The Wedding Gift (8 page)

I felt real bad then and
told him it was just the same at our house, that whenever Charlie’s
name got brought up, Mama would cry and Daddy would start ranting
and raving. Telling him that was a mistake though, 'cause George
got real curious and asked me why the mention of his dead son would
make my daddy rant and rave?

Hell, I had stepped right
into that one, as the last thing I wanted to tell George, if he was
not already aware of it, was that my daddy thought his daddy was
“
a negligent asshole
". Worse, even way back after Charlie died, the Willets'
lawyer had come to our house offering money, not, Daddy said, as a
way of taking responsibility for the house being something called
“
an attractive nuisance
” but as “
hush
money
." Daddy said they only offered the
money so that he would stop telling everyone and their brother in
Dalton how my brother must have been attacked in that house to get
those scratches.

Well, my daddy did not have
any money back then, but he was real proud, so he turned that money
down; I guess he did it so he could keep telling his friends at
Downey’s what a bunch of rich lying assholes the Willets were. But
obviously I did not want to say any of this to George, so I just
lied and said that was how daddy handled his grief, by acting mad
all the time. George, he laughed real sweet and said that maybe his
mama had a secret grief he didn’t know about 'cause she was mad all
the time too. Well I knew to quit when I was ahead, so I didn’t
share my thoughts on what I thought of how and why Miz Bethany
acted like she did all the time.

C
hapter 12

Four weeks later, all the
poop in the whole world hit the fan that was my life and I was
about splattered from here to hell.

I was late, maybe only a
few days, but I had never been late before. I told Jessie, of
course, and she was real good about it. She didn’t start in on me
that minute ‘cause she said she was waiting to see how much of a
dumb ass I was. She said she was waiting to “
share her thoughts
” with me until we
established whether or not I was a pregnant dumbass or just a
regular dumbass. I was feeling real scared and humble so I actually
told her ‘
Thank you
’, if you can believe it.

Me and Jessie knew that we
could not just saunter on into the pharmacy to buy a pregnancy test
as, if we did that, we might as well just go ahead and take out an
ad in the Dalton Tri-City Weekly, for heaven’s sake. Lurlene's
mama, who was the cashier there, was the biggest damn gossip in
Dalton and that was saying something I’ll tell you.

So, Jessie, she just went
on in there and shoplifted a first response pregnancy kit and two
wet and wild lipsticks, because it was like she said … what the
hell, might as well get her money's worth.

Now anyone alive who wasn’t
a fool should understand why I was glad every day of my life that
Jessie was my best friend. We went back to her house for me to take
the test as I nearly went crazy at the thought of doing such a
thing at my house with my own sweet daddy sitting downstairs all
innocent and still thinking I was his baby girl and all. As my
increasingly horrible luck would have it, Delilah, Jessie’s mama,
was home.

Her real name was Susan,
but starting last year she started telling everyone to call her
Delilah which, if it had been my mama, would have embarrassed me to
my shoes, but if Jessie was, she never let on. So there was
Susan/Delilah sitting there on the couch with a G and T in her hand
and, just like always when she saw me and Jessie together, she had
to act like she was our best friend.

She was all
“
Hey girls, whass up? Ya’ll want a little
drink with your good buddy Delilah?
”

Under normal circumstances,
and not a twelve alarm fire emergency like this, me and Jessie
would have said ‘
Hell,
yeah
’ at the drink offer and then Jessie
would have needled her until we peed ourselves laughing. But this
was not the time.

So Jessie just said like
she was being all serious “
Well hell,
Delilah, much as we would like to just sit here in the living room
at three in the afternoon and start drinking with my mother, I am
afraid I must decline for both of us. Just today Leeann and I went
to an assembly at school and it was all about a program called
Alanon. Do you know what that is, Delilah?
”

Jessie’s mama just shook
her head, her lips tight as a drum.

“
No? Well, I’ll tell ya.
See that Alanon thingy, well shoot it's about family members of
alcoholics and how they can get as messed up as the people who are
doing the drinking do, if you can believe it? And now me and
Leeann, we have to go write us a paper about it, and I don’t know,
but it seems to me we should be sober when we do it, don’t you
think so, Leeann?
”

Oh, that’s my Jessie! Her
mama looked fit to spit nails and I was having such a hard time
holding back my laughs that I thought I might have already peed a
little, and I needed to save it all up for the test because I
didn’t want to mess it up and make Jessie go and have to steal
another one for me.

After we got upstairs to
the bathroom and I shoved down my jeans to pee and Jessie stood
guard, I asked why she always had to go after her mama like that,
but when she answered me I knew I should have just kept
quiet.

Jessie said in a real hard
voice “
Oh fuck her and the horse she rode
in on.
”

See, that was Jessie too;
she could be real hard if you crossed her, and both me and Mark
knew when it was good for us to shut up, so that's what I
did.

It was real hard to pee
with Jessie standing there glaring at me like the deadly wrath of
God, but I managed it, and then, just for fun, I chased her out of
the bathroom and into her bedroom waving my pee stick at her. She
hollered at me and threatened to punch out all my teeth, and then
we sat on the edge of her bed and waited for three minutes which,
let me tell you, can seem like three days if you are anxious, which
I purely was, I don’t have to tell you.

It didn’t even take three
whole minutes, though That old line turned my favorite color
lavender, and then Pepto Bismol pink, and there was no way to see
it any different.

Of course then, when I
needed Jessie to be mean and funny to snap me out of my shock, well
instead she got real quiet, the contrary thing, and sat there
looking at me like we had found out I had cancer and two days to
live or something. I smiled at her a little to start us
talking.

“
Well hey, Jess, I guess
you’ll be Auntie Jessie now, huh? So if it turns pink, does that
mean a girl, you think? You know, I guess if it is a girl, I’ll
call her Jessie Lavender after you and my favorite color; what d'ya
think?
”

Oh that got her started all
right.

“
Leeann, I swear to God,
that you are the stupidest bitch to ever fall off the turnip wagon.
Honest to God, you are dumber than a box of hair. How in the name
of anything could you let that fat, ugly-ass old man make you
pregnant?
”

Well I was real relieved to
see Jessie snapped back to herself like this, but I was a little
mad too, ‘cause George is not fat. To be strictly honest, I could
see a day where not too far in the future that might well be the
situation, but right now he was just stocky, and twenty seven is
not old … it's just older.

So I told Jessie as much,
but she just shrugged like she didn’t care and said
“
Whatever..Hell, Leeann, what are we gonna
do now?
”

I have to tell you that
just her saying “
we
” relieved me so much that I threw my head into her lap and
started bawling like I was my niece, Tallulah, with a skinned knee,
and, Jessie, she can be so good - she just patted my head and told
me we would figure it out, and that “
Hell,
yeah, we would figure it out right this second of the
day.
”

I always worried when
Jessie said “
Hell, yeah
”, as it usually meant doing something crazy, like letting the
llamas from the agricultural farm into someone’s house for fun. And
that time was no exception. She made me call George right then on
his cell phone and tell him to meet us both behind the Piggly
Wiggly Supermarket right quick.

The Piggly was about the
only place in Dalton where you could talk to anyone right in town
without a fear of being disturbed. See, Sandy Jacobs, who is our
friend Britney’s dad, he ran the Piggly Wiggly store in town, and
he had got into a terrible fight a year previously with Lurton
Smits, the local garbage man. And because of that heated
disagreement, now Lurton would not pick up garbage from the
dumpsters from behind the store. And Mr. Jacobs, he didn’t get
around to doing it more than once a month, so the place stunk like
the bowels of hell. And, in addition, the rats started coming
around, so while it was real disgusting back there, it was also
real private, and privacy was not something that came easy in
Dalton.

Chapter
13

George was already parked
in his Humvee behind the store when we pulled up, on account of the
Willets' Building being three doors down from the
Piggly.

It was raining outside,
which was good as it made the rats hide. I purely did not like
rats, and that always made Jessie laugh at me, ‘cause she was not
afraid of them one bit, and liked to pitch rocks at them whenever
we came back here during lunch break at school to smoke a
J.

Anyways, we both jumped out
of her truck and into George's Humvee real quick. Only Jessie
shoved me out of the way and got into the shotgun seat, forcing me
to sit in back, which made me real mad, and I told her so, and she
told me to shut up, this was her meeting and she was doing all the
talking.

Like I have said before,
Jessie is real pretty too, so instead of finding her all high
handed, I could tell George thought she was cute as a button. He
grinned at both of us and called us ladies, asking what he could do
for us, and had we called him to a meeting at this
“
real nice spot
”
so we could attack him or something? He said normally he wasn’t
into threesomes, but for us he would make an exception. Can you
believe it? Of all the times in his life for George to try to act
like some bad ass guy, he had to pick then. I thought Jessie’s eyes
were going to pop right out of her head she was so mad. Hell, I
think she might have been growling even.

So instead of breaking the
news to George, all nice and subtle, she just got right in his
face, and said in a real mean voice “
Leeann’s pregnant, you fat asshole, and I am real sad to have
to say it's yours so, now that I have told you this fine news, you
might wanta tell your mama that her dumbass little mumps story
wasn’t such a good idea after all. Now, what are you going to do
about this?
”

So help me, I swear that if
there were a manual for a wrong way to tell a man bad news, then I
guess Jessie would have written it.

George was pissed and I
mean big time. Sadly I think it was more about Jessie having the
balls to say straight to his face that his mama was wrong than it
was about me being in a delicate condition. He started ranting and
raving - he’d run out of steam for a minute and then he’d start it
up some more. He just went on and on, all about his mama knew
everything about conception and sterility and did we think he
“
was so goddamned stupid as to have sex
without protection if he did not know for a goddamned fact that he
was sterile?
”

Then George, he said this
real ugly thing about how I must have been “
chippying around
” on him and I must
have thought it would be real clever to try and pass off
“
some no account, loser’s bastard off on
him to give it the Willets' name
.”

Of course then Jessie
socked him in his ugly eye, which was no surprise to me, but it
sure was one to him, and I jumped out of the Humvee and took off
running for Jessie’s truck. And then Jessie and him both jumped out
of the Humvee and came barreling over to me. George's eye was
already swelling up and his hair was all flat from the rain, and I
decided right then and there that Jessie was right, he was a fat,
ugly ass old man, and I would get me an abortion one way or another
before the week was over, and I guess I didn’t just think it, I
said it too because, when me and Jessie peeled out (splashing him
with garbage on the way), he looked like he might have been
crying.

Me and Jess drove around
for about an hour doing some J and T, and trying to figure out how
to come up with a story for going to a women's clinic in Oklahoma
City, and then we went back to my house and that was a mistake,
too, because my daddy was home. And when we walked in, he switched
off the TV, which was something that he never did even on Easter
Sunday when mama would beg him to shut off “
that damn idiot box
” so we could eat
in peace.