Honey

by Brenda Brooks

  “So you’ll tell her,” he said. I assured him that I would. As soon as I saw her again I’d lay it on the line.

  This got him halfway gone but he lingered. “One or two rules now and then is one thing,” he said. “But so many, so often . . .”

  I nodded. It was nothing, at this point, to convey a little empathy.

  “Please tell her to stop breaking the rules.”

  * * *

  Fifty grand was missing from the account holding my father’s wrongful death settlement, on top of the $20,000 I’d loaned Honey. My father. What would he suggest I do in a situation like this? But of course he never would have imagined I’d find myself in this tangled neck of the woods. How could either of us have foreseen the results of his appointment with the Jeep, the drunk, and the Scarlet River Bridge? The only comment he’d ever made to me about money was a lecture on plutocrats brought on by a bratty remark I’d made about a schoolmate’s funny teeth. “Nobody worries about cash more than people who have too much of it,” he pointed out. “And that’s why those who have too little are forced to make embarrassing, tragic choices such as whether to eat or keep their teeth. Let’s not humiliate them further.”

  And what I stood there knowing was that no amount of money was worth anything without her, and that my father might have been one of the few people who wouldn’t snicker at a sentiment like that, who would have slugged anyone who dared make a “poor you” joke at my expense. So yes, I wanted to break down right there in the bank and sob over the missing thousands, just like one of my dad’s fat cats, because it reminded me how much I missed him, my mother — her.

  I couldn’t leave the bank right away, could barely walk. I had to sit down in the waiting area until my head stopped spinning and my heart regained its rhythm, or at least started limping along again. I stared at a wall of paintings executed by locals, amateur efforts that Honey never failed to make fun of: a stand of trees cresting a hill; branches of trees reaching out over water; three trees staring down at a fallen comrade. And then in a similar mood (maybe the same sad art therapist) but with watercraft this time: boats setting out in the morning; boats returning at dusk (but not all of them); a lichen-encrusted hull overturned and abandoned on the beach. When the receptionist asked if I was waiting for Banking or Insurance, I told her that I was taking a moment to enjoy the local art. “We have so many talented people in this little town,” she said. I didn’t disagree. I was too busy hearing the wisecrack Honey would have made, one of those perverse remarks that leave people twitchy and uncertain: Too much talent, really. For such a small place.

  I drove home and called her again. Nothing. Voicemail was full. She was due to return that day, so I spent the rest of the afternoon, it seemed to me, picking out four bottles of wine. (Two French. Two Italian.) Took them home. Drank two. (One of each.) My cold was worse, so I swallowed a couple of cold tablets and had just drifted off when the phone rang. It was her, or at least her number. I said hello two, three times, each one more frantic than the last, before the line went dead. I called her back twice and then lay there for hours, it seemed to me, and could have sworn I didn’t fall asleep, but then I woke the next morning to knocking. I assumed it was the property manager again and something had gone wrong with the checks. Maybe he’d gotten to the bank after me and all hell had broken loose in the accounts since then. Or maybe he’d recalled a few more rules Honey had smashed to smithereens.

  I pulled on my robe and squinted through the security peephole.

  The smell of menthol cough drops rushed in when I opened the door. He excused himself, turned away, and blew his nose. I imagined he’d caught a cold standing around in the weather out at Fortune Bay, fielding questions from the Gazette about the banker’s condition, but for all I knew he might have caught it from me the first time he dropped by.

  He wore a ski jacket this time, rather than an overcoat, unzipped, with one of those holiday sweaters underneath, a picture of a Christmas sock with Naughty knitted across it. When he saw me notice, he blushed and said something about it being an old gift from his wife. “She has a matching one. Of course hers says Nice,” he said, and then got down to business.

  He asked if I’d heard anything from Ms. Ramone. It crossed my mind to pour him a shot or two of Honey’s bourbon, sit him down in the kitchen, and tell him a few things. Do I have a story for you! Aurbuck’s shady bank activities; him assaulting Honey at the condo, if not the results; the lost week in Vegas; the missing fifty grand. Everything, almost. And even though I didn’t have a clue what everything was myself, he’d help me figure it out. Because that was his job: finding things out. But that would include Fortune Bay and the MG. And wouldn’t I have to show him the video too? So I clammed the fantasy up tight and said, simply, no. Would he like a cup of coffee? I was just thinking of making some.

  He accepted, and we settled in at the kitchen table and exchanged a few general comments. Coldest winter since 1912. His two little girls had tunneled a fort in the ploughed snow at the foot of the driveway and insisted on him coming for tea every day at lunchtime. He asked if I had, by any chance, a Kleenex. I opened a new box and set it between us, which somehow reminded me of my mother and her well over fifty-minute therapy hour, but I restrained myself from inquiring, What’s on your mind today? Because I already knew.

  “Would you mind if I asked, Nicole, how long you’ve known Ms. Ramone?”

  “Since the beginning,” I said.

  “Since the beginning of . . . ?”

  It took me a minute to realize his confusion. “Oh, we’ve known each other since the beginning of time,” I said. “Right back to lying side by side in our bassinettes over at Buckthorn General. Our mothers gave birth the same day.” That was a lot of words. I reminded myself to be more careful, try to affect the usual tongue-tied demeanor I usually accomplished with ease.

  “You’ve been friends all your lives,” he said. “Or BFFs, as my kids would say.” He smiled. I confirmed it. Not a peep about our nuptials in Vegas. Who the hell knew if that was even legal? Talk about crying in the chapel.

  I expected him to bring out his notebook like last time and write down a few details, no matter how small, but no. He thought a moment. “It’s unusual, in this day and age, to know someone since childhood.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “No one stays put anymore,” he said. “Take this town as an example. There’s nothing left for anyone here. Vineyards and B&Bs for the rich, that’s the thing now.” He said things weren’t so different down in Torrent — nothing to rent, all the real estate too pricy to buy. He said it was one helluva situation and I couldn’t help thinking of Honey’s remark that day on the bench beside the cenotaph: What a fucking situation! Another one of those statements you just couldn’t argue with. He dumped three teaspoons of sugar in his coffee, all the while talking about some kid he’d gone to school with and how they were still great friends, “like brothers.”

  “Of course, we haven’t known each other as long as you and Ms. Ramone.” He took a few long sips and added, “Still, I’d do anything for the guy.” He set his cup back down and sighed. “You do things for family you just wouldn’t do for anyone else.”

  When he asked if I had family in town, for some reason I found myself telling him about my parents’ car accident — a distraction I suppose. I must have looked stricken because he reached out to touch my arm, and then thought better of it. He said people just didn’t appreciate the privilege of driving anymore.

  “Drunk drivers. The damned cell phones. All those bells and whistles. Pretty soon we’ll have to ask our cars where they’re taking us.” Then he apologized, told me he was sorry to hear about my folks, and that he hoped to god the perpetrator had at least had his license taken away, though he doubted it. He finished his coffee and glanced at his watch.

  As we stood at the door he asked if I’d heard about the banker up in Torrent. “You know
— the snazzy sports car in Fortune Bay?” I admitted that I had.

  “We’re talking to as many of his business associates as possible. Let Ms. Ramone know, will you, that we’d still like that word with her? When she finally gets in touch?”

  He shook a cough drop out of its package and offered one to me. Then he said that he and his wife had caught my show over at the Crescendo.

  “You’re good,” he said. “My wife especially likes the way you do Bach’s ‘Minuet in G.’”

  * * *

  The next day I didn’t know what else to do with myself so I decided to go back to the house on Montague Street: check the windows, look around, wander someplace familiar for an hour or so. It seemed I’d lost the knack for doing the very thing I’d perfected all my life: sitting still.

  Our house was at the end of the crescent on a large lot, as I think I’ve said, the Carneys on the one side, bordered by Duvalle Street, and a few acres of leased cornfields with a row of weathered advertising placards on stilts. Every winter the Carneys fled to Arizona for the holiday season so Montague would be quieter than usual. This was especially nice because Al Carney replaced the leaf blower with his antiquated snowblower every winter — and there we went again.

  I worried about having neglected the house over the past month. The water should have been turned off before the temperature dropped. I took the route I knew would be plowed, though all the roads in Buckthorn drove like rural in the winter: five or six feet of snow heaped on either side and the snow packed hard and slick, nuggets of salt scattered on top.

  By then it was about 6 p.m. Montague Street had been cleared, but several feet of snow had fallen since I’d last visited the house so I parked on the road, picked my way up to the verandah, and then couldn’t find my house key. I must have left it back at the condo, though I didn’t remember removing it from my key ring. I swore, started down the steps, and then I remembered, turned back, and slipped a key out from under the old watering can. Good old Dad.

  Something felt wrong as soon as I entered. I stood there for a few moments listening to the electric wall clock. It seemed that I couldn’t un-hear the thing ever since that day in the kitchen with my mother. The sheet of plastic covering the lawn furniture rustled in the breeze. And then the usual sounds the old house gave off, groaning and sighing, like the rest of us, about having to endure another winter I suppose. But what was this different thing I sensed?

  A breeze drifted through the house, the kind we felt only when the windows in my parents’ bedroom were open or when the door to the mudroom at the back of the house had been left ajar. I heard a door close, and the draft died away. I walked down the hall and through the kitchen, into the dining room, thinking to secure the door out back. That’s when I saw him.

  He turned and faced me — a rangy guy in a windbreaker and one of those caps with earflaps. “Fuck,” he said, then stood there a moment staring at me as if I was the intruder. Then he turned and fled out the back door. By the time I got my wits back, he’d descended the back steps and hustled off to the wooded area across from Duvalle. I sprinted down the steps and followed his prints through the woods and out to the side road beyond, arriving just in time to see a battered pickup swerve out onto the highway.

  When I got back to the house I locked the door and checked all the rooms. My mother’s office was messy as ever, stacks of books and assorted papers, but nothing seemed amiss; everything as I remembered. (Some thief, Honey would have said, he didn’t steal your mother’s bust of Carl Jung?) I switched on the light over the stove, locked up all the windows and doors, pocketed the house key, and waded back through the snow to my car all the while thinking about what Mr. Ear Flaps could have been doing skulking around my parents’ house. Was he looking for cash to buy drugs, maybe? Yes, that was probably it. Always a risk when you left a house standing empty too long.

  I got back in the Chevy and let it warm up — and then sat there at the foot of our driveway, my hands thrust between my knees to keep warm. I took a long look at the house, the woods, my mother’s planters at the foot of the verandah. And I guess in what you might call a victory of wishful thinking over current troubling reality, I put the guy out of my mind and found myself longing to take the whole house with me — fold it down nice and neat like a pop-up house in a kids’ book, tuck it under my arm, and off the two of us would go.

  Crazy, right? But that’s the only thought I could bear at the moment, because I couldn’t handle facing another why?

  15.

  As I got back to Havenhurst a call came in from Eddie, the manager at the Crescendo. The other piano player couldn’t make it to work, stranded out in the sticks with a dead battery. He hated to ask but could I take the shift from 9 to midnight? The guy had always been good to me, found extra shifts whenever I needed them, so I agreed, and prayed like hell that Honey would be at the condo when I got home that night. I’d let up on calling her by then. She had talked about deking out of the meetings on Wednesday, now it was Friday. Part of me figured it was only a matter of how far away from Buckthorn she’d gotten, but still I couldn’t let myself believe it.

  So I drove to the casino, had a quick drink, and got to work. Halfway through my shift I couldn’t recall anything I’d played and felt like I’d run out of desire (if only that had been true) and ideas. So I had another drink. And you know that whole thing they say about drinkers feeling no pain? It’s bullshit.

  After the intermission there were eight or ten requests scattered around my tip jar. I worked my way through a bit of jazz, soul, mostly pop. One request for “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” two for “Cry Me a River.” I could have crooned those old standards in my sleep. There must have been a Bob Dylan fan in the house. I didn’t sing many of his tunes, but screw it, I said (right into the mic, as it turned out) and gave them what they asked for: “Just Like a Woman.” Halfway through I realized the obvious: the man had stolen that song from me. Every goddamn word was mine. In fact, it would never be that guy’s fabulous fucking song — or woman — ever again. Because wasn’t that me, standing in the rain? And didn’t she know how to take just like a woman? And make love just like . . . ?

  That’s when I noticed the envelope next to my tip jar. I picked it up, a bit hefty for a request, but I did receive gifts from “admirers,” everything from cash to fishing lures — and it was almost Christmas. I tore off the end and tipped the contents out.

  It took me a moment to sober up and absorb what lay in my hand because all I could picture was Honey and me standing at Fortune Bay looking out over the ice, the snow blowing through the pines, her hands stuffed into her toque. The keys to Aurbuck’s MG. I tossed them, as if they were hot, on top of the piano, and then grabbed them back again and slipped them into the waistband of my skirt. There was a request scrawled on a piece of paper too: Crying Time.

  I’m not sure how long I sat there, my eyes drilling a hole in middle C, my hands curled up like a pair of cornered things trembling in my lap. In the hustle and commotion of the place — drinks ordered up, drunk fast and ordered again, the sound of all that hard-earned cash thrown away, the croupier’s dreamy hands moving over the cards — everything faded away and I felt myself sitting in that purple twilight once again, starry pinpricks revolving over the walls and ceiling, soft light from the impossible chandelier obscuring the stains and disappointments and, well, raw fear of reality.

  It wasn’t until Eddie touched my shoulder — “What’s up? How about another tune?” — that the room came rushing back, dragging my crazed inner mob with it: You should be scared. Never more than now! Who else knew about the keys? No one! Are you sure? I thought I was! Something bad’s going down. You’re telling me! And on and on.

  “About that tune?” Eddie repeated. And all I knew was that I couldn’t play the request. I wouldn’t do it. I was halfway into a surprising discovery: nothing stirs anger more than fear — and too many drinks. I’d defy whoever was d
oing this, if only for the length of a song. At least, that’s what I told that hysterical mob lighting torches in my head.

  But in shitty reality? How could I have picked a tune that demolished myself more thoroughly than “I’d Rather Go Blind.”

  * * *

  When I got home that night (the whole mental mob in tow, as if all the losers had piled in the Chevy and come home with me) I called her — and kept calling. I bounced the phone off the sofa a few times, poured myself a drink, called her again. It was about 2 a.m. when I decided I’d had enough. I’d call that cop back, as anyone would whose friend, lover — everything — had gone missing. Yes, I’d tell him just how well we knew each other this time. The old thrift store hourglass caught my eye. I’d dragged it around with me since I was eighteen, Honey’s pathetic stand-in I suppose, and barely saw it anymore. I snatched it up from where it sat among the bottles of bourbon and wine with every intention of smashing it against the wall. I remembered her laughing as she offered to show me how it worked that Christmas Eve at the old house: she must have thought I was an idiot even at eighteen, and it seemed I still was at twenty-four. But I couldn’t do it, couldn’t bear to turn myself into a ridiculous cliché on top of everything else: time runs out, that sort of thing. So I turned it over instead and watched the sand drain away while I drank whiskey — three shots to the hour.

  A sort of emotional anarchy set in. Sure, if I talked to the detective I’d go to prison because I was an accessory to something horrible. But at least Honey and I would go live in the big house together. She could organize the social evenings. Or maybe the horrible thing could be explained and we’d get away with it. She killed Aurbuck in self-defense after all. The other stuff — she’d just have to tough it out, if it was that bad, and pay up. Because, Jesus Christ, this was the fucking limit — and for what? A shitload of dough that I would have gladly heaped on her with both hands? And all of this so she could disappear with some woman in clunky brogues and a dorky disguise? After what I’d been through with her? She’d better hope that woman was her lawyer and that her smarts exceeded her fashion sense.