Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (10 page)

The good news was that Billy would live. He would have to have pins in his leg, and more surgery followed by physical therapy, but he would be okay.

The bad news was, we didn’t have any insurance.

“Tell me that again,” I said.

When Debbi was born in that very same hospital, our insurance paid for everything. But Billy had let it go, I learned, so they wouldn’t take so much out of his paycheck. Whatever he’d been doing with that extra $280 every month, I didn’t know. He probably didn’t know either. Money just slipped through his hands like water. Ten here, twenty there. Billy was a high liver, as I said. He cried like a baby when I told him I knew. I couldn’t stand this, what with him in pain and all wrapped up in those bandages.

“Just forget it,” I told him. “What’s done is done, water over the dam.”

I put him on the family room couch with everything he needed (TV remote, phone, cooler) close to hand. For once, I was glad he’d bought that fancy entertainment center!

Then I went back to work.

I ran the office for three lawyers: David Martin (tall, thin, sad); Ralph Joiner, a red-headed ball of fire who was in the state house of representatives; and Mr. Longstreet Perkins, old and dignified, a former judge famous for his opinions. I typed all their letters, made up loan packages, deeds, and so on. Typed papers of every sort. I did all the filing, all the accounting. I handled the reconciliation of trust accounts, the payroll, and collected rent for
absentee landlords who paid us to perform this service. I made my lawyers’ bank deposits, wrote their checks, and paid their taxes. They depended on me totally. “Dee Ann, I don’t know how we’d manage without you.” David Martin and Ralph Joiner were always telling me that. “Mrs. Sims, you’re a wonder,” said old Mr. Longstreet Perkins. Meanwhile our own house was a mess with Billy living downstairs in the family room, clothes and plates and magazines and what-have-you strewed all over the place. Men are naturally messy anyway, and Billy was the
worst,
even before the accident. It broke my heart to walk through the family room.

I have to say, it was nice going over to my own little office, which is eggshell blue, where I had put my desk catty-corner so I could see out the window into the street. I kept African violets blooming on my desk, and Tootsie-Roll pops in a jar for anybody that wanted one. You’d be surprised how many takers I had. I kept some M&M’s in my top drawer, too, for stress.

Which I had plenty of! Because of course I was the one who paid all the bills at home, and now I just couldn’t do it. Even with his disability check, I couldn’t make ends meet. I couldn’t stand to bother Billy with it either — he was in so much pain, and so blue. I started paying just
some
of the power bill,
some
of the water bill, some of the phone bill, some of the hospital bill, and so on. I’d stay up late figuring all this out while Billy watched TV.

“Aw, don’t look so worried, honey,” he said to me one night when the cable bill as well as the rent and his truck payment had come due. “It’ll work out. Come over here and give your old man some sugar.” He was drunk.

But instead of giving him that sugar, I surprised myself by saying, “I fail to see why you have to have such an expensive truck anyway, can you explain this to me?” I heard my voice going up
and up like Billy hates. “There wasn’t anything wrong with your old truck that I could see.” He had bought himself a new one only three months before.

“Goddamnit, Dee Ann.” Billy swept everything on the coffee table off onto the floor making the awfullest mess, and then he busted out crying, which was more than I could stand. He looked like the little boy in all his old school pictures. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just so goddamn sorry about the whole goddamn thing.”

“I’m sorry too,” I said.

The next day I went to work, watered my violets, then took two of Martin, Joiner, and Perkins’s trust account deposits next door to the bank where I deposited them straight into my own checking account. It was easy. I’ve known the teller at First Union, Minnie Leola Meadows, for years. She goes to our church. “How’s Billy getting along?” she asked as she handed me the deposit slip, and I said, “Better.”

That night I finished paying the bills.

As the months passed, I got good at this. Sometimes I’d take the rent checks from the property we managed. Sometimes I’d write a check to “cash” for something I’d make up, such as “supplies” or a phony repairman. I had everybody’s air-conditioning worked on, for instance. Sometimes I’d dip it out of the tax money. Most often, though, I simply wrote myself a check off the books, which was easiest of all — and why not? Nobody ever checked the books except me, and I kept them as neat as ever. Plus I never took much, mind you, only what we needed to cover those bills. I was not really stealing either. I fully intended to pay it all back just as soon as Billy started working again.

Finally, they took his leg out of the big cast, pulled out the pins, and put it into a lighter cast which closed with Velcro, so at
least he could take a shower. Oh, it just
killed
me to see how little and shriveled up that poor leg had gotten! I massaged it for him every night. But Billy was pepping up some. He started going to physical therapy every day, and then he got on that health kick. He quit drinking so much. He took a long walk every evening, like the doctor said. Sometimes he’d walk for an hour or more.

“I
CAN SEE RIGHT
where this is going,” Sam Hicks speaks up, grinning. Sam Hicks has a big gray mustache that hangs down on both sides of his mouth.

“Hush, Sam,” Lois Rubin says, writing on her clipboard.

B
UT
I
COULDN’T SEE IT
! I still thought Billy Sims hung the moon, and when he finally went back to work, I thought, okay, now we’ll be all right. We’ll be fine again. I was proud of myself for taking care of our financial problems without having to bother him about it. And the power company turned out to be real nice, giving Billy a sales job at their regional office in Boyd since he can’t climb anymore. But it was not the same. Billy was
never
home now, what with commuting to work and the physical therapy and the health club and all. And it seemed like we still kept getting further and further behind financially, no matter how hard I’d scrimp and save or how many times I’d add up the numbers.

“H
E WAS HOLDING OUT
on you, wasn’t he? Holding out! Son of a gun!” says Sam Hicks. “Hee, hee, hee.”

“Why you poor thing,” says Lois Rubin.

T
HIS IS HOW
I found out.

My friend Becky Brannon, that I have mentioned before, had
just moved into a new town home in the Village Green development, and so one afternoon I decided to ride over there and visit. It was a Sunday afternoon in June. Billy had gone to the lake fishing with Red and Tiny. So here we went, Debbi and me, with a varie-gated geranium from Food Lion as a house gift. They’ve tried to make Village Green look like a real village, with flower beds and picket fences and porches on most of the houses. All the streets have flower names — Becky lives on Primrose Circle. I could tell it was just her cup of tea, she’s always had ruffled curtains and ducks everyplace. She was already planning to stencil her kitchen.

We found her unpacking boxes. She jumped up to hug me. “Don’t you just love it?” she said, and I have to say, I did. Owning a home has always been my own personal dream, but I was real happy for Becky who has always worked so hard and deserves it. All her furniture, which had been too old-timey for her other apartment, fit right in. I was in the process of admiring everything, having fixed Deborah Lynn a Pepsi, when I chanced to look out the kitchen window and received the shock of my life.

For there was Billy Sims, bare chested, wearing cutoff blue jeans, leaning down to turn on a water faucet at the house next door. Then he proceeded to unroll an obviously new, long green hose from one of those spool things, and pull it around the corner of the house out of my view. I walked into the living room where Becky sat on the couch unpacking another box, surrounded by knickknacks and crumpled newspapers.

“Becky,” I said, “would you do me the favor of stepping up to your window and looking over there next door and telling me what you see?”

Becky looked at me like I was crazy, and then she got up and did it. She stared back at me speechless.

For there stood Billy Sims, big as life, watering her next-door neighbor’s grass, while a red-headed girl in a halter top weeded a flower bed around a birdbath. She had long white legs like pipe cleaners.

I knew who she was.

“That is Miss Lonergan, the physical therapist,” I said.

Just at that moment Debbi came into the room and said, “Mama, can we — “ and then, “What’s the matter?”

“Not a thing, sweetie,” Becky said. “Why don’t you go in my bedroom and watch TV until your mama gets ready to go?” She took Debbi by the hand. Becky came back with a box of Pepperidge Farm cookies, which she opened without a word. We ate them while waiting for Billy to quit watering Miss Lonergan’s yard and go in her house so I could leave, which I finally did. Becky’s a big girl too. But the thing about it that just killed me, and kills me to this day, is that Billy never once watered our own yard at home — Billy never showed a
sign
of yard work!

Now, do you remember what I told you Miss Manners said?

I took Debbi by Wendy’s on the way home and then watched
The Little Mermaid
tape with her and then put her to bed and went to bed myself. Of course I couldn’t sleep! My mind was in a whirl, thinking of what to do. Finally I decided to lay all the cards out on the table, confront him the minute he got home. But then I heard him dragging that leg up the stairs. And then I heard him in the bathroom splashing water on his pretty face. And then here he came, easing himself into the bed (our bedroom suite is not paid for either). He flung one arm across my stomach, the way he always does, and in about one minute flat, he started that little snuffly breathing.

Then I knew I would not say a word. I wanted to keep him
with me as long as I could, you see. I never in the world thought I’d ever have Billy Sims in the first place, and I couldn’t stand to lose him. So I wasn’t going to speed it up, nor do anything different. I couldn’t. I didn’t close my eyes that whole night long. Finally I just punched in the alarm thing before it went off, and waited for dawn to come. I made Billy a pan of biscuits to eat when he got up.

“Y
OU DIDN’T
.” L
OIS
R
UBIN
quits writing at this point. “Weren’t you
angry
?”

A
NGER HAD NOT YET
occurred to me.

That morning I went on to work as usual, and five more weeks passed by. I was holding my breath the entire time. Billy took me and Debbi out to the lake twice, and we also went overnight to a Garth Brooks concert in Lexington. I even got Billy to go to the church homecoming with me. I took two pans of my three-cheese lasagna, by popular request.

Then — now this is
yesterday,
of course, Monday morning — I had no sooner got to work and watered my African violets and sat down at my desk than here came two of my lawyers, Mr. Martin and Mr. Perkins, into my little office. They
knew.
It was written all over their faces. “Dee Ann,” Mr. Martin said, “this is terribly hard for us.” He looked like his heart would break. “You have been a valued employee, as you know. The best we’ve ever had. But on last Friday afternoon, after you left, I had occasion to check the George Pendleton trust account, and I was most dismayed to find that no deposit had been recorded this month.”

“It hadn’t?” I’d kept the check, of course. But I couldn’t believe that I had failed to write it in the book. It was my own dumb
mistake. If I’d done it right, Mr. Martin never would have known the difference. He’s an egghead intellectual, not a practical bone in his body. But this time he fooled me.

“So I decided to check on some of the other trusts,” he said. “I took the books home with me this weekend, Dee Ann, and finally ended up calling Longstreet” — he pointed his long bony finger at Mr. Longstreet, who looked like he would rather be anywhere in the world but here — “and as nearly as we can figure, you’re into us for about six thousand dollars. Would you say that’s fairly accurate?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Actually it is $13,825.

“We realize you have had some difficult circumstances in your personal life, Dee Ann, so perhaps we can work something out here, among us.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Embezzlement is a felony offense,” Mr. Martin said kindly. “But perhaps it need not come to that. What would you say if we worked out some sort of a repayment schedule . . .”

“No,” I said. “I could never make it. I can’t make it now. Go on and do whatever you have to,” I said. “I’m through with the whole thing.”

Mr. Longstreet Perkins raised one bushy gray eyebrow. “In that case,” he said, “I’m afraid we’ll need to walk down the street to the police station. I’m so sorry, Dee Ann. Do you want to call Billy first?”

“Hell, no,” I said, surprising myself. “He doesn’t deserve me.”

L
OIS
R
UBIN FLINGS DOWN
her clipboard. “Damn straight!” she says.

“Listen,” Sam Hicks says, “there is some men, myself included, that
prefers
a large woman.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” says Lois Rubin.

T
HE OLD LAWYERS STOOD
there looking at each other. “Well, then,” Mr. Martin said. I stood up behind my desk and looked them both in the eye, first one, then the other. I’m as tall as they are. I knew they hated this. They hated that I had done it, they hated having to turn me in. And in Mr. Longstreet Perkins’s eyes, there was something beyond that even. He understood that anybody could have done what I did in the name of love, anybody at all, that he could even have done it himself. “Ah, Dee Ann,” he said.

“Listen,” I said. “It’s all right.”