Detours (8 page)

Ellis stopped her before she could go on. “Lucky?”

“Blessed, fortunate, privileged—if you like any of those words better.”

“It’s not the word, but the sentiment I’m not sure I understand.”

“I told you last night I’ve been waiting a long time to find out what it feels like to lie next to a woman.”

“You were serious when you told me I’m the first?”

“Beyond serious.”

“And the lucky part?”

Mary spoke softly. “Oh, Ellis, you’re the perfect combination of every woman I ever conjured in my head. You’re so… gosh, I guess I’d say handsome. I love your curly hair and your rich, brown eyes. You’re trim and toned, and you’re so much fun to be with. You like animals, and you’re good with my daughter. Most of all, and you said it yourself, we didn’t have to work at getting to know each other. We just started talking, and right away, it was familiar and comfortable—like coming home.”

“What have you been doing these past four-plus years? I mean, you and Nathan got divorced and you knew you liked women.”

Mary shook her head sadly. “I had urges and inclinations, but I also had feet of clay. I joined every lesbian group I could find—reading groups, gardening groups, exercise groups, lesbian mothers’ groups. I swear I’ve been to enough potluck dinners to last me the rest of my life.”

Ellis spread her hands wide apart. “Surely in all of those adventures, you met some women you wanted to know better.”

“You’re right. I did. And she’d ask me out, or I’d buy a tanker truckload of courage and ask her out, and we’d go to a movie or have dinner or go to the nursery and pick out plants.”

“Followed by?”

“Followed by my spending the next however long refusing to return her calls and dropping out of the group where I’d met her.”

“Why?”

Mary made a sour face. “I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve known since I was fourteen that I was a lesbian, but I was too chicken to do anything about it. At twenty-nine, after a lifetime of listening to my mother’s badgering, even though I knew it was the wrong thing to do, I took the coward’s way out and married sweet, patient Nathan Kimbrough who had been courting me since we were in grade school. What self-respecting lesbian would want to get hooked up with a total rookie like me? A rookie who holds what I presume isn’t exactly a big drawing card in the form of one Natalie Christine Kimbrough.”

“So, should I be whistling for my dog, asking for my truck keys, and dragging my sorry self back to my apartment?”

Mary detected a hard edge in Ellis’s voice. “My turn to ask ‘why?’”

“Because it sounds like I’m the next one in a long line of women you think you might want to get to know, but when it comes right down to it, you’re still not sure.”

Mary was relieved that the sharpness was gone from Ellis’s words. “If that’s what I wanted, I could have simply dumped you off at your place yesterday afternoon when you were discharged from the emergency room.”

“Okay. So, where were you headed yesterday morning when the beer truck blocked the road?”

“To Charis Books, where I was supposed to be part of a discussion group on a book called
There Are No Accidents
by Robert Hopcke.”

Ellis laughed out loud. “How ironic. Obviously, there are.”

Mary wagged her finger like a schoolmarm. “Don’t rush to conclusions, m’dear. The premise of the book is that there is synchronicity in all of life’s events—that what we call coincidences are anything but.” Mary looked expectantly at Ellis. At last, the bulb over Ellis’s head illuminated.

“So the overturned beer truck screwing up traffic, me noticing the rainbow cat on your car window, our talking while we waited for the wreck to be cleared, my turning my ankle inside out, and your bringing me here to recuperate is all just a giant blob of happy coincidence?”

Mary smiled so broadly it almost hurt. “Yes and no. It feels like a series of coincidences, but it was no accident. It had to happen so that we could find each other.” Mary let the thought hang in the air for a moment, then issued her characteristic pseudo-evil laugh. “And now you are my prisoner, and we will tell each other our darkest secrets.”

“So which dark secret of mine do you want to know first?” Ellis shifted her still-aching leg to yet another position.

“We should start with the simple stuff. Who’s your favorite singer?”

“I really like the Dixie Chicks, and I think it sucks that most of the radio stations stopped playing them because of what Natalie said about George Bush. But let’s not talk politics. Who’s your favorite singer?”

“Melissa Etheridge. Every time I hear
I Wanna Come Over
, I need a change of underwear.”

Ellis chuckled. “Okay, I’ll remember that and only play that song when I’m sure you’ve got extra unmentionables near at hand. Where did you grow up?”

“Clarkesville, up in the foothills. Gorgeous countryside, but the locals are pretty much locked in a time warp. Most of my family’s still there. How about you? Where was home?”

“Savannah. It’s one of those places where people often say they’re glad to be from—far away from. Tell me more about your family.”

“When I told you my name, I told you my dad, Joe, was quite a jokester. He died of a heart attack when I was thirty-four.”

“I’d have liked to meet him. I’m sorry he’s gone.”

“Thanks. I miss him. He almost made it possible for me to tolerate spending time with my mother. I still don’t know how Joe the joker and Anna, the straight-laced Baptist, ever hooked up and had children. If it weren’t for her constant nagging about how I had to get married and at least give the appearance of—as she always put it—obeying God’s will, it’s anybody’s guess where I’d be right now. Make no mistake, she’s still a pillar of prayer at the Hill’s Crossing Baptist Church in Clarkesville. My two sisters, Naomi and Gloria, are traipsing right behind her and dragging their kids with them in the bargain.”

“When did you leave Clarkesville?”

“Right after high school. I figured it was my only chance to save my sanity. I had this dream of being a newspaperwoman, so I went to Georgia Southern University in Statesboro and got a degree in Journalism and Mass Communications.”

“Did you achieve your dream?”

“I surrendered the sanity I so desperately wanted to save and went back to Habersham County and got a job as a reporter for the biweekly newspaper.”

“Habersham County?”

“Clarkesville is the county seat.” Mary wrapped her hands around her throat. “I could have gone to a thousand other places, but noooo, I went directly back into the jaws of hell.”

“Where’s Nathan in all of this?”

“Waiting for me in Clarkesville. We got married in February of 1997, and as soon as I knew I was pregnant, I convinced him we had to get out of that backwater town, or our parents would drive us crazy telling us how to raise the baby. He wasn’t wild about the idea, but we moved to Norcross. Nathan tried to find work as a bricklayer, and I planned to get another newspaper job as soon as the baby was old enough to go to daycare. For the first year, Nathan worked pick-up construction jobs, but when Natalie came, he went to work at one of the big-box home improvement stores.”

“How’d he like that?”

“The steady paycheck was great and the benefits were terrific, but Nathan’s a country boy. He couldn’t bear being cooped up all day, every day.”

“Is that why he got the linesman job with the electric company?”

“Right. And it was exactly what we both needed, but for different reasons. He was thrilled to be back in the great outdoors, and I was spared some of the confrontations about our lack of a sex life.”

“Did you go back to work?”

“I liked being a stay-at-home mom, but my brain was turning into cold oatmeal, so I looked for jobs I could do from home. I lucked up on some freelance gigs at various community newspapers around Atlanta. That was the best of both worlds. I could raise my kid, but I didn’t have to let my cranium rust shut.”

“Are you still writing for the newspapers?”

“No. I was doing some research for a story one day, and I met a man who publishes a bunch of regional magazines, including one exclusively about Georgia. I wrote a couple of pieces for him, and about a year later, he offered me a full-time position.”

“You write for
Georgia Life
?”

“Yup, all the fascinating stuff from peanut crops to golf courses. I am your resident expert on Georgia political races, changing demographics in the state, and why our education system stinks. And I do it all from the comfort of my computer in my office right down the hall.” She pointed toward the rear of the house. “Part-time mom, full-time writer, erstwhile lesbian-in-training.” Mary checked the clock on the DVD. “But enough about me. You need an ice pack and a pill, and then I want to hear about the VanStantvoordts.”

Mary went to the kitchen and filled an ice bag, grabbed Ellis’s pills and a bottle of water, and then hurried back to the living room. “Okay, now it’s your turn. Spill it.” She handed Ellis the supplies.

“For starters, I don’t think our fathers could possibly be any more different from one another. I don’t think I ever saw my father smile, let alone heard him crack a joke. He was a professor of art history at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah. I’m pretty sure the fact that I share my birth date with Paul Gauguin—June seventh—was what he liked best about me.”

“Oh, come on. It couldn’t have been that bad.”

“I came along in 1969. He was already fifty-two when I was born, so I don’t think my arrival was exactly good news in his life.”

“Was your mom that old, too?”

“No, she was forty-one, but she wasn’t in good health. I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t sick. When I think back on my childhood, all I picture is darkened rooms and hushed voices and everybody acting like something awful was about to happen.”

“Are your parents still alive?”

“My mom died the summer after I graduated from high school. My dad told her it was too cold for her to sit outdoors at my commencement ceremony, but she went anyway. She got pneumonia. It was pretty awful.”

“I’m really sorry, Ellis.” Mary hugged herself as she spoke. “Losing a parent is so hard. I don’t care if it is the natural order of things. We need better users’ manuals for how to get through it. What about your dad?”

“He died in 2002, just a month short of his eighty-fifth birthday. He lived by himself right up to the end, still in the house I grew up in down in Savannah. And I guess I should confess, I hadn’t been there since Christmas 1999.”

“How come?”

“I always felt like an afterthought in his life. His only passion was for paintings by Rembrandt, Jan Steen, and Vermeer. When I still lived there, we often went for days on end with nothing more than cursory greetings as we passed each other at the breakfast table. Sometimes, he took me with him when he went to museums, but I think it was to make sure I wasn’t tiring my mother rather than so he and I could have time together. He’d lose himself in the artwork, and I’d make up games in my head to pass the time.”

“Were you an only child?”

“No, I’ve got a brother, Nicolas, and a sister, Anika. They’re twins, thirteen years older than me. By the time I started grade school, they were grown and gone.”

“Do you see them much?”

Ellis shook her head. “Almost never. We don’t even write to each other. The last I knew, my brother was working for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and my sister and her husband were in Richmond, Virginia.” She eyed Mary and spoke more slowly. “Dedrick and Helen, Nicolas and Anika. Those were the real VanStandvoordts. I was just a footnote to the family history.”

“Kids never believe they were important to their parents in the ways they wanted to be. Just ask Natalie. And as you’ve heard, the Moss tribe isn’t exactly the great American family, either. Maybe we’d better move on to another topic before we need to take a break and seek emergency psychotherapy.” Mary grinned maniacally. “Did you go to college?”

“I had two goals. One was staying out of museums, and the other was never listening to another droning description about the allegorical view of nature as represented by everyday objects in centuries-old works of art. I went to UGA and got a degree in Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.”

Twilight settled over the room. Mary switched on a couple of table lamps.

“So that explains your landscaping business.”

“I guess. I’d shovel manure out of horse barns before I’d lock myself away behind a desk every day.”

“You and Nathan both. Hmmm. I see a pattern in people I’m drawn to.”

“What else should I know about him?”

“He’s a good man… a good dad. I consider him to be my very best friend. I’d honestly be lost without him. When Natalie was two, he had a serious health scare. He had horrible pain in his testicles. I told him it was probably nothing more than three years’ worth of sperm staging a riot and demanding to be turned loose.”

“Did he have cancer?”

“We went from doctor to doctor trying to find out.”

“Not fun, I’m sure.”

“Not fun in the least. One urologist suggested that, in case it turned out to be testicular cancer, we should bank some of Nathan’s sperm so we could have more kids. The treatments almost always cause sterility.”