Her Own Place (24 page)

“Your mother,” Fletcher Owens told him, “evidently thought that I went off with the money she keeps in that bag. Is that right, Mrs. Barnes?”

Mae Lee's expression was an odd mixture of joy and pain. Then tears welled and overflowed her eyes.

“We thought she had a stroke,” Taylor explained to Fletcher Owens. “The day after you left, something happened to her. They couldn't find anything wrong with her at the hospital, but it's been like she'd lost her mind or something. She wouldn't tell us what was wrong. And all the time, it was this money which she must have been keeping hidden here in the house, and we didn't even know existed. She must have forgotten where she kept it, and she thought . . .”

“That I'd stolen it,” Fletcher Owens finished the explanation for him.

Now Ellabelle pulled herself up to all of her full, righteous glory. “What was she supposed to think?” she demanded. “You just up and left without hardly saying scat. Didn't say where you were going, or why. Like a thief in the night. Then her money turns up missing, or she thinks it's missing. Isn't that right, Mae Lee?”

Mae Lee only covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed. Taylor knelt down next to her chair and put his arm around his mother. “It's all right, Mama,” he said. “We understand.”

“Well,” Ellabelle puffed, “if this isn't the damnedest thing I've ever seen. Here we are sitting around getting ready for a funeral, and talking about sending Mae Lee to the hospital up in Durham, and all the time Mae Lee and Mr. Fletcher have only had some crazy misunderstanding. Simply because neither one of them had the brains to tell anybody else what was going on!”

Fletcher Owens shook his head sadly. “It wasn't very thoughtful of me,” he said. “I did leave my trunk behind, but I should have explained where I was going. My daughter in
High Point was about to have a baby, and her husband was out of the country and there was nobody else to take care of her children.” He turned to Mae Lee. “I'm truly sorry for the mix-up, but I'm getting to be an old man, and I tend to forget that others can't read my mind.”

“We are all getting old, I'm afraid,” Ellabelle said.

Now everybody began talking at once. “Won't you sit down, Mr. Owens?” Dallace asked. “I'm sorry we're in such confusion.”

“Thank you,” Fletcher Owens said, “but I've been traveling most of the day, and I'm very tired. If it's all right, I'll just go on to my room.”

“Your room?” Dallace was obviously embarrassed. “I'm afraid that we weren't expecting you, and...”

“Mr. Owens,” Taylor quickly broke in, “the girls have been staying in your room, but if you don't mind, you could sleep on the sun porch tonight, and they'll be out of there tomorrow morning.”

“No, I can stay at a motel tonight,” Fletcher Owens said. “I don't want to cause any more disruption than what I've already caused. If you'll just let me use the phone, I'll call a taxicab.”

“It's no disruption,” Taylor assured him. “I've been sleeping out there, but I'm going straight back to my family, now that Mama's all right again.” He picked up the two suitcases. “There's plenty of room for you. You just come right along with me.”

After Fletcher Owens had excused himself and gone out to the sun porch, and Taylor had told his mother and sisters
good-bye and departed for home, Mae Lee and her daughters and Ellabelle sat in the living room and talked. Mae Lee had stopped crying, and after a while she began to seem like her old self again, although obviously she was still feeling embarrassed about what had happened.

“If it hadn't caused so much grief and pain,” Ellabelle declared, “this whole thing would be funny. Shame on you,” she said to Mae Lee, “getting yourself all worked up over a man at your age!” She laughed.

“Was it the man, or the money?” Annie Ruth asked.

“I'd say it was a little of both,” Amberlee said.

“What I don't understand, Mama,” Dallace said, “is why you were keeping the money in the house in the first place, instead of putting it in the bank like Warren said he told you to do?”

“I should have listened to him,” Mae Lee agreed. She held up the bag with the money in it. “Tomorrow this is going in the bank, every cent of it. Even the twenty-two cents.” She rose to her feet. “It's past my time for me to be going to bed, too. It's been a long day for all.”

The sound of a buzzing chain saw drifted across the countryside. It was the sound of fall. Soon winter's cold would swallow up the fall afternoons and pull them into early darkness.

Mae Lee and Ellabelle sat on the front porch. It was time for their yearly watch for the migrating Canada geese flying south. They looked forward to those rare glimpses of the beautiful creatures, the sudden chorus of honking overhead. For years it had been a time they shared. They never made a conscious effort to make it a special occasion. There was no need to; the occasion created itself. They pulled warm wraps tightly about their bodies.

“A cup of hot cider or cocoa would be nice right now,” Mae Lee said.

“A piece of sweet potato custard pie would even be better,” Ellabelle put in. “But with Mr. Fletcher rooming here, I bet there's not a sliver left in the house.”

Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 1993 by Dori Sanders. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Design by Molly Renda.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used ficticiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-252-1

ALSO BY
DORI SANDERS
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