The Loves of Ruby Dee (3 page)

Miss Edna had been one of those to disdain crying, and “straighten up” had been a favored command. Mostly she’d said it while she watched the
Nightly News
with Tom Brokaw. “People just need to straighten up,” she’d say. “You tell them to straighten up, Tom.”

Ruby Dee thought she should have told people to cry more. “If you had done more cryin’, you would have lived longer, Miss Edna,” she mumbled in aggravation.

The frequent death of her patients was, of course, the major problem with Ruby Dee’s occupation. Her patients were predominantly elderly or people who’d been sent home because medical science could do very little for them. Ruby Dee could only bring these patients back from the brink of death so many times before they finally slipped over and left her. This was very hard on her spirit, and led to a lot of crying. She had been crying every day for a month, because of Miss Edna’s finally having slipped over and left her. Ruby Dee had done everything she knew how to do, and still Miss Edna had died.

Sniffing, she fished in her pocket and brought out a lace-edged hanky bearing the carefully embroidered initials EMS. Edna Marie Summerill. Miss Edna had given Ruby Dee all the lovely handkerchiefs she owned. “Someone who cries as much as you do should always have a hanky,” Miss Edna had said.

Folding the hanky so that she wouldn’t soil the embroidered initials, as Miss Edna had taught her, Ruby Dee blew her nose, hard.

Sensing a return to calmness, Sally moved away and went to make a place to lie on some towels in the corner.

“Sally, don’t be sniffin’ those towels. Come here; you can lay on this rug. That’s a good girl.”

Ruby Dee didn’t know how long those towels had been lying piled in the corner, but she knew that, left too long in a place that wasn’t too clean anyway, towels could draw centipedes, and she certainly didn’t want Sally dislodging one and possibly getting bitten. Ruby Dee had been terrified of centipedes ever since the age of five, when she had been bitten by one.

It had been the day after her daddy had gone off and left her with Big Grandma. Her daddy had gone off and left her a lot, the final place being Big Grandma’s house, where she was to reside in the closed-in front porch with the rotted floor.

Ruby Dee had been digging through her meager clothes piled in the corner of the porch-bedroom, when she came away with not only a T-shirt in hand, but the biggest, meanest, cinnamon-crusted monster momentarily attached.

Unfortunately, Big Grandma, not at all happy to have had a child dumped upon her, was also totally against crying, and Ruby Dee was crying up a storm. Big Grandma had slapped Ruby Dee silly, saying, “Stop cryin’, or I’ll give you somethin’ to cry about.”

That attitude never had made a lot of sense to Ruby Dee. She had come to learn early, though, not to expect human beings to make sense. Humans were perhaps the only beings in the good Lord’s universe that on a regular basis did not make sense. This belief freed Ruby Dee, as a member of the human race, from the constant need to make sense or explain herself. It also led her to a great degree of tolerance for and even acceptance of her fellow man. As she saw it, if people would accept each other as they were, everyone would be a lot happier, and then, of course, healthier. It really was that simple...and that impossible.

Her eyes fell on her boots, and she automatically dusted them, using the now thoroughly damp dingy towel. Her boots were brand-new Noconas. She had bought them with the money Will Starr had sent her for traveling expenses, which was hers to keep whether or not she took the job. Will Starr had struck her as being a mite stuffy, but he wasn’t a cheap man.

By all rights, she should have spent the money he sent her on new tires, but instead she had bought five cans of Fix-a-Flat and these boots, nourishing her spirit.

Undoubtedly Will Starr would have disapproved. Will Starr was the older one by a good chunk of years, and she wondered at this, because the broth
ers
certainly
looked enough alike to have come from the same pod, so to speak. They were good looking men, as far as that went, both with solid, square faces, shiny mahogany hair and light eyes. Lonnie Starr was lighter, though, in spirit and appearance. Will Starr struck Ruby Dee as being as stormy as his steel-colored eyes.

Suddenly she remembered all the water she had been running to cover the sound of her crying. With a stab of guilt at being wasteful of a precious natural resource, she rinsed her face, shut the water off tight, then patted herself dry with the dingy towel. It was really wet now, so she spread it neatly on the towel rod.

Well.

She stared at herself in the mirror and took her fingers to her hair. She had nice wavy hair and it hardly ever needed anything done to it. Her features were on the plain side, but her complexion was that of peaches and cream, so she didn’t bother with makeup, except lipstick. She brought a tube from her pocket and carefully put it on. Heated Sunset. There, she felt stronger.

Idly she opened the medicine cabinet. It, too, was not very clean. Certainly it was a man’s cabinet, one man, she would guess, probably the eldest Starr, because there was an old-fashioned shaving-cream cup and brush on the shelf. She liked him for that, for the cup and brush conserved, but the plastic disposable shavers made her subtract a point or two. There was a bottle of Old Spice aftershave, which looked as old as the shaving-cream cup and was all sticky around the top. The shelves were caked with who knew what-all. This cabinet was not at all sanitary. Ruby Dee took the dingy hand towel again and wiped the shelves as best she could.

She looked around the room. It smelled musty. It was lime green, a popular color of the forties and fifties, and she guessed that not one thing had been done to it since then, except to install a new shower curtain, which was black. And caked with soap and hard-water deposits. Vinegar would handle that.

From what she had briefly seen, there was no sign of a woman anywhere, and the whole house was ugly. There were hardly any pictures on the walls, and all the furniture was at least thirty years old and had been bought with no taste in the first place. It was dreary and sad, and no doubt an indication of the state of the people living in it.

She could help them, she thought, if Will Starr would allow it. Or if she could get herself together enough to do it.

Moving to the window, she pulled back the curtain. Dust flew, and made her sneeze. She blew her nose again with Miss Edna’s hanky, then clutched it and gazed out the window at the rolling grassland stretching down to a line of trees, all of them leaning toward the north. Bent that way from the constant south winds. Past that thin line of trees, the land rolled into more grass, browned now by the harsh sun. No other houses, not even electric lines. Just land and sky, far as the eye could see. It was peaceful.

Putting her hand into her left pocket this time, Ruby Dee brought out a piece of paper folded into a small square. It was pressed and crumpled from where she had tucked it inside her bra for at least a week, but doing that had proved to be uncomfortable. Her sweat had made the paper stick to her skin.

Miss Edna kept Ruby Dee from going crazy just then. She could tell Miss Edna things she would never have told anyone else, and she saw no reason to stop just because Miss Edna was dead.

Chapter 3

While the gal was in the bathroom, Lonnie again took up the matter of keeping her. From the minute he had laid eyes on Ruby Dee D’Angelo, he had been taken with the idea of having her around the house. He wanted her there something fierce.

Lonnie knew actualization of his desire was slim to none, because even if Will let her stay, the old man would keep them all in an uproar, but a part of him just wouldn’t let go of the idea. And if nothing else, he figured he could at least harass Will, because as he saw it, Will and the old man were dealing him an injustice that wasn’t necessary at all.

“So are you gonna go in and get the chicken dinners from Reeves’s tonight?” he asked, following Will into the office and throwing himself down in the old leather chair. He wanted Will to think about what they would be having to do.

Will raked a hand through his hair. “I don’t know,” he said irritably as he began to dig through papers on his desk.

“If you hired Ruby Dee D’Angelo, you wouldn’t have to go get chicken dinners…or anything else.”

Will ignored him. He picked up a paper, looked at it and threw it aside, frowning.

“What is it?” Lonnie asked, getting up and reaching for the paper.

Will said, “She just won’t work out, Lonnie. There’s no sense in gettin’ everybody in a ruckus by tryin’ to make it work.”

Lonnie had a sense that Will might want to try the gal after all. Will seemed to be arguing with himself. Lonnie read the paper. It was the gal’s résumé. “This looks pretty impressive to me.”

“The references the other four gave were good, too,” Will said, a certain defensiveness in his voice.

“Well, maybe this gal’s are true,” Lonnie replied, pressing him. “And if you don’t hire her, what are we gonna do?”

“We keep lookin’, that’s what we do.”

Lonnie didn’t like the sound of the decisiveness returning to Will’s voice.

“Keep lookin’? Where and for how long? It’s a cinch we ain’t gonna find anyone within three counties, and the rest of the state is beginnin’ to look bleak. Damn, Will. It’s time you quit lettin’ the old man call the shots on this tune. You’re foolin’ yourself, thinking you can find just the right person to suit him, because there isn’t such a person on this earth.”

“What do you want me to do, Lonnie? Tell him he has no control over his own place?”

Lonnie breathed deeply. “It may be time to think about puttin’ the old man in a home.” The minute he’d said it, he knew he shouldn’t have. He had been thinking it for a long time, though.

Will drew himself up and said in a voice as hard and flat as sandstone: “I don’t guess
I will.”

Then he turned and strode to the kitchen.

Lonnie followed. He had more to say
,
though he wasn’t quite certain what it was.

Will reached for his Dr. Pepper and went to peer into the dining room, looking toward the hall. Then he turned around, a perplexed look on his face. “The water’s runnin’ full blast in the bathroom.”

Lonnie went over beside him. Sure enough, the water was running. He turned back toward the kitchen. “Maybe she’s takin’ a shower.”

“She would do that, do you think?”

Lonnie had to laugh. “I was only jokin’. She’s just doin’ whatever it is women do in the bathroom, and whatever it is, it takes them a long time.”

It was funny, when Lonnie thought about it, but he had a lot more knowledge about females than Will did. The trouble with Will was that he lived by a rigid set of rules, and those rules kept him from sampling the joys of women. Will seemed to set himself above all that. To Lonnie’s mind, Will’s only interests were the land and horses and cattle, and if a woman was to walk up to him buck naked, he probably wouldn’t see her.

“You know, big brother,” Lonnie said now, “it would do you good to have that gal around here— and in more ways than just for housekeeping and tending the old man. It would show you what you’re missin' in this world. Since you and Georgia called it quits, you’ve shut yourself away here with the old man for so long that you’ve forgotten what a woman’s touch is like. You get more like the old man every day, big brother.”

Will swung his head around. “If you know so much, Lonnie, why don’t you just get yourself off to one of your girlfriends and let them put you up for awhile in the manner you’d like to live.”

Will’s tone sliced into Lonnie. He gritted his teeth and then scooped his hat off the table, pointing it at Will.

“It’s truth I’m not the brain you are, but I’m here to tell you that I know enough to know that you’re so damn afraid somethin’ you do or say is goin’ to give the old man another stroke that you’re turnin’ yourself inside out. You don’t even know who you are anymore, and neither does anyone else, and the old man is playin’ his ailments up for all they're worth.”

It was so rare a thing for Lonnie to speak with raw passion that he startled himself, shut his mouth and breathed deeply through his nose. The next instant, he finished his speech. “And all your pussyfootin’ around him ain’t gonna make one bit of difference, because someday that old man is gonna have another stroke...or die from all the drinkin’ he does, or from the junk he eats, because he’s too stubborn to listen to anyone.”

Will’s eyes could have started a fire. He said,
“That
old man is your father.”

“Huh! He gave up bein’ a father to me a long time ago."

Lonnie’s words rang in the air as he and Will glared at each other. But he wasn’t sorry. No, sir.

But he was some frightened for having revealed so much of himself. Setting his hat on his head, he retreated into indifference. “You do what you want about the gal. I’ll do what you suggested and go somewhere I can get a friendly breakfast each morning. I’ll be out of here tomorrow.”

Without meeting Will’s eyes, he ducked out the door, resisting the urge to slam it, though he let the porch’s screen door bang behind him.

Running was what he was doing. He felt as if he couldn’t get away from the house fast enough.

He glanced at the old man’s shop as he passed. The door was closed but the windows open, and he could hear the whir of the big steel fan. The old guy wouldn’t break down and buy an air-conditioner. He was so tight with a penny that he squeaked when he walked.

Walking along the edge of the graveled drive, Lonnie headed for his pickup, parked beside the horse barn. He had to push to walk, since the edge was sandy the way the whole drive used to be when he was a kid. So many times he had come racing up it, churning up sand. He could still hear himself calling, “Wait for me, Will!”

“Well, come on, squirt, we gotta get those calves fed.”

“My legs ain’t as long as yours,” Lonnie would grumble.

“They will be someday...someday you’ll be bigger than me.”