In the morning, Grandmother Tillman got up before Miss Edna and Nate and made pancakes and bacon for breakfast. Nate could smell the bacon right away when he woke up. When he went into the kitchen, he could smell the pancakes and the warm maple syrup waiting to be ladled onto them. Miss Edna came downstairs with her hair still damp from a shower and wearing one of the dresses Grandmother Tillman had found for her. She looked girlish in the simple, farm dress and wearing no make-up. Grandmother Tillman and Nate both stopped in their tracks when they saw her. She was pretty, but in a different way from the night before. She walked by Nate, and in spite of all the food aromas he could tell she smelled like Ivory soap. At that moment, Nate got his first adolescent crush. He was in love with Edna McElroy.
After they had washed the breakfast dishes, Grandmother Tillman told Nate to take Miss Edna outside and introduce her to Old Redemption. Nate thought it odd that he hadn’t barked the night before when Miss Edna had come up to the porch. He hoped the dog was all right. They found him in the front yard, resting in the shade of one of the whitewashed oak trees. He stood up and lazily sniffed at Miss Edna and gave a tired wag. Nate reckoned that Old Redemption had just known all along that Miss Edna was no threat. She patted him on the head and said some cute, doggie kind of stuff. Old Redemption wagged his tail more energetically and took her into his circle of protection without protest. Nate wasn’t the only one to fall in love with her that morning.
They went back inside and Grandmother Tillman asked Miss Edna how much stuff she had at her trailer. Miss Edna thought about it for awhile and said there wasn’t much that she needed to take, mainly clothes and make-up. She said she ate mostly at the diner and didn’t have much in the way of household goods. Grandmother Tillman threw a couple of empty suitcases in the trunk of the Oldsmobile and two cardboard boxes in the back seat. The three of them got into the front, Miss Edna in the center and Nate by the window.
Grandmother Tillman said that as long as they were in town, she was going to take care of some business at the bank. Grandmother Tillman still had that farm economy that didn’t believe in wasting gas. If you were going to make a trip into town, take care of all your chores. She probably would’ve gone grocery shopping, too, except that they needed the room in the car for Miss Edna’s things.
Miss Edna and Nate stayed in the car while Grandmother Tillman went inside the bank. She didn’t slide over, but stayed sitting right next to Nate. He was excruciatingly aware of every place their bodies touched. Finally, she shifted a little so she could face Nate while she talked.
“Your grandmother is the most interesting lady I’ve ever met.”
Nate agreed with her.
“I thought I’d die last night when you told me who she was, but she’s the kindest person, and so easy to talk to.” She looked confused for a moment. “Why’s she being so nice to me?”
Nate told her how his grandmother had saved Old Redemption on the bridge, and without going into detail, he told he how she was protecting him from Grub Hanley. He didn’t tell her, though, how he thought it was all tied in, somehow, to Grandmother Tillman’s Grand Reformation.
“So you, me, and Old Redemption are all strays she’s taken in.”
“We were all in danger.”
Danger,” Miss Edna said mysteriously. “Each of us in harm’s way, somehow.”
“Yes, we were all in harm’s way.” The phrase pleased Nate, especially coming from Miss Edna.
“I’m not scared any more,” Miss Edna said. “I’ve been scared, and I didn’t really know it until now, when it went away. It’s like having a toothache so long you forget about it, and then one day it goes away, and you realize it had been there, nagging at you.”
Nate didn’t know what she was talking about, but she seemed relieved and happy, so he was too. It was bizarre for him to be sitting in the car talking to her. It was Miss Edna, yet not Miss Edna. She seemed ten years younger than when she was at Cole’s. He realized that she was probably only twenty-two or twenty-three years old. She looked even younger as they both sat in the car waiting for Grandmother Tillman to come back. People walked by and gave them only the most casual of glances, two kids waiting in the car.
Grandmother Tillman came back and they drove over to the trailer park where Miss Edna lived. Grandmother Tillman abruptly stopped the Oldsmobile, and they all stared in shock.
“Oh, my God,” Miss Edna said.
The area right in front of her trailer looked as if a tornado had hit a yard sale. Her clothes had been thrown out and lay scattered all about. Dresses lay in heaps, yanked out of closets in armloads and tossed out the door. Underwear and small stuff was more spread out, as if the drawers had been pulled from the dresser and used to catapult the belongings into the yard. And most amazing of all, there were about two hundred phone books strewn about the place.
People were gathering, pointing, and whispering among themselves, and Miss Edna put her hands over her face in mortification. There was everything she owned, including her underwear, laying in the dirt for people to gawk at. Nate’s attention was riveted on the phone books. They got out of the car and Grandmother Tillman sent the onlookers away while she and Mill Edna started to gather up the clothes.
“Just get everything picked up for now,” Grandmother Tillman told her, “We’ll get it cleaned up and sorted out when we get back home.”
Tucson, Charlotte, Atlanta, Chicago, Des Moines, Mobile. They went on and on. Small phone books too. Gastonia, Sumter, Lakeland. A lot of them had holes in the upper left corners and had doodles written all over dog-eared pages. Nate figured those came from public phone booths. Cheyenne, Omaha, Chickasaw, Tallahassee. Miss Edna’s trailer was at the top of a slope and the books had cascaded and slid more than the clothes, probably because they were heavier. Looking at them scattered down the hillside gave Nate the impression of some sort of outdoor convention or modern sermon on the mount, with banners identifying where the various delegations had come from. Biloxi, Meridian, Nashville, Wilmington, Little Rock.
“What do you want me to do with these?” Nate gestured at the books scattered all around.
Miss Edna looked at the mess and quit stuffing muddy clothes into the suitcase. Some of the books’ pages flapped noisily in the brisk wind that had picked up. Things that belong inside look terribly stupid sitting outside, laying on the dirt, getting blown around and all.
“That sonofabitch,” she said, and then started to cry quietly.
Nate went over to her and put his arms around her, the way he had seen Grandmother Tillman do it.
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said. Nate was tall for thirteen, a little taller than she was, so they stood there while she cried on his shoulder. She still smelled like soap, and Nate could feel his shirt getting wet from her tears. Whatever these books had been for, they were gone now. There were too many for a refugee’s backpack.
Miss Edna and Grandmother Tillman finished packing up what stuff they could, and they got back into the Oldsmobile. They started driving off and Miss Edna looked back. Grandmother Tillman stopped the car and all three looked back together. The trailer door was open and the phone books dotted the hill, their pages still waving like white surrender flags.
“Funny how someone can make you feel like trash,” Miss Edna said.
Grandmother Tillman grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “If you were trash, young lady, none of this would’ve happened.”
They sat there, wondering what they could say or do that would bring what had happened to some kind of closure, so they could move on.
“To hell with the sonofabitch,” Grandmother Tillman said and put the Oldsmobile in gear.
Miss Edna squealed and said, “Amen.” They drove off and didn’t look back any more.
When they got back to Grandmother Tillman’s place, the two women got the washing machine going and tried to salvage what they could of the dresses and clothes. Miss Edna was quiet, not in a depressed way, more of a reflective way. She didn’t seem to be dwelling on her losses, she looked more like someone taking stock, inventorying what she still had.
That night, over supper, Miss Edna said, “Well, I guess I’ve got to figure out where I go from here.”
“Judging by your phone book collection, I’d say you’ve given it some thought before,” Nate said.
“Hush,” Grandmother Tillman said.
She was right, It wasn’t for Nate to bring up. Apparently, it wasn’t time for Miss Edna to, either. She ignored his brashness.
“Cole’s was such a low class place,” Miss Edna said. “It was a restaurant, but they didn’t respect food.”
Grandmother Tillman looked genuinely interested in the remark and asked Miss Edna to explain.
“Start with his sign, for instance,” she said. “Here’s this big sign sixty feet or so up over the highway, and all it says is ‘Eats.’ Buddy said that was because the truckers were doing seventy and he had to get the message to them in a hurry.”
“I always hated that sign. ‘Eats’ has such an ugly sound,” Grandmother Tillman said.
“That’s what I thought too, but that’s the way Buddy was, and that’s the way his food was. Quick and low class. Something someone could quickly shove in their maw and stay alive a while longer.” Miss Edna had a few more bites of Grandmother Tillman’s supper. “You sure are a good cook.”
“Thank you. I’ve always liked to cook.”
“I’m going to open my own place someday,” Miss Edna said after staring thoughtfully into her plate. She looked up. “And it’s going to have a long name, so that folks’ll have to slow down and take a while to read it. And when they come in, they’ll be willing to take time to enjoy the food and the company of other travelers.”
“What’ll you name it” Grandmother Tillman asked.
“I don’t know. I just know it’ll be a long name and it’ll be pretty and friendly like.”
“You should name it Miss Edna’s” Nate said.
“Too short.” She snorted as if he’d given a stupid answer in class. “My momma used to read me a poem that said ‘He lived in a house by the side of the road and was a friend to man.’ I think I’ll name it The House by the Side of the Road.”
“That’s a lovely name,” Grandmother Tillman said.
“It’ll remind me of my momma and you too. It’ll remind me of this house by the side of the road and what a friend you were.”
Grandmother Tillman put her knife and fork down and put her hands into her lap. “Thank you, Edna.”
“What kind of food will you serve,” Nate asked.
“Southern cooking. Friendly, southern cooking. Lots of it and with biscuits on the side. As many biscuits as someone wants. And I’ll walk around and visit with everyone and make sure everything’s okay, and fill their coffee cups and get them more honey for the biscuits if they need it.”
Everyone sat, quietly imagining such a restaurant with Miss Edna doing just what she’d described.
“You should do it, then,” Grandmother Tillman said.
“Where would I get the money?” Miss Edna laughed.
“Find a banker a little before lunch time and tell him what you just told us.”
They all laughed. Miss Edna looked as if she were going to argue the point, but didn’t. She made a cute little sound instead that meant she’d give it some thought.
Chapter 19
Copyright (C) 2009 Michael A. Hughes
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