Chapter 25
When I got back from town for the second time, I found Charlie on the back porch, trying to pry open a crate with a metal spatula. I just stood there watching, not speaking. A very hard thing for me to do.
“Dammit—” She sat back, sweat dripping down her temples. The top was still nailed down.
She wiped her brow in the crook of her arm and looked up at me. “Say it,” she said. “Say what you’re thinking.”
“Where should I begin?” Now that Frances and Mrs. Tartt were gone, all my frustration and fears and confusion could only land on Charlie.
“What are you so upset about?”
“Charlie, I got a list.” I took my good spatula out of her hand and bent the metal handle back straight. “First of all, it seems to me like you were trying to get rid of Frances and Mrs. Tartt.”
“Not Mrs. Tartt, just your sister. I can’t start a business and be her maid and ignore her rude stuck-up nose in the air.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Moving on, your numbers are unrealistic. There’s no way a dime-a-dance business can earn that—”
“We have to try—”
“—kind of cash and frankly I’m scared you don’t have any idea what you’re doing except getting Mrs. Tartt’s—”
“I never promised this would work!”
“Well, you sure dangled some mighty big numbers,” I said. “So could you at least act a little more worried about what happens if it doesn’t?”
Charlie’s mouth hung open. “You think I’m not worried? Have you even noticed”—her smile was clownish—“how my life has turned out?”
“I—yes. I have, Charlie.”
“Then don’t say I’m not worried. I am so worried this won’t work, I can hardly breathe.” She climbed to her feet, wiping her face again with her sleeve. Gone was the sales pitch, the chin-up confidence.
“I don’t feel any better knowing you’re as worried as me now.”
“Then go home, Birdie,” she said. “Don’t risk a thing. We told you already, you don’t have to do this.”
That was three jabs in one morning that my little life might not even be worth losing.
“I told Mrs. Tartt I’m staying, so I’m staying,” I said. “But I’ve got questions.”
“Fine, we can talk about it tonight. To be honest, I’m still figuring a lot of it out myself.”
You wouldn’t know that from the telegram I’d sent for her.
It’d been addressed to somebody named Flossy Stolivsky at Good News Bible Co.
, Inc., Sweetwater, Miss. The tenner read: GOOD HOUSE FAIR PAY VERY BUSY COME SOON brING OTHERS STOP.
The gray-headed woman at the Western Union looked up like she was dying to ask what in the world could be “very busy” these days, except a free soup line.
It seemed pretty presumptuous of Charlie when we hadn’t even unpacked the first crate.
“Whatever happens,” Charlie said, tapping her chest, “I take responsibility for all of this.”
“I’ll let Mrs. Tartt know that when they come seize her house.”
Even with the cooler weather, it was hot, heavy work.
I hauled more crates to the porch and unwrapped wads of Oxford Eagle newspaper to find inside sparkly pink balls, gold angels, silver stars and moons.
There were jumbled strings of tin lanterns, paper crowns, bags of confetti, ashtrays stamped with the letter T, horns, hats, a violin bow, a dried-up mouse skeleton curled inside a ladies’ gold shoe size 3, all the picayune pieces of Mr. and Mrs. Tartt’s parties, molded or stiff with age.
Also, a live chipmunk that skittered off and a nest of live baby birds I set back in the barn, the mama probably wondering, Where in the heck are my kids now?
When I returned, the cow was up on the porch, eating newspaper from 1922.
A few things I managed to ask Charlie: “How many boarders do you think you could get in here and when?” I’d need to start planning meals and where they’d sleep.
“Probably six, maybe seven. Some can share a room and hopefully they’ll start getting here in the next few days.”
“And do you plan on selling dances too?”
“No,” she said and then repeated it. “No, I don’t dance anymore. But the one you sent the telegram to, Flossy, she’s good, she’s got a specialty.”
“What kind of specialty?” I asked. Seemed like every answer brought a new question, but before she could answer, a corn snake slithered out of a crate and we both jumped.
By two, I’d tossed out most of the broken things, the smelly things, the deceased.
We’d moved on to pulling out the pieces of the dance floor.
Stacks of long boards, painted black, scuffed and peeling.
Heavy metal pieces to secure the corners and long metal brackets for the sides.
Posts that were to go down deep in the ground and hold the thing together.
The sun was fierce today, despite the cooler air.
By four o’clock, it felt like my mouth had melted shut.
We’d skipped lunch and I’d been too hot to ask any more questions.
I wished Mrs. Tartt was here to see everything being unpacked, it would’ve made her smile, though I was more glad Frances wasn’t.
I didn’t need her hollering from the sofa, What’s for supper?
Or Why are you even helping with this stupid idea?
In fact, I stuck a crinkled gold party hat on my head and, for a few minutes, let myself get very slightly excited.
Even if it was a failure, I’d never been to a dance club before.
Heck, a month ago, I’d never had hot water come out of a tap before.
Down in the yard, Charlie dropped a heavy cocktail tabletop in the grass. She’d already hauled about eight of them outside. Her face had gone from pink to strangely white.
“I think you need a break, Charlie,” I called. I’d been on the porch in the shade while she’d been working in the sun. When I came out with a glass of water, she’d moved under the shade of a crape myrtle tree and was pressing her forehead against the peeling trunk.
“I feel like I can’t breathe,” she said into the tree.
“Alright, drink this,” I said and gave her the water. She took it and drank it down. “Sit, sit here,” I said, and she sank to the ground and leaned the side of her face against the tree trunk. Something about that tree seemed to be steadying her.
“Will you tell me about her,” she asked, “just until I feel better?”
So I told her about the biscuits, how strawberry jelly and ham were Meg’s favorite.
How she’d helped me paint the walls blue and the trim white, how her eyes had lit up when I’d pulled the boards off the window.
I didn’t bring up that Meg was stuck in that moldy office or how the other girls treated her and surely not Garnett Pittman.
I fed her only the words she needed to stop crushing her face into a tree.
After a while she sat up straight again and said, “This thing better goddamn work.”
I’d almost made it down the stairs when I tripped on the hem of my nightgown.
I caught the rail as the banging on the front door continued.
Every single one of my bones ached from hauling crates and tables and floorboards the day before.
By the light pouring in, I figured it must be past eight in the morning.
I opened the front door and blinked at the woman standing there. She had lank yellow hair. She wasn’t much more than skin and bone inside a tight pink dress with pink straps, black kohl smeared under her blue, bulging eyes.
“Boy, she wasn’t kidding about this place.
Schmancy.” She walked right on past me into the house with a pink bag looped over one shoulder, swinging a beat-up brown leather suitcase in her other hand.
A peeling red decal on the side said See North Dakota.
She set the suitcase down with a thump and, looking around the empty hall, the library on the right full of piles of junk, the formal sitting room on the left, she said, “On second thought, this place looks like crap.”
“Are you here to sell something?” I asked. I was still half asleep, squinting at a tear in the seam of the pink fabric along her rib cage.
“You betcha I am,” she said and smiled, flashing the biggest set of false teeth I’d ever seen. “Name’s Flossy.” She stuck her hand out. I didn’t know what to do, so I shook it. “Charlie told me to get here on the fly.”
“Oh.” Finally I understood. She’s gotten here so fast. But she was not, by far, the elegant young lady Mrs. Tartt was expecting.
She looked over forty, with deep bags under her eyes and I noticed she had on a pair of heavy, black …
were those men’s shoes? They made her legs look skinny as broomsticks.
It got even more confusing when you added the tight pink dress and huge false teeth and the fact that she’d been working as a Bible saleslady.
“You’re the one with the … specialty?” Wasn’t that what Charlie’d called it?
“That is I. By way of a painful, yet fortuitous injury.”
“I’ll go get Charlie,” I said and started down the hall, calling her name. Voices traveled in this house, and I heard a distant deep thump and, seconds later, “I’m—I’m coming.”
“She’s coming,” I said. There was nowhere near to sit, that settee in there smelled odd. So I just kept talking. “So … how long have you been in this business?”
“Since I’s thirteen. A uncle type taught me. Whatabow choo?”
“Oh, I’m not, but my daddy taught me a few steps.”
“Ain’t we lucky. Keeping it in the family like that.”
She had a strange, unplaceable accent. “Where’re you from?” I asked.
“I’s born in Dakota, but some a me’s from Philly and Jersey and the greater New Orleans area.”
Charlie came hurrying up the hall in a white nightgown. “Flossy, you’re here already!”
“Well, I come soon as I could, just like ya said. So what’s it been, six, seven years since Memphis?”
Charlie nodded, chewing her bottom lip. She looked nervous as a cat, glancing from me to Flossy.
“You shoulda seen Priscilla when I told her I’s leaving. Tossed my things right out the window, she did. I burned that bridge good.”