Julia's Chocolates (13 page)

One of the women next to me placed a friendly hand upon my arm, her nail polish a lovely pink. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s not how I feel, and I’m delighted you’re here, and I’ve always liked your Aunt Lydia. My husband, Gavin, works for Stash as his accountant.”

Another woman across the table said, “Linda, please do shut up—”

A third leaned toward me across the table, her brown braid falling over her shoulder. “You must ignore her. We all do. Your Aunt Lydia and I swap plants all the time.”

“I think we’ll find wisdom and patience in the Bible now,” Lara intervened. “Everyone please open to Psalms, first chapter, first verse.”

But I could not ignore Linda Miller, that sanctimonious cow.

“Mrs. Miller,” I began, leaning across the table. “This is my first time here at Bible study. I came because my wonderful friend Lara asked me to come and for no other reason. You can attack me all you want. God knows I’ve committed my share of sins and have done so many stupid things in my life I could just cry thinking about it, but don’t you dare,
ever
say a word against my Aunt Lydia. She is the finest, most honest, most caring woman I have ever met, and she leads a life far more reflective of Jesus Christ than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Really? What about the druuugsss.” Linda Miller said the word “drugs” long and low, and I imagined steam shooting out of her nostrils.

“I think that God is far less worried about a tiny bit of pot than he is worried about people who speak in His name but don’t act in His name. It is always easy to judge and condemn, so much easier than it is to live a true Christian life. None of us should be judging anybody else. Last time I looked, that’s God’s job. So, again, Mrs. Miller, do not ever,
ever
say anything rude or untrue about my aunt again.”

The silence was deafening. The woman with the pink nails squeezed my arm. The one with the braid nodded, smiled. The woman across the table said, “Well said.”

Deidre didn’t move, seeming to be stuck like a statue under Katie’s unwavering gaze.

The twins came back to the conversation. “I’ve never said anything rude about your aunt, dearie!” said Rosita. “Never. She brings me eggs all the time, and when I was sick last year she made me dinners. That woman made me laugh so hard one time I got rid of a wart. Do you remember that, Jacqueline?”

“Warts! Warts!” her twin answered, flicking her fingers about. “Wart begone! Wart was gone!”

“Wart was gone. Poof!” Jacqueline said, wiggling her fingers back at her sister.

“Well, I think we’ve got things settled,” said Lara. “And now let’s open our Bibles together. I will read Psalms.”

Lara read. And read. And read. I knew she was trying to calm herself down, calm the situation down. When at last she put down the Bible, I was ready to clunk my head on the table and take a little nap.

“Now let’s close with our own prayers. Miss Jacqueline and Miss Rosita, would one of you like to start?”

“I’ll do it,” Rosita announced. “I don’t think that Jacqueline is fully awake yet from that long, very long, very very long Bible reading, Lara, dear, although you do have a wonderfully melodious voice.” She cleared her throat with a little humming sound. “I’m going to ask you all to pray for my garden. Those darn worms are in there again and those pesky bugs, and if I don’t get rid of those bugs, then I’m not going to be able to enter my squash in the county fair, and that would be a damn, damn shame.”

“And I’d like you all to pray for my bowels,” Jacqueline shouted. “I am having a terrible time with constipation.”

“Oh, it is terrible. Horrible. Horrible, terrible, Lord,” Rosita said with great reverence. “And the gas that I have experienced at home coming from my sister’s anus! It’s like she’s got a dead animal inside her gut trying to pass.”

“Thank you, Miss Rosita, Miss Jac—”

Jacqueline interrupted, her head bent over her folded hands. “Dear Lord, you know what it’s like to be stopped up and gassy, and I’m afraid it’s going to effect my bridge game tomorrow. Nobody is going to want to be my partner. Please also pray that Mr. Thompson will come over soon and he will have more luck with his bodily functions—you know what I mean, Lord. A woman has needs, but they can’t be met with broken bodily functions.”

I almost laughed. I coughed to cover my laugh. Lara did, too. The woman with the pink nails, the woman with the braid, and the woman who had told Linda to shut up all said quick, kind little prayers.

“Deidre?” Lara asked.

I stole a peek at Deidre. I noticed that her gray roots were showing just a bit.

“Dear God,” she started, seeming very uncomfortable. “Thank you for today. Amen.”

Then it was Katie’s turn. “Dear God,” I heard her say, her voice angry. “Please do not let my pies get into the wrong hands again.”

I assumed she was talking about J.D.

“My pies are made with love and care.” Katie’s voice became more strident. “They are not made to be stolen, then given to someone who is deceitful and dishonest and unkind.”

I looked up. Katie was still staring at Deidre. Deidre’s head was bent. I glanced across the table at Lara. Lara looked alarmed, her gaze shooting from Katie to Deidre and back again.

“I don’t care about the person who gave away the pie, but I also don’t care to sit across from the recipient, so please keep her out of my view from now on. Thank you. Amen.”

I never saw more than a blur of that Bible as it shot across the table from Katie’s hand toward Deidre’s face, but I heard Deidre’s scream, I heard a bone crack, and I heard her plump body hit the floor.

Everyone crowded around Deidre, the blood spurting from her nose like a fountain as she wailed. I grabbed a pile of napkins, as did Lara, trying to stem the blood, while the woman with the braid and the woman with the pink nails darted to the kitchen for ice. Linda sat quivering.

I glanced back at Katie. She was calmly picking up the plates and cups from around the table and walking them into the kitchen. I heard her humming as she passed by me. Her face had lost some of that strained look I had seen earlier at her house.

The twins clambered out of their seats and stared down at Deidre, clearly stunned. They had not seen the Bible flying from Katie’s hand as their eyes had been closed in prayer.

“God must be really, really upset with you,” Rosita told a wailing Deidre. “You must have sinned something good, girl.”

“Yeeeesss, something good,” Jacqueline added, shaking her head, then clicking her tongue.

“Good schmood,” they said together.

It didn’t take long for Linda the Big-Boobed Bible Bitch to tell the entire town that Katie had lobbed a Bible at Deidre.

And it didn’t take long for the town to figure out why sweet, lovely Katie the Housekeeper, with the charming children and the alcoholic mean-ass husband did it.

As Katie told me later, the longer she sat and stared at that cherry-pie stain on Deidre’s blouse, the more furious she became. “She even had cherry skin in between her front teeth. My God, Julia, who eats cherry pie in the morning?”

The verdict on Katie: Innocent. Very innocent.

The verdict on Deidre: Slut.

Deidre left town the next week.

After she left, J.D. got drunk and disappeared for four days.

On the fourth day, the police called Katie at 2:00 in the morning to tell her they had found her husband trapped in a car in a ditch. He had apparently been there since the day he’d stormed out of the house calling Katie every name in the book, breaking all her housecleaning tools, and draining her cleaning supplies.

He was furious about his lover’s nose being broken, but I suspect he was also furious that Katie (the money maker) had found out, that the townspeople looked at him as if he were vermin, and that Stash himself had calmly told J.D. he had never met another man who was less of a man than J.D. was.

“So he’s not dead?” Katie asked the policeman, cuddling her younger daughter, Haley, who had crawled into bed with her hours ago.

“No ma’am,” he said, his voice happy. He obviously did not know J.D. “He’s not dead. He’s hurt, but he’s okay!”

Katie thanked the policeman and told him she would be at the hospital soon. Then, she told me later, she pulled the covers over her head and cried.

B
eing a newspaper deliverer at the age of thirty-four is not as humiliating as one would expect.

For humiliation, there usually must be a “who saw me?” effect. For example, “I am so humiliated because so-and-so saw what I was doing.” Frankly, by the time I roll out of bed after my customary four hours of broken sleep to deliver newspapers, I am too exhausted to care what anyone thinks, even if they are up early enough to see me. Plus, I hardly know anyone here.

Two weeks after arriving in Golden, when my bruises were not quite so startling, I had started looking for a job. Jobs, I knew, were very scarce. Golden’s lumber industry had crashed, and the main factory outside of town had closed. No new businesses had taken their place.

This, of course, made for a crummy job search.

I looked for a job in the local grocery store. No luck. I was told that an art history major is a “lovely major,” by the assistant manager who sneered, her eyes narrowing as if I had personally offended her by even asking. “But no one who needs help finding Cheetos is going to care. Besides, you really aren’t qualified to work the cash register. You have no experience at all.”

Trying to get a job at the ice cream saloon didn’t work, either. The owner had six daughters, he told me. They all worked there. But would I like to buy a sundae?

I also applied to be a receptionist at the dentist’s and two of the doctor’s offices in town. No luck. Same with the hardware store, the drugstore, a small clothing boutique, and the movie theater. The schools did not need any assistants for the next year.

Which brought me to the newspaper. I could write. Perhaps I could do obituaries or dog shows or town picnics?

Ha.

Did you know that even tiny newspapers only hire people with degrees in journalism or who already have existing journalistic experience? Sheesh.

Although they wouldn’t hire me to write anything, their teenage newspaper delivery boy had just quit. Would I be interested in taking his place? I swallowed, said yes, and there I had it, my new career: newspaper deliverer.

Still, as I walked out of the newspaper office, my new paper route in hand, I was happy to have the job. I wanted to pay half of Lydia’s bills.

Lydia argued, slamming pans together six times for effect, “You’re family! Don’t pay. You insult me. You hurt me. I am your aunt, and I will provide for you…. Here, have a brownie. Your complexion tells me that your womanhood is waning. Better yet, let’s go target shooting together. We’ll practice shooting to kill and bring Melissa Lynn with us. Melissa Lynn loves the sound of gunshots.”

I didn’t argue. I knew Melissa Lynn, and no one enjoyed the sound of a gun more than that pig. She made her pig noises whenever Lydia put a leash around her neck and took her to the firing range. Plus, I could see Henry, the beaver who lived on a little river that flowed through Stash’s property, who came when Aunt Lydia called its name.

“I’m going to pay you, Aunt Lydia. Just think”—I laughed—“it’ll be enough to buy yourself another pot plant.”

She did not think my joke was funny and scowled at me as she dug her hands deep into the dough she was kneading. Stash needed more bread, and Lydia was a strong believer that milk and homemade bread made for a strong libido. “Young lady, I forbid you to pay me for anything.”

I changed the subject, helped her knead, fixed a fence in the garden, trimmed some bushes, and then we both set about re-painting the door black. There was no telling when a seedy man would drive up and try to con us into his evil ways, was there?

So I went to bed that night and got up way before the crack of dawn, collected the newspapers from the print shop, and was up and running my paper route, even though my body protested wildly at being up at this hour. The first time my paper route took me hours longer than it should have because I kept getting lost. The next day, I was better. By the end of the week—well, I had to pat myself on the back for being a good little paper deliverer.

And whose house was the last house on my route?

Yep. None other than Paul Bunyan’s himself.

Dean Garrett’s home is a sprawling, craftsman-style two-story home with floor-to-ceiling windows. Stash told me Dean owned a hundred acres and left a foreman in charge when he was at his Portland office working on different legal cases. The previous owner and Stash had had a falling-out because the other owner, Mr. Rekkum, didn’t take care of his dogs the way Stash thought he should.

Those dogs were left outside regardless of whether it was hot enough to flip a pancake on the sidewalk or cold enough to freeze your nostril hairs. There was a very small, crude doghouse that could only hold two of the three dogs. They weren’t always fed. They didn’t always have water. Stash had talked to Mr. Rectumhead, as Stash called him behind his back, about treating the dogs better, but Mr. Rectumhead laughed, spitting tobacco juice very close to Stash’s feet.

So one day Stash took the dogs. Mr. Rectumhead was pretty steamed and came charging over when he discovered that his dogs weren’t chained up by their empty water dish anymore, but Stash and the men who worked his land and helped with The Biz were waiting, all in a line. Guns are the only things that Mr. Rectumhead really understands, so he backed off.

But when he sold the land, he did it on the sly, through a Portland Realtor, and Paul Bunyan bought the acres, not knowing anything of the feud between Stash and Mr. Rectumhead.

Paul Bunyan had the old house razed first thing, Stash told me, then started building his own home. Stash went over to visit him, and the two hit it off like they were long lost brothers. Paul Bunyan even liked the dogs. The dogs liked him, too, although they would never set foot on his property, the memory of Mr. Rectumhead being obviously too much for them. Even when Stash brought them over in one of his pickups the dogs whined and cried, refusing to get out of the truck. And when Stash drove off with them back to his own ranch, he told me, you could almost see those dogs grinning, their relief a living, breathing, doggie thing.

So as soon as I discovered I was to be Paul Bunyan’s paper deliverer, I prayed that he wouldn’t see me. His visit to Aunt Lydia’s was still uppermost in my mind, and I couldn’t quite get the look of his lips out of my brain, or of his hands, so strong and capable, and the thought of what it would be like to be kissed so thoroughly by Paul Bunyan you could barely stand, or of how heavy he would feel if he lay on top of me.

So I would drive past his home on the days when he was in town and had requested a paper, and I would shove the newspaper in that box real quick and speed off. On the fifth day of my route, I saw him in his house. Although it was the wee hours of the morning, he looked to be talking on the phone. I drove off even quicker then, missing a deer by about an inch.

But on the eighth day of my paper route, I darn near ran him over.

Since I was often chilled, which I attributed to the Dread Disease, I was wearing an old blue camping coat and a sweatshirt I had worn the day before to help with the chickens. (I had had to pluck chicken feathers off it before leaving.) I was also sporting a pair of baggy jeans and boots. Before leaving I had ripped my curls back into a ponytail and brushed my teeth to give my nose a break.

I couldn’t have been more glamorous.

As usual, my heart started pumping as I neared Mr. Bunyan’s house. I slowed, then stopped the car and got ready to shove the newspaper into the box and leave.

And that’s when I saw the man, not three feet away, looming near the mailbox. My own scream almost scared the pee right out of me. It was piercing-loud and free-flowing, and it sliced through the cool silence of the country like a whip through ice cream.

I recognized Paul Bunyan, otherwise known as Dean Garrett, after I’d almost rammed him with the car.

I could hear his laughter low and sexy. “I’m sorry, Julia. God, I’m sorry. Are you all right? I didn’t mean to scare you.” His deep voice, rough around the edges, rumbled straight through my stomach. It was almost as if I were eating honey and pinecones.

“It’s okay,” I choked out, my heart racing at 1,845 beats a minute. “Really. I’m sorry I almost hit you.”

He laughed, and when I could breathe like a normal human I dared a glance into his eyes.

“Good morning.” Paul Bunyan leaned his arms against the open window, which put him only inches away from me. He smelled like fir trees and a roaring fire and coffee and warmth.

I swallowed hard, then stared straight out the front window. No way was I going to risk my breath floating near that man. “Good morning. I, uh, I think I dropped your newspaper, I’m sorry.”

“It’s no problem.”

I caught his smile out of the corner of my eye. He was so damn cute. The silence lingered, while I cast about for something non-inane to say. All I could get out was, “I, uh…well…” And then it hit me that Dean knew I had a paper route.

And it was about then that I felt humiliated.

“Can you come in for breakfast?”

I smothered a hysterical giggle. Breakfast? No. Absolutely no. He scared me to death.

“No, uh…well…” I gripped the steering wheel while my heart skipped 6,780 beats. “I can’t. I have to…well, finish off the newspapers. I mean, I have to finish delivering the newspapers, and then I have to help with the chickens. Amelia and Miss Clarice and Queen Koo Koo will be waiting, and they get really uptight when they’re not fed, and then Miss Clarice will peck at my hands…”
Please shut up.

“Amelia and Miss Clarice and Queen Koo Koo have behavior problems, then?”

“I, uh…well, yes. They have behavior problems.” If he stood there much longer I thought I would have a behavior problem. The fear had receded, and now that “woman in me” started to escape. Dean Garrett made my skin tingle and my nipples hard.

“They don’t make chickens like they used to, do they?” he said. I saw his mouth slant upward in a semblance of a smile.

I shook my head.

“How many more houses do you have to go to?”

“Houses?” Why did his shoulders have to be so grippable?

“Yes. Houses. How many more houses do you have to deliver newspapers to?”

Why did he have such high, slanted cheekbones?

“I…well, I’m done with the houses. You’re the last one.”

Why did he have such long eyelashes?

“Oh,” he said. “So you’re done with your route? I thought you said you had to deliver the newspaper to more houses?”

Rats. Caught in a little lie. I hate lying. I rarely, rarely do it. I might not be the brightest light in the chandelier, I might get engaged to freaks, I might cut out on my wedding day, but I do not lie. Oh dear. Was not telling Robert I was going to make a run for it on our wedding day a lie by omission? I brought my attention back to Paul Bunyan.

“You’re right. I’m done for the morning.”

“Good. So come on in for breakfast.”

“Oh no.”
Oh, God, no!
“No!”

He looked taken aback by the vehemence of my answer.

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant, that no way…I mean,
no
, I can’t come in for breakfast.”

“You can’t,” he drawled, and now I could see he was smiling. “Can’t or won’t?”

I won’t because I can’t stop looking at you and wondering how you would taste if I licked your lips
, I thought. “I can’t come in. I need to go, I really do.”

He nodded. I thought his eyes looked disappointed, but I figured later I imagined that. Dean Garrett could probably get any woman on the planet to have breakfast with him. Naked. “I understand.”

But he didn’t understand. I understood that.

He smiled at me then, in the dark, his white teeth flashing.

“Maybe tomorrow?”

“No, I can’t.”

“The next day?”

“No, I can’t.”

He smiled. My skin tingled. In a good way. “Thank you anyhow.”

He nodded, I rolled up the window of my car and drove off.

And that should have been that.

But it wasn’t. Every day for two weeks Dean Garrett waited outside by the newspaper box for me. Every day we chatted, our chats getting longer and longer. Every day he asked me to come up for breakfast. Every day I refused, shaking in my shoes, not only because I was afraid of men, but because I was afraid of myself.

And then one day I said yes.

Well, I didn’t really say yes. But my actions said yes. Dean gave me a bouquet of wild flowers, the flowers I had told him I liked better than any other flower. He also gave me this beautiful pink crocheted hat with matching mittens because I’d told him delivering papers was a chilly experience.

Then he got in the passenger seat of my car.

“Julia, tomorrow I’m leaving town for five weeks. I have to go back to Portland. You won’t have to put up with being accosted at the mailbox for a little while, although I promise you I will return to my post the minute I get back. So, please. Do me the honor. Come to my house for breakfast. I’ll cook. I’ll clean. You relax.”

I smiled, laughed, and then to my utter embarrassment, embarrassment that was so deep I wanted to nuke myself into a thousand bits, I put my head on the steering wheel and cried.