Fannie Flagg
I Still Dream About You
© 2010
For Jonni Hartman-Rogers, my friend and press agent for over thirty years, with love and gratitude
Prologue
IT’S FUNNY WHAT A PERSON WILL REMEMBER SO MANY YEARS LATER; what sticks in your mind and what doesn’t. Whenever he thought back to the year he had worked at the Western Union office, he remembered that little girl.
At the time, the entire city of Birmingham was surrounded by a number of smaller suburban neighborhoods, each with its own name and shopping area. Most had two or three churches, a drugstore, a grammar school and high school, a bank, a Masonic hall, a J. C. Penney’s, and a movie theater.
In East Lake, where he worked, the Dreamland Theatre sat directly across the street from the Western Union office, between the barbershop and the grocery store. He had been sitting at his desk, looking out the window, when he had noticed the pretty brown-haired girl in a green plaid dress. She was the tallest of the three or four little girls walking home from school together that afternoon. It wasn’t an unusual sight to see groups of kids going by that time of day. He was used to that, but just as they passed the barbershop, the tall girl stopped in front of the theater, waved goodbye to her friends, then turned and walked inside the two big glass doors and disappeared into the lobby.
Dreamland didn’t open until seven P.M. on weeknights, and he wondered what she was doing going into an empty movie theater all by herself. He even thought about walking across the street to check on her, but a few minutes later, a light came on in a second-floor window, next to the big neon sign, and he could see the silhouettes of a woman and the girl walking back and forth, so he assumed she must belong there.
But still, every afternoon after that, when he wasn’t busy, he would look over to make sure she’d made it home safely, and eventually, right before she went inside, she would turn and shyly wave at him, and he would wave back.
About three months later, he was shipped off to serve in the army, and by the time he got back to the Western Union office, the theater had closed down for good, and he never saw her again.
He had six granddaughters of his own now, but to this day, he still wondered what ever happened to the pretty little girl who had lived upstairs in Dreamland.
Once to every man and nation comes
the moment to decide…
And the choice goes by forever ’twixt
that darkness and light
– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Big Decision
TODAY WAS THE DAY MAGGIE HAD BEEN THINKING ABOUT, OBSESSING about really, for the past five years.
But now that it was actually here, she was surprised at how calm she felt: not at all as she had imagined; certainly not as it would have been portrayed in a novel or in a movie. No heightened emotions. No swelling of background music. No beating of breasts. No nothing. Just the normal end of a perfectly normal workday, if anyone ever could consider the real estate business normal.
That morning, she had gone to the office, worked on newspaper ads for Sunday’s open houses, negotiated a washer and dryer and an ugly monkey chandelier to be included in the sale price in one of her listings (although why her buyers wanted it was a mystery), and made a few phone calls, but nothing out of the ordinary. She had known for some time it was coming, but she wondered why it happened on this particular day, instead of one last month or even next week? Yet not more than two minutes ago, as she drove past the pink neon Park Lane Florists sign, she suddenly knew this was the day. No bells, no whistles, just the sudden realization of a simple fact. She sat and waited for the red light to change and then turned off Highland Avenue and pulled up to the black wrought iron gates, pushed her gate code, and drove into the large cobblestone courtyard. At first glance, seeing the tall, flickering gas lamps lining the sidewalks and the ivy growing up the sides of the walls, a stranger might have guessed they were in a quaint little mews somewhere in London, instead of in Mountain Brook, just five minutes from downtown Birmingham. Mountain Brook had always looked more English than southern, something that had always surprised her out-of-town buyers, but most of the iron, coal, and steel barons who had settled it had been from either England or Scotland. Crestview, her very favorite house, that stood atop Red Mountain and overlooked the city, had been built by a Scotsman and was an exact replica of a house in Edinburgh.
A few seconds later, she eased the new light blue Mercedes into her parking space, took her purse and keys, and headed up the stairs leading to her townhome. When she got inside and closed the door behind her, thankfully, the loud, jangling five-thirty traffic noises quieted down to a soft muffle. Her building was just one of the many stately old red brick apartment buildings built in the twenties and turned into condominiums in the eighties, when this side of town had gone condo-crazy. Her unit was a well-appointed two-story townhouse in the elegant, high-end enclave known as Avon Terrace and was kept immaculate at all times. The dark brown parquet floors were polished and shined, rugs vacuumed, kitchen and bathrooms gleaming and spotless. They had to be. She was the listing agent for the entire complex, and her unit was the model other realtors showed to potential buyers. Today, she didn’t stop to check the mail in the silver dish on the small table in the foyer, as she usually did, but walked straight through to the small den off the living room and sat down at her desk.
She knew it must be written by hand. Something like this typed up on the computer would be far too impersonal and certainly not in good taste. She opened the right-hand top drawer and pulled out a small box of monogrammed stationery containing ten sheets of thin blue paper with matching blue envelopes. She took out a few pages and one envelope, then reached across the desk and fingered through a bunch of pens she kept in a brown leather penholder with gold embossing, searching for something to write with. As she continued to test one cheap plastic pen after another, she wished she had kept at least one good fountain pen and that bottle of maroon Montblanc ink she had saved for years. Every one of her old black felt pens had dried up, and now she would have to use the only thing she had left that still worked. She stared at it and sighed. Life was so odd. Never in a million years could she have imagined that she would wind up writing something as vitally important as this on ten-year-old stationery with a fat, bright red ballpoint pen with silver sparkles that had Ed’s Crab Shack: Featuring the Best Crab Cakes in Town written on the side.