TWENTY-TWO

MARGARET PHELPS HAD met her late husband during the year of her eighth grade when a cotton broker named Jonathan Phelps moved to Jericho from Greensboro, North Carolina, bringing with him a wife named Louise and a lanky, freckle-faced, forever-grinning ninth-grader named Elton. It took exactly one second of looking into Elton’s eyes during their introduction for Margaret Grace Lowell to know she had met her future husband.

It was the nature of Margaret to believe that life was not complicated if you did not make it complicated. She took the good, nurtured it, and refused to let the bad linger. The only exception—and it was still painful—was the death of her husband. Because it was sudden and unexpected, she had never fully accepted it, and there were moments when the thought of him caused her to feel faint, and she would have to sit and take short, gulping swallows of air to keep the thought from suffocating her.

Now, there was another sadness, one that had caused her to weep into her pillow late at night and to make her claw at the bedcovering, pulling it to her chest, as though holding on to something that was being ripped from her.

The something was Little Ben.

After supper, sitting with his mother on the porch, Ben had announced he would accompany Lottie and Little Ben to Augusta in two days.

“Mr. Ledford and I talked about it,” Ben had said, “and it’s time. Mr. Ledford thought it would be the right thing to do if I went with them.”

“Sally won’t like that,” his mother had warned.

“Mr. Ledford explained it to her,” Ben had replied. “And then she talked to me when she came over after work. I think she’s all right with it. She might even be a little relieved. No matter how much she says she likes Lottie, I can see a little bit of jealousy in her once in a while.”

His mother had sighed with grief. “Ben, I don’t know if I can stand having that little boy going away.”

“It’s going to happen sometime, Mama.”

“I know, son, but he’s so happy here.”

Ben had smiled and reached to pat his mother’s arm. “I think he is, too. About as happy as somebody else I know.”

She had begun to cry, and could not stop crying.

It was early, before sunrise, and Margaret moved as quietly as possible in the kitchen, building the stove fire, preparing for breakfast. She would cook pancakes for Little Ben, she thought. Pancakes were his favorite. Pancakes drenched in maple syrup. And she would cook the sausage that he liked. And after breakfast, when the stores of Jericho opened, she would take him to buy some toys and books that she would send with him to Augusta, and she would stop by Tolliver Barkley’s home and pay Tolliver to set up his camera and take a photograph of Little Ben for her to keep.

She sat at the kitchen table, taking the one cup of coffee she allotted herself each morning, though today, she thought, she would cheat on her habit. She needed the coffee after a sleepless night. The burning wood in the stove had a sweet smoke odor, and somehow it reminded her of the pipe that her husband had enjoyed after his evening meal. Even now, years after his death, she would take the pipe from a drawer and sniff it, and the still-sweet scent of tobacco would bring her to tears.

She wondered if she would cook pancakes simply to remember Little Ben, and if she would weep.

It was inevitable that Lottie and Little Ben would leave. She had known so from the beginning, and yet she had wanted to believe the leaving would not be so soon. Their presence had filled the house with energy, and she had reveled in her role as hostess and caretaker, as mother-figure and grandmother-figure. It had been like living in the highly charged gaiety of a festival that did not rest or stop, and as she sat, drinking from her coffee, she believed she could hear the rollicking laughter of it caught in the kitchen curtains like sunlight.

She closed her eyes and lowered her head at the table and thought of Ben.

It had not been easy for Ben, having Lottie and Little Ben in the house, knowing, as he must, that Lottie had feeling for him, though it did not seem a feeling of want as much as gratitude. It would have to be that. Lottie was a widow, her husband recently buried. Women—even young women such as Lottie—did not turn immediately to other men. There was a time of mourning. Yet, Lottie did not speak of her marriage, which meant that her husband could have been a difficult man whose death was a blessing. Not like Elton. Men such as Elton were mourned for a lifetime, and when her friends gently suggested that at her age—not yet fifty—she should think again of marriage, for companionship if for no other reason, she hushed them with a look.

Lottie was young. Ben’s age, perhaps younger. She would marry again. There would be many willing and eager men vying for her attention and for the privilege of sharing her bed. If not for Sally, Ben likely would have been one of them, Margaret suspected. Still, Sally was the right woman for Ben. No one, including Lottie, would care for him as completely, or as passionately, as Sally.

And in time, there would be another Little Ben, she reasoned.

But not the Little Ben who had nuzzled so quickly, so completely, into her soul.

She heard a movement near her and looked up. Lottie was standing at the kitchen door, dressed in her silk nightdress and a green cotton robe.

“Oh, goodness,” Margaret said in relief. She stood. “I didn’t hear you.”

“I could smell the coffee,” Lottie told her quietly. “I guessed you were up.”

Margaret moved away from the table to the stove. “Well, come on in and I’ll get you a cup.”

Lottie crossed to the table and sat and watched Margaret pour the coffee.

“I just couldn’t sleep,” Margaret said, trying to sound cheerful. “Sometimes I go for days like that. Can’t sleep a wink, so I get up and make myself busy, thinking I’ll get sleepy, but I never do, and then I have to take an afternoon nap to make up for it.” She carried the coffee to the table. “But maybe it’s the coffee. Keeps me awake.”

“Does the same to me,” Lottie said. She put two teaspoons of sugar in the coffee and stirred it. She, too, had slept fitfully, remembering the attack of Coleman Maxey, knowing Coleman Maxey had recognized her from the carnival and knowing Arthur Ledford also harbored that secret. Arthur Ledford had rescued her from submitting to Coleman Maxey. And she would have submitted. Submission had always been safer than resisting, and she would have done it to stop the stories Coleman Maxey would tell. In the wondering of her sleepless night, she had thought warmly of Arthur. She could not remember anyone risking so much for her—not even Foster, or Ben. Her feeling for Arthur was surprisingly tender and good. Not a child’s feeling for a father, as she wanted to believe, but a woman’s feeling for a man.

“I like that robe on you,” Margaret said. “It’s a good color for you.”

Lottie looked at the robe, touched its lapel, then she looked up at Margaret. “We’ll be leaving tomorrow,” she said simply.

“Yes, I know,” Margaret replied after a moment. “Ben told me last night.” She sat across from Lottie. “It makes me sad, thinking about it.”

“I am, too,” Lottie admitted. “You’ve been better to us than anybody ever could be, but we stayed long enough. It’s time we went on home.”

Margaret rubbed her eyes with her fingers. She tried to laugh, could not. “I swear it’s going to be so quiet around here without that baby. I’ll probably go crazy.”

“He’ll miss you, too.”

“You’ve got your own life and I know it’s wrong of me to say it, but I do so wish you lived here,” Margaret blurted.

“Thank you,” Lottie whispered.

“I just don’t want you to forget us,” Margaret said desperately. “And I want you to come back to visit. Stay as long as you want to. You’ll always have a place here you can call home.”

Lottie smiled and let her eyes slowly scan the kitchen. “You’ve got the prettiest home I ever saw.”

“It’s just a place, Lottie,” Margaret said. “It becomes a home when there’s people like you and Little Ben in it.”

Lottie tasted from the coffee with her spoon. “It’s good,” she said. “I like the way you make coffee. My mama never could do it. She always made it so weak it was like colored water. Foster—my husband—taught me how to make it stronger.”

It was the first time Margaret had heard Lottie speak of Foster. “He must have been a good man,” she suggested tentatively.

Lottie gazed at the coffee. Her eyes smiled. “Yes, ma’am, he was,” she said. “He was older than me, and he didn’t have much, but he took good enough care of us.”

“Did you always live in Kentucky?” Margaret asked.

Lottie shook her head in a slight movement. “We used to move about, but when Little Ben come along, we went to Kentucky.” The smile in her eyes moved to her lips. “I liked it there good enough, even when it got so cold in the wintertime. I told Foster that when he died, we’d stay there, me and Little Ben, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said I hadn’t been home since he’d met me, and he always promised that he’d get me back there. He always said the only place a person ought to go to when he wants to start over, or to die, was at the home he’d been born to.” She paused, kept her gaze on the coffee cup. Then she added, “I didn’t know it, but that’s what he was doing when we went to Kentucky.”

Margaret looked away from Lottie. She could sense the salt burning of tears covering her eyes. Across the table from her was a woman who was the age of her son, yet older and, in her way, wiser than anyone Margaret knew. In her life, Margaret Phelps had never traveled more than a hundred miles from Jericho, and the domain of her existence had been the house they were sitting in. Lottie seemed to have seen the world, like some high, warm wind swirling over oceans and continents, dipping down on a whim to rub against places and people, leaving the places and people jittery with her presence.

“I think I’ll check on Little Ben,” Margaret said, standing. “I’m going to do pancakes for him and then we’re going to dress up and go into town and I’m going to spend my last day with him spoiling him, and if you or Ben or anybody else tells me I can’t do that, well, I may just pack him up and take him down to the train station and buy the two of us tickets to some place like California.”

For a moment the two women looked at one another, and then Lottie stood and moved to Margaret and embraced her, and both wept.

ON THE LAST day that Lottie would be employed at Ledford’s Dry Goods, Sally Ledford awoke determined to be as gracious and as ebullient as possible. She wanted to leave Lottie with the impression that she was regretful over Lottie’s leaving, yet also happy for her. And both emotions were real. She would miss Lottie, especially at the store. Even with the time required to be a public attraction, Lottie had worked feverishly at changing the displays of goods and, to Sally, the store had never looked as appealing. Still, secretly, Sally knew she would not be as tense around Ben with Lottie gone. She would have Ben to herself, and she would not have to wonder what happened in the dark rooms of the Phelps home during the deep hours of night.

On the night before, in her journal, Sally had written:

Tonight, Ben and I talked about him going with Lottie to Augusta, which is something that Daddy thinks is the right thing to do. At first, I was upset about it, but after talking to Ben, I’m all right. He wants to do the honorable thing and I know in my heart that he feels he owes Lottie for taking care of him. I will miss her. She has seemed like a sister to me, but I think it is best for her to leave and find her life away from Jericho. She will not have trouble finding a good husband. Every man I know seems taken with her, and that includes Ben and my own father. They try not to show it, but they do. Lottie’s special that way, I think. It’s not just because she’s pretty, but because she has a way about her that makes people want to look at her. I do want her to remember me as a friend, and as someone who is grateful to her for bringing my Ben home to me.

Oh, Ben said nothing about it, but I think he’s going to look for a ring for me while he’s in Augusta. I heard my father say something to my mother about it, when he didn’t know I was listening. I hope so.

I want to make tomorrow special for Lottie.

The art of forced celebration was an art Sally had learned from customers of Ledford’s, where gifts were often purchased not out of joy, but out of obligation. The difference between joy and obligation was seldom obvious, yet Sally could see it in the aura of the shoppers. It was in the shape of their smiles, in the tittering of their voices. For Lottie, Sally would strive mightily to pull an aura of joy around her, brightly coloring it with her smile and with her energy. She would not allow silence. Silence was the sound of remorse.

The first act in Sally’s plan for the day was to walk with Lottie from the Phelps home to Ledford’s, stopping for early-morning coffee and peach pie at Brady’s Cafe. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but never have, except when Ben and I stopped in yesterday,” Sally explained cheerfully. “So I told Daddy this morning that we’d be a few minutes late. You’ve got to have a piece of Mr. Brady’s peach pie. It’s the best in the world.”

To the customers of Brady’s Cafe, the appearance of Sally and Lottie was a welcomed interruption of their snickering talk about Coleman Maxey getting drunk and falling into a tree and knocking his front teeth out, the story Coleman had told when Dewey Capes sold him cotton to pack his gums. Coleman was a topic of discussion as common as predictions about the weather. Lottie Lanier was fresh as a rain shower on a spring day, as pretty as the rumors said she was, and as quiet and as polite. She seemed at ease with Sally’s happy chatter, replied pleasantly to introductions, but said nothing about leaving Jericho when Sally announced it was Lottie’s last day at Ledford’s.

“It’s a loss to the town,” Vernon Brady said kindly. He added, “But if it’s a job that’ll keep you, and Arthur’s too blind to see a good worker when he’s got one, why, you can come to work here any time you want to.”

The people who heard Vernon cheered the offer.

THE DAY PASSED quickly at Ledford’s, a day of motion and noise from Sally, a day during which Arthur Ledford busied himself with paperwork in his office, occasionally going to the window that looked out over the store and gazing at his daughter, with Lottie in tow, enlisting Lottie to help with questions about fabric and style. He had a sad, vacant expression on his face, like someone on a deathwatch, and even the coming and going of customers—heavy from the word that went out of Brady’s Cafe about Lottie’s leaving—could not bring him to the floor.

AT CLOSING, ARTHUR sent his daughter away to Ben’s home to help Margaret Phelps prepare a farewell supper for Lottie and Little Ben.

“I need to settle up with Lottie,” he said privately to Sally, “and to see if I can offer her some help with getting work in Augusta.”

“Don’t keep her late,” Sally said.

“I won’t,” her father promised.

HE HAD SPENT the day thinking of the right thing to say to Lottie, yet nothing seemed adequate or appropriate. He had resolved to be gentlemanly and professional, to keep a space between them that would say as much as he would say in words, or more. He would tell her again that his earlier behavior had been boorish and for that he apologized and hoped she would not hold it against him when she turned her thoughts to the days she had spent in Jericho, and he would thank her for understanding him in his weakness. He would assure her that Coleman Maxey would keep his tongue about her, or he would make good his threat to Coleman. He would offer again to contact merchant friends in Augusta and to provide her with a persuasive recommendation for employment. He would give her the envelope of money that he had for her—a sum considerably greater than the agreed-upon wage.

Arthur’s resolve was wasted. What he said when he saw her was “You are the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, and I will never forget you. When I’m an old man I will believe that for a few days of my life I was blessed because of you. Last night, all I could think about was what could have happened to you yesterday.” He could feel a single tear roll from his eye, down his cheek. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat and withdrew the envelope of money. “This is for you,” he whispered, holding it toward her.

Lottie did not look at the envelope. She moved to him and brushed away the tear with her fingertip, and then she slipped her arms around his waist and turned her face against his chest. She could hear the racing of his heart.

“My God, you are remarkable,” he said in a voice barely heard.

IN HER JOURNAL, Sally wrote:

Tomorrow morning Ben will go with Lottie and Little Ben to Augusta, leaving on the 7:10 train, and things will be different. Tonight, Mrs. Phelps (I already think of her as Mother Phelps) had a supper for Lottie and Little Ben, and I was happy to help her with it. My parents were invited, but my mother is still suffering from the summer heat, and so both declined. It was more than a meal. It was more like a banquet, and we ended it with having ice cream again. The ice cream was for Little Ben, who said to Lottie that he wanted to stay with his Gra-Ma. It made Mrs. Phelps misty-eyed.

My father has volunteered to drive Ben and Lottie and Little Ben to the train station, but I’m sure Mrs. Phelps will go also. With all the new outfits and other gifts that Lottie and Little Ben have, and all the people, it will probably take two trips. If all works well, Ben should be able to return tomorrow night, and if he’s not too tired, he will be at work day after tomorrow. Tonight he seemed like his old self.

It was a good night, but a little sad. Everybody talked to Lottie about coming back for the wedding, but I don’t think she will. I don’t know why, but I don’t think any of us will ever see Lottie again. I don’t think any of us will ever forget her, either.

Sally put her journal away in a desk drawer, then dressed for bed, but she was not sleepy and she slipped from her room and moved quietly past her parents’ bedroom to the kitchen. She was surprised to find her father sitting at the kitchen table in the dark.

“Daddy?” she said, worried. “What are you doing awake?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” her father answered.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Mama? Is Mama all right?”

“I’m sure she is,” her father said. “She was asleep when I went up to bed.”

Sally sat at the table beside him. “Are you bothered by something?”

Her father shook his head.

Sally did not know why the question filled her mouth. It was simply there, and she asked it: “Is it Lottie?”

Arthur did not answer for a long moment. He seemed to be staring at something across the room, hidden in the shadows of night. Then he said, “A little, I suppose. She was a good worker and a good person. I think I treated her poorly.”

“What makes you say that?” Sally said. “I don’t know anybody who would’ve given a person they didn’t know a job, but you did.”

“Against my judgment,” her father said heavily. “And that’s what bothers me. I was thinking about myself and the store, not what somebody else needed. I’m glad you pushed me to do it.”

“I liked having her there,” Sally said.

“I know,” her father whispered. He pulled himself out of the chair. “We’d better get some sleep,” he added. “We’ve got a busy morning.”

“All right,” Sally told him.

In her room, Sally took her journal from the desk drawer and added a line:

I couldn’t help the feeling that Ben was in love with Lottie. I was wrong. It wasn’t Ben. It was my father.