Cold Tea on a Hot Day (7 page)

Marilee would be choking back tears but would manage to get out quite calmly that she and Anita would like chocolate milk shakes, please. Her Uncle Perry always called Marilee a little lady because she never yelled or screamed or cried. There were so many times when she wished she
could
yell and scream and cry.

Now, as then, she took up the long-handled spoon and smoothed the chocolate syrup around on the vanilla ice cream. She liked to let the ice cream get a little soft and then mix it with the chocolate syrup. She would have to admit to being addicted to chocolate, but after having taken tranquilizers for too long after her heartbreak with Stuart, she thought chocolate a fairly harmless aid to getting along in turbulent times. Chocolate tasted good and felt good going down, and it did not make her brain so fuzzy as to spin out of the world.

As she spooned the chocolate and vanilla ice cream onto her tongue, she looked across and caught hers and Corrine’s reflections in the wide old mirror. Corrine’s dark eyes, for a moment, met hers in the mirror, before looking down at her sundae. Marilee watched Corrine’s reflection, the bend of the dark head, the way she tilted it slightly, looking for all the world like her mother at that age.

Marilee’s gaze returned to her own reflection. It struck her quite hard that here she was staring at middle-
age and still employing the same coping skills she had employed as a ten-year-old girl.

“You’ve been workin’ way too hard,” Aunt Vella said. “You just need a little boost. You should take a potent mixture of B’s for three months, and it wouldn’t hurt for you to start taking calcium…you need to start thinkin’ about keepin’ your bones. Every woman’s bones start to fade after thirty-five.”

Marilee had followed Vella over to the pharmacy shelves, where her aunt perused the bottles of vitamins and herbs, while the children occupied themselves twirling on the stools at the counter. Actually, it was Corrine being twirled by Willie Lee. She held on to the stool with her thin little hands, while Willie Lee got a kick out of spinning her around. Corrine was always so patient with Willie Lee. She displayed strong mothering instincts with him, and very often she did things for him that he was capable of doing for himself. Willie Lee allowed this, in the pleasing way he always went along with people.

“You worry about them too much. They’ll be fine. They have God, just like you do. He cares for you. Trust Him.”

At her aunt’s statement, Marilee looked over to see that the older woman had noticed her wandering attention.

“Then who looks after the children who are abused and forgotten all over the place?” Marilee asked, more sharply than she had meant to.

“I don’t know,” her aunt answered in the same fashion. “I’m not smart enough to know that. I only know what I
know, that there is a God who cares for us, and that worrying never solved a thing. Change what you can, accept what you can’t, and leave off worrying. It just wears you out.”

Marilee sighed, her mind skittering away from a discussion she didn’t wish to get into.

“I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she said. “I took them out of school for the rest of this year. Corrine looks like she’s going to face the firing squad each day she goes to school, and Willie Lee just keeps runnin’ away. Maybe I’m not even addressing the true problem…. I know I’m not…but it just seemed the one thing I could do.”

“Good. You changed something. And there aren’t enough days of school left to worry about it, anyway.” Vella was peering at the labels on the vitamin bottles through her reading glasses at the end of her nose. “Do you have the kids on vitamins?”

“Dailies.”

“Not enough.”

Marilee watched her aunt set about deciding which vitamins would be sufficient for the children. She felt an anger well up inside.

“Can vitamins fix a brain damaged by birthing?” she asked. “Or a heart broken by an irresponsible mother who prefers to drink rather than take care of her daughter?”

Vella’s dark eyes came up sharply. “No one prefers to drink. Anita is sick, Marilee, just like your daddy was.”

Marilee could not address this. She felt guilty for feeling so angry at her sister. Even as she thought about being angry, the anger began to ebb and slip into sadness
and guilt, which she hated worse. The guilt threatened to consume her. She kept thinking there ought to be something she could do to help her sister, but everything she had tried had failed. She could not look at it anymore.

“Mrs. Blankenship thinks Corrine needs a therapist,” she said, the words falling out almost before she realized.

“Half of America needs a therapist,” Aunt Vella said, “but where do you find a sane one?”

Marilee had to chuckle at this, said so seriously. She gazed at Corrine, who was now twirling Willie Lee on the stool. “I think a therapist is worth trying, but I just don’t know how I can afford it.”

“Children have an amazing ability to survive. Don’t discount it.”

“That’s another question,” Marilee said, her gaze coming back to her aunt. “What’s goin’ to happen if Corrine gets really sick? How will I pay the doctor bills? My doctor charges sixty dollars a visit.” The limit of those could plainly be seen. “She isn’t my daughter, so I can’t put her on my insurance.”

“Oh, my heavens, don’t go makin’ up worries that likely won’t happen.”

Marilee looked at her aunt.

Her aunt looked back and said, “We’ll help you, Marilee. You know that.”

“I know it, but how far can we all go? You know perfectly well a catastrophe could bankrupt us all without insurance.”

Aunt Vella said very quietly, “Have you thought about adoption?”

“I’ve thought about it.” Marilee felt guilty for admit
ting what seemed a very bad thought. “But I don’t think Anita would willingly go along with it. I could press it. I could take her to court and prove she isn’t able to care for Corrine, but what would that do to her?”

“You can’t take on Anita’s burdens for her, Marilee. She has to own up to being responsible for her own actions. If she’s going to be a drunken sot, she’ll have to take the consequences. You don’t help her by letting her off. Maybe if you pressed, Anita would have more reason to try to get herself straight.”

Marilee clamped her mouth shut. Discussing this was making her too depressed. She did not have faith in Anita, certainly. And now she was having doubts about having faith in herself. She was sinking into a full decline when the bell above the front door rang out.

It was Fayrene Gardner entering the store. She came swiftly toward the pharmacy counter and presented Aunt Vella, who stepped forward, with a prescription. Fayrene, sniffing loudly, was clearly distraught.

“We’ll get this straight away,” Aunt Vella said and immediately stepped through to the back room, calling, “Perry…we need this filled. Perry!”

Fayrene noticed Marilee, who just then found she was staring, feeling connected by her own distress.

“Are you all right, Fayrene?” Marilee asked, feeling the need to say something, and hoping Fayrene wasn’t about to confess to having fallen victim to some horrible disease.

“Men,” Fayrene said vehemently. “I wish they’d all drop dead.”

Marilee wasn’t certain what to say to that, and became
more uncertain when Fayrene’s face crumpled and she went to crying into a tissue. Feeling comfort was required, and needing to give it, Marilee reached out a hand to possibly take hold of the woman and provide what assistance she could.

But Fayrene pulled herself up tight and called, “Vella, I’ll be back to get it after lunch,” then pivoted and strode out of the store, again holding a tissue over her mouth to block a sob.

“Well, mercy,” Aunt Vella said.

“I don’t think I have ever seen Fayrene in such a state,” Marilee said.

“I haven’t, either.”

“What was the prescription? Is she really sick?”

Vella stepped back to the pharmacy area, then returned and said, “Tranquillizer. A good one,” she added with approval.

Marilee felt quite fortunate in that instant. Or perhaps it was more accurate that she no longer felt quite so alone, after having witnessed another person in despair. It reminded her that life was difficult, and this was a plain fact that, once recognized, made living if not smooth, at least not quite so shockingly distressing. It pointed up that people did continue to live on, no matter how often the will to live seemed to be challenged.

And at least she herself was within the control of chocolate. Her eye fell to a Hershey bar in front of the prescription counter, and she quickly grabbed it and threw it in with the vitamins Aunt Vella was now sacking.

“I might need that tonight,” she said. She thought maybe she ought to take a chocolate bar over to Fayrene.

When they came out of the drugstore, Corrine went skipping over in the direction of the florist next door. In fact, to Marilee’s eye, it seemed Corrine was drawn to the tubs of colorful spring flowers on display outside as if by a cord. But when just a foot away, the girl suddenly stopped and turned back to Marilee, in the manner of correcting a wrong action.

Marilee, who had herself entertained a first thought that flowers were an unnecessary extravagance, said with purpose, “Would you like some flowers? I think I would.”

As she spoke, she walked to the tubs of mixed bouquets that a few weeks ago Fred Grace, Jr. had begun setting out in front of his florist shop.

“If it works for Wally-world, it’s sound,” Fred told everyone, referring to the big Wal-Mart chain of stores. Within a week he gleefully reported that impulse buying had doubled.

“Which ones do you like?” Marilee asked the children.

Corrine, not quite meeting Marilee’s gaze, shrugged her small shoulders. Her eyes slid again to the flowers.

“I
need
some daisies,” Marilee said, reaching for a bouquet. “Absolutely need them.”

One thing she intended to teach Corrine was a hard-learned lesson she herself had experienced, and that was that beauty was a necessary part of life. She felt society in general had forgotten this, and that fact might just be a major cause of wars. Often, against every cell in her body that told her to be frugal, she would buy flowers or a pretty picture, because she felt her very life might depend on it.

“You can both choose a bouquet for yourselves,” she told the children as she examined the bouquet she had chosen, peering at little purple things that looked suspiciously like weeds.

Willie Lee wanted Marilee to pick him up so he could see better, which she did, and he gleefully pulled a bouquet of red carnations from one of the tubs.

“Cor-rine, you like yel-low,” he said.

Corrine chose very slowly and reverently a bouquet of yellow daisies and white carnations.

“Oh, those are lovely, Corrine.”

“Mun-ro needs flow-ers, too.”

“He can enjoy ours,” Marilee told her son.

Her son sighed heavily and bent to let the dog sniff his flowers.

Pulling a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse, she had Corrine help her figure out the total cost of the three bouquets, which Corrine did with amazing speed. Then Marilee handed the bill to Corrine and told her to go inside and pay Mr. Grace.

Corrine hesitated, and Marilee wondered if she had asked too much of the painfully shy girl, but Willie Lee spoke up and said, “Mun-ro says he will go with you, Cor-ine,” and indeed, the dog stood ready at the girl’s side.

Corrine turned, and Marilee watched her niece’s oh, so slight figure disappear into the store. She felt like hurrying after her, to be there beside her, guarding for any type of hurt that might come her way.

Then, peering through the window while trying not to appear to be peering, Marilee saw Corrine walk up to the
cash register and hand up the money to Fred Grace. Munro stood right at Corrine’s leg, his head next to her knee, looking upward, too. Fred handed down Corrine’s change, and then out Corrine and Munro came, a smile playing at the girl’s lips.

“Thank you, Aunt Marilee,” she said softly, depositing the change in Marilee’s hand.

“Thank you, Corrine. And Munro.” She and Corrine grinned at each other.

The three of them, accompanied by the dog, started down the sidewalk. Marilee, seized by a warm happiness, felt certain they were all walking straighter and marveled at the power of a handful of colorful flowers. The few people they passed along the way smiled, and one man tipped his ballcap.

The colorful flowers gave way to a spontaneous idea.

“Let’s grow our own.” Marilee looked at the children. “Let’s have a garden.”

Willie Lee gave back an enthused, “Yes,” and Corrine raised an eyebrow, as if wondering if it could be done.

At the temporary plastic greenhouse set up at MacCoy’s Feed and Grain, they ran everywhere at once, picking out flats of pansies and the biggest marigolds in the world. Corrine liked the blue cornflowers. Then the tomato plants looked so perky, and the idea of sweet homegrown tomatoes seemed so inviting, that Marilee got a half dozen of them.

The revolving stand of crisp and colorful seed packets caught Willie Lee’s attention. When Marilee went to pull him away, she selected several packets.