Curtiss Matlock - Chin Up, Honey

But in that moment, Winston wished so much for the companionship of the boy that he had the disconcerting sense of being close to tears. It rather rattled him. It was said that when a body went into a heart attack, emotions got all mixed up. He had experienced a heart attack a number of years previously, but mostly what he recalled was waking up and people annoying the hell out of him.

In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face and dried it with a paper towel. He purposely avoided looking in the mirror. These days the image in the mirror was some strange old man, not himself at all.

He threw the paper towel in the trash and stood bracing himself on the windowsill, trying to summon the memory of the man he had been in his prime, tall and straight, with steelgray hair and a chiseled jaw. It wasn’t so much what a person looked like. It was more how a person envisioned himself—that was what a person projected.

Just then a movement beyond the window caught his attention.

A figure was walking along the side of the road in the distance. A young man, wiry and with a bare torso, what must have been his shirt hanging down from the waist of his jeans. He was moving at a fast pace and kept looking back over his shoulder, then up and down the road, in a curious manner.

All of a sudden, in one swift motion, the fellow jumped over the barbed-wire fence around the pasture across the road and disappeared.

Winston jutted his face closer to the window. His vision was not what it once had been, of course, which was why he couldn’t drive any longer. Yet he knew he had seen someone, and now he was gone. Just disappeared right before his eyes.

He was about to check his own pulse when he saw a head pop up from the tall grass along the fence line. Yes, it was a head. It turned from side to side, looking up and down the road. The growing sound of a siren reached Winston’s ears.

The head disappeared into the weeds. A few seconds later, a sheriff’s car came speeding past, lights blinking and tires throwing up dust. The siren faded.

Thrilled that he had not gone round the bend and started imagining things, Winston thought of telephoning the sheriff’s office, but he wanted to see if the head popped up again, so he kept staring at the spot.

No head showed. He looked as far as he could up and down the road. He wondered if the figure had moved on in the cover of the sand-plum bushes to the cedar trees.

There came a rap. “Winston…you okay?”

He jerked open the door. “I’m fine. Things get slower when you get older. You’ll find that out. Everything you got is gonna drop south and get slow as molasses in January.”

Jim Rainwater shook his head and turned, heading back to his controls.

Winston followed, thinking again about telephoning the sheriff’s office, when the door to the building opened and Willie Lee came through it.

“I am here,” he announced and came straight over to Winston.

“And so you are.” Winston gazed in surprise at the boy and his dog. The boy’s eyes were very blue behind his thick glasses.

“Willie Lee insisted on comin’ down here early and waiting for you,” said Tate Holloway, the young boy’s stepfather, who followed the boy and the dog through the door.

“Well, that’s fine…I appreciate you, buddy.”

“Winston—you ready?” called Jim Rainwater.

“I’m comin’ straight away.”

Willie Lee slipped his hand into Winston’s larger one, and together they went into the studio, where Winston sat back down, put on the headphones and pulled the microphone close.

Willie Lee and his dog took their accustomed places, while Tate pulled up a stool and opened the Sunday paper.

Winston drew himself up. “Gather ’round, children. We’re ready for the anniversaries.”

Finding his voice, in fact all of him, returning to full strength, he read clearly from the listing in front of him, sending congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Ryan Showalter, who were to celebrate their third anniversary on Monday, and to Frank and Lisa Ruiz, celebrating a whopping six months, and to Herbert and LaVerne Riddick, who the past week had celebrated fifty-four years of marriage.

“I’ve known little LaVernie since Herbert brought her up from down in Hennrietta, Texas,” said Winston. “I asked her the other day what was her secret for her lengthy marriage. She said it was because Herbert never forgot their anniversary. Herbert told me that LaVernie never let him forget it. Now that’s what I call two sensible people—a woman who says what she wants, and a man smart enough to listen.”

Vella was in charge of the altar f lowers that month at the First Methodist. She had bought pots of blooming bromeliads on special from the Home Depot and saved the Ladies Circle some twenty-five dollars. Actually, she saved herself some twenty-five dollars, as she bought them through the Blaine’s Drugstore account and donated the f lowers, thereby transferring the expense in part to Uncle Sam. So she was doing her part and keeping the economy going. Things just passed along in life.

“Let me help you.”

She was a little surprised to see Jaydee Mayhall coming forward. He took one of the pots right out of her hand. “Well, thank you, Jaydee. Please set that one over by the piano.” She wondered what he wanted; Jaydee was not a man to do something for nothing.

The church was filling up. Inez Cooper came f littering past and stopped to point out that the pot in front of the pulpit was off-kilter. Vella didn’t think so.

“Well, it is,” said Inez as she bent to shift it a micro-inch.

Vella opened her mouth, then closed it and pivoted, going to take her normal place in the third pew. As she adjusted her skirt, she looked up to see Jaydee approaching.

“Hope you don’t mind if I sit beside you today,” he said, giving her his winning smile. He was a handsome man. He had always put her in mind of Douglas Fairbanks Jr., not that she ever wanted to tell anyone that. Not only would she be showing her age, but most of the time Jaydee was too annoying to compliment.

“Well…no,” Vella answered, in something of a confused state, but for some reason stopping herself from saying that the spot was saved for the Peele sisters, Peggy and Alma, who sat there every week. There were no nameplates on the pews, after all.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jaydee settle himself and smooth his sharply creased trousers. She wondered what in the world was going on with him. His behavior was hardly customary. The memory clicked in of him being somewhat disgruntled two months previously, when she had purchased the old oil-field building and lot west of town, getting to the property ahead of him. He might now know of someone who wanted to buy it and was hoping to get it from her cheap, then resell it. She had been in financial dealings with Jaydee before. He never could go at anything directly.

The Peele sisters showed up and were affronted at having their space taken. They could have squeezed between Jaydee and Bingo Yardell, who held down the other end of the pew, but instead Peggy Peele said, “We’ll just move back,” and hauled Alma after her, while Alma whined that she was too short to see from the back.

It was rather nice to have a man sitting beside her at church, Vella thought, taking note that Jaydee was a good-smelling man. One thing that she had always appreciated about her now-departed husband was that he had always smelled good.

Then here came Belinda and Lyle.

“Lyle and I thought we’d like to sit with you today, Mama,” Belinda said. She looked right at Jaydee and all but told him to move.

He did—closer to Vella—saying, “Good mornin’. Nice to see you, Miss Belinda.”

“Yes, you, too,” Belinda replied after staring at him a moment.