Written on My Heart

by Morgan Callan Rogers

  Bud was about six months older than Dottie and me. He lived through part of a fall and a whole winter before I barged onto the scene. “As soon as you could run,” his mother, Ida, had told me a short time before the baby shower, “your little legs carried you down the road to our house. You used to play in the driveway with Bud until one of you made the other one mad, and then we would walk you back up the hill.”

  “Did I just run loose? Where was Carlie?” I asked Ida. I called my mother Carlie because she had wanted to be called by her first name. “Mama sounds weird to me,” she told me when I asked. I didn’t care what she wanted to be called. I knew who she was to me.

  “Your mother was right with you,” Ida said. “You think she’d let you run down the road alone?”

  “I don’t remember,” I said. Carlie had taken with her any stories she might have told me. “But I remember playing with Bud.”

  Something about him, even then, made me feel strong and protected. He was a calm little boy who had grown into a quiet and easygoing man, unless something really riled him up.

  He was the leader of the four of us. Besides Dottie, Bud, and me, our little gang included Glen Clemmons, who was also our age. Glen’s father, Ray, ran the general store, close to the road that led to Long Reach. When we got together as a foursome, each of us contributed to whatever mischief we might decide to get into. Glen had the bad ideas, Dottie complained but went along, I thought Glen’s ideas were fun, and Bud was the voice of reason that no one ever listened to until it was too late.

  I might not have tuned in on his advice, but I heard his heart in my heart, always. His presence took root in me. I looked for him, even when we were with other people. Four years after Carlie went missing, I lost Grand to a stroke. My life took a header even as Glen, Dottie, and Bud found ways to get along in the world. Bud hooked up with a pretty, popular girl named Susan. I quit high school and took up with Andy Barrington, the son of rich summer people. At seventeen, I gave my virginity to him and learned how to smoke pot. I also almost died when Andy and I got into a bad car accident.

  Bud’s was a welcome presence as I healed. Armed at this point with a real understanding of how short life could be and how fast things could change, I fought for his love, and his own restless heart chose mine.

  When I was eighteen, my father died of a heart attack on his lobster boat, the Florine, on a beautiful July day. Bud moved in with me a few days after his funeral. He took a job as a mechanic at Fred’s garage, up on the road to Long Reach. He wasn’t a great cook and he left his dirty clothes on the bedroom floor, but he saved my sanity. He held me close when the dark tried to slink into my soul through the cracks in my heart, and he brought me back into the land of the living.

  We lived together for a year. We loved sex, so we shouldn’t have been surprised when we made a baby in the early fall of 1970. When I told him, Bud blinked a few times, shrugged, and said, “Well, we’ll manage.”

  We were both only nineteen at the time, but we were made of sturdy stock. It helped that Grand’s house was paid for. Bud and I managed to take care of the taxes and, so far, the day-to-monthly bills, but a new baby would up our spending in a big way. To help with finances, I struck a deal with Ray at the general store and he started to carry more of the bread that I baked from Grand’s recipes. Ray also took orders for my knitting and crocheting, and for Christmas wreaths. Only a few years back, I’d considered all of this a chore. Grand had been determined to make me useful, and I had found it a pain in the butt. But after her death, I began to appreciate what she had taken the time to teach me. Doing these things reminded me of her. I came to love creating something warm, beautiful, and lasting, or something that tasted of comfort, or helping The Point women put together wreaths for the annual Christmas season craft fairs.

  As the baby claimed its space inside of me, I thought about whether Bud would ask me to marry him. As long as I had loved him, I had dreamed of being married to him, but after all that had happened, it was enough just to have him with me. I was content with that. But in May, maybe at the urging of his mother, who said nothing with her mouth but everything with her eyes, he had asked me to marry him one night at suppertime.

  “Wondering,” he’d said, as I was easing a forkful of peas over my big belly.

  “What?” I said.

  “Want to get married before the baby comes?”

  Several peas jumped ship and tumbled down the slope of my stomach.

  Bud scraped his chair back and walked around the table to me. He knelt down beside me and folded my left hand between his own hands. “Florine Gilham,” he said, his dark eyes just as dead serious as I’d ever seen them, “you’re a keeper. I can’t think about my life without you. Will you marry me?”

  Could he feel the pulse of the hand cradled between his own? My heartbeat picked up so, the baby turned over. “Of course I will,” I said.

  We kissed for a little while and then he broke it off. “Don’t have a ring,” he said.

  “Wait,” I said. Bud hoisted me to a standing position and I waddled upstairs to our bedroom.

  I headed to the bureau, to Grand’s wooden jewelry box. Her husband, Franklin, my grandfather, had made it for her and carved her name, Florence, into the top. The hinges creaked as I lifted it up and looked inside. Grand never had much use for frippery, as she called it, but a few choice things were tucked inside. I plucked her diamond ring out of its velvet holder, pushed it over my swollen finger to see if it fit, took it off, and then squeezed it tight in the palm of my hand. Once downstairs, I handed it to Bud and he slipped it back onto my finger. Then Bud went back around the table to finish his supper.

  In less than twenty-four hours, we would be married.

  My husband-to-be turned over in bed and faced the wall, wriggling his back and butt toward me so that we touched. With the effort a whale must make to breach so it can breathe, I shifted my bulk so I was on my back. I draped my right arm over his hip and drifted off to sleep.

  2

  Our wedding day started with a visit from my late father’s girlfriend, Stella Drowns. No one locked their doors on The Point. She barely knocked before she charged in, hollering, “Yoo-hoo!”

  Bud shot straight up in bed. “You fucking hoo?” he said to me. “Is she for real?”

  “We’re in bed, Stella,” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Come back later.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she called from the bottom of the stairs. “I’m just so excited about today. I brought you a coffee cake. Figured you could use the sugar and the energy.”

  “Could have used the sleep too,” Bud shouted.

  “Hope you’re not that cranky all day,” Stella hollered. “Happy wedding day!” She slammed the front door on her way out.

  “What did Leeman ever see in her?” Bud said. “She’s out of her mind.”

  “Coffee cake,” I said. “He liked her, um, cake.”

  Bud rubbed his hands over his face. “You want cake and tea?”

  “That’s a great idea.”

  He climbed over me and stood naked in the early morning light. He scratched his butt and went across the hall to the bathroom. The baby did the twist in my belly. I put my hand on her to calm her down, but she kept it up, as if the prospect of coffee cake for breakfast and a wedding for lunch excited her as much as it did me.

  The front door downstairs opened just as Bud flushed the toilet. I tried to catch him before he headed downstairs, but I was too late.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he yelled.

  “That your wedding suit?” I heard Dottie say.

  “If people don’t stop barging in, it might be,” Bud said.

  “Where you going to put the rings?”

  “Glen’s supposed to have them.”

  “I say, wear what you got on, then. Supposed to be hot this afternoon.”

  “Come on up,
Dottie,” I called.

  “Why? The entertainment is down here,” she said.

  “Wait here,” Bud said to Dottie, and he took every other stair to the bedroom. His face was scarlet. “We’re going to start locking the damn door,” he said. “Right after Dottie leaves.”

  I grinned. “What’s done is done. Now she knows why I’m marrying you.”

  Bud pulled on a pair of jeans and hauled a white, holey T-shirt over his head. He was still sputtering when he left the bedroom and bounded down the stairs. “That coffee cake is for us,” I heard him growl at Dottie, who was more than familiar with our kitchen and could smell a baked good from miles away.

  “Just testing it out,” she answered him. “I approve. Here, I cut a piece for you.”

  “Going down to the folks’ house,” Bud called up to me. “See you at the wedding,” and he was gone. I hauled myself and the baby out of bed, shuffled to the window, and pulled up the shade. Dust motes sifted through shafts of sunlight.

  “Coming up,” Dottie said from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Bring me some coffee cake and some tea. With milk,” I said.

  “Hope you’re not going to be this bossy all day,” she grumbled.

  “Not promising anything,” I said. I waddled over to the rocking chair and grabbed an old green sweatshirt hanging off the back of it. It had been my father’s once, and he had been a big man. I plunked down on the rocker and tugged my pregnant-lady shorts to just underneath my breasts.

  By the time Dottie got upstairs, I was standing in front of the mirror, looking at the blond, red, and brown frizzled curly mop I called hair.

  “What the hell am I going to do with this?” I asked her.

  She set my tea and a plate mounded with Stella’s coffee cake on the bureau. She stood alongside me at the mirror and ran her hands through her brown pixie cut. “Cut if off,” she said. “That’ll take care of that problem.”

  “It’s a serious question,” I said. “What do you think I should do? Up? Down?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person. Evie knows about that shit. She’ll fix you up.”

  Evie was Dottie’s younger sister. At fourteen, she was a handful. “Evie wants what she wants when she wants it,” Dottie had said more than once, “and the only time she doesn’t want for something, she’s asleep.” What mattered about Evie that day was that she would have good ideas. I changed the subject.

  “Stella dropped by with the cake and woke up Bud. He wasn’t awful pleased.”

  “She probably just wants to be part of the wedding,” Dottie said.

  I sighed. “Oh, I know,” I said. “But I don’t want her fussing around while I get ready. She’ll get weepy about Daddy not being here, and then I’ll get weepier than I already am, and I don’t need that today.”

  “I guess not,” Dottie said. “Anyways, Evie’ll be over soon, with Madeline. You don’t want to see either of them before they have their coffee.”

  Madeline was Dottie’s mother. For money, she worked at the post office up the road. For joy, she painted seashore and ocean scenes in watercolor. Some of them brightened the walls of our house. Once in a while, she’d sell a painting to a tourist Ray sent down to the house. I loved Madeline. Every time I’d gone to Dottie’s house—and I’d gone there thousands of times—she acted as if I were a long-lost friend who’d just come back from somewhere far away. On my wedding day, she was going to pick flowers from Grand’s side garden to decorate the food and drink tables, and then fashion a bouquet out of peonies and beach roses for me to carry.

  “I’m so lucky to have you all,” I said to Dottie. “Hey, leave me at least a piece of that cake, please.”

  “It’s all yours,” she said, grabbing a last nibble.

  I slipped the remaining piece of coffee cake into my mouth and took a sip of hot tea that coated my tongue with melted, brown sugar–crumb topping. “Mmmmm,” I said. Stella really could cook. She had reeled Daddy in by bringing him a coffee cake and making him a couple of dinners. She drove me crazy, but sometimes she touched my heart and on this day, I loved everyone.

  Dottie and I puttered around for a couple of hours, making sure the house was to rights and then suddenly, it was ten o’clock, only three hours away from the wedding. I rushed upstairs for a bath. When Madeline and Evie showed up, I was standing in the bedroom combing the tangles out of my wet hair. Right away, Evie took over.

  “Let me do that,” she said. “Wait. Let’s sit you down first. No, not the rocking chair—I need to work on your hair from the back and sides. Dottie!” she hollered downstairs. “Bring up a kitchen chair.” I braced myself against the possibility that Dottie would holler back that Evie could just fetch it herself or else go to hell, but to my surprise, she carried a chair upstairs and set it in front of the mirror, exactly where her sister told her to put it.

  “Anything else, Your Highness?” Dottie said.

  “Nope,” Evie said. “Go away.”

  “I’m the maid of honor. I got rank over you.” Dottie set her solid self down on the mattress and settled in to watch over me as only a best friend can.

  I said, “I got rank over both of you. Dottie can stay.”

  Evie shrugged. “Well, whoever stays, you got to take off that sweatshirt first. It’ll mess up your hair and we’re only fixing it once.”

  I whipped off the shirt and we all admired my swollen boobs and bloated belly, along with the strange line of reddish-brown hair that had sprouted down the center of my stomach during my pregnancy. Dottie took my fancy lacy bra from the wedding-wear hanger and hooked the back for me while Evie scared up some towels from the bathroom. I sat down, and she began wrestling with my hair. I closed my eyes while she worked. I loved the light feel of her quick hands as she gently pulled, brushed, braided, and twisted my hair into shape. She hummed some tune I didn’t recognize in her husky voice as she worked.

  Down in the side yard, I heard Bert Butts, Dottie’s father, working with Glen as they set up tables and chairs in the backyard. Madeline’s voice entered the mix, along with the clatter of Grand’s silverware, plates, glasses, and cups. I’d suggested paper plates and cups to her, but she said, “We can break out the good stuff for this day, Florine. Your wedding day is worth it.”

  After a while Dottie got restless and wandered downstairs and outside into the side yard to “see if there was something I can do.”

  I half dozed in the chair. I jumped when Evie said, “There.”

  “You done?” I said, opening my eyes. She stood in front of me and I looked up and into her beautiful blue eyes. A forest of dark lashes surrounded them.

  “Looks good,” she said. “But you’re not going to peek until we make you up.”

  “I don’t know as I need much,” I said, and Evie rolled her eyes.

  “Let’s bury the freckles,” she said.

  “I like my freckles.”

  “Just for the day,” Evie said. She tilted her head and studied my face. “Humph,” she said, and reached for a bag filled with enough makeup to beautify the seven women living on The Point for a year.

  She smiled at me. “You got bones to die for,” she said. “Let’s bring them out.”

  “Aren’t they okay where they are?”

  She rolled her eyes again. “Blush,” she said. “We’re putting blush on them. You should take this seriously. I’m good.”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  She grinned. “I do,” she said. Her curly black hair framed her pale, heart-shaped face. Her nails were pearly pink and her mouth, made for kissing, matched the color of her nails.

  “She knows she’s pretty,” Dottie had said to me, more than once. “Well, she may have the looks, but I got the brains and the personality.” Sometimes, I wondered if Dottie might be a little jealous of Evie, but I never brought that up. Evie was the pretty one, but Dottie had
my heart.

  Finally, Evie was done, and just as the sun hit the far wall of my bedroom I stood up and stared at an unfamiliar creature who looked back at me.

  My hair was a mass of sprayed-stiff, strawberry-blond whipped cream, winding in and out of its own coils as if playing hide-and-seek. The freckles on my face had been blotted out by a blizzard of powder and blush. My startled greenish eyes peered out at me from behind shutters of thick, brown mascara. My long mouth sparkled with a smear of glitter slashed across the top of a spicy pink-brown lipstick.

  “Well, what do you think?” Evie said.

  “I’m afraid if I talk, my face will break.”

  Evie frowned.

  “Just give me a few seconds,” I said. “I have to get used to it. I think I look pretty, but I don’t really know what that means yet.”

  “You look beautiful. You are anyway. I just brought it out,” Evie said.

  Someone walked through the house and stood at the bottom of the stairs. “Can I come up?” Maureen called in her sweet voice. My heart smiled. I loved Bud’s younger sister.

  “Maureen, come check out Florine!” Evie yelled, and Maureen rushed up the stairs and stopped in the doorway of the bedroom. Her light-brown eyes widened and her mouth formed a perfect O.

  “What do you think?” Evie asked.

  “Florine!” Maureen said. “You look so pretty. Wow!”

  Maureen was thirteen, a year younger than Evie. Whereas Evie looked like a grown woman, Maureen was a gangly work in progress. Straight light-brown hair flipped and flopped over her shoulders and down her back. Her legs and arms were a tangle of knobby joints and long, thin bones. Her eyes took up most of her face, her nose was long and narrow, and she had yet to grow into her mouth.