A Thin Bright Line by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Author:Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780299309381
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2016-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

Tuesday, November 18, 1958

Daddy died of a quick heart attack in the courtroom. He was seventy years old but Lucybelle hadn’t yet considered the possibility of his death. She told her mother that she loved her, hung up the telephone, and wanted to call Stella.

The only number she had was for Acme Transport. Wanda was the dispatcher. Lucybelle had never been to their house.

Even before she felt the full impact of her grief at losing Daddy, she was hit by the realization that not only did she have no viable way for contacting Stella, her lover wasn’t available to her. At all. In any real way. These past three months had been an illusion of closeness.

The double whammy near about killed her that night. She drank too much. She smashed some dishes. L’Forte ended up peeing in a corner of her study.

In the morning she called Dorothy and asked if she’d keep L’Forte, then took a taxicab to the airport and booked a flight to Little Rock. The airplane bumped down on the tarmac, the wings wagging side to side, and the brakes screeched to a slow stop. Her brother, John Perry, having flown in from Portland, met her flight and they drove together to Pocahontas.

They found the house full of women, Mother on the couch holding tightly to her Bible, casseroles and cakes covering the dining room table. The smell of the lard-rich food made Lucybelle nauseous. She went directly to the little yellow cube that was her girlhood bedroom, closed the door, and sat on the small single mattress. Her arms and legs felt as brittle as sticks. Her face ached. Home without Daddy was impossible. If no one before Stella had truly seen her, at least Daddy had glimpsed her. He’d struggled to fit her into his picture of the world, the small-town Christian life he believed in with all his might. He’d viewed her intelligence as an anchor she’d have to forever drag, could not conceive that it might be her ship out, but he’d seen it. He had loved her.

Lucybelle was shattered.

She wanted a cigarette with a level of desperation that felt life-threatening. She had to smoke or she would die. The only feeling stronger was her shame: neither her brother nor her mother knew that she smoked. What a stupid thing to hide. But it felt like the nadir of her self, indicative of her lack of discipline, her vulnerability, her unworthiness.

John Perry had married a smart and beautiful woman, Helen, and they had four wholesome children. They took hikes after church on Sundays and talked politics at the family dinner table. She, by contrast, was involved with a woman who was cheating on her lover of fifteen years, a woman whom she couldn’t call even when her daddy died. She smoked cigarettes and didn’t even own a dinner table. She’d lost eight pounds since she began seeing Stella.

By the end of the week, she felt so diminished she seriously considered staying in Pocahontas. Someone had to care for her mother.

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