Snapshots

by Pamela Browning

  I thought about it for a moment. Too long a moment to suit Lindsay.

  “Trista? Are you going to answer, or do I have to drag it out of you?”

  “I’m glad to report that Rick seems better today. So am I.” I hesitated before taking the plunge. “Listen, Lindsay, I couldn’t tell you this last time we talked because Rick might have overheard, but you won’t believe what I walked in on yesterday.”

  “Try me.”

  “Rick was asleep in my usual room.”

  “So?”

  “So he wasn’t wearing any clothes. It was embarrassing for both of us.”

  Lindsay laughed. “I guess so!”

  “Rick expected all of us here today, not yesterday. Luckily, I’d stopped at Jeter’s and bought enough food for dinner, because there wasn’t much in the house. When I first arrived, Rick acted put-upon and uninterested, and as if he didn’t want me here.”

  “This is typical behavior in a depressed individual.”

  “Lindsay. Too much Oprah. Too much Dr. Phil.”

  “My degree is in psychology, remember? Anyway, how are you and Rick getting along?”

  “I’m coping. But Lindsay, you remember how the Mc-Cullochs always kept the cottage in good repair? Well, Rick’s been here over a month and he hasn’t done squat.”

  “What’s wrong, exactly?”

  She quickly outlined the problems. “Normally, Rick would have jumped right in and fixed things. I can’t wait until you and Peter get here. You are coming, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, Trista, we’d like to, but Adam has a fever and hardly slept all night. We sent Peter’s mom home because she was exhausted. Now Ainsley has broken out in blisters.”

  “This doesn’t sound promising, does it?” I felt acutely disappointed.

  “I’m so sorry, Trista. I really am. But we can’t leave the kids.”

  My spirits spiraled downward. “I understand,” I told her.

  “I suspect that you can best help Rick by getting him to open up, talk about his feelings, that sort of thing.”

  I expelled a long sigh. “He’s not very good at that. Never has been,” I said.

  “You’re long-time buddies. He’ll probably emote with you before anyone else.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, last night fresh in my mind.

  “Listen, Trista, I’ve seen the two of you engrossed in earnest conversation more than once,” Lindsay said, making me suspect that she’d been watching from the porch the day Rick had told me how frustrated he was over Martine’s refusal to have kids. That had been an intense conversation, all right, but no one else was supposed to know about it.

  Lindsay covered the phone with her hand, but still, I overheard her admonishing Adam. “No, honey, get back in bed and I’ll put on your Muppets video in a minute. And don’t scratch.” To me she said, “Adam’s having a miserable time.”

  “I’m really going to miss you, girl, but I’d better let you get back to him.”

  “Good luck with Rick, Trista.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t suppose you and Peter would like to adopt a stray dog,” I added hopefully.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Lindsay replied I have two sick kids, a pet rabbit and a pair of goldfish. I’d say we’re full up at present.”

  “Just thought I’d ask,” I said. I’m sure Lindsay was still shaking her head in puzzlement when we hung up.

  Having lost interest in Singin’ in the Rain, I opened a can of Cheerwine and wandered out on the porch overlooking the beach to drink it. The day was sunny and clear, a perfect day to be outdoors, and after I’d finished my drink, I decided I didn’t want to stay inside. A check of the bikes under the house proved fruitless; their tires were long flat, and the air pump that used to hang from a hook in the storage area wasn’t there anymore. Needing some way to burn off my nervous energy, I decided to go for a beach walk, this time in the opposite direction from the one we had taken last night.

  I glanced around, halfway hoping the dog was still lying under the oleanders, but she must have moved, because I saw no sign of her. Out in the ocean, a freighter plied its way out to sea, and several wet-suited boys on surfboards rode the swells, awaiting the perfect wave. I’d tried surfing a few times when I visited California with a boyfriend wannabe and had decided after a too-close call with a shark that it wasn’t the sport for me. I’d ditched the wannabe, too, since we hadn’t had much in common anyway.

  Usually when we were on the island, Martine and I competed to find the best sand dollars, and out of habit I scanned the sand ahead as I walked. Alive, a sand dollar is a flat sea animal with a feltlike coating of brownish spines, in many ways similar to a sea urchin. The dead ones we found on the beach are brittle disks imprinted with a five-petaled pattern of tiny holes, bleached white by the sun and about three inches in diameter. Martine was good at spotting them and had, in fact, found several perfect ones, which had always eluded me. I missed Martine, I realized suddenly. Like any sister, she could be a pain in the rear sometimes, but she was witty and she was fun.

  As I approached a scattered campfire, its users long gone, I spotted the only sand dollar on my walk so far. I leaned down to pick it up, hoping that this time, finally, I had found the perfect one, but one side of it was broken cleanly off. Still, it was pretty, a delicate souvenir of my walk, and for safekeeping, I wrapped it in a tissue I found in my pocket.

  Back at the cottage, I was arranging my new find with the others in the basket on the mantel when Rick sailed in the front door, trailing the tantalizing aroma of fried chicken.

  “You’re going to have to put up a mailbox,” I told him without looking around.

  “I don’t want any mail.” He continued into the kitchen and I followed.

  “Well, you’re getting it, because otherwise the mailman can’t deliver. Remember Stanley? Queen’s nephew?”

  “Tall beanpole of a guy? Used to drive a pickup truck?”

  “That’s the one. He’s your mailman.”

  “Stanley was older than us by about five years, and I was always so impressed that he could coax bait fish into his net,” Rick said.

  “You’ll get to reacquaint yourself with him in person once you get that mailbox up.”

  “Why didn’t he give my mail to you?”

  “He’s supposed to put it in the box,” I told him. “Postal regulations.”

  “My final divorce papers are probably what he plans to deliver,” Rick said.

  “Oh. He didn’t mention that.” I wished Rick hadn’t told me.

  A long moment passed. “I’m working around to the opinion that I might as well start accepting that the marriage is finished,” he said, speaking slowly. “Has been finished, I should say. Well. Let’s have lunch.” The discussion was clearly over.

  Rick began taking things out of grocery bags and stowing some of the things in the refrigerator. “You acquired more than fried chicken,” I observed as my gaze swept across the array off food on the counter. He’d bought things he knows I like: Evian water, smoked oysters to eat with saltines, and Bel Paese cheese, which I often melt on steamed asparagus. I was touched that Rick had chosen things to please me, and I thanked him as we put the items away.

  “Hey, I’ve got to keep the help happy,” Rick said.

  “Is that what I am? The help?”

  “You do wield a mean dust mop. Here’s a plate, so grab some chicken out of the bucket. And was that a pitcher of iced tea I spotted in the fridge?”

  “I made it earlier. Shall I pour you a glass?”

  “Sure,” Rick said.

  After I’d poured two glasses of tea and handed him one, Rick gulped a few swallows and sat down at the table across from me.

  Encouraged by the improvement in Rick’s state of mind, I found myself apprising him of recent developments with my job and how it was more stressful than I liked. Even though I didn’t care to get into my difficulties with Byron, mentioning my job brought out Rick’s feelings about his o
wn work, and he said he didn’t miss the department or working in Homicide as much as he’d expected he would. That was heartening, indicating to me that he was adjusting to this enforced leave of absence. In my opinion, it boded well for his future.

  Suddenly, elements in our relationship had somehow shifted back toward the old harmony and understanding we’d once shared. The pleasure of it filled my heart with gladness. I wanted to say fiercely, Let’s grab this moment in time and hang on to it, never let it go. We’re still the same people we were. It’s everything else that keeps changing. But the core is still honest and true. Like us. If Rick was aware of these thoughts spinning through my mind, if his were similar, he showed no sign.

  We never followed niceties of etiquette at Sweetwater Cottage, though Lilah Rose and Queen had done their best to encourage us otherwise, and Rick tossed a chicken bone into the wastebasket, placed at the ready beside the table. The thump caused a stir on the other side of the screen door, where the dog had parked herself. When she spotted me looking in her direction, she whomped her tail up and down a few times.

  Rick, just noticing her, asked mildly, “Whose dog is that?”

  “Nobody’s. She arrived this morning along with your mail.” I didn’t let on how pleased I was that she was back.

  “The USPS delivers dogs now? Since when?”

  “Of course they don’t,” I told him. “Stanley says she’s been following him around on the route.”

  “So why doesn’t he shoo her away?”

  “She likes it here,” I informed him. “She wants a home.”

  “She’d best ingratiate herself with someone else,” Rick said. He stood and started wrapping the remains of our lunch in plastic wrap. “Let’s go scare up a new mailbox—and I’m warning you right now that I’m not buying any of those tacky molded-plastic things shaped like pelicans or fish that the newcomers to the island are putting up. A plain one will do fine.”

  “That’s okay with me.” A thought occurred, and I decided to give voice to it. “And, Rick, somewhere along the way, how about if we run your car through the nearest car wash.” This was more diplomatic than stating flat out that the car was a mess.

  “You’re loads of fun, Trista,” Rick said with deliberate irony. “You really are.”

  I shrugged as eloquently as I could manage while snapping lids on disposable cartons. “I try.”

  “I don’t mind having you around. You’ve got a nice set of—”

  “That’s enough, Rick,” I warned.

  “Acrylic fingernails.”

  “Very funny,” I said, eyeing him from behind the refrigerator door. “As if you ever noticed them.”

  Rick stood watching the dog. “The mutt is probably hungry,” he observed.

  “Stanley said she probably survives by scavenging for food on the beach.” I was halfway hoping that Rick would show some interest, but he turned his back on that pleading gaze. It didn’t help that the dog chose that moment to scratch vigorously at a flea bite.

  Rick disappeared into his room, and I unfolded the bit of chicken that I’d saved in my paper napkin. “Sweet doggie,” I murmured to the animal as I quietly eased the door open. “I told you to go away.”

  Thump, thump, thump went her tail, and she scarfed down the chicken in one bite.

  No time to toss her a few more morsels. Rick, stuffing his wallet into the back pocket of his shorts, emerged from the bedroom, and I wiped the guilty expression from my face.

  “Are you finished with your tea?” I asked him as a way of distracting him from the dog, who was conspicuously licking her chops on the other side of the door. “If so, I’ll put that glass in the dishwasher.”

  He drained the glass and handed it to me, but it was slippery with condensation, and I didn’t react in time to catch it as it slid through my fingers. The glass broke as it hit the floor, spraying glittering shards in all directions.

  “Oh!” I exclaimed. I felt so clumsy. At least the noise caused the dog to disappear, though I suspected she’d lapsed into lurk mode under the shrubbery again.

  “It’s all right,” Rick said. “It was only an old jelly glass, though it was the one with Tweety and Sylvester. My favorite.” Rick reached into the closet for a broom as I bent to pick up the larger pieces.

  “I’m sorry, Rick. I—”

  He grinned at me. “Don’t worry. I still have the one with the Smurf on it. Careful—don’t cut yourself.”

  I detected genuine concern in his voice, and something else, too—an absorbed fascination in my bosom. I realized too late that our relative positions provided him with a wide-angle view down the front of my blouse. There wasn’t anything salacious about the way he was looking at me, but my predominant emotion was…confusion. To me, Rick was still Martine’s husband and therefore unavailable.

  They’re divorced, I told myself. The marriage no longer exists. He’s free, as free as he was before he married her. And I—I had never lost my heart to anyone after Graham, though I certainly hadn’t lived like a nun. Why would I? I had my pick of prominent bachelors in Columbia, some of them quite attentive. The trouble was that I’d avoided allowing sexual feelings to surface with Rick for so long that this didn’t feel natural or right. Yet now there was no reason for avoidance, no sense in denying what was real and honest and true.

  “I’ll get the vacuum cleaner,” I said, my voice sounding as squeaky as if I’d been gulping helium. The vacuum was in the hall closet, and I took my time getting it out while I struggled to understand why I was turning into a gibbering Daisy Duck around Rick.

  I’d planned to come here and help him find his way back to normal. But ever since I’d walked in the front door, I’d been forced to confront the fact that I no longer knew what normal was. And even if I managed, by some quirk of luck, to help Rick, what about me? I wasn’t doing so well myself.

  I noticed a faded color snapshot lying on the floor, which probably had fallen out of one of the photo albums that Lilah Rose filled so diligently. It was of me and Rick, and we were riding a bicycle built for two that we’d borrowed from one of the families down the street. We were about fifteen, and our expressions were joyous and carefree, frozen for all time.

  Back in the kitchen, with Rick elsewhere, I cleaned up the rest of the broken glass, thinking that perhaps our relationship was as shattered as the painted images of Tweety and Sylvester on the glass. But as Rick had said, he still had the glass with the Smurf. The same kind, only different.

  Maybe that’s the way it was with us, too. The same, only different.

  Chapter 12: Rick

  2004

  One summer at the cottage, probably when he was thirteen, Rick had been at odds with the twins for a few days, and, exasperated when no one would talk to anyone else, Lilah Rose had resorted to whisking Trista and Martine off on a shopping expedition to King Street in town. On his own for a whole day, Rick had been at loose ends, and Queen’s nephew Stanley had stopped by the cottage to deliver fresh fish after surf-casting on the beach. He found Rick disconsolately picking sand spurs out of his socks and wishing he’d chosen guys for friends instead of two extremely unreliable teenage girls whose emotions blew back and forth with the unpredictability of the wind.

  “Hey, Mr. Lonely Man, why don’t you help mend some nets,” Stanley had suggested playfully, and Rick, bowled over by the offer of man-to-man companionship after the difficulties of surviving in a household of women, accepted the offer gratefully. With Queen’s permission, Stanley carted Rick away in his chugging, old and shiny blue pickup to the white frame house off Center Street where Stanley and some of his brothers and sisters lived with Queen.

  Rick had visited the house briefly once before, the time his mother had dropped off a quart of chicken-and-rice soup when Queen was sick. He’d played hide and seek with a few of her young male kinfolk that day, darting in and out of the bushes planted around the house. On the day that Stanley rescued him, those same bushes in the front yard were draped with circular fis
hnets, and Rick spent an enjoyable afternoon learning to mend them as he and Stanley mourned the vicissitudes of women and devoured a whole sweet-potato pie. Queen had been real unhappy about that part of it, since she’d planned to serve the pie for dinner that night.

  This was what was on Rick’s mind right after breakfast on the day in the middle of the week when Stanley delivered a bundle of mail, including a letter from Roger Barrineau’s former law firm and an envelope from his own divorce lawyer. He stuffed the mail deep into the back pocket of his jeans and shook Stanley’s hand.

  “Sure is good to see you, Rick,” Stanley said. “Put some life back in this old house again, won’t you?”

  “I’m not expecting to stay,” Rick hedged. “This is a timeout from real life so I can contemplate my options. I’ve got some serious decisions to make, and this is as good a place as any to think it all over.”

  Stanley blinked off into the distance. “That’s always a good idea,” he said, putting the accent on the i of idea. “At a time like that, you can’t just go wheeling off in some direction you don’t know anything about.”

  “Exactly,” Rick agreed. He was unbelievably happy to be reacquainted with Stanley. “Say, Stanley, you want to come by once in a while? Drink a beer?”

  “What? You on the outs with everybody again?” Stanley studied his face.

  “Not everybody,” Rick said, deciding not to go into detail.

  “I wouldn’t mind stopping by now and then when I’m not on duty,” Stanley allowed.

  “Great,” Rick said, grinning. “What have you been up to all this time?”

  “Working for the post office, most of it. I married Luella Baker, one of the girls I used to bring over here sometimes to fish.”

  “Tall girl,” Rick said. “Crazy about you.” Luella liked to visit with Queen sometimes when she was working in the kitchen, Stanley being their foremost topic of conversation.

  “Luella and me, we’ve got children. A boy and a girl.”

  “You could bring Luella and the kids, too,” Rick suggested. “They could play on the beach while we kick back on the porch.”