Pinch of Love (9781101558638)

by Bessette, Alicia

  It’s Sunday night now, though, and Ingrid’s not asleep on my couch. She’s asleep in her own bed. She’s supposed to be, anyway.

  So I found your present hidden in the oven. Good one. I almost burned the house down.

  I put your present in the attic. Actually Ingrid put it there. It’s been about a year since I climbed those steps. I know I really should get rid of all those things up there. Maybe even donate them to the high school or something. Or has it all become obsolete? Useless junk? You were always a bit of a throwback that way. Maybe Wippamunk Antiques would take it all off my hands.

  The other morning I went to the grocery store to stock up on sugar, butter, and flour, all of which, in the name of experimentation, I go through a lot of lately (long story). I wheeled my way to the checkout, when, surrounded by bottles of seltzer, I heard my name.

  I stopped and turned. It was Pastor Sheila. She wore clogs, tights, and a red corduroy jumper dress. And all I could think about was that day—that day I found out about you, when I faced Pastor Sheila and Father Chet in Terry and Gail’s driveway.

  Anyway, in the grocery store, she asked me things. How are you, how’s your kitchen, etc. I answered coherently enough. Then I asked her, “On The Trip, did Nick mention anything about a present he bought for me?” My theory, you see, is that it will be easier to open your present if I know beforehand what it is. Does that make sense in heaven? Because it sure as hell makes sense down here.

  So, Pastor Sheila gave me the kindhearted Pastor Sheila smile. “No,” she said. “I’m afraid not.” She squeezed my arm, told me Wippamunk still prayed for me, Wippamunk will never forget. And she said, “Take good care.”

  Do you already know all this stuff, Nick? Do you know that I walk around all day without a bra on? And that I’ve taken to wearing your apron around the house, just for shits and giggles? Are you watching me? Hearing me? Knowing my heart? If so, then the following statement—hell, the whole e-mail—goes without saying: I miss you.

  KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK, PAUSE. Knock-knock-knock, pause. A steady, unchanging rhythm. I’m in my office when I hear it, typing away to Nick. Ahab pads in and whines. Knock-knock-knock, pause.

  We go downstairs and follow the source of the noise. It’s loudest in the powder room. The knocking comes from the other side of the wall. Ahab stands in the doorway, tilting his head, as I call, “Hello?”

  “Hi.” Ingrid’s voice sounds so distant. “I’ve been knocking for you.”

  “It’s late. You have school tomorrow.”

  “I just wanted to wish you good night. I know we’re going to win the Warm the Soul baking contest. I just know it.”

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “He’s studying with his earbuds in.”

  “You should get into bed.”

  “I know.”

  “Get into bed and read a book until you fall asleep.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good night.”

  I get up and shut off the bathroom light.

  Knock-knock-knock, pause. Knock-knock-knock, pause. Ahab whines.

  “Ingrid?” I say. “You have to stop knocking now. You’re driving the Captain nuts.”

  “Just one more thing,” she says. “Love ya ’n’ like ya.”

  Ahab leans into me, and I scratch his ear. I smile to myself. “Love ya ’n’ like ya,” I say.

  423: TRUE BURGUNDY.

  399: CHERISE.

  314: RAINY-DAY BLUE.

  My alveoli bulge from bronchial tubes like overripe purple grapes on a vine.

  It’s Friday, and Russ rings the doorbell precisely at one fifteen. A gust of wind sweeps through the house as I open the door. It’s snowing outside, and frigid. He gives me his usual high five and mail delivery before clomping to the kitchen to dish out lunch: leftover chicken potpie, which his wife made for dinner last night.

  I pour him a glass of milk as he shovels microwave-warmed food into his mouth. The phone rings, but I ignore it. The machine beeps, and my sister starts talking. “Yoo-hoo, Ze-ell. Why don’t you return any of my calls? When are you coming up here?”

  “That’s Gail?” Russ asks, fork halfway to his mouth. He always had a crush on my sister. I think he still does.

  “Yep, that’s Gail.” I scrape my plate.

  “Well, I’m gonna answer it.” He crosses the kitchen and picks up the phone. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the homecoming queen herself, Ms. Gail Carmichael-Dunbar,” he says.

  “Who’s this?” my sister asks; I hear because the answering machine is recording.

  “It’s your trusty former sophomore chemistry lab partner and trusty former mail carrier.”

  “Oh.” Gail sighs. “Hi, Russell. I’m still married, Russell.”

  “No funny business, now, Ms. Carmichael-Dunbar,” he says. “I’m married, too. And I’m on the clock. The government clock. But it’s good to speak with you. I can’t believe you moved away. How’s ski country, by the way?”

  “Beats Mount Wippamunk.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Beats Mount Wippamunk.”

  “Hello to your lovely parents,” Russ says. “Here’s your sister.”

  I roll my eyes as he hands me the phone. With his free hand he makes a fist and poses as if to sock me in the jaw. Then he cleans up the lunch plates.

  “I’ve been so busy with work,” I tell Gail. “But I’ll come up. Tonight. For the weekend.”

  She squeals so loud, I hold the phone away from my face. When I put it to my ear again, she’s saying, “What about the snow, though?”

  “It’s not supposed to be that bad here,” I say. “What about up there?”

  “It’s always snowing up here anyway. Can’t wait to see you.”

  MY CAR WON’T START. It hacks and chokes when I turn the key.

  Fine snow falls, the flakes little slivers of ice, like fiberglass.

  The car was Nick’s domain. Nick’s project.

  Balls.

  I bang on the steering wheel, the dashboard. I turn the key. Hack. Choke. Sputter.

  In the passenger seat, Ahab whines.

  I get out of the car and kick the door shut. Icy mud slides from the wheel well. The dislodged clump makes a slopping noise when it lands. I kick the front tire so hard, pain sears my big toe.

  “Problems?” It’s Garrett. He wears a fitted, stylish sweater. I can’t make out his facial features because of the bright porch light behind him.

  “Yeah. Car won’t start.”

  With a grunt he lifts the hood and studies the tangle of hoses and black boxes.

  I step back into the shadows, where I don’t have to squint. “I didn’t know you knew anything about cars.”

  “I don’t, actually,” he says. He lets the hood drop. “Where are you off to?

  “My sister’s. She lives in Vermont. On Okemo Mountain.”

  “Is it urgent?”

  “No. Truthfully, it’s not urgent. But it feels urgent, you know?” I think of the mural, the blank bodies with blank faces. Gail said not to worry about the bathroom, but of course, I do worry about it. Instead of skiing, I plan to lock myself in there until I finished what I started. It’s time. “I have some work to do,” I say. “Unfinished business, you could say.”

  The fiberglass snowflakes become thicker and fall faster. Polly Pinch would say the snowflakes are “really ratcheting up the action.”

  Garrett toes the snow with his left boot. “If you don’t mind my asking, unfinished business related to what?”

  “A bathroom.”

  “A bathroom?” He stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Will you explain it to me on the way up?”

  “What? No. You are not driving me a hundred miles to Vermont in a snowstorm at ten o’clock at night.” I meant to leave earlier, but I was working on a nasal cavity, and I couldn’t resist frontal sinus, pharyngeal tonsil, anterior naris. All that space, all those labyrinthine chambers and passages, behind a face.

  “This”—Garre
tt holds out his hand and catches a few flakes—“this is not a snowstorm. This is nothing. It’s supposed to blow over anyway. It’s no big deal.”

  “Famous last words,” I say. “I can’t let you drive me, Garrett.”

  He shivers and stamps his feet. “Why not? Why not let me drive you?”

  “Because it’s too much to ask.”

  He laughs—a deep belly laugh. “Oh please. You’ve been babysitting my crazy kid for weeks, indulging all her whims.”

  “That’s different. I like babysitting your crazy kid.”

  “Well, I like driving. And you can pay me for gas.”

  “But it’s so late. It’s a two-hour drive normally, and in this snow—”

  “I don’t sleep anyway. You know that. I planned on studying all night, but I’m going cross-eyed. I need a break.”

  “What about Ingrid?”

  “Oh, she sleeps anywhere. Besides, she’ll go anywhere with you.”

  “What about the Captain?”

  In the car, Ahab’s ears point tall at the mention of his name.

  “The Captain can keep Ingrid warm in the backseat.” Garrett stands opposite me with his hands on my shoulders. “Please? Let me do this for you. I want to do this for you.”

  “Why?”

  “I just do. Plus, all I ever do is drive to Boston and back. This’ll be different. An adventure.”

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER we climb into Garrett’s truck—Ingrid, Garrett, Ahab, and I—and haul ass up Route 331. The snow coats the road with shardlike flakes. Hannah Montana blares, and Ingrid sings along in the backseat. Ahab rests his head in her lap, and she holds his ear between her thumb and forefinger and caresses it. At her feet is the little suitcase I packed for him.

  We pass Mount Wippamunk. The sight of it hulking in the snow triggers a Memory Smack: My wedding day, January 1, 1999. I wore a thirty-dollar bridal gown—a straight, beaded thrift-shop purchase two sizes too big—over my ski clothes. Nick donned two layers of long underwear under the powder blue tuxedo his dad wore to the senior prom in 1969.

  At the mountain, Nick and I took the North Summit chairlift. In the chair behind us rode the best man and the maid of honor: Nick’s dad, Arthur, and Gail, dressed for a normal day of skiing. My parents shared the third chair with Gail’s husband, Terry, who wore a choir robe borrowed from Pastor Sheila. Under his robe, in the pocket of his purple one-piece, he carried a stamped slip of paper issued and signed by the governor, proclaiming him a justice of the peace for one day, and granting him the right to perform marriages in the glorious Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

  At the top of the chairlift, near a cluster of hemlocks, we formed a semicircle and waited for Nick and Terry to unclip from their snowboards.

  “Right,” Terry shouted into the wind. “It’s colder than a nun’s you-know-what, so let’s do this.”

  Curious skiers and boarders gathered around us as Arthur produced the velvet bag from his leg pocket. Gail snapped pictures with her point-and-shoot, one mitten held between her teeth. Nick and I pulled off our mittens; he shoved a ring on my whitening finger, and I one on his. We kissed: a quick, cold peck. Laughing, teeth chattering, we put our mittens back on.

  Terry said something like, “By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

  The crowd of strangers hooped and hollered and banged their ski poles together. The lift operator in the booth raised his thermos in a toast. And our crazy little wedding party headed down my favorite trail—the double-diamond Look Ma, a curvy and steep narrow, with good-size bumps on the left-hand side. It leads right to the lodge, where, in the upstairs function hall, a fire roared, poinsettias decorated tables, and Russ and EJ’s two-man band, the Massholes, warmed up.

  With a new Hannah Montana song, Ingrid’s singing gets a little louder, and the Memory Smack shrinks. Real time, real place. We’re almost in New Hampshire now. Quietly, while Ingrid belts out tunes, I tell Garrett everything: about Gail’s house, Nick’s favorite place in the whole world. About the bathroom there, and the photograph Gail wants me to re-create on the bathroom wall, and the day I almost finished the project. I tell Garrett exactly how Nick died, including some details Dennis’s article didn’t divulge. It doesn’t feel good to talk about all this, but amazingly, it doesn’t feel horrible, either.

  Ingrid’s head pokes between the front seats. “Can we stay at Zell’s sister’s tonight?” she asks.

  Garrett slows at a BLACK ICE warning sign. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Can we go skiing tomorrow?”

  “No, baby. I have to study. You know that.”

  “You study all the time,” Ingrid says. “Drop me off with Zell.”

  Garrett glances at me, as if to say, How about it?

  “Could be fun,” I say.

  He laughs and shakes his head. “We’re going to drop off Zell, and then we’re going to turn around and go home, baby. Sorry. Some other time.”

  “Aww,” Ingrid says. “That’s no fun.” She leans back and sings. After a while, just as we pass Allison’s Orchard, she yawns through certain words. Before long she falls asleep with her head slumped against the window.

  Garrett switches his iPod to John Legend. “That’s a sad story, Zell,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry it’s a true story.”

  “Everyone is.”

  He hums and drives. On Route 12 the snow thickens, and he slows even more. We gain elevation. The houses and gas stations along the side of the road grow sparse. We pass fewer cars.

  “I really appreciate this, Garrett,” I say. “Your driving me.”

  “It’s all good,” he says.

  My eyelids droop and pop open. Droop and pop open. Droop . . .

  I JOLT AWAKE. The truck swerves and fishtails—right, left, right. Garrett’s palms slap the wheel as he tries to steady the truck and steer into the skid. We careen into the oncoming lane, which is empty—no headlights crest the hill.

  My arms cover my face. My heart races. I don’t breathe.

  From the backseat Ingrid wails. “Daddy?”

  And then we’re completely spinning. 360. 720. 1080. Nonbeats: My chest seems to twirl with that empty, weightless wind.

  Stillness.

  Out the windshield all I see is the wide trunk of an old maple. We haven’t hit it, I don’t think. But we came close. The bed of the truck sticks out into the shoulder of the road, and the cabin plunges into the woods.

  Garrett seems out of breath. “Everybody okay?” He twists around and caresses Ingrid’s chin. She nods. Ahab whines, and she pulls him close and kisses his nose.

  “Zell?” Garrett puts his hand on my knee. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I say, despite the galloping in my chest. “You?”

  He drops his head on the steering wheel—thud!—and mutters something.

  “Garrett?” I say.

  “Two-wheel drive.” He sighs. “It only has two-wheel drive. It was thousands of dollars less than the four-wheel-drive option.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s sensible, then.”

  “Yeah. It’s sensible. If you live in Florida.” He puts the truck in reverse, but the tires spin. An eighteen-wheeler hurtles past, spitting slush.

  “You must slip and slide all the way to and from Boston,” I say.

  “Actually, I don’t. That trip’s relatively flat.”

  “True. Well, do you have any sand in the back? Or kitty litter?”

  “You’d think,” says Garrett. “But no.” He throws it into reverse again and taps the gas pedal. The truck rocks a bit, but then the tires spin, and we slide a little farther into the ditch, on a steep incline. He yanks the emergency brake and sighs heavily. He’s trembling, I realize—though barely perceptibly. He gets out of the truck, investigates the situation, climbs back in. “I don’t think you’re going to make it to your sister’s house tonight,” he says.

  “That’s okay. You have AA
A or anything?”

  He switches off John Legend and kills the engine. “Sorry.”

  “Nah,” I say. “Don’t worry about it. Not your fault.” I glance at my cell phone: twelve thirty A.M.

  “Should we call the police?” Ingrid says. “Call Officer Frances. She’ll help us.”

  “I’m sure she would,” Garrett says. “But Officer Frances is about fifty miles that way.” He gestures behind us.

  I peer out the window. The snow coats it so thickly now, it’s hard to see. “Maybe someone will stop.”

  We wait for a few minutes, but no cars pass.

  Garrett inspects his cell. “No bars.”

  I check my phone for a signal—none.

  “Well,” he says. “We just passed a place. We can walk there. It’s not far. We’ll get a couple rooms for the night? Figure out what to do in the morning?”

  I shrug. “What else can we do?”

  He exhales and shakes his head. He’s frustrated, I can tell; maybe he’s even embarrassed. But he doesn’t want to show it. “How far are we from your sister’s?” he asks.

  “At least an hour. Probably more.”

  “Eff,” he whispers.

  We hop out of the truck, brace ourselves against the gusty snowfall, and climb out of the ditch. In the shoulder of the road, I help Ahab into his coat.

  “Isn’t Ahab the cutest thing in the world?” Ingrid says as she helps me fasten his booties. She seems to be recovered from any fear she felt when the truck spun out, and she’s not daunted by the snow whipping all around us. She’s ready for another adventure. That’s her Ingrid style.

  Garrett’s too tense to comment about Ahab. He looks down the road as I clip on the leash. I feel guilty; I never should have let him drive me. In truth, I wonder why he was so insistent on driving me in the first place, especially considering the weather, and the late hour, and the fact that his truck is only two-wheel drive.