Chapter Nineteen
How did your date go?” Rosie asked before I even closed the door.
“Were you waiting up for me?” I asked.
“Yep, I was,” she answered. “Ada Lou thinks she’s your grandmother, and that’s all right, but I’m of an age to be your mama, and that outranks her.
That means that I can wait up for you to get home, be nosy, and ask questions.
Pour yourself a glass of sweet tea and come and tell me all about the evening. You know you want to talk to someone.”
I hung up my coat, filled a glass with ice and tea, and sat down beside her. “Yes, I do, but it might take a while.”
“Let’s start with something that’s been on my mind and has nothing to do with tonight. You mentioned a while back that men like Buddy made your skin crawl and said you would tell me why sometime.”
My nose crinkled at the thought of Buddy and the way his eyes followed me around the Tumbleweed. “Since he hasn’t been back in the café in weeks, I had forgotten about that sleazy piece of crap.”
“But you’ve never forgotten about men like him, have you?”
“No, I have not,” I answered. “I was almost fourteen, and Frank promised that I could have a fake ID on my birthday so I could play cards. You saw my picture at that age. I matured really early. Anyway, we were at one of those backroom games that drew in the kinds of guys you might expect. Frank was on a losing streak and had thrown his last chips into the pot. He lost again and was ready to leave the table. That’s when a man who had been watching me with .
. .” I paused and tried to find the right words.
“He didn’t look like Buddy, but he had those same creepy eyes.
Anyway, he said that Frank had something he wanted, and he would give him five thousand dollars in chips for one night with me. ”
Rosie gasped. “You poor child.”
“Of course, Frank said no, and we left the game, but he hesitated and looked over his shoulder at me before he turned the guy down. There were other offers like that, but by that time I had my ID, and I made the decisions, not Frank.”
“I’m so sorry that you had to live through that,” Rosie said.
I shrugged. “Life is not all rainbows and unicorn farts. I read on a T-shirt once that experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. Do you still want to talk about tonight?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “We both need to get that taste out of our mouths.”
I took a long drink, and it did help take away the memory. “You are already up past your bedtime.”
She patted the place beside her on the sofa. “If you ain’t done telling me all about it by midnight, we will stop and finish up tomorrow morning.”
“It started out really well,” I said, and went on to tell her about the kiss on the side of the road, and the restaurant. “That place was so romantic, Rosie, with crystal chandeliers and fancy leather chairs. And then his parents showed up.”
“You are joking, right? Did he know they were coming? I’ll strangle him if he sprung this on you out of the clear blue sky.”
“I’m serious as a heart attack, and he was as surprised as I was.” I told her about Julia and as near as I could remember what had been said.
She scowled and shook her finger at me. “Don’t ever let anyone, and I mean no one—not Julia Armstrong, or Jackson, or whichever Armstrong—make you feel inferior.
No matter how much you love a person, they are not worth giving up your peace to stay around them.
You handled that situation well, and I couldn’t be prouder of you if I was really your mama. ”
I didn’t even try to keep the tears from flowing down my cheeks. “You don’t know how much that means to me, Rosie.”
She handed me a box of tissues from a tiny end table. “Dry your eyes. I’m speaking the truth.”
Black mascara mixed with my tears and left long streaks on the tissue. “How did you get so wise?”
“Like you said, ‘Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted,’” she answered.
I pondered over what she said for several seconds. “Amen to that. I wanted to go to Vegas, but I got the Tumbleweed instead.”
“I wanted to have a happy ever after marriage, but I got the Tumbleweed instead, so we are enough alike to be kinfolk even if we don’t share a drop of that DNA stuff everyone seems to be taken with,” she said in a wistful tone.
I gave the tissue box back to her. “I would gladly claim you for my mama.”
“Thank you for that, and I meant what I said about not letting anyone control you. I thought if I found a good man in the church, one who had the same values that I had, then I could spend my life with him. Raise a bunch of kids and die with a big family gathered around me, singing hymns when I made that transition from a physical body to a spiritual one.”
“I take it that didn’t happen, since you wound up at the Tumbleweed, too.”
She barely nodded and took a deep breath before she went on. “What I’m about to tell you goes no further than the walls of this trailer. Do you understand?”
I felt a yawn coming on, but I stifled it. No way in the universe would I ever stop her from telling me her story. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I will be forty-eight years old in July. Thirty years ago, about the time you were born, I gave birth to a stillborn little girl. She was full term and perfect, but she never took a breath. I was eighteen and had been married for ten months. Her birth broke me. Not spiritually or mentally, but physically. I could never have another child.” She stopped talking.
“I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t help crying more tears.
“I was a smart student and graduated a year early, and I’d grown up with the man I was in love with, so we got married on my eighteenth birthday. We went to church every time the doors were open, volunteered for fundraisers, and even taught the four- to five-year-old Sunday school class.”
“Catholics have Sunday school?” I asked.
“No, they have catechism, but in those days, I wasn’t in the faith that I am now.
Fred and I worshipped in a nondenominational place that was very radical in their beliefs.
My parents had gone there my whole life, and they abided by the ‘rules.’” She air-quoted the last word.
“It’s what Fred and I both knew, so I was prepared to be a submissive wife. ”
“You?” I almost choked on the idea.
“Yes, and I did a fairly good job of it, until we got a new preacher who was very charismatic and began to make new rules. The first one was that to keep men’s minds pure during services, the women would sit on one side and the men on the other side of the center aisle.”
“Good grief! That dates back way more than a hundred years,” I gasped.
“Yes, it does, but according to Preacher John, it would keep all our minds on the Holy Father during his sermons and away from lust. Then he took away the Sunday school classes. His theory was that the children should be made to sit still in services and learn obedience to their elders. Things went from bad to worse. But looking back, it all happened because we women were taught from childhood to be submissive wives. Fred and I had been married more than a decade when it all came to a head.” She paused again.
She had my absolute attention, and I had to know what happened next, but I waited. From the sadness in her eyes, I could tell that it was not an easy story. She probably would rather keep it buried rather than endure the pain that came along with telling it.
She took a deep breath and went on. “By then Fred was firmly under the preacher’s control.
He was the head deacon and Preacher John’s best friend.
They met in private at least twice a week to discuss things.
Things between us changed so slowly that I didn’t realize it for a couple of years.
But then he became verbally abusive, blaming me for being barren like some of the women in the Old Testament.
He didn’t beat me, but nothing I did was right.
Preacher John told him that God was punishing him for past sins for not giving him children and backed it up with scripture.
According to Preacher John, Fred was entitled to have a wife who would produce sons for him.
Didn’t Jacob in the Bible have two wives, and even a mistress or two? ”
“Holy crap!” I whispered.
Rosie nodded in agreement. “That’s exactly what it was.
Mind control and a bunch of crap. Preacher John had four wives by then.
Our town was very small, with only the one church, so it became kind of like a commune of sorts.
Maybe like that show Sister Wives in some respects, only on a bigger scale.
When Fred came home from work one evening, he told me that he was taking another wife.
Preacher John had picked out a woman for him that would give him sons to carry on his name. ”
“What did you do?” I asked.
Rosie shrugged. “By what I’d been taught and then brainwashed to believe that was biblical, I should have kept my mouth shut and welcomed a younger woman into our house.
But I did not do that. I told Fred that the only way he was moving another woman into the home was if he divorced me.
That was the first time I had stood up to him, and he was furious.
He screamed that Jesus spoke against divorce. ”
I thought of what Scarlett had told me about her past. “Did he hit you?”
“Not at first, but when I argued that Preacher John jumped from the Old Testament to the New when it suited his needs and wants . . .” Another long pause. “That’s when he jerked off his belt and taught me his form of submission.”
The truth is stranger than fiction came to my mind. “Did you leave?”
“Not that time, but I asked for a special meeting with Preacher John, and I told him that I did not want another woman in my house,” she answered.
“I’m not sure where he got his verses, but it was decided that I should be an example to the other women who didn’t want to ‘believe.’” More air quotes went around the last word.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I was taken out of town the next night after midnight and stoned by all the men in the congregation. They tied me to a chair and threw big heavy rocks at me until I died.”
I had lost my ability to read people for sure if I was to believe that story. She had pulled my leg long enough, and I didn’t want to hear any more of this fake tale of woe.
“Only,” she went on, “I wasn’t as dead as they thought I was.
They left me tied to the chair, sitting there on the side of a seldom-used dirt road.
I suppose they figured the coyotes and buzzards would take care of my dead body, but there was still a little life left in me.
Have you ever read the story of the Good Samaritan? ”
I was speechless that something like that could happen outside of a horror film. All I could do was nod.
“Well, I had one. A priest had been down that road to deliver last rites to an old woman who lived way back in the sticks. He stopped and loaded my nearly lifeless body into the back of his vehicle and took me to his church in another town. The nuns nursed me back to health. It took several months. During that time, Preacher John was arrested for fraud. He was using the money donated to the church for sex trafficking. I’m not sure how that worked, but I did remember him sending several young girls off to work in other places.
I testified against him in court for trying to kill me.
The nuns had the foresight to take pictures before they cleaned me up and called for help to mend all my broken bones and body. ”
“Didn’t you go to the hospital?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I was too terrified to go, so a lady doctor who went to the Catholic church made house calls and took care of me. She called the police, and the rest is history.”
“You are in witness protection, then?”
“No,” she replied. “I was beaten to death and woke up a new woman. Ilene helped me change my name from Rita Marie Sanchez to Rosalie Smith, and I’ve been at the Tumbleweed ever since.
Matilda, my priest, and Scarlett are the only people who knew or knows all that.
Rita died in that chair. Rosalie was born when I looked up through a tiny slit in one bloody eye and realized that I was being treated by a couple of nuns.
And now it is midnight, so it’s time for us to go get some sleep. ”
“One more question, please?” I asked.
“Only one, and then that’s the last time I want to remember that part of my life.”
“Where did you learn to play poker?”
“Matilda had been a dealer at a casino in her past life.” Rosie chuckled.
“When I first came to the Tumbleweed, I had horrible nightmares, and she taught me the game. The nights when I woke up crying or screaming, she would get out the cards and we would play until I could go back to sleep. I got addicted to the game and wanted to play every night, even after the dreams ended. We decided to give it up one year for Lent. It was only a game to Matilda, but I spent a miserable month going through withdrawal. I learned that the deck of cards was controlling me as much or even more so than Fred, so I never played again until we played for candy.”
“Did y’all play for money?”
“That’s two questions, but the answer is no, we did not. We bet with dried beans and macaroni. I threw away a gallon jar full when I quit playing, and I’ve never let anything else control me since then. No more questions, and good night.” She got up from her chair and disappeared down the hall.
She might have slept that night, but not me. I kept going back and forth over her story, then flipped to all the events of that evening. Would Julia talk Jackson out of ever seeing me again?
Anything worth having is worth fighting for. Ada Lou was back in my head. You have won bigger battles in the past. If you really like him, then put up your fists and fight.