Hung Out to Die (2 page)

She broke down in sobs. And I went over to hold her, muttering, “now, Mamaw, it's okay,” even as I rolled my eyes and thought, geez, woman, you've only had twenty-two years of living just across the river from me, during which you've maintained stone-cold silence, until now. It wasn't like anyone had kept her from having a connection to me, except herself.

But Mamaw Toadfern was seventy-six years old, and I'd come because Sally'd insisted Mamaw was about to keel over any moment from poor health—although you'd never know it from her appearance—and wanted to see me for some special reason.

I'd guessed making peace with her kin before dying. But if this woman was anywhere close to dying, then the snow outside was also close to morphing into sand and turning the farmhouse and cornfield into a beach-side resort.

Suddenly, Mamaw pushed away from me, making me stagger back. “I'm all right,” she said, pulling a tissue from her pants pocket. She blew her nose, then tossed the tissue into the trashcan next to her dresser. “It's just . . . I've given away many of the quilts I've made. I stopped making them, you know, a few years ago, due to my poor arthritic hands—” she waved her fingers around, which, in addition to being hot-pink-tipped, were be-ringed on all fingers except her thumbs, and which looked pretty straight and limber to me “—and my failing eyesight—” she glared at me with her sharp, blue eyes—“but I could never bring myself to give that quilt away because it was the only piece of you I've had all these years.”

She sniffled.

I forced myself not to eye roll, and waited, silently.

Which, after a while, made her a bit uncomfortable, and she started shifting from foot to foot. I took note of that. You never know when such insight into a person's character will come in handy.

“So, anyway,” she said, “I wanted you to have this quilt, but there was also something I wanted to tell you.”

Suddenly, she stopped shifting, narrowed her eyes, and stared at me. She waited, silently.

Which, after a very short while, made me a bit uncomfortable, and I started shifting from foot to foot.

She smiled—revealing the pearliest white set of dentures I'd ever seen—when she knew she had me.

“I need to tell you a secret, Josie.” Suddenly, she clasped her hands to her chest. “Something I've never told anyone . . .”

And at that moment, we heard a momentous crash outside the front of the house.

We both ran over to the bedroom window.

There, on the front lawn, amidst all the many cars parked here and there, was an RV and a cherry-red sports car, right by the clothesline still tied up between trees in Mamaw's front yard. And the vehicles' front ends had vee-ed into one another.

A tall, elegant man in a tan wool coat emerged from the driver's side of the sports car. He looked like he was laughing and cursing, all at the same time. And a petite, elegant woman in a fur coat popped out of the passenger's side.

Mamaw's hand went to her mouth. She looked at me. “Oh, my Lord. My Lord . . .”

Mamaw's bedroom door flew open and Sally rushed in. “Mamaw—they're here . . . Uncle Fenwick, Aunt Nora, and . . .”

Sally's voice trailed off, as she stared at me. Mamaw nodded at her.

“And . . . your mama and daddy, Josie. They're here, too, in the sports car . . .”

That's all it took, on top of my hunger, and Mamaw's emotional histrionics and Youth Dew perfume. I passed out, cold.

Although I vaguely remember glaring at Sally as I crumbled and saying, “Sally, I'm gonna kill you.”

2

All right, I didn't
really
mean I was going to kill Sally.

After all, as she said the Sunday before Thanksgiving, she was just trying to help.

And Sally, besides being my cousin,
is
one of my best friends . . . now.

Of course, back in junior high, she often made fun of me—chanting with the other kids my hated nickname, “Nosey Josie,” which I got only because I am what I like to call curiosity-gifted. And she gave me wedgies at volleyball practice. And pulled me into the boys' restroom on several occasions to dunk me in the . . .

Well. No need to elaborate on those details. That was sixteen years or so ago. Water down the drain, so to speak. I'm over it. Truly.

Anyway, somehow or another she and I have become good friends, partly because she is the only Toadfern cousin (besides Billy, but he ran off to New York, and that's a whole other story) who has had anything to do with me since Mamaw Toadfern declared twenty-two years ago that I was “dead” to the family. And no one dared to go against Mamaw's proclamation, except Billy and Sally.

In Billy's case, I think it was because he was already the black sheep of the family.

And in Sally's case . . . I'm not sure why. We've never really talked about it. I like her and feel sympathy for her since her ex, Wayne-the-No-Good-Bum, left her alone to raise their now five-year-old triplets, Harry, Barry, and Larry. But I never tell her I feel sorry for her, because I think the old Sally might come forth and give me more than a swirly.

I love her sons, my cousins-once-removed, with a partiality for Harry, who is much quieter than Larry and Barry, and who has a real love for books and drawing.

I admire how she balances as best she can raising them with running the Bar-None, a bar and restaurant that her ex-mom-in-law (who also calls Wayne a no-good-bum for ditching Sally and the triplets) sold to her for a very low price when she went into semiretirement because, she said, the busy Friday and Saturday nights were killing her. Sally's mom-in-law still helps, though, running the bar Monday through Thursday night, and keeping the triplets on afternoons and Friday and Saturday nights so Sally can work.

Plus, Sally keeps me from possibly actually killing Cherry Feinster, another friend, with whom I have a much rockier relationship. She owns the business next to my laundromat, Cherry's Chat N Curl, and half the time I'm with her, she makes me laugh, and the other half she infuriates me.

The one thing Sally and I did have in common back in our school years was that we couldn't stand Cherry. She was on the cheerleading squad, which in itself was fine, except she also unmercifully taunted any girl who wasn't, much to the embarrassment of most of the rest of the squad.

But about five years ago she bought the barbershop next door, which had been sitting empty for two years, re-named it Cherry's Chat N Curl, renovated it, brought in two other hair designers and made a go of her business.

Since then, somehow the three of us have bonded. Maybe it's because we all own our own businesses in a town populated by a lot of people who still think that kind of thing is uppity for women (unless, of course, you're Sandy of Sandy's Restaurant—Sandy's run her business for forty years, and nobody dares cross her). Anyway, no one would have predicted our friendship, way back in junior high and high school.

But then, people . . . and relationships . . . have a way of changing and growing. Sometimes. If given the chance. Although not always.

Lessons I was about to learn the hard way—although I didn't know it the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

See, I thought I was just doing the usual good deed of opening my laundromat for a private session only for Sally. My laundromat is closed to the general public on Sundays, it being a day of rest and all, but Sunday afternoon is about the only time Sally has to do her laundry. No space for even a stackable washer/dryer in her little trailer at the Happy Trails Motor Home Court, just outside of town.

I've even given Sally a key, so she was already in my laundromat when I arrived after services at the United Methodist Church of Paradise.

I walked in through the back office/storeroom, hung my coat on the old rack that's been there since the day Uncle Horace originally opened the business, then stopped in the doorway that divides my cozy laundromat from the back room.

Sally was transferring a load from a washer to a dryer. She had four other washers and dryers going and stacks of folded towels and sheets covering one table, and stacks of her sons' clothes covering another. And she was humming “Amazing Grace.”

I grinned. We all find peace in our own way. For Sally, after a long weekend running the Bar-None, it was catching up on laundry while her sons snoozed peacefully at their paternal grandparents'. (They were good people, at least, who had tried to raise Wayne-the-bum right.) The zen of laundry.

Cherry sat on a plastic chair right next to Sally's folding table. Cherry was thumbing through her latest hairstyle book.

“Now, Sally, really, you ought to let me do the highlights and a bob like this,” Cherry said, tapping a page with a coral fingernail.

“Forget it,” said Sally. “My ponytail is serviceable.” She swished her long, brown ponytail—clasped in a green hair elastic at the nape of her neck—in a way that suggested her ponytail might actually have unexpected uses.

“Serviceable,” Cherry said, with a pout and a shudder. A ‘serviceable' hairstyle was, to her, like washing dyed clothes with chlorine bleach would be to me. Unthinkable.

I grinned wider. It was an argument these two had every Sunday. Cherry always just happened to “drop by,” and after we helped Sally load her car up with baskets of neatly folded, clean laundry, we either went up to my apartment—there are two apartments in the second story over my laundromat, and I live in one and try, mostly unsuccessfully, to rent the other out—for a late breakfast or headed across the street to Sandy's. This was going to be a Sandy's Sunday.

Cherry poufed her hair, currently a highlighted strawberry-blond bob that curved to her face without, somehow, actually getting in her face. It was anything but serviceable . . . although it did make her look ten pounds lighter. While Sally was well toned, even skinny, from chasing three sons during the day, standing on her feet at the bar every afternoon plus Friday and Saturday night, and somehow working extra odd jobs as a carpenter, both Cherry and I always seemed to be fighting extra weight.

I fingered my hair—an ordinary bob—tucking the usual annoyingly errant strand away from my eyes. The Forelock from Hell, I call it.

“Serviceable just isn't going to give you the allure you need to capture a man—”

“I've got plenty of males running around in my life. Literally,” Sally said. “Larry was chasing Barry all around the trailer yesterday and I thought it was going to rock off its cinderblocks—”

“Now, Sally, you know that's not what I mean. I mean, with your trim figure, all you need is a new hairstyle and maybe some makeup to catch you a man.”

Sally just hummed louder—I think she was at the “how sweet the sound” part of the hymn—and folded her sons' underwear, which she keeps organized by initialing the inside of the waistbands with permanent laundry marker, something I'd suggested.

“Plus you need a whole new wardrobe. We could go thrift-store shopping up in Masonville . . .”

It was time for me to break in. I walked into my laundromat. “Aw, Cherry, for pity's sake, just because you're plum nuts about Deputy Dean, doesn't mean you have to try to set up every woman you know.”

Deputy Dean was what Sally and I had taken to calling Cherry's latest love interest—Deputy Dean Rankle, who works for the Mason County Sheriff's Department. For some reason, it bugs her when we put the “Deputy” in front of the “Dean,” so of course we do so as often as possible.

Cherry looked up from her hairstyle book and glared at me. Sally stopped humming long enough to grin and say, “Hey, there, Josie. You tell her. She's getting too hot and heavy with old Deputy Dean. Why, they've been snuggled up in the back corner booth at the Bar-None most every night this week.”

I started toward one of the plastic chairs near Cherry. “Really? Well, I've noticed Deputy Dean dropping by the Chat N Curl several times this week—after hours.” I waggled my eyebrows at Cherry while I added, “Let me guess. Private pedicures? What goes better with khaki sheriff uniforms . . . Handcuff-Me-Please Pink or Siren Red?”

Sally giggled, which made me grin in turn. Sally is usually not the giggling type.

Cherry glared at me. “Oh, excuse me, missy. I was under the impression that men were supposed to actually spend time with their girlfriends. At least my guy doesn't have an ex he runs off to for Thanksgiving.”

I gasped.

Cherry turned her glare on Sally. “Or just plain runs off.”

Sally stopped humming.

I eyed Cherry coldly. “I think you owe Sally an apology.”

“Never mind me,” said Sally. “She owes you an apology, Josie.”

Suddenly Cherry burst out crying, put her head to her hands, letting her hairstyle book drop to the floor. “I owe you both an apology. I'm sorry. It's j-j-just you all start teasing me about Dean and I get all nervous, because I think he might really, really be the one.” She emphasized those last two words.

Sally tossed me one of the boys' old cloth diapers—thoroughly sterilized and bleached since their original use, and now employed as cleaning rags—and I tossed it at Cherry.

“Stop sniveling,” I said. “You're forgiven.”

Cherry grabbed the old diaper, dabbed at her face while sniffling. Then she stared at the now mascara-and makeup-smeared diaper, made a face, and started to purse her lips to form an “ew.”

I gave her a warning look and she thought better of complaining about her makeshift hanky. “How do I look? I bet I look terrible. And I have a date with Dean this afternoon. He's taking me to the Sir Save-a-Lot Cinema up in Masonville and then to Suzy Fu's Chinese Buffet.”

“You look fine. Plus you'll end up re-doing your make-up at least twice before you see Dean.”

“Okay,” Cherry sniffled. “And for the record, I just do one coat of clear for Dean's pedicures.”