All Things Work Together: Book I Because You’Re Crazy and You Don’T Care

By Victoria

A novel about a girl, Vicki Bright, from the 1960s Vietnam War eracovering the years she was falls in love and feels forced to marry young but finishes college. Losing her way because of a bad choice, she suffers tragedy as well as joy. While looking in many directions for help, it takes her faith to save her from a bad situation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503570139

Victoria

Victoria Chang’s books include Obit (longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award), Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her middle grade novel Love Love is forthcoming. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA program.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Victoria.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2015907817

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-7015-3

Softcover      978-1-5035-7014-6

eBook      978-1-5035-7013-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 05/29/2015

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CONTENTS

Character List

Acknowledgments

Dating Years (1968, 1969)

Wedding Bells (1970)

California Days (1971)

Going Home (1972)

Nursing School, Family Visits, And Illness (1973)

More Illness, Broken Promises, And New Promises (1974)

Home Again (End Of 1974)

Baby Or No Baby (1975 To 1976)

Good News, Bad News (1977)

Horses And Houses (1978)

Camelot Year (1979)

Shocking Loss (1980)

Aftereffects (Late September)

Good Year/Bad Year (1981)

The Big D (1982)

Prognosis

A Better Day

Second Time Around (1983)

Splitsville (1984)

Our New Life (1985)

About The Author

January 10, 2015

CHARACTER LIST

I want to dedicate this book to all women who were lost from breast cancer or murder and to all families surviving similar tragedy. I also dedicate this book to all whose lives were altered by war.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank my dad whom they say I inherited this gift for words.

Dad was an attorney and orator.

I’d like to thank my coworker, Thelma Young, because she continually asked for more and more chapters as I wrote this book and gave me the feeling my book is a good read.

Thank you to my Xlibres’ rep, Ann LogAn whose 2 hour phone calls over the publication months, kept me encouraged and gave me many ideas.

Romans 8:27

New International Version (NIV)

27 And he who searches our heartsknows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.

DATING YEARS (1968, 1969)

A carload of us are cruising the strip in Cara’s blue Dodge fart. We pull into Haley’s Drive-In and wait on the carhop to bring us our twenty-five-cent burgers. It’s Friday night, and I’m over after just having broken off with my first love, who wanted to take me to the bootlegger’s on every date. At my age, I haven’t had very many boyfriends, but I do want one.

Suddenly, the best-looking boy I’ve ever seen in my life opens the back passenger’s side door and jumps in between me and one of my best friends, tall, skinny Tosha. She’s the friend with the long, beautiful, straight, silky hair. I feel so homely next to her. I’m sure he’s going to ask her out. I think these thoughts to myself when I see him. I’ve met this boy before. Oh yeah, I was introduced to Tom by Will, my ex, when they worked together bagging groceries at Farmer’s Supermarket.

The day comes back to me now with him sitting there, touching shoulders with me in the tight backseat—the day I first met him. Will and I drive into the market. Tom is walking through the lot, and I think, I’m going to marry him.

Will drives up to this great-looking boy. Tom, this is my girlfriend, Vicki, whom I’ve told you about.

Tom leans in the window to get a closer look at me. Hi. It’s nice to meet you.

I smile shyly, glancing at him and looking down. Hi. It’s nice to meet you too. My thoughts come back to the present.

We ride the strip some more. Somehow, Tom picks me to invite to his car, and all our friends drift off in other directions. He talks a lot and tells me some of the story of his life once we are alone. I’m in college, and I live with my younger brother and my mom, who just got a divorce. I had a bad motorcycle wreck over a month ago, and I have a scar on my knee. I was drag racing in Alabama on an airstrip and fell and skidded a long way. Glad I was wearing a helmet. I don’t work at Farmer’s anymore. I’m a machinist, and I make tool and die at a machine shop out near the highway.

I just listen to him intently and let him talk as much as he wants. He drives me home in his car and walks me to the door and gets my phone number just before a quick good-night kiss.

I’m lying on my bed this Saturday morning, thinking of the wonderful night I had. Ring, ring. I pick up the powder-blue receiver of my princess phone, and it’s Tom. Are you busy Friday? I’d like to take you out to eat.

Let me check … Uh, it looks like I’m free that night.

Can I pick you up about six o’clock?

Sure. It’s a date.

On our first real date, he takes me to eat at Haley’s, and then we go to the drive-in movie.

You want some candy and popcorn from the concession?

That sounds great! I walk to the snack stand, holding Tom’s hand.

We are back in the car, and I sit as close to him as possible without sitting on his lap. We start to kiss, and I feel his tongue part my lips, and I like it. We come up for air, and he talks a lot, telling me more of his life story. I had a girlfriend for the past couple of years, but she cheated on me. My brother is two years younger than me. We have different dads, and my mom and his dad raised us.

Oh, I see.

My ex-stepdad is an abusive alcoholic, and Mom left him finally.

It is good she did.

She sold our nice house, where they raised us, and is renting one on the highway. I want to show you where we live and let Mom meet you.

Sure. I’d like to meet her. I bet she’s wonderful.

She’s bought five acres and plans to put a mobile home on it when she can.

That sounds nice.

My stepdad drank up our grocery money and made me eat my cereal with water but gave my brother the milk. I pretty much hate him. He made my cousin and me hide his whiskey and beer in our clothes while we were sitting in the backseat of his car in case a cop stopped him. He did other mean things to my cousin and me that I don’t want to talk about. I may tell you someday. I see tears well up in his eyes, and I feel so sorry for him.

I hug him tightly. Well, you seem to have turned out really good with such a bad childhood experience. You’ve done good to overcome your childhood.

Tom asks me out on dates on Friday nights over the next weeks and spends his whole little check on us to eat hamburger steak dinners smothered in gravy and sautéed onions. Our sides are hot golden, salty french fries and a fresh garden salad with Thousand Island dressing. We usually go to our favorite restaurant, Haley’s, where we were the night we got together.

On our first Christmastime together, he drives me downtown with him to the Mississippi retail shops, and we pick out a purple cat’s-eye, white-gold ring, and a navy blue button-up blouse for me. I give him a sweater, shirt, and his favorite 33 album.

***

So it’s decided. We are in love after dating for three months, and on this Friday night date, we are parking, and the juices are flowing just right in his 1966 Chevy with the front bench seat. His kisses are sweet but passionate, and I’m going crazy trying to hold back to no avail, and I give myself to him. It’s the best feeling in my short years. He does what it takes to save me from an unwanted pregnancy. Then he drives me home from our parking place and walks me to the door. Good night. I’ll call you tomorrow. I love you! And I sneak past my parents, snoozing in front of the TV, brush my teeth, and pull on my flannel PJ’s.

***

Tom and I have lots of friends. We hang out with them all summer at the lake then go to their parents’ home, and we play in the crisp fall leaves. I love the sound they make under us as we play around in them. Crack, crack, scrunch, crunch.

He gives me rides on his 750 Honda cycle. Hold on tight, Vicki. He jumps me over the high bridge, and my stomach goes into my throat a bit, and I squeal. Eeeeiii! I am not a bit afraid as I hang onto his ripped waist and watch his broad-shouldered arms handle the machine like a pro. We ride up to Tosha’s house on crisp autumn Saturdays and hang out with her and her brothers and sisters. Her backyard neighbor, Mike, whose parents own Haley’s Drive-In Restaurant, comes over also.

Sometimes, he lets me sit up front on the heavy cycle and steer it, but his strong thighs are always ready to balance it for me when stopping or on takeoff. He gives me driving instructions. Drive it like this. Let out slowly on the clutch on the left handle and give it the gas on the right one.

***

We spend our Friday date nights at his mobile home, cooking dinner and having friends over. When we are alone, we get in the king-size bed that takes up about the whole little bedroom. He plays Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay on his console radio/stereo, and we make it our song. It plays softly in the background. Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed. Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed. Whatever colors … Bob drones on musically.

We are also fond of listening to Iron Butterfly sing In a Gadda Da Vida and Steppenwolf’s GD the Pusher as we spend every Friday evening there together. He always gets me back to my parents’ home by 3:00 a.m.

He comes back over on Saturdays and takes me back to his place for the day. This winter, the pond is frozen enough to walk out on it without fear of the ice cracking. We pull on our rubber boots and ice-skate around, laughing and being playful with each other. It is the most fun I’ve ever had with a boy. We kiss in the cold air and hug to get warm. I love you, Vicki Bright.

I love you, Tom McCarty. We kiss long and hard before going inside to get out of the wet clothes and into some dry ones.

On week nights, he hangs out with me around Mom and Dad’s house, and I have him lie on top of the covers next to me until I fall asleep. He tries to get up and go home. Don’t go. I’m afraid to sleep alone. I have gotten this fear after my sister/bed partner has married and left me.

Okay. He lies back down, and I drift off. He’s gone in the morning when I wake up.

***

All isn’t perfect for us though. He’s begun to drink a little much and gets verbally mean but can’t recall it the next day. I like hanging out with the popular drinking crowd, but I can take the booze or leave it. When he’s drunk, I get angry at him, cry, and hit him softly on his chest and cry a little more, but he’s too out of it to care. I’m too in love to break it off with him.

I am in high school, a junior, and he’s a college freshman at the local junior college, where he’s working on a tool and die degree. We settle into our routines of school and family. In my case, school and work in his, and lots of dates. His mom has remarried and moved out of the state. He never really lived long with his dad.

***

I’m at school and get a call to the principal’s office.

Frightened by now, I walk in, and they have a phone call for me. It’s Tom, and he sounds in a bad way. I got my draft notice in the mail today. They’re drafting me to serve in the army in this war with Vietnam because I’m finished with my two years at the college—

Hang on, Tom. I’m leaving school, and I’ll be right there. I run out of the school, jump into my 1966 red Ford Mustang, and drive straight to his mobile home.

Tom is chasing shots of vodka with milk and then hanging out the sliding glass door and vomiting it all right back up. Tom, stop this please. I know you are upset, but we will figure this out and get through it together. I walk him to the small green shag-carpeted bath and get him cleaned up and put him to bed. Later at home, I think things over to myself. This is the only time in my life I’ve ever skipped school.

I love school, and I am in the popular crowd, even though they all have superlatives and I don’t. I spend my spare time with Scout, my spotted saddle horse, and, of course, dating Tom and painting at my easel. I don’t have time to campaign to get votes from the student body. Tom and I spend weekends riding my horse, Scout, at the local saddle club, and I love winning trophies. His cousin, Dan, keeps Scout for me on his dad’s acreage with a barn. They trailer him to the shows for me. It’s a sweet deal, and we ride doubles on his black gaited horse and my brown paint. We win first place a lot! I love the quarter-mile races we set up on Saturdays and riding the barrels and pole-bending on friends’ quarter horses. We also take the saddles and bridles off on warm summer days and hang onto their tails and ride them into the warm muddy pond at the club.

Now here we sit, discussing our future with Tom’s draft notice. Tom, I heard somewhere that it’s better to enlist for four years than to get drafted right to the front lines of Vietnam.

You may be right. I’ll check into that and ask my family what they think.

So this is what he decides to do, and the next day, he goes to the local air force recruiter and ups for four years. This way, the army can’t get him.

We had been discussing marriage after I did a couple of college years, but now my love is going away, and we just can’t stand to be apart.

I’m feeling very sad. What to do? What to do?

Maybe we should not wait until you are finished with college after all.

What do you mean?

You know, not wait to get married so you can come and be with me where I’m stationed.

Hmm … That might be a good idea.

We’re on our Friday night date, and it’s only a few weeks until Tom leaves for basic training in San Antonio, Texas. Before we go out on our date, we are at the mobile home where his mom and stepdad have moved back from Alabama to live with Tom and his brother. I know Mimsy, his mom, pretty well by now, and she’s been remarried for a while too. He calls to me in the den from the back, and I walk down the long, dark, narrow hallway, where I find Tom waiting in the restroom. He gently takes me and sits me down on the closed toilet seat and pulls from his pocket the engagement ring we picked out at Wade’s Jewelers downtown. It is white 14-karat gold and 1/4-karat diamond with a unique bow design. It’s all he can afford on his meager salary, soon to change to military pay. Vicki, I want you to be my wife. I hope that if you do marry me, the marriage won’t go down the toilet. Will you marry me?

I laugh at his sense of humor. Yes, I answer happily. After discussing our plans, we decide that we will marry after he’s finished basic training and I get through my first semester of my senior year.

***

I’m engaged, and my thoughts wander to when I dated other men at the time I first knew Tom. I guess now, with me being committed to this one man for life, I realize I won’t have any more dates for his or my lifetime, whichever comes first.

In the beginning of knowing Tom and before giving me his high school class ring, which was too large for my size 4 ring finger (I wrap it with bandage tape to make it fit), I dated this other boy. Jim was funny and cute with a fine blonde bowl cut and was fairly popular at my small-town Mississippi school. I was surprised when the phone rang, and it was at a time when I was still unsure what direction Tom and I we’re headed. I agree to go out with him on Friday night. It will be a double date with a couple with which we are both friends. Date time arrives after my usual primping, makeup, mascara routine, which I’d been practicing a year or two, while sitting at my antique dressing table.

Jim rings the doorbell and opens my car door. We are riding in the back, and the other boy, Mark, is driving. We go to the local drive-in movie to watch the current flick. He makes a move or two and gets his arm around me, but it goes no further as all I can think of is Tom.

After the movie, we are riding around town, and Jim starts serenading me with a hit song called Sock It to Me, Baby, and he does this very animatedly. It is corny, and it makes my stomach queasy. But looking back on it, I realize it is because I’m already in love with Tom.

While thinking back over our years together, I am thinking of at least three other times in our two years of dating and falling in love, I get restless and give Tom back his class ring to explore other things. At such a young age, I was just getting other social invitations, and one of the little girls, Patti, whom I’d spent weekends with before the dating scene started had invited me to ride the Greyhound bus with her to stay a week at her mom’s in Memphis. Her mom is a recently divorced registered nurse that works night shift at the ER at Baptist Memorial on Union Avenue. I did invite Tom to ride over to visit while I stayed in a nice two-bedroom apartment in the high-rise on Poplar on one of those summer weeks. The night Tom came, I learned to drink Budweiser, and the first cold, tall one decided to come right back up in the bathtub just as cold as it went down.

On one trip over to Patti’s mom’s apartment, we meet some boys while out and about, and we get invited to a Memphis state frat party. Tom is back in our hometown with his class ring, wandering around and checking out other babes I guess. I’m playing pool with the frats in their party room, and one of them invites me on a date to my first concert. The next night, we go to see Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. It’s a great concert, then we wind back up at his dorm. Girls can’t go in, but he lets me drive his nice new MG Midget convertible since he’s been drinking. I take off in it by myself and