[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
“Got a nightclub going in up over that way,” Charlie Boy says, and points past the long gravel driveway. “Up where the Amish drive their buggies. I found a Bible there once, right on the road, and I pulled over and picked it up, then I ran it up to the buggy right ahead of me, and the prettiest Amish girl you ever saw was inside. It belonged to her, so she thanked me something awful, smiled wide as the Mississippi. So pretty I still think about her.
“Some of those Amish kids, they find ways to be regular kids with regular degrees of trouble, drinking and all like that. There was a reality show about it, and a paunchy reporter asked this one who ran off to Tulsa on Saturday nights and drank and what not why she’d go on TV and admit to such a thing, and she said, ‘Well, Mama and Daddy don’t have a TV, so what’s the harm?’”
Charlie Boy has been talking for five minutes straight, jittery talk because he’s afraid of what will happen if he stops. I know how he thinks, and right now he’s thinking something bad and true is about to show up, which is not all that wrong.
I found him by driving around this Podunk town, cruising down the dozen streets that hobble around trailers and shacks and a few rock houses. He lives at the one motel right off the highway, pays by the week, but he’s been mowing today for a widow woman, and he’s drinking beer from an ice chest in the back of his pickup. The widow woman didn’t ask him for help, he tells me, but he’d seen her struggle with the mower, hitched over, her crooked back arched like a rainbow over the orange machine. He wouldn’t take so much as a dime for tackling her lawn, but still she watches him warily from her living room, the drapes caught up in her tight old fist, her white head bobbing the way old heads do.
“I didn’t come all this way to talk about the Amish,” I say.
He wipes his brow and closes his eyes for a second too long, and all that chatter from before stops cold. “Why did you come,
Luddie Biddle?” he says, even though I haven’t been a Biddle since I married his daddy nine years ago. When he says this, his eye twitches, and he tips the gold can up, draining the last of the beer.
“Look, Charlie Boy, there’s a conversation we need to have.”
“Daddy’s heart OK?”
“Just dandy.”
“He need money?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Then I can’t imagine what I could possibly do for the old man.”
“Just hear me out,” I say, then cross my arms and touch my shoulders, which is the thing I do when I’m nervous.
“Want a beer?”
“Never been a drinker. You know that.”
Charlie Boy shakes his head and his shaggy hair ruffles the way chickens do after they’ve rolled in the dirt and need to come clean. “Give me an hour, then meet me on the pier at Maizie Lake,” he says, and quickly draws me a map on a napkin he pulls from his pocket.
The lake water is the kind of blue you see on commercials for Florida, and the pines smell like Christmas. When Charlie Boy drives up, I watch him climb out of his truck, his cowboy hat sweaty across the band.
“You look good as ever, Luddie,” Charlie Boy says to me as he walks up. I’m sitting at the end of the pier. He leans against the railing, so I have to look up and shade my eyes to talk to him. “But then you always look good. One of the things Mama puzzled over, thought you’d made a pact with the devil.”
“Sometimes I think I did,” I say.
“Sometimes I think it too,” Charlie Boy says, and he cuts his eyes away from me.
“I loved your mama like a sister,” I say, and my voice falls, because it’s true, and because loving her didn’t do her one bit of good.
“You don’t have a sister, so I don’t know how you’d know.”
“Some things you just know, Charlie Boy. Like right now I know you’re being a jerk because deep down you still love me.”
“Who I loved was Mama, but she’s not here anymore.”
“I wish that she was,” I tell him, but Charlie Boy just smirks. “Let me have my say. Then I’ll be gone.”
He takes a nickel from his pocket, skips it across the water. It bounces four times, catching the light, and then it sinks. He sits down, pulls off his boots. He takes off his socks, cuffs up his jeans, and plunges his feet in the water so fast it splashes me.
“Talk,” he says, and looks straight ahead.
I draw in a deep breath. “Your daddy plans to tear the house down. Not sell it, mind you. Tear it down. I can’t talk sense to him. He wants to bulldoze it and buy a double-wide, not that I mind double-wides, but the house is solid, and I’ve put a lot of my own money into it. He calls it the ‘place of pain and sorrow.’
“I saw a lawyer, but he was no help. A man can bulldoze his house if he wants, and since it was his long before he married me, I don’t have a say in it. I thought that since you grew up there, you might want to stop him. Plus, it will be yours one day, once your dad and I are gone.”
Charlie Boy’s feet are slicing through the water. “You know what sticks out in that whole story?” he asks, but I don’t speak. “Place of pain and sorrow. What’s going on inside there?”
I stretch my back. “Pain,” I say. “Sorrow,” I say.
“Then why don’t you leave?”
“I’m forty-nine.”
“Wrong answer, Luddie Biddle. A woman who marries the husband of her dead best friend should say she’s too in love to leave.”
“Love isn’t everything, honey. There’s a thing called obligation. A thing called vows.”
“Did you love him when you married him?”
“Like the moon loves the sun.”
“You two flat out ruined love for me. You didn’t wait a year.”
I wish I could explain it, how it was after Enid died. Charlie Boy’s daddy couldn’t do for himself, and I needed to be inside Enid’s house, where it felt as if she might walk back in at any second. Grief has a way of scrambling things, I want to say, but I hesitate, and all that comes out is, “If I could go back.”
“After she died I drove for hours,” Charlie Boy says. He points in the direction of the main road that leads out of this place. “Out past the feed mill, up by the chicken plant, cut off from everyone who knew her. I thought if I kept driving, if I stayed away from anybody who knew Mama, I could keep her with me for a little longer.
“Death makes the living crazy,” Charlie Boy says, and it’s so perfect I wish I’d said it. “Only thing I took from the house was that pair of black-and-white high heels I talked her into buying when I was seven years old. Saw them in the window of Nedra’s on Main
“Street. I thought they’d make her look like a movie star. She didn’t make fun of me. She acted like she was happy to have my opinion. Heels were near about five inches, and it must have killed her to walk in them, but she wore them to church all the time. She had the heels fixed when they got worn down on the tip ends. I thought she was beautiful in those shoes.”
“Your mama was beautiful,” I say.
“I thought you two were alike back then.”
“I’m not half the woman she was.”
“I know that now,” Charlie Boy says, but then he cuffs me on the arm, and I feel something inside him turn in my direction.
“Your daddy isn’t good at being alone.”
“I’m not good at being together.”
“You shouldn’t miss out on life.”
“I do OK,” Charlie Boy says, and for the first time he smiles.
“You’re a good boy.”
“I’m twenty-seven.”
“I’m worn out,” I say, and my shoulders drop.
“You think Daddy’ll go through with it?”
“I do.”
“You think I could stop him?”
“I think he’d do just about anything to have you come
around again.”
“Might be easier to come to a double-wide. No memories.”
“Memories don’t end with the wood paneling, with the red kitchen stove.”
“I’m not done being mad at you, Luddie,” Charlie Boy says.
“I understand,” I say. “Plenty to be mad about.”
A cloud passes over the sun. In its shadow, the world turns a different color. The blue of the lake goes silver. In a month, it will be too cold to sit on a pier. In two months, every tree but the pines will be empty.
“Keeping that old house from splintering won’t help your marriage,” Charlie Boy finally says. “I hope you know that.”
“Mighty wise for a boy not yet thirty,” I say.
“I’ve spent some time with the Amish,” he says. “They’re known for their wisdom.”
I struggle to get up — my right foot has gone tingly. Charlie Boy rises and helps me. “I’ll go now,” I say.
He stands on the pier, his cowboy hat shading his eyes so I can’t read him at all.
When I get almost to the end, I turn back and say, “Those high heels, you still have ‘em?”
“Sure do,” he says. “Never showed ‘em to another living soul, though. It would be like giving away the center of everything that is, if that makes any sense. Like letting somebody walk around inside your head.” And then he taps his chest. “Or maybe your heart. Somebody walking around inside your heart.”
The ride home isn’t nearly long enough. I circle the block three times before I get the nerve to pull in the drive. I don’t know if the house will come down, but if it does, I’ll not survive it. I close my eyes and imagine it, the yellow bulldozer, the gut-punch of wood and glass and metal torn together, and I can see myself watching, my old white suitcase by my side, leaving this place of pain and sorrow, where I once knew joy, but so long ago it’s almost not a memory at all.
