Cold Tea on a Hot Day (24 page)

“There have to be thousands of mutts like that in the world. And so what if it is the dog?”

“I don’t know…but we still haven’t found the chip, and we have found that dog.”

“
Maybe
it’s that dog. And we don’t know we haven’t found the chip. It’s most likely in the car or the briefcase, and we’ll get at those when Frank gets us the court order. At least it’s all safe right now. Man, I’ve got a devil of a headache—I’m gonna get some Motrin and something to drink, if anyone shows up to wait on us in this hick place.”

Belinda, who thought it was a hick place, too, took no offense, nor did she feel prodded to do anything about waiting on them. She peeked around the bottom of the revolving comic book rack and saw the slim, nylon-covered legs of a woman in dark pumps and the dark-trousered legs of a man in shiny loafers disappear behind one of the drugstore shelves.

She sat back on her heels, wondering about who the people were. Somebody to do with that dead guy. What dog?

The man called, “Hey, anyone back there?” and Belinda, opening a hairdo magazine, heard her daddy come out and wait on them.

A minute later her daddy called, “Baa-linda? Ba-linda, we got some people here who want somethin’ to drink.”

“All right, Daddy,” Belinda said, pushing stiffly to her
feet. Her legs were numb from sitting on them. She scrambled around to slip on her flip-flops.

The man and woman looked a little stunned to see her come out from behind the magazine rack. They ordered Cokes to go and didn’t even sit while she made them. They threw the money on the counter, where she had to pick it up. She watched them walk out, and she thought of the looks the two had exchanged upon sight of her.

Well, she thought as she edged herself onto the stool and opened the hairdo magazine again, she would get it out of Lyle that night who these people were, and what it was all about with that Dan Kaplan and some chip and a dog.

Vella missed her home. She couldn’t say she missed Perry. Maybe she missed who Perry used to be. Maybe that was part of old age—missing everything as it used be. It had just seemed to slip away so fast. All those years. Where had they gone?

She pulled her champagne-colored Crown Victoria into the driveway, shut off the ignition and looked around to see any neighbors who might witness her arrival. There was not a sign of anyone, as usual during a weekday morning in the old neighborhood. Which did not mean that Doris Northrupt wasn’t peeking out from behind her window curtains. Likely nosy Mildred down at Winston Valentine’s house was, too, unless she was eating or watching television.

Her purse strap over her arm pressed to her middle, she walked quickly across the side yard around to the back to her rose garden, where she slowed to a stroll, enjoying whiffs of fragrance.

Pulling a pair of all-purpose scissors out of her purse, she cut blossoms for a bouquet. Again and again she reverently touched the leaves and sniffed the wide blooms. When she was full of the scent, she walked slowly to the house and let herself in the kitchen door that had not been locked in the forty years she had lived there.

She put her bouquet in a mason jar of water and sat it on the table and admired it. Then, noticing food stuck to the table, she got a wet cloth and scrubbed it clean. Next she cleaned the coffeemaker and made a fresh pot.

The window drew her, and she looked out toward the Valentine home, wishing for Winston to come across the pasture. He had visited her at Marilee’s, but they had not been alone since she had left home.

She washed the cup and glasses left in the sink and cleaned the counter that had food and coffee stains on it. She went on to wipe over everything and sweep the floor. She looked toward the Valentine house again, then sat at the table to drink her coffee. Halfway through it, she began sobbing. The suddenness and depth of the sobbing frightened her. When she managed to stop, she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

Then, swept along on a wave of fresh desperation, she took up the telephone and dialed Winston’s phone number.

Winston himself answered the phone.
A sign from God.

“Winston, I’m over here in my kitchen. Could you come down? I’d like to talk.”

After what seemed a very long moment, during which Vella worried what Winston must think, he said he would come right away.

Fairly flying around the kitchen, she got Winston’s favorite blue mug from the cupboard, wiped it shining, then poured it full of coffee and set it on the table along with sugar and cream. With the roses and her cup there, the table looked inviting.

She glanced out the window and saw Winston coming across the small fenced pasture between their houses at an encouraging rate, even with his cane.

A man hurrying to her.
Tears sprang to her eyes at the wondrous sight. She whirled and, with the heart of a young woman, she raced to the back door and opened it before Winston had time to make it up the few stairs.

“Are you all right, Vella? You didn’t sound very good on the phone.” His expression was filled with concern as he came stiffly up the stairs.

“No…no, I’m not all right.” The words poured forth, and then she burst into tears and had to avert her face in shame.

Winston, whose ripe age and experience with women had accustomed him to tears, reached out, drew Vella against him and let her cry into his shirt. She leaned on him a bit, and he had to balance with his cane, and after about a minute, he began to worry that Vella might push him over. He didn’t want to break a hip here in her kitchen and have the paramedics have to show up and everyone know he was alone with her.

“Vella…here, gal. Sit down and drink some coffee. That will help you feel better.”

He got her sat down, and then he sat himself down and felt greatly relieved at having averted breaking his hip. Old age was a pain in the neck, as well as the hips, elbows and knees.

He poured coffee for both of them. After a few sniffs, Vella took up her coffee cup with both hands and drank. Winston drank his, and for a couple of minutes there was silence, broken only by the hum of the refrigerator and Vella’s sniffs.

“This is really good coffee,” Winston told her. “I’ve missed it.”

Instantly he realized he had said a wrong thing, because she began to cry again. He decided to retreat into the safety of silence, drink his coffee, and wait her out and hope she stopped crying before Perry came home.

Keeping silent did the trick. Before he had finished his coffee, she managed to get ahold of herself and, as so many people did, slipped from sadness into anger.

“Oh, Winston,” she said with some vehemence. “I miss my house, and I miss my roses.”

Winston nodded, biting back the comment that she should just come home. There was no telling what might set her off again.

“I feel so foolish…leavin’ my house and Perry like I have. At my age, Winston.”

Winston nodded again.

“It’s just that…well, I’m all confused. I don’t seem to fit. It’s like all the rules have changed…like there just aren’t any rules today.”

Winston said, “Things are sure different,” and nodded.

“My heaven…even my menopause was later than most.”

Ohmygod. He sure hoped she did not continue on that subject.

She didn’t. She snatched up a magazine from a stack
atop the microwave oven and shook it at him. “Just look at all the people they are puttin’ on the cover of
Modern Maturity
these days. Movie stars. Do we all have to compare ourselves to movie stars? Do we have to have advice from people who get their faces and Lord knows what-all lifted and tucked? I can’t look at the thing anymore.”

With that, she tossed the magazine to the floor with force enough to send it sliding through to the dining room. Winston laid his hand firmly on the table to hold the cloth if need be.

“I look in the mirror and there’s this old woman,” Vella said with passion, “but I don’t feel that in my heart.”

Winston watched her press her hand in the middle of her very ample bosom. Something stirred inside him, a natural curiosity to see her lovely bosom. He was pleasantly surprised at his reaction.

“Perry has not touched me in so long, Winston.”

Winston, who definitely did not want to go any deeper with that, said quickly, “You are a lively woman, Vella. And you are not so old. I’m old,” he added, heavily.

“I’m sixty-six.”

“You are still in the youth of old age,” he volunteered, thinking of how he was in the old age of old age.

Vella said, “I don’t look forty…but I don’t feel sixty-six.”

“You are a handsome woman, Vella.”

She regarded him in a way that made him feel uncertain.

“At my age,” she said, “my mother was a really old woman and didn’t do anything but sit on her porch and talk
about eating. She talked about what she had for breakfast and what she was going to have for lunch and for supper. Minnie Oakes talks about that, and what she plans to watch each night on television. She marks it all down in the
TV Guide.

“The only other woman my age that I think may have my same feelings is Odessa Collier, and she’s…well, it is understandable for Odessa to be a little wild and loose, because she has always been wild and loose. She’s artistic,” she added pensively.

“You’re artistic,” Winston volunteered. “Just look at how you grow your roses and then arrange them.” He gestured at those in the mason jar.

Vella looked at the roses. Then, feeling an urge to move, she got to her feet and stepped to the counter. She now wished she had not started pouring her heart out to Winston. But since she had started, she might as well continue. She had so thoroughly tossed everything to the wind, what did she have to lose?

“I am not like Odessa. I’m just not like anyone, and being my age is not like I had imagined at all. I don’t know what to do with myself. I still want to do so many things. I still
feel
so many things.”

She sighed then, a sigh that hovered between exhaustion and desperation. She felt herself in a precarious balance between sobs and screams.

Winston got to his feet. He had begun to worry a little about Mildred coming down to check on him, and his bones pained him when he sat too long. He thought it time to look for an exit.

“It’s a good thing to feel, Vella. It proves you are alive.
And I guess being a little mixed up is a big part of livin’. It is better than the alternative,” he added.

This was a phrase he had been telling himself a lot of late. He wasn’t believing it so much anymore, though. Death had come to look pleasant, an end to many aches and pains and annoyances.

Vella lifted her head and looked at him. He was startled to find it was like she was aiming at him, and the very next moment she moved right up against him and kissed him. He saw it coming and couldn’t do anything but stand there and take it.

“Thank you, Winston, for your kindness to me,” she whispered with her lips still brushing his.

Her kiss had not been a thank-you sort of kiss. It had been an invitation, and she remained against him, looking him in the eye with that invitation that kindled a surprising feeling inside him.

He further astonished himself by encircling her with his free arm and kissing her with a passion he had not known he could summon. He wasn’t dead yet.

The sun was far to the west when Vella turned the Crown Victoria into the alley at a high enough rate of speed to cause the front to bounce precariously, but without slowing, she shot on past behind the police station and came to a jarring halt at the back door to the drugstore, right behind Perry’s dusty Lincoln parked in his space. She jammed the shift lever into park, left the engine running and propelled herself out from behind the steering wheel.

Rounding the hood, she stalked to the rear passenger
door and pulled out two suitcases. She started dragging them on their wheels; they fell over on the gravel, and she didn’t bother to right them, but dragged them on their side, until she got to the door, where she hefted them inside, making a lot of commotion in the endeavor. She was, after all, a sixty-six-year-old woman throwing around suitcases that each weighed half as much as she did. The thought brought her strength, and she threw the second case halfway across the storeroom.

Belinda appeared in the doorway from the front. “What in the world…?”

“I’m bringin’ your daddy’s things.”

“You are
what?
” Belinda took a wide stance and put her arms akimbo on her hips, as if to block Vella’s entry.

“I brought your daddy’s things from home,” said Vella, who had righted both cases and started tugging them forward. “He is down here from dawn to dusk anyway, he might as well move on down here. I’m movin’ back home.”

“You
aren’t!
”

“Yes, I am.” Vella was heading for the rear pharmacy door. She yanked it open. “I made that home for forty years. I worked down here, too, but I’m choosing the house. Your father already chose this pharmacy years ago. Perry!”

There wasn’t any need to yell his name. Her husband was struggling to get himself out of his old chair. His eyes were wide, and his mouth open.