The Three Miss Margarets (5 page)

“Good. I was hoping we’d get back to him.”

“Actually, he died in a bar fight that was such a Willie Nelson cliché it’s embarrassing to talk about it. But he left his land—two acres, including a right of way to the road—to his son, who left it to
his
son, and so on down the line.”

“The end of that line being . . . ?”

“Me.”

“And the land?”

“You’re sitting on it. Right smack in the middle of the beautiful Garrison Nature Preserve, where it sticks in their craw and screws up the bucolic landscape. Over the years, my people have sold junk on this land and turned it into an unauthorized trailer park and a used-car lot. I’m a better neighbor than the others, I just have a habit of shining bright lights into the woods and banging pots and pans to alert the deer during hunting season. The Garrison Trust has tried to buy this place time and again, they even offered fair market value for it, but no matter how broke or desperate or drunk we might be, we have never ever considered selling. Praise Jesus and Amen.”

She resisted an impulse to bow. Josh stood up. Somehow she wound up much closer to that bare chest than she intended to be. She told herself.

“Are you still mad at me for not . . . ?” He trailed off.

“Finishing what you started? I never said I was mad.”

“Yeah, you did. Sort of.” He grinned at her, but there was something sad in it. “I always know when smart, angry girls are mad. They’re a specialty of mine.” She noticed she hadn’t moved away from that chest. He hadn’t moved either.

“The thing is,” he said softly, “I like to have the woman’s undivided attention. You know?”

She was now sober and it was late. But he did have that body. And it would be good to have her bed smelling of a man again. She nodded and reached up to him at exactly the same moment that he bent down to her. And the kissing really was good when she put her mind to it. And he knew exactly where to put his hands. And what to do with them when he got them there. And this time she didn’t have anything else on her mind. And as far as she could tell, neither did he.

Somewhere close to morning, Laurel woke up. She opened her eyes just enough to see that the room was still inky dark. Josh had tossed one arm over her chest and was pulling her to him, squashing her breasts. His other arm was bent so his hand was under her shoulder, and his body was curled around her. It seemed the big New York writer liked to sleep spoon style.

Her leg was getting stiff. As gently as she could, so as not to disturb him, she turned onto her back. Without waking he shifted with her. Sleep choreography was obviously a skill of his. Suddenly, for absolutely no reason she wanted to cry. She had to get out of the bed. But then, again without waking, he sighed and did something that could only be described as nuzzling her neck, so she closed her eyes and concentrated on not letting the tears well up. And eventually she went back to sleep.

Chapter Five

T
HE ELECTRIC MIXER WAS WHIRRING
smoothly through the cake batter. Maggie added a teaspoon of vinegar, watched it blend into the red-brown mixture, and turned off the motor. It didn’t do to overmix. It had been years since she made a red velvet cake, but she’d awakened before dawn with a need to do something useful. She did that a lot now, but there had been a time when sleeping was one of her major pleasures. She could stretch her body out under cool clean sheets, and give herself over to oblivion for ten or twelve hours. Now she got scratchy as a cat after half that time, and often spent the rest of the night wandering through the house or reading books she’d already read, waiting for seven o’clock so she could phone Li’l Bit and begin her day. Peggy, on the other hand, was not to be disturbed before noon.

Maggie checked her watch and glanced at the phone. There were still hours to go before she could call the sheriff’s department. She could try Li’l Bit, who was usually up early too; it was tempting, but she could wait. They had a long day ahead of them. Long and sad. Which she wasn’t going to think about. Finish the cake, she told herself.

Fortunately she had some cream cheese in the fridge for the icing; butter frosting was out of the question for red velvet cake. She was orthodox about her baking. Perhaps because doing it the old way brought back the early days with Lottie.

I
N THE BEGINNING
it had been about idolatry, plain and simple. Lottie could run faster, climb higher, and jump farther than anyone else. She was the author of the endless sagas they played out day after day, serial dramas based on
Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Little Lord Fauntleroy,
and a gloomy little tearjerker called
Nobody’s Boy.
These were the stories Maggie’s mother read to her every afternoon as a reward for memorizing the alphabet and learning to read. Mama had trained to be a teacher before she got married, and she wasn’t about to let her smart little Maggie idle away her days just because she was too young for formal schooling. And anything Maggie learned, she passed on to Lottie, who picked it up secondhand as fast as Mama could teach it.

Soon Maggie and Lottie had devoured every book on the shelves in Maggie’s playroom. Maggie smuggled Mama’s magazines out of the house, and they spent hours under the magnolia trees, puzzling over household hints and stories about ladies who weren’t acceptable in something called polite society because they had Sinned.

They were polar opposites, she and Lottie. She was a steady child, smart but not brilliant and not given to quick emotions. Lottie was all speed and fire. She learned fast, got bored easily, and reacted viscerally.

When an early hurricane uprooted an old Douglas fir tree and knocked it across the driveway, the workmen who were clearing it up found a nest of orphaned baby squirrels in the trunk. Pink-skinned, hairless, with eyes still closed, they were too young to survive without a mother. Ralph was going to take them to the spring and drown them, but Lottie couldn’t bear it. She wept so hard, begging him to let her have them, swearing that she and Maggie could take care of them, that he finally gave in. Maggie looked on, knowing the enterprise was doomed. But she helped Lottie wrap the little creatures in towels to simulate the nest they had come from and heated milk to feed them from an eyedropper. For three terrible days they tried to force milk and sugar water down the throats of the baby squirrels. Maggie watched Lottie stroke the little bodies, fighting to keep them alive through sheer force of will. There was something almost cruel in Lottie’s determination, and it was a relief when one by one the poor little things died. As they buried the last one, Lottie whispered, “All I wanted to do was save them. Why couldn’t we?” Maggie started to say, Because they were too little, and we never should have tried. But Lottie’s eyes looked so tragic that she said, “We didn’t know enough. Next time we’ll know more, and we’ll do it right.”

The next day Lottie said, as if they had just been talking about it, “That’d be the best thing in the world, wouldn’t it? Knowing how to make something keep on living.”

And for the first time since they buried the baby squirrels, Lottie smiled the big joyful smile that lit up her face. Sometimes Maggie thought everything that happened afterward had stemmed from that moment. And moments like it.

T
HE CAKE PANS WERE GREASED AND FLOURED
. Maggie grasped the bowl of cake batter and began pouring it into the pans, dividing the batter evenly without having to measure it. These days, because of her arthritis, she used an aluminum bowl; the old ceramic ones she loved were too heavy for her to lift off the shelf. So she was stuck with this metal thing that reminded her of the sick pans in hospitals. She finished pouring, tapped the pans gently to get rid of the air, and put them in the oven.

H
ER LIFE HAD BEEN SO SIMPLE
when she was growing up. She was the only child of two doting middle-aged parents. Except for Lottie, the only other youngster around was Harrison Banning’s daughter, who was ten years younger. Lottie’s older brother and two sisters were already out of the house and working when Lottie was born. So Maggie and Lottie ran free on the farm, playing their games untroubled by outsiders. Sometimes it seemed to her that it had been unfair of God to make it all so easy back then. Those days had not prepared her for what lay ahead.

In the early years, Maggie’s mama hadn’t worried about the friendship between her daughter and her cook’s child. She assumed it would end when Maggie started school. It often happened that way: A white child would befriend a Negro playmate, particularly when they lived in an isolated area without any other families nearby. It all sorted itself out when the white child went off to school with her own kind. So Mama waited patiently for Maggie to drop Lottie and start making some real friends. When she didn’t, Mama finally felt she had to say something.

“Don’t you see how unkind you’re being, Doodlebug?” she asked gently. “Lottie doesn’t even talk like a colored girl.”

It was true. She and Lottie did sound alike, although she hadn’t realized until that moment that Lottie spoke the way she did. The idea pleased her.

But not Mama. “All you’re doing is encouraging poor Lottie to get above herself. It’s not fair to her.”

Maggie thought about giving Mama a list of all the things Lottie could do better than she did, but it would only make Mama lecture even more. So she smiled her sweetest, which could be very sweet indeed, and she and Lottie went on as they always had.

Until Mama lost all patience. “Maggie, I told you to stop this,” she said. “I won’t have people talking about my daughter and saying she’s strange.”

“It’s nobody’s business what I do.”

“Of course it is. Your family has a reputation in this town. People watch us, don’t you forget that. And for a young lady your age to have no friends but one little colored girl doesn’t look good. If you don’t stop, I’ll have a talk with Charlie Mae, and you know what she’ll do to Lottie.”

So Lottie and Maggie took their friendship underground. On a thirty-acre farm with numerous outbuildings it wasn’t hard to duck the adults. And every once in a while, to appease her mama, Maggie brought schoolmates home to play. She thought she and Lottie could go on forever with their life.

But they were growing up. Their bodies were racing toward a maturity she wanted no part of. In the course of one summer, Maggie developed a porcelain prettiness that caused Mama’s friends to cluck and say she was going to be a regular little heartbreaker. And Lottie became beautiful. Years later Maggie would still remember with an ache Lottie’s transformation from a skinny girl into a tall slender creature with high cheekbones, brown satin skin, and huge dark eyes. Maggie stayed childishly petite, but Lottie blossomed into a classic hourglass. She carried herself proudly, even when Charlie Mae punished her for being vain.

Lottie had a dream. She was going to be a doctor. The boldness of it awed Maggie. They had never heard of a Negro, male or female, being a doctor. But there was a supervisor who visited Lottie’s school, a young Negro woman sent around by the state, who took a special interest in Lottie. Miss Monross told her there were colored colleges she could go to, and schools where Negroes learned to be doctors. Miss Monross threw around names like Spelman and Bethune-Cookman—names Lottie wrote in the diary she kept under her mattress. When the time came, Miss Monross said, if Lottie worked hard at her studies and prepared herself, she, Miss Monross, would see to it that Lottie got to one of these schools. But she warned Lottie that she would have to study on her own. The education she was getting was not adequate for a future college student.

This was not a surprise to Maggie and Lottie. It hadn’t taken them long to figure out that the Negro school was inferior to the one Maggie went to. Lottie’s school was held in the church; the children sat in pews and worked on their laps. There were subjects the Negroes weren’t taught, because they didn’t have books or supplies. While Maggie was learning fractions and the capitals of Europe, the kids in Lottie’s school were struggling with basic reading and writing. By the time they were in high school, most of the Negro children had already left school to work.

So Maggie and Lottie began studying together, as they had done before when they learned to read. There was an old barn on the property that no one ever used that had become a storage place for unused junk. It was perfect for them. At night they waited until everyone was asleep; then they put on coats over their nightgowns and sneaked out. Lottie brought an oil lamp from the cabin, which they lit and put on the floor so they could see enough to read, and Maggie brought her school textbooks and spread her worksheets on a blanket on the floor. Lottie worked her way through the books, asking questions when she didn’t understand something, and Maggie would have to remember what she had learned in class and explain it. Later, she realized she got as much as Lottie did out of those nights. Knowing she would have to answer Lottie’s questions, she became a much better student than she ever would have been. Her ability to absorb information quickly would last for the rest of her life. But back in those days, it was all about Lottie. The memories of those nights in the old barn, huddled in her coat against the chill of winter, working by the light of the oil lamp, were some of her happiest.

M
AGGIE SET HER LITTLE KITCHEN TIMER
for thirty-five minutes and took the thing back into the living room to wait. Laverne, whose arthritis had been bothering her, had to scramble to follow. Maggie sat in her chair, and the dog settled next to her on the floor, muttering canine curses under her breath. “I know,” Maggie said sympathetically. “Getting old is just plain nasty.” She leaned back in the chair, her head finding the dent she’d made in the upholstery over the years.

W
HEN HAD IT STARTED TO CHANGE
for her? It was hard to remember so far back. Maybe it was when she saw Lottie walking home with three girls from her school. Maggie was in her room watching them from the window as they stopped at the end of the driveway to talk. It only took two or three minutes before they went on their way and Lottie ran up the drive to the cabin. But it was the first time Maggie realized that Lottie was making new friends. And what was worse, they were her own kind, as Mama would say. Suddenly Maggie was angry, in a scary kind of way she had never been before. Thoughts of getting even raced through her brain. She would refuse to talk to Lottie. She would not go to the barn that night; let Lottie wait and wonder what had happened. But when night came she couldn’t stay away from the barn, and once she was there she couldn’t stay mad at Lottie.

Or maybe it started when Lottie was crying over some hurt Maggie had now forgotten. But she could remember how she had wanted to put her arms around Lottie and hug her tight. But for reasons she couldn’t put into words, she didn’t.

Sometimes it seemed to her that she had always known she was different. Certainly by the time the girls in her school were giggling at boys and trotting out their early attempts at flirting, she knew she was. She understood their feelings, the giddiness, and the misty half-formed urges that drove them. But also she knew, by some deep instinct, that there would never be a boy who would inspire those feelings in her. If it had been important to her to fit in, she might have been horrified. But her life happened in the barn, after the rest of the world was asleep and she was alone with Lottie.

Loving Lottie was such a habit that it felt like the most natural thing in the world when she realized her feelings had changed to the kind that made other girls blush when they talked about boys. She watched the shadows on Lottie’s face as the oil lamp flickered, watched Lottie close her eyes to concentrate on a tricky math problem, and she was full of achy longings she could not describe. She waited for something wonderful to happen, something bigger than she had ever known before. Sometimes she drifted as she waited; sometimes she felt she would explode with all the things she was waiting for.

They had always stayed to talk after they were through studying, but Maggie found she had less and less to say. And Lottie seemed to be pulling into herself too. Now there was pain in being with Lottie; there was a distance between them that she wanted to smash through, but she was afraid. Because, for the first time in all the years she and Lottie had known each other, she wasn’t sure how Lottie felt.

A boy named James who went to Lottie’s school had walked her home twice after the Saturday-afternoon movies. Maggie had looked up at the colored section of the balcony and watched him maneuver so that he was next to Lottie when they got to the stairs. The second time he brought Lottie home he asked if he could sit with her on the porch. Lottie dismissed him. “I have better things to do with my time,” she told Maggie. “I’m not gonna end up like Momma, having a baby before I’m twenty and with no work I can do but cooking.”