Roxy pushes the buttons that roll all the windows down as she drives across the long bridge to Amelia Island. It’s dead low tide. On either side of the bridge, mud flats stretch out for miles, broken up by glistening streams of water winding through patches of tall green grass. Roxy pulls the rubber band off her ponytail and lets her hair blow back in the rush of funky, fishy air. She puts her cigarette out and breathes in deeply. No other air, anyplace else in the world, smells anything like this. March — it’s already the first of March. It’s been way, way too long. Roxy follows A1A through Yulee past the tourist places selling pecans and gator heads and Indian River oranges, noticing the fancy new sign at the right turn down to the southern point where the Ritz-Carlton is. That is not their end of the island, hers and Willie’s.
Roxy turns left toward Fernandina Beach, which still looks mostly like it did back when they bought the beach house years ago with that little windfall they got when his mother died. Miss Rowena! Lord. First Roxy thought Miss Rowena would never die. Then she thought she would never get over it. They bought the house for thirty thousand dollars cash, can you believe that? Now the land alone is probably worth five times this much. Roxy drives past the old amusement park, now closed. Not only closed but condemned, she hates this. She and Willie used to neck on the Ferris wheel, way up high. From the top, you could see all the way across the island. But now teardowns are starting, even on their own sandy street. That little yellow house on the corner where the Cardinales used to live is totally gone, as if it had never existed. A brand-new house is already framed up, under construction in its place. Roxy remembers back when Lou Cardinale built that tiki bar out back, he used to be so proud of his mai tais, but they were way too sweet. Soon, Fernandina Beach won’t even exist anymore, not this Fernandina Beach, not theirs. The kids have been calling it a time warp for years.
Roxy pulls into their driveway which is almost covered by the winter’s blowing sand, as usual. She’ll have to get out here and sweep like hell. Somehow she is always surprised to find the cottage still here. When she doesn’t see it for a while, she starts thinking maybe she just dreamed it up. She feels like that about Willie too. She forgets what he looks like whenever he’s away — she still can’t believe she ever met him, she still can’t believe he’s hers, even after all these years. Lord! Where did the years go, anyway? The little ramshackle frame house has been added on to haphazardly from time to time, a room here, a room there, like a house built by children. The deck sags. It’s still painted white, but peeling, with green woodwork and a Pepto-Bismol pink front door, the same colors it had when they bought it. Willie likes for everything to stay the same.
Roxy takes the door key out from under the rubber mat that says go away!
Their sentiments exactly.
She lets herself in, then goes around raising all the shades. She slides the glass doors open onto the deck and the beach. They’re hard to push on their gritty tracks. A red paper Japanese lantern hangs down low over the big battered oak table, always littered with whatever Willie has found on the beach. Every morning he walks for miles, then makes a different arrangement to amuse her. Often, I love you in shells — oyster shells, mussel shells, shiny coquina shells. Today there’s a funny cat face left over from last fall, with round startled shell eyes, a giant curved rusty nail for a mouth, and seaweed whiskers. The iron smile looks wry and seductive. Roxy remembers sitting at this table herself with Lilah and her little friends, making ballerinas out of pipe cleaners, using those delicate white hinged shells as the skirts. Sometimes they even glued on yarn for hair. Sometimes Willie still quotes that poem he used to say to her, the one about loving all the little things, and that’s still true. He still does. Roxy loves it when Willie says poetry out loud to her, she never heard anybody do this before she met him.
Roxy runs her hand over the pile of starfish and horseshoe crabs on the end of the table. Used to be, she didn’t give a damn about stuff like this. She would have thrown this whole mess in the trash. In a certain way, Willie has given her the natural world, as he has given her a stepdaughter, Lilah, the joy of their hearts. Pictures of Lilah are everywhere. Roxy believes in lots of pictures, though she has taken down almost all the photographs of little Alice now. Todd and Seth, her sons by her first marriage, are everywhere too: nice-looking boys, nice-looking men. She got their names from TV, to give them a good start in life, a plan that has clearly worked.
Willie likes to say that Roxy saved him, which is not true. It’s more true that he saved her, from a regular comfortable life of schedules and dinner parties and country clubs. Not that there is anything wrong with such a life. But if she had met Willie first, it would have been another story. She didn’t, though.
Willie is the love of her life. And actually, she met himtwice.
THE FIRST TIME, Roxy was married to the father of her sons, a law student named Livingston Lovett Carter the Fourth, like a king of England. “But what do people call him?” Roxy’s sister, Frances, had asked, wrinkling her nose, when Roxy took him up home. Roxy just looked at her. “They call him Livingston,” she said. This should have been a warning, but it wasn’t.
Roxy was crazy about Livingston from the first time she saw him at a wedding reception at the country club in Athens, Georgia, where she worked sometimes catering parties, one of three part-time jobs she took on during her sophomore year to supplement her scholarship. Frances kept telling her that she ought to just bag it and come back home and take classes at the community college like everybody else, and Roxy knew that made good sense, but she just loved Athens. She felt like herself in Athens, some way, which she never had back home in Rose Hill where she’d felt like an impostor in her own family all along. She knew this was crazy, but it was true. She could be Roxy in Athens but she was still Shelby Roxanne back in Rose Hill where she had been everything: a cheerleader, the vice president of the Beta Club, a star in all the plays.
She had even been crowned Miss Rose Hill in a pageant, reciting a poem she had written herself as her talent. That poem has been lost for years now. As Miss Rose Hill, Shelby Roxanne won a set of white Samsonite luggage and a steam iron, gifts which seemed to carry opposing messages: stay home and get married and iron your brains out, versus travel. She had picked travel, over everyone’s objections, accepting the scholarship in Athens. Her family was a close family, nobody had ever left the county. Roxy’s mother was one of the very few outsiders; she had come there to teach home economics in the high school, and fallen in love with Roxy’s dad, and then she never left either.
Roxy’s mother had made her and her sisters join the 4-H Club against their wishes, but then Roxy loved it, she loved to go off to 4-H conventions and contests in other towns, and to 4-H camp in Homosassee, Florida, where she got a new and better boyfriend every year. She loved the home demonstration part of 4-H, where you got to stand up in front of the judge and make a speech about whatever you were demonstrating, it was just exactly like being in a play. When she was a junior, Shelby Roxanne developed her own recipe for potato salad (her secret: the dressing was half French, half mayonnaise, so the potato salad was sort of pink). She learned all about the nutrient values of the potato and the history of the potato, including the Irish potato famine. She delivered her potato salad speech wearing a red and white checked blouse and a blue denim skirt, made by her mother and designed to look both patriotic and country at the same time (this was Shelby Roxanne’s own idea). She was the cutest girl in the contest. Her potato salad, prepared ahead of time and tasted by the judges, was good too. In fact, it was delicious. She won at the local level, then went on to the state contest in Atlanta where she lost in the finals because she didn’t wear a hairnet.
But she got her picture in the Rose Hill Record wearing her potato outfit anyway, along with a “little write-up” as her aunt Suetta always called it. Her aunt Suetta was making a scrapbook about her. Everything she did went into this scrapbook — every program from the times she sang in church, every play she ever starred in, the invitation to her high school graduation, the announcement of her scholarship to the university. The summer before she left, Shelby Roxanne and Frances and their first cousin, Darlene, got up a little trio named the Gospel Girls and sang at revivals and church homecomings all over their area, chauffeured by Aunt Suetta.
Later, in Athens, Roxy sang with a rock group named Steel Wool and slept with the bass player, named Skye Westbrooke. Skye thought the potato salad story was a riot, he was always getting her to tell it to his friends. At first Roxy enjoyed doing this, she enjoyed the big laugh she got every time, but after a while, she began to feel disloyal to somebody . . . her family? Or maybe her old self, that good, sweet Shelby Roxanne? She wasn’t exactly sure. So she quit, she refused to tell the potato story anymore, and she and the bass player had a fight, and that’s when she met Livingston at that wedding reception at the Athens country club in 1965, wearing the little black skirt and white blouse of caterers everywhere, serving tiny crab cakes on a silver tray.
Or to be exact, when Livingston met her.
Because whatever happened, Livingston took it over. This was his nature. He would make it his thing, and then he would make everything happenhis way, whatever he wanted. It never occurred to him not to do this. And it never occurred to Roxy not to go along with it, either, because whatever Livingston wanted, he wanted in the most intense and focused way imaginable. So of course she was flattered — who wouldn’t be? There is nothing as persuasive as somebody who wants you very, very much.
Livingston was cute, too, in a preppy way, before Roxy had ever heard that word. He had perfect blond hair that fell forward into his eyes just a little bit, and loafers with no socks (“Where are his socks?” Frances asked). He wore knit shirts with the collars turned up, which looked stupid in Roxy’s opinion, though she held her tongue. She would hold her tongue for years and years, about everything.
Now she is ashamed of this. But she felt guilty because she got pregnant. The modest wedding reception was held at that same Athens country club, paid for by Livingston’s mother and father who actually turned out to have a lot less money than a person might have supposed. Mostly what they had was a sense of style, like Livingston. They had expected him to marry money, and were disappointed when he didn’t. They were disappointed by the circumstances, as well. So it was Roxy’s own idea to invite only her own immediate family to the wedding, not all those tacky cousins from up in the hollers.
“Listen,” Frances whispered fiercely in the moment just before Roxy and their dad started down the aisle, “Don’t do it. Just don’t do it. This is not the love of your life.” Frances herself was holding out for Mr. Right. But Roxy did it anyway. It was also her own idea to drop out of college and start working a series of jobs to put Livingston through law school, where he was fast becoming a star: editor of the Law Review, Order of the Coif. He studied all the time. He was there, but not there. Of course she was very proud of him.
Roxy put the baby, Todd, in day care and worked as the receptionist at an insurance office, then as the manager at a swim club, and then she sold ads for the newspaper. Meanwhile her own degree hung out there in the future like a sign on an inn, lit up in the foggy night someplace on the other side of town. She always thought she’d finish it, but she never did. She was so good at jobs, so good with people. Everybody liked her. After Seth was born, Roxy stayed home and started selling Mary Kay cosmetics at night, at Mary Kay parties in people’s homes. Soon she was a Ruby, then a Double Ruby, then a Diamond, then a Double Diamond, moving right up the Mary Kay pyramid. She was about to earn a pink Cadillac. Roxy was making a small fortune selling Mary Kay when she found out that both her mother-in-law and the dean’s wife were scandalized by this career, that Mary Kay was considered somehow low class. It “would not do” for a lawyer’s wife to drive a pink Cadillac. So Roxy switched to real estate when Livingston finally graduated and got a job clerking for the federal judge in Macon. Real estate gave her more flexible hours for the little boys, anyway, and this is how she met Willie the first time, at an open house.
THIS HOUSE HAD BEEN on the market for almost two years because the owners were asking too much for it. It was an ultramodern split-level overlooking Lake Heron, north of town. Everything in it was chrome, beige, or black. Cold. Roxy could see why the people who lived here had split up, she couldn’t have lived in a house like this for five minutes herself. But you couldn’t have guessed this if you had come to the open house that Sunday afternoon, and Roxy had showed you around. The real problem, she soon figured out, was that people old enough to afford this house were put off by the style, and people young enough to appreciate the style didn’t have the money.
The open house had already been going on for two hours when Willie showed up with his wife, Lucinda, who was very tall, very pregnant, and incredibly beautiful. Roxy noticed her right off. You couldn’t help it. Lucinda had enormous blue eyes, like Lake Heron, and waist-length naturally blonde hair, as opposed to Roxy’s own not naturally blonde hair. Lucinda had a Kim Novak nose and a small pretty mouth with perfect white teeth. She wore a glittering lavender top over a flowing patchwork skirt. She was the most beautiful person that Roxy had ever seen in real life, like a movie star, or somebody on television. Maybe this was actually true, because she looked down all the time, like she was afraid of being recognized. Willie was sort of scruffy and nondescript beside his huge beautiful wife, a normal-size red-bearded man who wore a weird medallion on a chain. Willie had long scraggly red hair and an open shirt that showed even more red hair on his chest. Both of them were barefooted. Of course it was the early seventies, but still — this was Georgia, for Pete’s sake!
WILLIE INTRODUCED HIMSELF, then Lucinda, first names only, then went straight over to the refreshment table where he poured himself a plastic cupful of wine right up to the top and drank it all down in one gulp, then another. There was nothing to eat, all the peanuts and Roxy’s homemade cheese straws were long gone. She had already decided that these people couldn’t possibly afford this house when Lucinda went over to Willie and took his hand tentatively and whispered something in his ear. Lucinda moved slowly, like a woman walking through water.
Willie cleared his throat. “I guess we’d like to look at it,” he told Roxy.
“Okay.” She went into her spiel. “There’s a whole master suite upstairs with its own balcony overlooking the lake, and a choice of other rooms for the baby.” Though she couldn’t imagine anybody having a baby in this house — would it have a chrome crib? “And this is a great area for children,” she added. “There’s a Montessori school about a mile up the road.” These people looked like Montessori types to Roxy.
Lucinda gave her a shy half smile, then looked back down. Willie poured himself another cup of wine (“A traveler?” Roxy almost asked him) for the house tour. Upstairs and down they all went, then into the enormous gleaming kitchen where Lucinda barely glanced at the state-of-the-art appliances, clinging to her husband’s hand. Something was wrong with her, Roxy decided. Maybe she was terminally ill like Ali McGraw in Love Story, which had just come out. Or maybe she was on drugs. Actually they both looked like they might be on drugs.
Other visitors stared at them curiously as they came back down the winding staircase, holding hands. Roxy thought Willie and Lucinda would leave then, but they didn’t. Instead, they suddenly turned around at the bottom and went back up the stairs and stood in front of the long window on the landing for half an hour, whispering. Willie kept his arm around his wife and massaged her shoulder the whole time. At one point Roxy started up the stairs to speak to them, then just stopped on a step below, looking up at them from behind. The sun fell through the long window, spinning their hair into gold, as in a fairy tale. He really loves her, she thought.Really really really . Suddenly Roxy felt empty and foolish standing there in her little red suit and patent-leather pumps watching them. She felt hollow and fragile, like a wind chime, a thought so crazy that she went back downstairs and got a cup full of wine herself despite a frown from Irene Kramer, her more experienced co-worker.
Finally Willie and Lucinda headed back down the stairway like a bridal couple making an entrance. Lucinda was blushing, though she still looked down.
“We’ll take it,” Willie told Roxy when they reached the bottom.
“Don’t you want to look at the lower floor?” she asked. “The basement? There’s a whole guest suite down there, and an office — “
Willie looked at his wife, who shook her head slightly: no.
“That’s okay,” he said.
“Really?” Roxy knew she was being unprofessional, but she couldn’t believe it. And they still hadn’t asked the price.
“We’re sure.” For the first time, Willie smiled directly at her, and then she could see the appeal, all right.
Irene Kramer moved forward like a bitch on wheels. “I’ll be glad to discuss terms with you,” she said. “We can step back here into the study.”
“Oh, we’ll just pay cash,” Willie’s wife spoke for the first time, in a surprising little-girl voice. Then she wrote out a check for ten thousand dollars and handed it to Roxy. “Is that enough for now?” she asked, and Roxy said it was plenty.
They left in an old red convertible with the top down, her yellow hair flying out behind them like a banner in the breeze as Willie gunned it down the long driveway. Willie always drove convertibles, and he always drove too fast. He always cooked on high, too. But Roxy would learn all this much later.
“Well, I swan!” she said, reverting to an old mountain expression of her mother’s, which covered just about everything.
But Irene smiled a practiced, calculating smile that crinkled her makeup. “Music people,” she said. “Wait and see. You run into every damn thing in this business.”
THE SECOND TIME ROXY met Willie was twelve years after that, when she took a poetry class by mistake over at the college. It all started the day after Livingston told her that he was contemplating a run for the state legislature. “Why not?” he’d said, striding back and forth across the new Oriental rug. He’d made partner at Massengale, Frankstone, and Hogue, he’d made over ten million dollars winning personal injury suits, his specialty. Both boys had just left for Virginia Episcopal School, the same prep school Livingston himself had gone to. They were doing great. Roxy’s decorator, David, had just put the finishing touches on this house they’d built at the Ambassador’s Club — right on the seventh hole, for luck. Now, Livingston said, he felt lucky. For years, people had been after him to run for office. He had headed up a list of volunteer organizations and fund drives as long as your arm, he had served on many boards. It was time.
Roxy cleared her throat. “Actually,” she’d said, “I was just thinking it’s also about time for me to go back to school and get that degree. I’d like to teach, like Mama. Maybe home ec, don’t laugh. Or maybe special ed. I’d like to be useful in the world.” She didn’t know she was going to say this before she said it, it popped right into her head. Well, I swan! she thought. I sound just like Mama, who had recently died. Roxy had been feeling sort of shaky and weird ever since. Sometimes she felt like she was floating above herself, watching herself walk and talk and smile like an idiot. Or like she was in a play, or a pageant.
“Honey,” Livingston said, “you are useful in the world. You’re useful right here.” Livingston had been walking all around the new living room. Now he stopped and poured her a glass of wine. “I need you — the boys need you — just think how much I’ll need you when we run.”
“We,” he said, not “I.” And “when,” not “if.”
Immediately Roxy saw herself in a series of photographs taken on a series of platforms, herself and Livingston, smiling, smiling, smiling ever more broadly until her whole face was stretched tight. He would need her on those platforms, and he would need her as a hostess too, for Roxy was already a famous hostess in Macon, where her Christmas Eve parties had become a tradition, with homemade gumbo and jambalaya and a Christmas tree in every room, each tree with a different theme. She’d always loved people, and she loved to cook. But suddenly Roxy had a vision of herself cleaning up from those parties, putting the Christmas ornaments into those special boxes with the little dividers, each box clearly marked with its own theme label, for all the Christmases of all the years of her life to come.
She raised her glass to Livingston. “To you,” she said. “Go for it, honey!”
But she called Continuing Education over at the college that very day and signed up for a class named Kid Stuff: Special Topics in Special Education.
FIRST SHE COULDN’T FIND a parking space on campus, and then she couldn’t find Lenore Hall, and then the doorknob wouldn’t turn, or at least she couldn’t turn it, maybe because her hands were sort of sweaty because she couldn’t find the elevator either and she’d had to walk up three flights of stairs, so that she burst, literally burst, into the classroom, immediately dropping her purse, which fell wide open spilling change and makeup and her driver’s license and about a million credit cards all over the floor.
“Is this it?” she asked wildly.
Fifteen blank young faces turned around to look back at her.
“Well, is this it or not?” she said into the silence.
Willie stood up at his desk. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “But why don’t you just take a seat and we’ll find out?”
IRENE KRAMER HAD BEEN right, of course. Willie turned out to be Willie Cocker who used to play with Lynard Skynard and then started the legendary group Desperado. They had had that huge hit back in the late sixties with “Heat Lightning,” which he wrote. In fact the whole album went platinum. Lucinda had left him three years after they bought the house, taking their only child, a girl, with her. A year after that, Lucinda killed herself. Willie got the child, Lilah, at that point, but since he was in no condition to take care of her, Lilah had lived with his mother, Miss Rowena, in the big house over on Virginia Place until he got out of rehab.
So Lilah, not Roxy, was the one who had actually saved Willie, in Roxy’s opinion. From then on, he raised Lilah by himself, if anybody could have been said to have raised Lilah at all. Mostly she raised herself, or maybe she raisedhim. Willie quit the band so he wouldn’t have to travel and started teaching music lessons at home, plus the occasional English course over at the college, his original occupation. He was keeping it, he told everybody, very simple. They lived in an old bungalow near the campus. Lilah was the envy of all her friends, with a bead-curtain door and a television and refrigerator in her own room, plus her own dog, Possum, who slept on her waterbed with her. Possum was mostly Lab. They had found him lost in the mountains while on a camping trip. Willie had a dog too — Gator, found injured in a ditch beside the road when they were driving through the Okeefenokee Swamp. “Shot and left for dead!” Lilah liked to announce dramatically, pointing at Gator, a big friendly yellow mutt with floppy ears. Roxy thought it was so weird for them both to have dogs named for other animals.
And there were other weird things about them too, but what could you expect? After all, Willie was a genius, with a lot of fancy degrees from fancy schools up north, and geniuses are even weirder than rock stars, everybody knows that. Roxy was a practical person. Later, she would clean out their cabinets, get rid of the mold everyplace, buy new sheets that matched, and plant an herb garden. Willie was a gourmet cook but a terrible housekeeper, though a series of girlfriends (there was always a girlfriend, and she was always nice) had tried their best to organize him. “I have my own system,” he would explain, referring to the piles of papers and records and sheet music on the floor as his “files,” and in time these nice women would give up on organizing him, if their pet allergies or his unwillingness to commit hadn’t already driven them away.
The bungalow’s living room was filled with pianos, keyboards, and recording equipment, while the dining room table was piled high with papers and books. Willie slept downstairs back then, in the little room off the dining room, which used to be a sun porch. He liked it out there. He liked the weather, hot or cold. He liked to see the japonica bloom in the spring and watch the dogwood leaves turn red in the fall, up close. He wanted the moonlight to fall across his bed.
Lilah had the big sunny corner bedroom upstairs. She was never exactly sure who might turn up in the other two bedrooms when she woke up in the morning. Students, fans, relatives, friends — Lilah and Willie had a lot of friends. Sometimes the friends stayed for weeks. Sometimes Miss Rowena sent her hired man, Horace, over there to clean. Horace moved through the house mournfully and purposefully, mopping and vacuuming, clicking his tongue; after he’d left, they couldn’t find anything for the longest time, until they had messed it all up again.
Yet Lilah emerged from this crazy house on time for school every morning, neat as a pin, and marched off to the Harper Hill Academy in her uniform, the blue blazer and plaid skirt and knee-socks in winter, the white blouse and khaki Bermuda shorts and sneakers in spring and fall. She always had perfect attendance and perfect grades. It was a miracle; she was a miracle. Lilah grew into a tall, blonde, beautiful girl like her mother but so thin that her knees knocked together when she walked. Roxy had an immediate impulse to feed her. Lilah had the same huge blue eyes that Roxy remembered so well, the same Kim Novak nose, but a big, generous mouth like Julia Roberts so that when she smiled, which she did often, she gave off light like the sun.
Or like a lighthouse, Roxy thinks now, walking out on the sagging deck to look across the marsh at her favorite view, the black and white striped Cape Plenty lighthouse built in 1910 and still in use. Roxy identifies with this lighthouse — she and Willie are getting pretty old themselves now, but by God they are still in use, both of them. Everything still works — everything. Suddenly she can’t wait for him to get here, she hasn’t seen him for three days because he’s been in Atlanta scoring a documentary film. Roxy smiles, putting cushions out on the heavy old cedar deck chairs, gray with age. She looks out at the horizon and remembers the night they pulled the mattress out here and drank champagne and watched the Perseid shower, those shooting stars all night long. She has just gone back into the house and gotten another armful of cushions when the phone rings. She puts the cushions down and picks the receiver up; somehow, she knows it’s going to be important.
“Roxy?” Lilah’s voice is about an octave higher than usual.
“Hi honey, what’s going on? I thought you were going to some golf tournament or conference or something with Kyle this weekend.”
Kyle is the current boyfriend.
“We are — I mean, we were, but then Kyle changed his mind and now he wants to drive down to the beach all of a sudden, so is that okay with you guys?”
“Well, sure, but you know it’s still kind of cold out on the island, and it’s a pretty long drive, and it’s not great weather or anything yet. In fact, I just got here myself, I’m just starting to clean up the house.”
“What about Daddy? Isn’t Daddy there? Kyle says he especially wants to see Daddy.”
“Lilah, tell me what’s going on. Are you okay?” Roxy sits down on Miss Rowena’s old sofa, she called it her davenport.
“I’m fine,” Lilah says in a cheery voice, though it’s clear that she’s not. “Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s coming, sweetheart. He’s driving down from Atlanta, I’m not quite sure what time he’ll get here. In a little while.”
“Well, we ought to get there about. . . . What time did you say? Just a minute.” Though Lilah has put her hand over the receiver, Roxy hears a man’s voice in the background — clearly she’s talking to Kyle.
“Today? You mean you’re coming today?” Roxy wedges the receiver under her chin as she lights a cigarette.
“Actually we’re already on the road,” Lilah says. “Kyle says we’ll be there by six.”
“Oh great! Can’t wait to see you!” Roxy lies, hanging up the phone. Well shit. She sits on the davenport looking out at the line of waves on the empty beach. What if Lilah’s pregnant? But that’s impossible. Lilah has always been the sanest, smartest, most capable child in the world; now she’s got an MBA degree and carries a briefcase. MBAs don’t get pregnant, do they? But what else could it be? Now Roxy’s just dying to talk to Willie, but of course he doesn’t have a cell phone. He refuses to get one. He’s such a throwback, he won’t do e-mail either. He’s on the road by now too, loud music playing on his old tape deck, driving like a bat out of hell.
ROXY REMEMBERS HOW MISS Rowena used to push that imaginary brake pedal on the floor whenever she rode with her son. “Slow down, honey, for pity’s sake!” she’d beg, stomping on the floorboard.
“Brake-dancing,” Willie called this.
Roxy herself wasn’t much better, also terrified by his driving, always telling him to slow down, or pointing out whatever was happening on the road ahead, just in case he didn’t see it, backseat driving even when she was riding shotgun in the front seat — but Willie was such a scary driver that she just couldn’t help it. It was mostly a matter of his driving style, she had to admit, since he’d never had a real accident although he’d had plenty of fender-benders and gotten a lot of speeding tickets and even lost his license once for a year. But Roxy, like Miss Rowena, just couldn’t control herself whenever she rode with him. She couldn’t shut up. She couldn’t stop shouting out; she couldn’t stop giving pointers and issuing warnings. It got to be a real problem. Finally Willie had rescued them both by making a game out of it.
The game had started about ten years ago when they were driving up to the North Carolina mountains for MerleFest, Doc Watson’s bluegrass festival held in memory of his son, Merle. Roxy and Willie had never missed it.
They were barreling up I-77 north of Charlotte in his old white Dodge Dart convertible, taking the curves like a piece of cake, when all of a sudden the giant red tractor-trailer ahead of them slowed down to a virtual stop in its lane, without putting its turn signal on. “Willie,” she yelled, “Watch out! This truck is going to turn, or get off, or something. Look out, honey! Slow down! Or maybe you should try to switch lanes — “ which Willie obviously couldn’t do because the other lane was clogged bumper-to-bumper with traffic.
“You’re going to hit it! We’re going to hit it, honey — “ Roxy’s whole life began to flash before her, as it often did on a car trip with Willie. The last actual thing she saw before she ducked was the Ohio license tag of the truck, close up.
“Is that a fact, Mama? Is that right? You got to hep me, Mama, I can’t see a thing. I’m blind, Mama. Don’t you forget I’m blind. Now where is that truck? I swear I jus can’t see a thing out here on this highway, where is we, Mama? Where we going?” Willie went into his best Stevie Wonder imitation. Roxy sat back up to see that the truck had turned off and Willie was rocking back and forth, head cocked and bobbing, grinning from ear to ear. “Did you say they is a truck out here, Mama?” he hollered. “Where that truck at? You got to tell me, Mama, I can’t see nothing, I blind, Mama. I be just blind as a bat out here.”
She started laughing and fell right into it. “Stevie, you crazy thing! You slow down now, you just slow down and listen to yo Mama.” Even in Roxy’s own opinion, she sounded great. Willie wasn’t the only one who could do Stevie Wonder.
“Yas, Mama. Anything you says, Mama. Little Stevie gone get you there, you don’t got to worry about a thing. Little Stevie sure gone get you there bye and bye.” Willie threw back his head and started singing “I Was Made to Love Her.” Roxy joined him on “Work out, Stevie, work out,” singing at the top of her lungs.
Willie had explained that if she was going to treat him like a blind man, he might as well be one. After this, they played Mama and Stevie every time Roxy started backseat driving. It always slowed him down, and it took the pressure off too.
THE STEVIE AND MAMA routine still cracks Willie and Roxy up, though it scandalizes their three politically correct, super-high-achieving children, whose major rebellion lies in their straightness. Oh well, at least they aren’t Republicans. Roxy sighs, starting to clean. Or at least not yet, though nobody is really sure about this Kyle fellow. He’s brand new . . . Jesus, this living room looks like archaeology with its layers and layers of clutter: papers, clothes, books, shoes. Oh well. Roxy will just have to do the best she can, and the hell with it. She moves into higher gear. She puts the rest of the cushions out on the deck furniture, then sweeps the winter’s sand off the deck, then goes back inside and puts sheets on their bed and on the double beds in two of the other little rooms, who knows? Maybe Lilah and Kyle will make a pretense of sleeping in separate rooms. They are so straight.
Roxy shakes her head, remembering herself and Willie at the same point in their relationship, about two months after she started taking that poetry class. Because Willie was the love of her life — she knew it immediately too. She had never met anybody like him — anybody so brilliant and wild and funny, yet so educated — why, she was just crazy about him! She couldn’t believe that he actually seemed to like her back; she knew she didn’t deserve him. She is still convinced that she doesn’t deserve him, especially after losing Alice. If Roxy actually had to say what her best trait is, she would say, reliable. Hardworking. That’s pathetic, isn’t it? Even mules are hardworking. Horses! Even dogs. But she has a good bust-line too and a good heart which is capable of intense love, so much love that it has surprised her and even scared her to death upon occasion when it has caused her to do the wildest things, things she would have thought nobody her age would ever do, especially a realtor. She has never been his equal. She is just a normal person who got hooked up to a genius, sort of like a car that gets its battery charged by a Rolls Royce. This is a metaphor, which means saying one thing in terms of another, such as, “My love is like a red, red rose.” This is one thing she learned in Willie’s class.
They met for a cup of coffee to discuss the poem she had written for her first assignment, and after that, she couldn’t help it. Any of it. They were immediate soul mates, old souls, Willie called it. Roxy had never had a soul mate before. In fact, she hadn’t had any fun for years either, and Willie was so much fun. They snuck around. They had picnics out in the silent, secret black-water swamp. They spent afternoons at the Bambi Lynn Motel in Montezuma, where all the pictures on all the walls showed the same thing, the same locomotive coming around a bend. The Bambi Lynn Motel must have bought a truckload of those pictures. They made love on the new Oriental rug in Roxy’s living room while the boys were off at school and Livingston was at the legislature; they got rug burns, at their age. Rug burns! Roxy looked at them in the mirror and giggled. “Oh, that’s eczema,” she told Livingston when he asked. Sometimes they made love in Roxy’s own king-size bed with its dual controls of mattress firmness; she is not proud of this. Sometimes Roxy wore her old majorette uniform, which still fit, and one time when Livingston was at a meeting in Washington, she met Willie at the door wearing nothing but white high heels and her Miss Rose Hill banner and her rhinestone tiara.
They were crazy, and of course they got caught. But the big surprise was that Livingston did not appear to care too much one way or the other, certainly not as much as Roxy would have thought. In fact, this almost hurt her feelings, at least until his bland little administrative assistant, Miss Porterfield, came forward and stepped right into Roxy’s shoes without missing a beat. Claudia Porterfield had graduated from Sweetbriar College and gotten a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown. She was much more suitable for Livingston in every way. They had actually done him a favor, Willie said, which must have been true, since Livingston was reelected easily the next two terms, and then ran for attorney general.
Now Livingston remains just as stuffy as he ever was, but whoever thought their own Lilah would turn out to be more like him than her own real biological father? Lilah works incredibly long hours and has her calendar and address book and 401(K) plan and long-range plans and God knows what all on her blackberry or raspberry or whatever that little thing is that she carries around with her all the time.Lord! Roxy’s got so much to do before they get here: Lilah has such high standards, who would have thought it, this child of their hearts?
Roxy glances up at the Elvis clock on the kitchen wall, which says 4 p.m. already. Elvis’s pelvis swivels, his black and white checkered legs swing back and forth, back and forth, beneath his cool blue sports jacket. Lilah has called this clock retro and offered to sell it on e-Bay for them. Roxy and Willie have said no thanks. But now Roxy will have to get something ready for dinner, won’t she? She’ll have to go to the store. At least she brought that big tin of chocolate chip cookies along.Thank God. Roxy decides to take all these old magazines and newspapers to the dump on her way to the grocery store — and she’ll leave Willie a note too, so he’ll know what’s going on. He might get here sooner than she thinks. But first she’d better put clean towels out in the bathrooms, she might forget later. Roxy is very dismayed to find that there’s no overhead light in the tiny guest bath; this is a fixture she hates, you have to take the whole damn thing down to put in a new bulb. She gets a bulb and stool to stand on. Well, shit! Now she remembers. You have to have a Phillips head screwdriver too. Damn. She knows they’ve got one someplace. Roxy looks in the bottom drawer in the kitchen, then in the tool chest on the shelf above the washer and dryer where she finds every kind and size of screwdriver in the world except for a Phillips head. Wouldn’t you just know it? Meanwhile Elvis swivels on, tick tock tick tock tick tock. If you wind him up, he sings, Down at the end of Lonely Street, it’s Heartbreak Hotel.
Finally she looks in Willie’s rusted old tackle box, jammed into the back of their bedroom closet. It’s not in the top layer, filled with hooks and lures and pliers and knives and loose change and God knows what all. She starts to close the top, then — she will never know why she does this — she lifts that tray out and finds the stack of letters in the bottom of the box, bound with a rubber band.
THERE ARE MANY LETTERS, written in a large, loopy though somehow feminine hand, all addressed to Willie at a post office box — since when does he have a PO box? Roxy goes hot, then cold. She picks up the entire tackle box and goes over to sit down on the blue rocking chair in the corner beneath the cross-stitched sampler on the wall, made by her grandmother up home. It says, “Peace be with you while you stay, God be with you on your way.” Roxy can hardly breathe. She takes an envelope at random — not the top envelope — and smooths the letter out on her knees. It’s dated September 18, 1990, five months after Alice died.
Honey
You have just left and I am laying here on the bed still thinking about you and everything we do together and I can tell you, it means the world. I don’t know what I would of done if it was not for you, me or Ricky, ether one. I am so glad he is out of here now he is doing so good isnt he. I do not know what would have happened to him if he would not have met you. If I would not have met you ether. I just hope he can stay off the drugs, what do you think about that. Oh honey I hate to get up from here I can still smell you in this bed and feel your arms around me. You are so good to find some time for me I know it is hard for you to get away. You know I want you when ever I can get you honey but don’t worry I do not expect a thing, I am just so happy to see you whenever you come in this door with your big smile. I am just going to lay here for a wile and think about you honey then I am going to get up and take a bath and go over to the rest home and see Bill as it is Sunday thogh he don’t know it of course. But then sometimes I think, well he might, so I will go over there and take him some potato chips, he loves potato chips, and feed them to him one by one and tell him things just like he can hear me such as how the Atlanta Braves are doing, because who knows? Who knows a damn thing in this world? not me that is for sure ha ha except I am just happy that you are in it with me ever minute that I can get with you it makes all the difference. I will see you when I see you
I love you love you.
Love you
Mary Etta
Roxy’s hands are shaking so much that it’s hard for her to fold this letter back up and put it back in its envelope, one of those cheap oblong envelopes from the dime store. The return address reads
1104 Peach Road
Holly Springs
GA 30456
Which Roxy knows to be a country town someplace south of Macon, an old mill town she thinks, but definitely below the gnat line. A sleepy dead little redneck racist mill town, lots worse than Rose Hill. She grabs up another letter and reads
Bo,
Sometimes I think, well, what if I had never met you? What if Ricky had not gone up before that nice lady judge who sent him to the special school where you taught him music and saved his life? what if he had just went straight to prison instead, which he probably should of. Then he never would of met you, I never would of met you. What would of happened to us then, I wonder? and now Ricky is doing great at Ga. Southern, he has got a 3.5 average, did I tell you that, and a nice regular girlfriend and the band has got as many gigs as they can take while still in school, it sounds like too many to me tho. Sometimes I worry that there is something real bad out there waiting on Ricky around the bend but lord I hope not. I know I have got to quit thinking like that. I worry that he will go crazy because Bill was pretty crazy you know, even before the accident. I have not told you the half of it, the accident was just the last straw. Though I can not say that I did not love him, I did with all my heart, tho we was just kids of course at the time. And at least he got me out of that house. And Bill done the best he could, I will have to hand it to him. He did not deserve what has happened to him but then nobody does.
Bo? Where did that Bo come from? Roxy feels like she doesn’t know Willie at all, like she never knew him. Furiously she tears through the pile of letters, lines jumping out at her.
I wish you could come over here more but I know you can not Believe me I apreciate every minute of your time I can get I know it is hard
and
Bill apreciates that new TV so much I know even if he can not talk, it is company for him. Thank you so much you are so good to do it. You are so good to all of us.
Jesus! What does Willie think he is, the fucking United Way?
Bo,
If there is one thing I can not stand, it is for you to feel sorry for me. I am glad to do an honest days work too. Cleaning is honest work. I have done worse, believe me.
Plus I make more money than Rita, you remember Rita that lives in number 14? And she is a substute teacher at the high school. I know this is a shame but it is true. They is something wrong with this country. Also I can quit a person anytime if I want to, and not lose my job. I do not have to pay SS ether, ha! I have done a lot worse as you know, right after the accident when Bill was in the hospital and I had those little children at home, I am ashamed of what I done sometimes to put bread on the table. Well I was drinking then too. That was in Florida, down at Tampa, all them tourists in the plaid shorts. Well you never know what you will do until you have to. It is just a good thing Bill had been in the army or we would of all been up shit creek without a paddle, but at least he got the medical and now he is in the VA. I truly do not know what we would of done without the VA. Lord I was not but 22 when it happened, I am not even old now, you know it? I forget. I have felt old as the hills for years now but I am not relly. You make me feel young again, you have gave me back some of my life honey.
And to tell the truth, I like to clean, I am good at it too. I have got an eye for it according to all. It makes a body feel good to straighten up peoples shelves and fold their laundry and put the magazines in stacks on their coffee tables and line up all the chairs and leave everything so clean and neat and straight as it is not in life, ha! Where everything is a goddamn mess. I will even iron their pillowcases if I have got time. Mister Souci says I am the best he ever saw, he swears by me. He is the one that owns Pinetops. So do not pity me, I do not want your pity honey, just save some of the other stuff for me, ha!
Your Mary Etta
and
Well of course your wife is sad what in the world can you expect. It is harder for the mother, it just takes a long long time honey. There is a lot of us that lives in sad houses believe you me. But you go on, you have to. You will too. After Bills accident somebody told me it is like walking cross a big field in the dark all you can do is put one foot in front of the other and keep on walking and some day you will get there. You will too.
Roxy remembers something her own mother used to say when times got tough, that you just have to “keep on keeping on.” In spite of herself, Roxy sort of likes this Mary Etta, Mary Etta is her kind of girl. Plus Mary Etta can’t help any of this, she is just a poor dumb woman, a maid for Gods sake! with about a sixth grade education. A poor disadvantaged person that Willie has clearly taken advantage of, damn his sorry hide.
This reminds Roxy of that poem from Willie’s class, the one about the girl that got raped by the swan. What was that girl’s name? Leda! Roxy still remembers the ending. “Did she put on his knowledge with his power, before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” and clearly the answer is No, she did not. She did not put on one damn bit of knowledge or power either one, clearly she was an ignorant slut to begin with and she is still an ignorant slut today. She did not take in a damn thing, Roxy thinks furiously, but she is not really furious, not entirely, because there is something so sad and so sweet about this woman, oh Roxy gets it. She gets it all too well. Willie is a sucker for a sad story. But he is not a psychiatrist, damn him.
It is not really Mary Etta’s fault at all. This makes Roxy madder than ever, she’s going to wring Willie’s neck when he gets here. And then she is going to divorce him. Willie can keep his bass boat and his damn convertibles. She is going to keep the 4Runner and the house in town and the rental properties which they never would have owned if wasn’t for her anyway. But oh God, who will get this little house? She reads on.
Honey,
You have just left but I cant do a thing, I can not come back down to earth. I can not ever thank you enogh for taking me to Daytona, it is the nicest thing that anybody has ever done for me, ever. I loved that hotel and even roses in the room. It is a birthday I will always remember. I loved the white cloths and the candles on the tables and the moon on the water when we walked out onto the beach and you said that beautiful poem to me the one about that other beach, I will never forget it. Also what we did on the balcony, it is probably against the law ha ha! I will never forget that ether. Honey I could just eat you up with a spoon. I have got to calm down I have got to get some sleep you know tomorrow is my longest day first the Armstrongs then Mrs. Johnson then the Pinetops Motel. I think I will just stand dreaming at every bed thinking of you. Well thanks. Thanks thanks thanks baby, I am yours for ever no matter what.
Mary Etta
Dover Beach! Roxy can’t believe he said “Dover Beach” to her. This is unforgivable, the worst thing of all. This istheir poem, hers and Willie’s. Was. This was their poem which has always reminded her of this very place, Fernandina Beach, where they have spent so many days and nights and hours of their lives, where Roxy thought they were so happy. Ah love, let us be true / To one another!
Right. Roxy puts this letter back into the stack and sticks them all in the bottom of the tackle box and puts it back in the closet and closes the closet door. She is never going to look at them again. They are too upsetting. She does not need this! She is either going to kill him or leave him, one, she just can’t decide which.
Roxy drives down the beach to Food City and buys red potatoes and celery and eggs and mayonnaise and French dressing and everything else she needs to make her famous potato salad because she can’t think of anything else to make right now. She buys a Hormel Cure 81 ham and cloves to stick into it, and bananas and Cool Whip and vanilla wafers and pudding mix for banana pudding, which used to be Lilah’s favorite when she was a little girl. After all, Lilah is bringing this brand-new boyfriend to their home for the first time, they’ll have to eat something, it is certainly not Lilah’s fault that her daddy is an adulterer.
Roxy buys two bottles of white wine and two bottles of red and a six-pack of imported beer because who knows what this boy will want to drink? They’ve already got plenty of liquor back at the house. Roxy drives home and makes herself a gin and tonic and unloads her groceries and boils the potatoes and the eggs and sticks little cloves into the ham like it is Willy’s head, and puts it in the oven. She probably is going to kill him, but not in front of Lilah. She is not going to embarrass Lilah no matter what. She chops up the celery and the onion and the pickle and adds it to the potato salad, which turns out to be delicious. Good. The smell of the ham cooking fills the house. Maybe she’ll make some corn bread too. Roxy makes great corn bread.
She takes a nice long shower and washes her hair and puts on some sexy new underwear from Victoria’s Secret and even perfume, so Willie will see what he’s missing. She puts on her aqua V-neck top and some white pedal pushers and gold high-heel sandals and sits at the old oak table waiting and watching Elvis’s legs swing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Down at the end of Lonely Street at Heartbreak Hotel. You make me so lonely, baby, I get so lonely, I get so lonely I could die. The sun puts on a big Technicolor show going down, but nobody cares. Nobody comes. Roxy smokes a cigarette and taps her foot. She pours herself some more gin. She takes the ham out of the oven and makes the banana pudding.
She has never been so mad in her life.
She can’t decide whether she’s going to confront Willie immediately, before Lilah and Kyle arrive, or wait until after they’ve left. Obviously it would be better to wait until they’ve left, but the question is, can she wait? Can she even keep herself from dumping this banana pudding all over Willie’s head the very minute she sees him? But then nobody would get to eat any of it after she has gone to all the trouble of making it, and anyway, it’s Lilah’s favorite. Lilah sounded so weird on the phone. Roxy feels weird too, right now, but not like she is floating above herself, the way she has often felt before. She feels like she is somehow concentrated, more herself than she has ever been. She feels strong. And she can do it, she can wait. She’s got to, for Lilah’s sake, because they could never fake it for the rest of the weekend, her and Willie. They have never faked anything.
Oh, but that’s a lie, isn’t it? Willie’s been faking it for years, the son of a bitch, while she thought he loved her so much. She tries to remember back to that time which is all a blur anyway. But wasn’t it the summer of 1990 that Willie took her on that Blues Cruise out of Miami, with Taj Mahal and Sleepy LaBeef? And Roxy thought they had so much fun? Now she feels like a fool, an idiot. And wasn’t that the same year they went up to Gatlinburg for Valentine’s Day and rented that chalet with the hot tub? Was Willie thinking about this woman, this maid, the whole time he was fuckingher ? And Roxy is pretty sure that 1991 was when Willie Nelson played MerleFest, the first year they got the backstage passes. Oh God, who will get the backstage passes to Merle-Fest? These letters have taken it all away somehow — all the good times, her whole marriage, her whole life with Willie is suddenly gone like a shooting star.
If Willie had pulled into the driveway right then, Roxy definitely would have let him have it, first thing. But this doesn’t happen. She smokes another cigarette and drinks another gin which she can’t even feel, she’s so mad. She’s in a zone right now where she could drink a whole bottle and it wouldn’t even touch her. She makes the corn bread to calm herself down, Paula Deen’s recipe with the canned corn and the cheese in it, now Paula Deen is a woman who knows how to cook for men. But who gives a damn. Roxy pours the batter into her hot iron skillet and then puts the skillet back in the oven at 450 degrees just like her mama taught them, her and Frances, so long ago. Every girl has to have an iron skillet to be a wife, Mama said. But Frances never married, bless her heart, and she was still waiting for Mr. Right when she was killed in an automobile accident on the Atlanta belt line in 1994. Frances held out for love, but Roxy was the one who got it. The one whothought she got it, Roxy corrects herself. Well, shit. What a crock of shit. It all seems so sad and so stupid and so long ago, oh those sweet sweet hopeful girls they used to be.
Roxy is taking the corn bread out of the oven when Willie and the kids all arrive at the same time, first the Mustang convertible, then the navy blue Saab, with lots of spewing sand, slamming doors, and crying out hello, hello. Shit. Roxy puts on her biggest smile and runs out to hug everybody. “Finally!” she says. “At last! I was starting to get real worried about you all.”
“Mmmmm.” Willie breathes into her hair, tickling her ear with his bristly beard and mustache, squeezing her hard against him before turning to Lilah. “Baby! What a surprise. I didn’t know you were going to be down here.” He gives her a big hug. “Man. This is fantastic.”
“You would have known if you had a cell phone,” Lilah teases him.
“And this is . . .” Willie turns to the boyfriend, holding out a hand.
“Kyle. Pleased to meet you, sir.” Kyle steps forward. Willie registers the “sir.” Roxy hides a smile, watching Kyle crunch his hand, that’s the way they do it, these manly types. Then she remembers that she’s furious.
“We’re so glad to have you. Come on in the house,” she says sweetly to everybody. “Here, let me take that.” She grabs for Lilah’s bag, but Kyle has already got it. He’s a dark-haired substantial fellow with nice brown eyes and regular, pleasant features, wearing khaki pants and a white shirt, tucked in. Most of them wear their shirttails out these days, Roxy has noticed. Kyle manages to carry everything and hold the door open for everybody else. They all stand blinking in the sudden overhead light.
“Well! Babe, you look great,” Willie says, squeezing Lilah’s shoulder a bit tentatively, as if he’s testing to make sure she’s real. They haven’t seen her for, how long now? Four months, maybe? And there’s something different about her tonight, for sure. Lilah is, well, beautiful. She wears a long-sleeved T and black pants, a pink sweater tied around her waist, her long blonde hair springing out all around her shoulders. She’s curled it, or something. She looks animated, like she’s giving off sparks. “See?” she says, grabbing Kyle’s arm. “Isn’t this place just like I told you, just exactly?”
“You nailed it, hon,” he says, looking around. “I’m so happy to be here.”
Roxy is glad she had time to clean up. Still, she can’t imagine exactly what Lilah has told him. And she’s not sure she likes that “hon.” “I’ve got dinner all ready,” she says brightly. “But why don’t you take your stuff on back, settle in, and we’ll all have a drink first?”
“Mmmm. Ham, right?” Lilah says. “I can smell it. And some banana pudding for me, I hope?”
Kyle clears his throat. “Actually,” he says in the deep noncommittal voice of, say, a news broadcaster, “I’ve got a little surprise for Lilah. I’ve already made reservations for the two of us down at the Ritz-Carlton for dinner. It’s going to be a special night. She didn’t know anything about it,” he adds, seeing Roxy’s surprised face. “And I know we’ll want some of that ham for sandwiches tomorrow.”
“Oh, Kyle!” Lilah claps her hands, a favorite gesture from childhood. “You are too sweet! He’s just crazy,” she tells Roxy and Willie. “He’s always springing these surprises on me, I just never know what he’s going to do next.” Her hand flies up to her mouth. “Oh no,” she says. “I think that’s a really fancy place, honey. I don’t have a thing with me that I could possibly wear.”
But Kyle, it seems, cannot stop grinning. “Look in your bag.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just look in your bag,” he says. “And why don’t you go ahead and take a shower, too? While I run a quick errand. Our reservation is at eight thirty, we don’t want to be late. This is going to be a very special occasion.”
Lilah grabs up her bags and runs down the tiny hallway, giggling.
Kyle turns to Willie. “How about taking a little ride with me, sir?” he asks. “I want to buy her some flowers.”
“You can get some over at Food City,” Roxy suggests. “They’ve got plenty. I just saw them, I was just there. In the display case right next to the produce. Or you could just pick some of that forsythia blooming right next door, by the Connors’ garage. They’re not even here, they’d never know. They’re real nice anyway.”
Over Kyle’s head, Roxy sees Willie grinning at her, then making a kissy face with his mouth.
“No,” Kyle says. “I mean real flowers. Roses. And actually there’s a florist at 311 Hatch Street. Do you know where Hatch Street is, sir?”
“Willie,” Willie says.
“Sir?” Kyle blinks. “Do you know where that is?”
“Call me Willie, I mean,” Willie says, “and hell yes, of course I know where that is. Come on, Romeo, we’d better get a move on.” He grabs two beers from the refrigerator and throws one to Kyle, rolling his eyes at Roxy as they leave. Roxy sinks down on the davenport, feeling like a hurricane has just hit this little house. Down the hall she can hear water running and Lilah singing at the top of her lungs, belting out “Angel from Montgomery” in the shower. She’s got a great voice, just like her dad.
Roxy tries to relax and act normal but then suddenly she just can’t stand it, she jumps up and rushes back to their bedroom locking the door behind her and takes the tackle box back out and shuffles through the letters like a deck of cards, looking at the dates. Actually they’re all a long time back, aren’t they? The most recent ones she can find are dated 1991. Roxy takes a deep breath and smooths them out on her lap.
Bo,
I saw you there in the back at Bills funeral honey, you were so sweet to come. I wish I could of spoken to you. Did you see Rita? And little Billy and Vicki and the kids came in from Panama City, did you see them? She is getting sort of fat. My daughter Lisa is the one that is beautiful and cried real loud. And of course Ricky, I bet you would not of reconized Ricky if you had seen him in the street, now would you? Doesn’t he look good thogh? And that sweet girl, could you tell she is pregnant? Ricky jumped all over my brother Wayne for saying Bill’s death is a blessing, but I told him, this is just what people say at a funeral. And of course it IS a blessing after all these long years but it is so sad too, Lord I don’t know what I will do with myself, without Bill laying over there in the VA to tell you the truth. He never showed a sign that he could tell I was there, but I belive he did know it somehow, it was just something I felt way deep down always.
Well goodbye for now,
Mary Etta
Bo,
I appreciate yr letters and yr concern. I am sorry I did not write or call you back, I could not. I just went all to pieces when Bill died if you want to know the truth, I did not expect that to happen but there it is. Seems like I could not see you any more, nor write, I can not explain this ether, thogh you have been so good to me. But do not worry, things have turned out for the best after all. I have a suprise for you! I have married Mr. Souci, that I used to tell you about, that owns the motel where I used to clean, his wife had died some time previous. He will not let me clean any more, and treats me great! We are running this motel together now. And I am wishing you the very best Bo now and always. You know you saved my life.
Yr. grateful friend for ever and ever,
Mrs. Mary Etta Souci
Way to go, Mary Etta! A part of Roxy is cheered up by this news. She admires Mary Etta, she can’t help it. She ruffles through the stack again to make sure there are no more recent letters. But that’s it. Shit! Twenty years ago. This whole thing was over twenty years ago. Over and done with. Ships that passed in the night, water under the bridge. The only problem is Roxy’s problem now, the only problem is that she knows. That her heart is broken, that she is devastated, that’s all.
She knows.
THE DOORBELL RINGS, a sound Roxy hasn’t heard in years. Usually everybody just bursts in here. It rings again, a tinny blast from the past. Shit! Why are they ringing the bell, why don’t they just come on in the house? Hastily she stuffs the letters back in the tackle box and shoves it back in the closet. She runs a brush through her hair and slashes on some lipstick (Red, God damn him!), then hurries out into the tiny hall where she almost collides with Lilah, enveloped in a cloud of perfume and wearing a low-cut black dress, where did she get that? Lilah has never owned such a dress in her life. And where did that cleavage come from?
The doorbell rings again.
“You answer it.” Lilah pushes Roxy down the hall. “You get it . . . please?”
Roxy gives her a quick fierce hug and strides to the door. “Hel-lo there!” She sings out flinging it open and there stands Kyle holding the biggest bouquet of red roses in the world and smiling a goofy smile. His hair looks wet, slicked back. Somehow he has acquired a jacket and a tie. “Good evening, ma’am,” he says like a boy in a play.
“Good evening, Kyle.” Roxy feels like she’s in the play too. She peers over his shoulder to see Willie out there in the shrubbery drawing an imaginary knife across his throat and rolling his eyes back in his head like he’s dying, this would be funny if Roxy didn’t hate him so much and wish he were dead.
“Come on in.” She steps back.
Kyle comes in then stands there like a deer in the headlights holding his ridiculous roses as Lilah walks forward to greet him. “Oh wow, you look beautiful, hon,” he says. One thing about Kyle is, he’s sincere. Or he certainly seems to be. Actually he looks like he’s going to pass out. He thrusts the bouquet at Lilah.
“Oh Kyle, how gorgeous,” she says. Her blonde hair bounces all around her shoulders, her lips are glistening with some of that wet-look lipstick. Everybody looks wet these days.
Suddenly Kyle sticks his hand in his pocket and comes up with a shiny little camera. “Can you take our picture, ma’am?” he asks Roxy. “See, just hold it out and look in here. You can see us. That’s it. Okay.” He shows Roxy how to do it then springs back over to Lilah’s side, pulling her close. She smiles brilliantly — they both smile brilliantly — into the tiny camera, into the future stretched out before them.
“Oh, it worked!” Roxy cries. “Look at this, it’s perfect!”
“Thanks,” Kyle says. “Now I guess we’d better get going.”
“Okay, but I . . .” Clearly Lilah doesn’t know what to do with the enormous roses until her daddy takes them from her, kissing her lightly on the forehead.
“Have fun, bunny,” he says, his old name for her.
“Don’t wait up for us,” Lilah calls back, laughing. Her perfume still hangs in the air.
“Bye,” Roxy yells out the door.
“Whew.” Willie slams it. “Oh honey — “ He goes straight to Roxy and hugs her tight, a big long bear hug. “He’s going to marry my baby,” Willie says into her hair. “He’s going to fucking marry her.”
“What? Are you sure?” Roxy pulls back to get a good look at him.
“Yeah, fuck yeah, he is. He really is.” Willie is sort of grinning and sort of crying at the same time. “He’s going to ask her tonight.”
“You’re kidding. How do you know?”
“Because he asked me first, damn it. He asked me for her hand in marriage. That was the whole point of making me go on that little ride with him. He told me he would always love her and protect her and cherish her. He did everything except get down on one knee.”
“Cherish? He said cherish?”
“Yeah. Cherish.” Willie puts the roses down on the old oak table.
“So then what did you say?”
“Well, what could I say? I said yes, damn it, sure, if that’s what she wants to do. I said it’s all up to Lilah.”
“Then what?”
“Then he started grinning, then he hit me on the back so hard I almost fell down, then he hugged me.”
Roxy can’t even picture this. Willie is not a hugger of men.
“Then he shook my hand for about a half an hour, liked to kill me.” Willie goes into the kitchen and makes himself a gin and tonic. “I see you’ve been hitting the bottle here.” He grins at Roxy.
“Well, just a little. I guess I was nervous, I could tell something was up the minute she called.” Roxy follows him.
“Wait, I didn’t even tell you the punch line.” Willie takes a long swallow. “Then he gets out this little box and opens it up and shows me the ring.”
“He did?” Suddenly Roxy’s getting light-headed, she’s got to sit down. “So what does it look like?”
“Hell, I don’t know. It’s just a regular engagement ring, all right?” Willie pulls a chair over next to hers and sits down too. He puts his hand on her thigh.
“I mean, does it have a round diamond? Or an emerald cut, or is it square, or what? Is it gold or white gold?” Roxy hears herself rattling on and on.
Willie starts laughing. “Damned if I know. It’s pretty, though. It’s real big, real sparkly and everything. The works. The real thing.”
“Oh my.” Roxy can hardly breathe now.
Willie’s massaging her knee, almost reflexively. “Seems like he’s a real old-fashioned, stand-up kind of guy. He even offered to help pay for the wedding, what do you think of that?”
“Really? What did you say?”
“I said hell no, of course. I’ve only got one baby, damned if I won’t pay for her whole wedding. Then he said, ‘Well sir, I appreciate that, and of course I haven’t discussed this with Lilah yet, but we may want a pretty big wedding,’ and I said, ‘Well then, we’ll have the biggest goddamn wedding you’ve ever seen.’ “
“They are grown-ups,” Roxy reminds him. “I’m sure they have a lot of friends and business associates, and just think of all the people we might want to ask, too. Not to mention Kyle’s family and their friends.” Roxy has always, always wanted to run a big wedding, maybe because she didn’t really get to have one herself. The first time, she was pregnant, and the second time, she and Willie got married by a justice of the peace wearing a Gamecocks cap under a hanging lightbulb in Darlington, South Carolina. Seth and Todd both had nice weddings, but she did not get to run them because she was only the mother of the groom, not the bride, everything would have been very different if she’d been in charge. For instance she would never have a sit-down meal because that is the kiss of death, it just stops the flow of a party dead. Roxy would have a lot of little feeding stations instead, each one with a different kind of food so everybody can move around and mingle and visit with each other. And fireworks! She’s always thought a wedding should end with fireworks, though of course that would mean an evening wedding instead of afternoon.
“Be right back, honey.” Willie squeezes her thigh and disappears down the hall.
Actually Roxy won’t mind if Lilah and Kyle choose autumn instead of summer, autumn weddings can be so much more colorful, not to mention comfortable. The weekend after Thanksgiving would be perfect for a wedding. Or even Christmas. What about the weekend just before Christmas? The decorations could be so cute, so original. Red and green. Glitter — Roxy loves glitter. But what is she thinking? She and Willie will be split up by Christmas, God damn him, she’ll be long gone. She might have another life in another town. Lilah will have to hire a wedding planner. Maybe Roxy won’t even be invited.
But she can still plan Alice’s wedding, can’t she? as she has planned all of Alice’s birthday parties and Halloween costumes and trips and school clothes and Christmas presents over the years. Alice was born on Christmas Eve 1987, they put a Christmas angel and a gold star on her crib at the hospital. She died April 20, 1990. She was almost two and a half. It was a picnic at Highland Park for all the families of the girls on Lilah’s soccer team. Willie, in an apron, was grilling burgers while Roxy kept an eye on Alice and chatted with the other mothers as they set out all the food on the long table. Roxy was opening a box of paper napkins when all of a sudden she couldn’t see Alice anywhere among the other kids, and then the screams went up. Alice had run out into the parking lot after a ball just as Dave Bridges backed up his SUV, going after more ice. Somehow, Willie was there already, covering the small body with his own, while Alice’s blood pooled out all around him. “She’s dead,” he said to everybody. “Go on home, please, take the girls. Just remember Alice, just remember how she was.” Roxy has relived this moment over and over and over, thousands of times. She was watching Alice and then Alice wasn’t there. Everybody said it was not Roxy’s fault, again and again. It was not Dave Bridges’s fault either, he couldn’t see her at all. It was just one of those things. But Roxy can’t let it go. She has kept this terrible doubt in her mind, just as she has kept the Christmas angel and the gold star all these years, wrapped in tissue paper in the secret pigeonhole of Mama’s old desk from up home. She has kept all of Alice’s baby clothes too.
And over the years, she has kept on imagining Alice — little Alice here at the beach, walking hand in hand with her dad, making sandcastles, flying her kite, feeding the seagulls; sturdy Alice at eight, strong square knees and flyaway red curls; Alice a tomboy in ragged jeans at ten, surveying the world from her clubhouse up in the apple tree behind the house in Macon; Alice at thirteen, pigtailed, crazy about horses, leaning forward in her stirrups to ride through a golden field; Alice a high school cheerleader, turning cartwheels across a floodlit football field; or Alice right now, at twenty, a very good student at a very good school somewhere in New En gland, she’s still wearing jeans and those kind of combat boots like they all wear now, all the smart girls, she’s got little old-fashioned granny glasses and dreamy blue eyes and a sweet look about her, like an old-fashioned girl, like an angel. She’s biting her lip as she writes in the notebook on her lap, she’s sitting on the grass under one of those huge old trees that they have up there on campuses in New England. Alice hasn’t even thought about getting married yet! And she’s got plenty of time — all the time in the world.
“Honey? Honey? What’s the matter?” Willie’s behind her now, he’s nuzzling her neck with his prickly beard, bringing her back, as he has done time and time again. Oh how she will miss him.
When Alice died, Roxy’s grief was like a big dark, windy place that she was lost in, like the old abandoned Preston mine shaft that they used to sneak up the mountain to visit when she was a girl — its long twisting corridors opening into a cavern so vast that the beam of your flashlight finally disappeared into darkness, illuminating nothing, while your voice bounced back and forth, back and forth, fainter and fainter. She had stayed in this cavern for months, refusing therapy and drugs and all Willie’s attempts to divert her, even for a little bit, until finally he let her be, and just tended her, waiting. For a long time Roxy was dedicated to that darkness, that intensity, sensing that to lose it would be to lose little Alice forever. This has proved partly true. But finally she went out and got a pedicure, she got her hair streaked again, she and Willie went to MerleFest, then he took her on that blues cruise. Lilah graduated from high school. Seth was accepted into law school at UVA, Todd got married. Livingston ran for governor, Roxy saw his big face every day on the billboard at the turn off the interstate to the Reliable Real Estate office where she worked.
“Honey? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she says, setting the table. “I guess we’d better go on and eat.”
Willie slices the ham while she puts a piece of corn bread and a helping of potato salad on each of their plates. She grabs the honey mustard from the refrigerator. “Okay, then,” she says. He puts on a CD and they sit down where they always sit, facing each other. The seashell cat smiles its iron smile at the end of the table. Elvis’s legs swing back and forth. “Time’s the revelator,” sings Gillian Welch. Roxy pushes potato salad around on her plate. Actually she’s the revelator, she is, Roxy.
She can tell, or not tell. She can tell it now, or later. Or not at all. Never. But actually she doesn’t know if she’s capable of not telling it, of keeping such a big secret. She’s still so mad. She can’t eat a bite. She looks over at Willie, who’s almost finished already.
Suddenly he stands up. “This is big, isn’t it, baby? This is as big as it gets. Come on.” He pulls out her chair.
“What? Where do you think we’re going? I haven’t even done the dishes, you know. They’ll be back before long.”
“No they won’t,” he says. “And even if they are, so what? Come on. It’s a full moon out there. Let’s take a drive down the beach like we used to.”
“Right now?”
“Right now.” He’s got her by the shoulders, he’s hustling her along.
“I . . . I can’t,” she says, meaning,I can’t do this, any of it, any longer. The truth is what you get with Roxy, she’s so reliable, you can count on her.
But he’s breathing into her hair.
“Why not?” he asks.
“I . . . I . . .”
Willie draws back. He stops pushing her. He’s waiting. Elvis’s legs swing back and forth, back and forth. Down at the end of Lonely Street, it’s Heartbreak Hotel and I’m so lonely baby, I’m just so lonely I could die. The hands of the clock move to nine.
“I’ve got to get a sweater.” Roxy darts into the bedroom and opens the closet door and pushes the tackle box back where it belongs, back into the back of the closet, and piles an old quilt and some outgrown jackets and coats on top for good measure. There now! Archaeology. Nobody will ever know the tackle box is back there, and Roxy will never read those letters again. She feels her secret blooming like a great red rose inside her — a metaphor! Or, her secret is blooming like a great red roseinside the garden of her body, an extended metaphor, a beautiful image seen by no one. Known by no one except herself. Suddenly Roxy is damn proud of keeping this secret, of not hurting Willie, her soul mate, her old true love.
“Roxy, get a move on! What are you doing in there?” he’s yelling out in the hall.
“Just hold your horses!” she yells back, because she’s his equal now, isn’t she? Finally, after all these years. She thinks of herself and Frances on that seesaw Daddy made when lightning split the old poplar — two little sisters always teetering, but perfectly balanced. Another metaphor. She remembers Frances’s red wool coat and her flyaway dark curls in the April wind.
“Roxy, goddamnit! Come on!”
“Coming!” Roxy throws on her aqua scarf and grabs up the faux fur jacket she bought in Nashville. Outside it’s a big full moon but a windy night. Cold. Thank God he’s got the top up for once. She jumps in the convertible and Willie guns it down the driveway throwing sand everywhere. The seashell road stretches out white in the moonlight past all the dark houses ahead. The road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor. This is a poem from high school, when Roxy was Miss Rose Hill and potato salad queen. May the road rise to meet you. This is an old Irish toast that Willie taught her. Willie is Irish. But Roxy is nothing but Roxy, squealing as he accelerates, just like she used to do on the Ferris wheel, way up high. Then the houses are gone and they’re flying out toward the point past scrub pines and beach grass and sandy hills briefly illumined then lost in darkness as the land falls away behind them on either side. When they get to the little park at the end, Willie slows down enough to drive across the parking lot, right past all the posted and stop signs then out between the dunes and onto the beach itself.
Surely they’ll be arrested.
Luckily it’s low tide.
The moon is as bright as a headlight making a path across the water straight to them, it reminds Roxy of that locomotive at the Bambi Lynn Motel, its headlight bearing down upon such scenes, good Lord, some of them against the law. Suddenly Willie switches off the lights and now there’s nothing but moonlight everywhere, the moon lies fair upon the straits, the wide beach rising to meet them like a ribbon of moonlight itself until suddenly it’s all obscured by a bank of clouds. Now Roxy can’t see a thing. It’s black as pitch, dark as a dungeon, dark as a mine. Roxy can’t see the water, she can’t see the sand or the dunes beyond. If they die out here, that’ll ruin Lilah’s big wedding for sure. Plus it would be so stupid. She grabs his jacket, then his arm.
“Now Stevie,” she says sternly. “You watch where you’re going, honey. It’s a mighty big ocean over there.”
“Shut up, Mama,” Stevie hollers. “You just stick with me,” as they keep on driving down the beach into the windy dark.