Doing It at the Dixie Dew Read Free Page B

restoring an ailing house. He had come to my rescue just as I was about to give up, give in and go. Go where? Anywhere but here.
    When I first started on the Dixie Dew, I’d hired Jake Renfroe, somebody Verna Crowell from next door had said was “good.” Later I remembered Verna Crowell had said this with a giggle and her hand half over her mouth. Good at what? I should have asked her. Good at sending me faster toward rack and ruin?
    Jake Renfroe would order materials that piled up on my porch and then not show up to do anything with them. Meanwhile, bills kept coming in for all he’d charged in my name. Finally I picked up the phone and fired him. He’d cried. It’s hard to hear an old man blubber over the phone, but I held firm.
    Then Ida Plum said call Scott Smith. I did. He came and we’d been working together ever since.
    Now Scott stood here in my kitchen eyeing the cakes under various wraps and foils as if they were trophies. Verna rang the back bell at six this morning, carrot cake in hand. “I’m so sorry to hear about Lavinia. Such a loss,” she said.
    Verna lived in two rooms in a fifteen-room house that decayed more every day. Her house was a few years older than Mama Alice’s and until the last ten years had been kept freshly painted and in good repair. The Crowells had money, but Verna wasn’t about to spend it on heat in the winter or air-conditioning in the summer or paint and plaster and repairs. She was probably one of those “little old ladies” whom Father Roderick’s charm was wooing out of all they had.
    I didn’t know what to say. I’d never met Miss Lavinia Lovingood before she decided to come to this house and die. Miss Lovingood had looked so awful when Ida Plum and I found her, all doubled over, her hair in a tangle and her face frozen in such agony. And so cold. I got goose bumps every time I thought about it.
    â€œLavinia Lovingood and I were girls together,” Verna said, then added before I could begin to count, “even if she was a good deal older. Of course we hadn’t kept in touch. Not for years. Not until she wrote me.”
    â€œWrote you?”
    â€œAbout a month ago.” Verna reached down and pinched off a dead tulip bloom. “You keep a bulb groomed and they’ll last longer.”
    â€œI don’t understand.” I felt like putting out my hand to stop any more tulip molesting.
    â€œWrote she’d be in Littleboro three days and come by to see me. Said we’d talk old times, catch up on our lives.” Verna turned, started across the porch. “Now look what it’s come to. But that’s what we all come down to in the end, isn’t it?”
    I didn’t know any answers except to extend the cake back in Verna’s direction. “Please,” I said. “You keep it.”
    But Verna insisted. “Beth, honey, you don’t know when you’ll need it. At times like this you just don’t know what you’ll need.” She patted my hand with her soft, old, wrinkled, spotted one. “After all, what are neighbors for, if not at a time like this?” A dark, hairy mole on Verna’s cheek wiggled when she smiled. I’d seen that mole all my life, wondered why it never got any bigger. When I was little, I thought it looked for all the world like a bug and would crawl off any minute.
    Lord,” I said after Verna left. “Word spreads fast. Around here all you have to do is whisper and it’s all over town.”
    â€œWho could miss it?” Ida Plum stacked sheets in the linen closet. “It’s hard not to notice an ambulance backed up to a house, a body being hauled out in broad daylight.”
    Miss Lavinia had looked so natural. Just old, eighty plus, maybe heading hard toward ninety. People die in their sleep, I told myself. She just happened to be a guest and sleeping in my house when it happened.
    â€œThat’s the way I