Verna drove us over to the courthouse on Saturday in her blue Thunderbird with the top rolled down. Buck wanted it up so his hair wouldn’t blow. I wanted the same so we wouldn’t look like a parade. Verna wanted it otherwise.
“It’s two against one, Ma,” Buck said.
“It’s me against I don’t give a holy hoot,” Verna said. She liked how she looked flying down the road in that long, sleek, expensive vehicle. I asked Buck where she got the money for it, and he changed the subject. When I asked him again, he said, “You must not of heard me the last time you asked that same question.”
“You didn’t say nothing.”
“Then you heard me good, didn’t you?”
Verna was a sight in that car, a pretty one. She was tall, with real good bone structure. Part Cherokee Indian on her mother’s side, Irish on her pa’s. She had hair black as midnight and a shapely smile with large even teeth. But when she snapped her jawbone closed in front of your face, it’d scare the meanness right out of you.
Verna studied on the meanness and got all As. She was critical of everything and everybody, including herself, but Buck knew how to humor her. She picked us apart the night before we got married then started in on herself. She said her arms were getting flabby, her face was starting to sag, and her stomach was turning to mush.
“Ain’t one good part left of me, is there?” she said and turned to Buck.
“Well,” he said, “there ain’t nothing wrong with your eyes.” It was the second time I heard her laugh. It was a beautiful sound and a powerful sight; so many twinkles left in her eyes, but just enough blindness for her not to notice.
The courthouse was older than Moses, but it had new benches out front and a clock on the tower that still worked and all kinds of azaleas and dogwoods and Bradford pear trees planted on the lawn. Verna brought along her camera and one roll of black and white film. We planned on sitting on one of the benches for a picture, but workmen were painting them green when we got there.
The wedding ceremony was over quicker than you can swallow, so I’m not sure you could even call it one. The judge opened his Bible as soon as we got into his chambers and said to Buck, “You got the ring?” Buck nodded.
“Repeat after me,” and we did. He promised me what I promised him, except the words the judge gave me to say included obey and I took note of the fact that Buck’s didn’t. We each “plighted our troths” one to the other. Not knowing for sure what it meant, I wanted to ask before agreeing, but the stern look on his face told me not to. He said, “I now pronounce you man and wife. That’ll be five dollars,” and it was over.
“Ain’t I supposed to kiss her?” Buck said.
“Suit yourself,” the judge said. “No extra charge.”
Verna handed us the papers the judge’s clerk had prepared, and we signed our names where it said to. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a wedding, but the judge’s chambers were nice. There were flowers in a vase on the table next to the wall, which I thought was a special touch. And Verna bought me a new dress to wear. It was pale yellow. It wasn’t really a wedding-type dress, so it didn’t have a veil. I saw this little hat with a net that matched it pretty good, but of course any extra money Buck and I had was needed for more important things, so I wore my brown headband instead. When we got there, Buck took the white carnation Verna had pinned on his sport coat that morning and tucked it in my hair. My headband held it in place. I got a quick glimpse of myself in the mirror outside the judge’s chambers, and for a moment I felt like a bride. It was just like Buck to do something special from out of the blue. He could be such a jerk, but then he’d surprise me and I’d forget that he was. He was especially well-practiced at doing just that whenever I was mad at him over something he knew I had every right to be.
When we left, I thanked the clerk for the flowers. “It was real nice of y’all,” I said.
“No need to thank me,” she answered. “His Honor has ’em delivered every morning along with the coffee and donuts.”
We had lunch at the Crowe’s Nest Cafeteria and Verna paid. I looked around to see if maybe Mama and Pa would turn up. Seeing as everyone was talking about us, I figured they’d be gabbing on the fact we’d gotten married and were over here having our wedding brunch. Rebecca and Clarissa came. That was special. It would have been extra-nice to have a sit-down-and-serve-me lunch, but “fools that follow get what they find,” is what Mama said.
“Mama’s hiding out,” Rebecca said. “Thinks folks in this dumb town are talking about her. That she ain’t a good mother. You know, look what happened to Annie. Now you.” I nodded.
“But Pa told her not to worry on it,” Clarissa said. “Don’t forget that, Rebecca.” My heart lifted.
“Huh!” Rebecca said. “What he said was, ‘Don’t worry on it. Look what a mess God made with Adam.’” Clarissa motioned for Rebecca to hush, but Verna and Buck thought it was right funny.
“She sent these, Adie,” Clarissa said and handed me two jars wrapped in scented paper. Mama’s familiar scrawl was on the labels: Old-Fashioned Grape Jelly and Peach Jam.
“She got the names on them switched around by accident, but she said you’d have to be blind, dumb, or both not to know which is which,” Clarissa said.
“It’s our first wedding gift,” I said. “Look, Buck. Isn’t that nice of my mama?” He gave a quick nod and went back to wolfing down his second helping of country fried steak, mashed potatoes, fried okra, collard greens, black-eyed peas, and cornbread.
“I’ll write her a thank-you soon as we’re settled,” I said and handed the package to Verna. Then I got to blubbering. Imagine that? Jam and jelly jars making a body weep.
“You okay?” Rebecca said and handed me a paper napkin. I dabbed at my eyes and nodded.
“You’re the prettiest bride I have ever seen in this place, Adie,” Clarissa said.
“I’m probably the only one you’ve ever seen in this place,” I said, the tears forgotten.
“Still—” she said, “you are.” Buck had his arm around me and was smiling at everyone that came in. I squeezed Clarissa’s hand.
“Thanks for coming,” I said. “It means everything to me,” and it did. “You too, Rebecca.” I felt really good right about then. Who said my life had to be over? I had as many days ahead of me as I had before. It was up to me to make them good ones. I just needed to keep my attitude on the part of the cherry that wasn’t the pit.
“Adie and I are walking home,” Buck said. We were staying with Verna and Austin and moving with them to Hog Gap in a handful of months.
“Show this town we got nothing to be ashamed of,” he said and steered me towards the entrance. He let go of my arm and turned back.
“Hand me that sack, Ma.” Verna held up a brown paper grocery bag.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a surprise. Don’t be so nosy,” he answered. I turned toward the door. An elderly couple was on their way in.
“Meet Mrs. Buck Jenkins,” Buck said and gently placed me in their path. It was Mr. and Mrs. Findley. They were older than Egypt, not known for being friendly, and had faces molded in stone that said so. They looked up at me, their eyes blank as unused paper.
“How long you two been married?” Buck said and held the door full open. Mr. Findley silently guided his wife through the door. He turned and looked at Buck.
“Sixty-one years, come June fifteenth,” he said.
“Sixty-two,” Miz Findley corrected, “and it’s the eighteenth! How many times I tell you, June eighteenth?”
Buck plucked the lone wedding flower out of my headband.
“Well, Happy Early Anniversary!” he said and offered her the carnation. She stood still as a statue, but one small shaky hand inched out of her pocket and accepted the offering. She gave Buck a smile wide as Texas.
“We been married two hours,” Buck said and beamed.
“God help you,” Mr. Findley said.
“It’s God be with you,” Miz Findley corrected and yanked on his arm.
Mr. Findley winked at Buck and shook his hand. “Good luck, son,” he said, and we were out the door. Buck opened the paper sack and dropped a string of tin cans on the ground. He grabbed my hand and took off running. I went flying along, trying to keep up.
“Just married! Just married!” he yelled. The cans clanged on the sidewalk behind us. The Findleys stood at the front window of the Crowe’s Nest, along with Clarissa, Rebecca, and Verna, and waved. The cook ran out.
“Stop!” she shouted, and ran toward us, tossing handfuls of rice. Buck turned around with me in hand and beamed. We watched as the others flew out the door and hurried to join her. They each grabbed a handful of rice from the bag in her hand. Buck pinned my neck carefully in the crook of his arm. He leaned down and kissed me. I felt the rice kernels raining down on our heads. Cheers echoed up and down the street. Buck looked up and grinned. A small crowd had gathered.
“This is just the beginning, puddin’,” he said. “Just you wait.” He tugged on my arm and we took off running again. The cans followed.
“Just hitched!” Buck bellowed.
“Bye!” people called out after us, the elderly Findleys among them.
“Good luck!”
“Congratulations!”
“Have fun!” Clarissa said, waving wildly. We clanged onward, the tin cans banging on the pavement. Folks waved from their cars, honking their horns. Children followed, their ice cream cones dripping a milky path behind us. More cars gathered. Soon a caravan of cars was lined up beside us!
“Toot-Toot-Toot!”
“They’re just married!” Mr. Findley yelled to some folks coming out of the drugstore.
“Hey, y’all!” Buck nodded and beamed. “Thanks for coming! Thank you very much.” He squeezed me tighter around the waist with one hand and waved back with the other.
Attitude was no longer a word. It was everything. We rounded the corner and the wedding party broke up.
Buck was still grinning from Texas to Tucson. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “You’re gonna love Hog Gap.”
“You think?”
Buck stopped in front of the hardware store.
“Heck yes.” He used the palms of his hands to slick back his hair. He had a habit of doing that. It was shoe-polish black. But it surely didn’t need any help staying in place. It was slicked back permanently with Vitalis. Buck dumped half a bottle on it each morning.
“Sure thing, puddin’,” Buck insisted, “You’ll love Hog Gap.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been anywhere but Cold Rock,” I insisted, while he fixated on his reflection in the grimy old window at Mitchell’s Tool & Hardware. Then he reached for my hand.
“C’mon,” he said and jaywalked us across Main Street. There was a traffic light and a crosswalk at the corner, but Buck ignored them. He didn’t have much use for rules.
I ran behind him—my hand hidden in his—girl-grin happy for the first time in weeks. Just think; we were married! He’d be mine forever.
“Wait till you see Hog Gap. You’ll know what I’m talking about,” Buck assured me. I asked him what was so special about it.
“For starters, it’s got just what a body needs. And it ain’t got these dang asphalt roads burn your feet to hell. Everything’s dirt and gravel. Way it’s supposed to be. Some parts are still pretty much all wilderness. Got more pigs than people. Got deer, cougar, bears even. Shoot, it’s got critters in them woods up there ain’t nobody seen before.”
Hog Gap didn’t sound too good to me, but the way I felt about Buck right then, he could have said we were headed to Cow Pie Valley and I would have thought we were moving to north heaven. I did wonder if Hog Gap had plenty of girls who’d swoon over him, or if he’d have to get over it now that we were married and had a baby coming.
“How long you figure we’ll have to live with your mama?”
“You got a problem with that?”
“No,” I lied, “but I read somewhere married folks have a better chance at being happy if they’re off by themselves,” I said.
“Probably so,” he said. “We’ll stay for the time it takes me to get us a place. How’s that?”
We ended up staying just about the entire time I was waiting on the baby, most of it in Cold Rock. Then, finally, we made the move to Hog Gap, and I spent the last month there still living with Verna.
Buck didn’t keep a job long enough to get us any money, and he gave most of what he made each week to Verna for groceries. Then when we would get a bit put aside, he’d just up and quit his job. While he was looking for another, the money we’d saved had to go for groceries. Around and around it went.
But Verna always had plenty of money. She drove around in that fancy, blue T-bird and shopped for pretty clothes left and right. I asked Buck if she had herself an inheritance or something and he said, “It ain’t none your business where she gets her money,” so I stopped pestering him about it. But it was mighty strange, seeing as she didn’t work at a job but was always cashing these checks that came in a pretty white envelope with gold lettering.
Buck worked for just about everyone in Hog Gap that had a job to offer. He was running out of employers when we got what I thought was the break I’d been praying for. But then, Mama always said, “Careful what you wish for and mighty careful what you pray for.” I wasn’t thinking about that when Buck came home and told me Norman and Evelyn Fletcher, who owned the Five, Dime & Penny—about the only store in town had anything worth buying—thought Buck had “potential.” They had no sons of their own and were planning on training him to help Mr. Fletcher manage the store, and their only daughter Imelda Jane was going to help. I’m pretty sure Imelda Jane was what Mama was speaking about when she warned me about praying for what I wanted instead of what we needed.
“I start next week!” Buck said. “This is a real opportunity, Adie. You realize that?” he said, rubbing the palms of his hands together. “I’ll probably have to work nights, weekends, but this is the big time.”
Mornings, nights, afternoons, weekends—if that’s what it took for us to have a place of our own, I was agreeable. But the store closed at six during the week, and it wasn’t open on Sundays, so some of the hours Buck turned up gone concerned me. I started wondering why he had to work those hours, too, but I didn’t want to trouble him over the first real job with potential he’d had. Plus, I was getting real close to having our baby and wasn’t thinking much about anything else but the poor condition I was in. My back felt like a vise had hold of it, my feet were puffed up like inner tubes, and my belly stuck out like a watermelon too ripe for its vine.
We went to church that last Sunday before the baby was due. Imelda Jane was there with her folks. She made Rebecca look like the old maid in the deck of cards. Her family’s about the only ones in town who had any money other than the mayor and the doctor maybe. She came up to Buck after the service wearing the prettiest clothes I’d ever seen and looped her arm through his, like it belonged there. I wasn’t sure what to do.
“This is Adie.” Buck jerked his head at me.
She nodded and said, “Excuse us. We have some important business that can’t wait.” She walked him on over to the chinaberry trees at the side of the church building. They talked with their heads together. Verna Jenkins acted like it was the most normal thing under heaven, a husband just sashaying off with his boss’s daughter, arm in arm—in front of God, the pastor, the church folks and his wife—without so much as a howdy-do.
I got a strange feeling in my heart watching Buck with Imelda Jane. First, it hurt sorry. Then, it hurt mad. It was a fit of jealousy is what it was, one so bad I couldn’t control myself. I marched right over to the chinaberry trees, yanked Imelda Jane’s arm off of Buck’s, and replaced it with mine. Then I twisted off the only white gloves I owned, which had a little hole in the finger of one of them, and said to Miss Imelda-dressed-to-the-T’s-ain’t-I-something-Jane, “You see this ring?”
“Beg your pardon?” she said in a soft sugary drawl. She tossed her head to one side and fluffed the back of her long hair.
“You see this ring?” I repeated. “With a diamond in it?” My voice had a drawl too, but it came out sounding like a hoot owl maybe been raised in the south.
“You mean that sweet little ole yellow band with a sequin in the center?”
“This is not a sequin,” I said. “It’s a genu-wine diamond!”
“Really?” she said and smiled at Buck like they had a secret.
“And we got a certificate that says we can trade it up for a bigger size anytime we want, so long as we pay extra!” I was powerful mad and didn’t much care if she knew it. “Well, you see it or not?”
“What is your point?” she said. “We are discussing business matters here.”
“Then I guess you best discuss them matters during regular business hours. This here is Sunday church day and my husband’s coming home with me.” I took Buck’s arm and gave it a tug. He stood there grinning like he’d heard a good joke, and there was nothing funny about it, a totally pregnant ready-to-burst wife and a snot-nosed storekeeper’s daughter fixing to catfight over him.
And that was just the beginning. Had I known where it was headed, I’d have gone back to Cold Rock, begged Pa to take me in, and waited out front with my belly till he did. Instead, I reminded myself what Mama said about marriage.
“It’s a lifelong puzzle. You just keep working on it till it fits.”
That sounded reasonable. The problem was mine had one piece too many to ever be one that would.