The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Edward Kelsey Moore

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moore, Edward Kelsey.

  The Supremes at Earl’s all-you-can-eat / by Edward Kelsey Moore. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95993-5

  1. African American women—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.O556S87 2013 813′.6—dc23 2012028743

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Front-of-jacket art by Fred Lynch

  Jacket Design by Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1

  For Mom and Dad

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Chapter 1

  I woke up hot that morning. Came out of a sound sleep with my face tingling and my nightgown stuck to my body. Third time that week. The clock on the dresser on the other side of the bedroom glowed 4:45, and I could hear the hiss of the air conditioner and feel its breeze across my face. I had set the temperature to sixty before going to sleep. So common sense said that it had to be chilly in the room. Well, common sense and the fact that my husband, James, who lay snoring beside me, was outfitted for winter even though it was mid-July. He slept like a child—a six-foot, bald-headed, middle-aged child—wrapped in a cocoon he had fashioned for himself out of the sheet and blanket I had kicked off during the night. Just the top of his brown head was visible above the floral pattern of the linens. Still, every inch of me was screaming that the room was a hundred degrees.

  I lifted my nightgown and let it fall, trying to fan cool air onto my skin. That accomplished nothing. My friend Clarice claimed that meditation and positive thinking eased her path through menopause, and she was forever after me to try it. So I lay still in the predawn darkness and thought cool thoughts. I summoned up an old summer memory of hopping with the kids through the cold water jetting from the clicking yellow sprinkler in our backyard. I pictured the ice that formed every winter on the creek that ran behind Mama and Daddy’s house in Leaning Tree, making it look like it was wrapped up in cellophane.

  I thought of my father, Wilbur Jackson. My earliest recollection of him is the delicious chill I got as a little girl whenever Daddy scooped me up in his arms after walking home on winter evenings from the carpentry shop he owned. I recalled how cold radiated from Daddy’s coveralls and the way it felt to run my hands over the frost-coated hair of his beard.

  But Daddy’s shop had been gone for ages. The Leaning Tree property, creek and all, had been the domain of various renters for half a decade. And my children were each at least twenty years beyond dancing in the spray of a sprinkler.

  No thoughts, at least not the ones I came up with, proved capable of icing down my burning skin. So I cussed Clarice for her bad advice and for making me think of the old days—a certain recipe for sleeplessness—and I decided to head for the kitchen. There was a pitcher of water in the Frigidaire and butter pecan ice cream in the freezer. I figured a treat would set me right.

  I sat up in the bed, careful not to wake James. Normally, he was as easygoing a man as you’d ever meet. But if I woke him before dawn on a Sunday, he would look at me sideways all through morning service and right up until dinner. So, in order not to disturb him, I moved in slow motion as I stood, slipped my feet into my house shoes, and made my way to the bedroom door in the dark.

  Even though I had made the trip from our bed to the kitchen thousands of times in pitch blackness, what with sick children and countless other nighttime emergencies during the decades of our marriage, and even though not a stick of furniture in our bedroom had been moved in twenty years, I rammed the little toe of my right foot into the corner of our old mahogany dresser not five steps into my journey. I cussed again, out loud this time. I looked over my shoulder to see if I had awakened James, but he was still snoring away in his linen wrappings. Hot and tired, my toe throbbing in my green terrycloth slip-ons, I had to fight the urge to run and wake James and insist that he sit up and suffer along with me. But I was good and continued to creep out of the room.

  Other than the faint growl of James snoring three rooms away, the only sound in the kitchen was the bass whoosh made by the lopsided ceiling fan churning above my head. I turned on the kitchen light and looked up at that fan wobbling on its axis. With my toe smarting, and still longing to distribute my bad humor, I decided that even if I couldn’t justify snapping at James about my hot flash or my sore toe, I could surely rationalize letting off some steam by yelling at him for improperly installing that fan eighteen years earlier. But, like my desire to wake him and demand empathy, I successfully fought off this temptation.

  I opened the refrigerator door to get the water pitcher and decided to stick my head inside. I was in almost to my shoulders, enjoying the frosty temperature, when I got the giggles thinking how someone coming upon me, head stuffed into the refrigerator instead of the oven, would say, “Now there’s a fat woman who is completely clueless about how a proper kitchen suicide works.”

  I grabbed the water pitcher and saw a bowl of grapes sitting next to it looking cool and delicious. I pulled the bowl out with the pitcher and set them on the kitchen table. Then I fetched a glass from the dish drainer and brought it to the table, kicking my house shoes off along the way in order to enjoy the feel of cold linoleum against the soles of my bare feet. I sat down at what had been my place at the table for three decades and poured a glass of water. Then I popped a handful of grapes into my mouth and started to feel better.

  I loved that time of day, that time just before sunrise. Now that Jimmy, Eric, and Denise were all grown and out of the house, the early hours of the day were no longer linked to slow-passing minutes listening for coughs or cries or, later, teenage feet sneaking in or out of the house. I was free to appreciate the quiet and the way the yellowish-gray light of the rising sun enter
ed the room, turning everything from black and white to color. The journey from Kansas to Oz right in my own kitchen.

  That morning, when the daylight came it brought along a visitor, Dora Jackson. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a squeak of surprise when I first caught sight of my mother strolling into the room. She came from the direction of the back door, her short, wide body waddling with an uneven stride from having her left leg badly set by a country doctor when she was a girl.

  People used to call us “the twins,” Mama and me. The two of us are round women—big in the chest, thick around the waist, and wide across the hips. We share what has often been charitably called an “interesting” face—narrow eyes, jowly cheeks, broad forehead, big but perfect teeth. I grew to be a few inches taller, five foot three. But if you were to look at pictures of us, you’d swear we were the same woman at different ages.

  My mother loved the way she looked. She would strut through town on her uneven legs with her big breasts pointing the way forward, and you knew from looking at her that she figured she was just about the hottest thing going. I never came to love my tube-shaped body the way Mama loved hers, but learning to imitate that confident stride of hers was probably the single smartest thing I ever did.

  Mama wore her best dress that Sunday morning, the one she usually brought out only for summer weddings and Easter. It was light blue with delicate yellow flowers and green vines embroidered around the collar and the cuffs of the short sleeves. Her hair was pulled up, the way she wore it for special occasions. She sat down across from me at the table and smiled.

  Mama gestured with her hand toward the bowl of grapes on the table and said, “Are you outta ice cream, Odette?”

  “I’m trying to eat healthier, maybe take off a few pounds this summer,” I lied, not wanting to admit that I was thinking of the grapes as a first course.

  Mama said, “Dietin’ is a waste of energy. Nothin’ wrong with having a few extra pounds on you. And you really shouldn’t drink so much water at this time of day. You were a bedwetter.”

  I smiled and, in a childish show of independence, drank more water. Then I tried to change the subject. I asked, “What brings you by, Mama?”

  “I just thought I’d come tell you about the fun I had with Earl and Thelma McIntyre. We was up all night goin’ over old times and just laughin’ up a storm. I had forgot just how funny Thelma was. Lord, that was a good time. And that Thelma can roll a joint like nobody’s business, tight little sticks with just enough slack in the roach. I told her—”

  “Mama, please,” I interrupted. I looked over my shoulder the way I always did when she started talking about that stuff. My mother had been a dedicated marijuana smoker all of her adult life. She said it was for her glaucoma. And if you reminded her that she’d never had glaucoma, she would bend your ear about the virtues of her preventative vision care regimen.

  Other than being against the law, the problem with Mama’s habit, and the reason I automatically glanced over my shoulder when she started talking about that mess, was that James had worked for the Indiana State Police for thirty-five years. Mama got caught twenty years back buying a bag of dope on the state university campus on the north end of town, and as a favor to James, the head of campus security brought her home instead of arresting her. The campus security chief swore he’d keep it under wraps, but things like that never stay quiet in a little town like Plainview. Everybody knew about it by the next morning. It tickled Mama to no end when her getting busted became a sermon topic at church a week later. But James didn’t see the humor in it when it happened, and he never would.

  I was eager for Mama to get back on track with the story of her evening with the McIntyres, skipping any illegal parts, because foremost among my mother’s many peculiarities was the fact that, for many years, the vast majority of her conversations had been with dead people. Thelma McIntyre, the excellent joint roller, had been dead for twenty-some years. Big Earl, on the other hand, had been just fine one day earlier when I’d seen him at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat buffet. If he had indeed been visiting with Mama, it was not good news for Big Earl.

  “So, Big Earl’s dead, is he?” I asked.

  “I imagine so,” she said.

  I sat there for a while, not saying anything, just thinking about Big Earl gone from the earth. Mama gazed at me like she was reading my mind and said, “It’s all right, baby. Really. He couldn’t be happier.”

  We found out about Mama seeing ghosts at a Thanksgiving supper back in the 1970s. Mama, Daddy, my big brother Rudy, James, Jimmy, Eric, and me—I was pregnant with Denise that fall—were all gathered around the table. In keeping with tradition, I had done all of the cooking. Flowers Mama understood. She had the best garden in town, even before she devoted a plot to her prized marijuana plants. Food Mama never quite got the hang of. The last time Mama attempted to cook a holiday meal, we ended up feeding her black-and-gray glazed ham to the dog and dining on hardboiled eggs. The dog took one bite of Mama’s ham and howled for six hours straight. The poor animal never quite recovered. So I became the family chef at age ten and we ended up with the only vegetarian dog in southern Indiana.

  That Thanksgiving supper had started off real nice. I had cooked my best feast ever and everybody loved it. We joked and ate and celebrated having Rudy at home. My brother had run off to Indianapolis as soon as he graduated high school, so we didn’t see much of him and my boys barely knew their uncle. Everyone was having a good time, except for Mama, who was testy and distracted all afternoon. She got more agitated as the meal went on, mumbling to herself and snapping at anyone who asked her what was wrong. Finally she stood up from the table and hurled the butter dish at an empty corner of the dining room. She shouted, “Goddammit to hell!”—my mother can cuss a blue streak when the inspiration hits her—“Goddammit to hell! I have had just about all I can take from you, Eleanor Roosevelt. Nobody invited you here and it’s time for you to go.” She shook an accusatory index finger at the corner of the room where the stick of butter, avocado-green plastic butter dish still adhered to it, slid down the wall, leaving a shiny trail like the path of a rectangular snail. Mama looked at the astonished faces around the table and said, “Don’t give me that look. She may have been the perfect little lady when she was in the White House—all lace doilies and finger bowls—but since she died, she ain’t done nothin’ but show up here drunk as a skunk, tryin’ to start some shit.”

  Later, Jackie Onassis came to see Mama, too, but she was much better behaved.

  Daddy reacted to Mama’s ghosts by trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to see a doctor. James and I worried about her in private, but pretended in front of the kids that there was nothing odd about their grandma. Rudy decided that Indianapolis wasn’t nearly far enough from the craziness of his family, and he moved to California a month later. He has lived there ever since.

  Mama reached across the kitchen table and poked at my arm. “You’re gonna get a kick out of this,” she said. “You know that woman Earl was livin’ with?” “That woman” would be Big Earl’s second wife, Minnie. Mama couldn’t stand Minnie, and she refused to utter her name or acknowledge her marriage to Big Earl.

  “Thelma says that woman set up a fountain in the front room where Thelma and Earl used to have the hi-fi. Can you imagine that? Do you remember how nice that hi-fi was? Best I ever heard. And they saved up for a year to get it. We sure had us some parties to remember in that house.”

  Mama watched me eat a few more grapes and then said, “Earl said the nicest things about you. He was always so crazy about you, you know. And I don’t need to tell you how much he loved James.”

  James loved Big Earl, too. Earl McIntyre was the closest thing to a father James ever had. James’s daddy was a low-down, dirty son of a bitch who ran out on him and his mother when James was barely more than a toddler. James’s father stuck around just long enough to leave a few nasty scars and then hightailed it out of town a few steps ahead of the law to inflict more d
amage somewhere else. The visible scar on James was a half-moon-shaped raised leathery line along his jaw made by a razor slash intended for James’s mother. The deeper, invisible scars he left on James, only I saw. Only me and Big Earl.

  After James’s father ran off, Big Earl and Miss Thelma took it upon themselves to see that James’s mother always had food on the table. When the All-You-Can-Eat, the first black-owned business in downtown Plainview, opened in the mid-1950s and Big Earl couldn’t have been making a dime, he hired James’s mother as his first employee. And they kept her on the payroll long after emphysema had made it impossible for her to work. More important, the McIntyres kept an eye on James, so he wouldn’t end up like his daddy. I’ll be forever grateful to them for that.

  That’s how Big Earl was, a good and strong man who helped other people to get stronger, too. All kinds of folks, and not just black, loved him. You could take a problem to Big Earl and he would sit there and listen to you spill out a lifetime’s worth of troubles. He’d nod patiently like it was all new to him, even though he was a man who had seen a lot in his life and had probably heard your particular kind of blues a hundred times over. After you were done, he’d rub his huge hands across the white stubble that stood out against the coal black of his skin and he’d say, “Here’s what we’re gonna do.” And if you had sense, you did whatever it was he said. He was a smart man. Made a little money, kept his dignity, and still managed to live to be old—something a black man his age in southern Indiana shouldn’t have been able to do. Something many had tried to do, but failed at.

  Now, if Mama’s word was to be trusted, Big Earl was dead. But that was a mighty big “if.”

  Mama said, “What was I talkin’ about? Oh yeah, the fountain. Thelma said the fountain in her front room was six feet tall, if it was an inch. And it was made up to look like a naked white girl pouring water out of a pitcher onto the head of another naked white girl. Who comes up with that kind of stuff?”

  I poured another glass of water, and thought. Mama was often wrong when it came to her perceptions of the world, physical or ghostly. And she’d said many times herself that ghosts could be tricksters. The whole thing about Big Earl being dead could have been a prank played on Mama by a tipsy, belligerent Eleanor Roosevelt. I decided to put it out of my mind until later when we’d meet our friends for our standing after-church dinner date. We were gathering that Sunday, as we always did, at the All-You-Can-Eat. Little Earl and his wife, Erma Mae, had taken over running the restaurant several years back, but Big Earl still came in nearly every day to help out his son and daughter-in-law. One way or another, I’d have my answer come evening.