Miss Slappy Gets an Admirer: A Midlife Mismatch

Chapter 1: A Breath for Courage

Sara-Lapis pressed two fingertips on her personal check, hesitant, as though she still had a choice. As if she could avoid the calamity, walk away and accept the loss as a well-intentioned, failed experiment. Tear up the check and hurry back to Marietta!

On the other side of the bank counter, a middle-aged clerk waited expectantly, glancing back and forth from the customer’s face to the check under her fingers.

Sara-Lapis did not like to admit mistakes, in fact, she never made them. Why, then, did this last step in her plan feel like letting go of the rope swing over the Big Muddy River? Minus the thrill.

She straightened her shoulders. If just this once she’d made a mistake, it wasn’t her fault. All she had to do now was to turn this mistake (which probably wasn’t a mistake) into a triumph.

With a profound breath, she pushed her check toward the bank clerk. Then she passed along a deposit slip for her new account, transferring her savings from Marietta to Newcomb, her former hometown. It was too late to turn back; she’d already bought the house. 

The clerk ran a red fingernail under her name on the deposit slip, and looking up, said, “Sara-Lapis Hughes? My goodness, you’re Slappy! Slappy Hughes!” 

Sara-Lapis did not recognize the woman’s round face, professionally smoothed with heavy foundation and rouge and framed by a haircut that enclosed her cheeks like parentheses. She did, unhappily, recognize the old nickname.

A man waiting in line behind her poked his shaggy head forward and said, “Slappy? Would that be a name or a habit?”

Radiant, the clerk continued, “Remember me? I’m Betty Jean Morgan. Still ‘Morgan’.” She wiggled the check, an action that seemed unprofessional. “And you’re still ‘Hughes’. How about that? Both of us single! Of course, career women like us often keep their own names after marriage. You are single, am I right? I see you’re wearing no ring!”

The clerk appeared to take such joy in her discoveries that Sara-Lapis was afraid she was about to hit on her. Would she do that in the quiet, formal atmosphere of the bank? True, there were only two customers in the lobby and no other employee visible except a young woman at the drive-through window. 

The clerk peered around her and spoke to the man who’d breached their privacy. “Fin, have you met Slappy Hughes? She’s come home! We were in school together, twelfth grade, that is, the year me and Mom moved to Newcomb. Slappy, the man standing right there behind you is your neighbor!”

In rural towns like Newcomb, ‘neighbor’ could mean someone miles away. Giving the man a glance, Sara-Lapis hoped this was the case. 

He stuck his hand forward and said, “I’m Finley Wack, and I’m glad to meet’cha. You’re a fine-looking addition to our town, Miss Slappy. Welcome home!” 

In thirty years of living on her own, Sara-Lapis had learned to avoid drunks and pretend not to understand indecent proposals, so she did not let Finley Wack pierce her composure. A wack indeed, she thought, allowing him to press her cool hand. 

“My name,” she said carefully, as though talking to a child, “is not Slappy. It’s Sara-Lapis. Sara-Lapis Hughes.” 

Unfortunately, in her hometown she’d never been called anything else, a name first mouthed as Sa-a-Lap by a baby brother and morphed by the family into Slappy. She’d never considered the name meant slapping, though as eldest of eight kids in their tightly squeezed house she’d done some of that.

Pushing a receipt back across the counter, Betty Jean Morgan leaned forward and whispered, “I’ll call. We’ll have to catch up.”

“Goodbye then,” Sara-Lapis said, pressing her lips in a disapproving smile and wishing she hadn’t needed to include her cell number on the application for the new bank accounts. 

As she turned to leave, Finley Wack said, “You need anything, Miss Slappy, be sure and let me know.” He smiled broadly, showing a gap in his front teeth wide enough to sharpen a pencil.

* * *

Sara-Lapis Hughes believed it was best to live unburdened by possessions. Nearly every third summer of her teaching career she’d moved to a new rental. She’d lived in attic and basement apartments, townhouses, a high rise, and twice in a trailer park. Moving was both her expression of independence and her hobby. It had all the thrill of collecting—the pursuit, the decision, the negotiation—without the heavy burden of house ownership. 

Her three-year cycles typically included a year of investigating and deciding (exhausting weekends of discovery and conversations with prospective landlords), a year of blending her possessions (increasingly minimal) with a few purchases appropriate to the new setting (further searches of shops, yard sales, used furniture stores), and a year of increasing restlessness that always ended in the search for a new rental. 

Until now, she had never bought a house. Her new acquisition was her family home on Wack Road, and she’d bought it for the amount of taxes owed at a public auction. It had been hers for twenty-four hours.

Returning to her old/new home with her temporary checks and black contractor bags, she found a white Jeep Cherokee in the drive and one of her brothers perched on the railing of the porch. She could not at first distinguish which brother; she hadn’t seen them for years, and they all looked alike. This one stood down from the rail when she got out of her car. 

“Just wanted to let you know, Slappy, we don’t appreciate your dirty tricks,” he said.

He had less hair on top than she remembered, but the snarl in his voice identified him. 

“Pearson. How nice,” she said.

She’d been rehearsing a meeting like this. She waited for him to ask something stupid, like why had she stopped paying taxes on their mom’s house and why hadn’t she taken care of the sheriff’s notice about the sale?

He brushed the seat of his tan pleated trousers and frowned at the weathered rail where he’d been sitting. “How do you think Mom would feel about what you’ve done here?”

She sighed. “Pearson, Mom’s been gone nine years.” She waved toward the house. “Do you want to come in?”

“It’s not home anymore.” His mouth twisted in a pout. The front door opened, and a long-haired blonde sauntered onto the porch. Pearson’s wife, Bonnie.

Sara-Lapis smiled, enjoying the way Bonnie’s red strapless dress emphasized her plump arms and sagging breasts.

“Hey there, Bonnie. Looking good!”

Bonnie took a high-heeled step toward Pearson and stopped in an impertinent pose, one hand on her hip. “You too, Slappy. Nice job of screwing the family.”

“Oh. We’re a family?” Sara-Lapis let her eyebrows go up in surprise. “Who visits? Phones? Sends birthday cards?”

Pearson lit a cigarette. “Come on. Sure, we’ve lost touch, all of us scattered over the country. Canada too. Except you, right there in Marietta, what, three or four hours away? We counted on you, Slappy.”

She could not resist. “Seven of you boys, and not one ever reimbursed me for the taxes I paid. For nine years, Pearson.”

He laughed. “Let’s see, my share was about $12.50 a year? Would you like that in big bills?”

At this point, Sara-Lapis was tempted to offer him complete ownership for his nine years’ share—the house with its plumbing leaks, ancient wiring, broken window glass, warped roof and all. But this was Pearson, so it was important to seem indifferent. 

“Have you come for a special reason?”

“What happened to Pop’s guns?”

“You thought they’d still be here? After all this time?”

“I asked what happened to them.”

She shrugged, enjoying this. “I didn’t take them. Ask your brothers.”

Bonnie took a drag of Pearson’s cigarette and stubbed it out on the porch floor. “If there’d been an auction, everybody could have shared.”

“Ah, yes. Too bad you weren’t here at Mom’s funeral to make that suggestion. I know, too far, bad weather. After the funeral, your husband’s brothers and their wives grabbed up as much as they could pack in their cars. Nobody said, ‘Have an auction, we’ll share’.”

“You might have told us what you meant to do,” Pearson said.

Sara-Lapis smiled, because it was best to be casual about this, like it was no big deal, a predictable, ordinary outcome. Like she didn’t already have a mountain of regrets. 

“Everyone got the same notice I did,” she said. “You could have come to the sheriff’s sale and bid on the property. Too bad you didn’t do that.” Really too bad. Then her money would still be in Marietta, where it had grown slowly for years, instead of here, where it would quickly shrink to the cliff of disaster. 

“But hey,” she said. “Come inside. There’s some old stuff here. Take what you like.”

She led them through the five small rooms, three down, two up. A pink enameled chest of drawers remained in the upstairs bedroom she had shared with the youngest boys until she’d left home, the first to get away. In the drawers were boys’ underpants with stretched elastic, school notebooks and hard erasers, stained tee shirts, broken shoelaces, worn wallets, pages torn from hot rod magazines. The other rooms held similar leftovers: floor lamps with frayed cords, tables with wobbly legs, all hers to pack up and drag away, thank you very much.

“None of you would agree to sell. Easier to leave things as they were,” Sara-Lapis said.

“That’s how grief is,” Bonnie said.

Sara-Lapis sighed. “After a while it’s just stupidity.”

Pearson lifted a photo album from the kitchen table and flipped its pages. Blank spots marked photos someone had wanted.

In the kitchen, Bonnie looked through the plywood cabinets. From a box on the linoleum floor, she lifted a KitchenAid mixer.

“That’s new and it’s mine,” Sara-Lapis said. 

“I don’t want it anyway,” Bonnie said.

Pearson turned toward the door. “This would make Mom feel bad.”

“Lots of things made Mom feel bad,” she said. “But hey, you’re welcome to stay the night.” She gestured toward a room empty of all but an iron bed and thin mattress.

“Just passing through.” He let the screen door slam behind him. 

They said no goodbyes.

In the tiny house where eight children had grown up, Sara-Lapis Hughes, the eldest, the unmarried one, filled a bucket with hot soapy water, tugged the rusty refrigerator away from mildewed plaster and thought about the creamy walls and ceramic tile of the apartment she had left.

Chapter 2: The Neighborhood Nut

In the four-mile stretch of Wack Road between Route 50 and the Big Muddy River there’d never been more than two houses. Each sat on the better portions of the rocky, mossy land, bordered by old trees and pine needles. 

When Sara-Lapis brought her friend Claudine down to see the house they might bid on, she’d noticed the neighboring property was surrounded by high board fencing, barely visible through the trees. Thanks to the introduction of the bank clerk, she now knew someone lived there: a Wack. 

How, at her age, with all her experience, had she made such a stupid decision? 

There was not one thing to admire in the rough and ragged ground or in the house she and Pearson had argued about. The tree that had held the tire swing had fallen and lay rotting. The pine trees bordering the road had grown tall, throwing shade on her property half the day, and the pines behind the house shaded it during the other half. If she could take some of them down, sunshine could reach the house, though she hated the idea of cutting down a tree. She was grateful for the trees on the south side, however, a shield against her neighbor.

Her house did not have a lawn to mow, just a cleared area of moss and pine needles, flat rock, brush and straggly weeds, and beyond that, a sparsely wooded swamp. Her father had used a scythe to terminate anything near the house that aspired to be a bush. A grassy lawn was too much to hope for, but perhaps she could make the area around the house less ugly.

None of her brothers wanted the property but they didn’t want to sell it. Like as long as it was there, they were still kids? 

Sara Lapis had been in no mood to explain herself to her brother. She did not need accusations. She was the one who had suffered the embarrassment of their name printed in the legal notices in three issues of the weekly county newspaper, to which she’d faithfully subscribed all these years.

She was the one who had endured the anxiety of the public auction and the fear that she would arrive late, or be outbid, or be successful. Unfortunately, she had been the only bidder, and now she was trapped by a worthless, needy property in a region that had changed for the worse.

She had enjoyed several moments of revenge, thinking of her brothers receiving the notice of the sale, finally figuring it out. 

In the beginning, the idea of  buying the property had carried its own set of thrills and been a lift from her current state of restlessness. If she did not pay much for the house, she would not feel particularly committed, yet if she decided to live in it, there could be much investigation and happy pursuit in the remodeling process before she might feel restless again. 

And of course, in the beginning, Claudine had been part of the project.

Tired of the musty odor of the house, Sara-Lapis went outside. Her yard was like a forest floor, littered with branches, twigs, pinecones and rotting tree limbs. Cleaning all that up would allow her to work outside in the clean air for a while.

Mentally she organized this task. A child’s wagon or wheelbarrow would be helpful, but she had no such thing. A plastic garbage bag would serve to hold smaller twigs, but most of the job would require making piles throughout the yard. 

She worked at this task for an hour, rested fifteen minutes on the front porch, and returned to the yard for another hour. At noon she had a half hour break with a microwaved potato topped with cottage cheese. By mid-afternoon she had tugged and dragged the largest limbs to a pile for burning. She began to put smaller twigs in a bucket. 

It was when she approached the pines between her property and the neighbor’s that she heard fearful sounds of what might have been cries, shouts, or wails. The voice belonged to a man, and the anger in it sounded like a man, but she had never heard a man’s voice like this, rising in volume and pitch to the heights of an operatic soprano, growling rage, hurling words that might be curses.  

She stepped closer, then immediately stepped back, hearing, “Oh God! Get down here and be my strength.”

What was he doing? It was like witnessing a heart attack or mental breakdown. Yes, a mental breakdown. That’s what it was. She backed out of the pines, set down her bucket of twigs, and fled to the security of her own four walls.

If her judgment was correct, and until lately, she’d always had good judgment, her only neighbor was a nut.

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