People Always Going To

My business is grout, but I'm not stuck up about it. The way I figure, there's all sorts of things to know, and we shouldn't get all high and mighty just on account we happen to have a leg up on one little dab of the world's many and wondrous mysteries.

Take my Rosalie, for instance. Please, like the old comic used to say. No, seriously. She knows boiled peanuts. Knows the what-ofs and what-nots of goobers, the briny-cooked variety. It's not brain surgery: a batch of green peanuts, a cooker of water, salt, and time. Oh, but she has secrets – my Rosalie – inside tricks of the boiled goober trade she's sworn me to keep on the qt. Still, she's not a proud sort; she knows that everything we think we're sure of can go up in smoke without as much as a fare-thee-well. "Everything you know," she's told me, "is one less thing you don't."

So that's why this evening we're on our way to Dyersburg to see Miss Carmen Dupree who specializes in matters of the spirit. Rosalie's papa died in the summer, and now she wants to see what Miss Carmen might be able to tell her about Pappy Sam and how things are going for him in the great beyond. My job is to drive and keep from putting on what Rosalie calls my crabby pants. That's our story, always has been. Sooner or later, I say something I shouldn't. Maybe I whine about having to help cook those peanuts, and Rosalie gets all dramatic. "Oh, aren't you the one?" she might say. "Mister Grout Man. Mister Waiting for His Lucky Break. Mister Crabby Pants. You. Sometimes I just want to wash my hands."

It's not that I doubt the psychic powers of Miss Carmen Dupree; let's just say I'm not all hepped up about throwing money in her lap what with the economy how it is and people letting their grout stay dirty or cracked, and Rosalie's boiled peanuts going too-much unbought from her stand in front of the Wal-Mart. If Pappy Sam really is out there keeping check on us, I imagine he's tickled because one of the last crusades he went on before his heart seized up and quit was to get me to go into the trout farming business with him (It'd be an easy switch, he told me. Grout to Trout: all I'd have to do would be think a "t" in place of a "g." And besides, he said, people always going to eat fish.), and to convince Rosalie to give up the boiled peanut business and get herself into the heat-ing and air conditioning trade program at Tri-County Voc/Tech. ("People always going to be hot and cold.") That was Pappy Sam. He had a good notion of what people were always going to do, and he wasn't afraid to say it. So I expect he's slapping his knee over the fix we're in now: bill collectors calling up, repo men coming in the dead of night. If Miss Carmen makes contact with Pappy, I'm going to tell her to ask him whatever came of that three thousand dollars he owed me. Three thousand dollars he threw away one night at the Southland Dog Track. Let's see what he has to say about that.

I've got the sunroof open on account it's one of those warm October days, right here at Halloween, when the cotton harvest is on, and stray fluff just goes scooting through the air, and sometimes you can be driving down the highway and stick your hand out the window and snatch it up.

Everything's all buttercups and roses until we stop for supper at a Denny's restaurant, and when I lift my water glass up off the little napkin the waitress set it on, Rosalie says, "Lord a mercy. Would you just look? It...