Sam lifted the mask and leaned close to examine the seam. It was a slow and hot process, putting down a bead so carefully and patiently, keeping the oxygen at bay. Oxides in a weld created bubbles, pits, or inclusions that weakened the work and would be the first place to fracture under stress. His muscles strained as he alternately hammered and welded the body frame from a wrecked Mercedes. When he was finished, no one would know that it had once been part of a luxury car. It would resemble a tornado of lowercase E’s locked together, swirling out of control in a beautiful dance of alphabetic confusion. He studied the twisting shape and imagined this was how words in books looked to his dyslexic wife.
“Man, you got some weird stuff back here,” said a voice from the front of the garage. Sam jerked, catching his hand on a jagged edge of steel.
“Damn,” he frowned at the cut along his thumb then glared at the stranger standing in the doorway. “You need something?”
“A fan belt, my girlfriend says. She’s the mechanical one. Hell, I don’t know the difference between a fan belt and a fan club.”
Sam pulled a dark blue handkerchief from his back pocket and wrapped his bleeding thumb. “I’ll take a look.”
“Yeah, you do that, man,” said the stranger, stepping through the back door and ambling toward a nearby sculpture, a bizarre map of tailpipe roads. “She’ll explain the problem.”
Customers. Sam shook his head. While he worked on their cars in his one-man shop, people wandered through the artistic graveyard as if they were strolling in a museum. He hated it. “One day,” he’d told Antigone, “some art lover’s going to trip over an engine and sue us for everything we’ve got.”
As the stranger called to his girlfriend, “Carol, you’ve got to see this,” Sam swiped at an insect spinning about his head, which only made his thumb throb more, and marched to the front of the garage.
SAM LISTENED TO THE road. He’d pricked his ears toward Highway 74 ever since her call. He leaned into the innards of a 1983 Toyota Corolla, twisted the wrench, gripped it tighter, and yanked upward. The old spark plug had a hold like a snapping turtle’s jaws. Sam wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. A tractor-trailer whined west, and he paused. He lifted his head, craning for a hint of a familiar purr—the whisper of a motor he knew as intimately as his own face, the engine in his wife’s 1968 Mustang.
The phone rang, and Sam snatched it from his pocket with a greasy hand. “Tigg?”
There was a pause. “No, it’s your mother.”
Sam slumped against the Toyota. He watched two kids on bikes skid to a halt by the air hose. Immediately, a hissing air war broke out. “What’s up, Mom?”
“You sound . . . sad. Where’s Antigone?”
“I’m not exactly sure right now.”
“You mean she’s off on one of her driving fits.” Marian Thorne did not understand free spirits, and she most assuredly had never heard the call of the road. Good New England stock did not take flights of fancy. They were proud of feet firmly planted on the ground and believed directness was an attribute. Marian had been opposed to Sam and Antigone’s marriage from the beginning. When Sam broke the news of their engagement, while sitting in the Thornes’ big New Hampshire kitchen, his mother had cried, “But you’re a world-class engineer. Now you want to throw it all away to work in a garage in a little podunk town in North Carolina? You have a degree from Harvard. She keeps deer as pets and sells veggie burgers and towels, for goodness sake.” His mother’s shoulders slumped. “Honestly, what do you two have in common? What can you possibly talk about? She doesn’t think the same way we do, Sam.”
That was exactly Antigone’s appeal.
They’d met when he was the chief engineer on a project to replace a bridge in the next county over from Mercy. Antigone had been driving for about two days and was on her way home when her car quit, rolled to a halt not three hundred feet from the construction site. She was tired, gritty, and looked a mess. He’d never seen anything more beautiful. It was May, and she was driving the convertible with the top down. Everyone at the construction site wanted to help her, of course. A windswept blonde with a worthless car.
But Sam shouldered all the men aside and ordered them back to work. He asked a dozen questions about the car, slowly drawing out pieces of information Antigone hadn’t even realized she knew, about strange sounds and knocks and behaviors that had been going on for weeks. He was a therapist for cars. While he tinkered under the hood, she fell asleep, curled up in the backseat. When she opened her eyes, several hours later, her car was fixed and he was sitting on the trunk, his work boots dangling over the edge, watching her sleep.
“You’re hell on cars,” he’d said. “You need your own personal mechanic.”
Until he met Antigone, Sam had felt inept when it came to dealing with anything of a nonmechanical nature. Calling on girlfriends in high school, he was often sidetracked by a tricky toaster or a balky blender. This endeared him to mothers, but infuriated his dates.
The complex workings of kitchen appliances, however, couldn’t compare to his wife. Life with Antigone was like standing on a new bridge in the middle of a jungle. Sam felt its strength beneath him, but he also felt a sense of vertigo, the danger of falling, rushing toward the dark Amazon water with its flesh-eating fish and rib-crushing snakes. No one could aggravate him like Antigone (especially when she disappeared for hours), but no one understood him like she did either. Only Antigone, of all the people in his life, had said, “If you don’t like building bridges, don’t build bridges.”
A wife who thumbed her nose at expectations was incomprehensible to his mother. Marian Thorne had always done the expected, first as the wife of a New Hampshire judge and now in a retirement community in Florida, where she organized bridge nights and kept a vigilant eye on her husband’s blood pressure.
“You know,” Marian’s voice grated over the telephone lines, “some women just escape into a good book or their knitting. They don’t need to involve the interstate highway system.”
Sam smiled to himself. Things never changed. His mother had been trying to run his life for thirty-five years. Before she could start in on some Florida property he should buy or some idea about expanding the menu at the O. Henry Café to include more reasonable food like steak, he said, “Mom, I’ve got big news.”
“What?”
“You’re going to be a grandmother.”
For a moment, Marian was speechless, then he heard her shout for his father, “Jonas, we’re having a baby! We’re having a baby!” Marian got back on the phone. “When?”
“In nine months, I guess,” Sam shrugged.
“Men. Let’s see, it’s late April now, and give or take a few weeks, we could have a January baby. I hope this will be an easy pregnancy. I could tell you some horror stories.”
“Please don’t.”
“I’ll send Antigone some flowers,” Marian said.
“I’m sure she’d like that.”
“And some baby books. There’s so much to learn. Babies are not as easy as they look. They don’t come with an instruction manual, you know.”
“I’ll read every word,” Sam promised, but his mother wasn’t listening.
“I do hope Antigone doesn’t expose our grandchild to those wild beasts. . . .”
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT. Sam sat alone in the sculpture graveyard behind the garage. He willed himself to meditate, to push all thought from his mind. He must be patient and calm. He knew how it would feel the moment he saw her—as if the world had been stopped and now started again. But, for now, he must wait.
So, he closed his eyes and listened to his breathing and the highway and the voice of a barred owl somewhere. The owl’s call came out of the night, a series of hoos that sounded like: “Who cooks for you?” It was nearby, another being reassuring him that he wasn’t alone.
And while he was deliberately not thinking about her, Antigone came home. He felt her kiss on his eyelids and smelled her and, with
out opening his eyes, reached for her. He was sitting in the grass, his back against a sculpture that had car doors for wings. “You look like an angel,” Antigone whispered, straddling his lap.
He groaned and wrapped her in his arms, hugging her even tighter. “I was worried.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” She kissed him again.
Sam buried his face in her hair and inhaled the distinctive scent of her. A fragrance so familiar it even invaded his dreams at night. He thought of his child and how it would smell. New cars and babies, to Sam, were among the sweetest smells. He clamped his hand on the back of Antigone’s head and nuzzled his way to her lips. He felt himself melting into her like a bead of metal. A perfect joining. A fan of dimes.
The kiss grew urgent. He pushed up her shirt with his hard, callused hands, sliding it up her soft slender sides, up, up, past her raised arms. He tossed the shirt aside and saw her grin. She reached for his shirt, and he started in on her jeans. He rammed his crazy bone into the angel wings and groaned. He closed his mouth over her breast and sucked until the pain zinging through his elbow receded and Antigone was writhing on top of him. She fumbled with his zipper. He lifted her to slide himself inside her.
What about the baby? “Should we be doing this?” he mumbled between kisses. Antigone locked her knees around his hips and sent ecstasy corkscrewing up his middle.
“Yes,” she whispered, “yes, yes, yes.”
He lurched and smashed his foot into the remains of a Chevy Citation.
Antigone moaned. They were like two eels twisting in a tiny space, touching everywhere. They were electrifying. Finally, they went over the edge. Two bodies glistened and arched in exquisite pleasure as moonlight shimmered over the stripped axles, bald tires, and bent automobile frames.
Across the road, the deer slept, while a wild cat prowled and stalked shadows in the night. A family of raccoons picked through the garbage behind the O. Henry Café. The barred owl hunted overhead, on the lookout for mice nesting amid the automotive ruins. Sam pulled Antigone closer, wrapping his shirt around her. They whispered in the dark, in the gallery of auto art.
“You know, you can’t keep taking off without a word,” Sam told her.
“Sorry. It’s just that I’m so worried about her.”
She already thought of the baby as a girl. He didn’t care. He was just happy to have them both back in his arms. “Why?”
“I want her to feel whole and beautiful. I don’t want her to feel defective or stupid. I don’t want her to be like me.”
Sam gulped down his temper. His wife had dyslexia, so what? It took her a while to read things, and on some days, when she was upset or stressed, she never got the words to behave. That had become his job, reading things to her: stories from the newspaper, directions on medications, instructions for the DVD player. Out of love, he kept her secret. Still, to him, her fear was irrational. People wouldn’t think any less of her if they knew she had trouble reading.
“Well, that’s too bad,” he said. “Because I want her to be exactly like her mother. Except for the binges. This child may not get her license until she’s thirty-five.”
Antigone snuggled closer. “I don’t do it on purpose.”
“That’s not the point. I can’t do this waiting anymore, Tigg. It tears me apart. I try to be strong, but . . .”
“You are strong.”
“But it’s all different now. Don’t you see? I’m not just waiting for you; I’m waiting for both of you. I go mad just thinking of you and my child lost in the world.”
“I’m never lost, Sam. I always find my way home.”
To the navigationally impaired Sam, the idea of such complete confidence in one’s directional sense was inconceivable. To him, the world was swarming with wrong turns. “Tigg, please.”
Antigone took his hand. “I’ll try, Sam, I promise. I’ll concentrate harder.” This was the automatic response of the dyslexic: increasing the effort to focus. “I just don’t want to be an embarrassment to her. Mothers have to volunteer at school, read books at story hour and shit. They have to run scout troops and know all those handbooks from front to back. They have to be able to fill out forms at the hospital, school, ballet class. Childhood is one big form. Being a parent isn’t easy.”
“We’ll work it out. We’re going to be one big happy family,” Sam said.
“Bigger than you know,” Antigone said. And then she told Sam about the boy named Ryder sleeping in their spare bedroom.
Chapter 4
Taking Flight
STAR SIMS WAS TEN years old and the most secure kid Antigone had ever met. Maybe it was that the girl believed she was psychic and didn’t hesitate to let everyone know it. Maybe it was the uncanny number of Star’s predictions that came true—like the time she said a deer needed Antigone’s help and Antigone found a deer, pregnant, near collapse, and cornered by three wild dogs near the back gate. Antigone ran off the dogs and rescued the deer. A few weeks later, the deer gave birth to twins.
Antigone didn’t know if she believed in psychics, but she didn’t not believe in them either. A woman with a “mystery and miracle growing inside her,” as Antigone’s mother described gestation, had to keep her options open.
“Have you felt the baby yet?” asked Star.
“Maybe in a few weeks,” Antigone answered, glancing at the pretty child, who would someday be model tall and beautiful. Her dark hair, worn in several braids, curved around high, milk chocolate brown cheekbones. But the cheekbones were not her most arresting feature. It was those soft blue eyes, so piercingly mysterious, that nailed you. Those eyes knew secrets.
She and Antigone were sitting, resting their backs against a boulder at the edge of the pond on the O. Henry Deer Farm. They each sipped at ice teas with lemon while Fancy, a fawn born on the farm, lapped at the pond. Occasionally, Fancy glanced their way, wiggled an ear at a pesky fly, and then returned to drinking. Antigone loved the pond as much as Fancy did: the peaceful water, the tall pine trees hovering along the edges, the lazy pace. Insects floated on the surface until a frog flicked out a tongue or a fish rocketed up from the deep.
“I think it’s going to be cool having a baby around,” Star said. “You and Sam are going to be the best parents, I just know it.”
Antigone envied the child’s confidence, something she was far from feeling. She inhaled the scent of pine. Her mind, which earlier had been turning in dozens of circles within circles, was slowing. Soon it would be incapable of even a half flip. Her hands felt heavy. Her neck and shoulders could hardly support her head. She leaned back against the rock and thought of babies.
There were so many decisions to make, so many chances to do the wrong thing. Parenting was a minefield, and she felt she was wearing big clodhopper boots. Antigone realized, for the first time, how vulnerable parents were, how powerless they were in the face of love.
“It’s crazy, but I already feel like I’d do anything for this baby,” she said.
Star pulled her knobby knees up under her chin. “Mama says babies turn your life upside down, so it’s a good thing they’re cute.”
Star had been firmly in that cute stage when Earthly Sims, a single mother, brought her baby daughter to town. As Antigone held Baby Star, Earthly, fresh from a divorce and desperately needing to start over, dug into a mushroom quiche at the O. Henry Café counter and talked. About leaving her job as a lawyer at the ACLU in Atlanta; about splitting from her traitorous husband, Chester, a once brilliant ACLU litigator but now corporate hack “who got too many people out of messes they didn’t deserve to be gotten out of”; and about her sister who worked at the mill in Mercy.
“I’m not disillusioned,” Earthly had said with a big sigh. “I’m just tired of the law, of Atlanta, of Chester. I need a break.”
Antigone had inherited a nice chunk of Mercy from a never-met, never-married uncle who noted in his will that “a child with a disadvantage needs the money more than the rest of my worthless family.” The bequest, o
n the western edge of town, included three abandoned storefronts; a long-closed restaurant named after the short story writer O. Henry; a garage, complete with a rusted hydraulic lift, broken pumps, and empty fuel tanks; a two-story farmhouse; and across the road, two hundred acres of undeveloped land.
Talking with Earthly, Antigone immediately saw the possibilities. One of the vacant storefronts stood right beside the café; Earthly had the connection at the mill to get all the seconds they wanted. Before Earthly left the café, she and Antigone had devised a plan to open a textile outlet called The Great Cover Up. As it turned out, Earthly was good at retail, and she liked managing inventory and making change, which suited her silent partner just fine. That was nearly ten years ago. Antigone had watched Star grow up.
“What do you think of Ryder?” asked Antigone.
“He’s okay as strays go,” Star said.
“Strays?”
“Mama says you pick up strays like us.” Antigone started to deny it, but Star immediately reassured her, “Oh, it’s a good thing. People need a place.”
Book of Mercy Page 3
