Chapter 5
“M y mama used to say that it’s ersatz. Do you know what that means?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered my aunt.
I held up the necklace and admired how the stones twinkled, even though she kept her house so darn dark.
At least it was warm, unlike other places.
“I didn’t think you would,” Aunt Paula said, nodding with satisfaction.
“It means they’re faux diamonds, not real. But they look good, and no one needs to know. Speaking of looks, what are you doing with your hair?”
“My curling iron broke,” I mumbled.
It was a lie. I’d spent much too long out with Sir this morning, exercising him until both of us almost had to lie down and rest in the road.
But it had worked, and my aunt commented on it now.
“I don’t know why your mama said he was a devil,” she crooned, petting him.
“He’s as sweet as pie.”
“She said he was a devil? My Lord. It was just one pot roast!”
“And humiliation in front of the whole neighborhood.”
“It was just one family!” I sighed.
“I’ll apologize again, though. I tried to pay her for the cost of the meat, but she wouldn’t take it.”
“Maybe I should get a dog. A small one,” my aunt conditioned.
She scratched behind Sir’s ears and then looked over at me and how I’d draped myself in those ersatz jewels.
“I’ll let you take all that and anything else from the box.”
“Aunt Paula, do you really think you’re going to die?” It made me worried.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“But somebody should enjoy all this, and I think you’re owed something, too. I didn’t like what happened to you with Harlene and—”
“I don’t want to talk about them,” I interrupted, and we returned to discussing the jewelry, rugs, and furniture that she wanted to give away today.
Next, she wanted me to drive her somewhere.
Aunt Paula lived in a beautiful house on the brow of the east side of Signal Mountain, but she directed me to bring her to the Old Town neighborhood.
“Now I’m beginning to understand what your mother meant. I find him annoying,” she commented as Sir whined constantly in the back.
“The next right. Where is…oh, yes. That’s it, there. That’s the old Woodson place.”
I slowed to a stop at the sidewalk and looked.
It was large, old, and lovely.
Like Caleb’s farmhouse down in the valley, though, it also appeared that its best days were behind it.
It was generally dingy, with faded paint, curling roof tiles, and overgrown plants.
Marc would have a field day, I thought.
“I asked around,” my aunt said.
“There used to be renters in there, but they moved out about a year ago. It’s empty now.”
“I wonder who owns it. Maybe Caleb still does,” I commented.
“Maybe.” She shook her head.
“I remember his mama being so proud of her family name. ‘I’m a Woodson,’” Aunt Paula said, making her voice deep.
“Was that how she sounded?”
“Foghorn,” she answered succinctly.
“What’s her son like?”
“Well, he would know the definition of the word you used about the jewelry,” I told her.
“Smart like his mama, then. I thought as much.” She nodded.
“She was two years ahead of me in school and people used to compare us, although Lara-Lee didn’t like that. They would call us spinsters. Know what that means?
This time, I had an idea of the definition but I still said, “No, ma’am.
”
“It meant that no boy was interested in either one of us,” she said with relish.
“Not that I wanted them, either.”
I’d never heard anything about romance in Aunt Paula’s life.
“You didn’t want even one? You know, for…well, I just miss how they held me.” I’d held them too, as hard as I could, but they always got away.
“I never did and it seemed like she felt the same. Lara-Lee was a handsome woman, but she had a way about her. She would look at you and you swore that she hated your dang guts.”
“Well, she wasn’t good at making friends,” I said.
“But she made one somehow, because she got Caleb.”
“We all wondered about that. She was old when she got pregnant, very old.” She spoke with even more gusto than before.
“Who would have tangled with her? Lara-Lee was like a briar patch. She never told anyone who the father was, either, but by that point, she had lost touch with almost all of her former…I’ll call us acquaintances. She moved to some old farm and started to grow fruit trees. That was always what she was interested in, that plant stuff.”
“Agriculture?”
“No, more persnickety,” she said, and I knew that word but I still didn’t understand what she meant.
“I’ll ask around about the father, because now I’ll have an itch to know. I’m done here.” As the chauffer, that was my cue to bring her back home, which I did as she criticized my driving.
Then she forced me to take several bags of her possessions before I left, loading them into my back seat over my objections.
“Aunt Paula, not the big rug. I have an apartment…”
“Get yourself a house,” she ordered.
“Get yourself a real career and work harder. Get a husband and have some babies while you’re at it.”
“You just got done telling me that you, yourself, never wanted…yes, ma’am,” I concluded.
I drove down the back of the mountain and took the turns slowly, but Sir was still very upset by the time the road flattened out.
I pulled over to let him catch his breath and walk around.
I had no plans for the day, and nothing else to do besides some laundry.
With one hand, I securely held the leash and with the other, I texted and begged for an invitation, in a subtle way.
“Sir has a case of the fidgets,” I typed, and the answer came back fast.
“Come over and let him run,” Caleb wrote.
“I’m just working.”
It was Saturday, but he had said that he worked a lot.
“We’re going to Caleb’s house,” I told Sir, and he seemed mildly interested in that but not in the process of arriving there, which began with getting back into the car.
I had to lift him up and he didn’t help at all, just hanging limply like a giant sack of potatoes as I placed him in the cargo area.
I really felt like he weighed more than a hundred pounds.
He did perk up when we turned into Caleb’s driveway, because either he remembered it or he had already caught the scent of the man himself, who was waiting on his porch when we drove up to the house.
I immediately leaped from the car so that I wouldn’t be trapped in the seat and the dog was right behind me.
But after he ran to Caleb, he didn’t jump on him.
He sat, wagging his tail with excitement, and waited for the affection that he was due.
“There’s a good boy,” Caleb told him.
“Good dog. How are you, Kayleigh?” He looked at me.
“I guess the answer is, ‘You’re fancy.’”
“I’m all right,” I said.
“I went to visit my aunt Paula up on Signal Mountain and she gave me some of her ersatz jewelry.” I gestured to the five necklaces, the screw-on earrings, and multiple bracelets that I wore.
“Do you know what that word means?”
“Fake?” he suggested, and I nodded.
“I told her you’d know, and she said that she’d figured that you were smart.”
“Why would your aunt have an opinion about me?” He walked down the steps.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
He meant without a leash, which put the fear into me, but I nodded and decided to give it a try.
“Aunt Paula knew your mother.”
Caleb looked at me sharply.
“She did?”
I nodded again.
“They went to school together, except your mom was ahead by a few years. She said they were both spinsters.”
“What else did your aunt tell you about her?”
I repeated the information as we went across a field and through a few rows of trees that looked sadly stunted.
“She said that Lara-Lee was very smart and pretty, too, but she wasn’t interested in other people very much.”
“That’s an understatement. She hated people,” he told me.
“She hated everyone.”
“Except her son,” I added, but he didn’t answer until I asked, “Why was she like that?”
“I always thought that something must have happened, something that embittered her. It’s surprising to hear that she was the same way in her youth, too.” He sounded very surprised, almost shocked.
“My aunt Paula isn’t the friendliest person either,” I consoled him.
“She loves being standoffish, but there’s also another side to her. Like how she wanted me to visit and she liked Sir so much, and she gave me so much stuff. The back of my car is full.”
“Is that all hand-me-downs?”
“She suggested that I get a house and fill it. She showed me your former family home, too. Do you still own that place?”
“I do. There were renters in it, the same couple for the last twenty or so years, but they moved into assisted living. It’s sitting empty now.”
“It looks neglected but someone could fix it up for you.”
“Someone like Marc McCourt of Coops Creek Construction? Here, I’ll help you.” He took a big step over a muddy ditch and then reached out his hands to assist me as I jumped across it, too.
“Marc would be able to take it on after he finishes the barn project.” The demo would start on Monday, and my cousin and I were both very excited about it.
“Will you be here while he’s working?”
“No,” I said regretfully.
“I’ll have plenty to do in the office. I mean, I could…” I looked over at him.
“You’ll probably be busy in your own office.”
“There’s always plenty for me to do, too,” he agreed, and dashed my hopes that he’d been angling to see me.
Well, we both had to work, like Aunt Paula had advised.
She’d told me to find a career and I thought about that.
When I’d graduated from high school, my goal had been “fun” and not “professional advancement,” or even “supporting myself.” For the last several years, it had seemed like the day-to-day was hard enough to accomplish without also worrying about my future, and the jobs I’d done hadn’t had any longevity.
Was I going to be a waitress for the next forty years?
No, definitely not, because I’d been fired after a month due to my terrible performance.
We talked about the barn project but as with all my conversations lately, the topic soon turned to my dog.
I hadn’t yet told Caleb about the pot roast and I did that now as we kept walking.
“Hell,” he groaned. “Do you need a new mattress?”
“I flipped it for now, but it’s disgusting. I was so angry at him when it happened and he didn’t care at all, not even when my mother told him that she was disappointed. That’s about as bad as she gets with punishment.” My father didn’t go much further, either, no matter what their daughter had done.
“Once, when I was about twelve, I got in the most trouble I ever caused in my life,” he mentioned.
“My mother made me go cut a switch.”
I stopped dead.
“No! Did she really?”
He nodded.
“Yes, she did. I was shaking as I brought it back to her, and then she swished it through the air a few times and stared at me as she did it. I can still hear the sound.”
“Did she use it?”
“Nope. She said I deserved it but she wouldn’t waste her time and energy on me.”
“My Lord. I’m glad she didn’t hit you, but that wasn’t a very nice thing to do, not any of it.” That included what she’d said at the end.
Why wouldn’t her child have been worth her time?
“What had you done?”
“I ran away,” he answered, and he whistled for the dog.
Sir had roamed as we talked, and he’d disappeared from view a few times.
That made me very worried, but he always came right back when Caleb called or whistled.
The next time the dog took off, I reminded myself of how he’d returned before.
“Let me try to call him,” I suggested after he’d been on his own for what I considered too long.
“Sir, come,” I yelled.
We stopped and listened for the sounds of him running back to us, but the old orchard was quiet.
“Sir, come!” My voice had gone higher in pitch and I glanced at Caleb.
“Maybe he went too far to hear me.”
“No, he didn’t have time to cover that much distance and his sense of hearing is superior to ours.”
Ok, but he still wasn’t here.
“Sir!” I started walking in the direction he’d headed.
“Maybe he’s hurt, and that’s why he isn’t coming back.”
“Try to lower your voice and call more forcefully.”
“This is how I am! Am I supposed to be a totally different person to make him love me? I mean, to make him listen to me?” I took a deep breath.
“Sir!”
There was suddenly a crashing sound in a group of trees, and my dog appeared.
He galloped over to us.
“Oh, thank—” I started to say, and I finished with, “Umph!” He had knocked me over, but it was because he did love me, after all.
“Hell.” Caleb picked me up under my arms and dragged me out from under a hundred pounds of fur, muscle, and drool.
“Sir, sit! You are not to jump on her, do you hear me? Do. Not. Jump.”
The dog looked at him and I swore that he understood.
He wagged his tail and I wanted to hug him, but I reminded myself that I was supposed to be acting tough.
“I’m fine, and I know he didn’t mean it. And he came back,” I said, smiling.
“Yes, and you’re covered in leaves.”
“It’s just a little dirt.” I brushed myself off and he also brushed at me, a lot more forcefully.
“I don’t mind it, as long as I didn’t go into a puddle, too.”
“You’re different from what I imagined about a beauty queen.” He gave my back one last swipe.
“Well, remember that I wasn’t the actual queen. I was rarely even a runner-up.” I checked, and I still had on my ersatz jewelry.
“I think I’m ready to go back.”
After the extended exercise session of the morning and the roaming he’d done this afternoon, Sir was finally tired.
I was, too, but the farmhouse was so uncomfortable.
The only couch had an exposed wooden frame that bit into the back of your thighs, and there was no screen to watch a travel show on, except for Caleb’s big computer monitor that was full of different colored line graphs.
I wouldn’t have wanted to mess that up.
And although I wasn’t wet after that fall, I was definitely cold because there was no heat in this place.
I sat with Sir, my feet under his warm body, while Caleb started to make a fire.
“I need to get more wood,” he said, heading back outside, and I reached my hands toward the tiny flames in the grate.
I couldn’t feel any warmth yet…
And then they blew right out.
“My Lord,” I grumbled.
I hadn’t noticed a breeze, but Caleb could have left the door open, or maybe it had come down the chimney.
I pulled my feet from beneath the dog so I could go find the origin of the draft, and he jumped right up and turned his head, staring at the fireplace.
“It went out, unfortunately,” I explained.
“Now we may freeze. Well, not you, since you have that gorgeous fur, but I’m up the creek. I wish I hadn’t shaved my legs today because maybe I’d feel a difference.”
Sir suddenly growled, that same scary sound I’d heard him make once before.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him.
His eyes were glued to the fireplace and his body was tense.
Then I watched his head turn as if he were watching something, too, and tracking it across the room toward the door.
He remained as taut as a bowstring but he stepped to stand in front of me.
And it scared me to death.
I stood behind the dog, ready for anything—
“I got a big load,” Caleb said as he entered through that door.
Sir immediately relaxed and wagged his tail but Caleb stopped, midway across the floor, and stared at me.
“Why do you look like that? Your eyes are as big as dinner plates.”
“The fire went out,” I said, pointing at it.
“That’s all right. I can restart it.” He bent to build up the wood, but I was shaking my head.
“I think we’re going to go,” I told him, and he stood straight.
“Uh, ok,” he said slowly.
“Did something happen?”
“Sir started acting weird and it startled me,” I explained.
“He might have heard something in the walls. I think I have mice,” he said, and sighed.
“That was probably it,” I responded, and felt much better.
“It was like he was noticing something that I didn’t, and it was probably them scrabbling and squeaking. As you said, dogs have superior hearing.”
“I don’t mind if we leave, though. It’s always going to be cold in here no matter how big I make the fire.” He blinked.
“I didn’t mean to invite myself.”
“You’re totally invited,” I told him.
“Absolutely.” And the whole way over to my house, I smiled every time I saw his truck in my mirrors.
Sir was riding in the cab with him and they looked so handsome together.
I shivered, though, when I thought about the mice in the walls of Caleb’s house.
I wasn’t afraid of getting dirty, but I didn’t want anything to do with rodents, nothing at all.
And who would have thought that Sir, with all his size, would have been afraid, too?
There was really nothing to be afraid of, except for the paper that was now stapled to my door.
“Notice…” I read aloud, and then got out of my car to get a better look.
“What is that?” Caleb asked me as he emerged from his.
“This is my own fault,” I said.
I let him read it, too.
“Non-compliance with your lease.” He looked at the animal standing next to him.
“Sir.”
The dog hopped a little, raising his front legs in agreement.
Yes, that was his name, and he was why I was getting evicted.
“This seems pretty straightforward, but you could talk to an attorney,” Caleb said.
“One of my cousins graduated from law school, but he’s never going to pass the Tennessee Bar exam. He’s a very nice guy, though,” I added.
“He’d want to help, but I think he’s prohibited from practicing without a license.”
He looked again at the eviction notice and then at my dog.
“How far out of compliance are you?”
“He’s a little over the size restrictions,” I admitted.
“He supposed to be under twenty-five pounds.”
“That’s a lap dog, not Sir,” he pointed out.
“Why didn’t you talk to your landlord about him and try to work it out? Why did you let it come to this?”
“I decided not to stir up trouble!” I defended myself.
“He wasn’t hurting anything.”
“Except for his nails on the floor, scratching it—”
“I cut his nails and filed them. And painted them,” I pointed out.
“What about where he leaned against the screen door?”
“Marc can fix that, and he’s going to show me how to touch up the floor and I’ll also take care of the paint. And I know I should have told the landlord, but I was sure that he’d say no and I didn’t want to give up my dog. It’s almost a month and Sir will be officially mine, no matter what any landlord says.”
“And now, you’ll have your dog and no place to go,” Caleb pointed out.
“You just told me how Sir’s not welcome in your parents’ house because of his behavior.”
“They’ve made a lot of excuses for poor behavior in the past,” I retorted.
“I bet they’ll forgive him and let him keep going, eating more pot roasts until he pukes. They’ve never been able to crack down and say no and mean it. Not ever.”
“Are you talking about yourself? They let you get away with things?”
I opened my mouth but then stopped, realizing that I sounded like I was blaming them.
“What I did was my fault, not theirs. They weren’t sure how to deal…” No, I wasn’t doing this again!
I was not going to get into my sordid history.
“I have places where I can go. This isn’t going to end up with me and Sir living in my car. He would really hate that.”
“It doesn’t sound like you’re taking this very seriously.” And Caleb himself sounded very concerned.
“I am,” I told him. “I’ll deal with the consequences of my actions and fix this myself. I’m old now and I won’t run to my parents or to anyone else. I have savings. I’ll rent a new place—”
“With a dog this size? Where is that going to be?”
“Wherever it is, it’s my issue, not yours. I’m done with being the problem McCourt, besides my cousin David who truly sucks. I’m done with being the one who needs to be pity-hired. I’m an adult, a grown woman, and now I have dependents.”
We both looked at Sir, who wagged his tail.
“I’ll take care of both of us,” I informed both of them.
“I’ve got this.”
Maybe Sir believed me, but Caleb was clearly working through some doubts.
“Part of this is my fault,” he started out saying, and I shook my head.
“No, I accept responsibility for everything.”
“No,” he said right back.
“I knew that I should have taken him. I knew when you said that you had an apartment that it was a bad idea. I turned away instead of facing it.”
“Again, this was—”
“Can we go inside?” he interrupted.
“Your neighbor and his girlfriend are at the window.”
They were.
I saw their two faces peeking around the metal blinds that bent so easily when a dog pawed them.
The woman, she of the extra-long orgasm, waved at me, but I ignored it.
Obviously, her boyfriend had been the one to turn me in to the landlord, since that guy hadn’t driven here from Georgia to post a notice on a whim.
But it wasn’t my stinky neighbor’s fault, either.
As I’d told Caleb, this was all my responsibility.
But he kept arguing with me about that.
“I knew it was a bad idea as soon as you lifted him into your trunk and drove away on that doughnut. I watched it happen and I knew. He knocks you down, eats your shoes, craps out piles that are bigger than you are, and—”
“He’s a good dog!”
“He’s a great dog,” Caleb agreed.
“He’s smart as a whip and he’s obviously trainable. He’s also obviously not an apartment dog, not with how much you have to exercise him. How far are you walking every day?”
“It’s important for older women to get lots of exercise, all the steps.”
“Who is the older woman here? Aren’t you twenty-four?”
“I’ll be twenty-five in March,” I said, and I found it strange that someone who had an engineering degree (according to what I’d read about him) couldn’t keep straight one simple number, my age.
“When in March?” he asked, and I told him and got his birthday, too.
“Anyway, more exercise sure doesn’t hurt me,” I finally continued.
“I feel better than I have in a while, actually. I don’t know why you’re disagreeing with me—I don’t know what you’re disagreeing about at all,” I told him.
He looked at me for a moment before he sat on my couch, which was infinitely more comfortable than the one at his house.
Why anyone would build seating with a wooden bar that went directly under your knees was beyond me.
“I don’t want to avoid issues,” he said.
“This isn’t your issue.”
“It is, because I care about Sir and I inserted myself when I stopped to help you with your tire. You’re trying to be a person who takes responsibility, and so am I.”
I also seated myself on the couch, and so did the dog.
It sagged slightly. “You don’t seem like the type to shirk. How would you have gotten so successful without hard work and a nose-to-the-grindstone attitude?”
“I mean with people,” he answered, and now I understood.
“Oh, you’re saying that it wasn’t just a lack of time that led you to be alone with no girlfriend or wife,” I said.
“You were avoiding your relationship responsibilities?”
He seemed surprised.
“Uh, I never thought of it that way…yeah, I guess I was.”
“How?” I asked him.
“Uh,” Caleb said slowly, and maybe he hadn’t thought about it before but he was certainly considering the idea now.
“Well, speaking of birthdays, I never paid attention to those. I didn’t notice anniversaries, either. Who ever heard of a two-month anniversary, anyway? ‘Anni’ comes from Latin and it means year.”
“Did a woman expect you to celebrate that date, and you forgot it?”
He seemed genuinely confused.
“Yes, and she was very upset. We didn’t go out again.”
“And you forgot her birthday, too? You have a calendar in your phone, right?” That reminded me to text Marc and tell him to set a few reminders for his fiancée’s birthday.
“That was a different woman.” He rubbed his jaw.
“There might be a pattern, but I wasn’t referencing them. I was thinking about how I ran out of Tennessee the first chance I got, and I avoided everything that was happening here with my mother. I knew that things were turning rotten.” He looked across the room, toward the patio door with a screen that was now slightly misshapen.
“For the last ten or so years of her life, she wasn’t able to keep up with the farm.”
“You were in Florida,” I reasoned, “so you weren’t around to watch over it personally.”
“I wouldn’t have anyway. She wasn’t like that.”
“What do you mean? She didn’t want help?”
“That’s putting a very positive spin on it,” he said.
“She didn’t want anything to do with me or with anyone else. You can’t get help from people if you literally lock the gate and refuse them entrance.”
I thought about what Aunt Paula had said, how everyone had been surprised by Lara-Lee Woodson’s pregnancy because she’d hated people so much.
“Lara-Lee was like a briar patch,” she’d told me.
“Do you remember the cold snap a few years ago?” Caleb asked.
I nodded, because I did a little bit.
That had occurred just before I’d left for my second stint in rehab and specific events of that time were little hazy, but I remembered the general misery.
“I saw the weather reports and I was sure that her pipes would freeze, since there was no heat in the house,” he continued.
“I called on the landline, which was the only way to reach her, and she told me to leave her the hell alone. Then she hung up.”
“Why was she so angry at you?”
“She was angry at the world. I happened to be an inhabitant of that,” he said quietly.
“But I had done things to piss her off, too. I didn’t go into the sciences like she’d wanted. She was very unimpressed with my career.”
But he had one.
Aunt Paula would have liked that.
“She didn’t approve of where I’d gone to college, where I was living, none of it. But she was still my mother,” he continued.
“I believed that things at the farm weren’t going well but rather than acting, I ignored it.”
“Maybe you just didn’t want a fight. I don’t blame you for that,” I added quickly.
“Who wants to help someone who’s angry and insulting?” I thought of myself, though, and how people had kept after me even when I’d been awful, and I sighed.
“I guess I understand, because you keep doing it when you love someone. Even if it’s like slamming your head against a wall, you keep doing it.”
“Exactly. I don’t want to be that guy who conveniently looks the other way, not again.”
I thought of the things he’d said to me about his mother, how she’d been “too busy” to teach him even though she’d wanted him to be homeschooled, and then how she’d prevented him from knowing any other kids.
I thought about how he’d had to cut a switch for himself.
“I would give myself some grace, if I were you. And also, remember that it’s a new chapter.”
“That’s right. We turned the page on the year,” Caleb agreed.
“It’s my responsibility to find a new place for me and Sir, not yours. But I wouldn’t mind help,” I offered.
That seemed to make him relax.
“I do want to help. In a way, I feel like Sir is my responsibility, too.”
Well, no, but I was gracious.
“Want to look at listings while I start packing? According to the notice, I don’t have that long until I’m out on my butt.”
“Hell. Yes, I’ll start looking,” he agreed.
“There has to be something.”
There was.
Not what I expected, but there was.