Miss Julia Delivers the Goods (13 page)

As I walked into the store and turned down the aisle with hair products on the shelves, who should I see but Emma Sue Ledbetter? I would’ve turned around and studied the cold remedies if she hadn’t seen me at the same time.

“Julia,” she said, straightening up from her perusal of the lower shelves. “Just the person who was on my mind. Have you ever had that experience? I mean, running into the very one that the Lord has put on your mind to pray for? It’s more than coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Um, probably so, Emma Sue. But why would you think I’m in special need of prayer?”

“Why, what with the worry over Hazel Marie, her being in the hospital and all, and that awful home invasion at Sam’s house, I would think that you’d need more than the usual amount of prayer.”

“Well, you’re right. I have been beside myself with all that’s happened, and I thank you for thinking of me.”

“Oh, I always include the caregivers in my quiet times with the Lord,” Emma Sue said. “They’re often quite forgotten, but I know they need help and support just as much as whoever’s the main topic. How is she, anyway?”

“Hazel Marie’s still very weak, thank you for asking. She’s still confined to her room, not even coming down for meals, and all this is on doctor’s orders. The only thing that sustains us is that he says it’s completely curable, although the cure is long in coming. So please do keep holding her up in your prayers.” Waiting the appropriate godly moment, I added, “Prayer can be so uplifting.”

“Oh, Julia, you do my heart good.” Emma Sue got misty-eyed for a second, as she rejoiced in my spirituality. She wasn’t always sure I had any. “But listen,” she went on, “we’re all praying for her and for you, but scattered prayer is not always so effective. What Hazel Marie really needs is the laying on of hands. It’s usually done by the pastor and all the elders, especially on a new ordinand’s head, but it can be done as a healing service, too. Why don’t I tell Larry that Hazel Marie would welcome a healing service? He and I could come to your house and do it privately, since I know she won’t feel like doing it in a regular church service.”

Lord, the last thing Hazel Marie needed was Pastor Larry Ledbetter and his well-meaning wife coming into her bedroom intent on a prayer meeting. She would die of mortification, because neither the pastor nor Emma Sue would be satisfied with offering generalized and undifferentiated prayers. No, they believed in
specifics
. They would descend on her and question her as to her exact symptoms and want to know the name of her particular ailment and what the doctor recommended and on and on, as if the Lord needed a detailed list in order to address each item.

Hazel Marie would never be able to withstand their spiritual onslaught, and I just wasn’t in the mood to lie to the pastor and before God. The laying on of hands, no matter how well meant, would be a disaster.

“I’d hold off on that, Emma Sue,” I said. “Hazel Marie’s breakfast is as likely as not to come gushing out under extreme spiritual stress. I think the best thing for her right now is some long distance praying.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Emma Sue said, “is she that bad off? I had no idea, and of course we should put it off for awhile. I’ll tell you something, Julia.” She glanced around, then went on in a whisper. “Not many people know this, but Larry has a delicate stomach. Sympathetic, I think it’s called, so he might join right in if she started upchucking. Just tell her we’re praying for her, and that we’ll visit as soon as, well, as soon as things calm down.”

Assuring her that I would relay the message, we parted ways, her to purchase a bottle of shampoo and me to scurry away from the hair dyes. No need to give Emma Sue further reason to offer Hazel Marie up in prayer. I dawdled among the face creams, the body lotions, and the bath salts until I saw Emma Sue pay for her shampoo and exit the store. Then I ran back to the dye aisle, quickly scanned the innumerable products to heighten, lessen, or completely alter the natural color of one’s crowning glory, pounced on the Root Touch-Up in Light Blonde and made my purchase.

I declare,
I thought when I was safely back in the car and on my way home,
no way in the world could I continue to protect Hazel Marie’s secret condition with such lies as I’ d told both LuAnne and Emma Sue
. Well, I wouldn’t call them
lies,
exactly. They were more like highly creative stories in the service of a good cause. But the immediate question was: How many more could I come up with and how long would I have to keep spewing them out on the spur of the moment? My repertoire was about exhausted.

Well, I thought with some chagrin, the only savior on the horizon was Mr. Pickens, and a more unlikely one I’d be hard pressed to find. Still, he would solve all our problems if he’d get down off his high horse and submit to one more marriage. He could hold his nose if he had to, just so he made that baby legitimate and saved Hazel Marie and Lloyd from shame and disgrace.

Yes, I knew that bearing an illegitimate child was no longer considered a reason for shame and disgrace. I knew that many people did it these days without a lick of guilt or a tinge of embarrassment, flaunting themselves—clothed and unclothed—for all to see. But the fact of the matter was, Hazel Marie
did
feel guilt and she
was
embarrassed and ashamed, and I was proud of her for it. As far as I was concerned, she was showing character and good form.

Of course, she would be showing a good deal more than that fairly soon, especially as thin as she was, so it behooved Mr. Pickens to get a move on and us to see that he did.

“He got in a couple of hours ago,” Sam said as he crawled into bed well after midnight.

I’d been dozing off and on, waiting for him to come home. I was anxious to hear if Mr. Pickens seemed any different after going through so many lifestyle changes. “Did he ask about Hazel Marie?”

“Not specifically,” Sam said, yawning. “Just asked how everybody was.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Fine,’ and that was it.”

“Well, my goodness, Sam. What were the two of you doing all this time?”

Sam turned on his side and scrooched up close. “We discussed the case, honey. I showed him the scene of the crime, so to speak. Told him what Coleman’s men were doing, explained exactly what’s missing, that kind of thing. This is the first time I’ve seen him in working mode, and I tell you, he’s impressive. Very professional.”

“That’s a relief,” I said, snuggling up close. “He’s such a tease, always going on about something. I was afraid he might not take his work seriously.”

“No fear of that. In fact, he put me off when I asked about his move to Charlotte. Just immediately went back to questions about the break-in.”

My eyes were heavy by this time since I’d been holding off on sleep until Sam was next to me. But my eyes popped open as I thought of something else. “Did that new mattress get there?”

“Delivered this afternoon.”

“Well, good. I’d hate for him to have to sleep on one that was cut to smithereens.” Then in a few minutes I thought of something else. “Did James have fresh linens on the bed? What about the kitchen? Is there coffee and so forth ready for him?”

“He’s fine, sweetheart. James went the extra mile for him, had the bedroom cleared out, the kitchen stocked, and even got one of the television sets replaced. Pickens is in good shape. You can check on him in the morning, well, later this morning, and see if there’s anything else he needs.”

“I don’t know if I want to see him. What if I get so deranged at the thought of how he’s shirking his responsibility that I just fly into him? I’m not sure I could hold my tongue if I see him going along as if everything’s just fine and dandy. I’m liable to grab him up and shake him till his teeth rattle. I just hate having to wait for other people to do what they ought to be doing, don’t you?”

I guess he did, for he didn’t answer. He was sound asleep and after a few more minutes of worrying over how to make Mr. Pickens feel welcome, while at the same time letting him know I was not pleased with his behavior, I dropped off, too.

 

 

 

By the time morning rolled around, it dawned on me that I wouldn’t have to face Mr. Pickens right away. Dinnertime was hours away, so I had the whole day to prepare myself. Which was just as well, for the morning was taken up with coloring Hazel Marie’s hair. We’d decided the day before that it was too late in the day to start the procedure, especially since Hazel Marie was noticeably more active and alert in the mornings. By the afternoons, though, when she began to feel queasy, she’d usually sleep for the rest of the day.

So right after breakfast, Lillian and I stocked Hazel Marie’s bathroom with loads of towels, a chair for her to sit on, and rubber gloves to protect our hands from turning Light Blonde along with her hair. It was amazing to me to discover that a dye that turns hair yellow starts out as a brown color. In fact, the whole process was amazing to me. Especially when I discovered that even though the color would fade away or grow out of hair, it was set forever in my good towels.

I have to admit that we had a pleasant time doing it, laughing with Hazel Marie and hoping that we weren’t ruining her. As it turned out, Lillian didn’t know much more than I did about dyeing hair, but the directions were good and Hazel Marie was an old hand at it. She told us how and where to dab it on and kept a close watch on the clock.

“Y’all better not make my hair fall out,” she said, laughing.

It pleased me to see her in a lighter mood. Maybe getting your hair done is a way to put aside your troubles for a while. But I’ll say this right now, the next time she needed color, I was going to offer Velma whatever she wanted to make a house call.

While we waited for the color to set, Lillian brought up a midmorning snack and we had a nice time sitting together, talking about everything but what was weighing on our minds. I noticed that Hazel Marie was completely off coffee. She said even the smell of it, which is usually the best thing about it, made her stomach act up. She stuck to fruit juice, which was better for her anyway.

Lillian helped her into the shower when it was time to rinse her hair and stood right beside the tub, in case, as she said, the pore little thing got to feeling weak. And she did get weak, unable to hold up her arms long enough to roll her hair once she was out of the shower. Lillian blew it dry for her and put in the hot rollers.

We were all pleased with the results, although in certain lights you could tell where our efforts began and where they ended, mainly because there was just the tiniest tinge of orange where her hormones had acted up. Still, the dark roots were gone, so I didn’t think Mr. Pickens would notice the difference. Getting her to the point of looking her best for whenever we could bring about a face-to-face meeting was the whole purpose of the process. Well, and to make her feel better, too.

 

 

 

 

But after it was over and we’d had lunch, I had nothing to do but dither around, thinking up one ploy after another to get those two together. Sam was off somewhere, probably at his house helping Mr. Pickens find the trail of whoever broke in and stole the very papers he needed.

My mind veered off in that direction, and I began to wonder just who would know what Sam had been working on. I mean, it was certainly no secret that he was doing research and writing a legal history of the county, but he’d been fiddling with that for two years or more. So, what stirred somebody up just at this time? That’s what Mr. Pickens should be looking into, and I decided to bring that to his attention that very evening while he was at our table.

And that thought immediately swung my mind back to Hazel Marie and the urgency of bringing about a peaceful and proper settlement between them. It was the strangest thing in the world to me that she had so completely turned him off. It seemed to me that he had done or said—or
not
done or
not
said—something that had truly altered her very nature.

So it was all his fault.

Well, I could fix that
, I thought. Between us, Sam and I ought to be able to get him to march down the aisle by appealing to his sense of duty, if for no other reason.

And, Lord, what was I going to do about Lloyd this very afternoon, I thought, as my mind picked up on another worry. He might even stop by Sam’s house on his way home from the tennis courts, and that would be it. As soon as he saw Mr. Pickens, he’d come running to tell his mother. She could be packing up to leave before sundown.

I looked at my watch, seeing that Lloyd would soon be home, then I set my mouth and walked upstairs. Hazel Marie was propped up in bed, flipping through the pages of a magazine.

“You look so nice, Hazel Marie,” I said. “We did a good job on your hair. How’re you feeling?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, closing the magazine and putting it aside. “I’m trying to get my mind off it.”

“Off what? Besides the obvious, that is?”

“My stomach’s felt unsettled ever since lunch. I have to keep swallowing and swallowing. You know how you feel when you want to throw up and can’t?”

I nodded, noticing again how thin she was. “Well, I was hoping that you could get off that medication, but you can’t afford to be doing much more throwing up. You’re down to skin and bones as it is. Why don’t you take one of your pills and lie real still for a while? Take a nap, why don’t you? You had such a nice lunch, and you need to keep it down.”

“I guess I better,” she said, reaching for the prescription bottle. “I don’t want to get so that I can’t even keep a pill down.”

“No, we’d be taking you back to the hospital for injections if you do that. Go ahead and take it, then lie down flat and try to sleep. I expect you’ll feel better when you wake up.”
Just about the time Mr. Pickens would be coming for dinner,
I thought, as I checked the time again. “I’ll keep everything quiet for you.”