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Perry had not bothered to tell her goodbye. Again.
Gripping the stems of the cut roses so tightly that the thorns pricked her hands, Vella walked purposefully up the back steps and went inside to prepare a fresh pot of coffee for herself and Winston, who had, with the arrival of balmy spring, begun once more to join her for an early-morning chat. She got out the blue pottery mug Winston seemed to favor. In the mirror hung on the inside of the cabinet door, she paused to put on lipstick.
Down on Porter Street, the sun had risen high enough to shine its first golden rays on the roof of a small house dating from the forties that Realtors called a bungalow. In bed in the back bedroom, Marilee James, who was definitely not a morning person, was awakened by her eight-year-old son.
“Maa-ma…”
Marilee managed to crack an eyelid.
“Maa-ma…” He peered into her face, his blue eyes large behind his thick glasses.
Marilee tried to focus enough to see the clock. Willie Lee simply had no sense of time at all. He woke up when he woke, and slept when he slept, never minding the rest of the world…or his mother, who had not had a decent night’s sleep since Miss Porter had suddenly and fantastically thrown the newspaper management into her hands and run off with a husband.
Was that red numeral a five or a six? She was going to have to get a bigger clock. The thought caused her to close her eyes.
“Ma-ma, can I have a dog?” Willie Lee spoke in a whisper and slowly, carefully pronouncing each word, as was his habit.
“Not right this minute,” Marilee managed to get out with as hoarse a voice as she used to have when she smoked a pack and a half a day of Virginia Slims.
She gathered courage and stretched herself toward the clock. The red numerals came in more clearly. It was 6:10. Giving a groan, she rolled over and thought that she could not get up. That was all there was to it. She would not get up.
“I want this dog in this pic-ture.” Willie Lee shoved a book in her face.
Marilee, who could not respond in any way, shape or form, stared with fuzzy vision at a picture of a spotted dog in one of her son’s picture books.
Willie Lee, not at all bothered by not being answered, sat back on folded legs and said, “I will ask God for this dog.”
Marilee’s sleepy gaze came to rest upon her son, upon his head bent once more to study the picture book. His short white-blond hair stood on end in all directions, as was usual.
Her Willie Lee, who had put up a mighty struggle to enter the world and ended up with brain damage that cast doubt still upon his future ability to lead anything resembling a normal life without someone to watch over him.
Her heart seemed to swell and her heartbeats to grow louder…thump…thump…thump…echoing in her ears, broken only by the clink of dishes from the kitchen, where Corrine was no doubt readying the table for breakfast, as she had each morning since coming to stay with them.
With the aroma of coffee floating in to reach her, Marilee pictured the slight figure of her young niece at the counter. Likely she had to pull a chair over and stand on it in order to fill the coffeemaker.
Two of them, two little souls, depending upon only her, Marilee, a mere woman alone.
The idea so frightened her that in an instant she had flung back the covers and gotten to her feet, moving in the manner of generations of women before her who had struggled with the overwhelming urge to run screaming out of the house to throw themselves in front of the early-morning garbage truck. The saving answer to that urge was to propel herself headlong into the day of taking care of those who needed her.
“Let’s get you dressed, buster,” she said to her son, scooping him up, causing him to giggle.
“Time to get go-ing,” he said, mimicking her usual refrain.
“Yes…time to get going.”
When focusing on the needs of those around her, she did not have to face the needs clamoring inside herself.
“Here they are,” Corrine said and brought Marilee the car keys she had been searching for, as the child did each morning at seven-thirty—or any other time, really.
“Thank you, hon…now, let’s get goin’….”
The children trooped before her out the front door, and they all piled into the Jeep Cherokee for the five-minute drive to school, where Marilee let them out on the wide sidewalk in front of the long, low brick building.
The two, taller and very thin Corrine and shorter, slight Willie Lee, did not run off with the other screaming and laughing children but stood there side by side, forlornly watching her drive away.
Marilee, who caught sight of them in the rearview mirror, felt like a traitor abandoning her delicate charges.
Pressing firmly on the accelerator, she focused on the road and reminded herself that she was a working mother, just like a million other working mothers, trying to keep a roof over all their heads, and that her children needed to learn to deal with real life.
As she whipped the Cherokee into its accustomed place in the narrow lot behind the brick building that housed The Valentine Voice, she realized that she had been doing the same thing for most of seven years. Where did the years go? When had twenty-one turned into forty?
It was Miss Porter running off into a new life who had caused this unrest, Marilee thought with annoyance, hiking her heavy leather tote up on her shoulder. The next instant, having the disconcerting impression that she was beginning to resemble Miss Porter, she dropped the bag to her hand.
“My computer is down,” Tammy Crawford said immediately when Marilee came down the large aisle of the main room.
“Call the repairman.” Marilee threw her bag on her already full desk and picked up the day’s edition of the Voice. She had not had time to read it at home. She had not had time for weeks.
“Mrs. Oklahoma is going to visit the high school this mornin’,” Reggie said. “Principal forgot to call us…I’m goin’ right over there.”
“’kay.” Marilee didn’t think everyone really needed to report to her.
Charlotte strode forward with a handful of notes. “Here’s the first morning complaints of late papers…and Roger, that new guy they’ve hired up at the printer, wants you to call him…and here’s a note from the mayor for tomorrow’s ‘About Town’ column. City hall has lost those flags they thought they had left.”
Marilee took the notes and sank into her chair.
June, who was now working on their ad layouts since their top ad layout person had quit last week, came over and said, “I can’t read this note Jewel put on this ad. Do you think that is supposed to be a two or a five?”
“Call the Ford dealer and ask. I don’t think they would appreciate us guessing.”
“Okay. I can do that.” June generally needed to convince herself of action.
Marilee, giving a large sigh, fell into her chair and flopped open the paper to see how it had come out, and if she would need to be making any retractions and groveling apologies. She thought she was learning to grovel quite well.
“Another day in paradise,” she said to no one in particular.
The Valentine Voice
About Town
by Marilee James
For the one or two people in town who have not heard by now, Ms. Muriel Porter, former publisher of The Valentine Voice, and Mr. Dwight Abercrombie, who met last year on a Carribean cruise, were married yesterday afternoon in a small ceremony at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. Immediately afterward the two left on a world tour they estimate will take them upward of eighteen months. Following their world tour, the couple plan to settle in either Daytona Beach or possibly Majorca, Spain. Ms. Porter-Abercrombie wanted everyone to know she will always remain a Valentinian, however far she may roam.
“Valentine will always be my home,” Ms. Porter stated. “My ties there are as necessary to my life as cold tea on a hot day.”
The new publisher and editor in chief of The Valentine Voice, Tate Holloway, will be arriving this weekend to officially take over the paper. Mr. Holloway is Ms. Porter-Abercrombie’s cousin and a veteran newspaper journalist with thirty years experience on a number of the nation’s leading newspapers.
An open house will be held in honor of Mr. Holloway on Monday at the Voice offices. Cake and coffee will be served courtesy of Sweetie Cakes of Main Street. Come by and welcome Mr. Holloway, or address to him your complaints.
Until Monday, I will continue as managing editor. All news stories should be reported to me, and you can call me at my home number, 555-4743, afternoons and until 8:00 p.m. Please save all complaints for Mr. Holloway on Monday.
Other important bits of note:
The first meeting of the Valentine Rose Club will be held tonight, 7:00 p.m., at the Methodist Church Fellowship Hall. Vella Blaine will head the meeting and wants it stressed that all denominations are welcome and there will be no passing of a collection plate.
Jaydee Mayhall has formally declared his candidacy for city council. Thus far he is the first candidate to declare intentions of running for the seat being vacated by long-time member Wesley Fitz-water, who says he is tired of the thankless job. Mayhall invites anyone who would like to talk to him about the town’s needs to stop by to visit with him at his office on Main Street.
Mayor Upchurch has ten Valentine town flags left at city hall, for anyone who wants to fly one outside their home or shop. The flags are free; the only requirement is a proper pole high enough that the flag does not brush the ground.
Two
Looking in the Wrong Direction
“How long has he been missing?” Principal Blankenship demanded of the teacher standing before her.
“Since lunch recess,” Imogene Reeves answered, wringing her hands. “I don’t care if he is retarded and looks like an angel. He knows how to slip away. He is not just wanderin’ off.”
The principal winced at the word retarded spoken out loud. There were so many unacceptable words and phrases these days that she couldn’t keep up, but she was fairly certain the term retarded fell in the unacceptable category. She checked her watch and saw it was going on one o’clock.
She headed at a good clip out of her office, asking as she went, “Has anyone spoken to Mr. Starr…checked the storerooms?”
It could very well be a repeat of that first time, she thought, calming herself. It had been Mr. Starr, the custodian, who had found Willie Lee the first time. That time the boy had been all along playing with a mouse in the janitor’s storeroom. This had been upsetting—a little fright that the mouse might bite and the boy get an infection—but it was better than the second time, when the boy had gotten off the school grounds and all the way down to the veterinarian’s place a half-mile away. That time Principal Blankenship had been forced to call the boy’s mother, because the veterinarian was a friend of the boy’s mother.
Oh, she did not want to have to tell the mother again. Marilee James wrote for the newspaper. This would get everywhere.
Imagining what her father, a principal before her, would have said, would have yelled, Principal Blankenship just about wet her pants.
The storeroom had been searched and the custodian Mr. Starr consulted; involved with changing out hot water heaters, he had not seen Willie Lee since the beginning of the school day. The closets were searched, and the storerooms a second time, and the boys’ bathrooms.
At last the principal resorted to telephoning down to the veterinarian’s office.
“I haven’t seen Willie Lee,” the young receptionist at the veterinarian’s told her. “And Doc Lindsey has been out inoculatin’ cattle since before noon.”
The principal, with a sinking feeling, went along the corridors of her small school, peeking into each classroom, searching faces, hoping, praying with hands clasping and unclasping, for Willie Lee to appear.
In her heart she knew that Willie Lee had escaped the school grounds a second time, but she did not want to think of such a failure on the part of one of her teachers. Or herself. And truly, she didn’t want anything to happen to the child.
She did wish he could go to another school.
At last, with pointy shoulders slumping, she broke down and spoke over the school intercom: “Attention, teachers and students. Anyone who has seen Willie Lee James since lunch recess, please come to the office.”
In Ms. Norwood’s fourth-grade class, Corrine Pendley heard the announcement of her cousin’s name. Face jerking upward, she stared at the speaker above the classroom door. Then she saw all eyes turn to her.
Her face burned. Bending her head over her notebook, she focused her eyes on the lined paper in front of her and concentrated on being invisible.
The teacher had called her name several times before Corrine was jolted into hearing by Christy Grace poking her in the back with a pencil. “She’s callin’ you.”
Corrine looked up at the teacher, who asked if Corrine had seen Willie Lee. Corrine said, “No, ma’am.” She wondered at the question. Maybe the teacher thought she was a little deaf. Or else she thought Corrine would lie.
Why didn’t everybody mind their own business and quit looking at her?
Bending her head over her math problems, she made the numbers carefully, trying to concentrate on them, but thinking about her cousin. Willie Lee was only eight, and little for his age.
He was slow, but this did not mean he didn’t know about some things. One thing he seemed to know was how to get away when he wanted to. Corrine wished she had gone with him.
Her anxiety increased. She felt responsible. She should have been looking out for him. She was older, and he didn’t have any brothers or sisters, just like she didn’t.
All manner of dark fantasies paraded through her mind. She hoped he didn’t get run over. Or fall in a muddy creek and drown. Or get picked up by a stranger.
Her pencil point broke, startling her.
Carefully, she laid the pencil down, got up and walked as quietly as possible, so as not to become too visible, to the teacher’s desk to ask in a hurried whisper to go to the rest room.
In the tiled room that smelled strongly of bleach, she used the toilet and then she washed her hands. She kept thinking about the front doors. When she came out of the rest room, she turned left instead of right and walked down the hall and right out the double doors. She did this without thinking at all, just following an urge inside.
All the way down the front walk, she felt certain a yell was going to hit her in the back. But it didn’t. Then she was running free, running from school and then running from herself, scared to death to have done something that was very wrong and would make everyone mad at her.
She would have to find Willie Lee, she thought. If she found him, no one would be mad at her. The sun felt warm on her head and the breeze cool to her face.
At that very instant, when finding her cousin and being a hero seemed totally possible, she looked down the street and saw her Aunt Marilee’s brilliant white Jeep Cherokee coming.
The Jeep’s chrome shone so brightly, Corrine had to squint. Still, she saw Aunt Marilee behind the wheel. Corrine stopped in her tracks, and her life seemed to drain right out her toes.
Likely she was going to get it now. And she deserved it. She never could seem to do things right.
The vehicle pulled up beside her, and the tinted window slid down. Aunt Marilee said, “Where are you goin’?”
Corrine, who could not read her aunt’s even tone or blank expression, said slowly, “They announced ‘bout Willie Lee being missin’. I was goin’ to find him.”
Her aunt said, “Well, that makes two of us. Get in. I have to go see the principal first.”
Corrine opened the door and slipped into the seat in a manner as if to disappear. Carefully, she closed the door beside her. In the short drive to the school parking lot, she tried to read her aunt’s attitude but could not. She had never seen her aunt look like this. She thought desperately of what her aunt might be thinking, in order to be ready for what to say or do.
But all Aunt Marilee said to her when they got to the school was, “Come on back in with me. You’ll need to get your stuff from class.”
Aunt Marilee went to Corrine’s class with her and told Ms. Norwood that she was taking Corrine home early. Corrine, who was used to moving from an entire apartment in just a few minutes and therefore was not in the habit of accumulating needless trifles, stuffed all her books and notebooks from her desk into her backpack in scarcely a minute. As she lugged it to the classroom door, she could feel everyone looking at her, but it didn’t matter. She was leaving, at least for today.
The heels of Aunt Marilee’s Western boots echoed sharply on the corridor floor all the way back to the principal’s office, where Aunt Marilee said to her, “Sit right here. I don’t want to lose you, too.”
Without a word, Corrine sat. Aunt Marilee disappeared into the principal’s office.
The secretary, who had bleached blond hair teased up to amazing heights, looked at her. Corrine looked around the room and swung her feet that only brushed the floor.
Aunt Marilee had not fully closed the door, but even if she had, the voices would probably have been heard. Aunt Marilee had the furious tone she used when she and Corrine’s mother got into their fights. Corrine imagined her aunt was standing how she did when she meant business: feet slightly apart and eyes like laser rays.
Aunt Marilee wanted to know how people supposedly educated in child development could not manage to keep track of one little boy who was diagnosed as learning disabled and not able to think above five years old. The principal answered that the school was not a prison and did not have guards.
“We are trying to mainstream Willie Lee to the best of our ability,” the principal said. “We do not lose normal children, who are taught to participate.”
