Cold Tea on a Hot Day (15 page)

“She’s been sending Corrine cards, and she called twice this week.” She felt pleased to give this report. “She has a job at the Tarrant County Courthouse. Secretary, to a judge, I think.”

“Sounds encouraging. Benefits and everything?”

“She says so.”

“This may be the time she gets her act together,” Parker said.

Marilee tore a slice of bread. “Anita has been trying to get herself together for all of her life. Unfortunately, about the time she does, she gets herself hooked on something and comes unraveled again.” Marilee was a little ashamed at this bit of sarcasm popping out.

Parker raised an eyebrow at her.

“Okay, Anita is trying and is doing very well,” she said more properly. “But past history has me on the cautious side. I don’t know if Corrine will still be here for school in the fall or will be able to return to Anita, but it seems prudent, given past experience, to make plans for her schooling and to remain available, just in case.

“The chances are high that I will have Corrine popping in and out of my life. I am, as I have said, a woman with two children. That is how it is, and I’m sorry if it displeases you.”

Maybe her sharp attitude answered the question of what “a woman like her” was.
Contentious
came to mind.

“I didn’t say it displeased me.” He seemed awkward with the word. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt, Marilee. Corrine is not your child, and you will have to give her back to Anita when Anita decides to take her. You don’t want to look at this. You are gettin’ way too involved with her. You are making a burden for yourself that you don’t need to have.”

“A burden? I don’t consider my niece a burden.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that you are complicating your life in a way that you don’t need to.”

“And therefore I complicate your life.”

“Well, yes, it does that. And you don’t seem to care how it will affect me.”

Marilee stared at him. The truth in his words stung, and she wanted to sting back.

“You are an adult, Parker. She is a child. Virtually a motherless child. You condemn me for what I give her? You feel neglected because of it?”

He got all red in the face.

They were now more or less in a good argument. Parker pointed out once again, in different words and with the aid of his fork, that she had no legal claim to Corrine, and that Anita could come and take her at any moment, and there was nothing Marilee could do about it.

“Forgive me if I don’t care to see you hurt,” he added.

Marilee pointed out that she knew this fact very well, and that Corrine was her niece and would always be her niece.

“I have to be there for her. There isn’t anyone else.”

It came to her that Parker was an only child of two
rather cool and distant parents. His father had been dead some years, and his mother had remarried and moved to Colorado. It would be difficult for him to relate to feelings for one’s sister’s child.

“I know this is hard for you to understand, because you have no brother or sister, but Corinne is a blood relative, as close to me as my own child. I was there with Anita when she was born,” she added, remembering it all for an instant—the excitement, the wonder, the bit of sadness that the child was not her own and that she had known even then, that Corinne was in for a rough road with Anita, and that she, Marilee, was hopeless to prevent so many painful problems.

She gazed at Parker with her heart full of emotion that spilled over to him.

He pretty well wiped this out, however, by saying, “The best thing you can do for Corrine is to help her with her own mother and quit buttin’ in.”

She was shocked by her urge to reach across and slap him.

She said evenly, “I am not
butting in.
It was Anita who asked me to come get Corrine, Parker.”

Each recognizing how close they were coming to the line, they shut up. Marilee ate her lasagna, which was now sticking in her throat, and Parker mopped up the sauce on his plate.

They finished the meal in comparative silence broken only by occasional overly polite comments, in the manner of two people who are afraid one more cross word might be the last hot straw that ignites a flame to burn down the house.

Parker helped her to clear away the dishes; then he kissed her neck and cajoled her into kissing him, right there at the kitchen sink.

“I’m sorry we argued. I really am.” He gave her his best little-boy grin.

“I am, too.” Perhaps it had been more her fault than his.

She kissed him good and wondered what in the world was wrong with her. Pushing lingering resentment aside, she took his hand and led him to the couch, where they settled close together in the low light and talked softly of this and that, all innocuous subjects, while Parker kept getting more and more intimate with his hands, and Marilee kept getting more anxious.

She was annoyed with herself for not coming out and asking,
Do you still want to marry me? Let’s get this stuff straight.
She was annoyed with him for not taking the initiative to speak up on the matter.

She could not say any of this. She certainly could not bring up the marriage question. Better to let him bring it up. It was a man thing.

When he did bring it up, she would say yes. That was it. She would say yes. She kissed him deeply with this thought.

And then Parker’s mobile phone went off, his answering service relaying an emergency message.

“It’s Leanne’s mare,” he told Marilee, as he clicked off from the service and began punching numbers on the little phone.

He spoke into it and said the name Charlene in a brief
exchange, ending with, “I’ll be right out. I’m leavin’ from Marilee’s.”

He clicked off the phone and rose. “After what happened to the other mare, Leanne’s real nervous over this one. I said I’d be right out.”

“Charlene and Mason’s?”

“Yeah. Mason’s there…he’s ‘bout as good as needs be, too.”

She hurried with him to the door and out onto the porch. He broke into a trot to his truck. She held on to the porch post and watched as if he were going off to war, sending prayers with him as he backed out and headed off down the road.

God, please don’t let anything happen to this mare. It is so hard for him to have that happen.

She went back inside and softly closed the door, leaned against it and fought back sudden tears that somewhat baffled her.

She was struck with the knowledge that she could pray for the life of a mare, but she could not seem to pray about this situation with Parker.

Brushing her teeth, Marilee glanced into the mirror and stared at herself. She bent to rinse her mouth, and then she stared at her reflection again.

Up to a woman like you.

She was a woman who was quite contrary, she thought. Here she had a good man that she really cared for and she kept picking fights with him.

She was afraid of marriage.

This, of course, was only natural, given her experience
with Stuart, and what she had seen with her own father and mother. Marriage was serious business, not to be entered into lightly, so she was showing good sense to be cautious.

It was more.
Some unnamed fear.

It was fear of life passing by, and of making the wrong choices and being stuck with them.

With a hard tug on the belt of her robe, she pivoted and left the bathroom, stalking into the kitchen, where she made a cup of chamomile tea, sat at the table and sipped it, while alternately staring and looking away from her reflection in the night-black window.

She went to the back door and peered through the window, but all she could see was dark yard. Trees obscured Tate Holloway’s house. She wondered about him.

She did not intend to worry about Tate Holloway. Lord knew she had enough to think about, without going
there.

Seating herself again at the table, she sipped her tea while her gaze wandered in a slow circle from the red-checked tablecloth to her reflection in the window, to the telephone, then again to the tablecloth.

Finally she pushed herself from the table with a deliberate motion and dialed Parker’s home number, halfway expecting the impersonal voice of his answering service.

She was startled to hear a “Hello” in an unfamiliar voice. A
woman’s voice.

“I’m calling Parker Lindsey.”

“Oh, this is his phone. Marilee? This is Charlene. Parker left his phone here on the table.”

“I’d dialed his home phone. I thought his service
would answer, if he wasn’t home.” Marilee felt confused, but somewhat relieved to recognize Charlene MacCoy’s voice. Charlene was a warm person, and her voice was warm, too.

“Well, I guess they’ve already switched over here. He’s out in the barn with Leanne. Do you want me to go get him?”

“Oh, no, it’s not important. How is the mare?”

“She’s fine. She had the prettiest baby.” Charlene’s voice became excited. “Not a paint, like Leanne was expectin’, but black, with a white star and white feet. A really nice filly. And there was no trouble at all. That mare just popped her out, when she got ready. Parker swore she was holding things up just because.” Someone in the background said something, and Charlene said, “That was Mason, and he says that mare was waitin’ for the full moon to get up.” She laughed.

“Parker was in here havin’ coffee just a few minutes ago, and then him and Leanne went back out there to watch the mare and the baby again. Do you want me to have him call you?”

“No…I imagine he’ll be tired. I’ll call him in the morning.”

“Well, Mason’s just goin’ out there now. He’ll tell him you called.”

When Marilee hung up, she laid her forehead against the phone and gave thanks for the healthy filly.

And she wished she did not feel so dissatisfied. It made her feel selfish.

Lying in bed, with the moonlight filtering through the window and making patterns on her coverlet, she contem
plated herself and her life. She had the strong urge to pick up the telephone and call Tate Holloway, and she wondered at herself.

She simply had too much of a fondness for telephone talk in the night.

In Matters of the Heart

T
ate jogged along in front of Marilee’s house just as golden light shone into the elms that towered over the blue roof of the squatty white cottage.

With relief, he saw that her Cherokee sat alone in the driveway. No sign of Lindsey’s truck.

He jogged on over to Main, where his burning lungs and rubbery legs forced him to walk for over half the block. He was getting better, though, because he recovered by the time he got to the police station. When he turned up Church and was past the police station and getting close to the intersection, he began to wonder what might have happened to Lindsey. There was no sign of the man.

What might have happened at the evening’s previous candlelit supper? Was the man too worn-out to jog this morning? He did not like that particular train of thought.

He had dropped to something only resembling a jog
and was approaching his driveway when a figure came pounding around the curve in the street half a block ahead, accompanied by a rider on a bicycle.

It was Lindsey jogging, and the blond-haired woman on the bicycle.

“Mornin’,” Lindsey said, when he came near.

“Mornin’,” Tate replied and gave a wave.

“Hi,” the woman said.

“Hello.”

Tate watched the two pass, Lindsey jogging and the woman on her bicycle beside him.
Together?

Tate jogged up his driveway and around to the back door, up the steps and inside and all the way upstairs and into his bathroom for a shower.

He did not think he should jump to hopeful conclusions about the disintegration of the romance between Marilee and Lindsey. Sometimes things were not always what they seemed. A major rule for a journalist was to get the facts.

But he whistled as he showered. By golly, he was showing improvement in the jogging area. Don’t count him over the hill yet.

“We’ll see you tomorrow, Editor,” called Sherry, the waitress who worked the late-afternoon shift at the Main Street Café.

The few other patrons added their friendly goodbyes.

“Later, buddy,” from Juice Tinsley, and a wave from Norm Stidham, who had a mouth full of raisin pie.

“Don’t forget to send Marilee to cover the Homemakers meeting on Thursday. We’re showing the video Ms.
Porter sent from Cairo,” said Kaye Upchurch, who was sitting with her mother, Odessa Collier.

“Marilee’ll be there.”

“Good to have seen you, Tate.” Odessa gave her sultry smile.

Odessa Collier had to be pushing seventy but was still hot enough to strip wallpaper, Tate would bet.

He winked at her.

Folding the newspaper beneath his arm, he stepped out into the brightness of a May afternoon.

Thank you, Lord, for this happy minute. He thought of it with the feeling of a man who had been in combat in the jungles of Viet Nam, not to mention all the painful stories he had covered in his life as a journalist. He knew how fleeting happiness was in life on earth.

On this wonderful afternoon he was living what he considered the epitome of his dream. He had formed the habit to head to the Main Street Café at midafternoon each day, where he would get a glass of iced tea and sometimes a slice of pecan pie, and enjoy an informal chat with anyone there. After about fifteen minutes he would head on over to Blaine’s Drugstore, where he would get another glass of iced tea or maybe an ice-cream cone, and chat some more with Vella Blaine and whoever came in.

In this way, he got a pulse on the town. He discreetly jotted down the names of people he met, and at night he went over the names and recalled the faces in order to have them handy on his tongue for the next time he met them, or to mention in his editorials. In this fashion, he felt he was making a lot of people happy, and at the same time he built circulation, which was already up by nearly
a hundred people. People liked to see their names in print, and he liked to place the names there. It was a happy merging of desires.

This afternoon, upon leaving the drugstore after an ice-cream cone and a chat with Miss Vella, Miss Dixie Love and Gerald Overton of the Citizens Bank, he felt somewhat victorious, as if he’d scaled a tall mountain. He supposed he had only arrived at the first plateau—he had simply gotten moved into town and made some necessary decisions and implemented the biggest one of those, which was keeping the paper going and changing it to a twice weekly. So far he was living his dream and keeping a number of people employed and able to feed their families. Well and good. He tried not to think about the enormous precipice before him in the form of a giant debt, and the somewhat daunting matter of how he would live out the rest of his life.

One day at a time, he reminded himself, as he hopped over the door of his convertible and directed his BMW around the block to drive by Marilee’s house and saw only her Cherokee parked in the driveway. His curiosity over what had transpired with the candlelit supper was about to eat a hole in his brain.

Whipping his car on around the corner and into his driveway, he grabbed the bag of groceries out of the seat and went straight to the kitchen, where he made a pitcher of sweet iced tea. He picked up the pitcher and the new box of loose leaf tea he had bought to replace what he had borrowed. Then he stopped and tossed the box of tea back on the counter, before heading out the back door and across the yard to the gate in the fence.

It squealed as he opened it. Late-afternoon sunlight
filtered through the trees down onto the garden patch. Tate looked at it and thought that Marilee needed a plow.

When he reached the back steps of the little bungalow, he glanced upward and saw Corrine gazing out the kitchen window at him. She disappeared, and a moment later the door swung open to him.

“Hello, Mr. Tate.”

“Evenin’, missy. How are you? Why, is that a new bow in your hair?”

“Yes,” she replied with her normal solemness. “Aunt Marilee is in cursin’ at the computer you had sent over today.”

“Oh, she is?”

He grinned, coaxing a grin in return from the girl, whose eyes looked so much deeper than her years. He had already formed an idea of her situation, a formation based on his instincts about people and bits and pieces of knowledge discreetly picked up along the way about Marilee James, her sister and her family. He, having been a similar child, felt great empathy for this one.

“I brought some sweet tea. Let’s see if we can sugarcoat the situation.”

She said quite quickly and in a low voice, “Mr. Parker was here, but he doesn’t know anything about computers, and she ran him off.” She shook her head. “I hope you can help.”

“Well, I imagine I can.” So Lindsey had been there and had not been a help.

Corrine quietly assisted him in getting the glasses and ice cubes. Then she pushed a package of cookies at him. “I think you’d better add chocolate.”

When Tate entered the living room, it was with a glass of iced tea in one hand and a chocolate cookie in the other.

Marilee looked up and saw him and glared. “I don’t like this new computer.”

He lifted the glass and cookie. “I come in peace, to return your tea…made.” And then he determinedly grinned his very warmest grin.

“I had peace until I had to learn a new computer. My old one worked just fine.”

“Well, now, you couldn’t use the Internet with your old one. It is time to get on the information highway or get left behind.”

“I might prefer being left behind.”

Feeling a little desperate, he held out the glass and cookie, and she took them very slowly.

He watched her bite into the cookie and then look up at him, her eyes deep blue, and chocolate smearing her moist lips. An immediate full-blown fantasy filled his mind of kissing her until she moaned and writhed like a wild woman in his arms.

“You have a cookie crumb on your chin…let me just…there. Now, let’s see how I can help you with this computer.”

He pulled a chair over and sat on it backward, right next to her, continuing to look at her lips with anticipation. He knew quite suddenly that he was right where he wanted to be.

The sun was far to the west and the breeze dying down. In the process of deadheading her roses, Vella paused and ran a gardener’s appreciative gaze over the spring
greenery of her rosebushes and upward into the elm trees. “Thank you, God,” she whispered, as she almost invariably did at such a sight.

Then she caught sight of Perry’s big black car arriving. Anticipation and an ache slipped across her heart at the same moment.

She hurried up the steps and in the back door and straight to the oven, where she checked the meat loaf. It was good and dark, crusty as she liked it to be. She made a superb meat loaf; Winston always praised it all over when she brought it to the church fellowship supper.

“Got the Wednesday
afternoon
edition of the paper,” Perry said as he came into the kitchen. He was a big chunk of a man and seemed to fill the kitchen. Just like every other day of the week, on his way to the sink, rolling up his sleeves, he turned on the little television.

Vella looked over her shoulder at the set that sat on the counter. She had a sudden and disturbing fantasy of herself with a shotgun, blasting out the screen.

“I made meat loaf,” she said, showing it proudly as her husband sat at the table.

“Hmmm.” He glanced at it, then looked at the newspaper. “That Juice Tinsley’s goin’ all out with advertisin’ for the city council seat. Don’t know why anyone in their right mind would want the job.”

Vella focused on setting the food on the table. She liked the supper table to be colorful, like a bouquet of roses. There was the browned meat loaf with red tomato sauce on top, light-green-and-gold succotash, steamy ivory potatoes, golden butter and tan-kissed rolls.

Perry, who had been using the remote control to flip
channels on the television until he got to his favorite news program, said, “Looks like we’re gonna get in another mess over there with them I-rackees.” With one eye on the television, he served himself a slice of meat loaf.

Vella wondered, as she had for years now, how a man as educated as Perry—he had big university education from University of Oklahoma and the pharmacist degree, plus lots of courses every year to keep up-to-date—could have slipped back into such poor grammar.

She looked at her gleaming china plate and then at the array of food. She watched her husband fold open the newspaper and hold it with one hand, while eating with the other, and dividing his attention between the newspaper and the television.

“Perry, how is the meat loaf?” She still had not served herself.

“Hmmm…oh, pretty good,” he said, his eyes on the newspaper.

“Perry.” Vella, who had not yet served her plate, began unbuttoning the front buttons of her shirtwaist. Her heart began a rapid pumping. It was as if her hand was working all by itself.

Perry was now looking at the television. Vella noted the paleness of his complexion, the blue veins over his nose and at his neck. Yet he still had that little cowlick at the top of his head that she had loved from the very first.

“Perry.” She now had the top of her shirtwaist fully unbuttoned.

“Huh?” He did not turn his head from the television.

“Perry!”

In an instant she had pushed to her feet so hard that
the chair scooted back and bumped the counter. Then she yanked her shirtwaist wide open to reveal her voluptuous breasts, full and heavy in their support bra.

“Look at me!”

Perry was looking. He gazed straight at her breasts, with his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide as saucers so that she saw the blue irises, which she had not seen in years.

Vella felt triumphant. She had, at long last, succeeded in getting his attention. She felt, too, that she had gone completely mad, but she could not grab hold of caring.

“I’m alive, Perry! I’m alive and sittin’ here with you every night!”

“Well, my god,” he said.

“Is that all you have to say?”

He closed his mouth and swallowed.

Letting go of her dress, she swept an arm at the table, sending half the dishes and food crashing onto the floor. Her pendulous bosom heaved and swayed.

“I am sick to death of you actin’ like I am dead. Like I don’t exist, when day after day I work in your store, wash your clothes, cook your supper and clean your pee drips off the toilet. I am a flesh-and-blood woman who goes to bed with you night after night. I have worn perfume and new rayon gowns and put myself in front of you, and you don’t even see.” She had begun sobbing. “Look at me! I may be old, but I am not dead.
You
are not dead.”

Just then some bit of reasoning sliced into her brain, and she saw herself mirrored in his shocked expression. Covering her face with her hands, she fled the kitchen.

Perry, stunned so exceedingly that he could for some seconds only manage to move his head and watch his wife running away, thought, She’s gone crazy.

Then fear pierced his brain enough to propel him into action. He struggled to get out of his chair, but his brain was a little ahead of his body in coming awake, so he had a bit of a time getting going and ended up knocking his chair over.