Ezra

It was the slow kind of Sunday morning where everything seems to wade through cheap molasses. The kind of slow Sunday morning that calls for an oil change right after the 10:30 service just to clear the mind.

In a dirt clearing by her sunflower field, Bessie Mae’s stockinged feet were hidden by a pair of sweatpants and her face, shiny with sweat and satisfaction, were hidden beneath the belly of her old dinged-up truck.

Hidden, that is, until she heard her name through the light buzz of humidity.  

“Bessie Mae!”

She sighed, lifting herself out into the broad daylight to meet the old man that called her. Her first thought was that she wasn’t too fond of his eyes. They reminded her of her Papa’s eyes, the way they could be twenty-three or fifty-six or anything between. She knew anything could happen behind those eyes.

“I’m Ezra! You probably don’t know me. I sell antiques here in town and I’ve seen you around. I thought I’d find you outside somewhere, babying that heap of metal.”

Bessie Mae didn’t bat an eyelash at the comment. The old man chirped when he spoke, making his presence an even mix of comical and strange and unwanted.  

“I have a little gift for you!” He reached out to give her a small package wrapped in brown paper. It rattled, like it was full of little pebbles. When Bessie Mae’s hands remained firmly across her chest, Ezra set the package down at her feet.

“What makes you s’pose I need a gift? You don’t know me from a baby duck.”

Ezra didn’t flinch at her abrasive way of speech. “Oh, but I do! What if I told you that Charlie would like to speak to you? You better give him a call sometime.”

It is certain that Ezra should not have known Charlie, Bessie Mae’s estranged, smooth-talking, pretty-faced brother who could swoon a gray goose. But Bessie Mae knew something was off about the man when she first saw his eyes, so she didn’t doubt him.

“You’d call an alligator a lizard, you fool. Charlie ain’t got nothin’ to do with me and don’t want to get nothin’ started either. Been five years since I talked to him last.”

“I know that.”

“Well you low down like a snake’s belly in a wagon rut, goin’ around and tellin’ me who I need to call. Why don’t you go mind your own heaps of metal?"

He was gone without a trace of hurt feelings, leaving behind that little brown package and a thick air that only hangs around people with a deep-seated grudge.

Bessie took the little brown box from the dirt. She knew that whatever was in the box, that little box that shook like a bag of uncooked beans, was probably just as off-putting as the man. And Sunday, Bessie Mae thought, is the Lord’s day.

“And the Lord shore don’t need any more off-putting today,” she mumbled.

So she stuffed the little package inside the compartment of her truck, alongside a never-touched owner’s manual, a road atlas, and a messy assortment of letters she’d received over the years. She’d open it tomorrow, she thought. And maybe, just maybe, she’d think about calling Charlie.

Bessie Mae shut the compartment, took a long slug of iced coffee, and went about her oil change.