ONE
The August sun had already heated the seat of the concrete bench to an uncomfortable temperature when the old woman found her way across the courthouse square and wearily sat down. She had been serving customers breakfast since six-thirty that morning and had been up two hours before that making biscuits and gravy—a staple of Agatite early risers who regularly came by the Town and Country Dinette for their morning meal—and she was tired. Her faded pink uniform from the dinette had gotten egg on it that morning, and Dinah had suggested that instead of taking up her usual position on the park bench—her park bench, they had both corrected at the same time—why didn’t she just go home and change, maybe take a little nap before noon and the lunch rush. But she had come out to the courthouse lawn like always. Poor Dinah, she thought. After all these years a body would think she’d understand.
Imogene McBride scooched her skinny bottom around on the concrete bench, testing it to see if it had cooled any from the protection from the sun her body offered, and pulled brightly colored yarn from a shoebox she had brought with her from the dinette. She had started an afghan the day before for the Sellers’ new baby. It would bring her almost fifteen dollars after she paid for the materials, and with the three others she had yet to do this month, one more birthing and two wedding presents, she figured she might be able to squeeze out enough money for a new uniform, certainly a new pair of nursing oxfords too. Her feet had been bothering her lately.
Her posture was rigid on the bench as she knitted, like a secretary sitting at a typewriter, and although the knitting occupied her hands, her eyes paid it no mind; they were focused on the line of stores and businesses on the block facing the courthouse. They might shift away from time to time, but never for long. It was a long-established habit they had, and Imogene was completely unaware of their movement.
She was nearly seventy, but from a distance she looked much younger, and up close there was still the hint of a beautiful woman who had once been desirable and happy. Now, however, her skin, weather-worn and pulled taut by a severe ponytail gathered high on her head, was rough and betrayed none of its original suppleness and youthful glow. Her eyes were gray and clear, and her hair, long since gone white with age and work and worry, had begun to thin out in front, leaving small bald spots wisping free of the ponytail’s pull. She was thin and looked lean and tough, like a fence post that has seen too many seasons change but still has the strength to stretch the wire. Yet there remained a definition of a girlish figure, and she gently crossed her legs at the ankle, careful to keep her knees together in the uniform made for a much younger woman.
She came to the bench by the courthouse every day, winter and summer, regardless of the weather. She sat for about two hours every morning, longer when Dinah felt she could handle the noon crowd on her own, and two hours every afternoon. The dinner crowd was always too heavy for Dinah by herself, although the numbers of diners in the small dinette always seemed insufficient to keep the business out of debt. On pleasant nights, after the dishes had been washed and the preparations were made for breakfast, she would come out in the evenings too, sometimes sitting until past midnight, and on most occasions she would knit or crochet. Her habits were familiar to her, and she didn’t think much about them. It was just what she did: she sat on the bench—her bench—between nine and eleven of a morning and between three and five of an afternoon, every morning and every afternoon.
She was waiting for her daughter to come back.
A lot of folks had decided a long time ago that she was crazy. She knew that, but she didn’t think much about that either. She really didn’t care. She never had.
A little over thirty years before, she had sat down like a normal person on a park bench on a small city’s courthouse square, and her little girl had sat down on the green grass beside her for a while and then gone to the drugstore for an ice cream. And she had simply disappeared. Just like that, Imogene would have said, had anyone ever asked her about it. But no one ever did, and she never thought much about that either.
She had come to Agatite, Texas, thirty years before, driving her husband’s bright green Hudson and carrying more than two thousand dollars of his bright green money. In the car with her was everything she owned or cared about in the world: clothing packed neatly in overlarge, expensive traveling bags, her jewelry, an oil painting she had purchased on her honeymoon trip to Cuba in 1932, a rosary made of specially selected stones, mostly pearls and opals, but a couple of diamonds too, and Cora, her beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter.
The Hudson coughed and died two miles outside Agatite, and she gave the job of repairing it to Luke Short of Short’s Garage and Gas. Whatever was wrong with it wasn’t too serious, apparently, since Luke Short himself told her he could have her on the road again in a couple of hours, just as soon as he sent somebody over to Childress to the Hudson dealer to pick up some parts.
Luke’s station was directly across from the Sandhill County Courthouse, and she and Cora strolled over to the lawn. It was spring, April, and they took seats on and around the brightly colored wooden benches that invited weary pedestrians to sit and take off their shoes and wiggle their toes in the soft Bermuda grass of the courthouse lawn.
They sat there watching some birds fly back and forth along the lawn and idly commented on the people and traffic that passed in front of them along Main Street. Both were a little nervous, and both were wondering how things would be at Aunt Mildred’s up in Oregon.
Imogene didn’t mind the breakdown nearly as much as she’d thought she was going to. They had been traveling straight through from Baton Rouge, stopping only by the side of the road for an hour and a half while Imogene slept, washing up in filling stations and roadside cafés. She wanted to get to Oregon by the end of the week, so she could settle in with her sister and then call that son-of-a-bitch Harvey and tell him she would never speak to him again.
They had left Atlanta, her home for the past twenty years, the previous weekend, and then they had driven to Baton Rouge, checking into a motor court and waiting for Harvey to come and get them. Leaving him had been a very hard thing to do, and she should know. She had tried to do it twice before and lost her nerve. Her courage usually played out just after she packed, but this time she was gone, and gone for good. She had hoped for a scene in Baton Rouge, something climactic to convince herself and, of course, Cora, that it was really over between Harvey and Imogene McBride. But naturally, he refused to oblige.
Well, she insisted to herself on that bright April day, there would be no divorce. She didn’t believe in divorce, and even if she did, she wouldn’t give him one. The bastard could go on with his fooling around with every slutty little secretary he met if he wanted to, but he wouldn’t be marrying another Mrs. Harvey McBride. That was one thing of which she was certain.
Cora was so pretty, she noticed, sitting in a beautiful white-and-pink cotton dress on the green grass. The morning sun made her golden hair shine brightly. She had cried most of the way since they left Atlanta. She missed her daddy, Imogene supposed. Well, she’d get over that. Out in Oregon she could be told what a disgusting man her father really was, how he had made Imogene’s life a living hell with his mistresses and his drinking. But she didn’t want to tell her yet. Let her get all the tears out first, Imogene thought; then there would be none left for Harvey at all.
From an outsider’s point of view, Imogene’s life wouldn’t have appeared to have been anything short of wonderful. The McBrides lived in a large mansion in a fashionable neighborhood in the “best part” of Atlanta. Harvey McBride, a big, handsome Scot with a winning grin and red, curly hair, had taken a beaten-up old sawmill and converted it into a thriving lumber business in spite of the Depression and war shortages. From the time he first met Imogene, who was working as a secretary in her father’s business in Memphis, they had looked like a perfect match. She had actually defied her father and moved down to Atlanta to be near him two years before they married. But she often wondered if he would have married her at all if she hadn’t discovered that she was pregnant with Cora.
She had had an easy time with Cora’s birth, but she was a long time getting over it. She had hated the way she blew up like a balloon and couldn’t get out of a chair without struggling like a floundering walrus. She hated the whole experience, from morning sickness to labor pain, the maternity clothes, the confinement, the probing icy hands of the doctor, and the sheer humiliation of the whole process.
She knew of Harvey’s cheap little affairs even then, and she excused him, even if she didn’t forgive him, on the grounds that sex was the one thing she didn’t want or need in her frame of mind. Although her body mended quickly, her mind healed slowly, and by the time she wanted him to come to her bed again, he did so grudgingly, and finally he stopped completely. He spent his time and pleasure in the company of bleached blondes and trashy redheads he picked up at conventions and in his customers’ offices. No better than whores, that kind, Imogene thought with a dark hatred. He fathered at least one child by one of them, and he’d had to pay her off royally to avoid a scandal.
Still, he provided a comfortable life for Imogene and his beautiful daughter, Cora. They had two maids, a chauffeur, a cook, and a gardener. Imogene’s dresses as well as Cora’s were all handmade, and they were permitted to go on long, expensive vacations, although Harvey rarely went with them, to California, New York, even once, before the war, to Europe. Cora became a debutante and a very sophisticated beauty by the time she reached the climax of her teenage years. She had wanted to enter the Miss Georgia contest that year, but Imogene refused permission. It wasn’t dignified.
As the years went by and Cora grew, Harvey’s flings became more frequent and less discreet. He was getting older, fatter, balder, and the girls seemed to become cheaper in proportion. But he was also getting richer, so his relative attractiveness continued. Imogene endured well-meaning friends who told her “quite confidentially” that he had been seen with another woman on several occasions, visits from the parish priest who attempted to console her without revealing Harvey’s confessions, and the pitying looks of almost everyone she knew, most of whom thought she only suspected things, almost none of whom knew how well she was informed.
Finally she decided she had had enough. She made preparations to leave him, carefully and completely. When she had tried before, she had just thrown a few things into a bag, bought two train tickets, and usually dragged Cora as far as the train station before panic struck and she raced back home, unpacked, swore Cora to secrecy, made it to table in time for Harvey to come swinging in, half stewed from his double martinis at the country club, and managed to smile while he shoveled food into his mouth, made lame excuses about some extra work he had to do or a client he had to meet, and lurched out before dessert was served. Then she would spend the rest of the evening crying into her pillow more over her own cowardice than Harvey’s infidelity.
This time, however, she started planning months in advance. She made Gregory, the chauffeur, teach her to drive Harvey’s Hudson. It was a big, heavy car, but she wanted something substantial to take her to Oregon. She threatened to tell Sid Howard’s wife about his and Harvey’s little after-hours meetings at the bar of the Bledsoe Hotel if he didn’t use his legal powers to alter the title of the car into her name. She packed everything in new and expensive luggage, and she simply got the money by walking into Harvey’s office, the loaded Hudson parked down the street, and asking him right in front of his partner and new secretary—the one he hadn’t had a chance to conquer yet—if he could spare some cash for new drapes for the front hall. She explained in elaborate detail how they were to be handmade, and the man wanted twenty-five hundred dollars in advance, in cash. Harvey had too much pride to turn her down right in front of these people, so he immediately wrote her a check, which she cashed at his own payroll window, and that was the last she saw of him for a long, long time.
Cora stood up and brushed loose grass from her dress. “I want an ice cream, Mama,” she announced, looking over across Main Street to a shop that offered a sign, PETE’S SUNDRIES AND DRUGS, and boasted a large cardboard ice cream cone in the window. “You want one?”
Imogene fished a five-cent piece out of her coin purse, “No, honey, but you come right back, hear?” She looked over toward Short’s Garage and Gas. “The car should be ready soon.”
She watched as her daughter strolled across the lawn to the corner and waited before crossing the dusty brick street. Imogene frowned. Cora had a way of walking that bothered her. It was as if she were wearing spiked heels instead of the flat-soled oxfords. Her hips undulated as she moved from step to step, and her breasts seemed actually to rise and thrust forward. It wasn’t walking, really; it was almost prancing, like a show horse. Watching her from behind and then from one side, Imogene found herself wondering if Cora wore any underwear under her modest, white-and-pink cotton dress. Then she shook her head, passing her hands over her eyes briefly. It was a ridiculous thought. The dress was lovely, that was all. It had been specially made along with a dozen others by the best seamstress in Atlanta. It just looked so very nice in the morning sun, and as Imogene watched her daughter cross the street, she smiled with pride at the beauty of her only child. She would have to do something about that walk when they got to Oregon, she reminded herself.
A 1932 Ford with AGATITE EAGLES printed on the door passed behind Cora, and the two boys in the seat stared at her. They were too old to be boys, Imogene thought, and she started to rise and call to her daughter, but Cora went on her way, swishing her hips a bit too much, and looked back over her shoulder at the Ford with a big, toothy grin. Then, to Imogene’s horror, she winked at the boys. But before they could respond or Imogene could get to her feet, Cora disappeared inside the drugstore.
She’s too much like her father, Imogene thought, scowling at the green courthouse grass, and then tried to relax and lean back on the bench. She wears too much makeup for a girl her age, and she’s always wanting to fix her hair like those trashy movie stars. She wants to be more than she is. But why? She’s already the prettiest girl ever, much prettier than her friends, and naturally pretty. She didn’t have to bleach her hair or pull out her eyebrows the way they did. Imogene smiled when she thought of Cora’s one disastrous attempt to give herself a home permanent. Her hair had turned orange, and she had cried for three days straight. She had been only fourteen then, Imogene remembered, and it had seemed an eternity before her hair all grew out and returned to its natural, golden sheen.
But lately Cora had been talking about cutting her hair again, about possibly dying it dark just to see what it would look like, and she had taken to buying all sorts of cheap perfumes and wearing bright, printed scarves and heavy imitation pearl necklaces and other junk that made her look tacky and—Imogene winced at the thought—of easy virtue. Cora had spent a whole week’s allowance just before Christmas on a dozen peasant blouses, which she started wearing low on her delicate shoulders and would have continued to wear that way if Imogene had not put a stop to it by giving them all away to a charity drive.
Well, there would be none of that in Oregon. There would be no money for extravagant allowances, for one thing. And for another, Imogene had made sure that none of the cheap clothes and perfumes and makeup were packed in their luggage. Aside from whatever Cora carried in her purse, in fact, none of the miserable traits of their past life had come with them. In Oregon things would be better, back to normal, and Harvey would be a distant, unpleasant memory.
Imogene wanted her daughter to have a normal life, to marry, to live a happy and long life with a man she loved—and who loved her, Imogene added quickly—that was the important thing. She didn’t want Cora to fall for the first glad-hander with a pocket full of promise and a mouth full of sorry who came her way. She didn’t want her to become a man-hater either, though, or even to hate Harvey. Not really. She just wanted her to know enough to be careful, not to make the same mistakes Imogene had.
She had mixed feelings about taking Cora out of high school so close to graduation. She would be exempted from final exams in all but two courses—algebra and French—and Imogene had arranged for her to take them by mail under the supervision of a Portland school. The last month of senior year was all parties and fooling around anyway, and while it might be unfair to deprive Cora of those things, it would serve the purpose of keeping her far away from Joe Don Jacobs.
Joe Don was college-bound and a good athlete. He would only break Cora’s heart or, worse, leave her pregnant while he went off with some cheerleader, Imogene thought. Cora had no thought of college, although the McBrides could well afford it and she was smart enough. She had announced that she wanted to go to secretarial school! Well, that was one thing she would not do, Imogene promised herself. Imogene had a few thoughts about secretaries these days.
She sat on the bench patiently, now vaguely uncomfortable in the bright sunlight, and waited for Cora to emerge from the drugstore. Ten minutes went by, then fifteen. That was well nigh long enough for an ice cream cone, Imogene calculated, even if she sat down and read a magazine while she ate it. She was probably lost in one of those cheap, trashy movie fan magazines all drugstores carried.
Imogene wanted to get up and go see what was keeping her daughter, but she had told Luke Short she would be on one of these benches, and she didn’t want him to come looking for her and find her missing. She could go tell Mr. Short that she had gone to look for Cora, but Cora might come back and find her gone and panic.
She began to squirm on the bench, then she rose and walked up and down in front of it. She began to perspire in the sun. She needed a bath, she thought. She hadn’t had one since they were in Baton Rouge.
After they checked into the motor courts, Imogene had patiently waited until Cora settled herself into the room’s bathtub and closed the door. Then she called Harvey. “I’ve left you,” she told him matter-of-factly. “If you want me to come back, you’ve got to give up—you’ve got to stop what you’re doing. Change your life. I can’t live like that anymore.” He had said nothing, but she could hear him breathing, or so she thought, on the other end of the line in Atlanta. “Well?” she finally asked when she had endured all she could of his silence.
“What about Cora?” he answered. She hung up on him. That was that. It was on to Oregon and Mildred’s.
An hour had passed since Cora went in for an ice cream, and Imogene was angry. She could see the Hudson in Luke Short’s garage. He had the hood up and was leaning over the engine compartment. Finally she made up her mind and walked purposefully toward the corner, across Main Street, and into the drugstore. Inside, her eyes had difficulty adjusting to the dimmer light, but when they did, she saw an older man puttering around behind the drug counter. The fountain, the magazine rack, the two booths in the rear of the store, the jukebox, the perfume counter, all stood alone and empty. No one but the man was in the store.
“Excuse me,” Imogene said, and the older man, Pete Hankins, looked up from the prescription he was filling. He had apparently not heard—or had decided to ignore, Imogene said to herself—the bell attached to the door that jingled when she came inside. “I’m looking for my daughter. She just came in here for an ice cream.”
Pete scanned the empty store. “I haven’t seen her, ma’am, but if I do, I’ll send her right home. What’s her name?”
“Cora,” Imogene said automatically, tapping a polished nail on the soda fountain counter and glancing behind to see if her daughter was crouched down, hiding from her and waiting to jump out and shout something silly. “Cora McBride. But you don’t understand. She came in here about an hour ago for an ice cream, and she’s never come out. She must be here someplace.”
“Hasn’t been nobody in here this morning,” Pete said, still concentrating on the pills he counted into a small bottle. “Not since Mrs. Thompson came by for her husband’s medicine. Nope. No kids in here during school hours. Sheriff don’t like that. Now, later this afternoon—”
“No!” she said emphatically. Then she caught her breath and calmed her voice. “You still don’t understand. We’re not from here, from . . . what’s the name of this town?”
“Agatite,” Pete said as if only a complete fool wouldn’t know the name of the town she was in.
“Agatite,” Imogene repeated. She really did feel stupid as well as foolish. “We’re from Georgia. Atlanta. We’re passing through, uh . . . on vacation. Sort of. And our car broke down, and while we’re waiting on it to be fixed at Mr. . . . uh, Short’s garage”—she pointed vaguely out the window—“Cora wanted to come over here for an ice cream.” She waited, studying the stained smock of the druggist. “And she did. But she never came out.”
“Nope.” Pete thoughtfully put a hand up to his red chin and rubbed it. Imogene noted that his face looked scraped raw, as if he had shaved too close. “I ain’t served any ice cream today at all.”
“Well, maybe she didn’t have an ice cream.” Imogene felt herself becoming exasperated with this doddering old fool. “Maybe she had a soda”—Imogene looked around the small store—“or a Coke or a . . . or something else. She only had a nickel, so she couldn’t have bought much of anything other than ice cream.”
Pete looked around, following her gaze at the cheap perfumes and fingernail kits on the counter. “Maybe she changed her mind and went down to Central Drugs,” he offered. “They got ten flavors of ice cream, some with nuts.”
“No.” Imogene forced herself to be patient and to speak slowly so he would understand her. “I said she came in here! I saw her. She never came out. I was sitting over on the lawn there, on a bench.” She pointed again. “The red one. Right in front of this store. And no one has come out since she went in.”
“Nobody come in, neither.” Pete sensed her patronizing air and wanted to let her know his resentment, but he saw something glint in her gray eyes, and he softened his face and came from behind the drug counter, scratching his white hair. “What’s she look like?”
“She’s blond, eighteen, very pretty,” Imogene listed categorically. “She had on a white-and-pink dress and was wearing a pink ribbon in her hair and—oh—” Imogene broke off, realizing that the old fool was humoring her. “Do you have a back door?”
“Sure,” Pete replied, pointing to a small door almost concealed behind the shelves of drugs. “But she ain’t back there.”
“Did she go back there?” Imogene felt a scream trying to take over her vocal cords and forced it away.
“I told you,” Pete said, pulling a pack of Chesterfields out of his stained druggist’s smock and lighting one with a Zippo lighter from one of the displays, “Ain’t nobody been in here since Mrs. Thompson come in about nine-thirty for her husband’s pills.”
Imogene suddenly felt the desire for a cigarette creep all over her. She had quit smoking when Cora was a baby and grabbed a lit cigarette from her mother’s mouth and burned herself. After all these years she shouldn’t still want one, Imogene thought; in fact she hadn’t thought about wanting one until this very moment. She brushed the sensation aside. “May I look?” She nodded toward the small door.
Pete hesitated, she thought, for just a moment. “Sure, go ahead.”
Imogene walked back through the shelves and pushed on the door. It wouldn’t give. It was locked with a sliding bolt she had to stand on tiptoe to reach. Cora could never manage this, she thought. She’s a head shorter than I, especially when I’m wearing heels.
Finally she threw the bolt and pushed the door open. It was black as pitch in the room, but she went on in and fumbled around in the dark until her hand struck a pull-string that turned on a single hooded bulb overhead. The room was stocked with boxes of drugs, fountain materials, bottles of cola syrup, and every other conceivable kind of notion and sundry the store might carry. A sink and toilet were buried under an ordered cascade of cardboard and wooden crates against the wall, and Imogene turned a wrinkle in her nose at the sight of a small puddle of water beneath the rusty porcelain.
She spotted the back door in the center of the rear wall, and she went over and inspected it. It opened to the outside, but she couldn’t get to it because of a stack of large boxes that almost completely blocked it off. She tried to move the biggest of the boxes, but it wouldn’t budge, and she backed off and chewed on a fingernail as she studied the rest of the room. A safety razor and a bar of hand soap were visible in the damp sink well, and a bottle of cheap cologne was stuffed into the torn corner of a box atop the toilet. An open pack of Lucky Strikes rested on a stack of boxes on the wall opposite the sink and commode. It was half empty, she noticed as she picked it up. Once she had caught Cora smoking out in the greenhouse. Was it Lucky Strikes she had? Imogene couldn’t remember.
After a few minutes she came back into the front of the store where Pete was mixing a Coke at the fountain. “You sure you don’t want a Coke or cup of coffee or somethin’?” he asked. “You look kind of peekid.”
“No.” She forced herself into a polite tone once again, “Thank you.” She moved toward him. “I couldn’t open the back door.”
“Nope.” Pete sipped his Coke. “Neither can I. Lock’s busted. Has been for years. The only way to fix it is to put in a new door, jamb and all.” He rose from the stool behind the fountain counter and came around and leaned against the front of the counter. “That’s why them boxes full of magazines and school supplies and stuff are piled up there.” He hesitated, rubbed his raw jaw with one finger, and seemed to calculate. “I figure it’d take two, maybe three good-sized men to move all of them, and the door’s small enough that it’d be too much bother for no more than I keep around here worth stealin’.”
“You have drugs,” Imogene said flatly, surveying the store once again in the incredible hope that she might yet spy the figure of her daughter.
“Oh,” Pete said, sipping his Coke again, “I keep that kind of stuff locked up in a safe. Everybody knows that.”
“Are these yours?” she said quickly, holding up the package of cigarettes.
“Nope,” he replied. “I smoke these.” He fished the pack of Chesterfields out of his smock pocket.
“Are you absolutely certain you didn’t see my daughter when she came in here?” Imogene’s eyes narrowed, focusing to detect a lie. She felt she was an old hand at detecting men’s lies.
“Look, Mrs. . . . uh—”
“McBride!”
“Look, Mrs. McBride, I told you ain’t nobody been in here since Mrs. Thompson came in for—”
“I know!” Imogene screamed suddenly, “For her husband’s goddamn pills!” And she rushed past him and slammed the door behind her, listening to the ring of the door’s tiny bell as she ran out onto the sidewalk.