Chin Up, Honey

Mrs. Jennings was apparently not as inclined to domesticity as was her daughter. The entire time Emma was preparing the meal, her mother sat on a stool in the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking about an incident at a writers’ conference that she had attended the previous week. Her upset appeared to be with a woman who had told Mrs. Jennings that she could not be from the South because she lived in Oklahoma.

“And it wasn’t so much what she said, it was her attitude, standin’ there with her hand on her hip, sayin’, ‘Oklahoma? That’s not in the South.’ Like she was the last word.”

She was now in about the third full telling of the tale. The first time, Emma had said, “Did you tell her you were from North Carolina?” and that was when Gracie learned that both Emma and her mother were from way over on the East Coast. The information aroused the somewhat unsettling realization that there was so much she did not know about this man with whom she intended to join her life.

This time Emma said, “What did she say when you told her you were from North Carolina?”

“Not really anything. Perhaps she didn’t believe me…or has no concept of the fact that people move around. Bless her heart, she apparently has no idea that the Five Civilized Tribes that made up Oklahoma in the beginnin’ were all from the South. She’s from Georgia. She ought to know how her bunch pushed the Cherokees out here and stole their land, then Sherman sent half the inhabitants of three states runnin’ out this way.”

She spoke with the correcting tone of a history teacher, which she had been. Now retired, Mrs. Jennings wrote essays on social and historical perspectives that were carried in several small-town newspapers.

“I always thought Oklahoma was in the South.” This was Mr. Berry’s mild voice. Gracie looked through the entry to see him standing in front of the open refrigerator. “Maybe she has us confused with Nebraska on the map. Where’s the Coke I put in here a while ago?”

“Well, I don’t think many people know exactly where Oklahoma is,” said Mrs. Jennings. “The weathermen all stand in front of it when givin’ the national weather. And with the sorry state of education in this day and age, no one seems to know that Oklahoma was Confederate during the Civil War. They just rewrite history all the time.”

“That was a long time ago, Mamaw. Western’s the style now,” came Johnny’s playful voice. He called his grandmother Mamaw.

Observing the two through the doorway, Gracie tried to imagine one of their future children calling her mother “Mamaw.” That would happen once.

There was so much food. Sliced ham, potato salad, a vegetable gelatin salad arranged on the salad plates, lima beans—Mrs. Jennings called them butter beans—and corn, candied yams, a cold plate of sliced tomatoes and broccoli and celery sticks, a basket of rolls and rich cornbread of a sort Gracie had not before seen, and several saucers of soft butter and something called chow-chow. Johnny leaned near her ear and whispered that she wouldn’t like it.

“Good mercy, Emma, you cooked like it’s Christmas,” said Mrs. Jennings.

“Well, it is a celebration,” said Emma, with a smile at Gracie and Johnny. Then, to Gracie, “Now, honey, anything you don’t like, you just don’t eat.”

Emma was up twice to get things from the kitchen for Mr. Berry and Johnny. Whenever Johnny ate over at Gracie’s apartment, he got up and got his own salt and pepper and whatever else he might need. She made a mental note to speak to him about doing the same at his mother’s home. She would need to teach him before he got to his father’s age.

Then Mrs. Jennings was addressing her, saying something about knowing a family of Kinneys when she was a child and lived in Washington, D.C. during the war. She meant World War II, Gracie realized.

“Myrna Kinney…I haven’t thought of her in years. I don’t remember her daddy’s name, but they were from somewhere up near Baltimore. I wonder if they could be some of your kin. Stranger things have happened.”

“I don’t recall a Myrna. My mother is an only child—she’s Sylvia Colleen. Her father was also an only child, and so was my great-grandfather. I don’t know about before them.”

“Oh, I was speakin’ about your father’s family. I must be confused. I thought your last name was Kinney.”

Gracie looked at the woman. “Yes, it is. Kinney is my mother’s name. My father’s name was Mercier. Paul Mercier. He and my mother divorced when I was a baby, and my mother returned to her own name. I never knew him.”

She prepared to answer questions as she watched Mrs. Jennings take this in, but then Emma was returning to the table with a basket of fresh hot rolls and saying, “Mama, lots of women started keepin’ their own names back when Gracie was born…or to do like Julia Jenkins-Tinsley down at the post office and use both names.”

“Well, I know that…but it plays havoc with genealogy.”

“Are you goin’ to keep your last name, Gracie?” Emma asked. “I know in business it is sometimes easier.”

Gracie saw Johnny’s eyes widen slightly. She replied that they hadn’t talked about it, but she thought just for the first months she might go by Kinney-Berry and then change all the way over to Berry. “What do you think, Emma?” Johnny’s mother had told Gracie to call her Emma or Mom, but Gracie wasn’t ready yet for Mom. She did want to start by building a bridge with the woman, though.

“That sounds very sensible,” said Emma. “And we are very excited about you two gettin’ married…aren’t we, John Cole?”

“Yes, we are.” Mr. Berry always seemed a little shy but really nice.

Gracie found Johnny’s hand under the table, and he smiled at her.

“I look forward to meetin’ your mother,” said Emma, smiling at Gracie in a way that required a reply.

“And she looks forward to meeting everyone here, too.” Gracie folded her napkin in her lap. “In fact, she wanted to come today, was going to fly down for the weekend. But at the last minute an emergency came up at headquarters—something about the French division. She’s going to have to fly over there in the morning. To Paris. She goes a lot. She’s the only one in their office who can speak French. My grandparents were always taking her over there when she was a child.”

She could hardly believe she had come out with all of that. She looked to see Johnny’s reaction, fearful that he would betray her lying, but he was scooping up chow-chow with a roll, as if it was going to be gone in a minute. And all of what Gracie said could have been true. Her mother did speak fluent French and for that reason handled much of M. Connor’s business in Europe.

“Perhaps I could call her,” Emma said. “I’d like to introduce myself.”

“Oh, she’s hard to catch when these emergencies come up like this. Her hours get erratic. And she might already be gone. She wanted to get the first f light that she could. She said that for the next few weeks she’ll be out of pocket but would be calling me to touch base.”

“Well…I can send her a note. Before you leave, I’d like to get her address. And when you speak to her, please let her know that I look forward to gettin’ to know her.”

“Oh, she wants to meet you, too. She’ll be coming out soon…right after she gets back from France.” She averted her gaze, and her eyes fell on her glass. “This iced tea is delicious. Might I have some more?”

As Emma rose to reach for the pitcher on the sideboard, Mrs. Jennings said, “That’s ice tea, honey. Iced might be grammatically correct, but it isn’t said that way down here. If you want to be grammatical, you could say cold tea.”

“Oh,” Gracie said.

Emma refreshed everyone’s tea, and when she was once more seated, she brought up the subject of the date for the wedding.

“We were thinking the third Saturday in September, if that would work for you.” Gracie watched Emma’s face.

Mrs. Jennings put in that perhaps the church should be consulted to make certain it was available.

But Emma replied that she had asked Pastor Smith that morning, and he had said it was available the entire month of September. “He also said that he is going to check, but he believes the Catholic Church will recognize your marriage in a Methodist Church. Just in case this is important for the future.”

“There’s the Episcopal Church here,” put in Mrs. Jennings. “It’s really pretty…dates from the twenties and has stained-glass windows on either side.”

“Episcopal isn’t the same as Catholic, Mama. Gracie is Catholic.”

“Well, it isn’t so different. They have priests and wear a collar and robe and all that hoo-rah.”

“Some Methodist ministers wear collars and robes and all that stuff, too. It doesn’t make them Catholic.” Emma looked at Gracie with some excitement. “The church is small. It holds about two hundred and fifty, maximum. Do you think that will be okay?”

“I don’t think Methodist ministers wear collars,” Mrs. Jennings interjected. “I’ve never seen one wear a collar.”

Gracie waited to see if Emma would respond to this comment, but she didn’t. Feeling a little uncertain as to which thread of conversation to follow, she said, “We are not planning a very big wedding. We just want family and a few friends. We are going to pay for it ourselves, aren’t we, Johnny?”

“Uh-huh.” Johnny nodded as he finished off a roll.

“Well, we are plannin’ on helpin’ you with the wedding,” said Emma. “We want to…and anyway, it is tradition for the parents of the groom to pay for the weddin’ ring, the groomsmen’s gifts, the bouquet, the mothers’ corsages, things like that.”

Gracie took this in and felt a little apprehensive.

“Okay,” Johnny said, reaching for the last roll in the basket. Gracie had never seen him eat so much. He loved his mother’s cooking. She had been trying to pay attention to the dishes and was going to look everything up in a cookbook.

Emma began talking of the various relatives who were likely to come into town for the wedding and making plans for booking a block of rooms at the Goodnight Motel.

“My mother will stay up at my apartment,” Gracie said quickly, thinking that her mother would come unglued at the idea of staying at the aging motel on the edge of town. Her mother was particular about amenities.

Gracie explained that one of her friends was going to give her a wedding shower. Emma proposed giving them a couple’s bridal shower to introduce Gracie to the family and a few neighbors in Valentine.

“That way you can get to meet the family before the weddin’ in a relaxed atmosphere,” she said. “I read all about it in one of the weddin’ magazines.”

Gracie was touched by the idea and getting more nervous by the minute about the woman’s enthusiasm. She felt it likely that things could get out of control.

They did. Somehow the event ended up turning into a backyard barbeque, with Johnny’s father cooking steak and pork ribs in his secret sauce, a soda-fountain machine from one of the Berry stores, and possibly tap beer. Mrs. Jennings put in the suggestion of where to get plastic cups and paper plates at discount.

Gracie didn’t think it was going to look much like the lawn-party bridal shower she had attended once in Philadelphia.

9

Mother of the Groom

Emma remembered her camera before the kids left. “We have to get a picture for the engagement announcement!”

The late golden sunlight was perfect. She positioned them at the front fender of the Mustang. “Yes, yes, I want you in front of the car.”

When she got through taking Johnny and Gracie’s picture, she had John Cole get in with them. He was always reluctant to have his picture taken. He liked to be cajoled, and Emma did so. After this, she had her mother join in. Her mother then took a picture of Emma and John Cole with Johnny and Gracie. It was all so much like old times, when Johnny had lived at home.

Finally Johnny called a halt. He hugged and kissed Emma, and hugged his father and grandmother, and Gracie was hugged by everyone, too. Then the two young people roared away in the Mustang, down the lane, and it was as if they took a lot of the air with them when they went.

Emma’s mother followed, driving away much more slowly in her aging and faded Impala, going to her garden apartment over at MacCoy Senior Living Center.

Watching her mother’s car until it was out of sight, Emma was struck with a wave of melancholy. Her mother had moved out to live near them in Oklahoma two years ago, because most all of her immediate family—the Macombs—had died. The exceptions were a couple of aunts who were mentally out of this world and one sister with whom Emma’s mother had never gotten along. Even most of the Macomb cousins had died or gone off out of sight. Somehow the Macombs tended to lose members of the family. They seemed to go off to the grocery store or away on vacation and never return. They had not been especially close people, yet they had been Emma’s people. She barely knew her father’s family and didn’t count them at all.

Now, here were Emma and her mother, the end of that branch of the Macomb family tree. Emma thought about how someday her mother would be gone, and she, Emma, would move up into her place as the last matriarch. It appeared Gracie would be the one to move into Emma’s place. She felt sad and grateful at the same time. She had prayed for years for a daughter. It appeared that Gracie was the answer to that prayer. Thank You, God.

With high emotion filling her heart for the second time that day, she walked back into the house, which seemed starkly empty and silent, as it always did when Johnny left. Except, of course, for the television that John Cole was once more watching.

She finished tidying the kitchen, then sat at the kitchen table with a yellow tablet to compose the engagement announcement for the newspaper. She went through five pages before she got it exactly how she wanted it. She ended with the line: A September wedding is planned in Valentine, where the two plan to make their home.

She imagined it. The voices and laughter of grandchildren would fill the house. She would have children around her again, to cook for and kiss boo-boos, sing lullabyes, read books. They would need to get another calm riding horse to join Old Bob, and the children would ride in the afternoons. They would have to get a permanent dog, and not just the stray hound who passed by on occasion to be fed out the back door. And build a tree house. She could still do something like build a tree house. On rainy days she would bake cookies and make blanket forts in the living room.

She was in the midst of imagining all of these wonderful things when John Cole came in to get a Coke and bag of corn chips, and asked her what she was doing.

“Writing the engagement announcement,” she told him happily, and then read it to him.

His response when she finished was, “Have they said they are makin’ their home in Valentine?”

“Well…not straight out. But a house down here in Valentine will be much less expensive than one up there in Lawton. Where do you think they will live?” She did not know why John Cole always had to make comments that just threw cold water all around.

“I don’t know. I just asked.”

“I’m lookin’ forward to them livin’ nearby and to havin’ grandchildren to enjoy. Aren’t you?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I guess so.”

She found that answer unsatisfactory. “Don’t you want grandchildren?”

“That isn’t what I said, Emma. I haven’t even thought about it. We only found out a few days ago that Johnny was gettin’ married.”

“Well, it certainly isn’t like a big surprise. He’s a grown man…lots older than you and I when we married. It has been a fair assumption since he was a baby that one day he would be grown and havin’ babies of his own. That is what people do. I’ve imagined it.”

“That is not somethin’ I have done, okay? I’m not like you, Emma. I don’t go imaginin’ all sorts of things.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t sit around and think like you do, that’s all.”

“What is wrong with thinkin’?” She did not appreciate him criticizing her, which she knew he was doing, no matter how innocent he tried to make it out to be. He had always accused her of imagining things.

“Nothing. I just am not like you, Emma. I don’t spend a lot of time thinkin’ everything six ways from Sunday.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with thinkin’ about the future and plannin’ for it. You can’t have anything if you don’t plan for it. Everything that is here was planned first.” She gestured, indicating the surrounding kitchen.

“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it, and I didn’t say I don’t plan. I just don’t think about the same things that you do.” He was edging out the door.

“Obviously,” she said, annoyed and a little embarrassed, because the entire argument was stupid. She couldn’t even figure out how they’d gotten into it.

Later that night, she got all excited about an idea that came to her. She went to the family room to tell John Cole, which likely was a mistake, since he was watching the replay of a NASCAR race.

“Why don’t we have a pool put in for the barbeque? The younger people would really like that, and then we’ll already have it for when we get grandchildren.”

John Cole looked startled. “That’s a big project. I don’t know if you could get a pool and the yard all finished in time for the barbeque.”

“Oh, sure we can,” Emma said, delighted to have a rebuttal for that excuse. “Charlene MacCoy got one put in last summer. She said it was amazing how quickly it all got done. I think she said it only took about a month.”

John Cole’s response was to throw around a lot more cold water by pointing out the expense of a pool in addition to the expenses of the wedding and the gift of the honeymoon, and all sorts of things that could come up, such as having to go to Baltimore for the wedding.

Emma, who had also been thinking all day about having the inside of the house painted, said, “Well, a pool will be an investment. We’ve talked about one before, and I want one for when we have grandkids. I’ll just look into it. It won’t hurt to see.”

She really wished John Cole would have confidence in her good sense. She had not once in all their married years gone overboard with spending. She had pinched pennies as much as he had for many years, and as a result he now enjoyed a comfortable home. He just could not seem to see that they did not have to pinch pennies anymore. Of course, when he wanted something, he darn well got it. It all just made her so mad that she had to go clean the kitchen sink, then move on to scrubbing the floor.

As she was getting ready for bed, she went to the window and looked out into the dark expanse of the yard, imagining a pool sparkling beneath the moon.

The thought came: she and John Cole might like to sit out beside the pool at night, or even go skinny-dipping. Maybe that would get him away from the television.

Then she suddenly realized that in the background of all her fantasies of their growing family was John Cole. He was there in her images—supervising the building of the pool—and a new patio, of course—the purchase of a horse for the grandchildren, sawing the wood for the tree house, dragging blankets from high shelves and putting together tricycles.

Sitting with her and talking, holding her hand, kissing her…making love.

She tried imagining life without John Cole. Family suppers, grandchildren, the living room with his recliner and him not in it. She could not do it. In fact, she felt a little panic about it.

It suddenly occurred to her that she was doing exactly what John Cole had said she did: thinking everything six ways from Sunday.

And a very good thing that one of them did some thinking, she thought, going into the closet and putting on her slinky silk nightgown that she liked to wear to remind herself—and hopefully John Cole—that she was a woman.

She fluffed the large bed pillows and settled herself against them in an artful, womanly manner. She wanted to present an attractive picture when John Cole came through the door and found her there. She imagined a number of compelling things to say to him.

It turned out not to matter, though, because John Cole did not even come to bed. He fell asleep in his recliner and slept there all night. Probably not thinking at all.

10

Winston and Willie Lee

Earlier in the spring, when elderly Winston Valentine came upon an old electric wheelchair at a yard sale, he bought it and began using it to help him get around town. The wheelchair’s electric motor shortly proved unreliable, however, so Willie Lee often ended up pushing. Quite quickly the pair became a familiar sight on the streets of Valentine—the old man wearing a straw cowboy hat and riding in a wheelchair pushed by a boy with a Dallas Cowboys ball cap, invariably on crooked, and followed by a spotted dog.

Most days after their morning radio program, Winston took Willie Lee to the Main Street Café for lunch, because Willie Lee’s mother hounded them both about eating vegetables. Afterward they would go across the street to Blaine’s Soda Fountain to get ice cream.

Winston insisted that Willie Lee abandon the idea of the extra distance required to use the crosswalk and cut across in the middle of the block, often holding up traffic. Winston often quite boldly used his advanced age and Willie Lee’s position as an eternally sweet mentally challenged person to do just what he wanted to do.

No one minded except First Deputy Lyle Midgette, and he had given up trying to get them to quit the illegal and hazardous practice. Deputy Midgette would much rather face any criminal than Mr. Winston’s sharp tongue. Half the time he was not even certain what Mr. Winston was saying. Whenever he saw the two crossing illegally, he would turn around and go in the opposite direction, so that he did not have to feel he was derelict in his duty. It was a comfort to know that the sheriff had admitted to the same thing, saying, “There’s no one who can tell Winston what to do.”

The boy would push Winston in the wheelchair through the door of the drugstore, and the old man would rise and call greetings to everyone as he walked across the room to the soda fountain. There he would spend half an hour or so holding court and pretty much pretending that he was at least twenty years younger. He would hand out cold sweet tea and latte and barbeque and banana splits, along with advice and opinions. On good days, Claire Ford would come in, slip up on a stool, smile at him and ask for a strawberry milkshake, her favorite. He would make it extra thick and watch her rosy tongue savor the sweet pink cream off the long-handled spoon. On really good days she would be without her husband, and Winston would imagine himself at least thirty years younger, and sometimes he almost got some excitement in his pants.

During this time when Winston was occupied, Willie Lee, with Munro quietly at his heels, would occupy himself in the magical world of the magazine section. The plate-glass windows of the drugstore had wide wooden windowsills just right for sitting and reading, which was why Belinda Blaine kept insisting the magazine section needed to be moved, but she could not figure out where else to put it. Willie Lee would sit on the windowsill, and look at magazines about bicycling and skating and skiing and car racing. He could not read the words, had even quit longing to read the words, but he looked at the pictures and dreamed of doing these things himself, just like a normal boy.

“Where’s your mama?” Winston asked Belinda on that afternoon’s visit to the drugstore soda fountain.

“She’s gone off with Jaydee.”

“With Jaydee?” This was a surprise. Startling, even. “Gone off to where?”

“I don’t know, just off.” While he was dealing with this, she added, “And Claire was already in earlier. You missed her. She and Larkin were goin’ off this afternoon to Dallas.”

Everyone was off, and here he was. His Claire had not even informed him about a trip to Dallas. There had been a time when she told him just about everything. Now, more and more, she was slipping away from him.