How did this happen?” the woman asks me so soft I have to lean up in the chair to hear. “When did it start?” A good question. But when does anything start? How far back do you have to go? I was a big girl, now I’m a big woman. My life has been different because of it. Many avenues of opportunity are closed off to a big girl. You can’t be a majorette, for instance. You can’t be a cheerleader. You dress and undress in the shower stall at gym class. You stand in the back for group pictures. If you ever get elected to anything, it’s always treasurer. I never had a date in high school. Boys didn’t even notice my big breasts because I was big all over, like the Pillsbury Doughboy, remember him? On the packages of pizza mix and cake mix? I have opened a number of those packages in my time, I might as well admit it. Obviously I’m not a picky eater. Everybody has to be something, I reckon, and I’m a great cook. I tell you that in all honesty. I’m known far and wide for my cakes, my three-cheese lasagna, my chicken and biscuits, and especially my chocolate pecan pie — Billy’s favorite.
Used to be his favorite, I should say! During the first six years of our marriage, Billy gained forty pounds, which he complained about, but he didn’t really mean it. He needed to beef up some. He looked better than ever, in my opinion. Maybe I should have paid more attention last spring when he went out and bought that diet stuff at the Whole Earth Store in the mall and said he was going to get back in shape, but I just thought, isn’t that nice? A man has got to do something, after all, even a man that has got hurt and laid off, and they say walking is good for anybody, though it makes me short of breath, personally. I worked overtime while Billy walked. He walked all summer long.
It never occurred to me to wonder if he had a destination.
“Mrs. Sims, when did you start doing this?” the woman asks again. Her name tag says “Lois Rubin.” She’s one of those skinny, flat-chested women who wear turtleshell glasses and pull their hair straight back with a barrette and go around writing on clipboards. She’s not from around here. I bet she grew up rich. She’s rich now, big square-cut diamond ring plus a nice chip-diamond wedding band on her left hand. She’s just another do-good rich lady down here at the jailhouse occupying herself while her surgeon husband screws a nurse. Oh Lord! Now where did that come from? As a big girl, I’m used to hanging back and not just saying whatever pops into my head, the way I keep doing ever since they brought me in here. I swear, I don’t know what has got into me!
Billy always said he was going to get me a diamond but he never did. Though he had the best intentions in the world, poor thing, I still believe this. But life can snatch you up and mess with you in many different ways. Sweet, sweet Billy Sims. None of this is his fault, you can count on that.
I take full responsibility for everything.
“Mrs. Sims. Dee Ann.” Lois Rubin looks down at her clipboard. “High school graduate, good grades, student government, excellent work record in a number of positions. What happened to you?”
This is the same question asked earlier in the day by my preacher, Rev. Buford Long. Then he laid his hand on my forehead like Jesus and announced he has revved up the prayer chain for me. “Thanks but no thanks,” I said. “Get him out of here,” I told the deputy, who did it, grinning. This deputy’s name is Sam Hicks. Rev. Buford Long was just sputtering and spewing all the way out the door. “Now Dee Ann Sims, I know you are a good girl,” he said, working his neck like a chicken. “Why, you are one of my own! I know you don’t mean that.” He had on this powder blue suit. I knew his wife, Ruth, would be waiting outside in the car, just primed to get the story so she could spread it all over town. All she ever brings to church suppers is three-bean salad.
“Mrs. Sims, let’s go back to the beginning,” Lois Rubin says so soft her voice is like a voice in my own head. “How did this start?”
THE TRUTH IS THAT most times, you don’t even know something has started until you’re right in the middle of it, and even then, you don’t necessarily recognize what it is. It creeps up on you, like weight.
You wouldn’t believe it to look at me now, but I started out as a beanpole. Then they sent Sissy and me to the mission school, where my job was to work in the kitchen. By the time I started working for Mrs. Hawthorne and switched over to regular school, I was about like I am now. I always felt like there was another girl, a little bird girl, trapped inside me. She is quick and fast. She dips and soars. She is everything I’m not. I walked around with her wings beating, beating, beating inside my chest to get out.
I was not a thing like my mama who was movie-star, drop-dead gorgeous, she looked like Elizabeth Taylor. I have a picture of her in my pocket book right now, which of course they have locked away someplace. I remember being with Mama one time on the street, in Knoxville, downtown, and a man came up and put his hand on her arm. “Who are you?” he said. “Who are you?” I don’t remember what she said or what happened after that, whether she went off with him or not. I do remember holding Sissy’s hand on the street. I always took good care of Sissy when Mama went off “seeking a better association” as she said. And I was glad for Sissy when she got adopted, though she won’t hardly give me the time of day now that she has married rich and lives in Boca Raton, Florida. I haven’t heard a word from her since last Christmas when we got a basket full of fruit and a card with a picture of their house on it and “Cecelia and Lyman Petersen” in fancy printing. It’s a big house too. Pink stucco with palm trees. And I don’t care for fruit.
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since they caught me. It does seem like the more you do for somebody, the more they will turn on you in the end. Miss Manners said this once in the newspaper — if you act like a rug, somebody will walk on you. I’m coming to think this is true.
It seems like only yesterday that I used to braid Sissy’s hair the same way I braid my own Debbi’s hair now. Both of them the kind of little girls that you just naturally love to take care of. I hate to think that Billy’s sister Sue is taking care of Debbi right now. Sue will not know to lay down with her on the bed and sing Itsy Bitsy Spider and then say “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep” every night, or that Debbi has to have those little ponies lined up in a row on her pillow. Also I can’t stand to think about Debbi breathing all of Sue’s passive smoke. But Lord knows, Sue owes me — she stayed with us between husbands when she was so nervous. I had to wait on her hand and foot.
I’ve always been the dependable one, like furniture, like chairs. Like a La-Z-Boy recliner, and I guess you might say Billy was the original La-Z-Boy himself. I don’t mean to say that he was lazy, Billy, I mean to say that things have not worked out as he planned. He couldn’t help getting his leg hurt, he couldn’t help it that Tennessee Power and Light laid him off, or that drinking is genetic in his family, and I know he didn’t mean all those ugly things he said to me either. Billy is sweet, sweet. And handsome — Lord! I never could believe he really married me in the first place, with all the girls he had to choose from. He had the whole county to choose from.
Many is the time that I have woke up in the middle of the night with my heart just pounding, to think of it! And then I’d look over at him laying on his back with his hands folded on his belly like a dead man and that little nasal strip over his nose, which he has to use for his sleep apnea, and I’d hear his snuffly breathing, and I’d think, I am the only one who ever sees Billy Sims with his nasal strip on. Then I’d think, Billy Sims is still here in the bed with me! After eight years of marriage! It must be a mistake. But it is not.
Was not. It was not. I’d lay there and look at him for hours, listen to him breathing, watch him sleep.
For some reason this reminds me of one time when I was a kid and we were living in that old cabin way out in the woods and I woke up real early for no good reason and walked out on the porch, it was years ago and yet I can remember it like it was yesterday. Mama and Daddy were gone. It was early, early spring and rainy, a little white mist in the trees, sarvis and dogwood in bloom. The cabin was so old that the silvery boards on the porch felt smooth and almost soft to my feet. I walked out real quiet, and there he was. A twelve-point buck standing like a statue just beyond the treeline. He stared straight at me. I stopped dead still and stared back. I felt like he had been watching for me, waiting for me to come out that door. It was like he knew me. And then Sissy called “Dee Ann?” in her little baby voice from inside, and I turned my head for one split second, and when I looked back he was gone. Gone without a trace. Yet I knew he had been there, and for days afterward I felt warm inside, and special, because of it.
I DON’T KNOW WHY I’m telling you all this. “Just go on,” Lois Rubin says.
I WENT OFF TO work every morning after the accident feeling this same way, feeling special, leaving Billy asleep in the bed behind me. He got his nights and days all turned around after he got hurt. First he couldn’t get to sleep for the pain, he couldn’t get comfortable in spite of the pills. Then he got to where he was sleeping all day and staying up all night long, he’d watch videos, and why not? Poor thing. It killed me to watch him hobbling around the kitchen like a hundred-year old-man with all those pins sticking out of his leg. He was drinking too. It broke my heart.
I could never forget the way he looked running zigzag down the field at the homecoming game senior year, carrying the ball like it was a baby and then throwing it up so high in the end zone, it spun right up out of the light and was lost for good in the sky. That was the winning run.
I saw the whole thing from the student government concession stand where I was making hamburgers and sloppy joes, serving a man who got so excited by Billy’s run that he took off toward the field forgetting his change and his fries. Football is real big here. It always has been. And now that they’ve closed the Piney Creek mine as well as the Resolute No. 4, it’s the main thing going on. Everybody in town comes to the games — old people, teen agers, little kids, women holding tiny wrapped-up babies in their arms. We took Debbi to her first game when she was not but four months old, wearing a little purple outfit that Mrs. Francine Butler had knitted for her. People bring whistles and cow-bells, streamers to throw, and balloons to let loose at the right moment. Purple and gold. Those are the colors for the Gretna Golden Wave. But it’s the men that get into it most, all these men that either used to play football themselves or don’t have enough to do since they got laid off. Billy said they even used to come to all the practices, walking up and down the field real serious in their windbreakers, following every play. I guess it made them remember when they were young too, and strong, and ran down the field like the wind. But Billy said they just about drove the coach crazy, giving him so much advice. Then of course they’d go to all the away games too, following the bus.
Anyway, I stood there holding that man’s change, looking out at the field where Billy was jumping all around and high-fiving everybody, and he seemed to me like more than a person, like a different kind of thing entirely, like one of those gods and goddesses in Greek mythology. Billy was larger than life. I halfway expected him to leap up off the earth and take his place among the constellations too.
Well, he didn’t of course. He graduated and started driving a coal truck for Parker Mining Company right away. He had to. He had to take care of his mother, who had asthma, since his daddy’d got killed in the mine years before, when Billy was a little kid. He can’t hardly remember his daddy at all. All he can remember is that his daddy had red hair and whistled. He could whistle any song in the world. Then he’d say, “Why, just a minute there, son! What’s that I see?” and pluck a quarter right out of the air behind your ear. Nobody ever figured out how he did it. Billy doesn’t really remember him being drunk, though that’s all his mother remembered. She was sour as a persimmon by the time she died. Warned Billy off of liquor every day.
For a while, that took, and it might of took for good if Anne Patrick Poe hadn’t broke his heart. Everybody knew she would. Anne Patrick Poe was the most stuck-up girl in our school, probably the most stuck-up girl in the state. You had to call her by all three names, Anne Patrick Poe. She was Miss Gretna High, Homecoming Queen, and Miss Claytor Lake. She had college written all over her. That is until Billy got her pregnant.
I remember seeing her in the littlest red two-piece bathing suit at the class picnic out at the lake right before graduation. She stood knee deep in the water squealing while Billy splashed her, stomach as flat as a board. I sat up under a canopy with Miss Parsons, the home ec teacher, and Becky Brannon, my best friend, and watched them. Becky sighed. “Aren’t they the cutest couple?” she asked, and I said yes. Obviously they were, they’d even been voted Cutest Couple for the yearbook, though secretly I didn’t think she was good enough for Billy Sims. I thought she was too self-centered, which was true. I saw how she’d tease him, and toss that ponytail over her shoulder and flirt with other boys such as Coy Eubanks, toying with Billy’s affections. I had never spoken to her, not once. I spoke to Billy eight times that year, though he didn’t know my name. Why should he? It’s a big consolidated high school. Five of those times, he was buying hot dogs from me after games. He always got chili and mustard. The other times were in math, where I got an A and he got a D. Luckily he didn’t remember that later, when we got together.
Billy was not a student. But he was a charmer, and the teachers loved him in spite of his grades. Everybody loved him. He has this happy-go-lucky wide-open face with freckles thrown across it like stars, and a way of shuffling just a little when he walks. I saved a paper cup he threw down at the concession stand one time, and a potato chip bag. I flattened them out and put them in my scrap-book, and when Becky Brannon pointed at the page and said, “Now what’s that all about?” I wouldn’t tell her.
But it never crossed my mind that we would ever get together, me and him, not even in my wildest dreams.
Then came Thanksgiving, and Anne Patrick Poe came home from college putting on airs, and then came Christmas vacation and they ran off to South Carolina in her convertible and got married. The Poes almost died. First, Mr. Poe declared he would disown her and shouted out in public that Billy was nothing but trash. Then he calmed down and got Billy a job as a lineman at Tennessee Power and Light. Then he made the down payment for them on a new brick home in Sunnyside subdivision. Then, in April, she lost the baby. What did Mr. Poe think then? I reckon he was ready to eat nails, don’t you? But they were already married, Billy and Anne Patrick, so there was nothing he could do. She got a job at Susie’s Smart Shoppe in the mall, and Billy stayed on at the Power and Light. I’d see them around from time to time, such as at the Kiwanis pancake breakfast. “They look like they ought to be on TV, don’t they?” Becky said to me at the time, as we were getting some more pancakes. “Like Luke and Laura on General Hospital.” I had to agree. Furthermore, Becky was not that far off when she mentioned the soap opera. I’ll get to that.
But now, I am coming into the picture!
All through high school, as I believe I mentioned, I lived with old Mrs. Hawthorne. I had that little room on the third floor with a slanted ceiling. It was the first room I had ever had all to myself, so I loved it. Not that I didn’t appreciate my years at the mission school, but Mrs. Hawthorne’s house had pictures on the walls, and flowered rugs, and real silver. She said I could do whatever I wanted to in my room, so I painted it yellow myself, sunshine yellow with white woodwork, and Becky’s mother made a yellow flowered spread for my bed. “Oh, Dee Ann,” she used to say, brushing my hair, whenever I’d be over there visiting Becky, “whatever will become of you?” She said I had beautiful hair. Becky’s mother was real good to me. So was Miss Parsons, who bought me a sewing machine junior year, which sat on its own little table in my room at Mrs. Hawthorne’s house. Miss Parsons acted like she won that sewing machine in a contest, so I wouldn’t think she had gone out and bought it for me, but of course I knew better all along. She’s the one that recommended me to Home Health, which is how I started taking care of Billy’s mother. Social services paid for it.
But first, Mrs. Hawthorne died. I will never forget it. I’d been there six years. There is somebody like me in every town, that is good at staying with old people. Just as soon as Mrs. Hawthorne started failing, people started coming up to me in the Food Lion to say that if I ever needed another job, well, their mother would be needing some help, too, before long. I could see that the rest of my life was all laid out before me like the flagstone path that went straight from the street to Mrs. Hawthorne’s front door. I’d live with first one, then another. I’d take care of everybody.
Mrs. Hawthorne slipped away by degrees until finally there was nothing left in the bed but a little cornhusk doll. She quit talking. She quit eating too. I’d fix boiled custard, tapioca pudding, milk toast, all her favorites. I’d feed her myself with a spoon. Oh, I was desperate! Finally I called her family up long distance, and everybody came. But Mrs. Hawthorne wouldn’t talk to them either. She didn’t have time to talk. She didn’t have time to eat. She didn’t have time to sleep, hardly — when I’d go in there at night to check on her, there she’d be with her eyes wide open, clutching her blanket up to her chin, staring fiercely into the dark. Finally she motioned me over with her little clawlike hand. The light from the hall fell across her bed. Her lips were moving. I bent down to hear. “Dee Ann,” she said. “Oh, Dee Ann . . .” Her nails bit into my hand. “You must . . .” But I never knew what I must do, for just then a gurgling noise came up in her throat, and when I jerked back to look at her, she was dead. Dead with her eyes and her mouth wide open, teeth in the jar by the bed, cheeks sunk down in her face. I could not quit looking. Her eyes got darker and darker in death, and her mouth got bigger and bigger until I felt that she would swallow the whole world, me included. Yet I couldn’t move. I could feel myself going down, down. But just at the last minute I screamed “No,” or thought I screamed, and then I was scrambling out, phoning the doctor and the relatives, making coffee for all the folks who’d be coming over. I was just as efficient and dependable as always. Folks marveled at me.
But inside, I was different. For now I realized that I was going to die too, something that had not occurred to me before, in spite of being an orphan and all. Even as I was cutting my pound cake and getting out the folding chairs, I thought about it. I would have given anything to know what she was going to tell me. Anything! And what was I supposed to do? I kept wondering about this, it made me feel wild and crazy. I felt I had a destiny though I didn’t know what it was. When I finally got to bed that night, my heart was beating so fast I could hear it in my ears and feel it all through my body.
The very next morning, Home Health called and asked me if I would stay with Mrs. Sims, and I said yes immediately. I knew it was meant to be. But she was a bitter woman, as I said. She’d always had asthma, and now she had congestive heart failure. The house was a wreck. I was cleaning out the kitchen cupboards when Billy showed up the first time. I’d been there three days. It was May, nice and warm. I had opened all the doors and thrown up all the windows. Never mind that Mrs. Sims didn’t like this one bit — it was good for her. I was working so hard, banging pots and pans around in the cabinet under the stove, I didn’t hear Billy coming — didn’t hear his truck, or his step on the squeaky board by the kitchen door, a sound that I grew to love.
“Hey now,” he said.
I whirled around.
He stood just outside the screen door. His gold-red hair fell almost down to his shoulders under his TP&L hat. The sun was all in his hair. “I’m Billy, her son,” he said.
“I know,” I said. I had to sit back on the floor, I thought I was having a heart attack.
He stepped inside the door and squatted down beside me on the floor which I had just washed, thank goodness! “Do I know you?” he asked. Close up, his eyes were greener than ever.
“No,” I blurted out, “but I know you.” Then I got so embarrassed I liked to have died on the spot, but Billy just grinned, rocking back and forth on his cowboy boots.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “High school, am I right?” He snapped his fingers. “Hot dogs,” he said. “You used to sell the hot dogs at the games.”
I nodded. I couldn’t believe he remembered me after all that time.
Then he stood up. “Well, it’s a small world, ain’t it?” he said, stomping his feet a little bit to get the kinks out of his legs. I couldn’t of stood up if I had to. I felt weak all over.
“Now what did you say your name was?” he said, and I told him, and then he said, “Well, me and Anne Patrick, that’s my wife, are real glad that you’re over here taking care of Mama now. She’s been needing somebody full time for a while, and we just can’t do it, we both work, and my sisters live away.”
Of course I knew that Anne Patrick didn’t have to work, that it was just a little play job. But I nodded, acting sympathetic.
“How’s Mama today?” he called from the hall on his way in there to see her.
“She’s doing a lot better now since she’s on oxygen all the time,” I hollered back. “When she was trying to do for herself, she didn’t turn it on enough.”
“Well,” Billy said from the hall. Men never know what to say in the face of illness. Then I heard him say, “Hey, Mama.”
While she was taking her nap that afternoon, I couldn’t do a thing but go through every drawer and cubbyhole in that whole house, looking for pictures of Billy. And I found them at every age, school pictures and snapshots, stuck here and there. If it was my son, I’d of had them all put together in a nice album. But she wasn’t much of a mother, Ruth Sims. I got the idea that she’d spent most of her life laying up in the bed whining and acting sick until she really got sick, and of course by then she was good at it. Secretly I didn’t blame Sue and Darlene for going wild and taking off. Besides, if they’d stuck around and took care of her, I never would have got to step one foot inside the door.
And I was so glad to be in that kitchen with Billy Sims, it seemed like a miracle.
After that, Billy always stopped by about once a week, then twice a week when she started doing poorly, then three times a week when she got real bad. I got used to him coming by any time of the day and on up into the evening, sometimes he’d be as late as 10 p.m. When you work for the power company, you never know when you’ll get called out on a job. I kept beer in the refrigerator, coffee on the stove. I made sure I had something good cooked up all the time — chicken and dumplings, beans and ham, vegetable soup. Billy was always hungry, I don’t think Anne Patrick ever fixed him a thing. He’d sit right down at the kitchen table and eat, and then he’d lean back and smoke a cigarette and talk to me. Now I was not used to talking to men, so at first this made me nervous. But you can’t stay nervous long around Billy. He squints those green eyes and looks right at you as if you’ve got something to say. And so sure enough I’d find myself just blabbing on and on about everything under the sun, kind of like I’m doing right now. I told Billy Sims things I had never told anybody — all about living at the mission school, and with Miss Hawthorne, and the time I went out West on a driving trip with Becky Brannon and her family in a van, and the time I went to Disney World with the church.
“Yeah?” Billy’d say. “Yeah?” He smoked cigarette after cigarette. Then he’d start talking, telling me all about growing up here with his whiny mother and those two wild girls. “They used to climb out the bedroom window,” he said. “Shimmy down a rope. Then I’d hear them go off in a car. Sometimes I’d know who it was, sometimes not. I hated if it was anybody I knew.”
“Was it boys from school?” I asked, thinking of Billy’s friends. I knew all their names, of course.
“Naw,” he said. “Mostly older guys.”
He recounted every game he ever played in high school, every play. “I dropped back to the left,” he’d say, “and Clint threw this high pass, I never thought I’d get it — “ I remember one night in particular he was going on and on about football and eating a ham biscuit at the same time, and all of a sudden he quit talking and looked at me. “You can’t be all that interested in football, Dee Ann,” he said.
“Oh, sure I am.” I knew I was turning red. I lived for these conversations, though I knew they were nothing to him. He was just being pleasant, shooting the breeze, like he did with everybody. He never mentioned his wife, and I never asked. Though I imagined there was something wrong there, or why would a man like Billy Sims spend so much time talking to a woman like me?
This is how me and Billy got to know each other while his mama died. She was going down a lot faster than Mrs. Hawthorne had, in spite of everything I could do. The county nurse, Mrs. Francine Butler, came around every day to give her a shot, and the doctor came by about every three days. Lots of other people came too, neighbors and cousins and people from her church. But how many times do you think Anne Patrick showed up? I can count them on the fingers of one hand. Lots of makeup, so sweety-sweet it was obviously fake, oh I could see right through her! One afternoon when Billy was there she came by in this little shiny pink outfit, straight from aerobics. I saw how Billy’s eyes got all hot and liquid looking at her. He couldn’t keep his eyes off that little pink butt.
I felt like such a fool then, for thinking that my destiny was to take care of Mrs. Sims.
“She’ll not make it to Christmas,” the doctor said in November. By then Mrs. Sims didn’t recognize anybody, not even Billy. Then Francine Butler asked me if I’d consider coming to live with her mother when Billy’s mother died, and I said yes.
Billy came over a lot, sweeping cold air and electricity in the door with him. When he stamped his feet and took off his jacket and his utility belt, the whole house felt suddenly full of life. But Billy looked bad, dark circles under those pretty eyes. I knew something was wrong besides his mother dying, though Lord knows that’s enough for anybody.
One night in early December, he came in real late. I was still up myself, sitting in the kitchen in my old flannel robe sticking cloves in oranges for a church sale the next day. Billy threw himself down on a kitchen chair and lit a cigarette while I got him some coffee. Then he pulled a little bottle of bourbon out of his jacket pocket and drained it. He rattled the cup in the saucer while he drank the coffee.
“How’s Mama?” he asked, and I said she was not doing too good. He knew that. He looked at me through the smoke. His eyes were red. He had just put in a double shift at the power company. “Dee Ann, talk to me,” he said. “Tell me something.” So I did. For the first time ever, I told what happened when me and Sissy were little girls, that got us put in the home.
It was December then too. We were living out in that cabin in the woods that I told you about, real far from town. It was a cabin that Daddy had found, I think. Maybe the one that owned it was dead, or maybe nobody owned it. Daddy had an old rattle-trap truck then, he’d drive us out to the road so we could catch the bus to school if he was home, and if he was sober, but often we’d stay out there for days by ourselves while him and Mama was off drinking. And then one day he disappeared, just like that. Sissy was too little to understand. “Where’s Daddy?” she’d ask. “Where’s Daddy?” she kept asking.
“Gone with the wind,” said Mama. “Ha ha.”
So then I’d have to stay out there with Sissy whenever Mama got a way into town to seek a better association, and sometimes she’d bring a man back with her and sometimes not. Sometimes he’d be nice to us and sometimes not.
But the time I’m talking about was in December, and Sissy was sick. She’d been sick for days, and Mama was gone. I was nine or ten years old. I had to break the ice every morning to get the water from the creek. I could see my breath like a cloud in the air as I went through the snow to get it. We wrapped trash bags around our feet for boots, but Sissy could not get up or go anywhere. And then we ran out of firewood, and I had to gather all the branches I could find fallen down in the woods, and break them up to burn. First we had some potatoes, which I boiled, and some cornmeal, which I mixed up with water and made some little cakes. We had three Coca-Colas which we drank a little bit at a time, to make them last. I had put Sissy right up by the cookstove, by the fire, but she could not quit coughing. And we were hungry, hungry. When you’re that hungry, your stomach even stops hurting and you go away in your head someplace, it’s hard to describe.
I remember waking up sometime near dawn with Sissy coughing, and going out in the night for water, across the moonlit snow. Oh, it was beautiful! The black trees, the bright snow, the pointed moon sailing like a ship among the clouds. I dipped my pan into the freezing creek and brought it up to drink before I dipped it back down for Sissy. But that cold water sent a jolt straight to my brain. We’re going to die here, Sissy and me, I thought. We’re dying now. And then it was like I was flying through the air, up above the cabin, up above the dark trees, into the clear bright beautiful sky and I could look back down and barely see our roof in the little clearing while the woods went on and on forever on every side. A tiny line of smoke came up from the chimney far below. I took another sip of water and then I was running as fast as I could with the trash bags taped over my shoes, back to the cabin where I grabbed Sissy and wrapped her in everything I could find, all the blankets and quilts we had, and pulled her out the door and across the snow to the treeline, and filled up two more garbage bags with all the clothes and things that was ours and Mama’s, and pulled that out to where Sissy lay in a heap on the snow. I left Mama’s hats on the bed. She had two, a blue felt hat with a peacock feather on it, and a big straw hat with a bunch of cherries. Daddy had left a pile of news papers on the porch. I ripped these up and threw them everywhere. I pulled the furniture kind of together, what there was of it — the table and chairs, an old chester drawers, a rocker, a crib — and then I rolled up a piece of newspaper and lit it at the open door of the stove and went around setting all the other newspapers on fire. When it got to going good, I went out and sat with Sissy.
“Looky,” Sissy said. “Looky there.”
In no time the cabin was outlined by flames, all four walls and the roofline, like a crayon drawing on fire. After a while the porch fell down, and then the roof caved in, sending a huge column of flames and smoke straight up in the sky like a Roman candle. Good, I thought.
The fire had died down some but was still smoking plenty when the people came, I heard their trucks on the road below and their shouts as they came up the holler, though I was too weak by then to answer.
“Good God!” Billy Sims said when I told him this story.
He got up and came over to where I sat in my old bathrobe and hugged me, hard, and then he left.
His mother died the next day. Sue and Darlene came home for the funeral, and then they left, and a week later, Anne Patrick Poe left Billy for Coy Eubanks, from high school. He was a lawyer now, recently divorced. He lived in Memphis. He had come back into her life, she said, when he was in town settling up some family business. Now they were engaged. “Engaged!” Billy said. “But you’re already married to me!” “Oh, that was just a boy and girl thing,” Anne Patrick said. She said she thought he knew that all along. She said she was moving to Memphis immediately.
Billy woke me up to tell me all this the night it happened, he appeared at my bedside drunk as a lord. “She said she didn’t want to leave me until my mama died,” Billy said. “Now what kind of shit is that?” Then he staggered and started unbuttoning his shirt, and I realized that his intentions were to get into bed with me. For a moment I was terrified, but then a vision of Mrs. Hawthorne’s open mouth came to me out of the blue, and I knew that if I didn’t let him, I’d regret it for the rest of my life, no matter how scared I was, and I was plenty scared. But I moved over to make room for him anyway. He climbed into bed with me and cried like a baby for two hours, then shucked off his pants and made my dreams come true.
When I woke up, Billy Sims was gone. Well, I thought as the day passed, that’s that. He was drunk, it didn’t mean a thing. Probably he won’t even remember it. But I couldn’t help humming as I walked around packing up and cleaning so the house could be sold. I was moving from there directly out to Mrs. Francine Butler’s mother’s house in the country, to take care of her. I knew I’d treasure every minute I had spent with Billy Sims and play our conversations over and over in my head, like a tape. But I was kind of looking forward to being out in the country with Mrs. Green. They had a big farm pond out there, and cows, and it was real pretty.
I was all packed up and waiting for Francine Butler to pick me up when Billy’s flashy red truck came roaring into the driveway. He opened the door and scoped out the situation. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he asked, and I told him.
“No, you’re not,” he said. “Come over here. We’re getting married.”
For a minute, I didn’t go. I had a flash that my memories of Billy might make me happier than Billy himself. But then I saw Mrs. Hawthorne’s wide black mouth again, and gave a little scream, and ran straight to him. And we got married as soon as we could, to everyone’s total astonishment, I might add, especially those sisters! It was a good marriage too, a happy marriage. I believe that. For Billy and me, we’re two of a kind, and he never should have been married to Anne Patrick Poe in the first place. She was not his type. I’m his type! We like the same things — cooking and eating, why Billy even built his own pig cooker, for barbecues — and talking. Lord, that man can talk. And dancing, which he taught me to do. Line dancing, two-step, you name it. I’m a natural, though you might not think it to look at me.
But Billy had developed some mighty expensive tastes living with Anne Patrick, as I soon learned. Nothing they owned was paid for, and Billy had signed for all of it himself. So we were stuck, while Anne Patrick waltzed off to Memphis scot-free. Billy’s share of his mama’s little house just about got him out of debt, when it finally sold. I didn’t have a thing in the world, of course, but I soon got a nice job with some lawyers downtown, a good thing since Billy didn’t know beans about money, to my surprise. Why he didn’t even write his checks down in the checkbook! He bought such items as a bass boat, a real expensive entertainment center for the family room, some $475 Tony Llama boots, and all this health equipment, weights and such, after he got hurt.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We loved each other, that was the main thing. And I didn’t care about his spending habits. I wanted him to have those boots! Whatever makes Billy happy was my motto, and I never, ever, said no to anything he wanted, or anything he wanted to do. We went all over the place to Nascar races, for instance. This hobby is not cheap! “Life is short, Dee Ann,” Billy used to say. Naturally his attitude alarmed me. But I had never had any fun before in my whole life, and when I got pregnant with Debbi, my happiness was complete.
I will never forget the night I told him, December 8, seven years ago. He was working late, they were wiring the Sugar Fork tipple. I’d already done the test the day before, and it was positive. Then I came home from work and did it again. Positive. So I got in the car and drove out the House Mountain road and on up the mountain, getting there just at dusk. I love a winter sunset, always have. The tipple looked like a giant Tinkertoy outlined against the fiery sky. The clouds were silver. And there was Billy, high up, working. I knew him by the cock of his hip and the way he held his head. He was black against that sky, which faded to orange while I watched. I saw him lean back against the strap and signal to somebody. Then suddenly bright white utility lights went on all over the tipple and everybody cheered. Billy started waving his arms like a kid. I stood on the ground in the dark with his baby in my belly and cried like a baby myself. It was so beautiful.
“AW, SHOOT,” Sam Hicks says. “Now, now,” says Lois Rubin. “Here honey, here’s a Kleenex.”
BILLY WAS RIGHT beside me in the hospital when Debbi was born, and helped me breathe. But then later he started saying that a baby “cramped his style,” for of course we couldn’t just pick up and go out like we always had. “You go on,” I’d tell him. “Go.” And so he did, and I was glad he did. You can’t expect a man like Billy Sims to stay at home. I was still counting my lucky stars to be with him at all and to be blessed with this perfectly lovely little baby girl too. I loved staying at home with her and would have stayed a lot longer except that the bills were mounting up, and Billy kept pushing me to go back to work. I had to put Debbi into day care at two months, which broke my heart.
She was three when he had the accident.
Billy fell two stories down from that new hospital wing they were wiring. Landed on concrete, broke his jaw, his collarbone, his left arm, his wrist, his leg. If he hadn’t of been wearing his hard hat, he’d be dead. I can’t stand to think of it, to this day. Pretty Billy Sims laying crumpled up in the parking lot exactly like a bird that’s flown into a picture window. Of course the hospital was right there, so they rushed him into surgery immediately. I was half out of my mind by the time I made it, I ran all the way across the parking lot dragging Debbi. The doctor met me outside that awful steel door wearing green pajamas, stripping off his gloves.
The good news was that Billy would live. He would have to have pins in his leg, and more surgery followed by physical therapy, but he would be okay.
The bad news was, we didn’t have any insurance.
“Tell me that again,” I said.
When Debbi was born in that very same hospital, our insurance paid for everything. But Billy had let it go, I learned, so they wouldn’t take so much out of his paycheck. Whatever he’d been doing with that extra $280 every month, I didn’t know. He probably didn’t know either. Money just slipped through his hands like water. Ten here, twenty there. Billy was a high liver, as I said. He cried like a baby when I told him I knew. I couldn’t stand this, what with him in pain and all wrapped up in those bandages.
“Just forget it,” I told him. “What’s done is done, water over the dam.”
I put him on the family room couch with everything he needed (TV remote, phone, cooler) close to hand. For once, I was glad he’d bought that fancy entertainment center!
Then I went back to work.
I ran the office for three lawyers: David Martin (tall, thin, sad); Ralph Joiner, a red-headed ball of fire who was in the state house of representatives; and Mr. Longstreet Perkins, old and dignified, a former judge famous for his opinions. I typed all their letters, made up loan packages, deeds, and so on. Typed papers of every sort. I did all the filing, all the accounting. I handled the reconciliation of trust accounts, the payroll, and collected rent for absentee landlords who paid us to perform this service. I made my lawyers’ bank deposits, wrote their checks, and paid their taxes. They depended on me totally. “Dee Ann, I don’t know how we’d manage without you.” David Martin and Ralph Joiner were always telling me that. “Mrs. Sims, you’re a wonder,” said old Mr. Longstreet Perkins. Meanwhile our own house was a mess with Billy living downstairs in the family room, clothes and plates and magazines and what-have-you strewed all over the place. Men are naturally messy anyway, and Billy was the worst, even before the accident. It broke my heart to walk through the family room.
I have to say, it was nice going over to my own little office, which is eggshell blue, where I had put my desk catty-corner so I could see out the window into the street. I kept African violets blooming on my desk, and Tootsie-Roll pops in a jar for anybody that wanted one. You’d be surprised how many takers I had. I kept some M&M’s in my top drawer, too, for stress.
Which I had plenty of! Because of course I was the one who paid all the bills at home, and now I just couldn’t do it. Even with his disability check, I couldn’t make ends meet. I couldn’t stand to bother Billy with it either — he was in so much pain, and so blue. I started paying just some of the power bill, some of the water bill, some of the phone bill, some of the hospital bill, and so on. I’d stay up late figuring all this out while Billy watched TV.
“Aw, don’t look so worried, honey,” he said to me one night when the cable bill as well as the rent and his truck payment had come due. “It’ll work out. Come over here and give your old man some sugar.” He was drunk.
But instead of giving him that sugar, I surprised myself by saying, “I fail to see why you have to have such an expensive truck anyway, can you explain this to me?” I heard my voice going up and up like Billy hates. “There wasn’t anything wrong with your old truck that I could see.” He had bought himself a new one only three months before.
“Goddamnit, Dee Ann.” Billy swept everything on the coffee table off onto the floor making the awfullest mess, and then he busted out crying, which was more than I could stand. He looked like the little boy in all his old school pictures. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just so goddamn sorry about the whole goddamn thing.”
“I’m sorry too,” I said.
The next day I went to work, watered my violets, then took two of Martin, Joiner, and Perkins’s trust account deposits next door to the bank where I deposited them straight into my own checking account. It was easy. I’ve known the teller at First Union, Minnie Leola Meadows, for years. She goes to our church. “How’s Billy getting along?” she asked as she handed me the deposit slip, and I said, “Better.”
That night I finished paying the bills.
As the months passed, I got good at this. Sometimes I’d take the rent checks from the property we managed. Sometimes I’d write a check to “cash” for something I’d make up, such as “supplies” or a phony repairman. I had everybody’s air-conditioning worked on, for instance. Sometimes I’d dip it out of the tax money. Most often, though, I simply wrote myself a check off the books, which was easiest of all — and why not? Nobody ever checked the books except me, and I kept them as neat as ever. Plus I never took much, mind you, only what we needed to cover those bills. I was not really stealing either. I fully intended to pay it all back just as soon as Billy started working again.
Finally, they took his leg out of the big cast, pulled out the pins, and put it into a lighter cast which closed with Velcro, so at least he could take a shower. Oh, it just killed me to see how little and shriveled up that poor leg had gotten! I massaged it for him every night. But Billy was pepping up some. He started going to physical therapy every day, and then he got on that health kick. He quit drinking so much. He took a long walk every evening, like the doctor said. Sometimes he’d walk for an hour or more.
“I CAN SEE RIGHT where this is going,” Sam Hicks speaks up, grinning. Sam Hicks has a big gray mustache that hangs down on both sides of his mouth.
“Hush, Sam,” Lois Rubin says, writing on her clipboard.
BUT I COULDN’T SEE IT! I still thought Billy Sims hung the moon, and when he finally went back to work, I thought, okay, now we’ll be all right. We’ll be fine again. I was proud of myself for taking care of our financial problems without having to bother him about it. And the power company turned out to be real nice, giving Billy a sales job at their regional office in Boyd since he can’t climb anymore. But it was not the same. Billy was never home now, what with commuting to work and the physical therapy and the health club and all. And it seemed like we still kept getting further and further behind financially, no matter how hard I’d scrimp and save or how many times I’d add up the numbers.
“HE WAS HOLDING OUT on you, wasn’t he? Holding out! Son of a gun!” says Sam Hicks. “Hee, hee, hee.”
“Why you poor thing,” says Lois Rubin.
THIS IS HOW I found out.
My friend Becky Brannon, that I have mentioned before, had just moved into a new town home in the Village Green development, and so one afternoon I decided to ride over there and visit. It was a Sunday afternoon in June. Billy had gone to the lake fishing with Red and Tiny. So here we went, Debbi and me, with a varie-gated geranium from Food Lion as a house gift. They’ve tried to make Village Green look like a real village, with flower beds and picket fences and porches on most of the houses. All the streets have flower names — Becky lives on Primrose Circle. I could tell it was just her cup of tea, she’s always had ruffled curtains and ducks everyplace. She was already planning to stencil her kitchen.
We found her unpacking boxes. She jumped up to hug me. “Don’t you just love it?” she said, and I have to say, I did. Owning a home has always been my own personal dream, but I was real happy for Becky who has always worked so hard and deserves it. All her furniture, which had been too old-timey for her other apartment, fit right in. I was in the process of admiring everything, having fixed Deborah Lynn a Pepsi, when I chanced to look out the kitchen window and received the shock of my life.
For there was Billy Sims, bare chested, wearing cutoff blue jeans, leaning down to turn on a water faucet at the house next door. Then he proceeded to unroll an obviously new, long green hose from one of those spool things, and pull it around the corner of the house out of my view. I walked into the living room where Becky sat on the couch unpacking another box, surrounded by knickknacks and crumpled newspapers.
“Becky,” I said, “would you do me the favor of stepping up to your window and looking over there next door and telling me what you see?”
Becky looked at me like I was crazy, and then she got up and did it. She stared back at me speechless.
For there stood Billy Sims, big as life, watering her next-door neighbor’s grass, while a red-headed girl in a halter top weeded a flower bed around a birdbath. She had long white legs like pipe cleaners.
I knew who she was.
“That is Miss Lonergan, the physical therapist,” I said.
Just at that moment Debbi came into the room and said, “Mama, can we — “ and then, “What’s the matter?”
“Not a thing, sweetie,” Becky said. “Why don’t you go in my bedroom and watch TV until your mama gets ready to go?” She took Debbi by the hand. Becky came back with a box of Pepperidge Farm cookies, which she opened without a word. We ate them while waiting for Billy to quit watering Miss Lonergan’s yard and go in her house so I could leave, which I finally did. Becky’s a big girl too. But the thing about it that just killed me, and kills me to this day, is that Billy never once watered our own yard at home — Billy never showed a sign of yard work!
Now, do you remember what I told you Miss Manners said?
I took Debbi by Wendy’s on the way home and then watched The Little Mermaid tape with her and then put her to bed and went to bed myself. Of course I couldn’t sleep! My mind was in a whirl, thinking of what to do. Finally I decided to lay all the cards out on the table, confront him the minute he got home. But then I heard him dragging that leg up the stairs. And then I heard him in the bathroom splashing water on his pretty face. And then here he came, easing himself into the bed (our bedroom suite is not paid for either). He flung one arm across my stomach, the way he always does, and in about one minute flat, he started that little snuffly breathing.
Then I knew I would not say a word. I wanted to keep him with me as long as I could, you see. I never in the world thought I’d ever have Billy Sims in the first place, and I couldn’t stand to lose him. So I wasn’t going to speed it up, nor do anything different. I couldn’t. I didn’t close my eyes that whole night long. Finally I just punched in the alarm thing before it went off, and waited for dawn to come. I made Billy a pan of biscuits to eat when he got up.
“YOU DIDN’T.” LOIS RUBIN quits writing at this point. “Weren’t you angry?”
ANGER HAD NOT YET occurred to me.
That morning I went on to work as usual, and five more weeks passed by. I was holding my breath the entire time. Billy took me and Debbi out to the lake twice, and we also went overnight to a Garth Brooks concert in Lexington. I even got Billy to go to the church homecoming with me. I took two pans of my three-cheese lasagna, by popular request.
Then — now this is yesterday, of course, Monday morning — I had no sooner got to work and watered my African violets and sat down at my desk than here came two of my lawyers, Mr. Martin and Mr. Perkins, into my little office. They knew. It was written all over their faces. “Dee Ann,” Mr. Martin said, “this is terribly hard for us.” He looked like his heart would break. “You have been a valued employee, as you know. The best we’ve ever had. But on last Friday afternoon, after you left, I had occasion to check the George Pendleton trust account, and I was most dismayed to find that no deposit had been recorded this month.”
“It hadn’t?” I’d kept the check, of course. But I couldn’t believe that I had failed to write it in the book. It was my own dumb mistake. If I’d done it right, Mr. Martin never would have known the difference. He’s an egghead intellectual, not a practical bone in his body. But this time he fooled me.
“So I decided to check on some of the other trusts,” he said. “I took the books home with me this weekend, Dee Ann, and finally ended up calling Longstreet” — he pointed his long bony finger at Mr. Longstreet, who looked like he would rather be anywhere in the world but here — “and as nearly as we can figure, you’re into us for about six thousand dollars. Would you say that’s fairly accurate?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Actually it is $13,825.
“We realize you have had some difficult circumstances in your personal life, Dee Ann, so perhaps we can work something out here, among us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Embezzlement is a felony offense,” Mr. Martin said kindly. “But perhaps it need not come to that. What would you say if we worked out some sort of a repayment schedule . . .”
“No,” I said. “I could never make it. I can’t make it now. Go on and do whatever you have to,” I said. “I’m through with the whole thing.”
Mr. Longstreet Perkins raised one bushy gray eyebrow. “In that case,” he said, “I’m afraid we’ll need to walk down the street to the police station. I’m so sorry, Dee Ann. Do you want to call Billy first?”
“Hell, no,” I said, surprising myself. “He doesn’t deserve me.”
LOIS RUBIN FLINGS DOWN her clipboard. “Damn straight!” she says.
“Listen,” Sam Hicks says, “there is some men, myself included, that prefers a large woman.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” says Lois Rubin.
THE OLD LAWYERS STOOD there looking at each other. “Well, then,” Mr. Martin said. I stood up behind my desk and looked them both in the eye, first one, then the other. I’m as tall as they are. I knew they hated this. They hated that I had done it, they hated having to turn me in. And in Mr. Longstreet Perkins’s eyes, there was something beyond that even. He understood that anybody could have done what I did in the name of love, anybody at all, that he could even have done it himself. “Ah, Dee Ann,” he said.
“Listen,” I said. “It’s all right.”
And it was. It is. As we walked down the street, my heart got lighter and lighter with each step. I was glad to be caught! Mr. Martin and Mr. Perkins spoke to everybody we passed. A summer storm was blowing up by then, as you may recall. Wind whipped down the sidewalk, clouds tore across the sky. Mr. Longstreet Perkins had to hold on to his famous straw hat. It started thundering. Suddenly I felt the way I used to feel when Sissy and me were kids. We’d run up on the top of the mountain to whirl around and around whenever a storm came up. You can smell the lightning in the air, which is real exciting, it doesn’t smell like anything else in the world. So that’s how I felt, walking down the sidewalk to this jail. Drops of rain as big as silver dollars splattered on the sidewalk. We were getting real wet. My hair lay plastered in strings all down my face. Lightning flashed. It kept on thundering. But my heart rose like a bird with each step we took until I was flying, flying up through the electric air and out among the clouds.