The Stone Necklace

by Carla Damron

  “It’s not that hard to get a real estate license,” Elliott said. “Unless the rules have changed. You need to take a course, then pass a test, then sign on with a broker.”

  “What kind of course?” she asked.

  “You can take it online. Or maybe at the tech school.” He thumbed through the book. “It says it can be hard finding a broker but that’s one thing Phillip can do for us.”

  Lena huffed out a noise of disgust. Phillip was useless, yet so much of her future—of their future—depended on him.

  Elliott closed the book. “So I was thinking, maybe I’d stick around for a while. Maybe give this real estate gig a try. I know I’ll have to buy a couple of suits, and believe me, I shudder at the thought, but otherwise, I think I can make it work.”

  Lena’s hands wrapped around the table edge, knuckles blanching to white. “No.”

  He speared a bacon slice with his fork. “I knew you’d say that.”

  “Then why bring it up? You are an artist, Elliott. You are not a businessman. That kind of life—that’s not who you’re meant to be.”

  “Can I have some toast?” he asked.

  “Of course.” It was an unusual request. Elliott was always self-sufficient, tending to his own needs, and lately, trying to tend to hers. She slipped two slices of wheat bread into the toaster. At least breakfast was something she was good at. Maybe she could have a career as a Waffle House waitress.

  “You don’t know what I was meant to be,” Elliott said. “You think you do. You always had plans for me but I’m not sure they’re the same ones I have.”

  She stared at him, and jumped when the toast popped up behind her. She slapped them on his plate.

  “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

  “I’m not angry.” They both knew that was a lie. She wasn’t even sure what had her so furious, except she had always thought Elliott was happy, that he had what she didn’t: the chance to use his talent. To not live the same boring life as everyone else.

  “I love my music, but it doesn’t have to be my career. To be honest, it kind of sucks as a career. Maybe I need something else. A real job, as Sims likes to say.”

  “Now you’re taking advice from him? After disagreeing with anything he’s suggested for twenty-six years?” Of course, this was an exaggeration. Elliott looked up to his elder sibling, wanting his approval. When he had sent them the CD last year, his first question had been, “Did Sims listen to it?”

  “I’ve given New York four and half years, Mom. Four and a half years and I still live in a crappy, bug-infested apartment. I live on credit cards when business is slow. And I’m tired. I’m tired of the whole damn scene.” He pushed the plate away, jostling the vase. A pink petal dropped to the table.

  She almost scolded him for cursing but her son was an adult. He could use whatever language he wanted. He could make his own decisions about his life, too—if he made them based on his own needs and goals. Still, while she’d love to have him home, she couldn’t picture him moving here without it being a defeat.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” she said.

  When he took his plate to the sink, he left the book on the table. Lena opened it to the first page.

  CHAPTER 21

  Two quick bursts of the doorbell sounded three seconds apart, and Sandy wasn’t sure if she should answer. The Lean Cuisine in front of her held all the appeal of a jar of expired baby food, and if she opened that door, she’d never hear the end of it. You’re eating that?

  The bell rang again. She scanned the cluttered living room—couldn’t Sean have left his books in one stack instead of six? She smoothed her top, gave her hair a finger comb, and answered the door. Jesse had on shades, a slim gray suit, with an indigo necktie swinging loose around his collar. He lifted a large paper bag. “I brought ravioli from Pasta Fresca.”

  “Guess I’ll have to let you in.” She backed away, the door yawning open, Jesse marching through like he belonged there. But that was Jesse, he exuded ownership of any place he entered.

  He moved to the dining table. “What the hell is that?”

  “Pasta Not-Fresca.”

  “Holy crap. What did rehab do to you?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  Jesse lifted the plastic container and took it to the kitchen. She heard it splatter in the trashcan. Next, plates appeared, cutlery, and two glasses of water. Jesse probably wanted a beer, which he wouldn’t find here.

  “Do you ever think about calling before you show up?” she asked.

  He dolloped out spheres of pasta, plump shrimp, and chunks of tomato, the garlicky smell taking command of the room. “Do you ever think about inviting me over?”

  “Touché.” She wondered why she didn’t call. She had tried during rehab; four unreturned voicemails made the nightmare harsher, but they’d been over that.

  He sliced his ravioli into tidy little bites, which he ate with his fork upside down, European style. Sandy did her best not to shovel the pasta into her waiting mouth. She couldn’t shake her hunger, even when she was full.

  “How’s work going?” he asked. It seemed an absurdly normal thing to say, like they were an average couple discussing their day. Not the trajectory their conversation usually took.

  “Fine,” she said, then corrected herself. “No, not fine. I feel like a pariah. I’m pretty sure everyone knows I’m on probation, even though it’s supposed be confidential. And yesterday, my dealer found me in the parking lot to remind me he was open for business.”

  Jesse’s fork froze. “Son of a bitch. You should report him to security. Be the best thing for you and his other victims.”

  “And I’d have his other customers stalking me if I did.”

  “Give me his name. I’ll turn him in.”

  Sandy pondered this. She’d like to have Nathan out of her world. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Cal Jefferies plays golf with me. I can slip it into conversation.”

  “You play golf with the CFO of my hospital?” Something else she hadn’t known about him. Jesse had his secrets, but tossed one out now and then like a pearl clattering along the floor.

  “He can’t putt worth a damn. Last time I threatened to take him to miniature golf.” He chased a rebel tomato with his fork. “Did talk him into a new radio-surgery high-def beam shaper though.”

  “How much did you make on that deal?” she asked, knowing he wouldn’t say.

  He grinned without answering. She grinned back.

  “My commission was twenty-three thou.”

  Her mouth gaped open, both at the enormity of the sum—made during a freaking golf game—and at the disclosure. New waters with Jesse Harper.

  “I’m in the wrong business.”

  “No you’re not. Besides, commissions aren’t steady. Every day is a gamble. You gotta roll with the lean times and conserve for the fat ones. Only way to have balance in your life.”

  Balance. She mentally said the word.

  “I feel for all the folks lamenting their 401Ks. Took a gamble and they didn’t even know it.” Jesse held up the restaurant container. “Want more?”

  She did, but she shook her head. “Something else weird happened yesterday. I got to know this family when the father was on my unit. First patient I had when I came back. Guy didn’t make it. Anyway, the fourteen-year-old daughter was admitted on Peds. The mom asked for me so I visited her.”

  Jesse sipped his water, watching.

  “The girl is an emotional wreck. Anorexic. Hinting at self-injury. She’s a desperate, isolated kid and all I can think of is how I’m the worst person she could talk to.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I’m more screwed up than she is.” Sweat sheened her face and pooled in her bra.

  Jesse poked at another ravioli.

  “She looked so . . . lost.” She dabbed at her skin with her napkin. “When I was her age, God. I was so miserable. My parents had me nailed down. Controlled every fiber of my li
fe. And the endless hours they held me hostage in that damn church. A service could last three hours, easy. And if there was a baptism or someone getting saved, much longer. I remember profound relief when I woke up on any day that wasn’t Sunday or Wednesday.”

  Memories bubbled up, unbidden. She had been a little younger than Becca when she started asking the wrong questions. Dad avowed the Bible had to be taken literally, but Sandy puzzled over Exodus where it read: If a man sells his daughter as a female slave, she is not to go free as the male slaves do.

  “So Dad, exactly when are you selling me into slavery?” she had asked.

  “Mind your mouth. You’re already a slave to your sinning ways.”

  When she found a Leviticus verse that forbade wearing “a garment upon you of two kinds of material mixed together,” she pointed to Dad’s polyester jacket. “That one might get you in trouble.”

  The back of his hand stung her cheek faster than she could blink. She didn’t even mind the pain, she’d made her point, one of many that would get her slapped, scolded, and locked in her room over the course of her adolescence. Her therapist had called it abuse but she’d seen real abuse in the hospital. What she went through had been a sucky childhood that molded her into the disaster she was now, but many, many people had been through worse.

  Jesse pushed his empty plate away. “Didn’t you use to work Peds?”

  “That was in my other life.” The one she never, ever discussed with Jesse.

  “Might be more your forte than you want to admit.”

  She shook her head. While she loved working with kids—and she had—the memory of her mistake and the infant she’d almost killed—no. She wasn’t going back to Pediatrics.

  Jesse reached over and took her hand, which for some bizarre reason had started to tremble. Why?

  Jesse lifted a napkin and wiped her face. Tears? She was crying? Holy crap. Not in front of him. She shot up from the chair and started clearing away the dishes. Anger at herself helped the tears evaporate, but now her hands were vibrating so hard she was close to shattering the plates. Christ, could she use a hit just then.

  Don’t. She eyed the cell phone on the counter. Jackie, a speed dial away. She should have gone to an NA meeting after work. Fingers on her neck. Warm, massaging, playing her shoulders like a piano. She let her head fall back, leaning into the touch, and he slid his hands under her sweater, stealth hands, working up her spine, pulsing into her flesh.

  She closed her eyes.

  Arms around her waist, slowly, gently, turning her around. Pulled against him, the sinewy strength of him, the familiar warm breath on her skin, this one escape she still allowed. His lips on hers, but something troubling . . . the faintest smell, wafting from the collar of his shirt. She tilted her face away from his, buried her nose in his neck.

  “Son of a bitch!” She pushed him, hard enough that he lost his balance and caught himself on the kitchen counter.

  “What the hell?”

  “You smoked pot. I can smell it on you. Did you light up on the way over? Is that what prompted the sudden meal delivery?”

  “Shit.” Jesse turned as though looking at her was painful.

  “You know I can’t be around that stuff.”

  “I didn’t bring it with me. I would never—” He had his hands up.

  “But you did. Maybe you don’t have a joint in your pocket, but I’ll bet it’s in your car. Christ, Jesse. I can’t be around it at all. Just smelling it makes me crazy.”

  He didn’t answer. She did feel crazy. She wanted to charge out to his Lexus and open the glove box where he kept his stash and light up.

  “You’re saying that if I’m to see you, I need to live like a monk? No beer? No pot, even if I’m away from you? This is getting to be a damned expensive relationship.”

  “Well I’m sorry if I’m such a huge inconvenience for you.” How could he not understand what life was like for her? How she had lost so much and sometimes she was doing good to keep drawing breath in this gray place that was her life.

  Jesse returned to the table. He brought the glasses and forks to the sink. Closed the container holding the leftovers and placed them in the refrigerator, his movements fluid like mercury. After placing his napkin in the trash, he said, “Guess I’ll be going,” and walked out.

  BECCA LIKED DR. OWENS’S office. She sank into the buttery leather sofa, the red throw pillow squeezed in her lap, with Dr. Owens across from her in a swivel chair. She wondered about Dr. Owens’s earrings: red dangly things that bumped against her neck. Didn’t they irritate her? She had unblemished brown skin and a strong jaw, not like Becca’s, which was fleshy and undefined. Dr. Owens’s eyes were her best feature: big, and the shade of dark chocolate.

  Becca’s eyes might be pretty if they weren’t so close together. There was no fixing that. Her giant hands she’d gotten from Dad. She’d always wished for Mom’s delicate, sloped fingers and narrow wrists. Artistic hands, like Elliott had, which was so unfair.

  “Something on your mind, Becca?” Dr. Owens asked.

  “I like your hair.” She clutched at a strand of her own, which was like neither parent’s, hanging lifeless as mown hay.

  “Thank you,” Dr. Owens replied.

  “Mine’s more like straw.”

  Dr. Owens frowned. “And what kind of thinking is that?”

  “Negative thinking,” Becca said by rote. It wasn’t like she wanted to think about how ugly she was. She couldn’t turn it off like a light switch.

  “Have you been keeping your journal?” Dr. Owens asked.

  Becca pulled it from her book bag. In the first section she recorded what she ate. It stunned her how much they were making her put into her mouth, but for the first time in forever, she wasn’t hungry. The second section of the journal was much harder. Her feeling/thinking section. She was to record each negative thought that interrupted her day and beside it, write down a more positive one, or an affirmation. Becca had recorded ten thoughts, when she’d had well over a gazillion, and labored over each “corrective cognition” she was supposed to write. “I am fat and ugly,” replaced with, “I am beautiful just as I am.” “I ate too much,” supplanted with, “I must nurture and care for my body.” It made her want to barf, but she wasn’t supposed to do that anymore either.

  “Anything you’d like to share?” Dr. Owens asked.

  She flipped to the food diary. “Are you sure I need to eat this much? It seems like a lot.”

  “You’ve been meeting with the nutritionist. What does she say?”

  “That I need the calories to reach a healthy body weight,” which Becca did not believe. One hundred twenty-five pounds was a ridiculous goal. She’d have to buy Plus-size jeans and Spanx.

  “So, your first day back at school,” Dr Owens said. “How did it go?”

  “Okay.” Becca tugged at the corner of the Band-Aid the nurse had applied after taking blood from her arm. It had hurt the first time, but she was getting used to it. The weighing in, though—and not being allowed to see how much she’d gained—she didn’t get that part.

  “Okay how?”

  “Everybody was nice to me. Even the principal stopped me in the hall to say how sorry he was.” She had hated the attention. Her history teacher had approached her desk, stooped down, and said, “I’m so sorry, Rebecca,” because she never called Becca by her nickname. Mostly the kids avoided her, except Kayla and Dylan, who’d walked her to class, and sat with her at lunch. Then Amanda had approached her in the bathroom to say, “You are too nice to have something like this happen.”

  “Was it uncomfortable, being back?” Dr. Owens asked.

  Becca reached in her purse and pulled out the card that Mr. Brunson had given her. It was creamy white, with hand printing:

  The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,

  The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Thomas Gray, 1716–1771

&nbs
p; “Who gave it to you?” Dr. Owens asked.

  “My stupid poetry teacher. Only somebody else wrote it.”

  Dr. Owens handed it back. “What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know. I never know what that man is talking about.” She stared down at the last line. She had read those words a dozen times over the course of the afternoon.

  “What?” Dr. Owens asked.

  Becca glanced up at her.

  “You had a different expression. A flicker of something. Do you know what?”

  She traced the word “darkness” on the card. She didn’t feel her grief like darkness, more like a steady, unyielding gray. “It’s nothing.” She stuck the card back in her purse.

  Dr. Owens thumped a pen against the pad of paper she always held. “What’s going on, Becca?”

  Becca shifted, pushing herself deeper into the sofa cushions. She wished she could tuck herself inside it like a pearl hidden within an oyster.

  “Kayla asked me why I was leaving school early.”

  “To come here,” Dr. Owens clarified. “Did you tell her?”

  “I don’t want her to know.” If Becca had her way, nobody would know she was seeing Dr. Owens. She’d wear a raincoat and mask every time she set foot in this building.

  “Are you embarrassed?”

  This was a trap. If Becca said she was embarrassed or ashamed, it would have to go down in the negative cognition column.

  Dr. Owens cocked her head to the side the way Spats used to do when he was a kitten. “It’s important that we’re honest with each other, Becca.”

  Holy crap. She could. Not. Win. “Maybe I’m a little embarrassed. I shouldn’t be.”

  Dr. Owens smiled. “Let’s try that again. You don’t want Kayla to know because you’re worried she’ll judge you?”

  Becca gripped the journal, remembering the ugly things Kayla always said about Amanda who couldn’t help that she was built like a panda bear. “Of course she judges me. She judges everybody. It’s sort of her job as chief diva of Woodland Middle School.”