The Sweet by and By (19 page)

“Aren’t you going to tell us his name?” Margaret coos at me.

“Mike.” I must be crazy. I sound like I’ve never been on a date before.

“Michael, row your boat ashore, Hallelujah!”
Bernice sings at the top of her lungs, then busts out laughing.

“It’s not Michael; well maybe it is, I don’t know, but he goes by Mike. Just Mike.”

“Uh-huh,” Margaret says. “And what does Mike do?” “He works for UPS. He’s got a real good job.” “Good, good, so far so good.” Margaret eggs me on. “And . . . and that’s kinda it.”

“Where’d he take you?”

“Dinner under the stars I hope!” Bernice looks up from the
Pro- gressive Farmer
where she is reading about, or at least looking at, giant pictures of boll weevils. “These right here are something terrible,” she says, tapping a photo. “You’ve got a mess on your hands with these here. I know a lot about pests.”

I focus more on Margaret, leaving Bernice to the crop bugs. I ain’t proud of myself, but sometimes it’s hard to keep throwing a ball to somebody who never catches it. “It was nice,” I say. “An Italian kind of place with the littlest candleholders I’ve ever seen on the tables, and grapevines stenciled on the walls, you know, real elegant, and soft music, kinda classical I guess, violins and such. I didn’t even think I liked classical, but I liked what they were playin. Anytime I ever hear classical music, it’s all right when it’s soft and pretty but then it’ll surprise you with a loud blast that sounds like the end of the world. It’s like whoever wrote it is tryin to scare you so bad you don’t even know how loud to make your stereo cause if you overshoot it, you might go deaf.”

“Do they have spaghetti?” Bernice never ceases to surprise me with what she takes in and what drifts on by. “I like spaghetti.” She smiles. “But not SpaghettiOs, no ma’am, I do not.” She turns to Mar- garet. “You love spaghetti, don’t you?”

“Yes honey, I think pretty much everyone does, but I’m not sure that’s what Rhonda had.”

“Why not?” Bernice asks. “She went to Italy.”

“No Bernice, a restaurant.” I make an effort but decide to leave well enough alone. “We got fish,” I say. “He asked if he could order somethin for me and I said sure, why not.” I look at Bernice, who still is not satisfied about the Italy part. “But y’all, it doesn’t even matter what you get cause they bring you spaghetti anyway.”

“Ha!” Bernice yells.

“I told Mike, ‘I can’t eat all this. You’ll have to haul me off in a trailer if I do.’ He said, ‘Rhonda, it’s not a contest, just enjoy what you want.’ ”

Bernice cries out, “A beauty contest?” “No, he meant eatin.” I try to reel her in.

“I never heard tell of a eatin contest except at the state fair. Eat as many pies as you can, but you’ll get sick if you don’t mind!” Bernice is now howling. She has worked herself up into a full-out party.

Margaret is serious. “Rhonda, we don’t need all the details. Let’s talk about the important stuff. Is he kind? That’s what I want to know. Do you think he is kind?”

I don’t answer her right away cause as much as I’ve been thinking about him, I haven’t ever had anybody come right out and put a ques- tion to me like that.

“I guess,” I say. “I mean, I think he is, I don’t know. But he did surprise me. When we got up to leave the restaurant, we passed a table with an older man and woman havin dinner by the window. She looked like she was tryin to carry on a conversation, he was diggin into a prime rib and not payin her any mind. You could tell she had got herself all fixed up to come out to dinner, and left up to him, they might as well be sittin at home in front of a TV eatin leftovers. I didn’t know Mike had noticed until he walked over there as we were leavin and said, ‘Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt y’all.’ The man looked up,

barely. Mike turned to the lady. ‘I just had to stop and say I don’t know what occasion y’all are celebratin but you look beautiful. Y’all are a real handsome couple.’ I thought that woman’s jaw was gonna drop. She turned bright red and fingered the pearls around her neck and said, ‘Oh thank you. It’s our anniversary. Forty years.’ Her husband had gone back to sawin and chewin. ‘That’s a long time, isn’t it?’ she asked, like she couldn’t hardly get her mind around it herself. ‘Yes it is,’ I said. Mike squeezed my hand. ‘Y’all should be real proud,’ he said and stood still for a minute, like maybe he was waitin for somethin from the man, who sat there dippin bread in a pool of bloody juice on his plate. Mike looked back to the wife. ‘Anyway, sorry to bother y’all,’ he said. ‘Congratulations again.’ He took my arm and we walked away. ‘Thank you so much,’ I heard the woman say, and then back to her hus- band, ‘Wasn’t that sweet, Raymond?’ He didn’t answer her.”

“She ought to have told him to go to hell.” Margaret sneers. “She’s mad now, she’s hot as a firecracker!” Bernice cackles, looking

at Margaret through a magazine that she has rolled up like a telescope. “I’m not mad, I’m just telling the truth. I don’t even know those

people.”

Bernice laughs. “She might get in a fight before supper!”

“Stop peeping at me through that tube, Bernice, you make me ner- vous.” Margaret shifts in her chair, turning her whole body towards me. “Now, Rhonda. You’re going out again I guess, aren’t you?”

I’m trying to squeeze a big stack of folded towels into the only stor- age cabinet I have. “I don’t know, he hasn’t asked me yet.”

“Oh, he’s going to ask you,” Margaret says, “I’ll bet money on that.”

I feel embarrassed cause she has come right out and said what I’m hoping but there’s no way I woulda told. Bernice hasn’t caught up with us just yet, but at least she has calmed down some. She points to Margaret like she’s telling me a secret. “You get that girl right there mad, and you’ll know somethin, I’ll tell you that.”

Margaret can see right through me. “Sweetheart, you really are worried.”

“I’ve been goin out with friends mostly,” I say. “Last time I went out with a stranger was a year ago. I was at the Y-Not Drop Inn, that’s a bar pretty close to where I live. It’s also got a little restaurant but nobody’s hardly ever in there, everybody’s all crowded into the bar part, especially on the weekends. I was there with my friend Connie, but she said she had gotten up real early for her route and was gonna head home, but did I want to stay. I said, ‘Yeah I’m gonna finish my beer, go on.’ It wasn’t two seconds after she got off the stool that a guy sat down beside me.

“ ‘I know you,’ he said.

“I lit up a cigarette. ‘From the movies?’ I asked. A voice in my brain said real loud that I wasn’t in the mood to be picked up. And believe me, if I was in the mood, nothin would stop me, so you know I must really not have been to blow him off like that. And he was good lookin too, in a stray dog kind of way.

“ ‘I do know you,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember your name, but I know you. From school.’

“ ‘It’s been a long time since I was in school,’ I answered him. I really didn’t want to be rushed through my beer. It was Friday night and I had spent all day with my hands in people’s hair.’ ”

“You love hair, don’t you?” Bernice interrupts, innocent as a five- year-old.

“Yes I do, but there can always be too much of a good thing,” I say. “Anyway, turns out he had gone to college somewhere in the moun- tains and was working for a company that makes bike locks and I guess other locks too, but the bikes were the ones he talked about.”

“What is there to say about a lock?” Margaret asks. “Either it locks or it doesn’t. What else do you need to know?”

“I know, I know it’s boring but some people might think what I do is boring too.”

“I beg to differ,” she says. “Under every head of hair is the head of a person. That’s at least the potential for something interesting.”

“Well he wasn’t lyin. He was a year ahead of me, I found out later. Randy Roper. I didn’t know him but I had seen him around. He played baseball. When he asked me didn’t I want to get somethin to eat, I said, ‘Not here. Have you ever seen anybody eat here?’ We didn’t go to a restaurant. I knew we weren’t gonna eat as soon as I said ‘not here.’ He had a scar on his chest, told me he got it from the blade of a band saw that snapped off. Next morning, he left me lyin in bed at the Super8 and went to get coffee and didn’t come back. So much for ‘I-know-you’ Mr. Randy Roper.”

Margaret and Bernice sit staring at me, silent as two corpses. “Don’t y’all feel sorry for me. I got what I wanted and so did he. Hey, I do what I need to do and I take what comes along with it.”

“What did you get,” Margaret says, “other than the obvious?”

I want to snap at her, it’s like I hear my grandma in her voice, not that she said it mean, but I heard it that way. Judge and jury rolled up into one, that was Grandma. Instead, I feel the pressure start to build up behind my eyes, then tears. “I need Mike to be different.”

Bernice picks up the whole stack of magazines she has piled on her lap and puts them on the f loor. She gets up, slightly wobbly, and takes hold of my hands, still in the yellow rubber gloves that I use to clean sinks. She doesn’t try to say anything, maybe somehow she knows it’ll come out crazy, so she doesn’t want to. Then she kisses me, on the mouth, and standing perfectly still, smiles the biggest smile you can think of before going back to her chair like absolutely nothing happened.

“You need to bring Mike around here, Rhonda,” Margaret says. “When you feel ready to.”

“He said he wants to come. He’s heard me talk about y’all ’til I’m blue in the face and he wants to see y’all and everything else for him- self. I said to him, ‘Should I want to see where
you
work, cause I have to tell the truth, I don’t really.’ ‘Darlin,’ he said, ‘anytime you want to

see, just go stick your head in the truck, that’s my place of business.’ ” Margaret clears her throat. “I’m going to say something, sugar, and

I assume you will bother to listen since you took the time to tell us that story in the first place.”

“You’re scarin me now.”

“Rhonda.” She pauses. “You deserve to be noticed. Not once or twice, always. Now that’s a tall order, because when you stop acting like there’s something worth noticing, then you can be sure every- body else will follow suit.”

“We’re just datin,” I say.

Margaret goes on. “You want somebody to be different, you’ve got to be different. I myself didn’t learn that. I spent a lot of time waiting for my husband to change, and I’m not so sure that he didn’t actually try. That, my dear, was a pure waste of time. I don’t know how much anybody changes, they just take on different forms at different times. Kind of like water. Sometimes it’s liquid, sometimes it’s ice, some- times it’s slush.”

“I bought them slushies when they were little. Red, orange, grape, whatever they wanted at the 7-Eleven!” Bernice squeals. “If you drink em too fast, you’ll get a headache. That’s what I told them, and they listened.” She seems real satisfied to have the last word.

“I’m listenin too,” I say to both of em. “I am. Thank you.” “Anytime,” Bernice says. “Have you got a bathroom?”

“You know exactly where it is.” Margaret takes hold of Bernice’s hand. “Down the hall. Come on, I’ll go too. Let’s get out of here so this girl can get on with her life. She’s got a lot of fish still to fry.”

I watch them teeter out and into the hall. It’s so quiet that I can hear the f luorescent lights humming. I hate those lights cause they make the walls look fake. You can’t see the real color of anything. But I don’t want to turn them off. I don’t want to close up. It’s way past time for me to go, but if I leave too fast, I might forget something, and I don’t want to have to come back to look for it.

c h a p te r e ighte e n

Lorraine

B

y the time we pull into the parking lot, both of my pas- sengers are sleepin like babies. Neither one of their families

e

ev n knows Rhonda except by sight, so they had to sign release papers for me to bring them to the wedding. They’re used to it, sometimes we’ll take a van to the mall at Christmas, things like that, for any of em that are able. I like Rhonda all right even though I don’t really know her that good except from helping people get to the salon when she’s there.

When I volunteered to bring the ladies here today, Bernice’s son asked me, “Do you have a car that’ll run?”

I told him, “It gets me to and from work every day.”

“Uh-huh. Okay,” he said, like he was giving a test, then he added, “You know I’d take Mama myself, but my wife and I have plans we can’t switch around, we got the kids and all.”

“We’ll be all right, don’t worry yourself,” I said as my way of lettin him know I didn’t need or want to hear any explanations. We weren’t going but ten miles down the road into the country. As for Margaret’s daughter Ann, she’ll be workin like she does every weekend showing houses, that’s her busiest time. Standing with me in front of Ada Everett, I felt like she wanted to make a point. She said, “Lorraine, you know I trust you with Mama like I trust myself. If she wants to go, I want you to take her. Ada, are you going?”

“I can’t leave here,” Ada answered, handing over the form Ann needed to sign. “We’ve got a state inspection week after next. I wish I could, I think a lot of Rhonda.”

Ann nodded. “I know Mama does too, even though she says she’s hard on her head sometimes.” She clicked down the hallway in expen- sive shoes. She needed to look good to sell houses. She spoke without turning back. “Bye Lorraine, I’ll see you tomorrow.” And I knew she would too cause I couldn’t think of but maybe two or three times a year when she hadn’t been down here at some point in the day. That was her way, everybody finds their own way here. Miss Margaret com- plains about her sometimes, but they all do. Loved ones get it the worst no matter what, but far as I know, that’s life.

They tell me Rhonda hasn’t known her fiancé but a few months. I expect she feels like she knows him pretty good to get married, and I hope for her sake she does. She wanted more than anything to have these two ladies come, Margaret barely able to walk some days, and Bernice with no tellin what’s gon come out of her mouth at any time. Rhonda asked me if I thought their families would let em go and I told her I didn’t think it would be a problem. Margaret wants to go to every wedding or funeral or baptism or any other service she can if somebody will take her. I’ve never in my life seen anybody so ready to go to get in the middle of somebody else’s church service. “It’s the rituals of life I’m interested in, Lorraine. Taking part in them is good for the soul.” I say she’s nosy, that’s it. As for Bernice, she may or may not know she’s at a wedding, you can’t never tell. She loves Rhonda though and I think that’s all right.