Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [11]
“Come on, y’all, let’s play,” she says.
But the women cannot settle down and concentrate on the game yet. They are still laughing, overflowing with good humor. Mary Lou shuffles the cards endlessly, as though she can never get them exactly right.
——
Mack hardly watches TV anymore, except when the Rookers are there. He sits in his armchair reading. He belongs to a book club. Since Judy went away to college, he has read Shōgun, Rage of Angels, The Clowns of God, and The Covenant. He read parts of Cosmos, which Mary Lou brought him from the library. He does not believe anything he has read in Cosmos. It was not on TV in their part of the country. Now he is struggling along with The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. When he reads that, his face is set in a painful frown.
Mary Lou delivers a gun cabinet to a young couple in a trailer park. How they can afford a gun cabinet, she has no idea. She picks up some sandpaper for Mack. Mack will never make a list. He sends her to town for one or two things at a time. At home, he apologizes for not going on the errand himself. He is rubbing a piece of wood with a rag.
“Look at this,” he says excitedly, showing Mary Lou a sketch of some shelves. “I decided what I want to make Judy for Christmas, for a surprise.”
The sketch is an intricate design with small compartments.
“Judy called while you were gone,” Mack says. “After I talked to her, I got an inspiration. I’m making her this for her dorm room. It’s going to have a place here for her turntable, and slots for records. It’s called a home entertainment center.”
“It’s pretty. What did Judy call for?”
“She’s coming home tomorrow. Her roommate quit school, and Judy’s coming home early to study for her exams next week.”
“What happened to her roommate?”
“She wouldn’t say. She must be in some kind of trouble, though.”
“Is Judy all right?”
“Yeah. After she called, I just got to thinking that I wanted to do something nice for her.” Mack is fitting sandpaper onto his sander, using a screwdriver to roll it in. Suddenly he says, “You wouldn’t go off and leave me, would you?”
“What makes you say that?”
Mack sets down the sander and takes her by the shoulders, then holds her close to him. He smells like turpentine. “You’re always wanting to run around,” he says. “You might get ideas.”
“Don’t worry,” says Mary Lou. “I wouldn’t think of leaving you.” She can’t help adding sarcastically, “You’d starve.”
“You might go off to find Ed.”
“Well, not in that pickup anyway,” she says. “The brakes are bad.”
When he releases her, he looks happy. He turns on the sander and runs it across the piece of wood, moving with the grain. When he turns off the sander and begins rubbing away the fine dust with a tack rag, Mary Lou says, “People were always jealous of Ed. The only reason he ever got in trouble was that people picked on him because he carried so much money around with him. People heard he had money, and when he’d pull into town in that rig he drove, the police would think up some excuse to run him in. People were just jealous. Everything he touched turned to money.”
The way Mack is rubbing the board with the tack rag makes Mary Lou think of Aladdin and his lamp. He rubs and rubs, nodding when she speaks.
—
Judy drives a little Chevette she bought with money she earned working at the Burger Chef. She arrives at suppertime the next day with a pizza and a tote bag of books. Mary Lou serves green beans, corn, and slaw with the pizza. She and Mack hover over their daughter. At their insistence, Judy tries to explain what happened to her roommate.
“Stephanie had a crush on this Western Civ professor and she made it into a big thing. Now her boyfriend is giving her a real hard time. He accused her of running around with the teacher, but she didn’t. Now he’s mad at her, and she just took off to straighten out her head.”
“Did she go back home to her mama and daddy?” Mary Lou asks.
Judy shakes her head no, and her hair flies around like a dust mop being shaken. Mary Lou almost