Yankee Doodle Dixie (3 page)

For a second I think I’m in my bed in Vermont; the sheets feel like a continental glacier. After a decade sleeping next to a hot-blooded man, I’m still not used to facing the ocean of a bed alone. Baker is gone forever.… Peter is gone for … I curl into a ball for warmth and relax into the mattress. I’m asleep before my weary mind can usher in another thought.

Chapter Two

Only a tiny bit of morning light has seeped into the room when I’m awakened by the sound of my cell phone vibrating on the bedside table. Issie is sleeping sideways next to me, her feet pressed into my back. When sleeping over at Kissie’s, the girls and I have no choice but to share a bed; her house has only one spare bedroom. Sarah’s in with Kissie, who never wakes up before nine anymore unless she has to be somewhere. After sixteen hours of driving and very little sleep, even the sound of Virginia’s voice is not enough for me to rally. I can barely eke out a whispered hello.

“Hey.” There’s not a trace of oomph in her voice, either. “I saw my missed calls from you this morning. Sorry. John and I went to a movie last night and I left my phone in my coat pocket.”

“I tried the home phone,” I say softly, ducking my head under the covers so as not to wake Issie.

“You know we don’t ever answer that. Why are you whispering? Where are you, anyway?” she says, part Memphis drawl, part itching curiosity.

I’m too tired for the surprise. “I’m at Kissie’s.”

“YOU’RE AT KISSIE’S? Why on earth didn’t you let me know you were coming home?” Virginia’s voice could be heard clear across the room.

Issie stirs slightly. “Shhh. Issie’s sleeping right next to me.”

“Oops.”

“The reason I never called is because I wanted to surprise you.”

“I thought you weren’t coming for another month.”

“The movers had an opening and they slid me in. You won’t believe how I’ve started to calm down. I’ve been back in town only a few hours and I feel like it’s all just been a bad dream. Like all I ever needed to do was click my ruby slippers together and it’d finally be over.”

“What about the Yankee Doodle?” she asks. That’s her nickname for Peter. Having heard me babble about him like a teenager for the past eight months, she knew leaving him would be bittersweet. I couldn’t wait to tell her about the kiss though.

“That’s a long story. I want to tell you about it in person. But Virginia, I’m home!” I say it a little too loud, but clamp my mouth tight, paralyzed at the thought of having to entertain Issie on this deficient amount of sleep should she wake up.

“Thank. God.”

“What time is it?” I whisper even softer.

“Six.” Virginia’s children are early risers. They inherited that from their father.

I roll over away from Issie and cup my hand over my mouth. “
Six?
I just went to bed three hours ago.”

“Can you meet at the club today for lunch?” Virginia whispers back.

“I’m no longer a member, remember?” I say, half bitterly, referring to my charming ex-husband who terminated our membership.

“Oh for goodness sakes, I’ll buy your lunch.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“Like I’m really worried about that.” Virginia is very generous. She’d give me her last Coca-Cola, even if she were hungover and dying for it.

“Do you think Alice and Mary Jule are free today?” I ask her.

“They’ll have to cancel their plans if they aren’t. How about meeting at one? That’ll give you some time to go back to sleep. Where does Kissie live anyway?”

“You know where Belmont turns into McGavock, before you get to Sycamore Cemetery?”

“You better get out of there!” she practically yells. Up until now most of our entire conversation has been at a whisper.

“Relax. I’m fine. She has iron on all the windows and doors.”

“You’re a lot braver than me.”

“Nothing is going to happen.”

“Fine, then. I’ll see you at one, Fiery. Bye.”

Virginia nicknamed me Fiery a long time ago. I was the only one in our class of forty girls with red hair. That was back when people would say, “I’d rather be dead than red on the head.” The neighborhood boys brutally teased me about it so much when I was little that I grew up hating my red hair
and
my freckles. Not to mention my curls. I’d have given just about anything to be Marsha Brady with her stick-straight blond hair and tan skin. Now everyone wants red hair. Go figure.

*   *   *

The last time I’d stepped foot in the lobby of the Memphis Country Club I was married to Baker Satterfield and living the life I’d always wanted. Or thought I’d always wanted. Now, I’m walking in the door a single mother of two little girls wondering where in the world I’m going to live and how I’m going to support them.

My three best friends are sitting at a small round table in the corner of the Red Room when I arrive. Hard to believe, but the last time I laid eyes on them was last summer, May I think it was, when they surprised me after Baker left. Mud Season in Vermont was in full swing and the three of them showed up at my door with wallpaper and paint, ready to help turn my dank, Teutonic inn into a Southern showplace straight out of the pages of
Veranda.

As is the custom, I’m late, terminally ten minutes as usual, and my Coca-Cola is waiting for me—half poured in a bar glass with small square ice cubes—and the other half still in the bottle. I run right up to the table and squeeze each of them hard enough to leave a bruise. It’s a wonder all the other women in the room don’t ask us to hush. Between squeals and waltz-like hugs, we’ve created quite a commotion, and to make matters worse, my Coke bottle tips over as I’m slipping my arm out of my jacket. Johnson, the waiter, comes running over and mops up the spillage with extra red linen napkins.

“I’m so sorry, Johnson,” I say, and try helping him with the mess.

“Don’t worry about this, Miss Leelee. It’s just good to have you back.”

“Well, thank you. It’s good to be back.” I hug him from the side and hang my puffy white ski jacket, one of the few purchases I made in fourteen months of living in Vermont, on the back of my chair. It was in this very spot, nearly two years ago, that all three of these girls tried talking me out of moving. Naturally, that small detail has long been brushed under the rug. To be in Memphis at this very moment, with Virginia, Mary Jule, and Alice, is heavenly enough to make me forget all the turmoil I endured.

Alice jumps right in. Even before “How are you?” or “How are the girls?,” she gets straight to the point. “How’s Peter?” she asks, though when she says it, it sounds more like a declaration. “What is going on with y’all?” She sips the last of her diet Coke and chews on a couple of ice cubes. I can’t help noticing how pretty her hair looks. She’s one of the only women I know who doesn’t highlight her hair. It’s plenty blond enough naturally.

“I asked her that on the phone this morning. She says it’s a
long
story.” Virginia puts a freshly buttered melba toast to her lips. Her French manicure glistens from the reflection of the light overhead.

“Oh good, Leelee. I knew something was going to happen,” Mary Jule, the hopeless romantic of the bunch, says and rapidly claps her hands together.

I take a deep breath. “Well, I have to say, it surprised me. Remember how I told y’all that he wouldn’t talk to me once I decided to move back home? He’d come in to work, head straight into the kitchen and start drinking wine with Pierre?” I can’t help but remember the sullen look on Peter’s face as he sipped merlot with our maître d’.

As I spoke, all three were leaning in toward the center of the table with their arms resting in front of them.

“Well, this went on the whole week before I left. He hardly said two words to me. He’d cook all the meals for the customers and then leave immediately after the restaurant closed.”

“So not like him,” Mary Jule says.

“I know! Anyway, the morning I was leaving, Roberta, Pierre, and Jeb fixed a beautiful breakfast for the girls and me. Pierre even went out and bought us gifts—how sweet is that? But Peter never showed up to say good-bye. They all tried to act like it wasn’t weird or anything but I knew they thought it was strange. After all, we had worked side by side in the inn together for eight months, and he never shows up to at least
tell me good-bye
?”

“He was devastated. He knew he was losing you, shoog, and he was beside himself,” Alice says, consolingly.

“Well, as it turns out, after I told the other three good-bye, which was very, very sad, let me tell you, I stopped at George Clark’s gas station to fill up my tank one last time. Remember he’s—”

“The gossipy gas station owner. We stopped there to fill up Jeb’s pink Mary Kay car,” Virginia reminds me, referring to my multitalented handyman who not only swept my chimneys and raked snow off my roof with some Yankee contraption called a roof rake, but tended to his own proprietorship, Jeb’s Computer World. His pink Mary Kay car was a hand-me-down from his mother. They continued to split it for advertising, though, Mary Kay on the driver’s side and JCW on the other.

“Oh yeah,” I say. “Well anyway, my tank was full, and as I was pulling away from the pump I saw this person walking straight up to my car. At first I wasn’t sure who it was because his cap was pulled way down over his head and it was snowing like crazy but the closer he got I knew it was—”

“Peter.” Alice purses her lips together and nods her head.

Just that second, Johnson walks up to the table with a pad in his hand, ready to take our order. “Good afternoon, ladies.” His voice is extra cheery.

“Not now, Johnson,” Alice says, and shoos him away. “We’re all
dying
here.”

He holds up both hands, palms out. “No problem, I’ll come back,” he says, with an amused grin.

“Oh Johnson,” Mary Jule calls after him. “Please don’t mind us. Leelee had a
Casablanca
moment and she’s giving us the blow-by-blow.” Alice can be embarrassing sometimes but she never really means to be short. Johnson’s already moved on to the next table and seems unaffected.

“Keep goin’,” Alice says impatiently, and sweeps her hand in my direction.

“Where was I?”

“The Yankee Doodle is walking toward you at George Clark’s with his hat pulled way down.” Virginia loves all the little details.

“Oh yeah. So, he came up to my car and I jumped out. We stood there not knowing what in the world to say to each other. I mean it was so awkward. And then, out of nowhere, he asks me what CD is in my player. I tell him I don’t think there is one. Then he sits down on my front seat, says hi to Sarah and Issie, and finds Van Morrison’s
Moondance
in my CD case. He slips it into the player and skips through until he lands on ‘Into the Mystic.’”

“That’s the song y’all started to dance to the night you got the call with an offer on the inn!” Mary Jule’s eyes twinkle. She, like me, absolutely loves a romantic cliffhanger.

“Yes! And remember we never finished the dance?” I say, recalling the night my relationship with Peter went from not-so-platonic to nothing-really-happened-but-we-are-definitely-not-platonic.

“Because you didn’t just let the stupid phone ring and once he learned it was an offer he got so upset about the sale that he left the inn right then and there,” Alice says, finishing the story I’d told them fifty times by now.

“Well, we
finished
the dance right there in front of God and everybody at George Clark’s gas station.
Underneath the falling snow.
With a nor’easter headed our way.”

“You did not!” Mary Jule nearly screams.

“Shhhh,” we all say, looking around the room to see who’s peering in our direction.

“Yes, we did,” I tell her.

“That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Mary Jule says decisively, plopping her glass of ice tea on the red linen as if rendering a verdict.

“Did he kiss you?” Alice asks with raised eyebrows. Although she tries to appear calm by sipping her Coke, she can hardly contain herself, either.

I nod my head and visualize it for the fiftieth time since driving over state lines. “It was … incredible.”

“It should be a movie, Leelee, I swear to God. It should be a movie.” Virginia sits back in her chair and rakes her hands through her hair. “Who should play you?”

Alice turns to Virginia and waves her hand. “Hang on a second.” Then she turns back to me. “And then what happened?”

“We said good-bye and … I drove off.” I close my eyes and feel the sadness returning.

“WHAT?” Alice practically yells. “You didn’t stay with him?”

I gape at her. There are no words. I don’t know how to explain to them what I was feeling in that moment. That as hard at is was to leave Peter, my heart was already in Memphis when he finally made his move. Now, of course, I would do anything to make that kiss last longer than it did.

“I would have stayed,” Alice says definitively and reaches for a saltine.

“Would you listen to what you’re saying, please? You’re telling me that you would have stayed in Vermont even though all your furniture was on the way to Memphis, not to mention all your very best friends and everything else that is familiar in your life.”

“But your man was in Vermont,” Virginia says.

“He was
not
my man. He
is
not my man. Never once before that moment had he told me he cared about me. Not once. I cannot even believe y’all. First you tell me I’m crazy for moving to Vermont.
In this very room.
Then you call me every week for fourteen months and ask when I’m coming home. When I finally get here you’re asking why I didn’t stay?”

“Of course we want you home, honey. We just want you to be happy,” Mary Jule says.

Johnson strolls up to the table again and Mary Jule politely asks him to give us two more minutes.

“I just knew Peter had it for you from the moment I met him,” Alice says. She always thinks she has everything figured out. It’s the control freak inside her.

“Well he never told me that.
And,
even if I had known, what was I supposed to do? Stay in Vermont because
another
man in my life tells me to do so? I made the decision to come back to Memphis
for me
. I followed my own heart for once. Sure, I’m crazy about him but suppose we didn’t work out? Then what?”