Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (22 page)

They went back to her parents’ house for dinner. Loretta James had cooked a big meal, and they sat down to collard greens and squash casserole and field peas with stewed tomatoes and fried chicken and biscuits, washed down with gallons of sweet tea. For dessert there was peach cobbler. The children ate like field hands and entertained them with tales of the catfish. Eustis James and Jimmy Lee had worked together on several projects over the years, and pretty soon Eustis began to thaw toward the young man, and include him in the conversation. After awhile Eustis and Jimmy Lee began to exchange fishing stories, each more wild and fantastic than the last as they tried to outdo each other. The children laughed and slapped the table and rolled their eyes at their mother with each new whopper. Jimmy Lee had second helpings of everything and praised Loretta’s cooking skills until she turned beet-red and gushed like a schoolgirl.

When it was time for him to go, Nita walked him to his truck. They stood together, side by side, looking at the stars. Nita had never seen such a pretty night sky.

“Look how clear it is,” she said. “You can see every star like it was painted on.”

His breathing was slow and rhythmic. She could feel his breath on her cheek. “Do you know in the city you can’t even see the night sky?” he said. “All the reflected light keeps it hidden. It’s one of the reasons I never could stay in Atlanta. I had to get back to a place where I could see the stars.”

“I didn’t know you lived in Atlanta,” she said, glancing at him. His face, so close to hers, gleamed in the moonlight. “I probably should be getting home,” she said.

“Will Old Chuck be waiting up?”

“Who?” she said.

He took her in his arms and kissed her so long and so slow that she lost track of time and space and the whole world seemed to collapse around her like a black hole. She had never, in her whole life, been kissed like that. When he finished with her mouth, he kissed her neck and then he dropped his head on her shoulder and lifted her up in his arms, holding her there just a few inches above the ground.

“Damn,” he said, nuzzling her neck.

“Put me down before you hurt yourself,” she said softly.

“I’ve already hurt myself.” He kissed her again and set her down. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said.

When she came into the house later, her body light and freed from the weight of gravity, her mother was waiting for her.

“Now that one,” Loretta said, wagging her finger in the direction of Jimmy Lee’s disappearing truck, “is a keeper.”

CHAPTER

TWELVE

T
HE
S
UNDAY NIGHT
before Leonard left for his hunting trip, Lavonne walked around the house and waited, restlessly, for Mona Shapiro’s phone call. They had worked it out that Mona would call late, too late for Leonard to have time to think about what he would do, but Lavonne realized now she hadn’t specified what “late” meant. Late to Mona might mean eight o’clock. She could hear Leonard downstairs in the family room. She prayed their plan would work, but the voice in her head relentlessly calculated the odds for failure. She did a load of laundry, checked the clock at seven-thirty, folded a load of laundry, cleaned the bathroom, and checked the clock again at eight-fifteen. Her stomach throbbed. A rash broke out along her neck and her right arm. At eight-thirty the phone rang and Lavonne jumped like someone had touched a hot poker to her back. She let Leonard answer it, and then went to the top of the stairs to listen.

She could hear him a few minutes later, stomping down the hallway in his bare feet.

“Lavonne!”

“Yes. I’m up here.” She leaned over the banister so he could see her.

His face was red and slightly puffy. “That woman from the Kudzu Ball called again. She says she needs to talk to you about your duties as queen.” He wrapped his hands around the banister post like he was wrapping his hands around Lavonne’s neck. “I told her there was a mistake, that you wouldn’t be able to attend the ball but she said you have to call her.” His nose quivered. His bald spot shone like wet linoleum. “I thought we decided this was something you wouldn’t do. I thought I made it clear this was something I didn’t want you to do.”

Lavonne thought,
I’ll be the goddamned Kudzu Queen if it’s the last thing I ever do.
Lavonne said, “Sure, I’ll call her.”

Mona Shapiro called at ten-thirty. Leonard answered the phone in the kitchen and Lavonne could hear him arguing with her. After awhile he slammed the phone down and came into the family room.

“Goddamn it,” he said, throwing himself into a chair. He stared despondently at the blank TV screen. From time to time his lips moved as if he were arguing with some phantom adversary. Lavonne pretended to flip through a magazine. She yawned. “Is there a problem?” she said finally, trying to sound casual.

Leonard groaned and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his face hidden in his hands. He looked the very picture of rage and dejection.

Lavonne waited a minute and then asked again, “What’s wrong?” She forced herself to sound uninterested, her eyes fixed on the glossy pages of the magazine in her lap.

“You spend your whole year working your ass off, just so you can have this one week of relaxation,” Leonard said. “Fifty-one weeks of drudgery for one week of pure bliss.” He was working himself into a frenzy. He sounded like he might cry. Lavonne had never heard Leonard refer to a family vacation as “pure bliss.” She supposed family vacations would fall under the category of “drudgery.” “My one week of relaxation and now I’m going to have to miss it because of one crazy old woman who can’t make up her mind what in the hell she wants to do. It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.”

Lavonne clamped her lips together and flipped through the magazine. If she sounded too interested, he’d know something was wrong. Normally, she didn’t give a shit about problems he brought home from the office.

Leonard leaned back in his chair, his hands dropped in his lap like slabs of raw meat. The vein in his forehead pulsed. After awhile he said, “I’ve been after her for three months to close. I’ve had the documents ready and just sitting in a file, waiting for her to make up her goddamned mind. We were supposed to close last week and then she called at the last minute and postponed.”

“Who?” Lavonne said.

“The Shapiro woman who owns the bakery on Broad Street. The one you hired to cater the party.”

“What do you want with a bakery?”

“I don’t want a goddamn bakery!” He waved his hand at her like she was purposefully missing the whole point. “I want the real estate.”

Lavonne didn’t say anything. She fanned the corners of the magazine, letting them slap against the palm of her hand.

“I’ve been waiting for three months for her to make up her mind and close, and now, the night before I’m supposed to leave town, she decides she has to close tomorrow, and it has to be at one o’clock, or she walks.” Leonard shook his head. He wiped his face with one hand, dropped it again in his lap. “I mean, who is she to dictate terms to me?” he asked an imaginary audience.

“Maybe she’s had a better offer.”

Leonard looked at her like this hadn’t occurred to him. The dishwasher hummed in the kitchen. A shrub in the shape of a rabbit pressed against the window. “Whose side are you on, Lavonne?” he asked evenly.

“I’m not on anyone’s side, Leonard,” she said. “I really don’t give a shit who buys the bakery. I’m just trying to figure out why you’re getting so worked up over something so stupid.”

He stared at her, forcing himself to count to ten, forcing his turbulent heart to slow. “I’m getting worked up, Lavonne, because I have to be at a closing tomorrow at one, which means I’ll miss my flight to Bozeman.”

“So take a later flight.”

“There is no later flight. Do you know how hard it is to make arrangements to fly into Push Hard, Montana?”

“So go a day late.”

“A day late!” He jumped up and began to pace the room. “If I go a day late, I’ll miss a day of hunting. They won’t wait for me. They’ll ride up to base camp without me and I’ll miss all the action. I don’t want to go a day late!” She wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he suddenly threw himself on the floor and began to kick his feet and howl like a two-year-old.

“Okay.” Lavonne put the magazine down. She leaned forward, trying to look as sincere as possible. “Okay,” she said. “How about this?”

He stopped pacing and looked at her. She glanced down at the floor, pretending she was winging it as she went along.
I should win an Academy Award for this performance,
she thought.
I should win a goddamn Oscar.
“You said you had all the closing documents prepared, right?”

Leonard nodded miserably. “Yes,” he said.

“So sign a power of attorney and let one of the young associates in the firm close for you.”

“No,” he said, so quickly that she knew what she had suspected all along was true. Leonard didn’t want the firm to know the details of his close dealings with Redmon.

“Okay,” she said, feeling like this was too easy, like it was all falling into place like clockwork. “Make the power of attorney out to me and I’ll close it for you. I’ll sign the documents, give the check to Mrs. Shapiro, leave the documents in the file, and you can clean everything up when you get home.” She reached for another magazine on the coffee table. She didn’t look at Leonard. She could hear him breathing in the quiet room.

“The power of attorney has to be notarized,” he said, shaking his head.

She couldn’t believe he had fallen for it. He had to be desperate. She took a long slow breath and said, “So go in early, call your secretary to meet you there and have her type the power of attorney and notarize it.”

“She’s not going to get up at six-thirty to type a power of attorney!” He had a sudden mental picture of Christy’s angry face. Since the firm party, it was getting harder and harder to get any work out of her. With any luck at all, he could have her transferred to another attorney when he got back from Montana.

“Okay, I’ll type it,” Lavonne said. “I’ll go with you and type it up and you can get her to notarize it as we’re leaving. Surely she’ll come in early to notarize your signature?”

“I can get someone else to notarize it,” he said, as if the plan was beginning to make perfect sense to him.

“Okay,” Lavonne said, sitting back with the magazine in her lap. “There you go. Problem solved.”

Leonard sat down. He wasn’t accustomed to Lavonne offering to help him. It was shocking and left him speechless. He thought about his plans to leave her for a younger woman. “Are you sure you don’t mind?” he said. What would she do without him? He was certain no one else would marry her. She would become one of those sad, lonely, middle-aged women who sit alone in a darkened house drinking scotch and talking to the cats.
No, no, this wouldn’t do.
He was too far along his course to turn back now. It was every man for himself in this marriage. He forced himself to smile at his wife.

“I don’t mind at all,” she said. “Don’t miss your trip because of something so stupid.”

He relaxed. The color crept slowly back into his pink baby cheeks. His tiny lips stopped twitching. “Okay,” he said, beginning to feel cheerful again. “Okay.”

“That’s settled, then,” she said. She forced herself to smile. Her top lip felt glued to her teeth.

Across the street, the Redmons’ old dog coughed like a cat throwing up a hairball. Moths as big as hummingbirds flung themselves at the porch light. After awhile Leonard got up and went to the window to turn off the light. He touched her shoulder awkwardly as he passed. “Thanks,” he said. “I really appreciate this.”

Lavonne held the false smile as long as she could. She thought,
So this is what it feels like to be a lying, cheating, low-life dirty dealer.
She thought,
I could get used to this.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, going back to her magazine. “It’s the least I could do.”

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

T
REVOR WATCHED
A
TLANTA
gradually disappear below him. The city reminded him of the Emerald City in the
Wizard of Oz,
with its gleaming skyscrapers rising up out of the treetops. A pretty city, but big, spread out in all directions with rows and rows of little houses and looping expressways and tall, glass office buildings, and here and there, patches of trees sprouting up like fungi among the asphalt. He could not live in a place as big and spread out and impersonal as Atlanta. In Ithaca, he was Trevor Boone, grandson of wealthy planters and pine barren speculators, great-great-great-nephew of that other famous Boone who had forged trails into the Appalachian wilderness. In Ithaca, he was a Boone, he was somebody, but in the vast gleaming city of Atlanta he would be a nobody, another of the millions of nameless faces that hurried about their business below him, a legion of small scurrying ants. No, he decided, staring through the small cramped window at the landscape below, it was not a change of location he craved.

So what was it? It depressed him at his age to find himself floating aimlessly, one of those pitiful, self-indulgent, middle-aged men he used to make fun of. His life, which had started out so promising, had begun to flounder, had seized up and ground down upon itself like some monstrous, overloaded machine. What had happened to the young man so sure of himself, so certain of his dreams of the writer’s life, the old house on Lee Street overflowing with writers and artist friends? Where had that boy gone? And who had taken his place? The law had been a substitute, a concession to his mother, a safe place to channel his energies until his first novel sold, but it had also been a diversion, an anchor he had dragged through life until it wore him down, made him doubt himself and his dreams. Made him tired.

Three rows behind him he could hear Leonard and Charles and Redmon whooping it up like college boys. “Hey, honey!” Redmon shouted to the stewardess, “bring us another drink.” It had been Leonard’s idea to invite Redmon. They usually brought along the client with the most billable hours, and this year Redmon was the winner. Trevor couldn’t stand him and had made some excuse so he wouldn’t have to sit with them. Sunlight glinted off the wing of the plane. Fragments of cloud drifted past the window. The landscape below was flat and gray.

It seemed to Trevor his whole life had been a diversion, a futile attempt to elude truth. He had hidden behind the law the same way he had hidden behind his box of unfinished manuscripts, protecting himself from his own sense of inadequacy, his fear of failure, his fear of the ordinary life. He saw that clearly now. His writing was like being a Boone; it was a way of being extraordinary, a way of making himself feel like he was more than one of those faceless scurrying ants always looking for something else, for something better.

Three rows back, Charles and Leonard and Redmon were beginning to annoy the stewardess. “Put that down, sir,” she said in a tired voice.

“Okay,” Leonard said.

“Hey, baby, why don’t you sit down and have a drink with us?” Redmon said.

“Sorry, sir, I’m on duty.”

“Come on! One little drink.”

“It’s a federal offense to touch me there, sir.”

“A federal offense,” Redmon said. “Good thing I’ve got my lawyers with me!”

The woman in the seat next to him glanced at Trevor over the top of her book. She was pushing fifty, he guessed, with thinning brown hair and a face that had once been pretty. She smiled at him. “Friends of yours?” she asked.

“Not really,” he said. He turned again to the window. His women, too, had been a diversion; even Tonya. Sweet, gentle-hearted Tonya, who couldn’t argue and drove him crazy with her suffocating love. Like drowning in molasses, that love, like sinking in a thick syrup that clung to you and held you down no matter how hard you tried to swim. He had left her for good. She deserved someone better. Someone who would appreciate her love. Someone who could love her back.

Beneath him the plane rolled and shuddered and dipped. The woman next to him had begun to doze. Her book slid into her lap. Trevor held himself close to the window trying not to touch the sleeping woman, who was beginning to spread out in her seat and ooze over the armrest. He listened to the woman’s snoring and watched the clouds drift over the plane’s wing, and thought about Eadie.

He had seen her yesterday, crossing the street in front of the little bakery along Broad Street, and she had looked so young and pretty and happy, that for a moment his heart had stopped. It hung in his chest like a great weighted pendulum, suddenly still, and then she had seen him, too, and his heart had begun to move again, swinging in a wide gradual arc. He honked the horn and waved, and she looked right at him, and then away. She went into the bakery and left him sitting in the traffic, his hands clenched around the steering wheel. He wanted to follow her into the bakery and take her by the shoulders and shake her. He wanted to tell her she had been right all along. He wanted to make her love him again.

Now it was too late. He had called her twice, and both times she hung up on him. She had loved him for as long as she could, and then, with that steady courage he had always admired in her, she had let him go. Her love for him, he saw now with the painful clarity of hindsight, had always been good and true. She had always pushed him toward his better self. Rising as she had from that dismal trailer on the south side of town, she had not understood his own fear of failure, his inability to act. She had a defiant spirit and the gift of losing herself completely in her art and he had been jealous of this. He had tried to punish her. It was all hopeless and humiliating and he had no one to blame but himself. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back wearily against the headrest. Remorse settled over him like a wave of nausea. He felt feverish.

Behind him, Charles and Redmon had begun to sing the “Georgia Fight Song.” The other passengers looked embarrassed and tried to ignore them. A stewardess poked her head from the front cabin and began her slow procession toward the back of the plane. She passed Trevor, her face set in lines of weary resignation, eyes hollow, mouth drawn up tight.

“Hey, baby, where you been?” Redmon said. “We missed you.”

“Sirs, I’m going to have to ask you to quiet down,” she said. “You’re disturbing the other passengers.”

“Okay,” Leonard said.

“We’re not disturbing them,” Redmon said. “We’re entertaining them.”

Trevor concentrated on the patch of blue sky outside the window. He wondered what Eadie was doing right now. He wondered if she was working. He wondered if she was still sleeping with that goddamned personal trainer.
God,
he thought
. I’ve been a fool.

T
HEY LANDED IN
Bozeman around four o’clock, and from there picked up a commuter flight to Push Hard. The plane, an Embraer Turbo Prop, was crowded with a backpacking group from the University of Texas, and they seemed a little less aggravated by Redmon and Charles than the last group of passengers had been. They applauded politely after the “Georgia Fight Song,” and when Redmon broke into his rendition of “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers,” several joined in, and one ordered another round of drinks. “You know,” Redmon said, leaning across the aisle and draping one arm around the neck of a tall, curly-haired boy. “You Texas boys is family. And I don’t say that about just anybody.” Leonard sat next to him, smiling like an indulgent father with an unruly child. He’d been drinking steadily since they left Atlanta, but he was still sober, trying to pace himself, trying to keep Redmon and Charles from getting them kicked off the plane, or worse. He was on duty until they arrived at the Ah! Wilderness Ranch. He felt certain that once they arrived, the good times would begin. He’d be able to relax then. All his life he’d been the responsible one who did what was expected of him, but he felt sure this trip was fixing to get better. His whole life was getting ready to change in a very big way. He just knew it.

Charles slumped in his seat, nursing a bourbon and Coke and watching a girl with long brown hair who perched along the armrest of one of the seats facing the idiot Redmon. She was clapping and singing along to “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” She was not really pretty, but her face was pleasant and clean of makeup, and she had an attitude about her that Charles found compelling and mildly irritating. He had seen it in other young women her age, this attitude of knowing they were not pretty and not really caring, as if whatever motivated them went beyond caring whether or not they could catch a husband. These younger generation females were frightening to Charles. Knowing that they could choose any career, knowing that the traditional male worlds of law, medicine, and engineering lay open before them, that high incomes and sperm banks had made the necessity of a husband a thing of the past, they were an anomaly to Charles. They were an unsettling vision of a future where men like himself would have no power over women. Charles scowled and sipped his drink.

Trevor watched the girl with the long brown hair. She smiled at him, and he raised his glass in a salute. She reminded him of Eadie. Not pretty in the same way that Eadie was pretty, but confident. Sure of herself. The quality Trevor had always admired in his wife. The quality he had always found irresistible.

The captain came on to announce their arrival in Push Hard and the students scrambled to take their seats. Below them the runway lights twinkled merrily, surrounded by the tall dark ridges of the Gallatins. The lights of Push Hard glowed in the distance and the headlights of cars traveling down the mountain highway fell like shooting stars into the valley. The Embraer shuddered once and began its descent, bucking and lurching in the updrafts like a paper plane on a string. They felt it slip to the right, and hang for a moment, before plummeting the final distance, the cabin loud with the roar of engines and subdued laughter and tinkling glass. Five hundred feet from the ground the runway lights suddenly went dark.

The pilot’s loud expletive, followed by the roar of the engines as the pilot attempted to slow the descent, was the only sound in the cabin. The small plane clattered and shook like a roller coaster on a wooden track. It dropped suddenly and the passengers came up off their seats, luggage banging in the overhead racks, engines screaming. Redmon began to cry and blubber like a baby. “Oh Jesus!” he wailed. “Oh Lord, I’ve been a sinner but I have a good heart!”

Trevor had a sudden clear picture of the way his life could have been if only he’d had the courage to live.

Leonard had an immediate sense of the irony of dying before he ever got a chance to be a winner.

Charles had an instant vision of his wife and children inheriting millions and living a life of peace and happiness without him.

“Save us, Jesus!” Redmon wailed. “Save us!”

The runway lights flickered and came on suddenly, sparkling below them like a Christmas tree. The plane steadied and began its slow climb.

“Jesus!” Redmon said. “Sweet Jesus.”

“Let’s try that again,” the pilot said cheerfully.

Charles leaned over, put his head between his knees, and was sick. Leonard thumped himself on the chest with his fist, trying to get his lungs to draw. Trevor stared out the window at the blinking lights of Push Hard like Moses at the Burning Bush.

In the back of the plane, Redmon began to giggle.