“Sure, but—”
He lifted my chin with a finger, looked into my eyes. “My Italian girl.” His voice was sweet. “You need to go, don’t you?”
My heart lifted. “Are you sure?”
“Of course. We’re getting married, not shackled. You should go.”
You should go.
“Your dad will be going back again soon, right? Or your aunties? When did they last go back? It feels like last year. Was it last year?”
I said nothing.
“Frankie?”
“Three years ago. They went three years ago.”
“There you go. They’re due, right?”
I nodded.
He pulled me in tighter, kissing my hair. “One last trip before we have kids. You should do it.”
“Yeah,” I said in a small voice, as he reached over to turn out the light.
* * *
When I spot a small truck stop, I pull over and get out of the car. I fill up with petrol and then head inside. The shop smells like linoleum and dust and petrol and fried food. There’s a warmer with hot dogs and burgers in foil bags like presents. The attendant looks at me warily. He’s chewing gum.
I point to the coffee machine behind him.
“Milk or sugar?”
“Neither.”
“Huh,” he grunts as I hand over coins retrieved from the glove box.
There’s a tiny counter by the window, which I sit at, the steam from my coffee warming my face. It smells dreadful. Burnt and acrid. Taupe-colored bubbles cluster on its surface.
The attendant grunts again and I turn to see him flipping the pages of a tabloid magazine. The cover story, I notice, is about an actress who has lost her baby weight. There’s another headline about a celebrity who’s getting thin for her wedding, and yet another who’s checked into rehab and wears dark glasses almost as big as her petite face. The attendant doesn’t seem to notice my staring.
It’s so quiet in here, despite a ceiling fan, covered in grease and old dust, which clicks on every rotation. It feels peaceful. I wonder, for a moment, if I could stay here forever. Like one of those cardboard cutouts they have of celebrities or NASCAR drivers advertising something or other. Car oil, chocolate bars, pop. I could stay till I get shuffled into a corner by the toiletry products that rarely get purchased—tampons and deodorants. Stay till my cardboard becomes thin and nibbled at by moths, my colors fading. No one would notice.
A bell on the door jingles and a trucker steps inside, his feet heavy. He’s exhaling noisily, almost puffing, and has to lift his whole stomach to pull up his pants. He nods to the attendant. “Bruce.”
“Big John.” The attendant slips his magazine underneath the counter as Big John helps himself to a packet burger. “Okay out there?”
“Good, yeah. Quiet. No rain.”
I glance out the window and see Big John’s big truck, like the one that passed me on the road. Filled up with logs, all the same size and shape.
“White?” Bruce asks.
“That’s right. And some sugars. None of them diet ones, eh?”
I stare down at my coffee. The bubbles have burst and now there’s just a strange light brown ring around the outer edge. Big John takes a stool at the other end of the counter, though it’s so small there’s only a couple of feet between us. He glances at me before unwrapping his burger. The smell of it fills the air. Meat and grease mainly, something sweet, the sauce perhaps. It looks like someone sat on it. The lettuce hangs dejectedly out the sides, darkened from the heat of the warmer.
“Not from round here,” he says.
I lift my gaze from burger to devourer. Shake my head. I wrap my fingers around my coffee cup, more for a sense of purpose than an intention to drink it.
“What brings you?”
When I blink at him, he answers for me. “Getting out of town?”
“Yeah.”
Big John chews his burger slowly. He’s in no rush to get back to his truck. Some sauce falls to his chin and he reaches for a napkin. I notice that Bruce is back to reading his magazine. He’s towards the middle of it now, where he’s surely learning the secret to slim thighs. It probably doesn’t involve truck stop burgers.
“No one’s from round here is what I notice. Well, maybe Bruce,” Big John says.
Bruce hears his name and lifts his head. Big John waves his palm to reassure him we don’t need anything. Bruce’s head drops back to his glossy pages.
“I think he might be from Oregon,” he says.
Big John looks as though he might ask Bruce where he’s from, then decides against it and continues with his burger. It’s spilling sauce all over the place and he mops up the drops with a surprising amount of care and attention.
“I’m Canadian,” he says.
“I met some New Zealanders,” I reply, surprising myself. I hadn’t intended on saying anything.
Big John smiles at me. “Really? Well, that is something.”
“My fiancé didn’t want to travel. We were saving for a house. A wedding, then a house. That was the plan.”
I look quickly at my coffee, pick at the seam of the cup with my fingernail. Warmth blooms over my cheeks. I can no longer be the cardboard cutout.
“I’m Italian. Italian-American,” I mumble. “Someone told me once that if you dig from Italy straight through to the other side of the world you come out in New Zealand.”
Big John’s jaw pauses on his mouthful. He swallows. “Is that true?”
“No, it’s not. As it turns out.”
He chuckles. He’s moved the foil bag so it catches the last drips of sauce. He presses his finger into one of the puddles and brings it to his mouth. “People do talk some shit.”
I nod.
“How long you going to be gone?” he asks before stuffing the last of the burger into his big mouth. It seems to vanish within his stubbled cheeks. There’s not a crumb or drop of sauce on his face. He starts to clean his hands carefully, one finger at a time.
“Pardon me?” I say.
Big John swallows. The silence goes on for longer than socially normal. I wait.
“Till you’re back. To your regular life, I mean.”
“Oh, I . . .” The first thought I have is that he’s asking about the cabin. With Daniel and Bella playing vacation out front, and laundry to be done and trash to clear. Meals to think about. Huia to forage with. Merriem. Jack.
“Don’t mean to pry,” he apologizes in a soft voice. He smiles and stands.
“No, it’s okay.” But I still can’t seem to answer him. My regular life.
After pouring three sugar packets into his coffee, Big John presses a takeaway lid on top and picks up the cup. He touches the rim of his cap like an old-fashioned gentleman. Though his cap is no gentleman’s—it’s pink, tomato red once maybe, and the fabric is worn, fraying at the peak. “I’ll leave you to your coffee.” Then, turning his head a little, “Bruce.”
“Big John.”
I want to say “Big John” too, but I don’t actually know him. Instead I nod good-bye.
“Have a good break, miss.”
“Yes. Thanks.”
I look down at my own coffee again as Big John leaves and the bell on the door jingles. A gust of air skates in and the place is fragranced, for a very short instant, with the scent of cut timber. Then it is gone, along with Big John.
I stand, leaving the full coffee cup, and head back to my car.
Chapter Seventeen
• • • •
There are three days of peace.
The forest wakes a little earlier each day. The sun stretches thin fingers down through the trees; the birds sing or chirp or cry or squawk. I watch the dust spinning in stripes of light. There are the same smells: coffee, the loamy soil, salt in the towels, burning wood, marshmallows starting to fizz and caramel.
Daniel and Bella swim every day, their skin drying salt-dusted and smelling like Alex after a surf.
I make espresso each morning, d
ark and strong. Daniel drives to wherever it is he takes the garbage. Bella has begun to sketch each afternoon, in a large notepad with a piece of charcoal.
I do the laundry at Merriem’s house. She has a machine but I wash by hand in the deep laundry sink instead. There’s something nice about having my arms plunged into warm water and making things clean. I wash Daniel’s socks, a T-shirt that looks like one of Alex’s old ones, Bella’s underwear and tank tops. I realize that we’re the same size, though we probably always were. I wash the contents of Merriem’s laundry basket too: a long, mint-green satin slip; socks with bright spots; a faded paisley head scarf.
I seem to end up at Merriem’s in the afternoons regardless of whether there is laundry to do or not, as though there is a magnetic pull to the green cottage, with its yard full of bees making honey, and I’m not the only one drawn to its homely charms. Huia visits after Jellybeans and before Jack hurries over to see where she is. We eat slices of date loaf with butter and drink hot tea while she asks Merriem about foraging and me about dancing and Italy and my favorite color and whether I would choose wings if I had to choose between them or a prehensile tail. I have to ask her what prehensile means. Huia points out birds that visit Merriem’s yard for its spring treasures and tells me their names, where they’re from, and how common they are. She is a skipping, pint-sized, bird encyclopedia. Jack fixes washers or changes lightbulbs while we talk, then tells Huia it’s time to go home, which she negotiates over for at least another forty minutes.
There is a rhythm.
On the third night, I go to bed early while Bella and Daniel stay up tending the fire. As I close my eyes I hear a guitar. The music makes everything else go quiet. The strings picked over so tenderly, notes plucked out so beautifully they seem to tell a story. Of tears. Of loss. Like one of those Portuguese folk songs, where the singer wails and it cracks your heart like an egg.
The tempo picks up, the guitar talking fast, begging. And then slows again, slowly, slowly, like falling. One note. Then another. Putting one foot in front of the other. Slow and steady.
My heart beats against my palm, which is resting on my chest. The music is inside me. Pulling at me from the inside.
Then, in a sudden, hopeful way, it’s over.
Bella whistles. “Encore, Daniel!”
But there is no more. Just the one beautiful song. Sweet, sad, and too short.
* * *
At Merriem’s, on the fourth day, I hang out a few pieces of laundry on a wooden frame in front of the big living room windows. Merriem spreads honeycomb on slices of rosemary toast. Honey she collected from her hives, bread she baked. The smell is piney and sweet and comforting, like the forest.
Merriem gestures for me to sit and passes me a piece of toast, the heat still rising from it. “How are you doing?” she asks.
She’s wearing a blue dress and a long cardigan that reaches down to her knees. Chestnut-colored wool, with a thick, loose weave. One of her earrings is a moon and the other is a sun. They remind me of similar terra-cotta versions that hang on Aunty Rosa’s outdoor wall.
“Okay,” I reply, retrieving dripped honey from the plate with the tip of my index finger. “Is it all right I’m here so often? I enjoy doing the laundry. I never thought I’d say that.”
“Of course it’s all right. It’s nice to have the company. And sometimes doing laundry is just the ticket.” She nods at the wooden frame. “It reminds me of hanging cloth diapers.”
I frown. “You have children?”
She smiles, shakes her head. “I lived on a kibbutz. It was part of my work. Hundreds of cloth diapers, day after day after day, clothesline after clothesline. Like party pennants. I hated it at first. It seemed so dull. I think I had a different idea of what kibbutz life would be like.”
“A kibbutz . . . in Israel?” I ask.
She nods.
I imagine Merriem in a kibbutz, transplanting her face on to the images I’ve seen of women with head scarves in faded colors, the sun high and hot in the sky.
“Ezra,” Merriem explains, without my asking. “He was diabolically handsome. I was there for almost a year.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t like laundry as much if I had hundreds of diapers to deal with.”
She shrugs. “You’d be surprised. I enjoyed washing diapers in the end. It was meditative. Simple. Ezra and I fought a lot. In the end I enjoyed the diapers more than him probably.” She chews her toast noisily, then laughs. “Diapers don’t talk back.”
I glance at the washing on the frame. It’s not just clothes I’ve been cleaning. The cabin is also tidy and scrubbed. I have swept it out, ancient gray cobwebs and all, then mopped the floors by hand with an old cloth. I’ve even polished the window with vinegar and newspaper, and cleaned the bookshelf, one dusty book at a time. I’ve finished The Swiss Family Robinson and read Huia’s guide to birdlife from cover to cover.
“And the women,” Merriem adds, “on the kibbutz, they were something.” She sprinkles bee pollen onto the honey on her toast. “They’d been through so much and they worked so hard, yet they were cheerful. It left a big impression on me. Plus, they helped one another. They helped me. I’d never had that before.” She passes me the bee pollen. “Women haven’t always been so kind to me. I didn’t have sisters growing up.”
I nod, although I’m not sure how kind Bella and I have been to each other. Not very; not at all. I still avoid talking to her if I can help it, so she spends her time talking to Daniel or swimming or taking her yoga mat down to the ocean.
“Bella’s lucky to have an older sister,” Merriem says. “Especially one that washes her underpants,” she adds with a laugh.
“Oh,” I say, glancing in the direction of the laundry frame, “I was doing my own.”
Merriem just smiles and I return to eating my toast.
“Ezra died a few years ago,” she says after a pause. “I heard about it through a friend.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Cancer, of course. He had a family, kids and a wife. I think he was happy.” She shrugs. “Still . . .”
My tongue feels thick in my mouth. I clear my throat. “Still . . . it hurts.”
“Exactly. The country songs aren’t wrong. It hurts. The Buddhists aren’t wrong either. Life is suffering.”
“Life is suffering,” I repeat. My voice seems to have shrunk. I stare at her and ask, “Always?” I sound like a child.
Merriem shakes her head. She reaches over and takes my hand. “Not always.”
I swallow. I can barely whisper, “When is it not?”
Merriem gives a small sigh. “Oh, darling. Just when it’s not. When it’s a good day in between the hard ones.” She squeezes my fingertips. “When the sun shines and the bees make honey. When you’re with people who love you. When you find treasures—like morels and fiddleheads and huckleberries. When there’s toast.” She lowers her voice like it’s a secret. “When you’re doing the laundry.”
I nod, feeling tears welling. “There’s no more laundry left to do.”
“There’s always more laundry. People make their clothes dirty every day.”
“Well, thank God for that,” I say ruefully.
“Truly,” Merriem says. “You gotta start simple, honey.”
Her eyes are wide, imploring me. I think of what Jack said about finding myself under her wing. I place my other hand on top of hers. Her skin is thin and soft and warm.
She shakes her head again. “You young girls, you have too much to carry. You . . . Summer . . . It doesn’t seem fair.”
I frown. I’d almost forgotten Summer. Meeting her in the forest. Her kindness in Merriem’s kitchen.
“She lost someone too,” Merriem says. “Someone she loved. An accident, she said.”
Her face is full of compassion.
I drop her hand and stand up so fast the tops of my legs smack the table. I run back to the cabin, gulping down big, misshapen mouthfuls of fresh air.
* * *
As I reverse out of the driveway, gravel skitters under the tires. Bella stands in the door of the cabin, calls out, but I’m already halfway gone. I see her face is drawn and worried. I watch her lips make the two shapes of my name.
I drive too fast towards Edison. If I’m caught speeding I hope it’s Bob Skinner’s partner. I’ll shamelessly scribble Cousin Giulia’s phone number on his hand and speed off again before he has time to think.
Edison, Edison, Edison. My heart, pounding, seems to drum the word.
When I reach the town, both sides of the street are packed with cars. There are baskets full of spring flowers hanging under the eaves of Flourfarm, and tourists coming out with brown paper bags. Everyone is smiling. The throng is orderly, like bees returning to the hive. Tourists in T-shirts and puffer vests, hiking sandals. Smelling like sunscreen. A guy in an orange T-shirt and tan shorts glances at me and I realize I am panting. Adrenaline pumping through me like I’m about to run. Like I’m about to fight.
Despite the crowd I find Summer easily. She’s wearing a black T-shirt with FLOURFARM printed across the front and her hair is in a ponytail. She’s by a kids’ play area in the corner, passing a stick of chalk to a boy holding a plastic yellow digger. When she sees me she smiles, but it fades fast.
I thought of things to say to her in the car. Things that might come out as a shout. Things that I now realize will turn into a cry, a sob. I find myself saying nothing and staring at her. She looks pretty with her hair up, and she’s wearing mascara again today, her eyelashes long and pretty when she blinks at me. My gaze goes over her body, down her jeans to her dirty sneakers, over her breasts, back up to her face. I’m breathing hard through my nose, like there’s just not enough oxygen in the air.
“Frankie.” She steps over to me. “Are you okay?”
Her cheeks flush pink and I watch fear, or something like it, wash over her face. She knows. And she knows who I am.
She’s known this whole time and I’ve been the fool.
I wrestle with the tone of my voice before it leaves my throat. I’m proud when it comes out even and not too rushed. “Who. Else. Knows?”
I see the swallow in her throat. Her cheeks turn a darker shade of red. She glances over to the counter and a tall guy, hair the same color as hers, same pale freckles, is looking over at us. Her brother. There’s a huge line by the counter.
Season of Salt and Honey Page 18
