garden with just Clarice and Barbara Jean as bridesmaids.
The day after our high school graduation, Barbara Jean married Lester in the pastor’s office at First Baptist with just Big Earl, Miss Thelma, and Lester’s mother in attendance. The big wedding Clarice had dreamed of for her was out of the question since Barbara Jean was well into her fourth month with Adam by then and was starting to show.
Chapter 27
AA meetings made Barbara Jean want to drink. She sat and listened to people whine about the hardships that had led them to gather in a basement room of the administration building at University Hospital, where they were served the harshest coffee Barbara Jean had ever tasted—but good pastries, thanks to Donut Heaven. They’d tell their tales of woe and Barbara Jean would think, I can top that. But she never said anything herself during those first meetings, nothing honest, at least. She went twice a week, and at the end of each meeting she left feeling that she was fully justified in having a little cocktail as a reward for having sat through it. Still, she declared her AA experience a success because she now drank about half as much as she had been drinking before. At least it seemed like half as much to her.
She patted herself on the back for throwing out most of the alcohol in her house. Though, naturally, she had to keep some beer and wine on hand for guests. And she saw no reason to toss out the whiskey, since she hardly ever drank that anyway. She stopped carrying around liquor in her thermos to her volunteer jobs, most days. She didn’t drink before 5:00 p.m., more often than not. And she let the calendar determine the extent of her late-night drinking. She only drank on dates that had some particular importance—holidays, birthdays, special anniversaries, things like that. So, if she was drinking every night, it was just because it was April. That month being a minefield of significant dates was hardly her fault.
On April 11, 1968, one week after Dr. King was shot dead, Miss Thelma tired of watching Barbara Jean mope around the house and struggle to keep her food down. So she sent her to the clinic at University Hospital. The next day, which was the day Lester was due back to hear Barbara Jean’s answer to his proposal of marriage, she returned to the clinic and learned that she was pregnant.
Barbara Jean was seventeen, no husband, no family—more or less the same situation her mother had faced in 1950. But Barbara Jean was relieved when she found out. By the time she walked the distance from the clinic to the All-You-Can-Eat, she actually felt joyous. The decision she had made to choose Lester was suddenly unmade. She had leaped off a tall building and discovered that the pavement was made of rubber. Marrying Lester was out now. Chick and Barbara Jean would have to create a life together somehow. Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles. Any city, burning or not, would have to do.
When she got to the All-You-Can-Eat, the after-work rush was on. Barbara Jean saw Little Earl running from table to table taking drink orders and clearing plates, but she didn’t see Chick. She walked through the dining room and down the back hallway and looked into the kitchen. Still no Chick. Big Earl was alone there, so busy slinging pots and pans around that he didn’t notice her sticking her head in. She went to the storeroom then.
Barbara Jean knocked lightly on the storeroom door and whispered, “Ray?” No one answered. She pushed open the door and walked into the dark room. Groping along the wall, she found the light switch and turned it on. Everything of Chick’s was gone. The bed was there, but it was stripped of its sheets and blankets. His books and magazines were no longer stacked on the homemade shelves. His clothes were missing from the hooks Big Earl had screwed into the walls. She stepped further inside and turned in a circle as if she might find him secreted away in a corner of the tiny room. The one thing she did find was the Timex she had given him for his birthday, a day that now seemed as if it were a thousand years in the past. The watch rested atop a stack of cans at the side of the bed surrounded by tiny bits of glass from its smashed crystal. She