Last Ride to Graceland (12 page)

“We're not open,” she says. “Give me an hour.” She says it neither defensively nor regretfully. Just with an absolute matter-­of-factness, and I know from her tone that the Bay Restaurant is successful. She doesn't care if I come back in an hour or not, because plenty of other people will.

“I'm not here to eat,” I say, and then I spill out the whole story. That I'm Honey Berry's daughter and that I have in my possession a Stutz Blackhawk that once belonged to none other than Elvis Presley. I'm beginning to suspect that my best move is to spew out the facts and then shut up and wait for something to happen, good or ill.

Marilee wipes her hands on a cloth that's hanging from her waist, pulls out a pair of glasses from the top of the dashiki, puts them on, and then slowly studies me from top to bottom.

She must have been getting ready for the lunch rush. She's been chopping and dicing for an hour or better, that's my guess, and the music coming at me through the door isn't the sort of track you play when the guests arrive, not that muted and inoffensive stuff that's only one step up from elevator music. What's coming through the door is James Brown, cranked to the max. Prep music, and she probably has a prep beer on the counter too, Sunday or not.

“You've got the car with you?” she says after she's checked me over and I've evidently passed muster. Looking like my mother has never opened so many doors for me as it has on this trip.

“Yes, ma'am. Parked . . . parked somewhere. Under a tree.”

“And you're taking it back to Graceland?”

“Eventually.”

“You want a beer?”

“Absolutely.”

“All right,” she says, glancing at a clock on the wall behind her. “I can give you twenty minutes. Is that dog with you?”

“Unfortunately, yes, ma'am, yes. I must confess that he is.”

“I'll get him water,” she says, then jerks her head at Lucy and says, “Lay down, dog.”

To my absolute shock, Lucy does.

Marilee goes inside, the door slamming behind her in a way that suggests I'm not to follow. I lace Lucy's leash through the deck railing and sit down in one of the chairs, which reclines so
sharply that the minute my butt hits the seat I'm thrown back, looking up at the bright blue sky. James Brown cuts off, right in the middle of “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag,” and in the silence that follows I can hear the
schloop-oop
of the water beneath me, the slow and steady suck of a tidal bay.

Marilee had not flinched in the least when I said I was Honey's daughter. Once again, I have the vague sense I'm expected. Would Eddie have called her, given his aunt a heads-up that a girl with a chewed-up eight-track and a muscle car and a snarling dog was looking for some answers? Unlikely. And her face didn't even change all that much when I told her Mama was dead.

She already knew it. I don't know how she could've, but she did.

Marilee's back, with a mixing bowl full of water, which she plunks at Lucy's feet, and a Miller which she hands to me before sinking into the Adirondack beside mine. She's heavier than she looks. I can tell by the way the chair groans when it takes her weight, and that's the way it is with tall people. They can hide their bulk, while five pounds on me looks like twenty. She settles back and asks, “You said your name's Cory?”

“Yes, ma'am. Cory Beth Ainsworth. Most recently of Beaufort, South Carolina.”

She turns her head and looks at me strangely, so I rush on. “The Ainsworth is for my father, or my adoptive father, I guess I should say. Honey's husband. His name's Bradley Ainsworth. I have to tell you, to be honest, that all this ‘Honey' business is new to me. I'd never heard the name until three days ago. I grew up thinking my mother was just plain Laura Ainsworth,
but finding the Blackhawk changed everything. Do you remember the Blackhawk?”

“Nobody forgets that car.”

“I guess not,” I say as Lucy noses the mixing bowl off the side of the deck. It teeters right on the edge, then falls into the bay. It seems like it takes forever before we hear the splash.

“I told you to sit down, Mr. Dog,” Marilee hisses, and Lucy drops like he's been shot.

“I'm looking for two places,” I say. “The first is Doozy's Barbecue.” No response, so I go on. “And the other one is called Joe's Salvage and Vintage.”

“Vintage and Salvage. I know it. What you need to go there for?”

So I explain about the eight-track disaster and how I dropped the whole mess in the hands of her nephew or cousin or whatever Eddie is to her and he said he would do what he could. It's beginning to dawn on me that I left the most valuable item I've ever owned with an absolute stranger. Because now that I've had time to think on it, I've decided that tape is probably worth even more than the Blackhawk. Elvis had a lot of cars, but as far as I know he only wrote one song. Marilee just nods slowly as I ramble on, neither confirming nor denying that it was her voice and Honey's talking to Elvis, although of course it was, and they must have been listening to the tape as they drove south from Memphis, otherwise why would it have been waiting in the player for thirty-seven years? I didn't see any other tapes in the car. For all I know, my mama listened to the same two or three bars of that song nonstop for three days, from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean.

“Do you know where I might find this Doozy's Barbecue?” I say when it becomes obvious that Marilee doesn't intend to comment on the news that I first destroyed and then abandoned the last recorded music of Elvis Presley. She's lifted her head from the slope of the chair and is looking out over the water, with a plastic beer stein full of what looks like sweet tea in her hand, but at my second mention of Doozy's, she slowly pulls her attention back to me.

“Well, you've found Doozy's,” she says. “What's left of it, anyway. There's a piece of the pig sign inside, over the bar, so remind me to point it out to you later. That's where I worked, you know. Where I worked before I went on tour and after . . . after your mama and I left Graceland, all I could think was if I got back here, maybe Mr. Doozer would give me my old waitressing job.”

“So she brought you here. Honey, I mean. She drove you down from Memphis.”

She cuts her large, heavy-lidded eyes toward me and I see that I've offended her. “We drove each other down from Memphis.”

“Right. I've been thinking all morning that Fairhope is exactly the sort of town my mama would have loved. The whole time I was driving, I was wondering why she ever came to Fairhope, but now that I've seen the place, I'm wondering why she would have ever left. I'm guessing Mr. Doozer gave you back your job?”

“That he did.”

“I'm surprised Mama didn't want a job waiting tables at Doozer's too.”

“Maybe she did,” Marilee said with a snort. “But there were complications.”

“Like her being pregnant.”

Marilee shifts her weight in the chair. “Pregnant? Not so as I'd know about it.”

“I was born seven months after my parents got married,” I say. “They told everybody in town I was a preemie, but I weighed over nine pounds.”

“You counted it out.”

“Yes, ma'am. In fourth grade we had to draw a family tree and put all the dates on it. Weddings and births and that sort of thing, so there it was staring me in the face, the fact they'd married in August and I was born in February. Of course I was only a kid. They told me I'd come early and I believed them.”

“At least for a while.”

“I guess. But you know the funny thing is, I couldn't bring myself to turn in that family tree. I took the first zero of my life on that assignment. I guess even a kid knows on some level that there's no such thing as a nine-pound preemie.”

“Nine pounds,” Marilee says with a chuckle. “Little Honey must have looked a sight, carrying you at the end.”

“Her stomach stuck out so far she always said she could set a saucer and teacup on it and use me like a table. But that's not the point. The point is—”

“The point is that Honey was pregnant when she left Graceland,” Marilee says. “And that is news. News indeed.”

I have the impression that she's lying. Still trying to hold on to some promise she made thirty-eight years ago. Because if Mama confided in anybody, it seems like it would have been
Marilee. But I've got no proof of that or anything else, so I decide to keep the conversation moving.

“Do you have any idea . . . who the father might be?”

“
The
father?”

“Do you have any idea who my father might be?”

She shakes her head slowly. I'm not sure if I believe her or not, but I've only been here ten minutes and I don't want to fall back into my old habit of burning every bridge right after I've crossed it, or hell, half the time I'm slinging gasoline while I'm still over the water, torching my own security right out from under me. I rush things. I always do. I ask the wrong question or, just as bad, I ask the right question at the wrong time. So I do myself a favor and let the silence stretch. Marilee and I sit and wait, listening to the slurp of the water and the distant church bells coming down from the town. The lunch crowd will be on its way soon.

“So your mama never told you anything,” Marilee says softly.

“Not much. She told me she learned more about music in that one year on the road than in a lifetime before or after. But about living with Elvis?” I shake my head. “She wouldn't even have his records in the house.”

Marilee stares me down at this. She's thinking something, and thinking it hard, but her face is one of those show business faces. It's expressive in one way, the mouth mobile, the eyes large and darting, and she waves her hands around like a hula dancer. But in another way she's blank, hard to penetrate. My mama was like that too. Both there and not there. I guess it's a trick they taught the girls at Graceland.

“You could have stacked up every Bible in Memphis, Tennessee,” Marilee finally says, “and I would have sworn on every single one of them that Miss Honey Berry was a virgin.”

Now this is pretty much the exact opposite of how the man in Macon portrayed Honey.
Your mother was a wild child,
that's what he'd said, pushing back his aviator shades with the tip of his finger.
She did it all and she did it all the time.
I suspect those words will be burned in my brain until the day I die. Either one of these two strangers is lying to me or Honey was as big an enigma to her friends as she was to her daughter. One of those women who showed a different side to everybody she met.

“If Honey wanted to stay here in Fairhope with you, maybe work at Doozy's,” I say slowly, “why did you send her on her way?” I have to tread carefully. I'm on this woman's property and we are both aware that Marilee Jones owes me less than nothing.

“Doozy's was a black restaurant.”

“It was 1977. Restaurants weren't segregated.”

She pushes to her feet. “Maybe not legally. But we had our ways. Things that were just understood, that went without saying. You've got to remember this is the Deep South, not the middling South where you started from, or the shallow South up around Virginia. It makes a difference. Fairhope's as deep as you get.”

To illustrate, she gestures toward the bay and she is indeed right, for if a voyager like me were to take two steps in any direction, she'd be in the water.
Picked up a boy just south of Mobile,
I think, apropos of nothing
.

“Honey always said she'd come back one day,” Marilee says. “She looked into this water and put her hands on her hips and swore to me that she'd be back.”

“But you never saw her again.”

“It's getting close to lunchtime. Want me to fix you something to eat?”

Those waffles from the Montgomery La Quinta breakfast bar are long gone and I definitely do want her to fix me something to eat. But I don't see anyone else coming down the pier, not a server or a line cook or anything, and it's hard to believe she runs this place, tiny as it is, all by herself.

“And your dog,” Marilee goes on. “I'm guessing he'd like more than a bowl of water. Maybe a pork bone.”

“That would be very nice. But you don't have to—”

“I'm thinking you should stay here a day or so,” Marilee says, to my surprise. I've spent the whole conversation rocking from one butt cheek to the other in the deep Adirondack chair, getting ready to jump up at any point and retreat, so the last thing I expected is that she would ask me to stay.

“Hurricanes hit the gulf about every third or fourth year,” Marilee goes on idly, as if this is a logical next sentence to say after just asking me to stay without adding any explanation as to why or where. “A major one got us in the fall of '79, and it was enough to blow Doozy's from the top of the bluff right into the water. They pulled the shell of it back to the pier, and dried it out the best they could, but
things that get that wet are never quite dry again. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, ma'am. I know exactly what you mean. I grew up on a marsh.”

“Mr. Doozer said he'd had enough,” Marilee said. “Seemed determined to take the storm as a sign from above. Sold me the restaurant for a song and then I figured if Jesus had seen fit to fling Doozy's in the water, then the water was where it would stay. We still sell barbecue, of course we do, but we sell seafood too, any kind you want. As long as it's fried.” She looks at me evenly. “So what's your pleasure? Ribs or flounder?”

“Whatever's easy. You don't have to fire up the grill just for me.”

She shrugs. “We open at twelve thirty on Sunday, just time enough to let the good people get themselves down from church. It takes them a while, you know, to greet their neighbors and compliment the preacher on his sermon and walk that long line of steps. No need to rush things. Nobody's got anywhere to be on a Sunday afternoon in Fairhope, so twelve thirty works out fine.”