Cold Tea on a Hot Day (17 page)

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I can take them with me, or get someone to stay with them.” Her interest was spiral
ing upward at a rapid rate, but caution sat on it. “I haven’t ever done that sort of reporting. I wasn’t trained as a journalist. I just answered the ad Ms. Porter put in the paper, and there wasn’t anyone else who had the least writing ability, so I got the job. Everything I’ve written has been set right here in Valentine.”

“I got all my journalism training on the job, too,” he said. “I went to school to be a Baptist minister. While I was at it, I took a job as a sports reporter for the college paper, and, well, once I saw my name in print, I was hooked.”

Marilee was busy looking him up and down. There he sat in cowboy boots, faded denims and a soft khaki shirt. She could not identify what type he looked like, but she did not think it was in any way a minister.

He must have picked up her thoughts, as he then said that had all been almost thirty years ago. “I was infinitely more suited to journalism,” he said. “I tended to have a certain type of curiosity about people that was less suitable for a minister but quite well suited for a journalist. And at the time I enjoyed whiskey way too much to be a Baptist preacher.” He grinned.

“I’m a farm boy from East Texas, who came up narrow and went wide. I was married one time and divorced some fifteen years ago because I wasn’t a very good husband. I gave up drinkin’ a long time ago, but I sure can get as high on reading history and sweet tea and good blues music.”

He paused, and she was not at all certain what was going on, although she felt certain that something was going on.

“What about you, Miss Marilee?”

“Me?” She straightened her spine.

“What can you tell me about you?”

“I’m certain you know all there is to know about me.” She fingered her glass and saw that it was empty…his was, too.

“I know you are a native of Valentine but have traveled some,” he was saying. “That Vella and Perry Blaine are your aunt and uncle, and that you are divorced from that devil-may-care fellow in the picture, who I believe you said was fifteen years your senior.”

My heaven, the man had a memory.

“You have one son, and now your niece, your sister’s child. I know you enjoy motherhood. I’ve seen that myself in the way you extend yourself for those children. I know you write well, don’t like computers, enjoy my sweet tea and are quite addicted to chocolate.” He grinned at her. “I’d like to know more.”

“Why?”

She remembered quite clearly what he had told her the evening before, and she saw in his eyes that he remembered, and knew she did, too.

He said, “Because we’ll be working closely together, and I will most likely have to make decisions that involve you.” He paused, then added, “And because, as I have already been trying to get across, I am attracted to you and would like to explore the possibilities between us.”

Realizing she had let things go too far, she fixed him with the skeptical eye that she felt would let him know she wasn’t in the market for such flirting. “There are no possibilities between us.” She got to her feet.

He did not move. “Word on the street is divided about whether or not you are actually engaged to Parker Lindsey.”

“Word on the street?”

“Rumor…and I’ve asked around. Are you and Lindsey engaged? Was that what that little candlelight supper was about last night?”

Marilee wasn’t certain which way to go with this. “Nooo…but Parker and I…we have an understanding.”

“Ahhh…an understanding. Is that like ‘going together’?”

When he said it, it sounded childish. “Yes. We’ve been dating for a number of years, and we are considering being engaged.”

“I see.” He frowned. “And you still keep your ex-husband’s picture on your desk.”

Marilee felt the barb sting. “
If
it is any of your business—which it is not—I keep my ex-husband’s picture there so Willie Lee can see a picture of his father.”

She took their glasses to the sink, thinking that he would take the hint to leave.

But all he did was scoot his chair back and slouch down more comfortably. She looked over her shoulder. His gaze was on her, and he seemed to be doubling something inside himself that perhaps she had better prepare to rebuff.

Maybe she would ask him to explain his term:
a woman like her.

At that rather intense moment, however, the doorbell rang, causing Marilee to jump and just about holler “Ohmygod,” which was a word not far from her thoughts
at that minute. Thank goodness she held herself in check enough to say politely, “Excuse me just a minute.”

She hurried for the front door, a part of her not thinking so much of letting someone in as of letting herself out. In her mind, she was practically running down the street.

Corrine had already answered the door, with Munro right at her heels. Willie Lee remained on the couch, as normal for him, fast asleep.

The door swung wide to reveal the caller to be Aunt Vella. On sight of her aunt in quite a disheveled state, Marilee knew instantly that some disaster had occurred.

“I’ve left Perry,” were Aunt Vella’s first words.

It was a sight Marilee had never in her life seen, nor expected to see, her aunt crumbling before her eyes. She reached out and took hold of the older woman, who burst into sobs.

“I don’t have anywhere to go!” Aunt Vella cried.

Marilee, struck to the core, said instantly, “Oh, yes you do, Aunt Vella. You have right here!”

Putting an arm around her aunt, she led her into the kitchen and sat her at the table, where Tate immediately poured her a glass of sweet iced tea. Aunt Vella took up the glass and knocked the tea back as if it were a shot of whiskey.

When Vella had not come home by the time the late-night news program finished, Perry called his daughter, Belinda, who had finally moved out on her own three months earlier. Likely, he thought, Vella had shown the first signs of going crazy on Belinda’s thirty-first birthday, when she had packed all of their youngest daughter’s
things and told her to move out to the apartment over the drugstore.

“Let me speak to your mother,” he said when his daughter’s voice came on the line.

“What? Daddy?” Belinda had never had a phone call from her father.

Perry, gripping the receiver, listened to his daughter say that her mother was not there. She had not seen her mother. She wanted to know what had happened, and Perry told her that her mother had gone crazy and driven off.

Belinda, who had little capacity for alarm, said, “Well, if she shows up here, I’ll let you know. Did you check out by her roses? Maybe she’s out there on the bench.”

Perry hung up and padded in his sock feet to peer out the back door window. Vella had planted solar lights in the ground at the edges of her rose garden. They had cost a mint.

He peered hard. The lights lit things up considerably. The bench was bare.

He went back and telephoned Belinda again and told her that her mother was not on the bench.

“Well, I imagine she’ll turn up tomorrow mornin’, Daddy,” said Belinda, with obvious impatience at being again interrupted. “If she doesn’t, I’ll have Lyle put out an APB.”

Belinda hung up and relayed the information about her mother and father to Lyle, who lay beside her in the bed. “They had a spat. Must have really been somethin’ this time. Usually Mama just quits talkin’ to him,” she said, welcoming Lyle’s hard body against hers, which was the
one thing in life that she had found could sustain her interest for any length of time.

“Mama isn’t gonna leave her roses. She’ll be in the kitchen makin’ breakfast in the mornin’.” Then she focused her thoughts on what Lyle did for her.

Tate, his reading glasses on his nose, folded up the yellowed newspaper he was reading and threw it atop the others in a pile on the opposite side of the bed, old editions of
The Valentine Voice
from the archives on the second floor of the
Voice
building. At least the newspapers provided a weight, something in bed with him.

Experiencing a wave of loneliness, he thought of Marilee and imagined her in bed with him.

Immediately he swung his legs to the floor. He rubbed his eyes and checked the clock—1:33, and sleep still wouldn’t come.

He got up and dressed in sweatpants and a shirt and running shoes and headed out for a jog. He figured Bubba would be asleep somewhere, but the cat streaked out from beneath the lilac bush and fell in behind him.

Once again, Tate headed along the street in front of Marilee James’s house. He saw with some comfort that Marilee’s Cherokee was alone in the driveway. He slowed, peering to see if there was a light in the rear bedroom. There was, a low glow. Either Marilee was awake or she slept with the lamp on.

Dragging himself from the sight, he continued on around to Main Street, where he was surprised to meet up with Winston Valentine walking, with his cane tapping, from the opposite direction.

“Winston?” he said involuntarily.

“Hello, Editor.”

“Can’t sleep, either?”

“Old people never sleep, son.” Winston did not stop his slow strides.

Tate kept on going, too, turned at the police station and jogged along Church Street toward his own house. On the opposite side of the street another jogger, a woman whose silver-bright leotard glowed beneath the streetlight, gave proof to hidden lives going on throughout the night.

Marilee gave up trying to sleep. Reaching into her nightstand drawer, she pulled out half of a Hershey bar kept there for emergencies. Punching her pillows, she sat up against them, broke pieces of the Hershey bar and stuffed them into her mouth.

She knew exactly what was wrong with her. She wanted a man.
Yes, Lord, it was true.

Lying there, listening to her Aunt Vella’s snores reverberate from the other room where she slept in Willie Lee’s bed, Marilee wished for a man to hold her and fill her with wild feelings that took her away from the loneliness that struck so deeply this night.

She admitted this to herself, hoping to get rid of the desire, trying to give it up to God, but she kept holding on to it, thinking maybe some miracle of a perfect life with a perfect man would appear before her. The lonely yearning tugged ever harder, giving her fantasies of both Parker and Tate, which was about as foolish as could be.

Taking the telephone on her lap, she called Parker. He answered in a sleepy voice.

“Parker, it’s me, Marilee.”

“Oh…what time is it?”

She told him it was almost two o’clock and that she couldn’t sleep. “I need to talk to you for a while,” she said, choking so badly on the words that her voice broke.

“What?”

“Could we just talk?” she whispered.

“Okay.” His voice was way too sleepy to be satisfying.

“Parker? Parker are you awake?”

“Barely.”

He explained that he had been busy that night with an epileptic dog and a horse cut by barbed wire.

Marilee listened, then told him about Aunt Vella, who lay in Willie Lee’s bed, snoring louder by the minute. “They’ve been married forty-five years. I doubt either of them has had a full week apart in all that time.”

“I imagine she’ll go home tomorrow,” Parker said.

Marilee, whose mind seemed to be jumping all over the place, wasn’t thinking about Vella any longer. “Parker…would you come over?”

“Now?”

“Yes.” She had gone out of her mind. “Come over and sit on the couch with me.”

“Okay,” Parker said with questionable enthusiasm, despite how he had been after her.

Marilee hung up and stared at the telephone. Good grief. How did she get herself into such nonsense? She slipped into her bathrobe and went to open the front door a crack, so that Parker wouldn’t make any noise coming in.

Turning, her gaze fell on Willie Lee. She had forgotten about leaving him sleeping on the couch. She was truly losing her mind. With him here, that left her bed as the only empty place in the house. She imagined herself and Parker falling into her bed.

Propelled by a bit of panic, she hurriedly lifted Willie Lee and carried him into her bed. He never woke up for anything until he was ready, and likely that would probably be when Parker arrived.

On her way back to the living room, she saw Munro come out of the bedroom where he had been sleeping with Corrine. He gave her a curious look.

“Come lie with me,” she told him, sitting on the couch and patting the space beside her.

After a few seconds of debate, he came and hopped up beside her, circled twice and lay against her. He felt nice, warm and comforting, and a peace began to steal over her. She thought that she should have thought of Munro before. Sleeping with a dog could have true advantages over a man; a dog wasn’t going to make all those demands and then run off and leave you.

She fell asleep and didn’t know until morning that Parker had never come. He telephoned while she was having coffee with Aunt Vella.