from the thermos of spiked tea she always kept with her—it wasn’t practical to bring her demitasse cups from home—she had turned off the part of her that grieved. And she wasn’t about to turn it back on.
Every Friday morning, Barbara Jean went to First Baptist and did office work. She answered the phone, filed and made copies, all the things she had once done for Lester when his business first took off. After the office closed, she went downstairs to the church school and led Bible study class for new members. Even her pastor, Reverend Biggs, was impressed with Barbara Jean’s biblical knowledge. Finally, she thought, all of those drunken nights in her library with Clarice’s gift Bible were of some use to her.
On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, she worked at the Plainview Historical Society Museum. The museum, which consisted of a greeting area and three small rooms, each dedicated to a period of Plainview history—Indian Territory, Civil War, and Modern—was a twenty-minute walk up Plainview Avenue from her house. Her primary responsibilities were to sit at a desk in the greeting area, hand out brochures, and say, “Please wait beneath the Indiana state flag generously donated to the museum by the descendants of famed Hoosier president Benjamin Harrison. A tour guide will be with you momentarily.”
Sometimes she was called upon to don a frontier wife costume and pretend to churn butter or stir imaginary food in a plastic pot over a papier-mâché fire, if the usual frontier wife volunteer couldn’t make it. When no guests were at the museum, which was most of the time, she sat, sipped from her thermos, and read fashion magazines.
There were many days when her two sentences guiding the museum guests to their waiting place beneath the flag were the only words to cross her lips from sunrise to sunset. Those days were her favorites. She saw the other Supremes two or three times a week, and that was all the conversation she felt she could handle.
Walking back to her house from the museum, she followed Plainview Avenue as it rose toward the center of town and the intersection of Plainview and Main, where her house stood. If she turned her head to the left and peered downhill, she had a perfect view of the remnants of Ballard’s Wall and the entrance to Leaning Tree Estates, as the housing development that now occupied her old neighborhood was called.
One early November day as she left the museum for home, she looked down at Leaning Tree. The tall, contorted trees of her old stomping grounds lent even more drama to the landscape now that they’d shed their leaves. She stared at their hunched-over skeletons. They were more impressive to her now than ever. Those trees had all adapted and thrived in the face of the grave insult that had been done to them. If she’d been inclined to ask God for anything, it would have been to make her more like the leaning trees.
She had done her best to adapt. In the three months since Lester’s death, she had organized her time so that she was on the move nearly all day, every day. And wasn’t that what everyone said widows should do?
But now, studying those crooked, old trees, Barbara Jean had to admit to herself that she had failed to thrive. No matter how activity-filled her days were, it was her nights that owned her. That night, she entered her fine home and heard the voice of her mother whispering bad advice and viperous recriminations in her ear. And after managing to fall asleep in her bed, she was wide awake within an hour, believing that she had felt Lester shift positions in the bed and then heard his congested cough coming from the bathroom. Was it pneumonia again?
She got out of bed and wandered the three floors of her house, hoping that she might find it calming. But it didn’t work; it never did. Adam filled the space every bit as much now as he had when he was alive. She heard his footsteps running from room to room on the third floor, where Lester’s home office had been before the stairs became too much for him. Adam played up there that night just as he had thirty years earlier. The dark, cluttered storage rooms and mazes of filing cabinets held no menace for an adventurous boy who was never frightened, even when he should have been. The sound of Adam humming to