I blinked. If Bitty did even one of those things the earth would probably wobble on its axis.
“You can’t cook,” was all I said, however. “You can’t even boil water without ruining a perfectly good pot.”
“You’ll teach me, won’t you, Trinket?”
I stood there with my mouth open. Then I said weakly, “Teach you to cook?”
“Sure. You can cook, can’t you?”
“Not with one hand.”
“But that will be perfect. You just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. See? I’ll have to let Sharita know I won’t be needing her for a while. Maybe a year or two. For however long it takes to get through this.”
The prospect of Bitty learning to cook was daunting enough, but doing without money for a year or two? It would kill her. She wouldn’t know what to do. She’d be like a baby duck learning to swim in the middle of the Atlantic.
I didn’t have the heart to disappoint her, so I said without meaning a word of it, “I’ll teach you to cook, Bitty. Everything will be just fine. You’ll see. Jackson Lee will be able to figure something out before you have to start shopping at Wal-Mart, I promise.”
“Do you really think so, Trinket?”
God, I hope so,
I thought, and said aloud, “I really think so. Now. Is there any pimento cheese left?”
Since all the pimento cheese was gone, I ended up eating Sharita's homemade chicken salad. It’s delicious, with pine nuts and small cut up grapes, big chunks of chicken and minced celery all mixed up with some kind of seasoned mayo that gives it an excellent flavor. I ate two sandwiches, then felt too full to have dessert, so limped back to my bed in the parlor.
Bitty was already there. She was walking much better, I noticed, and wondered if she’d taken another pain pill. Maybe her pills were less powerful than mine. She stayed awake and alert, if fairly goofy when taking them. I should probably call the doctor and ask for something not quite so strong. Not that my balloon ride hadn’t been fun, but I had obviously missed out on important events while flying high in my dreams.
“Where are the boys?” I asked. “Have they come home from Heather’s yet?”
Busy spreading a newspaper over her lap, Bitty nodded. “Oh yes. They’re all in the basement watching a movie. I said they had until midnight, then everyone needs to go home.”
“Well, they are certainly being quiet,” I observed. “I wouldn’t even have known they were here.” Bitty just nodded, and I noticed she had a huge pair of scissors in one hand. She wielded them across the newspaper in her lap with soft snicking sounds. Pieces of paper fell away in neat squares. I watched for a few moments before I couldn’t stand it any longer.
“What on earth are you doing?”
Bitty kept snipping, her focus on the paper. “Clipping coupons. I thought I might as well get started on saving our pennies. You eat hot dogs, don’t you?”
“Yes. You don’t, however.”
“Well, I will now. They’re like bratwurst or Polish sausage, right?”
“It depends on the kind you buy. Bitty. You have no idea how to make out a grocery list. You have no idea what you have in your pantry. Or your freezer. Wait until tomorrow. Sharita will be here and she can tell you what you need.”
“I’m going to need an envelope for these. So, when I go to Wal-Mart all I have to do is pay for stuff with these coupons, right?”
I rolled my eyes and sank back onto the cushioned comfort of two fat goose-feather pillows. “They also require green ones. You know. With the faces of presidents on them.”
“Oh.” Bitty looked up at me. “Then why am I clipping coupons?”
“Damned if I know. If you go to a Wal-Mart, I want to be there with my camera.”
“Trinket, you know I’ve been to Wal-Mart before.”
“Not to shop, Bitty. You go there with someone, not get a cart and go up and down the aisles looking for bargains, price-checking, comparing size to brand—that isn’t your style.”
“I can’t afford my style now,” she said, and there was something so vulnerable about her at that moment I couldn’t pick at her anymore.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll show you how to shop at Wal-Mart. Just don’t blame me if it turns out wrong.”
“How can it turn out wrong?”
I hated to even consider the many ways Bitty could get into trouble at a Wal-Mart store.
****
It was the fire alarm that woke me. At first I thought someone was shrieking, but even in my sleep-fogged and still slightly drugged state, it quickly became apparent that it was much more than that. For one thing, it had a
whoop whoop
sound like no shriek I’ve ever heard. For another thing, it was continuous, and even Bitty would have to draw a breath every now and then.
I leaped out of my bed too quickly, got dizzy, and stood there a moment before I decided I could walk without falling. So I lurched from the parlor into the hallway. A thick cloud of smoke drifted from the direction of the kitchen. It smelled suspiciously like burnt bacon. I expected a small grease fire, not an inferno. Foolish me.
In the kitchen, it boiled up from the state of the art stove like a black mushroom backlit with orange-red flames. Bitty beat frantically at it with a towel while it spread over the stovetop and licked a path toward the counters. Chen Ling came out from behind the breakfast bar like a pug missile, and shot past me toward the front of the house. Even the dog knew when it was time to abandon ship.
“Bitty!” I yelled over the alarm, “Where’s your flour or cornmeal?”
“Are you mad?” she yelled back. “This is no time to be baking!”
There was no time to explain the dynamics of a grease fire. I jerked open a couple of cabinet doors and found something that looked like flour. At the moment I managed to toss it over the worst of the flames, the fire department arrived. A good thing, because whatever was in the plastic canister flared up and shot sparks into the air.
Two firemen wearing helmets, boots, and asbestos jackets and pants barged into the house through the front door. One of them grabbed me and shoved me toward the still open door, while the other one attempted to remove Bitty. She bopped him on the helmet with a metal spoon and said something I was glad I couldn’t hear, but he merely picked her up and carried her out onto the front lawn where Chen Ling sensibly sat and barked at the big red fire truck. Bitty was unceremoniously dumped next to her dog.
I stood in the bushes next to the house and regretted wearing just a tee shirt and panties to bed. Thank heavens it was one of those really long tee shirts, but still—there I was, once more outside without proper clothing. Dreams can come true, it seems.
At any rate, moments later Brandon and Clayton were escorted downstairs and joined us on the front lawn, where they looked at their mother in bewilderment.
“What happened?” one of them asked.
“There’s something the matter with that stove,” said Bitty. “It started a fire!”
“They can do that when they’re turned on,” I said from the hydrangea bushes, and Bitty shot me a disapproving glare. I didn’t care. It didn’t take a genius to figure out she had been trying to cook. If nothing else, the charred sticks of bacon were evidence enough against her.
The boys were still confused. “Who turned on the stove? Was it an accident?”
“Your mother was trying to cook,” I said as I artfully arranged myself behind the thickest limb of blue snowball flowers. “I think she burned the bacon.”
“Trinket, I can speak for myself, thank you,” Bitty said in a very shrewish tone. “I do not need you to make up stories.”
“
Were
you trying to cook?” I demanded, and when she didn’t answer, I added, “See? I was right.”
After a moment, one of the boys—Clayton, I think—asked, “Aunt Trinket, why are you standing in the bushes?”
“I didn’t have time to dress. What took you boys so long to come downstairs? Didn’t you hear the alarm?”
“Oh, we heard it, but thought Mama had just forgotten the code again. She does that sometimes. A lot.”
Bitty sat down on a garden bench near a flowerbed that held dozens of pink vinca flowers and a huge blue gazing ball on an elaborate stand. Of course, she was clothed in a dressing gown and silk pajamas, so she didn’t have to hide in the hydrangeas like I did.
By now neighbors were out on their front lawns, too. Mrs. Tyree, who lives next door to Bitty, stood at the iron rail fence between their yards and peered over at us. “Are you all doing all right?”
Bitty, ever the gracious hostess, nodded and smiled. “We are doing just fine, Mrs. Tyree, thank you for asking. Lovely morning, isn’t it?”
“Yes, quite lovely. Not as quiet as usual, however,” Mrs. Tyree responded in a dry tone that made me laugh. She’s lived next door to Bitty for years and years and has seen just about everything in that time, I’m sure. Mrs. Tyree is elderly, dignified, and the epitome of a well-educated black woman. She reads voraciously, and in her spare time conducts tours through the Ida B. Wells Museum. I suspect she has more fun keeping up with Bitty’s antics than she does watching cable TV.
Across the street beyond the front of the fire engine, I recognized more neighbors. Richard Simmons—no kin to the bouncy gentleman with the exercise videos—wore a bathrobe, slippers, and carried his morning paper in his hand. People craned their necks to see what was happening on their street. It was still so early no one had left for work yet or gotten ready for the day, and they milled around in the brittle early sunlight that hadn’t had time to heat things up. Except for a few bugs and the inconvenience of the fire, it might have been as lovely a day as Bitty pretended.
Just about the time the firemen got the fire put out in the house, Bitty’s automatic sprinklers came on. I usually forget about those things, since they come on before I get up, and apparently, so had Bitty.
She leaped up from the garden bench as jets of water shot up from the ground like Old Faithful. They’re the kind of sprinklers that send out sprays of water in a rapid flow as they make a 360 degree turn to cover as much ground as possible. Since they’re every six feet along the water line, there is practically nowhere to escape them if you happen to be standing in the front yard.
Brandon and Clayton made a mad dash for the front porch. Since they were wearing some kind of athletic shorts like basketball players wear, it didn’t really matter if they got wet. Bitty made frantic circles looking for a way out, holding her hands in front of her as if to keep the pulses of water at bay. Chen Ling snapped at the water coming from the ground a few times, then beat a retreat to the shelter of the porch.
There was no way I was moving from behind the hydrangea bushes, not with all those people standing in the street. Besides, the water wasn’t so bad where I stood since the bushes formed a barrier of sorts. I’m tall enough that the water didn’t hit me in the face, either. Poor Bitty.
She staggered drunkenly around the lawn with her eyes closed against the water jets, her hands out in front of her like a blind person might do to keep from running into obstacles. I couldn’t stand it.
“Bitty!” I shouted. “Over here! Come over here!”
“Where?” she shrieked, and opened one eye in an attempt to find me. She looked nothing less than a drenched Cyclops in a lovely pink dressing gown, silk pajamas, and with bandaged feet stuck into white fluffy slippers.
That was the picture that made the front page of
The South Reporter
.
CHAPTER 13
Sometimes the worst days in our lives turn out to be not so bad in retrospect. I thought about that a lot in the days following the fire. Bitty’s insurance picked up the costs of repairs as well as clean-up, and she and I went to a hotel in Memphis to stay until it was over. Her insurance paid for that, too. Good insurance is essential, we agreed.
That was how we ended up at The Peabody Hotel. Since I’d never stayed there as a guest, but had worked there for two years, I figured it was about time I was treated as nicely as they treat all their guests. We ordered room service in the mornings for our breakfast, spent a leisurely time eating Eggs Benedict and drinking mimosas, then dressed to go downstairs and sit in the lobby.
Bitty, of course, had refused to leave Chen Ling behind no matter how many times I pointed out that dogs aren’t welcome in most hotels, but no one said a thing about the ugly baby in the sling. It must be a new part of the employee training that has been implemented since I left their employ. Not that I minded.
No, after the stress and horror of the previous weeks, this was a vacation for both of us. We deserved to be pampered, we said over breakfast mimosas, luncheon Bloody Marys, and supper’s White Russians. Well, I had the White Russians and Bitty drank the Jack and Coke. My system is less tolerant than hers, and even though I had gladly left my pain medication behind, I was still taking antibiotics.
So on our sixth day at the hotel, we sat near the marble fountain and watched the ducks paddle around while we drank a Bloody Mary. It was my first, Bitty’s second. I had talked her into giving up her pain medication by promising not to say a word about the photograph in the paper. I think it was one of the reasons she was glad to leave Holly Springs behind for a week. Quite a few people had called her about it. If I say it was a bad picture of her, that is a mild statement. It was atrocious. Poor Bitty had her head tilted to the right, her mouth open in a lopsided scream, and one eye squeezed shut while the other eye looked as if it was about to pop right out of the socket. Silk dressing gowns and pajamas have a habit of clinging to the body when drenched, and there was Bitty on the front page of
The
South Reporter
with both arms out, one foot lifted, fingers splayed, and silk clinging to her like a second skin. Fortunately for me, all the photographer got of me in the photo were my feet and head. Of course, it looked like I was wearing a bush, but I can overlook that. Nothing important showed.
Anyway, her feet were much better, and she’d removed the bandages and wore shoes again. I still had my right arm in a sling, but since Bitty wore Chen Ling across her chest in a discreet sling, we matched. The casual passersby might assume we had recently been in an auto accident, which was completely true.