Elvis and The Dearly Departed. Peggy Webb

fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches I was so fond of before I fell from Graceland, but it’s still good Southern home cooking.

      Well, back to my foxy little poodle. TCB, baby!

      Elvis’ Recipe for Fried Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches

      First, watch Callie toast two pieces of white bread. I know whole wheat’s better for you, but a dog sweating under an August sun hotter than stage lights needs all the carbohydrates and sugar he can get.

      Sit there and drool while she melts about half a stick of butter (the real kind, not that cheap imitation stuff) in the bottom of a skillet. Next, howl “How Great Thou Art” while she spreads smooth peanut butter on one side of the toast, puts a bunch of sliced bananas in the middle, and fries the sandwich, turning it till it’s golden brown on both sides.

      Dig a nice cool hole under the oak tree and bury the sandwich until you can sneak off, dig it up, and enjoy it without being bothered by Callie’s silly stray cats and that dumb cocker spaniel she found in the Dumpster behind the video store.

      Chapter 3

      Feuds, Hot Fudge, and Moveable Corpses

      The funeral home is a war zone. Mellie’s not speaking to Janice, Janice is not speaking to Bradford, the teenagers are not speaking to anybody but their newly rich uncle, Kevin’s not speaking to Lovie (who turned down a proposal while she was backed up against the refrigerator in Eternal Rest), and nobody in the Laton family is speaking to Uncle Charlie.

      All he said was, “You probably want to see your daddy before you leave the funeral home.”

      “You can hang his sorry carcass out for the birds,” Janice said, then drove her Avis rental car off and left Bradford and the boys to hitchhike back to Mooreville.

      I was getting ready to offer a ride, but thank goodness Mellie said she’d drive them back.

      Frankly, I’m tired of the Latons. All I want to do is find Elvis and a quiet place to curl up and repent my latest transgression with my ex. I always do this, say I’m not going to feel the least bit guilty, then have second thoughts and figure a woman headed to battle in the divorce court ought to know better than to sleep with the enemy.

      After the warring camps leave, I grab my purse. “Uncle Charlie, is there anything I can do before I go?”

      “No, dear heart. I’m going by Grover’s office to discuss the progress he’s made on finding Bevvie Laton. Then I’m driving out to the farm to fix Ruby Nell’s front porch glider.”

      Mama will be sorry she missed him. It serves her right for gambling away my money.

      Uncle Charlie locks up and we walk into the full blast of hundred-degree August heat. All I can say is it’s good for business. Nobody can keep a hairdo more than two hours in this humidity. Except me. I’m proud to say my slick brown bob can withstand tornadoes and still look like I stepped out of Vogue.

      “Lovie, leave your van here and ride with me. Elvis is missing, and I want to find him.”

      Without a single question, Lovie hefts herself into my maroon four-wheel-drive pickup, which is my alter ego. If I could be a truck I’d want to be a take-charge Dodge Ram with a kick-ass Hemi engine. Nobody messes with this sucker.

      I pull out of the parking lot and head to the east side of town toward the King’s birthplace.

      Every time we pass by, Elvis howls. Tupelo Hardware, too, for that matter. On the corner of Front Street and Main, it still looks very much the way it did when Gladys Presley bought her son’s first guitar. The owners have marked a big X on the spot where he stood and love to claim credit for starting him on the road to fame. As a tribute to the King, the store keeps a fading cardboard poster in the window of a young, skinny Elvis caught in swivel-hipped splendor.

      They sell Elvis guitars, too, and I’m not ashamed to admit I have one. Jack was going to teach me to play it, but we all know how that turned out.

      Lovie and I are bumping across the railroad tracks east of the hardware store when my cell phone rings. She digs it out of my purse.

      “It’s Jack.”

      “Tell him I’m not talking to him. Permanently.”

      She hands me the phone.

      “Hello, Jack. Why aren’t you out chasing women?” Mama’s innuendo at work.

      “You’re the only woman I want to chase and I’m still looking for Elvis. Where are you? I’m picking you up.”

      “Do me and the world a favor. Go by yourself. Save condoms.” I hang up.

      One of Tupelo’s landmarks rises in the distance—a water tower the city no longer uses that’s shaped like a golf ball on a tee. I hang a left, then wheel into the parking lot beside the shotgun house where Elvis (the icon, not my dog) was born. It’s two rooms with front and back doors aligned so you can shoot through the front and out the back.

      Suddenly I’m out of steam. I just sit in the Dodge Ram gripping the steering wheel.

      “That does it,” Lovie says. “You’re spending the night with me.”

      She rummages for her cell phone. This could take two weeks: she has a purse the size of Texas. I hand her mine and she calls Janice Laton.

      “Callie won’t be home tonight. I trust everybody can get along fine without her…. Great. Oh, if her basset hound shows up, give us a call.”

      She gives Janice both our numbers. “Let’s get out of here, Callie. We need hot fudge.”

      It’s getting too dark to see, anyway, and I’ve never known a problem that couldn’t be made better with chocolate. I head back west in the gathering gloom. We nab her van at the funeral home, then end up on Robins Street.

      You’d expect somebody Lovie’s size to have a house like mine—ten-foot ceilings, big rooms, massive closets. She lives in a doll’s house, a little pink cottage on a postage-stamp, magnolia studded lot a few blocks from the heart of downtown Tupelo. The only spacious room in her house is the kitchen.

      She makes two hot fudge sundaes, then rifles through her CDs and selects Pachelbel’s Canon in D. We sprawl on her blue velvet sofa with our feet on the coffee table, needing no communication except music and chocolate.

      Lovie’s penchant for highbrow music surprises most people.

      When she was sixteen, she wanted to be a classical pianist. She’s a genius at the keyboard and could easily have been a professional musician, but after Aunt Minrose choked to death on a chicken bone at the Sunday dinner table, Lovie gave up lofty aspirations in favor of ice cream and boys. But even so, she still looks like a plus-sized Rita Hayworth.

      After dinner I borrow one of her one-size-fits-all nightshirts with a slogan that says Hero Wanted, Apply Here, and we settle in for a marathon of watching old cowboy movies.

      “The great thing about westerns is that you can always tell the bad guys by their black hats.” Lovie says this in a way that makes me wonder if she’s just searching through all those men till she finds one with a white hat.

      The thing is, Jack wears black all the time, but deep down if I thought that made him one of the really bad guys I wouldn’t let him touch me with a ten-foot pole. Or any other size, for that matter. But that man has settled into my heart and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get him out.

      The miniature Big Ben on Lovie’s TV chimes half past midnight. I head to bed while Lovie stays behind to watch The Lone Ranger.

      “I never could resist a man in tight pants and a mask,” she says.

      She loves to leave you laughing.

      Lovie’s phone wakes me up at the crack of eight. In my opinion the day shouldn’t start till ten o’clock. I luxuriate in my cousin’s