Page 6 of The Cadence
“She wouldn’t have liked it to go to pieces,” I answered, and she held my arm and nodded as tears welled up in her eyes. For my part, I was mostly too busy to cry, except at night when I was alone in my bed. Then I sobbed into a shirt that I left on my pillow, ready for that purpose.
Besides getting the house ready, I also had to get myself ready for my next stage of life and that proved to be a lot harder than fixing the faucet.
I had found a job at the Biscuit Barrel restaurant, but on the morning that I was supposed to start, my car wouldn’t.
It was dead, totally dead, and I didn’t have enough money for a rideshare.
The bus that eventually got me there made so many stops that I was an hour late on the first day.
I wasn’t fired at that moment, but I had a feeling it was coming shortly so I got a second job in preparation for losing the first one.
It paid less but the commute was better.
There was plenty to accomplish, but sometimes I took a moment to rest. It was during one of those, when I was sitting in my grandmother’s rocking chair, that Will came home again.
I saw him behind the wheel of a car that stopped at the curb, a different one from what he’d driven the last time he had shown up at my grandma’s house.
He got out as I stood, kind of dazed, and it wasn’t only because of how I was a little tired from the double I’d pulled the day before and my shift at the restaurant that had begun this morning at four.
“Hi! What are you doing here?” I called.
“You were right about the pothole,” he answered as he walked toward me. “Kids could swim in there.”
“They might start if it gets any hotter.” I watched as he joined me. “You’re back. Is it because of your dad again?”
“I had some time before I need to be in Michigan,” he explained.
“Can I get you anything? Want something to drink? I made a jar of sun tea.”
“Sure,” he answered, and we went inside. He stopped once he saw the living room. “What’s going on?”
“This is what’s left,” I explained. “I gave the couch to the church, for the meeting room. Miss Mozella wanted the chair where my grandma always sat when they knitted together. I also sold her bed and I got someone to take the mattresses.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here at all. Where are you moving?”
“That’s a little up in the air, but a girl I’m working with at the Biscuit Barrel may have a space opening in her apartment.
I’ll have to figure out what to do with the dining room set because it won’t fit in that place,” I said, running my hand across the table.
“I’ll be able to bring my own bed and my grandma’s sewing machine.
” I looked at the boxes, too. “I want to keep her baking sheets and bowls, all the kitchen equipment. It’s packed now and maybe I’ll leave it that way until I have a bigger place of my own. ”
“When do you need to be out for good?” he asked.
“Friday.”
Will Bodine stared at me. “Today is Wednesday. You don’t mean this week.”
“Yeah, I mean in two days. Most of the boxes will fit in my car and so will the sewing machine and her fabric and yarn stash. If I have to leave the other stuff, like the dining set and my bed, I guess that’s ok.”
“And then…what? You’ll sleep in your car with your belongings until you find a place to live, and then you won’t have a bed to use if you do?”
“I’ll figure it out,” I said.
“You seem very calm about it.”
“This isn’t the worst problem,” I answered.
“The worst problem is losing somebody that you love. After that, nothing seems so terrible. I’ll get you the tea.
” I had left a few things out of the boxes, and one was a glass that I filled for him.
Then I invited him to take a seat at the dining room table, the one I wasn’t sure what to do with quite yet. “What’s wrong with your father?”
“What?”
“Didn’t you say that you came back here again because of him?”
“He’s all right,” Will answered.
“Are he and your mother still fighting?”
He looked at me for a moment before nodding. “You remember,” he said, and I nodded back. “They’re still like cats and dogs and they still won’t divorce and leave each other the hell alone.”
“Do they need you to come home and referee?” I asked.
“No, they never listened to me anyway,” he said. “He’s been acting worse, though. You know about his car accident.”
Everyone in this town knew about his car accident, because a collision with an ambulance ferrying a patient to the hospital was going to draw attention.
It had drawn national attention, just a little, and just because his son was a pro athlete.
Luckily, everyone (including the patient) had survived and the gossip had died down.
But I imagined how Will would have dealt with it.
I remembered how he’d sat at this table seven years before when he’d come to tutor me, and how he’d carefully removed three pencils and his calculator from his bag.
He’d made miniscule adjustments with his long index finger, just a slight tap one way and the other, until they were perfectly spaced and aligned.
No one would have enjoyed a family member getting into a drunken car accident and hurting people, of course, but I bet that the disorderliness of it bothered him in another way.
“I’m glad you were able to come back and deal with whatever’s happening now,” I said, and he looked at the boxes.
“I’m fine, but your situation concerns me. It may not bother you, but it absolutely needs to be dealt with. You can’t sleep in your car.”
“That’s a last resort,” I assured him.
“You won’t go to any of the people from your church?”
“I won’t do that to them. I mean, I might for a night or two, but I would need to have a definite idea of what was next so that they didn’t feel stuck with me.
They would want to help but they can’t,” I said.
“If they knew that I didn’t have a place to go right now, they would all be anxious. So I’ve been lying.”
He squinted.
“I know that I shouldn’t, but it’s for a good reason,” I explained. “I think that gives me a pass.”
“Lying is ok if you mean well.”
“In this case, it was for the greater good. I’m not going to give a blanket dispensation,” I cautioned, “but there are occasions when you have to. My grandmother really didn’t like lying in a general sense but she did at times.
She told me that her son was a Marine, for example, because she wanted me to be proud of him as my father.
I believe that he did once visit a recruiting office, but that was as far as his military career went. ”
Will seemed interested. “What about him? Could he help you right now?”
“No,” I answered. “Definitely not. He died in prison three years ago. It was really the beginning of the end for my grandmother.” Despite his flaws, she’d loved her only child.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I didn’t know him very well,” I reassured him. “He was locked up for most of my life and I never visited until I came to live here and she became my guardian. You don’t get to know someone when you only see him across a table once a week in a room with a hundred other visitors at the prison.”
“I’m still sorry. You don’t have any people left?”
“No. Hang on, I’m going to grab my tissues. It was so nice of you to give me all those boxes.”
When I returned from my bedroom, he was checking his phone and frowning at it.
“Is something happening with your new business?” I asked. “I was thinking about it more.”
“No, nothing about that. My agent—never mind. Did you ever consider leaving Tennessee?”
“Leaving?” I repeated. “You mean like living in Georgia?” The state line wasn’t that far away.
“I mean going farther,” he said, and I felt my eyebrows raise.
“No, I never did. My car isn’t reliable and everyone I know is here.”
“Do you have a lot of friends from high school?”
“I mean my grandmother’s friends from church. But they care about me,” I added, “and I care about them, too.”
“Besides them, there’s nothing tying you to this place.”
“I have two jobs now,” I said, “one at the Biscuit Barrel and I’m also a stocker and bagger at the grocery store around the corner. That’s great because I don’t even need to take the bus.”
“You could get jobs like that anywhere,” Will told me.
“The biscuits wouldn’t be as good.”
“This is serious, Calla.” His face didn’t show it, but his voice was run through with frustration. “You’re about to be evicted and your plan is to live in your car.”
“I understand the seriousness of not having a stable home better than most people. I’m doing the best I can!” I told him. “What do you think I should try next, spinning straw into gold?”
“No, I have another idea.” He had a totally different plan, which he described over a second glass of tea. It was not anything that I expected, but I liked what he was telling me.
And it wasn’t too long before I heard myself saying “yes” to it.