Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [122]
Pearl turns around. “I’ll be counting on you for advice.”
“Oh, I have plenty of it.”
“What about me?” Fleeta asks. “I done blowed out three babies, and Pavis—he was a back birth—snapped my tailbone like a cracker on his way out. I got me a lot of advice to give, ’specially about the birthing itself.”
“I’ll need your advice too, Fleets.” Pearl goes into the kitchen.
“Pavis really broke your tailbone?”
“Yeah, and that was a goddamn omen. That boy never give me nothin’ but trouble and heartache and pain, both of the physical and of the mental variety. First he stepped on my tailbone, then on my feet—you know, when he was a-crawlin’—and then when he went to prison, he done stepped on my heart.”
“You ever hear from him?”
“When he gets a phone day.”
Fleeta pulls out another box of greeting cards from under the folding table. “This here sidewalk sale is already a bust,” Fleeta tells me, sorting through the cards like they’re junk.
“You have a bad attitude.”
“If it was a good idea, every vendor on the street’d have one. You don’t see Mike’s Department Store hauling out the Agg-ner leather goods, or Zackie putting out the Wranglers. But we have to make a show peddling crap nobody bought all year.”
“What is your problem?”
At first Fleeta looks as though she may bite my head off because I dared to snap back at her, but then she softens and says quietly, “Doc Daugherty told me I have to quit smoking.”
“Did he find something?”
“He saw a spot on an X ray, said it weren’t nothin’ now, but if I didn’t quit the smokes, it would turn to the emphysema. And I’m mighty pissed about it.”
“God, Fleeta. It’s simple. You have to stop smoking.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“Don’t you understand you’d have three dead customers by breakfast if I couldn’t smoke?”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t? My nerves is so bad that I shake most days. I need ’em, and I told Doc that.”
“What did he say?”
“He tole me he understood but he didn’t want me gittin’ the emphysema, neither. He tole me to quit gradual. Keep cutting back till I’m down to one a day.”
“You think you can handle that?”
“I’m not gonna be easy to be around.” Fleeta takes an envelope and goes inside to get change.
Spec, Otto, and Worley are sitting at the counter in the soda fountain eating the lunch special: soup beans and corn bread, with a side of fried apples. Spec has a lit cigarette resting on a saucer. I put out the cigarette on my way to the coffee pot.
“Hey, what’d you do that fer?” Spec bellows. He adjusts the captain’s bars on his pressed khaki shirt. His legs are too long for the stools, so he has them slung to the side like railroad ties. Spec has taken to putting gel in his thick white hair. The sides are so shiny and close to his head, he actually reminds me of the great George Jones, who is as famous for his coiffure as for his singing.
“You need to set an example for Fleeta. She needs to quit.”
“Since when is Fleeta Mullins my problem?”
“Since she went to the doctor and he told her to quit.”
“Jesus, Ave. I got enough on my plate. Don’t make me Surgeon General of Wise County too.” Spec adjusts his glasses and fishes for his pack of cigarettes. I stop him.
“You’re in here every day for lunch. She needs your support. Thank you.”
I pour myself a cup of coffee, and freshen Otto’s while I’m at it.
“I can stand up for my own damn self,” Fleeta announces from the floor. “I don’t need the support of any of y’all.”
“Aw, Fleeta, relax.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Otto Olinger. Just ’cause you is president of the Where