reach him. Even as she played, Clarice kept looking over her shoulder, searching for the face of her youngest son in the crowd. But I was sure that, deep down, she knew he wouldn’t be coming. Carl could be anywhere. And wherever he was, he wasn’t likely to be alone. Handsome Carl was the pretty apple that hadn’t fallen far from Richmond’s big, dumb tree.
After seeing Big Earl laid to rest next to Miss Thelma, we kissed our children goodbye and watched them hurry back to their busy lives. Then James and I drove home to pick up the food I’d made for the funeral dinner and headed over to Big Earl and Minnie’s house.
No, just Minnie’s house now. Big Earl had lived across the street from the All-You-Can-Eat since I could remember, and this sad, new reality was going to be tough to get used to.
We found the widow situated on the porch swing surrounded by sympathetic well-wishers. Minnie made it clear that no one would be granted admission without first being given a recounting of the visit from her spirit guide and the prediction that her death was coming sometime over the next 360 days. So we stood in the heat while she acted out the tale again. Then, as soon as decency allowed, James and I offered our condolences for her husband’s passing and for her own upcoming demise and ran inside.
The place had changed a good deal since the days when I had spent a lot of time there. But that was to be expected. My memories were mostly from attending countless childhood parties in these rooms with Little Earl and our school friends. And the last time I’d stepped beyond the front door had probably been twenty years earlier, on the occasion of Miss Thelma’s funeral.
The interior was now a combination of the old and the new. Everywhere I looked, decorations and furnishings from the era of the first Mrs. McIntyre battled it out with things obviously brought in by the second wife. The old oak table I’d eaten at many times still took up most of the dining room’s floor space, but an enormous, glittering gold-plated chandelier hung above it now. The chandelier had hundreds of clear glass lightbulbs with jittery orange lights bouncing around inside of them to suggest candle flames. It was definitely a Minnie addition.
Family pictures and framed needlepoint scenes crafted by Miss Thelma shared the walls with photographs and posters of young Minnie dressed in a sparkling one-piece bathing suit. In the photos, Minnie stood onstage flourishing a handful of playing cards or staring at the camera in open-mouthed pretend surprise as Charlemagne the Magnificent levitated her above his head.
I had never understood why Big Earl married Minnie. They couldn’t have been more different in terms of their dispositions, and I never witnessed a moment of anything that looked like true affection between them. But looking at the old pictures of her that adorned the walls, the mantel, and just about every other visible surface, it made a little more sense to me. In those pictures, she was glamorous and desirable, an exotic and magical creature with an air of mystery. We had all thought of Big Earl as a father figure and a friend. But hadn’t he been a man, like any other? Maybe when he saw Minnie, he didn’t see the spiteful old woman who now sat on the front porch greeting guests with “Thank you for coming. Did you know I’ll be dead in a year?” Maybe Big Earl looked at her and saw a gorgeous, smiling showgirl freeing a squirming rabbit from a hat. Maybe seeing Minnie that way had helped him get through those lonely years until he was back with Miss Thelma. I hoped that was the way it had been for him.
I caught sight of the fountain Mama had told me about during her visit to my kitchen earlier in the week. It took up a quarter of the floor space in the living room and was even more of an eyesore than Mama had made it out to be. It was six feet high, and the two naked maidens Mama had described—one crouching, the other standing over her dousing her with water from a pitcher—were life-size and realistically detailed. Rose-colored lights shone on the fountain from sconces on the wall above and behind it, giving the smooth marble surface of the statues the glow of pink skin. One of the lights submerged