Rock of Ages (16 page)

“OK. You know best,” Kenny says, in a voice that suggests the opposite. “Come on, let's go before the fat boy gets back. We're just not destined to be graced with his company today. Maybe he's actually gotten a job.”

They are walking back to the truck when Georgia hears Forsythia Crumpler calling.

She waits at her hedge, unwilling to trespass.

“I saw you all walking by the pond,” she says, nodding to Kenny. “Can't help but keep an eye on that place, I suppose. Habit.”

“We came to see Pooh,” Georgia says, “but he wasn't at home.”

“Come to make peace?” Forsythia offers a slight smile, then turns to Kenny.

“Mr. Locklear,” she says, “I hope you're taking care of this girl. That Pooh Blackwell scares me. I tell you, Georgia, I used to not lock my doors at night. I do now.”

“Mrs. Crumpler,” Georgia says, “does this look like one of Jenny's shoes?”

The older woman takes the shoe, examines it from all angles.

She shakes her head.

“I don't know. Lord, it looks like some she had, but I can't say for sure.”

Georgia thanks her, then thinks to ask if she's all right.

“I'm fine,” the old woman says, then hesitates before she speaks again. “I'm just sorry to have that boy living next door to me. He comes tearing in and out of here all hours of the night, and he's got all kinds of no-account friends that like to visit him.”

“You want me to talk to him?” Kenny says.

She looks alarmed.

“No. No, don't do that. That'll just make it worse. Let's just wait and see how it works out.”

They leave it at that. Georgia promises to check up on her, and promises herself that she will call her every day.

Kenny drops Georgia in her driveway. Before he leaves, she walks around to his side of the truck and thanks him for his time and support.

“Nothing to it,” he says. “You know, though, Mrs. Crumpler is right about watching out for yourself. I'm pretty sure I can take care of that fat tub of crap, if it comes to it, and I'd rather make peace than war, but you ought to be careful.”

“Hey,” Georgia says, forcing a smile, “I've got my trusty friend here.” And she pats her pocket.

“If you take it out,” he tells her, as he's already told her twice, “use it, early and often. That's important.”

She holds up her right hand.

“I promise. Scout's honor.”

He shakes his head and drives off.

Justin and Leeza are there when she walks inside, along with another man she doesn't immediately recognize. The darkness of his skin is accentuated by the white of the apron he's wearing. He's standing next to Leeza, who also is wearing one. Hers is yellow with blue flowers, once worn by Georgia's mother and now appropriated by the girl who soon will give her a grandchild. Four generations involved, more or less, she thinks. Justin stands to one side. They all seem to have been laughing, and her expression sets them off again.

“What?”

Justin finally controls himself enough to tell her that Blue has come by to visit, and Leeza was trying to make biscuits the way Annabelle taught her, without much luck. And so now Blue is helping.

Georgia shakes Blue Geddie's hand. It has flour on it, as does his face and everything else the apron does not cover. Georgia thinks, despite herself, of Al Jolson in reverse.

She hasn't spoken to Blue in years.

After her father's death, when everyone knew about the will (she had rebuffed a local lawyer who tried to convince her Littlejohn McCain didn't truly mean to give nearly half his farm to “those people”), she visited Blue and his mother a couple of times, but it was awkward.

They seemed afraid that their good luck was only an illusion. They couldn't make themselves believe that she meant them well, that she was not seeking, after all the nice words and genteel manners, to take back from them their godsend. She couldn't have convinced them that she thought land she never wanted was just compensation for her son's careless act and Blue's shattered leg. They kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it didn't, they always bid her goodbye with obvious relief.

After that, Georgia thought it would be better to just let it lie and stop scaring Blue and Annabelle to death.

She would see one or the other of them from time to time over the years, but it has been the better part of a decade since she has had a face-to-face conversation with Blue Geddie.

He has grown into a handsome man, with a strong, full nose separating eyes and a mouth that obviously are accustomed to laughter. His flawless, unwrinkled skin is a rich mahogany seldom seen even one state north, in the Piedmont of Virginia. His head, shaved and darkly shining, shows off its perfect proportions. He and the red-haired sunburn-magnet Leeza, who can barely reach the counter, and actually has to turn a little to give her swollen belly room, are so different in color that Georgia wonders if they don't represent the extremes that human pigment can attain.

“Well, Blue,” Georgia says, raising her arms, “I'm sure you're a better biscuit maker than I am. Your kids are probably better. The dog is probably better.”

“Well, Miss Georgia,” he says, “my momma used to say I was so ugly, she figured I'd better learn how to cook, since no woman was likely to ever do it for me.”

Georgia tells him he must have been the ugly duckling, then, turned into a swan, and when he gives her a polite but blank look, she says, “What I mean is, you've grown into a handsome man. And stop calling me ‘Miss Georgia.' Just Georgia will do fine.”

It's impossible to tell, but she thinks he is blushing.

Leeza does seem to be getting the hang of biscuits. After they've talked for a while, she produces a baking sheet full of them. They look and smell almost like some of the better ones Georgia remembers from her childhood. There is ham left from breakfast, along with molasses and syrup and butter, and the four of them make a lunch that, while lacking in variety, is as good as any Georgia can remember in some time.

Blue's visit, it develops over the course of their impromptu meal, is more than just a social one.

“One of the guys I worked with in the Peace Corps, his family runs a big distributorship up in Manhattan,” Justin tells her. “They buy fresh fruit and vegetables all over the Southeast and haul it up there, the same day. He used to tell me about it all the time when we were in Guatemala. They were always looking for the best way to get some of the great stuff they grow down here up there.

“They just have to have reliable sources for everything, stuff ready to go when the truck gets here. I've been talking to him, and he's going to come down and check it out. Selling produce to rich New Yorkers will beat the hell out of selling berries to people a bucket at a time.”

“Although,” Blue says, “we'll still do that, too.”

Justin nods.

Georgia wants to ask her son, just shy of a master's degree, what in the world he thinks he's doing, how he could consider such a boneheaded move, how he could think about embracing the very thing she went to college to escape, how he could so blithely embrace downward mobility, and what exactly in the hell does he knows about farming.

She is becoming adept at holding her tongue.

“Part of it,” Justin says, “is we've got to get Kenny on board.”

Kenny's land turns out the sweetest cantaloupes and watermelons, a big mover, Justin tells her, for the city people up North. Georgia remembers that people did brag on her father's melons when she was a girl. She never developed a taste for them herself.

And the McCain farm has always produced more than its share of greens—collards, mustard, kale, and turnips—well into the winter.

“If we can get all of this tied together,” he adds, “we can have something to send up there just about all year.”

“What does Kenny say about this?” Georgia asks them.

“He's studying it,” Blue says, in a tone that might have some disapproval in it.

“Why hasn't anybody mentioned this to me before?”

“Well,” Justin says, when the other two look to him, “I guess we figured you'd just clear a space on the floor and have a shit fit. We wanted to have a good plan before we told you about it. We've still got to figure out who gets what, assuming we make anything.”

“But I'm not having a shit fit,” Georgia says, forcing a smile. “I'm calm. I'm not judgmental. I'm not asking you if you've lost your mind. Excuse me.”

She gets up and walks out, leaving silence and then low talking behind her.

The shoe is still sticking out of her jacket. She walks to the back room where she put the plastic bag containing Jenny's possessions.

She takes the other one out. She puts them both together, under the brightest lamp in the room.

They are both beyond repair, but as Georgia looks at them as closely as she can, she comes to the conclusion that fills her with dread and, she must admit, excitement.

She calls the sheriff's office. This time, Wade Hairr is in, although she waits five minutes for him to come to the phone.

“Sure, Georgia,” he tells her. “Come on by. What is it you want to show me?”

“I'd rather just show it to you, Wade.”

“This doesn't happen to have anything to do with Jenny McLaurin's death, does it?”

“Well … Yes, it does. But this is important. I know you think I'm fixated or something, but I think you're going to want to see this.”

He sounds like a man seeking to let someone know he's trying to be tolerant and not quite succeeding.

“OK, then. When?”

“How about now?”

A short silence.

“I reckon that'd be OK.”

She thanks him and hangs up, then puts both shoes in the same bag, emptying Jenny's other possessions on the bed.

The heft of her jacket as she removes it reminds her of the gun.

She takes it out and puts it in the top drawer of Jenny's dresser, holding it with the same care and trepidation she might have afforded a nonpoisonous snake.

CHAPTER TWELVE

November 19

This has ceased being funny.

I am tired of seeing things other people aren't seeing, and pretending I don't see them.

My old classmate the sheriff was concerned enough, I suppose, considering he thought he was dealing with a lunatic.

I showed him the two shoes and explained their provenance—surely not a word I would have used around Wade Hairr.

It wasn't just the shoes, I explained. It was the shoes and the missing ring.

“Well, Georgia,” he told me, digging into his right ear with his index finger while I tried to look somewhere else, “it isn't much to go on, you've got to admit. God knows where that ring went to, and God knows how that shoe got in the middle of that field, or even if it is the match of the one Miss Jenny was wearing.”

He made it clear that, if I were to find some more evidence, something that would actually meet Wade Hairr's definition of evidence, I should call him.

I hadn't planned to mention anything about Pooh's visit Saturday night, and I still haven't seen that eminent personage. Kenny's been busy, and I haven't really wanted to go back by there since I found the shoe.

Wade brought it up.

“Pooh didn't seem too happy when I asked him about the ring, by the way.”

“I know.”

And then I gave him the watered-down version.

“Well,” Wade said, with a smile that was just a notch shy of rueful, “he gets things in his head.”

“Gets things in his head like what?” Although I thought I knew.

“Well …” Wade started most sentences with that word, and he could turn it into three syllables if he was really stalling for time, “he seems to believe that you're trying to get the house back from him. I told him there isn't anything to that. Heck, I even told William that.”

“William thinks I'm trying to get the house back, too?”

“I didn't say that. It's just, well, they think it's funny that you would be coming to the sheriff's department about a missing ring nobody seemed to even think about until she'd been dead near-bout three weeks.”

“Well, Jesus Christ,” I said, and the woman clerk looked at me and frowned. “I mean, what was I supposed to do? He was the one who found her. I just thought he might have seen the ring, or at least noticed if she didn't have one on.”

“Well, I'm just saying …” Wade held his hands up in defense.

“Just let it die down, Georgia, would be my advice. Let sleeping dogs lie. You don't want to get the boy mad at you.”

I had to admit I didn't want that. I also had to admit to myself that Wade Hairr was one sorry-ass excuse for a sheriff.

“OK,” I said, getting up while Wade stayed seated, “forget it. Maybe the shoes don't match. Maybe it's nothing. Just do one thing, if you would. Don't mention it to William or Pooh.”

That, of course, would prove too much to ask.

This morning, I was thinking about all that, while I listened to a smooth-jazz CD. I was thinking that I might never really know whether Jenny died of neglect, in which I played a major role, or of something more exotic. I was trying to resign myself to that lack of knowledge.

There aren't any easy ways to lose someone.

With Daddy, it was neglect. I should have known he wasn't going to just let himself dwindle away to nothing, be a “burden.” Somebody would have had to step in and stop him by force, take him home with her to Virginia, say, or move back for a while.

Somebody didn't.

With Phil, it was the opposite of neglect, I guess you'd say.

Either one can leave you staring out a window at nothing, months or years later, until your coffee gets cold.

Phil was in great shape, I thought. Hell, we made love three and four times a week, a record among my little middle-aged group of overeducated, underappreciated ladies, as far as anyone would admit. Phil had to know I talked about him, the way friends of mine would just sometimes grin and walk away when we'd run into one of them at a restaurant or a movie. He always made me come at least twice, and sometimes three or four times. He was very, very good, not just with his cock, but with his tongue and his hands, and with his mind. He had some imagination, something no one would have imagined in the gentle, steady self he presented to the world outside our bedroom (OK; maybe including the living room, bathrooms, and sometimes the back porch, too.)