My Redacted Life: Chapter 36 (Cont._3)

Marriage Day Minus One: After addressing the effects of my so-called bachelor party with a couple of beers, I felt better. I cleaned up and drove to the farm so I could take Brenda to the airport to pick up her aunt. The aunt’s given name was Mildred, I think. I knew her, as everyone did, as “Pill.” Why? The stock answer was that she was one, a "pill." I soon discovered the truth in that.

What can I say?

“She’s the one who taught me to fish,” Brenda explained, “and how to dig bait for fishing.” I thought perhaps I was going to meet an interesting character. I was so right.

I learned that she was the human resources director at a large corporation in the Chicago metro area. She had a nice office and a wall festooned with her college diploma and an assortment of credentials. They had all flowed from an inventive and creative mind. I’m not sure she ever finished high school. I would learn more, first hand, about the marches she made through life to a number of different drummers. My education started at the airport.

By the time we arrived, Pill and her adopted daughter Jennifer, who was to be the flower girl, had retrieved their baggage and were waiting for us. An array of baggage lay around them and they pointed me to the largest. I expected a normal load, but when I grabbed the handle, the bag didn’t move. What? With some effort, I carried it to the waiting car. Having secured Pill and Jennifer in the back seat of Brenda’s car, we loaded the bags in the trunk.

“What’s in there?” I whispered to Brenda as the two of us loaded the monster suitcase into the trunk.

“Liquor,” she said.

I nodded a complete lack of understanding.

“She knows there won’t be any at our house,” Brenda said. “She came prepared.”

“She brought her own liquor all the way from Chicago?”

“Lonoke is in dry county, don’t you know?”

I suppose it made sense. It sure made me wonder what was inside the suitcase. It also made me wonder just what kind of family I was getting myself into. Over the coming years, I would continue to wonder, though there was one thing I would become completely sure of as time passed.

Aunt Pill deserved her name, no doubt. She and I would become good friends, no doubt about that as well.

I left Brenda at her folks’ house after we had unloaded the ladies, their clothes, and the liquor. They all stood in the yard and waved me off. I was going to Little Rock to contemplate my future. They were going to catch Pill and Jennifer up on the news. As I waved, I knew I would only see Brenda Cole for a few more brief minutes, ever again. After that, she would be “Brenda von Tungeln.”

Now that was a sobering thought. I imagined that Aunt Pill would address it in proper fashion as the day wore on.

Aunt Pill, in a photo
she would have liked.