The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion (39 page)

She was a lot more than Lenore Simmons’s daughter. She was beginning to be somebody else, and she liked who she was turning out
to be. Thank God, Earle had urged her to go. He was right. She wouldn’t have missed this trip for the world.

Just a few months ago, she had been ready to sit back and take it easy, and now her life was just beginning again. She was learning so much—about Wisconsin, California, the WASPs, Polish food, Danish food.

Sookie ordered five copies of
A History of Poland,
and gave one to each of her four children. Then she sat down and read it herself. She was just in awe of how brave the Poles had been and at all the hardships they had endured.

Why hadn’t she known all this before? She looked down at her arm and thought to herself, I have proud and brave Polish blood running up and down in all my veins. How wonderful! The next time she and Earle went over to the Oyster House, she did something that she had never done before in her life. She ordered a dozen raw oysters—and not only that, she ate them! She would probably never do it again, but at least she had done it once. Mrs. Poole was beginning to branch out in the world.

O
F COURSE
,
WHEN SHE
got back from Solvang and told Dee Dee her real father’s name, Dee Dee immediately hired a professional genealogist to trace the Brunston family in England and find out if James Brunston was still alive. The lady found out that they had all died, except for one of his daughters.

Dee Dee wanted her mother to contact her. “She’s your half sister, Mother!” But Sookie decided that there was really no point in contacting the poor lady at this late date. It would only mean having to divulge unpleasant information about the woman’s father. Why upset her? She would just let that be. But they did find out that James Brunston had lived to be almost ninety and had died of natural causes. That was all she really needed to know.

Since meeting Fritzi and studying so much about history, Sookie had begun to look at Lenore with different eyes. She began to see how being a female and growing up when she had, with so many restrictions, must have been very frustrating for her. If she had been allowed to go on the stage, she probably would have been a star. And given all
of Lenore’s organizational skills and her ambition and drive, had she been a man, she most likely would have been a CEO of some big company. It really was sad to think that if Lenore had been born just a little later and gone into politics, who knows where the woman might have wound up?

Thank heavens, Sookie’s girls could be almost anything they wanted to be. And it made her happy to think that her birth mother and two aunts had helped open doors for the women who came after them. As Carter said, “How cool is that?”

L
IFE WAS FINALLY BACK TO NORMAL AGAIN
,
WITH ONE EXCEPTION
. D
R
. Shapiro was very pleased with Sookie’s progress and said he felt she was well on the way to making a new life for herself, but his practice in Point Clear was not growing. It seemed nobody wanted to see a psychiatrist, and if they did, they certainly didn’t tell anybody about it. And so he and his wife had decided to move back to New York, where seeing a psychiatrist was a status symbol. His only regret in leaving was that he would miss Sookie. He would never have told her, of course, and she was an older lady, but in the past months, he had developed a little crush on her. She was probably the nicest person he had ever met, patient or not.

S
OOKIE WAS FEELING BETTER
, but she still missed seeing her smaller birds. She hadn’t seen a nuthatch or a chickadee all spring. Day after day, she sat in her greenhouse and watched the blue jays. She studied their feet and the way they landed on the rim, and she began to do sketches of bird feeders and try to figure out the measurements.

She was trying to come up with a better smaller feeder with wire mesh, so just the tiny bird seeds would filter through, with a smaller ledge that curved up just enough for the smaller birds to land.

Walter Dempsey was a handyman they used from time to time,
and he could fix almost anything. He had a small carpentry shop where he made all kinds of gadgets. After Sookie had drawn a sketch with what she hoped were the correct measurements, she drove over to his shop and walked in. “Hey, Walter. I have a little drawing of a bird feeder. Do you think you could make this for me?”

He looked at it for a moment, then said, “I think I can do this up for you. When do you need it?”

“As soon as possible.” It wasn’t as if she didn’t like blue jays. She did, but she felt she had to do something or else the little ones would just stop coming altogether.

O
NE WEEK LATER
, S
OOKIE
sat in her greenhouse and waited. In about five seconds, a big fat blue jay swooped in and tried to land on the rim of her new bird feeder. He kept fluttering around, trying to balance himself and eat the bird seed at the same time, but eureka! He couldn’t do it, and after about three or four more attempts, he finally gave up and flew away. Soon several more blue jays tried to land, but because the ledge was so narrow, they, too, had a hard time balancing themselves, and they gave up and eventually flew over to the sunflower seed feeder.

It took a while for the little birds to understand, but the next afternoon she received a visit from a tiny titmouse, and as she watched, he was able to perch on the rim and feed. Success! She immediately called Mr. Dempsey and ordered five more bird feeders.

The following Monday morning, Sookie ran into the house and called Mr. Dempsey. “Oh, Walter, we had three more house finches, an indigo bunting,
and
a chickadee! I just can’t thank you enough.”

“Well, you’re welcome, but it was really your idea. I just followed the plan. I think you may have invented a really useful thing, Mrs. Poole.”

“Really?”

“Yes, ma’am, and you know, Mrs. Poole, I was thinking. Maybe you should get a patent on that design. I figure I could knock out at least twenty of these a week. I talked to Mr. Nadleshaft over at Birds-R-Us and told him about the success you’d been having with your
feeder, and he said if I made some more, he’d be happy to try and sell them for us.”

Sookie was delighted. She and Walter took her design to a lawyer in town, and they drew up a business agreement for their new company that Sookie named Blue Jay Away. They would split the profits fifty–fifty. Within a month, Sookie and Mr. Dempsey were so busy they could hardly keep up with the orders. In just six months, they hired an assistant and a bookkeeper, and the business grew from there.

A year later, they branched out even more and hired an advertising company. Pretty soon, they had ads running in
Southern Living
magazine and in all the bird-watcher magazines, featuring a photo of the feeder.

Pretty soon, the company had its own website, www.BlueJayAway.com, and much to their surprise orders started coming in from all over the world. As Sookie said to Earle, “I didn’t even know they had blue jays in China. Did you?”

W
HEN THE LOCAL PAPER
did an article on her, they referred to her as “Mrs. Earle Poole, Jr., housewife and inventor,” and she couldn’t have been more pleased. Life was so amazing and full of surprises. All of her life, she had thought she was stupid, and now she was an “inventor.”

Not only that, but with the way sales were going, Earle started considering retirement. As the next few years went by, the company pretty much started running itself, and she and Earle had time to enjoy being alone again.

Sookie did have one big scare. One Sunday afternoon, Earle had been on the phone talking to a friend of his, and as she passed by the
den, she overheard him say, “Yes, but deep down, I really would like to have another Great Dane.”

Oh, dear God, she thought. Why not a small horse or a cow in the house? Please, dear God, let this just be a passing fancy. She loved Earle, but having one Great Dane was enough for a lifetime.

B
OTH
U
NCLE
B
ABY AND
A
UNT
L
ILY HAD DIED AT
P
LEASANT
H
ILL IN
their late eighties, but at ninety-three, Lenore was still going strong. Unfortunately she had outlived Angel, her live-in nurse. After much pleading, she finally agreed to go to Westminster Village, but only temporarily, until Sookie and Earle could find another nurse. However, to Sookie’s surprise, during her last visit, Lenore seemed pretty happy. “I have to say, Sookie, I am enjoying my step-in tub, and the food here is quite adequate, but I could just kill Conchita for up and dying on me.”

A
WEEK LATER
, S
OOKIE
had just come in from the store when the phone rang, and when she picked up, she heard a woman’s voice. “Mrs. Poole? This is Molly from Westminster Village, and I’m calling because your mother has just had what the doctor thinks might be a slight stroke, and he thought maybe you should come over.”

When she arrived, she was told that her mother was in the intensive care unit, but that she was to wait before she went in. Dr. Hind-man came out and said, “Mrs. Poole, before you go in, I just want to warn you: She’s still very disoriented, so don’t be surprised if she doesn’t recognize you.” He entered the room before her, walked over to the bed, and indicated for her to follow. Sookie walked over to her
bed, and the doctor said, “You have a visitor, Mrs. Simmons. Do you know who this is?”

Lenore opened her eyes and looked up. She smiled, then took Sookie’s hand and said, “Well, of course I do. This is my daughter, Sarah Jane, and she’s the best daughter in the whole world, and I love her.”

Sookie looked down at the old woman lying there, so small and helpless, and squeezed her hand and said, “I love you, too, Mother.” And she meant it from the bottom of her heart. Lenore squeezed her hand and dozed off again.

Sookie sat by her bed as Lenore slept, and she didn’t know if her mother could hear her, but as she sat there, she quietly sang to her, “Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde, and the band played on.…” As Sookie watched Lenore sleep, she was amazed that even now, as old and as helpless as she was, she was still so pretty.

T
HE DOCTOR CAME BACK
a few hours later and told Sookie to go on home and get some rest, and he would call if there were any changes.

That night, they called with the news that her mother was gone.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, L
ENORE
’
S
lawyer knocked on the door and said, “Mrs. Poole, I’m so sorry about your loss, but your mother said I was to deliver this to you in person within twenty-four hours of her passing.” She opened the envelope, and inside was a letter.

At three o’clock that afternoon, the phone rang, and it was a man from the local monument company. “Mrs. Poole, I have instructions to deliver the headstone. Where would you like it placed?”

“What?”

“Your mother ordered a headstone … and it’s pretty large.”

“How large?”

The man told her that Lenore had ordered a five-foot white marble statue of a weeping angel for her gravestone and said, “to bill her in care of you.”

“My God, when did she do this?”

“Oh, about ten years ago now, although she came in every so often and made changes. She was quite specific. It had to be carved out of Alabama marble only and had to have absolutely no flaws.”

Sookie nodded. Of course. That was Lenore. Gone for good, but still calling the shots. Sookie thought, “Well, okay, old gal. Why change now?” As usual, Lenore got her way in the end, just as it should be.

S
OOKIE WAS AMAZED AT
all the flowers and tributes that were paid to her mother at the funeral. So many people said such lovely things about her. But the one that meant the most to her was sweet old Netta, who took her hand and said, “She was a lot of trouble, but it’s going to be a dull old world without her.”