Good Heavens (20 page)

“Okay. I'll give the girls, uh, the
ladies
, their work assignments, then I'll make a grocery list.”

When I came through the day room, Portia was curled up in a corner of the couch looking through my Bible. The other women were waiting for me outside and polluting that good mountain air with tobacco smoke. That is one nasty habit. Why any woman would want to go around smelling like the American Tobacco Company is beyond me. But I wasn't going to let a thing like that spoil my day—not this day—not with forty thousand dollars in our bank account.

I was in the middle of making work assignments when I glimpsed Evelyn ducking behind the dumpster, and I was curious to know why. “She's throwing up,” Linda told me.

“Is she sick?”

“No, Miss E., she's not sick,” Nancy said.

“She throws up all the time,” big-mouth Linda informed us.

That puzzled me, but I didn't want to follow up on it in front of all the girls. Nancy, being a nurse, didn't think Evelyn was sick, so I would leave it at that.

“Now, Lenora,” I said, “Miss Ursula will be busy in the office this morning and I have to go into town. I'm leaving you in charge of checking the rooms upstairs to see that everybody has made their bed and hung up their
clothes. After you're done with that, see if you and Evelyn can straighten up the craft room. It's a big mess.”

The rest of them knew what was to be done in the garden; if I was to get back from town in time to fix lunch, I didn't have a minute to spare. I made a quick list, got the check, and hit the road.

To tell the truth, it was a relief to get away for a little while. It gave me enough peace and quiet to get my head and my heart to agree again. That's a big problem with me. My heart wants to go one way and my head another. Beatrice always told me I had more heart than head, but I took that with a grain of salt because most of the time Beatrice put me up on a pedestal right up there with the pope. If she had been in Praise and Prayer and heard all them questions Linda asked that I couldn't answer, she'd know she was right; that my heart was okay but it was my head that was out of line.

It's surprising what forty thousand dollars in the bank will do for your faith.
Nothing doubting
, I told the Lord,
what we need is a preacher—somebody who can answer questions about the Trinity and all the like of that
. Good heavens, if the Lord would send us forty thousand dollars, surely he would not mind giving us somebody who could teach the Bible.

I wished Beatrice would call so I could tell her about the legacy. That thing of her depending on public phones to call me was a nuisance.
Don't Carl know it is un-American not to be holding a cell phone to your ear in all public places?

I laughed and barreled down the Old Turnpike, belting out “Standing on the Promises.” Coming around a curve, I slammed on brakes to keep from running over a partridge and her brood. That mama didn't mind the brakes squealing—just moseyed across the road like always, her chicks following along behind, but when I commenced singing again, that scared the daylights out of her and she shot through the woods like a rocket! I had to laugh.

In the store I hurried as fast as I could with the shopping. At best, we would have a late lunch. Naturally, when you're in a hurry, they have only one cashier working and there's a line a mile long. I can't stand to wait any time, much less when I'm running late. Ordinarily I'd tell the manager he needed to get another girl on checkout, but I guess I was too happy to make a fuss. While I was standing in that line, I ran through my list to make sure I had bought everything. We would have hot dogs for lunch since that was something we could fix quick. For supper we'd bake the ham and have cabbage and potatoes. We might even stir up a couple of the cake mixes.

When I finally got through the checkout, I went to get the car. All that working in the garden had my bones in an uproar, so, with forty thousand dollars in the bank, I gave myself a treat by driving up and having the bag boy load the groceries. It was worth the fifty-cent tip.

Driving home I was still excited, but being alone in the car was a good time to be praying. I thought about Angela, Brenda, Melba, Portia, Evelyn—there were so
many needs. But I couldn't keep my mind on praying. A body needs to wind down to pray right.
I have got to find the time to pray more, Lord
. There was so much going on at Priscilla Home, I couldn't keep up with it. My mind was racing from one thing to another.

Albert Ringstaff—now that was something I wanted to get to the bottom of. Him turning out to be someone who knew Lenora was a big surprise. Him asking “Was it Milan or Moscow?” where he last saw her was a big mystery.
Good heavens, there's no telling what we have got here
.

The Chevy had made it up the Old Turnpike, and I tooted the horn as I was turning in the driveway. The girls dropped their tools and flocked toward the back door to meet me.

12

By the end of the week we had accomplished a lot—Dora had borrowed the plow again and laid off the rows getting the garden ready to plant. You should've seen the scarecrow those girls made! It wasn't a “he” it was a “she” with a burlap body and lots of stuffing in all the right places and dressed in the tackiest evening gown and shawl I ever saw. They named her “Goldilocks” because Brenda and Melba, our two hairdressers, had dyed a mop head yellow and made it into stovepipe curls for Goldilocks's hair. Earrings Emily had made from jar rings dangled from both sides of the head, and somebody had found throwed-away pie pans to hang on her to scare the birds away.

Friday I drove the van into Rockville and let the girls off at a strip mall. Dora didn't want to go to town, so Ursula scheduled a counseling session with her. Lenora went with us, but it was beginning to rain and she didn't get out of the van. The only thing I needed was mouthwash, and I bought a large economy size. After my trip
to the drugstore, I sat in the van with her, waiting for the others to finish shopping.

I talked but Lenora didn't. Finally, I got the courage to ask her in a roundabout way about Ringstaff. “I guess Mr. Ringstaff had business in New York.”

She nodded her head.

“I thought he was retired.”

“He is,” she said, but that was all. Her pale skin and that lank-looking hair made her look older than her fifty-odd years. Fingering a button at her throat, she seemed lost in her own little world.

I didn't know where to go from there, so we just sat, not talking. The rain was coming down pretty hard. I kept an eye out for the girls as they went from one store to another. I hated spying on them, but they weren't allowed to go in a drugstore where they could get over-the-counter dope. Of course, they could get some of that stuff in the grocery store as well as beer and wine, but we couldn't deny them the right to a grocery store. Once we got back home Ursula would check their purchases to make sure nothing outlawed at Priscilla Home was brought in the house.

Even though it was raining, I asked, “Lenora, would you like an ice cream? There's a store on the corner.”

She shook her head.

“Wasn't it nice of Mr. Ringstaff to give us those fish? He's quite a fisherman. I wonder what kind of work he was in.”

“He worked for a piano company in New York.”

I had it on the tip of my tongue to say, “So that's where
you met him, New York?” but I didn't. Instead, I said, “I guess his company called him back to New York.”

“From time to time, they do.”

I figured Ringstaff was a piano salesman. “Maybe he can help us sell our piano.”

“Oh no,” she said, and a spark of life showed in those dull eyes.

“Mind you, we wouldn't expect him to do that for nothing; we would pay him for selling it.”

“No, don't do that,” she said rather forcefully for a woman who never had anything to say.

“Well, I won't burden him with it, but it's a shame to let it keep on taking up room in the parlor.”

“Before you do anything, let Al—Mr. Ringstaff look at it.”

“Okay,” I said.

On the way home, everybody was happily showing their purchases to each other and talking up a storm. Angela sounded off on “Old Time Religion,” and they all joined in. Then it was “Sanctuary” and half a dozen more choruses.

Raining like it was, I took it slow and easy on the Old Turnpike and kept thinking about Ringstaff. The only thing I got out of that conversation with Lenora was the fact that he worked for a piano company, but I was more curious about the connection between him and her. Did he meet her in a nightclub where she worked? He didn't look like a man who hung around nightclubs—he had more class, but you never could tell. . . . He didn't strike me as a married man.
Probably divorced or a widower
, I thought. I did wonder if those two could be more than
friends. Before she caught herself, Lenora had almost called him Albert. No, I decided, he was older than her, and she was an alcoholic who popped pills. A man like him wouldn't be interested in a woman like Lenora. . . . Even so, I remembered how excited he got that day on the rock when he first saw her.

Solving this mystery was not going to be easy.

Back at the house we ran around closing the windows to keep out the rain. That done, I helped Ursula go through the packages of stuff the girls bought in town. Linda was bragging about shoplifting. “In high school my friends would tell me what they wanted from such and such a store and I'd go get it for them. I was good at it, I tell you—so good I was banned from the mall. After that I just went to the next town to do my shopping. Before you know it, there wasn't a town within twenty miles that didn't ban me from their stores.”

Wilma picked up on that. “If you were so good at shoplifting, how come you got run outta all those stores? You musta got caught lots of times.”

“Linda, did you steal this bra?” I asked as I poked it back in the bag.

“I'll never tell,” she said and laughed.