She got up and hugged him, her arms around his middle. “I might take you up on that someday, you know,” she said into his chest.
“Anytime, honey.” Tony winked at Angie over Rivera’s dark head. “Just say the word.”
With the house to herself Angie found that she was unexpectedly lonely. After a short hesitation she called her parents, bracing herself for impact as she punched in the numbers.
She said, “Is that Tommy Apples?”
“Ang! What the hell! I was just telling your ma, she’s disappeared into a swamp someplace. It’s been a month since you called.”
“It’s been less than a week, Dad.”
“And the mail we forwarded to you came back undeliverable, ‘No such person.’ ”
“It did?” Angie lowered herself into the rocker on the porch to watch the fireflies bumbling around the garden. “Did Ma have the right address?”
“Sure she did, she got it off the sheet you left. What kind of nutty place are they running down there, mail can’t even find you?”
“I’ll look into it,” Angie said, thinking of her mail cubby in the English department, that rectangle that had been empty every day since she got here, and then of Patty-Cake Walker and her smile. No counterstrike, indeed.
Her father was saying: “So, your aunt Bambina wants to know if you met that Jesse Jackson yet. She’s always had a thing for that man, you know. Like a girl with a crush on a priest.”
In the background there was a snort of dissent, and then the phone was dropped and picked up again.
“Don’t listen to him,” said Fran Mangiamele. “So, have you?”
“What? Met Jesse Jackson? He lives in Chicago, Ma.”
“What do I care about Jesse Jackson? I’m asking you”—her mother paused dramatically—“about John.” And then, into the silence: “John Grant.”
“I know who you mean,” Angie said.
“Well?”
“I told you already, Ma. He’s here, he’s getting married, end of story.”
“What’s she saying?” boomed her father.
“For Christ’s sake, Tommy, go get on the extension.”
“I like this phone better. What’d she say?”
“She says he’s marrying somebody else.” To Angie, her mother said: “It’s a solid thing, this engagement?”
“Ma,” Angie said wearily, “you want me to break up his relationship?”
“It’s not the worst idea,” said Fran. “It’s how I got your father, you know. He was going to marry Loretta D’Oro. You remember? We used to call her Goldy, she came in for breakfast every day until her husband took a heart attack and she quit working the counter at the Korean grocery. Your father was going to marry her, until I made him think different.”
“That’s not true!” shouted Tommy Apples. “Never!”
“Oh, it’s true. You ask Bambina, she’ll tell you.”
The phone changed hands abruptly, and her father said, “You paying toll charges to hash over old gossip, or do you want to tell us something interesting? What’s the old lady like, anyway?”
“Wait,” yelled Fran. “I’ll get on the extension.”
A half hour later, Angie put down the telephone and felt it ring, immediately, under her hand.
“Ma, what?” she said.
There was a long pause, and then Caroline Rose’s soft voice said, “Am I interrupting something?”
“Oh,” said Angie. “Sorry, I thought you were my mother. No, you’re not interrupting.”
There was a small, uncomfortable silence while Angie realized that she had never spoken to Caroline on the phone before. Then: “Can I help you with something, or did you want to talk to Rivera? Because,” she went on, almost babbling, “she’s not here just now.”
Caroline cleared her throat. “That’s all right,” she said. “I’m happy to talk to you.”
Angie bit her lip and wondered if southern custom required that she respond in kind, but then Caroline had launched into what sounded like a rehearsed speech.
“Miss Zula asked me to call. Tomorrow afternoon she’s going to Savannah to see an old friend. Miss Zula has told you about Miss Anabel?”
“Her high school teacher,” Angie said. “Yes.”
It turned out, as Caroline had called to say, that Miss Zula went to Savannah once a month to visit Miss Anabel, always by train, and this time she was inviting Tied to the Tracks to come along. If all went well and Miss Anabel didn’t change her mind, Tony would be allowed to film and they could interview the old lady.
“One more thing, while we’re on the phone,” Caroline said, and Angie’s heart lurched into her throat.
“I have been meaning to apologize to you about my aunt Patty-Cake’s behavior. She is sometimes a little too protective.”
“She has no cause to be,” Angie said. “I’m no threat to anybody.”
Caroline said, “Of course you’re not. But you’re very pretty and successful and sure of yourself, and you and John—” She paused. “Patty-Cake does have a suspicious nature, but I don’t. I wanted you to know that.”
“Well, good,” Angie said, and wondered why she was vaguely offended instead of relieved.
Later, unable to sleep, she came back down to the kitchen and began to make notes for the next day’s shooting. She was agitated and couldn’t say why, except that Caroline Rose didn’t have a suspicious nature, and thought she was pretty. Which made no sense at all; none of that should matter. What mattered was tomorrow, and the work she needed to do to get ready.
A moth bumped softly against the window screen, and from down the block came a very satisfied postcoital tomcat screech. Angie listened to the scratch of her pen on paper, and contemplated Miss Zula’s devious mind.
In the morning Angie found Tony in the kitchen when she came downstairs. He was trying to get the filter into the coffeemaker, one eye screwed shut. The other, red-rimmed, jerked fitfully. She took the filter out of his hand and shooed him away.
“I take it you’re just coming in,” Angie said. “Where’s Rivera?”
“She got lucky,” Tony said. “Really lucky. Luckier than me, at any rate.”
“Looking for love in all the wrong places?”
“Oh, I got some,” Tony said, yawning. “You know that blond woman with the chipped tooth who checks out at the Piggly Wiggly? DeeDee.”
“I do,” Angie said with great seriousness. “I do know DeeDee.”
“Well.” He slumped into a chair and ran his fingers through his hair until it stood up. “My Piggly Wiggly days are over.”
“What was it this time?” Angie asked.
Tony put back his head to study the ceiling. “Day-of-the-week thongs.”
She considered for a moment, and then decided that Tony needed no coddling. “This from a man who owns not one but two pairs of Home-of-the-Whopper boxer shorts. No good ever came from looking into a woman’s underwear drawer, you mope.”
Tony’s mouth twitched. He yawned again, loudly, but he was smiling. “Time for bed. We aren’t shooting anything important, are we?”
“I’m afraid we are,” Angie said. “We’re getting on a train for Savannah at exactly a quarter to one this afternoon, with Miss Zula. To go visit a retired high school teacher. If you’ve got to sleep you’d best get to it, and I’d forget the coffee.”
Tony groaned, heaved himself out of his chair, and headed for the stairs. Over his shoulder he said, “You’ve got a cruel streak, Mangiamele. Someday it will come back to bite you on the ass. Someday very soon.”
When Rivera had neither showed her face nor answered her cell phone by eleven, Angie roused Tony out of bed and pointed him toward the shower. Then she stood outside the door and shouted questions at him.
It turned out he remembered very little about the woman Rivera had left the bar with: dark-haired, lots of makeup, nervous laugh. “Your average closeted lesbian,” he said when he came out of the bathroom with a towel around his middle, water running down his face and chest. “Or at least she was last night. Today, who knows?”
He leaned over to look at his face in the oval mirror over the dresser, pulled down an eyelid with a thumb. “Christ,” he said balefully. “No wonder I can’t get laid.”
“Didn’t get her name?” Angie asked again, in desperation.
“Meg,” he said patiently, rubbing his bristled cheeks. “But I don’t know her last name. We can do this without Rivera, you know.”
Outside, the first rumbling of a storm echoed in the distance.
“Of course we can,” Angie said. “No problem at all.”
NINE
Ogilvie Bugle
NEWS ABOUT TOWN
Mayor Smith and the Jubilee Committee ask us to remind everybody that the Fourth of July is just four days away. The final organizational meeting will take place in the public room at the library tomorrow at seven p.m., and will be broadcast live on OP-TV, channel 12. The official schedule is available online at
www.ogilviejubilee.org
, at any of the stores on Main Street, the Piggy Wiggly, and the library. Entry forms for the 5K walk/run, the chili cook-off, baking contests and parade floats must be turned in by noon tomorrow at the library. The editorial staff of the
Bugle
reminds y’all that Miss Annie doesn’t look kindly on lollygaggers.
The flight from Atlanta to Savannah was one John had taken so many times that it made no more impression than getting in the car to drive to the store for milk. An hour in the air was just long enough to gather his thoughts and give himself another talking-to.
He was good at making plans and sticking to them, but like so many other things in his life this summer, a simple plane trip was turning into something else, and quite abruptly. Within five minutes in the air, the weather had turned from threatening to bad, and the man in the seat next to him—a dignified, calm grandfatherly type in a three-piece summer-weight suit—had gone the color of his shirt. Trembling, he asked John in an embarrassed whisper if he could hold his hand.
“I’m about to shake myself right to death,” said the old man, who introduced himself as Bob Beales. “Even if this plane doesn’t go down. I am that scared.”
John was trying to think of something comforting to say when a flash of lightning lit up the small cabin and the plane lurched. He held out his hand in a fist and the old man grabbed it, his fingers slightly swollen and red at the knuckle. The hands of a man who had worked hard all his life, who did not ask for help lightly. John was not reminded, not in the least, of his own father or of the one grandfather he had known.
“Don’t tell me how safe it is to fly,” said Bob Beales.
As John’s own father had died in a small plane, he wasn’t likely to say any such thing. He said, “I’m too worried about losing my lunch all over your suit to do much talking.”
The old man let out a squawk of a laugh and then yelped with the next lurch. His grip on John’s hand tightened.
“Tell me why you’re going to Savannah,” John said. “Maybe that will distract us both.”
“I’m going to Savannah,” said Bob Beales, “because my wife of forty-six years is there visiting her brother, and I couldn’t stand not having her in my bed even one more day.”
The plane did a half roll in one direction and then the other. John’s stomach lurched into his throat, and he used his free hand to fumble for the airsickness bag while the old man continued talking.
“. . . some of those years were a little thin, truth be told, but I have never wanted anybody else, and if I die today,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “I’ll have no regrets, not a one. And that will have to do for a prayer, because I’ve got nothing else to say to my maker.”
Just as suddenly as the weather had gotten rough, it settled. There was a fraught silence in the cabin and then a woman called out, “Thank you, Jesus. Can I get a drink?”