“Let’s be patient. Them old fools can’t live too much longer, and then we can do whatever we want on our own property,” I told Joyce after the crotchety old couple left.
“Odell! That’s a mean thing to say,” she laughed. “But I hope you’re right.” We both laughed.
I loved spending time with Joyce. She was the most pleasant and kindhearted person I ever met. She tried to accommodate everybody. One Friday evening she was excited about a tent revival she had been looking forward to for weeks. She canceled just so she could babysit one of her coworkers’ three kids. The oldest one was eight and the youngest was five, but they cussed like grown folks and acted like wild savages. That didn’t bother Joyce at all. She still fawned over them like they was little angels. “There is no such thing as a bad child, just bad behavior.” That was what she told me when I offered to break a switch off the pecan tree in our front yard for her to use on them little devils for sneaking into our elderberry wine. I knew she was going to be a good mother to our children, and that was one of the reasons I wanted us to have several.
Joyce had opened up a whole new world for me. She worked with some nice, intelligent people that I enjoyed socializing with because being around them made me want to be smarter. She and her friends read books and magazines and newspapers on a regular basis, so I started doing that too. I thought it would help me speak more proper. But English was such a complicated language, not only was it a struggle for me to understand most of what I was reading, it wasn’t helping me improve my sorry grammar. I was going to keep trying, though, because I wanted my wife to be as proud of me as I was of her.
It was such a joy to wake up each morning with this wonderful woman in my arms. Some mornings I gazed at her as she slept. She looked so serene, and I was going to make sure she stayed that way. On top of all the other things I loved about my wife, she liked to party as much as I did. When we wanted to let our hair down, we picked up a bottle and sat on our front porch with a few of our friends. We wanted to avoid the rowdy jook joints. Especially after a man shot off a gun in one of the ones we used to go to.
Joyce even went fishing with me whenever I wanted to go. But she got tired of that real fast. She didn’t like baiting hooks and waiting for hours at a time for the fish to bite. She didn’t complain when I went by myself, which was what I liked to do on weekends and some weekday evenings after I closed the store at five p.m.
When we had our next backyard barbecue, a week after the last one, it was just me and Joyce. Ten minutes after I fired up the grill, the Copelands came hobbling out to their back porch, looking like they wanted to cuss out the world. “Oh shit!” I said through clenched teeth. Joyce bowed her head and snickered.
“I hope y’all don’t be out here too long with all that damn smoke drifting over here,” Mr. Copeland wheezed. The scowl on his face was so extreme, it looked like he’d been sucking on lemons all day.
“We got asthma,” Mrs. Copeland added, looking just as bitter.
“We won’t be long and I’m sorry about the smoke,” I told them.
“Y’all want a couple of plates?” Joyce asked. “Me and Odell can’t eat a whole slab of ribs by ourselves.”
“Yup. I wish y’all had offered us a plate that last time, too,” Mrs. Copeland snipped. “Just cut it up when it get done and bring it on over here.”
As soon as they went back inside, I looked at Joyce and shook my head. “Baby, you must be a saint. I can’t figure out any other way you can stand to be nice to them mean old fools. I wish I could figure out what I did to deserve you.”
“Just keep being yourself, Odell. That was all you did, and that’s all you’ll ever have to do for me.”
There was no end to my pleasure.
Even with all I had, every now and then I thought about what I didn’t have. Like the petite, beautiful wife I’d been dreaming about all my life. I didn’t let myself think about that woman too often because it was too late, and it didn’t really matter that much now anyway. If anybody had asked, I would have told them that life had blessed me enough to keep me satisfied for the rest of my life.
But I was wrong.
If I had not decided to drive the fifty miles to Hartville that Sunday afternoon the first week in August, or if Joyce had rode shotgun with me, I never would have met the sweet young thing who would send me on a detour I never saw coming.
Chapter 17
Odell
I DIDN’T KNOW NOBODY IN HARTVILLE. I’D BEEN THERE ONLY A FEW times when I was a kid. They had more sugarcane fields than most of the other little towns, so when we would drive through it, Daddy would stop and me and him would sneak into a cane field and grab as many stalks as
