Free The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee by Marja Mills

you want me to . . . ?”
    Angie laughed. “Sure.”
    Tom put the cubes back in the freezer. “Old habits die hard.” He looked sheepish, then amused.
    Ernie was chuckling. “I catch myself doing the same thing.”
    Nelle tipped her head back and laughed. “Oh, Tom.”
    He explained. When they were children in the 1930s, getting ice, and keeping it, was a lot of work. And it cost money. The rolling store came through town twice a week, selling its wares, and so did the ice truck. It was out of Evergreen, the Conecuh County seat and home to the railroad station from which Nelle later set out for New York. The iceman hauled big blocks of ice in the back of the truck. He stretched a canvas tarp over the top to keep them cool, or as cool as they could stay under the Alabama sun. Air-conditioning didn’t come in until the 1960s, and even then it was enough of a novelty that businesses that had it advertised the fact.
    So used ice was something to rinse off and keep, not toss in a sink to melt. Tom’s mother washed off any ice that remained in a glass and put it in a sawdust-lined hole in the ground. Then she covered it with cloth. She would no more let ice melt down a drain than she would throw away the scraps of cloth she stitched into quilts.
    On hot days, which were most days, nothing was as refreshing as a chip of ice dissolving on your tongue and running cool down your throat. Just the sound of it clinking in a glass of sweet tea made you feel cooler. It was civilized.
    This was the first of many times I would find myself around a kitchen table with Nelle, enjoying the sound of laughter and old friends trading stories of the way things used to be.
    It was pitch-black outside now, and time to go home.
    “Angie, you are a marvel,” Nelle said, pushing back from the table. “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a meal more.”
    “You come back quick, Nelle,” Angie said.
    Ernie walked us to the car and opened the passenger door for Nelle. “Don’t be getting into any trouble now,” he said.
    “Heavens, no,” she said, laughing.
    “I can’t make any promises,” Tom said.
    It was their usual give-and-take. Nelle fumbled to fasten her seat belt by the car’s interior light. She feigned indignation. “Tom, what in the world?”
    He reached over and guided the seat belt into the buckle.
    Nelle rolled her window the rest of the way down and reached over to put her hand on Ernie’s sleeve. “You take care of yourself, Ernie. Thank you for a wonderful time.”
    Ernie nodded and glanced at the backseat. “You find your way back here now, you hear?”
    Nelle and Tom chatted the whole way home about people they had in common with Ernie: who had been feuding with a neighbor, who had remarried, who had come into a small inheritance, and whatever happened to his cousin?
    The names didn’t mean anything to me. But I listened to the easy banter between the two, even as I got sleepy in the backseat. Tom was right. Nelle was in her element here.
    We followed our headlights through the dark back to Monroeville.
    —
    O n that trip, I was able to spend more time with Alice and Nelle. Once they passed, Tom pointed out, the tangle of myths and half-truths that have flourished amid Nelle’s decades-long silence would only grow. He worried about that.
    “When she and Alice go, people are going to start ‘remembering’ things as they didn’t happen, or outright making things up, and they won’t be here to set the record straight. So keep taking notes, girl.”
    One afternoon, I had a message from Nelle. Since I would be in town awhile longer, would I like to go for breakfast? If so, she would swing by the motel the next morning and get me. Once again, I found myself waiting in the glass vestibule of the Best Western, not sure what to expect.
    She was right on time. She pulled up in a dark blue Buick sedan and motioned for me to get in.
    “Good morning.”
    “Morning,” she said. “Have you been to Wanda’s?”
    I