Stolen
fiction by Tommy Hays
Negotiating the Livingston’s narrow rock-wall driveway in my father’s Lincoln was like threading a freighter through the Panama Canal. The slightest miscalculation could result in disaster—a scraped tire, a scratched fender or worse. Whenever I went over to Julia’s house, I made sure to drive my mother’s Biscayne, a Chevrolet, whose only challenge was the gear shift—three on the tree. Tonight called for the Lincoln, one of a long line of used Continentals. This was a five-year-old ’68, dark blue with an ornate front grill, folding headlights, electric windows, leather seats and a carpet so deep I often lost the keys in it. Driving my father’s Lincoln was to float around town in a room more elegant than any in our house.
I parked in back of the Livingston’s house, checked myself in the rearview, straightened my bow tie, then ran a comb through my hair which hung to my shoulders. As I got out, I slipped on my coat. My mother had gone with me to Gregory’s Formal Wear in Lewis Plaza to rent a tuxedo. With its starched shirt and button up vest, I felt as stiff as in my band uniform.
I was about to knock on the kitchen door when the porch light winked on. Julia’s sister opened the door. She smiled, flashing her braces. “Not bad,” she said, looking me up and down. Three years younger than Julia, Sarah had a boyish frankness about her that always made me smile.
“Julia!” she sang over her shoulder.
We heard someone come into the kitchen. Julia stepped into the fluorescent light. She wore a long black dress with rose prints and a lace collar. An elaborate silver necklace I was sure I’d seen at World Bazaar hung from her neck. Her thick black hair fell across her shoulders, framing her face in a way that made her look older and sophisticated.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I said.
Standing behind her sister now, Sarah frowned at me.
“Your dress,” I said to Julia. “It’s really nice.”
Sarah rolled her eyes at me.
“And the rest of you too.”
Sarah gave a little inward groan.
Julia smiled. “You look nice too.”
A screech owl trilled in the big pine that darkened the back yard.
Sarah shooed us out the door. “Have her back home on time.” She poked me in the cummerbund. “Or Jay will kick your butt.”
Jay, as his daughters called him, or Doctor Livingston, as everyone else in Greenville called him, wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’d lost his wife to cancer years ago and was so busy with his practice and patients at the hospital, Julia and Sarah often had the house to themselves.
“You brought the Lincoln,” Julia said as we walked out to the car, running her hand over its gleaming hood. My dad had gotten it a wax job for tonight.
“Dad insisted we take it,” I said, as she climbed in. I shut her door, which closed with a hushed, solid sound like a vault.
I climbed into my side.
“I love your dad,” she said. All my friends loved my dad. He was warm, kind, dapper and wore a coat and tie even around the house. His office was in our basement, beneath my bedroom, and I often fell asleep to the confident rhythm of his typing. He was famous among my friends for the way he answered the phone, with an enthusiastic two-toned “Helloooo!” that made you feel as if he couldn’t have been happier to hear from you.
I turned the ignition and the engine started up with its deep powerful rumble.
“So we’re actually doing this,” Julia said.
“Looks like it.” I inched the car very carefully down the drive.
Julia and I had grown up blocks from each other and had gone to elementary school together. Not till high school did we become good friends. I’d go over to her house, a big white two-story on McDaniel Avenue and sit in her living room on its oriental rug and listen to Joan Baez or Judy Collins on their big stereo and talk about The Little Prince or Siddhartha or Trout Fishing in America. We didn’t date and weren’t a couple. I’d tried to kiss her once and she pulled away saying, “Don’t be so intense.” Mostly we hung out with our small group of misfit friends.
One day several weeks ago, I’d gone out on the school lawn, where students ate lunch near the magnolia tree. The preppy kids gathered on one side of the magnolia, the girls in their sweaters and plaid skirts and penny loafers, the boys in their polo shirts and pleated khaki pants and tasseled loafers. We hippie kids, in our tie-dyes, leather vests and desert boots, gathered on another side. In my flannel shirt and worn bellbottoms, I sat down on the edge of the circle beside Julia, who wore her signature suede maroon jacket, peasant blouse and hip huggers.
Off to another side, a group of Black students sat eating lunch. They mostly wore bellbottoms and corduroy jackets. The girls, their hair either straight or in an Afro, wore loop earrings and, if they wore glasses, usually wore wire rims. Some of the girls wore white crocheted caps.
“Proms are a creation of the bourgeoise,” Stan Steller said. A perpetual stoner with bloodshot eyes, Stan was forever pushing his hair out of his eyes between Marxist pronouncements. While the drugs dampened his grades, he was the only student in our class to receive a perfect SAT score. “I wouldn’t be caught dead at a prom,” he said.
“Unless Gwen Bledsoe asked you,” said Celestine Pickens, a tall, thin Jesus Freak, who wore a clothespin necklace that held Bible verses she switched out daily.
“What about you?” Julia, who had been leaning back on her elbows, chewing a piece of grass, was now looking at me. “Are you going to the prom?”
“Are you kidding?” I frowned as I peeled my banana. It surprised me Julia of all people would ask me that.
“I thought class officers had to attend,” Julia said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. Then I added a little less certainly, “Nobody ever said anything about that to me.”
Julia took the piece of grass out of her mouth. “I’m probably wrong.”
As I watched her, an icy dread settled in my stomach. I couldn’t remember the last time Julia was wrong.
“Besides,” Julia said, “aren’t you helping plan the prom?”
“That would be the Prom Planning Committee,” I said. “I’m not on that committee.” I’d been asked if I wanted to be on that committee, but I’d never been to a prom or a dance of any kind.
“Wouldn’t it be lame if the class president didn’t attend the junior senior?” Julia said.
I lowered my head into my hands as it became clear Julia was right.
“You could abdicate,” Christine said, patting my back.
“He’s not a king,” Stan said.
“Tender your resignation,” said Morgan Norris, a stout, jock hippie, who hung out with the hippie kids as much as his football teammates would tolerate.
“Ah, the responsibilities of higher office.” Will shook his head in sympathy. Will Lyons was a kind, shy guy who carried around books on Zen Buddhism and who talked from somewhere back in his throat like Kermit the Frog.
The bell rang and, as we returned to class, I walked slowly toward the building. I had tossed my lunch bag in a garbage can when Julie came up beside me. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” she said. “If you want company, I’d go with you.”
This surprised me very much. “I thought the prom thing weirded you out,” I said. We’d discussed it a couple of times. While we weren’t in Stan Steller’s militant anti-prom camp, the idea of proms with their drama and extravagant dress left us uncomfortable. “So why would you go with me?”
“In solidarity of us not being prom going types,” she said. “As corny as it sounds, ever since I read Cinderella as a little girl, I’ve wanted to go to the prom. And if I’m going to go to the prom, there’s no one I’d rather go with than you.”
I looked at her. It was the first remotely romantic thing I could remember her saying to me.
“Of course, I don’t mean that in a romantic way,” she said, scratching her nose.
“Of course,” I said.
She flicked her hair back over her shoulder. “I don’t mean it like that either. I don’t mean it in an anti-romantic way.”
“I see,” I said.
“I’m not sure I do.” She gazed toward the magnolia that clattered in the breeze. The look on her face reminded me when we were in sixth grade, and Mrs. Lyde said that whenever she asked the class a question, she could see the wheels in Julia’s head begin to turn.
“What I’m trying to say is this,” Julia said. “If I’m going to allow myself to entertain the suspension of disbelief going to a prom and giving myself over to the experience would require, there’s no one I’d rather suspend my disbelief with than you.”
I detected a compliment in there somewhere. “So you’ll go?”
The last bell rang, and we hurried to our classes. Thirty minutes later, halfway through Mrs. Graves’ explanation of a fundamental theorem, it occurred to me how out of my depth I was, and how it had nothing to do with calculus.
Julia turned on the radio. All my friends wanted to ride in the Lincoln—a world unto itself, it dwarfed all other cars in its orbit. As we turned down through Cleveland Park, we wound along the funky-smelling dark ribbon that was Reedy River, past empty lighted tennis courts hovering in the dark, and past a dim parking lot where half a dozen cars contained couples making out by dashboard light.
We emerged from the park and turned down Main Street, its harsh sodium lights, tinging downtown industrial bleak. “MacArthur Park” came on the radio, and I turned it up. It was a song they were playing a lot and my favorite. I thought it was emotional and atmospheric. I loved the swell of the orchestra, and when Richard Harris hit that high note, it gave me chills. “It’s such a great song.”
“I think it’s schmaltzy,” she said. “Besides, why would anybody leave a cake out in the rain, especially if they’ve lost the recipe?”
A few blocks before we reached the Poinsett Hotel where the prom was being held, we stopped at a busy intersection. Traffic had hardly stopped when an old woman, slightly bent, unsteadily lifted her little cart of groceries off the curb and began to cross. The intersection was wide, and the woman, painfully slow, was only halfway across when the light changed to green. One driver didn’t see her and had to swerve. Traffic stopped. A truck blew its horn, and the woman froze.
“I can’t look!” I said.
Before I knew it Julia had jumped out of the car, run into the middle of the intersection, taken the woman’s arm and led her the rest of the way across. I left the car where it was, grabbed the cart and wheeled it after them.
After Julia had helped the woman across, and I had pulled the cart onto the curb beside them, I ran back and moved the car to the side of the road. Julia was talking with the woman, who sat on a bench seeming shaken.
“She catches the bus here,” Julia said.
The old woman was vaguely familiar.
“Can we give you a ride home?” Julia asked her.
“That won’t be necessary.” The woman pulled a little card out of her purse and was doublechecking it. “The bus will be along directly.” Then to herself, “That road gets wider every day.”
Seeing a police car pull up beside the Lincoln, I realized I’d parked in a no parking zone. I told Julia we should get going.
“Will you be all right?” Julia asked the woman.
“I’m about to get a ticket,” I said as the policeman got out of his patrol car and with pad in hand, walked to the back of the Lincoln to see the license plate.
As we drove the last blocks to the hotel, Julia kept looking back out the rear window. “She shouldn’t be making that trip by herself,” she said.
I circled the hotel looking for a parking spot. I was anxious, part of me wanting to get inside. The other part, the part that had never danced in public, the part that had never smoked marijuana (No Toke Award winner two years in a row among my hippie friends), the part that stayed home at night and studied, that part wanted to be anywhere but here.
Julia pointed to a space between a couple of parked cars. “Think it’ll fit?”
Before she could finish her sentence, I was parking. I’d taken my driver’s test in the Lincoln and had made mistakes, but the officer, taking pity, said if I could get “this tank” between the orange cones, he’d give me my license. What the officer didn’t know was that my dad had me practice parallel parking the Lincoln till I could do it in my sleep.
The prom was held in the Gold Room of the Jack Tar Poinsett Hotel, an old hotel with a shabby glamorous feel, where people like Amelia Earhart, Bobby Kennedy, and Liberace had stayed. Generations of Greenville High classes held their proms there. My mother had attended her prom there, with the same immense chandeliers, long heavy drapery, and gold Persian carpeting. As beautiful as it was, the place smelled like my grandparents’ living room. But there wasn’t anything staid about the band. Moses Dillard and The Textown Display was a legendary blues funk band who our senior counselor, Mrs. Xanthine Norris, somehow knew. The ballroom rocked. Dressed very sharply in tuxes, the band consisted of a White sax player, a White trumpet player, two Black guitarists, a Black bassist, a Black drummer and a powerful Black singer named Bill Wilson whose voice rattled the chandeliers.
Most there were White students but a couple of dozen Black couples danced on the far side of the ballroom, keeping mostly to themselves. The year was 1973, two years since integration, which meant Black schools had been closed and Black students forced to attend White schools like mine. What we White students didn’t begin to appreciate was how much had been taken from the Black students—their prom, their sports teams, their clubs, their chorus, their band, their teachers, their administrators, and hardest of all, their friends. Integration was spoken of as a compromise, but the Black students did all the compromising.
“Oh my god, look,” Julia said. Toward the middle of the room, Stan Steller, in a suit, was sliding across the floor like James Brown. Our jaws dropped when we saw he was with Gwen Bledsoe, who was dressed in a yellow chiffon dress pulled down to her shoulders. We spotted Will Lyons in a tux, his hair tied neatly back in a ponytail, dancing with Celestine who wore a long tight glittery dress that made her look a little like Cher.
Julia nodded to the dance floor.
“Can’t we just watch?” I asked.
She gave me a look. “What do you think?”
I looked back across the ballroom at the Black students. And although at the time I didn’t comprehend what they’d been through, even then I could see in their dancing, their unapologetic presence at the prom, something dignified and courageous as they created a space for themselves in the midst of this foreign world, a world they’d been shunted into.
I danced close to her, then backed away, then she moved close to me, both of us following the bass guitar’s beat. Julia and I danced several dances. With each dance I loosened a little more.
Julia and I walked onto the dance floor where all around us people were rocking and swinging and swaying. As the music throbbed and thumped, Julia closed her eyes, dropped my hand and began to dance. I stood watching her. As the bass guitar shifted into a deeper beat, I began to feel the music in my chest. Julia opened her eyes and looked at me in a way she’d never looked at me. The horn and the sax came in and the music shifted into a higher gear, and the whole dance floor came alive. I gave into the music. Then, like I did sometimes alone in my room at home listening to “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” or “I’ll Take You There.” I stopped thinking. At one point I looked around to see if anyone was laughing at me, but no one was paying me the least bit of attention, no one except Julia.
I danced close to her, then backed away, then she moved close to me, both of us following the bass guitar’s beat. Julia and I danced several dances. With each dance I loosened a little more.
At intermission, we went to the restrooms, but as the music started back up and couples went out on the floor, Julia was nowhere to be seen.
That’s when we heard sirens. I hurried out the big revolving door to see firetrucks and an ambulance fly up Main Street. An image of the old woman stepping out into the middle of traffic flashed through my mind. I ran up the sidewalk, and at one point tripped and went sprawling onto the cement. As I picked myself up, I saw flashing red lights from the firetrucks and ambulance up the block. I smelled smoke, then noticed a crowd of people outside the S & W Cafeteria. I pushed through the crowd and found the bus stop bench where we’d left the woman, but the bench was empty. Firemen in helmets and gear hurried into the cafeteria. I happened to look over and saw Julia and the old woman sitting on the steps of the old courthouse next door.
“What happened to you?” Julia asked. She and the old woman looked at my tux, which to my horror had big rips in the knee and the elbow.
“I tripped,” I said as I calculated how many mowed lawns this would set me back.
“You’re bleeding.” Julia bent down to get a closer look at my knee.
The old woman pulled a roll of paper towels out of one of her grocery bags and gave them to Julia, who folded them and pressed them gently on my knee, staunching the blood.
Julia looked in the direction of one of the EMTs who’d arrived along with the firemen. I told her they had a lot more important things to deal with. The next thing I knew I was sitting on the back of the ambulance, the EMT cleaning and bandaging my knee.
As he finished up with me, Julia explained that she’d gotten worried about the woman and had come to check on her and found her still waiting for the bus. Turned out she’d had an old bus schedule. No more buses were running tonight. They’d smelled smoke and people had poured out of the cafeteria, where, it turned out, there had been a kitchen fire.
Looking in the direction of the woman, Julia said, “She wants to walk home but I said we’d give her a ride.”
“Where does she live?” I asked.
“West Greenville,” Julia said.
“You’re kidding? West Greenville was nearly two miles. “Of course, we’ll give her a ride.”
But when Julia and I looked up, the old woman was gone, then we saw her way up the street. We caught up with her two blocks up Main Street, pushing her cart in the direction of West Greenville.
“I don’t need a ride,” the old woman snapped when we came up to her.
“Please let us take you home,” Julia said.
“No ma’am,” the woman said. “I can take care of my own self.”
“What about your groceries?” I nodded at her cart. “They might go bad by the time you walk all the way home.”
This seemed to give the woman pause. Then it thundered.
I ran back for the car, then Julia helped her into the back seat while I set her groceries and cart in the trunk. It wasn’t long before it was lightning and thundering. As the woman gave me directions, her deep voice and the occasional little whistle through her teeth had me glancing at her face in the rearview mirror. As she directed me down smaller streets, lightning-illuminated mill houses and tiny clapboard homes flashed from my childhood when I’d sat in the back seat of another car, my father driving and talking with a woman in the passenger seat.
We turned down a dead end with a collection of houses huddled together, but before the woman said anything I had pulled up to a small well-kempt white house with a picket fence. The yellow porch light was on.
“Is this right?” Julia turned around to the woman. “Is this your house?”
It had begun to rain. as Julia and I followed the woman up her walk. Julia carried the groceries, and I, her cart. Julia leaned over and whispered to me, “How did you know this was her house?”
I shrugged.
A woman about my mother’s age opened the door, came down the steps and took the old woman’s arm. “Mama, where have you been? I’ve been worried sick.”
“I missed my bus,” she said.
“I told you I’d pick you up.”
“These folks gave me a ride home.”
The woman glanced at us, then to her mother said under her breath, “Mama, I bought groceries just yesterday.”
It rained harder, and although she didn’t look happy about it, the daughter waved us into the little front room, hot as a furnace. Even though it was early spring, a gas heater glowed in the middle of the room. She carried the groceries into the kitchen. The old woman rolled the cart into a corner and asked us to have a seat. We could hear the rain on the roof. The room, with its ticking heater, and black and white framed photos on the mantel felt familiar. On the wall hung a gold framed triptych of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy.
Seeing me look at a photograph of a smiling young man in uniform, probably not much older than me, the old woman came up beside me. “My grandson.”
The way the old woman tenderly touched the photo was something I felt in my bones. A door swung open in my chest, a door that had been closed for so many years. Beverly. She was Beverly, and what I felt in that instant was a joy that rocketed me back to childhood, but on the heels of that elation came a wave of guilt, and, suddenly, all I wanted was out of there.
The daughter came back in from the kitchen, she said, “Thank you for bringing her home.” I saw her noticing my tux.
“I tripped,” I said, and she shook her head in commiseration.
“So you were at the prom tonight,” she said. “My daughter was there. But she hasn’t come home yet.”
“What’s your daughter’s name?” Julia asked.
“Janice,” the daughter said. “Janice Martin.”
“Janice works on the school paper with me,” Julia said.
I knew Janice from student council. She was smart, National-Merit-Finalist smart, and had already been offered a scholarship to Duke. I didn’t say any of that, because I noticed Beverly who’d come back in the living room was watching me closely.
“It’s nice meeting you,” I said, getting up from the chair and nodding for Julia to get up too. “But we should let you put your groceries away and we need to get back to the prom.”
“You stay right where you are,” Beverly commanded. I thought, Here it comes. After all these years, after all the sadness and regret, here it finally comes. And in a way, I knew it would be a relief. I braced myself.
But Beverly walked past us and started into the kitchen.
“Now Mama, you don’t need to do that,” the daughter called after Beverly.
“Denise,” Beverly turned on her daughter, and in a tone that reminded me of being in danger of a switching, said, “If it wasn’t for these kind folks I’d still be walking home and I’d be soaked to the bone.” And with that she disappeared into the kitchen.
Denise looked at us as if for an explanation. Julia told her that her mother had been wheeling her cart across a busy intersection and had gotten stranded and told her she’d been trying to walk home. The daughter closed her eyes and shook her head. “She’s been such a proud person all her life. She can’t stand the idea of anybody taking care of her.”
“Denise?” Beverly called from the kitchen.
“Yes ma’am.” Denise sighed and went out to the kitchen where they heard Beverly say, “I don’t see it.”
“Mama,” Denise said, sounding as if she was trying to keep her voice down but too angry to manage it. “You don’t have to do anything for these people. You don’t owe them a thing. You’ve spent your life doing for these people, our whole family has.”
Julia and I looked at each other.
Moments later Beverly came into the front room carrying a cake wrapped in Saran Wrap. “I keep a pound cake in the freezer for company and such,” she said. She held it out to me.
“We can’t take your cake,” I said.
Beverly’s brows furrowed.
“Take the damn cake,” Denise snapped, coming in from the kitchen.
Julia held out her hands as Beverly set the cake in them. “Thank you,” Julia said. “It’s a beautiful cake.”
“If you want to eat it tonight,” Beverly said, “put it in a cold oven on 250 degrees and warm it up for ten minutes.”
When we stepped out onto the front stoop, the rain had stopped but water dripped from the gutter and there was a cool breeze. Beverly followed us outside, took my hand and looked me in the eye.
“You remind me of my grandson,” she finally said. Then she looked away. “We hope he’s home soon.”
“Mama, come on back inside, so these people can go home,” the daughter called from inside, then opened the screen for her and closed the door.
Julia carefully set the poundcake on the floor of the back seat, and I drove us out of West Greenville, feeling the eyes of the neighborhood follow the shiny Lincoln gliding through its wet streets. A bright moon appeared and disappeared behind clouds scudding across the night sky.
Neither of us said anything for a moment, as we headed back downtown.
“What was going on with you back there?” Julia finally asked.
“What do you mean?” I glanced at her.
“I’m not sure I’ve seen you quite like that. You kept looking at the woman like you were seeing a ghost.”
I sighed. “She used to work for us.”
Julia turned to him. “You’re kidding? Why didn’t you say something?”
“I wasn’t sure it was her at first,” I said. “And to tell you the truth even then I couldn’t really believe it. It was only when we went into the house that I really knew. It’s been such a long time. I was only five when my parents let her go.”
“Twelve years,” she said. “No wonder you didn’t remember. But why’d they let her go?”
Coming to a stop sign, I signaled and turned onto Main Street. “I’d rather not get into it.”
She looked at me for a minute, then looked away. “Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to pry.”
I pulled in front of the Poinsett Hotel and parked but left the car running. “If you don’t mind, I don’t feel like going back in there,” I said.
Down the block we saw a couple embracing beneath the darkened marquee of a movie theater where the other night several of us had gone to see Harold and Maude.
“Are you all right?” Julia gently put her hand on my bandaged knee.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I said.
“I’m not talking about your knee,” she said.
We were quiet on the way home. I felt sad and angry that I was botching the whole prom date thing. As we passed back through Cleveland Park, we saw the amorous couples had all gone home. We passed the tennis courts where two surprisingly agile old men volleyed back and forth, the thwack of them hitting the ball echoed across the river.
“I’m sorry we didn’t go back to the prom,” I said after a while.
“That’s okay. That was about all of that hoopla I was good for anyway.”
I couldn’t help smiling.
She looked at me. “What?”
“You said, Hoopla.”
“What’s wrong with Hoopla?” she snapped.
“Nothing. I just never heard you say that word.”
Ordinarily she might’ve laughed but instead she looked out her window and an awkward silence settled between us.
She was so smart, so deep, so unreadable. Now with her head turned away, I thought what I always thought whenever I happened to sit behind her in class—that with her ears poking out of her curtain of hair, she looked innocent, childlike. Sometimes as a teacher droned on, I would edge my fingers to the top of my desk, where strands of her hair had fallen across my desk, and lightly touch them.
When I pulled the Lincoln back up Julia’s driveway, I parked next to Doctor Livingston’s old Peugeot, and was about to get out to open the door for Julia when she took my hand.
“Tell me about Beverly,” she said.
I sat back in my seat and looked toward Julia’s house. Moonlight bathed their whole house, making it look otherworldly, like a stage set.
“It’s sort of a long story.”
She dug around in her macrame purse she’d made herself and pulled out a small mason jar nearly full of red wine. She unscrewed the lid, took a sip and then handed it to me.
“What if your dad sees us?” I said, looking at the house, where I knew his window was. But his light was out. I eyed the jar. I hardly ever drank. I took a sip of wine. We passed the jar back and forth. It wasn’t long before a warmth bloomed in my chest, and I felt my limbs loosen and my thoughts free up.
I told her that I had been only five when my father withdrew two thousand dollars from the bank to buy the first in what would become a long line of used Lincolns. He’d put the money in his sock drawer but when it came time to go to the car dealer, the money wasn’t there. My parents turned the house upside down. Since Beverly was the only other person ever in the house, did our laundry, and put our clothes in our drawers, my parents decided it had to be her.
“That’s why they let her go?” Julia said.
“They didn’t have a choice,” I said. “Or that’s how they felt. It was partly about the money, mostly they couldn’t have someone they didn’t trust taking care of me.”
I told Julia it was hard, and I remembered being very upset and my parents were too. They didn’t have the heart to tell her they suspected her. They told her that their money had gotten tight and that they couldn’t afford to keep her. They told me that story too.
“The only thing I knew was that Beverly was gone and I missed her something awful.”
“That’s sad,” Julia said.
“It gets worse.” I took a sip of the wine and told her that six years after the money went missing and they’d let Beverly go, my parents bought a new dresser. My mother had been in their bedroom moving clothes from the old dresser to the new one. My father was outside washing the cars. And I was clipping the hedge. My mother came outside looking upset, yelling for my dad. We followed her into their bedroom where she pointed to an envelope in the middle of the bed as if it were a snake.
“Where?” my father said, his face pale.
“When I took out the drawer, it was stuck to the back,” my mother said, palming tears from her eyes. “It must’ve gotten wedged back there.”
My father sat down on the bed, opened the envelope and took out a handful of hundred- dollar bills. I’d never seen that much money in my life.
It was only then, six years after the money had gone missing that my parents told me the whole story.
“What happened when they told Beverly that they’d found the money?” Julia asked.
“That’s just it,” I said.
Julia eyes widened. “They never told her?”
I shook my head.
“Because if they had,” Julia said, thinking aloud, “she’d know they’d suspected her in the first place.” She leaned back in her seat. “That is tragic.”
“Beverly had to have sensed the truth,” I said. “And even if she didn’t, it still really sucks. She lost her job because my parents jumped to conclusions. We blamed her for something she didn’t do.”
“You didn’t do anything,” Julia said. “You were five years old and knew nothing about it.”
I took a sip from Julia’s jar, then looked at her. “They have so little.”
“I know,” she said.
A possum crossed the driveway in that fast-walk way possums have, his face a white mask in the moonlight, then disappeared into the deep shadows of Julia’s backyard.
When we got out of the car, I walked her halfway to her door.
“Thank you for taking me to the prom,” she said.
“That feels years ago,” I said.
“I had a nice time,” she said.
“You don’t have to say that,” I said. “I’m sorry we left early.”
She fixed me with her steely gaze of hers. “I never say anything I don’t mean.” Then her expression softened and she took my hand. “Thank you for telling me about Beverly. I feel like I know you better now.”
With the wine and the wooziness catching up with me, I remembered the couple making out under the darkened marquee. I wondered if Julia was thinking the same thing. But I said good night and was climbing back into the car when she called
“Wait!” and ran up to me.
“The cake,” she said.
I’d forgotten all about it. I lifted it carefully out of the car and handed it to her.
“Come in and I’ll put water on for tea,” she said.
“I don’t know that I’m in the mood.”
“Get your butt in here, Mister,” said a familiar voice from an upstairs window. It was Sarah.
“How long have you been there watching us?” Julia said.
“Too long.” She closed the window and reappeared at the back door and stood in the light with her bathrobe on. “Get in here and let’s have some of that cake.”
Reluctantly I followed Julia into the kitchen.
“Oh no!” Sarah said when I stepped into the light. “Your coat!” She fingered the tear in my elbow. “Oh, and your pants.”
“I don’t think he wants to talk about it.” Julia set the cake on the counter and unwrapped it.
Sarah tapped it with her knuckles. “Why is the cake frozen?”
Julia slid the cake inside the oven and turned it on. Then she filled a kettle, set it on the stove, lit the eye with a wooden match and a blue flame whooshed underneath. She put three teabags in a big blue Chinese teapot that I knew had belonged to her mother. I took down cups and plates. When the water began to boil, Julia poured it into the teapot, let it steep, and it wasn’t long before the kitchen filled with the warm rich smell of cake and not long after, she slid the cake out of the oven. I cut us each a very big piece. The first bite rocketed me back to sitting with Beverly one afternoon, at the Formica table in our den, eating her coconut cake. Tears filled my eyes.
Julia, Sarah, and I had only taken a few delicious bites, when a terrible screeching sound went up outside and the house shook. We ran out back. My heart stopped. The Lincoln was gone. Just gone. Stolen. Somebody’s stolen my father’s car. What would I tell him?
Sarah was pointing down the driveway. Somehow the Lincoln had rolled to the bottom of their driveway, miraculously stopping a foot from the busy street. I had a sick feeling as I realized I hadn’t put in the parking brake.
With the car wedged against the stone wall, I had to climb across the passenger’s side and crawl into the driver’s seat. I started the car and backed it away from the wall which caused more unearthly screeching. A wide deep gouge ran the length of the driver’s side, where it had scraped the wall.
Julia came down the drive and stood beside me running her fingers over the gouge.
“What will I tell him?” I said, hardly able to speak.
I started to get in the car when Sarah ran up and handed me a silver-stemmed thing I recognized as the sideview mirror, clipped off by the wall. I tossed it into the back seat. I turned on the radio, surprised “MacArthur Park” was playing again. Maybe a request. But as loud as I turned it up and despite Richard Harris’s best efforts, the malignant grinding rising from the Lincoln’s inner workings drowned out everything else. And a loss was a loss was a loss.
Tommy Hays is the author of four novels: The Pleasure Was Mine (St. Martin’s Press), In the Family Way (Random House), Sam’s Crossing (Atheneum) and middle grade novel What I Came to Tell You (Egmont, USA). He was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors, writers judged to have added to South Carolina's literary legacy. He was named to the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the governor of North Carolina. He’s retired Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program and Lecturer Emeritus in the Master of Liberal Arts program at UNC Asheville.