Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  “I’m an architect. At least I did that,” he said, as if to make up for something else he should have done but didn’t.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “What’s happening with you? With your life?” He squeezed her hand as if she were about to let go. She wasn’t. He glanced at her empty ring finger and she thought she detected a look of relief.

  “Well, the music, like I said, it’s good. It’s a long road but it feels like it was paved for me.”

  This made him smile. “And all the rest?”

  “I have no children, no marriage plans if that’s what you’re asking.”

  They both looked at Melinda still searching the shelves.

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever get married,” she said, though she didn’t know why she said this. She hadn’t actually believed it. She hadn’t ever subscribed to the thought at all.

  They were still holding hands when Annie saw Melinda coming. She pulled her hand away, and Joshua hugged her tightly and whispered, “I’m always hoping I’ll see you here,” and then there was Melinda standing at his side, looking confident as could be, and Annie had to give her credit for being such a good sport.

  “They didn’t have what I was looking for,” she said.

  “Well. It was good seeing you,” Joshua said.

  Annie nodded and told Melinda it was nice meeting her and wished them both the best of luck.

  Melinda gave a jaunty kind of wave. Joshua checked the air with two fingers and Annie smiled as if he were taking her picture.

  She thought about how happy they must look to other people. Crossing the parking lot beneath the sun, their hands locked and swinging. As they drove off she busied herself with her own pretend shopping. Then she walked outside to an empty blue sky and a day as cool and perfect as any day she could have hoped for. She sat behind the wheel of her car and stared a good long while across the road at a gull on a broken steeple. A substitute, she thought, for what was meant to be in its place.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Annie shouldn’t be driving in this weather. Government buildings closed early, a twenty-car pileup on the interstate has left traffic at a standstill in both directions, and power lines have already begun to snap. People all across the state are being warned to stay home and here she is, roaming snowy streets with practically the whole county to herself. She passes housing developments with yards of swarming children and their armies of lopsided snowmen. She passes empty strip malls, car dealers with glittering flags and balloons, the only thing moving on the lot. But it isn’t until she reaches the winding back roads of Wentzville Springs in the middle of a pine forest cloaked in snow that she feels she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.

  She’s afraid to blink for fear of finding out it’s an illusion, an exquisite hoax painted on a life-size backdrop, a North Pole theme park drawn up overnight. But it is none of these. The white peaks towering above are so real she can almost smell the frozen pine coming through the vent of the car. She opens her window and breathes as deeply as her lungs will allow. Clean, frozen pine.

  The Land Cruiser is about to run out of gas so she pulls into what looks like an abandoned station. If it’s open she’ll pay a fortune for full-service only, and that’s fine. She feels like spending everything she has just so she can start over with money Owen hasn’t helped her earn.

  A red, round pump stands alone in the center of the concrete drive. The vending machine is empty. A single can of motor oil is placed in the window next to a handwritten sign that reads OPeN. Annie scoots the car forward over the bell and stops. For a moment nothing happens. She’s about to drive off when an old woman with a crude underbite appears in the doorway as if she’s just been retrieved from a fairytale. She smiles with a genuine lack of teeth and swings her arm as she scampers around, moving quickly at her business of filling Annie’s tank. When she’s finished she appears at the car window with her hand held out. She’s wearing a headscarf as plain and brown as butcher paper. Annie includes a twenty-dollar tip in the pile of cash.

  “Isn’t there a fish house this way somewhere?” Annie asks.

  “Used to be years ago,” the woman says. Her lower jaw strains her s’s into a hiss. She points up the forested road with a thick, yellowed fingernail. “It’s the Bull Creek now,” she says. “Best barbequed grouper in the state of Florida.”

  “Thank you,” Annie says.

  “It’s Frank’s place,” the woman adds with a hiss.

  The Bull Creek parking lot is packed with trucks and SUVs. Maybe it’s the same place, maybe it isn’t. The air smells of burning logs and mesquite and charcoal, weighted by the sounds of laughter and loud voices drifting from inside the tavern.

  Annie opens the door to a room full of men holding beers and women passing around plates of food like a picnic or a family reunion. Christmas lights are strung in all the windows. Babies, a set of dark-haired twins, pass between women in red and green holiday dresses while a man’s voice rises above the others to say that Bill Greene is destined to be a justice of the peace. A circle of men clang their beer bottles at the center. “Here, here,” they say, and drink up around an enormous stone fireplace roaring with heat.

  Annie stands in the doorway feeling as if she’s crashing someone’s party.

  The place certainly looks like something out of the past. Everything made of knotty pine, the acrid smell of old beer, jars of pickles and boiled eggs and raw peanuts on the counter. The green-lit jukebox glows near the pool table situated under an array of muted light from a stained-glass shade. Otis Redding is singing “White Christmas” from all corners of the room with more sex and soul and yearning than anyone has ever put into that song. A small, makeshift stage lines the back wall, and she imagines the excitement of a local band playing live for the first time.

  A thickset man with peppered gray hair crosses the room toward her. His baggy carpenter pants and surf shop sweatshirt make him appear younger than he is, or else the thin creases around his eyes and across his forehead make him appear older. She guesses he’s the age her father would have been had he lived.

  He introduces himself as Frank, and as he shows her to a table in the back, a smoky layer of citrus drifts off the grill behind the end of the bar. She assumes it’s the grouper. “Do you marinate it in orange juice?” she asks, and slips off her jacket and lays it across the extra seat at her table.

  Frank grins.

  “Grapefruit?” she asks.

  Frank places his hands on the hips of his baggy pants, and with a kind-looking grin that produces two dimples he says, “As much as I’d like to tell you I’m afraid I can’t.”

  She smiles and turns to the happy crowd. She understands the rules of privacy. An hour has gone by since she left Owen in her living room, and she wouldn’t care to tell another living soul about what went on there for as long as she lives.

  “One beer, coming up,” Frank says without asking. Her face must say it all and she likes that he can read it. He’s got a familiar way about him, like a cousin, an uncle, someone who gets a kick out of you for no reason at all.

  He starts to hand her a menu. “I’ll have the grouper,” she says, and leans into her chair and rubs her hands together. Frank smiles. “On the double, Captain,” he says, and steps behind the bar.

  A newspaper lies folded on the empty table next to her. The giant red headline reads: WHITE CHRISTMAS LEAVES FARMERS IN THE RED. Beneath it are several shots of ice-coated oranges like candies dipped in frosting. Annie flips it over. In the bottom right corner a smaller headline reads: Prosecutors Seek Death Penalty in Jørgenson Case. Calder’s mug shot stares back at her. Seeing it causes an ache in her chest, and she rubs it like a bout of heartburn until it fades. His tangled hair is thrown around as if he has just emerged from a convertible. His eyes are bloodshot and one lid appears to be closing, and she imagines Calder struggling to keep still for the camera. Next to him is the picture of Hal’s roadside bar, its white, clapboard siding and gravel park
ing lot. She skims the article. Brother of singer/songwriter Annie Walsh…could have only been committed by someone with a great deal of strength…apparently crushing the large man’s skull against the wall of the roadside bar…The coroner’s office believes a heavy metal tool of some kind was used in the crime.

  She flips the paper and tosses it back where she found it.

  Frank sets the foamy beer in front of her and she swallows big, uneasy gulps like a child forcing medicine down her throat. Heat rises to her face and hands. She watches as people laugh and lean into one other with ease, people who don’t seem to have a care about anything or even have a life outside of the one they are experiencing right here.

  She has a perfect view through the double glass doors to the patio out back. Animals have tracked through the snow. Birds, raccoons. There’s a post to tie up dogs and a dish for water and a small bed of wood chips under the eave for them to lie on, and she knows right away that she likes this man, Frank. Forest surrounds the patio on three sides, and she scoots her chair to better see the trees draped in snowy moss.

  She drinks down the last of her beer. After the second one her whole body feels dreamlike and snug, her hips softening into the wooden chair. If not for Frank arriving with the grouper, she may have fallen asleep.

  “Does a river run out back there?” she asks.

  “The St. John’s,” he says. “Can’t see it for the trees.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have any cornbread would you?”

  “Coming up,” he says, and hurries off to the sound of a kitchen bell.

  The grouper gently breaks apart in her mouth, a heavenly melt of buttery pepper and citrus and smoke, and all she wants is to linger in the sounds of people laughing, Aretha Franklin now crooning on the jukebox. But the beer seems to have doused her brain, and a memory she had buried long ago floats to the surface.

  Her mother, young and smiling from her blue oversized chair in the corner near the floor lamp with the chain switch. She looks up from the big book in her lap and offers Annie bits of odd information the way she did so often in those years. She tells her how years ago women were diagnosed with things like bad humors, hysteria, and nostalgia. Doctors ordered them to sit outdoors in the sun. The cure was fresh air and sunshine. Fresh air and sunshine is something her family has had nearly every day of their lives. “It’s like insurance,” her father says, walking into the room with a greasy car part in his hands. Calder follows behind with some tools. “We’re so full of it,” her father continues, “we can save some up inside ourselves for when hurricane season sets in.” Her mother smiles and says, “According to this, nothing of the mind is ever going to ail us.” She laughs so peacefully and flashes her bright white teeth at her father and the two of them lean in for a small kiss inside the pale yellow cone of the light.

  But this is not the way it happened. This is not the real memory. This is the one Annie made up.

  All her life she’s managed to switch that afternoon around inside her head, turning Uncle Calder into her father. Uncle Calder was the one she’d seen leaning in to kiss her mother. Her father had come in later with the car parts, with Calder trailing behind, and her mother did say the part about sunshine and fresh air and her father did say the part about insurance. But there had been no kiss, at least not between her parents. Uncle Calder, who’d been working on the car with them, was the one who’d walked in and kissed her mother after her father had come and gone. And Annie wasn’t sitting there when the kiss happened either. She’d just stepped around the doorway, and when she saw what was happening she held her breath and slipped away and somehow flipped the whole incident inside her head to the thing that made more sense. Her father was the man who’d kissed her mother. He was the only man her mother would kiss.

  The beer has gone right through her. It feels a little like floating as she makes her way to the bathroom. Her hands reach in front of her, her mother’s hands, slender and veiny, searching for something to hold on to. The men tip their hats as she drifts past. Old country boys.

  A plate of warm cornbread steams on the table when she returns with a weighty ache behind her eyes. Why on earth did Uncle Calder go after the one person it was clear he wasn’t supposed to have? And why would her mother cheat on a man who loved her as much as Annie’s father did? Why should she cheat on her father at all when she loved him so much that losing him nearly killed her, too?

  No wonder Annie didn’t confront Owen that morning at the table. No wonder she made him eggs Benedict and pretended everything was fine. She’d gotten a head start on denial, on keeping her mouth shut, on twisting reality the day she witnessed her mother and uncle kissing beneath the lamplight.

  She thinks of Owen’s hands between his knees, his foot bobbing on the floor. Doubt trickles in. Maybe she was wrong to tell him to leave. She was just reacting to the news. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems once she’s had a chance to think it through.

  She takes a deep breath and turns to the forest floor filled with giant Elephant Ears like downy hearts springing in all directions. The trees above are twisted and tangled, one into the other, a woven canopy of earthy brown and green and white. She feels weepy and misplaced, a woman suffering from nostalgia, a woman years removed from everyone and everything that has ever offered her life a sense of purpose.

  Thin tears slide so quickly she’s unable to catch them with a swipe of her hand before they reach her mouth. The salty taste shakes something loose in her shoulders. Her mouth falls open and she doesn’t know if she’s laughing or crying. She leans forward and then throws her head back at the ceiling and groans.

  If he’s still there when she gets back she’ll know she was wrong about him. If he’s there she will ask him to stay.

  “Unrequited love’s a bore,” she quietly sings. “Yeah, and I’ve got it pretty bad. But for someone you adore, it’s a pleasure to be sad.” The lyrics keep rolling off her tongue until Frank scrapes his grill with a metal spatula and Annie turns, startled by the sharp sound of metal on metal. His eyes fix on her, giving the feeling he’s been watching, listening to her sing. She covers her mouth, embarrassed.

  Frank flips the fish with his tongs. “The Mamas and the Papas,” he says, pointing his tongs at her. ‘“Glad to Be Unhappy.’ Haven’t heard that one in years.”

  “You’ve got sharp ears, mister.” She feels a wave of drunkenness. It’s late morning on Christmas Eve and she’s drunk in a tavern in the middle of nowhere.

  Frank smiles at her.

  She gawks at the gap between his teeth.

  “You’ve got a pretty voice, young lady.”

  She shrugs, feeling a momentary jolt of sobriety.

  “You do that for a living?” he asks.

  Something tight rises in her chest.

  The thing is, he won’t be there when she gets home. He’s already rushing home to Tess, his heart banging around in his chest over all the stupid things he’s done, over just how close he came to losing everything.

  For a moment they don’t speak. The conversation seems to have nowhere to go.

  Then suddenly it’s as if she’s listening while her mouth jabbers on. “I have a record. It sold pretty well. Selling pretty well, I guess I should say.”

  “What’s the name of it?”

  “You know what’s really funny? My favorite song off that album is called ‘Falling Off the Edge of the World.’”

  “That’s you? Wait a minute.” Frank lays the tongs aside. “That’s you? Singing that song?”

  She nods and her head feels wobbly, loose on her neck. “It’s funny because my boyfriend who ran off and left me for someone else, twice now, I’m pretty sure, twice now for the same woman, it’s complicated, don’t even try to figure it out,” she waves her hand around, “but that’s beside the point, what I’m saying is this guy always thought that song was about him. It’s not about him.” She shakes her head and everything moves in slow motion.

  “You’re Annie Walsh?”


  “Shh.”

  “I’ll be damned. It’s not every day I get a celebrity in here.”

  “A celebrity. No. I’m no celebrity, Frank.”

  He crosses over and shakes her hand. His palm is dry and coarse and he shakes and shakes the way Joshua did and Annie gets weepy again and pulls her hand away. “I thought it ended so well. I thought we did a good job, the way we walked away like that. Like real grown-ups.”

  “If you’re talking about love, it never ends well. Not as far as I can tell.”

  “You made a rhyme.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Walsh.”

  “I don’t normally drink,” she says. “Just so you know.” She needs to catch her breath. “I don’t drink.”

  Frank pulls out the extra chair and joins her. “I suppose with your brother. I mean, if I was you I’d have another,” he says, and quickly catches himself with a small laugh. “Apparently you bring out the poet in me.”

  She’s conscious not to look sloppy when she laughs.

  “Can I get you anything else?” He rises as if needing to get back to work.

  She burps the taste of grouper, and even the burp tastes good. She shakes her head.

  “Coffee? I’ve got some fresh brewed back there.”

  “Yes. Coffee. I’ll have coffee,” she says, remembering her cup sailing at the Christmas tree. It seems funny to her now.

  She looks over at the makeshift stage. There’s a microphone and a stool in the center. “After that I’d like to sing a song, if you don’t mind.”

  Frank stands there in silence.

  Annie’s palms sweat and she rubs them down her thighs but they don’t feel dry. “Is that not all right?”

  “That’s more than all right, Miss Walsh.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a guitar back there somewhere would you?”

  “No, but I know where to get one.”

  “And a violin. I need someone who can play the violin.”

  Frank rests his hands on his hips. “You’re looking at him.”