Her father was long dead and her mother still felt sufficiently irate about his behavior to warrant traveling with her holy megaphone. And she was passing out anger-management advice? Watch out, old woman, or I’ll brew an extra hot pot of coffee just for you.
Clarice said, “Thank you for your advice, Mother, but I’m really not angry. Things are the same with Richmond as they’ve always been. We’re fine.”
“Clarice, dear, you just scalded the man’s crotch and threw away his insulin.”
“Threw away his insulin? What are you talking about?”
Her mother pointed at the trash can. Clarice went to it and pressed the foot pedal that lifted the lid. Sure enough, atop eggshells, coffee grounds, and discarded wrappings of different sorts was the box that contained Richmond’s insulin supply, the box that sometime during the past ten minutes she must have removed from its place in the refrigerator door and tossed into the trash.
She picked up the insulin and stared at it for several seconds. Then she put the box back into the fridge. She took off her apron then and said, “Mother, I think we’ll go shopping a little bit later.”
Clarice left the kitchen and walked through the dining room, past the living room, into the music room, and to her piano. She ripped into Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata and forgot about everything, for a while.
Chapter 19
During the week after she saw Chick at the hospital, Barbara Jean couldn’t keep her mind in the present day. She chatted with Erma Mae at the All-You-Can-Eat on Wednesday afternoon and found herself glancing down, fully expecting to see Erma Mae’s son, Earl III, clinging to his mother’s apron with sticky hands. It was only after several seconds of bewilderment that Barbara Jean recalled that Earl III—or Three, as everyone called him—had long since grown up and said goodbye to Plainview, like most of his generation. That Friday evening, a pack of laughing college students passed her on the street as she walked home from the museum, and she ogled them until they noticed that she was watching and returned her stare while chuckling and whispering to each other. In her embarrassment, she nearly chased after them to explain that she had momentarily misplaced a few decades and had been searching through their crowd for the younger faces of her middle-aged friends. The sight of a young interracial couple strolling, hand in hand, down Plainview Avenue on Saturday night spun her into a state of near hysteria, fretting over threats to the couple’s safety that had largely vanished years earlier. Each memory triggered by these encounters pushed her toward a bottle, a flask, or her thermos of spiked tea. The good memories weighed her down just as heavily as the bad, and they all demanded to be drunk away, even though some of those memories really were wonderful.
After Barbara Jean kissed Chick in the back hallway of the All-You-Can-Eat, she fell into a pattern. She would wait until Big Earl, Miss Thelma, and Little Earl were asleep, and then she would look out of her bedroom window to see if the light in the storeroom across the street at the restaurant was on. If it was, she slipped out of the house and went to see Chick.
They sat on his bed, surrounded by sixty-four-ounce cans of green beans and corn, and they talked until one or both of them couldn’t keep their eyes open any longer. When they weren’t talking, they were kissing—it was just kissing, at first. And every moment was heavenly.
If they couldn’t meet at the All-You-Can-Eat, they would sneak over to the backyard of Odette’s house and press themselves together in the seclusion of the vine-covered gazebo in her mother’s garden. At Barbara Jean’s insistence, they even traveled over shadowed routes to his bully of a brother’s property a few times. They went into the shed where Chick had lived with his chickens and they kissed passionately on his old feather-covered cot. It was like a purification ritual, and the danger of the situation made it all the more irresistible.
Chick was a year out of high school then and he was thinking about college, mostly because Big Earl kept telling him that he was too smart not to. Big Earl said the same thing to Barbara Jean.
Barbara Jean liked the idea of college, but she couldn’t imagine what she would study. She didn’t have a passion like Clarice had with her piano. She got okay grades and she liked school enough.