Cold Tea On A Hot Day. Curtiss Matlock Ann

      “Is your choice chocolate, too?” Aunt Vella asked Corrine.

      Corrine frowned in contemplation.

      “I’ll give you another minute.” Aunt Vella went about lining up four dishes and making the sundaes—cherry for Corrine, it turned out. While doing this, she threw conversation over her shoulder, telling about the Rose Club meeting held the previous evening—“We had ten people!”—and how they had already voted as a first project to plant roses around the Welcome to Valentine signs at each end of town.

      “Winston and I are goin’ up to Lawton tomorrow to buy bushes,” Vella reported, feeling increasing excitement with the telling.

      She had been very pleased with the respectable turnout of people for the first rose club meeting, and felt a glow that her idea of a rose club had proven out. Especially after Perry had rather pooh-poohed the idea as frivolous. She almost had not pursued the idea, after his attitude, but it had turned out that a number of people, such as their mayor’s wife, Kaye Upchurch, had liked the idea immensely. While Kaye Upchurch could be on the frivolous side, she was truly knowledgeable about what was good for the town. Her enthusiasm for the Rose Club’s place in the community was heartening.

      Vella was also becoming more and more excited about going up to Lawton with Winston. She had never been anywhere with Winston, outside of her own backyard or here at the store.

      “We’d like to get the bushes in the ground soon. It’s already so late to be planting,” she added, bringing her thoughts back to the moment. “We could very well get a repeat of last summer and all that heat. Winston thought we could install some sort of watering system by the welcome signs,” she said, focusing on a plan. “If the city doesn’t want to pay for it, Winston said he would.”

      In Vella’s opinion, Winston was a little free with his money, and this was both quite amazing and refreshing. Her husband Perry pinched a penny until it gave up the ghost. Vella thought she needed to take lessons from Winston in being more free and easy. She did not want to spend her remaining years being as controlled as she had spent her entire life to this point.

      Marilee, only halfway listening to her aunt’s conversation, other than to observe that the Rose Club seemed to make her aunt very happy, watched the loose skin at the back of her aunt’s arm wiggle, while her biceps worked sturdy and strong. Marilee had lately been trying to exercise the backs of her own arms, which were the first thing to go on a woman; she was amazed that her aunt was so strong, though, despite the sagging back of her arm.

      Then Marilee found herself looking over the counter, at the age-spotted long mirror, the shelf of neatly lined and glimmering tulip glasses, the modern licenses in dingy frames, and the yellowing menu with the Dr Pepper sign at the top. The drone of Uncle Perry’s television reached her from the back room of the pharmacy, where her uncle would be sitting in his overstuffed brown chair.

      Aunt Vella brought a dish of ice cream around the end of the counter and set it down for Munro. “I didn’t think he needed whipped cream or a cherry,” she said, then stood there, watching the dog, as they all were.

      “I sure hope this doesn’t give him a headache,” Vella said, as the dog began to lick the cold sweet ice cream with some eagerness.

      “He likes it,” Willie Lee pronounced quite happily.

      “Hmmm…”

      Aunt Vella went back to put the finishing touches on the people’s sundaes; they definitely got whipped cream and a cherry. She then set the children’s sundaes on the granite counter, with a “There you go, sugars,” pronouncing the word as shu-gahs in a way that caused a particularly strong pull on Marilee’s heart.

      As her aunt scooted a sundae across toward her, Marilee looked at it and suddenly realized she was sitting on the last stool at the far end of the counter, right where she had always sat as a child when she came running into the drugstore, dragging Anita by the hand. Aunt Vella would lean over the counter, dab at Anita’s tears and ask, “What can I get for my two shu-gah girls today?”

      Marilee would be choking back tears but would manage to get out quite calmly that she and Anita would like chocolate milk shakes, please. Her Uncle Perry always called Marilee a little lady because she never yelled or screamed or cried. There were so many times when she wished she could yell and scream and cry.

      Now, as then, she took up the long-handled spoon and smoothed the chocolate syrup around on the vanilla ice cream. She liked to let the ice cream get a little soft and then mix it with the chocolate syrup. She would have to admit to being addicted to chocolate, but after having taken tranquilizers for too long after her heartbreak with Stuart, she thought chocolate a fairly harmless aid to getting along in turbulent times. Chocolate tasted good and felt good going down, and it did not make her brain so fuzzy as to spin out of the world.

      As she spooned the chocolate and vanilla ice cream onto her tongue, she looked across and caught hers and Corrine’s reflections in the wide old mirror. Corrine’s dark eyes, for a moment, met hers in the mirror, before looking down at her sundae. Marilee watched Corrine’s reflection, the bend of the dark head, the way she tilted it slightly, looking for all the world like her mother at that age.

      Marilee’s gaze returned to her own reflection. It struck her quite hard that here she was staring at middle-age and still employing the same coping skills she had employed as a ten-year-old girl.

      

      “You’ve been workin’ way too hard,” Aunt Vella said. “You just need a little boost. You should take a potent mixture of B’s for three months, and it wouldn’t hurt for you to start taking calcium…you need to start thinkin’ about keepin’ your bones. Every woman’s bones start to fade after thirty-five.”

      Marilee had followed Vella over to the pharmacy shelves, where her aunt perused the bottles of vitamins and herbs, while the children occupied themselves twirling on the stools at the counter. Actually, it was Corrine being twirled by Willie Lee. She held on to the stool with her thin little hands, while Willie Lee got a kick out of spinning her around. Corrine was always so patient with Willie Lee. She displayed strong mothering instincts with him, and very often she did things for him that he was capable of doing for himself. Willie Lee allowed this, in the pleasing way he always went along with people.

      “You worry about them too much. They’ll be fine. They have God, just like you do. He cares for you. Trust Him.”

      At her aunt’s statement, Marilee looked over to see that the older woman had noticed her wandering attention.

      “Then who looks after the children who are abused and forgotten all over the place?” Marilee asked, more sharply than she had meant to.

      “I don’t know,” her aunt answered in the same fashion. “I’m not smart enough to know that. I only know what I know, that there is a God who cares for us, and that worrying never solved a thing. Change what you can, accept what you can’t, and leave off worrying. It just wears you out.”

      Marilee sighed, her mind skittering away from a discussion she didn’t wish to get into.

      “I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she said. “I took them out of school for the rest of this year. Corrine looks like she’s going to face the firing squad each day she goes to school, and Willie Lee just keeps runnin’ away. Maybe I’m not even addressing the true problem…. I know I’m not…but it just seemed the one thing I could do.”

      “Good. You changed something. And there aren’t enough days of school left to worry about it, anyway.” Vella was peering at the labels on the vitamin bottles through her reading glasses at the end of her nose. “Do you have the kids on vitamins?”

      “Dailies.”

      “Not enough.”

      Marilee watched her aunt set about deciding which vitamins would be sufficient for the children. She felt an anger well up inside.

      “Can vitamins fix a brain damaged by birthing?” she asked. “Or a heart broken