A Storied Man

Bernie is a poverty-stricken woman whose life takes an unexpected turn when an old friend returns to town. This is Part Eight.

Parts: 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|…

Related reading: Talk With a Killer, Wall

Part Eight

It felt great to be clean. Soap and hot water, taken for granted most of her life, had become a luxury for Bernie. Before life on the streets, a hot tub or a swimming pool caught her attention. Now, a simple chance to get clean comfortably became more than mere daily ablution. She remembered but could no longer relate to patting an alarm clock’s snooze bar and thinking, “I’ll just wash my hair this morning.”

She wrapped herself in the towel, covering from her underarms down to her knees, and pushed aside the shower curtain. Bernie stepped out and, despite the way she had been living, was scared to guess what might attach itself to her skin. She winced as each thickly calloused foot touched the damp cement floor.

The shower room door opened a few inches. Through it came a pair of jeans and a gold sweater on hangers, held up by a woman’s unadorned right hand. The scent of honeysuckle floated in with them.

“Shonda?” Bernie said. She pulled the door open. It was her new, old friend.

Shonda smiled and said, “Hi, you!”

Bernie reached out to the sweater, but stopped just short of touching it. Even in the dingy, dank space, it almost shimmered. “It’s beautiful. You brought this for me?”

“Yes. It reminded me of you. But I brought more, too,” Shonda said and held up a burgundy duffle bag and a clear plastic zippered pouch. The pouch bulged full of makeup, tweezers, a razor, an eyelash curler, and other tools Bernie hadn’t used regularly in years. “Now, you don’t have to use all of this, but I wanted to bring it just in case.” She pointed at the duffle bag. “Panties, bra, socks, and shoes.”

Bernie felt like she was 17 again, and her friend from down the street had come to help her prepare for a big date. It should be silly, she thought, but it wasn’t.

“Oh, God, hand me those tweezers. How did you get Nathan to tell you which shower I was in?”

“You know how he is.” Shonda crossed the room and hung the clothes on the shower curtain rod. “He puts on a show but can’t back it up with a spine.”

“Sometimes he’s pretty tough with me,” Bernie said.

Shonda laughed as she sat on a folding metal chair. “Because you wouldn’t go out with him back in school.”

“That little creep? You bet your ass I wouldn’t.” Bernie leaned near the mirror and used the tweezers to grab several hairs between her eyebrows. She yanked. “Ouch! But I don’t think that’s Nathan’s only problem with me.”

Shonda’s smile faded. “You mean… Kenneth?”

“Yeah. He was a jock, you know. Even though they never managed to win a game, those boys were close.” She plucked another bundle of hairs above the bridge of her nose, then tapped the metal tweezer on the ceramic sink. “Oh, my God. I was a sasquatch.”

“No, you weren’t,” Shonda said. “You should have seen my eyebrows in my wedding pictures. Pretty scary. I can’t believe nobody told me to do something with those before that.”

“As far as Nathan and Kenneth go,” Shonda continued, “just forget about all that. I thought you had moved on from it.”

“I did. I met a man from out of town. Greg Dumond. He bought out Smithson Ready-Mix and brought me on as his administrative assistant. Good timing, too, because nobody else here would hire me. I practically ran that place. We fell in love. Got married. Folks mostly ignored him at first, but they had depended on Smithson so much that they had to work with him. He made enough friends that they started working on him. He started saying he felt like he didn’t even know me. Like he married a stranger.”

“What did you do?”

“Tried to convince him I was innocent, that everybody was being unfair. You know what Greg said?”

“What?”

“That it didn’t really matter, because I was bad for business.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish.”

“That son of a bitch. But how did you end up on the streets?”

“He sold out and moved. Never paid a cent of alimony. I couldn’t find a decent job, but I didn’t want to leave here.”

“What about your folks? Couldn’t they take you in?”

“You didn’t know?” Bernie said.

“No, I really haven’t kept up with the old hometown.”

Bernie set down the tweezers, turned to face Shonda, and sat on the edge of the sink. She tried to make sure she left out nothing important.

——-

Her mother and father won a U.S. Virgin Islands trip by scrawling a quiz answer on a 3×5 index card. It was a bright spot after practically being shunned as the parents whose daughter had hurled a popular boy off a mountainside. Her father finally took some time off from the Aromatique plant, and off they went to island-hop around the Caribbean in a chartered sailboat.

Before leaving they took a short course in diving so they could take advantage of the clear water. While not as clear as that part of the sea, nearby Greers Ferry Lake was a popular spot for Scuba training. Although they were the oldest people in the class, they were in shape and quickly earned their certification.

On the yacht, they at first felt a bit out of their element, but soon discovered much in common with the wealthy vacationers aboard.

“They even met one of the Yarnells,” Bernie said.

“Of Yarnell’s Ice Cream?”

“Yep.”

“Cool.” Shonda pulled out a long black comb and started slowly pulling it through Bernie’s damp hair.

Bernie continued.

She and Greg had just left the high school band’s spring concert. They sat in his pickup, in the parking lot. “I don’t want you to stay there. Two weeks is too long,” Greg said.

“It’s my parents’ house, and they don’t want to leave it empty while they’re gone,” Bernie said.

“You’re my wife. You belong here with your husband.”

“You already told me you’re not sure you still love me. Why should you care?”

“It’s complicated. Look, Bernie, just don’t do this. I don’t want people talking about us more than they already do.”

“Screw them. I’ve learned to stop caring what most people think. There aren’t enough years in my life to please everybody else.”

“You killed that boy.”

“Defended myself, thank you.”

A knock came at Bernie’s window. She turned to see pastor Pete Gist, the man who had picked her up only moments after her frantic trip down Sugarloaf Mountain — the last time her feet touched ground anywhere near it. Her window squeaked in protest as she cranked it down to find out what Pete wanted.

“You two coming to couples’ class in the morning? Ruth has a real special lesson for us.”

“Ruth who?” Bernie said.

“Ruth, from the Bible,” Pete said. “You know, the book of Ruth?”

“Never heard of it,” Greg muttered. Then, louder and with a smile, “We’ll be there, brother Pete.”

“Good to hear it. Well, I’ll let you go on about your business. Have a good evening.”

They said nothing on the drive home. Greg gave a nod to all drivers who met his gaze, a behavior he had learned in the few years since moving there, but avoided looking at Bernie.

At home they remained silent. To pack her things for her two weeks away, Bernie dug out the big suitcase so she could avoid having to come back home. Her Bible sat in a stack of books next to the luggage. She thought again of Ruth. It seemed she remembered that name.

She opened the Bible and flipped the impossibly thin pages to the short book of Ruth. One passage was highlighted yellow. Ruth’s mother-in-law had instructed her and her sisters, whose husbands all had died, to return to their own mothers and remarry. The only one who stayed, Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”

That was the kind of devotion she and Greg had sworn to each other. Did promises mean anything? Bernie sat on the bed and cried.

Her first week at her childhood home went fine. Each day she drove into work at the ready-mix plant, and spoke to Greg barely enough to run the business. Back at the house she looked longingly through photo albums from her childhood. Her first Girl Scout cookie meeting, her first Bike-A-Thon for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Nothing was that simple or that happy anymore.

On the tenth day, as Bernie rummaged through her father’s music collection, the phone rang. Figuring it was Greg, she left it alone, but after seven rings she knew it wasn’t him. Nobody waited seven rings. Something was wrong. She set down Carole King’s Tapestry, one of her father’s favorite records and walked to the phone table in the family room.

She took a deep breath and answered. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mrs. Dumond?”

“For now, yes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. How can I help you?”

“Well, Mrs. Dumond, I’m the captain of St. Martin’s Pride, and there’s been an accident.”

“What?” Bernie sat in her father’s old recliner. “What happened?”

“He had a mild heart attack during a dive and got into trouble under water. We got him back on board as quickly as possible and administered CPR, but he had gone without oxygen too long. The only hyperbaric chamber is in a hospital on St. Thomas. We tried our best to get him there in time, but the doctors couldn’t help him.”

“What do you mean ‘couldn’t help him?’ He’s… dead?”

“He didn’t make it.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Dad!” Bernie’s breath quickened. Her heart pounded. “No, no. This isn’t right. Someone put you up to this. This is one of you bastards playing a trick on me.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Dumond –”

“Stop calling me that!”

“I just… I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Wait. Mom. Where’s my mother?”

“She’s with your father right now. She wasn’t up to talking to anybody just yet. Will you help her make new travel arrangements? Right now their return flight isn’t for another four days, but we knew she probably wouldn’t want to wait that long.”

Shocked, Bernie steadied her hand enough to scribble down the information the captain gave her.

“How awful. I’m so sorry,” Shonda said, now holding the comb still against Bernie’s scalp.

“It was the worst, but I’ve had years to cry over that. You know, even with all the trouble I caused them, that church was full of people just off shift from Aromatique. It was the sweetest smelling funeral in history.”

Shonda continued combing. “So your mother’s still living in their house?”

“She did for a while, but she’s buried next to Dad now. Something about losing him made her lose her will to do anything. They had me when they were older, so by now she’d be about 75.”

“You’ve been through so much.”

“Let’s stop talking about the past,” Bernie said. “Give me that comb. You’re like one of Cinderella’s stepsisters with that thing.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Drama. You may follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, and/or leave a comment below.