Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

by Deb Caletti

  “Where’ve you been?” Travis asked. “My fearless girl gone chickenshit?”

  A curl of anger rose up in me. I wanted to snatch his beret and throw it in with the koi. I made a lunge for it, but Travis stepped back neatly, as if he were anticipating my move.

  “That’s the Ruby I love,” he said. “I miss the way you wear your hair pulled back in that clip. I miss the way your eyes get wide when you’re afraid.”

  I turned away from him. There was a robin on the ground, under the cedars. It was trying to drag a huge twig in its mouth, but the twig was entirely too big for it. The robin hauled it a few steps, rested, and tried again. It reminded me of Mom lugging our Christmas trees into the house.

  “I miss your wrists. They’re so small they’re breakable. I miss the way you look at me like you couldn’t care less.”

  “How’s this?” I gave him a blank expression. But it was a lie, and he knew it.

  “You’re special, Ruby. I’ve never met anyone like you before. We were becoming so close.” He stepped toward me again, and I let him. He ran his hand down my back, untied my apron, pulled my hips to his. I heard voices; Allen’s, one of the nursery workers, and someone else’s, a customer.

  “The water pump’s got to be enough to circulate the whole thing at least once, say, every two hours,” I heard Allen say.

  I felt myself slipping back to him. I didn’t even have the decency to clutch at branches, try to hold on with my fingernails as I slid, slid down the mountainside, heading for a valley vivid with color and dangers I knew little about.

  “Follow me,” Travis Becker said. He strolled off up the dirt pathway, gazing at the garden statues and waterfalls as if he were a browsing customer. I know what I should have done. I should have tied my apron and gone the other way, back down the path from the tree plot and inside the building. I should have found a shopper looking for something that would kill aphids and cutworms.

  Instead I saw that Travis had gone off the path meant for patrons and was walking fast toward the greenhouses, and I followed him. There are several greenhouses out there; one large hothouse and one small, cool greenhouse that Libby uses for her personal prizes—her orchids. That’s where Travis was heading, his hand already reaching out for the knob on the glass door, disregarding the EMPLOYEES ONLY sign. I was nearly running—I could feel the loose ties of my apron flap against the back of my legs. I needed Travis out of there, and in some way I felt down, down, deep, I just plain needed Travis. He had left the door open a crack, and I pushed it open and walked into the coolness. Those orchids in there, that’s what I felt like. Hidden and growing quietly, secretly unfurled, waiting for that glass door to be pushed open so that they could be seen, be discovered.

  Travis, in his black clothes, stood in a corner, glass rising around him, leaning on the shelves that held the fragile orchids and looking my way. “Come here,” he said.

  “Be careful behind you,” I said. “You don’t belong in here.”

  “This place smells like armpit.” Travis did not turn to look at the flowers behind him. I liked the smell in there—wet earth mixed with sweetness. The sweetness of pink, if pink had a smell. Those flowers were so difficult to grow that it took three to five years for them to even get a bloom. I had to get him out of there before Libby saw us. Outside the glass panes I could see Allen and the customer down the pathway, the customer a big bearded guy with one boot up on the rock ledge of the fish pond.

  “This is one of the coolest spots in this town on a hot day,” he said. “That and the freezer storage of the Front Street Market.”

  Goose bumps rose along my arms at the mention of the cold and his clear message that he’d been places he shouldn’t have. “How do you know about this greenhouse?” I said. “This is private.”

  “I like to know about the places around me,” he said. “Would you come over here?”

  “Travis, you’ve got to get out.”

  “Come here first.”

  “I mean it.”

  “One kiss.”

  “Shit, Travis.” I had one eye on Allen and the customer.

  “One kiss and we’ll leave. Baby, come here.”

  I went over to him. He rubbed his hands up my arms to warm them. He kissed me, his tongue taking its time in my mouth. He pulled my body to his. I was worried he would lean back into the orchids and crush them. Our lips made such a messy slurping sound that I was somehow embarrassed for the orchids, so open and gentle, to hear.

  “Now,” he said. He was holding my wrist. He took a pen from my apron pocket, a felt-tipped marker, took the cap off with his teeth. He turned my wrist around. “Hold still.” He wrote on the inside of my arm and then recapped the pen. “There. My phone number. Now there’s no excuse not to call me. I don’t give it to just anyone.”

  His presence, the black of his clothes, was so wrong in there amid the glass panels of light and the tender colors of the flowers. It was the same black that was now on the thin inside skin of my arm. I had that same feeling with him there in Libby’s special place, among her trowels and her gloves formed to the shape of her hands, that I did seeing the woman’s tennis shoes outside on the porch of the house Travis had stolen from. It was the invasion of something innocent.

  Travis hooked his arm around my neck and pulled me close again. He moved his mouth across the skin of my shoulder up to my ear. I closed my eyes. “We could do it right here on the floor,” he whispered.

  I opened my eyes. Outside the glass panes a flash of color caught my attention. A batik dress, a blue bandanna. “Travis! We’ve got to get out of here!”

  He turned around slowly, followed my gaze. “Look who’s coming.”

  “Goddamn it, Travis. Goddamn it.”

  I could see Libby walk up the path and stop at the pond with Allen and the customer. She put her hands on her hips. She gestured toward the waterfall, made motions with her hands in description. Cottonwood fluff snowed down upon the scene outside the glass, drifting, I was certain, into the pools of water. I remembered the solid, contented feeling I’d had earlier of being cared for. One look up and I was certain her kind, know-all eyes would see Travis’ black figure in the glass.

  “Get down,” I hissed.

  “So you liked my idea,” Travis laughed.

  I was beginning to panic. I felt hot tears of desperation spring up. I tugged on the leg of Travis’ shorts. “Down!”

  Travis didn’t move, but Libby did. She crouched down beside one of the waterfalls and stuck one arm inside the pool. The customer was nodding. Libby’s back, thank God, was to us.

  “Get out! Go now!”

  Travis looked through the glass with the casualness of someone checking his watch when he had all the time in the world. Panic wrung my stomach. I wanted to scream at him. He walked toward the door with infuriating, horrible calm and left. I waited a moment and left behind him, following him onto the patron walkway that led away from the waterfalls, toward the hedge trees and rows of standing junipers. He spoke to me over one shoulder.

  “Don’t forget to call,” he said.

  I went into the bathroom right after I’d gotten inside the Johnson’s Nursery building after Travis had left, and tried to scrub that marker off my arm. The shadow of the number was still there, though, as was Travis’ own shadow—every time I looked toward the greenhouses, I thought I saw him there. Whether he really was there or whether my fear had imagined him, I don’t know; all I know is that I saw flashes of black behind the glass panes where the orchids lay. I felt nauseous at my own weakness that let him come back in my life.

  Sydney and Lizbeth came over that night. We all rolled our sleeping bags onto the floor of the living room. My mother and Lizbeth sat cross-legged on the floor and talked about poets and polished their toenails.

  “I hate to take the obvious road, no cleverness intended, but I really like Robert Frost,” Lizbeth said.

  “I think it is so great that his name is Frost and he writes about winter and snow,�
� Sydney said. “How perfect is that? I mean, it’s like an ice cream man with the last name of Cone.”

  “Our lunch lady’s name is Candy Sweet,” Chip Jr. said.

  “No way,” I said.

  “It is too!” he said with so much sudden indignation that I knew he was probably telling the truth. Either that or the polish fumes were getting to his head.

  “I used to know a woman named Anita Hurl,” Lizbeth said. “Get it? I need to hurl?”

  “She had very cruel or very stupid parents,” I said.

  “When I was a kid I thought diarrhea sounded like the name of a beautiful woman,” Sydney said.

  “This conversation is getting gross,” Mom said.

  We watched an old Frankenstein movie Mom had brought home from the library and we made fun of it. It was in black and white—and yellow, thanks to our television—and even though we were laughing at it, it was actually pretty scary. It was enough to make me not think about Travis Becker for a while, and the fact that I had recently let down my mother in her belief that we were well on our way toward extricating him from my life. Chip Jr. must have thought the movie was scary too, or else he was sick of us, because he made some excuse and went to bed. Poe ate popcorn out of the bowl on the floor when he thought we weren’t looking.

  Everyone went to sleep, finally. I listened to the rhythms of all of their breathing, and the crickets outside, through the open screen window. The evening coolness that drifted in made me think of the coolness in that greenhouse; the crickets, of that night in someone else’s garden. I put my fingers up to my arm. Of course, I had already committed the number to memory. I still know it now.

  “Here,” I said to the short woman in the jeans and white work shirt, which was open at the neck to reveal a chunky beaded necklace. “Please. Sit here.” I rose from the soft floral chair in the room, which I had taken before all of the old people started to arrive.

  The woman dropped her book bag on the floor with a thunk and sat in a wooden rocker to my left. “What do you think, because I’m old that if I don’t get the softest chair I’m going to have a stroke and die?” she said.

  She adjusted her roundness on the chair, reached down into her bag, and opened her glasses case.

  “No, I um . . .”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t kick off just yet.”

  “Don’t mind Peach. She thinks Attack the Newcomer is a parlor game. Like charades,” Harold Zaminski said. The last time I had come to the book club I was fourteen, and all I could remember was that Harold pretended to pull a quarter from behind one of my ears. This time when we met, he had taken my hands and told me how lovely I’d become in his smooth, husky voice that sounded the way a soft old leather chair would if it could talk. It was impossible not to love Harold. He had aging-movie-star good looks, with comb marks still in his slicked-back hair and the thoughtful, intelligent face of a longtime reader. He smelled like a fresh splash of Old Spice, and was a practical joker. My mother called this passive-aggressive behavior, since as the resident male Harold was always getting picked on, and his pranks were his small acts of revenge. The week before, he’d taped down the handle of the spray nozzle on Miz June’s kitchen faucet so that when Mrs. Wong turned it on, water shot straight out. Harold was always forgiven because of the food he brought. On Miz June’s dining room table I already saw the apple tarts, with their bumpy crusts lightly browned and sprinkled with powdered sugar.

  “Ann,” Harold called toward the kitchen where my mother was pouring coffee with Miz June and Anna Bee. “Peach already has her fangs out and they’re pointing Ruby’s way.” The book club was always held in Miz June’s house, a delicate yellow-and-white Victorian on one of Nine Mile Falls’ side streets. It had a wide porch with hanging flower baskets that she watered with the raised end of the garden hose, and a carriage house out back, now the garage for her rarely used Lincoln Continental, pale yellow with the license plate MIZ JUNE. It was a gift from one of Miz June’s many admirers, Chester Delmore. You could see the car in there if you peered through those dusty windows. If you didn’t know better, you’d think those headlights were going to blink at you in some sort of surprised pleasure at being noticed after such patient waiting.

  “Tattletale,” Peach said.

  “Viper,” Harold said.

  “Children. Enough bickering.” Miz June entered through the doorway of the dining room, carrying a silver tray with china cups that trembled like nervous kids during a thunderstorm as she set them down on the marble-topped coffee table. The double strands of pearls Miz June wore swung toward her chin as she leaned over. Miz June made you think of climbing roses on a white trellis. She had a cap of blond hair and fine features, and wore a floral dress that matched her living room, which was raspberry-toned and gracious with its Victorian parlor furniture and fringe lamps, polished mahogany fireplace, and vases of dried hydrangeas. A painting over the fireplace showed a Victorian couple in a boat against a soft green lake; the man in the hat bent toward the woman as if in proposal, while she had her head turned toward the water as if he were more boring than the all-weather channel. According to Mom, Miz June seemed to attract men the same way a summer evening attracts mosquitoes. I got the feeling from that painting that Miz June, in spite of her gentle demeanor, probably liked the zzzip sound of a bug light.

  Peach had finally gotten her glasses free from the case, plunked them on the end of her nose. “Well, I must say, having Ruby here is actually much nicer than the junior librarian-in-training you sent us last week.”

  “Fowler is hardly a junior librarian,” my mother said as she came out of the kitchen followed by Anna Bee. Anna Bee had arrived at Miz June’s on her Schwinn, her poof of white hair tucked under her bike helmet that had a small lightning bolt on the side. She rode her Schwinn everywhere. You could see her around town, her basket filled with a sack of groceries or a waxed white doughnut bag or a package tied with string as she headed to the post office. It made you proud of her.

  “His hair was too long,” Harold said. “He looked like a hippie.”

  “Cute dog, though,” Peach said.

  “Lovely little dog. It escaped and tinkled in the upstairs hallway.” Miz June sipped her tea. “Beauty had never seen such bad manners.” Beauty was Miz June’s cat.

  “He was nervous. All these new people,” Anna Bee said. Her little white socks had dragonflies on them. You could see them when she sat down, along with a peek of thin, pale leg where the socks stopped.

  “I heard about that,” my mother said. “Fowler felt terrible.” She dived for a change of topic. “I’m going to be bringing Ruby for a while. She’s having boy trouble.”

  “Jeez, Mom,” I said.

  “Ah.” Miz June set her cup down. “It runs in the family, then.”

  “So what are we, her punishment?” Harold winked at me.

  “Punishment, fine. Just don’t expect us to do the wise-old-person routine. I hate that,” Peach said.

  “I don’t mind sharing my experience,” Anna Bee said. She took a seat on the settee. She sat down very slowly, as if unsure whether her butt would land in the direction she was aiming.

  “I find that most old people aren’t wise, they’re just old,” Miz June said.

  “We’re as screwed up as everyone else,” Peach said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Harold said.

  “And sweet. They think you’re sweet just because you’re old. For Christ’s sake.”

  “I’m sure you don’t have that problem,” Harold said.

  “Keep in mind this,” Peach shook her finger at me. “If an old person is sweet, they’ve probably always been sweet. If they were wise, they were probably always smart. Nobody changes that much.”

  “Well, every body changes quite a lot.” Miz June sighed.

  “I keep thinking that my neck resembles the skin of a lima bean if you popped the bean out with your finger,” Anna Bee said. She lifted her chin so that we could see. She was right.

  �
�You should see the butterfly tattoo I got on my keister years ago. It’s now down on the back of my thigh,” Peach said. “Like it flew there.”

  The doorbell interrupted that image, thank God. Harold went to the windows, peeked out. “It’s only Mrs. Wong.”

  “It’s a miracle. She’s only fifteen minutes late,” Miz June said.

  “What this time?” Anna Bee said. “Car trouble?”

  “Be nice,” Mom said.

  “Her arm got stuck in the mailbox. A bunch of sheep were flocked in her driveway and she couldn’t back out her Mercedes,” Peach said.

  “Her nephew came down with mengue fever and was near death on her doorstep,” Harold said.

  “Dengue fever,” Anna Bee corrected.

  “That’s what I said.”

  I heard a thunk, thunk, thunk up the porch steps, and then the doorbell. “Sorry, sorry,” Mrs. Wong said as she bustled in. She waved one hand around. She was dressed chicly in black and white, her wrist circled with gold jewelry. Mrs. Wong’s accent was still very heavy. “There was a little problem at the Golden Years Rest Home. Grandfather Wong hit his neighbor in the jaw.” She slugged the air in demonstration. “He thought the man was stealing his magazines. I had to go calm him down.”

  “Ninety-year-olds shouldn’t be getting Playboy anyway.” Peach chuckled at her own joke.

  “I don’t bring him that filth. Let me tell you, he would like a Playboy, too,” Mrs. Wong said. “I bring him Reader’s Digest.”

  “Grandfather Wong should have paid the guy to steal them then,” Harold said.

  “Good God, take him something with a little substance,” Peach said.

  “How many amazing recoveries from disease does anyone care to read about?” Harold said.

  “You know who has the Playboy. Mr. Wong, that’s who. He hides it whenever I come home. I am sure of it,” Mrs. Wong said. She took off her dress shoes and put on a pair of old red slippers she’d taken out of her bag.