Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem Page 3

  She listened for a moment, got up and cautiously peeked out into the main meeting room of the Clubhouse. Holding her breath, she closed the door and tiptoed into the storage closet. She emerged with a shining face and a key. She scuttled back to her desk, unlocked the lower right desk drawer and removed an ancient Thom McCann box.

  Oh, the Thom McCann box. It had once held a pair of little red pumps. Those pumps had been a big part of her plans for her future when she was, well, she didn’t exactly remember how old she’d been at the time, though her claimed age had been twenty-one. She’d bought them specifically to wear to the fairgrounds to drive those LaCour boys wild. Those shoes had helped her walk all over Tender’s heart. The red pumps were long gone, but the box held another dream, her future just waiting to be counted up.

  The bells on the outer clubhouse door gave a cheerful jangle. “Rhondy?”

  Rhondalee jammed on the lid, slammed the box into the drawer, turned the key and hustled into the closet to hide it. Her husband’s voice was low and sweet. “Rhondy? Are you in here?”

  Oh for heaven’s sake, what was he doing here? “I’m in the storage closet, Tender.”

  He sat at the desk when she came out hauling the old Kirby, her arms draped with orange extension cord. God only knew what he was up to behind her back, just sitting there in dangerous proximity to the drawer. He was looking through a small pile of paper scraps on her work surface. “What are these, Rhondy?” His mouth twitched a little in amusement as he read them aloud. “A heavy load.” “Black as midnight.” “Tall timber.” “A crime against God and nature.” “A tragic waste.” “Mad as a wet hen.” He pushed them into a pile. “You could just rearrange all these little scraps, and you’d have what passed for a conversation at Coffee Klatch.” He laughed, then cringed in pain.

  “What’s making you wince like that? Do your teeth hurt?”

  “My teeth are fine.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Rhondy? Do you hear anything strange?”

  “No, I do not. You’ve been drinking, haven’t you. Pretty soon you’ll be like Abner Widdel.” In a trailer park full of drinkers, Abner Widdel was the official park drunk. He sat under the corrugated plastic roof of his lean-to porch and added exponentially to the mountain of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans by his front steps. In his quest to be perpetually drunk, he’d evolved into an ultra-efficient device for converting beer into urine. “I know you’re drinking, Tender, so you might as well stop lying about it.”

  “I don’t drink.” Tender sounded tired. “Where’s Annie Leigh?”

  “Only Satan knows where that girl gets to. I can never find her when I want her unless I’m busy and then she’s always underfoot.” She plugged in a black connector and struggled toward the door.

  He moved to stand. “Let me help you.”

  She spat out words like a staple gun shoots out staples. “I don’t need your help. Other people might need your help, but I most certainly do not. Any help at all. Do you hear me? None.” She wrestled the machine out the door and began to vacuum the courtyard.

  She demanded an answer.

  Haven’t I been a good wife? Haven’t I? She ran the Kirby with ferocity, sucking up every trace of dust while laying out her thoughts to an Invisible Committee she’d mentally convened to hear her evidence and render a judgment as to her fitness as a wife and Tender’s failure as a husband. I have done that man proud as a wife, and this is how he repays me?

  She kept laying out her case as she finished the courtyard.

  Back in the office, she found more fuel for her anger. Overwhelmed by the sound, Tender had fallen asleep at the desk. Oh, that was just one of his tricks to avoid working, falling asleep wherever he sat, like a cat. Rhondalee listed his failings and her virtues as she readied Clubhouse’s main room, moving tables, Kirby-ing up the snips and threads that always littered the carpet after the Crafts Club was done, setting up chairs. She shook out a checkered tablecloth on the dais tables for a homey touch. She finished with a pitcher of water and a glass of ice, laying the gavel of office alongside.

  There. All set.

  She stomped into the office, ignoring his gentle snores. On tiptoe, she sidled close enough to fish his keys out of his shirt pocket and put them in the top drawer. If he decided to wander that night, he wouldn’t be going by truck. She stashed the Kirby. Then it was time to catch up on her filing. Every scrap and sheet of paper was filed according to her own personal system in one of three large black file cabinets. She filed and fussed, sliding the metal drawers closed as loudly as she could, working those drawers like a conductor works his symphony in a rising, slamming, singing fury of passive aggression.

  Finally, she had to resort to yelling. “Tender, WAKE UP!”

  He did, his face twisted in pain. “Rhondy, do you hear that?”

  “Hear WHAT? I hear NOTHING, is what I hear. I was just FILING. Now stop that NONSENSE because it’s time to go HOME.”

  He shook his head and stumbled to the door. She walked behind him through the courtyard. “Look at you, stumbling like some kind of a bad joke.” But he looked more confused than drunk.

  “Maybe I should drive?”

  Driving everywhere, like that fool brother of his who would drive his car a half of a block. She was glad she’d filched his keys and left them in the office. “The last thing I want is to have my no-good drinking fool of a husband weaving that crappy old truck around the highway when he’s already lost his ability to set his feet down in any kind of a pattern that anyone would recognize as walking.” They made their way home, Rhondalee sending out stinging little volleys of shame and disappointment to keep him moving. “Is that how you want to live your life, Tender? As the punch line of a joke told by Quentin Romaine? What kind of example are you for our granddaughter?”

  By the time they reached their front door, Tender was utterly defeated.

  Under the awning of their front porch, Rhondalee traded her Keds for leopard-print house shoes, neatly positioning the sneakers on the shoe rack. She’d had Tender install it to preserve the cleanliness of their wall-to-wall. Tender kicked off his boots, ignoring the rack completely, and stumbled barefoot into the house. Tsking, she set his dusty boots on the bottom rack of the shelf, where the yellow dust wouldn’t sift into her pretty shoes.

  They entered their kitchen, decorated in early hen house. Tender looked around, a frown on his achingly handsome face. “When’s Annie Leigh supposed to be back here?”

  Rhondalee cleared her throat. “I guess you expect me to make you some coffee.”

  “Coffee would be nice. But where’s Annie Leigh? It’s getting on dinnertime.”

  “I’m not speaking to you right now, Tender.” While perking the coffee, she silently composed a list of the many ways in which Tender LaCour had been a marital disappointment. The list stretched from their wedding night, when he was a virgin of all things, to the absurd name he chose for their daughter, to the color he chose for the latest used truck he bought.

  He sipped his coffee, which had the usual restorative effect. His eyes cleared, his neck straightened. Proof positive that he’d been drinking. “Thanks, Rhondy. I believe I’ll mow.”

  “I thought you were tired.”

  “Your coffee revived me.”

  She looked at him, nostrils flaring. “If you think I’ll let you go outside and cut that grass by yourself, you’ve got another thing coming, Tender LaCour.”

  He looked at her like she was crazy.

  IF ONLY HE’D wear a shirt when he cut the grass, she thought. Tender had always been such a ropy man, so tall and lanky and hard. In middle age, his body hadn’t gotten fat or gone slack. He’d just gotten a little narrower in the backside, a little wider through the middle. When he took off his shirt, there was absolutely nothing to make a woman wish he’d put it back on.

  Despite her husband’s partial nudity, Rhondalee felt oddly calm as she weeded. She remembered feeling that way after marital relations years ago, but now it was just filing and
cleaning and weeding and counting the money she kept in her desk drawer that brought her this sense of fulfillment and peace.

  Tender ran a mower over their patch of grass. It was about the size of their bedroom, and rarely topped two inches in height. She knew to the second just how long it would take for him to mow that area, and her entire body was steeled against the moment when the blade whispered over the last of her tidy, parched grass. Her face folded like a bad hand of cards as her husband sank his sharpened blade into the larger patch of lush, uncut turf next door.

  She stood up and tried to send him a glare of warning. He smiled. Waved. Oh, she hated it when he played innocent. She sank to her knees with a scowl and accidentally yanked out a petunia. She sent up a mental appeal to the Invisible Committee. “Why can’t she get someone else to cut her grass? Why my husband?”

  As if on cue, a plump young woman stepped onto the porch of the trailer in Space 48. Lifting a hand as tender and graceful as the petals of an opening rose, she pushed her messy yellow curls out of her mismatched eyes, one brown, one green. Her curved body was as inviting as a favorite pillow. She gave off the aroma of baking. It was ridiculous how young and pretty her neighbor was, and her name was just as pretty and ridiculous.

  Fossetta Sweet.

  “No one’s as sweet as that woman,” Rhondalee thought. “She’s sweet enough to send me into sugar shock.” The Invisible Committee said nothing. “Have you seen her kitchen? She has the nastiest kitchen in this Park. She never lifts a finger. Look at her hands.”

  But clearly, Fossetta had been working away at something that morning. Circles of sweat showed under the arms of the faded yellow rayon slip she wore, and splashes of water marked her apron. A woman in the 1950s might have worn that black and white gauzy thing to serve cocktails, but Fossetta wore it to do the dishes.

  Rhondalee LaCour had a powerful voice, but even she couldn’t drown out a lawnmower. But she gave it a try. “TENDER! IT’S TIME TO GET READY FOR THE MEETING!” He didn’t hear, he didn’t falter. But when Fossetta held up one pretty little white finger, just one, and smiled, Tender stopped moving.

  He was glowing.

  Fossetta walked down her aluminum steps and into her verdant, overgrown patch of grass. Tiny steps in bare feet, reaching down here and there, plucking up something, putting whatever it was in her apron pocket. She always did that before her grass was cut, walked around, stooping, plucking, her face as calm as a saucer of milk, her pink tongue darting out to moisten her little rosebud lips, the white backs of her fat thighs showing shamelessly when she bent over. She always did this before Tender cut her grass.

  Rhondalee watched as Fossetta walked over to Minah’s flower bed and shook out the pocket of her apron, emptying it of what looked like little green sticks. She fished through her apron pockets one last time and raised up her hands. A tiny green serpent writhed in each one. She laid these last two garden snakes among Minah’s petunia’s with great deliberation and tenderness, then moved in her unhurried way back to her door and went inside.

  Tender commenced his mowing. He moved contentedly, carefully, pacing off the parameters of Fossetta’s unfairly large lawn. Rhondalee’s lipstick-laden lips clamped to a waxy line. She’d just had it. She marched up to her porch, kicked off her pink gardening clogs and shoved them into the rack by the front door. She turned to her husband and yelled as loud as she could. “IT’S TIME TO CHANGE CLOTHES FOR THE COMMUNITY MEETING!”

  Unfortunately, Tender had cut the mower right before she let loose, and her voice positively echoed through the Park. Through an open window next door, Minah Bourne said “Thanks, Rhondalee. We’re all glad for the reminder.” Someone a bit further up the block called out something less polite. Rhondalee stood for a moment, gathering her dignity around her. Tender spoke with grace and kindness. “I’ll be in as soon as I rinse off the mower blade.”

  How dare he be so kind.

  She entered the kitchen and washed her hands with great care, running as much hot water as she could into the kitchen sink.

  He could take a cold shower.

  RHONDALEE STEPPED SMARTLY out on the little porch thirty minutes later, as carefully arranged as a lunch packed in Tupperware. Fossetta also stepped out her door and lifted her white arms to welcome the beginning of an evening breeze. Her rayon dress, a threadbare remnant from the 1940s, fluttered and lifted in a way that made it clear that underneath that purple dress, Fossetta wore none of the satiny garments that floated on her clothesline like whispered suggestions. Nothing at all.

  The idea made Rhondalee shiver.

  Her evening invocation over, Fossetta lowered her arms. She turned and smiled at Rhondalee, smiling as if Fossetta wasn’t a living affront to all the basic Christian ideals of womanhood. Her graceful white hand floated a little wave of hello to her neighbor.

  Rhondalee turned away, her jaw set. “Do you see?” she demanded of the Invisible Committee. “Do you see what I have to tolerate?”

  The Invisible Committee ignored her.

  Rhondalee looked down at her own hand, tracked with veins, tendons, and freckles that looked suspiciously like age spots. She gave herself extensive home manicures, but it looked like she’d glued ceramic nail tips on a buzzard’s foot. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her poplin shorts. Well, she thought, Some People have pretty hands because they do no work, no work at all.

  Tender stepped out beside. “Nothing like a cool shower on a hot evening.” He’d changed into pressed Wranglers and a shirt she wasn’t sure she liked for reasons she couldn’t possibly articulate. He wore his favorite cowboy hat. She couldn’t bear to see his eyes looking out from under that cowboy hat, eyes as humid and silver as the winter sky over Tennessee. She knew any woman in the world would fall in love with his eyes. He smiled. “Ready, Rhondy?”

  “I’ve been ready for a long time. Aren’t you forgetting something? Your boots, Tender.” He slipped them on. “You’d forget your head if it wasn’t attached.” He crooked his arm and she took it.

  They started toward the clubhouse, following Fossetta’s unhurried and solitary progress toward the center of the Park. They had a clear view of the shift and sway, the bounce and jiggle, and the slow, steady steps of those delicate white feet in pink moccasins. And all the men working in their yards, tuning up their trucks, or just shooting the breeze over a Budweiser, all those men stopped to watch her pass. And all the men who were inside found a reason to drift out, let their eyes wander, follow her unhurried progress toward the heart of the trailer park.

  But Tender saw none of it. His eyes never even strayed in Fossetta’s direction.

  Rhondalee’s eyes could not look away. She saw those blonde waves rise and curl around that regal head like a natural crown, she saw the fabric of that old dress streak with the sunset’s rays of crimson, saffron, vermilion, aubergine. Somehow, Fossetta Sweet caught the sunset.

  Rhondalee’s throat tightened. How does she do that? “How does she wear the sky?”

  The Invisible Committee didn’t answer.

  A CROWD MILLED out in the courtyard, finishing cigarettes before stubbing them out in coffee cans full of sand. The Clubhouse was strictly a non-smoking edifice for insurance reasons. Rhondalee smiled and nodded, scanning the crowd. She was hot, waiting there, but Fossetta didn’t seem to be sweating at all, just occasionally fanning herself with a white hand. “Oh, she likes the dry heat,” Rhondalee thought. “In a wetter climate, she might rot.”

  She watched as Randall Stagg approached Fossetta. Randall was near to graduating high school, just a child, really. Well, it was his second or third run at a diploma, but he was still too young to be talking to Fossetta. Rhondalee watched him lean toward Fossetta and smile. She smiled back, inclined that head of taffy curls his way. Took his arm. And what did they do? Did they enter the Clubhouse to attend the meeting? Did they join their neighbors to hear the issues, to discuss the controversies that would be put to community vote? No. No they did not. The two of them walk
ed right back up the street towards Fossetta’s trailer.

  Tender stood beside her, his silver eyes half-closed, as if he were suffering, aching inside. Rhondalee felt a strong need to slap her silent husband. Look at That Woman, she wanted to say, take a good hard look at her, you addled old fool. She’s a slut, nothing more, nothing less. “Well, I guess that young man is going be ruined tonight.”

  “Oh, Rhondalee, calm down,” said Vonda Ridgeway. “At least she don’t do married men.”

  Rhondalee felt a shamed blush move up her neck, over her ears, threatening to set her hair on fire. Was it that obvious, what she put up with? Was the whole park laughing at her love struck husband? And at her? “I THINK IT’S DISGRACEFUL!”

  Tender put his hand to the ear nearest her and winced.

  Oh, she’d just had it. What was WRONG with him? She gave his arm a shove. “Why did you wear that shirt? Why can’t you wear something decent?”

  He looked down at his sleeve and frowned.

  And this was the worst of it. There really wasn’t anything wrong with his shirt. It was one of those wallpaper-print cowboy shirts with pearl snaps. It was faded, but pressed. The shirt was respectable, but if she said so, she’d contradict herself. What she objected to was how good he looked in it.

  “I’ll go change my damn shirt, Rhondalee.”

  She watched him leave, his black hair swinging against the back of his neck, his legs moving in that easy, masculine stride that turned so many women’s heads. Just watching him walk made her furious. He had no right to walk like that. Her throat swelled with injustice, suspicion, and something else. Something like shame. Do you see what I put up with, she asked of the Committee, do you see how he does this?