Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (4 page)

“Well,” grumbled Rhondalee, “I have my newsletter.” She put her hand on the lowest drawer on the left-hand side of her office-supply liquidation metal desk and gave it a tug. That drawer was always securely locked, but she had to check it a couple times an hour, anyway.

Still locked. She smiled a prim and thin-lipped smile.

Melveena Strange pushed open the metal office door with an elbow. “Rhondalee? Do you have a sec?”

Distractions and bother, the life of a trailer park manager. The busybody teacher was smiling, of course, smiling and smiling because apparently she was so darn happy all the time. Melveena wriggled her way over to a chair. “I was just here for the Afternoon Crafts Circle, and I thought I’d drop by and say hey.”

“I’m real busy.” She glared at the scanty pile of papers on her desk. She decisively moved some acrylic paperweights from one stack to the other and back again, as if she were playing a board game.

“Oh I understand that. I mean, you have so
much
to
do
around here.”

It was about time for someone to notice that. Rhondalee warmed a little. “I do. It isn’t easy with Annie Leigh badgering me all the time. That child is so noisy. Jesus says children should be seen and not heard, you know. Jesus likes peace and quiet. It says that there right in Genesis or somewhere.” Rhondalee had never opened a Bible in her life, but that didn’t stop her quoting freely from what she assumed to be between the covers.

“Amen to that, Rhondalee.” Melveena looked like a cat ready to pounce. “I was wondering, have you given any thought to my idea?”

“Your
idea?
” Rhondalee had a deep and abiding mistrust of all ideas. Ideas were dangerous. “Which
idea
was that?”

“The idea of Annie Leigh going to school out in Bone Pile? I’d pick her up on my way, and drop her at home, too. Of course, she’d have to stay after a bit with me, but I’d get her home eventually.” And there was that beauty queen smile again. “By law at age seven, she’ll need to be enrolled. Think of the work you could get done with her gone all day.”

Rhondalee wrestled briefly with temptation. It was true, Annie Leigh had requested to go to school several times, and she would probably love to go out to that wretched little school with those wretched little girls. For Heaven’s sake, she might even make
friends
with some of that tick-ridden trash. Rhondalee shuddered. “Those Bone Pile kids are not godly. I don’t think they’d be a good influence on my Annie Leigh. Heaven help the Reverend, he has his work cut out with that ministry.”

Melveena smiled again. This smile had so many teeth in it that it looked downright carnivorous. “Think about it, Rhondalee. Don’t say no just yet.”

For reasons she couldn’t figure out, Rhondalee didn’t say no, though she certainly wanted to. The Community Meeting would start in three hours. “I have work to do, Melveena. I have to get ready for the meeting.”

“Of course you do. Well. Bye, now.” Melveena waved a little pageant wave and elbowed her way back out the door. She might have been a lady, but she didn’t exactly walk like one. The men in the park said she did her best work from the waist down. Melveena Strange was considered to have the best walk in the area.

I wonder if they all walk like that in Arkansas, thought Rhondalee. Her face fell into lines and pouches. When some women age, the girls they were hide just below the skin, peeking out now and then with spark and sass. But this was not the case with Rhondalee. Age had drained the youth from her as thoroughly as if she’d been put through a cider press. A generous application of hair dye, Aquanet and party-plan beauty products had done nothing to restore it.

She listened for a moment, got up and cautiously peeked out into the main meeting room of the Clubhouse. Holding her breath, she closed the door and tiptoed into the storage closet. She emerged with a shining face and a key. She scuttled back to her desk, unlocked the lower right desk drawer and removed an ancient Thom McCann box.

Oh, the Thom McCann box. It had once held a pair of little red pumps. Those pumps had been a big part of her plans for her future when she was, well, she didn’t exactly remember how old she’d been at the time, though her claimed age had been twenty-one. She’d bought them specifically to wear to the fairgrounds to drive those LaCour boys wild. Those shoes had helped her walk all over Tender’s heart. The red pumps were long gone, but the box held another dream, her future just waiting to be counted up.

The bells on the outer clubhouse door gave a cheerful jangle. “Rhondy?”

Rhondalee jammed on the lid, slammed the box into the drawer, turned the key and hustled into the closet to hide it. Her husband’s voice was low and sweet. “Rhondy? Are you in here?”

Oh for heaven’s sake, what was he doing here? “I’m in the
storage closet
, Tender.”

He sat at the desk when she came out hauling the old Kirby, her arms draped with orange extension cord. God only knew what he was up to behind her back, just sitting there in dangerous proximity to the drawer. He was looking through a small pile of paper scraps on her work surface. “What are these, Rhondy?” His mouth twitched a little in amusement as he read them aloud. “A heavy load.” “Black as midnight.” “Tall timber.” “A crime against God and nature.” “A tragic waste.” “Mad as a wet hen.” He pushed them into a pile. “You could just rearrange all these little scraps, and you’d have what passed for a conversation at Coffee Klatch.” He laughed, then cringed in pain.

“What’s making you wince like that? Do your teeth hurt?”

“My teeth are fine.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Rhondy? Do you hear anything strange?”

“No, I do
not
. You’ve been drinking, haven’t you. Pretty soon you’ll be like Abner Widdel.” In a trailer park full of drinkers, Abner Widdel was the official park drunk. He sat under the corrugated plastic roof of his lean-to porch and added exponentially to the mountain of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans by his front steps. In his quest to be perpetually drunk, he’d evolved into an ultra-efficient device for converting beer into urine. “I know you’re drinking, Tender, so you might as well stop lying about it.”

“I don’t drink.” Tender sounded tired. “Where’s Annie Leigh?”

“Only Satan knows where that girl gets to. I can never find her when I want her unless I’m busy and then she’s always underfoot.” She plugged in a black connector and struggled toward the door.

He moved to stand. “Let me help you.”

She spat out words like a staple gun shoots out staples. “I don’t need your
help. Other people
might need your help, but I most certainly do
not
. Any help at
all
. Do you
hear
me?
None
.” She wrestled the machine out the door and began to vacuum the courtyard.

She demanded an answer.

Haven’t I been a good wife? Haven’t I? She ran the Kirby with ferocity, sucking up every trace of dust while laying out her thoughts to an Invisible Committee she’d mentally convened to hear her evidence and render a judgment as to her fitness as a wife and Tender’s failure as a husband. I have done that man proud as a wife, and this is how he repays me?

She kept laying out her case as she finished the courtyard.

Back in the office, she found more fuel for her anger. Overwhelmed by the sound, Tender had fallen asleep at the desk. Oh, that was just one of his tricks to avoid working, falling asleep wherever he sat, like a cat. Rhondalee listed his failings and her virtues as she readied Clubhouse’s main room, moving tables, Kirby-ing up the snips and threads that always littered the carpet after the Crafts Club was done, setting up chairs. She shook out a checkered tablecloth on the dais tables for a homey touch. She finished with a pitcher of water and a glass of ice, laying the gavel of office alongside.

There. All set.

She stomped into the office, ignoring his gentle snores. On tiptoe, she sidled close enough to fish his keys out of his shirt pocket and put them in the top drawer. If he decided to wander that night, he wouldn’t be going by truck. She stashed the Kirby. Then it was time to catch up on her filing. Every scrap and sheet of paper was filed according to her own personal system in one of three large black file cabinets. She filed and fussed, sliding the metal drawers closed as loudly as she could, working those drawers like a conductor works his symphony in a rising, slamming, singing fury of passive aggression.

Finally, she had to resort to yelling. “Tender, WAKE UP!”

He did, his face twisted in pain. “Rhondy, do you
hear
that?”

“Hear WHAT? I hear NOTHING, is what I hear. I was just FILING. Now stop that NONSENSE because it’s time to go HOME.”

He shook his head and stumbled to the door. She walked behind him through the courtyard. “Look at you, stumbling like some kind of a bad joke.” But he looked more confused than drunk.

“Maybe I should drive?”

Driving everywhere, like that fool brother of his who would drive his car a half of a block. She was glad she’d filched his keys and left them in the office. “The last thing I want is to have my no-good drinking fool of a husband weaving that crappy old truck around the highway when he’s already lost his ability to set his feet down in any kind of a pattern that anyone would recognize as
walking
.” They made their way home, Rhondalee sending out stinging little volleys of shame and disappointment to keep him moving. “Is that how you want to live your life, Tender? As the punch line of a joke told by Quentin Romaine? What kind of example are you for our granddaughter?”

By the time they reached their front door, Tender was utterly defeated.

Under the awning of their front porch, Rhondalee traded her Keds for leopard-print house shoes, neatly positioning the sneakers on the shoe rack. She’d had Tender install it to preserve the cleanliness of their wall-to-wall. Tender kicked off his boots, ignoring the rack completely, and stumbled barefoot into the house. Tsking, she set his dusty boots on the bottom rack of the shelf, where the yellow dust wouldn’t sift into her pretty shoes.

They entered their kitchen, decorated in early hen house. Tender looked around, a frown on his achingly handsome face. “When’s Annie Leigh supposed to be back here?”

Rhondalee cleared her throat. “I guess you expect me to make you some coffee.”

“Coffee would be nice. But where’s Annie Leigh? It’s getting on dinnertime.”

“I’m not speaking to you right now, Tender.” While perking the coffee, she silently composed a list of the many ways in which Tender LaCour had been a marital disappointment. The list stretched from their wedding night, when he was a
virgin
of all things, to the absurd name he chose for their daughter, to the color he chose for the latest used truck he bought.

He sipped his coffee, which had the usual restorative effect. His eyes cleared, his neck straightened. Proof positive that he’d been drinking. “Thanks, Rhondy. I believe I’ll mow.”

“I thought you were tired.”

“Your coffee revived me.”

She looked at him, nostrils flaring. “If you think I’ll let you go outside and cut that grass by yourself, you’ve got
another thing coming
, Tender LaCour.”

He looked at her like she was crazy.

IF ONLY HE’D
wear a shirt when he cut the grass, she thought. Tender had always been such a ropy man, so tall and lanky and hard. In middle age, his body hadn’t gotten fat or gone slack. He’d just gotten a little narrower in the backside, a little wider through the middle. When he took off his shirt, there was absolutely nothing to make a woman wish he’d put it back on.

Despite her husband’s partial nudity, Rhondalee felt oddly calm as she weeded. She remembered feeling that way after marital relations years ago, but now it was just filing and cleaning and weeding and counting the money she kept in her desk drawer that brought her this sense of fulfillment and peace.

Tender ran a mower over their patch of grass. It was about the size of their bedroom, and rarely topped two inches in height. She knew to the second just how long it would take for him to mow that area, and her entire body was steeled against the moment when the blade whispered over the last of her tidy, parched grass. Her face folded like a bad hand of cards as her husband sank his sharpened blade into the larger patch of lush, uncut turf next door.

She stood up and tried to send him a glare of warning. He smiled. Waved. Oh, she hated it when he played innocent. She sank to her knees with a scowl and accidentally yanked out a petunia. She sent up a mental appeal to the Invisible Committee. “Why can’t she get someone
else
to cut her grass? Why
my husband?
”

As if on cue, a plump young woman stepped onto the porch of the trailer in Space 48. Lifting a hand as tender and graceful as the petals of an opening rose, she pushed her messy yellow curls out of her mismatched eyes, one brown, one green. Her curved body was as inviting as a favorite pillow. She gave off the aroma of baking. It was ridiculous how young and pretty her neighbor was, and her name was just as pretty and ridiculous.