Tending to Virginia by Jill McCorkle Read Free Book Online

liked that kind of chair anyway, only reason it caught on was because of those Kennedy boys who looked all right if they could get their mouths closed over those teeth and that voice they all have, I mean we ain’t talking Magnum P.I.” She laughed and patted the chair like it might be alive. “That’s some tough car next door to you, though,” she said and pointed to the Corvette that raised the hair on Virginia’s neck every time she heard it crank and rev and screech and scratch.
    “I love it, though,” Virginia said, meaning the chair, smiling as if by repeating the same words she had said ten years ago, they could redo that scene, correcting and editing the bad parts, the parts that had worried Virginia all through freshman orientation to the point that she wrote Cindy a long letter. “Your father did pay for my camp,” she had written, not going into the explanation that she had gotten from her mother.
    “I can’t believe she told you or that they told her,” her mother hadsaid. “Ben’s garage hadn’t done very well that year. It was his idea. He wanted you to go to that same camp because he knew you wanted to and he went and asked Raymond for a loan.” Her mother had paused and stared hard as if she was reading the fine print of a document. “It was done real formallike because Ben wouldn’t do it any other way and we paid back every cent.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “You would have felt bad; a child shouldn’t worry over money, that comes soon enough.”
    She didn’t tell Cindy that part of the story, didn’t tell how Raymond had pulled her father aside at every family gathering and whispered. “Don’t worry about it, Ben. You may never be able to repay me.” No, she just wrote that what Cindy had said was true and she apologized and then continued to send cute little funny cards to Cindy and to Chuckie, always mentioning Charles and Madge and Raymond, and Cindy never responded once.
    “Why don’t you ever write?” Virginia had asked over Thanksgiving.
    “Write? I’ve got a baby and a husband, a sick daddy and a mama that gets on my nerves the tee-total time.” They were eating at Gram’s house—the old house before she had to move to the duplex—as they had done every year; Gram, bustling around the kitchen where she had a ham, a turkey with all the trimmings, vegetables that she had frozen from her garden, fried apple pies. Lena, standing in the kitchen chain smoking, talking and pacing so that it seemed like she was doing something even though she wasn’t while her husband, Roy Carter, sat with a newspaper spread over his lap and puffed a cigar, leather driving gloves still on his hands, a flat tweed cap on his head.
    “Take off that cap you look like a clown,” Lena yelled.
    “Ah, ya, ya, ya, RO lena.” He looked up, their eyes meeting and staring, never blinking, the room going silent as it always did during their momentary outbursts. “Just shut up and do something other than pace and act like you’re doing something.”
    “I do more in a damn hour than you’ve done in your life!”
    “I hope Charles and I never get like that,” Cindy said to Virginia.“Charles and I will never be like that, and I won’t be like my mama either. God, I don’t know why Daddy married her.”
    “Write?” Cindy had asked just four months after Thanksgiving. “How could I write a letter back about what little dip shit fraternity party you went to when I’m getting a divorce and have a dead daddy?”
    Virginia rocks faster, her legs feeling so full and heavy; all those years, the bits and pieces that she can’t get off her mind, and then it started changing, one thing after another; Gram’s move to the duplex, a Piggly Wiggly replacing Gram’s old house, Raymond’s suicide, Roy dying, Lena having to move to a home, Cindy divorced remarried and divorced again, and Gram’s hair turning so white, her mind wandering back and forth over the years. Gram, the one person who