“Thank you, R.C. This’ll go with the money Willadeene gave us too. Now you take that shovel and put it back where you got it from. Now let me close this door before we both catch pneumonia.”
A look of disappointment flashed on R.C.’s face. Min knew he wanted her to invite him in, but he launched into the story anyway, right there on the porch in the dead of winter. He was twenty-seven and for the first time in his life he had a good plan. The waitress at the IHOP on Pleasant Valley Parkway, where he’d stopped for country fried steak, told him it was a good plan so he knew it had to be. He didn’t need his mama’s home or a halfway house. He would go to clown school and entertain children. But first he had to get the money together.
Min told him, “Good luck,” edging the door closed.
“It’s gonna be harder than I thought, huh, Miss Min?”
“You know bad news, R.C.—ain’t no speed it won’t drive. Travels fast. And good news barely moves at all. Get yourself together and know it’s going to take a little time before folks trust you again.”
“I’m real sorry about what I done. Please tell Miss Gussie I said so. I’m gonna find a way to make it up to you.”
“Well don’t think too hard on it tonight, R.C. Go on home.”
When they finally climbed into bed at two in the morning, Gussie turned on public radio and got excited by the voice that came out. “There he is. My, it’s been a long time since we heard him.”
“Bobby Blue Bland,” Min said. “That album Dreamer . . . what was the song you used to wear out? Named after some woman, I think. Yvette?”
“Yolanda! Driving around Charleston in a bright red cadillac. She took his money and left him crying.”
Min started to sing, “Oh Yolanda, why you forsake me? Why you just lay, lay, lay my body down? Oh Yolanda, why did you leave me? In this wilderness with no money down.”
“You remember that summer we drove to the Shenandoah Valley and just happened to catch Mr. Bland at that dive in Staunton?”
“You said that was the best barbecue you ever tasted in your life.”
“It was.”
“You drank too much beer.”
“I did.”
“Sat with you in the car with your head in my lap for a couple of hours before you could drive us back to the hotel.”
“Yeah, so, what does this story prove except you love me? Tell me something I don’t know.”
*
Gussie slept fitfully. When the shot went off and R.C. fell to the floor, she shook awake and opened her eyes to Min’s steady breathing. The room was still dark but she sensed sunrise was not far off. She pulled the quilt up higher when she heard a loud thud. On her way to the kitchen, Gussie stopped at the basement door. She could hear someone singing “Silent Night.”
The door swung open and Gussie stumbled and braced herself, stunned to see R.C. standing there in her hallway, smelling like a saloon, snot eddying in the gulch just below his nose, just as it had been every day she taught him the first quarter of fourth grade.
“I was just coming to get you and Miss Min up. I’ve searched everywhere that I would think to hide something valuable and can’t find anything worth a damn. So I figured I just better get you two up and ask you.”
Gussie thought about the storm doors outside that led down to their basement and how she and Min never locked them. This probably wasn’t the first time he had been inside their home.
“R.C., what in the world is going on here?”
“We not in your class anymore, Miss Gussie. You go sit in the kitchen. I’m gonna get Miss Min up. We gonna talk about this the way I wanted to when I came a few hours ago.”
Gussie was unmoved until R.C. pulled from his pocket the little six-shooter that had belonged to Min’s father.
“I found this in one of the boxes. I don’t plan to use it but it comes in handy for scaring folks. Now you go on in the kitchen and sit down.”
“What has your life come to, R.C.?” Min said, appearing out of the shadows.
R.C. scratched his head and tugged at his left earlobe, gestures Gussie remembered from when he was unable to answer questions in class. He pushed both women into the kitchen, flipped on the light, and ordered them to sit down at the table. Under his baleful gaze Gussie felt her heart jackknife in her chest as her bladder released.
“What do you want, R.C.?” Min’s voice was flat and disgusted.
Gussie groaned as two urine rivulets became one at the cleft between her pressed-together knees.
R.C. looked at Gussie’s hands shaking on the table and Min’s still as a frozen pond. “You all used to have rings—I remember that—just like you was man and wife. Where they at?” He smirked and wiped his runny nose with the back of his hand.