* * *
Turned out Bernice Thorton lived way on the other side of Timnath, a farming community out on the eastern plains, but I found the place after wandering down two roads that were dead ends and then finally finding the right one. As I pulled up, an older woman came out of the door and onto the porch. She shaded her eyes from the afternoon sun and called, “Who is it? Lily?” Her voice sounded unsure.
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered as I got out of the car. “It’s Lily; we talked yesterday?” I started up the steps and saw she had a scrap of paper in her hand with my name and company name written on it, the information I’d given her on the phone. I gave her my best smile and pointed to the paper she was holding. “That’s me.” I didn’t want to confuse her by mentioning I’d been at Shannon’s service. Besides, I’d slipped out early like a cooped up cat.
“Yes, yes, come in.” She held the door open for me. “Sorry for the mess. But, law, the paintin’ and all, it’s a miracle! I’m so old I didn’t even re-call my dead brother had this great-grandson, but the boy come to my door, and I put him to work.
“Yes,” she nodded, “the Lord provides; the Lord does provide. Been needin’ this paintin’ done for a long time now.”
That explained the general disarray of the yard: half-painted trim; ladders fallen over into the bushes; and paint buckets stacked on the porch, paint spilling out into thick bands on the floor. There were careless footprints all over the porch, tracking paint everywhere. By the size of the prints, the kid had big feet.
“Come on in, now; watch your step. I’m so sorry he couldna come fetch that box of Shannon’s. He was sure hopin’ to, but his truck jist broke. Said he’d be needin’ some of Shannon’s books from that school trunk to start up at the college. Anyhoo, he had to go get some smokes, he said, and would be back shortly to be gettin’ that trunk from you.”
Careful to avoid the paint, I walked past Bernice into the house, which was dim in the afternoon light, with closed blinds and pulled curtains. The stuffy room was full to overflowing with furniture upholstered in every shade of dark purple and figurines on every surface. She urged me to sit down, offered me something to drink, and vanished into the kitchen to return with two glasses of chartreuse liquid on the rocks.
“It’s a special mix,” she said. “So banana-y! Do you like it? I learned it from a lady friend at church.”
“Oh, yummy!” I said as I took a drink. It was hideous, somehow crossing the heavy-handed imitation banana flavor with a saccharine strawberry smell reminiscent of public bathroom cleaner. I was hoping she wouldn’t notice if I didn’t take another sip but, rather, used the glass and its frightening banana-y contents as a prop to gesture with.
Bernice Thorton wanted to talk about her niece. Shannon may have mentioned to her aunt that she had worked for me, but Bernice didn’t seem to remember. “I just can’t believe she would do that, kill herself, it’s against Jesus’ will. And the po-leece, they won’t listen ... one even said it had nothin’ to do with Jesus! Can you imagine? Nothin’ to do with Jesus?! They say she drowned herself ’cause she’d done somethin’ wrong, and I know that if she’d confessed her sins to Jesus …” She was becoming upset, and Jesus was pronounced JEEZ-zus.
“Bernice, I know this is hard for you, and I’m really sorry about Shannon. When was the last time you saw her?”
“A month ago, maybe? Maybe more? She came by on her way back down from Cheyenne, where she’d been workin’ on a project for a few days. She wanted to ask me to a special dinner; wanted me to be her number one special guest. She was real excited and lookin’ forward to me meetin’ her honey, right after they got back from a trip.”
That didn’t sound like someone who wanted to commit suicide, but I kept my thoughts to myself, even though they agreed with Bernice’s. “Besides being excited, did she seem any different to you?”
“Well, I’ve been thinkin’ about that right there. She seemed tired to me, pale as a ghost ... she was always workin’, it seems, on those real estate wheelin’ and dealin’ jobs, workin’ for her boss, who was her fee-ann-say, and I don’t know what all, so I says ... I says, ‘So what about gettin’ married?’ ... ” Bernice started to go off track. Her thin, grey hair was beginning to come out of its bun as she ran her hands from her forehead to her crown in anxiety.
“She seemed ... tired?” I coaxed her back onto the subject.
“Yes, she even said so her own self. That she’d been feelin’ tired; out of sorts, she called it, not herself.”
“Not herself,” I repeated.
“That’s what she said. Said she’d been feelin’ better since she’d been in Cheyenne; guessed it was because she was gettin’ more sleep, she said. But still not feelin’ all that well.” Bernice stopped and looked out the window through the dotted Swiss curtains.
Then she continued, “At least she wasn’t a-drinkin’ again. That was an answer to my prayers. I’da known ifin’ she was, and I’da given her a piece of my mind if she had been!” Bernice Thorton shook her finger at me for emphasis. Was this true, or did Shannon just hide her drinking from her aunt? I wanted to believe the former, but two people had said they saw Shannon drunk at that party, shortly before her death.
“I loved that child ... but I’da given her a piece of my mind!” she repeated. Her voice softened, and she said, “Then she says she has to go, even though she just got here; she had to go so that Barry wouldna know she’d stopped along the way. She said he always wanted her to come straight back to the office, so she said it’d be our little secret, her and me, about her visits. Then I asks her if she and that Barry was gonna be gettin’ married in the eyes of Jesus …”
Yikes; Bernice was going off again. I thought I’d try one more tactic to stop the Jesus tirade. “Oh, Bernice, sorry to interrupt but this drink is so-o-o-o good; how did you say you made it?”
Bernice put her hand up to her mouth and smiled behind it. “That’s my special mix. Well, I got the idea from Frieda at the church’s Wednesday night supper, but I added some things of my own,” she said proudly. “Let me—” She started to reach for my glass.
“I bet Shannon loved this drink, too,” I fibbed, trying to discreetly avoid her grasp. “You said you’d seen Shannon a month ago. Did she call you or anything after that?”
“No, and that wasn’t like her, not one bit. She was the sweetest thing; you know, she’d always call or somethin’ a couple of times a week, always askin’ how I was doin’, all interested and wantin’ to know all about church goin’s-on.” Bernice sighed. “Then after she started workin’ with that fella, she didna have time any more, or didna feel well.” Bernice reached over and took my glass. “No ... no time for old Auntie.”
I wasn’t sure if I was going to find out more about Shannon, so I thought about making signs that I had to go. But to my horror Bernice Thorton rose and insisted on giving me a tour of her knickknacks in every room. “And this here is the Howard Johnson Freebee Giveaway Collection Room! Over here are the darlin’ yella plastic cups ... I have the whole set!” Then we went to the next room, and the tour seemed like it went on for hours.
So when my phone pinged with a SOS text from Liz Burzachiello on a job site, I excused myself and called her back, praying for an excuse to flee from having to see more darlin’ plastic cups. Liz explained the situation, and it turned out that there was a relatively major problem concerning the hardscaping on the project we had started that morning. I was, indeed, needed on site, so I could truthfully tell Bernice that I had to run—immediately. I was so relieved!
When I told her I needed to go, she looked disappointed and started to walk out to the living room. But when I moved for the door, she tried to get me to stop one more time and look at a display in the dining room.
“I am so sorry, but there’s an emergency that I have to attend to for my business,” I said. “I am so sorry I have to leave now. Thank you so much for the refreshments and tour of your lovely home.” I wanted to get out of there;
to do it nicely, but out of there.
“Oh, alrighty, then. Thank you for coming by,” Bernice said as I hurried out the door, off the porch, and into my car. I waved, making apologetic motions through the windshield, and tried to get out of the driveway as quickly as I could.
As I pulled out, my phone rang. It was a client who rarely called, so I took the call, even though I don’t like to talk and drive. She was shopping at the nursery and wanted some advice on plant choices. A block or so away I pulled over, turned off the engine, and finished the conversation at the curb. We discussed several options for container planting, and we chatted about the weather. I tried to end the conversation as soon as was appropriate so I could get back to town and the project.
When we were finished, I looked at my watch and felt anxious about getting back to the job site. I gunned my car back onto the road and zipped back to town, my mind on the problems Liz had discussed and the solutions I needed to come up with to solve them. I pulled into the landscape materials supply company’s yard, which was on a small dirt road off the main highway, and reselected the stone needed for the project, since the original order couldn’t be filled.
This yard specialized in local stone, with acres of stacked pallets of flagstone, river rock, and boulders. The flat-planed kind quarried nearby had rich but subtle patinas of copper, iridescence, and orange on the buff-colored stone, with over washes of black iron oxide, and was a favorite of mine to use. After I mentally redesigned the grouping of the boulders, I picked out the big rocks to replace the ones that had been accidentally sold to someone else.
One of the truck drivers I regularly worked with said they were running slow that day, so he agreed to load up the pallets and deliver them to the job site within the hour. That done, I once again pulled onto the road and hurried off to the project. We put in a long afternoon, but we got in a sweet flagstone path of more beautiful local stone, so once again we were a tired but happy crew.
Back at the shop, as Liz and I were unloading the tools from Wanda the trailer, she asked, “So, tell me how Bernice was doing—was her name Bernice? Did her nephew at least help unload the trunk for you?”
The trunk. “Oh, crap! Crap, crap, crap.” I hated myself for being scatterbrained and so damn easily distracted. “No-o-o-o-o—no unloading was done,” I said ruefully. I rolled the empty trailer into her place at the side of the yard, feeling stupid with tinges of dementia.
Liz looked confused. “But, you—”
“I know, I know! I went out there to deliver the trunk, and I-forgot-to-take-it-out-of-my-car-before-I-left-in-a-hurry-and-now-it’s-still-in-my-car!” I said, all in rush, feeling totally brainless.
“Oh, I hate it when I do that,” Liz said. “The other day I went out to take Emma her lunch at work, and we got to talking about something, and I left without giving her the lunch! I had to turn around and go back. So I know what you mean.”
“You do? That makes me feel better, like I’m not losing my mind.”
Liz turned around at the open bay door of the shop and smiled. “I didn’t say anything about you not losing your mind.”
“Now, don’t get uppity,” I laughed. “Help me out with this.”
I backed the CR-V up to the shop door, and we unloaded the trunk, once again. This time we set it just inside the door by the window, so we could easily load it when it was time to go again to Bernice’s. I sighed. This has got to be my penance for not being charitable in the first place, I thought. I decided to put off calling Bernice Thorton until the next day, because I couldn’t face another knickknack tour in the same day.
We finished unloading and generally straightening things up, talking about the day’s work as we did. On days like this afternoon, with the sun filtering through the linden tree at the corner of the shop, casting dappled shade on the gravel yard, I thought of how the mystic Rumi put it: “Let the beauty we love be what we do.”
Our job done, Liz headed home. Admiring the bucolic scene once more, I shut up the shop and headed into the house for a hot, relaxing shower; a good book—with the prickly Sicilian Salvo Montalbano—out on the porch; and then bed.