Jilted (16 page)

Clyde felt a wave of heaviness pressing on his chest. After he saw Hoby's wrecker being pulled from the lake, he had expected to be sad—even angry—but the chained-down feeling surprised him, as if he was a vicious dog tethered to a post in a weedy front yard. His friend had died, and Clyde hadn't been around to do anything about it. A match struck deep inside Clyde's gut, starting a slow burn of helplessness that quickly flared into fury.

He walked to the back door and peered at the old shed in the corner of his yard. It would feel so good to take an ax to the rotted two-by-fours, to relieve his stress in blow after blow on the dry wood, to vent his anger and frustration.

But that would never do.

Chain-link fences separated his yard from five others, giving his neighbors a front-row seat from their kitchen windows. A front-row seat to witness his rage that, even though justified, would not necessarily appear so to others.

There were just too many things to deal with. If it were only he who was hurting, it wouldn't be so bad. Clyde gripped the door handle with his fist, unable to hold back his fear. Fear of how Lynda would deal with everything happening in her life.

Would she lock herself away again?
Would she hold herself accountable?
Clyde could only hope she'd work through the pain more quickly this time, but Lynda wasn't good at that. She was fragile. She needed someone to help her through all of life's battles, because she had been through too much strife on her own.

And there was so little Clyde could do for her.

He wrenched the door open, shoving aside his concern about the neighbors. That shed was coming down.

***

Three hours later, he once again held the door for Lynda at the bookshop, hoping an outing would do her good.

“I always thought the old post office was a strange place for a store.” Lynda's negative comment put a smile on Clyde's face. Sunday her eyes had shown little or no emotion, but two days later, a hint of irritation had returned.

As they entered the shop, Clyde noticed Pamela Sanders on the other side of a display of greeting cards, just before she stuck her head around the corner.

“Hey, Clyde. You back again?” She smiled as she wiped her forehead with the back of her pudgy wrist, but when she saw Lynda, she scooted into the open. “Oh … Lynda … I heard about what happened out at the lake, and I'm so sorry.” Her face mirrored Lynda's pout, and she emphasized the last word as though she felt the pain herself.

“Thanks, Pam.”

Lynda's eyes settled, and Clyde was surprised at the soothing effect Pamela had on her.

“It's not as big a deal as you would think,” Lynda half lied. “It happened so long ago.”

“Death is always a big deal, sweetie.” She grasped Lynda's hand briefly, long enough to solicit a slow blink from Lynda but not long enough for her to pull her hand away.

“Had many customers?” Clyde asked.

“Hardly any so far, but I'm still having the time of my life.” Pamela beamed. “I never realized how bored I'd gotten since Emily went off to school. This shop is just what I needed, and I absolutely
love
the setup in the back. Even if the reading room doesn't take off, it gives me a place to rest my feet.” Her eyebrows lifted comically. “You should show Lynda how we changed things around. Since she's here and all.”

“I guess we'll just sit back there a spell,” Clyde drawled, “if that's all right with you.”

Pamela's palm went into the air as if she were swearing an oath. “Take all the time you want.”

Lynda rolled her eyes softly, but she followed Clyde to the back room, where a leather couch and chair had replaced a few of the bookshelves. “Clearly you and Pamela are working a plan.”

“Yep.”

She put her hands on her hips and inspected the layout of the room, but even while she turned and frowned and sighed, Clyde got the impression she didn't hate the space. “It's bright in here now.” Her eyes swept the ceiling, taking in the skylight, then the fresh coat of paint on the walls. “Light yellow. I like that.”

“Troy and Pam have worked hard on this place,” he said.

“I get the impression you have, too. Oh goodness.” She pointed at Ellen Mendoza's old VHS collection, displayed in a couple of stacked milk crates.

“Aw, now … once Pam gets the coffeepot working, it'll practically be a Barnes and Noble.”

“Coffee would definitely help.”

Clyde sat on one end of the couch. “The smell of old books reminds me of memories. Or imagination.” He shrugged, embarrassed he had said it. “Or something like that.”

She perched on the opposite end of the couch and rubbed the toe of her tennis shoe across dried paint splatters on the cement floor. Her gaze wandered to the shelves of books, the scented candles on a table in the corner, the buzzing fluorescent light high above their heads. “This is better than my bedroom,” she said.

“Yep.”

Her eyes opened slightly wider than normal. “This was nice of Pam, wasn't it? She's been kind to me. Through all of it.” She shook her head. “For years.”

“She always thought Hoby was a
peach
.”

Lynda smiled big enough to show her teeth. “Exactly how Pam always described him.” Her eyes darted to the lighted exit sign above the back door, and her smile vanished. “How did you know what to say to me Sunday? When I was stuck in bed?”

He shrugged. “I was locked up awhile.”

“But that was against your will. I locked myself up all on my own.”

He wished she would let him hold her again. “Sometimes being locked up is safer than being out in the world.”

A cricket inched its way across a rug near a squat metal shelf packed with children's books, and Lynda watched it intently. When the insect disappeared beneath the books, she looked back at Clyde, and her eyebrows asked for more explanation.

“For a while … in prison … it was good to be distant from the pain of what had been done to me. Against me. But once I had forgiven them and accepted my fate, then I just felt locked up, and the real imprisonment started.”

“Are you saying I should forgive Hoby for being a drunk?”

“Maybe.”

She gritted her teeth. “I'm just so mad at him, you know?” She trembled. “He was so selfish.”

Clyde wanted to tell her it would be all right, ask her to let go of the pain and get on with life. “You should read.”

She seemed to grope for the lighter topic like a lifeline. “I'm not going to read a psych book, if that's what you mean.”

“I hadn't thought about that, but it's not a bad idea.”

When he pretended to search the nearest shelf, she kicked him.

“Here's one. How to deal with crazy women.”

The second time she kicked, he caught her foot and held it across his lap. At first she pulled against him, but when he rubbed his hand up and down her shin, she settled. Clyde kept his gaze focused on her shoelaces for a few minutes, worried she would be glaring when he looked up, but when he lifted his eyes, he was surprised to find her with her head resting against the couch cushion and her eyes closed.

“Do I really need a psych book?” The edges of her mouth teased upward.

“Aw, Lyn. I don't know what you need. Everybody grieves different.”

“How would you know?” She spoke with impatience in her tone, but she immediately shook her head. “Forget I said that. You have more in your life to grieve than just about anybody I know.”

“Depends on how you look at it.”

She opened her eyes. “How did you know to tell me to tackle the bedroom door?”

“I've heard things over the years. From prison ministers. Or books. And now that I'm home, your son-in-law tells me stuff. He's got me talking to one of his therapist friends over in Snyder.”

“You're in therapy? But it's been two years.”

Suddenly his personal life lay exposed on the couch between them. “Can you believe there's a therapist in Snyder of all places?” He knew it wasn't fair to avoid her questions when he was the one who had started the pushing, but Lynda had enough problems without worrying about PICS.

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, then blinked and rolled them, letting the shift in topic pass without argument. “Okay,” she said with finality. “No, I didn't know there was a therapist in Snyder. Is he in the old post office?”

Her sense of humor tickled him around his Adam's apple. “In an old house, actually.”

“How cozy.”

“You should try it sometime.”

“An old house?”

“A therapist.”

“But I only just now made it to the Trapp Door.”

He shut his mouth and looked her in the eye, but her gaze darted away as though she had looked directly into the sun.

“Are you going to make me read a book?” Her chin lifted.

“Might as well. How about that brown one?”

“Brown one?” She pulled her foot off his lap and stretched to the shelf behind her. “This brown one?”

He sighed. She could be cute, but she could also be snooty. “It's not brown, is it?”

“As green as grass.”

“Whatever.”

She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. “Remember when we used to play Chicken Foot with those multicolored dominoes, and you couldn't tell the colors apart?” She smiled but didn't quite smile. Her memories seemed to keep spiraling back to Hoby, no matter what she tried.

“Aw, now …”

She chuckled for real then, and the sound soothed Clyde's worried nerves like the salve his grandmother used to put on his sunburn.

“We better be going. I've got work in a few.” He lifted his eyebrows, silently asking her about her job, but it was her turn to ignore a question. He stood up.

“Aren't you going to get a book?” she asked.

“I guess not.”

“Why?”

He hesitated. “I've read them.”

“All of them?” She looked down at the book in her hand. “Even
Anne of Green Gables
?”

“Okay, I ain't read that one, but I've read most of them.” He didn't feel like adding that he had donated a good portion of them. Books he'd found at garage sales in the past two years, read, and then passed on to Pamela.

“Why did you bring me here if you weren't planning on buying a book?”

He held his breath for a count of three, then jumped off the high dive. “I'm comfortable here, and I thought you might be, too.”

She gazed around the room. “You know … I sort of am.”

A vibrating rumble eased through Clyde's chest. He could tell Lynda wasn't completely recovered from discovering her husband might be dead—who would be?—but she could see beyond the pain. And someday, when she came further out of the shadows, she might once again notice him in the sunshine.

“Ansel, how you doing today?”

Wednesday morning, not only did I get out of the house, but I did it all by myself. Clyde would have been proud had he known, but I didn't call him. I called Velma.

“Aw, Lynda, I've been worse,” Ansel said.

My brother-in-law's chair of choice was his recliner, and that's where he was today. Only instead of his usual position, sitting with the foot support lifted, he had the chair laid all the way back. His head rested to the side, and his hands lay limply on the armrests. I wondered if he even had the strength to change the channel on the television.

“I'm better now the TV reporters have left us be.” His eyes met mine, and without words, he conveyed compassion for my loss. I was startled to realize I had briefly forgotten about Hoby. Losing my husband, whom I hadn't seen in nearly seventeen years, paled in comparison to Velma losing her husband, whom she had seen every day for over thirty.

Velma motioned toward the sliding-glass door. “They've been out in the pasture with their zoom lenses.”

“Blasted photographers.” Ansel seemed to have rallied his strength to make the outburst, and then his head sank back down on the headrest.

“JohnScott posted signs.” Velma pursed her lips. “That did the trick.”

Ansel grunted. “Thank God.”

“The old man's been talking a lot about the Lord lately,” Velma said. “Seems to think he needs to get right.”

“Now, Velma,” he said slowly. “I've got plenty of time to set things straight with the Big Guy. I'm in no rush.”

“No … no rush.” I tried to sound carefree, but in the back of my heart, hidden where nobody could see, lay an urgent secret. Now that I was looking at Ansel's approaching death, I couldn't bear the thought of him not knowing God. An involuntary chuckle slipped from my throat. “The people down at the church wouldn't know what to think if Ansel Pickett walked in.”

“Good Lord,” he rasped, and then a laugh turned into a coughing fit. When he had quieted and wiped his lips with a cloth handkerchief, he insisted, “I'm not thinking of going to a worship service. God's here at the house, too, ain't He?”

Velma clicked off the television. “Ansel heard that Neil Blaylock went back to the church a week ago.”

“I heard that.”

My brother-in-law reached for a toothpick on the end table, then placed it between his teeth and talked around it. “Reckon they'll make him an elder again?”

“Surely not,” Velma said.

He shrugged his shoulders weakly. “Wouldn't put it past 'em.”

My insides turned to Jell-O. “So you won't be headed to Sunday services anytime soon?”

“Naw, not me,” Ansel said. “Velma might get a hankering to go, though.”

“Not without you, I won't.” My sister pulled a crocheted throw pillow into her lap and fluffed it. “I only go there for weddings and funerals and such.”

Her face went white.

“Mom and Dad's funeral was the first time I'd ever been in the church building,” I said.

“You don't say.” Ansel joined me in making the best of Velma's accidental funeral reference.

“That was a strange time,” Velma said.

“I barely remember it.” Except for the parts I did remember. Like the women who patted my shoulder with their squishy, warm hands. The emptiness in my lungs, as though I couldn't draw in a good breath. The caskets at the front of the room, shut tight because the accident had been so gruesome.

“You were in shock, I reckon,” Velma said softly as she picked at the yarn on the pillow.

We sat in silence until Ansel drifted to sleep, his toothpick falling from his lips and down into the inner parts of his recliner.

Velma put the pillow in the crook of the couch and gave it a good thump on the top edge. “Nowadays we've got all these talk shows telling us what we should've done back then so we wouldn't be in the shape we're in now.”

“We're a mess, aren't we?”

“Ansel's a mess.” The lines around her eyes deepened when she looked at him. “He was talking about visiting the church before Neil started stirring things up down there. Now, he'll be dead before he gets around to it.”

I looked at my brother-in-law, his worn hands folded over his chest as if he were already lying in rest at the funeral home. But I reminded myself what Ansel had said. God was at the house, too. I clasped my hands together, locking my fingers tightly, and squeezed with all my might, hoping Ansel was right.