by Maria Flook
“When Rennie was sick last year, I went over to give her foot massages. There’s a spot on the instep that corresponds to the bowel, the large intestine, but Rennie didn’t want me to do it. She’s likes to be self-sufficient, you know.”
“Rennie told me that she almost died,” Holly said.
“Colon cancer.”
“Does she have one of those awful bags?”
“No, it was too late for that. The doctors couldn’t remove all the cancer. No sense chopping her up. It would have been closing the barn door after the cow got out.”
“What’s the prognosis?”
“Of course, it’s hopeless, but I bring her raw almonds from The Golden Sheaf.”
“That hippie store?”
“Call it what you want. Almonds are supposed to have some healing substance like laetrile. I get a pound for her and she eats them, but I guess she knows it’s a shot in the dark.”
“She’s skinny, but she looks tough.”
“Staring death in the face gives Rennie a zing.”
“Shit.”
Nicole said, “She’s not scared. Rennie said at her age she has to keep looking down the well and hollering for the echo.”
“It must be a mess with those two brothers—”
“Well, she can’t rely on them. If I don’t see her one day, I try to go over to make sure, and she’s always fine. She’s got her clam rake and she’s down at low tide poking around, or she’s in her shack organizing her ceramic jewelry inventory, carding whatever she has left or separating different sizes of beads into coffee cans. Until she got sick, she had a souvenir shop on Bowen’s Wharf. She still has a jewelry kiln in the shack, but she’s not producing much. You know, I bet some of the glazes she used were carcinogenic. Some of it had lead, anyway. Lead helps color along, I don’t know why.”
“She make those earrings you have on?”
Nicole fingered the gaudy plastic baubles clipped to her ears. “No, these are Bakelite. These are collector’s items, they’re like gold now.”
Holly looked at them. “Who would have thought plastic would be something fashion important in the nineties?”
“This was virgin plastic. The very first stab at it.”
Holly nodded. The talk of Rennie’s cancer had made Holly think of her father, who had died of cancer just two years earlier. She wasn’t speaking to her father prior to his diagnosis and when they connected it was too late.
Their rift occurred when Holly had gone over to her father’s place after her mother left him for another man. “How can you let her walk out on you like this?” she had asked him.
“What’s the point of making trouble,” he said.
“She took all your furniture. You paid for it and she took it.” The living room was empty except for a few pieces. Feathery helixes of dust twisted along the baseboards every time the heat came on. “What are you going to do about it?” she said.
Her father sat in the one remaining vinyl recliner the color of Campbell’s corn chowder. Holly had always depended on her father to take her mother to task for the wrongs she committed against Holly, which were numerable. Her father’s sudden surrender was a personal affront to Holly; she felt he was deserting her.
“Oh, come on,” she told him, but she couldn’t cheer him. She lost her patience. “Worm,” she called him. The last word she had ever said to her father—Worm.
Holly returned to nurse him when he became sick. But he didn’t recognize her. Her imperial regret, worse even than burning Jensen’s bed, was the one-syllable word she had flung at her father. After her father’s death, the hospice volunteer gave Holly a cardboard circle, a Grief Wheel. Grief has a structure; it has stages, remissions, and surges. The stages were “Shock,” “Protest,” “Disorganization,” “Reorganization,” and “Renaissance.” Within these stages there were cognitive, affective, and somatic manifestations such as “anger,” “accusation,” “meaninglessness,” “intense anguish,” “self-hate,” “eating disorders,” and even “chest pains.” A red plastic arrow selected each stage and offered a list of its corresponding symptoms. Holly didn’t imagine Rennie’s two sons would find comfort in a Grief Wheel, although she had kept it; it was somewhere in her belongings.
Holly picked up a sliver of glass from her bed linens. How could Nicole come in there and litter her sheets with these shards? She shifted the conversation to Willis Pratt. “I think Rennie’s son is crazy,” Holly said.
“Which one?”
Holly thought that certainly Nicole would know she was referring to Willis Pratt.
“You mean the banker? He’s a vice president in precious metals at Fleet National,” Nicole said.
“Precious metals? Really?” Holly imagined the gold ingots and platinum bars like neat foil sticks of unsalted butter.
“Yeah, and he’s an expert investor. You know, all those funds and things. He’s made himself rich. He’s got money to burn. Oops, sorry—”
Holly wasn’t too happy with it. “Money to burn” was an everyday figure of speech, wasn’t it? If people kept dredging up ancient history, Holly would never get ahead.
“Sorry,” Nicole said again, tipping her face at Holly.
“Sure, no problem,” Holly said. “What about the younger guy? The one with the broken arm. He came in here and busted up the kitchen decorations.”
“Which decorations?”
“The spoon. The spoon is half gone.”
“That’s part of your damage deposit right there,” Nicole said.
Holly couldn’t tell if Nicole was joking or not.
“He came in here and broke it off the wall. He’s a fried egg.”
Nicole shrugged. “He’s temperamental, but he’s on Rennie’s side. Rennie’s other son wants to put her away at Château-sur-Mer, and she’s not budging. I think he’s trying to get something official and put her in there against her will. She can’t pay her taxes. That’s when the government agrees to step in. Until then, it’s a family matter.”
“How do they know she’s going to die?”
“Sweetheart.” Nicole looked at her. “We are all—”
“Shit.” Holly didn’t like the mannerism.
“Dying at home is the goal.”
“In her own bed. I see.”
The window was in. Nicole heard her telephone ringing. Her son, Lindy, came over to get his mother. Nicole went back to her side and in five minutes she was dressed in her uniform: mustard-color exercise tights and tunic. She hopped into her car. As Nicole backed out of the driveway, Holly heard a horrible squawk. Holly looked out her window to see that Nicole had stopped the car. Nicole had backed her car over the collie puppy. Holly ran down the porch steps and together they pulled the dog out from under the car. The puppy nipped at Holly; its pain was telling it orders. Its jaws snapped, but its eyes looked at Holly with sorrowful recognition. The dog was badly injured. Nicole stood up and swore. She looked at her wrist, twisted the watch face between her thumb and forefinger.
“Stupid dog. She sleeps under the fucking car. But I guess she’s all right,” Nicole told Holly.
Holly stood up. “Wait. I don’t think it’s all right. It looks bad to me,” Holly said.
Nicole’s two children, Lindy and Sarah, stood behind Holly, Nicole across from them. The dog’s jaw dropped open and it began to pant.
“I have my appointment,” Nicole said.
“You’re going to give a massage? Now?”
“When I get back, I’ll take her into Sakonnet Animal Hospital. I think I have a credit there for fifty dollars.” She left the dog at Holly’s feet. Nicole’s children were crying. Nicole got behind the wheel of her salt-encrusted Saab and shoved it into reverse.
Rennie came out of her house and stood on the porch. “It’s the pelvis,” Rennie told Holly. “I can see from here, it’s crushed.”
“Jesus Christ, I can’t believe she drives off and leaves me here with this dog. Her kids—” Her hangover was holding on. She hadn’t eate
n breakfast. She should have fixed herself a bull shot just to get going. She had booze in her cupboard, but she didn’t have any bouillon cubes.
The two children walked back to their house expecting Holly to terminate her involvement. Lindy put his arm around his little sister’s shoulder.
“Wait. Lindy—” Holly called to the boy. “I’ll take the dog to the vet.” The children turned around to face her. They looked like children in a Walter Keane painting. Their big, oversized eyes stared at her in wary gratitude, their mouths blank.
Rennie was squatting down, palpating the dog’s abdomen until it yelped.
“Which vet should I go to?” Holly said.
“I hope you’re ready to shell out your own cash.”
“Oh, I didn’t think of that. Don’t you think she’ll pay for it? It’s her children’s pet.”
“Nicole, pay for it? In a coon’s ass.” Rennie told Holly that Nicole had a way of assuming that events occurred beyond her perimeter of responsibility. “She picked all my pole beans one time and said that they told her to pick them. The beans sent messages to her. She was just giving me a hard time. She stole those beans for dinner. She’s a con artist. Then, one time she hung out her clothes right before a nor’easter. Which took a lot of brains. The wind tugged them off the line, they blew all over the place and she wouldn’t retrieve them. All over the trees and bushes. Brand-new panties. Left there for days. Willis wasn’t going to collect them. So, after a while, I took them for myself. They asked me to pick them.”
“You took her underwear?”
“Ladies Jockeys. Nice ones.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You make her sound nasty. Nicole seemed all right this morning. Normal. She fixed my window.”
“Did that window need to be fixed?”
“What?”
“Was the window broken?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.” Holly started to get angry. Why did this woman want to confuse her?
“If your window was broken, you would have noticed it. It’s raw. You would have felt a draft.”
“You mean she didn’t have to fix my window?”
“She was probably just snooping.”
Holly went into her house and came back with a laundry basket. She rolled the dog into the basket and put it in her own car. The children ran for their coats and she settled them in the backseat on opposite sides of their puppy. “Don’t put your hands near her face,” she warned them. “She’s going to snap.”
Rennie went into her house and came out wearing her car coat. She sat in the front seat next to Holly. “I’ll pay for the dog today, tonight we gang up on Nicole to get the cash.”
“What if the dog needs to be put to sleep?” Holly asked.
“We’ll see about that.”
“We don’t have permission from Nicole. The doctor will need the owner’s permission, won’t he?”
“No one is putting anything to sleep. Watch what you say. The walls have ears.”
The dog was euthanized. After the procedure, they brought the dog home in the same laundry basket. The dog’s weight felt as if it had doubled when Holly lifted it out of her car. That must be what they call “dead weight,” Holly was thinking. Rennie said she would ask Willis to dig a hole. They would bury the puppy and put a marker where the kids could plant something later on, after the last frost. Holly left the dog in the basket on Rennie’s porch.
Rennie said, “You like seafood?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m going down to my cable and pick some mussels for lunch. You want some lunch?”
“You’re going where?”
“There’s an old mooring cable on the beach. I haven’t collected mussels for quite a while; it should be a good harvest. Fruits de mer.”
Rennie waited for Holly to decide.
Holly’s stomach had calmed down but her headache was holding on. She didn’t know if she should chance it, mussels of all things, but she liked Rennie’s company. “I guess I do need to get some lunch,” Holly said.
The tide was moving in and Rennie gave Holly an extra pair of rubber waders. The ridiculous thigh-high boots must have belonged to Willis and she felt strange wearing his boots into the cold sea. The two women waded along the cable until they were in past their knees in the icy water. Rennie’s crop of mussels was clinging in irregular hunks along the rusted steel braid which stretched in a taut line from the rocky shore out to the depths somewhere. Rennie plucked the shellfish free and cut any extra weed from them before dropping them in her metal scallop basket.
“I can’t eat much of these myself,” Rennie told Holly. “My plumbing is on the blink half the time.”
“But you look great,” Holly said. “No one would ever assume—”
“That I’m a medical throwaway? Well, it’s true. They can get you to a point and then the ball’s back in your own court.”
Rennie’s flat assessment of her situation encouraged Holly’s protests, but Rennie was correct. Holly had seen it happen to her father. She couldn’t tell Rennie what to expect, but she wanted to tell Rennie that her father’s soul wasn’t extinguished. His soul was like a great wrought-iron bell that shook Holly with unbearable vibrations, a relentless ringing imperceptible to others. If she hiked alone on the beach it was inviting her father’s scrutiny. She “took a walk” with her father every time she went out the door, and he followed her back inside. Since his death, her private hours had become strangely “unprivate.” She felt her father’s presence, not as a spirit or a ghost; it was more like a wounded “eye” out of nowhere. She wanted to ask Rennie if she planned to haunt Willis like her own father stalked her, but of course she couldn’t say that. She must have looked peculiar because Rennie was watching her. Rennie said, “I sure apologize for the other day. People do crazy things sometimes.”
“That’s all right,” Holly said.
Rennie said, “Sometimes people go too far.”
Holly thought she might be referring to Jensen’s bed. Rennie was dredging it up just to let Holly know it didn’t matter to her if Holly had done such a horrible thing or not.
Holly stood in the clear brine and looked the other woman in the eyes. Holly said, “It must be difficult having two sons who feel so opposite.”
“It’s like the blue and the grey. Two brothers meet on the battlefield; their mother doesn’t know which one will come back to her kitchen hearth. She might have a favorite, you know.”
Holly said, “Is Willis your favorite?”
“A mother doesn’t admit who it is.”
“Is Willis rebel or Union?”
“I don’t know yet. How can I know which one is on the losing side until the war is done?”
Rennie shook the basket and looked at their haul. It was about four pounds of huge, silvery-black teardrops. “This is plenty, unless Willis shows up.”
Holly looked across the water at the house. The cuffs of the cold rubber waders rose up the insides of her thighs and she didn’t want to be in them anymore.
“He used to eat this much by himself, but lately he’s fussy. I think he looks skinny, what do you think?”
“How would I know?”
They walked back along the beach. Rennie stooped over something in the sand. A big thirty-pound hunk of seal meat had washed ashore, its gorgeous dappled hide intact.
“Struck by a propeller,” Rennie said.
“Maybe it’s a shark’s leftovers.”
“No, I’ve seen this before. A trawler hit it. Poor thing.”
In Rennie’s kitchen, they stood at the double sink. Holly trimmed the beards off the mussels with a paring knife and Rennie scrubbed the remaining weed from the shells. Rennie steamed the shellfish and Holly ate half of what was set before her. She was late for her shift at Saint George’s where she had to start the dinner.
Chapter Seven
Fritz was working for Gene Showalter in Fall River; he was hired to pick up some containers. He told Willis that for two bills th
ey would drive into the general aviation hanger at Green Airport in Warwick, pick up the what-have-you, and they’d drive it back to Fall River.
Willis told Fritz, “Easton Pond was my last foray under the slimy petticoats of your goons in Newport or Fall River, whoever they are.”
“This guy is unique,” Fritz said.
“Save the introductions. I don’t want to meet your friends of distinction.”
Fritz said, “This is all velvet. It’s plush.”
Willis agreed to go along. He told Fritz, “For one, I can deliver the Salve Regina ball and chain at her sister’s.” Willis was glad for any excuse to get rid of Debbie Cole, the nursing student. The afternoon on the Cliff Walk was just a prelude. A few days after their initial streetfight, Willis went into Douglas Drugs, where Debbie worked weekends. She was repricing a row of analgesics and he waited around for ten minutes until she was ready. She came right along, without asking questions. It was as if he was picking up a prescription. It took ten minutes to get her outside, twenty more and the whole thing was a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Willis took her around with him every night, but she was wearing thin. Debbie collected horoscopes, little tubes of paper she purchased at convenience stores. These tiny scrolls irritated Willis when she pulled them open and started reading out loud the daily warnings.
Before meeting Fritz, Willis took Debbie to play pool at Narragansett Tavern. It impressed her when the weekenders ogled at Willis’s success despite his injury. He asked her to chalk his cue, which she did with cute ceremony, then he propped the stick against his plaster cuff and sighted. He built up the drama. He poked at the cue ball and it clacked where he’d aimed it. He took all the solids but he had trouble with the eight ball. He scratched. It was anticlimactic and the girl complained. They drank pitchers and came back to her tight coed apartment on Fenner Avenue where they ate tortilla chips in bed. The cornmeal grit was making the bed sandy and the girl peeled off the sheet, shook it on the floor, then tucked it under the mattress again.
