It was at this shoe store-Reyers is the name of it-that I was to meet Lawrence’s widow. She was an assistant manager there.
I’d never been to Reyers before. But I’d sure heard about it. It was located in an old supermarket right downtown. It had over 150,000 pairs of shoes to sort through, in every size, style and color imaginable.
There was a NO FOOD OR BEVERAGES sign on the door. I folded my arms and waited while Eric guzzled the last two inches of his Mountain Dew.
Inside, Eric and I went our separate ways. He headed for the men’s shoes. I headed for the women’s. I hurried through the high heels and pumps, lingered in the flats, finally gravitating toward a sale table piled high with Indian moccasin slippers. They were only six dollars and James, as you remember, had gnawed my old fluffy ones. I started looking for a size seven.
I was spotted by a dowdy saleswoman in a beige pantsuit. She had short gray hair, fake pearls the size of turtle eggs, a smile poured from quick drying cement. “Is someone helping you?” she asked.
“Actually, I’m here to see Dory Sprowls.”
“Actually, I am Dory Sprowls,” she said. “Which probably makes you Maddy Sprowls.”
“It does.”
We shook hands like a couple of bankers. Gave each other the once over. I don’t know what she was expecting, but I know what I was expecting. I was expecting a much younger woman. A much more attractive woman. A tootsie-type with big bazooms, like Lawrence’s second and third wives. But looking at Dory Sprowls was like looking at my reflection in an old storm door. In size, shape, age and general lack of attractiveness, we were two old peas in a pod. “I’m sorry I’m early,” I said. “You never know how long it’s going to take you to drive anywhere this time of year. Especially when you’re not exactly sure where you’re going.”
She pawed the air, just the way I do. “Don’t I know it,” she said.
We found Eric in the boot department. We headed for his truck. I sat in the middle. We drove to her house on the bluffs east of downtown. It was a modest Cape Cod surrounded by unruly shrubs. She gave us the nickel tour and then sat us down at the kitchen table. Before leaving for work, she’d put on a crock pot of beef stew. She ladled out three big bowls, tore apart a loaf of rye bread, and put on a kettle of water for our tea. She gave Eric a fancy goblet for his fresh bottle of Mountain Dew.
I’d promised myself that I wasn’t going to compare notes with her about Lawrence. But that’s exactly what we both started to do, before we could swallow our first spoonfuls of stew.
I told her how I’d met Lawrence at Hemphill College, in a freshman English class. How it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but a long friendship that eventually soured into romance. She loved that.
She told me how she’d met him, in Pittsburgh, in a community college cooking class for singles. How their mutual difficulty mincing garlic evolved into something more.
We discovered that we’d both been married to Lawrence the same number of years-six. We discovered that neither of us had taken the time to find another man.
For a long while we howled about the quirky little things we couldn’t stand about our mutual husband-his annoying habit of singing at the breakfast table, the way he clipped his toenails in the living room, how he’d leave his ashtrays on the floor in front of the toilet. It was finally Dory who got down to brass tacks: “He told me he’d been a skunk with you,” she said. “And the two wives after you.”
“You knew about all that and you married him anyway?”
She laughed at her stupidity. “Yes, I did. And he was a skunk with me, too. Until his angina got so bad he couldn’t climb our bedroom stairs let alone somebody else’s.”
I could see in her eyes that she’d loved him. And I suppose she saw that same weakness in mine. “He did have his good points,” I said.
“Yes, he did,” she agreed.
When neither of us could think of any, we turned to the reason I’d come. “Like I said on the phone, Dory, there’s been a murder at the college. A very popular professor. And there’s a chance-a very small chance-that his murder is related to another murder. Back in the fifties. When Lawrence and I were seniors. I thought there might be something helpful in his old college clippings.”
She pointed to a big blue Rubbermaid storage tub on the kitchen counter. “Help yourself.”
My stew was already getting cold but I went straight for the tub. I peeled off the lid and ran my fingers across the tops of the folders stuffed inside. The air around me was immediately thick with the beautiful stench of old newsprint. “This is so good of you. Eric and I can get them copied and back to you in a couple of hours, I’m sure.”
She pointed at me and then my bowl. “Finish your stew. You can take Lawrence’s folders with you. And keep them.”
“Keep them? You sure?”
Again she jabbed her finger at my bowl. I obediently tiptoed back to the table. “Those years belong to you,” she said. “I’ve got lots of other tubs that belong to me.”
We finished our stew. Eric put the Rubbermaid tub in the back of his truck. We drove Dory back to the shoe store. I went inside with her and bought two pairs of those darling six-dollar moccasins.
Then Eric made me go with him to Daffin’s, supposedly, as I said before, the world’s largest candy store. We ogled the chocolate animals on display-the 400-pound turtle, the quarter-ton rhinoceros-and then stocked up on leftover Easter candy. We headed for home.
Eric had one hand on the steering wheel and the other around the neck of a huge milk-chocolate rabbit. He’d already eaten one ear and was making quick work of the other. “She was nice, wasn’t she?” he said.
I was nibbling on a marshmallow peep. “Yes, she was.” I just love those marshmallow peeps, especially when they’re stale and chewy. This one, unfortunately, was still fresh. But I knew that wasn’t going to stop me from eating ten or twelve of the damn things before we got back to Hannawa.
Eric finished the other ear. “No offense, but she reminded me of you.”
I had to agree. “Spooky wasn’t it-almost like Lawrence came back to me after all those years of flopping around.”
The rabbit’s entire head now disappeared into his mouth. “Feel vindicated, do you?”
“Vindicated? It made me feel like shit.”
And it did make me feel like shit. Lawrence, I’m sure, had loved me well enough. But he threw it away for better sex. For twenty-five years he hopped from one anatomically advantaged woman to another, marrying some of them, not marrying most. Then in middle age-older and wiser, his body parts apparently starting to wear out-he married me again. Or at least he married a woman exactly like me. And then the bastard cheated on me all over again! By proxy!
Meanwhile, I’d holed myself up in that damn little convent of mine on Brambriar Court. Pitying myself for the way I was. Pitying Lawrence for the way he was. Romanticizing that nano second of a marriage we had until it was right up there with Romeo and Juliet. In all those years the only man I’d been intimate with was Dale Marabout. He was just an awkward horny kid at the time, twenty years my junior. As nice as it was-and it was nice-it was only a brief sexual vacation. Dale moved on to a woman his own age. I slinked back into my emotional exile, into my martyrdom, into my Morgue Mama-ness.
And now, thanks to the beast who put that bullet in Sweet Gordon’s head, I was being forced to fall in love with Lawrence Sprowls all over again. To dream about a future with him all over again. To have my soul shattered by his infidelities all over again. One thing was clear-I was going to get the sonofabitch who killed Gordon if it killed me.
I made Eric stop his truck, right in the middle of the road. I slid out and went to the back. I pulled out the plastic tub and lugged it back to the cab. I squeezed in next to it. I ordered Eric to “Drive!” I put an entire marshmallow chick in my mouth. I pulled out a folder full of Lawrence’s clippings and started to dig.