I screamed out all my rage, sadness, and hurt over winter’s hellish marriage of sleeted water and bastard wind. “MOTHER,” I shrieked, “come home. NOW.” But the ocean and the rocks kept up their own icy battle and ignored me. In my desperation, I shouted, “Here! Now give her back to me!” and I threw the red ruby heart into the cold blue sea.
And then Carlie was with me. Sudden heat hugged me from my head to my toes, as my mother wrapped her arms around me. I smelled her perfume and pressed my nose into her hair and it was just us, in a little glowing circle of warmth. Love me sweet, never let me go . . . , we sang, and I would have been happy to end things there.
But here was Glen, throwing his heavy flannel hunting jacket over me.
“Let’s go, Florine,” he said. I looked up and smiled at him, and at Bud and Dottie.
“See? I found her,” I said as Carlie’s arms tightened around me.
“Florine, your lips are blue,” Dottie said. “Where’s your coat?”
“Can you get up?” Bud asked.
“I don’t want to get up,” I said.
“Jesus, Glen, pick her up,” Dottie said. “She’s hypodermic.”
Glen slung me over his right shoulder as if I was a rag doll, and hurried back down the trail, my head and arms dangling down his back. Carlie slipped away from me as Dottie kept shouting, “Don’t go to sleep. Stay awake. Don’t go to . . .”
When I woke up in my bed around dusk, my eyelids felt like someone had placed bricks on them. It was a struggle to open them, so I gave up and kept them shut. Grand was talking to Daddy in our kitchen.
“Well, Florine isn’t ready for you to find someone else. She’s tougher than tripe, but still she’s a girl as lost her mother.”
“The last thing I want to do is hurt my girl. If I’d known how bad she would’ve felt, ’course I wouldn’t have done it,” Daddy said. “But, Ma, it’s like living in hell. Taking some comfort for a night made me forget. Is that so wrong?”
“What do you think?” Grand asked. Then it went quiet, while Daddy thought, I guess. Grand said, “Carlie might come back. Or even if she doesn’t, Florine needs to wrap her mind around that fact.”
Daddy said, in a voice so low it scraped the floor, “Ma, Carlie ain’t coming back. I can’t do no more there. I hate calling Parker and the rest of them. They hate it that they ain’t got nothing to report. Jesus, we’re circling our circles. I loved that woman more than I can say, and if she was to walk through that door, I would welcome her back with a parade. But Ma, she’s not coming back. And Ma, I can’t do this.” He cried for a while, and I heard Grand’s “There, there,” and could imagine her patting his back.
Sometime later, I felt his damp hand heavy on my forehead. I forced my lids up and stared into his worried blue eyes. Then I turned over and faced my bedroom wall.
“Leave me alone,” I said.
16
Soon after Carlie and Daddy got married, Daddy built a small shed beside the house to shelter Carlie’s car, Petunia, during bad weather. His trucks sat out in the snow and rain and rusted, but not Petunia. I never got the full story of how Carlie had come by her—something about waitress tips and winks—but Petunia was her traveling companion. When she’d left for Crow’s Nest Harbor in Patty’s car, she’d left Petunia parked in the driveway, it being summer. After the disappearance, the police went through her like gulls on fish bait. But they found nothing that might be considered suspicious, unless gum wrappers, a tube of pink lipstick, and a melted Hershey bar (mine) in the glove compartment could be toted up as evidence. It got too sad to see Petunia sitting there and so about two months after Carlie’s disappearance, Daddy moved her into her shed, drained her fluids, and shut the door on her.
Sometimes, I went out and sat in the driver’s seat and let the tears fall as I looked through the windshield, or I climbed into the backseat and curled up on Petunia’s soft musty seats. Sometimes I napped there.
During the winter of 1964, though, I didn’t sit in her at all. After my trip out to the ledges, going outside unless I had to didn’t set well with my fingers and toes. I was content to guard the house against a possible Stella Drowns invasion.
But Petunia wasn’t lonely that winter.
One Saturday in late January, when Daddy was uptown and I was in the kitchen, I spied Bud Warner walking up the hill through the Buttses’ yard. He veered to the left and walked toward the shed. He looked around, and then slipped inside the shed door.
I threw a coat on and barged out, opened the door, and glared at a sheepish Bud, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, gloved hands on the steering wheel. I walked up to the window and he rolled it down.
“What are you doing?” I said.
Bud shrugged. “Feeling stupid.”
“You look stupid,” I said. “What are you doing in my mother’s car?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“Better I laugh than knock you sideways to Sunday.”
Bud smiled. “Probably could, too, mad as you are. Move, so I can get out.”
I stepped back and he got out and shut the door. We walked around to the front of the car and he leaned on the grill. He patted Petunia’s hood. “She’s a nice car,” he said.
“She’s Carlie’s car,” I said.
“Think Carlie would mind that I sat in her and pretended I was driving her?”
“Why?”
“Well, I know it sounds foolish,” Bud said. “But I like to pretend I’m taking her out on the road, people looking at us, thinking what a beauty she is.”
He looked at me with steady dark eyes and a little smile, trusting me to understand something about him. I liked that, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
“Well, you can sit in her, I guess,” I said. “Long as you don’t smoke.”
“I don’t smoke, you know that.”
“I didn’t know you came up and sat in my mother’s car. For all I know, you could be lighting up a pack a day.”
“Nah,” Bud said. He moved away from Petunia and we walked to my front door. “Guess I’ll go home now,” he said. “You sure you’re okay with me sitting in the car?”
“I’m okay with it,” I said.
“Thanks,” Bud said. “I’ll see you,” and he walked down our driveway, arms and legs too long and loose. He turned around and waved. I waved back and then he disappeared behind the Buttses’ house.
As the longest winter of my life dragged its ass across the calendar, I welcomed every minute of returning light, and I welcomed Bud’s visits to the car.
Sometimes he left behind little presents. On Valentine’s Day, he set a white candy heart that read SOME GIRL on the passenger seat, and on Saint Patrick’s Day, I found a green ribbon tied to Petunia’s steering wheel. I knitted a black watch cap for him and found it gone, replaced with a Charms cherry lollipop.
One day in late March, I spied him slipping into the shed and I decided to join him in the passenger seat. We looked through the windshield, down over the hill to the harbor, where ice cakes glided to a salty death in the spring ocean.
“Be warm soon,” Bud said.
“For sure,” I said.
“Someday,” Bud said, “I’m going to drive away from here for good.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to be here for all of my life. I don’t want to fish.”
“Where will you go?”
“Someplace where I don’t know everybody. Maybe Long Reach. Maybe beyond that. Don’t you feel cramped in, sometimes?”
“Mostly I feel like I got a hole inside,” I said.
Gulls landed on the chunks of ice in the harbor, riding them past us and out of sight. “Carlie felt cramped here,” I said. “She wanted to go places all the time.”
“I know how she felt,�
� Bud said. “Sometimes, I get so crazy that I get up at night, go outside and walk until I’m tired. I just have to move. My legs can’t be still.”
I thought about his lonely, restless, skinny self walking down the dark roads, feet crunching on the gravel or scuffing over tar.
“You think I’m crazy?” he asked. I turned to look at him.
We saw each other different at the same time. We’d always looked at each other as through water, a wavy, liquid, safe distance. But in that car, in that moment, that water evaporated and became air, clear, dry, and true.
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I said.
Bud’s eyes got wide. Then he turned toward the windshield and shook his head. “I don’t want to get stuck here,” he said, more to himself than me. He opened the car door and hopped out, startling me into a series of blinks. He said, “Don’t tell no one I go walking in the night, okay?” He shut the car door and off he ran. I let myself out of Petunia, shut the door to the shed, and went into the empty house. I tugged at the string holding my heart aloft and gently lowered it back into place.
17
One day in early April, the school bus dropped Dottie and me off, and we walked to Ray’s so we could buy a snack and split it. Dottie always bought the goods, because I didn’t want to go in and see Stella. That day, after coming out of the store and while trying to work the cellophane off some Hostess cupcakes, Dottie said, “Your dad’s in there.”
“Is he? What’s he . . . God damn it,” I said. I ignored the cupcake Dottie held out and I marched inside. Daddy was leaning up against Stella’s counter, but he straightened when he saw me and looked guilty as hell. I turned and stormed out of the store. Daddy followed me.
“You seeing her again?” I asked. “Just let me know.”
“No, I’m not seeing her,” Daddy said.
“Good,” I said.
“What do you want for supper?” he asked.
“Too busy talking to pick up something at the store?” I asked.
“Jesus,” Daddy said. “Why would I need a wife? I’ve got you to nag me.”
Maybe he wasn’t lying, then, but late one night not long after that, I heard the sound of footsteps on the driveway. I bolted up out of bed and looked out of my window. Two figures walked up the driveway, away from the house. I figured out that the tall one was Daddy, but who was the smaller one? Then I knew.
I got out of bed and went into the kitchen. The faint trace of Stella’s cologne and something I would later come to know as the smell of sex hung in the darkened kitchen.
“Screw you, Stella,” I said, then realized someone already had. A little later, Daddy sneaked back down the driveway, came into the house and went to bed.
In the morning I said to him, “Thought you weren’t seeing her.”
Daddy put the coffeepot on the burner and said, “I wasn’t.”
“But you are now?”
“I want to,” he said. “But I want you to be all right with it.”
“Can’t have both,” I said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s me or her.”
Daddy sat down across the table from me.
“Florine,” he said, “how can I explain this so you’ll understand it?”
“Explain what?”
“I like this woman,” Daddy said. “I’ve known her a long time. If your mother hadn’t come along, I might have married her, and she could just as well have been your mother.” I gave him such a look of disgust that he added, quickly, “’Course, that didn’t happen.”
“Good thing,” I said.
“But all that put to one side, I need some company.”
“What’s wrong with the company you got? You got Grand, me, Sam, Bert, Ray, Pastor Billy, and more. What’s wrong with us?”
“You’re all good company,” he said. “I mean someone I can really talk to. A good friend I can spend time with. And she can cook like no one I’ve ever known.” Daddy smiled. “And I know you liked that meal she cooked, too, even though you pretended you didn’t like it. I ain’t totally ignorant. I know you, some.”
“What you mean is you need someone you can fuck,” I said. “Isn’t that it?”
I could tell that he wanted to hit me, or yell at me so loud it would blow me off the chair. But instead, he let out a long, slow breath, then he said, his blue eyes sharp, “I suppose it’s too much to ask that you don’t use that word. But I don’t want to ever, ever hear you use it like that again. I hope that when you’re ready to be with someone—you treat that time with the goodness it deserves.”
He got up and walked to the front door. He put on his coat and turned back to me. “I got to get out of here for a few minutes, I guess. I never thought I’d hear my girl talk that way and I’m ashamed of you. And I’ll tell you right now, Florine, the real reason why I want to see Stella. I’m dying inside with missing your mother. I could suck on some bitch of a bottle, but I’d rather talk to someone. Be with someone who can help me get through this. You think about that and I hope you can dig down and haul up some kindness from somewhere inside you.” And he left the house.
I tried. I did. When I got home from school a couple of nights later, Daddy was in his woodworking workshop, off the living room. The smell of pine tickled my nostrils as I looked in on him.
“You mind picking up the house?” he asked, not looking up.
“Why?”
“Stella’s bringing dinner,” he said. “And I expect you to be nice to her.”
My good intentions scattered like marbles the minute she came through our door. I hated the way she stretched like a snake shedding its skin when Daddy took her coat, the way she wore full war paint on her face.
“Hello, Florine,” she said to me.
“I got homework,” I said. I went into my room, sat at my desk, took out a couple of pieces of lined notebook paper and wrote I hate Stella Drowns until Daddy knocked on the door and called me to supper.
“Not hungry,” I said.
“Get out here,” he said. “Please.”
Stella heaped noodles, brown sauce, and dark chunks of beef onto my plate.
“That looks good,” Daddy said.
“Beef Stroganoff,” Stella said.
“Beef strong enough?” Daddy said. Stella giggled. “Silly,” she said.
Daddy started to take a bite, but Stella put her hand on his arm. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asked.
Daddy looked confused.
“She means grace,” I said. “Remember, she said it before.”
Stella bent her head and said some words.
Daddy added an Amen and then forked food into his mouth. He sat back in his chair and gave Stella a broad smile. “My God,” he said, “I don’t know when I’ve ever tasted anything so good. But,” he added, and winked at Stella, “it needs a little salt.”
“Oh dear,” Stella said. “Not enough?”
“Plenty,” he said. “I just like a lot of it.”
“Salt’s not good for you,” she said.
Daddy laughed. “Oh, I know, but I got to have some fun, don’t I?”
She lifted an eyebrow and said, “I’m not fun enough?”
“I just like more salt than normal,” he stammered.
“Well.” Stella sniffed. “I’ll put more in, I guess.”
Daddy put the saltshaker down. “It’s fine the way it is, isn’t it, Florine?” he said.
“A turd is dinner to a dog, but that doesn’t mean I have to eat it,” I said.
Stella’s eyes turned to glassy shards. “Well,” she said, “you’re honest.”
“She’s not fit to sit here,” Daddy said, his face red. “Go to your room.”
“Should have let me stay there
in the first place,” I said.
I slid off my chair, went into my room, slammed the door, and put Elvis on my record player. I played “Jailhouse Rock” loud. I imagined Carlie coming back home right now, in the middle of their dinner. She’d look at Stella, smile and say, “Hey there, Stella!” sit down, serve herself up, thank Stella for coming, and we’d all go on from there.
After a long time, I took Elvis off the turntable, climbed into bed, and slept. I woke later to the sound of Stella crying and Daddy talking. I crept from my bed and cracked the door so I could see them. They were by the front door and Stella had her coat on.
“This is too soon,” she said. “Carlie is still in your eyes. I can’t live with that.”
“It’ll take me awhile,” Daddy said. “You got to be patient with me.”
“Florine doesn’t want me here. I don’t want to force her.”
Daddy walked toward her and she backed off. “Stella,” he said.
Stella said, “I waited for years for you, Leeman. It was hard for me to watch Carlie have your baby. I wanted that for us.”
“I’m sorry,” Daddy said.
“Good night,” she said, and left.
“The witch is dead,” I told Dottie at school the next day.
“Ding dong,” Dottie said.
But that night as I lay in bed, I heard Daddy answer the door in the dark. I opened my bedroom door just enough to see Daddy and Stella locked together in a kiss, making noises deep in their throats. They moved toward Daddy’s bedroom and in less than a minute, the bed squeaked faster than a hamster running on a rusty wheel.
That did it. I dragged Carlie’s suitcase from under the bed. I’d already packed some clothes and other things I’d need. I put Carlie’s favorite Elvis album on top and shut the lid. I opened my window and dropped the suitcase, then myself, to the ground. Daddy hadn’t been the only sneaky one. While he’d been making nice with Stella, I’d been taking little dribs and drabs of money from his wallet and his pockets. I had enough money so I could walk to Long Reach, get a one-way ticket on a bus to Crow’s Nest Harbor, and start looking for my mother.
Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) Page 10
