The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

In Which Charlie Dickens Makes Amends



A minute after Verna Tidwell had told him what she thought he ought to hear and left the Dispatch, Charlie Dickens pulled on his seersucker jacket, jammed his straw hat hard on his head, and locked the front door behind him. His hair was uncombed, his tie was undone, and his collar was crooked, but he paid no attention. Striding fast, he was in such a hurry that he didn’t take the sidewalks but cut catty-corner across the courthouse lawn to Fannie Champaign’s hat shop, his unbuttoned coat flapping.

As he went, the images raced through his mind like Movietone newsreels, speeded up. The social evenings he and Fannie had shared the year before, the Methodist Ladies pie supper and the Dahlias Valentine party and the St. Patrick’s Day Lions Club’s Irish Stew Supper. The private evenings in the following months: dinner at the Old Alabama one week and dinner in Fannie’s apartment the next, with pinochle or dominoes afterward, the radio softly playing. He remembered the quality of her company, as well, the slyly intelligent wit and quiet good humor, which had so subtly disarmed his ironic cynicism. And the look of her, the curly brown hair with its russet highlights, the expressive eyes, the trim ankles and slim hips. Under her spell, he had entirely forgotten his curmudgeonly ways and had allowed himself to be transformed into something almost . . . well, companionable, especially when their evenings began to end with a few soft kisses that seemed to promise something more. Charlie was enchanted.

But when he heard that Fannie had told her friends that they were engaged, he was shocked into a sudden understanding of his precarious situation. He was teetering on the brink of marriage. Of course, he might have gotten around to proposing, if he had been allowed to come to it in his own way, when he was ready. But he hadn’t, and he wasn’t. How dare she spread such a ridiculous fiction?

In his pique, Charlie had deliberately—oh, yes, deliberately and quite hurtfully—broken Fannie’s spell. Affronted, he told himself that he had been clever enough to elude marriage all these years, and he would be damned if he was going to be pushed into it now. Why, he could barely support himself on what little money the Dispatch brought in, over expenses. He could not begin to support a wife—and what if there were children? He had no patience with children. He had no need of a wife to tell him what to do and when to do it. He much preferred the single life, so that he could drink and play pool and poker with the boys whenever he damned well pleased.

And so he had lied to her, had made up a stupid story about himself and Lily Dare, and had squired Lily (an old flame, long ago extinguished) publically around town, knowingly humiliating Fannie in the eyes of her friends. But when she locked up her shop, rented her apartment, and went away, he realized that he had made a terrible mistake. He had thrown away something priceless, something of such enormous value that he could never recoup the loss. He was a fool, an utter fool.

And so he had done what some men do when they are disappointed in love. He had pickled himself in Mickey LeDoux’s Lightning. He likely would have died there, too, alone and unmourned, if it had not been for Verna Tidwell. A few moments before, she had marched into the Dispatch office and read him the riot act, telling him that Fannie still cared and if he had a single ounce of intelligence left in that booze-sodden brain, he would go straight to her and confess that he had been a total and complete idiot and throw himself on her mercy.