Caveat Emptor and Other Stories Read online

  Beryl rose with the menace of a summer squall. “That’s quite enough, Sylvie. Give your father his bath, then remain in your room until I call for you.”

  “Now, Beryl,” said Estelle, “it isn’t like this was submitted to the committee at the county fair. All of us have substituted ingredients on occasion, although I can tell you molasses and Karo syrup just don’t—”

  “Shall we go outside?” Beryl said coldly.

  Ruby Bee could tell it was not the moment to broach the most delicate topic of ginger versus an extra pinch of cinnamon. “It isn’t that bad,” she said to Sylvie, who was hovering in the doorway with a very peculiar look on her face. “The crust is very flaky and light, and nicely browned. Sometimes, mine are so soggy I feel like I plucked ’em out of a swamp.”

  Sylvie stared at her mother. “If I’d known we were expecting company, I would have tried more honey.”

  “Be sure to give your father’s back a good scrub,” Beryl said. She went across the kitchen, picked up a plastic bottle, and squirted cream into her palm. “I never go outside without a good slathering of sunscreen. We can’t be too careful about skin cancer, can we?” Without waiting for a response, she began to apply it to her face, neck, and bare forearms.

  Ruby Bee gave Estelle a hard look, then said, “We can’t stay for long, Beryl. I’m supposed to be open for lunch, and I believe Estelle has an appointment before too long.”

  “That’s right,” Estelle said brightly. “Elsie McMay gets mighty testy if I keep her waiting for so much as a butterfly’s flitter. We’ll just take a quick gander at your garden and be on our way.”

  Beryl finished rubbing the lotion onto her skin. “Sylvie, you get busy with your duties. Tell your father I’ll be in to see to his lunch after I’ve cut back the verbena. There are times when it feels like I’m the only person in this family able to take responsibility. You might as well have made that pie with green persimmons.”

  Ruby Bee gazed longingly at her car as they went outside. In a few minutes, she assured herself, she and Estelle could bounce down the driveway and turn on County 103. Not even the most delectable apple pie this side of heaven could warrant putting up with Beryl Blanchard and her mean-spirited tongue. The pie might have needed more honey, but Beryl needed an infusion.

  Buck was seated in his wheelchair on the far corner of the porch. “Leaving so soon?” he called.

  Ruby Bee sat down on a wicker chair beside him. “I was thinking how much I’d like to hear about your adventures in Naples and Athens,” she said, wishing she had the gumption to grab his hand but keenly aware of Beryl’s glare. “I’ll bet you have all sorts of souvenirs and trinkets from your Navy days. Would you mind if I came by at another time?”

  “If it works out,” said Buck. “I may be gone.”

  She couldn’t stop herself from clasping his bony arm. “Now, Buck, it can’t be that bad. Beryl’s feeding you a healthy diet of fresh fruits and vegetables. You’re as nice and pink as”—she waved vaguely at the yard—“those blossoms over by the gate. Once you get back your strength, why, you might just be arm-wrasslin’ at the bar and grill come Friday night. I seem to recollect you were pretty darn good at it once upon a time.”

  Beryl loomed over them. “Before he got sick, there was a lot of things he could do. Now all he’s good for is sitting and complaining. Estelle’s around back, looking at the dianthus. You want to see them?”

  Sylvie came out of the front door. “There’s something I should tell you, Ma.”

  “I don’t want to hear one more word from you, young lady,” said Beryl. “You just take your father in and see to him, then go to your room and read your Bible until I call you. See if you can find any recipes using milk and honey.”

  “I’m warning you—you should hear me out.”

  Beryl’s cheeks turned red. “Maybe I’ll hear you out of house and home if you don’t obey me. If I find so much as a single travel brochure on the table when I come back inside, I’ll pack your bags myself and throw them at the end of the driveway. As for your father, he can learn to wear diapers and suck soup through a straw. Do you understand?”

  Sylvie grabbed the handles of Buck’s wheelchair and took him into the house. Ruby Bee was too appalled to do more than follow Beryl down the steps to the yard.

  Beryl stopped at a trellis covered with sweet-scented, creamy blossoms. “This is an antique variety of honeysuckle called Serotina that blooms all summer. In the fall, it will be laden with lovely red berries that draw in our feathered friends. We are all nature’s guardians, are we not? As opposed as I am to disorganization, I allow the butterfly weed just beyond the fence to thrive in order to nurture our winged visitors.”

  Ruby Bee was steeling herself to make a remark about nurturing those a mite closer to home when she saw a yellow jacket light on Beryl’s arm. “You got another friend,” she said, pointing.

  Beryl flicked it off. “They never bother me. Out here in the splendors of …” She stopped to flick off another one. “Why, I haven’t been stung since …”

  “Take it easy,” advised Ruby Bee, backing away. “Don’t slap at ’em.”

  Beryl was staring in horror as several more yellow jackets began to crawl up her arm. “I’m allergic to them. Up until three years ago, I didn’t know I was, but then I got stung and had to be taken to the emergency room. Why are they doing this? Make them go away!” She gasped as one lit on her cheek. “Away!”

  Ruby Bee had no idea what she was supposed to do. “Don’t make any sudden moves. They’re just—”

  “What?” shrieked Beryl as several more alit.

  Estelle came dashing around the corner. “What in tarnation’s wrong?”

  “She must have disturbed a nest,” Ruby Bee said, still not willing to move in any closer. “All they’re doing is investigating thus far. As long as she doesn’t …”

  Beryl began to slap at her arms. “What are they doing? Why won’t they leave me alone?” She ducked her head and stumbled backward. “Make them go away! Oh my Gawd! I’ve been stung! Get these things off me!”

  “What should I do?” demanded Ruby Bee. “Call for an ambulance?”

  “Do you have one of those kits?” Estelle said, grabbing Beryl’s arm despite the yellow jackets descending like ants at a picnic. “Can you give yourself a shot?”

  Beryl fell onto the grass. “Kit’s in the refrigerator.” Her voice thickened. “Need it now.”

  Estelle nodded. “I’ll get it right away. You just rest easy for a minute.”

  “I can barely breathe,” Beryl gasped. She rolled over and weakly attempted to brush the yellow jackets off her face and arms. “Help me!”

  Estelle ran into the kitchen and jerked open the refrigerator door. A carton of milk, a covered dish with leftover pot roast, a bowl of green beans. “Sylvie!” she called as she pawed through bowls. “Where’s the kit?”

  “Kit?” said Sylvie as she came into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes and yawning.

  “Your mother has been stung!”

  Sylvie paused. “Oh, dear.”

  “She says there’s a kit in the refrigerator!”

  “Then let’s have a look, shall we?” Sylvie opened the refrigerator door, pondered the contents, and then closed it. “No, I don’t see any kit. Why don’t you ask Mother which shelf she put it on?”

  Estelle went back to the yard, where she found Ruby Bee twisting her hands. Beryl was still, white, and to be real blunt, as dead as a doornail. “I don’t know if this so-called kit might have helped, but I feel like we should have done something,” she said as she stared down at Beryl’s body. Yellow jackets seemed to be feasting on her as if she were a crumb of cake at a Sunday school picnic. “You’d almost think …”

  “When they collect the body,” Ruby Bee mused, “ain’t nobody going to test her skin. She was allergic to bee stings. She went into shock, and she died before she could give herself a shot. Yellow jackets are nasty critters. When riled, they attack. They’re a
sight smaller than hornets, but they’re meaner and more willing to attack.”

  “Why did they?” asked Sylvie as she sank down on the grass.

  “I reckon you know,” Ruby Bee said as she folded Beryl’s hands over her chest. “You and Buck are gonna have to live with it. I won’t say anything. You’ll have to decide if a Caribbean cruise is enough to wash away your sins. You have to live with what happened, not me. If the sugar that was meant for the pie ended up in the sunblock lotion, that’s not up to me.”

  “You won’t say anything?” said Sylvie.

  Ruby Bee gazed at Estelle. “We need to go. If I don’t put an apple pie in the oven before long, the truckers will be squawking like jays long about noon. Maybe I’ll try an extra pinch of ginger.”

  “Do that,” murmured Sylvia as she went inside the house and closed the door.

  Caveat Emptor

  The first time she came walking across the street, I pegged her for a whiner. Her shoulders drooped like she thought she was carrying a goodly portion of the world’s woes in a backpack, and from her expression, I could tell right off that she didn’t think it was fair. I had news for her: nobody ever promised it would be. If it were, I’d have been playing pinochle beside a pool instead of watching soap operas while I ironed as the world turned.

  She came onto the porch. “May I please use your phone?”

  “Long distance?” I said cautiously.

  “I need to call Mr. Wafford. He was supposed to have the utilities turned on by today, but nothing’s on.”

  I took a closer look. She was at most in her late twenties, with short brown hair and a jaw about as square as I’d ever seen. Her eyes were sizzling with frustration, but her smile was friendly. Smiling back, I said, “You bought the house over there.”

  “I’m Sarah Benston. I signed the papers last week, and Mr. Wafford promised to arrange for the utilities to be on when we got here. It’s after nine o’clock. My son and I have been on the road for fourteen hours, and there’s no way we get by without water and electricity. I was hoping that he could still do something.”

  “You bring your son inside and let me give him a glass of juice,” I said. “You can call Wafford if you want, but you’re welcome to camp out over here. How old’s your boy?”

  “Cody’s ten. I guess it’s too late to call Mr. Wafford. He won’t be able to do anything at this time of night.”

  I still wasn’t sure what to make of her as she brought in a listless child, rolled out a sleeping bag for him in a corner, and kissed him good-night.

  “So you bought the Sticklemann house?” I asked her as we sat down at the kitchen table.

  She took a sip of coffee and nodded. “It seemed smart, even though my ex can’t remember to send his child-support payments. I never finished my degree, so I decided to move back here and take classes. I was going to rent an apartment, but then Mr. Wafford explained how I could buy a house and build up equity. After the three or four years it’ll take to graduate, I can sell the house and make a small profit. Cody’s used to having a yard.”

  “How long since the divorce?” I asked.

  “A year.” Sarah put down her cup. “I know this is an imposition, Mrs.…?”

  “James, honey, but you call me Deanna. I know what you’re going through. My daughter got divorced four years ago, and she had a real tough time before she threw up her hands and moved back in with me. Now she has a job, a good one, at an insurance office in town. She’s dating a real polite boy she knew back in high school. Her daughter Amy’s eight, so she’s in bed. It’s not a good idea having three generations of women in the same house, but we do what we got to do. You have a job, Sarah?”

  “As a teacher’s aide,” she said with a shrug. “It’s minimum wage, but the house payment’s not much more than what I’d be paying in rent. Mr. Wafford is financing the sale privately, since I probably couldn’t have qualified for a loan. Even if I had, I’d have been charged closing costs of more than three thousand dollars. This way, I only had to put down five percent, which left me enough to pay for the rental truck and the utility deposits.”

  “It’ll work out,” I said soothingly, although I had my doubts. My daughter had needed food stamps and welfare and everything else she could get until she’d found a job. I would have helped her out, but all I had were my monthly disability checks.

  I made her a bed on the sofa, then sat and gazed out my bedroom window at the Sticklemann place, wondering just how much Jeremiah (“Call me ‘Jem’”) Wafford had told this nice young woman.

  Not nearly enough, I suspected.

  I watched her from the porch the next day. I would have liked to help her haul in suitcases and furniture, but my back wasn’t up to it. Her boy did what he could, trying to be the man of the family; finally, Perniski from up the road took pity on her and carried boxes, mattresses, bed frames, and mismatched chairs inside the house. All the same, she did most of the work, and I could see she had spirit.

  Cody proved to be a mannersome child, and he ended up most weekday afternoons with Amy, watching movies on the television. Sarah tried to pay me for looking after him. I refused, saying that he was no trouble. He wasn’t.

  A month after she moved in, she came knocking on my front door. I could tell right off that she was upset, but I pretended not to notice and said, “You have time for coffee?”

  “What’s the deal with the water lines?” she said, close to sputtering with outrage. “The toilet backed up and flooded the bathroom. The plumber says that all the houses out here have substandard pipes from the nineteen-fifties, and there’s nothing he can do short of replacing everything from the house to the main sewer line. Where am I going to find a thousand dollars?”

  I sat her down on the porch swing. “There are some things Wafford didn’t tell you, honey. After he bought the house, he slapped fresh paint on it and put down new linoleum—but it’s still an old house. Don’t be surprised if the roof leaks when it rains. Mrs. Sticklemann had to put pots and pans in every room.”

  Sarah stared at me. “What can I do? I called Mr. Wafford, but he reminded me that he recommended I pay for an inspection. It would have cost three hundred dollars. All I could hear him talking about were the possibilities for flower beds and a vegetable garden, and how Cody could play in the creek.”

  “Don’t let him do that,” I said. “Clover Creek may sound charming, but it’s downstream from a poultry plant. Some government men were out here last spring, trying to figure out why all the fish bellied up.”

  “Anything else I should know?” she asked grimly.

  I hoped she wasn’t the sort to blame the messenger. “There’s been some trouble with the folks in the house up at the corner. A couple of months ago the cops raided it and arrested them for selling drugs. One’s doing time in the state prison, but two of them are back. That’s why I walk up to where the school bus lets the children off in the afternoons. I’ve warned Cody about them too.”

  “Thanks, Deanna. I’d better go check the mailbox. Maybe this is the year I win a million-dollar sweepstakes.”

  We didn’t talk for a long while after this, but only because she was busy with her job and her late-afternoon classes. Cody always kept a watch for her out the window, and as soon as her car pulled into the driveway, he’d say good-bye and dart across the road to help her carry in groceries. She and my daughter were friendly enough, but they didn’t really hit it off. Amy, on the other hand, was crazy about Cody; he returned her affection with the lofty sophistication of an older man.

  Sarah continued having trouble with the house. When I asked Cody about an exterminator’s van, he said the carpet in his bedroom had fleas and showed me welts on his legs. On another day, he told me that his mother had called Mr. Wafford and then banged down the receiver and apologized for using “naughty” words.

  She had spirit all right, I thought. Too bad she hadn’t had common sense as well when she signed the papers in Wafford’s office. It wasn’t hard to imagin
e how he’d conned her, though. He was a slick one behind his hearty laugh and grandfatherly face. He’d owned half the houses along the road at one time or another. Most of the folks who’d fallen for his “equity” pitch had discovered a whole new side to him when they fell behind on their payments. There was a reason why he drove a flashy Cadillac.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Sarah said one evening while we watched Amy and Cody play on a tire swing in the yard. “There are bats in the attic. I saw them streaming out from under an eave last night.”

  “You have mice in the garage, don’t you? Bats are nothing more than mice with wings.”

  She shuddered. “I called Wafford, and he said the same thing, then gave me a lecture about how they eat insects. From the way he carried on, I thought I was expected to thank him for providing mosquito control. What if one gets downstairs?”

  “Mrs. Sticklemann kept a tennis racket in the hall. I don’t think she ever had to use it, though.”

  “That’s comforting,” she said dryly. “I was waiting for you to say she died of rabies.”

  “Nothing like that,” I said, then stood up and raised my voice. “Amy, you need to get busy on your spelling words for the test on Friday. Go on in the house and get out your book.”

  Sarah gave me a look like she knew darn well I was tiptoeing around something, but she called to Cody and they left. I felt bad not telling her, but she had more than enough problems. Sometimes when you buy a lemon, you can squeeze it till your face turns blue, but you still can’t make lemonade.

  Later that evening when the telephone rang, I answered it without enthusiasm, expecting my daughter to give me some cockamamie story about how she had to work late.

  “Deanna,” Sarah said abruptly, “go into your living room. Don’t turn on the light. There’s a man out on the road, staring at my house. He’s been there for at least half an hour. Should I call the police?”

  “Hold on.” I put down the receiver and did as she’d asked, then came back and picked it up. “I see him, honey. You say he’s been there half an hour?”