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Deleted Scene from Marva Cope

By Teddy Jones

This first deleted scene was scrapped, along with the entire chapter that it was part of. My colleagues at workshop agreed that neither the character nor his appearance was necessary to Marva Cope, the novel. Widower Bart Goodlow, a retired farmer/rancher in his late seventies has a plan. He’s going to pick up his college sweetheart, a widow in Galveston, more than 600 miles from Jackson’s Pond, marry her, and bring her back with him. Her family wants to put her in a nursing home and she’s not near ready for that. His daughter, an attorney, resists loudly. His son, not so much. Bart hasn’t spent much effort trying to convince them he’s right. He doesn’t need their permission. This scene occurs the day before Bart is to leave for Galveston.

By the time he got to the ranch with the furniture, the wind had settled and the sun drooped toward the horizon. Dwain met him out at the barn and started helping him unload without even being asked. When they finished unloading, Dwain said, “That it?”

Bart stood silently next to the stack of blue bins. He’d take one of them back to the house, the one with his wife’s favorite embroidered apron. He lifted the top one, then put it down, told himself to let it be. Moving toward the door, he said, “Yeah. Had to make some room. Adelaida’s bringing a few of her things. Don’t expect it’ll be much. But I wanted to give her room to make the place look like home to her.”

“Makes sense. I’ve got fried chicken for supper. Cooked it earlier. There’s plenty if you’ve got time to stay.”

“Sounds better than a scrambled egg sandwich which is all I had to look forward to.”

Dwain set the table and Bart sat in the living room, looking around the place where he and his wife had raised their family and lived until they moved to town after the kids were grown. Back then his wife kept it bright, with lots of colorful touches—curtains at the kitchen window, bright tablecloths, embroidered cup towels on the kitchen cabinet. And in the summer she grew flowers to cut—zinnias, cosmos, daisies, roses—to have in the house. Dwain kept it all neat and fairly clean, but a person could tell a bachelor lived there. Bart’s place in town looked pretty much the same.

Eating the supper Dwain had cooked, neither of them spoke for a while except for, “Pass the salt, please.” Then Bart said, “Being here reminds me of your mother. I remember her most days, but being here . . . Well, after your mother, it’s been hard letting myself love another woman.”

He didn’t expect an answer. Didn’t know why he even said it. Maybe it was the smell of fried chicken that reminded him of all the times they’d sat at that table eating that same meal, her always there at the center of it all.

Dwain stopped a bite of mashed potatoes part way to his mouth. He said, “But you do love this other woman?”

“I do.” Bart chose his next words deliberately. His son could learn something from him if he said it just right. “After all this time alone, I knew that all those good years with your mother were wasted if I stayed closed up, not loving. I’ll always love your mother. But I can still love another woman in a different way. I need someone to care about every day. I’ve gone past just being alone all the way to being lonely.”

He reached for a second piece of chicken. Dwain had stopped chewing and was watching him. “Adelaida and I talked about this. She’s in the same situation. I never knew her husband, but she says he was a good man and she still loves his memory. She said she has empty space in her heart that needs filling.”

Teddy Jones is the author of five published novels, as well as a collection of short stories. Her short fiction received the Gold Medal First Prize in the Faulkner-Wisdom competition in 2015. Jackson’s Pond, Texas was a finalist for the 2014 Willa Award in contemporary fiction from Women Writing the West. Her novel, Making It Home, was a finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom competition in 2017 and A Good Family (not yet unpublished) was named finalist in that contest in 2018.

Although her fiction tends to be set in West Texas, her characters’ lives embody issues not bounded by geography of any particular region. Families and loners; communities in flux; people struggling, others successful; some folks satisfied in solitude and others yearning for connection populate her work. And they all have in common that they are more human than otherwise.

Jones grew up in a small Texas town, Iowa Park. Earlier she worked as a nurse, a nurse educator, a nursing college administrator, and as a nurse practitioner in Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. For the past twenty years, she and her husband have lived in the rural West Texas Panhandle where he farms and she writes.

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