Howard bought out Bob’s half of the section of land they’d made something out of out west. Bob made something out of the new acres he bought further west. By 1959, the flat lands around Howard’s and Alice’s had enough houses and roads and small farms that the Howard Hobbs’s expanded their little store with an upstairs and an elevator for folks who didn’t like stairs. They owned a piece of Lorrinda’s House of Beauty and the Mercantile Bank and pretty much every business in town, and the town was named Alice and had been named Alice from the minute it was a bona fide town.
Forty-two miles west, the hilly country around the Bob Hobbs’s was likewise blooming houses. Bob was the Postmaster there, six days a week sorting mail addressed to residents of Teensy Bit. (He’d dropped the extra “t” off his late wife’s maiden name to get the town council’s approval, according to what Alice told Howard.)
To an outsider it would seem only logical that these towns, started up pretty much on the dollars In Trust the Bitt sisters inherited from Grandma Alice, should by all rights be named after those same sisters.
But to an insider, which Howard Hobbs was, the town namings came out of bitter love. And bitter love is a sad thing (even Joe Markelson knows this). There’s a promise inside it that twists up the best of what is. Some might even go so far as to say that the cause behind the Federal Highway System building the Interstate 63 miles due south of the two-lane road between Alice and Teensy Bit was a part of that twisted bad love.
Others, like the gossips in at Lorrinda’s, might attribute the by-passing of Alice and Teensy Bit to the fact that the governor’s brother-in-law owned a rock blasting outfit and 63 miles due south there was a good amount of rock to blast through to reach the other side of Bald Mountain.
The long and the short of it measured no more than this: all the promise of the fifties and sixties and seventies withered away as surely as the grasslands did, as surely as Alice’s memory for words was withering daily, as surely as Teensy had withered down to even less than her little name suggested, till Bob had to feel through the bedspread to find her like a cord of old socks knotted and covered pretending to be his Teensy.
Alice, when she remembered to tell Howard about her sister’s last days, some thirty years back now, would go all soft, and, Howard, for all the years gone down in between, would go all hard just the same, remembering a field of green corn and his tender young wife going at it with his one-armed best cousin and friend from the war. Of course, this is just the way Evelyn Merkelson reinvented the stories for her nephews, Joe and Ted. She had been, after all, and according to her, Alice Hobbs’s dearest friend.
Alice died in 2006. Bob didn’t come to her services. But Howard came upon Bob later, near dark, sitting in the white plastic lawn chair Howard had left for himself at the edge of the new sod over Alice’s grave. He stood back for a long spell, not looking at Bob or the gravesite, but listening. He was 83, Howard was, and his hearing wasn’t real keen, but he knew what a sob was. After a minute or so, he turned and left. Can’t make a thing gone sour anything other than what it is, he was overheard mumbling to his potatoes.
Then, and nobody heard this, he was thinking about Alice, and how, while she still remembered how to cook, how she used to make “Friendship Bread” off the clabbered milk starters Lorrinda or one of those other old gossips, like Evelyn, would share. That’s what Howard was thinking when he left Bob to sob at his Alice’s grave.
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