Sentimental Journey (12 page)

“Sorry, Mama.” He was out of breath and the words came out in a stutter.

“Your daddy had to run out to the Miller place. Old Cora Miller’s DeSoto won’t start. Probably because she took a good, long gander under the hood and the engine just upped and died. Lord knows she’s got a face that’d kill a weed.” She tossed her head, then swiped a wave of hair out of her right eye. “He wants you to watch the pumps, hon, till he gets back.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He wedged his way into the doorway.

She stopped him with a soft hand on his shoulder. She smelled clean, like soap and the cherry-almond hand cream she always used.

He looked up at her.

At that moment he thought he might have just understood why his daddy put up with her. It was the same reason Red did whatever she asked him to do, the same reason he wanted to make her happy. He’d remembered his granddaddy saying there wasn’t a man alive who after taking one good look at his Dina Rae wouldn’t give her the moon.

She brushed the hair off of his forehead with a tender touch of her hand. “You need a haircut.”

“Aw, Mama.”

She laughed. “Don’t you ‘aw, Mama’ me. I’ll cut it on Saturday.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he muttered. He liked his hair over his ears because they looked too big for his head. Although lately he thought he might be growing into them like his daddy said he would. But he still liked his hair longer. She always cut it too short.

“I think we have time for one song. You want to sing with me?” She gave him a wink.

“Sure.”

“Go look outside that window, hon, and see if there’s anyone out front.”

The filling station was empty, the gas pumps standing there tall as Injuns. “Ain’t no one out there.”

She gave him a narrow-eyed look. “There’s no such word as ‘ain’t.’ “

“But, Mama, everyone says ‘ain’t.’ “

“No, everyone doesn’t. And if everyone shot their dog and their daddy, too, would you do it?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and mumbled, “I don’t have a dog.”

“You want people to treat you with respect, Billy Joe, then you can’t talk like some old farm boy.”

His granddaddy had been a farmer, and he was the best and the smartest man Red had ever known.

“You remember what I tell you, now.” She walked into the house. “You use the sense God gave you and good English. You hear me?” Yes, ma’am.

“Good.” She patted the spot next to her on a feeble, short-legged bench. “You come here and sit by your mama.”

He crossed the room and sat down next to her in front of an old cabinet piano made of some kind of dark wood the deep color of
Texas
farmland. It had belonged to her grandmother Chisholm, who was nothing more to Red than an old image in a photo—a small woman with a silly-looking calico bonnet and a sagging chest.

His mama flexed her hands.

He looked down at the piano. Over the past thirty-odd years, the keys had turned as yellow as an old man’s teeth, and there were white rings melted into the wood from the beer bottles she had set on top of it.

She didn’t need any sheet music. She carried all the notes in her head. She could play anything. You just named a song, and she could sit right there and pound out the sweetest melodies.

A second later her hands flew over the keys in a rousing rendition of “Ain’t She Sweet.”

He knew she played that song on purpose. He’d asked her once if “ain’t” wasn’t a word, then why was it in a song title? Didn’t make sense to him and he said as much.

She told him that if he was looking for things to make sense in life, he might as well give up right now. That was his mama. Like her daddy, she said things he remembered.

Her foot tapped and pumped the brass piano pedals, drawing out those sugar notes. It was always the same for Red, sitting there beside her on that wobbling bench, tapping his fingers on his patched knees in time to the music. Suddenly the cracked paint, the beat-up old wood floor that slanted south, and that worn-out blue divan in the corner didn’t matter.

Oh, Lord, the sound she could lure from that piano was enough to make an angel cry and the devil dance.

A car horn blared from out front.

She stopped playing suddenly and swore one of those raunchy, mouth-washing words. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Better see who it is.” She was reaching for her beer bottle.

Red got up and ran out the front door. He shoved the screen open so hard it banged on the outside wall, then rattled against the frame when it snapped closed.

He stopped running halfway down the front steps and stood there frozen.

Sitting right in front of the tall, glass-topped ethyl pump was what looked to be a brand-new Ford-blue cabriolet with its canvas top crushed down. It had sparkling whitewall tires. The hubcaps were polished steel, and the background of the V-8 emblem was painted in the same glossy Ford-blue as the chassis.

Red let out a soft whistle. It was some automobile. He ran toward the driver, a tall man in an expensive suit and a Panama hat who was leaning against the spare tire in the rear and puffing on a cigar that smelled like black walnuts.

“Is this a real V-8?”

“Sure is.”

His daddy was going to be mad as cats in a sack. A real V-8 engine and he wasn’t there to see it.

“Fill her up for me, son.”

“Sure.” Red went over to the pump and began to fill the car. As far as he knew no one had filled up their gas tank in a good six months. It was always a dollar’s worth here or fifty cents’ worth there. “Is that carpet on the floor?”

“Yep.”

Red craned his neck a bit. “In the back, too?”

“Yep.”

He shook his head and just stared at that beauty of a car, holding the gas nozzle in the tank on the right rear fender.

The man grinned at him from around his cigar.

With the rag top and windows down, the car was the sportiest thing Red had ever seen. The bench seat was russet brown leather, and it smelled just like new shoes, although it had been so long since he’d had a pair you’d think he would have forgotten the smell by now.

Even the rumble seat was covered in leather.

“Well, my, oh, my, will you look at that.”

Red pulled his gaze away from the dream car and watched his mama saunter toward them, over the warm blacktop driveway in a pair of fancy red high heels he’d never seen.

The man straightened up like he’d just been starched. He whipped off his hat. “Ma’am.”

She was wearing lipstick the color of a vine tomato. It made her lips look fuller and her skin look as perfect as fresh cream. She had a flowered comb pulling up one side of her shoulder-length, wavy hair. The comb matched her best blue-and-red dress, which was not the one she’d been wearing a few minutes ago, but now skimmed her long, bare legs.

She ran her hand along the car in the same tender way she’d brushed the hair off of Red’s forehead.

He got a sick kind of feeling in his stomach—the kind you got when someone played a joke on you and you hadn’t seen it coming.

“Why, I think this is the prettiest car I have
ever
seen.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“My name’s Dina Rae.” She held out her hand and looked straight at the man in the same way Red looked at his teacher when he wanted her to believe that he hadn’t let those big old spiders loose in the girls’ washroom.

“It makes me feel like an old woman when people call me ‘ma’am’,” she said.

That was news to Red. He was brought up to say “ma’am” out of respect. If he hadn’t, he would have gotten one hell of a licking with his daddy’s belt or his granddaddy’s razor strop. He knew that for sure because he’d made the mistake of testing it once.

“Roland Stiles.” The man took her hand in his.

Red’s knuckles tightened on the gasoline nozzle.

She smiled, then pulled her hand away and walked slowly along the car, dragging a finger along the shiny paint until she was standing in front of it. She stepped back a foot or so and put her hands on her hips.

Roland Stiles was looking at his mama the way a hungry dog looked at a ham bone.

Red was watching them so closely that he lost track of things and pumped gasoline all over the fender.

Shitfire!

He snatched an old rag from his back pocket and hunkered down, trying to wipe the gas off as fast as he could. When he looked up again, embarrassed, and ready to hear about what he’d done, he saw that they hadn’t even noticed.

“ . . . No,” Mr. Roland Stiles was saying. “I’m from
Jackson
.
Not
Jackson
County
, but
Jackson
,
Mississippi
.”

“I figured as much. I don’t think you can buy a brand-new Ford in Acme.” She grinned up at him, then shaded her eyes with a hand as she cast a quick glance up at the late afternoon sun. She turned back and began to fan herself. “It’s hot enough out here to wither a fence post. Why don’t you come along inside. I’ll get you a nice cold Dr. Pepper and you can tell me all about
Jackson
,
Mississippi
.” She threaded her arm though his and then turned back to Red. “You take good care of Mr. Stiles’s car, now, Billy Joe. Wash that windshield real good.”

He just stared at her.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes,
ma’am.”
He looked away. He couldn’t watch as they walked toward the small station building where bottles of Dr. Pepper, Bireley’s, and Crème Soda were kept inside a white-and-red porcelain cooler that looked like a washing machine.

Once, a long, long time ago, he remembered his mama taking his daddy’s arm like that and walking and talking with him. At least he thought he remembered it. It was back in the days when they all went to church on Sundays, those days when she made shirts for his daddy and him, and dresses for his sister.

But that was before his granddaddy died and before Mama got her night job. It was when his mama still talked to the church ladies, like Cora Miller and Ida Mae Dodd, talked to them instead of about them. He couldn’t remember a time in the last five years when she’d been close enough to his daddy to even touch his arm.

Red rubbed hard on the windshield, scouring off the crusted, yellow bugs. He finished and began to polish the single side mirror, then stepped back. It was shining like a new nickel. He swiped at his dripping forehead with his bare arm. He was hot.
He
wanted a Dr. Pepper. He stuffed the rag in his back pocket and marched toward the station.

Inside, they were standing side by side, both leaning against the wooden counter and talking about the seventeen thousand World War I veterans camped out in
Washington
,
D.C.
, trying to get their service bonuses just so they could survive.