The Pirate Queen

by Patricia Hickman

“So he stole it?” asked Saphora.

  “I heard my mom fighting with him about it,” said Tobias. “She was mad and told Daddy he was a thief and a backstabber.”

  “When I told my client about Tobias, he said to offer Mel a settlement to buy back his own patent. But on the condition that he sign custody to you, Mama,” said Gwennie.

  Tobias hugged her. “I love you, Gwennie. You’re a rock star.”

  Saphora had not thought of much else the past few days other than Tobias’s fate at the hands of Dora. It was a lot to think about. All at once she remembered the quiet afternoon she stood on the landing with her suitcase packed. She had planned to come and live alone in her house by the Neuse River.

  “Give her time,” said the cop.

  “I don’t need time,” said Saphora.

  22

  We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.

  ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, Gift From the Sea

  Davidson Prep had planned an outdoor ceremony for the senior graduation. Black thunderheads grew from south of Lake Norman. They grumbled like hungry bellies. Five hundred parents and grandparents grabbed seats on the folding chairs in rows along the front lawn. Some of the parents pulled out plastic rain parkas, maybe because the air smelled like rain. But right overhead was a triangle of blue, the shape of a pool ball rack.

  Saphora saved six seats beside her. Even though it was May, the air was chilly. She buttoned her yellow sweater. She sat only one row behind the graduation candidates.

  Gwennie yelled across the school lawn, “Here we are!”

  Saphora got up and waved at Gwennie’s two girls running in sundresses and sweaters. Finally girls in the Warren clan had balanced out the loud boys congregating in the summer house at Oriental. Luke blamed the female progeny on his gene pool. Gigi and Evanley hugged Saphora and then climbed into chairs on either side of her. Gwennie carried a gift wrapped in Davidson Prep blue.

  “Luke’s parking. He drove us round and round until I was going nuts, so I told him to drop us off,” said Gwennie.

  Turner walked alongside Eddie, who had grown taller than his daddy. He had to bend his knees to kiss his Nana. Eddie sat beside his Aunt Gwennie. Turner was still arguing over Eddie’s not having gotten a haircut.

  “I like his hair,” said Saphora. It was blond and curled around his shoulders. “We’ve got a minute to spare,” she said. “I don’t see Tobias.”

  “The Ws are seated right in front of us. He should be there somewhere,” said Gwennie.

  Saphora counted the boys in front of her, the boys she had gotten to know the past few years because they seemed to congregate in her basement and around her refrigerator.

  Andrew Watson, Jeffrey Warlick, Matthew Wade, all the boys who either played baseball with Tobias or had come to the games for the past few summers. Andrew Watson had won a baseball scholarship. Tobias had brooded over it but then found the character to congratulate him.

  “I made it,” said Luke. He picked Evanley up and sat down with her in his lap.

  The school’s dean made opening comments and a minister prayed. The valedictorian was slated to make her speech. But the dean took the podium again and said, “Davidson Prep has a longstanding tradition of honoring its scholars. As I name the following scholarship awards, I would ask the students receiving them to take the platform.”

  Saphora was beginning to worry. Tobias still struggled with the unpredictable consequences of his illness.

  The dean named seven scholars. Each student came from the front row and took the platform. As they did, they were handed a gold tassel that they each affixed to their graduation caps. The dean said, “There was one scholarship awarded yesterday. It was given to a Davidson Prep student for outstanding achievement in science. Tobias Jefferson Warren is the recipient of this award at Elon University, where he will take studies in medical research.”

  The parents came to their feet. Saphora gasped. Tobias was standing slightly shorter than his peers but holding the gold tassel over his head.

  “Mama, did you know?” asked Gwennie.

  “He didn’t tell me,” said Saphora. She was near to bursting with joy.

  “All right,” said Eddie. “That’s my man.”

  The scholars filed down the aisle, taking their seats alphabetically. Tobias walked past his friends along the back row, each of them giving him a high-five.

  The salutatorian read her winning essay and then introduced the valedictorian. She was a funny girl who gave a speech for which all the students cheered.

  The crowd was seated as the front row of graduates stood to receive their diplomas.

  Tobias handed the cap back to Saphora. “Can you put the tassel on for me, Mom?” he asked.

  “I can, but it’s not a hard thing to do,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t have gotten it without you,” he said.

  “Tobias, you are a surprise,” she said.

  Tobias asked to leave flowers on Bender’s grave before heading off to the senior parties that would end with a sleepover back at his house. Saphora drove him to Mt. Zion where Bender had been interred back in that fall season when Saphora had decided not to run away from home. He laid flowers from Saphora’s garden on the grave. He’d tied blue and white ribbons around it, his school colors.

  Saphora took him home where he changed before Andrew picked him up. The house was going to be very quiet come August when Tobias headed off to Elon. There was not much summer ahead when she thought like that.

  Sherry had opened the patio door drapes full-blown. The sun warmed the potted begonias setting outside on her green garden cart. The light filtered into the living room that she had repainted the color of olives, a tint that she could nearly taste.

  She might sell the house. Luke had finally sold his house in Oriental since Gwennie had been taken on as a partner in a Charlotte law firm. She had been nagging Saphora about moving into one of those upscale condominiums in uptown. Saphora tried to imagine herself in a place where the views glistened with car windshields, not a rippling lake.

  She could live like Marcy, but then Marcy was seldom home. She imagined the quiet was difficult, an enveloping kind of silence that echoed with past conversations that had been taken for granted. She would decide when the thought of it no longer made her feel suffocated.

  Tobias had delayed her season of solitude the summer that Bender died. Now he was going away. The tide of those days had beckoned in so welcome a manner, as if she could dance in the elation of escaping her life on the lake. She was holding it out now in front of her, seeing all of it as if her past were a long, mellifluous skein of silk—the night Bender held her, whispering to her while they danced on the street; the first time she told him “we’re pregnant,” the way her breasts ached and yet gave her such pleasure to feed a baby from her own body; Gwennie standing in a French shop holding up the blue coverlet, now worn, and how her eyes emoted elation at having passed the bar; Turner holding Eddie for the first time and Ramsey marrying the girl who would eventually bear him children. She could see Bender standing in the entry telling her about his cancer, Eddie coming to stay with them that summer in Oriental, Tobias meeting them on the beach, Jamie kissing her good-bye for the last time, Gwennie falling in love with Luke, Mel losing his way.

  Last of all, she could see Bender apologizing in a language so affected by wilting neurons that he might have been misunderstood. But she comprehended.

  There was no pain capable of erasing the moments that she had lived in the manner she had chosen. Her life was not ruined by Bender’s lapses. Nor was it halted, but the minutes kept unfolding, awakening, disappointing and astonishing.

  Turner was dating a woman he had met at the hospital. She had been a patient, and she taught school in Matthews. Over dinner last Friday night, he looked smitten with her. She was as red headed as Gwennie.

  Tobias ran across the tiled lo
bby and slid in his socks. He pulled on his sneakers that had been parked by the door and kissed Saphora. “I’ll be back tonight, Mom.”

  “Sherry will have the food ready,” she said.

  “You are the best woman in the world,” said Tobias.

  “Tobias, you make me feel loved.” She hugged him and then said, “See you later on.”

  Sherry came up from the basement into the kitchen. She was leaving some food upstairs for the parent chaperones who would arrive in two hours. “What are you thinking about, Miss Saphora? You look lost in your thoughts.”

  “I’m fine, Sherry,” she said.

  “You’re about to have the house all to yourself finally,” she said. “You won’t be needing me around here.”

  “I do need you, Sherry. I’ve needed every person the good Lord’s put in my life.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I didn’t want to go looking for a job in this crazy job market. The only skills I have are looking after you. I don’t even know how to explain that in a résumé.” She brought a box of books and magazines for Saphora to go through. “These are from the house in Oriental. You asked me to clean things out before you all headed down there for the summer,” she said. She pulled out a magazine. “Look what I found. You thought it was lost.”

  It was the copy of Southern Living with her gardens on the cover.

  “You are a miracle woman,” said Saphora.

  Sherry went back downstairs to put out more food for Tobias’s graduation party.

  Saphora went through the box. There were the medical journals that Bender had pored over searching for a cure for brain cancer. Tobias would want those. He had claimed a lot of Bender’s books for his own over the past few years. She had found a good use for the library after all. Tobias swore he could smell the man in the pages who was almost his daddy.

  Then she found Mabel’s small wooden cross. She would keep that for sure. Every time she looked at it, she could see Luke digging in the backyard for treasure. The Southern Living she would keep to remember what she almost threw away but found along the way.

  She dropped the magazine into the rack with the other periodicals. It would be nice to pull out and remember every now and then, to see the black-eyed Susans open faced when winter set in.

  The doorbell sounded.

  “I’ll get it, Sherry,” she said. She half expected Marcy to be standing there. But she was surprised.

  “Saphora, I’m so sorry. I missed the whole graduation ceremony.” John Mims looked apologetic. He was robust, though, dressed out of church in jeans. Hair the color of snow curled behind his ears. He held a bouquet of flowers in his good hand; a gift bag dangled from his wrist. “I got Tobias’s invitation and had to come. I’ve enjoyed watching him grow over the summers.”

  “I didn’t know you were coming.” To her recollection, he had not returned the response card. “His party’s here tonight. You haven’t missed him entirely,” said Saphora.

  “I’m glad. I did leave soon enough. But there was an accident on the Interstate.”

  “Traffic gets so backed up.”

  “I saw it happen. So I sat with the lady until the ambulance showed up.”

  “How awful.”

  “She’s going to be fine,” he said. “You look good.”

  “As do you.” She enjoyed his attention. “Can you come in?”

  John came inside. He commented about how he was still wrestling over missing the commencement ceremony. He handed her the bouquet. “I’ll bet Tobias looked good in his cap and gown.”

  Saphora led him into the living room. He put the gift bag on the coffee table.

  “Your house is beautiful. It looks like you.”

  “Thank you, John. Did your charity drive go well?”

  “It did. Thank you for the check.” He took a seat on the sofa so Saphora sat across in the overstuffed chair. “Sherry must be cooking,” he said. “Smells familiar.”

  “Yes, she’s cooking for the party.”

  “I hope I’m not interrupting your plans.”

  “You know me.”

  “I do know you,” he said. “I just don’t want to get in the way.”

  “Tobias will be thrilled to see you. Besides, the other parents will stay upstairs with me. We’ll watch a movie while the kids meet downstairs in the basement.” She felt surprised at how eager she was for his company. “So, will you stay?”

  “I’d hoped you would ask.”

  She made John hot tea, lemon only. She was able to take a few cookies hot from the pan before Sherry came back upstairs. She realized that she had not asked him how he wanted his tea. At the summer house, he had paid numerous visits, so she had come to know how he liked his tea, his steak, and his salad with spinach leaves and red onion slices.

  She looked up from the kitchen bar. He sat facing toward the big picture window, looking out over the lake. Then he picked up a framed photograph of her. He held it in his lap. He looked at it for a good amount of time.

  “Hot cookies?” she asked.

  He put back the photograph as if he’d been caught. Then she remembered how he had been caught in the act of stealing oysters the first time she met him. It came to her that she had been so busy with Bender and then with grief and then with rearing Tobias that she had not noticed how she had been collecting common details from the life of John Mims. There sat John on the periphery of her memories, tending to Bender’s soul but never far away and always observant of how she lived.

  John got up from his seat. “I’ll have a few,” he said. A sailboat was gliding across the lake.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said.

  “Will you come and sit with me?” he asked. “I want to hear all about your life this year. You always catch me up in the summer. But this year I didn’t want to have to wait for you to come back to Oriental.”

  “John?”

  “Yes, Saphora?”

  “It’s so thoughtful that you’ve come to see Tobias.”

  “I’ll confess it was more than Tobias,” he said. “I’d hoped you’d agree we cultivated more than the conventional friendship, Saphora.” He took her by the hand and led her back to the sofa.

  “I guess that’s true.” She sat next to him.

  He helped her set the plate on the table but kept holding her hand. “Tell me everything that I’ve missed this year.”

  “First, I’d rather you tell me everything that has happened to you this year,” she said.

  “I insist. You first.”

  “What’s to tell? I adopted a boy and he loved me and my life is full.”

  “Stole him, actually.”

  “As you know, I’m a pirate.”

  “It’s called finding ‘the better part.’”

  “You helped me find fullness, John.” It had taken the passing years to understand what a clergyman meant by abundant living.

  “Saphora, you’re the most interesting woman I’ve ever met. I’ve noticed when you’re around, everyone pulls out all the stops. You make others want to be better people.”

  She was drawn to his compliments. He never said anything unless he meant it. “You see me,” she said.

  “Even when I’m sleeping.”

  “How did I miss that?” Now he was surprising the fool out of her.

  “The life you lead is hard to see from inside.”

  “Why can’t I see it like you do?”

  “What?”

  “My life.”

  He took her hand in his. “Sometimes even I can’t take you all in.”

  “You have been waiting all this time, John Mims, for me to learn these things, haven’t you?”

  “You needed time to pass, Saphora.”

  “I’ve never met a man like you.” She looked out across the lake. The sailboat had anchored in the greening cove beyond her dock.

  Saphora did as John asked. She could have told him about all that had happened since the last time she saw him at the summer house, last summer in Oriental. Tobias�
�s last year of high school was full of the trials and victories of a young man coming of age, and that meant she stayed busy keeping up with him. But she started back only as far as the few weeks leading up to Tobias’s graduation. She was in a hurry to get on with knowing John Mims. It was time to start saying hello instead of good-bye.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to express my gratitude to Lissa Halls Johnson, my editor, for your tireless attention to our shaping of this story through your skills and wisdom. Thank you also to Pam Shoup, my production editor, who contributed greatly to the things we might have missed, but your keen eye caught. Thank you to Captain Chris Daniels of the Oriental’s School of Sailing. You were very patient and helpful as I gathered sailing facts for this story’s Outer Banks setting. Thank you to adoptive mom Beverly Mitzel for your careful reading of this story regarding the care of a child with HIV/AIDS. You deserve a medal for your commitment and compassion for special needs adoptions. I also want to thank the art department for this gorgeous book jacket. A very special thanks to the Random House/WaterBrook Press staff whose work often goes unnoticed—Shannon Marchese, Allison O’Hara, Steve Herron, the staff assistants, sales team, marketing team, and publicity staff who support your novelists behind-the-scenes. Jessica Barnes, you find answers and hunt people down and are a calming influence in the midst of a harried schedule. Thank you, WB staff, for your tenacity and patience. It takes a small army to put out a high-quality novel, and I’m so honored to have you all in my camp.

  I would also like to send encouragement to the brave women and children I’ve come to know through the Secret Angels Project. To help a mom or child affected by HIV, please visit www.secretangelsproject.com.

  READERS GUIDE

  A writer friend recently said to me that if she were Bender’s wife she would tell him to go and convalesce alone. But a marriage of three decades has complicated Saphora’s choices. Why do you think she stayed with Bender?

  Saphora’s strongest desire at the outset seems to be to run away from home. But in the end, we discover there were hidden desires realized in Saphora’s story. What other intrinsic desires were driving her?