Mama was standing at the commode in tears when I got home.
“I simply can’t take any more!”
“What now?” I asked, weary of all the problems that had assailed us.
She held out a letter written on see-through paper and fragrant with old-lady perfume.
“Aunt Hattie is coming.”
I rubbed my head that had developed a dull ache during my visit with Carmen.
“That’s bad.”
Mama shook her head. “Worse than bad. She’s coming to inspect you—us—to see if we’re living according to her standards of propriety.”
“Who cares about her standards?”
“I do. If she finds us up to snuff, she might leave us a little something in her will.”
“Are we her only kin?”
“The only surviving, since her nephew, Michael, and his parents died. You remember, his father was my brother, Hamilton Lawrence the third. We wouldn’t be in her will at all if Michael were still living, you can count on that. He was her pride and joy. Michael Durell Lawrence.”
“What did they die of?”
“A boating accident on Lake Pontchartrain.”
“If we’re her only kin, then who else could she leave it to?”
“The DAR, or the Colonial Dames of the Seventeenth Century, or the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They’d be the most likely candidates.”
“When is she coming?”
“June fifteenth, for at least two weeks, maybe more.”
“I’ll be six months along by then!”
Mama flailed the air with both hands. “Why do you think I’m beside myself?”
“What are we going to do?”
“Send you to a home for unwed mothers, that’s what.”
“But where will you tell her I am?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
The room swayed. I leaned against the commode. Mama grabbed my arm.
“Are you going to faint?”
“No, I just got a little dizzy. It’s passing now.”
She led me toward the den. “You need to sit down.”
“How much would ‘a little something’ be?” I asked when I was sitting on the couch across from the windows.
“It could be quite a bit. Her father, your great-grandfather, left her well off. He was a prominent man in the shipping industry down in New Orleans. Did I tell you, she was once a Mardi Gras Queen? She’s so old now, she might not have two nickels left to rub together. If she does have any money left, you’d think she’d fix up that rundown family mansion in the Garden District she lives in, if for no other reason than to keep up appearances. Money can buy everything in this life.”
“Money can’t buy happiness,” I said.
She turned an astonished face on me. “But it can certainly buy a reasonable facsimile. Where did you ever hear such falderal?”
“Aunt Hattie told me herself, when I was visiting her that summer.”
“Oh dear. Maybe that means she doesn’t have much.”
“You’re always the pessimist,” I said. “It could mean she has money and it hasn’t brought her any happiness.”
Mama eased down into her chair and gazed out the window.
“Funny you heard from her today,” I said. “I was just talking about her.”
Mama raised one eyebrow. “To whom?”
“Carmen.”
“And what were you telling Miss Carmen about your Great-Aunt Hattie.”
Even now, at sixteen and pregnant, I didn’t feel I could tell Mama about seeing the diaper changed.
“Only that I’d visited her in New Orleans.”
“Where did you run into Miss Carmen?”
I could scream when Mama quizzed me like that.
“I didn’t. I went to see her. She is my sister. I guess I can see her when I want to.”
Mama lifted an imperious chin. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
I looked her straight in the eye. “I’m going to see my father again too.”
“You love to provoke me, don’t you?”
“I didn’t do it to provoke you. Is Aunt Hattie sick?”
“She doesn’t indicate she is.”
“Then why is she talking about leaving stuff?”
“She isn’t. I’m just ruminating because she’s old enough to be thinking about it. She turns eighty on June twenty-third.”
“I’d forgotten we have the same birthday.”
“If she gets wind of your condition, she’ll think we live in moral degeneration, and she’ll renounce us on the spot.”
“She must already think that, given your scandalous divorce,” I said in self-defense, deliberately trying to rattle Mama’s cage.
She bristled. “To the self-righteous, who consider themselves morally superior, divorce pales in comparison to pregnancy out of wedlock. And now, just as she must be thinking enough time has passed since the divorce that she can visit us without bringing shame down on her own head by association, you turn up pregnant.”
“She’s an old maid, fixin’ to be a great, great aunt. Won’t a new baby carry some weight with her?”
“Not an ounce. Be serious, Julie. If nothing else has proved it to you, this letter from Aunt Hattie must. You absolutely have to go to a home or reveal the situation to Mr. Budrow and get him to marry you.”
We sat in silence for a long while. Finally, I asked, “Seriously, if I do go to a home, where will you tell her I am?”
Mama’s face shattered. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Hand me that box of tissues, will you?”
“I guess you could say I’m at that girls’ school in Dallas you once threatened to send me to.”
“School is not in session in June!”
A knock sounded at the front door.
“Who could that be?” Mama said, jerking upright and wiping her eyes.
From the living room we could see the tall figure peeping in through the glass in our front door. The lights were off, in spite of the dreary afternoon. I didn’t feel like having company. Maybe he couldn’t see us.
“Whose face is that, looking in?” Mama asked from behind me.
“Julie,” he called, knocking again, almost frantically. “Julie, I know you’re in there.”
It was Farrel. I moved to the door and opened it.
“Why do you all keep your doors locked in the daytime?” he demanded through the screen. “This is El Dorado.”
An entire essay flashed through my mind explaining that we’d locked our doors for years because of my father’s violence and the whole sordid story, but I only said, “Force of habit, I guess.”
We stood, looking at each other, the damp cold of February seeping into the house. He shivered, and I pushed open the screen door.
“Sorry to bust in like this,” he said, “but I’ve called and called. Don’t you ever answer the phone? Finally, I decided this was the only way to see you.”
He stepped inside and hesitated, looking past me toward the dining room. Mama stood there in the doorway, frowning like she had acute appendicitis.
Given the state she was in, the idea of latching on to him as a solution for my problem might overcome her. Temptation was working on me too. If he married me, it would get me out of this mess. People would still count on their fingers and know I’d had to get married, but I would no longer be unmarried and pregnant.
“I’ve left messages too,” he said, staring accusingly at Mama.
I took a deep breath. “I got them.”
“Then why didn’t you—?”
“Sit down, Mr. Budrow,” Mama broke in. “You young folks can talk in the living room. I’ll go back to the den and my easy chair.”
An inch of me relaxed once she was gone. Farrel sat on the antique sofa in front of the windows. His long legs made him appear weirdly out of place on that delicate piece of furniture. I perched on the edge of a chair on the opposite side of the room.
“I see,” he said with a wry smile.
“You see what?”
“How it’s going to be. You over there and me here.”
I ignored his remark and pointed to the gas heater recessed inside the carved, wooden mantle.
“It’s funny.”
He cocked his head. “What is?”
“How, as a child, I believed Santa came down a chimney above that stove. But there is no chimney. My mind saw it as a real fireplace, complete with ashes on the hearth.”
He stared at the flames running blue and orange up the platelets of the stove.
“I guess you’re still ticked off at me about that fool dance.”
“You mean your betrayal?” I said.
“I’ve told you it didn’t mean nothing to me. She asked me to go. What was I going to say?”
“‘No,’ for starters, followed by ‘I’m taking Julie.’”
“Yeah, well . . . I . . .” He broke off, looking aggravated.
Maylene said he’d asked her. He said she’d asked him. I would never know who to believe. It didn’t matter. Betrayal was betrayal, no matter how it came to pass.
“So, what possessed you to come here today?” I asked, remembering the hundreds of times I’d have given anything if he’d dropped by to see me.
“Don’t be like that.”
“Like what?”
“Sarcastic. I came because I heard you were sick at school the other day.”
“Who told you about that?” I demanded, shrinking at the sudden shrillness in my voice.
“A little bird,” he said, his face sober.
“No, tell me who told you.”
“Why are you getting upset?” he countered.
“I’m not the least bit upset.”
“You’re yelling, and you look like you’re about to cry. Tell me what was wrong.”
“Nothing was wrong. What could be wrong?” I said, straining every nerve to sound casual. “I just . . . nothing.”
I hated the look of dread on his face. His gaze felt like a probe drilling into my brain, to ferret out the truth that lay hiding there.
“You know what could be wrong.” He leaned forward. “Julie, is everything okay? Tell me.”
What if I told him and he wanted me to get an abortion? I didn’t think he would, but what if he did? I wouldn’t be able to bear the heartbreak of hearing him suggest that to me.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“You threw up because of nothing?”
“It was just . . .”
“Just what?”
On the other hand, maybe Carmen was right. Maybe I should tell him. Maybe, after the part he played in Frances’s death, he wanted to do the right thing by me. Maybe he did have feelings for me, after all. Maybe he even loved me. Why else would he be quizzing me like this? If I were to trust him and tell him, I wouldn’t have to go to a home. I could be Mrs. Budrow and have him and his baby. I opened my mouth to spill all, but he spoke first.
“Was it that time of the month?”
The gleam of hope flickering in his eyes felt like a dull knife cutting into my guts. He didn’t love me.
“Uh . . . yeah. Right. That’s what it was.”
Relief swamped his entire body, evidenced by his slump into the back of the sofa.
“Thank God,” he said.
Never in my life had I witnessed such relief.
“Well,” he began, brightening up. “I have some news, then.”
“What news?”
“I’ve got a job!” His whole aspect changed from fear to jubilation.
“A job?”
“Roughnecking with a drilling company out of Texas that bought up some leases to drill for oil here in Arkansas. It’ll be great money! You know, Julie, I don’t let many folks see who I really am. You’re special to me, so I’m going to tell you something I’ve only ever said to one other human soul, and that’s Don.”
He dropped his head into his hands for a long, thoughtful moment. I waited, barely able to draw a deep breath. When he raised his head, he looked at me with intensity burning in his eyes.
“The driving force of my life is to pull myself up out of the mire of poverty me and my folks and my brothers and sisters are trapped in. My new job will make me enough money that, after only a year of living here at home and working the rigs, I’ll have enough to go to the university next year.”
His voice built with enthusiasm. “None of my folks has ever had a college education. I’ll be the first. I want to get my degree in engineering. I’ll have to go to school and work too. But maybe, IF I make my grades, and IF I can save enough money, I’ll be able to get my master’s and work for General Electric someday and have a big house on the right side of the tracks . . .”
He broke off. His face burned red. He was hurt by what people said about his family.
I felt numb. No way could I tell him now and shatter his dream.
“You’re going to be living here in town for the next year?”
“Yep. How’s that for good news?” He stared at me with bright eyes.
That left me no alternative except to go to the home for unwed mothers. I pulled out all the stops in the smile department and put on my best act.
“That’s wonderful news, Farrel. I hope all your dreams come true. I’m glad you shared them with me.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You’re sure you’re okay? You’re not fibbing to me, are you? I want to do right by you.”
That sealed it, left not a shred of doubt I was doing the right thing. No woman on earth would want that kind of proposal. All I could manage was a nod.
“You could make one of my dreams come true right now,” he said.
I couldn’t even muster a smile. “How?”
He patted the burgundy silk cushion beside him. “Come over here, and I’ll show you.”
“I can’t,” I said in a flat voice.
He looked puzzled. “Why?”
“You know why.”
It seemed a struggle for him to speak the words.
“It’s not like you think.”
“What do I think?”
“That I’ve got a wooden heart. That what’s between us don’t mean nothing to me.”
“You have a funny way of showing it, especially considering your theme song.”
“What theme song?”
“Don’t tell me, show me.”
“Aw, I didn’t mean nothing by that. I would tell you.”
But he didn’t. He clapped his knees and, with a big smile, heaved up from the sofa.
“I’ll call you.”
I followed him to the door. Bending, he put his lips on mine in the old way, the way that said he loved me, even if he didn’t speak the words. The same familiar fire shot through my body as he crushed me close.
We broke apart, and he started out the door. Deep inside, the longing I always felt when I was with him reared up again, making me ache to pull him back and tell him the truth. To hell with his dreams! But I hesitated an instant too long, and he moved out of reach.