Caveat Emptor and Other Stories Read online

  “The award is gonna be presented at the cafeteria this Friday evening. I told her to come by that morning and I’ll recomb her hair for free. She was real pleased.” Estelle nodded smugly at her reflection in the mirror, real pleased by the undeniable generosity of her own gesture.

  Harrumphing under her breath, Ruby Bee came out from behind the bar to take another pitcher of beer to the only customers, a trio of truckers in the back booth. Business at Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill was slow these days, but so was everything in Maggody, Arkansas (pop. 755). These days, at least, everybody knew where Arkansas was on the map on account of the new president (not between Oklahoma and Texas, as the old president had said), and Ruby Bee was hoping that tourists might start flocking like cowbirds now that summer was approaching. Jim Bob Buchanon seemed to feel the same, since he’d repaired the dryers at the Suds of Fun Launderette and put a fresh coat of paint on the front of Jim Bob’s SuperSaver Buy 4 Less. This very morning she’d watched Roy Stivers setting out brass lamps and cracked washbowls in front of his antique store, and Brother Verber down at the Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly Hall had changed the letters on the portable sign to read: STRANGERS WELCOME; FREE ADMISSION TO HEAVEN. This wasn’t to say the collection plate wouldn’t be passed under their noses several times, but at least he wasn’t selling tickets at the door.

  “I already knew about all the details concerning the ceremony,” she said disdainfully as she returned. “Benjamin called me yesterday to say he wants to have a surprise party afterward at their house. He was supposed to come by at two to talk about the menu.” She consulted the neon-trimmed clock behind her. “It’s already after four. I wonder if he’s still coming.”

  Estelle snorted. “I wouldn’t hold my breath. Poor Mary Frances had to wait most of an hour before he picked her up. I’d have been hotter than a pepper mill, but she said she was used to it after all these years. She admitted he was always late when they were dating in college and she should have known there was no way to change him. The only reason she didn’t wait at the altar was that she told him the wrong time for the wedding. He was at the hospital when Sara Anne was born, but Mary Frances was in labor so long her mother had time to drive down from Saint Louis. When Ben Junior was born, he didn’t get there until she was back in her room and the baby was in the nursery. Imagine it taking him more than three hours to get to the hospital!”

  “She’s a saint to put up with him all these years. Maybe I ought to call him at his office and remind him about our meeting. Do you recollect the name of his insurance outfit in Starley City?”

  Estelle did, and pretty soon Ruby Bee was asking to speak to Benjamin Frank.

  The secretary’s sigh hinted at years of frustration. “He’s not here yet, Mrs. Hanks. He called more than an hour ago to say he was on his way, so I’m hoping he’ll be here before Mr. Whitbread gets fed up and leaves. There’s a lot of business at stake.” She sighed again, but most likely not for the last time.

  “It don’t take an hour to get to Starley City,” said Ruby Bee, feeling sorry for the secretary and the unknown Mr. Whitbread; “I could be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Mr. Frank has good intentions, but he’ll think of errands along the way and pretty soon he’ll be on the other side of the county talking to a client or over at the cafe drinking coffee. He won’t even notice that he’s late.”

  Ruby Bee asked her to remind him of the meeting, then hung up and mentally adjusted Mary Frances’s halo. “How can someone be like that?” she asked Estelle. “If I was Mary Frances, I’d have long since ripped out my hair and taken to wandering around town in my underwear like Cornwallis Buchanon did before they packed him off to the county old folks’ home.”

  “She said they’ve never heard the opening hymn at church or seen the credits at the picture show. She used to invite folks for supper, but she finally stopped on account of Benjamin getting home about the-time everybody was saying good night. Last year they were supposed to visit Ben Junior all the way up in Alaska, but they got to the airport late and missed the flight. She cried for a week because she was gonna see their new grandbaby for the first time and Ben Junior had booked them on a three-day cruise as a Christmas present. Of course the airline wouldn’t refund the money for the tickets because it wasn’t their fault, and Ben Junior lost the deposit.”

  “There ought to be one of those twelve-step programs for folks like that,” Ruby Bee said with a trace of tartness, “but they couldn’t hold their meetings. Everybody’d show up too late.”

  They were busy commiserating with Mary Frances when the door opened and Benjamin Frank came striding across the dance floor. He was a big man, his face crinkled, his gray hair clipped short, his grin stretching from ear to ear, his teeth as white and even as could be bought anywhere. He had an unfortunate fondness for plaid and polyester, but the overall effect was dapper, if not chic. “How’re the two prettiest ladies in Maggody today?” he called. “I keep waiting to hear you’ve both eloped with handsome millionaires from Farberville. If Mary Frances didn’t keep me on a short leash, I’d be showing up on your doorsteps with flowers and candy to beg for a peck on the cheek.”

  Ruby Bee gave him a pinched frown. “You said you were coming at two o’clock, Benjamin, and your secretary was expecting you an hour ago.”

  He winked at Estelle as he sat on the stool beside her. “You sure worked magic on Mary Frances’s hair this morning. You ought to open a hair salon in New York City and run those fancy boys like Vidal Sassoon right out of business.”

  Estelle patted her own festive red beehive. “That’s right kind of you, Benjamin,” she said, unable to stop herself from simpering. “A lot of folks don’t realize that cosmetology is an art, and—”

  “About the party,” inserted Ruby Bee. “What kind of food do you want me to fix?”

  He beamed at her. “Everybody knows you’re the best cook west of the Mississippi, Ruby Bee. You decide on the menu, and don’t think twice about the price. I’m so proud of Mary Frances for being the Teacher of the Year that I get misty just thinking about it. I want this party to be real special. The ceremony starts at seven, so we’ll most likely leave by six-thirty. You can bring the food then and get everything all set out in the dining room. I’ll leave some balloons and crepe paper streamers in a sack on the back porch and be eternally grateful if you could tape ’em up.”

  “We’d be delighted,” Estelle said just as if she were the one catering and not just tagging along out of habit. “Mary Frances will be downright thrilled when she steps through the door.”

  “But we aim to be at the high school at seven,” said Ruby Bee. “Mary Frances won’t get her award until everybody’s done making speeches, but I don’t want to miss a minute of it.” She paused to give him a piercing look. “And you don’t, either.”

  “I’ll be sitting in the first row,” Benjamin said as he slid off the stool. “I promised her I’d be home and in the shower by six o’clock, and ready to escort her whenever she’s finished getting gussied up. I guess I’d better head on to my office. My secretary gets irritable if I’m late.”

  Ruby Bee waited until he was gone before she said, “I’d get homicidal, myself. Do you realize he never once apologized for being late?”

  They resumed commiserating with poor Mary Frances, who’d taught countless teenagers to recite poetry but couldn’t seem to teach her husband how to tell time.

  I’d given up trying to whittle a chunk of wood into something remotely resembling a marshland mallard and was dozing away the day in the Maggody PD, where I was the one and only P. Once upon a time I’d had a real live deputy, but now I had a beeper. I also had an answering machine, but I’d quit checking messages after I realized the only person using it was my mother, Ruby Bee, and every last one of her messages began with a treatise on how much she disliked talking to a machine. What I really needed was voice mail, I decided as I monitored the progress of a spider across the ceiling. “To gripe about my schoolmarm ha
ir, Press One. To gripe about my aversion to lipstick, Press Two. To gripe about my lack of a social life, Press Three.” It would never work; there weren’t enough buttons to handle Ruby Bee’s litany of my sins.

  The telephone interrupted my whimsical reverie. After a few scowls in its direction, I picked up the receiver and reluctantly conceded that the caller had reached the PD.

  “Arly, this is Mrs. Jim Bob,” said a familiar but not welcome voice. “I am fed up with those junior high boys cutting across the back of my yard on their way to Boone Creek. Not five minutes ago they tramped right through my begonias, and when I went onto the porch and told them to get off my property, one of them used an obscenity.”

  “No kidding?” I said with the proper degree of incredulity. “Do you want me to shoot ’em? I’ve still got four bullets in a box in the back room.”

  “No, I want you to go down to the creek and give them a lecture about trespassing and disrespect for their elders. I’d do it myself but I have to fix a green bean casserole for Eula Lemoy, whose back is bothering her. It won’t keep me from watching for your car to go down the road within the next five minutes, Miss Chief of Police.”

  “I’ll probably go ahead and shoot ’em,” I said, albeit to the dial tone. Mrs. Jim Bob’s a royal pain, but Jim Bob’s the mayor and therefore, at least technically, my boss. In order to avoid a tedious lecture at the next town council meeting, I hung the CLOSED sign on the door and drove down Finger Lane to the swimming hole to see if I could persuade the miscreants to find another shortcut.

  Said miscreants had moved on. I gazed at the bubbly brown water, remembering some moonlit nights of my youth when hormones had bubbled as loudly. The sun was warm, the breeze laden with earthy rawness of spring, the birds twittering and flitting in the branches, the squirrels nattering at me. Manhattan, where I’d led a tumultuous married life, has art galleries and opera, but there are some scenes that are a sight more elegant.

  It occurred to me that I needed to stake out the swimming hole for an hour or two, just in case the miscreants returned. In order to survive the ordeal, I needed provisions along the lines of a ham sandwich, potato salad, a bag of cookies, and a big cup of iced tea. All of this was available at the SuperSaver deli, where I could also find a tabloid filled with wondrous stories of alien lobbyists and sexual aberrations.

  Such are the exactitudes of law enforcement in a town where nothing ever happens, I told myself as I parked in front of the store and started inside. I detoured to greet the figure almost hidden behind a cart piled high with sacks of groceries.

  “Congratulations, Mrs. Frank,” I said, resisting the urge to scuffle my feet and duck my head as if I were telling lies about uncompleted homework. She hadn’t been a tyrant in the classroom, but even fifteen or so years later, with white hair and faded blue eyes, she radiated a measurable dose of the same authority.

  “Thank you, Arly. I must say I’m tickled pink, although I don’t know if I’m more excited about the award or my retirement. Forty years is a long time to attempt to instill a lively interest in dead poets.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, “Well, congratulations again,” I said, edging toward the door.

  “Forty years of bells and tardy slips,” she continued in a musing voice, “to be followed by who knows how many years of waiting for Benjamin. That’s what I’m doing now. My car’s in the shop, so I’m at his mercy. Do you know how long I’ve been standing here?” Her voice tightened and her eyes narrowed as she regarded the rows of parked cars. “Over half an hour, that’s how long. Benjamin promised to pick me up at four sharp, which is why I went ahead and bought ice cream and frozen orange juice.”

  “Would you like me to give you a ride home?”

  “That’s thoughtful of you, Arly, but surely Benjamin will be here before too much longer. It simply never occurs to him that other people dislike waiting for him. I’ve grown accustomed to it after all these years, but now that I’m retiring, I wonder if I’ll be able to handle it.”

  I was eager to get back to the creek, take off my shoes, and let the mud slip between my toes, stuff my face, read about two-headed babies in the Amazon rain forest. “I’ll be clapping for you on Friday,” I said in one last attempt to extricate myself from the conversation.

  “But Benjamin won’t,” she said, talking more to herself than to yours truly. “It won’t matter how many times I tell him how important this is, how many times I beg him to be there at seven o’clock. He’ll cross his heart and swear he’ll be there, but he won’t, and he’ll be wondering where everyone is when he arrives two hours later. This may be the most important event in my life—an acknowledgment of all my years of teaching and the beginning of what’s supposed to be our golden years together. He really should be on time.” She took an orange from a sack and squeezed it until the skin burst and juice dribbled down her white fingers. “He really should.”

  Something was dribbling down my back that wasn’t a source of vitamin C and I was ready to forget about my picnic and flat out flee to my car. I’d known Mary Frances Frank for a good many years, but this was my first glimpse of her as a vindictive Munchkin. “I’m sure he’ll make it this one time,” I said.

  “He’d better,” she said. “Otherwise, he’ll be very, very sorry … this one time.”

  By Friday I’d corralled the miscreants and bawled them out, cleaned the back room of the PD in a paroxysm of seasonal madness, and given some consideration to dust-busting my efficiency apartment above the antique store. Only my penchant for chicken-fried steak and cream gravy saved me, and I was devising ways to idle away the afternoon as I went into the bar and grill.

  “Thought you said you’d be here at noon,” Ruby Bee said in an unfriendly voice.

  I didn’t much worry about it, in that she’s no more predictable than the weather—and this was hurricane season, after all. “Did I say that? I could have sworn I said I’d be here around noon.” I appropriated a stool and gave her a beguiling smile. “How about the blue plate special and a glass of milk?”

  “How about you learn to be on time?” muttered my mother, although she did so while stomping into the kitchen.

  I sat and waited, listening placidly to the wails from the jukebox and the conversations from the booths along the wall. Now that it was no longer legal to shoot helpless birds and hapless mammals, the hot topic seemed to be the slaughter of largemouth bass and crappies. At least it was preferable to brands of toilet bowl cleaners.

  Estelle sat down beside me as Ruby Bee came through the kitchen doors. “I guess we’re all excited,” she said.

  “I guess we are,” I said, although I had no idea what she assumed was exciting us. I myself was a little choked up at the sight of the plate Ruby Bee was carrying, but I’m a patsy in such matters.

  Ruby Bee banged down the plate in front of me. “Has Mary Frances decided what she’s going to wear tonight?” she asked Estelle.

  “Her beige linen suit. She wanted to buy a new dress, but her car’s still at the shop and Benjamin didn’t get home yesterday in time for her to drive to Farberville. I wouldn’t have liked to have been him when he finally got there. Mary Frances’s eyes were flashing when she told me about it this morning, and I can imagine what all she said to him. They may have been married for forty years, but his lateness is starting to get on her nerves.”

  “I heard something interesting,” Ruby Bee said. She glanced at me to see if I was listening, then moved down the bar so she and Estelle could share the big secret. The two often mistake me for someone who cares. “I heard,” she continued with the muted subtlety of a chain saw, “that Mary Frances made up with her brother just two days ago. After all these years of not speaking, she upped and called him, and then borrowed Elsie’s car for the afternoon and went to visit him.”

  “She didn’t say one word to me,” Estelle said, clearly stunned by the magnitude of the revelation. “Not one word, and there I was recombing her hair for free!”

  “Elsie
promised not to tell anyone, but we were talking about the award ceremony tonight and she let drop that Mary Frances invited her brother and his wife.”

  “What about the credenza?”

  Ruby Bee nodded somberly. “She gave it to him. Here they’ve been fighting like dogs and cats over it since their mama died ten years ago, refusing to speak to each other at the family reunions, paying lawyers to file lawsuits, and sitting on opposite sides of the church at weddings and funerals. All of a sudden she’s willing to give him the credenza just to make peace with him. He went to her house and picked it up last night. I was flabbergasted when I heard that.”

  I halted a forkful of mashed potatoes halfway to my mouth. “I don’t understand why you’re treating this like the collapse of the Soviet Union. Maybe she wants to begin her retirement without any lingering feuds.”

  Estelle pondered this while she ate a pretzel. “Nope, this credenza is mahogany and it’s been in the family for three or four generations. We’re not talking about a sewing box or an end table worth a few dollars. Roy Stivers appraised it back when Mary Frances and her brother were dividing the estate, and he said he hadn’t come across a nicer one in all his born days.”

  In that I wasn’t sure I’d recognize a credenza if it nipped me on the butt, I resumed eating.

  Ruby Bee resumed gossiping. “Elsie was miffed when Mary Frances brought the car back all covered with mud. It seems her brother is working on that new stretch of highway that’s supposed to replace Highway 71 if they ever finish blasting through the mountains. Mary Frances wanted to hose off the mud, but Else said not to bother on account of it wasn’t right for the Teacher of the Year to be washing cars. They almost had an argument over it, but Mary Frances insisted Elsie come over for coffee and homemade doughnuts this morning. Elsie ain’t all that hard to mollify.”

  “Mary Frances is gonna be real-hard to mollify if Benjamin’s not on time tonight,” Estelle said. “She told me she was going to teach him a lesson once and for all. Do you reckon she’ll say something in her speech?”