No Defense (4 page)

The next time Jessie ran past me I stretched
for her hand, caught it, and interlaced her fingers with mine.

“Sunny day chasing the clouds away. On my
way to where the air is sweet. Can you tell me how to get, how to
get to Sesame Street?” I sang along with her, helping her with the
missing line.

Jessie tried to skip, but I pulled her back
and pointed at my belly. I looked chagrined, letting her know how
sorry I was that skipping just wasn’t possible right now. She
accepted my limitation, and we sang together, swinging our arms
back and forth, until we reached the doors to the Tallagurnsa Steak
House.

The Steak House was the largest restaurant in
the county and the only one with a AAA rating. Open six A.M. until
twelve P.M. every day of the year except Christmas, the popular
immaculately clean, family restaurant, was known for fresh,
delicious food; nothing too fancy, just good solid home
cooking.

The restaurant occupied a two-story building
in the middle of the block between the SP Drug Store and Bowe’s
Department Store. On the first floor were two dining rooms. In the
front dining room, from which diners could see anyone who passed on
the street and where the majority of the seating was in Naugahyde
booths, the atmosphere was always informal. In the more secluded
back dining room, where lunch was served under the same bright
fluorescent lights, nighttime brought tablecloths, candles, and, by
Tallagumsa standards, a measure of intimacy. The top floor
consisted of one long, large carpeted room, perfect for banquets
and parties, divisible into two or three smaller areas to suit any
occasion.

As I passed through the Steak House foyer,
walking by the Lions Club plastic gum machine, the orange
Birmingham News
dispenser, and the black
Tallagumsa
Times
tray, I felt my present collide with my past. I had
worked, dated, and celebrated every significant event of my life,
from my first horse show to my wedding, here.

Inside, the smell of fresh coffee, pies,
biscuits, and sweet rolls enveloped me. I looked down the wall
booth, a single continuous green Naugahyde booth running almost the
length of the front dining room and separating that dining room
from the hallway to the back. Green plants grew out of the planters
framing the top edge of the booth. The wall booth ended like a
giant upside-down L at a corner booth where the owners, Mimi and
Howard Bledsoe, could usually be found, watching over the
restaurant’s activities.

Neither of the Bledsoes was in their booth,
and for a second I worried that they’d sold the Steak House. I’d
recently heard from Mother that they were thinking about selling
the place and retiring. Mimi’s arthritis was getting worse, and
Howard wanted to travel. I sympathized with their reasons, I
understood that one day I would come here and someone else would be
sitting in their booth, and I knew my heart would break when that
day came. I was saddened last year when my parents rented out the
family home and moved to a fancy new wood-and-glass house on Clark
Lake; I needed more than ever for the Steak House to endure
unchanged.

Estelle, my best friend since first grade
and the Steak House hostess, was perched on the stool behind the
check-out counter. Her petite figure was barely visible behind the
old cash register. Estelle’s blond hair was in the same pageboy cut
she’d worn since high school. As Buck always said, she was “as cute
as a button.”

Estelle saw us, squealed “LuAnn,” sprang off
the stool, and flittered over to greet Eddie, Jessie, and me; the
rest of my family was already upstairs.

“Y’all are here! Y’all are here!” Estelle
cried. “Look at you.” She patted my stomach. “You look
wonderful!”

I turned to hug her in a sideways embrace,
the best I could manage with my stomach. “Only a best friend would
say that,” I said.

Estelle hugged Jessie, then Eddie; her head
just reached his chest.

“Jessie, go on and get your candy bar from
behind the counter,” I said. “Then you can go ahead upstairs
if
you want.”

Jessie looked to Estelle for official
permission.

“Help yourself,” Estelle said.

Jessie walked around the counter and slid
open one of the glass cabinet doors. She surveyed the array of
candy bars for a moment, put her hand into the cabinet, almost took
a Hershey’s Bar, hovered briefly over a Nestle’s Crunch, and
finally landed on a Three Musketeers. She grabbed it and ran
upstairs calling “Granddaddy! Glady!” “Glady” was her name for my
mother.

“I’ve been excited all day!” Estelle clapped
her hands several times.

“I didn’t know
you
cared so much
about the courthouse,” I said.

“That’s not all that’s happening today,” she
said.

“Oh, no! There’s more? What else, Estelle?”
Eddie loosened his tie and scowled. “I can’t take much more.”

“Can’t tell,” she teased. “’Til come
upstairs in a while and visit with y’all.”

She went back to the cash register to ring
up the long line of customers filing out of the back dining room.
They were mostly women in their fifties and sixties, who, I
assumed, were passengers from the tour bus outside on their way to
the Grand Old Opry in Nashville.

I looked around the front dining room.
Several people, customers and friends from over the years, waved to
me. I waved back.

“Hey, Chip,” I said to the short stocky man
in one of the front booths. He’d been the county prosecutor until
last year. “How’s Betty?” I shook hands with him and talked briefly
to people at four other tables, then joined Eddie, where he’d been
waiting near the cash register.

He looked irritated as he took a few packs
of Steak House matchbooks from a countertop bowl and put them in
his pocket.

“What is it, LuAnn? What is it with you and
this place, this town, these people?” He glared at me. “Every time
we come here, I get the feeling it’s 1968 and you’re homecoming
queen again. I thought you and Estelle might start up with one of
your cheerleading routines just now. And if you weren’t so
pregnant, I know we’d have to stop on the way out of town and watch
you ride your horse. You love this. All of it. You just can’t let
it go.”

Before I had a chance to respond, Mother
appeared at the top of the stairs, fiddling with her American flag
pin.

“Are you two ever coming? Your father’s
waiting, LuAnn,” she said.

“Coming,” I said. Happy to avoid another
argument with Eddie, I turned away from him and walked up the
carpeted stairs and down the hall toward the party sounds:
laughter, talking, silver clinking against china.

The room was full of people—at least one
hundred, maybe more. Someone, probably Estelle, had decorated the
room with red, white, and blue helium balloons.

The room dividers were pushed into the wall,
leaving one large open area. Straight ahead, the buffet lunch was
being served off four banquet tables pushed together and covered
with tablecloths. The centerpiece was a bouquet of white gladiolus
in a crystal vase. On each of the fifteen round tables placed every
few feet and surrounded by six chrome and leatherette chairs was a
single red rose in a stem vase. Near the doorway was the bar.

To my right, at the far end of the room, was
the speaker’s dais. Above and behind it hung a huge photograph of
my father’s face. Ever since Buck and a few state Democratic party
officials decided to push him as the next governor, any event
involving my father resembled a political rally.

I’d heard about, but never before seen,
Daddy’s new campaign picture. I studied it, trying to see him as a
voter might. Honest but not dull. Attractive but not vain.
Self-assured but not too cocky. Governor Newell Hagerdorn. That
sounded good to me.

Standing with Daddy and Ben Gainey near the
speaker’s dais was my high-school love, Junior. A former star of
the Tallagumsa High Tigers football team, he was six foot five and
brawny, his large crooked nose and thick neck souvenirs of long
workouts and spirited high-school games. We had been boyfriend and
girlfriend beginning in the ninth grade and our senior year had
been elected homecoming queen and king. I’d never regretted ending
our relationship when we went our separate ways in college, but I
still had a soft spot in my heart for this gentle giant.

Much to everyone’s surprise, Junior had
returned home recently as the county prosecutor after nine years
out of the state, seven in college and law school and two at the
Department of Justice. Rumor had it he had national political
aspirations.

A few of the helium balloons had floated
down from the ceiling, and Junior held one in each of his beefy
hands. He tossed one balloon into the air, then another. Falling,
they cast shadows like fat ghosts across the wall.

Eddie caught up with me at the door. “You’re
in luck, Queen LuAnn: There’s your king, Junior Fuller.” His tone
was mocking.

“Please stop being so mean, Eddie,” I said,
pulling him back out into the hall. “I know you don’t want to be
here, that you wish you were still in Atlanta, but could you
possibly pretend you’re not miserable. Please!” Tears welled in my
eyes and I leaned against the wall. “You’re making me crazy.”

He sighed deeply. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You
know I get deranged whenever we come here. You don’t act like
yourself, and it scares me.”

“I think you’re the Mr. Hyde here, Eddie,
not me.” I sniffed.

“Maybe I am. But you’re so drawn to this
place, so absolutely and totally happy here, that I can’t help but
take it as a slap in the face. I feel like an intruder.” He lit a
Salem with one of the Steak House matches. “And it doesn’t help
that people here think of me as a loser-Eddie, the political
cartoonist. Doesn’t he have anything better to do? When’s he going
to get a real job? That’s your father’s opinion, I know.”

“It is not his opinion, and no one thinks of
you as a loser. They know you’re an artist and a journalist, that
you’ve been published in the
New York Times
, that you’re
almost syndicated.” I sniffed again. “Could you get me some
Kleenex?”

He went into the men’s restroom a few yards
away and came out with a wad of tissue.

“They also know I don’t support you and all
these children you keep having, that your father’s been sending us
money,” he continued.

I took the tissues and put all but one in my
pocket. “
I keep having?
Excuse me! I had a little help in
that department! And who do you think knows about the money?
Nobody! You’re getting paranoid, you know that, about
everything.”

“You don’t think Buck and Jane know? Junior
too? How much you want to bet?”

“Junior has no idea where we get our rent,
Eddie.”

“And Estelle? What about her?”

“Come on, Eddie. This is stupid. The money
is between me and Daddy, so let’s drop it. This is Daddy’s big day,
and he wants us with him.”

“Every day is the mayor’s big day around
here as far as I can tell.”

“I guess we’ll have to talk about this
later. I’m going in now,” I said. “You’re welcome to come if you
stop acting this way. Otherwise, feel free to make your usual
escape: Go hide in the kitchen with Roland and talk to him while he
cooks.”

“I can’t-Roland’s in there too, by the bar.”
He pointed with his thumb in that direction.

I heard Roland’s deep heartfelt laugh before
I saw him. He was talking to the waitress serving the drinks.
Roland, recently made the Steak House chef at age thirty, was a
small, thin man and one of the few Tallagumsa-born hippies.
Freckled from head to toe, he wore his long red hair pulled back
into a ponytail. His sense of humor and his respect for Eddie’s
work made him one of Eddie’s favorite people in town.

“I thought he cooked every weekday
afternoon,” I said.

“I guess they turned him loose for the big
event. Look, I don’t want to go downstairs anyway, LuAnn. I want to
stay here, with you and Jessie.” His hands were outspread in front
of him.

I clasped his hands in mine and kissed him
lightly on the lips. “A truce?” I offered.

He kissed me back. “A truce.”

“Do I look okay?” I asked.

He took a stray piece of hair and pushed it
into the root of my braid. “Beautiful,” he said, draping his arm
across my shoulder. Together we walked into the reception.

“A drink might hit the spot,” Eddie said,
turning quickly in the direction of the bar.

I reached for him and caught his forearm.
“In the middle of the day?” I said. “Don’t, Eddie. You’re cutting
down, remember? You promised.”

“Come on, LuAnn. I deserve it. You want
Eddie happy?” He grinned and shook his arm free of me, then ordered
a scotch on the rocks. He took a gulp. “You’ll get Eddie
happy.”

CHAPTER
THREE