FALLING WOMEN and Other Stories by Ellen Herbert

Award-winning short stories about families in turmoil and children in peril, from a homeless mother forced to put her son in foster care to a suburban mother afraid of passing her water phobia to her son.

Braxton, North Carolina, is the where in these stories, an imaginary coastal town adjacent to Camp Corregidor, a stopover for recruits on their way to Vietnam, and later to Iraq. Braxton is the home front where citizens battle alcoholism, marital breakups and scandal. In Braxton, when a sister or father does wrong, the whole family shares the blame. Even Braxton’s babysitters are dangerous: snooping, stealing secrets—and even husbands.

But love abounds. Sisters driven apart by scandal reunite when their father remarries. The babysitter who ran off with the mayor is welcomed back into her family when she returns to Braxton pregnant. A woman on the verge of being committed to an asylum for alcoholism is pulled back from the brink by a devoted friend.

The Atlantic Ocean erodes Braxton’s beaches at an alarming rate, and the riptides and undertow pose a danger to swimmers, but a few good Braxtonites stand on shore watching, ready to save someone in trouble.

“...WHAT THESE GENEROUS, ACCOMPLISHED STORIES REVEAL IS THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HUMAN HEART.” —Kate Blackwell, author of You Won't Remember This: Stories.

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SHELFSTEALERS, INC., LAREDO, TEXAS www.shelfstealers.com $11.90 US

Praise for Ellen Herbert’s

FALLING WOMEN and Other Stories “By

turns, appealing, worrisome, full of sighs, full of cheer, these stories remain always true to life, and line by line make for easy reading about difficult matters.”

—Alan Cheuse, fiction critic for NPR's "All Things Considered."

“FALLING WOMEN is a collection of tragedy and redemption, humor and beauty, and it's all served up with a potent dose of truth. Ellen Herbert's prose, entertaining and relevant, cuts to the quick. Each word is well chosen. The stories are perfectly ordered. And every emotion resonates. A masterpiece!"

—Peter Giglio, author of "A Spark in the Darkness," and editor of "Help! Wanted: Tales of On-the-Job Terror"

“In Braxton, NC, the fictitious hometown of Ellen Herbert's ‘Falling Women,’ war is never far away, thanks to a nearby military base, and there's plenty of grief to go around. The women of the stories—sisters, mothers, widows, students— struggle with money, alcohol, family betrayals, and staying true to themselves. One of the myriad pleasures in reading Herbert's wise tales is that many of her ‘falling women’ not only survive but triumph. Fiction may be made of ‘artful lies,’ as one of the characters suggests, but what these generous, accomplished stories reveal is the truth about the human heart.”

—Kate Blackwell, author of "You Won't Remember This: Stories."

FALLING WOMEN and Other Stories by Ellen Herbert

Copyright Š 2011 and 2012 Ellen Herbert All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-61972-000-8

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FALLING WOMEN and Other Stories by

Ellen Herbert

SHELFSTEALERS LAREDO, TEXAS

“The World As I Know It” was published in The Sonora Review and won a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize; “To Hold But Not Touch” appeared as “Swimming Lessons” in First for Women; “The Yellow Sneakers” was published in The Dexter Review and won a Dexter Review Short Story Prize; “The Bad Thing That Happens to Good People” was published in Fiction Weekly; “When the Forsythia Blooms” was published in Thema; “Higher Ed” appeared as “How to Get a Husband” in First for Women; “Prodigal Pirates” was published in The Crescent Review and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize; “Goalkeeping” and “Jazzland” appeared in Negative Capability (“Jazzland” won the Lip Service Prose Prize); and an earlier version of “Falling Women” won a Virginia Fiction Fellowship for Ms. Herbert.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to acknowledge my son, John Joseph Herbert, the inspiration for many of my stories. John is a wonderful young writer as well as editor.

I would also like to thank the Writer's Center, Bethesda, Maryland and all my friends there for their support through the years.

Lastly I thank Sheryl Dunn, Marzena Romanowicz, and Marla Mendenhall for having this publishing dream called Shelfstealers.

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CONTENTS

The World as I Know It..........15 When the Forsythia Blooms...........23 Higher Ed..........35 The Calling..........47 Jazzland..........57 The Yellow Sneakers..........69 Falling Women..........77 The Hurdlers..........93 Prodigal Pirates.........99 Goalkeeping..........113 The Bad Thing That Happens to Good People..........127 To Hold But Not Touch..........139

THE WORLD AS I KNOW IT During my childhood I had one indelible summer, indelible because a journey divided my life. Of all the summers that have passed, only this one remains whole and undiminished by time, a smooth solid stone on the bottom of the lake of my memory.

It began early one July morning in the summer of '58.

The ten-year-old me took a small suitcase out to the trunk of my uncle's Cadillac, an aqua-and-pearl cartoon fish with fins that curled foolishly from its fenders as if to mock the creatures of the sea.

"Hope you packed enough, Vera," Mother said behind me.

How much was enough? Their marriage ship was sinking, and they were putting my sister and me into this whale of a lifeboat and sending us south to Mobile and safety. Like most kids, I’d threatened to run away, but I never really meant it. Now my parents were helping me to do so.

I walked through the glittery grass beside the driveway. Dew seeped into my sneakers. A breeze brushed sunlight into the giant oak standing sentry at the sidewalk’s end.

Uncle Scott, a tiny man, wrinkled as a raisin and seldom completely sober, directed my father in the arrangement of our gear in the trunk. I wrapped my arm around the carport's post, its metal cool against my skin, and leaned in to catch Dad's eye. But his gaze seldom strayed from Mother, whom he had wronged and wanted to right.

Their recent trouble began with success—Mother's, when she, a Latin teacher, was promoted to high school principal. Dad, out celebrating, ran into a

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Ellen Herbert 16

newspaper truck. To wreck his Impala, be brought home in a police car, and for Mother to put him to bed weren’t out of the ordinary for him. Nor was it for me to be either surprised or thankful he didn’t get hurt. About my unreliable father there was one certainty: his luck was boundless. But it ran out.

The next day I found the newspaper crumbled in the trash. The Braxton Times, obviously angered about the loss of its truck, reported that my father had been charged with drunk driving. They even put the story on the front page.

In my room, I smoothed out the newspaper and read about my darling dad.

Until that moment I thought having your name in the paper was a good thing.

With my fingertip on my father’s name, I rubbed and rubbed until the paper tore and newsprint came off on my hands. At the bathroom sink, I brought my hand to my face and smelled the odor of ink and paper and shame, which came off with soap and water. All except the shame.

In Braxton, as long as you didn't kill anyone, the right lawyer could fix a ticket. Dad’s others had been handled by Marshall Doddson, Esquire, whose "hands are tied this time 'cause you made news in the process."

"Caveat emptor." Mother sometimes joked about Marshall, but her Latin was for good times. After the report of Dad’s accident made the paper, she kept a stony silence.

Geico, the safe driver insurance and Dad's employer, found out about his offense and fired him. With school out for summer, and all of us home, Mother was trying to fire him too. But she found it difficult with me, his defense attorney, present.

I couldn’t help but defend him, happy accident that he was. His chance meeting with Mother led to my existence. He offered her his trolley car seat as they traveled Georgia Avenue, Washington, D.C. during THE War. Dad's version went: "I wouldn't have been sitting there, looking up at your mother hanging from the strap above me if my ship didn't get scraped in the Canal on our way to the Pacific. While the leak was fixed, we had a layover in Panama. During that week the Japanese took Wake. No leak, and I would have been taken, too."

With that, I would lift his hand, turn it over, and stroke each finger from palm to fingertip to feel how close he came to capture, possibly death. Or to count the coincidences that led to me.

Out from our house came Aunt Lizbeth, a cardboard dress box under one arm. Aunt Lizbeth and Uncle Scott had stopped in Braxton on their way home to Mobile from their annual pilgrimage to Maryland's racetracks. Without consulting me or my sister, our parents decided Uncle Scott would deliver us to Alabama so we could visit with Dad's sister "a while."

Mother and Dad had opposing reasons for sending us away. He hoped that once alone, he’d be able to patch their fractured marriage. Mother wanted to cut her losses. "Tarnishing my star," she whispered to him late one night when we were supposed to be asleep. But I wasn’t in bed. I stood in the dark hallway outside their door and listened to Mother threaten separation, divorce.

In that dark hallway I learned love could end. I learned you could do

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something so bad love dries up. Dad’s crime: he brought shame on all of us.

That’s the way towns like Braxton worked. Dad brought shame home, and we all had to share in it.

This was why I was afraid to leave home. Afraid the world as I knew it would not stay intact. I wished I didn’t know what was going on. I wished I was like Lucy, my little sister, who loaded her maimed dolls into the Cadillac’s front seat as if we often went away on trips without our parents.

Shortly after Lucy received a doll for birthday or Christmas, she plugged in my toy iron that really worked, straightened the curl out of her newest victim's hair, and cut its frizzles to the root. Painting its lips and cheeks with Mother's blood-red nail polish finished her process. All her dolls had a similar startled, pathetic look as if they were related.

"That's my place, Miss Lucy," Aunt Lizbeth said. Hands on hips, she eyed the shotgun seat.

"Semper fidelis," Lucy told her.

The adults laughed. I didn’t. I’d caught Lucy’s act before.

Mother taught me Latin phrases; Lucy copied me. I wasn’t always certain what they meant, but Lucy at seven hadn't a clue. Not that this stopped her from peppering her speech with them. She decided whatever tone she used determined their meaning and enjoyed the attention they brought her from grownups.

This time Latin didn't help her get her way. Mother took her arm and directed her into the back seat. "Mind your aunt, Girls." Dad transferred Lucy’s maimed menagerie to the backseat and opened the door for me.

I went to Mother's side, my wet shoes slapping pavement, feet awash inside.

I took her arm above the elbow. Under my breath, I said, "Remember Hansel and Gretel—" "You'll have fun." Mother touched me without looking into my eyes. Soon I found myself beside Lucy in the backseat, the belly of the whale. Uncle Scott turned the ignition.

Children sent deep into the forest, the bread crumbs they shred to mark their path, the swooping birds that eat the crumbs. The curtain of night drops. The children stumble and fall and don’t know which way to go. Through the trees, a golden light glows from a cottage, but the children aren’t fooled. They know the cottage isn’t home. A children-eating witch waits for them there. But not even a witch can equal the dark knowledge that the children were sent away to be lost.

Uncle Scott brought his arm along the top of the seat and looked over his shoulder, inching the Cadillac down the driveway.

Lucy smiled and waved as if we were riding a float in a parade.

All this time my body tightened with fear. I wanted to beg our parents not to do this, not to send us away, but I didn’t. I said nothing.

Mother taught a language no one spoke, and I was learning it. Like her, I pulled back behind my eyes, and stayed quiet, not quite believing that what I feared when I listened to them in the dark outside their bedroom was coming to pass. Not quite believing Lucy and I were being sent away.

Out the car's back window I watched Mother, a bone thin woman almost a

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head taller than the fleshy man beside her, lift her hand and corners of her mouth. This couple didn’t look right together. They weren’t a matched set. I'd never admitted this before, but sensed it ever since I first studied their wedding pictures.

We moved further away, and they grew smaller. I saw them from a distance the way the world did and I understood: once they were two strangers far from home who imagined their chance meeting into love. They could have been wrong.

Dad grinned as if he heard my thoughts then threaded an arm around Mother. She neither shrank from him nor embraced him. She remained straight as the mailboxes we passed. This was the last picture I snapped with the camera of my mind. I stayed balanced on my knees looking backward until we turned the corner, and they disappeared.

I faced front, shut my eyes, and found their image behind my lids. The familiar stretch of lawn and rambling redwood house made the background. It was the world as I knew it, a snapshot I could pull out when I went to bed, in that time between wakefulness and sleep, when lately the forest had closed in, and my fear became a voice that whispered: what's going to happen to us?

"Like my new car, Girls?" Uncle Scott asked. A pine tree deodorizer hanging from the rearview mirror filled the car with a pine smell too intense to be real.

He drove one-handed with the wheel's steering knob, his other arm dangling out the window. The breeze lifted the top strands of his carefully arranged, dyed black hair. With his Pruitt beak and Hawaiian shirt, he resembled an exotic crested bird.

Lucy held Tiny Tears by her wooden hands. "My babies get car sick," she said.

"Lord, I hope you don't," Aunt Lizbeth said without turning around. She dealt cards out on her box top. Mother said Aunt Lizbeth came alive around a bridge table, but solitaire had to do her for the road.

Our route 17, the ocean highway, cut tobacco fields misty with low clouds as if the earth were breathing heavy. We went through blinking towns with a Piggly Wiggly, post office, and cluster of churches, blinking because they all had one blinking light, yellow or red. You could almost hear their mayor say, "What kind of town are we if we don't have a traffic light?"

With each mile a knot grew in my stomach. I closed my eyes, my palm over the knot, and imagined it was a ball of twine, one end tied to the mailbox at the bottom of our driveway. If I could string together the churches, freewills, gospels, Immanuels, the one-pump gas station towns we breezed through now, with old men's names like Henry and Ebenezer, and the gray marshlands that replaced John Deer green tobacco fields, would the twine lead me home?

*

*

*

"I'm hot," Lucy announced early afternoon with lunch at a diner behind us, sun throbbing overhead, and the black asphalt highway unfurling into forever. She came to stand behind Aunt Lizbeth and watched her flick cards.

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"That one's prettiest." She leaned over Aunt Lizbeth's shoulder. Her feet left the floor.

"Get back and behave, little sister," our aunt said.

I didn't like the way she talked to Lucy. My arms came around my sister.

Back on her side of the seat, she lay down and put her head in my lap, her knees folded into her chest. I stroked her white blond hair. Her eyelids opened and shut like a doll's eyes.

In winter she resembled a slug, pudgy and pale with see-through skin and dirty blond hair. Summer brought a metamorphosis. Her skin tanned. Her hair, eyebrows, and lashes bleached white, making her navy blue eyes look large and naked.

She fell asleep. Her stubby fingers meshed with mine. I put my head back and drifted off too, rocked by the sound of the Cadillac's wheels. In my dream, I saw a graph. The points on Mother's line: struggling through college, working at the War Department, waiting for love to find her. Dad's points: the loss of his own mother when he was little, lying about his age to enlist in the Marine Corps, miraculously missing capture. Their lines intersected on the streetcar. Romance, courtship, marriage, me. Did it all come to an end now?

Wet with sweat I awakened in Georgia. The seat's plastic cover felt permanently stuck to the back of my legs. Georgia might as well be Mars with its blood-red soil and acres of midget trees. I was too tired to notice much.

At every city limits sign I said, "Is this it?" Lucy chimed in, “Are we there?

Are we there?”

"Almost," Uncle Scott answered and kept going.

At Waycross, Georgia, he turned into the parking lot of the Peach Tree Motel. Gravel crunched under the tires. The Cadillac stopped. Our prayers were answered.

Lucy and I slid to opposite windows to see what we could see. The plastic seat cover slick with our sweat. We couldn’t wait to get out of the car.

Uncle Scott pulled a brown bag from under his seat. On cue Aunt Lizbeth reached over her card table and snapped open the glove compartment. Few words ever passed between them. She seemed to know his thoughts as he thought them. Although I didn’t like these two, I wished my parents were so well matched.

She took a silver cup from the compartment and handed it to him. He poured, pointed his chin, and downed the brown liquid in one bob of his Adam's apple. A whiff of bourbon surrounded us, punctuated by his long satisfied sigh, then bottle and cup got whisked away.

He went into the office to check in.

"Look." Lucy drew me to her window. She pointed to a pool of aqua water shimmering through a stand of trees. The sight was almost too inviting to be real. From that moment on, we begged to go swimming.

Once we got in the room, we pulled bathing suits from our bag and sidled into the bathroom; it smelled of mildew and Old Dutch cleanser. We tugged on our suits and came out to the air conditioner’s rattle from the room’s back

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window. Uncle Scott in a sleeveless undershirt stood in front of its stream of stale air. He unwrapped wax paper from a drinking glass. He would pour another, with ice this time. One for Miz Liz, too.

She sat on the side of the bed next to the nightstand, her hands around a fresh deck. We took up a position near the door, tiny motel towels draped around our necks, like prize fighters about to enter the ring.

Lucy opened and shut the door, an action sure to irritate. “Please, please,” I said.

"Stop letting the cool out," Aunt Lizbeth said.

"All right. Ya'll go on." Uncle Scott shooed us. "But don't go in till we get out there."

I closed the door on the high crackle of shuffling cards, and we hopped across the hot asphalt parking lot. Lucy squealed, "Veni, vidi, vici," pronouncing the vees like w’s. Silly sounding but correct.

I opened the metal gate with a clang, skimmed the white concrete apron, and jumped in the shallow end. I loved the way the water opened up and let me in, its smooth feel against my skin.

Lucy came to my side and splashed. I laughed, splashed back. Soon the aqua water dissolved my soreness. I put my head back against the side of the pool and watched how the trees splintered the light from pink and purple clouds smeared across the horizon.

Were they seeing the same sunset in Braxton?

I thought about Mother and Dad, whom I loved equally, but I was rooting for Dad to win their struggle, because he wanted us to stay together. My mind drifted until I realized I hadn't heard Lucy. I looked up.

She paddled near the rope that separated the shallow end from the deep.

Her head ducked under the rope.

"Don't," I called. She couldn't swim.

She came up in the middle of the deep end, yelled, "Ver," and disappeared.

Even from that distance I saw something in her eyes I’d never seen before. I rushed to the end of the shallow part. Water grazed my chin, my toes barely touched bottom. I could swim but not well. At the rope, I took a deep breath and dove under.

I came up in the deep end near her. She jumped me, sending me down, so far down into the belly of the deep end that I felt its prickly bottom against the soles of my feet. I pushed off the bottom and moved past her to the surface. I tried to inhale, but she jumped me and pushed me down.

Inky anger exploded in my brain; she was trying to kill me. I fought back with a ferocity I didn’t know I had, and made my way up. She clawed my shoulder. Her foot kicked at my chest. Over and over we climbed one another to the surface. The moment before my head broke the ceiling of water, I looked up into the dome of sky and longed to suck its blue into my lungs, but Lucy was there, all thrashing arms and legs. I couldn’t breathe. Her gasps filled my head.

I traveled between two worlds, pushed down to one, struggling up to the other. I tired. At the surface I tried to inhale and choked. The trees around the

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pool threw shadowy nets over me. The noisy surface world, the whine of cars, doors slammed, people shouting, was like a room in which a band played. The door to that room opened less and less, and I nestled into the quiet below. My arms, legs felt loose and free. My body glowed fluorescent. Through pale skin I traced a network of blue, blue as the water. How peaceful I was.

It was then, when I didn't look, that I saw the rope and reached for it. I pulled myself away from my sister and her struggle. My head came up and out of the water, but my lungs had forgotten. The air tasted strange. I coughed.

Lucy's feet, white and wrinkled, kicked past me. She held onto the end of a long silver tube. A black man tall as God extended it to her from the side of the pool.

I was shaking hard, but I managed to walk out the shallow end and onto the concrete apron. The solid ground under my feet sent strength through my body. In a grassy corner behind a tree, I was sick.

The man helped Lucy out of the pool, the long metal part of a vacuum cleaner at his feet. He was the motel janitor.

I went to them. Without meeting his eyes, I said, "Thank you."

For the rest of my life I would think of things I wished I had said to him.

That he saved our lives and the lives of our children yet unborn; that he allowed my parents to live a life more comedy than tragedy because he saw us drowning and came to help. That he was our savior, and his actions that day would be my example. Because of him, I couldn’t look the other way when people around me were in trouble.

My sister nudged me. I brought my arms around her and rode the wild thump of her heart until she calmed. I knew without any explanation about natural instinct that she did what she had to in the water. And so did I. The office door creaked open. A woman stood in it and gave the man a hard look. He picked up the vacuum cleaner part, waved it at her, and turned to us.

"You two all right now?"

"We aren’t going in the water again.” I looked up at him, my eyes filmy with chlorine. “Promise."

He lifted two fingers to his brow in salute and went to an open doorway nearby, where the rest of the vacuum cleaner waited.

Exhausted, I sank into a lounge chair. Lucy came to sit on my lap, her thumb deep in her mouth. The Georgia dusk gathered around us.

* * * Through the years, small things conjure up that day in '58. Sometimes, at the smell of chlorine the whole of it shoots through me, and my heart grows taut at the nearness of death, always just over my shoulder. I learned from the experience that the best way to save those drowning is to extend something to them, not to jump in with them. Still, I remember the ten-year-old me who didn’t hesitate to go in the deep end to save her sister. When I act less than heroic, I remind myself: that ten-year-old hero is still inside me.

The water proved to be a blessing, helping separate me from my parents so

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I could learn to float the turbulent surface of their marriage. For they stayed together through more storms with patchy sun because that's the way they imagined love to be. And in the end only death separated them, and now not even that. They lie together beneath a stand of pines at the edge of the cemetery just outside Braxton.

Lucy disagrees with my version of what happened at the Peach Tree Motel.

She says we were bad kids who didn't listen to our uncle. I no longer argue about it. Nowadays the troubles and triumphs of our own children dominate our weekly long- distance conversations. For during our struggle in the pool I found her, my buddy for life, the only person in the world who shares this history with me. But like our mismatched parents, we don't agree about much, not even about our own history.

Yet that night in Georgia, we were happy just to sit together by the pool.

Happy that maybe boundless luck could be inherited. Around us the cricket choir grew shrill. Darkness closed in. I took her hand, turned it over and stroked each finger from palm to fingertip.

WHEN THE FORSYTHIA BLOOMS I’m sitting in my rocker by the window, one hand wrapped around my good man, Jim Beam, the other around a can of Coke. I put a swig of bourbon in my mouth followed by Coke. Those carbonated bubbles are fun, but truth be told, once I get going I leave the cola by the wayside.

Tomorrow Thurman, my husband of thirty-three years, is going to take me the other side of Beulahville, NC, and put me in Casfield Psychiatric Institute.

Last night I overheard him tell Olivia to pack my bag. I’d be leaving Saturday morning.

“But Marla's quitting,” Olivia said in my defense. “She hasn't touched a drop in three months.”

“I swear it's been two and a half.” I came into the kitchen where they both stood around the sink.

“Unseemly for a woman to swear,” Thurman said. “And a place has opened up for you at Casfield's, so you're going.”

I wasn't even aware I'd been on a waiting list.

“I'm not going to let you take my baby.” Olivia threw her arms around me.

Thurman stomped away.

Some baby, I'm fifty-five, the speed limit, double nickel, but to Olivia the black woman who raised me, I’ll always be her baby. And she's been more mama to me than my own, who died when I was six and lies buried across the road inside the iron fence.

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Sipping and rocking, me and Jim get going good now, until I rock so far back, the rocker bucks, spilling me out on the floor. Bottle and can roll away. I hold onto the window sill to stand.

Below the window, golden arms reach up for me. I decide: if I’m leaving, I’m going of my own accord. I push out the window screen and watch it fall like a kite in a sudden calm.

I get out on the window ledge and sit, feeling like a performer on stage, forsythia footlights below. My shoes drop one, two. "What a friend we have in Jesus," I sing to Carolina, to spring, to gather courage from my own voice.

I wriggle my toes in the cool air, and ignore the fist of fear in my stomach even Jim B. can't unfurl, let go the ledge, and push off. Head first and flip, blue house dress filling with air, its white dots dance apart. One floor, two, free and flying until they catch me, as they promised. I bounce in the forsythia's sharp arms.

On my back, I see Olivia's face come over me like a dark sun. "You've really done it now, Girl." She feels my arms and legs for broken bones.

"Did you see me fly through the air? Did I look like an acrobat?"

"I saw a dotted house dress fall pass my window." She helps me up. "I've got to get you straight before Mr. Thurman gets home." We walk to the back door.

"Thurman would plain die if he saw me flying through the air."

Olivia covers her mouth with her palm, her eyes roll back in her head.

“Don't tell him you fell out of the second story window. They'll never let you out of Casfield's if they know.”

“Didn't fall. I jumped.” I put my head against the kitchen table's cool metal, chilling me lovely like when we grew tobacco and worked in the roasting hot curing sheds.

* * * One summer morning soon after my mother died, the summer I turned six, I woke when light poured into the crack between my curtains and the window.

I called out for my dad. When he didn't answer, I shot out of bed, ran through the empty house, and out into the fields soupy with morning fog. I ran between rows of tall tobacco, crying. From that day forward, waking and sleeping, fear has been tall and green. Eventually I heard voices and found Dad in a curing shed, watching over workers binding the sweet smelling leaves. I took hold of his waist and wouldn't let go. He lifted me and carried me back to the house.

On the way I asked him over and over, "Who's going to keep care of me now?"

And there she was, my beautiful Olivia, in the kitchen, baking biscuits for breakfast. Dad introduced us.

That first summer Olivia was always baking. Dad complained to her that she was keeping the house hot with the oven always on, but she ignored him

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and kept right on. I'm sure she thought keeping us stocked in cakes and pies would ward off the darkness overtaking us since Mama died.

That first day, after Dad went back to the curing shed, Olivia put a hot biscuit in front of me where now she puts a cup of coffee, Olivian mud, her setme-right-for-Thurman drink. But we never fool him.

My husband does not love me. He turned away once he saw there would be no children. Dr. Hurst told me I was fine, but Thurman never would have himself checked out. Instead he took up with Jesus. Not that he wasn't always religious, but once he decided I was barren, he turned up the volume on religion, becoming a deacon at Braxton Freewill Baptist.

Olivia fishes beneath the sink and pulls out another bottle of Jim. "Why does he buy you this if he doesn't want you to drink?" She's asked this before.

A car door slams in the driveway. I scurry through the house and see a Highway Patrolman coming up the front sidewalk, coming for me.

I run upstairs, shut my bedroom door, and listen.

Soon Olivia’s footsteps clomp upstairs. “Marla, you've got to come down and speak to the man.”

I get in my rocker and prepare for blast-off. She stands behind me and puts a hand on my shoulder. "It's Thurman," she says softly. "He's gone."

I look up at her. "Gone where?"

“Dead gone,” she says.

I feel my face open in a grin. "I guess I won't be going to Casfield's Psychiatric after all."

“Put on a sorrow face and don't breathe too close to the man.”

Officer Gurganus tells us that Thurman was on his way home from his pharmacy when he pulled off the road past the Winn Dixie, turned his flashers on, took his teeth out, set them on the dash, and died. It was like Thurman to go so orderly.

Once the door closes on the patrolman, my hand is around Jim. Before I can get the bottle to my lips, Olivia wrenches it away. ”You say you drink because of Thurman. Well, death has parted you, so you won't be needing this.”

I let her have the bottle, but when the phone rings in the foyer and she goes to answer it, I grab Jim and sip until I put summer back inside.

"Marla, it's Miss Bessie Lynn," Olivia calls. I hide the bottle and go to the phone.

Miss Bessie, my last living relation, the oldest daughter of Dad's brother's first wife, is full of sympathy and curiosity about Thurman's end. Winn Dixie's store manager has spread the news. No sooner do I hang up with her than the phone rings again, a deacon's wife wanting to know the same details.

All evening I sneak Jim, drinking my way into sorrow. "I wasn't a good wife to Thurman," I call out to Olivia, who's in a cleaning frenzy.

When I stop being able to talk, she has to answer the phone for me. “You've got to get yourself straight,” she says after she hangs up from a call. “This county is going to converge on us tomorrow quick as a cake cools down enough to slap some icing on it.”

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I crawl up the steps to bed.

*

*

*

Sun scorching my eyelids wakes me. Pain is a winking neon sign in my head.

Usually after a bad one like last night, I hurt my way through for a while, but only a hair of the dog will do me today. I sneak downstairs to search for Jim in the kitchen. I’m fishing through the cabinet beneath the sink when Olivia comes up behind me.

“Get dressed,” she says in a low voice. “The man from Eternal Peace Gardens is here to see you.”

“I feel awfuller than I ever have in my life.” I look up from where I'm squatting. “Can't you talk to him? Order anything you want. Nothing but the best for Thurman.”

“No, I can't. You asked me to call him last night. Don't you remember?”

I try to recall so hard the place between my eyebrows hurts. I never trusted Thurman's reports of what I did the night before, but I trust my beloved Olivia.

I slink through the house, kneel at the parlor's keyhole, and take a peek at this grave salesman.

I nearly fall backward because he is the best looking thing I've seen in a long while. Black wavy hair threaded with silver, dark eyes, movie star features, wearing a linen suit he must have gone all the way to Raleigh for. My mind thinks: S-E-X! I ought to be ashamed of myself, I know. I'm fifty-five, my husband is barely dead, and THAT is what’s on my mind.

It's a wonder I remember what it's all about. Thurman moved into the guest room permanently more than three years ago after my bladder unleashed on him when I'd had a little too much to drink one night. I tried to woo him back by going off liquor, cooking him chicken-fried steak and gravy, being nice as pie to him, but he would still have nothing to do with me. So one night I fell off the wagon, knelt in front of him, and unzipped his fly.

“Stop, Marla.” He choked and yanked me up off the floor.

“You're not performing your husbandly duties.”

“You're getting right what you deserve.” He went on to quote some scripture about drunkenness.

I never did give up on him, though. My life went in circles: drying out with Olivia's help, trying to win Thurman back, giving up on him, and going back to drink. You’d think if I understood it so well, I would have been able to stop.

I leave the parlor keyhole and return to Olivia, who's excited about our guest, too. She's decided to play maid. She put on a white starched apron and is polishing our silver teapot, so she can serve coffee in it.

I whisper, "I'll get on a costume too and be down directly."

Grinning, she does a mock curtsey and sets the teapot on a silver tray.

At my dressing table, I scrounge some dried-up Revlon. I haven't worn make-up in years since I seldom go anywhere. I stopped driving almost a decade ago when I got scared of the damage I could do behind the wheel. Thurman

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refused to take me anywhere, either. “Once you show you can act right for a good long length of time, then you can go, but not before.”

He wouldn't even take me to church. Not that I minded. I never cared for his free-will Baptists. I've got nothing against Jesus; I believe in Him, but I don't believe Thurman's bunch have the monopoly on Him they claim.

Anyway, Holy Roller Thurman felt guilty not taking me to church, so Sundays on his way out in his deacon's suit, he set me in front of the television with Jimmy Swaggart. One Sunday the more Jimmy screamed, the lonelier I got, so I ran out of the house and through the fields to the black church.

Squatting between tobacco plants, I listened to their music and felt less alone, for their church was a living thing, its old boards shaking from the movement inside, heat waves rising from its tin roof like messages sent straight to heaven.

I longed to go inside, but I knew I would embarrass Olivia. Before their service let out, I wandered back home.

"Powder and paint makes you what you ain't," I say to my reflection because I look—well—not so bad. Time has been kind to me, what with my slender girl body, not much gray in my auburn hair, and not many wrinkles either. Unlike Thurman, I still have my own beautiful teeth.

My looks irked Thurman. “Preserved in alcohol is what you are, Marla May. You drink, and I suffer.” And I guess he was right, for here Mr. Clean Liver has gone on before me. I thank the Lord that life isn't fair and go down to the man in the parlor.

He gets to his feet the moment I enter the room. He must be at least six feet tall. “Mrs. Beasley, I'm Wesley T. Pelletier.” He hands me his card.

I smile, extend my hand, and feel the silky fur of his knuckles with the back of my thumb. Thurman was as hairless as a Chihuahua, whereas my daddy was a hairy man. I like hair on a man. The only Bible verse I've ever managed to retain comes to me: my brother Esau was a hairy man, but I am a smooth man.

Mr. Pelletier and I sit, and my mind goes to how his furry hand might feel on my shoulder, going down my spine.

“Thank you for the delicious coffee,” he says, “my favorite beverage.”

“Mine too,” I say, pick up the silver teapot, and slosh some into my cup, ignoring Olivia in the doorway trying to swallow a laugh.

“May I offer my condolences concerning your husband's passing. I never knew him personally, but he was a well respected businessman in Braxton.”

I wish Mr. Pelletier wasn't wearing a tie so that the hair I feel certain covers his chest might peek out his collar.

“So you'll be needing a final resting place for Mr. Beasley.” He unfolds a map of plots in his Eternal Peace Gardens on the coffee table.

“Thurman never could take much sun, so I would like for him to be under a tree.” We pick out a shady spot.

“I suppose you'll be wanting a double plot so you and Mr. Beasley can rest side-by-side.”

Thurman didn't lie with me in this life. Why should I lie with him in the next? Olivia and I have already decided to be buried across the road with my

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parents and Olivia's favorite husband, Franklin. But I can tell that Mr. Pelletier is a modern man who wouldn't approve of our home-grown cemetery.

“No double-wide for me, thanks,” I say. “A single will be fine.”

That’s as far as we get alone before the parlor door opens and Miss Bessie Lynn followed by a contingent of Thurman's Smithfield relatives crowd in.

During the commotion, I sign his papers, finishing my business with Wesley T. Pelletier, but my mind can't shake his image.

I'm hugged, patted and told the same thing by the funeral crowd. “Such a shock.” “Not sick a day.” “At least he went quick.” Their voices, high whiney women noises, low drumming male sounds, pierce me. This many people haven’t been in the house since my father died.

“I'm going upstairs to lie down,” I say to Olivia, who's trying to make room in the fridge for all the food they've brought.

Lying in bed, I think about Thurman. We started out so well. Thurman was working as a pharmacy intern from UNC at Sewell's Drug Store, an oldfashioned affair, shady with dark unpainted floor boards, whirring ceiling fans, a soda fountain and marble-topped counter lined with spinning stools. Perched on one of those high stools, I thought the world was an assortment of items inside a glass case, and all I needed to do was pick out what I wanted.

I wanted Thurman, who was cute, shy, a college man. My senior year of high school, I drank plenty of cherry Cokes on my way to getting him to ask me out.

I had a good excuse for going to the pharmacy often because Dad had taken sick that year, so sick that we'd let the tobacco go.

I liked the way Thurman was always on time and wore a tie when he took me out. I also liked the way people asked him what to take for a yellow jacket sting, sunburn, or what have you, so I decided he was the one. We were married before Dad died. As a wedding present Dad bought out Mr. Sewell and gave Thurman the pharmacy. But Dad was crafty, even on his deathbed, and insisted on keeping the whole thing in my name. I believe that decision kept Thurman from leaving me these last years.

As shadows lengthen, Olivia comes in looking dog-tired. She sits in the rocker. I lie sprawled on the bed.

Dusk, my favorite time of the day, comes on. Dusk, husk, musk, sultry, sexy.

My mind goes to Wesley Pelletier. “I really am quitting drinking,” I tell her.

“Uh-huh,” she says and does not pause in her rocking. I don't blame her for not believing. I have told her this before, but this time I mean it.

That night is a tough one. It always is the night after. Parting from Jim is not sweet sorrow; it's hell to pay.

I sweat and roll in my sheets, drowned and parched all at once. I won't go into the other nerve-jangling symptoms except to say that if I could hold onto the pain of withdrawal, wrap it carefully in tissue, and pull it out whenever Jim calls, I would never drink again. The trouble is that I forget what the pain is like once it's over.

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Thurman's funeral is a blur of salty sweat. “You look the part of a grieving widow,” Olivia whispers in the car on the way to the cemetery. We two are alone for the drive.

“I wasn't a good wife to him.” I can still see his long white face as they closed his coffin.

She puts her arm around me and says, “There's blame on both sides.”

They lower him into the ground under a budding oak. Afterward I climb into the funeral home’s dark car and look up the hill. Wesley stands on its crest directing his men to get the floral arrangements upright in a steady wind. He reminds me of my dad during harvest when our farm was a little city with people and purpose.

I know who I want to keep care of me now, and I set about to make it so.

* * * A week later I wake with that purpose in mind. My head no longer throbs, and my hand is steady when I pour myself a cup of coffee. Better yet, the novelty of my widowhood is wearing off. Even Miss Bessie hasn't called today to say she's stopping by.

“Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I'm free at last,” I quote Dr. Martin Luther King.

Olivia rolls her eyes. She's driving me into Braxton to my first hair appointment in years.

The day turns out wonderful with us laughing a lot, shopping, having lunch at the Whistling Pig Barbecue. At Lurleen's Beauty Salon, I have my ear to the ground about Wesley Pelletier and find out his particulars: widower, grown children, Episcopalian, right down to the color and type of his underwear— baby blue boxer shorts. I find this out from Miss Mayola, who works at Sears Catalogue Sales.

All the rest of that spring whenever Olivia and I aren't out cavorting, I practice my driving. I ride around in our empty fields, flat and barren as parking lots. In my travels, I notice how the pines are inching back on the land my great grandfather cleared. The sight of them grieves me. Nature doesn't cut you much slack before she comes in to reclaim her own.

Off and on my old buddy Jim B. calls to me the way the sirens did to the sailors, but I ward off thoughts of drinking with Wesley’s image. When that doesn't work I promise myself a trip to the liquor store as soon as I can drive out on my own, because with Thurman gone I've got no one to buy it for me.

Olivia won't.

“I'd sooner buy you strychnine poison.”

* * * “So Thurman was going to have me committed,” I say to Olivia one afternoon over tea in the parlor, a habit we took up to ease my cocktail-hour cravings.

I hand her the papers from a lawyer that came in the mail earlier that day and were addressed to Thurman.

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She scans them. “I recollect one night when you were drunk, and he got you to sign your power-of-attorney over to him,” she says, her chin slightly nodding. “I knew he was up to no good.”

Neither of us needs to spell out what his plans were.

“Try one.” I pass her a plate of chocolate chip cookies I baked that morning.

She takes one and looks at it suspiciously before she takes a bite.

“Marla, you know I would have tried everything I could to stop him.” She pats my hand.

I lift her hand and kiss her palm, pink as the inside of a seashell. “You're a woman of some means.” Thanks to Dad as well as her Franklin, Olivia was left money. “But you're not blood kin,” I say. This so obvious, it makes her laugh, hard. “And he was my husband.”

“Oh Lord.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “They might have locked you up for the rest of your life.”

I put the legal papers back in their envelope, take them upstairs, and stick them in a corner of my dressing table mirror.

All this helps ease the pain of my widowhood.

* * * The day comes when I'm ready to drive solo.

I wait until Olivia goes down for her afternoon nap before I get dressed in a new dress and heels. I drive through town, passing the liquor store in a blur. I know right where I'm going. I turn into the Eternal Peace Gardens and park in front of a small brick building located across from the duck pond.

The air inside feels refrigerator cold.

I come to stand in front of his desk. “Hi Wesley, remember me?” I am being bold as a brass monkey, but I'm 55, soon to be 56. It's now or never.

He stands and smiles at me with teeth perfect as Chiclets. “Of course,” he says, trying to recall my name.

“Marla,” I say and extend my hand. “Marla May Beasley. You sold me a plot for my husband.”

“Marla.” He holds onto my hand. “Let me guide you to your husband's grave.”

“No,” I tell him and sit in a deep leather chair, the chair for the bereaved.

“I'm here to see you.”

He sits back, looking at me curiously.

“To tell you how much I appreciate your kindness in my time of sorrow.”

He leans forward, planting his elbows on his leather desk blotter, his hands folded into a church steeple. “I know how you feel, Marla. I lost my wife to cancer several years ago.”

“That's what took my darling Dad.” I cross my legs the other way, my nylons making that swishing sound. “It's a hard one.”

Wesley turns that gorgeous furry wrist of his and looks at his watch. “I go over to Cracker Barrel this time of an evening for supper. Would you care to join me?”

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“I’d be delighted.”

After we eat salads with thin strips of chicken, broiled not fried, I suggest we share dessert, something Olivia and I always do.

“That doesn't sound sanitary, Marla.”

He talks about his diet restrictions while I eat a slice of key lime pie. “I never touch sugar,” he says.

After we leave, he takes me back to his Eternal Peace Gardens, where he comes alive. He tells me how he bought the property, scraped up the land to make the duck pond, and surrounding hills.

“See, Marla, the plots are contoured the way you'd plant a hillside crop.”

He motions with his hand to illustrate.

“Too bad you can't rotate them,” I say, teasing, but he doesn't laugh. I like a man who takes what he's about seriously.

I move closer to him as we walk downhill so I can sniff his English Leather cologne. Standing close enough to get a great snort, I know how the bee feels deep in a honeysuckle trumpet.

He takes me by his wife's grave. He runs his furry hand over the plaster angel atop her tombstone, his index finger lingering on every indentation.

After we visit Thurman, I say, “I've recently started back driving. Would you mind following me home? I'm a tad nervous driving at dusk.”

“My pleasure.”

At my curved driveway, I pull my car around, hop out, and get in his car before he can cut the engine.

When Olivia comes to the front window, I wave her away.

As the ochre and pink sunset fades, Wesley and I tell each other our life stories. Like me, he comes from a tobacco farm. Unlike me, he and his wife, Lucille, were happily married. He has three grown sons. I leave out how bad Thurman was to me and how I started drinking over it.

Or did I start drinking first, which made Thurman turn mean? Whatever the case, I do not want to sound negative to Wesley.

A starry dome of night sneaks up on us complete with a cricket choir.

Wesley turns to look me straight on and says, “I know the rules about how long you need to wait after a death...”

I reach across and put my finger to his lips. “I'm not afraid of what’ll be said.”

He thinks a moment. “I'm with you, Marla. Let's try Ponderosa tomorrow night.”

And so we begin. I feel like a girl again, all fluttery, living for the evenings and weekends with Wesley. He takes me all over the county. With him at my side, I rejoin the world.

Olivia gets caught up in it too. New clothes, redecorating the house. At Christmas we sit upon our stiff new sofa in velvet dresses, mine green, hers red, waiting for Wesley to pick me up for the Country Club dance.

“You know how long it's been since you had a drink?” she asks.

“I knew you'd been thinking about that.”

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“You turned your life around and I'm proud of you.”

I put my arm around her shoulders and grin. “Now that I've been a good girl, you suppose I can have a little nip in my eggnog tonight?”

She takes my arm away and stands to face me, her hands fisted on her hips.

“If you get run over by a freight train, it’s not the caboose that kills you.”

I have to promise her no drinking, not a tad, nip, or swig, before I can answer the door for Wesley.

*

*

*

Through the months, Wesley and I exchange kisses, closed-mouth, no tongue, but kisses with promise. One mild night in January we're kissing in this manner in the front seat of Wesley’s big Lincoln when I lie down across the seat and encourage him to join me.

He snaps me upright. “I may be an old-fashioned fool, Marla, but there are some things I won't do,” he hesitates, “without benefit of marriage.”

“I respect your moral convictions.” I slip my fingers between the buttons of his shirt, tangling them in his chest fur, and stroke him while his breath clouds the dashboard and windshield beyond.

“Let's go ‘head and get married,” he says, sounding frustrated.

“Sure” I say. But I'm not, not about marriage, marriage to Thurman being what it was. But Wesley isn't Thurman. For one, he's an Episcopalian, a group I find a lot more palatable if you have to be religious, and he's a lot better looking than Thurman. Plus, he takes me about the county, acting proud to be with me.

*

*

*

As our wedding day grows closer I grow surer because we're both fogging up the Lincoln's windows. I’m not ashamed to admit to myself that more than anything, I want to have sex with this man. And not just once either. I’m not that kind of woman. I want it on a regular basis. Isn't that what marriage is all about?

One weekend in February I convince Wesley to come to Raleigh with me.

“Help me pick out a dress.” He agrees to go because I can tell he doesn't trust my taste.

We stay in separate rooms at the Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel, separate adjoining rooms. The door between us is locked on both sides. After a day of shopping where we cannot agree on a dress, but pick out a china pattern, we have dinner at a nice restaurant and return to our separate rooms. I take a long bath, put on a new negligee, and open my side of the door. I knock and call his name.

Wesley's footsteps sound from the other side. He opens his door. “Are you all right?” He's wearing only baby blue boxer shorts.

“I thought I heard something out in the hall.” I pretend to try to close my silky robe. “It’s probably nothing, but could we keep these doors between us unlocked? I'd feel safer knowing you were near.”

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“Of course,” he says, reaches for me, and we kiss a long time before I say good-night.

Sometime in the night he gets into bed with me. “We'll be married soon,” he whispers to explain his lapse in conscience. He kisses me deeply. We enjoy ourselves so much we order room service the next morning and decide to stay another night.

I remain in the lovely fog of sex until our drive home when he says, “You can always wear my mama's dress.”

He brought his mother's wedding dress over to the house a while back. I put it on to please him, but I didn't like the feel of the old dusty lace. Later I told Olivia, “I'm afraid his first wife wore it too.” Olivia’s expression turned grim.

She squeezed her mouth tight, cinching in her words.

“You're handling every detail of the wedding,” I told Wesley over the phone.

“I'll decide what I wear. The dress is the only thing that's mine.”

*

*

*

The day of our wedding Olivia knocks and comes in carrying a dress under plastic. “One of Wesley’s funeral workers dropped this off.” She lifts the plastic.

“Look familiar?”

It's the dress I tried on before, Wesley's mother's dress, with a cameo pinned to the neck. He sent it over here even though I told him I didn’t want to wear it.

What Wesley doesn't know is that one day when he had triple burials at the Eternal Gardens, Olivia and I slipped over to Kingston and found the cornflower blue dress that hangs behind my door.

“This came with the dress.” She hands me a small package and a note that reads: Something old: Mama's dress Something new: this cameo, a gift to you Something borrowed: one of Miss Bessie’s handkerchiefs Something blue: see for yourself.

Love, Wes His note charms me. Inside the little box is a blue garter for my thigh. It reminds me of our time at the Sir Walter Raleigh.

I want to please him. “I suppose I could save my new dress for our honeymoon cruise.”

Her eyes roll back in her head. “Mr. Wesley’s sure going to take care of you.” With that she goes downstairs.

At my dressing table mirror, I take in my reflection and do not see a happy bride. Olivia's words have shaken me.

No matter what Wesley suggests, I will not carry one of Miss Bessie's old snot rags as my “something borrowed.”

I will wear Olivia's seed pearls. I try to hook them around my neck, but miss the catch, and they fall to the floor. I bend to pick them up when something

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shiny winks at me from beneath my vanity. I poke at what shines and bring out that bottle of Jim from the day last spring when I jumped out of the bedroom window. I clean the dust bunnies from it and set it atop my dressing table.

As I put my face on, sounds of the wedding guests come up from their cars, car doors slamming below my window, and from the front parlor where people are settling in their chairs. Their noises rise about me in a great babble. They remind me of Thurman's funeral and Dad's before that. My palms sweat. I drop things.

Directly beneath me from the kitchen, I hear the voice of my dead husband Thurman. He has come back. I shiver and keep listening. I hear Olivia too and realize my mistake. The man's voice is not Thurman’s but Wesley’s. He's speaking to Olivia in a low hissing tone, the way Thurman used to talk to both of us. How I hated it.

I take my bottle of Jim and go to the rocker. I need a drink to marry that man.

But I do not drink just yet.

Instead I watch sunlight bathe our land. I remember watching Dad from this vantage point in his big straw hat walking like a king through those fields ripe and green. Their present emptiness shames me.

Olivia knocks and comes up behind me. I take in her dragging gait, her slow inhale, exhale. I look around at her hands—gnarled ebony beauties—on the back of my chair. Hands that need a rest.

I stand. It’s time I was keeping care of her. “Your turn to rock,” I tell her.

She shakes her head. “Sit,” I say, and she does.

“We get so little time on this side of the road before we're put in the ground on the other,” I say, and slip the cornflower blue dress over my head.

She hums “Amazing Grace” and I look down on her plaited head and think my heart will break for love of her.

“We're going to plant again,” I say because fear isn't tall and green. Instead it comes in winking bottles.

“You mean tobacco?” She looks over her shoulder at me.

“No, tobacco's a death crop, as much as what Wesley plants. Dad didn't know any better. He sowed tobacco for money, but in the end his cigarettes reaped him. I’m thinking canola and corn.” Golden and tasseled, proud crops.

“There's money in soybeans.”

“Then soybeans too,” I say.

“What about Wesley?” she asks.

“I'm not marrying anybody today.” I stoop to look at myself in the dressing table mirror. “I'm going downstairs and tell’em so. They’re welcome to the food, though.”

“I'll help you,” she says, a wide smile on her face. She gets up.

“No,” I say. “This is mine to do. But do for me what I can't do for myself.

Get rid of this.” I hand her the bottle of Jim. Never being one to put anything off, she unscrews the top, takes out the window screen, holds the bottle out the window, and pours it into those lucky forsythias.

HIGHER ED When Louella was seventeen and so in love with Ed Babcock that she dropped out of high school to marry him, getting an education was the last thing on her mind, but as the years passed, she came to long for what she had given up. She knew she was a good wife and mother. She could fry chicken and bake biscuits with the best of them. And she kept a reasonably clean house, which hadn't been easy with three children, especially the red-headed twins, Jerry and Junior. Yet something was missing for her, as if there were a big room inside her where she had never been. At thirty-nine she felt unfinished.

“There are two kinds of people in this world,” she told her daughter, Crystal.

“The educated and the not. I’m a ‘not,’ but more than anything I want you to get a good education.”

In spite of Ed's objections, she and Crystal secretly filled out college applications and sent them off.

Because of the twins, Ed vowed never to waste another nickel on higher education. They’d spent five years in a teacher's college, affectionately known as E-Z-U, where because of failed courses and their numerous changes in majors they were still only juniors.

It’s been four months since they dropped out and ran away to Atlantic City to become croupier trainees at a casino.

“Croopy what?” Ed asked after reading their first postcard. "Is that a disease?"

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“You're thinking of spasmodic laryngitis common in infants,” Crystal told him while Louella reached for the dictionary. She found croupier and read its definition aloud.

“You mean I spent $60,000 educating them so they could play cards?”

“Careful of your blood pressure, Daddy. You're turning purple.” Crystal took his pulse. “Take a deep breath to calm down.”

* * * Louella's hands shook the day she got the mail from the box and found a letter to Crystal from Johns Hopkins University.

In the same stack was a postcard from the twins. On the front was a white strand of beach speckled with tan bodies. In big letters it read DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY at Paradise Island. On the back, with little punctuation and poor spelling, the boys wrote that New Jersey winters were cold, so they took jobs as bellhops in the Bahamas. But our move left us short on $, could you wire a couple hundred?

When Crystal got home from school, Louella handed her the letter from Johns Hopkins.

She ripped it open and read. “I’ve been accepted.” With her blond hair and creamy complexion, she could have been a cheerleader, but her concentrated gaze and often pleated brow showed her true nature. She had always been a serious child, mature beyond her years. “They want me, Mama. They want me.”

She gave the letter to Louella.

The lovely words—We're pleased to inform you—jumped out at her. “I’m so proud of you, Honey.”

Crystal hugged her. “But I dread telling Daddy.”

“You leave your father to me.”

Crystal wasn't like her brothers. Ed knew that, but his disappointment in his sons blinded him to reason. He had counted on the boys coming home after graduation and helping him run his Dodge dealership. Getting him to change his vow against higher education would not be easy.

* * * That evening Louella made Ed’s favorite dinner, country fried steak with gravy, and she had a Budweiser in a frosted glass ready for him when he came through the kitchen door. She and Crystal stood over him as he gulped his beer.

“Darwin Waters tells me his boy Petey has given up on you, Crystal,” Ed said, refilling his glass. “He's thinking about giving his class ring to Gretchen Lanier. Why don't you go up to him tomorrow and say something sweet?” With that he looked up at his daughter.

She dropped her chin.

For years Ed's dream had been to unite his world of Dodges with Darwin's John Deere franchise located across the highway, forming an empire of automobiles and farm equipment. The way he envisioned this happening was

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for Crystal and Petey to fall in love. Unfortunately Crystal had never shown the slightest interest in Petey, but Ed was stubborn and wouldn't give up.

Louella knew he didn't want his children to experience the hardships he had known as a sharecropper’s son in a family of twelve. He had started out with nothing but ambition and a willingness to work hard. He was an American success, providing his family with a sprawling brick rambler and two new cars in the driveway, but as Louella often told him, he didn't know when to quit.

She sat opposite him at the table. “Something wonderful's happened, Ed. Our Crystal has been accepted at Johns Hopkins University.”

“I don't want to hear another word.” He lifted his palm like a traffic cop signaling stop, turned up his beer glass, and downed it. He was a peachy colored man, freckled and fair, but when he got angry he turned red from the neck up and his freckles united. Louella and Crystal watched this coloration process.

They ate in silence. Louella kept wondering how she could get Ed to do the right thing for their daughter. When his fork sunk into a piece of pecan pie, an idea came to her.

“Ed, you think Petey Waters is such a good catch. Well Johns Hopkins is crowded with millionaires' sons. Crystal could do a lot better than Petey up there.

Think of it as an investment.”

Ed had high cholesterol. Even so, she let him have another piece of pie while he digested what she said.

When his plate was clean, he laid down his fork. “So where is this Johns Hopkins University, Crystal?”

“Baltimore, Daddy.” With that she hugged him.

He took her face in his hands. “You've got one semester to catch you a big fish, Missy.”

* * * Crystal had been in Baltimore two months when she called Louella during the day while her father was at work. “Braxton High didn't prepare me for the biology courses here. I'm spending every waking moment not in class, studying in the library. I feel awful when Daddy calls on Sunday and drills me about husband hunting.”

“Keep studying, Honey, and leave your father to me.”

Ed had been in a bad mood ever since the twins called collect from Lake Tahoe to say they were dealing blackjack there.

“If you two are doing so well,” Ed had said, “how about making an installment on all that money I blew on your education.”

A few days later, when he received a money order for ten dollars in the mail from them, he nearly exploded. “Crystal might as well come home. I’m not going to be scammed by any more of those college thieves.”

“It's wrong for you to blame her for what her brothers have done,” Louella said, but he wouldn't listen.

During their twenty odd years of marriage there had been few secrets between them, but after talking to Crystal, Louella sat down at the big oak desk

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in the den and scribbled some notes about the kind of young man Ed wanted Crystal to meet. Out of their desperate need, Brent Westwood of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, heir to an oil fortune was born.

She sent Brent's description to Crystal and instructed her to tell her father about him when they phoned her on Sunday, but Friday morning Crystal called home.

“Mom, I can't tell Daddy this stuff. That would be lying.”

“I know it's wrong,” Louella said, “and I may burn in hell for it, but if it means you get a good education, I'll burn happy.”

Sunday when Ed talked to Crystal on the living room phone, Louella listened in from the kitchen extension.

“Brent was sitting at a computer terminal beside mine in the library,” Crystal said, obviously reading from a script, her voice a monotone. If she couldn’t say her part better than that, Ed wasn’t going to believe her.

Louella pulled the phone’s cord as far as she could so she could see into the living room. Ed had his feet up in his recliner.

“When I dropped my pen,” Crystal cleared her throat, “we both went down for it and knocked heads. He says his life's been full of happy accidents like that.”

“Happy accidents,” Ed said. “I like that.”

“His grandmother discovered crude while digging a grave for Emmett, their family cat, who died of old age. They keep Westwood Oil small, so they can run it the way they want, but it's highly profitable.”

“Well I can appreciate their business sense.”

Louella put her hand over the mouthpiece, so Ed wouldn’t hear her smothered relief. Crystal might know her biology, but she was no actress.

“One more thing, Honey, before we hang up. What kind of car does Brent drive?”

“I don't know, Daddy. We haven't driven anywhere together yet.”

“Well, call and let me know soon as you find out.”

In the following week Ed mentioned other details about Brent's life he wanted to know.

“Isn't tonight their date?” he asked. He stood by the picture window watching rain wash the glass. “Sure hope they have better weather up there.”

And so they did. “There were so many stars out they crowded the moon,” Crystal read on Sunday. “He turned on his car radio and we danced to an oldie, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ right there beside my dorm. Bathed in milky moonlight, the parking lot became a land of—” “Honey, tell me about his car again.”

Brent's car had been a toughie. At first Louella gave him a top-of-the-line Dodge sedan until she realized Ed wouldn't want Brent to drive the same car he did. He wanted fantasy, magic. So she gave him Ed's dream car: a powder blue Cadillac convertible.

“The matching leather interior is soft as cat's fur,” Crystal read. “When you nestle into it, the seat seems to mold to your body.”

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Louella brought the receiver to the kitchen doorway so she could watch Ed on the living room phone. His eyes were closed, a look of rapture on his face.

Her lies were making him happy. How could that be wrong?

Through the winter and into spring semester, Brent's life got as cluttered as Louella's knickknack stand. In a locked drawer she kept notes about him, including his family tree, which traced the Westwoods and St. Johns, his mother Francesca's family, back to the Revolution.

On the condition that Crystal nail Brent down to his intentions, Ed paid for her to go to summer school. When she came home afterward with a naked ring finger, he was disappointed. But Louella could see something different about her. She had a dreamy, distractibility that could be love.

While grocery shopping one afternoon, Louella asked her, “Have you really met a boy at school?”

“Oh, I've been going out with Ghias, an exchange student from Bangladesh, but it's no big deal.” She squeezed her mother’s hand. “What I'm excited about is my volunteer work at the public health clinic. They're training me to take down medical histories, give inoculations, even draw blood.”

At the checkout stand, Crystal said, “Now I know what I want to do with my life.”

While they loaded food onto the conveyor belt, scenes from her childhood came to Louella. The twins letting their little sister extract their splinters, because she did it so expertly. The time Louella burned her hand frying bacon, and Crystal said butter was the wrong thing to put on it, led her to the sink, and held her hand under cold water. Through the years, Crystal took care of their bee stings, sunburns, cuts.

“You want to be a doctor,” Louella told her daughter. She knew it all along.

* * * After that day, Louella's mission to get tuition money out of Ed took on a religious zeal. One evening when he was in a particularly good mood because of a postcard from the twins that said they were homesick and wanted to come home, Louella saw her chance. She got out his checkbook and a pen and had him sign a check for fall semester. After he handed the check to Louella, he took Crystal's hands in his.

“Your mother and I were married twenty-three years last month. We've had a pretty good thing all this time,” he said. “You love Brent, don't you, Honey?”

Crystal hung her head. “Uh-huh.” Lying was hard for her. Over the phone was one thing, but face-to-face to her father was a lot tougher.

“Then go after him the way I went after Darwin when he was ready to buy a new car. No way was I going to let Otis Lanier sell him a Honda.” He lifted her chin. “Tell Brent you're ready to settle down, and he's the one.”

Later that night when the twins called collect and asked if Ed would wire the money for their plane tickets home or just send them a credit card, his mood changed. “You boys are twenty-five years old. I'm cutting you loose.”

“Could you at least send back the ten we sent you?” Junior asked.

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Ed put down the phone. “I spoiled those two. Now I'm reaping what I sowed.” He turned to Crystal. “But I'm not going to make the same mistake with you. That crook John Hopkins got the last dime out of me, so you better be engaged by Christmas, Missy.”

“Study hard, Crystal,” Louella told her later. “I'll take care of your father.”

* * * As Thanksgiving approached and Ed threw away a warning notice from the university that the spring semester tuition was late, Louella knew he was serious about cutting off the money. Frantically she sought a solution. Since she'd always been an avid reader, she spent her afternoons in the library searching for a way out.

One day she picked up a Stephen King novel to take her mind off her troubles. His book gave her nightmares, but at the same time it showed her what she had to do.

“The accident happened right after he dropped me off,” Crystal told her father over the phone.

Listening in, Louella wished with all her heart that Crystal could bring more emotion to her words. And she felt sorry for scriptwriters and playwrights whose beautiful words were turned into wood by actors.

“Praise the Lord you weren't in the car with him,” Ed said. “How badly messed up was his Caddy?”

When he got off the phone, he wiped a tear from his eye. Louella felt ashamed of her deception. “We never know when our time may be up,” he said.

“I need to live each day like it was my last.” At that he sat and wrote out a check for Crystal's tuition, wired plane tickets to the twins for Christmas, and instructed Louella to send flowers for Brent's funeral.

Two days before Christmas the boys called to say they'd cashed in their plane tickets to pay for tap dancing lessons.

“How could you?” Louella asked from the kitchen extension.

“We've been told we have talent,” Junior said.

“By a guy whose brother was Rosemary Clooney's agent,” Jerry chimed in.

“He oughtta know.”

Once they hung up, Ed panted with anger. He'd wrapped the phone cord so tightly around his arm it looked as though it had cut off his circulation. “I want to jump through the receiver and knock their heads together.”

“Daddy, I don't like the way the vein in your neck is throbbing. Come lie down here.” Crystal gestured to the sofa.

While she got her father to do some deep abdominal breathing, Louella went to the desk in the den and came up with a new boyfriend for Crystal. And not just because they needed him for tuition. Ed had been happy with Brent, with the prospects of having him as a son-in-law.

On Christmas Day, Crystal told her father about Richardson Ashford, another Johns Hopkins student, whom she met at Brent's funeral. “Rich's father is a wealthy tobacco farmer from Maryland.”

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“I didn't even know they grew the stuff up there,” Ed said. But Louella knew.

She'd done her research.

After he left the room, Crystal said, “I hate to start the new year telling more stories to Daddy.”

“Honey, if I could get the money out of him any other way, I would.”

* * * On a Sunday in February, Crystal read the description of Richardson's Jaguar over the phone to her father. Louella on the kitchen’s extension mouthed the words along with her. She couldn’t help enjoying her own phrasing.

“No matter how many ruts in the road the car makes you feel like you're riding a velvet ribbon.”

After he hung up, Ed sighed with contentment. He took the Raleigh paper, sat down in his Lazy-Boy, and pushed his feet up higher than his head. “I sure like the way Richardson took her to meet his parents right off,” he said from behind the newsprint. “Shows he means—” The recliner snapped up and he came to his feet. "Great day in the morning." His face was red, and the pulsing vein in his neck was joined by another in his forehead. He shoved the paper at Louella.

On the front page of the entertainment section in color was a picture of the twins, their red hair flaming, top hats and canes in hand, wearing only bow ties, small shiny underpants, and tap shoes. She put her palm over them to cover their nakedness as she read about the Twin Studd Muffins appearing at a club in Charlotte.

“Stud only has one d,” she said. “I bet they didn't bother looking it up before they gave themselves the name.”

“It's not the name I’m worried about.” With trembling hand Ed pointed to the caption. These double studs are homegrown. Jerry and Ed Babcock hail from Braxton, N.C. Catch their jiggling act Thursday through Saturday at the Bayou.

He collapsed in his chair. “I’ll never be able to hold my head up in this town again, never be able to walk into Roy's barber shop, or eat at the Whistling Pig.” “It's not that bad Ed.” But it was. For weeks Ed came home with tales of how his friends, Darwin, Roy or Otis Lanier, danced around him, shuffling their feet and singing. His own mechanics put on skirts over their greasy overalls and did a can-can for him one lunch hour. He told Louella that out in public he tried to be a good sport about it, to laugh and act like it didn't bother him, but nightly at home he raged.

On their weekly phone conversations with Crystal, he said. “This is it. No more money. Put Richardson on the phone. I want to talk turkey with him.”

Crystal managed to put him off, and called back when her father wasn't at home. “Think fast, Mama.”

“I have. This is going to require some crying from you, so dissect an onion and practice.”

Later Crystal called and spoke in tears. “Richardson said I either spend the night with him, or we're through.”

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“Tell him you weren't raised with morals like that,” Louella said from the kitchen extension, trying to sound as indignant as she could.

“Slow down, Honey,” Ed told her. “Maybe he didn't mean it the way you think.”

She marched into the living room. “What are you suggesting your daughter do?” While she went on in that vein, Crystal cried in his other ear.

“All right, all right,” he said. “Pull yourself together.”

“Tell her the tuition check is in the mail,” Louella said.

Crystal got calm when he said those magic words.

* * * Thanks to summer sessions Crystal had only two semesters to go until she graduated. To wring more money out of Ed, Louella would have to think of a character that far outshone the other two.

Out of this need sprung Winston Roosevelt Lee, a direct descent of two of Ed's heroes, the Depression-era president and the confederate general. Upon graduation, Win would take over the reins of his father's company, National Foods, and he asked Crystal to marry him on their first date.

“That's my kind of man,” Ed said. “No messing around. How big is your diamond, Honey?”

“Win says Baltimore's too provincial to find a proper ring. Over Thanksgiving he'll pick one up at Tiffany's in New York.”

Ed was glowing when he got off the phone. “Winston-Roosevelt-Lee, Winston-Roosevelt-Lee,” he went around repeating to himself like the little engine that could.

So pleased was he with Louella's creation that she was able to rub Win against the grain. Win became unconventional and fun. He drove an antique, refurbished Studebaker Hawk and won a part in the school musical, South Pacific.

In the shower, at the top of his lungs, Ed took to singing “Some Enchanted Evening.”

“When does South Pacific open?” he asked Crystal one Sunday. “Tell Win that your mama and me are coming up for it.”

Crystal said she didn't know. Ed made her promise to find out and call them back.

Louella threw every objection she could think of at Ed about why they shouldn't go. “You won't even ride to Greensboro to see your own sons dance, but you're willing to go all the way to Baltimore.”

He would not be dissuaded. Every other day for a week he called Crystal to ask about South Pacific. As usual Louella told her she'd figure a way out.

Saturday evening Louella and Ed sat down to supper. Crystal walked in the kitchen door.

Louella jumped up. “What’s wrong, Crystal?” She tried to put her arms around her, but she pushed her away.

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“It's over, Mama,” she said. “I can't stand another minute of this deception.”

She slumped into the chair across from her father. “There is no Winston Roosevelt Lee, Daddy. I made him up to get you to pay my tuition.”

Louella held her breath before she filled with pride. Her daughter wanted to take the blame.

Ed's freckles united into an angry blush. Louella didn’t know skin could turn that red. “And no Richardson or,” he swallowed hard, “Brent either?”

Crystal, lips pursed, brow creased, said, “No, Daddy.”

“She didn't make them up,” Louella said. “I did.”

He looked at her and recognized the truth. He banged his fist against the table, so hard the plates jumped. “What chance does a man have if his own family lies to him and cheats him?” He got up, paced the room, shouting about deceit. He lifted his face to the ceiling and spoke to God. “What did I do to deserve these women?”

They let him vent.

Ed became still, his hands fisted at his sides.

“Sit, Ed,” Luella said. “I have something to show you.” She left and returned with a stack of computerized print-outs from Johns Hopkins.

“All this time your only concern has been that Crystal make a good marriage. That's not how women succeed today.” She handed the sheets to him.

“Check out her grades.”

He pushed his chair back, went to the den, and came back wearing his new reading glasses. He put the sheets in chronological order. He went down the list of courses, the credit hours for each, and her grades. Without looking up, he said, “You sure are taking a lot of biology and chemistry, Crys. All A's, too, except uh-oh, here's a B plus in English.” He lifted his face, gone pale now. “You should get your mama to help you with that.” He gave Louella a hard look.

“She's good at creative writing.”

“You forced me to do it, Ed. Crystal deserves this opportunity. She's going to become a doctor.”

“Medical school?” He cleared the table in front of him and put his head down.

“Think of it as an investment,” Louella said.

“I’ll come back to Braxton and set up a clinic,” Crystal told him, stroking his red hair gone white at his temples. He kept his head down, knocking his forehead against the table.

He straightened and raised his hands, palms out in surrender. “Well you two suckered me this long, why not?”

The next day when Crystal was leaving for Baltimore, she handed her mother a file. “These are the letters you sent me about your characters. Daddy believed them, and sometimes I halfway did, too. You have talent, Mama. You ought to be a writer.”

“But I’m not educated.”

“All my life you've been reading and learning, Mama. You are educated.

You can accomplish anything you set your mind to.”

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With Crystal's words and the cost of medical school spurring her on, Louella decided to try writing.

Ed brought home a typewriter from his sales office. Every morning after getting the house in order, she sat and pecked away.

Soon she looked forward to sitting down with Brent, Richardson, and Win. For so long she’d felt as if there were a big room inside her where she had never been. At last she entered her empty room.

* * * The day Crystal graduated, Louella and Ed drove to Baltimore. They felt especially nervous because the twins, who were appearing at a night club in Washington, D.C., would be meeting them for the graduation ceremony. It would be the first time they'd seen their boys in the flesh in several years.

The twins showed up in expensive gray-striped suits. Ed acted shy around them, while Louella couldn't stop looking over at them during the ceremony to make sure they were behaving. She imagined them stripping off their suits and tap dancing on their folding chairs, but they behaved.

Afterward the whole family went to a restaurant.

“This feels like old times,” Ed said and looked around the table.

“No, it doesn't,” Louella said. “The boys aren't throwing their rolls.”

“Nowadays we toss our buns,” Jerry said with a wink.

Ed laughed until he turned red. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped over.

Quickly Crystal had him on the floor, and was pounding on his chest.

“Call the rescue squad,” someone yelled.

Time went fast and stood still all at once. Louella watched the ambulance pull away with Ed's white face inside and Crystal riding beside him. Somehow Louella and the boys got to the hospital.

A young doctor, his eyes almost the same shade of blue as his scrubs, came to them in the waiting room. “Mr. Babcock has had a mild heart attack, but he's out of danger now and should be fine.”

They followed the doctor to the intensive care unit, where they found Ed hooked up to several gadgets.

The boys held back while Louella joined Crystal next to his bed.

Ed opened his eyes and looked around. Winking, he said, “Am I still in the land of the living?”

Everyone laughed. The boys came closer, so that all of them—the twins, Crystal, and Louella—formed a circle around the bed.

“You're a lucky man, Mr. Babcock,” the doctor said, “to have a daughter who knows CPR. She saved your life.”

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Ed lifted his head off the pillow, his face opening into a smile. “I have been blessed.” He reached over and patted Crystal's hand.

The doctor walked to the door.

“Say, doctor,” Ed called after him. “Are you married?”

When Ellen Klarpp Herbert was in eighth grade, she was crowned 4-H Dairy Princess of Onslow County, North Carolina, for an essay about how to build platforms to keep alligators from nudging over the neighborhood's garbage cans and feasting. Her essay solved a community menace. Her sister said she’d lied because she didn’t do any of the things she wrote about.

That night Ellen’s conscience kept her awake long enough to decide that from then on she would write fiction - she could make up fiction. Since then, she's learned that at the heart of good fiction is truth, yet you can lie with impunity to get to that truth.

Ellen received her MFA with a concentration in fiction from George Mason University in 1992. She teaches writing at the Writer's Center, Bethesda, Maryland and at Marymount University, Arlington, Virginia. At Marymount she has been a full-time term appointment as well as an adjunct.

She's had 20 short stories published. One of her stories won a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize and was read on NPR. Another won a Virginia Fiction Fellowship and took her to London for a wild summer. Her story, "Prodigal Pirates," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is included in this collection.

Shelfstealers is honored to publish Ellen Herbert’s collection of award-winning stories FALLING WOMEN and Other Stories.

You can watch Ellen write her first full-length novel, THE MATCHMAKER OF KRAKOW via Shelfstealers' WATCH OUR WRITERS program at http://www.shelfstealers.com/watchellenherbertwrite/

If you enjoyed reading the first three stories of “Falling Women and Other Stories� by Ellen Herbert, you can purchase a paperback or Kindle version of the book on Amazon by clicking the link below: http://amzn.to/AinKTp