Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [110]
“Spec, now you listen here. I ain’t sharin’ you with no goddamn whore. You got to choose. You choose me or her. Now that’s that. I didn’t give up my goddamn life since the age of goddamn fifteen to get to this point and be by my goddamn self. If you wanted out, you should’ve gotten out when I could still get me out there and find me another man. Who is gonna want me at sixty-four? You might as well set me on farr right here, right now in this room, and watch me burn. Now that’s the goddamn truth.”
The barrage keeps me in the hallway. Soon I hear the sound of soft sneakers on linoleum.
“Hi, Leola.”
“Hey, A-vuh.”
Leola has a yellow bouffant hairdo and big Oscar de la Renta glasses. Her face is small, so the glasses cover most of it. She has an unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. She is tiny, and you can see the remnants of a great figure from her youth. She was always busty, but now she’s low-busty. She wears tight pink stirrup pants that pick up the pink letters on her oversize sweatshirt, which reads MYRTLE BEACH MAMA.
“Are you okay?”
“I need a smoke. Nice balloons.” Leola walks up the hallway.
Spec is lying in the bed attached to tubes of all kinds. He’s wearing his sunglasses, which I think is weird.
“Hey, Spec. I heard it went great.”
Spec holds up five fingers.
“I heard. Quintuple. Well, might as well unclog all the pipes while the doctor’s in there.”
Spec nods. “Doc Turner split my breastbone in two with an ax. He’s a fine surgeon. The scar is vurry thin, but it’s right long.” Then he whispers, “Is she gone?”
“Leola?”
He nods.
“She went for a smoke.”
“I got caught,” he says quietly, rolling his head back into the groove of the pillow.
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Twyla was over here last night. She come to see me.”
“Oh no.”
“And I got caught.”
For years, Spec has led a double life, seeing Twyla Johnson, his off-and-on girlfriend, while married to Leola, the mother of his five children. Twyla works at the Farmers and Miners Bank down in Pennington. She’s a petite brunette with a gorgeous smile and lots of time on her hands (bank hours are ten to three). She’s probably sixty now, still a young thing to old Spec.
“I’m sure Leola thinks she saw more than she saw. Didn’t she?”
“No, she pert near saw it all.”
“Well, what did she see?”
Spec won’t say.
I press him. “Did Twyla kiss you or something?”
“No.”
“Was she holding your hand?”
“Not my hand.”
“Oh no.”
“Yeah, she was, well, you know what she was doing. It’s been a vurry vurry stressful time for me. Vurry much so. And Twyla come all this way, and frankly, she wanted to make me feel good.”
“Oh, Spec.”
“I know. It’s like your worst nightmare. It’s like your mother catchin’ ye, for Godsakes. It could turn you off entirely. You know what I’m sayin’.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I mean. Is it so wrong? Is comfort so wrong? I mean, let’s say I was about to die in here, which I was, they practically spelled it out, I mean, I was a goner. Every damn avenue to my heart was clogged, Ave. It was dirt nap, Good Night, Irene, and kiss-your-ass-good-bye time. And if I had my pick of ways to spend my last moments, it sure weren’t gonna be with my sorry kids and my hateful wife gaping at me like a carp in a fish tank. I wanted my Twyla.” Spec sounds pitiful.
“Well, what’s gonna happen now?” I sit down on the bed. The movement jostles the cloudy tubes connecting in and out of him like overpasses on Appalachia Strait.
“That remains to be seen. Leola’s not left the room since. Poor Twyla burst into tears and run out of here. I ain’t seen her since. She ain’t called, neither.”
“She’s probably afraid.”
“It’s just a mess.”
“Yes, it is.”
“What ought I do?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want out of this hospital. And then I want to be happy.”
“Who makes