4

A BAD DREAM came full blown right at dawn Thursday. I blamed Tim for talking about my nightmares, like he had summoned a bad dream right out of the night. I shot up out of my mother’s bed. The sheet was wrapped around my feet. My pajama top was soaked in cold sweat. Since I could not fall back to sleep, I got up to clean.

Fanny left with Dill and their four children. I drove Tim to the airport. It was along the way he got a call from Meredith. They were talking all the time, it seemed—when Tim woke up, during lunch, and again at midnight. Finally, after four years of trying, she announced right then over the phone that they were pregnant.

I told him, “You ought not to have signed up for the National Guard. If you get called away, what will Meredith do?”

“Im getting too old to get called up,” he said. He kissed me good-bye. I drove home.

Delia slept late.

I cleaned Daddy’s bedroom using bleach water to get rid of the medicinal smell. Then I sat down at the small desk in front of the window and pulled out Daddy’s bank statements and the will. He had always paid bills at that desk, yelling at Mother when he balanced the checkbook. It was their game. Mother was supposed to keep the pantry filled and clothes on our backs without the expenses showing up on the bank statement.

Renni said Mother once sold plasma to buy a Thanksgiving turkey. I remembered Mother raising a turkey right out in the garage, but it did not cost her a penny. That bird somehow worked his way off a poultry truck. Mother found it wandering the roadway, stunned, she said, as if addled by the fall off the truck. She threw Daddy’s fishing net right over its head and dragged it all the way down our driveway, corralling it finally in the garage. She never said anything about selling plasma. But Delia was telling it now for truth as if she herself sat at Mother’s side watching the blood fish down the tube.

I read the most recent bank statement. Daddy had saved up a quarter of a million dollars. In his will, he left me the executor, as well as the newly appointed guardian of Delia’s trust. Since I had been paying his bills for a year while he withered away to a pencil of a man, I knew about his stash. But having grown accustomed to his treatment of me as a clerk, I felt like a crook laying claim to it.

Delia crept down the hardwood floor in the hall and stuck her head inside the room. She wore only a long T-shirt ornamented with NASCAR driver Kyle Busch’s face. “You cleaning?” she asked.

I was bent over a baseboard beneath the windowsill. “I’m cleaning,” I said. “Smells like a nursing home or a hospital room around here.”

“Did you make coffee?” she asked.

“A half pot.”

She looked away.

“You want to move into the house? I mean, it’s empty. You might as well,” I said.

“I figured you’d want to live here, what with you and Braden splitting up.”

I came up on one knee and then stood. “We’re not splitting up,” I said, not so much defensively as to the point. It wasn’t her business. “I can help you move into the house.” Then I thought about her animals. “But maybe you ought to leave the chickens outside.”

“Sure, sure. It’s a good house and all, not for inside chickens. You mean it? I can live here?”

“We need to wrap the pipes for winter. I can help you do that.”

“This’d be my house then?” She kept asking, “You sure?”

“We’ll both own the house, of course. But you might as well live in it. Keep it up.” She was in a fix after her last bout with Leland. Her carpet had been pulled out after a sewer backup. She was walking around on the bare subfloor. That was when I moved her into the trailer. It was the last time I saw her until Daddy’s funeral. “I can make you a list of what to do. You’ll have to keep up the taxes. It’s not much,” I offered.

She yawned. “We got anything to eat around here? I’m starved.”

I kept cleaning until, bored, she left me to finish. I swept the baseboards and then pulled off the bed linens to launder. I was about halfway up the hall, holding the load to launder, when I heard a sound coming from the guest bathroom. I knocked on the door. “Delia? You in there?”

Cigarette smoke escaped under the door.

Mother hated smoking in the house so much that, after she died, my father continued taking his smokes outdoors. “It’s okay to smoke. I mean, if you’re going to live here, you can do that.”

She opened the door, grinning. She blew out a stream of tobacco smoke. “That’s right. It’s my place now.” She strutted out into the hallway, her cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth. She extended her arms as if she was about to dance. She was always a graceful girl, rather artful when it came to dancing. She twirled. Then she lifted her arms into the air, the wide grin never leaving her face. “My place, my place, Gaylen!”

“Houses are harder to keep up than trailers. You can’t let the lawn go to pot or leave garbage out.” She was bad about not carrying garbage out to the dumpster.

“I swear I’ll take good care of this place.”

“We’ve got some money from the inheritance. You can use it to fix up the house, if you want,” I said.

“Money?” She looked as if she didn’t know about the inheritance. She could have been playacting. It was her way. She would get this honest-to-goodness look about her of utter surprise, even when she knew the truth full well.

“We can go to the bank today if you want.” Daddy wanted the money split between us. But her trust was dependent on my agreement to make small deposits into her account each year.

“A new house and money all in the same day? What am I, rich or something?” She twirled again in her sock feet and then leaped, this time both legs extended in midair, landing nearly in an arabesque. Her heel slipped on the hardwood floor, and she fell backward. Her feet went up in the air and she yelled, “I broke something!”

I helped her to her feet. “You got any clothes you want to move over?”

“I know what I want. One of them aboveground swimming pools. Do I have enough for that?”

I didn’t know how to explain the trust fund without setting her off.

“I been needing me a suntan. This is the life, Gaylen. A house and a swimming pool and all the money I’ll ever need. I can quit my job at the furniture factory.” Hamby’s was the only employer willing to keep Delia on in spite of her outbursts and flights of fancy. She never knew that Braden had talked a friend of his into hiring her. “You need to keep your job, Delia. Besides, you’d get bored sitting around the house doing nothing.”

Her eyes drooped at the corners.

“You like the people at Hamby’s,” I said.

“I do,” she said. “We go out to the Waffle House at three in the morning, all us late shifters.”

Delia’s reputation around town was legendary. A lot of the stories about her tantrums and rages came from the Hamby employees, I realized, but she didn’t act as if she knew.

When we were girls, the town character was Ned Guillame. He climbed up onto the water tower after a group of high school boys told him that naked sorority girls could be seen each summer night performing a wiccan ritual on the twenty-yard line of the high school football field. After his death in 1985, Delia picked up his baton as blithely as an Olympic torchbearer.

I stuffed my father’s linens into the washer. Then I packed my suitcase, my overnight bag, and said, “Lets go and take a look at your place. We can decide what you can move to the house and what you can sell off.”

She slid into a pair of jeans while I started the load of linens. When I joined her, she was dragging an old steamer trunk through the kitchen. She wanted it, so I told her to take it, mostly because it was unlike her to care for family items of sentimental value. She shoved it into my car trunk. I placed my bags in the trunk too. We drove off, headed for her trailer.

We passed through downtown. Delia said, “I heard you yell early this morning. One of your bad dreams. What was it about?”

I had nearly forgotten about the nightmare. “Usually, I can’t figure out what I’m seeing. It’s as if I’m straining to see in the dark and something is scaring me, only I can’t see it. This one was different.” The shadow was crawling into my bed. “Usually I believe in my sleep I know what I’m seeing. Then I wake up and it’s washed away.”

Delia waved at the theater owner sweeping the walk in front of the new movie theater.

“But I remember this one. I was a baby again. Isn’t that odd? It was as if I opened my eyes and saw myself as an infant lying on a table.”

“Was you hurt?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I was afraid, and then I woke up screaming.”

“It’s your psychic self trying to tell you something.”

I was exhausted, though, as if I had not slept all night. “You’ll have to tell me when to turn. I haven’t been out to your place in a while.”

She directed me onto a country lane. There were few of that type of road left. So many roads in Boiling Waters were under renovation, being widened while new subdivisions sprang up on both sides of Fifty Lakes Drive. We drove past a horse farm and then turned again onto an unmarked and unpaved road. The road sign had gone missing, and the lane was shadowed by sycamore and oak that hid an old cemetery. The road snaked past three mobile homes, all of them prettily decorated with concrete yard art and circular flower gardens. The pansies were still blooming, but down South, even if the weather brought a melting snow, winter pansies’ faces lifted like little girls frozen in the ice.

“Turn right into this next drive,” she said.

I drove around the mailbox that was off its perch and lying beside the drive. Two bare lawn-chair frames sat starkly out in front of the trailer. A flattened tire lay propped against the front porch steps. Empty beer cans were piled in a ceremonial heap at the foot of the stairs. Delia pushed them aside with her foot. She carried the long empty trunk inside, she said, to use for packing.

The sparse lawn out front was pungent as if spring was trying to sneak up from the soil. Not a bird sang overhead. I craved a sausage biscuit but not from Delia’s kitchen.

The single-wide was dark. I reached for a light switch.

“My lights was shut off for nonpayment,” she said. “I had the money, but it got took out of my purse. I don’t know by who.” She waved her hand in the air.

I knew that Freddy had taken it, the same as Ray and Leland. But when Delia was in the early stages of being dumped, denial was her pacifier.

I decided that I would show her a budget and how to plan out her spending so that she put aside enough money to pay the utility bills. I was lit up by the thought. My father had picked at Delia so much, I decided, that she had fallen into despair. What she needed was training. If she could train a dog to dust her tables, she could keep a checkbook balanced.

“If you’re careful, I can show you how to save a little aside every month so you can have your swimming pool,” I said.

She beamed. “You’d do that, Gaylen?”

“It takes time,” I said. I opened the window blinds, but yanked too hard. The blinds came loose from the frame and clattered to the floor.

“Who cares? The landlord can burn it all down, far as I’m concerned.” Delia lifted another blind and looked out. “My neighbor kept Porter overnight. I couldn’t stand to leave a new pup here in the dark. I’ll fetch him after I get my things.” She pulled her clothes off the hangers in her closet. She handed each piece to me, I assumed, so that I could fold them. I held up the first shirt. “This is a man’s shirt, Delia,” I said.

“I been living with a man. Freddy, he wouldn’t let me buy a stitch of clothes. That left me to wear nothing but his things.” She unzipped her jeans and opened her fly. “But I love him, so what was I to do?”

“You’re wearing men’s underwear,” I said.

“It’s all I had,” she said. “All he give me.”

“Are any of the clothes in this closet yours?” I asked.

“Nothing but a few bras.” She held up a bra, yellowed and stretched thin.

“We’ll go shopping then.”

A loud noise shook the trailer. I braced myself against the wall, thinking the entire place might cave in.

“Someone’s beating my door down, sounds like,” said Delia.

I told her to keep throwing out the men’s clothes, that I would get the door.

A woman about thirty, black, and about to pound the door down stepped away when she saw me.

I looked at her inquisitively, trying to smile.

“I come looking for Delia Cheatham.” Cheatham was Delia’s name by her first husband. “Am I at the wrong place?” She was frowning, trying to see around me. Suddenly a burst of feathers and clucking from inside the trailer startled her. She backed away. Least One wanted to escape the dark trailer prison.

“It’s a pet,” I told her. I let Least One out the door and into the yard.

She was a spare woman, dressed too thinly for the chilly weather. When I didn’t answer her question about Delia, she backed down the stairs looking at me mistrustfully. “If you see her, she’s the ho tried to take my husband. He been living two lives, one at my place and one here until today. But it’s over now, tell her.”

Glad to hear it, I was about to close the door, but the pain in the woman’s eyes made me continue to stare after her. It was the kind of curiosity that made my expression appear obliging, but really, my fascination with Delia’s life made me stare. Here was a woman I might have never met if I had not been placed at that instant on my sister’s threshold. “If I see Delia, may I tell her who asked after her?”

“Sophie Deals, Freddy Deals’s wife. Delia knows Freddy, that’s for sure.”

Delia whispered down the hall, “Tell her to get lost!”

“Delia Cheatham! You come face me!” Sophie cocked her head to one side. She smirked and planted one clear acrylic heel on the first porch step. “You hiding, ain’t you? You know you broke up my marriage.”

“Shut up, Sophie!” Delia yelled, but she wouldn’t come out.

Sophie tromped back up the stairs, her long arms pulling her up by the porch rails toward me. I wanted to calm her and send her on her way. “Please, Mrs. Deals, I’m sure Delia’s got no reason to fight with you. If you’d just take some time to cool off, I’ll talk to her and see what she can do to make it right.”

Sophie’s eyes softened. She pursed her lips, pausing, still straining to see around me. “You think you can get her to make things right?” she asked, as surprised as if I was fresh as flowers off the farm. “Only way she can do that is to keep away from my Freddy. We got four kids to bring up, and she don’t care nothing about that. Maybe you can talk to her.”

“I will,” I promised. “She’s moving away, if that helps.”

Sophie acknowledged me with a slight nod. “Good, then. Can’t believe my husband got tangled up with the likes of her anyhow.” She was standing out in the yard and was pretty well on her way off Delia’s property when she muttered, “Everybody knows she’s crazy. Who knows why Freddy went slumming?” She turned to walk back to her car.

Delia yelled from inside, “Shut your face, Sophie! He don’t love you anyway!”

Sophie turned and yelled, “Your life ain’t worth squat from this time on! You watch your back, Delia Cheatham.”

I walked out onto the porch to be certain she was leaving. I took the steps down to the last boarded landing, continuing to force a smile any time Sophie glanced back at me. I didn’t see the door come open and the butt of my father’s rifle lift over my head. Delia yelled, “I’m not standing for this!” and then pulled the trigger. I fell onto the bottom porch step. The rifle fire was as deafening as it had been out in the deer woods with Tim. But overhead, it seemed to take all of the sound out of the air, out of my ears, as if no sound was left in the world. Sophie fell against her car.

I clambered up the steps before Delia could unload a second round. I forced the rifle butt into the air. Delia was laughing. Sophie gunned her engine, pulling out onto the dirt road, gravel spangling my car like wedding rice.

Reassured that Delia did not just murder her boyfriend’s wife, I said, “What a relief! I thought you got her.” I leaned against the railing, trying to regain my senses.

“I did. She was bleeding like a knifed hog.”

I stared after Sophie, but she kept driving until her car was out of sight.

“She won’t come messing around here no more!”

“How’d you get Daddy’s gun in the first place?”

“Tim stored it in the gun rack, and I put it in back o’ your car, bent inside that steamer trunk you give me. I heard she was coming to whip me.”

“You’ll go to jail, Delia!”

Her smile disappeared. “Sophie’s brother’s a low-life drug dealer. The Freemans don’t go to the cops for nothing.”

I had heard of Mason Freeman; back-page-of-The News and Observer-Mason Freeman. He did time in prison after turning down a deal with a Wilmington judge to snitch on a fellow drug-dealing relative.

Dust lifted from the unnamed lane in front of Delia’s trailer. “Go and pack what little you need, Delia. We’ve got to get you away from here. Go, go!” I meant to the police. But the road never took us in that direction.

Still driving, I called the rental office where I worked. A leasing agent, a college student named Kimberly I hired out of the university, was manning the phones. I oversaw a small-time rental operation. The couple who owned the apartments had given me a week’s leave to go to my aunt’s cottage. But Daddy died and the leave turned to bereavement. Either way, I was supposed to be back by Monday.

Kimberly said, “I leased out a unit today. He’s divorcing, but drives a BMW. He checked out fine, like, he’s maybe well off. We’re going out tonight. You didn’t say I couldn’t date clients, did you? You holding up all right?” and “Sorry about your dad.”

Delia sat beside me. She pointed to a hot dog stand. “That’d be a good place to stop for suds and a dog.”

“Kimberly, I’ll try to make it back Monday. But stuff has come up, you know the little things that come up after a death,” I said, getting increasingly better at lying than Delia.

A customer came in, and she had to cut the call short. “I got exams coming up. Monday would be a stretch.”

I knew with her parents’ recent divorce Kim needed the hours for school bills. “But if I don’t get back until Tuesday, you could cover for me?”

She was breathing into the phone.

“You’ll get a bonus. I’ll buy you a blouse.”

“Okay, then.” She hung up.

I was watching the mirrors for a tail. “Delia, there’s a good chance that Sophie’s gone to the hospital. They call the cops for bullet wounds, no matter what. I think we ought to go straight to the police. You can tell them you were mad, you didn’t mean it. She threatened you.” With Delia’s track record and Daddy’s death, we could claim all sorts of mental anguish.

She stared out the window, watching the passing stores and shops along Fifty Lakes Drive. A road sign advertised concert tickets for an underground band.

“If we go straight to the police and you tell them that you didn’t mean to shoot her, that you were, I don’t know, just fooling around or something, maybe you’d get off with probation.”

She cocked her head. “Them cops, they got it in for me. You know since Ray got caught growing weed in the backyard, they drive real slow past my place now, like they’re watching me.”

“They’re not watching you, Delia. Why would they?”

“Ever since then, they watch me.”

You could never tell by looking at Delia whether she was in the present or in her fictive world. She never showed it, not in her mannerisms or body language. But since she was a little kid, her bottom lip jutted out when she was off script. As we drove out of town, but onto the highway and not onto the interstate, she was wide-eyed and her bottom lip could hold dime tips.

I said, mad as bees, “Getting back to the present, let’s talk about shooting people. Most of us don’t shoot people, so maybe you shouldn’t either.”

Delia’s fingers curled into tight balls. When Daddy lectured her, I saw that same tight-fisted response. She told me, “I been wanting to kick Sophie Deals’s butt since Freddy told me how she treated him. She don’t love him, so I don’t know what her problem is anyway.”

“But he’s married to her, not you.”

“He talked about leaving her.”

“They do that.”

“How would you know anyway, like, you’ve had this perfect husband, and now you’re throwing him away.”

She had a point. “No man’s perfect, Delia.”

“There’s that new restaurant, Bojangles. They got chicken. You crying, Gaylen?”

I wiped my eyes. The tears hadn’t flowed since the day after Daddy’s funeral. “It’s been a tough day, Delia. We just buried Daddy. My sister’s shooting people.”

She laughed. “Life’s like a big nut, ain’t it? Hard to crack and such.”