Southern Living (33 page)

“Sir?”

“I’m gonna have to do somethin’. I’m gonna have to make me an arrest.”

On the advice of his doctor, twice each week Frankie Kabel got his blood pressure taken. And without telling his daughter, because he did not want to inflate her ego even further, the place he chose to do this was the machine at the pharmacy in the Kroger where she worked.

As the machine hummed and the stiff material inside the tube began to squeeze his arm, Frankie would look up at the pictures of the store managers on the wall and let the eight-by-ten color portrait of his daughter—
Donna Kabel, Produce Manager
—sink into him like butter on a hot biscuit.

W
here are you taking me?” Margaret asked.

“It’s a surprise,” Dewayne answered. “It’s not too much farther. Are you still feelin’ sick?”

“A little.”

“Is that Rolaids helpin’ any?”

“A little.”

“You’re sure not happy this mornin’.” Dewayne paused, then smiled. “But I’m fixin’ to change that.”

They rode south on U.S. 41, the Dixie Highway—past the flea market, past the airport, past one dead armadillo on the road, past the shady pecan groves and the Badcock Peach Packing Plant and Visitors’ Center, which was marked by a water tower whose roundish top was painted to be a peach.

Finally, Dewayne turned onto a red-clay dirt road, and a mile or so later they pulled up to a white trailer with hail-dented, blue-metal shutters, which seemed to be resting in the shade of a gigantic live oak.

“Who lives here?” Margaret asked.

“My friend Bobby.”

“So what are we doing?”

“Just settle those ants in your pants and relax.”

From the bed of his blue truck Dewayne pulled a large Igloo cooler and motioned for Margaret to follow him. They crossed a grassy field, sloping downward, and after a few minutes Margaret could hear water from a creek.

“There she is,” Dewayne said. “She’s always early—and here she’s early again. This here’s the first dogwood to bloom every year in Selby. And I’m the only one who knows about it. You ever seen one before?”

“No!”

Margaret walked up to the tree. It was relatively short, gnarly and twisty but with a wide canopy. “These flowers, Dewayne. They look like orchids.”

He reached and plucked one from the tree then walked over, took Margaret’s hand and set it in her palm.

“There’s a story about this flower,” he said. “About this tree. They didn’t used to be short and squatty like this but big and mighty like that oak over there. And it was big enough that the Jews picked it to make the cross for Jesus, and the tree was so sad about bein’ used to kill him that Jesus promised right there that dogwoods from then on would be short and squatty and crooked so no one would wanna use ’em for a cross ever again.

“Now, look at this.” He pointed to the blossom in her hand. “These petals here—there’s two long ones and two short ones, which makes it kinda look like a cross. And these little brown marks … Look at ’em real careful; they look brown but they’re
not. There’s red for blood and rust for the iron, and these are supposed to be where the nails were in Jesus’ hands. And in the very middle … see there? The little pollen things? That’s supposed to be his crown of thorns. Course this probably isn’t true, but it sure is a pretty story.”

Margaret looked up from the blossom and into Dewayne’s eyes.

“Darlin’,” he asked. “Are you cryin’?”

She fell into him and buried her face in the denim shirt that covered his chest.

“Honey? Sweetie? What’s goin’ on? Are you okay?”

After a few moments, Margaret gathered herself and leaned back from his body. “Dewayne, I’ve got something horrible to tell you.”

“What? What is it? Oh, Lord—are you leavin’ me? Are you movin’ or somethin’?”

“No,” she replied. “But maybe I should so I don’t hurt you. I’m pregnant, Dewayne.”

His eyes grew large and round. “Oh, my gosh.” He raked a hand through his blond hair and looked at the flowering dogwood. “I thought we were bein’ careful,” he said.

“We were,” Margaret answered. “Sex is a game of chance, and we didn’t beat the odds, Dewayne. We are now among the three percent who get pregnant on the pill.”

Margaret reached for his chin and pulled it toward her so she could look him in the eye. “I wasn’t gonna tell you,” she said. “I was just gonna take care of it and say nothing … because I know how you are and what you would want to do about this. And you and I have very different opinions. Children should be planned, Dewayne. They deserve it.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.”

On the way home they stopped for a red light at the corner of Tyville Road and Vineville Drive, at an overgrown lot with a large,
professionally painted plywood sign pounded into the red-clay ground:
“Watch for us: Hersch Porsche-Audi. Atlanta’s finest car dealer is coming to Selby.”
Beyond the sign sat what appeared to be an abandoned car of Cadillac length, consumed by a thick green blanket of kudzu. Margaret thought it looked like a piece of topiary that General Motors might commission for the front yard of its headquarters.

Everywhere in Perry County, bulldozers were felling trees; back-hoes were digging trenches and laying pipe; two Atlanta concrete companies had moved in and set up temporary plants out by the new Holiday Inn Muscogee Convention Center because the local companies could not keep up with demand. It was hard to find a traffic light intersection in the outskirts of Selby that did not have some piece of earth-moving equipment snorting and clambering over the landscape like a tank sent in to occupy unfriendly territory.

Throughout the city, yellow ribbons had been tied to seemingly every tree and shrub whose trunk was thicker than a broomstick, and the group responsible for this had stapled hundreds of its printed cardboard signs to the bark of trees, featuring a grainy photograph of a traffic light on red with the letters H.A.L.T. underneath. Unfortunately, many motorists didn’t know this was the acronym for the protest group who put them there—Help All Lovely Trees—and they immediately braked upon seeing these signs, mistaking them for official warnings of a new traffic light ahead. Such was the rate of change in this central Georgia city.

Margaret finally broke the silence. “They’re ruining this town,” she said. “I can’t understand why the natives aren’t jumping up and down screaming.”

“They are. Look at all those signs.”

“No. I mean ranting and raving and picketing and getting loud and right in the face of the zoning board and the county commission.

What is it with Southerners, Dewayne? Why don’t they fight? Why don’t
you
fight? Why are you so passive? Why don’t you try to change my mind about the baby?”

He continued down the road, both hands on the steering wheel as always. “We fought once,” he said. “Didn’t do a darn bit of good.”

U
sing a sterling-silver pestle she’d ordered from the Frontgate catalog, Suzanne muddled the sugar cube, bitters and water in the bottom of a cut-crystal tumbler. In went the splash of Crown Royal, the ice, the maraschino cherry, even the twist of lemon she normally did not include.

The garage door had opened minutes earlier, and Boone’s BMW, now inside, was still running. Suzanne knew he was finishing business on the car phone, and she rushed to make his old-fashioned so it would be waiting for him. She’d also removed the burgundy, tassled throw pillow from his chair that he complained about every night. And an hour earlier, Donna had dropped by with a casserole dish of veal piccata, Boone’s newest favorite meal. One of the better things about being pregnant, Suzanne had realized, was that she no longer had to lie about preparing the meals; suddenly, it was okay to be a slacker.

Suzanne wanted everything perfect, everything Boone-friendly this evening. She had been in Atlanta for the day and stumbled
upon an immense, nineteen-thousand-dollar candelabra at Beverly Bremmer’s Silver Shop and needed his permission to exceed the never-stated-but-implied limit of two thousand dollars for a single purchase. When Suzanne walked into Beverly’s and saw it gleaming beneath the halogen lights on a pile of rumpled black velvet, she knew immediately that nothing else would do for the round table in the foyer for Dogwood.

Suddenly, Suzanne heard the alarm chime that indicated the door had been opened. With cocktail in hand, she checked her lipstick in the mirror behind the wet bar and turned to greet her husband.

“Hey, hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

Boone, normally a slow sipper, took the drink from her and downed a third of it in two swallows. “New outfit?” he asked.

“You always ask me that, silly,” she replied. “No. This outfit’s old as the hills. I’ve been tryin’ to save money because of all the things we’ve been needin’ to buy for Dogwood.”

“Suzanne … we need to sit down. I need to talk to you about somethin’.”

“Boone, you look so serious, honey. What’s goin’ on?”

“Just sit down, Suzanne.”

She chose the couch, he his chair. Boone took another sip of his old-fashioned and began to set it on the end table but stopped in midair. “Where’s the coaster, Suzanne?”

“Oh, Josephine!” she cursed her housekeeper in absentia. “Just a minute, darlin’. Okay, here’s one.”

He leaned back in his chair and grabbed the arms in a way Suzanne had never seen him do, as if he were trying to steady himself. “I was gonna surprise you today,” he said.

Smiling, Suzanne leaned forward, sitting on the edge of the sofa. “You know I love surprises, sweetie.”

“I’d left a message with Mylene to call Dr. Madison and hunt
me down another ultrasound picture of Maston. Have him send it to me as an e-mail attachment.”

Suzanne’s smile began to collapse until she caught it midway down, and it now trembled as it hung there by frayed threads. “Well, did you get one?” she asked.

“What do you think?”

“What are you sayin’, Boone?”

“Someone’s been eatin’ fried chicken behind the curtains, Suzanne. You’re not even a patient of his. His office has no record of you.”

“Well now that’s impossible,” she said. “It’s probably some stupid secretary’s fault.”

“No, Suzanne. I talked to him directly. He’s never met you. Now, can you kindly tell me what the hell is goin’ on here?”

Suzanne shot up to her feet and began twisting her diamond ring with her thumb, as if checking its snugness to make sure it could not come off. She walked over to the curtains at the edge of the window and pulled at a stray thread.

“You’re not pregnant, are you, Suzanne?” he asked.

Crying with her back to him, she whipped around to face her husband.

“I wanted to give you a son more than anything else in the world, Boone,” she blurted. “I know it’s what you want more than anything. And I thought that maybe if I said it then it just might come true … and you’d be happy.”

“Come off it, Suzanne.”

“I know it sounds silly, honey, but you know how women are. I was even thinkin’ of goin’ off and stealin’ me a baby from someplace like that trailer-trash girl did in Macon County … just so we could be happy again. And your momma and daddy could be happy. I just wanted things to be right, Boone.”

“For God’s sake, Suzanne, why did you say you were pregnant in the first place?”

“I don’t know why!”

“You’re actin’ like a crazy woman!”

Boone thought of the visit from the sheriff about the dogs. Partly out of guilt—he’d convinced himself that Suzanne had killed them because he’d been so ugly to her about the problem in the yard—Boone had not mentioned the incident. Instead, he had come home, found the antifreeze and dog food beneath the sink in the utility room and took it all out to the trash.

Suzanne’s voice, shaky and thick with mucus, filled the room like the whine of a tornado-alert siren. “But I did it all for you! I’d do anything for you, Boone. Lord knows all this sure proves that.”

He slapped his hands on his thighs and stood. “You know, Suzanne, I swore I would never forgive you for marryin’ me without tellin’ me you couldn’t have kids. And I finally got over that and got on with my life, and then I’ll be damned if you didn’t turn around and do the same thing to me all over again. I can’t believe I was so stupid. It’s amazin’ how you can fool yourself when you want somethin’ so bad. Well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

“What’re you sayin’, Boone?” Suzanne asked.

“I’m sayin’ it’s over, Suzanne. I’m sayin’ we’re through.”

“How can you say that? We got the Dogwood party Saturday!”

“And we’ll have the goddam Dogwood party because it’s too late to back out of that. We need to be good stewards of tradition. But then you’re gonna go out of town somewhere and fake a miscarriage and come on back and I’ll be sweet and sympathetic.”

“And …”

“And then you’re gonna leave me.”

“Boone!”

“I’ve thought this through, Suzanne. I’ll swallow my pride and become the only Parley to ever get a divorce, and I’ll have to bow at my momma’s feet and admit that she was right about you all along. And then I’m gonna get married again and have the children I always wanted.”

“But Boone!” Suzanne yelled through her tears, stomping her foot on the polished limestone floor. “What’ll I do? Where will I go?”

“You’ll be just fine, Suzanne. You’re as conniving as a cat, and I’ll bet my family’s name that you’re gonna land on your feet every time you get kicked off the roof.”