Maybe Millie saw it coming.
“Juanita,” she’d written in a handwriting that had lots of bows, whooshes, and exclamation marks, “old age can’t catch you if you keep moving. I see him peeking around my door. I have to get rid of this cane!”
But sometimes, it’s the little things that get you. Little things like germs. It was cold and flu season and Paper Moon was hit as bad as anyplace else. Sedona got it, too; not even the crystals could protect us. Folks passed it around like a handshake after church. It was a sticky little sucker and some people got it twice. It was so bad that it took on a life of its own. Jess, who never gets sick, came down with it and coughed for nearly a month. He referred to it with a sneer as “the Cold.”
“The Tilsons are as strong as oxen even though we don’t look like it,” Millie had bragged to me once. “We survived ice storms in Minnesota and drought on the eastern plains of Montana. It takes a lot to take out a Tilson.”
No, it only took one little germ.
“The Cold” came back like a bad check. It brought a lot of nasty stuff with it. Millie started coughing and the cough moved southward into her chest. The antibiotics made her sick and then she got a temperature. She had to go back to bed and got too weak to use her cane or even the walker anymore. Her temperature kept spiking, one hundred, one hundred and three, and then back to one hundred. Millie tossed, turned, and sang. She spoke to people who weren’t there. Asim, the Siamese cat, kept watch.
Finally, after two weeks of touch and go, Barb felt comfortable enough to let her patient sleep alone in the room. Millie’s temperature had broken and she wasn’t coughing as much. For the first time in a few days, Millie wasn’t delirious.
“Barbara, you’ve been a good girl,” Millie had told her. “You go and grab a nap. I am not going anywhere.” But she lied about that.
At midnight, Barb checked on her patient and found that she was in a peaceful and final sleep. The Siamese cat, who had hardly left her side during her illness, gave Millie one last look, then jumped from the bed and slinked out the door. Inez says that cat has hardly been seen since.
“Can you get away?” Jess asked. “The funeral is on Wednesday afternoon.”
“There’s no ‘can’ to it,” I barked out, not angry at him, angry at Millie for leaving me without a fairy godmother. “I’ll let you know after I’ve checked the flights.”
“Number 1695, United, leaves Flagstaff at 8:15 Tuesday for Denver, change planes and take number 1141. It gets into Missoula at 12:30. Be on it, you have an e-ticket. I’ll pick you up from the airport.”
I love this man. He is always laying down red carpet to soften my steps.
I remembered something.
“Call Inez. And ask her to find a white Maine Bocker suit. Millie said that she wanted . . .” I couldn’t finish.
“I’ll call her,” Jess interrupted. “Take a walk, Juanita.”
Nina was sympathetic. She said she’d felt a weakening in Millie’s energy. “You’ve been doing me a huge favor. Do what you have to do. Spirit said that you would be going home soon. I’m really sorry to hear about Millie.” She frowned for a moment as if she was thinking about something. “But don’t worry about her. She made it to the other side all right.”
Probably taking more tango lessons,
I thought. And just the idea of Millie dancing a steamy tango in the hereafter with some dashing man made me smile.
Peaches called from the road. She had a delivery in Needles but had to get back to Casper for a doctor’s appointment and couldn’t come to the funeral.
Doctor’s appointment? Warning bells started going off in my head. Peaches hadn’t looked right the last time she rode through Sedona. She was thinner, her face was pale, and she seemed to be moving slow—not like Peaches at all.
“Must be my new diet,” she said.
“Peaches, what’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Fine, fine, just routine annual stuff, you know. Getting all the plumbing checked and everything.” She really did sound happy even with the roaring engine in the background. But something made me think that there was something that Peaches wasn’t telling me. Was it intuition? God, I hoped that it wasn’t anything serious, something else to worry about.
“OK, if you say so,” I told her. “Don’t let me find out there’s something wrong with you, girl. I’ll kick your behind.”
Peaches’s laughter was cut off by coughing. I knew that she’d quit smoking. But had she quit too late?
“How you getting to Montana?” she yelled. I heard the Purple Passion’s horn blasting.
“Flying. Please say a prayer,” I said.
“I wish that I could be there,” she yelled over the crackling cell phone connection. “Always liked Millie, she was a good old broad. A little nutty but all right.”
In Peaches-speak, “all right” meant that Millie was almost perfect.
I took a walk.
Nina’s place backs up against the foothills just outside Sedona near a little ridge—like the way Jess’s cabin sets up on Kaylin’s Ridge. But that’s where the similarities end. Jess’s cabin is almost hidden by forest. It’s not that far from the diner but it might as well be on the other side of the world. It is surrounded by giant trees and every four-legged creature that you can imagine. Whenever there is a knock on the door, I think it’s a brown bear outside wanting to come in for a cup of coffee.
The hills outside Sedona are crumbly and rocky with scraggly bushes and stubborn cacti hanging onto a spoonful of water. There are hardly any trees at all. There’s a path that folks ’round here say led to a mine but I don’t see that, unless they were digging for gravel. It’s worn down, so lots of feet have used it but not for any gold or tin or any other ore that some poor soul thought these little hills could give up. They ain’t fooling me. They trudged up here for the same reason that I did—the view.
I found me a spot just perfect for my behind where I could lean against a boulder and rest my back. I looked down on the town sprawled along the highway. And off in the distance, I saw the red rocks gleaming in the late morning sunshine. It’s a beautiful and peaceful spot and sometimes I would nestle against the rock and close my eyes. (After checking for snakes first.) Besides the back porch of the diner that overlooks Arcadia Lake, I think this is one of my favorite places.
Used to be, a long time ago—in another life, as Nina would say—I was afraid of places like this. Open places, spaces where hills bury their toes into the earth, where the fingertips of the mountains tickle the sky. I’d stand on the back porch of Jess’s diner and look out at Arcadia Lake and wonder what Kaylin’s Ridge was like but was too scared to go there. I’d been used to tiny places with tight boundaries. I knew fences and barriers and right angles. The openness of the plains, the never-ending green of the forest with its splotches of gold sunshine beneath my feet, I didn’t know these things until I came west. The land, the people, people like Millie, all of these things. Before I knew Millie I thought I needed rooms to be safe. Thought I needed small places and small ideas to go with them.
It’s all turned upside down on me now. I don’t like cities, I don’t like traffic, I don’t give a damn about nice shopping. Give me a vast grassy plain, a mountain or two, a little desert for spice, and a cool forest of towering pines. From afraid of spaces to afraid of fences, that’s me. And now, I needed the canyon’s depth to think, the nosebleed section of the red rock’s highest point to mourn.
And so, I’m here with my butt settled into place, wiping my eyes and balling up tissues and wondering why I’m crying over a woman who I’ve only known a short time—an old broad who never met a challenge she didn’t accept or see a roadblock that she didn’t go around. And even the prospect of death—like everything else—didn’t scare Millie. She was just afraid that it would inconvenience her.
“Doesn’t frighten me one damn bit, except . . .” she’d told me the last time I saw her. This was when she was on the mend from the broken hip and hobbling around on a cane. “Except that I have so much planned! The cruise next year and the Doc and I were thinking about Alaska. Did you know that I spent some time in Alaska? Ketchikan.” Her sapphire-blue eyes sparkled with mischief.
“Millie, nothing you say ever surprises me,” I’d told her. But I could not imagine her wearing those sheer negligees in Ketchikan. When I told her that, she smiled impishly.
“I wore less than that! It’s
amazing
how warm a log fire can be. I have so much to do. If only we could have death by appointment. Then, maybe, I could work everything in.”
A scratching sound caught my attention, pulling me away from the memory and my tears. A pair of rabbits scampered up the hill, stopped, looked at me as if I owed them last month’s rent, then hopped away.
At eighty plus, which is all she’d ever admit to, Millie had so much to do, so many plans. Going on forty-five, I was afraid to make any. Scared that something would go wrong. Scared that I would fail.
I heard the screech of a hawk above me farther up the ridge. From the sound of things, it had lunch on its mind and was preparing to make the pickup. That’s focus for you.
“I can’t do that,” I would tell Millie when she would suggest that I try this or go there.
Her deep blue eyes would darken for a moment then narrow and her face would take on a serious expression.
“Of course you can,” she would snap back. “Don’t tell yourself that you can’t and don’t pay attention to anybody
else
who has small ideas about what you can do. If I’d listened to every damn fool who told me I couldn’t do something, or shouldn’t do something, I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. It’s amazing how much you can get accomplished if you don’t give a damn about what other people think.”
Millie was the kick-in-the-ass, get-up-off-your-behind match striker that I needed to push me into the arena with the lions. She didn’t take prisoners and she didn’t listen to excuses.
“ ‘Shit or get off the pot.’ That’s what they used to say,” she’d say in a voice sharp as a whip.
Yeah, that’s what they used to say all right.
Now she was gone.
I looked out across the ridge, past the town and the canyon, toward the red rocks. I tried to feel the vortex but I didn’t. I dabbed my eyes and blew my nose and prayed that the red rocks could spare just a little bit of energy for me.
Too soon I was sitting in a cylinder made of steel and other heavy things zooming through space at an altitude high enough to make your nose bleed. If God had meant for folks to fly, wouldn’t he have made us with wings? I was on an airplane from Flagstaff to Missoula, headed to Paper Moon, Montana, just off I-90, east of Montana State Route 93, and at least thirty miles from anything else. When it comes to Paper Moon, it doesn’t matter where you are coming from, you can’t get there from anywhere.
The captain’s voice came over the loudspeaker. Cheerfully, he told us that we were flying through the jet stream so there might be a “little turbulence.” Yeah, right. The next “little” bump nearly threw me into the seat of the young man next to me who had a spike in his nose. I had been wondering where else he had spikes.
“Oh, excuse me,” I muttered, trying to get situated again and keep from wetting my pants. He grinned and said, “That’s cool.” Lord, he had a spike in his tongue, too.
The plane swooped down beneath the clouds then banked to the left as it made the approach to Missoula International. It was a bumpy ride down but I didn’t notice the turbulence this time. I stared out the window at the snow and the patches of brown here and there, the ribbons of gray and white that snaked between. In another two hours, I would be in Paper Moon.
Chapter Five
I
didn’t know how much I missed Paper Moon until Jess turned off at Exit 12A, Silver Spring Road. There’s no silver and there’s no spring. Somebody just thought that would be a nice name for a road. There is nothing like the cool, dark green of a western Montana forest and the beauty of the sunlight warming the snow-covered surface of Arcadia Lake. It was still winter and Montana wouldn’t throw off the cold and the snow for at least two months. Winter here is the real deal and not for sissies. There were several feet of snow on the ground and the wind felt as if it was visiting with relatives from the Arctic Circle.
I stuck my nose out the window. The icy air froze my lungs and made me cough. It felt good. I smiled, closed my eyes, and enjoyed it.
“Juanita, that desert has dried out your brains,” Jess commented. “Only the dog hangs his head out the window. What’s the matter with you? Silly woman,” he murmured. “Move your head.”
I pulled my head back in and he raised the window. I snuggled into the multilayered coat that Jess had brought for me to wear. I had a winter coat, but Jess said it wouldn’t keep a buffalo’s butt warm. “An Ohio coat,” Jess called it, not heavy enough for the winters out here.
We’d been riding in silence since Missoula. I was in a thoughtful mood. Jess would glance over at me once in a while, probably to see if I was still awake. I was getting to know this place all over again. And, after the scorching heat of Arizona, my bones had to get used to the bitter cold that seeped through coats and gloves and hats and settled in the marrow of your bones. I was comparing the wide open spaces of the northwestern plains with the wide open spaces in the southwestern deserts. I looked across the endless pasture of Paul Terrell’s ranch that seemed to stop with a screech of brakes at the Rockies rising in the distance. And, once again, I gazed with wonder at the mountains, giant-sized pyramids of slate, the peaks disappearing from sight under caps of clouds and berets of snow.
When Jess turned off onto Kaylin Ridge Road, I came out of my daydream, sat up, and looked at him.
“You’re not going to the diner first?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Figured you might want to get situated, rest a little, maybe unpack.”
The clock on the dashboard read 12:30.
“It’s lunchtime. Probably have a full house . . .” I thought aloud, my mind clicking over automatically to my role as cook on the lunch shift. “Did you make chicken salad? Did I tell you that I add sliced apples to mine now? What about soup? Are they making Reubens? Did you remember to add the steak sauce to the ground beef before you pressed it into patties?” Then I bit my tongue and slowly looked over at Jess.
Jess has the darkest eyes I’ve ever seen. I read somewhere that black eyes don’t exist in humans. Whoever wrote that is wrong. Jess has black eyes as sure as my butt is wide. And they can get blacker, if that’s possible, when he’s ticked off (and then you just better get the hell out of the way) or when he’s amused about something. He’d set his jaw tighter than the vault at Fort Knox. But the corners of his eyes were turned up. He was enjoying himself.
“It’s so damn incredible, Juanita. We managed to keep the diner open while you were takin’ a spa vacation getting your aura adjusted. Ain’t that just the most extraordinary thing? Even managed to fry up some decent eggs and make a sandwich by myself once in a while.”
I snorted.
“Yeah, but it’s a good thing I came back when I did. ’Cause if you don’t start adding my secret ingredients to the recipes, you’ll have to close.”
He gave me a look that would warm butter then flipped the turn signal.
“You really
aren’t
going to the diner first, are you?”
“Not on your life. If I take you over there now, you’ll never leave. Somebody will make a phone call, the whole town will show up and, before you know it, you’ll be standing knee-deep in pork chop sandwiches.”
He was right. But I was disappointed. I wanted to see the folks again, wanted to be around people who really did
eat
food. Not like the tiny half-sized types I had been cooking for who ordered a stack of pancakes with blueberries, ate one blueberry, then said they were full! I wanted to see Mountain dive into three scrambled eggs, a bowl of grits (with butter), four pancakes, and six slices of bacon. I wanted to hear about the new Wal-Mart that the town was up in arms about, the high school band director’s divorce, and Mignon’s new boyfriend. Not to mention the fact that Horace Patterson’s wife was having a baby and . . . I’d missed Paper Moon. It felt good to be back even if it was for a funeral.
When Jess opened the door to the cabin, I heard barking.
“Dracula! The Queen of Sheba is back!”
That darned dog charged toward me like I was breaking in but stopped just short of tackling me. I held up my hand. Before I left after Christmas, I’d started teaching Dracula a few new tricks.
“Don’t slobber on me!” I warned him.
Dracula hung his head as if his feelings had been hurt.
“Don’t give me that stuff, you know what I’m talking about,” I crooned as I scratched him behind the ears. I frowned as I felt around the dog’s shoulders. “Dracula, you feel . . . skinny.” I stepped back and studied the Rottweiler, who looked up at me with eager brown eyes and a rapidly wagging tail. “Jess! You aren’t feeding him enough! He’s so skinny!”
“Humph. Juanita, the dog’s growing up, that’s all, lost that baby fat. I’m exercising him more. And . . .” He poked his head around the doorway from the bedroom and gave me a sneer. “I don’t feed him sissy food like you do. Plain old dog chow, that’s what he gets.”
“Well, Lordy, no wonder,” I commented, squeezing Dracula again, then I shrugged off my heavy coat. ‘He’s starvin’ you t’death,” I told the dog, lowering my voice so that Jess wouldn’t hear. He thinks that I spoil Dracula. What does he know? “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, I’ll get you straight.” Dog chow for my baby. I fed Dracula a little chow mixed up with . . . well, that was my and Dracula’s little secret.
“This week’s mail is in the hall, on the sofa table,” Jess yelled from the other room.
I was looking out the windows at the snow. It was so quiet-looking, so clean, not even rabbit tracks to break the cake-icing smoothness. It wasn’t tinged with gray or dirty like a February snowfall that’s stayed longer than a third cousin from Alabama. It was so white that it sparkled in the little beams of sunlight that sneaked through the trees to the forest floor. A stag held up his nose to catch a scent on the wind. He was the “fourteen pointer” that Bobby Smith coveted. But Jess owned this part of the ridge and posted “No Hunting” signs, so the old stag was safe for now.
“Jess, I’ll split the meat with you,” Bobby had offered. “Juanita can fix up some venison steaks with one of those fancy French sauces that you like to make.”
Nice of him to volunteer my services.
But Jess had turned him down and I was glad about that. Cooking up the father of Bambi didn’t appeal to me.
The mail was on the table in a neat pile with a paperweight on top just as Jess had said. Two pieces of paper got my attention right away. One was a telephone message from my son, Randy. Next to Randy’s name, Jess had scrawled, “Not urgent.” The other was a large white envelope with a return address from the Arcadia Valley Community and Technical College, Food Services Management Department, Mason, Montana. I fingered the envelope. It was thick. And on the front, in bold red letters, there were the words, “Your future begins at AVCTC!”
“I saw the packet from Arcadia Valley,” Jess spoke from the doorway. “Are you and Mignon signing up for another painting class?”
“Yep,” I lied, gathering up the rest of the mail and the phone messages.
My heart was thumping in my chest the way it always did whenever my children called. They are grown now, past the age where I have to worry about high fevers or fights on the playground. They have graduated to bigger and better things for me to worry about. Randy was paroled a while back and now works as a sous-chef in a restaurant. I am still learning the lingo.
He had patted me on the shoulder as if I was ten years old.
“No, Momma, not ‘cook,’ ‘chef,’ ” he’d corrected me.
My baby was sautéing, stir-frying, and searing with the best of them. I was as proud as I could be.
My daughter, Bertie, had come a long way, too. She’d gotten away from the couch, the soap operas, and the beer and was now working two jobs. She was taking business courses at Franklin and had decided to be an accountant. Not a bad job for a girl who’d always been able to count up change in her head from the time she was six and memorize all of the numbers on my lotto tickets, including the tickers.
Rashawn was my wild card. He lived on the edge and he liked it that way. Drugs and guns. He knew what he wanted wasn’t anything that I was talking about.
“I’m a businessman, Momma,” he would tell me in his cool tenor. It was a voice smooth enough to sing in a church choir. It was a voice that was scalpel sharp when it told you that your time was up and hand over the money. “Every business has its rewards and its risks.”
It sounded very black and white, like he was talking about running a dry cleaners or a Starbucks or something. I wished he was making lattes.
“I can take care of myself,” Rashawn always said. I had no choice but to believe him but it didn’t stop my stomach from churning whenever I got a message from “back home.”
“Sixes and Sevens, may I help you?” The female voice was perky. Yep, that’s the word. Perky.
“May I speak with Randy Jackson?”
“Chef is out right now,” the voice replied. “May I take a message, please?”
“Oh. I’m his mother and I am returning his call.”
“Mrs. Louis? Chef Jackson was expecting your call . . . he said to tell you that . . .” I heard the sound of paper rustling. “Here it is. It isn’t an emergency, that he and Roberta are fine and he’ll call you tomorrow.”
Chef Jackson, my, my, we have come up in the world. And has folks taking messages for him, too. I am impressed.
I told her that was fine and hung up. I smiled to myself. I had almost forgotten that my daughter’s real name was Roberta.
“Juanita?”
Jess and Dracula stood in the doorway.
“I guess I wasn’t thinkin’,” he said. “Brought you straight over here without even asking if you’d rather go to Millie’s.”
I had thought about it. But there would be time for that later.
“What time do you have to be at the diner?”
Jess sent the dog to the front room. His eyes twinkled as he smiled.
“Mental health day,” he said simply, pulling me into his arms.
I snorted as I nuzzled his cheek.
“Mental health day, my behind,” I told him.
“Exactly what I wanted to talk to you about,” Jess murmured as he gave me a squeeze.
I have just one thing to say about Millie Tilson’s funeral. I have never seen
anything
like it. And that is saying something ’cause black folks can
do
some funerals.
Number one, we’re not in any hurry to get the loved one buried so we have lots of time to plan a spectacle. God forbid that any fourth cousin from Bedbug, Georgia, should miss it! Aunt Sue is coming from Alabama on the Greyhound and won’t be here until next week? We’ll wait! Cousin Earl’s still recovering from gall bladder surgery? Friday after next is fine. The dead will
still
be dead then, won’t they? Time is not a factor. If you want to really insult a black undertaker just tell him that you want your loved one’s funeral—from the wake to the planting—done in three days. He’ll look at you like you’ve just smacked his momma.
It takes time to coordinate all those details. Gospel choir or senior choir? Will Miss Virginia sing the solo or Sister OraLee? Brother Joseph is playing the organ? What about Mrs. Perkins, the piano teacher? But those are relatively minor issues. If the son of the deceased wants Reverend Smith to deliver the eulogy and the daughter wants Father Jones, you have a problem that might take a few more days to iron out. You have to decide whether the service will be held at Second Street AME or Mount Ararat Baptist! And if you have a Methodist issue or if there’s an Episcopalian convert, forget about it. You might end up putting your loved one on ice because the family will argue about that mess until Kingdom come. Last but definitely not least, there is the decision of which funeral home to use.
This issue alone has been known to bring about divorce, incite violence, and create rifts between folks wider than the Mississippi River. In a community of any size, there are at least two black funeral homes. Half of the folks in town use one (and have since Moses was a boy), the other half uses the other one. There are usually members of both camps in one family.
“I wouldn’t send a dead mouse to Robertson’s,” says the brother-in-law. The fight begins there. Voices rise, threats are made, and tears shed. The arguing only ends when someone (once again, it’s usually an in-law) suggests cremation. The guns may come out then. You know black folks have to have a body to cry over, and we love wakes. They are the next best thing to wedding receptions.
When it’s all said and done, you don’t have a funeral, you have an event (or an ordeal, depending on your point of view) with music, testimonials, preaching, crying (I’m not talkin’ about delicate sniffles into cloth handkerchiefs either, I’m talkin’ about gut-wrenching sobs, “Lord, Jesus, help me!”s, and mounds of wadded-up Kleenex), and little “side” services from this guild, that club, or fraternity or sorority. Bring your lunch because you’ll be there all day. There will be food served afterward but you’ll need a snack to get you through the three-hour service.
Before Millie’s going-home, that was my experience with funerals. But this was Silver Lake County, Montana, settled by Presbyterian Scots, Lutheran Germans and Swedes, with a few free-range Baptists and Methodists thrown in for flavoring. When Millie went to church, which wasn’t often, she attended First Presbyterian in Mason. So I had prepared myself for a forty-five-minute one-hymn-two-prayer-reading-of-the-obituary-dust-to-dust-ashes-to-ashes-it’s-11:45-let’s-wrap-this-up service with coffee and cake afterward to fortify the family.