A Kiss for Maggie Moore
By Micki R. Pettit
THE WEDDING
She is wearing white. Baby’s breath plays peekaboo with the folds of her braided hair. Her face, somewhat red from all the bridal attention, glows beneath a veil delicate as fairy wings.
His face is glowing, too. He is a man in love, exuberance in every line of his dimpled, lopsided grin. An expression that never ceases to both astound and annoy me.
I stand beside them, wearing panty hose no less, in a puffy-sleeved frou- frou dress she has chosen. I am the maid of honor. Oh, to be the bride.
“Lord, look mercifully upon these two who have come seeking your blessing. Let your Holy Spirit rest upon them so that with steadfast love they may honor the promises they make this day.”
The low, droning voice of Reverend Bauer melds with the sound of the Sanctuary’s antiquated furnace. It’s hard to tell which blows hotter air. Together they lull me into a nostalgic stupor.
“Take her right hand in yours, and with the vows that bind one another repeat after me: I, Buckingham Howard Majors the Third . . .”
.....
“. . . Buckingham Howard Majors the Third!” he shouted with hands on hips, looking like a general who had just taken a hill. My hill.
“A third of what?” I shouted back. “Not a third. The Third.”
“Well, I’m Margaret Emma Moore—The First. That means I’m number one. Get it, Mr. The Third?”
“Oh yeah? Well, I was here first.”
He had a point, but I wasn’t going to back down.
“You lie! You lie like a fly with a booger in its eye!”
“Wait a minute—Margaret?” His voice turned smug. “Why, you’re just a girl.”
JUST a girl. It wasn’t the first time someone had mistaken me for a boy. Nor was it the first time someone had said those words as if being a girl wasn’t good enough, but this time the phrase stung. He was a dead man. I took my best as-seen-on-television boxing stance. “You take that back,” I demanded.
He crossed his arms and tilted his head as if reconsidering. He obviously outweighed me, but I was meaner. Mr. The Third didn’t want to tangle with me, so he did the next best thing to winning: he negotiated.
“Well, if you’ll share the hill, I’ll share this.” He pulled a fistful of smashed jelly beans from his pocket.
Never one to turn down anything edible, I accepted.
“My friends call me Bucky,” he said, holding out a hand to help me up our jointly claimed pile of construction rubble. That’s when I saw his dimple for the first time.
I took his hand, and he took my heart.
.....
“...take thee, Melinda Ann Thomas...”
.....
The new girl was wearing a school dress fancier than anything I’d ever seen, much less anything I’d ever wear. Her hair was the color of autumn grass, golden with a hint of red. It was tamed by two fancy French braids, each embellished by a bright blue bow that perfectly matched her dress, and her eyes. She was sitting on the rusty rail of the old railroad tracks. No train had ran them for years, so they were ours to travel.
Bucky spotted her first. We had been scouting Indians, certain that any minute a whole war party would appear over the horizon and lead us on an adventure—just one of many imaginary scenarios Bucky and I had acted out since we made peace atop the pile of house-making leftovers.
“Who you s’pose that is?” Bucky whispered
“Don’t know. Never saw her,” I whispered back. “Maybe it’s the Medicine Woman.”
“Hmm,” he wondered. “Let’s get closer.”
On hands and knees, we inched our way through the tall grass alongside the tracks, Bucky in blue jeans and a T-shirt, me in hand-me- down overalls.
When we were about six ties away, she moved, plucking a dandelion that had gone to seed.
“Ah, an unsuspecting damsel,” I whispered, immediately changing pretends. Bucky didn’t respond. Instead, he fixated on the dandelion, as if he were the one examining the bygone flower. She had enchanted him. I didn’t like it. Not one bit.
Since Bucky had ceased to be part of the plan, it was up to me to find out exactly who this princess was. Leaping into the air, I gave my best monster-on-the-loose scream. The effect was disappointing. She stiffened, but didn’t scream back.
When you attempt to scare someone and it doesn’t work, you have to redeem yourself quickly. I tried again, knowing full well I probably looked like an idiot. Although Bucky stood up and glared at me, the girl seemed amused.
“What’s your name?” I asked. “And why are you here?”
“Melinda,” she said, standing to brush the dirt from the backside of her dainty dress. “Melinda Thomas. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve been following you. I’m your new neighbor.”
Something about her tugged my heart, like the need to nuzzle a sleeping puppy. She extended her arm for a handshake. An offer of friendship, if I would only take it. The formality suited her, and I liked her show of respect. I decided she would fit in just fine.
At least until she smiled at Bucky.
.....
“ . . . The ring? May we have the ring, please?”
Reverend Bauer is addressing me. Suddenly, I’m the focus of all eyes. “Mags, tell me you’ve got the ring,” Bucky whispers.
“Of course, I’ve got the ring.” I’m wearing it. Unfortunately, the blasted thing won’t come off without a fight. I discreetly stick my finger in my mouth and pull one-and-a-half karats over my knuckle with my teeth. Then I hand it to the groom.
Bucky gives me one of those “I don’t believe you did that” looks. Melinda smiles.
Taking Melinda’s delicate hand, Bucky raises it to his lips before sliding the ring past a manicured nail and over a long, dainty finger. I watch it come to rest where it really belongs.
Still, I wonder...
“Whom therefore God has joined together, let no one put asunder. You may kiss the bride.”
.....
Bucky’s eyes were squeezed shut, his puckered lips slowly moving toward their target. Fully alert, Melinda awaited the inevitable encounter with no outward show of fear. When their lips touched, Bucky’s eyes sprang open and Melinda’s closed.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!” I interrupted, stealing the moment. Bucky stood up from the clubhouse bench, seeming a little too upset by the intrusion.
“I thought it was okay,” Melinda assured him.
“Yeah, Mags. What do you know?” Bucky snapped.
I defended my pronouncement. “There was no movement. I mean, come on. Everybody knows you got to at least move your head.” Using my fist as an imaginary partner, I closed my eyes, tilted my head upwards and rolled it from side to side with dreamy abandon. Satisfied with my demonstration, I opened my eyes to Bucky’s smirk—he knew I was no more practiced in the art of kissing than either of them. Melinda, however, was impressed.
“Should we try again?” she asked me.
“No,” I sulked. “This is stupid.”
“Well, it was your idea in the first place,” Bucky reminded me.
I licked the split in my upper lip that always came with the dry winter air. The hideous thing had kept me from being the one to give Bucky his first kiss. And mine.
“It was an experiment,” I said. “And a dumb one at that.”
“Well, what should we do now?” Melinda asked with new enthusiasm.
Suddenly I was annoyed; when it came to imagination these two had none. All Bucky did was get us into trouble, and all Melinda did was . . . be perfect.
“I don’t know. You’re the new president. You figure it out. I’m going home.”
After paying due respect to our official clubhouse mascot, Hector, a Clorox bottle made into a pig, I left through the blanket that served as the clubhouse door.
I didn’t really want to go home. There was still plenty of daylight left, and supper was still a few hours away. I was about to go back in when I heard Bucky tell Melinda, “Ah, let her go. She’s in a snit and won’t be much fun anyway.”
That made me mad enough to run all the way to the fence. Before separating the barbed wire, I looked back at our ramshackle clubhouse. No one came out.
“Who needs them anyway,” I told myself as I pushed down the lower wires and slipped through. Besides, it wasn’t like they could come up with something worthwhile to do without me.
I should have never left them alone.
PART ONE
The Summer of 1968
CHAPTER 1
The house where I did most of my growing up was pink, about two shades darker than cotton candy. Not a conventional color for rural Wyoming. Then again, the families who lived along Old Orphanage Road were anything but. We were a colorful bunch who coveted elbow room yet understood the need for neighbors.
The Bales and their Barn had arrived first. Built in 1920, the Barn was a relay station for illegal booze back when our neck of the woods was beyond both city limits and the local sheriff department’s jurisdiction. Few people in Wyoming, including the sheriff, paid much attention to laws that forbade them to partake in whatever the hell they wanted, and Mr. Bales took advantage of the situation. He hired some local musicians, added a few outhouses, and made the Barn the most popular speakeasy this side of Thermopolis.
Respectability didn’t enter the picture until Mrs. Bales did. Not that she was averse to downing a beer with a whiskey chaser, but Elizabeth Bales was first and foremost a do-gooder. Her pet project was establishing a county orphanage to be built on the twenty acres her first husband had acquired in a poker game. Unfortunately, he lost the property to Mr. Bales in the same fashion then shortly after keeled over from a bad liver. Apparently, Elizabeth’s affections came with Mr. Baleses’ winning hand. After allotting the appropriate mourning time to hubby number one, they married. Once again, the twenty acres were in her possession. However, her new husband’s illicit establishment—within eyeball distance of her proposed orphanage site—was a potential contribution to juvenile delinquency. In the throes of love, Mr. Bales shut down operations. The Barn was converted into an honest-to-goodness home, complete with kitchen and indoor toilet.
As for the county orphanage, it was doomed from the get-go. Construction began shortly after prohibition ended then moved at the pace of a hobbled horse. During a wild spring thunderstorm, its newly erected thirty-foot flagpole took a direct hit from a lightning bolt. Nothing was left on the premises but charcoaled skeletons.
The orphanage never was rebuilt, but names being names, and people being people, the route would forever remain Old Orphanage Road.
Mr. and Mrs. Bales hung on to their undeveloped land until the early sixties when they decided to sell. My father was the first in line to buy. A painter by profession, Dad was giving the Barn the last of its red coats when Mr. and Mrs. Bales took a shine to him. Never having had any kids of their own, the couple relied on townsfolk to look in on them. They were also lonely, so Dad, who could be quite charming, convinced them they needed some company. He had just enough money for a couple of acres. They agreed to whittle down their land.
Dr. Simms was second. He tried to buy the remaining acreage, but Mrs. Bales had come to like the idea of having a neighborhood and wouldn’t sell Doc anything more than five.
Our house—a modest three-bedroom with a basement—was the first to be framed and the last to be finished. Every weekend Dad would drive the backhoe, pour some cement, pound a few nails, and do whatever it took to move construction along using whatever money he’d managed to come by that week. Dr. Simms and family was living in their modern showcase long before we had a roof. While they had floor-to-ceiling windows, two fireplaces, and an attached two-car garage with an automatic garage door opener, we were happy to move in as soon as ours had a functioning kitchen and a flushable toilet. It didn’t matter that the floors were bare plywood, the bathroom lacked a sink, and the living room walls were unpainted sheet rock.
Dad had been sold on aluminum siding by a smooth-talking fishing buddy turned salesman. A rather off-putting shade of pink, the siding came primed for painting, however that wasn’t on my father’s list of priorities.
The color offended Dr. Simms. He rang our newly installed bell one evening at suppertime. “When the hell are you going to paint over that damn pink? It cheapens the whole damn area.” Showing remarkable restraint, my father reminded the good doctor that if he ever got around to paying his bills and came across one owed for a certain paint job on a certain reception area, some people might have enough money left over to buy a bucket of paint. The doc went away in a huff. Two days later Dad received a check in the mail. He immediately went out and bought pink exterior paint.
About the time of the paint feud, Big Buck Majors, a businessman who owned the biggest car lot in town, started building a home for his family just catty-corner from ours. Construction on the Padilla home began around the same time.
Mr. Padilla had been a successful rodeo clown, growing up in the border city of Juarez and traveling both the Mexican and United States rodeo circuits. Two days after arriving in our city with his long- suffering wife, five niños and a bambino on the way, he took a bull’s horn to the gut and landed in the hospital. Surgery was touch and go, but the afterlife didn’t stand a chance, not with Mrs. Padilla lighting candles and reciting rosaries to keep her husband in the here and now. When Mr. Padilla woke, he claimed the Virgin came to him in a vision, delivering a bedpan along with a message that further instructions were forthcoming.
When his bandages were removed for the final dressing, Mrs. Padilla took one gander at her husband’s gut and fell to her knees. There on his abdomen, etched in scar tissue, was the Virgin Mary standing in front of a big red house.
Not sure of his vision nor his emerging scar, Mr. Padilla loaded up the family in their rickety pickup and set out for a drive, hoping to sort things out. As fate would have it, they blew a tire on Old Orphanage Road, not thirty yards from the Barn—the big red house.
Mrs. Bales happened to be on the front porch in her nightgown taking in the morning sunshine and combing her long white hair. Apparently, she was the spitting image of the Virgin on his belly, because when she looked towards the road, Mr. Padilla was running towards her followed by five hollering kids and a very pregnant woman. “Nuestra Señora, Nuestra Señora!” They chased Mrs. Bales clear past the frog pond before she finally tuckered out, at which point Mrs. Padilla went into labor.
Although a harrowing experience for all, it worked out for the best. Mrs. Padilla gave birth to a healthy seven-pound girl who she named Elizabeth, after Mrs. Bales. And Mrs. Bales sold them two acres at a price they could afford.
Doc Simms kept his eye on the Padillas’ house as it sprang to life, pleased until the landscaping began, as Mrs. Padilla was enamored with statues, in particular Madonnas. No less than thirty Ladies graced the outside of her home, along with a variety of saints, weather vanes, and tropical birds. To add insult to Doc’s injury, my father helped Mr. Padilla paint the outside of his home a lovely shade of green. The color complemented the arrival of Mrs. Padilla’s mother’s turquoise trailer.
During the Padilla fiasco, the five acres sandwiched between the Simmses’ and the Majorses’ were purchased by Walter Esmond Thomas. The Colonel, as he came to be known, was a widower, and Melinda his only child. Their quarters went up without a hitch, meticulously built then meticulously run by Mrs. Mavrakis, the Thomases’ housekeeper and Melinda’s confidante. Bucky and I welcomed Melinda into the fold.
The last to arrive were the mysterious Fricks. The Fricks didn’t build a new house, they brought one of their own. Hailing from a time when it was fashionable to live in the middle of town, the house had been abandoned after the war and eventually sold, becoming Clemens Funeral Parlor until they decided to tear it down and build a modern air-conditioned facility. Enter Mrs. Bales and the Historical Society, who were appalled at the dismantling of the grand old home on Main Street and found a buyer.
The workers spent two months maneuvering the defunct dwelling onto its new foundation. And then nary a Frick showed up. Eventually, Dad doubted such a thing as a Frick existed, although Mrs. Bales assured him that a Frick lawyer certainly did. Doc withheld his opinion.
So, on one side of Old Orphanage Road we had the well-to-do dads—the Doc, the Colonel, and Big Buck. On the other side lived the working class, the Padillas and my family, along with the yet-to-be- seen Fricks. The Barn was in a class by itself.
Mrs. Bales had handpicked us all, bringing us together on the outskirts of our expanding town. Our neighborhood—the backbone of who I, Maggie Moore, was and what I would become—shaped the indelible friendship between me, Bucky Majors and Melinda Thomas.
1968 was a tempestuous year for our country. Although slow to come to the rodeo, even Wyoming was beginning to feel the effects of change. But at just twelve years old, my best friends and I had yet to open our eyes to anything happening outside of our own environs. We had more important things to do. Life was still about playing outside and staying out of trouble.
