Later, after it was clear they’d vamoosed for good and stuck us with their ancient dog, Dude, who they left in our backyard with a note tied to his collar — something’s come up! sorry about this! will repay! — my mother said the tea leaf reading didn’t have to be so complicated: “She might have just gone ahead and told me she saw an incontinent Bull Terrier in my future.”
After the reading, on that last Christmas Eve, Honey and I had walked back to the duplex on Argyle Avenue to let the dog out for a crap. We hung out for a while under the street lights with the snow coming down and the banks glittering like crushed-up diamonds all along the crescent up to Broad Street. She lit a cigarette, which smelled blue on the cold air, and then tossed the match away, a tiny scribble in the dark. She always let the smoke drift from the side of her mouth like a noir starlet. A hokey line from one of our old movie favorites followed a look like that. I remembered that night’s offering for a long time; it was the last I’d hear for a while.
“Kiss me. I want you to kiss me,” she cried. “The liar’s kiss that says I love you and means something else.” I pushed her away, as usual, but not before she singed the tips of my hair with her cigarette. How we laughed, our voices the only sound under the low winter sky. We wandered around another half-hour or so, out to the field across from Duvalle and around the block to have a gawk at the Christmas lights on the boulevard, and then she clipped the leash on the dog and we followed our tracks back to Montague to pick up Inez.
And even though she must have known they were abandoning Buckthorn before daylight, she was silent as the night, this girl I’d known forever who would call me up and go on for hours about some crazy thing her old man did, or about “some asshole” she’d told to fuck off. Sometimes she simply read to me from one of her mother’s recipe books, lingering over the culinary notes as if the intricacies of copper pots and pepper mills and wooden spoons and mandolines were some kind of miracle.
That night she didn’t say a word about her plans to vanish from our lives; she just slipped her arm through mine and sang a line from that old Joni Mitchell song about wishing she had a river she could skate away on. And I guess something in me faltered, because even though I registered the melody I failed to hear the meaning behind the lyric, which just shows my limitations in playing by ear.
2.
All those years. And what’s the first thing she says at the cemetery that day? “With my brains and your looks we could go places.” So much like her, and yet not, because she said it softly, not a hint of the drifter’s bravado in The Postman Always Rings Twice, one of our top oldies. Back in the day this would have been my cue to become the femme fatale and dish something back — but under the circumstances? She blushed, as if the line had slipped out like the old habit it was. We both looked down. I stared at her hands and saw her fingers when we were eight, or ten, chipped sparkle polish on her nails, shuffling cards, fussing with the gears on her bike, lacing up her hockey skates.
I’m not sure if I met her square in the eyes, but if so it was only for a moment, and then I looked away again, down at her skinny jeans blown out at the knees, then up the length of her coat, a dark wool thrift-store buy, the type we liked as teens. It seemed to me her boots were the pair she wore while tearing up the countryside on some guy’s motorcycle back in the day, and me in my flip-flops clinging to her from behind, terrified.
That day was warm for April; I’d removed my steaming blazer at the grave site, but she wore two or three layers underneath the coat — a shirt under a sweater with oversize plastic buttons — and a scarf, green, with crushed tassels.
“Christ, Nic,” she said and stared even harder at my shoes. And what was the right response to that tiny chip of a statement after so long a wait? It was almost as though she read my thoughts because she added, “I just — don’t know what to say.”
“Think of something, will you?” I said, all in a rush, because it’s not like the words hadn’t been queuing in my throat all those years. I half-forgot my father getting shoveled into the ground behind us. But then she reminded me.
“Shit. I’m so sorry he’s gone. I just couldn’t believe it when I heard.”
She pulled a bunch of damp Kleenex out of her pocket — two or three dropped to the ground. I picked them up, stuffed them back into the pocket of her overcoat, thinking of my father’s expression for the balled-up tissues in my mother’s wastebasket at the end of her counselling day, all those “white roses of despair.”
Another lengthy period of silence followed — a patch of emptiness so profound that I thought it might go on forever, and we’d just continue standing there until our time came and then topple into a nearby grave.
“I’m so goddamn sorry I missed the service,” she said.
I laughed. At least, I guess it was a laugh, and I suppose it belonged to me, because her own face remained solemn, drawn.
“Nic, I . . .”
“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight.” I said. “You’re sorry he’s gone, couldn’t believe it when you heard the news, and regret you missed the service.”
I had to give her credit because she was too proud, if nothing else, to look away. For a few seconds I wasn’t sure how to follow up, and then carried on, “And what about my mother?”
“Of course your mom. I was going to say . . .”
“You were going to add her to our list of regrets?”
“Of course not. I mean — yes. Oh shit.”
I took her in. She looked raw, like someone recovering from an illness. That kind of hollowed-out look about the eyes. I’d just begun thinking of lightening up, giving her a chance — because who knew? Maybe one of the many things I feared really had happened, maybe she’d been kidnapped, dug a tunnel to freedom, a mile per year, and came straight back to tell me about it — when she regrouped and got a little testy herself.
“Look, if you want to tear an honest strip off me about something please bring it on. But don’t do this other thing, because . . .”
“An honest strip about something?”
She slipped a pair of sunglasses out of her coat and put them on. I would have recognized her mother’s old cat-eyes anywhere. But how solemn she looked, and so far away from eighteen, as she turned away from me, the deep green lenses against her pale cheek. She glanced at the Eldorado. I reached out, removed her glasses, and folded them in my hand.
“Don’t worry. I won’t try to stop you,” I said. “Because it’s just too hard, isn’t it? Dragging yourself back to — what did you always call it? — ‘this fucking hellhole of ours.’ But the least you can do is look me in the eyes after six goddamn years of nothing. You know, just stand there and — look at me.” I considered holding that moment for five or six seconds, then turning and walking away. At least I’d have my dignity, as long as I remembered where I parked the car. On the other hand, this might be my last chance to have it out with her and why squander the moment? So I carried on. “I mean, what did you think I’d say, ‘Hey, Honey. Where the heck you been? Sorry I missed your phone calls. How come no recipe tips for the last three thousand days?’ Or whatever it’s been?”
“Please,” she said and reached for the glasses. “I’m sorry for everything — all of it. I know exactly how shitty I’ve been. There’s nothing you could accuse me of that isn’t bang on. Name it. Anything. You don’t know the half of it.”
When I didn’t answer she gave up on the glasses and began buttoning her coat. The last button was missing. A few threads clung there and she brushed them away and squared her shoulders.
“Yes, I’ll look you in the eye. That’s mostly why I came back after all. But I’ll tell you what I won’t do: I won’t play this game.”
We both stood our ground, I guess you could say. I wanted to break down and tell her how all this time I thought she must be dead. Didn’t she know that? Why else would I stop hearing from someone whose whereabouts I
’d known every day of every week since childhood? And now, seeing her standing there, every awful thing I’d imagined came rushing back: she’d drowned in some river, been kidnapped, sold as a sex slave, murdered by some loser driving a van stuffed with torture devices, or — lost forever to a drunk in a Jeep.
“Honestly,” she said, “just haul off and slug me. I know I deserve it. But don’t torture both of us with this whole passive-aggressive thing.”
When I turned to go, she grabbed my sleeve.
“Drive with me,” she said.
* * *
Rumor had it that the girls from Ipanema had disappeared because Honey got pregnant and Inez dragged her off to get an abortion. But Buckthorn rumors always come in grimy droves. Another was Inez finally went off the deep end and Honey dragged her off to the nuthouse to dry out. Everyone seemed to know that Mrs. Ramone’s daughter was easy and wild, and Mrs. Ramone herself drank up a storm and grew pot plants in the duplex, although it would have been easier to name someone who didn’t drink too much and get high in Buckthorn, outside of my parents. Or some said Honey’s often-absent father had robbed a bank somewhere and sent for Honey and Inez, so they said fuck the old furniture and shitty TV and deserted the crappy duplex on Argyle Avenue like anyone in their right mind would. But most people assumed they had stiffed the landlord one too many times, like plenty of others before them, and fled to salvage some dignity.
Inez may have been overdoing it with her migraine medication (washed down with whiskey) but the rest was b.s. Honey had made it through her teen years by taking and borrowing more things from guys than she ever gave away: dirt bikes, motorboats, snow machines, and, later, dinners and tickets to see popular bands in the city. No, she didn’t get in trouble because of some guy. With her looks and smarts, there was every chance she’d make the right connections and score a hot job in the city someday.
I just couldn’t understand what came over them to disappear so suddenly, or why she never contacted me. All my emails bouncing back? The canceled phone? Hadn’t I proven myself to be an ace confidante? Who held the pail while she siphoned gas for the ravenous Eldorado? Who else could she have trusted to keep it zipped when she found that rusty pistol tucked inside a battered suitcase behind the abandoned Shell station? We were fourteen or fifteen by then. Not that she needed to worry, because Inez, when she discovered the gun, stuffed it into a Corn Flakes box and pushed it to the back of the shelf. “It’s probably lost its bang,” she said. “But might come in handy for a prop someday.”
The afternoon she appeared at Buckthorn Cemetery, Honey may have looked depleted from wherever her travels had taken her, but she still knew how to swing that boat around on a dime and make tracks down the highway. I studied the inside of the car as she drove: tuner knob missing, the steering wheel worn smooth over god knows how many miles — impossible to say how many because the mileage meter, like the clock, had been buggered, as her mother put it, from the get-go. A bunch of Inez’s old cassettes lay scattered across the dash. Stacks of clothing, neatly folded, hid the back seat, and on the floor were a couple of picnic coolers and three or four plastic water jugs. Shirts and sweaters on hangers hung from the windows. I ached to know the lay of the land, but her proud bearing held me back. All in good time, I figured.
The so-called vintage Eldorado had been pretty much a beautiful wreck right from the day she and Inez came cruising down the avenue and parked in front of our place on Montague Street. Inez listed the car’s stats for my father while he circled the beast several times: phantom gray, genuine leather upholstery, top-of-the-line everything.
“It’s been around the block but pretty damned swish, wouldn’t you say?” Inez said, as she fired up a Player’s Light. She said the car had spent its whole life in Austin, Texas, and did we know that it was sunny in Austin, Texas, 228 days of the year and hadn’t snowed for thirty-five years? She wished they would have left the Texas plates on the car but the authorities wouldn’t permit it.
She pointed out what the manual called the “vestigial fins and aggressive grill” while Honey slipped behind the wheel and I gazed down the length of the beast. Yes, it was only a car (as my mother pointed out later), but it looked like something that flew to the stars, or hunted along a coral reef, with a body like a long sheet of molten silver and streaked with soft creases, as if someone had gone over it with an iron while it was cooling. It was a week before either of them noticed the clock was forever stuck at 2:03. Later, when things began to drop off or fall apart, Inez called it the Mobster, and Honey joked about the screwed-up wiring that turned the air conditioner on and off at will. When Inez insisted it was the equivalent of owning 350 racehorses, Honey said it was more like having one old nag. Still, a Cadillac Eldorado in any condition was hard to resist at seventeen. Whenever Honey did that clucking sound that kick-starts a horse I knew we were going somewhere. As soon as we left the cemetery that day, I knew exactly where we were going.
* * *
I seldom made that drive anymore, but I could have gotten there blindfolded. I mean it: the exit onto Highway 4, ten minutes or so to County Rd. 8, the right turn at the octagonal barn, and then right again at the sign for Crystal Lake and down the gravel road toward the cabins, bait shop, and the boat launch straight ahead. There was a time Honey would hit the gas as if to charge straight over the launch and into the drink, but that day she slowed, turned left before the cabins, and then down a smaller road to the lookout. We parked next to a kiosk where a new sign, already covered with graffiti, offered up a few details about the Buckthorn County area: marine species, wild life, nature of the woodlands — an attempt to promote a little tourism in the area as business declined.
When she turned off the ignition there was nothing but the sound of the wind and waves as they curled into whitecaps and raced toward the beach. The old familiar view rose up: the long row of trees across the opposite shore and the pale blue hills behind.
She rested her hands on the steering wheel, her eyes focused ahead as though we were still driving and if she let go we’d careen off the road. She started right in apologizing again.
“I really am sorry, you know.”
“I don’t want regrets,” I said. “I want a story, and a damn good one. So come on, because I’ve got to get back.”
She turned to face me, her knee against the back of the seat, like when we sat eating pizza and bullshitting in the old days.
“Do you remember when we were fifteen — that day the storage locker slammed closed on my arm and busted it? Well, that story was just that: a story, a pile of crap.” She reached over, snapped open the glove compartment, and fished out a small, silver flask from under a stack of tattered napkins, unscrewed the cap, and offered it to me. I waved it away. I guess she saw something on my face because she assured me that she never took a drink before noon and gestured toward the clock. “And it’s three minutes after two, as always, so . . . cheers.” She took a couple of sips, screwed the cap back on, and smiled. “Remember how I swilled whiskey while paddling the lake? And yet I still managed to paddle the straight and narrow.” She waited for me to go along with her, get in the spirit, but I just wasn’t there.
“Wrong story,” I said.
“Okay then. But the whole thing’s so goddamn embarrassing I can’t stand talking about it, which is just one of the many reasons why I never did. The truth is — I broke my arm at the storage locker, sure, but with a little help from the old man. The door itself was completely innocent, an unwilling accessory at most, nowhere else to go.” She smiled at this and then told me not to look so shocked, because the cops had been hauling her father off to jail for one reason or another for years.
“You knew that,” she said. Sure I did. Sometimes when she called me late at night I could hear Inez and Honey’s father going at it in the background, the sounds of things being thrown around, the music turned up, as if that would fool the folks on the other side of the duplex in
to thinking the battle was really a celebration. But this kind of thing had become almost standard for most of Buckthorn, hadn’t it?
“You’re telling me your dad broke your arm.”
“Here’s the facts,” she said, serious now. “And this is one-time only, because I owe it to you. And you’ve got no idea how much I regret not coming clean, and making it right, until so late in the game. If I’m even making it right at all. Because that’s up to you.” She slipped the flask under her thigh.
“It was a Sunday. The asshole was on a mission to ditch all the shit Inez couldn’t bear to get rid of and save the locker’s storage costs. You know, so he could go on losing golf balls on the fairway and swilling beer in the clubhouse — and god knows what else — rather than get a real job. Half the stuff in the locker was his own crap, but whatever, it had to be done. But then the prick said something about Inez. Something that a father should never say to his daughter about her own mother. I slugged him. Actually broke a finger before the arm; had to tape it later. He grabbed me. We fought like a couple of movie cowboys in a saloon. It’s true the locker was mostly full of the kind of shit my mother couldn’t resist buying at lawn sales and thrift stores: ornate mirrors, a pair of garish tufted chairs that even a cat had clearly hated, old bottles, stupid pictures in gaudy frames. But so what? Not enough room for his pricey golf clubs, I guess, and those two trophies he won, probably for boozing. He grabbed my arms and pushed me against a bookcase cluttered with all those trinkets that Inez was so wild about.” She laughed again. “I can tell you it’s really something to find yourself staring into the eyes of an Elvis bust while dear old dad presses himself up against you and goes caveman.”
Honey Page 2