“It’s a secret,” Maureen said.
“I won’t tell,” I said.
She sat down on a folding chair in the middle of the lawn as Billy knelt before her with the garter. His face went pink as he pushed it above her bony knee. Maureen’s blush matched his own.
The day melted into a pale orange sunset and the tide in the harbor turned, showing us its other side as it flowed along. Glen spun records, drank beer, and sang out of tune to almost every song he lowered onto the turntable. The girls and women danced together, or with Billy and Bert. Ray sat off to the side with Sam, who refused to go home, although he looked as if he could knock on death’s door and be welcomed in anytime.
I did my best to keep up with my own wedding. I danced a couple of times, ate some wedding cake, and drank a little more Champagne. But finally, my body and my baby were ready to call it quits. Dottie and I stood together on the lawn as I looked around for Bud. I finally spied him walking a tipsy Stella across Daddy’s driveway toward the house.
“I owe you more favors,” I said to Dottie, who now sported shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt that read, BOWLERS NEVER STRIKE OUT.
“How come?”
“You rescued me from Stella,” I said. “Thanks.”
“She wasn’t that bad. Talked about Leeman most of the day to anyone who might listen. ’Bout how she wished they’d gotten married. Seems to me she ought to get some kind of hobby, so she could think about something else and not be so sad.”
“She doesn’t want to think about anything else,” I said.
I watched Bud walk back to me, admiring the way the westerly sun hit the side of his face. It shone on his dark hair and sparked his eyes into lit pieces of coal. As he reached me, he took my hands and said, “Well, Mrs. Warner, it’s about time for our honeymoon.”
Dottie said, “This shouldn’t have nothing to do with me. If it does, there’s something wrong.” She walked off toward her mother, who was beginning to clean up, alongside Ida. Madeline handed Dottie a tray of dirty dishes. “Don’t you dare drop any of this,” I heard her say as Dottie walked toward the house.
“Our honeymoon suite is right over party central,” I said to Bud. “What kind of time are we going to have with the tunes and the talk going on all night?”
“We’re not staying here tonight,” he said. “Ma and Dad booked us a room at the Stray-Away Inn down the road.” The look I gave him made him grin. “Your bag is packed,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m going to change first,” I said.
“Hurry up,” Bud said, and headed for the bar.
“Such a nice day,” Madeline said as she helped me out of the dress. “Bud looked so handsome and you, well, you . . .”
“I had a lot of help,” I said. “Thanks to you.”
“My pleasure. May be the only wedding I ever get to help with. Don’t know what either of my girls will end up doing. I can’t see Dottie marrying anyone, and I’m just hoping Evie doesn’t get pregnant before she’s out of high school.”
I didn’t know what to say about that, so I hugged her, holding on maybe a few seconds too long, but Madeline didn’t seem to mind. When she left me, I dressed in a honeymoon ensemble consisting of a pair of shorts and a huge T-shirt. Then I went into the bathroom and washed what makeup would come off from my face. I hoped the Stray-Away had a shower so I could wash the gunk from my hair. I lumbered down the stairs. In the kitchen, Madeline, Dottie, Evie, Maureen, and Ida were busy coming and going with glasses, plates, silver, and food. “I feel funny not helping you out in my own kitchen,” I said. “Do you want me to—”
“We want you to go honeymoon,” Ida said. “We’ll get this.” With that, she turned her back and ignored me. So did the rest of them.
I looked out onto the porch, where several rocking chairs sat facing two wide windows that looked over the harbor. Glen sat in one of the rockers, taking in the quiet movement of water and the aftermath of sunset.
I walked through the kitchen, onto the porch, and sat down in the rocker beside Glen. When he looked at me, I saw new lines around his eyes and setting on either side of his mouth. I hadn’t noticed them while we were dancing. He was only twenty, like the rest of us, way too young for those lines.
“You okay?” I asked him. He turned back to the water.
“Yup,” he said. “I’m good. Trying to remember how this looks so’s I can picture it when I’m over in Vietnam.”
We rocked for about ten seconds, and then he said, “I don’t want to go over there. I don’t want to be in the army. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking about when I did it.”
A lone seagull flew across the harbor and toward the ocean, drawn toward a nightly resting place known only to itself and a few thousand others.
“I’m sorry,” Glen said. “Christ, it’s your wedding day.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I can sit for a minute.” We rocked in unison. “I wish I had something that would make you feel better,” I said. “I guess I could say that everything will be okay, but you’re the one has to do it.”
“Dumbass thing to do,” he said.
“You sound like Ray,” I said.
“Hah. Funny thing is, I think I did it so’s he won’t think I’m such a bonehead.”
“You’re not . . .”
“Hell I’m not,” he said. “Big, dumb Glen.”
“He related to stupid-ass Florine?”
Glen smiled.
Another seagull glided past the windows toward the sea and sleep. I pictured it settled down, yellow eyes closed, head tucked under its smooth gray wing.
“Love this time of day,” Glen said. “So damn quiet.”
“They have this time in Vietnam,” I said. “Got the same moon and the same sun too. And stars.”
“Might have different stars.”
“Same sky.”
“Different sky.”
“Same sky. Different place.”
Behind me, I heard Bud ask his mother if she’d seen me.
“We’re out here,” I hollered to him.
“You ready?” he said behind me. “Oh, hell, here you are with another man already. We ain’t even had a honeymoon yet.”
Glen stood up. “You better get going, before you have that baby,” he said. He helped me out of the chair and I reached up for a hug. “You’ll be all right,” I whispered into his ear.
“Yup. She’s a good one,” he said to Bud. “Not too many of them around.”
“Oh, there’s plenty,” I said. “You’ll find the right one when you got the time.”
“Doubt that,” he said.
“Cheer up or I’ll kick your ass,” I said.
“She will,” Bud said. He and Glen did that clumsy back-slapping hug that men do, and then he took my hand and we walked through the kitchen, turned left, and walked down the hall and out the door.
If I were to write about my one-night honeymoon for the local newspaper’s society pages, it would read something like this:
Mr. and Mrs. James Walter “Bud” Warner left for their trip down the coast to the Stray-Away Inn, where they dined on lobster and steak—Champagne compliments of the house—and watched the stars from the balcony connected to their suite.
Mrs. Warner presented Mr. Warner with the keys to her mother’s 1947 coupe, Petunia, which caused Mr. Warner to gasp and hold his bride of less than 24 hours and swear that he would love her for the rest of his life. Mr. Warner presented Mrs. Warner with a ring containing a tiny emerald in the center of it to replace the one she had tossed overboard during her father’s burial at sea. Mrs. Warner cried and kissed him so hard they both almost passed out. They attempted to consummate their marriage, which was tough because the baby took up most of the room needed to do that in any proper way. They smiled themselves into sleep.
What I wouldn�
�t write is what happened sometime in the night when I woke up in a sweat, fear spreading its fingers outward from the center of my heart. Something was wrong. Or was it? Bud slept heavy beside me. My hand slipped to my belly. All was calm there. Still, I couldn’t throw off the feeling and I needed to move. I hoisted myself out of bed, slipped through the balcony doors, and looked out over the clear June night.
The seagulls had long gone home and the dark was thick with silence. Night spread a soft glove over the water. The horizons blended so well, I couldn’t see where ocean ended and sky began. My heart slowed down as I sucked in the sea air. My shaking lessened eventually. The baby kicked out and turned.
Oh, how much of my soul did I owe to that sea! What ever would I have done without the water nearby to soothe night terrors? How many times had I walked down to the lobster wharf, or picked my way along the path to the little beach to immerse my feet in the cold salt water for comfort? Just looking out at the never-ending tide untangled the knot of grief and confusion I held inside, smoothed it out with liquid fingers, and floated it downstream.
Bud knew I was afraid I would lose him. Knew I was afraid that, at any given moment, I could lose anything. That’s the way things had gone for almost eight years, ever since Carlie’s disappearance. What was to stop time and circumstance from taking away this baby or my husband?
I heard the bed creak back inside our honeymoon suite and then Bud was behind me on the balcony. “You’re all right,” he said, wrapping his arms around me from the back. “We’re all right. Junior is doing okay too. Nothing will happen to us.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“I don’t. But the odds are on our side. Pretty soon, you ain’t going to have time to worry about things that probably won’t happen.”
We swayed in the darkness on the balcony, listening to a school of fish jump until my eyelids drooped and I whispered, “Let’s go in.” Bud and I lay on our backs in bed, held hands in the dark, and slept.
3
My fear of something awful happening started when I was twelve, during the summer of 1963.
Carlie loved to travel but Daddy didn’t like to leave The Point. To satisfy her need to see something new, every year Carlie and her friend Patty, a waitress at the Lobster Shack where they both worked, traveled three hours north up the coast to a motel in Crow’s Nest Harbor. That summer, while they were there, Carlie walked into town one day and was never seen anywhere, by anyone, again.
Not knowing what happened to someone is hell on Earth. Countless catastrophes can befall a person. Believe me, I went through most of them in my mind. I even had visions, real visions, about how my mother may have met her end, each scene more horrible than the last. Nightmares grabbed hold of my heart and shook it until confusion and fear almost broke me in two.
My head also veered in another direction regarding my mother’s fate. This path was as dark, in another way. Sometimes, I believed she had actually left me for another life. That possibility caused me to constantly look for her wherever I went. A crop of red hair threw me into a tizzy, particularly red hair on a woman walking with a little bounce in her step. I stopped going anywhere because I was always on alert, which tuckered me out. But I had to hope in my worn-out heart that she was alive somewhere. It was better than her being dead.
Carlie was a joy to be around, full of life and laughter and mischief. She was always pulling something. She and Patty loved to shake things up. The last trick they pulled together was this: Patty and Carlie got drunk after a shift at the Lobster Shack and they dyed their hair. Patty went to Carlie’s red, while Carlie took on Patty’s blond. This unannounced change upset my father, but she charmed him into liking it. Not too long after that, Carlie and Patty left for Crow’s Nest Harbor.
Daddy looked and searched and called everyone who could possibly help find Carlie. When no one could, he took to the bottle and left me to fend for myself for the most part. Mornings, if he got up in time, he was still drunk. He’d throw together some kind of lunch for me and then growl if I questioned anything. I had always been a good student, but I hated going to school because, besides being flat, tall, and skinny, I was the girl whose mother had vanished. I could sense the other kids’ eyes on me and hear their whispers. But no sense talking to Daddy about it. He told me to “get on with it.” But neither of us got on with much of anything. Without Carlie, the heart and soul of our family, things fell apart.
Stella showed up around Christmas that year, only four months after Carlie’s disappearance. I hadn’t liked her before she showed up, and after she showed up I hated her. Stella had dated Daddy in high school, and then waited around for him to ask her to marry him. She left town in a huff, hoping he would chase her and beg her to come back. Instead, Carlie met Daddy and Daddy married her. Stella came back, started working at Ray’s, and took every chance she could to be mean to both Carlie and me. When she showed up at Daddy’s house and pretended to like me, it was a bit too much to take. I made no bones about my disgust for her, but Daddy needed little persuasion to let her take care of him. He didn’t care how I felt. After a season of their nonsense, I decided to run away, but Grand stopped me at the end of Daddy’s driveway and took me into her house.
Grand was Daddy’s mother. She was a big-boned, big-hearted Yankee, loving and practical. As I mentioned, she taught me things, made me toe the line, and could not have been a better influence on a lonely, confused, grieving girl. Grand had a love affair with Jesus, a sure, pure devotion. She didn’t force me into a relationship with him and she didn’t judge me, the way I felt Ida did at times. She just lived her life according to the way she thought Jesus would want her to, with tolerance, patience, and humor that she used as examples to keep me from flying off the deep end. I lived with her for four years before I lost her to the stroke. I was seventeen. That’s when I quit school and took up with Andy Barrington, who was as fucked-up as me. He was driving when we had the car accident.
The accident was triggered when Andy’s father, Edward Barrington, surprised us by traveling up to the cottage and disturbing our winter love nest. I remember what happened up until the accident. Edward had come to take Andy back home to Massachusetts with him. He told me that Andy had been thrown out of many schools for smoking dope, which surprised me because Andy had told me he was up at the cottage to “take a break.” Andy told his father we weren’t coming with him, but Edward told him the sheriff was on his way. We walked outside, heading for Andy’s truck so we could leave. Edward followed us, slipped on the back steps of the cottage, and knocked himself unconscious. Andy ignored me when I suggested we help him. Andy took Edward’s car instead of his truck because he said it was faster. We took off at a high rate of speed. The last thing I remember was flying into a grove of trees made to look fragile by the car’s headlights. We should have died, I guess, but we ended up in separate hospitals in separate states, both badly hurt. I recovered at Daddy’s house. Edward survived and sent Andy to military school. I never heard from him again.
Daddy and I grew closer while I got better, although I gave Stella a hard time. When I was able, I made a break for it over to Grand’s house, with Bud’s help.
Daddy died the summer I was eighteen. Sometimes, it feels like it never happened, even though I was with him on the boat at the time, and when we buried him at sea. But Stella, who really did love him, will always remind me that he’s gone.
Throughout all of this, I grew to appreciate the little community I lived in. The Butts family, the Warner family, and Ray kept an eye on me, fed me, took me in for overnights and parties, and made me part of their families. Now that I was older and things were normal, I hoped to give them some of the support they’d given me as Bud and I, and the baby, settled into our lives as a married couple.
I gave a lot of thought to the kind of mother I wanted to be. I couldn’t wait for the baby to call me “Mama.” Me calling my mother Carlie was okay with me, but I ad
mit that sometimes I felt more like her friend or little sister. Grand took charge, gave me orders, told me what my responsibilities were, and let me be a kid. That’s what I wanted for my kids. It was my job to take on the big stuff. It was their job to not have to worry about that.
I wanted calm. I wanted peace. I wanted nothing more than to be a wife and a mother and to make beautiful things and bake wonderful bread. I wanted to wake up and look out and be grateful for the place I lived and the day just ahead. But I had been through too much to expect that life would be simple. Thus far in my life, Fate had a habit of flinging me ass over teakettle into yet another unasked-for adventure. I hoped that my settling down would bore Fate.
But, as Grand liked to say when I was impatient, “Wait and see, Florine.”
4
We came home after our honeymoon night to a house decorated with ribbons and a refrigerator full of wedding food. We ate leftovers for a few days, and after that, Ida brought supper to us almost every night. I was thankful, because the downward pull of the baby pressed against my weakened back. The car accident had twisted it badly, and I would always have pain. Sometimes I cursed out Andy as I beached on the sofa, knitting baby blankets and sweaters sized from birth to one year old. I pondered what to name a girl. Bud had taken charge of naming any sons we would have.
“Why can’t I think about boy names?” I said.
Bud shrugged. “I like the idea of you naming our girl.”
“How many kids you think we’ll have?” I asked.
“About ten, I think.”
“That’s a lot of names. We’d better get cracking.”
“Later. It’s wicked hard to be on top of you these days. I’m scared of heights.”
We were joking about the number of babies. I knew that my body wouldn’t be able to do this ten times. My doctor had been surprised that I had gotten this far without the pain that was just setting in.
“Stupid,” I said, aloud, one afternoon. “Stupid me.”
Written on My Heart Page 4
