Cold Tea On A Hot Day. Curtiss Matlock Ann

he did experience a little bit of disappointment when his gaze found her front porch, white gingerbread trim, and empty.

      Not only was all quiet at the James house, but along most of the street. At the house on the corner, a young man wearing a UPS uniform was chinning himself with bulging arms on a beam across the middle of his porch ceiling. He dropped to his feet, headed for his car at the curb, casting Tate a wave as he came. Friendly fellow! Tate waved back.

      Turning up First Street, heading for the commerce area of Main, Tate slowed. He had begun to breathe quite hard. He sure didn’t want to have a heart attack on his first day in town. He glanced back and saw that Bubba had deserted him.

      Tate continued on, a sort of jog, meeting two ladies who were race walking, pumping arms, talking at the same rate they were walking. They exchanged swift hellos with Tate.

      On Main Street, a woman was unlocking the door of her shop—Sweetie Cakes Bakery painted across the window. She nodded and slipped in the door. Further down the street, he looked across at The Valentine Voice building. By golly, it was his!

      He was walking now.

      Just then Charlotte came through the front doors of the Voice, surprising him somewhat, and put up the flag, setting it quickly and returning inside before Tate got close enough to holler a good morning.

      He was perhaps breathing a little too hard to offer a hearty good morning.

      For the past two weeks his attention and time had been taken up with his move to Valentine; that he had not been routinely jogging was telling on him now.

      At the corner of the police station, from where he thought he smelled coffee brewing, he turned up Church Street, heading for home. The golden rays of the sun now streaked the horizon.

      Funny how he had not realized that the street went up a hill.

      Ah, there was another jogger coming toward him. Tate felt the need to push himself into a jog. Didn’t want to be out jogging and not doing it.

      A minute later he was sure glad he was jogging, because the young man coming toward him turned out to be not quite so young, and to be Parker Lindsey. By golly, he looked all youthful male in a sleeveless shirt and jogging shorts that showed tanned hard thighs.

      The two approached the intersection.

      “Good mornin’.” Tate raised his voice and refused to sound breathless.

      “’Mornin’,” Lindsey returned, cruising along at a good clip. He even wore a sweatband around his forehead, like a marathon runner.

      Tate put some strength into his jog. He might have a few years on Lindsey, and a lot of grey in his hair, but where there was snow on the mountaintop, there was a fire in the furnace. He thought of the old saw as he continued on across the intersection toward his driveway, intent on at least jogging around to the back of the house, out of view.

      Just then he saw, coming along down the hill, a shapely blond young woman in a skimpy exercise outfit, jogging and smiling at him. He might have stopped to talk to her, but the young woman’s attention was captured by Tate’s older neighbor on the opposite corner, who came from her house in walking shorts and shoes, waving and calling the blond woman by name.

      The town was a haven for health enthusiasts!

      He continued up his driveway, which had much more of an incline than he had before noted, and around to the back steps, where Bubba now lay, sunning himself. The cat gave Tate a yawn.

      “I feed you…no comments.”

      Tate dragged himself in the door and sank down upon the floor, going totally prostrate on the cool linoleum.

      

      Marilee sat holding her coffee cup in both hands and thinking that she should have made it stronger. She had gotten used to Corrine’s brew and seemed not to be able to function well on a weaker variety.

      Across from her, Corrine, looking for all the world like she was about to be shot, played with her food. Willie Lee, who ate slowly, asked if Munro could go to school with him.

      “He will be lone-ly with-out me,” he said.

      Marilee, watching Corrine play the fork over her egg, thought, there are only three weeks left to the school year.

      “I think we can have the ending of our school year today,” she said, suddenly getting up and taking her plate to the sink. “You two do not need to go back this year.”

      She looked over her shoulder to see their reactions.

      Willie Lee’s eyebrows went up. “I do not have to go to schoo-ool to-day?”

      “No, not today, and no more until fall. We’ll see about it then.”

      Corrine was looking at Marilee with a mixture of high hope and sharp distrust on her delicate features.

      “I’ll call Principal Blankenship and see what we can do about you finishing your work at home,” Marilee told her.

      The relief that swept the girl’s face struck Marilee so hard that she had to turn away and hide her own expression in her coffee cup. She thought of her sister, Anita. Corrine’s mother. She had the urge to toss the coffee cup right through the window.

      Then Willie Lee was at her side and tapping her thigh. “Mun-ro needs breakfast.”

      Looking into his sweet face, Marilee smiled. “He does, doesn’t he.”

      “I can give him my egg,” Corrine said.

      “Please, make him toast, too, Ma-ma.”

      “Yes, darlin’…I’ll make toast for Munro.” She looked at the dog, now eating the egg very gently from Corrine’s plate.

      

      Marilee’s reasoning mind told her to force the children to go to school and face what they would have to face sooner or later, a regimen and self-control, and those few cruel and mean and inept people one will come across on many an occasion. Life was a tough row of responsibility to hoe, and the sooner the children, even Willie Lee, learned this, the better.

      She all but took out a gun and shot her reasoning mind. It wisely shut up.

      Thinking of both the principal and her new boss, who she would now ask to let her work at home, she got herself dressed nicely in a slim knit skirt and top in soft blue, accented with a genuine silver concho belt from her more prosperous days of no children and a husband who earned quite good money as a world-renowned photojournalist. She managed to talk herself into doing a thorough makeup job and brushed her hair until it shone.

      Then she sat at her cherry-wood desk to telephone Principal Blankenship and secure from the woman the promise that Corrine would be kept with her grade. The principal was surprisingly agreeable, even eager, at the idea of releasing the child, whom she all but labeled troubled straight out.

      “Corrine has perfect straight A’s,” the principal said. “Her grades are not a question. She is a very bright girl. That is not at all her problem in class. I’m sure we can accommodate you in order to help Corrine have the rest she needs.” Then she tacked on, “Ah…I have the name of a child therapist you might want to consider.”

      For Willie Lee, the principal promised to consult his teacher about work that might possibly help him. Marilee, who had from her teenage years been unable to shake her faith in her own mental capacity, told the principal not to bother Mrs. Reeves. “I’m going to pick out a curriculum for Willie Lee.”

      The principal definitely disapproved of this action, labeling it risky, but stopped short of pressing, no doubt fearful Marilee would change her mind and bring the children back to school.

      Marilee thanked Principal Blankenship for all her help and hung up, sitting there for some minutes, her hand on the telephone, gazing at nothing, until she realized she was gazing at a pattern on the Tibetan rug that fronted the couch. She remembered, then, buying it in Calcutta, on one of hers and Stuart’s