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6

Lemonade

Without a building permit or title to the house, Don had about reached the limit of work he could do. Yet he wasn't interested in sitting around the house the rest of the evening, and he had no place he wanted to go. He had long since learned that movies and books were either stupid or not. If they were stupid, it made him impatient and angry to spend time with them. If they were not, then they had the power to unlock emotions that he had no desire to face again. Work was the solution, and so work is what he did.

If he couldn't do anything with the house, there was always the yard. This being North Carolina, anything that you mowed became a lawn, so under the deep scraggly weeds on the property there was a lawn just waiting to be uncovered. It took all his extension cords to get his Weed Eater out to the front of the property, and there was no way he'd get it all the way to the back, but anything he did would be an improvement. Maybe he should have bought a gasoline-powered machine, but he didn't like carrying flammable liquids around with him.

The afternoon had turned hot, and he was soaked with sweat by the time he finished with the front and side yards and as much of the back yard as he could reach. He was also covered with flecks of weeds, most of which he was probably a little bit allergic to, so he itched as well. What a great job to do when you've got no shower, he thought. As he coiled up the cords and put everything away inside the house, he tried to decide whether he should go get a shower and then put on some of his dirty clothes, or go do a laundry while he was still so filthy that touching clean clothes would only get them dirty again. It was getting on toward dusk when he locked the front door and headed for the truck.

"Hey! Hardworkin' man!"

It was the old white woman from next door. She was standing behind their picket fence, holding a plate with a checkered cloth over it.

"Look at this!" she said.

Dutifully he went over to the fence and waited for her to pull away the cloth with a theatrical gesture. It was a loaf of hot fresh bread, and even though he was more thirsty than hungry, and too hot to wish for anything but cold food, there was no resisting the yeasty smell of the stuff.

"I don't know why that smells so good to me," he said. "My mother never baked bread."

"Jesus had to tell us not to live by bread alone because if we had our druthers we'd try," she said. "We also got stew, which I know is too hot to sound good to you right now, but you need something to stick to your ribs. And we got lemonade."

"I'm in no shape to be decent company, ma'am," said Don. "There's no water working in the house yet and I'm filthy as a fieldhand."

"I've sat at table with fieldhands before," she said, "and there's nothin' to be ashamed of in it. Now don't give me no argument. I seen you lock that door, so you can't pretend you ain't done working for the day."

"I just couldn't put you out." He almost told her that he had to get some laundry done, but stopped himself in time—the mood she was in, she'd snatch the laundry right out of his hands and insist on washing it herself.

She raised a quizzical eyebrow. "If I ever seen a hungry man it's now, so what are you afraid of, that we'll talk you to death? Maybe we will, but we won't make you talk, so you can just shovel in the food and pour lemonade down your throat and pay us no heed, we're used to that since we hardly listen to each other anymore."

Don laughed in spite of his effort to keep a courteously sober face.

"There," she said. "Besides which, if you got no water in that house then you sure as hell need to pee."

That was the clincher and she knew it. She turned her back on him and was halfway to the house before he'd straddled his way over the fence. "Beg pardon, ma'am," he called out to her, "but I'll go around the back way so I don't track this mess through your front rooms."

She called over her shoulder. "I'll have the back door open before you get there, unless you run."

He didn't run and she was as good as her word. If the bread had smelled good, the smell in the kitchen should probably have been a controlled substance. The black woman—Miss Judy?—was sweating over the stove, but she smiled at him as he came in though she didn't have a free hand even to wave.

"I hate to put you to so much work," he said.

"We were going to eat no matter what," she said. "And we were going to have to cook it ourselves, too, so you didn't cause us to do a thing we weren't planning to do anyway. Now go wash those arms up to the elbows, boy, and maybe wash your face while you're at it."

Once he saw the dainty guest towels, he had no choice but to scrub his face and neck and hands and arms for fear that if he didn't wash well enough, he'd mar the perfect cleanliness of the towels. And while he was at it, he took them up on the offer of a toilet. He had a copious bladder but its capacity wasn't infinite, and he was glad when he was done because he could stop thinking about how his first kiss since his wife left him was in a bathroom during an inspection tour of the plumbing fixtures. This bathroom might have been romantic; the other one should have been condemned. But the ways of love are hard and strange... he had read that somewhere, in one of those books he ended up wishing he hadn't read.

When he got out the kitchen was empty of people and the pots and pans were empty of food. He had brushed himself off on the porch, but he was still embarrassed about coming in to the dining room, what with the carpets and the plush upholstery.

"Don't be shy," said the white woman, who was pouring lemonade from a sweating silver pitcher into three tall glasses.

"You're going to have flecks of grass and weeds wherever I sit."

"Then it's a good thing we know how to clean house, isn't it," said Miss Judy. She had just set down the tureen of stew and was folding up the dishtowels she had held it with as she carried it in. "Let me see your hands."

He walked in and dutifully showed them, palms and backs. He half-expected her to demand to see his neck and behind his ears, but instead she picked up a huge serrated knife and told him to slice the bread. "It's fresh so slice it thick."

Don was good with tools and he got the knack of working with hot bread on the first try. A smooth back and forth, but only light downward pressure so you didn't mash the soft part of the bread. Before he had a chance to ask where to stack the slices, Miss Judy had one of the bread plates right to hand and he flipped the slice deftly onto it. A moment later three thick pats of butter were melting into the bread, and the same happened with the next two slices.

Only when they all sat down did Don get a chance to glance around the room. The china was elegant and fussy, and so were the knickknacks and doilies on every surface in the room, but the overall color scheme and style of furniture were not exactly grandmotherly. It was so plush in red velvet and mahogany that it looked for all the world like a bordello. Naturally, he kept this observation to himself. Maybe this was the only decorating style that could be agreed on by a white woman whose accent made her from Appalachia and a black woman who had the eastern flatlands in her speech.

"It occurs to me," said the white woman, "that you never mentioned your name."

"I think the introductions have been lacking all around," said Miss Judy. "I'm Miz Judea Crawley."

Ah. So "Miss Judy" was definitely a name for only her housemate to use. She'd be either Miz Crawley or Miz Judea to him. He took a guess, deciding on the more affectionate title. "I'm honored, Miz Judea. I'm Don Lark."

"And this is Miz Evelyn Tyler," said Miz Judea.

No correction, so his use of her first name had been acceptable. He smiled at the white woman and said, "Honored to meet you, Miz Evelyn."

"Don Lark," said Miz Evelyn. "What a lovely name. Like the first birdsong of morning. Dawn. Lark."

She said the words as if they were music. Don found it disconcerting. What had been a source of schoolyard teasing now sounded charming. Maybe he had finally grown into his name.

"I got to say, you ladies take neighborliness farther than I ever saw before."

"Then it's a sad world," said Miz Evelyn, "because we've hardly done a thing."

"Folks can't be too neighborly," said Miz Judea.

That was a philosophy that Don knew wasn't true, at least not for him. And while he knew it was ungrateful of him, for the sake of the next year's work, he had to lay down some boundaries. "I got to tell you, ladies, I'm not a very neighborly kind of guy. I'm sort of... standoffish."

They glanced at each other. "That's all right," said Miz Judea. "Standoffish is fine."

Miz Evelyn chimed in cheerfully. "In fact, that's sort of what we—"

"Hush, Miss Evvie," said Miz Judea. "That's for later."

For the first time it occurred to Don that maybe there was more here than gregarious old ladies giving a lesson in kindness and manners to the whippersnapper working next door.

Miz Judea lifted the lid off the tureen and steam rose up into her face. She sat a little straighter, closed her eyes and breathed it in. "You smell that?" she asked.

Oh, yes, he smelled it.

"What does that smell like?" she demanded.

He didn't even have to search for an answer. "Like I've died and gone to heaven."

"Don't just smell it, Miss Judy. Serve it!"

Don would never have said anything, but he felt the same impatience. Even after a hard day's work, food always seemed like just another duty, shoveling in something out of a grease-spotted paper sack. Today was a day of unexpected pleasures. And in this case, it wasn't even a forgotten pleasure. Nobody in Don's family was really much of a cook, and certainly nobody on his wife's side. That wasn't just sour grapes after she left him, either. She managed to simultaneously undercook and scorch Kraft macaroni and cheese, and once he opened up a lunch she packed for him and found potato-chip-and-mayonnaise sandwiches. He'd almost gagged. It made him appreciate his mother's very, very plain cooking. His mother always acted as if Chef Boyardee spaghetti was maybe a little too spicy.

The stew heaped high on the ladle and Miz Judea served it without spilling a drop. She passed him his bowl. He waited as the other two bowls were served, while steam and the smell of pepper and beef and spices he'd never heard of rose around his face. Finally they each were served, and since nobody was taking a bite they must be waiting for him, as the guest, to begin. He picked up his spoon and dug in.

Miz Judea laid a hand on his arm. "Don't forget to give thanks."

He almost thanked them again, before he realized what they meant. It made him feel stupid, since he'd said grace every day as he was growing up, and he and his wife had seen to it that they raised their daughter with prayers at meals and every night before bed. But for the past couple of years, there'd been nobody to pray with and, more importantly, nobody he much wanted to pray to.

The ladies bowed their heads. "Dear Lord, for this food we give thanks," said Miz Evelyn, "and for this strong young hardworking man who earns his bread by the sweat of his face. Bless him to be smart enough to get the hell out of that house before it eats him alive."

Don wasn't the only one startled. Miz Judea gave a little cry and apparently kicked Miz Evelyn under the table, since she gave an equally sincere cry in response. "Evvie!" said Miz Judea.

Miz Evelyn steadfastly kept her eyes closed and intoned with all deliberation, "A. Men."

"Amen, you silly old tart," said Miz Judea. "Say amen yourself, young man."

Bewildered as he was, Don had nothing better to say. "Amen."

"Now eat before she says something even stupider," said Miz Judea.

Don was grateful to obey. The food was good, but there was an element of craziness about them both—no, call it simple strangeness—that disconcerted him, precisely because they didn't seem crazy at all. They seemed like his kind of people, earthy yet elegant, gracious yet plain. He liked them. They were generous. They were funny. But when it came to the Bellamy house, they were, in fact, loons.

The conversation stayed on safe subjects through the rest of dinner—how the Bestway on Walker Street was the only survivor of an onslaught of supermarket takeovers that brought in the big boys and drove out the small ones; how outraged everyone was when they changed the names of a half-dozen of Greensboro's historic old streets so that Market and Friendly would have the same names along their entire length; how ironic it was that now they couldn't even remember what the old names had been... Hogarth? Hobart? Hubert? No, that was the vice-president back in 1952, wasn't it? Or was he the one who got impeached? It was like being caught up in a history lesson in which the teacher had no notes. They remembered everything, had lived through everything, and yet they remained hopelessly vague about all the public events.

But not the private ones. They could still tell stories about their childhoods. For Miz Evelyn it was Wilkes County, not quite the heart of Appalachia after all, but still true hill country. "I learnt to smoke before I turned five, and nobody whupped me for it either, they just slapped me when they caught me filling my pipe from some grownup's stash."

"My mama caught me smoking when I was ten and I thought I'd never walk again," said Miz Judea.

"And don't it beat all—her folks was tobacco farmers, and mine raised chickens and pigs and bad corn." Miz Evelyn shook her head over that one.

"Well, it wasn't cause my mama wanted me healthy, I'll tell you that, cause her whuppings took a lot more out of me than the tobacco ever did."

"I notice you don't smoke now, either of you," said Don. If either of them did smoke, the smell would linger on everything in the house, and there wasn't a trace of it.

"Well, that's Gladys," said Miz Judea.

"Can't abide smoke," said Miz Evelyn. "Can't say as how I blame her, either, all shut up indoors like she is. Not a breath of fresh air. Can't go filling it up with smoke now, can we?"

"Gladys?"

"I should say Miz Gladys but she's younger than us so, you know," said Miz Evelyn.

"My cousin," said Miz Judea. "Six years younger."

"She lives here?"

"Upstairs," said Miz Evelyn. "Bedridden, poor thing."

"But let's not talk about Gladys," said Miz Judea. "She doesn't like being the subject of talk."

"Says it makes her ears burn," said Miz Evelyn.

After dinner, they tried to make Don sit at the table or in the parlor while they straightened up, and got Gladys's dinner tray ready, but Don insisted. "All the good company is out in the kitchen. You wouldn't make me stay alone in the parlor, now, would you?" So he ended up with a dishtowel drying while Judea washed.

"It's not right for us to make you help," she said.

"It's my pleasure," said Don again. "Beautiful china."

"Used to be in the Bellamy house," she said. "Used to be a set of twenty-four places, nine dishes per place. We've only got three complete settings left. The cereal bowls are always the first to go."

"I wasn't expecting to eat so well tonight, I'll tell you, or off of porcelain as fine as this, either."

"The laborer is worthy of his hire, that's what the Bible says. Though what that has to do with this I'm not sure, it just seemed the right passage to quote."

"If I'm the laborer, then what have you given me wages for?"

"If that was your wages, then we cheated you. You hardly made a dent in that stew."

"You made enough for a whole work crew! You'll be eating that stew for a week."

Miz Evelyn came back downstairs with Gladys's dinner tray. Don realized that she had carried up, not a bowl of stew, but the whole tureen, and now it was empty. So was the pitcher of lemonade, and there was nothing but crumbs on a plate where there'd been half a loaf at the end of dinner. Gladys couldn't have eaten it all, could she? How much appetite could a bedridden woman work up?

"Gladys is so crabby tonight," said Miz Evelyn.

Judea plunged the pitcher into the dishwater, and then the tureen, not even seeming to notice the fact that Gladys had already almost polished them both, they were so completely empty.

"I'm not surprised," said Miz Judea. "Wouldn't you be?"

Miz Evelyn spoke confidentially to Don. "She's on a diet."

At once Miz Judea rounded on her. "He doesn't need to know personal things like that about her, Miss Evvie. You are talky tonight, aren't you?"

That seemed unfair to Don—it was Miz Judea, after all, who had told him that Gladys was bedridden. Don didn't like it when the two of them crabbed at each other. Especially the names they called each other—names his mother had taught him never to use even with his friends, let alone with women. So Don changed the subject to the one that he knew they couldn't resist.

"You ladies have been talking around something all night and never quite hitting it on the nose. Now we're about done with the dishes and I'm heading back over to the Bellamy house. My house."

His plan to stop their argument worked, except that it focused Miz Judea's scorn on him. She rolled her eyes. "My house, did you hear him?"

"Well, it ain't ourn."

"Ours."

"Oh, you're the one to correct my grammar."

"I'm the only hope you got of not sounding like a hillbilly whore."

"What about the house?" Don said, again trying to stifle the argument.

Suddenly the two of them grew quiet. Miz Judea put the dripping tureen in the dish drain. "You just let that dry by itself," said Miz Judea.

"I can dry it," said Don.

"You're tired and I don't want that tureen in your hands when you hear what Gladys said."

Apparently they had no idea Don wouldn't be hanging on every word that came from the mysterious Gladys.

"It's those locks you put on the doors," said Miz Evelyn. "They're strengthening the house." She said it as if this were an appalling idea.

"That's the idea," said Don. "I've got all my stuff in there."

"But you just can't," said Miz Evelyn. "The house was finally beginning to fade, don't you see? Any time now, the termites was going to get in and... oh, Miss Judy, he's just not listening."

"Yes I am."

Miz Judea laid a hand on his arm. "What Miss Evvie is trying to tell you is that it's out of the question for you to renovate that house."

"I'm sorry, ladies, but it's too late. That house isn't a historic site and I've got all my money tied up in it."

"You said during dinner you haven't closed yet," said Miz Judea. "You can still get out of it."

"But I don't want to get out of it. It's a beautiful old house, strong and in better condition than it looks."

"That's what we're telling you," said Miz Judea.

"Just let the house die a natural death," said Miz Evelyn.

They were definitely crazy.

"He thinks we're crazy," said Miz Judea.

"No I don't," said Don.

"And now you're lying." She was smiling when she said it. "But we're not crazy, and you've got to stop repairing that house. It's very dangerous for you to go on."

Don had no idea how to take this. If they weren't two little old ladies in a decaying neighborhood of Greensboro, North Carolina, this could very well be a shakedown. "Are you threatening me?"

"No! Not us!" cried Miz Evelyn.

"You'll just take our word for it," said Miz Judea with the finality of a gradeschool teacher.

"Ladies, I'm grateful for the meal you fed me, and I hope we'll get along as neighbors while I renovate the house, but I got to tell you, every penny I have in the world is sunk into that place. I'm going to fix it up and sell it."

Their eyes grew wide and they looked at each other in horror.

"Sell it!"

"Oh, Miss Judy, he's not even going to live in it himself, he's going to find some unsuspecting family and..."

"It's wrong of you to do that, Mr. Lark!" said Miz Judea.

This was too much craziness for him. And what made him most uncomfortable was that he felt downright ashamed of being so rude as to disbelieve their heartfelt warning. They had been generous to him, and he wasn't complying with the simple favor they asked in return. And what was his real reason? He hadn't signed anything yet. He could walk away. And the only reason he wouldn't was because it would make Cindy Claybourne think he was a flake.

Wait a minute! The only reason? It was none of their business, that was the biggest reason, and it was the perfect house for him because all it needed was him and his skill and vision and labor to make it a beautiful place to live, to give it some meaning again. Just because a trio of nutcases lived next door was no reason to feel bad about getting such a good deal and maybe even starting a relationship with a nice woman after all these years. A good dinner didn't entitle them to that.

Don folded the damp dish towel. "Ladies, I'm sorry, but I got a lot of work to do tomorrow and I better get to bed."

He took a couple of steps toward the door, but at once Miz Evelyn laid a hand on his arm and slipped in between him and the door. And when she spoke, her voice was strange. "You don't have to leave so soon, do you, Mr. Lark?" She played with the fabric of his sleeve.

She was flirting with him! She was somewhere between eighty and eight hundred years old, and she was playing the coquette. He didn't know whether to laugh or flee.

"Let him go, Miss Evvie, you're making a fool of yourself."

She let go of his sleeve at once. But she didn't stop trying to keep him. Her face brightened and she turned to Miz Judea.

"I know! Why couldn't we let him have this house to sell?"

"Will you just think for a minute, Miss Evvie? He doesn't sell houses, he fixes them up, which this house doesn't need. And even if it did, what about Gladys?"

"Ladies, I don't want your house. I've got my house over there."

"You think it's your house," said Miz Evelyn. She was still arguing, but she was also moving out of his way so he could leave.

"I'm going to make it my house by my own sweat," said Don. "And when I fix up that eyesore it's going to increase the value of the whole neighborhood. I have no idea why that bothers you, and I'm sorry it does, but...."

The sink was drained and Miz Judea's hands were dry. She came over to him, shaking her head, and began to push him gently out the door. It took some quick action on Don's part to get it open before she pushed him through it.

"No need to apologize," she said. "You do what you got to do. Just remember—that house gives you any trouble, you come ask us."

Don found himself on the back porch of the carriagehouse, the screen door shutting in his face. The two old ladies crowded each other in the doorway, each trying to speak one last word to him, make one last plea.

"We used to live there, you know," said Miz Evelyn. "Back in 1928 till Gladys fetched us out in '35. We're very, very old. We know what we're talking about."

"Just ask us whatever you want, whenever you want," said Miz Judea. "Now go on over there and sleep as well as you can!"

That was the last word. Miz Judea closed the door and left him on the porch with the moths and mosquitoes. Only then did he realize that he was still holding the dishtowel. He thought of knocking on the door but couldn't stand the idea of having them think he had had second thoughts. So he draped the dishtowel over the porch railing and walked around the house. He didn't swing himself over the picket fence—he knew better than to try even minor athletic feats in the dark, not when he was this tired. Instead he walked out to the curb and studied the dark Bellamy house. The nearest streetlight was partly blocked by leaves that shifted in the breeze and the moon was flitting in and out behind the clouds, so the house kept changing as he watched. Changing, but it remained unchanged. The lines were clean, the structure sound. If the work he did today somehow made the house stronger, he was glad of it. That was as mystical as he was going to get.

He took out his key, unlocked the front door, and walked carefully into a room only somewhat lit by the streetlamp. He found the hanging work-light by feel more than sight, then followed the cord with his hands to the switch about four feet down. The light was blinding at first, and even when his eyes got used to it, everything in the room still looked oddly shadowed because the worklamp hung so low and kept swinging and twisting a little. The pile of furniture against the far walls looked especially forbidding in the strange light.

Don walked back to the front door and locked the deadbolt, then pocketed the key.

His cot was leaning against the south wall, the bearing wall that divided this room from the stairs. He took it down and unfolded it in just a couple of moments, then unrolled his sleeping bag and flung it out over the cot. It was warm enough tonight that he'd sleep on top of it, but cool enough that he'd stay in his clothes. He sat down on the cot, pried his shoes off his feet, emptied his pockets onto the workbench, then switched off the light and lay down on the bed.

But now he couldn't sleep, tired as he was, full of food as he was. He could only lie there and listen to the breeze moving the leaves outside and the cricking of the crickets and the small sharp sounds of the house contracting as the night cooled it from the outside in. What did these women think this house was? They said they'd lived here back in the late 1920s—but how could that be true? Segregation was strict then, and the chance of a neighborhood putting up with a black woman and a white woman keeping house together... unless they weren't keeping house, except in the sense of being housekeepers. Had they been servants here? Had something nasty happened? The owner murdered his wife or something? And now they had convinced themselves it was the house that was evil, and not the people they worked for.

What am I doing? Making up lives for these people. How can I possibly do that when I can't even make up a decent life for myself?

"Crazy women," he murmured.

Making me crazy. That's what he couldn't say out loud. I've slept alone in so many derelict houses now, and here I've let a couple of old ladies give me the willies. Well, it wasn't going to go on. The worst thing in the world had already happened to him. He had lost his daughter, lost his wife, and then buried them both. He wasn't going to get scared of house sounds. If any of them got too obnoxious, he'd find the source of the creaking and with a few long woodscrews he'd quiet it down again. This was his house, or would be by this time tomorrow. It was also a good house and he was going to make it better. If there was something wrong with the house, he'd heal it. When it came to houses, he was the physician. By the time he was done, the old ladies would come over for a tour of the place just like everybody else and they'd ooh and aah about how gorgeous he'd made it.

Or else they'd sit there in their house and stick pins in a doll with "Don Lark" scrawled on it in crayon. He didn't really care which.

He rolled over on his side and did what he always did to go to sleep. He imagined rooms and estimated the dimensions and calculated the floor area and the wall area in order to figure out the cost of carpet and wallpaper and how much wainscoting he'd need and...

It never took long. He slept.