Mark Dunn - We Five

“I’m rather engaged, Lyle. Be a love and make tea for all three of us if you would.”

The novelty of this idea struck Jane’s brother as something quite intriguing. “I could certainly do that. But you’ll have to direct me to the proper cupboard.”

“Shall I tell you first where you’ll find the kitchen?”

“How can you be such a bloody lark so early in the morning?” he grumbled.

Ruth and Jane waited until he had left the room to collapse into hysterics.

Bellevenue, Mississippi, February 1997

(from

Five Came Running,

by Mark Dunn)

Ruth heard a knock at the trailer door. She had been watching Katie Couric talking to a woman Ruth didn’t recognize. There was no sound coming out of the television because the volume knob had fallen off when she hit the set with the closet door. It was an old Sylvania portable black-and-white the Mobrys had given her when she moved into the trailer.

Ruth had been living with the now-retired minister and his younger sister since she was fourteen. Before this, she’d been housed in two different orphanages and then parked with six different foster families. The Mobrys, Ruth’s very last foster guardians (they couldn’t be called foster parents because they weren’t husband and wife), had been very kind to her, as had the congregation of the small non-denominational church the Reverend had shepherded. The Church of the Generous Spirit was unique among the Protestant churches of northern Mississippi. Not only had it been racially integrated from its inception — this in a part of the country in which integration, while the law of the land, wasn’t always the law of the heart — the church had an unusual take on Christ himself. For Reverend Mobry’s flock, Jesus was an unabashed, unapologetic liberal. Kind of like Hubert Humphrey, if Humphrey had been the son of God.

It was a small congregation, but a well-knit one, and in it Ruth had found the loving extended family she’d always wanted. She knew nothing of her blood family — only that her mother, a migrant worker thought to be from Appalachian Kentucky, had died in an automobile accident. The near-term baby she’d been carrying at the time was pulled from her corpse and saved, but circumstances — Ruth’s mother had no traceable relatives — required that Ruth make her entrance into the world as a ward of the state.

Ruth had now reached the age at which she was no longer a ward of the state.

And she was no longer the responsibility of the Mobrys. And though she was very fond of the brother and sister who had taken such good care of her for the last seven years, Ruth was ready to spread her wings. She’d been the first of We Five to notice the ad placed in the local paper by Lucky Aces Casino, which was about to open up in Tunica County, right on the Mississippi River. (The Mississippi state legislature was very specific in crafting the 1990 law that permitted gambling in the state: its casinos had to be docked either along the Mississippi River or on the Gulf of Mexico.) Lucky Aces needed cocktail waitresses, and Ruth thought this was something she and her friends could do.

By choice, Ruth had never gone to college, choosing instead to pursue a path of “self-education.” The term she used for herself, but which she never said aloud, since most people would think it had something to do with an interest in cars, was “autodidact.” Whenever Ruth wasn’t assisting Ms. Mobry around the parsonage (the house where the Mobrys lived was called the “parsonage,” though it was owned by the siblings free and clear) or helping out at the church, Ruth read. She’d set out at the age of fifteen to read from cover to cover every book at the Bellevenue Library, as well as all the hundreds of other books which she’d bought at garage sales and second-hand book stores throughout Desoto County. (Except, that is, for the bodice-ripper romances; these she got for Ms. Mobry. It was a secret passion of Lucille’s, which no one at the church was supposed to know about.)

Ruth hoped someday to write professionally. This was her dream.

Now that she was grown and Reverend Mobry had turned the pulpit over to a younger man, the waitressing job seemed a perfect fit for her. It would give her time to read. And write. Bringing drinks to people at their slot machines and gaming tables didn’t sound like a very taxing kind of job; it was definitely one she wouldn’t have to take home with her every day in the way of frets and regrets. Ruth would also have the chance to see more of her four friends from childhood, Maggie, Jane, Carrie, and Molly, both at the casino and during the free hours the five liked to spend together.

We Five applied for the waitressing jobs together and were all hired. The head of Human Resources, a Ms. Touliatis, liked it that her new applicants got along so well; they seemed much more like sisters than friends. “You’re all so, so, so cohesive !” she had marveled. “And Lucky Aces Casino needs cocktail waitresses who are cohesive.” Then Ms. Touliatis, who was forty-one and looked to Ruth as if she’d been twice run over by the ineluctably trundling steamroller of life, added through a wistful sigh: “I wish I had friends who were as dependable and devoted to one another as I see ya’ll are. By way of contrast, I just last week caught my best friend Lawanda in bed with my husband Mack. Well, not just my husband, but also our Irish Setter, Dakota. Can you imagine that? Both my husband and my dog were cheating on me!”

“I don’t think we can imagine that at all,” replied Jane, who felt a response of some sort was required.

“And then,” Ms. Touliatis went on, “there’s my other good friend— former good friend, Heidi. Heidi once made fun of my lazy eye over the loudspeaker at Kmart.” Ms. Touliatis pulled a tissue from the box on her desk and blew her nose. “A good and true friend is one of life’s great treasures.”

“That’s a fact,” said Jane.

The Mobrys had taken news of Ruth’s new job very well. “How convenient,” said the Reverend, “with the casino just down the road. And nowhere in the teachings of our socially progressive Lord and Savior do we find objections to cocktail waitressing in riverboat casinos, though the Southern Baptists would certainly have you think otherwise.”

“But do be careful,” Lucille Mobry added. “Men do get drunk in those places and try to take advantage when they can.”

Ruth nodded. “Yes, the woman who’s in charge of all the waitresses — Ms. Colthurst — she’s gonna have us all watch a training film called ‘How to Keep Their Mitts Off Your Tuches.’ I think it was put out by the New Jersey Gaming Commission.”

Lucille suddenly looked tristful. “Does this mean you won’t be living with us anymore? Are you gonna be moving in with one of your girlfriends?”

“Well, she doesn’t have to,” suggested the Reverend. “She can have the trailer out back. You can be a real working woman, Ruth, with a place of your own, but you’ll have us close at hand for whenever you need anything.”

“That’s very sweet, Uncle Herb,” said Ruth. “But if I took you up on this, I’d want to pay you rent.”

“We’ll take a little somethin’ from you if it makes you feel better,” said Mobry. The retired minister was halted by a thought. “You know, Ruth, you’ve got an awful lot of books, and I’m not sure they’ll all fit into that trailer. I might have to buy you one of those steel storage sheds and we can turn that into a little library for you.”

Ruth smiled. “That would be a funny-looking library.”

Lucille slapped the air with her hand. “Oh let’s just keep the books in her old room. Whenever she wants one, she can come get it. Oh honey-girl, I guess you can tell how hard it’s gonna be for us to let go of you. Just moving you outside into Lucius’s old trailer is gonna feel like a huge separation.”