Fiona's Flame

by Rachael Herron

  CHAPTER NINE

  Never be afraid to ask another knitter for help. She asked someone else the same question once. – E. C.

  The next morning, Fiona dragged herself through a shower and downed a cup of cold coffee left over from the day before. She’d slept through the alarm clock again. Even with two clocks set, Fiona could sleep through both the buzzing and the music. Once she’d been given one of those alarms that you throw against the wall to shut off, and she’d thrown it right through the bedroom window. And she’d managed to drift back to sleep even after registering that the tinkling noise that followed was falling glass shards.

  Finally dressed, Fiona tromped through the small garden to the shop. When she unlocked the door, Daisy rolled in, Tabitha running past her to the back of the shop.

  ‘You’re early,’ grumbled Fiona.

  ‘You’re opening late. Give me my breakfast, quick.’ Daisy glared at Fiona, but Fiona didn’t buy it for a second.

  Daisy started over. ‘Okay. May I please have whatever health food you’re pressing on us this morning?’

  ‘Pineapple bran muffin with a side of fruit,’ said Fiona, pulling them from where she’d packaged them up last night when she got home.

  Daisy pouted prettily. Once Fiona had heard someone describe Daisy as a Disney princess on wheels, and she had to admit, while she’d never tell Daisy about the comment, it was an apt description. She had a head of amazing Dolly Parton blonde curls and huge blue eyes. She sewed herself whimsical dresses, and allowed Tabby to wear whatever she liked, which meant that sometimes both of them went out wearing gauzy wings and frilly tutus.

  ‘He asked me out.’

  ‘He did?’ Daisy rolled her chair so close to Fiona that she had to step backward. ‘What did you say?’

  Embarrassment filled her. Again. Fiona flopped sideways onto the couch and looked out the window where two cars she didn’t recognize were filling their tanks. ‘I said yes. And then I asked if I could plan the date.’

  Daisy blinked. Her lashes were long, soot-black, and curled. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It had been important to her, for some reason, at the time. ‘I just thought I should.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Fiona straightened, willing her spine to be made of steel alloy, not mercury. ‘U-Pick Metal Scrap.’

  Daisy’s voice was a breath. ‘You wouldn’t.’

  Fiona nodded hard. ‘Oh, yes. I would.’

  ‘Do you know what you look like when you get back from ripping cars apart? It’s like you’ve dived into the first burned out, smashed car you see in there and rolled around, smearing yourself all over the greasy front seats. You remember when I couldn’t get that piece of – what was it, a broken coat hanger or something – out of your hair? And it was full of that muddy oil? That short haircut I had to give you did not suit you, by the way.’

  ‘I’d had to shimmy under the Rolls Royce to get the metal finding I needed for that contracted pair of earrings, remember? The one for that rich Santa Barbara witch who only wanted Rolls parts and then refused to pay after I mailed them to her? I had to grind my head in the dirt for like an hour under there.’

  ‘Would that woman have known the difference between parts from a Rolls and a Nova? And now you’re going to take Abe Atwell with you to search for tiny pieces of metal. You’re going to what? Give him a pair of pliers and meet up with him when he’s pulled off enough parts to fill your bucket? Or should we not talk about your bucket yet?’

  ‘Oh, my God, stop it. Eat your bran muffin. Tabby?’ Fiona called into the back of the store.

  ‘Je nettoie la salle de bains!’ a small voice yelled back.

  ‘You don’t have to clean the bathroom, kiddo!’ Daisy shook her head. ‘She’s obsessed with Windex right now. She’s cleaned every mirror in the salon like three times a day this week.’

  Fiona said, ‘Isn’t that a little OCD?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Daisy, looking with suspicion at the muffin. ‘She’s fine. She gets it from her dad. I’ve never met a clean freak like Nate. Highlight of the divorce was kicking him out and leaving the dishes in the sink for three days straight. Why do I have to eat this?’

  ‘Here’s one for Tabby, too. Promise me no McDonald’s this morning.’

  Daisy groaned. ‘But we pass that one on the highway on the way to school …’

  ‘Promise me.’

  ‘McMuffin?’

  ‘I need my girls to be healthy.’ Fiona bent down for the kiss Tabby flung against her cheek, and walked with them out to the van. She ruffled Tabitha’s fluffy blonde curls. They were exactly the curls that Fiona had dreamed of as a child – perfect storybook locks. Fiona pushed her long, ordinary, mouse-brown hair behind her ear.

  ‘Which is why you make me stop by here every morning. To torment me with whole grains?’

  ‘Yep.’ Fiona knew that while Daisy protested, she loved the attention. She worked so hard to take care of herself and her daughter, putting in extra hours at the hair salon she owned while making sure Tabby had everything she needed. Single motherhood was hard enough. The legs she’d lost the use of in a car accident in her teens didn’t slow Daisy down, but Fiona knew the disability made everything exponentially more difficult.

  Tabitha, an expert at seven, helped her mother navigate into the front seat and then folded up the wheelchair, placing it on the rack behind the driver’s seat where Daisy could get it out alone later. ‘Nous allons à l’école, Tante Fee.’

  ‘You’re going to an elephant?’ Fiona leaned in the van window. ‘When is she going to start speaking English again? My French is not so good. Maybe she could switch to Spanish? I’m better at that.’

  ‘You never know. She’ll be on to something else in three months. You know that’s how she is. Hey, let’s talk Cowboy Ball real quick.’

  ‘I don’t speak that language, either.’

  Danny Tweipo honked as he pulled away from the pump. Fiona waved and smiled. ‘Saved by the horn.’

  Daisy took the key out of the ignition. ‘I’m not leaving until you tell me you’re going to it with me.’

  ‘This is not news to you. I don’t do dances, lady.’

  ‘What if Abe is there?’

  Fiona felt an uncomfortable tension in her chest. Could she be having a heart attack? Was that what it meant when your heart did that little flippy thing, speeding up, skipping, and then slowing down again? She caught a glimpse of herself in the dark glass of the window behind Daisy’s head.

  Shit.

  She looked as tired as she felt, and almost as frantic. Her eyes were wide, her face pale. Seriously, would it kill her to buy a lipstick? Maybe she’d run over to Zonker’s later and pick one up. Pharmacies had makeup, right?

  ‘I told him something I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Fiona.’ Daisy’s eyes went wide. ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘I was on a mind-altering substance.’

  ‘This story can only end badly.’

  ‘I told him about my crush.’

  Daisy laughed and gestured for her to go on with a jingle of her keys. In the backseat, Tabby was chanting, ‘J’aime, tu aimes, il aime …’

  ‘It’s not funny. I might have told him I wanted to get in his pants. To be in them, actually. With him. At the same time.’

  Daisy said, ‘Wow. Just … wow. That is awesome. What did he say?’

  ‘I passed out before I could hear his answer.’

  ‘Even better,’ said Daisy. ‘You’ve been in love with him for how long now?’

  Forever. Since the day of the kitten. She’d still been in college, commuting on the days she wasn’t helping Roy out at the station, long before she saved enough to buy the place.

  That day, Fiona had been tucked up in her favorite chair in the Cypress Hollow library, studying for an econ final. The chair was in a tiny annex, hidden behind a curtain, and she’d only found it because she’d once spied Phyllis Lynch sneaking out of it carrying an em
pty yogurt container. The librarian had smiled at her and nodded for her to go ahead. ‘It’s the best spot in the house.’

  And it was. The wingbacked chair with its lumpy seat faced the street and was advantageously located behind a large fern on the other side of the window. Fiona knew from checking that no one could see in, but the seated person could peek out between the fronds – a perfect place for spying on the world outside.

  That day, she’d been idly doodling with her highlighter more than she’d been studying, staring sideways out the window. Abe Atwell walked by. She knew him by sight – he’d been a few years ahead of her in school, but she’d never really noticed him. People felt sorry for him because his father had died in a boating accident when he was in high school.

  Abe stopped suddenly in front of the mailbox on the sidewalk, staring at it as though it had jumped out and poked him, tilting his head to the side once, and then again. Why hadn’t she ever noticed how chiseled his jaw was?

  Abe opened the mail slot and peered in. He took a step away from it, and then back toward it. He looked around as though to check if someone were spying on him. Fiona instinctively held her breath. Could he see her? Did he feel her noticing that he had the sexiest butt she’d ever seen? His rear was packaged up tight in his Wranglers as if he were just another Cypress Hollow cowboy instead of the sailor she knew he was.

  But instead of looking harder through the fern at her, Abe went back to staring at the mailbox. He moved to the back of it and appeared to be trying to open it. He put his ear against the side and then looked in through the slot again.

  By now Fiona was overcome with curiosity. What could he hear in a mailbox? She leaned forward, almost not caring if he caught her staring.

  He took out his cell and made a call. Fiona couldn’t quite make out the words, but through the glass she could hear the tenor of the conversation, and it sounded important. Urgent. She thought about going outside to try to help, but if he couldn’t get the mailbox open, who was she to try? Plus, by now she’d noticed how thick and ropy his forearms were, right there where his elbow bent … She should probably just stay in place and keep watching.

  Not more than two minutes after he made the phone call, a police cruiser pulled up. Had he heard a bomb ticking? Officer John Moss got out, tucking in his blue shirt. He wiped at the perpetual sheen on his forehead and listened as Abe talked animatedly to him, before doing the same thing Abe had done, pressing his ear against the mailbox. He said something into his radio and then they both took up a waiting stance, arms folded, eyes on the road. Abe looked west, Officer Marsh looked east. Only one of them looked amazing from the back, though, and it wasn’t the cop. Fiona didn’t mind if whatever they were waiting for took all day as long as Abe kept his back turned like that.

  Cindi Smythe in her animal control van arrived at the same time Marshall Gedding careened up in his postal truck, both of them jostling for the same parking spot. Fiona watched with fascination as Cindi got out a stick with an adjustable wire loop on the end. It was an animal of some kind, then, not a bomb.

  Marshall opened the back of the mailbox with a key, Cindi pressed in tight on one side of him, Abe on the other. All three leaned forward, and Abe came up with a kitten.

  Even from her spot in the library, Fiona could tell the cat was too young to be without its mother. It was dingy and gray, a tiny tabby. Abe cradled it in one hand against his flannel-shirted chest.

  When Cindi reached to take the kitten from him, he turned away, shaking his head, cupping his other hand around the animal.

  Fiona lost her heart at that moment. Bam. It jumped out of her body and into the already full hands of Abe Atwell. When she heard later that he’d adopted the little cat and had taken it to live with him on his boat, the deal was done. Irrevocably, her crush had developed and grown, bursting instantly into full-bloom. And with it came the jitters, the nerves, and the complete assuredness that he had no idea who she was.

  Now, years later, her palms still resting on the sill of Daisy’s open van window, Fiona blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘I asked you how long you’d been in love with him.’

  ‘It’s just a stupid crush. I’m thirty-three. I should know better.’ Suddenly, she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It was too much, standing there under Daisy’s unwavering gaze.

  ‘You have to tell me what you’re going to do on the date. Besides taking off his pants, obviously.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay. You’ll be taking off your pants?’

  ‘No.’

  Daisy tilted her head to the side. ‘No pants-wearing at all? Open the door pantless?’

  Fiona laughed. ‘Stop.’

  ‘Why? Pants are funny. And no pants is the platonic idea of pants being funny. Just the word is great. Pants.’

  Fiona crouched and touched the bottom lip of the door frame. ‘Do you know this is loose?’

  ‘Don’t change the subject on me.’ Daisy craned her neck out the window to look at it. ‘But yeah. It’s been flapping.’

  ‘Come in this afternoon when you finish work. I’ll fix it.’

  ‘Fine.’ Daisy started the engine. ‘We’re going to be late.’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Cowboy Ball! No pants!’ was Daisy’s parting cry.

  Pants. The imagined vision of Abe, pantless, filled Fiona’s mind for one incredible second until she pushed it away. She went to refill the paper towels at the tanks.

  Daisy was right about one thing. Pants was a very good word.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I heard a woman say she was too old to knit. That made me sad. Then I gave her cashmere and a pair of large needles, and she’s been much better ever since. – E. C.

  ‘Mom?’ Abe set the cardboard box down on the lumpy green settee that had always perched in the front room of his mother’s house. He went through to the kitchen. ‘Where are you?’

  She wasn’t in the room she’d presided over for more than forty years, the room where Abe always said that time had stopped. Over the window hung a piece of a fishing net Conway Atwell had tied so long ago that a breath would probably untangle it. His father’s German beer stein stood on the stove. An old broken oar leaned against the coatrack – his mother, Hope, used it to chase the raccoons away from the trash on nights when they made too much noise outside. The kitchen still smelled of the cinnamon Abe’s father had added every evening to his cup of hot chocolate. Abe had once caught his mother rubbing a bit of cinnamon into her wrist. ‘What are you doing?’ he’d asked. ‘Making myself smell good for your father,’ she’d said. Conway had been dead for seven years by then.

  His mother wasn’t delusional – she knew her husband was dead. Hope Atwell, though, would never stop wishing for a miracle. And Abe loved that about her. It frustrated the hell out of him, of course. When a woman half-hoped to see a dead man come walking in the door every time it opened, that same woman would be prone to forget how important it was to a son to occasionally be greeted without disappointment.

  But Abe had nothing to say about that. Nothing at all.

  Where was she?

  Hope wasn’t in her bedroom or the bathroom. She wasn’t anywhere in the house. The garden? She knew gardening made her rheumatism worse, but she was a stubborn old woman. Abe was like his father in many ways – his patience with difficult catches, the ability to tie a thousand different knots – but his mulish stubbornness came directly from the woman who had insisted on finishing the sweater she’d been seaming while her water broke. She’d gotten to the hospital minutes before Abe came pushing his way into the world, the darning needle still clutched between her fingers when the nurses handed her Abe, squalling like a wet cat.

  ‘Mom?’ Abe called again, pushing through the screen door. Outside, the fountain that he’d made for her burbled just like it was supposed to, and a sparrow chirped just once, in promise of the spring that would hopefully come soon.

  Otherwise, it was completely silent.

  Fear
rose inside of him, dark and ugly. He called more urgently, ‘Mom.’

  ‘Up here,’ came a voice from above.

  Relief. Not today, then. It would come someday, though, and then what would he do? Abe could picture how it would be one of these days, when he’d arrive to check on her only to find her fallen somewhere in the house, hurt, unconscious. Or worse.

  But not today, thank God.

  ‘What the hell are you doing up there? I thought you were going to stop scaring me out of years of my life.’

  Her face peered over the edge of the roof. ‘Cleaning the gutters.’ Her short gray hair, never under control at the best of times, was sticking straight out and was full of leaves and cobwebs. She was wearing a cream Aran with a large darned patch at the stomach.

  ‘Are you freaking kidding me?’

  ‘You didn’t do a very good job last time you were up here.’

  ‘Where’s the ladder?’

  She pointed to the side of the house and disappeared again.

  Abe sprinted to where the rickety ladder perched precariously against the chimney. He climbed as fast as he could, pulling his way up the old, splintered eaves.

  His mother stood on the far edge of the roof, jabbing a broom into a gutter that didn’t look at all clogged.

  ‘Would you quit that?’ Abe stepped over the ridge and started down toward her.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She didn’t turn around. ‘I’ve never fallen off this roof before, and I don’t plan on starting now.’

  ‘If you make one more move, I’m going to push you off and blame your fool-headedness. I’ll tell the fire department I found you in the jasmine.’

  That made her laugh, at least. Next to the sound of waves splashing against the side of his houseboat during a rainstorm, it was his favorite sound in the world. ‘No one would believe you. They’d accuse you of my murder. A perfectly lovely old lady, cut down in her prime.’

  ‘Show me the old lady on this roof,’ Abe said lightly.

  His mother kissed his cheek. ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘If I fall I’m taking you with me.’