Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [105]
I am sitting in the living room with Aunt Alice. Ethel gave her an upsweep with tendrils worthy of the great Loretta Lynn at the Grand Old Opry. She even wears a little lipstick. There’s a rap on the door; it’s Spec.
“My wife done made you a cobbler, Alice. How do you like rhubarb?” he asks.
“Thank ’er for me. I love it,” Alice says.
“So how are we doin’, girls?” Spec says as he sits down.
“Fine,” I tell him.
“Alice, I done want to run somethin’ by ye.”
“Yeah?”
“Bobby’s outside.”
“My Bobby?”
“Yes ma’am. Yer son. I went over to Kingsport and fetched him. Now, number one: he’s sober. Number two: he feels like a shit-heel for not gittin’ over here sooner. Number three: I don’t have a number three. He just wants to talk to ye. Are ye up fer it?”
Alice nods that she is.
Spec doesn’t move from his seat, he simply shouts. “Bobby, git in here.”
Bobby Lambert, forty-six years old, comes in the door. He is short like Alice but has his father’s face, long and hangdog, with eyes that droop in the corners, a wide mouth, low ears, and a shock of thick hair that hangs down the center of his forehead in one curl. He is thin and has the purple-veined nose of a drinker. He’s very nervous and shifts from one foot to the other. He is wearing his best clothes, but the cotton button-down shirt is yellowed, and the hems of his pants are frayed where they rest against the top of his shoes. His fourth wife must have left him.
“Hey, Mama,” he says, holding on to either side of the doorframe.
“Git over here and hug yer mama’s neck!” she says with a bass tone to her voice I’ve never heard before.
Then Bobby starts talking so fast it’s as though he’s conducting an auction. He’s dazzling his mother with information, about this deal and that deal and this new car he got and how the transmission’s the best and what kind of leather seats take the heat and which ones don’t, and I look at Spec and he looks at me and we’re thinking the same thing: this guy is a first-class huckster.
But Aunt Alice loves it. And him. This is her only son, and she loves everything about him. Her eyes travel over his face as though she has found a precious jewel that throws back her own reflection. She doesn’t let go of his face, she is so madly in love with it. And she just nods as he drones on. Soon he’s kneeling, and the picture of that, of a son at the feet of his mother, begging for her forgiveness without asking for it, is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. No matter what Bobby would ever do, she would forgive him. No matter what, he would always have a place here, and the only reason he didn’t was his own shame. Now that he sees that his mother still loves him and always will, he can stay. And he will, until the very end.
In just three days, Alice Lambert goes to bed for good. Fleeta helps me get her to the bed. She thinks Alice didn’t digest Annie Hunter’s apple dumplings too well and that’s why she’s taken the turn. I tell Fleeta that it isn’t anything that Alice has eaten, it’s the cancer. Cancer is very strange; it grips a patient, and then it seems to go, then it can rage back like a fever and take you. This is what has happened to Alice. Bobby helps with the sheets, smoothing them under Alice as we turn her. I tell Fleeta to run and call Doc Daugherty.
Bobby sits on the corner of the bed and holds his mother’s hand. I see in his face all the things I went through when my mother passed. The great sorrow of being separated from the one who brought you, the guilt at not doing enough for her (there is never enough we can do for our mothers), and the desperate hope that the pain will be minimal. He is trying not to cry, for her sake.
“Bobby, hon, I need me a minute with Ava.” I decide to let it go. She has always mispronounced my name and that’s that. Bobby looks at me kindly and leaves the room.
“Yes, Aunt Alice?”
“Do you know why I came to your boy’s funeral?”
“No ma’am.”
“ ’Cause I lost a son too.”
I’m confused, and I look at Alice quizzically.
“Not Bobby. Calvin. Calvin died at four