Queen Bee Goes Home Again (2 page)

“Finally.” An ache the size of Stone Mountain squashed my heart. “So this is it. Back to Miss Mamie's turf. Back to having my every move evaluated and criticized by the whole town.”

Thanks to Miss Mamie's prayer chains, both Baptist and Methodist, who saw me as the sum total of every mistake I'd ever made and every sin—real or imagined—I'd ever committed.

I went on, “I
hate
losing my privacy. And the awful thing is, I don't think I have the energy left to escape again.” I inched forward as the line of SUVs and pickups condensed. “I am too
old
to start over.”

“Speak for yourself,” she said.

Oh, sure. Easy to say when all you have to worry about is deadheading your rose garden. Tricia had scored big in her divorce.

I'd gotten zip.

Oh, Phil had signed the divorce decree granting me decent alimony. Then he'd promptly quit his job and disappeared. I'd gotten several contempt-of-court convictions on him before I realized I was just wasting time and money.

It was up to our son David—furious at his father—to inform me that friends had bumped into his dad living high on the hog on St. Bart's with his “fiancée” Bambi Bottoms (she'd legally changed it to that) on the money he'd squirreled away offshore. And bragging about it.

Humiliated and furious, David had promptly called and told me.

Thank you so much. Like I needed more reason to resent his father. I mean, really.

At least David had his great job and his great wife Barb in Charlotte to distract him, plus my precious grandbabies—Callista (what were they thinking?), four, and sunny-bunny Barrett, two. But after my only child had told me about his dad, David had become oddly distant, so I hadn't nagged him about not calling me. Yet I sure missed hearing about his job and his family. I'd tried calling them, but they politely blew me off. So I left them alone, hoping things would work out some time before I died.

All I had to distract me were bills and useless contempt citations.

Considering my destitution, I wondered if I'd get a percentage if I ratted Phil out to the IRS. The trouble was, I had no idea exactly where he was.

“Are you still there?” Tricia asked.

“Sorry.” I rescued myself from useless resentments and vowed to stay in the present. “My mind wandered. It does that a lot lately.”

“Stress,” she diagnosed.

Then she promptly ignored the rules of our Poor Baby Club and lapsed into
it could be worse,
with, “At least the apartment is air-conditioned this time around.”

I wasn't in the mood. “Why did God let this happen to me? Again,” I demanded for the jillionth time.

Tricia let out a brisk sigh. “God didn't do this. Your crooked ex and the crooked banks and subprime lenders and the politicians did. Everybody's taken a hit.”

Except Tricia's ex, who did high-security alternative-power backup systems for the Fed.

When I didn't reply, she said, “Anyway, you've been praying that God would bring America back to its knees, whatever it took.”

“Yeah, but I didn't think that would mean
I'd
be driven to poverty. And have to move back home. Again.”

Gratitude,
my inner Puritan scolded.
At least you have a place to go, with people who love you.

Love me too much,
I mentally retorted. At sixty years of age, I did
not
need to be mothered. Or constantly evaluated, no matter how subtly.

I looked up at the traffic. Rats. The blasted delivery truck was still there. “I've repented and cleaned up my act since Grant Owens.” My one disastrous fling. “God knows, I have. So why am I having to repeat this purgatory?”

“Honey, you're the best person I know,” Tricia told me, and I knew she believed it, but compared to the politicians and government contractors she still hung out with, anybody half decent looked like a saint. “Bad things do happen to good people.”

Surely Jehovah God, Author of All Things (including me), wouldn't punish me with destitution just for mentally cussing Him out when nobody else was around. Well, maybe not mentally all the time, but it was my sole remaining vice.

“Are you still there?” Tricia asked.

“Yes. I'm thinking.”

God bless her, she let me.

Other than cussing in my brain, I did my best to live a good Christian life. I went to see God at His house most Sundays and tithed, and I tried to be compassionate with everybody—well, except my ex. (Not that I'd had the chance. He'd been out of the country for ten years.)

I'd forgiven Phil long ago as an act of obedience and spiritual self-preservation, but my emotions hadn't quite gotten the memo. Especially since I'd found out he was still screwing me over, and in the Caribbean.

Not that I hated Phil—I didn't have that in me—but I'd love a chance to give him a good sheet-beating till he coughed up some cash. Wishful thinking, but I didn't encourage it. Life goes on.

As my Granny Beth always said, “Being bitter is like drinking poison and expecting it to kill the other person. It only hurts you.”

I wasn't bitter. At least, not till the bottom of my life had dropped out. Again.

“I just don't understand why a criminal like Phil can break all the rules,” I complained to Tricia, “and end up in the catbird seat, but I'm the one who's homeless and destitute.”

Tricia sighed and quoted scripture. “‘Why do the evil prosper?'”

“So the question isn't a new one,” I griped. “I still want to know why.”

“Remember what your Granny Beth always used to say,” Tricia reminded me. “‘
Why
doesn't matter. It's the devil's most destructive distraction. What matters is how you deal with it.'”

“I did not call for logic or solutions, missy,” I scolded. Our Poor Baby Club expressly prohibited logic or solutions. Only sympathy allowed. “Or
it could be worse.
And this is definitely a four, not a three.”

“Poor baby, poor baby, poor baby, poor baby,” she corrected. “Now, whine away.”

So I did, till both of us had had a crawful.

Disgusted with myself for going on so long, I ended with, “Sorry I dumped my pity party on you. Next time I call, I promise to be more positive.”

Tricia chuckled. “You can dump on me all you want. Anytime. Lord knows, I dumped on you a lot more when I got divorced. So you still have a serious whine credit with me.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

I always felt better after talking to Tricia, but nothing could make this day any easier.

I, Linwood Breedlove Scott, was officially returning to the Mimosa Branch Hall of Shame.

 

Two

I looked ahead and saw the deliveryman load up his dolly,
again,
with flat boxes that let off cold fog in the heat, then he headed back to the front door of Terra Sol, one of three remaining upscale restaurants in town. Four other establishments had bitten the dust when the depression hit.

If I had to wait in the heat much longer, I'd have to turn off the AC, and maybe the car, to keep the motor from conking in the hot sun.

Frustrated, I distracted myself by looking at the stores on either side of Main Street. I hadn't been back “downtown” in the three years since I'd moved to my much-mourned little brick ranch Fortress of Solitude house near Sunshine Springs. At least the few surviving restaurants here seemed to be doing well, evidenced by the traffic and resulting lack of parking spaces.

But all the New Age artists' studios were gone now, much to the relief of the churchgoing ladies of Mimosa Branch, Miss Mamie among them.
FOR SALE
or
FOR RENT
signs replaced the nude paintings and sculptures (even
males
!) that had so alarmed the locals when downtown was invaded by the coven of modern artists (or
mod-run,
as many of the churchwomen carefully pronounced it) more than a decade ago.

My wonderful, free-spirited glass sculptor friend's gallery had only lasted ten months in ultraconservative Mimosa Branch, and even the County Art Center had refused to exhibit her work. So she and her partner had moved to Asheville, a lesbian Mecca in the mountains.

The recession, combined with the local evangelicals' efforts to “save” those “weirdo” artists, had finally run the rest of the modrun artists back to California where they belonged. The few remaining local “boats and barns” artists and sculptors had retreated, rent-free, to the old mill warehouse, now vacant and for sale, where they rattled around like beer cans in the bed of an old pickup truck, hot in the summer and freezing in the winter.

Miss Mamie had kept me up on all the gossip by phone, whether I wanted to hear it or not (mostly not).

I knew better than to hope she'd lay off, now that we'd be seeing each other so much. Miss Mamie was Miss Mamie, and at ninety, I knew there was no chance that she'd quit gossiping, so it was up to me to ignore the irritations and focus on her good parts, which were many. (I had my church psychologist and 12-step enabler's group to thank for that revelation.)

Still, a wave of psychosomatic nausea brought me back to the present just as the delivery truck finally pulled away, only to have a car back out of the fifteen-minute parking in front of the drugstore.

Chief Parker's—so named through a succession of five owners—was now Mason's Hometown Drugs, retaining its defiant mid-sixties appearance, if not its name. Old Doc Owens's
NEVER CLOSED TO THE SICK
sign was missing from the plate-glass storefront, along with the pharmacist's home phone number—a casualty, no doubt, of the twenty-four-hour pharmacy in the new Kroger over by the huge mall at the Interstate.

Megamall or not, though, downtown Mimosa Branch was still Mimosa Branch, despite the suburban transplants who'd overrun it and the new sidewalks with brick inserts lit by replicas of antique Victorian streetlights.

At last, the car ahead of me got going.

Passing the drugstore's plate-glass windows, I flashed on Grant Owens, and the nausea spiked. Can we say, Mr. Wrong?

But it hadn't been his fault. All the signs had been there that he was totally incapable of relationships, but I had deluded myself into thinking I could have a fling with him, no harm done, and he was worthy of my attentions.

Not, on all counts.

I'd repented at leisure and knew God had forgiven me, but that didn't make it any less shameful, a fact that Mary Lou Perkins—the first and foremost of Mimosa Branch's self-righteous pot-stirrers—continued to drag up in a “serves her right” tone whenever anything bad happened to me, like losing my home. Never mind that plenty of good, hardworking Christians had lost their houses, too.

Mary Lou controlled the women's programs at First Baptist and was dead set on preventing “pollution” in the church. Totally negative and judgmental, she was clueless that she'd been seduced by the dark side of the Force. Poor baby.

Thanks to a decade in my 12-step enabler's group, I'd finally realized I couldn't control what people said or thought about me. I could only control my responses.

Which at the moment included the distinct possibility of hurling in my car.

Finally exiting the business district, I eased my minivan and U-Haul past the old cotton mill, where a Mexican butcher's and a
supermercado
were the sole remaining tenants, evidence of the continued influx of illegals who now did all our yard work and had taken all the entry-level jobs at the poultry plant.

Leaving olde towne behind at last, I passed First Methodist, then the old brick Presbyterian church that was now the newest First Baptist. (The
previous
new, giant metal First Baptist across the highway had gone back to the bank after the real estate bust and ensuing depression had halted growth and decimated tithes.)

Then came “silk stocking lane,” railroad tracks on the left, big houses on the right. Gone were the tall, sparsely leafed-out elm trunks that had lined the sidewalk in my youth, leaving the houses unshaded to bake in the setting sun. I'd long known that there was no hope for the elms since Dutch elm disease had swept across the country, but now that all evidence of them had been erased, I felt a tug of grief, as if those stubborn trees had stood for my own determination to survive.

The new sidewalks, shiny metal benches, streetlights, and wispy, twelve-foot replacement trees looked very nice, but the houses were left exposed, stripped of their buffer.

The first big house I passed was the handsome old brick First Methodist manse (sold off years ago to help pay for repairs to the historic church). Next, I passed the same gorgeous white house that was still a law office, one of the few left in town. Next came the hundred-year-old Greek revival replica of a plantation house I'd always loved.

Beyond that, at a right angle facing town, sat the youngest of the Breedlove mansions, built in the 1920s, a brick Italianate whose pretentious exterior and life-sized cement lions had always looked out of place in Mimosa Branch.

Lately, the house had been converted from a bed-and-breakfast to a “Christian Family Retreat” by an African-American televangelist who'd bought it and moved in with his family, stirring remnants of residual prejudice deep below the surface in the local white racists, but nothing in the open.

The biggest change was in front of those old mansions. Taking advantage of the boom before the bust, the city had extended the sidewalks and streetlights all the way to the railroad crossing three blocks past Miss Mamie's. Then they'd done away with the dogleg in front of the “Christian Family Retreat,” where Main Street had become Green Street, filling the resulting triangle with a new park that sported an open-air amphitheater that faced away from the tracks (for logical reasons).