Dixie Browning - Lucy And The Stone

Grins were vulgar, loud laughter quite beyond the pale.

Lucy hadn’t even known what a pale was.

But by the time she had learned to cover her five-foot-eleven, one-hundred-forty-pound frame in suitably understated fashions, to wear modest pearl buttons in her ears instead of three-inch gold-plated hoops with dangles and to drink watery iced tea instead of diet cola with her meals, her marriage was already foundering.

By the time Alice had left for Scotland, Lucy had been wondering how long she could go on hiding the truth about the wretched state of affairs at 11 Tennis Court Road. Billy began drinking soon after breakfast, and when he drank, he was mean. Lucy had tried repeatedly to make him seek help, which had only made him meaner.

Alice had gone from Scotland to France and then directly back to Scotland, almost as if she didn’t want to come home. Lucy could have used her support at the time—particularly after she lost the baby. But Alice would have been devastated, and Lucy couldn’t wish that for her. Alice had still been visiting friends abroad when the divorce had become final.

It had been a quick one. At least Billy had agreed to that much, paying for her requisite six weeks’ residency. Afterwards, Lucy had sold her wedding and engagement rings, and the diamond and sapphire guard ring Billy had given her for her birthday, a week after their wedding, for enough to relocate. She’d been intending to try Richmond, but she’d missed a turnoff and ended up taking I-40 through Winston-Salem. Just north of town, her car had broken down, and by the time she’d had it repaired, she had only enough money left to rent a cheap room and look for a job. It was a way of life which was all too familiar. Unscheduled moves, unscheduled stops.

But the job had turned out to be a good one, waitressing at a popular restaurant. She’d attended night school, finished her teaching degree and was now in her second year of teaching sixth grade. Not half bad under the circumstances, she thought proudly.

“Lucy, my dear,” Alice had said that rainy night nearly two weeks ago. “Why didn’t you ever write? You knew I’d be concerned.”

“I’m sorry, Mother Hardisson” was all Lucy could think of to say. Sorry your son turned out to be such a bastard, sorry he robbed you of your grandchild and sorry you can’t divorce him, too. You’d be better off, believe me!

“Oh, please, my dear. I’m the one who’s sorry I wasn’t here when you needed me. I’m sure if I’d been able to reason with you both, we could have worked things out. Now I reckon it’s too late.”

It had been too late the first time Billy had struck her. It had been too late the first time he’d brought one of his floozies home and she had found them in the hot tub together, jaybird-naked.

It had been over the day she found his private stash in the celadon vase on the mantel. She had flushed it down the john and threatened to tell his mother if he didn’t straighten out. Wild with anger, he had struck her on the side of the head, knocking her halfway down the stairs. A few hours later she had miscarried.

But Lucy hadn’t said any of that. It wasn’t the sort of thing one said to a woman like Alice Hardisson. Billy’s mother had always been kind to her, even though Lucy knew she’d been shocked right down to her patrician toenails when her precious son had run off and married a nobody who’d been migrating north from Mobile, Alabama—a part-time student, part-time lifeguard, with no more background than a swamp rat.

Alice had graciously refrained from offering to buy her off. Instead, she had made the best of her son’s unfortunate marriage, and Lucy would always love her for that. Her father hadn’t left her much—a battered old twelve-string and a lot of wonderful memories—but he had left her a legacy of pride.

When, after three years, her ex-mother-in-law had called to tell her about the cottage she had leased for her companion, Ella Louise, to vacation in while Alice went on a two-month cruise with friends, Lucy’s first impulse had been to hang up.

But then Alice had gone on to tell her about Ella Louise’s tripping over a dog and breaking her hip. “Naturally, a place like that would be out of the question. She’s gone to stay with her sister down in some little town in Florida. So you see, if you don’t take the cottage, it will just go to waste. It was too late to cancel by the time I thought about it.”

“But why me? My goodness, surely you know someone else who would like to use it.”

“My dear child, you must allow me to soothe my conscience by providin’ you with a little vacation, else I’ll never forgive myself for bein’ away when you needed me most.”

And so Lucy, having been taught by the grande dame herself, had graciously allowed herself to be persuaded. There was no real reason why she shouldn’t accept a gift from a friend, she rationalized. The friend could afford it, and obviously wanted to do it. Why else had she gone to the trouble of tracking her down after all this time?

Come to think of it, how had she tracked her down? A forwarding address? Medical records?

Lucy was too tired even to wonder about it now. And too hot. Her backside was permanently bonded to the vinyl seat cover of her car. At least she was a whole lot closer to the end of her journey than when she had set out this morning shortly after daybreak.

Frank had risen early and come over to help her load the car. He’d promised to water her plants and air her apartment when and if the rain ever stopped. She had hugged his two daughters, one of whom was her student, and then hugged Frank, avoiding the question in his eyes the same way she had been avoiding it all year.

She didn’t love Frank Beane. Liked him enormously, adored his motherless children, but as much as she longed for a home and a family, she wasn’t about to take another chance. She had excellent taste in friends, lousy taste in husbands, but at least she had sense enough to learn from her mistakes.

Reaching over, Lucy patted the scuffed hard-shell case that held Pawpaw’s old twelve-string. She had strapped it into the passenger seat with the seat belt, having filled the back seat with books, linens, clothes and groceries.

“One of these days, Pawpaw, I’ll have music on my own back porch and a garden full of okra and tomatoes for gumbo, and maybe even a few cats. One of these days...”

She sighed. Lucy had no use for nostalgia. It was a nonproductive exercise, brought on, no doubt, by smelling salt air again after all these years. This was different from the Gulf Coast, but salt air was salt air, and Lucy was tired.

Pawpaw had been a roughneck. He had worked the oil fields, moving from place to place, but never too far from the Gulf Coast. Lucy, motherless for as long as she could recall, could remember piling into what they used to call the Dooley Trolley, an old camper truck held together with duct tape and baling wire, and setting out in the middle of the night for a new job, a new town—new friends.

Lucy could barely remember her mother, but there’d always been women in her life. Pawpaw—tanned and handsome, with his black-dyed hair and his broad grin, the metallic scent of crude oil that clung to his clothes, usually tempered by a mixture of sweat, bourbon and bay rum—had been like a magnet to women. A good-looking, good-natured man, Clarence Dooley’s only weakness had been an itchy foot and a deep-seated aversion to long-term commitment.

Nearing the tall, spiral-striped lighthouse, where the highway turned west, Lucy squinted against the glare of afternoon sun and thought about Pawpaw and Ollie Mae, one of Pawpaw’s lady friends, sitting on the back stoop after supper, Pawpaw playing his guitar and singing, and Ollie Mae sawing away at her fiddle, the sagging flesh of her upper arm swaying in time with each stroke. Pawpaw had been dead nearly eighteen years now, and Lucy had long since lost track of Ollie Mae and Lillian and the rest of Clarence Dooley’s mistresses.

For one isolated moment she felt utterly alone. And then she shrugged and put it down to no more than being in a strange place, among strangers. Something she should be used to by now.

It would pass. Everything passed, good and bad.

* * *

“You’ll like Maudie and Rich,” said Jerry, the boy from the marina where Lucy had been instructed to leave her car and take a boat out to Coronoke. “Maudie—she’s my cousin on my mother’s side. Well, I reckon if you go back a little ways, on my daddy’s side, too. She used to be—Maudie, that is—she used to caretake over to Coronoke, but then this guy—”

Lucy clutched her guitar case in both arms, wondering if there was going to be much spray. She’d brought her raincoat, but like an idiot, she’d left it in the trunk of her car.

Watch where you’re going! she wanted to say, but didn’t because he was only a boy. Still, she’d feel a whole lot safer if he would keep his mind on what he was doing instead of staring at her as if she were some kind of freak and filling her in on the pedigree of people she had never heard of and would probably never meet.

There was no spray. In fact, they were barely making a wake. Lucy could have swum faster than this if she hadn’t been so blessed tired. The boy—he couldn’t be more than sixteen or so—was looking at her in a certain way that made her feel like the butterfat champion at the county fair.

After thirty-four years she ought to be used to it. Towering over everyone in sight, having men make lewd propositions without even getting to know her first. It was all part of the curse that had befallen her at the age of twelve, when she’d shot up to five feet eight and her breasts had burst out of her training bra.

“Sugar, there’s not a blessed thing you can do about it, less’n you was to get fat as a sausage all over,” her father’s lady friend, Lillian, had told her. “Even then, it prob’ly wouldn’t do you no good. Girls with your looks’s got a hard row to hoe, and being big just makes you stand out more.” Lillian had been one of Lucy’s favorites. A blowsy redhead, she’d been kind enough to take a motherly interest in Lucy at a time when Lucy was undergoing a lot of frightening changes in her body and in her emotions.

“Don’t you never let a boy lay a hand on you, you hear me? They’ll try. Lord knows they’ll try to make you think they’re a-hurtin’ somethin’ fierce and you’re their only hope o’ salvation. But you tell ‘em you got the curse real bad, and your Pawpaw just sent you out to get some gun oil, ‘cause he’s a-cleaning up his shotgun. If that don’t shrivel up what ails ‘em, you use your knee where it’ll do the most good, y’hear?”

Lucy sighed. Nostalgia. It had to be the smell of all this salt air. She’d never been one for looking back. “Big adventures ahead, li’l sugar,” Pawpaw always used to say when they’d load up the trolley and light out in the middle of the night for a new town, a new job. “That ol’ highway’s unrollin’ right in front of your pretty brown eyes. You just keep on a-lookin’ straight ahead.”

The narrow beach was striped with coral sunlight and lavender shadows when Jerry pulled up to the pier on Coronoke. He clanged the tarnished brass bell that was attached to the side of a shed and within minutes, a woman came jogging down through the woods.

“Hi, you must be Mrs. Dooley. I’m Maudie Keegan.”

“It’s Ms. That is, I was married, but I took back my own name so—”

“I know what you mean. Neither fish nor fowl. Me, either, until I solved my problem by becoming Mrs. Keegan.”