Chapter 19 #3
“Should we call it a night?” Erin stood up from the clean, damp rug and pushed the hair that had fallen into her eyes out
of the way with her wrist.
“Absolutely not! I was winning that hand,” Gemma insisted with a wry smile. “Let’s just move to the dining table. I don’t
know if I’ll ever be able to sit on that couch again, either, without picturing corn floating in a pile of whiskey.” She shuddered
at her own words, and CK told her to be quiet.
The group sat quietly at the mahogany trestle table in the dining room while Erin shuffled the cards before dealing out another hand.
Celia Kate darted her eyes around to ensure they were alone and then asked Nell softly, “Is Moira all right? She must be so
embarrassed.”
Nell, arranging the cards in her manicured hand, replied, “She’s okay. She was washing up when I left her.” Nell paused. “Did
you happen to notice all of Jeffrey’s things still left out when you went up to check on her earlier?”
“Yes,” CK said. “It broke my heart. I can’t imagine.”
Erin added sympathetically, “All of his clothes are still in the closet too. His desk is untouched.”
Celia Kate leaned back in her chair to get a better view of the stairway in the foyer, making sure Moira wasn’t approaching.
“Nell, I completely understand now why you’ve been worried about her. If you decide to talk to her about her drinking again
before the weekend is over, I’ll join you.”
“I will too,” Erin agreed.
CK, Nell, and Erin turned their attention toward Gemma, who still had a sour expression on her face. Sensing their stares,
Gemma finally relented, saying, “Okay, I’ll talk to her with you. Letting loose on your birthday weekend is one thing, but
if she’s throwing up on furniture several times a week, then that sounds like a real problem.”
“I did the most embarrassing things when I was drinking heavily,” Nell said while adjusting the cards in her hands.
“I rambled on social media late at night. Once I posted homecoming pictures of Tate and his girlfriend at the time, and I captioned it ‘Tate and Jezebel, Homecoming Dance’ because the dress she was wearing looked more like a bathing suit from the 1940s.”
“Nell! You didn’t!” Gemma exclaimed.
“Oh, I did.” Nell sighed. “It was up for a couple of hours before my daughter saw it and logged into my account while I was
asleep and deleted it. My son was furious, and the poor girl he was dating was so embarrassed. Her mother called me and cussed
me up and down. I ruined that relationship for poor Tate. What I did was completely inappropriate.”
“It sounds like her dress was inappropriate,” Gemma added while focusing on the cards in her hand.
“It wasn’t exactly something Emily Post would approve of, but I was still wrong.”
“Where I grew up, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, alcohol and drug abuse is everywhere. By some miracle, neither my mama nor
daddy were addicts, but I have a lot of cousins who either drink or use drugs,” Erin said before taking a sip of water from
her glass resting on a coaster. “I’ll never forget my birthday. I was turning ten and my cousin Earl showed up drunker than
a skunk, and he pulled his gun.”
“He what?” Gemma reached for a milk chocolate bear claw on the table.
“Yeah.” Erin laughed in amazement. “I still can’t believe it.
We were at a picnic table in the backyard.
Everyone was singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and when I was done blowing out the candles, Earl took out his gun, raised it in the air, and fired off a couple of rounds.
That was his way of celebrating, I guess.
My granddad and some other family sprang into action, not sure what was going on, and wrestled him to the ground and got the gun away from him.
My mom always said my tenth birthday came in with a bang. ”
They all laughed, and Gemma said, “It sure did. That’s wild.”
“I’ve got family up in Asheville. Beautiful country up there,” Celia Kate added.
“I grew up well north of Asheville, near the Kentucky border, in a very isolated area.” Erin scanned her cards, seeing two
nearly complete runs and a stubborn queen of spades that refused to fit anywhere. “Moonshine stills were still in operation
up there. I don’t think we had running water until I was in middle school. My father came from a family of coal miners, and
he and my mama were both sick a lot because of the mines and the poor air quality. My mother had a hard time getting pregnant—I
was her miracle baby. They were good parents who loved me more than anything, but they couldn’t provide much for me. I had
to grow up quickly and take care of them.
“This has been my life from the beginning—a never-ending struggle for money and to make ends meet. By the time I met Phillip
and he took me out of the mountains, my mother had already passed away and my father was in a care home. He was still young
then, but he looked much older, worn down by life in those hills. Even after I moved down here with Phillip, I was still poor.
Life was a bit better, but it came at a price. I had running water, but I paid for it in other ways.” She drew a card from
the stockpile, her skinny fingers slow and deliberate.
“When I look around at this house and ones I cleaned before it, it’s mind-blowing.
How do people have all this? They must work hard, right?
I work too, but I don’t have anything left over.
People inherit things from their families, passing them down generation to generation, and I guess being poor and having hard luck can be inherited as well.
I want to be the one to break that cycle.
I don’t want my grandchildren to go hungry like I did, or like PJ did some nights.
I want this kind of curse to end with me. ”
“Generational curses,” Nell agreed. “My granddaddy was a drinker, so was my daddy, and then me.”
“My mama was on anxiety medicine half her life. She did a Prozac trial in the ?80s.” CK discarded a junk card. “Rummy.”
Gemma gathered everyone’s cards and shuffled them well. “We’re all big. Mama, Daddy, me, my brother.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother, Gemma,” Nell said.
“Oh yes. My big brother, Garrett. He’s not only older, but he’s actually big—about six three and four hundred pounds. He’s
divorced and has two kids, and he lives up in Lexington. He works as a football coach there. I haven’t told him about Tyler,
and I made Mom and Dad promise not to tell him either. He’s never been a fan of my husband. He’s liable to come down to Atlanta
and rip him limb from limb.” She dealt the cards across the table, watching them slide gracefully over the smooth mahogany
surface.
“I’ve always thought Garrett was a smart guy,” CK added, but Gemma ignored her.
“My father had an affair while I was in high school, which nearly tore our family apart.” Nell’s green eyes studied the cards in her hand.
“Our mother allowed him to stay in the house, but they slept in separate bedrooms for years, living as if they were worlds apart. I can remember them being in the same room together, not speaking a word, as if the other were invisible. My younger brother and sister sensed that something wasn’t right, but they didn’t know all the details like I did.
I tried to protect them from the truth and did my best to keep our home happy for their sake.
“My parents continued living that way for years, even after I moved out to go to college. By then, my brother and sister had
figured out that it wasn’t normal for a husband and wife to sleep and eat separately and to ignore each other like they did.
However, before my younger sister, Candace, graduated high school, God managed to restore our parents’ marriage. My dad quit
drinking, and peace and love returned to our home. The affair and hitting rock bottom were necessary for him to realize just
how serious his problems were. Maybe Moira needed to embarrass herself the way she did tonight to face her issues.”
“I don’t think it will be like that, like your parents, for me and Tyler. I don’t think there’s anything left for us,” Gemma
said matter-of-factly.
Nell nodded. “And that’s okay. Some marriages are restored. Some aren’t.”
“How did you find out, Gemma? I know you said you don’t want to talk about it, but I can’t get it off my mind,” Celia Kate
said. “You dropped a pretty big bomb on us.”
Gemma tossed a card into the discard pile and said, “He came home late one night last fall, reeking of cheap perfume. You know the kind—like a mix of alcohol and cat urine. Anyway, I asked him about the smell on his clothes, and I swear he didn’t even look ashamed.
He sat on the bench at the end of our bed, where he always sits to take off his shoes every night.
Without a hint of guilt or remorse, he said, ‘I have a girlfriend, Gemma.’ It was as if he were casually mentioning that he had used the last roll of toilet paper—so nonchalant.
I actually laughed, thinking he was joking, but then he looked up at me, dead serious, and repeated it.
That’s when he told me it was Rebecca from his office and that they had been seeing each other for a couple of months. ”
“Oh, I could kill him!” CK exclaimed through gritted teeth. “What did you do?”
“Carolina wasn’t home that night—she was at Mama and Daddy’s house having a sleepover. So Tyler and I had a huge shouting
match. He told me that he didn’t find me attractive anymore and that he never really did. I told him to get out of the house,
and after arguing for a few minutes, he finally grabbed a bag and went to his girlfriend’s place. I was so mad. If he hadn’t
left the house, I probably would have ended up as the subject of an episode of Dateline.” Gemma ate another bite of bear claw. “I didn’t tell anyone, not even my parents, for at least a month, while he kept right
on seeing her. I was tempted to tell Carolina what a jerk her dad was, but I didn’t, to protect her. Anyway, I don’t even