The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County: A Novel

10. Marilyn Jones

39 Marilyn Jones 10 On a bright and sunny early May day, Marilyn sat in her office at the supper club, thinking back to when she first began running the place. She remembered so well the day her life changed completely: it was September 25, 1973, and she was a sophomore at Ripon College. As she left the lecture room that Tuesday morning, her roommate, Jesse, met her at the door. “Someone from the main office just called and said you should stop by the office as soon as possible.” Marilyn immediately wondered what she had done wrong. She knew that she had been partying a little too much, and that her grades weren’t much above a C average. But what had she done to trigger a summons to the main office “as soon as possible”? She walked across campus thinking about what kind of trouble she must be in and what the possible punishment might be. And she wondered how she would break the news to her parents, who were counting on her to do well and to help them manage the supper club when she graduated. The Joneses had spent all their savings on enlarging, modernizing, and refurbishing the supper club, turning it into a popular place for locals and tourists alike. Marilyn had been helping out at the supper club ever since she was three or four years old, and by the time she was in high school, she was waiting on tables and doing all kinds of odd jobs around the place. During the summers she worked there full-time. It wasn’t a bad summer job—her parents even paid her a salary. But she would have preferred going out with her friends and spending some time away from the supper club. 40 Marilyn Jones She pulled open the main office door, walked up to the counter, and in a quiet voice said, “My name is Marilyn Jones, and I was told you needed to see me.” “Oh, Marilyn, thank you so much for coming by so promptly,” said the secretary behind the counter, a gray-haired and very friendly woman. “Dr. Sykes is waiting to talk with you. His office is the first one down the hall.” Marilyn’s head was still filled with worry about what she had done wrong as she knocked on the closed door. “Come right in,” she heard. “I’m Marilyn Jones.” “I’m Dr. Sykes,” the plumpish, round-faced man on the other side of a rather cluttered desk said. “Please be seated.” He pointed to a chair that sat alongside his desk. Dr. Sykes took off his glasses, put them on the desk, and then looked right at Marilyn and said, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you.” Marilyn steeled herself for the worst. Would she be placed on academic probation? Had her partying gone too far, and was she going to receive a reprimand of some type? But what she heard was beyond anything she expected. “We’ve just learned that your parents have been killed in a car accident,” Dr. Sykes said quietly. “It happened at nine this morning on Highway 22, just north of Montello.” “What did you say?” Marilyn asked, hoping she had not heard correctly. Dr. Sykes repeated, this time a bit more slowly. “Your parents were both killed in a car accident this morning.” “Oh, no. Oh, no. That can’t be true. It must be someone else. Are you sure?” blurted out Marilyn, her blue eyes filling with tears. “It’s true, Marilyn. I stand ready to help you in any way I can—you just need to tell me how.” “It’s not true. It’s not true,” Marilyn cried, pounding her hands on Dr. Sykes’s desk, knocking one of the piles of papers to the floor. But when she looked into Dr. Sykes’s sad face, she knew it was true. Late that afternoon she tried to call her sister, Gloria, ten years her senior, to tell her of their parents’ death and to ask her advice on funeral 41 Marilyn Jones arrangements and what she should do with the supper club. Since she left for California in 1966 after a big family fight, Gloria had not once called or written to either of her parents or to Marilyn—not on their birthdays, not at Christmas, never. Marilyn thought she had moved...