Sweet Carolina Morning (25 page)

Jack rolled his eyes, turned it off and slipped it in his pocket.

Despite knowing that going home was the best thing to do, as they wound down the mountain in the truck, Linny fantasized about what it would be like to deal less with Vera, if just for a little while. Maybe she and Chaz would get a sudden burning desire to live off the grid for a year to fix their marriage. They'd move to a cabin with no plumbing in Talkeetna, Alaska. Normal-looking couples did it all the time on all those Alaska shows Jack and Neal watched. Vera and Chaz could re-bond while chopping firewood and fixing their broken snowmobile that they urgently needed to go into town to get much-needed supplies because a blizzard was fast approaching. For one long moment, Linny imagined how serene life would be with Vera in Talkeetna. She and Jack would walk together through a field of wildflowers, each holding one of Neal's hands—something the boy would never allow them to do. Bluebirds and hummingbirds would fly around them.

Flushing guiltily, she glanced at Jack as though he could read her mind, but he was flipping down the sun visor. Linny blew out a sigh. She stared out the window. She didn't really wish for that Alaskan adventure for Vera. Neal needed his mother and he'd grown to love his stepfather, Chaz, too.

Linny and Jack were quiet for much of the long drive home from the mountains to Willow Hill. Even her Technicolor daydream of Vera battling icy winds as she trudged to the outhouse in fifty-below weather didn't cheer her up. Linny was just too disappointed to make conversation. Jack looked pensive, and the muscles in his jaw worked.

Her phone rang and she glanced at the screen. It was Ruby, one of her mother Dottie's two best friends. Had something happened to Mama? Her stomach tightened as she pictured her mother lying on the floor like that woman on the TV commercial who lived alone and did not have the emergency clicker necklace.

But Ruby sounded cheery. “Hi, sweetheart. Hope you're just walking on air now that you're freshly married. You tell that handsome hunk of husband of yours that I said hey.” Ruby had been a looker in her heyday and still had a flirty streak.

Linny breathed out. This wasn't a meet-me-at-the-emergency-room call. She called to Jack, “Ruby says hey, you handsome hunk of husband.”

Jack shook his head, but his mouth crooked up.

“We're at your Mama's house and you need to talk to her,” Ruby said. “For weeks now, we girls have been planning to go to the RV show at the Civic Center to make a final decision about what kind of camper or RV we want to rent for our trip. We're fixing to get in the car to go and now she's making all kinds of excuses for staying home. This is the last day of the show,” Ruby said, sounding exasperated.

Since coming to terms with learning that her late husband had a long-time mistress, her mother had shaken off her dour, church lady demeanor, and blossomed. She'd given up the yard sale habit that bordered on hoarding, taken a two week Caribbean cruise with her girlfriends, and was now seeing a charming older man named Mack whom she'd met on the ship. Oh, and Dottie—a card carrying Baptist and member of the Sisters of Dorcas ladies prayer circle—had won $250,000.00 on the nickel slots on the ship. So, emboldened with her first big vacation, Mama and her two friends had cooked up this RV adventure they called their “trip to see the U.S. of A.” It was all the three of them had talked about for months.

“Let me talk to her,” a woman's voice said insistently. Linny heard a fumbling as the phone changed hands. “Dessie here,” said her mother's other best friend, in her usual brisk tone. “This is the second time she's backed out of the RV show. Yesterday, she said her feet were hurting her, and today she's claiming her sugar's high.”

Linny paused a beat, baffled. “She doesn't have bad feet or sugar problems.”

“We know,” Dessie said dryly.

“Can you put her on the phone?” Linny asked, rubbing the spot on her temple that had begun to throb. What was going on?

More fumbling sounds, and the phone clattered as it dropped to the floor. Dessie picked back up. “Your Mama doesn't feel like talking right now. She and Curtis are going in to take a little lie down.”

Linny wondered again how her mother could get any sleep at all sharing her bed with Curtis, her 170 pound Great Dane. But maybe Dottie really wasn't well. “Dessie, does she seem sick? Should you run her by the urgent care?”

Dessie said, “We ate lunch at Captain Finn's Seafood and she had the First Mate's Special with an extra order of shrimp, and lemon chess pie for dessert.” She chuckled. “So, her appetite's fine and her color is good, too. You ask me, I think she'd just got a case of nerves.”

“Nerves about what?” Linny asked, coming up empty when she tried to think of any stressors in her mother's peaceful life, and all the unexpected happiness that had been showered upon her over the last year.

Dessie's voice was back at a normal decibel level and extra bright. “Well, we're real glad you had a good visit to the mountains and we can't wait to hear all about it.”

Her mother must have come back within earshot. Scanning the highway for signs she saw that they were almost to Greensboro. “Dessie, you and Ruby go on to the RV show yourselves and do reconnaissance for your trip. Jack and I are coming back early and we'll be home in two hours. Tell Mama I'll stop by and see her this evening.”

“I will, honey, and you two drive safe.” Dessie ended the call.

“What's wrong with your Mama?” Jack asked, his eyes lit with concern.

“Not sure. The girls don't think it's anything serious, but I'll run by and check on her. Dessie said it could be nerves.” She turned her hands palms up. “About what, I don't know, but I'll find out.”

* * *

Later, after they'd unpacked, Jack left to pick up Neal at his ex-wife's house, and Linny hopped in her trusty old Volvo to drive the ten miles to her mother's house. She bumped down the long gravel road lined by rows of bushy tobacco plants thriving in the land her Mama owned and leased out to other farmers. Rolling down the window, she breathed in the country fragrance of loamy earth, mown grass, and honeysuckle. She caught a whiff of skunk and it didn't bother her a bit. It just smelled like her childhood.

Slowing, she approached the driveway of the aqua blue trailer where her mother had let her stay for free when Linny's second husband stole her money and then died on her. The trailer had become such a haven for her while she rebuilt her life. She peered down the driveway but it was too overgrown for her to see much. She spied a clothesline strung with brightly colored t-shirts and dresses that danced gracefully in the breeze, and felt better. Mama said the new renters were “a real nice young couple” who adored the trailer Linny had turned into a little jewel box with new drywall, fresh paint and reclaimed wood floors from the Habitat Re-Use Center.

Linny pulled in to the driveway of her mother's tidy ranch, right beside the carport that housed her mother's Buick. Trotting up the front walkway, Linny knocked on the screen door and looked inside. “Mama? Mama?” she called. In the background, she heard a man's voice on the TV, which was turned up to her mother's usual blare level. Linny rapped harder, and peered in the crack between the door and the frame. Her mother had a hook and eye holding the door shut, her version of home security. Linny pulled her cell from her purse and dialed Dottie, but heard the phone ring and ring from inside the house. No one picked up. Her heart fluttering faster, Linny cupped her hands and called more loudly, “Mama! Mama!”

A clatter sounded and Curtis barreled down the hallway, woofing a baritone bark that would have sent burglars straight into cardiac rehab at Raleigh Memorial. Her mother followed, cooing to the dog, “Now, sugar, you just hush. That's just our Linny.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Linny broke into a smile. Though she'd always loved Mama, she'd only recently begun to really
like
her. Once Dottie shared the truth about how empty her marriage to Linny's father had been, some weight had been lifted from her. Dottie had become sunnier, warmer, and more real—and Linny wanted all the time she could get with her. If Dottie had a cold, Linny worried it was budding pneumonia. If she had a headache, it was a sign of an impending stroke. Dottie was a fit fifty-nine with no real health problems. And ever since she'd met the dapper Mack and begun to play pickle ball and dance the tango with him, she'd lost ten pounds and started doing a Jane Fonda DVD every morning. She could probably lap Linny in a 5K. Trying to hide how rattled she'd been, Linny waved too animatedly and made a big show of fussing over the big dog whose face was now pressed to the screen. “How are you, baby dog?”

Curtis began to wag his long, thick tail—the tail that could clear side tables and buckle your knees if he clipped your legs.

“Sorry for not hearing you sooner, honey. I was snoozing with that Inspirational Living channel on in the background to keep me company,” Dottie said.

Linny tried to be surreptitious in sizing up Dottie as she shooed away the dog and unlocked the door. Dottie's hair was bunched up on either side like she'd slept on it funny, but she was steady on her feet and her eyes were bright. “Hey, Mama,” Linny wrapped her mother in a hug, comforted by the familiar smell of Jergen's hand cream, baby powder, with a hint of Aqua Net.

“How are you, shug?” Dottie asked, motioning Linny to follow her back into the living room. “How was your trip and why are you back early?”

Dottie sank into her velour chair and reclined and Curtis gracefully curled into a loop on the carpet beside her. Linny filled her in on the honeymoon, omitting the part about Vera's dramatics and talking instead about Jack needing to get back for a work issue. As her newly tech-savvy mother scrolled through the trip pictures on Linny's phone, Linny noticed she was wearing a faded, polyester pink zip-up house coat and those awful white Velcro sandals that she thought had been relegated to the Goodwill box. Those were remnants of the bad old days when disappointment made Dottie dress like a frumpy woman twenty years older than her actual years.

These days, Dottie had a nice lady at Belk's who helped her pick out sassy but age-appropriate clothes. So why was the frumpiness back?

After her mother's final
so pretty!
and
that looks so sweet,
Linny settled back on the couch, and cocked her head. “How are you feeling, Mama?”

“Oh, I'm bumping along,” Dottie said, not meeting Linny's eyes.

Trying to sound casual, Linny persisted. “So you didn't feel up to going to the RV show?”

“It'd be real crowded, plus my stomach was bothering me.” Dottie picked an imaginary piece of lint from her housecoat.

“I thought it was your feet and your sugar,” Linny said, raising a brow.

Flushing guiltily and probably trying to remember her original ailments, Dottie nodded her head vigorously for emphasis, “It was all three: stomach, sugar, and feet.”

The poofs on her mother's hairdo bobbed as she nodded, and Linny pictured Precious the poodle with the faux tummy-toothache-itching issues. Linny was such a bad person. She bit the inside of her cheeks and tried to keep a straight face. “What's really going on, Mama?”

Her mother sighed gustily. “I don't know,” she admitted. “Maybe I'm just getting cold feet about the whole trip.”

“Why, Mama?” Linny asked. All they talked about was Graceland versus Dollywood, interstates or secondary road, and how to find the most accurate reviews of campsites on the internet.

Dottie paused, and blurted out, “I'm scared. What if we have a flat tire, or pick up a murdering hitchhiker, or fight with each other the whole way? What about beavers with rabies coming after us? That happened in a campground in Arkansas just last weekend. Dragged the man under while he was swimming at the lake. What if we drive over a steep ravine?” She made swooping downward hand motion to simulate diving off a cliff.

Linny hid her smile. She'd had the same awful vision of the motor home flying off a cliff when she'd first heard about the U.S. of A. trip. Clearly, Mama was the genetic link to her own worry-wart streak. “Anything else on your mind?”

“Well, none of us are world trotters.” She glanced at Linny and smoothed the lace doily on the arm of the chair.

Linny suppressed a grin. World trotters. Globe travelers. Dottie could mix an idiom, mash a metaphor. But it
was
a big deal that Mama and her girlfriends—who had been homebodies for most of their lives—were taking this trip. Travel could be daunting, especially when they were all in their late fifties and early sixties and planning on driving that giant bus of a motor home camper thingy.

Her mother went on, her words rushing as she let them go after penning them up for so long. “I'd never been out of the state before the big cruise, and the girls had only been to South Carolina. Ruby went to Myrtle Beach once and Dessie went to Dillon, South Carolina because she was underage and wanted to marry her first husband who . . .”

Linny raised a hand to try to head off the inevitable spelling but it was too late.

“. . . turned out to be G-A-Y,” her mother nodded, looking proud of herself for being so wildly progressive as to know a G-A-Y person. “Anyhow, what if we can't handle it? What if we get lost? What if Mack finds another lady friend while I'm gone? What if Curtis forgets all about me?” Looking stricken, she leaned over to scratch under the giant dog's chin and stare at him soulfully.

“You've been worrying about this a lot, Mama,” Linny said softly.

Dottie nodded, poodle poofs bobbing again. Linny felt like reaching over and gently smoothing them down, but didn't. Dottie was feeling inadequate enough right now, and she'd been made to feel inadequate by Linny's father for most of their marriage.