Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833)

by Rogers, Morgan Callan

  “Ray says you went over The Cheeks,” she said. “Is that right?”

  I sat up. My arms ached. What had we done with my arms?

  “Ray said what?”

  “Says that Andy Barrington is staying in the cottage.”

  “Oh for pity’s sake,” I said. “Is it on the front page of the paper now?”

  “No,” Dottie said. “But you being my best friend and all, I thought I’d ask.”

  “Speaking of being best friends, how come you told Bud I liked him?”

  “Just come up,” Dottie said. “Happens sometimes.”

  “How am I supposed to trust you?”

  Dottie shrugged. “I see your point. Won’t happen again. I promise.”

  “Okay. I got laid,” I said. “You want to take that back to the store and announce it?”

  “Jesus to Jesus, that’s some news!” she whooped. “You got laid?”

  I nodded.

  “Was it Andy Barrington? The firecrackers guy?”

  “The same one.”

  “Thought you was going to save yourself for Bud.”

  “As you pointed out, there’s no chance of that happening.”

  “True. You going to tell me about it?”

  I did, from the stew to the sex.

  “How’d it feel?”

  “Good,” I said. “I can’t remember much.”

  “Did you come?”

  “A thousand times,” I said.

  “I should try it. Gus told someone on my team he’d ask me out in a minute.”

  “Go for it.”

  She shrugged. “Not my type. Can’t picture him going at it and me yelling, ‘Gus, Gus’ underneath him.” She left a little while later.

  I was changing my pad upstairs in the bathroom when someone else knocked on the front door. I wondered if it was a reporter come to get the juicy details.

  “It’s open,” I yelled. When I went downstairs, I found Bud in the hall.

  “Seen you more in the last couple days than I have in a month,” I said.

  “I got to say it,” he said. “He’s no good for you.”

  “Who’s no good for me?”

  “Andy.”

  “Did Dottie tell you?”

  “Heard up at Ray’s.”

  “What do you care?” I said. “What’s it to you?”

  “I heard some things.”

  “Everyone is hearing things today,” I said. “Maybe the whole damn Point should get their ears checked.”

  “I don’t want to make you mad,” Bud said. “Just thought you should know about it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Straightened me right out.”

  “I shouldn’t have said nothing,” he said.

  “Seems to be what you’re best at,” I snapped.

  He went out the door, closing it with a quiet click behind him.

  The way he closed that door, so polite, so calm, like he was leaving a crazy person, set me off. “You never say nothing!” I screamed at the door. “Could have been you.”

  I clenched and unclenched my hands, wanting something to fill them with. Then I remembered I had to make bread for the store. I went into the kitchen and mixed the dough for the first two loaves, then pummeled the shit out of it, muttering at Bud, Stella, Ray, Dottie, even Andy. I had the period blues, for sure.

  But mostly, I was mad at Bud. For someone who didn’t talk much, he’d managed to open my eyes to the fact that I’d given myself to someone I hardly knew. I’d snuffed out any chance of ever being with him by screwing some summer boy in a freezing house where I wouldn’t have been welcome as a guest during a cocktail hour.

  “God damn you, Bud Warner,” I hollered, and I threw a wad of dough at the kitchen wall, then another one, until all the dough in the bowl was stuck or sliding slowly down the wall to the floor.

  I was too down to be jumped when Daddy said from the kitchen doorway, “You okay, Florine?”

  “No,” I said. I walked over to where he was standing by the doorway and put my arms around him. “I feel like crap,” I said.

  He patted my back and said, “Shhhh,” for a few seconds, until I got myself back together. Then I walked over and started peeling dough off the wall.

  “Stella told me you went somewhere last night,” Daddy said.

  “I did,” I said. “Over The Cheeks. You must know that. Everyone else does.”

  “Small place,” Daddy said.

  I threw the dough out, wet a dishcloth, and went back to the wall. I scrubbed at the oily stains but they had set in, leaving me a nice reminder of my temper.

  “Florine, I ain’t real happy about you seeing this boy.”

  “Well, I wasn’t real happy about you seeing Stella. Didn’t stop you, did it?”

  “We’re talking about you and this boy.”

  “His name is Andy.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d listen for a minute.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for him to talk.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd he’s up here without no heat or nothing?”

  “You asking me or telling me?”

  “I’m asking you to think about this. How come he ain’t in school?”

  “He got out early for Christmas break for good grades and he decided to come up here. He’s had all this outdoor experience and he thought it would be fun to camp out. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, on the surface. You get a chance, you bring him to meet us. Do that for me, please?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “You want to come over and have supper with us?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m tired.”

  “Be careful,” Daddy said, and left.

  I baked bread for Ray and between loaves I knit on a baby sweater that was part of a set. I spun what everyone had said around in my head until I had it all dried, folded, and sorted, but I wasn’t able to put it away. Every time I thought of Andy as evil, I pictured his eyes, sparking and full of me. At about eleven o’clock, I turned off the lights and pulled myself up over the stairs to bed.

  Tomorrow, I thought, The Point will move on to something else. I sank into the sheets, ready to let my dreams do the driving. But I didn’t get too far down the road before I heard a soft knock at the door in the side yard. I knew it had to be Andy because no one ever knocked on the side door. I bounded out of bed and ran downstairs. I opened the door and he lunged over the door stoop and pinned me against the stair banister. Everything inside me took off like a twitchy flock of birds as we kissed and clenched with the door wide open. December whooshed in, scraping its boots on the doormat and bellowing out, “Where’s the party?” If my feet hadn’t gotten cold, we would have been there forever. I finally managed to shut the door.

  39

  We were out in the open after that. Some may have thought I was throwing it into their faces but that wasn’t the reason I trotted Andy around. I liked him. Partly I liked him because he thought different, he’d seen different things, and he told me stories about the things he’d seen and done. Partly I liked him for the sex. And he was a person who had come back from the past. He was living proof that it was possible that lost things could show up again. He listened to me talk about Carlie. Telling someone new about her was such a relief to me. It shifted the heaviness in my heart, moved her loss around a little bit so that there was more room to breathe.

  “I remember her,” he said. “She was so pretty. I only saw her that day on the lawn when she came over with you, but I remember she had the reddest hair and a happy face. I hated that my father was such an asshole that day. He hit me. Did I tell you that?”

  “He hit you?” I said. I must have been staring at him as if he had two heads
, because he said, “What? You think because we have money that this shit doesn’t happen?”

  “What about your mother?” I asked. “We’ve talked about Carlie, but you never talk about your mother.”

  He was quiet for a minute, looking at the fire. We were dressed, for once, and had just eaten fish chowder I’d thrown together for us. Somehow, he’d managed to get a bottle of red wine that sat on my tongue like velvet and made me sleepy.

  “Mothers can disappear in more ways than one,” he said. “My mother—she sleeps a lot. Sometimes, she’ll sleep the whole day away. That’s when I’m home. Probably, she sleeps more than that when I’m gone. Her sister, my Aunt Meggie, took her to the Bahamas to get her away for a while.”

  “When Grand died, I was so sad that all I wanted to do was sleep,” I said. “I might still be there if people had left me alone.”

  “Sometimes, I feel like I’m an orphan,” Andy said. “I mean, I got two parents, but where the hell are they? And when I’m with them, it’s just a pain in the ass.”

  By that time we’d been together every day, except for Christmas. I spent that time with Daddy and Stella. I had invited Andy, but he had wanted to be alone.

  “No one wants to be alone for Christmas,” I argued. “My father wants to meet you.”

  “Some other time, Sweetness, okay?” Andy said. “This year, I want to write some, think some, sleep some, take a walk. Besides, I’m not alone. You’re not that far away.”

  Christmas night found us curled around one another like greedy vines. We toasted in 1969 wrapped in a thick sleeping bag on the porch with a bottle of champagne that made me giggle and feel ticklish. We snuggled and picked out stars for ourselves and named them. We got stoned, too, although I wasn’t as sold on it as Andy was—I didn’t like the smoke and heat hitting my lungs or the dull depression afterward.

  It went on like that into January. Him and me, prone, heating one another against the freezing weather and the storms that raged outside. We stayed in his cottage, mostly, for the adventure Andy liked, and for the privacy I craved. We managed by keeping the fire going and wearing layers of clothes. When we needed showers or warmth, we headed for Grand’s house. We did our business in chamber pots, then flung out the slops into the ocean at the end of the lawn. Emptied pot in hand, I would turn to look back at the house, picturing our children rolling down perfectly mowed summertime grass.

  Andy didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get back to school. That seemed odd to me, but I’d quit, so who was I to ask anyone about their own plans? Still, he was supposed to graduate in June, and it was coming up on the second week in January. Finally, I asked, “When you going back to school?”

  We were face-to-face, naked in bed. He smiled and gave me the tender eyes. “Independent study,” he said.

  “You’re not going back to school, are you?” I said.

  “Would it bother you if I stayed?” Then he did something that made me forget I’d asked the question.

  A couple days after that conversation, we both got a hankering to clean up. We walked hand-in-hand through the quiet of the mid-morning and met Bud driving up the road from his house. He passed by without looking at us, his mouth set taut like nylon rope.

  “He’s late for school, I guess,” I said.

  “He’s cool,” Andy said. “That look in his eyes. He could be a dangerous character in some movie, someone you least expect to do what he’s doing. A spy or something.”

  I snorted. “Bud? Nah.”

  I knew someone had been in Grand’s house the minute I opened the door. I listened for the echo of what had gone on while Andy headed upstairs to check things out. Then, in the kitchen, I found a piece of paper on the table, held down by Grand’s bluebird pepper shaker. At first I didn’t recognize the writing, but then I saw that it was in Daddy’s hand. He seldom wrote more than a list. His cursive was big and loopy and the words sloped down on the paper.

  Florine, dear,

  I got to tell you how I feel. You ain’t here much, so I can’t do it. But I need to say I’m worried about you and I want you to come home to Grand’s house. I know we don’t talk much at all, but I’m still you’re father and you got to know I love you, even if I don’t say it much. If you don’t want to come by youreself, bring that young fella along and we can work things out. I told you to bring him to supper and I ment it. Please come and talk to me.

  You’re loving Daddy.

  “Oh Daddy,” I said, feeling tender about the wrong spellings and the way he’d borne down on the pencil so hard it had ripped the paper in a couple of spots. To write me a note, Daddy had to have been bothered. Maybe Stella had put him up to it but it didn’t matter. I had been a bad daughter. I hadn’t been thinking about him, or Grand’s, or bread, or knitting, or anything or anyone else downwind of Andy’s cottage.

  When Andy got out of the bathroom, I said to him, “Do you want to meet my father?”

  He looked at me out of the sides of his eyes. “Is he here?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “He wants us to come to supper. It’ll be okay,” I said when he looked like he wanted to bolt. “Stella will cook something good and there will be lots of it. Daddy won’t say much but Stella will do all the talking. We won’t be there long, couple hours, maybe. He just wants to meet you, look you over.”

  “I don’t know,” Andy said. “He’s a big guy. I wonder what he thinks of me poking his daughter.”

  “I don’t see that coming up,” I said.

  “I don’t have too much luck with fathers,” Andy said.

  “So you don’t want to go to supper?”

  When he caught the low growl in my voice, he said, “I’ll do it for you. What time?”

  “Let’s go ask Stella if tonight is okay,” I said. “Get it over with.”

  We walked toward Ray’s to ask her there, but before we got there Andy said, “I’m going back to the cottage. You come for me when it’s time for dinner. We’re almost out of wood and I should bring some in. It might snow.”

  The sky was as blue as Daddy’s eyes.

  “Well, it feels like it’s going to snow,” Andy said.

  “What is wrong with you?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just have this feeling that if I don’t bring in wood, it’ll snow. Why wait when I can do it now and prevent that from happening? Your father would approve of me taking care of you by making sure you’re warm and dry, right?”

  I knew he was stalling. But I let it go.

  “See you later,” I said.

  He gave me a lip-smacking kiss in front of Ray’s, then walked toward the path.

  I went inside. “Got Daddy’s note,” I said to Stella. “How about we come over tonight?”

  She lit right up. “Oh, that would be wonderful,” she said. She leaned over the deli counter and said, “I saw you kissing Andy.”

  “What time do you want us?” I asked.

  “About five,” she said.

  I went back to Grand’s for a little while. It was well past the New Year and the ruby glass hadn’t had its January cleaning. I took each piece out, cleaned the cabinet, washed and dried the pieces and put them back. I touched the spot where the red ruby heart had lain, wondering if anyone would ever find it; maybe in the belly of a fish or swept up in a net. What would they think if they did find it?

  I went up to the cottage around four. It was dusk but I could see smoke rising from the tall chimney over the central fireplace. When I went inside, the place reeked of pot. Andy had taken the fire screen off and was feeding the fire little twigs, rocking back and forth and humming.

  “I see you got the wood,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said. He turned to me. The whites of his eyes were cherry red.

  “You can’t come to supper like this,” I said.

&n
bsp; “What?” he asked. Then he giggled and said, “You’re pretty.”

  “What’s my name?” I asked. “Do you even know my name?”

  He laughed and slapped his thighs. “What’s your name?” he asked me. “I know your name. It’s my darling Florine of The Point. She’s the girl for me.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Andy, I’m going to have to go on to supper. If I don’t, they’ll be worried.”

  “Oh,” Andy said, face suddenly serious. “Well, help me up and we’ll go.”

  “You’re too stoned,” I said.

  He laughed and when he did I turned around and walked out into the dark. He caught me by the edge of the woods. He tackled me and I fell into the icy snow, scraping the palms of my hands. Andy fumbled under the fresh, ironed skirt I’d put on for supper.

  My eyes stung as I shoved his hands away. “Don’t,” I said. “I have to go. Go back to the house, you’ll get cold.”

  He stroked the side of my face with the backs of his fingers and gave me a look that held so much love that it hurt me to see it. I struggled to get out from under him.

  “I’ll talk to you later, okay?” I said.

  He rolled off me and helped me up. He smiled and said, “I love you.”

  “I know,” I said. My hands and knees hurt like hell. “I love you, too.” I did at that moment. How could I not, when he needed me so much?

  He kissed me so hard that one of my teeth pinched my lip and I tasted blood.

  A little ways down the path, I looked back to see him watching me go. In the faint light, he seemed to be floating on white. I got to Daddy’s house at five thirty.

  I told them that Andy had gotten a cold that had come on fast. But Stella’s eyes shone like high-beam headlights and I knew she was dying for morning to come so she could spread the word. Andy’s not showing up would make him stand out like a sore thumb and turn the spotlight on him and on me in ways we had never, ever wanted.

  40

  I stayed in my own bed that night. I waited for Andy to show and worried when he didn’t. Somewhere around dawn I fell asleep.

  The phone rang at around ten o’clock Saturday morning. It was Dottie, wanting to know if I was home. Dottie hardly ever called—usually she dropped by—and her call brought it home to me that I hadn’t been around enough to be dropped in on. I suddenly couldn’t wait to see her. I made cocoa and a stack of cinnamon toast and we sat at the kitchen table and wolfed it down while Dottie unloaded some news.