TWENTY-ONE

You want my opinion, you should be making a documentary about how y’all talk a different language than we do down here. And I don’t mean English, neither. I never have run into a Yankee who don’t come down here with all kinds of crazy ideas about who we are and what we think and how we spend all our time figuring out how to make life hard for black people, but then never really listen when we try to say plain how things really are. You had best start large, if you really want to tell the story of Miss Zula’s life, because all of Ogilvie had a hand in bringing her up, as she has had a hand in each of our lives.

Your name: Walker Winfield. If you’re willing to listen to what I have got to say, stop by and see me anytime.

Sunday morning Angie was trying to make some order out of the mess in the reception area while John slept. She was folding his trousers when his cell phone fell out of the pocket and gave a soft beep.

She picked it up and looked at the display screen. It was the battery that was beeping, down to its last half bar of life. The reception bars, on the other hand, were all there: five of them. The ringer was off, but the tiny envelope that indicated waiting voice mail was glowing. The number next to it had a certain symmetry that Angie had to appreciate: eighty-eight. He had eighty-eight messages, from the woman he had left at the altar, her family, his own, curious neighbors, relatives, colleagues, most probably one or all of the people who wrote for the Bugle. Messages that would be distraught and angry and colorful in a variety of ways. If this were her phone, if these messages had been left for her, she would have deleted them all, without ever listening to a single one. But John would listen; that was one difference between them, and nothing she could be proud of.

John woke up when she kissed his cheek. He turned his head toward her, mumbling, “Where did you go?” His arm came up and pulled her in.

“Just tidying up,” Angie said. She held up his phone for him to see, and watched him wake up, fast. “This is a satellite phone. We could have got out of here yesterday, and you knew it.”

He didn’t avoid her gaze, made no apologies. “I suspected, but I didn’t look.”

“Ah. Plausible deniability?”

“That was my plan, pretty much. You mad?”

His eyes were very blue, and his expression only vaguely contrite.

“Nah. So, you want to get out of here?”

He stretched, yawned, stretched again. Peeked at her with one eye cracked open. “How many condoms left?”

She smacked him. “Are you going to call the police on Patty-Cake?”

“Do you want me to?”

She shrugged. “On the one hand, I’d certainly like to see Win Walker’s face if he has to arrest her. On the other—I think you could be more creative than the police would be.”

“You’re right,” John said. “I have a few unorthodox ideas for dealing with Patty-Cake. But that comes later. First I have to talk to Caroline, and then we have to get out of here.”

Angie found she didn’t want to listen to any conversations John might need to have. She took a shower, washed plastic cups, made coffee, cleaned up in the conference room. Thinking, as she did, of all the things that might be going wrong out there in the light of day, where people were no doubt still looking for John, and Rivera, if no one else, was beginning to wonder about her. Suddenly the idea of another twenty-four hours locked in these rooms with John seemed very attractive.

When he came to find her she told him so. She said, “I’d actually like to show you some of our footage, especially the stuff we shot in Savannah. I’m thinking it might be pretty effective to use it layered with passages from Miss Maddie’s autobiography— Oh. Um, I never did get around to telling you about that.”

He looked more intrigued than concerned. “Miss Maddie wrote an autobiography?”

As Angie explained, John studied the floor. There was nothing frightening in that, especially, but she wished she had not brought up the subject of work so soon. The day ahead of them would be hard enough.

John raised his head and looked at her, his expression thoughtful, alert, almost severe in its sincerity. He said, “I know how important this is, I do. But just for today, can we forget work?”

She walked up to him and put her face to his shoulder and her arms around his waist. And nodded, because she didn’t trust herself to talk.

“Hey,” he said gently, rubbing her back. “Did I manage to say the right thing?”

She nodded again, cleared her throat, and leaned back to look at him. “Thank you.”

“Why, you’re welcome, darlin’. Do you want to know about Caroline?”

“Not especially,” Angie said. “But you better tell me anyway.”

“It was Miss Junie on the phone. Caroline was out running.”

“Running.”

“After early mass, according to her mama.”

Angie said, “So, did Miss Junie take you apart?”

“Oddly enough, no,” John said. “Miss Junie said, and I quote: ‘We had a lovely going-away party, I’m so sorry you had to miss it.’ She still sees me as the injured party.”

“You did tell her why you weren’t there?”

“Sure. Later today the Rose girls will be paying Patty-Cake a visit, you can be sure of that. Whatever vitriol was headed my way has been effectively diverted.”

“You are bad,” Angie said, laughing.

“Listen.” He lifted his head. “Here comes Rob.”

 

From the other side of the door came the sound of muffled voices and something being dragged along the floor. Angie was just starting to realize that she wasn’t hearing Rob Grant’s voice when a key turned in the lock and the door swung open.

“… hell if I know,” Tony was saying.

His head was turned away so he didn’t see Angie and John standing there, but Harriet Rose Darling did. Her eyes went very large and very round, and the color drained out of her face.

“What?” said Tony, and turned. He blinked.

“Hey, Ang,” he said. “John. Great minds, and all that.” He managed a half grin.

Harriet said, “John Grant, what are you doing here with Angie?”

“The same thing you were going to do here with Tony,” Angie said. “If I’m busted, so are you.”

Harriet flushed, her mouth in a perfect circle, but Tony put himself in front of her before she could say anything more. “We’ll have to go to plan B. See y’all later.” He pulled the door shut and opened it again immediately, ducking his head apologetically. “Uh, there’s something here I need to—”

Angie grabbed the remaining condoms off the coffee table and handed them over without a word. Tony wiggled his eyebrows at John, and closed the door again.

Angie said, “Well, that explains a few things.”

“And confuses others.” John snorted, and then they were laughing so hard, they had to hold on to each other. They were still laughing when a hesitant knock at the door interrupted them. John opened it. Rob and Kai were standing in the hall, looking at a high-backed wooden chair. The one, Angie assumed, that Patty-Cake had wedged under the doorknob.

Rob said, “How hard did you try to get out, anyway?”

“I am not an attorney, but I advise you anyway, don’t answer.” Kai held up a large white paper box. “We brought breakfast from the bakery.”

“I trust y’all have coffee,” said Lucy, swooping in. “Don’t make a face, John, and don’t blame your brother. I wasn’t about to be left out. A boy needs his mama at a time like this, I don’t care how old he is.”

John looked remarkably sanguine at the unexpected sight of his mother. “I’m thirty-six, Mama, which means you must be—”

“Now, don’t be fresh,” Lucy said, frowning at him. She came over to Angie and hugged her. “Sit down and eat something, sugar. John, you look like a bum.”

“Why, thank you, Mama,” John said dryly. He lifted the lid of the bakery box and peered inside. “Speaking of bums, where is Sam?”

“Stop,” Lucy said. “I’m not going to let you rile me, not this morning. I sent Sam home. This kind of family melodrama gives him hives.”

“And he was getting on your nerves,” Kai volunteered.

“That too.” Lucy winked at John. “Y’all missed one hell of a party yesterday.”

“So Miss Junie tells me.” He turned to his brother. “How did Caroline seem to you?”

“Transformed,” Rob said. “She wouldn’t let anybody leave. Insisted they all stay and have a good time. I know I did. Or I would have, if I hadn’t been worried about you.”

Lucy and Kai laughed at Rob openly, until he held up his hands to ask for mercy.

Angie said, “Will somebody please give me the highlights?”

John was glad to see Angie relax as Lucy and Kai worked together, the oddest relay team imaginable, to reconstruct the non-wedding of the season at Old Roses. She was leaning against him, her skin cool against his, and John was sorry that she had found his phone, even sorrier that Tony had showed up to reclaim his condoms. They’d have to stop at the drugstore on the way home.

“Now, my personal favorite part would have to be when Patty-Cake fainted dead away,” Lucy was saying. “Just as Caroline said she was moving north to start cooking school, Patty-Cake went down for the count.”

“I think Tony got that on video,” Rob said. “You’ll be able to see it for yourself.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” John said. “Almost as much as I am to her resignation.”

“So now what will you two do?” Kai said cheerfully, looking from John to Angie and back again. “Everybody thinks you ran away together, of course. “

Angie said, “Oh, great.” John could feel her tense, humming like an electric current where their arms touched.

Lucy leaned over and squeezed her hand. “Sugar, I have been coping with Ogilvie gossips for all of my life, and my best advice is this: Don’t disappoint them.”

Rob groaned, but Lucy ignored him. “If they want to believe you two have run off together, then run off. It will make them happy and stop the talk quicker than trying to convince them otherwise. Beyond that, everybody loves a happy ending, and you two certainly deserve one.”

“Unless you do not want to be together,” Kai said, equably. “In which case, such a solution would be counterproductive.”

Angie took a deep breath, while John found he could hardly breathe at all, wondering what was about to go wrong. She sat up very straight, took one of John’s hands between her own, and squeezed it. “That may be the most unorthodox bit of advice I’ve ever heard,” she said. “But it makes sense to me.”

“It does?” John heard his voice crack. “What about not being rushed, and needing time, and all the rest of the stuff your mother told me?”

She drew in a shaky breath and smiled. “John, you’ve been hanging in my closet for five years,” she said. “If you’re ready to come on out, so am I.”

Lucy put a hand to her throat, a delicate, desperate gesture. She said, “Closet?”

“It’s not what you think, Mama,” John said, laughing. “Not at all.”

 

Angie kissed John good-bye and went back to Ivy House on her own, because, she told him, she was worried about Rivera. It happened to be true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. John, who had developed the beginnings of an insight into the way she thought and the things she needed, kissed her soundly and then whispered into her ear so that nobody else could hear.

“Take whatever time you need,” he said. “You call me when you’re ready.”

All the way back to Ivy House, Angie thought about the strange state of being ready, about being willing to take the next step, prepared for almost anything. To call John Grant on the phone and tell him he could come and get her now. There were some hard discussions ahead of them, decisions to be made that wouldn’t be easy, but even that didn’t scare her anymore. The only thing with the power to frighten her was the thought of Rivera. Rivera, who was like a sister to her, who had helped her through so much, was alone at Ivy House, coping by herself with a broken heart.

But maybe not. There seemed to be some kind of party going on at Ivy House. There was music loud enough to be heard on the street, and when Angie opened the door, the sound of women’s voices raised in laughter and talk was clear.

She found them on the screened porch. Rivera and Jude, Miss Zula and Miss Maddie, and in a corner of the old striped couch, with her bare feet tucked under her, Caroline Rose, laughing, her color high and her eyes bright.

“Miss Junie thinks you’re out running,” Angie said to her.

“This is where I ran to,” Caroline said. “I just stopped by to say hello.”

To Angie Miss Zula said, “Girl, we thought you’d never show up.”

“Where have you got John hid away?” said Jude Parris.

“Don’t you be thinking about John Grant,” said Miss Zula. “Now that he’s good and settled.”

“That’s not what I want him for,” said Jude. “I want to talk to him about applying for one of the new film positions.”

“He would have been there yesterday,” Angie said, mostly to Caroline. “But Patty-Cake got in the way.”

“Mama told me. Now she’s so mad at Patty-Cake it takes some of the pressure off me. And she’s just about ready to canonize John for putting up with me for so long anyway.”

Rivera had been sitting quietly through all this, smiling broadly at everything and everybody. Angie said, “Rivera, aren’t you going to say anything to me at all?”

And then Rivera was there, her strong arms reassuring and welcoming, her smile unforced and full of promise. “Sure I do,” said Rivera. “Good things come to those who don’t panic.”

“Girls, sit down,” said Miss Maddie. “Jude, give Angie a glass of wine.”

“Wine would be nice,” Angie said. “Some answers would be even better.” She looked right at Miss Zula when she said this, and for once got a look in return that was completely open.

“You’ll get those, too,” Miss Zula said. “Today, Angeline Mangiamele, you’ll get just about anything you can bring yourself to ask for.”