by Karen White
Merritt must have recognized it, too, because she stood.
“Merritt?”
“Yes, Owen?”
“You can unplug my Darth Vader night-light if you want.”
“All right. But only if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
Merritt stood and leaned down to kiss Owen’s forehead. “Good night, Rocky.”
“Good night, Mary Ann,” he said with a sleepy giggle.
“Why not Ginger? She had better hair.”
“Okay. Good night, Ginger.”
Loralee smiled to herself at the mention of the hair, thinking that Merritt might not be so hopeless after all, then quietly backed away from the room, pausing at the top of the staircase so she wouldn’t be seen.
“Merritt?” Owen’s voice slurred again as he called out to his sister.
She paused in the doorway where Loralee had been. “Yes?”
“Or you could leave it on. I’m only ten.”
“True. Okay, then, I’ll leave it on. Good night,” she said again.
There was no response, only the assurance that Owen had worked through his fears with Merritt and had finally found sleep.
Loralee rushed down the stairs as quickly as she could in the dark in her long nightgown, not wanting to be seen by Merritt as they crossed paths to their rooms. She stood in the darkened foyer, opening her eyes wider. What Merritt had said was true—there was light. It came from the tall windows where the glow from the streetlights fell inside in ribbons of white. Loralee could see the shapes of the furniture that had become dear and familiar to her already, recognized the wallpaper on the wall transferred from red and cream to shades of gray.
Her fingers itched to write down the words rushing to her head before she forgot them. Even in the blackest darkness, there is always light shining somewhere.
A sob rose in her throat, but she held it back. Someone was coming down the stairs, and she didn’t want anybody to see her crying. Not because she was embarrassed to cry—a good cry was healthy for everybody. It was just that she didn’t think Owen or Merritt was ready to see it.
She tiptoed to the kitchen, grateful for once that she wasn’t wearing her heels, then sat down at the table in the dark with her back to the door and began to cry softly into her hands.
The overhead light flickered on and Loralee glanced up in surprise, thinking just for a moment that the ancient wiring had finally gone haywire. Or that the ghosts she suspected lurked in the corners of the old house had decided to show themselves.
Instead she smelled the soft lemon scent of the hand lotion she’d given to Merritt when she’d noticed her cracked cuticles, and quickly rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Are you all right?” Merritt asked.
“I’m fine. With all the time spent working in the garden, I think I’ve become sensitive to something out there. I can barely breathe, and my eyes and skin are so itchy that I couldn’t sleep. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
Merritt moved into the kitchen and took a seat at the table opposite Loralee, giving her a full view of Loralee’s face. Merritt quickly hid her surprise as she took in Loralee’s puffy eyes and runny nose. “Those are some pretty bad allergies. Maybe you should take something before you head outside again.”
Loralee nodded as she reached for a tissue from a box on the table and carefully dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose. “I will, thank you.”
Merritt leaned back in her chair. “I suppose that was you I heard in the hallway upstairs while I was talking with Owen.”
“Probably. Unless you think it might have been a ghost.”
Merritt’s face stilled. “There’s no such thing.” She sounded like a child trying to prove something wrong just by saying it.
“There’s so much in this great big universe that we don’t understand. But just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Kind of like love, don’t you think? Many people never really experience it, but they still have faith that it’s out there.”
Merritt hugged her arms around her middle, something Loralee had seen people do on planes during bad turbulence.
Loralee leaned forward, feeling a bit like Dr. Phil during one of his TV shows. Except he always wore a suit and not a leopard-print peignoir. “You must miss your husband a lot.”
The look in Merritt’s eyes made Loralee sit back in a hurry. It took her a moment to recognize what she’d seen there. It was fear. But fear of what? Acknowledging how much she missed Cal? Or fear that the question would lead to another?
“Why did you say that?”
Loralee shrugged. “I’m usually pretty good at reading people and situations, but I get a lot of mixed signals from you about your husband, and to be honest, I just can’t figure it out. Was he a lot like Gibbes?”
“No,” Merritt answered without even pausing to think about it. Which meant she’d already been thinking about it a lot. “Except for their eyes and the color of their hair, they are nothing alike.”
“I’m taking that as a good thing,” Loralee said, bending forward to ease the pain in her abdomen.
“Not that it matters. Cal is gone, and Gibbes isn’t a permanent fixture in my life.”
Loralee considered her stepdaughter. “You know, if you married Gibbes, you wouldn’t have to change the monograms on any of your towels or linens.”
Merritt, whose legs had been crossed, jerked up so quickly her knee hit the underside of the table. “What are you talking about? I’m not marrying anybody—especially not Gibbes. I don’t ever want to get married again. Marriage . . . it didn’t suit me.”
“Maybe it’s because you just didn’t marry the right man. It’s pretty rare that a person gets it right on the first try. I was married once, before your daddy.”
Merritt rubbed her knee as she looked at Loralee with surprise. “I didn’t know that.”
“I was still wet behind the ears—barely eighteen. We were married for about five seconds. Mama said I was making a mistake, which of course meant I had to go ahead and do it. And after the divorce I moved back in with Mama and she never once said, ‘I told you so.’ That’s when she said that life is a lot like the interstate, where every exit is an entrance someplace else.” Loralee smiled. “And she was right. My divorce made me see that I needed to make some changes, and that’s when I decided I wanted to be a flight attendant. And if that hadn’t happened, then I never would have met your daddy.
“So, see? Maybe it wasn’t that marriage didn’t suit you. Maybe you just weren’t married to the right person.”
“Are you not wearing any makeup?”
Loralee blinked at the abrupt change of subject. Robert had been that way, too—changing the subject when the current one no longer interested him. It must be a New England thing, because Southerners would talk a subject to death until it lay gasping and panting in the dust. And if it were an unpleasant one, they’d just end it with, “Bless your heart.”
“No, I’m not—well, except for my tattooed eyebrows and eyeliner. My mama taught me that the first rule to having good skin was to always take your makeup off before you went to bed at night.”
Merritt considered her for a moment. “You look pretty without it, you know. Although I think I need to change the bulbs in here—you look a little yellow. Why do you wear it?”
Loralee smiled her flight-attendant smile. “Because I like how it makes me feel—strong, powerful. Confident. It’s like a man putting on a suit and tie, I guess, but more fun. You know us Southern girls are born with a makeup brush in one hand and a lipstick in the other.”
Despite her best efforts, Merritt laughed, the sound bubbling out of her mouth.
“You should try it sometime,” Loralee said.
“I wouldn’t even know where to begin. My mother didn’t wear makeup either.”
Their eyes met in mutual surprise that Merritt’s last sentence hadn’t come out as an accusation.
Being careful no
t to push too much, Loralee said, “When you’re ready, I’d be happy to give you a starter course.” Her gaze dipped down to Merritt’s shirt. “What are you wearing?”
Merritt looked down as if she’d forgotten what she’d slipped over her head only a few hours ago. “It’s one of Cal’s sweatshirts.”
“Do you wear it to feel him close to you again?”
Merritt opened her mouth to speak, her lips moving as she thought about her answer.
“If you don’t know for sure, then my guess is you wear it because you always have. Does it make you feel good? Or sexy? Or even like a girl?”
Merritt frowned. “It’s something to sleep in. I don’t need to feel anything but tired when I put it on.”
It was Loralee’s turn to look surprised. “Do you mean to say that after being married for seven years, it never occurred to you that what you wear to bed should make you feel something?”
Merritt squirmed in her seat. “Cal was away a lot at the firehouse, and it gets pretty cold in Maine. I needed to be warm, and this worked.”
“It’s not cold here.” Loralee looked pointedly at her.
Merritt shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to sleep in—well, except for a football jersey. Besides, I roll the sleeves up so I’m not too warm.”
“Well, we can certainly fix that,” Loralee said, her mind racing in all sorts of directions, and she was happy to follow it down any one because then she didn’t have to think about how bad she felt.
She stood and went to the freezer and yanked it open. Ice coated the surface like the fur on a winter hat. “Make sure your next freezer is self-defrosting. I’ve already taken an ice pick to this, but it doesn’t seem to help.”
Reaching in, she pulled out a gallon of ice cream and then retrieved the fudge sauce from the refrigerator. “And you need a microwave.” She pulled out a small saucepan from one of the lower cabinets and placed it on top of the stove.
“What are you doing?” Merritt asked.
“I’m making you a chocolate sundae. Isn’t that why you came down here?”
Merritt’s face was exactly like Owen’s when she caught him sneaking cookies from the cookie jar. She turned to tell Robert to look, forgetting once more that her husband wasn’t there anymore to share parts of their day, to call attention to the funny things Owen did and said. He was gone, and she’d accepted it and had even learned to live with it. But that didn’t mean she’d ever stop looking for him.
Merritt opened her mouth to deny it, but Loralee cut her off with a wave of the ice-cream scoop. “Owen has a sweet tooth the size of Texas, and it had to come from somewhere, because it didn’t come from me.” She placed three large scoops of ice cream in a bowl. As she poured a good amount of chocolate syrup into the saucepan, she said, “I’m a salty kind of person—I love chips and French fries and pretty much anything fried. Robert loved his desserts, that’s for sure. He couldn’t get enough of my red velvet cake—and Owen, too. I should make one for you. And if half of it is missing when I come down in the morning, I’ll know I was right about you.”
She adjusted the burner under the pan. “Only one burner works on this stove.”
“Loralee?”
“Not that I’m trying to rush you into anything, but a kitchen is the heart of any home. I think once you get the kitchen exactly as you want it, you’ll feel more at home here.”
“Loralee?” Merritt’s voice was insistent enough to make Loralee stop talking and turn to her stepdaughter.
“Yes?”
“Are you sure you’re all right? It looks like you’re crying.”
Loralee touched her face and her fingers came away damp. “It’s the allergies,” she said, but didn’t sound convincing even to her own ears.
“Come sit down, all right? I can make my own sundae.”
Too tired to argue, Loralee switched places with Merritt, watching as she turned off the burner and poured the chocolate over the ice cream. “Do we have any candied cherries or caramel pecans?”
Loralee dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “No, but I’ll add them to the grocery list. Maybe some peanut-butter chips, too?”
“Oh, yes,” Merritt said as she brought her sundae to the table and placed two spoons between them.
“No, thank you,” Loralee said, her stomach already protesting at the sickly sweet smell of it. “And what’s a ‘pee-can’?”
Merritt paused with a brimming spoonful of ice cream and fudge sauce suspended in front of her mouth. “It’s a nut. You know, like in pee-can pie. You’re from the South—I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”
“I know what a ‘puh-cahn’ is. That’s a nut that you eat. A pee-can is something a soldier takes on maneuvers. If you’re going to be living in the South, you need to know the difference.”
Merritt smiled as she swallowed her first bite. “Well, no matter what you call them, they taste great with caramel sauce and poured on ice cream.”
They sat in a comfortable silence while Merritt ate and Loralee studied her face for future makeup lessons. When Merritt was finished, she washed and dried her bowl and spoon, then put them away before pouring herself a tall glass of water to take upstairs.
“Aren’t you coming up?” she asked as she stood by the doorway.
Loralee shook her head. “In a little while. Since your daddy died, I find that I can’t sleep through the night anymore. I think I’ll watch a little TV for a bit. Hopefully there will be something good on one of the three channels that have any reception.”
“Good luck with that.” Merritt paused in the doorway, almost swaying with indecision. “Thanks for the sundae.”
“You’re welcome.” She stared into her stepdaughter’s blue eyes, and saw her son’s. “Thank you for letting Owen and me stay here.”
Merritt gave a perfunctory nod. “Good night, Loralee.”
“Good night, Merritt.”
She waited until Merritt’s slow footsteps reached the top of the stairs, followed by the quiet click of her bedroom door closing. Then Loralee turned off the kitchen light and let herself out into the back garden.
The smell of rain hung heavy in the air, the cloud-covered sky above a moonless and starless dome of black. A storm-born breeze trickled into the garden, the sea-glass wind chimes waltzing in slow circles.
Loralee looked up at the sky, realizing that what Merritt had told Owen wasn’t completely true—that sometimes the dark simply absorbed all the light you couldn’t see, and you just had to have enough love and faith in your heart to trust that it was there.
She sat on the bench for a long time, her eyes dry as she studied the darkened sky even after the rain began to fall.
chapter 20
MERRITT
I fed the red and white checked material through the sewing machine, the pulsing needle like the mouth of a baby bird. My first two attempts had been disastrous, ending up with knotted thread and clumped fabric. Despite popular opinion, operating a sewing machine wasn’t like riding a bicycle. The needle jammed again, pulling on the fabric, my foot lifting from the pedal a fraction of a minute too late to prevent another train wreck.
I knew part of the problem was my lack of concentration. Each inch of fabric, each tiny stitch, every whir of the motor reminded me of my grandmother. Not just of us sewing together, but of the joy we’d felt in creating something. Which brought to mind the letter she’d received, and the handkerchiefs, and how I’d never seen the sewing machine again after that day. I stared down at the knot of fabric bunched beneath the needle, but saw only bright red monograms on a white linen handkerchief.
“What are you making?”
I looked up at Owen and Maris, who’d approached without my being aware, and felt a little offended that they couldn’t tell what it was. “A tablecloth.”
“Or maybe a drop cloth?” Gibbes moved to stand behind the children, looking over their heads at the red and white disaster.
“Why are you here?” I asked, too annoyed to
check my manners.
“It’s good to see you, too. I rang the doorbell and Rocky let me in. I just saw my last patient of the day and figured now would be a good time to pick up all the recycling boxes.” He indicated the sewing machine. “You need to hold the fabric with a really light touch—don’t try to feed it into the needle. Slowly press the pedal to gently pull it forward and you just let the fabric move so it doesn’t bunch. Makes it a lot easier.”
I remembered my mother and grandmother both telling me the same thing: that I needed to slow down and focus. I sometimes wondered whether they would even recognize me now. Except for the decision to move to Beaufort, my life for the last decade had been a plodding and deliberate existence, every day planned to go unnoticed and unremarked.
Frustrated, I turned off the machine and slid back the chair. “And how would you know so much about sewing?”
Gibbes stepped back as I stood. “Everybody had to take home ec in high school. And shop. So I know how to use a needle and thread as well as a hammer and nail.”
“I’m guessing the needle-and-thread thing works out great for you in your chosen profession.”
“Yes, ma’am. And I’ve been told that I’m pretty handy with my tools, too.”
Our eyes met as we both realized what he’d actually said.
He laughed, not looking embarrassed at all. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it that way. Although I refuse to retract my statement.”
I put a hand over my mouth, trying to hide my own laugh, and for a brief moment I thought he might actually be flirting with me. My laugh died quickly as I remembered that I wasn’t the kind of woman men flirted with. At least, not according to Cal.
Flustered, I tried to gather the fabric to tuck it out of the way. I managed to do nothing more than bunch it up so that it would require ironing if and when I ever finished it, but at least I had time to allow my face to return to normal.
“Mrs. Heyward?”
“Yes, Maris?”
“Can you take us to the marina? Rocky says he hasn’t been there yet.”
“I, um . . . Will we need life jackets?”
“Not unless you’re planning on getting on a boat or going swimming,” Gibbes said, not exactly hiding his smile. “I think Maris and Owen just wanted to go look at the boats.”