Sausage curls are escaping from her hairnet and her red fingernail polish is chipped at the tips. “What was that all about? With the sheriff and Sam?” she asks, setting down the two brown cows.
I can’t look at E. J. when I explain, “Somebody told the sheriff about Sam and Mama’s friendship.” (I’m not sure if Vera knows that her good friend is dead. She probably does since she’s tight with Beezy, but unless she says something, I’m not going to tell her that Mama’s passed. That would be mean.) “He’s takin’ Sam in for questioning in her disappearance.”
“Admiral Jesus H. Christ,” Vera says, very rattled. The lines between her eyes look like her first initial-V. “That changes things.”
I take a slurpy sip of the float and say, “Not really. I’m sure it’s just routine.” But then suddenly, something pretty bad occurs to me. What if the sheriff knows that Mama is dead, too? If he does, then I know from spending many hours in my father’s courtroom that the first thought that will come to his mind is foul play. Law-men can’t help it. They’re born suspicious. That’s why they become policeman and not poets. Yes, murder is what will dart across the sheriff’s mind. Before Papa threw our television set out the window, my favorite show was Mannix. When people went missing in that show, every stinking time they never made it back home alive. Joe Mannix would look and look, but those missing loved ones always turned up shot in an alley or stabbed on a park bench or smothered in their sleep the way Yolanda Merriweather was by her husband, Jimmy.
Seems like when a wife gets murdered, it’s almost always by her husband, but Papa didn’t do that to Mama. The most superior court judge in Rockbridge County placed his hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the law, not break it, no matter how furious he got at his willful wife. His Honor could lash out at her, even kick her when she was down, but he could never take her life.
But if I thought that Mama could’ve been murdered, that would mean the sheriff might think the same. Not about Papa, but Sam. It would never in a million years occur to Andy Nash or anybody else in this town that my father would be capable of doing away with my mother.
Vera searches in her apron pocket and comes out with a pack of Pall Malls. She shakes one out, tamps it down on her thumb, and struggles two times to get a match lit. Picking a piece of tobacco off her tongue, she says, “Y’all better finish up and get back home. It’s gettin’ late.” Where’s Jane Woodrow anyway? Don’t think I’ve ever seen you two apart, Shenny.”
“She’s back at the fort. She was too weak from hunger to come with me.” The red glowing Coca-Cola clock is letting me know that it’s fifteen past nine o’clock. I’ve left my sister alone for an hour and a half and Vera’s right, I hardly go anywhere without her. Feels weird, but not completely bad. I love her with all my heart, I do, but being with Woody, it’s like spending every minute of every day inside a Mixmaster. “Would you mind makin’ me two of your famous egg salad sandwiches?” E. J. nudges me hard in the ribs. “Make that three. One with extra, extra mayonnaise. To go?”
Vera sets her cigarette into a slot on the gold metal ashtray and says, “Three sammies, one with x mayo comin’ up.” She bends to slide the sandwich fixings out of the Frigidaire, but her shoulders are shaking with the effort. Woody gets like that sometimes. I’ve always thought that means she’s struggling to keep something inside her and it’s struggling to come out. Like having a tug of war, with yourself.
“Vera?” She looks at me in the mirror behind the counter that she uses to keep an eye on her customers. She’s having a hard time holding my gaze. I want to reach across the counter and pat her on the back. It’s unnerving to see a woman with an Anchors Away tattoo inked into her bicep burst into tears. “Are you wantin’ to tell us something?”
She snivels, packs the sandwiches into a wax bag, and places them on the counter in front of me. “About your mama, Shen,” she says in a drawl thicker than one of her malts. “I’ve been meanin’ to…” She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. They’re at her neck, then her hair, and finally, she’s rubbing them together.
“Did your mother ever mention to you… did she tell you that she was plannin’ to… damn it all.”
Maybe Vera was the one who told the sheriff about Sam and Mama, and she wants to get it off her abundant chest.
“There’s something you need to know,” she says. “Evie… your mother… she was gonna leave your father.”
E. J. shovels a spoonful of vanilla ice cream into his mouth and asks, “Where?”
I already know that, but since his mother and father are so happily married, he doesn’t get what Vera means.
“When Mama… do you know if she was planning on asking Woody and me to join her when she left?” I ask Vera in the smallest voice. Even though she’s dead, it matters to me more than anything ever has that my mother wasn’t going to leave without asking her peas in a pod to come along, the same way she had that Easter in the garden.
“Your mother had been plannin’ her getaway for months,” Vera says, like she didn’t even hear me. “She had every little detail down pat. She was gonna take the steppin’ stones across the creek, and your mama, E. J., she was gonna borrow the Calhouns’ car and give Evie a ride to the bus station.” She’s trying to remove a napkin from the container to use as a hankie and it’s giving her a hard time. She finally gives up and uses her capped sleeve to wipe off her drippy nose. “I’ve gone over this in my mind a dozen times. I don’t know what the hell went wrong.”
I know how she feels.
“We all kept hopin’ that we’d hear from her,” Vera says.
The same way I was. Before I found out from my father that night in the woods that he was “sorry for the way things worked out.”
Even though I would have told my mother that I couldn’t leave Papa back then because I was a daddy’s girl, her asking again would’ve made all the difference. I ask Vera, louder this time, “Was Mama gonna ask Woody and me to come along with her?”
“A course she was, cookie,” Vera says, snubbing out her cigarette and patting my hand. “Didn’t you get her note?”
“What note?”
“Your mama was supposed to leave a note behind for you. A beautiful note. She knew how much you twins loved your father, especially you, Shenny, but once you read her explanation, Evie was sure that you’d…” She stops to faraway smile, the way you do when you’re having a nice memory. “I offered to take you girls to her when the time came, but your mother, she wanted Sam to do it. She thought it best that a family member bring you.”
E. J.’s mouth drops practically down to the counter alongside mine. Sam? A family member? Why would she say something like that? What is wrong with… oh, poor thing. Working these long hours at the lunch counter. Those deep fryers can get awful hot. Vera probably has a severe case of heat exhaustion. Bootie Young told me there was this one time that his dairy-farming daddy was working too long under the sun and his mama found him trying to milk one of the bulls.
“Now, Vera,” I tell her in the voice you use when dealing with the sick or maimed, “a little rest and relaxation is what you need.” I’ve gotten up off my stool, taking care not to make any sudden moves. I’m going to walk over to the pay phone and call Doc Keller to come over here quick as he can. “You know Sam is our friend and not a relative, right? You just got mixed-up.”
“Well,” she says, throwing her hands into the air, “like they say in the Navy, the torpedo is outta the tube now. No sense pretending it ain’t.” Vera comes from around the counter and steers me back to my stool. “You’re gonna want to be seated when I break this to you. Me, too. Move over, E. J.” She gets situated between us. “A long time ago, when Beezy was just a girl, she worked for your grandfather cleaning his house, Shenny.”