Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [29]
Her hair was, how to put this? If not orange, then orange-like, sort of a bonfire color. Melissa’s cousin turned out to be a short, sturdy woman in her early fifties, with a doughy though pleasant face, smooth, rosy cheeks, and Wedgewood-blue eyes that were happy, direct, and shrewd. They met at the India Palace restaurant near Bragg—Rhee’s suggestion, Melissa had never had Indian food but the duskiness of the place seemed suitably exotic. The twangy sitar music on the sound system reminded her of cats in heat.
“Oh honey,” Rhee exclaimed, clamping Melissa in an eye-popping hug, “I am so glad to see you. And just look at you! My God what a gorgeous woman you’ve grown into!” Hearing her cousin’s weirdly familiar mile-a-minute voice Melissa at once felt the undertow of family relations. She dearly loved her family, but after a couple of hours in Lumberton she always felt herself smothering under the ties that bind, all that tightly wound energy compacting on itself like a rubber band ball.
As she followed Rhee through the buffet line Melissa considered her cousin’s history, how she’d led a life of exemplary conformity until a falling kitchen light fixture knocked her cold. After that she began acting odd, the oddness consisting, so far as Melissa had gathered, of exercising, backtalking her husband, and learning to play the drums, as well as casually mentioning to family members that she could now channel signals from the other side. Eventually she left her husband and moved to Fayetteville, where to the horror of her kin she set up shop as a psychic. One of the more successful, by all accounts: word drifted back that she was much in demand among private detectives and desperate families, and that her services were not unknown to various law enforcement agencies.
Out of nervousness Melissa loaded her plate, while Rhee took only flat bread and rice. In line they talked about their hometown kin; Melissa felt herself reverting to the mumbly torpor that family always seemed to inspire, but after they’d settled themselves in a booth and unrolled their flatware, Rhee said:
“So you got out. Congratulations.”
Melissa sat up; it was like a needle in the spine.
“And you did it while you’re young,” Rhee went on cheerfully, “see how smart you are? Whereas it took me forty years and a whack on the head to realize Lumberton was going to be the death of me. Genius is wisdom plus youth, you know who said that? Me neither but I’m sure no genius, I blew half my life doing what everybody expected me to. We have to live our own lives and that’s what you’re doing, I’m just so proud of you! Now tell me about yourself.”
Melissa gave the expanded résumé version—home, marriage, work—while Rhee ate her rice and bread in dainty garden-club bites, a style imprint from her previous life. Melissa heard herself describing Dirk as “a wonderful guy”; children were covered by alluding to the thinking-about-it stage. She was conscious of Rhee listening with a level of attention that was gratifying, and at the same time unnerving. She seemed to absorb everything, but behind that sunny, dumpling-textured face you had no idea what the woman was thinking.
“It sounds like you’ve done just wonderfully for yourself,” Rhee observed when Melissa ran out of things to say.
“I’ve been lucky.”
“Yes, lucky.” Rhee’s smile was wry, and a little distant, as if an old boyfriend’s name had come up. “And I trust you’re happy, Melissa. Because that’s what I want for you.”
“Well,” Melissa gave a weak laugh, “mostly?” Rhee sat there pleasantly, patiently, like a sales clerk waiting for money; after several moments Melissa realized that her cousin wasn’t going to break the silence, so there was nothing left to do but spill it.
“You know,” the older woman remarked after Melissa had told her about Erzulie and Dirk, “it never ceases to amaze me.”
“It doesn’t?”
“And yet it happens all the time, this strange and wonderful way of the world which brings a thing and its polar opposite together. Think about it,