Cold Tea on a Hot Day (18 page)

“Did you call me last night?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, paused and then added, “I was just wantin’ to talk, but you were too tired.”

“I sure was,” he said. “You didn’t ask me to come over there, did you?”

“No, you must have dreamed that.”

A Fine State of Confusion

S
he had made a poor decision in not arranging for a sitter for the children or leaving them with Aunt Vella when she went on a research trip to a juvenile detention center up near Oklahoma City. As a result, the three of them, plus Munro, had endured almost six hours of structure and confinement, and were now hot, tired and cranky.

With a pounding head, Marilee felt great relief to see the outskirts of Valentine up ahead. She also saw a bunch of vehicles parked off the road and a group of people clustered around the Welcome to Valentine sign.

“There is Aunt Vel-la.” Willie Lee, disobeying the rule by being out of his seat belt, was on his toes and peering over the front seat.

“It’s the Rose Club,” Corrine put in.

Marilee, slowing down, saw Reggie taking pictures. And there was Tammy with her notebook, talking with Winston for the article in the paper.

She pulled off the road, and she and the children, and Munro, who’d had to wait in the car at the detention center, tumbled out of the Cherokee with great relief to move after the long drive. Munro was apparently doubly glad; he went directly to hike his leg on a tree.

“Hello, Mis-ter Win-ston,” Willie Lee said, approaching the elderly gentleman who was directing the work of his younger fellow Rose Club members, frequently pointing with his cane, from a lawn chair in the shade of a big elm.

“Hi there, Mister Willie Lee.”

The two shook hands.

Marilee bid Winston hello, as well as his two lady boarders, Mildred and Ruthanne, who sat on either side of him. Mildred was eating jelly beans out of her purse, and occasionally Ruthanne would ask for one, throwing each orange one she received into the grass.

The Rose Club members, the eight who were retired and therefore not at jobs, were busy planting Madame Isaac Pereire rosebushes at each end of the sign and smaller polyanthas, Excellenz von Shubert, in the middle. When Winston and Vella had not been able to find the varieties at any of the local nurseries, the club had been forced to order from a grower in Texas. Aunt Vella had coerced her fellow members of the Rose Club to agree to this, mainly by bowling everyone over with her knowledge of the varieties. Just then, dressed in a lightweight, blue sprigged cotton dress, wide straw hat and purple gloves, she at once directed and got right into the dirt of the work to make certain her fellow members did the job right, which meant according to her specifications.

Marilee marveled at how her Aunt Vella did not sweat and could come away clean from digging in the ground.

“We got a late start,” Aunt Vella told her, shaking dirt off her gloves. “We still have to plant the east sign, but now that everyone knows what they’re doin’, it ought to go faster.”

Seeing how vibrant her aunt appeared caused a little panic inside Marilee, who would have preferred a little more pining for her husband on her aunt’s part.

Aunt Vella said, “Winston and I are takin’ Mildred and Ruthanne out to pizza tonight. We can bring some home for you, so that you don’t have to cook,” she added quickly, her expression so eager to please that Marilee’s heart constricted.

“That will be lovely, Aunt Vella. I need to get a rough draft done up from my notes on this detention center as soon as possible.” If she didn’t get it down before other situations took command of her mind, she tended to forget the passionate point she wanted to make with a piece.

“Let the children stay and help us. Oh, do say yes, Marilee. We’d love to have them, and then we can take them to get pizza with us, and you can focus directly on your write-up.”

“Well, I don’t know….” The strong reluctance to let the children out her sight swept Marilee; she was getting to an irrational point of reluctance with this.

Her gaze went quickly to locate her little people. Willie Lee was on hands and knees helping Doris Northrupt tamp dirt around a small bush, and Munro lay sprawled a foot away in the shade of the city sign. She looked down at Corrine, who looked up at her.

“Would you like to stay and play here?”

Corrine nodded somewhat hesitantly. A smile was on her heart-shaped face, if not quite on her lips.

Taking herself in hand, Marilee kissed the children, got back behind the wheel of her Cherokee and drove away, although she looked in her rearview mirror several times. She reminded herself that they were all in the same town, that it wasn’t the same as being separated by one hundred miles. And she really was very glad to have a few hours to herself. Even if it was a bit strange to be on her own.

She pulled swiftly into the driveway, went into the house, dropped her leather tote on the couch and carefully put her keys on the desk. Since Corrine wasn’t there to help her find her keys, she had better keep track of them.

Pausing, she listened. There was the ticking of the small clock on her desk, a gurgle from the refrigerator.

She had not heard it this quiet in months. For the past five nights, Aunt Vella’s snoring had filled the air. Heaven knew Marilee didn’t want Aunt Vella to feel as if she were in the way. Aunt Vella had been trying so hard not to be an inconvenience, which was why Marilee felt like a rat wishing she could see an end to the situation of her aunt snoring every night in one of the children’s beds. The snoring did not concern soundly sleeping Willie Lee, but Corrine could not sleep in the same room with Aunt Vella. After two mornings of waking up and finding Corrine on the couch, Marilee had insisted Corrine share her bed; she did not believe the couch was good support for a child’s growing little body. With Corrine came Munro. As much as she had enjoyed the first nights of her niece and the dog
sharing her bed, Marilee now found herself needing breathing room.

Aunt Vella meant one more adult sharing a house with only two bedrooms and one bathroom, and one coffeemaker. Marilee simply wasn’t used to it. It gave her a disconcerting glimpse of how set in her ways she had become, and the adjustments that would be required if she married Parker.

She and Parker still had not settled the question of marriage. For the past five days they had hardly seen each other. He had stopped in for supper several times, but had rushed out again on emergency calls. He had not made any further mention of his proposal of marriage. She was not only too hesitant to ask, but too stubborn, too.

Right this minute there was no need to think of that, she told herself, yanking open the refrigerator and staring into it, right at the latest glass pitcher of tea bestowed upon her by Tate Holloway.

The man was true to his word about returning her box of tea all made up, she thought, carrying the pitcher to the counter, where she poured herself a glass of the sweet, invigorating brew. In fact, her editor seemed to have developed the habit of popping in her back door each evening to bring her a pitcher of tea and ask if she needed his help on the new whiz-bang computer, or question her about one or another person he had met in town. Tate definitely had the journalistic quality of being curious about people.

She had not been alone with him, though, to have the opportunity to ask him what he had meant by
a woman like her,
the phrase still echoing in her mind. Although
tempted, she resisted the urge to seek time alone with him. That did not seem like a good idea. Every time she came face-to-face with the man, she imagined what it would be like to kiss him, which was foolishness in the highest extreme.

She took the glass of tea—which had just the right amount of lemon; the man sure knew how to make iced tea—to her desk, where she sat with firmness and turned on the little whiz-bang computer that she had grown to appreciate…mostly. She had forgotten her notes, so she had to get up to get them. She sat back down and adjusted herself on the chair. Sometimes adjusting herself in the chair helped her to think.

With determination, she took up a pencil and made a hasty outline. She didn’t find it an adequate outline; she couldn’t seem to get things lined in her mind. She sipped the tea, thinking it would stimulate thought.

Then she realized she was staring at the photograph of Stuart. She picked it up and looked more closely at the smiling face. She did keep it for Willie Lee…but she supposed she kept it for herself, too.

Gazing at her ex-husband’s image, she wondered where he was now.

He could be dead, for all she knew.

But she did not believe he was dead. She had felt him a lot in her heart these last weeks, for some strange reason. She wondered, in the way a woman does when remembering snapshots from the past, if he had changed radically from the dashing young man he was in the photograph—he had been thirty-eight then. He would be almost fifty-five now.

She firmly set the photograph back in place.

With a frustrated sigh, she ran her hands through her hair. She found it ridiculous that she could not keep her thoughts in place. She had a story to write. She adjusted herself in the chair again, looked over the scribbled outline, then sat staring at the computer screen.

She found it ridiculous that the house seemed too quiet.

With that uncomfortable thought, her mind went zinging back to the children and Aunt Vella. She had the sensation of being bereft, and had the very odd urge to race right down and get the children and her aunt.

Almost before realizing it, she was on her feet, taking up her keys and purse, and heading out to her car.

She did not go to get the children. She
could not
go get them; they were having a perfectly wonderful time with Aunt Vella and Winston. They would all think she had lost her mind if she went and got them.

And Marilee really wanted this time alone. That she felt a little afraid of being alone was, she concluded, to be expected, since she had not experienced the alone state in quite a while.

While thinking all of this, she homed directly like a carrier pigeon to the drugstore. Realizing this, she thought that she could have walked down and gotten out nervous energy, at the same time having an argument with herself, demanding that she go back home and get to work. She would do that, she decided, after a hot-fudge sundae.

She came to a bumping halt head-in at the curb. She got out, slammed the Cherokee door, walked swiftly into
the drugstore and ordered the sundae from her cousin Belinda, who had, since her mother had left both husband and store, been working the day shift and leaving the evenings to two high school teens.

“Just go ahead and get it yourself, okay? I’ve been on my feet all day. I’m beat.” Belinda said this from where she sat on her mother’s tall stool, reading the Sunday edition of the newspaper. “Would you refill my Dr Pepper, while you’re there?”

She pushed forward a glass of ice on the counter. What told Marilee that the person behind the wide-open newspaper was indeed her cousin were the pink fuzzy slippers.

Marilee snatched up the glass, thinking that it was a good thing Aunt Vella wasn’t there. Aunt Vella despised her youngest child and only daughter going around in bedroom slippers.

Marilee herself often had trouble believing Belinda had come out of her aunt. Aunt Vella had once been a raven-haired beauty possessed of ten-carat diamond style, which she had still. Belinda, on the other hand, was a dishwater blonde with a style no higher than five-and-dime glass. That Belinda took after her father was the explanation in Marilee’s mind, most especially as she glanced toward the pharmacy window.

She could hear the murmur of her uncle’s television and imagined him back there slouched in his old chair. The thought annoyed her. She felt her uncle should not go on as if his wife of forty-five years had not up and left. She did not expect Uncle Perry to suddenly turn into a Lothario, but the least he could do was pick up the phone and call Aunt Vella.

“I left your mother a little bit ago out at the west welcome sign. She’s out there with the Rose Club planting roses.” Marilee plopped the refilled soft drink on the counter.

“I know,” Belinda said from behind the paper. “Minnie Oakes stopped in here on her way out there to take cold drinks. She made sure to tell Daddy where Mama was.”

“What did he say?” Marilee got a vintage sundae glass from the shelf.

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear. Jaydee is sure chewing at this detention center like a dog with a bone. I heard the mayor will probably have to have plastic surgery on his nose.”

“They won’t know for sure if it is broken until the swelling goes down.” She fought the cellophane covering of a new box of chocolate brownies; apparently the wrapping was designed to keep the brownies safe for a century.

“Well, the detention center is comin’. Socking the mayor doesn’t seem like a big help.”

“Jaydee didn’t really mean to sock the mayor, and it wasn’t really over the detention center. He was just frustrated in general, like he can get.”

Marilee felt similarly frustrated in that instant by the cellophane covering on the brownie box. She had the enormous urge to throw the package on the floor and stomp on it. And suddenly she realized that she was irrationally angry. It seemed like she had been falling into irrational anger for weeks.

“Then what was it about? I heard it was the detention center. Paper says detention center.”

With deliberate calmness, Marilee got the scissors from beside the cash register. “Jaydee was pretty worked up about the detention center, but he was aiming to sock Juice Tinsley, because he made a smart remark about Jaydee’s wife possibly ending up in the juvenile detention center, so it would be easy for Jaydee to visit her. Walter got socked when he stepped in to keep the peace.” With careful control, she cut the cellophane at the end of the brownie box.