The Five Strangers, page 13
“I know I do,” Bobby said with a big grin. “Now what can I get for y’all?” he said to Rita and me. Caden and Jelly already had beers in front of them.
“Red wine,” Rita told him.
A little shamefaced, I ordered an unsweetened iced tea. “I’ve got to drive back to Cadbury House in the dark later, and I don’t want to spend the night hung up on a bush. Do you still have those jalapeno poppers?”
“Does the pope have a rosary? Anything else?”
Caden and Jelly wanted Buffalo wings, and Rita wanted veggies and bleu cheese dip.
As Bobby went away to fill our orders, Jelly leaned over the table and said, “Guess who walked in just now? No, don’t look! She’s just over there, looking around for a place to sit, but she’s not going to get a view of the stage now. The place is jammed.”
“If I can’t look, you’re going to have to tell me who it is,” I said. The two younger people had saved the chairs facing the stage for us latecomers, and I had my back to the door.
“It’s Sheila Colson. Who’d’a thunk? And she’s way overdressed for a beachside bar.” Naturally Jelly would have something to say about that.
It made me self-conscious about my own choices, but after quickly reviewing myself, I knew I’d chosen wisely. I was wearing my standard dining-out-near-the-beach outfit, which is a notch or two below resort casual but way above mucking out the kennel. Like Rita, I had on cotton ankle pants and a roomy tee, mine solid yellow and hers floral pink, along with the usual strappy sandals. Jelly’s lack of comment assured us that we’d been appropriate, but not particularly daring.
When I’d first gone to Whitby House to pick her up, Rita and I had also both been wearing big gold hoop earrings and a number of bangle bracelets. We didn’t even have to discuss it. After looking me up and down, she’d quickly changed to long, sparkly, drop earrings and taken off the bangles before throwing on a long chain necklace. Why, I don’t know. It was an instinct we both understood but neither of us could explain, though Jelly probably could.
Turning to see, I agreed with Jelly’s verdict on Sheila: she was dressed for the wedding reception, not a bar with a fish in its name. It made me wonder for a second if she was meeting a blind date, but when she saw me looking her way, she stopped surveying the room and wove her way through the bar in our direction.
“I guess I’ll have to try to find a seat at the bar,” she said, obviously angling for an invitation to join us.
“We’ll find you a chair,” Caden said, gallantly going off to find one while the rest of us made room. He was not about to let Sheila separate him from Jelly, and he ended up placing the chair so that it separated Jelly from me instead.
Bobby was delivering our orders by then, and he quickly took hers.
“Old Fashioned,” she told him. Looking at how busy the bar was, she added, “Better bring two while you’re at it. You might be too busy later. And whatever that is, I’ll have another order.” She was pointing at my jalapeno poppers, and when I told her what they were she asked for other choices and decided on veggies and dip, just like Rita.
As Bobby walked away, Caden set himself out to be at his best. “Aren’t I lucky, having you four ladies all to myself tonight?”
(I made a quick assessment and decided that Jelly might have been hanging out, but Caden was definitely on a date. He had nice manners, but I was pretty sure he’d rather be with one lady rather than four.)
“Well, don’t get too smug. Here’s a little competition for you,” Rita said.
Before Caden could see who she meant, Dusty July in his best stage clothing, courtesy of Girlfriend’s, came up beside him and beamed at all of us.
“Evenin’ boss,” he said to Sheila.
“Hello Dusty,” she said, and I thought I detected what you might call her special voice as she said it.
Good lord, I thought, could this elitist prig actually be falling for a wandering minstrel in used clothing? Because it wasn’t just the voice. It was the eyes and the elegant clasping of the hands on the table, and the lingering way she was gazing up at him.
“Place got full,” he said, looking around and nodding as people recognized him. He was smiling shyly, and as always, his smile was sweet.
“You’re not having a bout of stage fright, are you?” Jelly asked.
“Maybe just a little. But it sure brings back something I haven’t felt in a long, long time. Butterflies,” he said, rubbing his chest. “Good butterflies. Giving me the willies and making me happy, all at the same time.”
He looked at me then. “I feel like it owe it all to you, Miss Taylor. You and your friend Ed, bringing me into town and taking me under your wing. Is there anything in particular you’d like me to play tonight? I can do almost anything country/western or folk.”
The only folk song I could think of was You Are My Sunshine, and I didn’t want that. That one tends to turn into a singalong, and I wanted to hear Dusty, not the whole bar.
I only really knew one country/western song, so I asked for My Beloved.
Sheila stared at me. “I thought you didn’t know that one.”
“I looked it up and listened to it. I liked it. Do you know that one, Dusty?”
“Oh, sure. Yes. I know it.” His butterflies were becoming almost visible now, fluttering around behind his eyes, and I noticed Bobby heading our way.
“You ready?” Bobby asked as he got next to Dusty. “Should I give you an intro?”
“Rules of the house are fine by me, whatever they happen to be,” Dusty told him.
“I’ll go over and get you started,” Bobby said, and the two men walked away, Dusty turning around just before they got to the stage set-up to give us a quick wink.
* * *
Whatever the butterflies were trying to do didn’t hold him back, because Dusty settled himself on a tall stool before the microphone and before he said a word, a benevolent warmth rolled out over the room and we were his. I looked around quickly and saw everyone smiling, like one big happy family waiting for papa to give the Thanksgiving blessing.
His patter was natural and easy, and his thanks for everyone showing up was as genuine as a prayer. He didn’t talk for long before beginning, and his voice and manner were so engaging I found myself filled with contentment and ready to like whatever he was going to do. I couldn’t even tell you what he said. The words didn’t matter. It was the connection that mattered, that magical connection he always seemed to manage with anybody at all.
“And I’ve already had a request,” he told us, causing me to sit up. “So I guess I’m gonna start with that, because I haven’t really made up a song list. We’ll just let the songs come out of me anyway they want to, if y’all don’t mind.”
The crowd consented in murmurs, giggles and stray applause, and Dusty began to strum. His fingers pressed and wandered over the strings as he held the guitar in his arms, creating soft waves of sound in a slow, easy rhythm. His voice was an extra string to the guitar, blending and leading and quavering away in perfect concordance. The song came out of him as if he were telling us secrets he could share only with us, because he knew only we would understand. It was sweet and fresh and sincere, and by the time he finished I was trying to dab my eyes with my napkin discreetly, so nobody would notice.
The applause nearly tore the roof off, and behind the bar, Bobby was startled into standing up straight while the tap overfilled a glass.
Dusty was a star. It hit me hard at that moment, and when the noise in the room had died away to the point that I could make her hear, I told Sheila she might need to look for a new handyman because Dusty had found his destiny.
She looked back at me mistily, and I felt better about having gotten emotional over a silly old song. I might have had to dab the moisture from my eyes, but Sheila had tears on her cheeks.
Chapter 22 – Too Many Old Fashioneds; Too Many Memories
We all had to take a deep breath after that, and Dusty’s next number was a lively one that I recognized as an old folksong I’d heard at the farmer’s market from time to time. The magic of My Beloved melted away, but the warmth around the room remained and got more upbeat.
While I was watching Dusty, I hadn’t paid attention to the goings-on at our table. When I finally did look around, I realized that Sheila had finished her first two Old Fashioneds and was working on a third. Dusty’s voice and charisma had enchanted everyone, but from the weepy-weary look of Sheila when Dusty finally did his encore and took his last bow, the performance had almost laid her out. At the very least, it had brought back memories, and from the look of her, they weren’t all happy ones.
I remembered what Rita had managed to dig up about Sheila’s past, and I sat there for a few minutes weighing the wisdom of bringing up The Foggy Mountaineers. Sober, she was one of the tightest people I’d ever known. Soggy-looking as she was now, I figured questions about the past were either going to bring on sloppy hysteria or a stream of cringeworthy confidences. Maybe both. But I was curious, and at the moment she looked like her guard was down. I decided the way she reacted would be all right with me either way; I had plenty of Kleenex in my purse and the night was young.
I was just about to make my first artless remark and see how it landed when the star of the show popped up tableside with a chair and moved himself in between Rita and me. We pelted him with congratulations, and Rita made the remark that by now, the main act was probably cowering in the dressing room, wondering whether to take the stage or just go home.
“Oh, Randy’s a local favorite,” Dusty said. “He’ll do fine, and he’s got a cute little lady with him who’s going to keep the men happy even if Randy doesn’t.”
“You know him?” I asked.
“I do now,” he declared. “Why thank you, boss,” he said as Bobby came over from the bar and set a beer in front of him.
Bobby was looking very juiced, and definitely more interested in Dusty now that he’d been a smash hit with the patrons. “You free tomorrow night?” he asked.
“Well, yeah,” Dusty responded as if he were surprised. “You mean you want me back?”
“Brother, if you want to move in and call yourself at home it’s all right with me.” The little witticism seemed to make Bobby stop and think. “You’re new in town, aren’t you? Where you stayin’?”
“Here and there. Are you offering me a place to sleep as long as I mop up and don’t invite my friends over?”
Bobby thought about it for all of a split-second. “Ever work security?”
“Boss, I’ve done any kind of work you can think of that didn’t require either a doctorate or a rich daddy.”
“That room at the back we’ve got the nerve to call the dressing room look all right to you? If you’ll keep an eye on the place while you’re here, I think we can work something out. Come back to the office after closing and we’ll talk about it.”
I marveled at the way people instinctively trusted Dusty, but had to admit that I’d succumbed myself. And it was obvious from looking at the bar itself that there was a way to secure the liquids after hours by pulling down a rolling, locking barrier. But still . . . .
After Bobby walked away, Dusty turned to me and asked how I’d liked the job he’d done on my song.
I didn’t get the chance to answer.
I’d been about to tell him that actually, I’d asked for the song for Sheila’s sake, because it was the only C/W song I could think of and she’d already told me it was a favorite, but she cut in and told him herself.
He looked to her for approval, and she almost crawled over me and curled up in his lap.
* * *
Sheila proceeded to shock the heck out of me, at least, by spilling it out immediately that she’d been married to the bass player of The Foggy Mountaineers, he’d been a bastard (et cetera, et cetera), he’d taken all their money and left her, and many other details that had us all blinking and cringing. And she wept. After a while, I just took my packet of Kleenex out of my purse and left it on the table in front of her.
She mentioned that she wanted another Old Fashioned and then forgot about it. Nobody reminded her.
“You’re just a kid,” she suddenly said across the table at Caden, as if he’d offended her somehow. “You wouldn’t remember any of this, or that song, either.”
“Oh, I love that song,” he said. “I remember it well. But I was surprised when you requested it, Taylor.”
I opened my mouth to explain where I’d first heard of it, but again, my input wasn’t required. Sheila, alone among strangers and practically talking to herself now, went off about how much the song had always meant to her, which was why she incorporated Beloved in the name of her shop (et cetera, et cetera).
“It doesn’t remind me of him,” she said without naming the bastard again, but we’d already learned from her that his name had been Grady Grissom. Making her Sheila Grissom, at least for a while there. Sheila Colson, I decided, was much more elegant, and completely free of the fragrance of moonshine.
“It was the other that made it special,” she said, mooning off into silence the way drunks sometimes do.
We waited, heads moving ever so slightly toward her, but nothing else seemed to be forthcoming.
“Other what?” Jelly asked.
“Emerson,” Sheila said in a reverent whisper, barely audible above the noise in the bar. “Emerson Fogg. As good a man as was ever born. I want you to know that I always felt a deep and abiding love. But in a good way, you know?”
“There is no bad way to love,” Dusty told her, without addressing the question of why we all needed to know about her abiding love.
“Oh, yes there is,” Sheila said in a dire voice. “I know. I was married to a real bastard, after all. Some boundaries you just don’t cross. Unless you’re a bastard. Don’t tell me there’s no such thing as bad love.”
I was about to guess that she meant swapping partners among bandmates, right?, but she cut me off again, suddenly reanimating and becoming declarative, rather than just rambling drunkenly.
“Do you know what that man did?” she asked defiantly.
“Which man?” I said.
She wasn’t listening.
“After she left him flat and run off with that hornswoggling two-timing son-of-a-”
“Wait!” I said. “Are we still talking about Emerson Foggy?”
“Fogg!” she yelled at me. “Emerson Fogg. Have some respect for a good man’s name. Do you know what he did then?”
Getting close to losing track, or even bare comprehension, we all chanted No.
“He took her back. That’s what he did. After that bastard went ahead and left her.”
Getting it all straight, (and looking far too gleeful), Jelly said, “Wait – first the bastard left you and then he left her, too? The one he’d run away with in the first place?”
“That’s exactly what he did, and do you know why?”
We shook our heads.
“Because she got sick, that’s why. She got cancer. She was dying, and the treatment was going to cost all the money he had – excuse me, all the money he stole – and he wasn’t about to blow it all on chemo, so he left her flat. Flat and dying. And then . . . and then he took her back and stayed with her to the end.”
“The bastard?” Caden asked.
“I think she’s talking about Emerson Fogg again,” I said.
Everyone told me No, she’s not.
“Yes I am!” Sheila cried. “Aren’t you listening? Emerson took her back, after she’d run out on him, that’s the kind of man he is. Took her back and tried to nurse her back to health, but she died anyway.”
We were running out of Kleenex and I didn’t care, but Bobby came up behind Dusty and murmured something, passing over a stack of napkins and looking uneasily at Sheila.
“Bartender, another Old Fashioned,” Sheila said to him, as Dusty looked up directly at Bobby and shook his head. “Right,” Bobby murmured without specifying what was right, but as it turned out, no more Old Fashioned appeared. Dusty murmured back to Bobby, and whatever it was settled things. Bobby nodded and walked away.
“I think,” Caden said, carefully interpreting, “what Sheila is saying is this. That her ex-husband, this Grady Grissom, ran away with Mr. Fogg’s wife. But then Mrs. Fogg developed cancer and Mr. Grissom left her. And then Mr. Fogg took his wife back and took care of her until she finally died.”
He looked to Sheila for agreement, and she sobbed, “Chrissy!”
Taking a guess, Caden said, “And Mrs. Fogg’s name was Chrissy.”
“Of course it was,” Sheila said, losing some of her passion as she suddenly looked exhausted.
“Your ex-husband dumped this lady when he found out she was sick?” I commented. “A man like that is no great loss, Sheila.”
“I haven’t lost him yet, but I’m about to.”
Once again, I found I needed an interpreter. I looked across the table at Caden, but he just shook his head and murmured, “Sorry, I’m lost again.”
Jelly, much more adept at trashy drama than the rest of us, understood completely.
“You never divorced him,” she said. “Legally, you’re still this hornswoggling bastard’s wife.”
“I’ve got the legal standing to get back from him what’s legally mine,” she said. “But I need to get shot of him. I’m – I’m moving on. You know, with my shop and all.”
“Well, I should think so,” I said. “And as for what’s legally yours, you should let a divorce settlement put that in writing. She can divorce him in absentia, can’t she?” I asked the table at large.
There were no lawyers present, and I got nothing but blank looks, but I reminded myself that I had a lawyer at home. I made a mental note to ask Michael about it. I wasn’t eager to do Sheila any favors with free legal advice, after the way she’d shoved Abraham off the table at Girlfriend’s. I was just curious.
As I’d looked around the table for an answer, I’d seen a look in Rita’s eye. It clearly said, “Later, girlfriend.” I just nodded. If it was more of Sheila’s backstory that Rita had managed to dig up, I wasn’t quite ready for it yet. The tragic story of her married life had been enough to digest on nothing but iced tea and jalapeno poppers.
