Free Doing It at the Dixie Dew by Ruth Moose Page B

offers to sell, but selling would be considered only when I was on my next-to-last breath. The offers had come in long legal envelopes on stationery so crisp it rattled like danger when I unfolded it. They were from some legal firm whose name took the two top rows of the letterhead and written “on behalf of a client who wishes to remain unnamed at the moment.” The offers were insultingly cheap and I told myself I’d be down to my last dime before I’d give away the only piece of real life I had left.
    I rounded the courthouse corner and stopped for the circle traffic when I saw someone walking past the closed double doors of First Presbyterian Church. A woman in a long red dress hoofed down Main Street, swinging a black pocketbook on a chain. She swung that pocketbook as if she saw something overhead and wanted to knock it down and “stomp it flat,” as the saying went. Reba, it could be nobody else. She’s off again, I thought. Off to wherever her mind went when it got out of whack.
    I walked behind her down the block. Crazy Reba owned the world at this moment. She had it on the chain of her pocketbook and was swinging it. For a moment I envied her careless joy, her wild, childlike, just plain efflorescence in just being alive. Reba heard all the birds and called back to them in their language, a singsong of sounds and phrases. “Thief, thief,” she yelled to the blue jay.
    â€œThief, thief, thief!” the jay screamed back, then joined two other jays in a tree, and all of them sang, “Thief, thief, thief.”
    Reba stopped under the tree and flapped her arms, waved the pocketbook, and the birds shot out like blue sparks in all directions. She laughed and laughed, bent down and beat the sidewalk with the purse.
    I glanced at the newspaper’s headlines as I walked, half-listening to Reba’s blue-jay screeches and dove coos, until I reached my own driveway and started toward the sunporch door.
    Reba stopped at the front walk, stared at the house, then plopped down mightily, a heap of red melting into a blob. She took off her shoes and scratched her feet.
    Oh God, I thought, she’ll be there all day and anybody considering the Dixie Dew will take one look at her and drive away as fast as they can. Reba was not the advertising I needed. I backed out my yellow Volkswagen Beetle, Lady Bug, slowed and rolled down my window. “Reba, can I give you a ride?”
    Reba got up and walked to the car. She held a spike-heeled shoe in each hand: one black, one white. “You going to Vegas?” she yelled with a broad smile that showed the gap between her teeth where some were missing in front.
    â€œI’ll take you home,” I said.
    Reba looked as though she didn’t know me from anybody, but it didn’t matter. To her, a total stranger was a whole new opportunity.
    â€œI can go there by myself,” Reba said, and pointed toward her tree on the hill.
    I thought Reba might be staying at the new group home; she looked clean, her hair freshly washed and combed smooth. Then I remembered Verna Crowell had warned me soon after I came back to Littleboro. “Keep your doors locked,” Verna had whispered. “Reba just comes in and helps herself to your bathroom. She’ll crawl in your tub, take a shower, help herself to all the soap and shampoo and hot water you got. Then she leaves a trail of wet towels out the door.”
    Verna went on to say that Reba had really scared her once. “I heard all this water running in my own bathroom and I wasn’t in it. I knew there was no one in that house but me and I wasn’t in the tub. I tell you, it’s a funny feeling. Then Reba comes out, drying herself, singing up a storm.”
    â€œTake me to Vegas.” Reba hit the side of my car with her shoe. “I said take me to Vegas, you car, you.”
    I reached for my gearshift but was afraid to start forward. Reba might step in front of the