Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Cleron ate a hamburger at the roadside chain’s snack bar. Through the window he could see the Nicholases’ station wagon pull up. “Katy, bar the door,” he said to himself.

A moment later, Ladella joined him. She had finished her sandwich and was holding several boxes of Stuckey’s brand confections she wanted to buy, along with a cedar plaque that read, “I don’t swim in your toilet, so please don’t pee in my pool.” (She and her husband had just put in a swimming pool the previous spring.)

Ladella had been standing very near the front door when her sister and brother-in-law entered the store. One of her candy boxes had slipped from her nervous hands and hit the floor with a loud thwack. She had looked at Truman (trying her very best not to give her sister the courtesy of even a brief glance) and said somewhat exasperatedly, “Truman Nicholas — you had to have seen our car in the parking lot. Why didn’t you keep on going?”

Before Truman could attempt an answer, Fay shot back, “We have every right to stop here too. You don’t own Stuckey’s.” Fay had said this without looking at Ladella, and then brushed roughly past her to peruse, with serious purpose, a row of roasted nut products.

“What was I to do?” Truman whispered in an apologetic tone to Ladella after his wife passed. “She likes this place just as much as you do.”

At her husband’s table in the snack bar, Ladella recounted what had just happened. Then she subjoined, “I am going to make my purchases and then go and sit in the car. Finish your hamburger, and don’t keep me waiting.”

Ladella strode over to the cash register and bought her confections and the plaque with the funny saying on it and then went out to sit in the Gremlin and stew and fume. Her husband Cleron followed a few moments later. He passed Truman on the way out. The two men shook their heads and shrugged. After walking out of the store, Cleron turned and walked back in and then said to Truman by way of afterthought, “I’ve been meaning to ask you what you think about the curriculum changes for the fall, but we’d better not do it with the women around, or they’ll think we’re talking about them behind their backs.”

Truman nodded and sighed.

After they’d gotten back on I-40, Fay said to Truman, “What was it that Cleron said to you in the Stuckey’s?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“You’re lying. You men are conspiring in some way. I just know it. And we aren’t stopping anywhere else between here and Oklahoma City. If you get hungry, you can eat these pralines.”

Truman had every intention of not stopping again, but the gas gauge took that decision out of his hands. Plus, he was hungry — hungry for something in the meat family. Unlike Cleron, he hadn’t eaten a hamburger at the Conway Stuckey’s. There was another Stuckey’s in Checotah, Oklahoma. They could get gas there, and he could grab a sandwich. The Nicholases hadn’t packed a cooler like the Keys. Truman Nicholas didn’t believe in filling a car up with food from home; that’s what roadside eateries were for.

Ladella was sitting at one of the plastic laminated tables in the snack bar section of the Checotah, Oklahoma, Stuckey’s store eating pretzels when they arrived. She watched with unmitigated horror as her older sister and her husband got out of their brown Matador and started across the parking lot. “If that doesn’t beat everything!” she said aloud.

She had hardly finished the word “everything” when a piece of pretzel slipped into her windpipe. She began to choke. Very little air was getting through. Her husband was in the restroom. There was a white couple sitting at the table next to her. They watched, horrified, as she quickly began to claw at her throat. “Help her!” the woman called to the short order cook behind the counter.

“You want me to call a doctor?” he replied stupidly.

Ladella couldn’t speak. She couldn’t breathe. She was becoming lightheaded even as the adrenaline of fear pumped throughout her body.

Fay saw what was happening as she entered the store. She saw Ladella clutching at her throat with a woman standing helplessly next to her and a man slapping her futilely on the back.

Fay ran toward her sister. She knocked over a display of old-fashioned fruitcake to get there. She pushed the man out of the way, grabbed Ladella, wheeled her around, and placed both of her arms around her sister’s waist. With her right hand, Fay made a fist and pushed it against Ladella’s abdomen just above her belly button. She grabbed the fist with the other hand and began to make a series of strong upward squeeze-thrusts into the abdomen. On the fifth thrust, Ladella coughed. The piece of pretzel flew from her mouth.

Fay sat her sister down. There was a long silence. Then the man, who had now been joined by Fay’s husband Truman, said, “How did you learn to do that?”

Fay didn’t answer. She had sat down across from Ladella and was gently patting her sister’s trembling hand.

Truman turned to the man and said, “It’s a procedure developed by a Dr. Henry Heimlich. He published it a couple of years ago in Emergency Medicine —that’s a medical journal.”

Cleron was out of the restroom now. He hadn’t heard any of the commotion and was startled to find his wife and sister-in-law sitting at the same table, looking tenderly into each other’s eyes. He turned to his brother-in-law Truman. “Did Jesus just come back?”

“Ladella was choking. In case you were wondering, the abdominal thrust maneuver attributed to Dr. Heimlich apparently works.”

The two sisters kept their silence for a moment longer and then Ladella, still looking at Fay, said, “I think you broke one of my ribs.” She touched the lower part of her rib cage gingerly.

“You’re welcome,” said Fay. She pursed her lips, then released them. “Let me feel it. Maybe it’s just bruised.”

As Fay was touching Ladella’s diaphragm, Ladella said, “I probably wouldn’t have choked on that pretzel if I hadn’t seen you and Truman driving up.”

“Do you hate me that much, Ladella?” asked Fay, sitting back in her seat and folding her arms across her large breasts.

“No more than you hate me ,” said Ladella.

“But I don’t hate you at all,” replied Fay. “I just don’t like you very much.”

“Then why did you save my life? Or would you have saved whoever was choking at this table?”

“Well, of course I would have done the same for anybody,” said Fay. “But it obviously mattered more to me because it was you. For good or bad, you’re still my sister.” Fay thought for a moment and then said, “When are we going to end all of this, Ladella? Does it go on like this until we’re both dead?”

“Mama always favored you.”

“And Daddy always favored you .”

“The sad truth is that when it comes right down to it, they both probably always liked Marcus best.”

Fay nodded. “He is the only son and he is the only one of us to give our parents grandchildren.”

Ladella took a sip from the cup of water that the short order cook had brought her. “I never enjoyed any of those years of not having a sister.”

Fay agreed with this statement by nodding pensively.

Out in the parking lot, after their wives had gotten inside their respective AMC passenger vehicles, the rent between the two temporarily, perhaps even permanently mended, Truman said to Cleron, “Had we all decided to take you up on your idea of driving out together, this reconciliation might never have happened. The Lord, Brother Cleron, works in mysterious ways.”

“Ain’t that a fact, Brother Truman. Ain’t that a fact.”