Doing It at the Dixie Dew Read online

  “Who says I only shop in Littleboro?” He poured me a cup of some exotic mixture that had perfumed the whole house as it perked. Coffee always smelled better than it tasted, I thought, but wouldn’t say such a thing aloud for anything.

  My hand touched his as I took the cup and I thought how warm his fingers were, how strong. Fingers that had taken this house and started pulling it into shape. Helping make it into a business. Warm hands and a sturdy, dependable presence that had too quickly become an everyday part of my life, which scared me a little. I took the coffee and turned away. You learned a lot of things through pain, and one of the things was not to get too close to whatever caused it. But Scott wasn’t Ben Johnson and Scott was here when I needed him, at least for now.

  Scott always said he came when I called him. That much was true. When I first came back to the Dixie Dew, he pulled his truck into my driveway, got out and strode, both hands in the pockets of his jeans, straight toward a stack of materials Jake Renfroe had ordered and not used. Scott walked around the tarp-covered stuff, inspected it as if it were a used car and he could hardly restrain himself from kicking the tires … if there had been any. He stepped onto the porch, introduced himself and shook my hand, then went back to his truck for a clipboard and tape measure.

  I offered to show him around, but he said, “I’d rather poke around on my own for a while. Then I’ll have better questions and save you time. I charge by the hour, but I’m not on your clock yet.” He bent to check a loose board on the front porch, lifted it looking for termites, then poked the decay to test for dry rot. He didn’t comment. I knew the house was solid. It just needed a million gallons of paint and a new roof and a heating and cooling system and a new kitchen and enough wallpaper to roll out a road to China and … the list was endless.

  “Uh-huh,” Ida Plum had said when I came in the kitchen. “You got a live one now.”

  “Who is he?” I asked. I thought Scott looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure.

  “You know him,” Ida Plum said. “You’ve known him all your life.”

  “Me?” I asked. “Not really.” The name rang a faint bell, but I think I’d remember that face, those eyes so blue they took your breath away, those dark curls. “He would be better looking if he didn’t have that smart-aleck smile pasted on his face,” I said.

  “He married Cedora,” Ida Plum said as she rinsed a dish.

  “Ohmygosh,” I said. “Not the Hollywood Princess. Not Miss Broadway Bound. Not Miss Talent Running out Her Rear End.”

  “That one. Nobody ever understood it. Both sets of parents tried to have it annulled.”

  “So what then?”

  “She went to Broadway and took him along.”

  “She went to Hollywood and he came home. I think I get the picture now,” I said. Cedora Harris, who called herself Sunny Deye, could now be heard singing commercial jingles: dishwashing liquids, body soaps, floor mop stuff. You had to know her voice, that clear, distinctive, lovely voice, to know it was Cedora. I had been two years behind Cedora in school. Her presence was so strong it probably still had an aura in the halls of Littleboro High. She was like something God dropped in the wrong place. That red-gold hair, green eyes and a figure the boys fell over. Poor Scott.

  When he found me later, I was on the sunporch scraping paint off one of a million windows. “Tearoom,” I said. “The rest of the house will be a bed-and-breakfast and this will pick up some of the lunch trade, the garden clubs, bridge groups, that sort of thing.”

  “You an idealist?” he asked. “The world eats idealists for breakfast. I’ve been chewed up and spit back out a few times.”

  I felt like taking my paintbrush to his face, that smug, know-it-all, sardonic look. “Does that mean you’re out? You won’t take on this job?”

  “It means I will, but on my own terms.”

  I waited, didn’t look at him, just scraped paint as hard and fast as I could. I turned my back to him and scraped as if he had left, as if there were no one in the room but me and my life depended on getting off this old paint. Dry shards flew in my face, made me cough. I didn’t have to hire him and it didn’t cost me anything to listen.

  “I’ve got a couple of good people I call on from time to time, but mostly I’ll do a lot of the work myself,” he said. “I’m versatile and I’ve restored a half dozen or so of these big boxes in a couple of the counties around here. I’ll work it flextime. Which means I may come in early and leave late or come in late and leave early. I may work nights or Saturdays or Sundays or holidays or whenever I’ve got materials on hand and time. My time is by the hour and I’ll show you a weekly running tab on where we are. Can you work with that?”

  Could I refuse? It wasn’t like a dozen stood in line bidding for the job. I’d hired Jake Renfroe and for two months all he’d done was order materials, smoke his pipe, go around knocking it against the walls and say, “Miss Bethie, your grandma was some fine lady.” Sometimes I felt like going to Verna and just asking why the heck she had ever recommended Jake Renfroe to do the work. Was she trying to set me up for failure? If so, why? She and Mama Alice had been close as sisters. Or I thought they were.

  There was nobody else in town to take on something like this. Littleboro was a do-it-yourself or do-without town. “You’re on,” I said.

  He reached for my hand, which was covered with dust and paint flecks. I extended my hand and he took it. “You just hired the best,” he said.

  And certainly the most modest in the business, I wanted to add but didn’t.

  Scott had made the renovating a project, a challenge, a puzzle to solve. Like Miss Lavinia’s death.

  Surely Miss Lavinia had not been in any pain. Surely she would have cried out, called to me for help, tried to come downstairs. I hoped Miss Lavinia Lovingood died a simple, good and natural death. Even Ed Eikenberry said it looked that way, but he wouldn’t know for sure until the autopsy came back from Chapel Hill. Probably Thursday or Friday. Meanwhile plans for her services were in progress, full swing.

  Like Mama Alice always said, this town turned out for a funeral. And they surely did for my grandmother’s six months ago. Police Chief Ossie DelGardo, the hearse, family cars, funeral procession, even if it was only five blocks from any church in town to Littleboro Cemetery. Bruce Beckner, his assistant (who was also the rest of the Littleboro Police Department), stood at the courthouse square, hat held over his chest, and stopped traffic for the funeral. Anyone from out of town would think it showed respect. How wonderful this remaining bit of Americana, this little town keeping a quaint custom long after big cities raced past and forgot it. Truth was, Ossie DelGardo and Bruce Beckner didn’t have one earthly thing else to do but drive around in their respective cars and confer at Will’s Bar-B-Que west of town, where the hickory logs were split and stacked tall as a fence behind it and the little pink pig’s four neon feet never stopped running. Nor did the scented smoke stop permeating the town, sunup to sundown, six days a week.

  Miss Lavinia had paid for three days. I would have to refund two days to her estate, wherever that was. Miss Lavinia, I wanted to say, wherever you are, couldn’t you have waited until your three days were up, then gone somewhere else to do it?

  Do it, I thought. That sounded like sex. In high school and college you were asked, “Did you do it?” And everyone knew which girls “did it,” which couples were “doing it.”

  Miss Lavinia didn’t do it. She died. And she didn’t have any choice in the matter. Or did she? The real question was, why had she come back to Littleboro at all? And what the heck did those two little cryptic words on her note mean?

  It was so strange. All of this. Strange and unsettling. Maybe coming back to Littleboro wasn’t the right thing to do at this point in my life. Maybe all this was taking my life in some direction I didn’t want to go.

  Chapter Three

  I grabbed my old plaid windbreaker from the hook on the back porch and walked down Main Street to Littleboro Cemetery. Back at the house I
knew the phone was ringing, people were in and out. Before I’d left, one guest called to cancel. I couldn’t help but wonder if he really had a last-minute change of plans or if the news of Miss Lovingood’s demise had already traveled two hundred miles. And if so, how much farther would it go? Bad news always wore winged shoes. And gossip danced with taps on its heels.

  “Go,” Ida Plum said. “You need some fresh air. I’ll hold the fort. Mind the store. Tend the shop … whatever.” She waved me away with her dust cloth. The vacuum cleaner stood behind her like a retired soldier, worn but still staunch. Mama Alice’s stalwart old Hoover, its burgundy bag of a paunch faded as damask. Its motor sounded like gravel in a blender.

  I walked down Main Street. Verna Crowell’s lilac bushes were lit with lavender candles. I drew in the deep blue smell. The old lilacs were thick as a hedge behind Verna’s wrought-iron fence, and the fence was so rusted and sprawled you had to know it was there to see it. Something moved behind the curtains at one of the windows. Verna? Or her darn rabbit, Robert Redford? Sometimes he hopped onto a chair and sat looking out, his red eyes like two tiny coals in the darkened rooms. Verna’s old galleon of a house begged for paint, gallons and gallons and gallons of paint, and a team of ten men with ladders and buckets and brushes to apply it. Verna’s house was even worse than Mama Alice’s. If Scott Smith was smart he’d open up a paint store in this town and take food stamps in trade. Except people like Verna didn’t get food stamps. They had money, probably lots of money, yet lived like street people once removed.

  I’d walked to the cemetery a lot in the months I’d been back.

  It had been six months since Mama Alice died, been buried next to Granddaddy McKenzie, who died when I was a week old. Beside their graves was my mother’s, Alice McKenzie Henry’s. Mama had stepped off the curb in front of the courthouse straight into the path of a transfer truck. She was killed instantly. I was seven, in the second grade. Mama Alice had come for me, walked me home and been mother, grandmother and good friend until last year. Beside my mother’s grave was a flat, empty space, marked and set aside for Andrew Buie Henry, who went to Vietnam and never came back. Missing in action. All my childhood, those words haunted me. I wanted to believe they meant my father was still alive, that Andrew Henry was more than a framed photograph on my dresser and a few scattered memories of a tall man with dark hair and a deep laugh. The grave was empty. That meant it waited for something or someone, as an empty space lay marked and waiting for Lavinia Lovingood, who’d come home to die. I hoped that she, herself, had come home to live, make a life for herself in Littleboro.

  The Lovingood mausoleum was a solid cement little house on the hill in the back corner of Littleboro. It had been there all my life, and I never thought much about it. The name Lovingood never meant anything to me before either.

  The mausoleum was big, impressive, carved with pillars and scrolls, ornate columns. Tall cedars stood at each corner of a rusted iron fence. Several dogwood trees leaned near the two tombs, tombs impressive enough to encase Pharaohs.

  The Lovingood section was only equaled in Littleboro by another heavily fenced family plot in the opposite corner which held the Merritt mausoleum. Inside the Merritts’ fence, a woman in a faded yellow dress knelt over a grave.

  I stopped, stood very still. I felt as if I’d been caught somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. My own family plot with Mama and Mama Alice was far down the hill, beyond the fountain, little benches, plantings and trees.

  The woman at the Merritt mausoleum arranged a vase of brown plastic chrysanthemums on the ground at her feet and talked to herself. “I miss my sweetheart, my love, precious…” I started away, but my footsteps on the gravel startled the woman, who turned around. “Oh,” she said. Both hands flew immediately to her cheeks. “Who’s there? What do you want?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “I’m not used to anyone being in this cemetery,” the woman said. She seemed calmer now, walked toward the fence and peered at me. “You’re Alice McKenzie’s girl, aren’t you?” Her small eyes, black as onyx, were bright and piercing in her patchwork face of heavy rouge over extremely white skin and a thick stitching of wrinkles. “Miss Tempie?” I asked. I’d taken piano lessons from Tempie Merritt for a year when I was eight, came home crying with red fingers after each session. After the nightmares began, Mama Alice let me stop the lessons. The nightmares also stopped. I couldn’t tell my grandmother then how Miss Tempie whacked my hands with a ruler for every wrong note, how the huge Merritt house two blocks over was always cold and smelled of rubbing alcohol. To this day the smell of rubbing alcohol made me gag. Tempie was deathly afraid of germs. And yet here she was still alive, more than twenty years later, germs and all. I wondered if she still taught? How many rulers she’d broken during her teaching career? Or how many little fingers and egos she had bruised and damaged? I wondered if today’s parents knew and still accepted her “teaching methods.”

  Miss Tempie was even thinner than I remembered; her bones seemed almost sharp enough to puncture the faded cotton shirtwaist dress. And her soiled white sweater, crookedly buttoned, looked angled as a bent clothes hanger. She tried to smooth her hair, almost white now, with touches of the blond she used to be. She still wore her thin hair pulled back, pinned in an irregular and awkward roll, with wisps escaping around her head like a swarm of white moths.

  “It’s Harold,” Miss Tempie whispered. She turned to look behind her. A large man in dark green work clothes and a bill cap stood beside Miss Tempie’s old black Cadillac, a monster of a car so old its fenders, spots on the trunk and hood, looked as though they’d been polished through to the body paint. The man held a shovel. His bulk cast a thick shadow toward us.

  “Harold?” I didn’t know any Harolds. Certainly not a Harold Merritt. Miss Tempie didn’t have a brother, nor a son that I knew about. Who was Harold?

  “My poodle. I know you’re not supposed to, but it was the family plot, and Harold was with us nineteen years. That’s old for a poodle. I couldn’t bury him just anywhere.” Miss Tempie twisted her handkerchief with a tatted edge. Her fingers looked knotted and blue.

  Oh God, I thought, that’s what money would do. The Merritts had owned this town along with the Lovingoods, only the Merritts lived longer, held on to their money and influence. Miss Tempie probably had slipped whoever gravedigger was in charge of the cemetery a twenty or two and together they smuggled dead Harold into the family plot. Nobody knew or cared, or if they did, they looked the other way. Miss Tempie turned back to the grave. “I didn’t want to let him go,” she said. Her voice quavered like a tired old mourning dove. “He slept at the foot of my bed every night. This last year … this last year, he couldn’t climb up there by himself and I had to lift him. He weighed next to nothing toward the end. And then one morning he wasn’t there. Not the real Harold, just his little fur suit.” She bent to the ground weeping, crying, moaning.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, and touched her shoulder. Sad to think all she had to love was a poodle. I thought Harold was probably the kind of poodle that humped all the kids’ legs as they took piano lessons. I felt lucky to have escaped knowing him. Lucky I didn’t have to go in that house, where the odor was so dark and thick I used to come out and take a dozen deep breaths to get the smell out of my lungs.

  I couldn’t go to the McKenzie family plot, though the spring grass on Mama Alice’s grave would be bright and tender. Too much sorrow for me still.

  I walked away as quietly as I could. All that wet and loud grief was getting to me. Miss Tempie had surely livened up my walk “to get away from it all.” Until today the cemetery had been a fine and private place.

  Still not ready to go home, I walked past the Dixie Dew, around the courthouse square, and headed for the library in the new big concrete box of the Government Complex. The whole thing was so cold and modern it made me think I was in another town. One without heart and soul and history. The old library
, the one I’d grown up with, had been on the next block, a redbrick building that had mellowed almost brown over the years. Inside it was full of paneling, balconies and tall shelves you needed a rolling stepladder to reach. I loved it. I’d spent half my growing-up years reading in one of the wing chairs beside the green marble fireplace, or on rainy days gazing out the tall windows toward the courthouse and the statue of the Confederate soldier. In the winter I could see past it through the water oak trees along Main Street to the blue roof of Mama Alice’s house.

  As soon as I stepped through the double glass doors, Ethelene Smart said, “Wasn’t it just awful about Lavinia Lovingood?” Ethelene had been reference librarian in Littleboro for as long as I remembered. “That poor woman,” she said, and laughed. “Not that you could call any of the Lovingoods poor.” Ethelene wore her long brown hair, heavily streaked with gray, pulled back in a ponytail that switched and swayed when she moved. She had a pencil poked behind one ear. Her movements were brisk as a wren and she talked in a high chirrup of a voice. “Lord, those Lovingoods had money all the way back to King Midas. They were drinking tea out of little china cups when the rest of us around here were still using gourd dippers.” She took me to a large brass wall plaque in the local history room that said it had been donated by the Lovingood family. Then Ethelene pulled a Littleboro Historical Society book off the shelf and pointed out a blurred photo of the old Lovingood house that had stood on this corner until the Government Complex was built. It looked as large and imposing in the photo as I remembered, white and ghostly, tall columns and wide porch.

  A patron dinged the dinger at the checkout desk and Ethelene hurried over as fast as any spinster librarian in her sensible shoes could go.

  I was too tired and distracted to read magazines; none of the new novels grabbed my attention and I didn’t think I wanted to involve myself in a murder mystery. I’d read all the “cat” mysteries, and I didn’t like those “fast city cop” or “macho men on houseboats” types.