Waiting for Woodrow

A year ago I tried to cobble together a short story based on a dear friend of mine’s sister, June. I tried to tell of a finicky old woman who accidentally invited her son “Cupper¹” and his family to move in with her after the passing of her husband, Charley. “Shore I invited them to stay a while, but I never begged. And I never asked them to move in permanently.” This was on top of the resentment she bore towards Cupper’s wife who turned her nose up to this old woman’s new air fryer. Also, the young woman licked the back of an antique silver spoon and dumped it in a pan of dishwater. 

What I ultimately wanted to get to was the remarkable character Woodrow, June’s hired hand. This was the story I wanted to really settle in with because it was real-life Woodrow that fascinated me, though I’d never met him. So I filled June’s living room with a bunch of dead plants. I put her sister, Dee, on a sofa smack dab in the middle of it all. “Why don’t you get rid of these plants, June? They’re all dead!” To which June replies, “Woodrow will take care of them.”

I had lofty ideas for Woodrow. I thought of making him a Christ-figure, so much so that the reader might begin to wonder if “Woodrow” was just June’s euphemism for Jesus. “When are you gonna ask Cupper and his family to move out?” “When Woodrow returns.”

But then as I used up what little information I had on Woodrow the True, his characterized version started to fall apart. I made him into a sickly man who lost his vocal cords to cancer, and I made June a heartless prude with no bedside manner. I didn’t like who either of them had become, so I suppose that’s why the story died. Died like one of June’s plants.

The other evening Dee—the real Dee—asked if I could do her a favor. She had bought an antique full-sized bed frame currently being held in Starkville and had found someone willing to drive it down to her house here in Jackson. She asked if I with my brutish strength might drop by that evening and hoist it out of the truck. I’ll admit I’m always a little flattered when someone asks me to do man’s work. Limited man’s work. If you find a roach in your house, you can forget it. 

I was already on board with helping her and wouldn’t hear any offerings to buy me dinner, which is the usual game we play, but then she told me that the bed frame had been kept safe in Starkville by the man “who had meant the world to June and her husband,” a man who had “done for Charley what no brother would’ve dreamed of doing for him,” and I immediately knew who she meant.

“You mean Woodrow?!” Dee was impressed by what she thought was my excellent memory. She thought I had recalled him from one mention. She didn’t know I had been writing about him. Still doesn’t. At the thought of meeting my protagonist, I pictured me shaking his hand with both of mine. Making his trucker hat bounce on his head with all my enthusiasm. “Mr. Woodrow, sir, it’s a great honor. A great honor.”

I came to Dee’s house that evening after dark. There was a massive F-150 in the driveway. Two old souls were sitting in Adirondack chairs under a flood light that subtly winked in a cloud of night bugs.

“Now, this is Sara coming up the driveway and she’s a friend,” I heard Dee explain.  She slowly stood up from her chair and gestured to the figure sitting beside her, a figure who was not Woodrow. Whatever he looked like, however wrongly I might’ve envisioned him in my short story, I had not done so poor of a job as to imagine him as a woman. She filled all the boundaries of the Adirondack chair and had nary a strand of hair on her head. She was introduced to me as Phyllis, Woodrow’s cousin. In Phyllis’ lap was a mid-sized poodle named Angel Rose. It had to brace its legs against the slope of Phyllis’ lap. “See? She’s our friend!” Dee said to the dog as it silently wrinkled its nose at me, giving a subtle snarl.

I’ll admit I was disappointed not to meet Woodrow. As I set to work letting down the tailgate and hefting the head and foot board out of the truck, I glimpsed Phyllis as she sat in the Adirondak chair, her feet crossed at the ankles. I wondered if she bore any resemblance to her renowned cousin. I pictured him lean and sinewy with a trucker hat and an aversion to pampered dogs. He was an amalgamation of my late grandfather and my handyman—and altogether the opposite of Phyllis.

Half my task was lifting the bed and all its parts ever so gently out of the truck, and the second leg of the work was getting it through the door and into Dee’s study. I began pulling the bed slats out of the truck as the two women marveled at the bedstead’s craftsmanship and how it didn’t have a single scratch though it was a hundred years old. Dee made the comment to Phyllis that, “the original owners must’ve never had kids,” and I laughed. And then I realized there were two interpretations to that comment, and I had wrongly chosen the more risque’ one.

The whole unloading process took me fifteen minutes at most. When I piled the last bed slat against the wall in Dee’s study, I turned with a satisfactory exhale and saw Dee gently but quickly pull the door closed, leaving me briefly shut in the house with the bedstead. Don’t ask me how I picked up on this antique gesture, but I knew that on the other side of the door Dee was giving Phyllis money for her trouble. I stood there on the plush red carpet, took in all the Elvis records nailed to the wall, and waited to be let out again, like I was Dee’s own Angel Rose.

When Phyllis ambled back to her truck, hefting her poodle under an arm like a football, she had somewhere on her person the secret money and also the phone number of a doctor who did knee replacement. Dee had given her that, too, although that part was alright to talk about. I later sat in Dee’s living room and she told me she promised Phyllis she would connect her with the best doctor around, and she patted her own two glossy, pale knees that were both creased lengthways down the middle with white scars.

I was too sweaty to sit on her good furniture, so I sat on the floor, adjacent to Dee in her armchair, and listened to more stories of Woodrow, trying to ignore how schmaltzy it looked to be sitting at this woman’s feet. She told me how Woodrow cared for Charley in the last year of his life, one aged man serving as nursemaid to another aged man, “doing for him what no brother would’ve dreamed of doing.” Then Dee tried to buy me dinner.

1. A Southern pronunciation of “Cooper.”