The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett - 25

I wrote the letter to the Heidelbergs the next morning, keeping it short and simple with only a few white lies. I just wanted to get the door open and start a conversation. I said I was a volunteer at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum here in Oxford and that I was writing to do a “welfare inquiry” about Margot Lefleur, Meg as we called her. Since Garnett wasn’t writing one, more testament to her disregard for Meg’s welfare, the lie slid off Rory’s ink pen easily. I asked if Meg was eating and sleeping well and enjoying her new home, and could we please correspond until we knew she’d adjusted? Since our telephone had been cut off, I couldn’t ask them to call us, and most families (though probably not them) wouldn’t be eager to spend that money anyway, so I just wrote, Please write back as soon as permits to me personally , to ensure your letter does not get mixed up in general correspondence for the orphanage: Birdie Calhoun, Oxford, MS. At the bottom, I added, Please let Meg know that I’m thinking of her fondly.

After I’d sealed it up, I felt surer than ever that Meg at least needed to know her mother hadn’t abandoned her. Charlie took the envelope from me and pressed it to her chest, beseeching Mother Mary to get the letter to them, though by the end, it sounded more like a threat than a prayer. I couldn’t blame her. The most depraved details from Charlie’s story kept sneaking in my ear, the colored man crying for his mother, no more imbecile babies, the stationmaster’s billy club.

He used it.

Walking to town that morning, it felt a full twenty degrees cooler than the day before, even though we were still a few days shy of September. It felt like we’d woken up in a different country, maybe in a different year. I could make a proper meringue in this weather, if we could afford any vanilla.

Frances was walking with me, saying she needed to get out of the house. “I’ll see you back home later,” I told her. She’d gotten all dressed up in pink poplin and a pink hat, for the important chore of buying us ten cents of sugar at City—knowing Frances too well, I didn’t suggest she go to Freedmen Town—while I went to the post office to mail the letter.

The square was a little busier than usual due to the cooler weather, no doubt. I cut across it to city hall and the post office in the back. A line of people stretched all the way past the post office boxes, which Mrs. Tartt didn’t use. She liked her mail handed to her so she could say thank you. After I’d waited for twenty minutes in line—Mrs. Nutt was working alone today and she was a talker —a tall, broad-backed man passed by me, headed out. I pulled down the brim of my hat and pretended to be real interested in my letter to the Heidelbergs.

“Birdie?”

“Hey, Jack.” His blue shirtsleeves were rolled up his forearms and his jacket hung over his arm. He smiled and took his hat off. He looked very delighted with himself.

“I tried to call you, but—”

“They cut the telephone off,” I said.

“That’s not good news,” he said.

“We’ll be fine,” I said. “Good to see you.” I nodded and faced the back of the head in front of me. The line moved up and Jack moved with me. He was close enough that I could smell him—pine aftershave, leather car seats warming in the sun.

“Are you free after this? I wanted to …” He glanced at the couple behind me. “Talk to you about something. I have to catch the train to Jackson at 3:15.”

I couldn’t hold back. “Going home to see your wife?” I’d said it in a smart-mouthed way, but it came out sad. I looked him square in the eyes as I moved up in line again.

He didn’t look away, but his shoulders dropped a bit. “I’m sorry—I should’ve told you that.”

“You think so?”

He looked down at a thick envelope he was holding. The line was moving faster now. “I’m going to Jackson to meet with the divorce lawyers. Again. It’s taking a while to settle.”

“Birdie, you’re next,” Mrs. Nutt called from behind the counter.

I stared at him a second, then stepped forward. “Sorry, Mrs. Nutt, I need to send this first-class and check the Tartts’ mail.” I turned back to Jack. I’d only ever read about divorces in the newspaper. I’d never known anybody that’d gotten one before. Where I was from, a husband died or went out to buy chewing tobacco and never came home. Those were the choices. But a divorce, it sounded so adult , sort of grimy.

“How long have you …” I didn’t even know what to call it.

Jack glanced at the couple in line behind me again, clearly listening to us. “I filed about nine months ago. But it’s been tricky for—a few reasons.”

I studied him, wondering if something was horribly, perhaps deliciously wrong with him.

Mrs. Nutt came back with a few envelopes. “’At’ll be three cents for the first-class.”

I slid the pennies over the counter. “Are you leaving her, or is she leaving you?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure which was better. They were both bad.

He glanced at Mrs. Nutt. “We are … leaving each other.”

“Why?” I asked. Hand on the coins, Mrs. Nutt looked up at Jack. Behind me, the man said, “Poor fella,” and his wife beside him hissed, “ He’s a married man, Stu .”

“Could we talk about this somewhere else?” Jack asked. “Walk to the bank with me when you’re done? I want to show you something.”

A part of me wanted to tell him my daddy’d made sure I’d be just fine without a married man, thank you. In the other part, a tiny hope was blooming again.

“I’ll meet you down there in a few minutes,” I said.

He nodded, he’d take that. The lady behind me tsked.

At the writing counter against the far wall, I opened a letter from Mama and skimmed the dozens of worrisome Doris questions: What kind of men are you meeting? Is Frances upset we asked for money? Should you be carrying that kind of cash on the train? Is Frances upset with us? I felt sick to my stomach when she said we were down to fourteen dollars.

Frances had given me concise instructions: Do not tell Mama anything about what happened. I started writing a letter back on Frances’s fancy cream-colored stationery: Please don’t worry, Mama, Frances is fine. It’s going to be fine. I’ll be home soon, I hope. Watered-down nothings to soothe her.

I stopped writing, tapping my pencil point on the paper. My chest felt like it was about to spill over with foolish hope and too many problems—how much more could I fit inside myself? I took out a new sheet of paper and started a new letter: We are not alright, Mama. Rory lost the family fortune and took all the valuables. I won’t be bringing any money home. Frances is heartbroken and Mrs. Tartt had to let her help go because she couldn’t pay them … It was a relief to let it all out. I did manage to leave out that I’d gone on a date with a married man—I wasn’t ready to share that. Or that Frances’s husband had caught the Homo Sexuality. Might as well save something for the next letter.

But in the end, I sent the first letter. The second one, I tore into a hundred pieces and threw away. I just didn’t know if Mama could handle hearing it.

As I walked down to the bank, Jack came out wearing his straining gray suit coat, like he’d been watching for me. “I hope we can talk more about—everything,” he said. “But first I wanted to show you this. Those are the numbers Rory called the week he was fired.”

Dear Lord, I’d forgotten about this. On a sheet of paper was a list of seven or eight telephone exchanges with numbers and cities written in Jack’s cursive, sloppy enough to be a third grader’s.

“Ignore the ones with checks, they were business calls for his last trades. But that one,” he said, pointing to Whitworth-502 , “that’s the Robert E. Lee Hotel in Jackson.”

“I called them last week and they hadn’t seen him,” I said. “He has an overdue bill though.”

“Eleanor said he also got quite a few calls from New Orleans that week. They were incoming, so they won’t be on here, but she remembered because he snapped at her for not shutting his door all the way.”

So he talked to people in two big cities, Jackson and New Orleans, where we couldn’t afford to look for him, but maybe it was still worth something. I pointed to the last scribbled number, with x 6 beside it. “What’s that?”

Jack shrugged. “Florsheim. It’s just a shoe store in Jackson. But he called them six times his last few days.”

I pressed my lips together. God, what if.

“You want to give them a call from my office, just to see?” Jack asked. “One more long-distance call’s not gonna break this bank.”

“Yes. Thank you.” I followed Jack inside, past Henry Tartt, past Eleanor, whose eyes followed me all the way back to Jack’s office. He shut his door, and I shook my head to the chair he offered. He told Silva it was an urgent long-distance call and to please ring him back right away. Then he leaned against his desk, facing me, and took my hand.

Every time you touch me, I feel electricity going through me. “How long have you been married?” I asked.

“Seventeen years this October,” he said. A long time. “If it’s worth anything, I really was going to tell you when I called the other day.”

I could feel my face redden. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Or did you think I wouldn’t care?”

“I wasn’t thinking. That’s pretty clear to me now.” He let go of my hand and I felt the loss, a body part removed. “I shouldn’t expect you to see a married man, especially in a town like this, but”—he grimaced like he was about to give me bad news—“you’re just … you’re not like anybody I’ve ever met before.”

The telephone jangled on the desk. Jack picked it up, nodded, and handed it to me.

“Florsheim, may I help you?” It was a man. His voice was friendly.

“Um, hello. This is—to whom am I speaking?”

“This Jimmy Watts. What can I do you for, ma’am?”

“Hi, Jimmy. I am looking for somebody … a man by the name of Rory Tartt?”

Nothing but silence. It lasted a few seconds and then he cleared his throat. “Who’s that again?”

“Rory Tartt, from Oxford?”

He cleared his throat again. “I’m afraid I don’t know anybody by that name, ma’am.”

“I see. Um, are you the only person who works there?”

Another pause. “Yes ma’am, I own the store.” As I tried to think of what to ask next, he said, softer, “If I do happen upon him … is there a message I can give him?”

I heard something there. “He’s gone missing,” I said. “If you hear from him, could you please ask him to send a telegram home?”

“Of course. If I happen to hear from him, yes, ma’am.” And he was gone.

I handed Jack the receiver. I wasn’t sure yet what I’d heard but all I said was, “He said he hasn’t seen him.”

After he hung up, Jack bit his lip. He looked so boyish in that second I wanted to hug him. “I’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Could we talk some more about everything … we didn’t talk about yet? I could come by the house after work on Thursday.”

“No.” I didn’t want to pretend it was a date until it was. “I’ll meet you here.”

When I got home, I was still jittery with the news of Rory making those calls. It was more information than I could keep to myself but not nearly enough to do anything about. I stared into the kitchen cupboard at the dwindling ingredients. We’d eaten all the tuna fish, the noodles, the grits, the imported canned meats, the lovely, decadent terrines of foie gras. Looked like it was going to be poached eggs again, and Frances would just have to put up with it. I’d serve them over toast tonight, dress the plate up with watermelon pickle on the side.

We’d run out of butter too. I looked over at Mrs. Tartt at the table, fiddling with an abandoned game of honeymoon bridge she’d been playing with Charlie.

“You ever churned butter, Mrs. Tartt?” I asked her.

She chuckled. “Heavens, no .” Then she said in a wary voice, “But you’re about to teach me, aren’t you?”

I sat her on a stool by the breakfast table window and laid an apron across her lap, the butter churn between her feet. Ladling the cream off the pitcher, I showed her. “All you do is pump the paddle, like so. It ought to sound like you’re walking through mud.” I wondered if she’d ever done that either.

Sitting very upright with bright red lipstick on, she started working the stick between her legs, pushing it down and up. “This isn’t too hard,” she said. “I think I’m getting the hang of it now.” After only five minutes, she was already pink in the face and peered into the barrel and asked, “You reckon it’s about ready?”

“No, not even close,” I said. “And don’t stop or it won’t make.” She frowned and pumped more, bits of cream splashing on the apron.

I was kneading the bread when Frances came in with a grocery sack. It was only seventy-five degrees today, but her face was crimson. “Mr. Wallace at University Grocery refused to do business with us. He said I could pay against what we owe him, but that’s it. That rich people like us ought to pay their bills, so I had to walk over to Inmon’s.”

Across the room, still pumping, Mrs. Tartt said, “I declare, is that really what people think of us now?”

“Why didn’t you just go to City in the first place? They’ll take our money,” I asked.

Frances ran herself a glass of water and sat down at the table. “Because I went all the way across town to Mrs. Chisolm’s shop to see if she was hiring. She’s not.” Well, at least Frances was trying to try.

Charlie walked in with the clothes basket, as Mrs. Tartt’s churning was slowing to a mere stroll through the mud. Then it stopped altogether. She said, “That does not look like butter.”

“You go sit, I’ll do it,” Charlie said. I saw Frances roll her eyes. Charlie started pump-pumping, pump-pumping fast and steady as a small animal’s heartbeat. Mrs. Tartt wiped her face with a handkerchief and rubbed a blister rising on her thumb.

It was time, it was past time, to make some decisions.

Standing behind the counter, I came out and said it: “Rory called the Robert E. Lee and a shoe store in Jackson from the bank a few days before they fired him.” No preamble, no side pickle, just plop it on the plate.

Mrs. Tartt’s blue eyes widened in a way that made me think of the moment the lights had come back on in the house. “This is good news—we need to telephone them and see what they know.”

I didn’t remind her the telephone had been cut off. “I did already, and neither claims to’ve seen him. Thing is, he also got calls from New Orleans that week, but we don’t know who from.”

“But it’s still something to go on, isn’t it? Don’t you think we should start looking for him? We could start in Jackson?” Mrs. Tartt said.

“Exactly what I’ve been saying all along!” Frances wailed.

If she had, I sure hadn’t heard her say it. Still, I understood why this sounded like the answer. If they found him—a big if —they could easily sell the car and some valuables to cover the rest of the mortgage, but: “It might very well turn into a wild goose chase, and traveling around looking for him’s gonna take time and money we don’t have much of. Mrs. Tartt, the soundest plan is still to try and sell the house. Then you’d have plenty of money left to go look for Rory and look properly. You could afford to go to two, three, five cities if you had to, and you’d have something to live on when you got back, whether you found him or not.”

Mrs. Tartt was twisting a white linen handkerchief. Frances was scowling hard at me. “Hold on a minute,” Frances said.“This whole thing could still take care of itself—maybe Rory’s just having … a temporary breakdown of some kind.” She started fanning her face with this month’s Oxford Electric bill. I couldn’t blame her—if the house sold, where was she supposed to go? Back to Footely to live with her spinster sister? “Rory still could come to his senses and get home in time to pay that mortgage.”

“Frances,” Mrs. Tartt said. “You can’t really believe that.” Not two days before, she would’ve glazed over, nodding like she believed it too. Instead, she set her hands firmly on the kitchen table and said, like this was a Flower Club committee, “I move we discuss Charlie’s idea.”

Charlie missed a pump on the churn. “I thought—we were waiting until tomorrow.”

“Now’s just as good a time,” Mrs. Tartt said.

Charlie took a breath. She wet her lips. “I was thinking … what if you tried taking in some boarders here at the house to earn some money.” She started pumping again.

“I don’t love the idea, but I hear folks are doing it nowadays to get by,” Mrs. Tartt said. “And it’s much better than selling my house to a stranger.”

I covered the bread with a towel so it could rise and walked around the counter. “Well, it’s not a terrible idea. You’ve certainly got the room, but …” I looked around the kitchen. “Might be hard without any furniture.”

“I’d rather not have more strangers living with us?” Frances said.

“Well, actually, Charlie’s suggested we wouldn’t have to be here,” Mrs. Tartt said. “You could go see your mama down in Footely, and I could go visit with my widow sister down in Jackson.”

And I’d go back to Footely, I thought, with no money, just problems.

“And I could ask around about Rory while I was down there,” Mrs. Tartt was saying. “I’m sure my sister would accompany me—”

“If you’re going to Jackson to look for him, then I’m coming too,” Frances said.

Mrs. Tartt smiled, slightly. “Of course you can, dear. Charlie’s offered to stay here and help with the boarders. We’d only allow ladies, and Charlie thinks she might already know of some. This way we’d have an income so we wouldn’t spend our last cent traveling …”

I was doing the math—four or five bedrooms rented at, what, a dollar a week? For the next six weeks …

“That won’t earn you anywhere near two hundred eighty-four dollars by mid-October,” I said.

“There’s … a little more to the idea, dear,” Mrs. Tartt said. “The way Charlie explained it to me was, the boarders would need an income themselves in order to pay us rent, so we’d let them work a little business here in the backyard.”

Frances pulled her lips back. It was an ugly look for her. “What kind of business ?”

“It’s—” Mrs. Tartt frowned, looking uncomfortable herself. “A dancing business. It’s called … dime-a-dancing.”

“A—what?” I asked.

“It’s where you pay a dime to dance,” Charlie said, pumping. “Sometimes they call it taxi dancing. I worked in one up in Memphis.” That was where she’d met Welty. Charlie should’ve mentioned this to me before getting Mrs. Tartt’s hopes up.

“Now, I know it sounds a little seedy, I thought so too at first,” Mrs. Tartt said. “Like that picture, Ten-Cent something with Barbara Stanwyck, but Charlie says our club would be much more sophisticated than that.”

Before I could say anything, Frances, eyes squeezed shut, said, “ Who? In their right mind would drive all the way out here to dance?”

Mrs. Tartt didn’t miss a beat. “The college boys would, dear. And we know the college boys have the money or they wouldn’t be going to college.”

“But they can already dance everywhere in town.” Frances directed this to Charlie, not Mrs. Tartt. “The Tea Hound, the Palace, the Mecca—they have hops all the time over at the school.”

“Go ahead and tell them what you told me, Charlie.”

Charlie finally let the churning stick go—that butter was bound to be thick as bricks by now. She swallowed. She seemed awfully nervous. “I know there’re plenty of places to dance in town, but the problem is there aren’t enough girls to dance with. Which is an opportunity for us. If you look in those places, you’ll see all sorts of boys waiting for their turn or trying to cut in on another couple. It’s always been like that, but this year it’s going to get worse.”

“On account of Governor Bilbo fired all the teachers three years ago?” Mrs. Tartt said. “The school lost its certification, but this year they’re getting it back. Tell them what it said in the newspaper, Charlie.” It was starting to feel choreographed between them.

“The paper said nine hundred and fifty boys will be showing up at the college in two weeks,” Charlie said. “That’s three hundred more than last year and four hundred more than the year before, but only a hundred and three girls are enrolled, so that’s ten boys to every girl. I’m saying, what if we had a place where the boys could go dance with a woman—a young lady, or as many as they could pay a dime for. Not to mention—”

“Oh my God!” Frances said. “What is she even talking about?”

Charlie ignored her; she was looking at me now. “ Not to mention , the girls have a very strict curfew at the college and the boys don’t, so what are the boys supposed to do after ten o’clock at night?”

Mrs. Tartt smiled. “Ten’s a little late. Could we say nine thirty?”

Charlie shrugged. “The point is the boys are going to go somewhere, especially on Friday and Saturday nights, so I figure they might as well come here and spend their daddies’ money.”

“Charlie,” I said, “I still—I don’t see how this could make nearly enough money in time.”

“Along with dances we’d also charge for dance lessons. Somebody’s got to teach the boys all the new dances so they can impress the college girls.”

Frances had started tilting a cheap glass saltshaker back and forth on the table, click, clack, click. “And what do you get for those, two dimes?”

“There’d also be the rent money every week. You’ve got two guest rooms upstairs, and there’s the pair of converted nursery rooms in the attic, and then there’s Rory’s room—”

“We are not renting out Rory’s room.” Frances practically spat this. “What if he comes home?”

Charlie gave Frances a cool, even look.

“Alright, alright.” I put a hand up. Frances was gripping the saltshaker now like she might pummel Charlie with it. “Charlie, again, this is all very … good of you to try and help, but the whole thing sounds a little … questionable to me.”

“ Questionable? ” Frances laughed. “ Cheap is what it sounds like. Boys paying girls to dance with them in our backyard? Turning your family home into a floozy boardinghouse? Viktoria, why would you want to embarrass yourself like this?” Frances hardly ever used Mrs. Tartt’s first name. “Believe me, I don’t want to sell the house either, but have you thought about what people would say about us?”

Mrs. Tartt looked from Charlie to Frances and started to speak but grimaced instead.

“The whole town would be gossiping about this,” Frances said. “ Did you hear what happened to the Tartts? They started a low-class dance club because they lost everything! We haven’t even tried to look for Rory yet! What if we found him in a week? Or even two?” Frances folded her hands in prayer. “We could clear this whole mess up without anybody but the bank knowing about it.”

Mrs. Tartt sighed, looking at her handkerchief curled in her fist. “Maybe I did get a little too excited. Charlie, this is—it’s not the kind of thing the Tartts do.”

“You’re right, it’s not.” Charlie laughed bitterly, and tears pooled in her eyes. “Because you don’t know what it feels like to be desperate yet, but I do.” She leaned closer to Mrs. Tartt. “Remember when you told me there are only a few things in life worth taking a chance on? And if you miss your chance, it is gone .” This conversation felt very private between them, but I had to speak up.

“Charlie, this isn’t Memphis, or Jackson, it’s Oxford,” I said. “It just seems … I don’t know … unlikely to work, in all sorts of ways. How much money could something like this possibly make?”

Charlie sat up straight and took a deep breath. “On a very good night, maybe fifty dollars. In a good week, close to two hundred.”

The hinge of my mouth creaked open. She had to be kidding. Or drunk. Or both.

“I know it’s hard to believe, and all that wouldn’t be yours.” She spoke in a deeper, more serious tone now. “The ladies working at the club would earn a share of the dance money, and there’d be costs involved, food and electricity and things to make the house comfortable again. But we’d also make a pretty good amount selling whiskey drinks too—”

“ Whiskey? ” Frances shouted.

We looked at Mrs. Tartt. She shrugged. She knew about this?

“Well, we’d want it to be popular,” Mrs. Tartt said. “And we do have an awful lot of it down in the cellar. It’s not like we can sell it to Mr. Fauster.”

I was speechless. Charlie had convinced Mrs. Tartt to turn her house into a speakeasy? My head was spinning. All the doubts I’d had about Charlie woke up again. Was she some kind of a con artist? I mean, in addition to a convicted criminal? I pulled a chair out and lowered myself down in it.

“Couldn’t we get arrested for that?” I asked.

“Oh I doubt Sheriff Porter would do much,” Mrs. Tartt said. “They’re saying Prohibition could be over by Christmas. Not that Lafayette County’ll ever go wet, but folks’ opinions have changed about taking liquor.”

“We’d split the profits three ways,” Charlie added.

“Don’t include me in this, this criminal enterprise!” Frances said.

“Oh, I wasn’t,” Charlie said. She looked over my way.

“What—you want me to operate this business with you?”

Frances let out a harsh, mean laugh.

“You’re good at business,” Charlie said. “And we’d need a bookkeeper to keep everything organized. We’d only have to be open a few weeks … a month tops, and then we’d close shop. You could go back home with pretty good money in your pocket.”

Those words, go home and good money , hung in the air. But I rubbed the back of my neck. This all seemed too good to be true.

“Charlie, maybe this is too much to ask her,” Mrs. Tartt said. She looked a little embarrassed. “You’ve done so much for us already, Birdie. It’s just that I know your family’s having money problems too, is why I thought you might be interested.”

Had Frances told her that? No , Frances would never admit the Calhouns weren’t the comfortable plantation owners she’d made us out to be, so that left Charlie. I’d mentioned our troubles to Charlie one of those nights on the back porch, smoking cigarettes. So not only had she been working on Mrs. Tartt behind our backs, she’d used my family to convince Mrs. Tartt to do this. That felt a little too conniving for my tastes, but I said nothing.

“If it worked, you would have the bank off your back,” Charlie said to Mrs. Tartt. “And then you can decide if or when you want to sell your house, instead of in a hurry and be forced to take pennies on the dollar from a cheat like Mr. Fauster.”

“How long have you been thinking about this, Charlie?” I asked.

Charlie looked at me square-on and said, “Two years.”

“Henry always said if you want to make money, you’ve got to take risks.” Mrs. Tartt glanced over at Charlie. “That and never let them know you’re desperate.”

For a while nobody spoke and then Charlie stood up from the stool and carried the churn over to the counter, the tall stick still stuck in it. “I’ll let the two of you sleep on it tonight, but we don’t have a lot of time. Let me know what you decide tomorrow.”

So this was my decision too? If I voted no, it wouldn’t happen?

“Why are you even doing this?” Frances asked Charlie. “Why do you care so much about what happens to this family?”

“Because I want to get my daughter back.” Charlie said it plain and simple. There it was.

“You have a child, Charlie?” Mrs. Tartt asked. She sounded genuinely surprised. “Well … where is she?”

“She’s living with a family a few hours north of here,” Charlie said.

“Why’s she not with you?” Mrs. Tartt asked.

“She was—I lost my job and couldn’t afford to take care of her, so she went to live with them.” Which wasn’t exactly true but it didn’t matter. Frances narrowed her eyes slightly on Charlie, but kept her mouth shut.

“I’m terrified I’ll never see her again.” I could hear Charlie sobbing under the words. “I’ll do anything to get my daughter back.”

Mrs. Tartt shivered and nodded, like she understood the feeling.

The cow is mooing. So get up and milk her. I opened my eyes to the first light slipping through the porch screens. That isn’t a cow , I realized, that’s a people. Why are they laughing and talking … at this painful hour?

Downstairs, I pulled on a pair of cracked rubber boots. When I opened the side door, the morning was pink, vaporous, the air cool. Mrs. Tartt and Charlie were over by the black barn talking. I walked toward them, through the wet grass.

For hours last night I’d stared out at the moon through the screens, ruminating. Dissecting this idea of Charlie’s—was she on to something? Could a dime-a-dance business really make that kind of money? I almost went down to her room to demand more details, tell her she should’ve talked to me about this first. I worried that this was just a way for her to stall for more time here to get to Meg, even if she got Mrs. Tartt’s hopes up along the way. None of that really mattered because I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Tartt actually agreeing to this. Mrs. Tartt would probably tell Charlie no, and I’d go home even broker. Maybe Jack would write me a letter from time to time and then he would stop writing.

The wide barn doors stood open. Mrs. Tartt, still in her long blue nightgown, was telling Charlie, “Now I’m not saying strict as the University Club, but if we did it, you couldn’t let in every Tom, Dick, and Harry off the street.”

“I’d make sure every customer was checked thoroughly,” Charlie said. She had on a fresh apron over a crisp dark green cotton dress. I wondered if she’d even gone to bed. “Don’t worry, there’ll be no riffraff here.” She glanced at me approaching.

“But how? Would you know?”

“Believe me, I have a sixth sense when it comes to scoundrels.”

Mrs. Tartt nodded like she trusted Charlie on this. “Course long gowns would be more elegant, but all the young people want to wear is tea-length these days and if we did this, I’d insist that the ladies’ shoulders be covered when they’re not dancing. Morning, Birdie,” Mrs. Tartt said. Her eyes were a little swollen and pink, like she hadn’t slept much either. “They’d teach the classic steps, wouldn’t they? Not just all that boogie-woogie they’re doing these days.”

“Of course. Don’t worry, they’ll be professionals, elegant young ladies who know what they’re doing,” Charlie said. She sounded a lot more confident than she had last night.

Mrs. Tartt tiptoed into the barn, minding her blue satin slippers. Strips of orange light shone through the slatted walls. “Everything’s packed up in those crates back there. The old dance floor pieces are on farther back. It’ll all need a very good scrubbing, I imagine.” Mrs. Tartt lifted the top off a crate, a feathery dust rising, and took out a wad of yellowed newspaper.

“We’ll clean it all up and make it look just like the photographs,” Charlie said.

Mrs. Tartt unwrapped the newspaper and held up a silver star on a string. She smiled. “Heavens, if we did this, it could be like 1922 all over again, couldn’t it?”

“We could make it whatever we wanted,” Charlie said. “Like going back in time.” I watched Charlie closely, suspecting that other, possibly more alluring things had been said before I’d come out here. Giving Mrs. Tartt visions of a world that no longer existed—with money and presidents who were friends of the family, unwrinkled faces and sons living at home.

“Who knows, maybe you could even afford to hire Picador and Polly again,” Charlie said.

“ No ,” I said. She’d gone too far, bringing up Picador. “You can’t say that, Charlie—”

“Why not?” Charlie asked.

“Because it’s—too much.” I was getting warier by the minute, listening to this. “Mrs. Tartt, I think we should go talk somewhere, just the two of us.”

“It’s alright, Birdie,” Mrs. Tartt said. “We discussed it, and Charlie said you wouldn’t have to be here if you didn’t want to. She could run things herself, so you can go back home.”

That made it worse. “You’d actually let Charlie run a dance club here while you and Frances were out of town?”

“If you don’t like the idea, I don’t want you to feel put upon.”

Charlie was standing right there, but I lowered my voice. “But you’ve only known Charlie a couple of weeks, and she’s—” Desperate? A convicted criminal? A con artist? “Don’t you think this all sounds a little too good to be true?” I whispered.

“Well, of course I do, dear.”

I waited for more, but she seemed all right with just that. All the things that could go wrong started falling out of my mouth. “But—you could lose your house wasting time on this slipshod idea, you could get in trouble with the police, you’d be the talk of the town …” Mrs. Tartt just nodded at all of them. “Don’t you think you should at least lower your expectations, in case it doesn’t work?”

Mrs. Tartt backed her chin up at me. I believe I’d offended her. “I’ve lived my whole life with high expectations. I have the highest of hopes every day and I plan on staying that way.”

“But what if it fails?” I asked.

“But what if it doesn’t fail, Birdie?” she asked. “I want to go look for my son. I want to keep my family’s house, and I want my precious things back. I’ll never stop hoping for the best.” She tilted her head to the side, curiously studying me. “Don’t take this the wrong way, dear, but what do you have to lose if you did do this?”

That stung. “I guess … not that much,” I said.

“Well there’s your answer, dear.”

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

She nodded. “I think so, yes.”

I was the one who’d brought Charlie here; I’d asked them to trust her, give her a hand. She was my responsibility. Behind the barn the cow started mooing to be milked. “Then I reckon I better stay and look after things.”

“She actually said yes to this?” Frances said. I was standing over her, still in her bed, which just meant a mattress on bare floorboards. She sat up. “Does that mean we can go look for Rory?”

“Evidently.”

Frances got up and flung open her curtains. Full sunlight filled the pink room, which was littered with clothes and shoes and potions with no drawers or a wardrobe to live in. “ Good. And I hope we find him too,” she said. There was a hard edge in her voice that surprised me. Certainly more productive than thinking Rory was coming home to save us. There was already enough pipe dreaming going on in this house.

An hour later, I brought a plate of biscuits to the parlor, where Mrs. Tartt and Frances were conspiring on the old red settee. “My sister Lulu will be plumb delighted to have us stay,” Mrs. Tartt said, but then she murmured, “I just wish she wasn’t so poor .”

They had a map open on the wooden crates that acted as a coffee table. Jackson was a big city, probably twenty times the size of Oxford. I’d been only once for the doctor’s visit and didn’t think Frances ever had been. Along with the Robert E. Lee, they said they’d be checking the King Edward Hotel and several of the nicer boardinghouses for any sign of Rory. “And check the filling stations too—ask if they saw the Studebaker,” I said.

Mrs. Tartt frowned up at the mantel where the painting had hung a thousand years ago. “We better go by the silver and jewelry shops too, to see did he try to sell anything.”

“And I plan on visiting a cer-tain friend of his down there too,” Frances said, tapping her finger on the map.

“Who?” Mrs. Tartt asked.

“Esther Royal. They used to go together, and last fall she was here for the jubilee, and I bet I saw her looking at him ten times. And some of those times he looked back .”

Mrs. Tartt pushed herself up from the sofa, giving me a sharp look. “I reckon we better go get ready. The train table said it leaves at 12:20.”

“You’re going today ?” I asked.

“Charlie thought it’d be best if we go on and go. She wants to concentrate on getting everything ready for these boarders.” Behind them, through the windows, I could see that Charlie had already hauled half a dozen wooden crates onto the back porch.

“Can you let Garnett know we’ve gone out of town without telling her why?” Frances asked me. I nodded I would.

“Heavens, I keep forgetting about the telephone. Birdie, would you mind running to town and asking Mr. Binny will he come pick us up at half past eleven?”

I told her yes, I’d go tell him, but this was all happening too durn fast. What did they think, they’d find Rory and wrestle him for all the things he’d taken? Talk him into giving them back? That was as delusional as when they thought Rory’d magically come home and pay the mortgage. I grabbed Frances by the sleeve. “I think you’re going on a wild goose chase, Franny, I just—I need you to know that.”

“Well what if I’m not? What if we take a chance and find him?”

“In a town of fifty thousand people? With nothing to go on but some telephone calls?”

She stood up straighter. “It just so happens some things are worth taking a chance for, Birdie. Not that you’d know that, the way you live your life.”

Ah, there it was again. What could Birdie know of taking chances? She’s too content living an unchancy life at home with Mama and Meemaw. “There’s a real good chance we could lose our house too, in case you’ve forgotten,” I reminded her.

“Can’t you for once hope for the best? I swear, you are just like Mama.” She stomped up the stairs, leaving me with the lonely fear that, sweet Jesus, maybe I was.

I turned to Mrs. Tartt and set my hand on her shoulder, hoping she could feel the weight of what I was about to say. “Don’t forget to go by Florsheim Shoes in Jackson. The owner’s name is Jimmy Watts. Rory telephoned the store six times the week he was fired.”

Mrs. Tartt nodded and whispered, “I see.”

After I ran to town to tell Mr. Binny, I packed them a basket for the train—butter sandwiches, two milk jugs of water, hard-boiled eggs, and okra pickles was the best I could do. I gave them thirty dollars from the Luzianne Tea can, which left us with about twenty-nine now. At 11:35, Frances and Mrs. Tartt were at the front door with matching blue suitcases. Mrs. Tartt, the experienced traveler, wore a soft pale cotton dress with a short-brimmed hat and flat shoes, while Frances had chosen a heavy cream ensemble with stiff black piping. She looked papier-mâché’d inside it. Her huge pinwheel black hat was tilted so ridiculously to the side she had to stand back from us so she wouldn’t knock us with it.

Charlie came up the hall, her apron already filthy from unloading the barn. I’d be riding to town with them to send a tenner to Mrs. Tartt’s sister to let her know they were coming.

“If you don’t mind,” Charlie said, handing me a folded piece of paper, “could you send a telegram for me too? It’s to a friend who might be interested in boarding with us.”

As Mr. Binny motored up out front, Frances studied herself in the mirror of a compact and snapped it closed, suddenly looking miserable. “What if I find him at Esther Royal’s? What do I say?”

“I really, really doubt he’s there, Franny,” I said.

Mrs. Tartt picked up handbag and said, “I believe we might need to have a talk on the train, dear.”