by Wendy Silk
“Hi,” she greeted me, brushing dark, grainy black dust off her hands over the tiny bit of garden that lined the pathway. “You looking for me?”
Confusion and fear surged within me. “No, I don’t think so. I’m looking for Tim and, um, the other guy that lives here. Do you live here too?” I steeled myself to hear the answer. She was going to say that she was Tim’s wife, right? That was it. For some reason, I’d been sure that no woman lived with them, but here she was. That was why he hadn’t contacted me. He was a cheater after all, just like all those guys at work.
“Nah, not me,” she said. “I wouldn’t live in this complex if you paid me. I’m just the painter. But you say you’re looking for the guys that lived here? This unit has been empty for weeks. I’ve had it on my list to get fixed up so the manager can rent it out again.”
My confusion was reaching new heights. “You mean they moved out?”
She gave me a sympathetic look. “You were dating one of them? Yeah, sorry, I don’t know what to tell you. Nobody’s been here, and my paperwork says there’s no forwarding address. Not that there was anything left of their deposit after all I’ve had to do to improve the smell in there.” She cocked her head at me. “Look, I’m really sorry. I’d say just forget about him and move on. Best course of action.” And with those concise instructions, she stepped back into the apartment, this time shutting the door all the way behind her.
I could feel the heat of the day rising all around me, making my ears buzz. It seemed like the damp waves of southern humidity were wafting up from the dingy shrubbery next to the path I was standing on. Suddenly, my head was swimming, and I couldn’t think what to do. The only movement I was capable of was to lean forward into the bushes before I vomited.
Then, like the worst kind of fool, I finally realized what was happening to me.
It wasn’t going to matter if I found Tim. He was gone, and had been for weeks. But he had left me with something infinitely more precious.
Even though my body was protesting everything about the moment, from my clenching belly to my aching head, my heart leapt inside me. I might be covered with a sheen of sweat on every pore of my skin, and I might be throwing up into the bushes, but, as it turned out, I wasn’t alone after all.
I put my hand gently over my belly and smiled as I hadn’t done in years.
Part Two: Present Day
Chapter 6: Cici
Every afternoon, around five o’clock, just before it started to get dark, I lifted my face up toward the sky and I breathed in the smell of the ocean. The clouds were massed over me in the springtime puffs of grey that rolled in from the Pacific. The endless calling of the gulls intensified as they began to prepare for nightfall. It was my favorite time of day, and it never ceased to awaken in me a fervent thankfulness that I was no longer in Texas.
All those sensations meant home to me. They meant I was back in the Pacific Northwest, back on Whidbey Island. I was back home in the town of Blue Shore, where I’d been born, and where I’d spent my childhood. The ease of being in my special place was like a mountain that I leaned against when things felt difficult. There were always going to be issues with work, and family, and friends, but at long last, I was home.
I had brought my daughter to Blue Shore.
When she came, I finally had a reason to go back. The thought had terrified me, but I could do it for her. She would have the best I could give her, even if it meant I had to face demons I had hoped were buried forever.
My moment of quiet solitude came to a sudden end when I heard the screen door banging on the front door. I looked up from the table of papers that I sat at in our screened back veranda, knowing I’d see Kelly marching in with more energy that she knew what to do with. As usual.
“Hey, Cici!” My best friend and business partner was full of cheerful news. “Are you still working on that menu art? We need to get that out to the printers, pronto.” She pretended to make a stern face at me. “I know what you’re really doing, you’re daydreaming about how much you love this place, aren’t you? I’d argue with you, but I love it here too. You talking me into moving up here is one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
As she reached me, Kelly set Maggie down in a crawling position on the brightly colored rag rug in front of me. Maggie planted her feet behind her and, in what looked like an advanced yoga move, worked herself into a standing position without holding onto any surface. Then, she began to lurch toward me with the wide-legged stance of new walkers everywhere.
“Maggie!” I crowed. It wasn’t the first time she’d walked, but I didn’t think I’d ever get tired of watching her. I opened my arms wide to receive her, and she beamed with triumph as she reached me. “My girl, I missed you,” I mumbled into her neck as I nuzzled her.
“She missed you too, even though we were only out for an hour,” laughed Kelly. “She kept signing for you and wanting to come back.” She paused, then chuckled. “Except for the one part when she was distracted by a cookie. We were in the corner shop, dropping off our ‘Summer Flowers’ bags of cookies, and I managed to break one of the bags as I was setting up the display. So, you know, I bought it and gave her one. That means that I was one of our official customers today.”
“Well we aren’t going to get rich that way,” I pretended to frown at her.
“Of course not. We’re not going to get rich any way doing this, but that’s just fine with me. What we are going to be is happy, peaceful, and our own bosses.”
I nodded happily at the thought. “That’s more important than anything, isn’t it? No more skeezy guys looking down our shirts at the bar, no more counting out tips to share. We’re running the show now, and it’s a damn good little show, I’d say.”
Kelly fiddled with her fingernails, then noticed she was doing it and sat on her hands. “Cici, I wish I knew more about how you fit in here, though. All I have to work with is that when you were pregnant with Mags, you suddenly sprang it on me that you owned a house out here. A house! Seriously, the times I thought we weren’t going to make rent or get the electric bill paid, and here you were sitting on the fact that you owned an entire building? And look at it, it’s adorable, on this giant lot, with a pool? It’s like we entered some kind of alternate reality.”
I felt a blush rise in my cheeks. “Kelly, you know I’ve answered this a hundred times. I inherited the house, yes. But for a long time, I wasn’t ready to contact the lawyers about it. It was all set up with renters, and the money was waiting for me here.” I gulped, trying to hide my feelings. “I just couldn’t come back.”
Maggie was wiggling in my lap, pulling my hair and calling out, “Cookie! Cookie!”
Miraculously, I could breathe again. It was always Maggie that made things work for me. She made my entire life possible. “You know what made me able to come back? Miss Maggie here. She is the best thing that ever happened to me. Not just because she’s herself, but because when I knew I was pregnant with her, I finally felt ready to be myself again. This is where we belong.”
“Your secret bank account and sweet little three bedroom house were a fun surprise for me, as your business partner,” laughed Kelly. “But, yeah, the real reason I’m willing to run this catering operation with you is because it means I get to have Maggie in my life.”
I swatted at her, leaning so far out of my chair that the squirming one year old in my lap almost overbalanced us both. Maggie was sucking on my hair now, but I didn’t mind. My personal grooming standards had changed since the days of batting my eyelashes at truckers who couldn’t take their eyes off my cleavage. I looked down at my plain t-shirt, which still had some remnants of Maggie’s pureed lunch on it. I didn’t even try to brush it off. At this point, I was embracing who I was.
“So,” I prodded her. “What did Mr. Kemble say about the next order of cookies? Is he on board for a bigger standing order? Does he want to add the line of muffins, too?”
Kelly’s face fell slightly. “No, unfortunately
that’s a negative on both counts. He says he’ll stick with the seasonal cookie display, but that he doesn’t have enough confidence in us yet to try anything more.”
I pursed my lips. “That’s stupid. All he needs to have is confidence in the cookies. He knows you; he sees you every time you come in. And he’s known my family for years…” I let that thought trail off.
Kelly came to my rescue, though, with an enthusiastic whoop. “I forgot to say! This was going to be my big thing I wanted to tell you when I got home. You don’t need to feel too down in the dumps about the order at the corner shop, because I’m here to tell you that we’re going to hit the big time. We are going to interview to cater at the hotel!”
I fought my way through my sense of dread to ask her, “The hotel?”
“Come on, pay attention. The Blue Shore Hotel. The big one. That giant historic building that rests on the ridge overlooking the water? You know, the main employer of half the town? Don’t tell me that you grew up here and you don’t know anything about that hotel.”
I stood up and began to walk into the kitchen. I threw the words over my shoulder, knowing they would make her follow me. “Of course I know about the hotel. Mostly what I know about it is that we will never do a catering job there. Never.”
As I buckled Maggie into her highchair and put some crackers and her sippy cup onto her tray, I could feel Kelly’s outrage building as she came into the room behind me.
“Are you kidding me? That’s the best place for us to cater around here. It’s the goal I’ve had for booking our events since we moved up here. I’ve been networking like crazy, and today, finally, I get a call that they want to have us come up for an interview to see if we should be on their list of approved vendors.” She was so mad at me that she practically had smoke coming out of her ears. “So you’re telling me right now, and not a moment before this, that we’re going to turn down the best job opportunity in this entire town?”
I was moving in slow motion as I tidied the kitchen. I’d left the lunch dishes out so I could grab a few minutes to work on the menus, but now the mess confronted me as if it had been waiting for the worst possible time.
“Kelly, I don’t know what to tell you. There are things about my past here that I just can’t…”
“I’m getting tired of hearing that,” she snapped. “If you could please just trust me, we could get a lot more done. And if you can’t, then maybe we shouldn’t be working together after all.”
Maggie sat in her high chair, toying with her crackers, but she wasn’t immune to the argument going on around her. We hardly ever fought, even about the business, so it was new to her. Her big eyes went back and forth between us.
“I’m sorry,” I said in a low voice. “I know you’ve been patient with me, and I know you moved up here with me just because I said I wanted to be here.”
“Oh, stop it,” she answered, recovering her temper. “I moved up here because I’ve always wanted to live in a place like this. A small town on an island! It’s pretty much the most picturesque place I’ve even seen. You didn’t have to talk me into it. And you’ll tell me your deep dark secrets when you’re ready. It’s ok.” She flashed a reassuring smile at Maggie.
I took a deep breath and found, to my surprise, that I could do this. If I thought about somebody other than myself, if I focused on Kelly’s dreams too, I could do it. “All right. Let’s interview with them.”
“Really?!” Kelly bounced on her heels and squealed.
“Yes, really,” I said. “Let’s have a Morning Meeting tomorrow to talk about it.” Ever since the day we’d had our first formal business talk at our kitchen table back in the old apartment, it had been our tradition to formulate our most serious plans that way.
Kelly grinned at me, running her fingers through her hair. “You know what? We can’t do that. We’re booked already for an interview at the hotel, first thing tomorrow morning.”
I shook my head at her, but her enthusiasm was contagious. If I could pull this off without running into any old ghosts from my past, it would be the making of our business. I’d tried to outrun the ghosts for years. Maybe now it was time to stop running and just live my life as if I had a right to happiness.
Chapter 7: Tim
“Hey Tim!” I spun around as my buddy Jorge yelled over at me across the deck of the ferry. “I’ll bet you’ve never seen so many clouds in the sky on a summer day, Texas guy.”
“Nah, an overcast day like this means nothing to me,” I laughed. “You kidding? I just spent months picking berries with you in Oregon. I’m no longer impressed by something as simple as a bunch of clouds.” I didn’t want to say it aloud, but I was thankful every single day to be away from the bright, sunny skies of my Texas hometown. The guys I worked with here had no idea what I’d left behind there. If I never went back, that would be too soon for me.
Jorge chuckled and headed inside the ferry to start collecting the rest of our crew. We’d just come up together from the Willamette Valley, where we’d been picking strawberries. Our crew boss had a van that carried enough of us that he could make a bit of extra profit for providing our labor. We all knew that he was taking some of our profits off the top, sure, but his negotiating abilities were what got us the work. Picking was hard, backbreaking labor, but it was honest and it paid cash.
For somebody like me with a prison record, that was the best I could hope for these days.
I hoisted my backpack onto my shoulder and surveyed the landscape that the ferry was approaching. The island had a military base on one side, but the rest of it looked to be agricultural land sprinkled with artsy communities. I didn’t have a whole lot of patience for the crafty, aging hippie vibe that some of those towns gave out, but the wild beauty of the island attracted me. I found myself daydreaming that it could be a great place to raise a family.
Then I shook my head at myself. Who would take me on as a husband? I didn’t know that I’d ever have a family, even if there was any other girl for me but Cici. She’d been lodged in my mind like a diamond in a hunk of plain rock ever since the night we’d spent together. I knew it was crazy. I’d never see her again, and even if I did, why would she look twice at me now?
I hated running the words through my mind, but I did it every so often, just to remind myself that it was all real. I was a felon now. After all the years I’d spent keeping my nose clean, staying away from the trouble that was my stepfather and his friends, I’d still ended up in just as much trouble as he had.
T&A Construction, indeed. We should have gone ahead and gotten the truck painted something more accurate, like “Two Dumbass Guys Construction.” In the end, I hadn’t gotten to keep the truck, or any of my possessions, really. Aaron had sold all of our tools that he could. He admitted to me that he’d taken them all to one of those pawn shops with bars over all the windows and doors. That morning that I’d spent with Cici was one of the best in my life. While I’d been with her, however, Aaron had been running around town raising as much cash as he could, then throwing in the “loan” of my vehicle to a drug dealer a couple of rungs up the ladder from his usual pot supplier.
He couldn’t sell the truck, since it was in my name. That day I found him in our living room, packing up all those bags of marijuana, I’d been glad to hear about that. I’d thought I could somehow salvage the situation if I still had my vehicle to get to any work sites.
I’d been wrong about so many things on that day. Only a few minutes after I’d arrived home, in the middle of my haranguing him about what an idiot he was, we ended up with what looked like twenty cops in the parking lot of our apartment complex. They busted us both for possession. We were together in the room with the drugs, we had both owned the items that had gone to the pawn shop to pay for them, and my own car was part of the arrangement with the dealer.
That didn’t add up too well for me.
Small town Texas law was not kind to us. The cops hauled us in immediately, impounding the few things we still o
wned. I’d been right that the amount of marijuana that Aaron had laid out in our living room was way over the line where real trouble starts. What an idiot. In the end, it meant felonies for both of us. I’d gotten less jail time than him. Was I supposed to be grateful for that? I hadn’t even done anything, but at least I wasn’t still in the slammer like he was.
I knew I wasn’t a bad guy. Maybe I had poor judgment when it came to making friends, but I was going to turn all that around. These guys on my picking crew were my buddies now. If we stuck together, we’d find steady work. Once I had that under control, I’d figure out the next step.
The next morning, I was covered in a fine layer of dust by eight o’clock. We’d already picked more rows that I could count. Everything about me smelled like raspberries, but it was no longer a smell that meant anything positive to me. Maybe once I’d associated the smell of berries with pie or with the little tubes of lip balm that the cute girls in my junior high used to carry around with them everywhere. Now I didn’t think I wanted to see another berry of any type ever again, as long as I lived.
“Tim, hold up,” our crew boss stepped in front of me. He wore a big hat that was supposed to shade his skin from the sun, but even in the cloudy Pacific Northwest, he’d picked up a tan that verged on leathery. By the time we were all old men, it wasn’t going to be a good look. I frowned as my concentration evaporated. None of these guys were going to get old. There was no health care, and the living wage was only adequate if you considered “living” to be camping out in somebody’s old cabin, or sometimes just tents.
“Yeah, Davis, what’s up?” I nodded at him. Even though I chafed at being bossed, he was a good guy. He did what he needed to do, and he let us stay out of his way as long as we made him money.
“Tim, I need somebody to drive the van over to the other side of the island this morning,” he said. “I cut a deal with the farm on today’s wages if I can help them with a delivery. But you know I can’t leave these guys out here without keeping an eye on them. If they didn’t all fall asleep on the job, they’d be pissing in the rows and getting us banned for good.”