What Makes a Family

by Colleen Faulkner

  Minnie shakes her head. “I don’t know why you keep doing it. Shoveling poo.”

  I slowly rise, crunching on what’s left of the peppermint in my mouth. I don’t want the horses going without water. “Henri says I have to work. Everyone pulls their share.”

  She shakes her head, looking down at the little skirt. She’s sewing on sequins now. “You could join the coochies. Jacko hasn’t replaced Alice yet.”

  Jacko sent Alice packing because she got in the family way and wouldn’t get rid of it. I hadn’t known her well, but she’d seemed like a nice girl. I wouldn’t have gotten rid of my baby, either. But I’d have done what I could to keep a baby out of my belly to begin with. Of course I hadn’t known about such things when I left Bakersville. I hadn’t even understood what making business was or how it was done. It was Minnie who saved me from Alice’s fate, probably. She brought me a little rubber thing to put inside me. I was so embarrassed when she tried to explain how it worked and where it went that I was in tears. But Minnie ignored my girlish behavior and even offered to help me put it in the first time. I thank God for Minnie. And I don’t care if it’s a sin for one girl to help another girl not have a baby. I don’t know what I’d have done without her.

  “I don’t think I could do what you do, Minnie.” I feel myself blush. I’ve seen Minnie and Millie’s act dozens of times. I don’t think it’s so terrible. But I can’t imagine myself on that painted stage. All those men looking at me. Hollering and whistling. “And . . . I don’t know how to dance. Not like you. I can’t even do the fox-trot.”

  Minnie sets down her sewing and gets off the bench to come around to me. She takes both my hands and pulls me to my feet. “I could teach you.”

  I shake my head. “I should probably talk to Henri.”

  “It’s not Hank who makes decisions for you, Sarry. It’s you.” She squeezes my hands in hers. “You could save a lot of money.”

  “I don’t have anyone to send it to,” I tell her, looking into her big, dark eyes.

  “Then save it for yourself. And when you’re ready to move on, you’ll have it.”

  “But I love Henri. I could never . . . entertain men after, the way you and Millie do.” Jacko has a private area set up behind the stage where for an extra fee a gentleman can spend a few minutes with one of the coochie girls. What the girl does on her time is her business, Jacko says, as long as Jacko gets his cut. I don’t even want to think about what the girls are doing back there.

  “Not required for the job,” Minnie says firmly. Then she goes on, talking fast. “The dancing is easy. You just sway your hips and move your arms. And I could make your costumes. We could get fabric in town this week. And I’ve got plenty of feathers. Rude-baker’s girls are known for their feathers, now.”

  “I can’t buy fabric. I don’t have any money,” I whisper. “What I make barely covers what I have to pay Jacko to eat and sleep in the truck.”

  “So I’ll front you the money. You pay me back. No interest.”

  “Sarry!”

  I hear Jacko’s voice calling from somewhere outside the tent. I keep my gaze locked with Minnie’s.

  “You planning on working today or you running off after Hank?” Jacko shouts.

  “Think about it,” Minnie whispers. “Things don’t work out with you and Hank, you could make enough money to go anywhere you want in a year.”

  I try to pull my hands from hers. She smells good. Like French toilet water. Men bring her things like that. She has regular marks because this is her third summer passing through these towns. “I have to go, Minnie,” I tell her.

  She gives me a quick peck on the cheek and lets go of me. “A carny girl’s got to take care of herself, Sarry. And have a plan for when she’s ready to move on. You best think about your plan now, while you got the chance. And the pretty face.”

  I press my lips together and nod.

  “Sarry!” Jacko yells. Then he lets out a string of curse words that would have made me blush two months ago. Not anymore.

  I flash Minnie a quick smile and rush off in my heavy rubber boots. “Hold your horses, Jacko!” I shout. “I’m comin’!”

  23

  Abby

  I listen to Drum’s cell ring, wondering why he hasn’t picked up. It’s the third time I’ve called. Not that I’m worried. At least not yet. I’m not that person who thinks every time someone is late getting home from work or school that he’s been flattened by a tractor trailer. Still, it’s not like him not to pick up. Even when he’s running.

  I’m seated on the end of the dock in our backyard. It’s a nice dock. Daddy replaced the old wood and pitch dock three or four years ago with one made from composite decking. Daddy is so old-school about so many things; I love it when he surprises me this way. He said he did some Internet research about the environmental issues of chemical-treated wood for docks and decided to give this more expensive version a try. The dock is picturesquely beautiful with what looks like weathered gray, wide planks. It’s prettier than any dock one of the guys in town built us over the years, and I don’t get splinters in my shorts sitting on the end anymore.

  Drum’s cell rings three times, and I’m just about to hang up so I don’t get his “leave a message” message, when I hear his voice on the other end.

  “Abby?”

  “Drum.” I laugh, so relieved that I feel silly. I guess I was worried. “Hey, where you been? I called you a couple of times.”

  “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition?” he asks. It’s a line from a Monty Python skit from a million years ago. Our code for why are you being so nosy?

  I look up, across the bay, at the glistening, blue-green water. When I was a little girl, Mom Brodie used to tell me that the surface was littered with diamonds, and that was why it sparkled. I believed her for a long time, maybe because it certainly seemed, growing up, as if I lived in a magical place.

  I’m quiet for a second. Drum’s voice sounds strange. He doesn’t sound like himself. “You okay?” I ask.

  He doesn’t say, “Sure, I’m fine.” In fact, he doesn’t say anything for a long beat.

  The concern creeps back. “Drum?”

  He exhales. “Sorry. I was asleep. Trying to sleep. Take a nap.”

  I wait for further explanation. Drum’s not a napper. Me? I love a good nap on a rainy Sunday afternoon, but Drum doesn’t want to waste the precious minutes he has on this earth sleeping them away. Which means he only sleeps about five hours a night and he never, ever naps. He didn’t even nap when the kids were babies, keeping us up all night. But that was the old Drum. Lately, he’s been sleeping more. A sign of depression, I’m afraid.

  “Should I come home?” I ask.

  “No.” He makes a derisive sound. “Of course not. I’m fine, Abs.”

  “You don’t sound fine.” Emotion wells in my throat. It’s not just Drum. It’s everything. It’s Mom Brodie’s dying, the will, my awkward relationship with my mother, my concern for Celeste. I was worried about my sister even before all this. She’s been so sad lately. When I talk to her on the phone. In person, she’s always performing. I think I get the real Celeste late at night, when I sit in the dark in my living room and talk with her. I’m afraid of what losing the money she thought she was inheriting might do to her.

  “You want to come here?” I ask.

  “You need me to come?”

  I watch a sailboat glide by in the distance. It’s not a local sailboat. Sail is too white. Hull is too pristine. It irritates me that some stranger is marring my view of the open water, though I certainly don’t have that right. It’s not as if Brodie Island has some sort of moratorium against strangers in these waters.

  “No, I don’t need you to come,” I tell my husband. “But . . . it would be nice to have you here.” I take a breath. Exhale slowly. “This is harder than I thought it was going to be. She’s just lying there, fading away right in front of us.” I hesitate and then go on. He’s such a good listener. He’s known me
so long; he knows when I’m trying to gather my thoughts, and he’s okay giving me that time. “I keep wondering what’s going on in her head. Does she know we’re there? What’s she thinking? Is she here with us, or is she lost in her memories? Is she with us at all or has her brain shut off, and we’re just waiting for her body to catch up?”

  “Aw, baby, I’m so sorry. I’m supposed to go have dinner with Reed tonight. I could come tomorrow. I can take a couple of days off. Take some personal time. If they don’t like it, tough tacos.”

  I have to chuckle. My husband has to be the only sixty-year-old man who says “tough tacos.” “No, it’s fine,” I say, feeling better already. I just needed to hear his voice. “We should stick to the original plan. You and Reed will come for the funeral.” I lean forward and dip my toes in the water. The tide’s low, so I have to stretch to reach. Slack tide. I can tell by the waterline on the shore. “I’m fine. We’re fine. I just miss you,” I say wistfully. “And, things are . . . the way they always are here. Awful and wonderful.”

  I think about Mom Brodie’s will. I wasn’t sure when I was going to tell Drum about my impending inheritance. It makes me uncomfortable talking about the money before Mom Brodie’s dead. It makes me even more uncomfortable to think that her death is going to significantly change our lives, in a good way. But Drum seems so down that I think I’ll tell him. Then I feel awkward. Where do you start with something like this? “I . . . I won’t keep you,” I hear myself say. Gulls circle over my head and call. “I know you have to get on the road, but I have a . . . surprise.” I hesitate.

  “Okay.” He doesn’t say it with much enthusiasm. He really isn’t himself, and I wonder if counseling wouldn’t be such a bad idea. But maybe he doesn’t need professional psychological advice. Maybe he just needs enough money to allow him to make the changes in his life that he wants. Maybe he just needs to pursue his dream.

  “I’m inheriting some money from Mom Brodie. A lot of money,” I blurt.

  “What?” He says it as if exhaling. “You’re kidding. How much—no. I’m sorry. That was so not cool. Your grandmother is dying. We shouldn’t even be talking about this.”

  I name the amount of money I stand to inherit.

  For a moment I think he hasn’t heard me and I’m going to have to repeat it. Then I hear a sound, like he’s sat down.

  “Wow,” he says at last. “Wow.”

  “Yeah.” I lean over the water and watch a blue claw crab move lazily along the bottom, through the waving green grass. It’s a small one, not big enough legally to catch. And a smart crab, I suppose, because he’s safe here. We never crab off our home dock. Other docks we’ve got on Brodie, sure. When we were kids we used to crab off the old cannery docks all the time. But never here. Daddy calls it his crab sanctuary. He swears they bed down here because they know they won’t get caught, be covered with Old Bay seasoning, and be thrown into a steamer basket.

  “Wow,” Drum says again. “I didn’t know she . . . I didn’t realize Mom Brodie had money of her own to leave anyone. I just assumed everything was locked up in a trust the way the land is. You’ve always joked about being the pauper heiress.”

  “I was shocked when Daddy told me. Still in shock. I don’t think any of us knew she had money. You know my family. No one ever talks about money. Not Brodies.” I think on that for a moment and then go on. “You realize what this means, Drum. You can retire.” I give a little laugh, excited and scared at the same time. I can’t believe I’m going to be able to give him his dream. How many people can ever say that? How many people can ever give this kind of gift to someone they love so dearly? “We can sell the house and buy something near the water. You can open your studio. Drum, you can go in Monday and resign. You never have to teach again if you don’t want to.”

  “I . . . don’t know what to say, Abs.” His voice is full of emotion. I think he might be crying, which makes me want to cry. “You sure you want to do this with your money? Because . . . it’s yours.”

  “Ours,” I say. “Or it will be.”

  “I . . . I don’t even know how to wrap my head around this. I . . . I’m speechless.”

  I smile, so happy he’s so happy. “So you might as well start making plans,” I say. “We’ve got to get the house ready to sell and—”

  “Whoa, let’s go easy, here, babe. We need to talk to the kids. To Sarah at least, before we talk about moving.”

  “Sure, sure, but you know her. She’s always up for an adventure. That’s how we’ll present it.”

  “You think she wants to move this year? She’s just going to be a sophomore in high school.”

  “Don’t you remember last year when she wanted us all to move to Costa Rica so she could learn how to surf? Sure, we’ll talk to her, but I think she’ll go for it, Drum. I really do.”

  He’s quiet for a minute on the other end of the phone before he says, “I think we should table this whole discussion until after the funeral.”

  “You’re right,” I agree. “It’s weird to talk about spending her money before she’s dead. Disrespectful, almost. But I wanted you to know. Because I’m so happy for you, Drum. For us.”

  “Wow,” he says again. “It’s a lot to think about. Fairly overwhelming. I mean people talk about changing their lives, really changing, but we don’t usually do it.”

  I shift my cell phone to my other ear. “Um . . . but there is a weird little . . . I guess I can’t even call it a snag,” I say. “I don’t know what to call it.”

  “Okay. What’s that?”

  “She didn’t leave Celeste anything, just Joseph. And me. Apparently Celeste was in the will, then at some point, fairly recently, Mom Brodie went to the family lawyer and removed her name.”

  “Holy shit, Batman.”

  Another one of his phrases. I smile. My sixty-year-old, pony-tailed, vegetarian husband doesn’t look like the kind of guy who says “Holy shit, Batman.” But maybe he does. After all, he does say “tough tacos.” “So yeah, we’ve got that going on here, along with the hospice nurse’s stopping by to tell us Mom Brodie’s blood pressure is dropping, but that’s to be expected. Before she dies.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to come down?” Drum asks me in the sweetest voice. He’s almost whispering. “I can reschedule with Reed.”

  “No. No.” I stand up and push my hair out of my face. I should have worn my ball cap. I can feel my nose burning. I’m not one of those super-pale redheads like Sarah is. I actually tan a little. Mom Brodie always said it was the Native American blood in the Brodies, but I do try to protect my skin. I don’t want cancer eating off my nose. “You go see Reed. I know he’s looking forward to it. I get the idea Mom Brodie could die anytime, now. So I’ll see you when you come for the funeral.”

  “Okay. But you know I’ll come, Abs. I’ll come right now if you need me. I don’t mind.”

  Again, I smile. And I wonder what I did to deserve this guy.

  “So . . . how’s your sister taking it?” Drum asks. He already seems like a new man. A man with hope. “Being dispossessed?”

  “Um . . . she doesn’t know.”

  “She doesn’t know?” he repeats.

  “Daddy wants to wait until after the funeral to tell her. I think he’s worried about her making a scene.”

  “I can understand that. Blondie can sure make a scene when she wants to. It’s not really my business, but why do you think your grandmother didn’t leave her anything when she left her other two grandchildren all that? Certainly enough to go around.”

  I look back at the house and squint into the afternoon sun. It’s a sprawling, turn-of-the-century, two-story farmhouse. White. From the backyard, you can’t see the two-story veranda that makes it so grand. But it’s the back of the house I see in my dreams. The house and the dock. Mom Brodie said that back in the days when the house was built, most families faced the front of the house to the water, but old Joe Brodie, Daddy’s grandfather, had a different idea. He wanted the private,
family area to be on the water, where it could be enjoyed on lazy Sunday afternoons after church.

  I spot Daddy and Joseph near one of the two picnic tables under the Granddaddy Oak. That’s what we all grew up calling the tree that was supposedly here when the Brodies came here in the seventeenth century. It’s a white oak, the same species as the Wye Oak, which was the oldest oak in the US, dating back to the 1500s, until it toppled in a thunderstorm when I was in my twenties.

  I feel like I’ve spent half of my life under Granddaddy Oak. I played superheroes under it when I was a little girl. Celeste and I learned to dance a waltz under those trees under Daddy’s tutelage. Drum asked me to marry him under that tree. And I can’t imagine how many bushels of crabs I’ve eaten . . . how many hundreds of bushels my family has eaten there over the last three centuries.

  “You’ve got a lot of secrets going on there, babe,” Drum says in my ear.

  I see Celeste come out of the house, spot me, and start the hike toward me. “Not really,” I tell Drum. “Just the two.”

  He chuckles. “Right, just that your squeaky-clean grandmother has a naughty tattoo and a past that I presume no one knows about. And the will drama.”

  I watch Celeste walking toward me. As always, she’s overdressed. Who dresses for picking crabs? She’s wearing a tight little jean skirt that suggests she’s waxing her nether region, and a pink sequined tank top. Her hair is teased up in some kind of crazy topknot that looks like cotton candy, with a glittery headband. She isn’t wearing the glittery heels, at least. She’s barefoot, but I bet the crazy shoes are within reach.

  “I gotta go,” I tell Drum. “Blondie fifty yards off my bow and coming in fast.”