I wave goodbye to my old friends, watching as the cement truck chugs out of sight of the big Tudor house on Blue Forest Road. Approaching the carport with my luggage, I prepare to meet head-on these dear people I see for a few days once a year. They will greet me with all the love and understanding they can muster for someone who left the small-town south for a life of smog and godlessness. They will wait on me hand and foot, call in long-lost friends and relatives, and for the time being pretend, as they always do, that their prodigal son has made a valiant life for himself.
But this time no one is here to greet me. I glance into the top of the monkey pine my grandmother Stalworth planted near the swimming pool. A hawk swirls in the edges of a cloud beyond the uppermost bough. If I were in one of the spaghetti westerns I spent time with as a boy, I’d check the water in my canteen and pray the hawk sensed something else half-dead in the area.
A brand-spanking-new ivory pickup sparkles next to my mother’s five-year-old powder blue Lincoln Town Car. My father has bought a new pickup every other October as long as I can remember, as soon as the new models come out. He studies the brochures all summer long from his La-Z-Boy in the living room. He falls asleep for his afternoon nap looking at them, and they’re the first thing he picks up when he pads out of the bedroom at five thirty a.m.
It’s cool in the carport, and it smells like gasoline and pool chlorine. I hear a phlegmy wheeze from the adjacent storage room my father calls the Little House, its door standing ajar. A tiny sneeze from the area of the refrigerator freezer summons me closer. A mangy-looking Yorkie mix carefully creeps down the two cement steps to the carport, baring its two remaining teeth as I gingerly set down my luggage. It smells old, wet, and sour.
“No way,” I say out loud. The beast moves an inch closer with a low growl, flies swarming around her oozing eyes and a dirty butt she’s too old to clean.
“Here, Puffy-Puffy-Puffy!” Jewel Ann crows from her house across the road.
There’s an old saying: “There’s a mean dog for every Baptist south of the Mason-Dixon Line.” This is true. Our nearest neighbor, Jewel Ann Crenshaw, adopted Puffy from the pound after the death of her husband. Puffy was a six-pound Yorkie mix who had hated me ever since I turned the garden hose on her when I was sixteen. Doing the math, the mutt had to have found the Fountain of Doggie Youth.
The dog looks in the direction of Jewel Ann, then back to me, its top lip quivering in anticipation. I raise my hands a few inches from my sides like Gary Cooper before a gunfight. “Hello, Puffy, you ugly little motherfucker.”
A firm hand on my shoulder startles me back to reality.
“It is a thing of woe.” Fanny blows her nose into a handkerchief.
I’m not sure if she’s crying or not. “Yeah, well, let’s don’t dive off a burning bridge just yet,” I say, giving her a hug.
“I taught you that,” she says without a lick of sentiment. The only wrinkle in her face is a near-straight line between her big dark eyes. A single strand of gray swoops across the top of her coal-black shoulder-length hair. She takes my hand.
I indicate the dog still standing guard like a sentinel at hell’s gates. “Is this—I mean, this can’t be—”
“Puffy.” Fanny sniffs.
“But—”
“Number Three.”
“Gotcha,” I say, wondering how I missed Number Two.
Fanny points to the sunroom straight ahead. Through the spotless panes, I can see Tina perched on a stool on the brick patio.
I tiptoe across the wooden sundeck for a closer look at her before I announce myself. When Tina is really plugged into her painting, she squints at the canvas until her eyes appear closed, like what she’s seeing is too vivid to take in with her naked eye.
“Hi,” I finally say.
Tina squints over the canvas and smiles the way she always did, as if doubting the world would smile back. “Hi,” she says. She puts down her brush and walks over. Although the two of us are facing each other, neither of us makes a move to embrace. I think we both feel it may be too much on the both of us. Her hair, colored a natural-looking brunette, is cut short and stylish with lighter highlights, a trick that makes her come off freshly scrubbed and youthful. I take her hands in mine. “Hey.”
She sighs, another smile. “It all started with a cough,” she says, as if she still can’t believe she has inoperable lung cancer and is standing here in the middle of this seemingly perfect day. “I was having trouble on my walks, you know, climbing the hills? They checked my heart, took an X-ray, everything was fine. Few weeks later, they took another X-ray and found it. Doctor even called me at home to tell me I had lung cancer. Didn’t even ask whether or not I was by myself, which I was.” Tina looks to the sky and points. “Did you see these clouds?” she says, squinting. “Look, there’s a giraffe! Or is it a bird?”
I take Tina in my arms and hug her tight. She seems smaller, thinner, like some kind of bird herself. She pulls back and studies my face.
“There’s the big city boy.”
My father’s voice blasts from the patio steps behind me. Unlike my mother, my father had not once visited me in the sixteen years since I had left. Tina turns me to face him like it’s my first day of school. Garrett slaps my belly with the back of his hand. “Getting a little soft there, huh?”
I know I’m supposed to find humor in the remark, but I don’t. “I guess. You look…” I say, trying to sort out a compliment for this man I always thought so much more handsome than me.
“Still one ninety-five, stripped,” he says, puffing his chest and slapping his belly.
I’m trying to remember whether or not we shook hands or hugged the last time we greeted each other when I notice Sis standing directly behind him, dressed in her Sunday best like Garrett. “We were at a funeral,” she says, giving me a quick hug. “Ginny Ezell’s sister. You remember her?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“So,” Sis says, going to retrieve my luggage, “are you here to take over?”
“No.”
“Yes, he is,” Tina says with a wink, her eyes never leaving mine.