Gail Godwin - Flora

“Except for—?”

I lowered my voice: “Kind of naïve. Huge inferiority complex. Not that we’ll be going anywhere for people to notice. My father has quarantined us to the house. Did you hear about Brian?”

“I heard he was pretty bad. His acting career’s probably over, unless he does wheelchair parts. But at least he’s not in an iron lung like that little girl. So how was your week with the high-living Huffs? Did you get lots of swimming in?”

“I’d have gotten in a lot more if I’d known the summer was going to turn out like this.”

“I heard a really odd rumor about him.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Huff. Some people think he doesn’t exist.”

“That’s crazy. He’s always sending packages.”

“You can send packages to yourself.”

Though I knew Annie’s best rumors originated inside her own fiendishly inventive head, that didn’t make them any less appealing. They always had a rightness about them, like the rightness of what ought to happen next in a good story. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you heard this rumor,” I said, and waited for her usual answer.

“Well, when you’ve got not one but two parents working for the phone company, you hear a lot. You can listen in on anything if you have the right equipment. Which brings me to my exciting news. We’re being transferred.”

“Wait a minute. Is this some more of that joke?”

“What joke?”

“What you said a few minutes ago about how I was going to miss you, but then you said you were joking.”

“It’s no joke. I just wasn’t ready to tell you yet. They’re moving us to this boring little town in the flatlands. Daddy will be regional manager and make lots more money and Mammy will stay home with us. She’ll probably die of resentment and boredom or kill us first, I haven’t decided which yet.”

“When?”

“Daddy’s already down there looking for a house. We’re supposed to move in three weeks. They’re paying for the Mayflower van and we don’t even have to pack up our own stuff. My rotten little sisters will share a bedroom in the new house and I’ll get one all to myself.”

“You sound awfully pleased.” Two out of three friends cut down in two days. I was on a losing streak, like Flora with her jobs. Only she still had two out of three left.

“You can come visit. It’s only a bus ride down the mountain. You’ll be able to stay over at my house for a change. Maybe I’ll give my room a name like the rooms at your house.”

Then she ruined everything. “But the truth is, and we’re both smart enough to know it, Helen, we’ll probably never see each other again.”

SLOWLY IT CREAKEDinto afternoon and I was beginning to see how the whole summer was going to be. Meals and Flora. Flora and meals. We couldn’t go anywhere and nobody could come to us. To escape Flora, who was already preparing supper, though we had hardly finished with lunch, I had gone to the garage to sit in Nonie’s car. I had been waiting very quietly, trying to summon back the voice from yesterday, when a motorcycle roar shattered the stillness. I slammed out of the garage in time to see it buck over the crowning bump of our hill. It was a three-wheeled affair with a storage trunk behind. A skinny man with pointy features and close-cropped bright orange hair dismounted, mouthing my father’s worst obscenity. But when he spotted me, he quickly socialized his face and called, “You folks have one holy terror of a driveway.” He wore khakis, the pants stuffed inside high lace-up boots.

“We’re having it seen to, now that the war is over,” I said haughtily.

“Well, it is and it isn’t.”

“What?”

“The war. We still have the Japs to beat.” He looked past me into the open garage. “Oldsmobile Tudor touring car. Nineteen thirty-three.”

“How do you know that?”

“I worked on cars like this before I joined up. My name is Finn. I’m your grocery deliverer. One thousand Sunset Drive. Sounds like a movie.”

I started to shake hands but remembered my father’s warnings. This person had been all over town delivering groceries. “My name is Helen Anstruther,” I said.

“The one who likes the Clark bars.”

“How did you know that?”

“I heard her ask you when I was taking your order. I fancy them myself.”

He wasn’t a foreigner, but he wasn’t a local either. His speech was different. On his sleeve there was a patch with an eagle’s head.

“Were you in the war?”

“I was, I was. I was supposed to jump on D-Day but I got sick in England and they had to ship me back to the military hospital here.”

“It must have been your lungs then.”

“Now how did you know that ?”

“It’s their specialty. My grandfather helped them start that hospital. He was a doctor. This house used to be his convalescent home where people could finish recovering from lung problems. Or sometimes mental problems.”

His high-pitched laugh resembled a cry of pain. “The perfect place for me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I had a collapsed lung and then later came the mental problems.”

Then here came Flora flying out of the house, apologizing for having been upstairs, as if her presence were required before any two people could start an interesting conversation, apologizing for “our” driveway, and oh, what a cute machine, but such a hot day to be outside riding around bareheaded.

“This is Finn, who’ll be delivering our groceries,” I cut her off. I introduced her simply as Flora, leaving off the cousin part.

Flora plunged into a handshake, all polio warnings forgotten, and said she hoped we hadn’t weighed him down by ordering too much, we would try not to order too often.

“Oh, I have people who order every single day,” said Finn.

“My goodness, every day?” exclaimed Flora, sounding foolishly impressed.

“Many of our customers don’t have refrigeration.”

“We didn’t have refrigeration back in Alabama when I was growing up,” Flora eagerly volunteered. “Just this one little icebox in the cellar with a block of ice. The iceman brought us a new block twice a week.”

Shut up , I was thinking, but Finn only smiled at her. “I’ve got this one lady,” he said, “who doesn’t hesitate to phone the store whenever she remembers something she forgot.”

“She must be a rich lady,” I said sarcastically.

“Ah, no,” he said. “She’s a lonely old lady who’s losing her memory. But I always fit her in. It’s no trouble at all.” (He sweetly pronounced it “a- tall .”) He seemed like a kind, good-humored person, if a little odd-looking. It was certainly kind of him to pretend not to notice what a fool Flora was.

Somehow we got the grocery bags into the kitchen without her embarrassing me again, though she did keep calling me her little cousin and had started up again about the okra. I made sure Finn got a good look at our Frigidaire, which was more up-to-date than anything else in the house. This was not Flora’s Alabama. It would have been interesting to hear about his collapsed lung and even more about the mental problems, but I needed to get him away before he started dreading his future deliveries to these two isolated females at the top of their holy terror drive.

“WHY DO WEalways have to eat at six?” I asked Flora, when she started rolling out her biscuit dough.

“Because that’s when people eat.”

“We never used to eat at six. We ate at all different times. My father and Nonie had to have their cocktails first.”

“Well, you and I don’t have any cocktails.” She looked very proud of her clever reply.