by Lisa Duffy
“He’s such a pain in the ass,” he muttered. Then, “I don’t want to get in the middle of this.”
“It’s a little late for that.”
“Hope. This isn’t my information to give.”
“Well, apparently Jack can’t give it either,” I said. “And look where it landed him.” I waved to where Jack was, somewhere in the hospital, hooked up to tubes and lines and monitors.
Boon swore under his breath, shifted in his seat.
“Boon, please. As his friend. And mine.”
He was silent, staring at the floor.
“Whatever it was, it was a long time ago. This is ridiculous.” I was angry now, and it came out in my voice. “Was it about fishing? About a girl? What?”
Boon groaned and threw up his hands, faced me. “I don’t see how this is going to help, but what do I know? It was a girl. Hannah something. I don’t remember her last name. She moved here our senior year, got serious with Finn right away. They were that couple, you know? Pretty cheerleader meets the football guy, the golden couple. Only problem was he had a drinking and steroid problem, and she had a temper. They’d have these colossal fights in the middle of the school parking lot. Didn’t matter who was around. Anyway, the summer after we graduated, she got a job working at the Wharf Rat as a waitress.”
“Enter Jack,” I said.
“Yes and no. He wasn’t interested. And that made her more interested. I swear whenever we pulled in on the boat after hauling traps, she’d be on the patio, watching for him, waiting to take her break just at the right time. He didn’t stand a chance.”
“She was pretty?”
“Not pretty,” he said. “Beautiful.” But his voice was hard.
“You didn’t like her?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Finn was a jealous guy. Add the alcohol, the steroids, and he’s a gasket waiting to blow. I think he cheated on her, pissed her off one too many times, and she used Jack to get back at him.”
“Used him how?” I asked.
He looked at me, waited. “For his stunning conversation skills,” he said after a minute.
Boon had his eyebrows up, and when he saw that I understood what he meant, he rolled his eyes. I took a deep breath and motioned for him to continue.
“You sure?” he asked, and I nodded.
“Jack got pretty lit after work one night, drinking beers with me and Eddy on the dock. She showed up after her shift, and that was that. Game over.”
“Meaning they started seeing each other?”
“If that’s what you want to call it. It didn’t last long. Maybe a couple of weeks. Long enough for her to get what she needed to make Finn jealous. She found him at a bar one night and told him about Jack. Threw it in his face from what I heard. Publicly. Eddy was there, and he said she came right over to Finn and lit into him.” He paused. “Finn left the bar with a bunch of his buddies and they went looking for Jack.” His voice grew quiet. “Beat the shit out of him. He couldn’t see out of his eye for weeks.”
He touched the place over his eye where Jack’s scar was. My eyes went wide.
“He told me he was on the boat when that happened.”
Boon bit his lip, let it go. “He was. That’s where they jumped him. Four of them. The defensive line, basically. When I found him, there was so much blood on the deck, I thought he was dead.”
I looked over to see if he was exaggerating, but his face was drawn, serious.
“Turns out the blood wasn’t all his. Four on one, and he managed to break Finn’s nose.” There was a hint of pride in his voice, but I saw from his face that he was bothered by the memory of it.
We sat in silence while I tried to wipe the image of Jack lying in a pool of blood from my mind. Jack hated to talk about his past, said the day his life really began was the day he met me. It used to drive me insane, the way he’d dodge my questions, kiss me to make me stop grilling him. But then we were married, and the years passed, and suddenly we had a history of our own.
I thought back to the night of the party. I heard Jack shouting, They’re not allowed to come over here again.
What he’d meant was you’re not allowed to bring my past back like this. You’re not allowed to do that.
“Why wouldn’t he have told me this?” I asked out loud, more to myself than to Boon. “It was so long ago. He couldn’t think I’d be upset over something as stupid as two guys fighting over a girl.”
Boon looked at me. Stared at me. Stared at me the way someone stares at you when they’re about to change your reality, your perception of things.
And suddenly I knew what it was. I don’t know how. Maybe it was Boon’s face, full of regret. I held up my hand so he wouldn’t say it out loud, and we sat in silence.
I blinked several times. I concentrated on breathing. I wondered how to ask Boon if there was a child out there that belonged to Jack that I didn’t know existed.
Instead I asked him if he’d fallen in love with her. This Hannah I’d never heard of before now.
“God, no. I think he just thought they’d fool around for a while. Then after Finn jumped him, Jack tried to break it off with her and she told him she was pregnant.”
“It was his?”
Boon turned to me. “Sort of a moot point.”
He paused, cleared his throat. “A couple of days later, she swallowed a bottle of her mother’s meds and chased them back with a fifth of vodka. Never woke up.”
There was a flipping sensation in my belly. I swallowed the hard lump that had formed in my throat. Swallowed again. I felt the tears well up behind my eyes.
“He kept all of this a secret from me,” I said, dumbfounded.
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
I shook my head. “Why?”
Boon sighed. “It really messed him up. Jack was always the straight-and-narrow guy. Only child, never knew his father, and his mother was always in one crisis or another with some guy. His grandfather was the only thing stable in his life. And he was always working on the boat. So that’s where Jack went. He was the same then as he is now. And you know how that is. He doesn’t talk about anything that bothers him. Took him over a year, drunk one night, to tell me he felt responsible. That it was his fault. That if he’d stayed away from her, none of it would have happened.”
“That’s a burden to carry all these years.”
Boon shrugged. “If you want my two cents, I think the reason he didn’t tell you has to do with forgiving.”
“I would have forgiven him. I didn’t even know him when this happened.”
“I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about him,” Boon said. “I don’t think he’s forgiven himself. I’m not sure he knows how to.”
There was a long stretch of time we sat without talking. Then the nurse came to say Jack was out of recovery. She looked at me and said, you can see your husband now, and the first thing that came to mind was yes. Yes, I can. But was my husband ready to be seen?
24
Kat
It turns out Smelliot isn’t so bad after all. I almost fell over when Mom said he was staying with us for a week. She was putting sheets covered with soccer balls on the bed in Maddie’s old room when she told me this, and I had to sit down on the edge of the bed and ask her what this meant. She couldn’t mean sleep at our house. As in use the toilet, eat at our table, wake up in our house. I told her this and made my eyes wide to show how awful that would be.
She waved her hand at me to stand up so she could tuck the sheet under the mattress and told me that, yes, staying with us did mean sleeping here, and eating here, and using the bathroom. And I was to be a perfect hostess. I shook my head at her and left the room. The only hostess I knew was the girl with the big fake smile who carried menus and brought us to the table whenever we went to the Wharf Rat, and if Mom thought I was going to smile like that the whole time Smelliot was here, then I had an even bigger problem.
My first thought was
to go upstairs and stay with Grandma. Then I remembered Grandma was back in Florida. I’d tried to convince her to stay longer, even made her an ice-cream sundae with caramel sauce mixed with coconut flakes. But she reminded me that she’d already stayed extra long so she could help spread the rest of Maddie’s ashes. She said it was time she went home so Mom could get back to regular business. I asked her what regular business Mom had to get back to, and she looked over at me and said her life in a serious way, and since I wasn’t feeling all that serious, I shrugged and went back to eating my ice cream.
Jess had come up with the idea to put the rest of Maddie’s ashes in the sunflower garden at the Salt House. Or maybe it was all of us. We’d been sitting at the table after dinner one night, and Dad was in the best mood. Maybe it was because he was taking a long vacation. Or maybe it was because we were moving when the construction was done. Or maybe it was because Mom had made brownies and cut them up in wedges and put the whole pan on the table and we were eating out of it with our fingers. Piece by piece. Like a cake. And Mom wasn’t even telling us to stop. She was just watching us, and then she left the kitchen and came back carrying the wooden box with Maddie’s ashes.
I still felt bad for stealing them and making such a scene that day. But Mom had promised she’d tell Dad and he wouldn’t be mad at all, and she was right because even though the box had water rings all over from when it fell in the ocean, Dad reached over and pulled me onto his lap when Mom sat down and asked everyone to think about a good place to spread them.
Dad said, “She liked dirt,” and I nodded, because she did. She’d crawl as fast as she could to dig her hands into it before anyone could grab her. And then it seemed like everyone thought of the same thing at once. Jess said, “Sunflower,” and Dad said, “Garden,” and Mom said, “Perfect,” and I just smiled and took a bite of my brownie. Because it was perfect.
And then the day had come, and the sun had been so bright and the sunflowers so tall and yellow, bent over and looking down at us like a family of happy faces, that I wasn’t even sad like I was that day at the ocean. I told Mom this before I went to bed that night. She said she felt the same way, and wasn’t life funny like that? Sometimes, she said, what you think is going to happen is nothing like what actually does.
I had to agree because not in a million years would I think we’d be moving to the Salt House. Like to live.
Which was why Smelliot was staying with us. Peggy was taking Alex to some boat-building school way up in the part of Maine that always made Grandma do a fake shiver. And when Peggy got back after dropping Alex off, she and Smelliot were renting our house. Mom thought it was a good idea that Smelliot spend some time here. Plus, Mom kept telling Peggy to take her time coming back, that she should take a mini-vacation after all her hard work.
Peggy had spent the last two weeks decorating Mom’s new office. Mom had loved it so much she got her editor to do a story on it. A bunch of people came over to the Salt House with big lights and cameras with these long lenses. After the magazine came out, Peggy said her phone started ringing off the hook. Mom and Peggy couldn’t stop talking about it. They’d say, Can you believe how good it looks? And then they’d start hugging and talking over each other, saying no, I didn’t do anything, you did it all, and blah, blah, blah.
Now Mom was telling me to cheer up—that it wouldn’t be so bad. I scowled at her and went to my room. I made a sign for my door that said No Boys Allowed and taped it right up so Smelliot would know that my part of the house was off-limits to him. But then Dad walked by and stuck his head in and said he’s a boy and how would he lie with me in my bed at night and read me my book if he couldn’t come in? So I crossed out boys and wrote—No Smelliots Allowed—and then Mom walked by and gave me her look so I took it down and decided when Smelliot got here, I’d ignore him.
That was still my plan when they pulled up in Alex’s truck, but when Smelliot got out, he walked right over to me. He was holding a plastic bag, and he stuck it out to me. It swung back and forth in front of my nose.
“It’s for you,” he said.
“Me?”
“Yeah. Take it.”
I folded my arms in front of me and asked him if he thought I didn’t know better. There was probably dog poop in it. Or worms. Maybe even a lit firecracker waiting to blow up in my face. But he put the bag on the step.
“Suit yourself,” he said.
Everyone was down on the sidewalk, saying good-bye to Alex. Dad shook Alex’s hand and told him if he wanted a job in the summer, all he had to do was ask. Then there was a pause when nobody said anything until Dad said maybe we could all go inside and have a cup of coffee and give Alex and Jess a minute alone. I told him I didn’t drink coffee, and he picked me up and put me on his shoulders, so high up, my head was as tall as the stop sign, and Mom said, “Jack, please, the doctor,” and Dad let out a sigh. But he put me down. Then he leaned over and kissed Mom on the cheek.
Smelliot was still standing next to me. I waited until my parents and Peggy went upstairs to say, “See. They’re not getting a divorce.”
I put the emphasis on the v. It had taken me an hour to find it in the dictionary after deforest only said something about trees. Believe me, Jess had heard about that.
I thought he’d have something stupid to say, maybe even another lie. But he just shrugged. Like that was that.
I folded my arms and stuck my face out at him. “And I heard you’re moving in here and your Dad’s not. So who’s the one getting the divorce now?”
I expected to feel good after I said this. He had it coming, after all. But the way his head tilted back, as if what I’d said was a punch he never saw coming, made my stomach hurt, like the words had turned right around and socked me too. Grandma would say it served me right. If I didn’t have something nice to say, then I shouldn’t have said anything at all. Too late now, I thought to myself.
I pressed my tongue into the roof of my mouth, tried to think of what to say. I could lie and say I hadn’t heard that his dad wasn’t moving in, even though I had heard it. Mom had said that Mr. Finn was going away for a bit to try to get better and to not ask Smelliot about it. When I asked what he needed to get better at, Mom had just sighed and said, “Better choices, Kat. Learning how to make better choices.” I hadn’t asked anything more because I had no idea there was a place you could go for that. I’d gone outside, out of sight, before she got any bright ideas about sending me to the better-choices-place.
“Don’t tell my mother I said that about your father,” I blurted out.
He kept his face blank, as if none of it mattered. “He’s not my real father. He’s my stepfather.”
I considered this. It was a twist, all right. “Where’s your real father?” I asked suspiciously. He was a known liar, after all.
“In heaven. He died a long time ago. I don’t remember him.”
I thought about telling him I knew someone in heaven too. Usually people made a sad face when I told them this news. And then I’d have to make a sad face too. It was tiring. So I stopped telling people about Maddie.
But he didn’t look sad when he told me about his dad. So I gave it a shot.
“My sister’s in heaven too,” I said.
Smelliot’s face didn’t change at all. If anything, he perked up, like he was happy we found something we had in common.
“What’d she die of?”
“She stopped breathing. She went to sleep and didn’t wake up.”
“It’s not a bad way to die,” he offered. “Better than getting ripped to pieces by a man-eating sloth.” He bent over and pretended to rip into something with imaginary claws. I didn’t ask, but I hoped that wasn’t how his father died. I watched him until it seemed like he was never going to stop.
“So what’s in the bag?” I said loudly, and pointed behind him.
He stopped what he was doing and looked at me. Then he reached in the bag and pulled out something shiny and silver. The sun caught it and sent a li
ght in my eyes.
“It’s yours,” he said, holding it out to me.
When my eyes were back, I saw that it was the trophy from the last day at camp. The one he took home after he tripped me and I fell.
“So you did trip me,” I said accusingly.
“Not on purpose. If your legs didn’t fling every direction, it wouldn’t have happened.”
That was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. “That’s what your eyes are for. You see someone in front of you, you go around. You don’t go through them,” I told him.
“Do you want it or not?” he asked in a tired sort of way, as if he’d rather be anywhere else in the world.
I held my hand out, and he gave it to me. It was heavier than I thought it would be. Not like the cheap plastic trophies they gave out at the swim meet last summer. Even the girls that held their noses when they jumped in the water got one. Not dove. Jumped. Like they were at a backyard cookout instead of a race. I remember I’d been so mad in the car on the way home that Mom had pulled over and told me she was not going to drive one more inch until I calmed down.
“But why bother giving out trophies if everyone gets one,” I’d shouted.
She’d started to speak, then looked at the road. Finally, she looked back at me. “They wanted to make everyone feel special. That’s a nice thing, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t answered because what I wanted to say would’ve only got me in trouble for using bad words. I’d tossed the trophy in the trash when we got home. Who wanted a trophy for first place when Mary Ellen Arnold took the same one home and she came in dead last after she doggy paddled over to the side because the water was getting too deep. Too deep in the shallow end.
Smelliot was still waiting for me to answer. As if I had to think about it. Of course I wanted to keep it. But the whole thing seemed kind of fishy.
“Why fess up to it now?” I narrowed my eyes at him, turned the trophy this way and that. Maybe he’d rigged it to blow up.
“I don’t know,” he said, but he looked over at his brother, who was leaning against the truck next to Jess. Alex gave him a thumbs-up, and Jess mouthed to me: Say thank you.