Cold Tea on a Hot Day (25 page)

“What in the world are you doin’ now, Vella?”

“You heard me, I’m sure. Here are your things.” She did her best to swing the cases forward, and in the process
she almost toppled herself and had to grab the doorjamb to keep from falling. Breathing deeply, feeling her heavy breasts move up and down, she added in a more controlled manner, “I’m movin’ back home. You can stay here. I’m seein’ Jaydee about a formal separation.”

She turned and headed out of the store, and Belinda followed, saying hysterically, “Mama…don’t do this. Don’t do this to me…leavin’ Daddy with me!”

Vella was listening for Perry, God help her, but she listened in vain, because her husband did not call to her.

With her vision blurred by tears, she got back into her car and headed on down the alleyway, bumping out on the other end.

Situations Unfolding

“M
arilee?” Vella called out as she entered the house and tossed her purse onto the couch. She breathed deeply, feeling depleted and therefore totally calm.

The house was warm. Marilee had not put on the air-conditioning. The windows were wide, and late-afternoon sunshine shone across the porch and through the front screens.

“In here.”

Vella followed the sound of the voice to the back bedroom, where she found Marilee sitting on the foot of the bed, which was covered with clothing and shoe boxes and various other paraphernalia. In fact, the entire room was covered with a wide variety of paraphernalia.

“It looks like a tornado hit this room.”

“What? Oh.” Marilee, who had been reading something, looked around as if seeing for the first time. “I was picking out a dress to wear tonight, and then I got to
lookin’ for the box with my birthday stuff…tryin’ to find the candle for Parker’s birthday cake on Saturday. Pretty soon I had so much out, it seemed a good time to clean thoroughly.” She paused. “I had a keep pile and a giveaway pile, but now I don’t remember which is which.”

“You have a certain candle for Parker’s cake?” Vella shifted a pile of clothing to make room on the corner of the bed, sat and slipped off her shoes. Her big toes were becoming arthritic and suffered in shoes, although it struck her now that this was the first she had thought of it all day. That seemed a good sign of how alive she felt.

“The number four,” Marilee was saying. “I’ve been savin’ the four and just buy a new number to go after it. I used it on my cake last year. We blow it out real quick, so it’s like new.” She twisted and reached a hand to the windowsill, bringing back the candle to show Vella. “See…just a little bit melted there.”

“It looks fine.” Vella thought that her niece could sure be thrifty.

The two sat there a minute, as if both out of breath. Vella found the room dim after the afternoon brightness outside. Golden light beams filtered through the trees and the window screen. A faint breeze brought the sound of the children’s voices in the backyard and gently stirred the drapes. Watching the drapes move, Vella thought, not for the first time, that her niece showed a marked fondness for a forties look; the draperies were of a large flower pattern similar to one Vella herself had in her living room way back when. She did not care for it now.

Perhaps for a while the young got old, and then the old got young again.

Her gaze came around to her niece, as if to see herself at that age. She then noticed Marilee’s disheveled appearance.

“Have you been crying?”

Vella had long ago given up expecting Marilee to be truly happy. It was a set of mind that Vella, too, had struggled with when in her forties. Maybe she was just now coming out of it, she thought.

“Oh—” Marilee wiped her eyes “—yes, and it’s silly really. I just got to reading some of Stuart’s old letters.” She fluttered one and indicated the shoe box filled with folded papers and envelopes. “I kept them…heaven knows why, but I did. I just now found the box in the back of the closet.”

She looked at the letter she held, and Vella did, too, recalling the tall, handsome man who had swept her niece off her feet, and for whom Vella had never cared. She had known Stuart James instantly as a childish philanderer, without an ounce of giving anywhere in him.

“We wrote a lot of letters to each other, even when we were together. We were both writers.” Her niece smiled wanly, looking in that instant so very young.

“Of course you kept them. We like to go back over things like that so we can cry all over again.” Then, more gently, “They are memories that are important. They deserve to be kept.”

Vella thought perhaps she was speaking to herself. She automatically reached to take out a letter.

“You can’t read them!” Marilee pushed Vella’s hand away and gathered the box to her lap.

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking. Of course I can’t read them.”
She had simply been following curiosity, with the box right in front of her. Her escapade of the afternoon had her thoughts all awry.

“Well, some of them you could read.” Marilee’s expression was apologetic. “Most of them, in fact. We did a lot of discussing of theories in general, like love in general. Most of them were written when I was in college and indulging in an intellectual phase that is so far removed from reality. I was profoundly impressed with Stuart’s mind. I guess I thought he knew everything there was to know about life. He’d seen so much, done so much traveling to exotic places, and he presented such a wise philosophical figure. He was like a guru. He loved that, gathering all of us admiring students around him. Look, here’s a picture of our little gang.”

“Where are you?” Vella pushed her glasses down her nose to sharpen the bifocals.

“I’m…this one, here’s my head.”

“Oh.” She recognized her niece’s face, in the rear of the picture and half-hidden by hair. Marilee in those days had been quite introverted, hiding her feelings and her entire self, if possible. She still hid her true self to a great extent, Vella thought.

“Reading the letters now, I see that I put a lot of intentions into them that were never there. I built Stuart and our love up into some great fantasy that it never was.” She paused. “Maybe I didn’t love him as the man he was but as a fantasy of him in my mind. Then, when he was the human man he was, I got mad at him for disappointing me.”

“Oh, everyone does that when they fall in love,” Vella
said. “None of us would ever get married if we saw our lover as human. We have to be blinded by love and then grow to accept the reality. By the time we do, we’re a little more used to it.”

What had happened to her being used to Perry? Maybe she simply could only take so much reality of him.

“Well, it was a great disappointment when I could suddenly see. Stuart didn’t want a wife. He wanted a perpetual cheerleader.”

“Don’t most men?”

Marilee laughed at that. “Yes, but most do grow out of it by the age of forty.”

“Hmm, maybe.” Vella, whose spirits were sinking by the minute, thought that it would be nice if Perry wanted anything more than someone to mop up after him.

Marilee stuffed the letters back in the shoe box and put the lid on it. “I’ll need to go ahead and get rid of these. I doubt Parker would take very kindly to me hauling my former husband’s letter along into our marriage.”

“You’re goin’ to marry Parker, then?”

“Yes. And here’s the dress I’m going to wear tonight to tell him. What do you think?”

“It’s lovely.”

Holding the dress before her, another one that reminded Vella of the forties, Marilee observed herself in the mirror. “I’ve been rude and thoughtless to Parker,” she said to her aunt and to herself. “Keeping him waiting all this time. I didn’t mean to be…. I just don’t want to make another mistake.” Marilee’s eyes were dark and had that bit of worry that seemed always to be there.

“Oh, honey…you are human, and the plain fact is
humans make mistakes all over the place. Don’t be so hard on yourself, and don’t expect to escape making mistakes. Every mistake makes us smarter.”

Marilee turned to face Vella and said, “We won’t be getting married immediately. We’ll have to make plans, get Parker’s house ready for us…but you can come with us, Aunt Vella. There’ll always be room for you with us.”

Vella had not realized that she had fallen into a thoughtful state, which Marilee had read as pensive. “Oh, honey, how very thoughtful of you.” She supposed she
had
been pensive, thinking of living alone. “But I won’t need to go live with you and Parker. I’m going back home.”

Marilee looked startled. Then she smiled broadly. “Oh, Aunt Vella, I’m so glad. I know you’ve been disappointed in Uncle Perry, but you two can work this out. You should be together.”

“Well, I don’t know about shoulds,” Vella said, touched by her niece’s emotion and sorry to disappoint, “but I know what I had to do. I went to see Jaydee Mayhall and started separation proceedings. I’ve moved Perry out of the house, so that I can move back in.”

Marilee, in a stunned state, followed her aunt into the kitchen, where Aunt Vella began opening cabinet doors and asked, “Do you have anything planned for supper for the children?”

When Marilee said she did not, Aunt Vella suggested macaroni and cheese. “I can eat with the children before I go to the Rose Club meeting, and then all Jenny has to do is get them bathed. I’ll be moving back home tonight, too.”

“I’m going to bathe them before I go.” Marilee was following her aunt around the kitchen. “Have you really thrown Uncle Perry out? How can you do that?”

Vella said, yes, she had thrown Perry out, and it had been easy. “I just packed him two suitcases. He really doesn’t have much. He can get all his televisions whenever he wants.”

“How can you throw away forty-five years of marriage? Aren’t they worth anything?” Marilee wanted to know.

To which Aunt Vella replied, “Yes, they are worth a lot, and I’m not throwing them away. I am honoring those years. They have made me the woman I am…a woman who isn’t so stupid that she wants to spend her remaining, relatively few, years being tied to an unfeeling dolt. Here, grate this cheese.”

Marilee grated cheese and chopped up carrot and celery sticks, all the while saying in ten different ways: “Are you sure, Aunt Vella? Are you really sure? Do you not care at all for Uncle Perry anymore?”

Vella replied, “Yes, I do care for Perry. I wish him well. I want him to be happy. But the first person I love is myself. God gave me a life, and it is my responsibility to honor and live this life. My husband no longer takes part in our marriage. He doesn’t even see me, so I see no reason to hang around and be ignored. I cannot live with that level of indifference.

“I also love my house,” she added. “I picked it out, I decorated, I’ve kept it all these years, and I see no reason to give it up just because I’ve given up my marriage.”

All of her aunt’s confident explanations dried up
Marilee’s questions. A heavy sadness at the situation and at life in general settled over her. It appeared in that moment that life was a most uncertain and lonely business.

When Marilee gave voice to this depressing sentiment, Aunt Vella said, “Of course it is. Those who think differently are fooling themselves with unreasonable expectations. There are no hard and fast answers anywhere, except to keep moving on and trusting God to guide, trusting Him be there with you, as well, through both wise and foolish actions.”

Marilee could not seem to grasp this concept. Foolishness seemed too risky to trust even to God. When she stated this opinion, Aunt Vella said, “Why, honey, foolishness is the human condition and exactly what God handles best.”

The IGA was a major place of running into neighbors and holding conversations. Tate wasn’t much in the mood for holding conversations, but he didn’t seem to have a choice in the matter.

Minnie Oakes came up to him in the produce aisle and told him in no uncertain terms that she would not at all appreciate walking through Wal-Mart and coming upon a bunch of caskets. “If they did stock them, I’d expect a separate room, with the door closed. That’s my opinion, for the paper.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, Miss Minnie.”

Tate noted her comments on an index card. She gave a quick nod and went off toward the bread, her tiny back ramrod straight. He turned to choosing bananas and some
very aromatic nectarines, laid the bags gently in his cart and pushed on to the meat section. He hated grocery shopping.

The store was having a beef sale, and Norm Stidham had a cart full of steaks and rump roasts. “Got a passel of grandkids comin’ in this weekend,” Norm explained, then gave the long list of names. “Oh, and I been meanin’ to give you my opinion on this casket monopoly, Editor. I think maybe we ought to have a tax and all funerals paid for by the government. Just my opinion. Do you know how to spell my name?”

Over in the condiments aisle Tate ran into the mayor’s wife, Kaye Upchurch, who asked his choice for the appetizer for Saturday night’s dinner party: cold artichokes or green bean vinaigrette.

“Green bean vinaigrette,” he said.

“Oh, really? I was leaning toward the artichokes.”

“Then artichokes are wonderful.” He did not know how he would stand several hours of this woman’s demanding company, on top of his disappointment over Marilee not being with him.

“Oh, and, Tate, please don’t bring up the subject of coffins at the party.”

“No, ma’am, I won’t.”

“And if anyone else brings it up, change the subject.”

“Yes, ma’am.” His mother had taught him well.

She gave him a quick nod and went on her way. With a deep breath, he lifted a bottle of ketchup off the shelf, then headed on around to the next aisle. As he went around the corner, he almost bumped right into an oncoming cart. It was Leanne Overton, and the first time he
had seen her in other than her jogging clothes. She wore a crisp white shirt and turquoise jeans that hugged her slim shape in about the same manner as her spandex pants.

“Excuse me,” he said. “They need traffic lights in here.”

“Yes…” She smiled and headed on.