by Nat Burns
Vetty was a talker. I soon knew all about her life chasing oil through the state of Texas with her family when she was younger.
When the food came, I stared at the lovely offerings as if held spellbound by a snake charmer—huge baskets of brown, steaming hush puppies, mounds of golden french fries, and a heaping platter of fried shrimp, artfully arranged with lemon wedges and small, dark green bowls of cocktail sauce.
Couscous was like an alchemist in the kitchen. I’m not sure what he did to the food, but I ate like a fiend until I thought my stomach would burst. I hadn’t enjoyed eating much since Mary died, but this food was irresistibly delicious. All of us had a healthy appetite. Soon, the table looked like a war zone, yet Carolina brought over even more food—a stainless pot full of boiled shrimp, heavily coated with a spicy powder. Though ready to burst, I had to try just one. I groaned at the beauty of it.
Angie’s and Sanchez’s laughter made me blush.
“Oh, yeah,” Angie intoned. “Welcome to the island. Spunky’s has the best food.”
“I agree,” said Vetty, leaning back and patting her tummy. She looked over at Georgie, who was gumming a teething biscuit into a smeared mess. It was even in her hair. “Your turn’s coming, little bit,” she said. Georgie offered a biscuit-adorned grin in return and pounded the treat on the high chair tray, apparently in hearty agreement.
I noted that food was regularly going out of the kitchen as the three of us ate, so I was not too surprised to see that the outdoor tables were mostly filled with customers when Angie and I left the back kitchen part of the restaurant.
“Sanchez seems nice. And I like Vetty, too,” I said as we made our way onto the beach.
After Sanchez departed, we had left Vetty cleaning up the table while Georgie babbled from her perch in the high chair. I felt guilty for not helping, but she shooed us out and informed us that she was supposed to be working anyway because she was being paid.
“Yeah, Anna and I go way back, and if you ask me, all Couscous’s clan are good people. Without a doubt.”
“I agree. They wouldn’t even let us pay anything for all that food.”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “He’s pretty aggravating about that.”
We walked on the cool, hard-packed sand just beyond the water’s edge. The insistent wind seemed bent on forcing our bodies into one another.
“How did you meet him? Couscous,” I clarified.
She laughed and leaned into me so I could hear her over the wind and waves. “I met him when he was about three hundred pounds lighter. He came into town from Las Vegas and Mama hired him as a chef at the restaurant.”
“Figures,” I responded. “Did he work there long?”
“A couple years. Unbeknownst to us, he was a huge lotto player, and lo and behold, one day he won the Texas State Lottery.”
I stared at her. “No way!”
She shook her head as if bewildered. “Yes, way. A couple million.”
“And he opened a restaurant?”
She shrugged. “What can I say? He loves to cook.”
We laughed together. I realized it had been a long, long time since I had felt this relaxed and so completely at ease.
“May I hug you goodbye?” Angie asked me abruptly when we reached my car.
I pondered the question. Not the idea of the hug, but rather that she felt she had to ask. I smiled and held out my arms. “Of course.”
She drew me into her embrace. My body fell limp, reacting immediately to the powerful strength I felt in her. Her body was strong. Though probably a ridiculous notion, I felt her spirit was strong too. She held me gently, a hand firmly cradling my shoulder. Comfort washed across me…and attraction. I held her tightly, my head tucked into the curve of her neck, and imagined being loved again.
We held each other longer than might be considered seemly, and I know my cheeks were pink when I finally stepped back. She didn’t seem to notice. She waited while I unlocked the door, got inside my car, and started the engine.
“Thank you, for everything,” I said when I rolled down the window. “You still owe me a story, though, about the…the center?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot. Come by the restaurant sometime when you can,” she called. She moved to one side and swung herself into a bright yellow Jeep. “I’m there most mornings and evenings.”
I waved to show I’d heard.
I drove home pensively, thinking about Angie the whole way. I loved the way her nose crinkled when she laughed, and how her lips and eyebrows were a pale flaxen color bleached even lighter by the sun’s energy. I also loved to study the patterns made by the light freckles that peppered her cheeks. The gamine contours of her face were enchanting. I realized with some amazement that I couldn’t wait to see her again.
Angie
I’d felt her. Really felt her, and she was an amazing person. I wasn’t sure what a “Suzy deadline” was, but everything else I’d picked up from my hug with Grey Graham had proven what I had surmised about her from that very first day.
I saw that she had recently lost “Mary,” someone she’d been very close to. Was it a partner? I wasn’t sure, but I knew that I needed to get to know her on this earthly plane. I set that as a new, short-term life goal on the drive home.
My small cottage on the causeway side of North Shore may have been small, but I had been really comfortable there since moving from Cathy’s apartment. I’d never been much on having a lot of stuff. It seemed like I was happy with all the stuff that nature provided me outside, so some would have considered my living style to be extremely minimalistic.
Mama, the packrat of the family, said it was just sad. She attributed it to me avoiding the energies I picked up from objects. I suppose some of that was true. All I was sure of is that I wasn’t willing to expend energy on things that weren’t important to me.
After letting in Buddy, the neighborhood’s stray cat, I put some food in his bowl and relaxed on the sofa, staring out at the sun-bleached scrub grass beyond my sliding glass door. The ocean was ten feet from the door, but the soothing water just wouldn’t distract me today.
I listened to Buddy crunching his dry food and absently mewing enjoyment to himself, and let my thoughts roam. This could be a risky endeavor as, when fully relaxed, often too much information creeps in. I’d learned as a child to dampen down my intuitive abilities and I carried that self-made buffer around daily. Only at home alone would I let my guard down, and even then I picked up some pretty weird messages from time to time.
I would always remember when Cerise Hernandez came to me. She’d been dead six months and had been bothered the entire time by her mother’s extreme grief. She wanted me to let everyone know where her body could be found so that her mother would accept her death and get on with her own life. That had been a bit freaky. I’d done as she asked, leading the police to her body, accidentally entombed in a refrigerator when hiding from her brother, but I wanted those on the other side to know I wasn’t in the business of carrying messages for them. I needed to keep both feet firmly on the side of the living, so I ignored a lot when I was open.
Leaning forward, I lit the thick candle resting in the center of my coffee table. It was a good focal point, helping sharpen my thoughts so they would go where I wanted them to go and not where they were pulled. Today, I wanted to think about the SPICEY and about Grey.
I sensed huge changes coming in my life. Unfortunately, I was better with static energies from the past rather than visions of the future, so those upcoming changes would remain a mystery until they transpired.
I stared at the candle and focused on what Frankee had said, that maybe it was time to let the school close. Was that a message I should take to heart?
The kids I taught were all special needs kids, students who could be reasonably mainstreamed into the regular public school system. But would they be happy there? Their parents and I agreed on this one fact: probably not. There were a lot of fine teachers in Port Isabel schools. The problem is
they were all overworked and underpaid. When it took me six tries to gain Tommy’s attention so he could soak up one important fact, it was evident that other teachers were just being set up to fail these kids. No, we had to keep the school open. The problem was how?
I thought about a fundraiser or a grant. Would that give us enough time to get the word out and get the funds in? I doubted it. So what to do? My meager salary was paid by a grant and the parents paid a stiff activities fee already. As I had so many times before, I would wait. Wait for the issue to resolve the way it would while shifting energies as far in what I considered the direction of right and correct as I could.
Buddy approached the sofa. I leaned forward to give him a few quick scratches before he had to head back outside to patrol his territory. He never stayed long. I rose and let him out through the glass doors.
I followed him outside and strolled down to the water’s edge. My neighbor, Jimmy Carson, was about a quarter mile out in water that came almost to the top of his waders. He saw me and waved.
“Fishing for a late supper?” I called to him.
“You know it,” he called back cheerfully and recast his line. “Red snapper are running.”
I looked down and watched a sea hare undulate by in its indigo-purple beauty. Ducks over by the breakwater disagreed violently and let everyone know about it with their loud calls.
I thought of Grey and wondered if she would come to love me. We’d had such a good afternoon together, and I had sensed her reacting positively to me. Hope swelled in my heart. I wish we’d been alone, so I could have talked with her more intimately.
I couldn’t see the future, but I did see feelings. And they were there. Growing slowly, but there. I hugged myself and lifted my eyes to the horizon, trying to feel Grey again.
Grey
I’m not 100 percent sure why you came to Marks & Crocker, Suzy.
I was denied a raise at my other job, sir.
Ah, yes, receptionist for that financial firm downtown.
Yes, sir, that’s the one.
But you’re a very good worker, Suzy, I can’t understand that.
My manager decided I was slacking. He said every time he saw me, I was either chatting with someone in the lobby or talking on the phone.
I studied my scribbled notes for the comic strip and wondered if the joke was too subtle. I leaned back and yawned, hoping that I would get a good night’s sleep tonight. I rubbed Oscar Marie’s ears. She was on her usual perch on the flat, narrow surface at the back top of my drafting table. She purred with delight.
“Let’s try and sleep through the night tonight, old girl,” I told her. I glanced at the closed door to the Bookmark, refusing to dwell on the night before.
I looked back at the strip and lifted my two main markers.
I had always enjoyed drawing Suzy. In fact, the character with her dark page boy and overlarge glasses had been one of the first characters I had doodled while still a young child. The name had been the same then too, but over the years, she had worked many different careers as a nurse, a stewardess, and at times a firefighter and a doctor. In fact, I wasn’t sure there wasn’t any career she hadn’t attempted at least once.
For the past ten years, though, she had been cemented in as a receptionist for the Marks & Crocker legal firm. Now I suppose she would be there forever. Syndication had a way of stagnating a strip. Now it was up to me to bring her to life each week within those confines. Not always an easy task.
Luckily, her boss was a chauvinist idiot and Suzy herself, well, I liked to say she was a little clueless most of the time.
I started with the final frame. Using a thin black marker, I sketched Suzy sitting at her desk, wearing a headset unplugged from the phone and slung by its skinny black cord over one shoulder. I usually tried to follow Dallas weather patterns and today was a cold day there, so I sketched in a button-down cardigan. Her legs were crossed, and one kitten-heeled pump dangled from the toes of the upper foot, the sight just visible in the kneehole of her desk.
Alexander Marks sat in a rolling office chair on the opposite side of her desk, his legs extended and his feet propped on her desk. She had just delivered her punch line so he was looking at her with a raised disbelieving eyebrow, his characteristic unlit cigar hanging from the corner of his droopy lips. I opened his mouth a little so that the cigar drooped comically. There, that helped. I reached for the correction fluid and all hell broke loose.
Oscar Marie hissed and spit, and the paper panel was pulled from beneath my hands and tossed on the floor. I felt a frigid wind, just like the night before, sweep across me and race away.
I dropped the bottle of correction fluid onto the floor as I backed away from the drafting table. Oscar Marie was standing up on her perch now, her back arched and fur standing up all over her body. I pressed my back against the dining room wall.
“Mary? Honey?” I searched the room. It had to be her. There was no wind coming in from outside and the air-conditioning hadn’t kicked on since nightfall.
“Mary? Won’t you talk to me, sweetheart? Are...are you angry at me for moving? I kept your books though, all but the ones Brynna took. They’re all here.”
I waited, willing her to communicate so I could be comforted by her presence instead of afraid. I heard the wind outside, buffeting the exterior of my apartment, but she didn’t speak to me.
A low growl sounded from Oscar Marie. The door to the Bookmark clicked open. The slow groan of the door opening set every hair on my body rising. I knew I had shut the door securely before coming back to work, when I had swept the huge expanse of floor one last time, preparing for tomorrow’s furniture delivery, and then checked the alarm before switching off all the lights. I had closed that door. Yet it gaped open invitingly, as if waiting for me to come and learn the secrets of the universe. I couldn’t move. Terror held my body captive.
Oscar Marie followed her usual descent path from drafting table to dining table to chair to floor. She approached the doorway cautiously, and then moved across the threshold.
“Ossie! Wait!” I cried, my body released from its paralysis.
I stepped to the door and reached for the lights. Before I could flip the switch, however, I was caught and held by the strange tableau before me. In the dimness, backlit by the streetlights of Lighthouse Square, I saw that the books I had left so neatly aligned on the shelves were now stacked in the center of the room in a high vertical column.
I noted movement and saw, to my horror, that the huge heavy stack, some eight feet tall, was suspended off the ground by a good twelve inches. The stack was bobbing in midair.
As I watched, the horizontal volumes began to break away from one another and spin in a strange tornado of books. It spun faster as I watched. Suddenly, one of the books broke away and made a beeline for me. I couldn’t move. Thankfully, it passed inches from my head and slammed into the doorframe.
A loud phantom scream fractured the night and woke me from my stupor.
I grabbed Oscar Marie roughly by her collar and scurried into the relative safety of the apartment as more books broke loose from the vortex. I slammed the door shut and felt the vibration of the heavy wood panel as several volumes slammed against it.
I twisted the deadbolt and backed away from the door, holding my breath while I waited for what other new horror would befall me.
Angie
Mama and I were both having a hard time waking up this morning. Thank goodness Gail was lively enough for both of us because she was doing most of the setups while Mama and I leaned on the bar, slurping extra coffee.
“So why are you so tired?” I asked her.
She blushed suddenly, causing me to chuckle into my coffee cup.
“That’s none of your business, young ’un.”
“Hey, that’s just fine with me, Mama. You’d best get it while you can.” I waved a dismissive hand at her. “So how does Nando look this morning?”
She grinned at me and moved to the back of the b
ar for more coffee. “Who said anything about Fernando?”
I perked right up. “Mama...something you want to tell me?”
She added extra cream to her cup. “I already told you it was none of your business.”
I slid off my stool and moved toward her.
“Oh no, you don’t! Don’t you dare touch me!” She laughed, the movement causing her white apron to flutter against her abundant chest.
I paused in my advance. Curiosity was chewing a hole in me, but she was my mother and I had to respect that.
“Shoot, Mama, come on!” I begged, stretching an arm toward her.
She laughed at my dilemma, but shook her head firmly.
I backed away and resumed my seat.
“So what’s been happening in Angie’s world?” she asked when she took her seat next to me.
I looked at her, trying to show my aggravation. “Oh, yeah, like I’m gonna tell you anything now.”
She stared me down, her familiar warm brown eyes filled with merriment and demand.
“I met Grey again,” I said finally.
“Grey?” She squinted, trying to remember.
“The woman I dumped the pizza on.”
“Oh. Which one?”
It took me thirty seconds before I realized she was pulling my leg. “Aw, Mama. Why you gotta be mean? You know I’ve never dumped a pizza on anyone else.”
Her smile was infectious. “I don’t know about that. Seems to me when you were just starting out, you let fly a couple.”
I ignored her comment, realizing it was true. “So anyway, I ran into her on the beach yesterday. She’s awesome. I took her over to Couscous’s place, and we had a blast.”
Mama smiled a satisfied little smile and leaned forward, showing her interest. “So what’s she like?”
I shook my head and focused on the ceiling. “Better than I expected. We didn’t get a chance to talk much because Sanchez and Vetty were there, but I got a big old hug when we said good-bye.”
