Niles Reddick

Garden Party

We went to a garden party. It was a birthday celebration for Stella who my wife knew socially from the garden club and who’d turned seventy-five. Stella had hired a band, a caterer, and a bartender, and the event took place in her canopied backyard with old growth Oaks, Magnolias, and Ginkgo. The bartender served Bloody Marys with a splash of Worcestershire sauce to compliment the tomato juice and vodka and garnished the drink with a stalk of celery. Some had Bloody Marys while others had iced water with mint leaves. The tables were all draped in sage green plastic cloths, and each table had a round vase with Hosta leaves covering the inside glass and a couple of white hydrangeas capping the vase. Of the forty or so guests, many of Stella’s friends wore floral prints on linen or seersucker and sandals, and their husbands mostly wore khakis or shorts, loafers, a seasonal short sleeved shirt, and a few wore Panama hats.

Stella’s husband Bill had dementia but was sociable and a great conversationalist though we’d heard he’d lost his filters. Most simply ignored him, and while he remembered my name, he didn’t remember my wife’s, told her she had pretty hair, but her feet were ugly. She’d just had a manicure and pedicure the day before, and on the way home, she looked at her feet and asked if I thought her feet were ugly. I rolled my eyes and simply said no and wondered if I got dementia if I might be honest about her ugly feet.    

I told Bill it was a nice party he’d thrown for Stella, and he responded, “I didn’t know anything about it.” It was probably true. Stella had paid for it herself and arranged all the details. The garden party was a manifestation of her belief that she had to please herself first and foremost. She couldn’t rely on her husband, anyone else, or even God. The woman was a steam roller in the community, she had a one-track mind, and if someone got in her way, he’d find himself as flat as Wile E. Coyote, hearing “Beep, beep” and watching Stella the Road Runner speed away.

Once we were seated, we made casual conversation with others while we listened to the Rat Pack-type trio sing mostly top Sinatra songs (That’s Life, Fly Me to the Moon, Something Stupid, You Make Me Feel So Young, among others) from the elevated back porch. When the band took a break, a retired Methodist minister slurred a brief prayer, missed a step, and fell into one of the plucked hydrangeas while a couple rushed to help steady him. He waived off assistance but had a waddling gait to his car after the party.

The guests lined up for a feast of sliced ham, biscuits, candied bacon, veggies, fruit, pimento and cheese, and petit fours decorated like birthday cake. Stella spoke briefly, thanked friends, relatives, college buddies, and former work colleagues for coming.  While gifts hadn’t been requested, a few brought them anyway, but most had piled up cards on a table. The band and trio picked up with My Way while people nibbled, snacked, and knocked back Bloody Marys, some of which had more vodka than tomato juice.

Bill spilled his Bloody Mary, and it rushed like a tsunami onto Loretta’s linen blouse, and he took napkins and rubbed them on her. “That’s okay, Bill. I’ve got it,” Loretta said, and he responded, “Everybody sees that you’ve got some new ones” and continued to press her chest. “Bill, that’s enough,” she snapped, and it was as though someone turned on a light and he became aware, wobbled back, stepped on a tree root, and fell sideways into two guests, hitting his head on the corner of the table on his way to the ground, where he was unconscious and bled slowly from the cut above his eye. If he could smell, he would have smelled dirt again like he had on the playground when he fell from the monkey bars in elementary school, when he hoed his mother’s garden as a teen for hours, or when he dated a young Stella and they went to the stock car races on Friday nights, and the race cars sent clouds of dust from the dirt track into the stands.

Someone yelled “Stella”, and she directed a friend to call 911. She went to him, kneeled by him, and shook him. “Bill, I’ll make sure they take care of you.”

Niles Reddick is author of a novel, three collections, and a novella. His work has been featured in over 500 publications including The Saturday Evening Post, New Reader Magazine, The Museum of Americana, Citron Review, Nunum, Right Hand Pointing, and Vestal Review. He is a four-time Pushcart, three-time Best Micro, and three-time Best of the Net nominee. His newest flash collection If Not for You was recently released by Big Table Publishing.

Website: http://nilesreddick.com/
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