I turned to Barbara Jean, who sat across from me on a chrome-and-leather stool at the butcher-block kitchen island. “Barbara Jean, earlier today you got drunk and got behind the wheel of your car. You could’ve killed somebody. You could’ve killed a child.” Both Clarice and Barbara Jean gasped when I said that. And, looking back, I suppose that it was just about the meanest thing I could’ve said. But I was on a roll and I wasn’t going to let politeness interfere with what I had to say, what I should have said so many years earlier.
“You drove drunk and you pissed on yourself in public, Barbara Jean. There’s no way to pass that off as anything but what it is.
“The way I see it, now that Lester’s gone, this is my business.” I gestured at Clarice. “Our business, because we both love you.”
Barbara Jean spoke for the first time since I’d started the off-the-cuff intervention. She said, “Today was a hard day, Odette. You don’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t understand. I probably can’t. My husband’s healthy. My children are alive. I’m not saying you don’t have cause. I’m saying you’re an alcoholic who pissed her panties in downtown Plainview. And I’m saying that I can’t watch you do this to yourself. I’ve got enough on my hands dealing with my disease. I can’t deal with yours, too. The cancer’s all I can handle right now.”
“Odette, please,” Barbara Jean said.
But I had played the cancer card, and I wasn’t ashamed to follow through. I said, “Barbara Jean, I might not live to see you have that moment of clarity that tells you to stop drinking on your own. So I’m telling you, loud and clear. You’re gonna put a stop to this shit before it kills you. Tomorrow, Clarice and I will pick you up and drive you to Alcoholics Anonymous.”
The AA thing just came to me all of a sudden and I had no idea where we’d find a meeting. But even though Plainview was a small town to those of us who’d grown up here, it was really a small city now, especially if you added in the university. And every city in the country had at least one AA meeting a day, didn’t it? I added, “If you’re not ready and waiting when we drive up, I’m washing my hands of you.”
Clarice cried out, “Odette, you don’t mean that.” Then, to Barbara Jean, “She doesn’t mean that. She’s just worked up.”
She was right. I couldn’t really have washed my hands of Barbara Jean, but I was hoping that Barbara Jean was too messed up to know that. I drove the point home. I said, “Barbara Jean, I won’t spend what might be my last days dealing with a damn drunk. I’ve got too much on my plate.”
I couldn’t think of anything more to say to Barbara Jean, so I turned to Clarice. “And, speaking of plates, what’s with those noodles, Clarice? I didn’t get my supper today and I’d better put something in my stomach.”
We ate and didn’t talk about AA for the rest of the evening.
Aside from putting together a good meal from the odds and ends in Barbara Jean’s refrigerator, Clarice did a nice job of keeping our minds off what had happened. She made us laugh talking about Sharon’s wedding, which we decided to start calling “Veronica’s wedding” since that was more accurate.
Clarice said that, for Sharon’s sake, she was trying to inject some small touches of good taste into the spectacle Veronica was designing. The more she talked, the more excited she became. It reminded me of how she’d gotten such big kicks, and big disappointments, out of planning Barbara Jean’s wedding and mine.
She claimed to be a fan of understatement now, but decades earlier Clarice had tried to convince both Barbara Jean and me that we had to have at least a dozen bridesmaids because it was unlikely you could get your picture in Jet magazine with any fewer. She’d also insisted that we had to have our ceremonies at Calvary Baptist instead of our own churches because Calvary’s beautiful stained glass and the painting of sexy Jesus above the baptismal pool made for the best wedding photos.
Clarice’s wedding to Richmond did get covered in Jet—because of his football career and her historic birth and piano prizes. But things didn’t go as she’d planned for Barbara Jean and me. I married James in my mother’s