The House on Fripp Island

by Rebecca Kauffman

  A year or so later, before Keats had turned twenty, Joe was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he was gone within months.

  Roxie battled her father every step of the way. She wasn’t able to prevent him from bringing charges against Keats, but she swiftly began the process of legally emancipating herself from her parents. She remained in touch with Keats in the time following the incident, despite a court order that they have no contact until she turned eighteen.

  She begged Keats for his forgiveness long after he’d assured her that it wasn’t necessary.

  She loved him. Somehow, and she didn’t know if she would ever be able to understand this fully or accept that she was deserving, but somehow, amid all of this, Keats had started to love her, and he kept on loving her too.

  Roxie returned to Fripp Island midway through her senior year of high school, as soon as the legal emancipation process was complete. She didn’t have her diploma or a penny to her name.

  She moved into the loft with Keats and got a job at Gram’s Diner.

  They kept to themselves, knowing how people talked.

  Keats didn’t get nearly as many calls as he and his father had prior to the incident, but he still found a fair amount of work through a few loyal homeowners who gave him the benefit of the doubt, despite having heard the rumors. Between his handyman jobs and Roxie’s tips from Gram’s, they made enough to keep up with the rent on the loft, the utilities, groceries and food for Leo, and the occasional night out in Beaufort, and whatever was left they put into savings. Their goal was to have two thousand dollars saved by the time they left Fripp Island for good.

  Roxie learned what sort of meals she could make for under five bucks for the two of them: spaghetti, bologna on Wonder Bread, casseroles of hamburger and potato. Fish and crab they caught themselves and ate with melted margarine, a slab off the brick-sized block of the cheap stuff, which was slick and yellow as an egg yolk. They ate ice cream that came in a bucket.

  On days off together, they took Leo to the beach and went for swims and walks and napped in the sun. They crabbed and fished and retrieved recycling from all the condos, sorted through the glass bottles and aluminum cans and took them to the collection site at the Piggly Wiggly in Ashby, where they would get fifteen cents for every recyclable. In the evenings, they played Cribbage and Spider Solitaire; they watched sitcoms on a tiny rabbit-eared television set and sunsets from the deck.

  Keats eventually proposed marriage with the engagement ring his mother had worn—his father had kept it for all the years since her death—and they were married one October afternoon at a courthouse in Beaufort.

  They intended to leave Fripp Island as soon as Keats’s time on the registry had expired. They were eager to go, but if they were to move while he was still listed, they would be required to alert all their new neighbors to his status, which would of course contaminate relationships in any new community. So the plan was to head south with as many of their possessions as they could pack into Keats’s truck as soon as his time on the registry was up. They had a few small fishing towns picked out on the coast of Georgia, where they thought they could happily start a new life.

  Five months. Assuming the paperwork went through, they would be in Georgia by Christmas.

  8

  POPPY WOKE AT five o’clock the next morning, when the air was still blackish blue and certainly not cool, but not yet hot. She shuffled to the closet for her running shoes and sports bra, dressed quietly so as not to disturb John, and went down to the kitchen. She boiled water on the stove and stirred in a spoonful of instant coffee, just like she did every morning at home. She had noted yesterday that the house contained a French press and an espresso maker, but she preferred her instant. Better flavor. She didn’t care what anybody said.

  When she stepped out onto the back patio to do her stretches, she noticed a set of footprints in the sand leading from the house to the beach. She did not see a return set of prints. It entered her mind that Scott, in midlife-crisis mode, might have gone skinny-dipping, and she decided not to follow the footprints to investigate.

  She drank her coffee, walked around to the front of the house, and out to the street, where she took a left. She planned to go to the tip of the island and back, a two-mile circuit.

  Cicadas buzzed and air-conditioning units roared. The air smelled of fish and gasoline and sweet blossoms. Poom-poom-poom-poom-poom, her tennis shoes padded softly along the footpath. She passed gorgeous modern condominiums with entire walls of glass. Sprawling plantation-style homes with white-pillared porches and immaculate lawns that looked too good to be real, surrounded by sand and scraggly brush. Every tenth house, it seemed, was not a mansion but a small shanty with a beat-to-hell roof and pastel wooden signs stuck crookedly into the ground near the entrance, messages like Seas the Day and Peace, Love, and Sandy Feet.

  Poppy stopped to cough into a fist. The humidity down here, even at this early hour, felt like it was about a thousand percent. She glanced at her watch; somehow she was keeping a good ten-minute-per-mile pace. She carried on down the path, enjoying glimpses of ocean between the houses. The sunrise was still at least half an hour away, but the world was slowly awakening to its presence, the sky going navy overhead, rosy at the horizon, stars retreating. She admired the palmetto trees, hardwood live oaks, magnolias, some barkless species that she didn’t recognize.

  A huge gray teardrop of a wasp nest was attached to a nearby telephone pole. Poppy would have liked to suit up and take an industrial-sized can of Raid and a baseball bat to it, like a piñata. She loved an excuse to be merciless.

  Soon she had to stop again. She coughed and wiped a thick film of sweat from her face with the hem of her shirt. She stretched her muscles. Damn, this humidity was really doing a number. Her lungs tickled like the dickens and she couldn’t seem to get a good breath in or a good one out. She guessed she had about a half-mile to go to her intended destination, so she decided to power through until she had gotten at least that far. She’d walk some of the way back if she had to.

  Poppy jogged a quarter of a mile and noticed a parking lot up ahead next to a small, ramshackle blue building with a sign out front that she couldn’t yet read from this distance. When she sniffed the air, the wonderful aroma of breakfast reached her. Bacon and coffee and maple syrup. She drew closer and saw that the sign read Gram’s Diner in pale green cursive. Several cars and golf carts were parked in the lot. Poppy sniffed the air greedily; sugar, coffee, and fat.

  She had to slow to a walk again by the time she actually reached Gram’s. The humidity was too much. She was drenched with sweat, her breath was shallow. A terrible throbbing cramp was spreading through her belly.

  She paused in front of the restaurant and peered absently into the windows at the sweet and cozy-looking scene within. Most of the patrons at this early hour were locals, Poppy gathered; tanned to jerky, with mounds of bleached yellowy hair bundled into unruly ponytails or contained beneath faded pastel caps. Most of them were elderly, although there was also a table of young surfers who were eating eggs in their wetsuits.

  A voice to Poppy’s left, from the side of the restaurant, startled her.

  “You worked up quite a sweat,” a woman’s voice said. “Need a glass of water?”

  Poppy turned. The woman was leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette, and wearing a teal skirted apron over denim shorts and a T-shirt. She was thin, young, early to mid-twenties, very pretty. Large, pale blue eyes. Glossy blond hair pulled into a long, loose braid. She waved her cigarette in the general direction of the entrance. “Just go in and ask. They don’t bite.” She smiled. Her teeth were too straight and too white, like too much money had been spent on them.

  Poppy coughed and wiped sweat from her face with the collar of her T-shirt. “No water necessary,” she said. “I just wasn’t prepared for the humidity. Hell, it’s nasty out here.”

  “Takes some getting used to. I grew up in Massachusetts, so I know how it is when you’re
not accustomed. You from up north?”

  “West Virginia,” Poppy said. “So . . . sort of.”

  The young woman took a long drag from the cigarette.

  “Massachusetts, you said? You’re a long way from home, then,” Poppy said.

  “This is home now,” the woman said. She tap-tap-tapped a bit of ash from her cigarette, then stared silently at the beach for a long moment.

  Gathering that the girl didn’t wish to offer more on the topic of home, Poppy gestured toward the inside of the restaurant and said, “You work in there?”

  The girl nodded. “Roxie, by the way.” She put the cigarette back in her mouth, wiped her hand on the apron, and extended it to Poppy.

  “Poppy.” As she shook the girl’s hand, a great, ticklish outburst rose from her lungs and she had to step back and cough harshly.

  “You sure I can’t get you anything?” Roxie said, her young face creased with concern. She patted Poppy’s sweating shoulder. “You’re welcome to come on in and sit in front of a fan for a minute. I’m a runner too. Same exact thing happened to me first time I tried to go for a run down here. I gave up a mile in.”

  Poppy coughed again. “So’d you give it up for good, then?”

  “No,” Roxie said. “I still go couple mornings a week, when I’m not working. You just need to stick with it, the body adjusts to the humidity. But you look like you should at least sit down for a minute, take a rest.”

  “Actually,” Poppy said, taking a breath in through her nose to settle her lungs, then lowering her voice, “if you can keep a secret . . .”

  Roxie’s eyebrows arched.

  Poppy nodded down toward Roxie’s hand. “I quit cold turkey when I got pregnant with my first, eighteen years ago, but I still sneak one now and then when I know I can get away with it. My husband would kill me. But I swear, nothing sets me straight like a cigarette.”

  Roxie laughed and passed the cigarette Poppy’s way.

  Poppy raised it to her lips. She pulled long and hard on the Camel. Her eyes rolled back and she moaned deep and low with pleasure. Then she released a slow stream of white smoke through her nostrils, savoring the tidy thrum of the nicotine, the way it set her whole body right. Hell, the whole world.

  Poppy made a move to return the cigarette to Roxie, who said, “Nope, that’s all for you. You earned it. You enjoy that.”

  Poppy took another drag and gazed out into the gray-blue morning. “Sorry to interrupt your break and hijack your cigarette.”

  Roxie said, “I’d take your company any day over the creeps who interrupt my break to talk my ear off about how far under par they were yesterday.” She paused to stick her tongue out the side of her mouth. “Sleazy rich losers. They’re relentless.”

  “Gross,” Poppy said. “I used to work at a restaurant. I know the type.”

  Roxie tossed her golden braid over her shoulder and glanced at her watch. “Time for me to head back in,” she said. “Take it easy out there, OK? Don’t overdo it.”

  Poppy said, “Reckon I’ll be walking most of the rest of it. Thanks again for the cigarette.”

  “Anytime.”

  Poppy looked back into the diner, a charming scene with checkered tablecloths, framed photographs of fish and sailboats and beaches and sunsets, and old-fashioned stainless-steel napkin dispensers and sugar jars on every table. She thought perhaps she’d bring John for breakfast tomorrow morning, request Roxie for their server so they could leave her a generous tip. She and Roxie might share a fun moment or a wink as they told John how they had met this morning while Poppy was out for a run, but they would deliberately leave out the part about the cigarette.

  Poppy always got a warm, happy, and hopeful feeling when she was around young women who worked in restaurants. It made her feel like the world really didn’t change all that much, that life was still good, people were still alright. There was still a lot to recognize and like in one another. She left the diner and made her way up the street to her intended destination, where she paused to stretch against the coin-operated binoculars that faced the beach.

  Seagulls dove and stabbed at things in the water. There was a decent swell, and she imagined the surfers would be out there riding it at any moment. She listened to grunts and the ping of rackets from nearby tennis courts. The sun was beginning to rise over the water, the tiniest sliver of gold appearing at the horizon, the brightness of it violent against the dark and distant ocean. She enjoyed this view for a bit, the gold swelling and appearing to pulse against the sea as the sun worked its way up and out, gradually setting the horizon on fire.

  Then she headed back toward the house, jogging for short intervals, the stomach cramp finally shaking loose, her body finally feeling strong.

  With Roxie’s indictment of “sleazy rich losers” on her mind, Poppy’s thoughts turned to what Lisa had said yesterday about the likelihood that Scott was having an affair. Just when they were coming up on their twentieth anniversary and everything. It made Poppy hot and queasy with spite.

  When they were teenagers, Poppy had been the one the boys flocked to, with boobs already in the eighth grade, the big hair and big personality, the naughty jokes. Lisa was her awkward sidekick, gangly and pale, taller than all the boys in the class, which was such a humiliation that she experimented with a hundred different postures to conceal her height, until she pinched a nerve in her neck. But within months of graduating from high school, Lisa began to appreciate her long legs and show them off with short shorts and miniskirts. She developed curves and learned how to apply makeup that suited her green eyes and pale complexion.

  Poppy and Lisa started dating John and Scott around the same time.

  John was part of the small crew hired to renovate the patio of Luigi’s, where Poppy and Lisa waited tables. The project only took a month, but in that time John became friendly with the restaurant staff, who would bring him lemonade and garlic bread when they could sneak it without the manager noticing.

  John had dropped out of high school several years earlier, when his father died and his mother spiraled into depression. John was already working construction in the summertime, and his grades were not good enough to propel him into any other field, so he left school in order to support his mother until she was able to get back on her feet. That never really happened, so John never returned to school and never left construction.

  Poppy asked him out on a date as the renovation project at Luigi’s was wrapping up. She liked his crooked, pinched-off smile and gentle eyes. She said, “So are you going to take me out to dinner or what?” He stared at her like she’d just asked if he wanted to go to Mars. She said, “Good God, that’s a look! You’re about to offend me. So sleep on it, then. I get off around eight tomorrow.”

  John was waiting in the parking lot the next night at 7:45. He wore khaki pants and an ill-fitting jacket over a flannel shirt. They went to dinner at the Half Moon Diner, spent four hours there, and then kissed outside her house.

  Soon things got hot and heavy, but John didn’t want to go all the way and sleep together until they were married, because his parents had raised him that way. When Poppy learned this, a few more dates in, she proposed on the spot. They got married at the courthouse two weeks later. Everyone said they were acting like total maniacs except for Lisa, who knew Poppy better than anyone.

  For their honeymoon, they spent one night at a cottage on Middle Creek Lake. They picked up groceries on their way to the cottage, and John stunned Poppy that evening by roasting a chicken. He explained that he had been doing the cooking at home since his mom had lost the will to look after herself.

  Poppy was John’s first. John was Poppy’s . . . well, who was counting? John didn’t seem to give a shit. Poppy was prepared to tell, but she was relieved when it was apparent that John wasn’t going to press her for a number.

  She got up early the next morning to make him breakfast, eager to impress her new husband, especially after his masterpiece the night before. She had never cooked
an actual meal in her life, outside of cereal and toast and powdered macaroni and cheese from a box.

  Thirty minutes later, she delivered John a rubbery, grayish omelet the size of a pizza, on a serving platter meant for hors d’oeuvres.

  “Good Lord!” he exclaimed, sitting upright in bed. “What’d you do, use all dozen eggs?”

  Poppy nodded. All she wore were knee-high blue socks and a greasy dish towel slung over her shoulder. The omelet teetered precariously toward John and he recoiled.

  “Is that . . .” John stared at the thing. “Why does it smell like . . . did you put cinnamon in it?”

  “Like a special pancake.”

  John laughed uncontrollably while Poppy sputtered angrily like a steaming teapot. Her nipples were bright and erect, pubic hair matted sideways like a crooked toupee, goosebumps covering her bare arms. “Well, if you’re just going to sit there laughing at me while this beautiful breakfast gets cold . . .”

  John took the omelet from her and set it on the bed stand, then he pulled her back into bed.

  Scott had become a regular customer at Luigi’s during his years in law school at Wheeling University. He usually went to the restaurant with two or three of his buddies, and they would sit at the bar drinking Peronis and watching sports on the TV. He started chatting up Lisa one day, dazzled by her beauty and small-town naïveté. Scott was in his final year of law school and almost thirty at the time; he had worked in sales for several years before deciding to pursue law. For their first date, he took her to his campus, where they walked around and he showed her the buildings where he went to class and the small cathedral where he attended mass, then they went to dinner at the only French restaurant in Wheeling. As soon as Scott passed the bar and received an offer from Raslowe & Associates, he and Lisa became engaged and moved up to Warrenton, just outside of D.C., where they had lived ever since.

  Their relationship made perfect sense. Despite her humble upbringing, Lisa had always had a taste for the finer things. She lusted after the clothes she saw on soap operas and the handbags that the wealthy college students carried around. She tried to eliminate the distinctly West Virginia aspects of her Southern accent. Lisa always knew she was going to end up with money. It was never a question of if, just a question of when and who.