Mrs. Billingsley and the New Neighbors
by Sally Stevens
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
“In Paris?” Mrs. Billingsley smiled.
“Oh, dear me, no,” laughed Leila Mae. “Paris, Texas, Naomi. Me and Ivan lived in Paris, Texas for about one and a half years. ’Fore that we lived in Waco and, ’fore that, we lived in Tennessee. Mama worried lots when I told her me ’n Ivan was goin’ to Texas, but I believe a wife should follow her husband and stand by his side even when there’s trouble. I learned that from my mama.”
“Trouble?”
“Yes, Naomi. She stayed right by my pa, even though...” Leila Mae seemed to Naomi to have stumbled across a painful memory. She grew quiet for a moment. Then she continued on. “Well, then, after me an’ Ivan got together, it just seemed like everywhere we went, people didn’t understand Ivan. You know, we suffered with police harassment all the time! One day, two officers showed up at the door and talked to Ivan for a long time and, that night, he says to me, ‘Leila Mae, we’re gonna pack up and move outa here. It’s getting’ so a man can’t live his life without pissin’ off some old busybody.’”
“Oh dear, Leila Mae...”
“Oh, excuse me, Mrs. Billingsley, but that’s just what he said. He usually don’t talk like that, but he was real upset. We packed everything up. We didn’t have a whole lot to pack then, just newly married and all. And we rented us a truck that night at U-Haul and we just left. We didn’t say goodbye to no one. We just drove straight on through to Paris.”
“It must have been difficult for you, moving so frequently. I hope you have a chance to stay in Mayfield long enough to get acquainted. It’s a really pleasant place to live, and the community has so many activities and organizations that you and Mr. Trowbridge might find interesting.” She was hard-pressed to think what those might be at the moment, but she did want to be encouraging.
“Oh, Ivan’s not much of a joiner, Naomi. He gets nervous when folks get too friendly. I just try to go along with it, but sometimes I wish we had some nice friends, you know, like you and Mr. Billingsley. Ivan’s okay if folks don’t talk to him too much about his business, but he’s a real private kind of person, if you know what I mean.”
Then Leila Mae brightened a bit. “Um, Naomi, I have some delicious brownies I just baked last night. Why don’t I get us some to have with our coffee?” She winked at Mrs. Billingsley as she got up from the kitchen table and continued talking as she reached up into the cupboard for the tin of brownies. “These are kinda’ special brownies, Naomi. You don’t have anything pressing to do this afternoon, do you?”
She giggled and brought a plate of moist, dark chocolate brownies to the table. The sweet aroma wafted up through Mrs. Billingsley’s nostrils. She had started her diet again this morning, for the fifth time this month, but perhaps just one, to be gracious. She wouldn’t want to hurt Leila Mae’s feelings.
“Thank you, dear. They look delicious.” And she helped herself.
The two women sat nibbling together over their coffee, chatting. As they visited, Mrs. Billingsley felt herself growing more at ease and felt quite enthusiastic about finding her new friend. Leila Mae asked about Mr. Billingsley and about Mayfield, and soon the conversation flowed gaily, interspersed with laughter and a fresh supply of brownies.
Finally, after most of the small talk seemed to have been exhausted, Leila Mae suddenly leaned across the kitchen table and took hold of Mrs. Billingsley’s arm. “Have you ever thought, Naomi, about just packing up and going off to find some adventure of your own? You know, just going to the bank and taking out all your money and leaving Mr. Billingsley with the cat to feed and all the bills and just buyin’ yourself a pretty new wardrobe and going off to maybe San Francisco or even New York City? I think about it lots, Naomi. Sometimes I lie awake at night thinkin’ about it. But I never get brave enough to do it.”
Mrs. Billingsley was a little taken aback. She thought about the question. She looked out of Leila Mae’s kitchen window across the drive to her own house, with its new climbing blossomed vines and her little vegetable garden in the back yard, where one of the parrots sat on a pile of dirt pecking at her tomato plants. She thought about it some more. She really couldn’t see it...running off from it all... for herself.
But she suddenly pictured Leila Mae in a stylish new outfit, suitcase in hand, walking out of the door, shutting it on Ivan and going off to Chicago. She decided Chicago would be better for Leila Mae than San Francisco or New York City. She pictured her sitting in a smoky jazz club in Chicago, sipping a sloe gin fizz, next to a handsome young man with patches on his jacket elbows and a notepad in front of him.
The young man was a music critic for the Chicago Tribune, and he was crazy about Leila Mae. They would leave the smoky jazz club and walk together to their apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. Leila Mae would take some classes in the evening... perhaps a wine-tasting class and a discussion group of American Literature of the Twenties. She would cut her stringy blond hair, have it restyled, and she would make espresso after dinner in a smartly decorated apartment for herself and the handsome music critic. Mrs. Billingsley, in the passing of mere moments, created an entirely new life for Leila Mae. She smiled as she basked in the satisfaction of her accomplishment.
Her reverie was interrupted by the sound of giggling. Leila Mae was poking Mrs. Billingsley with her forefinger and giggling uproariously. “Naomi, I didn’t say you could leave now, I was just asking if you ever thought about it. You just up and left me sittin’ here all alone with my brownie crumbs. I think you do think about it, don’t you!” She patted Mrs. Billingsley on the shoulder, in a congratulatory manner.
Mrs. Billingsley blushed. “Oh my goodness, dear. I did wander off for a minute, but I was thinking about you going off to a new life, with bright young friends and an exciting place to live...” Mrs. Billingsley wondered if she should speak so freely. But inspired in the moment, she continued. She would seize this opportunity to fertilize the seed of an escape plan, which was obviously already planted in Leila Mae’s thoughts and help her get out of this wretched dilemma in which she lived.
“Leila Mae, do you have your own checkbook?”
“Those brownies really did go to your head, Naomi. Ivan wouldn’t no more give me a checkbook than he’d loan his Harley to some stranger.”
“Well, where does he keep his money? How do you pay your bills?”
“Ivan likes to deal in cash. He says cash is the only thing you can count on these days. All those little envelopes you saw in the dining room? They come in with dollar bills in them. Ivan, he takes those dollar bills and puts them in a wooden box that he keeps by his side of the bed. Even when he goes off on his bike and has his meetings and comes home with his ‘big bucks,’ like he calls them. He deals in cash.”
She leaned close to Mrs. Billingsley. “Naomi,” she whispered, “you want to see? I know where he keeps it, but I don’t ever touch it; he knows exactly how much is in there. If I was braver, I’d wait till he was gone, and I’d grab me a handful, and I’d take off. But I wouldn’t never really do that, ’cause Ivan would get so mad. I’d be scared to think what he’d do if he ever really got mad at me.”
Mrs. Billingsley looked at Leila Mae. There was such a frightened look in her young eyes, like an animal on the run. She felt an urgency, a concern for this sad young woman whose life seemed to be at the mercy of the strange man in black wrist cuffs. His whole existence reeked of suspicious motivations.
“Leila Mae, you don’t have to be afraid of him. You have rights, you know. Half of everything he has belongs to you. You don’t have to live your life cowering in fear. You’re such a pretty thing and so sweet, and you’re a person too, you know. If he doesn’t treat you well, and you ever need to — well, you know — make a change... make a decision to leave, you just remember you have a friend now right next door, and she’ll help you any way she can.”
Leila Mae looked at Mrs. Billingsley. Tears began to well up in her eyes, and she reached into her apron pocket for a handkerchief.
“You don’t know how much that means to me, Naomi. I never would really go, but just knowin’ you’re there means a whole lot to me. I used to think if I ever got real tired of Ivan, I’d call my mama and she’d send me a bus ticket back to Tennessee. But Mama’s gone now. She got pretty sick last winter and, before I could get Ivan to let me go home and see her, Aunt Millie called and said she just passed away that night over at the hospital. Awful sudden. And we couldn’t go home just then, and now I sometimes feel like I’m all alone in the world. But since I got me a friend now, Naomi, that makes Mayfield a real special place.” She reached over and gave Mrs. Billingsley a hug.
“My goodness, look at the time, Leila Mae. Where has the afternoon gone to? I must be getting back home to fix Mr. Billingsley’s dinner. You’ll come over to visit me next time. Thank you for the delicious brownies... you’ll have to give me your recipe.”
“They have a special ingredient in them, Naomi. Ivan gets it for me. They’re from a recipe he says his mother used to make. I’ll ask him to get you some.”
When Mrs. Billingsley got home, she sat on the veranda for a few minutes in the wicker love seat swing, thinking about Leila Mae and Ivan. She wondered how just hard it would be to find the music critic with the patches on his elbows.
* * *
Several more weeks passed, uneventfully. The friendship between Mrs. Billingsley and Leila Mae deepened, with the two being frequent visitors in one another’s kitchens. Leila Mae did seem terrified still at the prospect of Ivan’s finding out about their bonding and was careful to plan her visits for periods of time when she knew Ivan would not be likely to arrive home unexpectedly and find them together. The card game between the two couples never took place, for one rather flimsy reason or another. Mrs. Billingsley had to admit she was not terribly disappointed about that.
But she had been having strange dreams. And they repeated. And they were all about Ivan. However, not in the normal way people dream about someone. These had to do with untimely demises, Ivan being the untimely demise-ee.
In one dream, a large bird swooped down on Ivan from the Billingsley’s front porch as he was trying to break in through their front door in the dead of night. The bird attacked him viciously, its large, sharp, hooked beak gouging holes in Ivan’s face and sending him off screaming into the night.
In another, Ivan was again trying to break in the front door, and the vines that twined around the railing of the porch sprang to life like snakes, wrapping themselves around him, pulling his hands behind his back and twisting themselves around him, then creeping up toward his neck and choking him.
Just as he began to scream in that dream, Mrs. Billingsley woke up, her heart pounding. This isn’t right, she thought. But at least if she couldn’t confront him in the light of day herself, the bird monster and the vines were stepping up to take care of things.
Mrs. Billingsley also had experienced something rather strange. When she went into town for tropical bird food at the pet store, or stopped at the library, or just ran into the market, she kept seeing a tall young man kind of in the distance ahead of her, walking with the crowd. He would be wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows and always carried a note pad in one hand. But then at some point he would turn around to look back, and he had no face. She couldn’t figure out how he found his way around Mayfield with no face, no eyes to see. And then he would be gone.
And then a day or so later, she would see him again. She thought of course that it was the young music critic she had conjured up, who would rescue Leila Mae and run off with her to Chicago to their apartment and the wine tastings and finally, when she saw him one more time, she waved at him. And he waved back.
She couldn’t figure out how he knew to wave back, since he had no face and no eyes and had no idea that someone had waved at him. But she decided it was not her responsibility to figure it out. She wondered if she should tell Leila Mae about him. Maybe the next time they had coffee and brownies.
Copyright © 2025 by Sally Stevens
