“Great! Who’s this little lover?”
She put the box on the kitchen table and flipped it open. In there were six opportunities to commit the sin of gluttony.
“Stop bringing donuts! You know I’m trying to diet!” Suzanne said.
“I know. But the light was on. And I could smell them. And I’m weak. And I can still afford six donuts.”
There was an infamous red neon light on the sign in front of the donut shop that they turned on when they had donuts fresh from the oven. And they had drive-thru service, a diabolical invention of entrapment.
“This is Pickle, my meaningful other. Pickle say hello. Go on. Say hello!” Pickle yipped and licked Carrie’s outstretched hand. “Good girl. Okay. Let’s just get it over with and eat them right now.”
There was a distinct thumping on the floor from the room above us. Suzanne started to laugh.
“What’s that?” I said.
Suzanne said, “That is my Miss Trudie’s cane. She can smell sugar.” She hurried to the stairway in the hall and called out. “I’ll be right there!”
“How funny!” I said.
“Nothing wrong with her sense of smell,” Suzanne said. She put two donuts on a small plate and turned to Pickle. “You want to go say hello to my grandmomma? Come on!”
Pickle looked at me for approval.
“Go on! Behave yourself.”
And Pickle scampered out of the room and up the stairs with Suzanne.
“So, how’s it going?” I said to Carrie.
“You know? Not so great. I’ve got that problem with John’s children?”
“The darlings,” I said.
“Well, I found out late Friday afternoon that they won and now I’m broke. The judge was as mean as John’s kids.”
“Aren’t you going to contest the decision? Surely they don’t want you to be destitute. I mean, how could this happen?”
“Because the judge is a sanctimonious asshole. He said under North Carolina law, since John died on the altar before the marriage could be deemed legal and be consummated, that we weren’t married and his children should get everything. And the fact that John and I lived together all those years was of no interest to him. In fact, he seemed offended by me like I’m some kind of a Jezebel.”
“Good grief. Didn’t your lawyer object?”
“Of course! He went crazy! But it didn’t matter. Judges can do whatever they want.”
“Aren’t you going to file a countersuit?”
“And get the same judge? And the same result? For what? And who’d take the case? A contingency lawyer? I’m sick of lawyers and courts and judges.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“Well, being that I’m practically a professional spouse, I guess I’ll start looking for another husband. I just joined About Time.”
Suzanne reentered the room.
“Professional spouse? Ha! That’s rich! More like a black widow spider, if you ask me,” she said. “She gets them in her web, has her way with them, and then zaps them!”
“Oh, thanks!” Carrie said, and laughed. “Sadly, it’s true. I have been unlucky with husbands.”
I didn’t want to ask how many there had been but I knew because of what Suzanne said that I would be correct to assume that however many there had been, they were all dead. And what was About Time? One of those online dating sites?
“Where’s Pickle?” I said, unsure of how to respond.
“Sitting on my grandmomma’s lap watching old reruns of Lassie. You may never see her again.”
“Oh Lord,” I said, and laughed. “She loves Lassie like no other.”
We started opening boxes and, once again, decided to categorize the contents by what the nursing home could use, what could go to Goodwill, and what should get ditched.
“Most of the clothes should go to Goodwill,” I said.
“Probably,” Suzanne agreed.
“Yeah, now that I’m looking at her clothes again,” I said. “It’s all pretty beaten up.”
Suzanne was going through a box of Kathy’s papers and came upon a pile of bank statements held together with rubber bands. She opened one and within a minute or two I could see the surprise on her face.
“Oh my!” she said.
“What?” Carrie said.
“She didn’t even have five hundred dollars to her name!” Suzanne said.
“Really?” Carrie said. “That’s worse than my situation!”
“Maybe she had other accounts?” I said, thinking how does a woman get along in the world with only five hundred dollars to her name? Not that I had much more, that was for sure.
“I’m digging,” Suzanne said. A few minutes later she added, “Well, if there are other accounts they’re not in this box. All I’ve got here are six years of statements from Wells Fargo. Thank goodness she had good medical insurance.”
“Who can afford insurance these days?” Carrie said. “It’s so expensive.”
“You didn’t sign up for Obamacare?” Suzanne said.
“Are you serious? Have you been to that crazy website? Forget that! Wait! Oh, gosh! I can’t believe I forgot to tell y’all!”
“What?” Suzanne and I said together.
“Guess who was standing on Savannah Highway with a big old sign protesting Krispy Kreme using palm oil that comes from cutting down rain forests?”
Suzanne looked at me and arched an eyebrow as if to say, How should I know? I giggled because I didn’t know anyone who protested anything. Ever.
“Boy, I have some dull life,” I said. “I don’t know anybody who would do that.”
“Me either,” Suzanne said.
“Yes, y’all do! It was Paul! That guy Kathy used to date! The organist from the church!”
“Holy Mother!” Suzanne said.
“Did you talk to him?” I asked.
“Come on, you know me. Do you think I could pass that up? I went over to him and said, So, Paul? What’s going on? He gets all worked up and says in this very deep man voice, Well, I have a problem with child labor, destroying orangutan habitats, and driving Sumatran tigers to extinction. I was like, You’ve got to be joking! Sumatran tigers? Oh Lord! But I said, Oh! Of course! Me too!”
Carrie started laughing so hard and Suzanne laughed politely, but something about the way Carrie had been speaking didn’t sit right with me.
“What in the world are you talking about?” I asked nicely even though I was irked.
“Remember I told you that guy was a tree hugger?” Suzanne said. “I mean, not that there’s anything the matter with saving the planet.”
“It’s just that he’s so adamant. I don’t know. It’s just a little undignified for a man his age to be out there raising hell at a Krispy Kreme. Aren’t college students supposed to do that?” Carrie said. “It’s weird.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but at least he’s got some convictions. Every man I’ve dated in the last ten years, and I mean both of them? Their only convictions are that they don’t want a committed relationship, and don’t worry, you’re not going to emasculate them by paying half the bill. Then they want to screw.”
“Then give them half a screw,” Carrie said, and her face turned scarlet.
Then we laughed, really laughed. It felt good.
Chapter 4
In the Dark
The late-afternoon horizon was dissolving into the jewel-toned colors of sunset. The temperature was finally dropping too, but the air was still warm and nearly wet. It would be as sultry an evening as any I’d ever known. We were gathered on Suzanne’s porch sipping wine, picking at a wedge of Gruyère, nibbling apple slices and thin slices of a smoked sausage, and talking. Pickle was curled up at my feet. I was looking forward to meeting Miss Trudie. Suzanne and Carrie assured me she always appeared around
the cocktail hour. And besides the much anticipated arrival of Miss Trudie, it was the most exciting hour of the day. The colors of the sky all around the horizon went completely berserk, sending out flashes of rose and purple and shades I could not name because there were no words for them. Even for the most hardened old salt, sunset was too spectacular to ignore.
“Miss Trudie likes to have a small glass of sherry with me,” Suzanne said. “And then she goes in the kitchen and makes herself a martini in an iced-tea glass and she thinks I don’t know. She eats the olives on the side. By the handful.”
“Whenever you see her eating olives,” Carrie said, “you can be about one hundred percent positive that there’s gin in her glass.”
“What happens when the gin runs low?” I asked. “And the vermouth and olives?”
“Well, I go to the liquor store, of course!” Suzanne said. “We just don’t discuss it.”
“No! Of course not!” I said.
Weren’t they merely doing their part to live up to our hard-earned reputation as eccentric southerners?
And of course, the more wine we consumed, the more we revealed about ourselves. Going through Kathryn’s clothes, papers, and books had once again been profoundly unnerving. We were all just wrung out.
“You know what was really strange?” Carrie said.
“What?” Suzanne said.
“Seeing what she read,” Carrie said. “I’d bet you a tooth that I’ve read all the same fiction authors that she did. Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler, Anne Rivers Siddons, Anna Quindlen—all the Anns. But we never talked about books. Not even once.”
“Well, she played her cards close,” Suzanne said. “But she read lots of people. She always had a book with her.”
“Didn’t you think her clothes were like ultratailored? Almost to the point of being utilitarian?” I said. “So much khaki and so many little cardigans.”
“Yes, she was pretty conservative,” Carrie said. “Did you have a chance to get a good look at her china? Her dishes were ancient. Probably from some relative. Her teacups were actually thin around the lip. I mean they were worn down!”
Suzanne said, “That’s because she believed that drinking green tea would help push her cancer into remission.”
“The poor thing. I read somewhere that you’d have to drink five hundred cups a day for green tea to make a difference,” I said. “But what is truly interesting is that the Japanese get a lot less cancer.”
“That’s weird. I wonder why?” Carrie said.
“The only difference I could ever find in our diet and theirs was that they eat shiitake mushrooms like mad, a lot more fish, and way less gluten.”
“And they drink green tea all the time,” Suzanne added.
“Listen,” I said, “we’re all gonna go someday from something.”
“True enough,” Carrie said. “Nobody gets out of here alive. At least no one that I know of.”
We smiled at that. Carrie was amusing even when she didn’t know she was.
“Well, I’m not going to be happy until I can figure out why Wendy was wearing the bracelets you gave Kathy and what is up with her furniture.”
And I liked Suzanne because she was so pragmatic.
“I say that the answer is somewhere in Kathy’s boxes,” I said.
“I sure hope you’re right,” Carrie said. “I really don’t like that woman.”
“She’d be hard to like,” Suzanne said.
We rocked back and forth for a few moments, sort of mesmerized by the day’s end.
“This is such an amazing place,” I said. “How long have you been living here, Suzanne?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe fifteen years?”
“Really? Wow!” In my mind all I could do was quickly calculate and then wonder why Suzanne, who would’ve been about thirty-six at the time, would want to come and live with her grandmother, who would’ve been right at eighty-five. So I asked the question in the most diplomatic way I could. “Have you always lived in Charleston?”
Suzanne and Carrie exchanged looks.
Carrie said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Suzanne. Tell her! It’s not like you’re protecting a matter of national security!”
Suzanne took a deep breath and refilled our glasses.
“Okay,” she said, “did you ever make a bad judgment and totally screw up your life? And no matter what everyone told you, you just kept making one bad call after another?”
“You mean, like when I married Mark, who left me with an infant to go live in the deep woods in the Northwest to become a doomsday prepper and live in an underground bunker?”
Suzanne looked at Carrie and they burst out laughing. I joined in because what else could I do? It was just so ridiculous.
“That’s a good one!” Carrie said.
“Yeah,” Suzanne agreed. “That kind of bad call.”
“And he never sent any child support except for twenty dollars and a lottery ticket at Christmas?” I said.
“Oh God,” Suzanne said. “That’s terrible.”
“Awful!” Carrie said.
“And your own mother never fails to remind you that she told you so and that you’re still an idiot?” I tossed a crouton into the salad just to emphasize how incredibly unlucky and naive I had been, and that in addition to the price I’d paid, I was, now and forever, the family dartboard.
Suzanne couldn’t wipe the grin from her face. Her right hand was covering her mouth, and I could tell that the laughter she was holding back was in the tsunami range. She held her left hand in the air like a woman about to testify at a revival, took several gulps from the wineglass in her other hand, clunked it down on the table, and then she stood.
“Okay,” she said, then whispered, “Before Miss Trudie shows up for her one ounce of sherry and her half pint of gin, I’ll give you the short version.”
“We’re ready,” Carrie said, and winked at me.
“So, after I got my MBA from Columbia—”
“You mean Carolina?” I asked.
“No, I mean Columbia University in New York,” Suzanne stated.
What was I thinking? Of course she went to Columbia University in New York. She probably had an IQ of two hundred and fifty. I completed my nursing and nutrition courses almost right in my backyard and never went anywhere. And almost all of the people I grew up with went to a college in South Carolina. I wondered at what age I would stop being insecure about not graduating from Harvard, which I would never have had the courage to attend even if it was free and they were begging me to come. Which they weren’t. Begging, that is, or offering me a free ride.
“Oh!” I said. “I thought so but I wasn’t sure.”
It was the tiniest of fibs.
“Anyway, I went to work for FTD in Chicago.”
“You mean the flower delivery company?”
“Yep, that very one. Even then I was in love with flowers. I don’t know why I thought Chicago winters would be fun, but I did.”
“Because if you’re from here you know what it’s like to live and die in hell,” Carrie said. “Freezing to death is an attractive alternative.”
“Oh Lord!” I said, and giggled.
“Anyway, I worked like a beast, climbed the ladder very quickly, and caught the attention of all the managers and officers.”
“And one in particular!” Carrie said.
Suzanne squinted at Carrie and put her hands on her hips. “Do you want to tell this story or am I telling this story?”
“Sorry,” Carrie said, and made sort of an apologetic face.
“Naturally, he was married but he said he was going to leave his wife. It was textbook classic. I believed him. I was such a fool for that man it was pitiful. This went on for nearly ten years. He would leave her, she’d threaten suicide, he’d go back to her. It got to
the point that it was just stupid. I was so worn out from his lies and the disappointing truth of it all that I quit my job, came home to Charleston, and had a little meltdown.”
“That is so terrible!” I said.
“And opened my business. Well, it was especially terrible because by the time I untangled myself from him and got over it, I was almost too old to hope to safely bring babies into the world.”
“He was a world-class shit,” Carrie said. “That’s what he was.”
“Boy, I’ll say!” I said.
“Look, there are worse ways my life could’ve played out than this,” Suzanne said. “He didn’t hold a gun to my head, you know. I have a pretty sweet business. I have the pleasure of my grandmother’s company and I get the benefit of her wisdom every day. I’m healthy. I live in a magical place. I’m solvent and hell will freeze before I let another man in my bed. Maybe.”
“That’s right, sugar. Keep your options open!” Carrie said.
“With any luck,” I said, with a smile as big as I could manage, “someday you might inherit this magical place!”
I never would’ve guessed that someone as brilliant as Suzanne would get caught in one of those messy affairs. Not in a million years.
“Are you kidding? I have two sisters, Alicia and Clio, both of them very wealthy with long marriages and tons of kids who are just waiting for Miss Trudie to go to that big cocktail party in the sky so they can get their share.”
“I have a brother like that,” I said. “Alan Jr., also known as Bubba, and his very annoying wife, Janet, have something to say about every dime my parents spend. You know, it affects their inheritance if my father buys a tire for his car or if my mother buys a new sofa.”
“Don’t you just love families?” Carrie asked.
And then we heard what had to be Miss Trudie’s approach from a distance. Shuffle, thunk. Shuffle, thunk. The sound grew louder as she neared us. Suddenly the screen door swung open, hit the wall with a thwack, and there stood Miss Trudie, relying heavily on her tripod cane to propel her forward. Her thin white hair was swept back into a braid that began at the nape of her neck and extended down almost to her waist. She wore a gauze, embroidered Mexican wedding dress and slip-on canvas shoes with a Mary Jane strap. Her arms were bony and marked with the bruises and ravages of time but she had decorated herself with Native American bracelets and necklaces of beautiful turquoise and hammered silver.