walk into the living room, wearing one of her nice dresses and a pair of her glittery earrings,
and his father’s eyes would light up as if seeing her for the first time.

They’d finished their pie. Jessie and Grover were playing chess on the floor by the fire, and their father was sitting on the couch, sipping his coffee with Sudie beside him, when there was a knock at the front door. Sudie ran to the door and led a woman back to the den. Dressed in green hospital scrubs, she had a wide face sprinkled with freckles, deep green eyes and a smile that reminded Grover of Glinda the Good Witch in
The Wizard of Oz
, one of the few DVDs they owned.

“I hope I’m not interruptin’ your supper,” she said.

“Leila,” Jessie said. “Have you met Walt Johnston?”

“Don’t get up,” she said.

Their father stood anyway. “I meant to get over and welcome y’all to the neighborhood before now,” he said. As soon as you started thinking their father didn’t notice anything, like new neighbors for instance, he up and did.

“And this is Sudie and Grover,” Jessie said.

“You’re the boy Clay met over in the canebrake,” she said. “He says you’re quite the artist. I didn’t mean to interrupt y’all’s game,” she said, glancing at the chessboard. “I told Emma Lee when I got home from work this evening I’d help her put together a bookshelf we bought. Now I can’t find my Phillips. Must’ve lost it in the move.”