The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

Chapter 7





The night before Big Earl’s funeral, Barbara Jean dreamed that she and Lester were walking along a rutted dirt road on a cool

fall day. They exhaled clouds of white mist while rust, yellow, and brown leaves floated around them in a circle, as if they were

at the center of a cyclone. Because of the storm of leaves, Barbara Jean was just barely able to make out the path ahead of them.

She held Lester’s arm tight to keep from twisting her ankle in the tire tracks embedded in the road. Even in her dreams, she

always wore heels.

After a time, the leaf storm around them thinned enough to reveal a river ahead. On the opposite shore, a small boy waved. Then,

just as they lifted their hands to wave back, a woman in a silvery, iridescent gown appeared, hovering in the air above their

heads. The woman said, “Lester, the water is frozen. Just walk on over and get him. He’s waiting.” But it was November or

December in the dream and the river was clearly only half frozen. Barbara Jean could see the bubbling and churning current just

beneath the brittle surface of the ice. She dug her fingers into the rough cloth of her husband’s winter coat to keep him from

going out onto the river. As Lester’s sleeve escaped her grasp, Barbara Jean woke up with her pulse racing and both of her arms

reaching out for Lester.

She’d had that dream, or one nearly identical to it, for years. Sometimes it was spring or summer in the dream and, instead of a

dangerously thin layer of ice, it was a decrepit rope bridge with rotted wooden slats that spanned the water. But she always

dreamed of the same road, the dirt trail that had once formed the western border of Leaning Tree. It had been paved ages ago, or

so Barbara Jean had been told. She hadn’t gone near it in years. She always dreamed of the same waving boy, her lost Adam. The

woman in the air also never varied. It was always her mother.

Barbara Jean awakened from her dream with a sore back from being curled up for hours on one of the two Chippendale wingback chairs

that sat by the fireplace in the library of her home. The chairs had been reupholstered, at frightful expense, with burgundy

crushed-velvet fabric adorned with a fleur-de-lis pattern that matched the design of the library’s hand-painted wallpaper. Every

spring at the Plainview Home and Garden Walk, people made a big fuss over those chairs, and Barbara Jean loved them. But they were

hell on her lower back if she sat in them for too long a time.

Barbara Jean and Lester’s house stood at the intersection of Plainview Avenue and Main Street. A three-story Queen Anne giant

with a turret at its northeast corner and six separate porches, it had once been called Ballard House, and still was by most of

the inhabitants of Plainview over the age of fifty. It was built in 1870 by a local thief named Alfred Ballard who looted some of

the best homes in the vanquished South during the Civil War and returned to Plainview a rich man. Mr. Ballard’s descendants

lacked his business sense and his ruthlessness. They failed to add to their fortune, wasted the money Ballard had left them, and

eventually lost the house to the tax man. In 1969, after he expanded his lawn care business to Kentucky and got a contract to tend

all of the state-owned properties in the northern half of the state, Lester bought Ballard House for his young wife and their son,

Adam. It was a gutted, falling-down mess at the time, and although she loved the house, Barbara Jean had no clue what needed to be

done to put it back together. Clarice, though, had been raised by her mother with the assumption that she would one day oversee a

grand home. So Barbara Jean turned every decision in the renovation process over to her friend. Barbara Jean stood back and

watched as Clarice transformed her massive shell of a house into the kind of showplace Clarice would have lived in if fate, in the

form of a three-hundred-pound, corn-fed Wisconsin linebacker with blood in his eye, hadn’t stepped in and transformed Richmond

from a potential NFL legend into a recruiter at a university whose football glory days were long past. Out of respect for her

friend, Clarice never accepted a bit of credit for her hard work. Instead, she patiently tutored Barbara Jean, teaching her

everything she knew about art, antiques, and architecture. Between the practical experience Barbara Jean gained from tending to

the needs of her extravagant old home and from Clarice’s guidance, she eventually surpassed her instructor’s level of expertise.

When she stood from the antique chair to stretch her lower back, Barbara Jean’s Bible tumbled to the floor. After she’d had

dinner with Lester, counted out his pills, and put him to bed, the evening had become a blur. She didn’t recall that she’d been

reading the Bible before she fell asleep. It made sense, though. She tended to drag out the Good Book when she was in a dark mood,

and the shadows had closed in around her that night, for sure.

Clarice had given Barbara Jean that Bible in 1977, just after Adam died. Lester had become frightened when his wife stopped

speaking and eating and then refused to come out of Adam’s room, so he called in Odette and Clarice. They got right to work, each

of her friends administering the cures they trusted most. Odette mothered her, cooking wonderful-smelling meals which she fed to

her by hand on the worst days. And, during the long hours she spent sitting in bed beside Barbara Jean while her friend cried onto

her broad bosom, brave Odette whispered into Barbara Jean’s ear that now was the time to be fearless.

Clarice came brandishing a brown suede-covered Bible. It was embossed with Barbara Jean’s name in gold letters on its front cover

and had “Salvation = Calvary Baptist Church” printed on the back. For weeks, Clarice read to her about the trials of Job and

reminded her that the fifth Chapter of Matthew promised “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

But both of Barbara Jean’s friends had come bearing medicine for the wrong illness. More than courage or piety, what she needed,

what she would scour Clarice’s Bible forwards and backwards searching for over the many years that followed, was a clue as to how

to get out from under the boulder of guilt that rested on her chest and forced the breath out of her. Well intentioned as it was,

Clarice’s gift just armed Barbara Jean with a long list of good reasons to be seriously pissed off at God while the weight of her

guilt ground her into powder.

Barbara Jean was finally able to leave Adam’s room after she and God came to an understanding. She would continue to smile and

nod through services every week at First Baptist just as she always had, and she wouldn’t call Him out for being as demanding and

capricious as the worst two-year-old child, ready at any moment to reach out with his greedy hands and snatch whatever shone

brightest. In exchange for this consideration, Barbara Jean asked only that God leave her alone. For decades, the pact worked out

fine. Then, with Big Earl’s sudden passing, God reminded Barbara Jean of who He was. Bringer of death, master comedian, lightning

bearer. He made it clear to her that He had no intentions of honoring the terms of their truce.

Barbara Jean put the Bible on the eighteenth-century candle table next to her chair and walked to the mirror above the fireplace

to inspect herself. She didn’t look too bad—a little puffy, but nothing some time with an ice pack wouldn’t take care of. Also,

the sun wasn’t up yet, so she still had time to get a little rest to ensure she would look good for Big Earl. And she was

determined to say goodbye to her friend looking her very best.

She had laid out her outfit for Big Earl’s service earlier that evening, before heading into the library. Out of respect, she

would wear a black dress. But she chose magenta shoes, a matching belt, and a white hat with clusters of red and black leather

roses around its wide brim to go with it. The little black dress was cut well above the knee and had a tiny slit on the right

seam. Clarice would hate it and would have to bite her tongue to keep from saying so. But Barbara Jean wasn’t wearing it for

Clarice. She was wearing it for Big Earl.

When she was a teenager and was ashamed of having to wear her mother’s flashy, trashy hand-me-downs, Big Earl made a point of

telling Barbara Jean that she looked pretty every time he saw her. Not in a dirty old man way or anything. He would just smile at

her and say, “You look divine today,” in a way that made her feel as if she were wearing haute couture. Or he would see her come

into the restaurant in one of her mother’s shiny, too-short skirts and he’d turn to Miss Thelma and say, “Don’t Barbara Jean

look exactly like a flower.” Anywhere else in town, she might have been dirt, but inside the walls of the All-You-Can-Eat, she

was a flower.

Long after Barbara Jean had choices and knew better, she would occasionally pick one of the brightest and the tightest from her

closet and sashay into the All-You-Can-Eat on a Sunday afternoon just to give Big Earl a reason to grin and slap his knee and say,

“That’s my girl.” On those days, she left the All-You-Can-Eat feeling twenty years younger than when she’d walked in. So, for

Big Earl she was going to squeeze into a black dress she wouldn’t be able to take more than a shallow breath in and she was going

to look damn good in it, or die trying.

Barbara Jean knew she should get to bed, but she didn’t feel sleepy, just a little woozy still from the vodka. She didn’t

remember getting the bottle from the liquor cabinet, but there it was on the table next to the Bible. That was her pattern. When

her mind was too full of thoughts—usually about the old days, her mother or her son—she would reach for either the Bible or the

bottle and end up with both in her lap before the night was over. She would sit in one of her burgundy chairs and drink vodka from

one of the antique demitasse cups Clarice had found for the house. She sipped and read until the memories went away.

Barbara Jean always drank vodka, partly because whiskey had been her mother’s drink and she swore she’d never touch it. Also,

vodka was safe because people couldn’t smell it on you. If you stuck to vodka and you knew how to control yourself, nobody talked

trash about you, no matter how many times you filled your demitasse cup.

She put the cap back on the vodka bottle and returned it to the liquor cabinet. Then she took her cup and saucer to the kitchen

and left them on the counter for the maid to deal with in the morning. When she returned to the library to turn out the lights,

she contemplated reopening that troublesome Bible. She was in just that kind of mood, and it wouldn’t take long. After a few

vodkas, Barbara Jean’s form of Bible study was to close her eyes, open the book on her lap, and let her index finger fall onto

the open page. Then she would read whatever verse was nearest the tip of her nail. She had done this for years, telling herself

that one day she would land on just the right thing to turn on some light inside her head. But, mostly, she spent countless nights

learning who begat whom and reading of the endless, seemingly random smitings the Bible specialized in.

She thought about the day to come and decided to go on up to bed. Rather than disturb Lester, who was a light sleeper, she would

lie down in one of the guest rooms. If he asked in the morning why she hadn’t come to bed, she would tell him that she had gone

straight to the guest room after staying up late to pick out her outfit for Big Earl. If she looked well rested enough, maybe he

wouldn’t suspect that she had spent yet another night in the library drinking and stocking up on ammunition for her ongoing

battle with God.

Barbara Jean removed her shoes before she left the library so the sound of her steps wouldn’t create a racket as she crossed the

herringbone parquet floor of the grand foyer. She climbed the stairs slowly and carefully, recalling one of her mother’s warnings

about the missteps that could prevent Barbara Jean from accessing the better, more respectable life that Loretta had been cheated

out of. Loretta had said that if a woman fell down the stairs, people would always gossip that either she was a drunk or her man

beat her. And you couldn’t have them saying either thing about you if you wanted to get chummy with the type of folks who could

actually do something for you. That was the way Loretta had divided up the world, into those who could or could not do something

for her. And she spent most of her life designing plots to wrest the things she wanted from the people who she believed possessed

them. In the end, it did her no good.

In her stocking feet, Barbara Jean crept along the second-floor hallway of her house. She tiptoed past the bedroom she shared with

Lester. Then she passed by the guest rooms. The door to Adam’s room drew her to it as surely as if it had stretched out a pair of

arms and pulled her into its embrace. She opened the door and stared into the room at the familiar low shelves crammed with out-

of-date toys, the small desk strewn with faded crayon drawings, the miniature chair with a pale green sweater slung over it as if

its owner might dash into the room at any second to retrieve it. Everywhere she looked there were things that she had sworn to her

friends she had thrown away or given away decades earlier. She knew she shouldn’t go into this room; it did her no good. But she

still had a stagger in her step from the vodka. And she comforted herself with the knowledge that, in the morning, she probably

wouldn’t recall experiencing the ache in her soul and the fire in her brain that always led her to this same place.

Barbara Jean stepped inside and shut the door. She curled up on the short bed, atop cowboys and Indians on horseback engaged in

endless pursuit of each other across the comforter. She closed her eyes—not to sleep, she told herself—just to rest and gather

her thoughts before going to one of the guest rooms for the few remaining hours of the night. Moments later, Barbara Jean was on

that dirt road again, clutching her husband’s arm while her shimmering mother floated above their heads whispering, “He’s

waiting.”