Page 20 of Shake the Habit

“And humiliation in front of the whole neighborhood.”

“It was just one family!” I sighed. “I’ll apologize again, though. I tried to pay her for the cost of the meat, but she wouldn’t take it.”

“Maybe I should get a dog. A small one,” my aunt conditioned. She scratched behind Sir’s ears and then looked over at me and how I’d draped myself in those ersatz jewels. “I’ll let you take all that and anything else from the box.”

“Aunt Paula, do you really think you’re going to die?” It made me worried.

“I’m fine,” she said. “But somebody should enjoy all this, and I think you’re owed something, too. I didn’t like what happened to you with Harlene and—”

“I don’t want to talk about them,” I interrupted, and we returned to discussing the jewelry, rugs, and furniture that she wanted to give away today.

Next, she wanted me to drive her somewhere. Aunt Paula lived in a beautiful house on the brow of the east side of Signal Mountain, but she directed me to bring her to the Old Town neighborhood. “Now I’m beginning to understand what your mother meant. I find him annoying,” she commented as Sir whined constantly in the back. “The next right. Where is…oh, yes. That’s it, there. That’s the old Woodson place.”

I slowed to a stop at the sidewalk and looked. It was large, old, and lovely. Like Caleb’s farmhouse down in the valley, though, it also appeared that its best days were behind it. It was generallydingy, with faded paint, curling roof tiles, and overgrown plants. Marc would have a field day, I thought.

“I asked around,” my aunt said. “There used to be renters in there, but they moved out about a year ago. It’s empty now.”

“I wonder who owns it. Maybe Caleb still does,” I commented.

“Maybe.” She shook her head. “I remember his mama being so proud of her family name. ‘I’m a Woodson,’” Aunt Paula said, making her voice deep.

“Was that how she sounded?”

“Foghorn,” she answered succinctly. “What’s her son like?”

“Well, he would know the definition of the word you used about the jewelry,” I told her.

“Smart like his mama, then. I thought as much.” She nodded. “She was two years ahead of me in school and people used to compare us, although Lara-Lee didn’t like that. They would call us spinsters. Know what that means?

This time, I had an idea of the definition but I still said, “No, ma’am.”

“It meant that no boy was interested in either one of us,” she said with relish. “Not that I wanted them, either.”

I’d never heard anything about romance in Aunt Paula’s life. “You didn’t want even one? You know, for…well, I just miss how they held me.” I’d held them too, as hard as I could, but they always got away.

“I never did and it seemed like she felt the same. Lara-Lee was a handsome woman, but she had a way about her. She would look at you and you swore that she hated your dang guts.”

“Well, she wasn’t good at making friends,” I said. “But she made one somehow, because she got Caleb.”

“We all wondered about that. She was old when she got pregnant, very old.” She spoke with even more gusto than before. “Who would have tangled with her? Lara-Lee was like a briar patch. She never told anyone who the father was, either, but by that point, she had lost touch with almost all of her former…I’ll call us acquaintances. She moved to some old farm and started to grow fruit trees. That was always what she was interested in, that plant stuff.”

“Agriculture?”

“No, more persnickety,” she said, and I knew that word but I still didn’t understand what she meant. “I’ll ask around about the father, because now I’ll have an itch to know. I’m done here.” As the chauffer, that was my cue to bring her back home, which I did as she criticized my driving. Then she forced me to take several bags of her possessions before I left, loading them into my back seat over my objections.

“Aunt Paula, not the big rug. I have an apartment…”

“Get yourself a house,” she ordered. “Get yourself a real career and work harder. Get a husband and have some babies while you’re at it.”

“You just got done telling me that you, yourself, never wanted…yes, ma’am,” I concluded. I drove down the back of themountain and took the turns slowly, but Sir was still very upset by the time the road flattened out. I pulled over to let him catch his breath and walk around. I had no plans for the day, and nothing else to do besides some laundry. With one hand, I securely held the leash and with the other, I texted and begged for an invitation, in a subtle way.

“Sir has a case of the fidgets,” I typed, and the answer came back fast.

“Come over and let him run,” Caleb wrote. “I’m just working.”

It was Saturday, but he had said that he worked a lot. “We’re going to Caleb’s house,” I told Sir, and he seemed mildly interested in that but not in the process of arriving there, which began with getting back into the car. I had to lift him up and he didn’t help at all, just hanging limply like a giant sack of potatoes as I placed him in the cargo area. I really felt like he weighed more than a hundred pounds.

He did perk up when we turned into Caleb’s driveway, because either he remembered it or he had already caught the scent of the man himself, who was waiting on his porch when we drove up to the house. I immediately leaped from the car so that I wouldn’t be trapped in the seat and the dog was right behind me. But after he ran to Caleb, he didn’t jump on him. He sat, wagging his tail with excitement, and waited for the affection that he was due.

---