A well-lit corner of the produce department at Dilly’s Fine Foods had been rearranged to function as a location set. There was a long cutting board counter set against a backdrop of a refrigerated rack of lettuce in a vivid and varied palate of green. There was a camera set up on a tripod and numerous lights and reflectors. Beneath it all ran a web of lines and cables that Wilma found difficult to maneuver the oxygen tank through.
The director hollered at one of the young grips to help her.
“I can take this thing off,” she told the director.
He shook his head. “I think you should go with it,” he said. “It’s not unsightly and it’s defining. We don’t want you to be confused with a half million other old ladies in this town.”
Wilma would have scolded the young man for such a statement, but he’d already turned to something else. And she supposed that she wasn’t all that different from the half million other old ladies in the community. Besides, the director, Kenny, was twenty-eight going on fourteen and undoubtedly a summa cum laude graduate of the Joan Rivers School of Tact.
Homer had been as good as his word. When he got an idea, he went forward with it at breakneck speed. Wilma had hardly had time to even roll the idea over in her mind before he had her shooting a studio test.
Kenny had initially been skeptical, but it seemed that Wilma had one of those faces that worked on camera.
“Did anyone ever tell you, you look like Lauren Bacall,” Kenny had said. “I mean how she looks now, not back when she looked good.”
The guy was not astute enough to pick up on either the icy smile or the thickly layered sarcasm in her “thank you, Kenny.” But he was good at his job. He made her attractive on screen and made her produce beautiful.
Today they would shoot all five of the week’s one minute segments. It was only five minutes of air time, but even with good luck it would take them most of the day to do it. There was no writer, no specific dialog assigned. A board in large, easy to read letters hung beneath the camera. It said: Stop by the produce department of your Dilly’s Fine Foods today. It was the only line that she was definitely supposed to get in.
In the first spot she would be comparing four kinds of lettuce. The next would show how to peel and seed a cantaloupe. Then she’d demonstrate the best way to thoroughly wash spinach. Next she would compare and contrast different varieties of peaches. And finally, for the Friday spot, she’d present the spotlight produce of the week. This was an opportunity to present some unusual fruits and vegetables. Today’s choice was gobo root.
Surprisingly, Wilma wasn’t nervous at all. She was feeling well and she knew she looked good. They’d worked out a schedule where Amber could stay home with Jet the day that Wilma had to work. Jet liked that a lot. And it also made Amber available to help Wilma with her hair and makeup. Homer sent a limo to pick her up. That undoubtedly perked up the neighbors in Mahncke Park.
The grip, who was about Wilma’s height, stood in her place behind the counter for much of the set up. But when it was time to light the set, it had to be Wilma standing there, her hair, her clothes, her oxygen tubes. Finally it was time. She did her part without a hitch. Then it was back to waiting.
To avoid having the same clothes every day in a week, Wilma started out in a gray suit with a scarf. For the second segment she would lose the scarf. In the third she would have the scarf and not the jacket. The Thursday and Friday spots, she had a pale blue blazer and a neckerchief.
It was a long day for a woman of her age and health, but Wilma stood it well. She spent most of it just sitting around. And she used that time to peruse the produce department and make notes about future spots she might do.
It was afternoon during the taping of the Thursday spot that her attention was inexplicably drawn away from the camera, and she saw Max Roper on the edge of the crowd watching her.
She flubbed slightly, although she recovered quickly enough that Kenny didn’t insist they shoot again. But she wanted to. On the second take, she came through perfectly.
As the team reworked the set, moving out the peach baskets for the collection of exotic vegetables, Wilma motioned Max to come to her.
“I’m going to take a minute,” she told Kenny.
He acquiesced, distracted.
Wilma was trying to negotiate the wheels of the oxygen tank over the cables on the floor.
“Let me help you with that,” Max said, picking it up for her and carrying it.
“I love the way you men always want to take charge,” she teased. “Whether it gives you a hernia or not.”
“Not,” he assured her.
“This thing is pretty handy,” she told him, indicating the tank. “But it’s not something that fits neatly in my hip pocket.”
He nodded agreement.
They made their way to the little coffee bar between the produce section and the front entry hall. Max found her a stool at the end of the counter and then dragged one from between two customers farther down.
Wilma watched him. She had missed the sight of him, the tempo of his movements and the road map of lines upon his face. She’d never seen him outside of the Empire Bar, where dark shadows could disguise age and wear. But even in the clearly lit fluorescence of the supermarket, he still looked good to her.
He smiled as he pulled his stool up beside her and took a seat.
“You’re looking well,” he told her.
She laughed, lightly, but her tone was wry. “Yes, I’m one of those glamorous TV personalities,” she said.
He never missed her sarcasm and raised a sardonic eyebrow in response.
They ordered coffees. Wilma got a straw with hers. It was pretty hot to drink that way, but it kept her from messing her lipstick.
“Homer told me that you’d been sick,” he admitted more seriously. “I hope I wasn’t the cause of that.”
“I have emphysema,” she told him. “It may have some links with heart disease, but not, I don’t think, of the broken variety.”
“Did I break your heart?” he asked.
Wilma shrugged. “A lady would never tell,” she said. “And a smart women wouldn’t either. I leave it to you to decide which grouping I fall into.”
“Truthfully, Wilma,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m a sucker for either designation.”
They laughed together.
“It seems I owe you an apology,” he said. “Homer told me that you didn’t know he was my son.”
Wilma nodded. “I had no idea,” she told him.
“I’m very proud of him, but that’s between he and I. I don’t go around boasting that he’s my kid,” Max said.
“You’re not really the boastful type,” Wilma pointed out.
Max shrugged. “That’s not the reason,” he said. “As you can obviously see, he’s very wealthy and successful. A lot of people have come my way trying to use me to get to him with a plea or a deal or a scam.”
“I’m sure,” Wilma agreed.
“So I am cautious about mentioning him unless there is some reason to do so,” he said.
“Some people would be delighted to use their child’s name to feather their own nest,” she said.
“Maybe so,” Max said. “But my nest has feathers enough for me. Homer takes care of his mother, a slew of younger half brothers and sisters and a family of his own. I’m not a big fish, like he is, but I’ve made a place for myself in this pond.”
Wilma wouldn’t have admired him more if he’d told her he’d won the Nobel Prize.
“So anyway,” Max continued. “As soon as you told me about your produce obsession, I knew that Homer would find some really good use for you.”
He hooked one boot heel on the stool railing and crossed a long, lean limb over his knee.
“When you went on and on about how much you admire the stores,” he continued, “I knew you and Homer were a perfect match. He tries to surround his business with very smart, very unique and interesting people. It’s the secret of his success. I knew he’d be crazy about you. But I worried.”
“Because you weren’t sure that you could trust me,” Wilma said.
Max nodded. “From the beginning you were mysterious,” he pointed out. “You just showed up out of nowhere. You were short on purpose and details. And long on those melt-a-cowboy smiles. I knew that you were up to something. You had to be. It all fit so well that it made me suspicious.”
He hesitated, eyeing her speculatively.
“When it was obvious that you’d checked up on me, that you knew a lot more about me than I’d told you or that you’d revealed about yourself, I immediately thought that I was being set up,” he said.
Wilma nodded slowly and made no comment.
“There are men, I suppose, who could just leave it at that,” he told her. “They could just admit that they jumped to the wrong conclusion and move on. But it seems that we still don’t have the whole story straight here. And until we do, I don’t think I can just let it go.”
“All right,” Wilma said. “I’ll tell you the whole story.”
Max folded his arms across his chest as if ready to patiently hear her out.
She took a deep breath.
“Well, it’s true that I didn’t know that dear Homer, whom I adore, by the way, was your son,” she said. “I’m sure that you are very proud and rightfully so.”
Max nodded.
“I was somewhat mysterious and evasive with you,” she said. “And that was not accident. I did it because I didn’t want you to find out about my daughter.”
Max looked puzzled. “You told me that you had a daughter,” he pointed out. “You had some rather nice things to say about her. And made it clear that you don’t think she’s much like you.”
“She isn’t like me,” Wilma said. “And yes, I did tell you about her. But I didn’t say that she worked in your office.”
Max’s eyes widened.
“Ellen Jameson is my child.”
“Well, that’s certainly a surprise,” he said. “But, you know, I thought there was something strangely coincidental about her and you.”
“I’m glad you never caught on,” Wilma said. “I think that maybe she has, but I haven’t revealed a word to her.”
“So Ellen told you about me?” Max asked.
“She talked about you from time to time. Just enough to make me interested,” Wilma said. “And she’d also mentioned what a fount of information your receptionist, Yolanda, can be. I got the complete lowdown scoop on you from Yolanda, including the detail about your ranch in Uvalde. She didn’t mention Homer Dilly.”
“Because she’s been specifically told not to,” Max said. “Yolanda’s a talker, there’s no getting away from that. But when you work among people’s financial records and their personal papers, you have to be able to keep a confidentiality. When something is not to be told, you couldn’t pry it out of that girl with torture.”
Wilma nodded. “An interesting twist to her character,” she said.
“I could never have kept her at my office,” Max said, “if she wasn’t one hundred percent trustworthy and discreet about the things that matter.”
That certainly was true.
“So Ellen is your daughter,” Max said. “What I don’t understand is why that had to be a secret?”
“Well, you might not want to get involved with someone connected to your office,” Wilma said.
Max raised an eyebrow at that. The answer wasn’t particularly convincing.
“More than just you finding out about Ellen,” Wilma admitted. “I didn’t want Ellen finding out about you.”
“Why not?”
She took another sip of the hot coffee through the straw as she formed her answer.
“I told you that my life had been a lot like a game of musical chairs,” she reminded him. “What I probably didn’t make clear was that at every pause in the music there was a new man in my life. I’m sort of the Mommie Dearest version of the Old Woman in the Shoe. I’ve had so many husbands my children didn’t know what to do.”
Max shrugged. “At our age, a lot of folks can have a checkered history.”
“For me, I think, it was more than that,” Wilma answered, honestly. “As I told you, I never really had any kind of career or goal or even any real dreams for myself. I had my kids by accident and raised them basically on automatic pilot. I just kept moving from man to man. That was all I knew to do with myself, with my life. Whenever things got bad, I’d find me a new fellow, figuring that would make things better.”
Max was listening intently.
“When my last husband passed away,” she said. “I had a little house and my social security. I just figured that I’d sort of retired from the love-em-and-leave-em lifestyle.”
Wilma hesitated.
“I guess you know some of the trouble my daughter has been having lately,” she said. “She’s a really fine woman. She’s a much better daughter than I have ever deserved. Her husband’s death and the bankruptcy and most recently the threat of losing my little house, is a lot to put on a woman who’s been through so much in the past few years. I wanted to fix things for her. I wanted to help.”
Wilma gestured toward the set in the produce section. “It never occurred to me that I might be able to bring home a paycheck to put in the kitty. The only way I knew how to get money was to marry some.”
She sighed heavily.
“So the long and short of it, Max Roper, is that I wasn’t being sneaky, conniving and underhanded because I was trying to get hooked up with a job from your son. I was being sneaky, conniving and underhanded so that I could get you to fall for me.”
Max slowly shook his head and chuckled. Disbelief evident in the sound of his voice.
“Wilma, Wilma, Wilma,” he said. “You are really something else.”
“I guess,” she admitted. “Seduction isn’t quite as straightforward as it used to be.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Max told her. “It worked, didn’t it?”
The lovely old iron bridge had been built in the 1890s with elaborate cresting and finials to span the San Antonio River at St. Mary’s Street. It served that purpose for more than forty years, when it was abruptly removed from that busy crossing and relocated in Brackenridge Park to allow picnickers to drive their cars on either bank of the river.
Ellen parked the Chrysler Concorde on the far side. She and Wilma, Amber and Jet got out and began unloading their celebration repast. They had brought charcoal to make a fire, hot dogs to roast, a watermelon to cut, homemade piccalilli relish and macaroni salad.
Once the food was unloaded, they hesitated.
“You want to do it before or after we eat,” Wilma asked Ellen.
Ellen looked at Amber, as if for guidance. “I think we should eat first,” she said. “It’s late and I’m sure Jet is hungry.”
Amber nodded agreement.
Within minutes they got the charcoal going though, of course, it wasn’t really ready for cooking for another half hour.
Jet and her mother spent the time getting a Rugrats kite into the air.
Wilma sat on the picnic bench watching them and smoking. Ellen was watching them, too.
“They are like two kids instead of mother and daughter,” she said. “Amber is having as much fun as Jet.”
“It’s time she had some fun,” Wilma said. “You can’t get too much of it in one lifetime.”
Ellen could not argue with that.
The afternoon was glorious. Officially it was autumn, but in south Texas summer was just beginning to wind down. School was back in session. The absence of other children and the usual crowds made noon on a Thursday the ideal time to visit the park.
Amber was on her new schedule. The previous week she’d taken classes for the first time in five years.
Wilma’s produce spots were running regularly on television. She wasn’t exactly a celebrity, but people recognized her when she and Jet made their visits to the grocery store.
Ellen continued to keep moving forward. One foot in front of the other. She didn’t know where she was going, but she was determined to get there.
Hey up there! Thanks for the sunshine and the cool breeze, she prayed. It’s a great day for moving on.
“I think it’s time to be roasting some dogs!” she called out to the two healthy, laughing children scampering in the grass.
“Let’s roast some dog!” Amber hollered back.
Jet giggled and came running. “I wanna roast a dog,” she said. “Lemme roast a dog.”
Wilma had cut some hickory limbs from their backyard tree for “weinie roasters.” Ellen slid the hot dogs on the end of the sticks and allowed Jet to hold hers over the little fire. The four-year-old thought it was great fun. It would have undoubtedly been quicker just to grill them, but what fun was cooking hot dogs if no sticks were involved.
And fun was what Jet Jameson was after today. She was into knock-knock and didn’t let up once during the meal.
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Yaw.”
“Yaw who?”
“You don’t have to get so excited about it!”
Jet squirted more mustard on her buns than any of the women had ever consumed at one sitting in their lives. And she declared adamantly that the only food in the world better than her grandmother’s piccalilli was her mother’s macaroni salad.
For dessert there was watermelon. And once the seed spitting contest commenced, even Ellen was roped into participation.
The meal was one long pleasant memory.
Wilma was hugging Jet.
“You are the sweetest baby girl in the world,” she told her.
“I’m not a baby girl, Wil-ma,” Jet protested. “You forget. I’m four now.”
“That’s right,” Wilma said. “I still owe you a birthday gift, don’t I?”
Jet nodded. “I remember you promised me anything I wanted,” she said.
“That’s exactly right,” Wilma said. “Have you thought about what you want?”
“Uh huh,” the child said. “I’ve been thinking about asking you.”
“Well, ask me,” she encouraged.
Before Jet had time to do that, Ellen interceded. “I hope it doesn’t cost too much money,” she said gently. “’Cause Wilma doesn’t have a lot of money.”
“Just let the child say what she wants,” Wilma scolded. “We’ll worry about what it costs when we go out to buy it.”
“I don’t know if it costs anything,” Jet said. “I don’t think it costs anything.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Wilma said. “What is it that you want?”
“I want you to mind the doctor, Wil-ma, so you won’t die,” Jet said in her sweet, little girl voice. “I want you to quit smoking your cigarettes.”
The silence in the park was nearly deafening.
Ellen wanted to pipe in, to say something, to assure Wilma that they hadn’t put the child up to it, to explain to Jet that some things you ask for, people just aren’t able to give to you. She did none of that. She watched Wilma gaze down into the bright, brown eyes of her little granddaughter for a very long moment. She laid her aged, wrinkled hand over the little girl’s tiny one.
“I…I’ll try,” Wilma said. “I will try.”
Amber set her hand upon Wilma’s. “That’s all any of us can do,” she said. “We just try.”
Ellen topped their hands with her own. “Somehow I just know that we’ll succeed,” she said. “But then, you know what an optimist I am.”
They all laughed.
Wilma pulled the pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and threw them on the charcoal fire. Within seconds they were a brightly glowing flame.
“I think it’s time now,” Ellen said.
From a secured box in the trunk of the car, wrapped in a blanket, Amber pulled out the urn and handed it to her mother.
“You’re sure?” Amber asked. “You’re ready?”
Ellen nodded.
Jet clasped her mother’s hand and held Groovy Girl in the other. Wilma pulled her tank. They walked back to the bridge, stopping in the middle of the span.
“There’s no place that’s more the heart of San Antonio than the river,” Ellen said. “I can’t imagine anyplace else that Paul would rather be.”
She opened the top of the urn. Before she’d even tilted it, the breeze had reached down inside and grabbed the light gray ash and whisked it away. Ellen turned it sideways and in an instant the ashes were a fine cloud floating above the water. And then they were the water.
“Goodbye, Grandpa,” Jet said, clapping, delighted.
Ellen followed her lead. “Goodbye, Paul,” she whispered. “I’m moving on.”
The women stood there on the bridge together for long moments, just watching the water hurrying its way downstream.
“What are you going to do with this?” Amber asked, indicating the urn.
Ellen shrugged. “I’ll keep it as a remembrance, I guess.”
“Paul was in there five years,” Wilma pointed out. “I’ve hardly stayed anywhere that long in my life.”
Her words broke the solemnity of the moment. Ellen hugged her.
“Look! Come look!” Jet called out, motioning to them excitedly.
“What is it?”
“Hurry, come look,” the little girl insisted.
All three women did.
Resting on the pavement next to the curved metal bridge brace were four pennies. Each one face up.