by Louise Hawes
By the time we left school, H’s confidence level had soared so high that he asked Margaret and Miss Kinney to come to the beach with us. Margaret said yes, but mercifully, Miss Kinney said no. Still, she stood in the faculty lot, loading her not-so-secret admirer with enough last-minute instructions and attention that he hardly minded. Armed with the note she’d written for the poet and the near certainty of another meeting with his teacher if he coaxed a poem from Baylor, H was tripping. His dream machine kept hatching plans all the way to the student lot.
“I’m thinking I’ll write a poem for her,” he told us as we piled into the Taurus. (He never locked it at school, so we didn’t have to go through the Great Key Hunt until we were all safe inside the car.) “Maybe Julie will like it even better than Baylor’s.” He rifled through his pockets while he spoke, then started pulling his backpack inside out. “Hey, she might decide to read it in class.” He stopped his search long enough to turn to Margaret and me in the back. “You know, like a model?” Hard as it is to believe, the boy was dead serious.
“It’s Julie now?” I asked him. “What happened to Miss Kinney?” Fry and I traded wise smiles across the front seat. Which felt sweet and private, even though we weren’t touching.
“You mean you’re going to try to compete with Rufus Baylor?” Margaret didn’t seem like the cynical type, but the snort-laugh that followed her question did not exactly convey optimism about H’s chances.
H flicked open the glove compartment, found his key, and started the car. He was much too excited to care about anything we said. Our sarcasm must have sounded like a dim and distant rain falling somewhere outside his private Happy Land.
“She likes love poems, right?” He turned to Fry now, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Maybe I’ll leave one on her desk, unsigned. Make her wonder whose spell she’s under, whose words are driving her loca.”
“A fine plan, my man.” Fry was wearing his riff look. “Let’s swing by and pick up my board. Then we’ll help you write the greatest love poem of all time. On the beach.” He turned to me and Margaret for support. “Kinney’s eyes will be shining like stars, right? And her lips? Her lips will be like two—”
“Halves of a clamshell?” Margaret actually had a sense of humor. Who knew?
“Dead herring?” I suggested. “Two dead herring dropped by seagulls and rotting in the sun.”
Margaret laughed, not a snort-laugh this time, but a sort of triple-header, like she couldn’t stop. I was beginning to like this girl. Besides, her hair was almost as red as Wanda’s.
“See, my man?” Fry leaned back, buckled himself into his seat. “A few hours under an umbrella, sipping and sunning, and we’ll have a poem that cannot fail.”
“I wish I could contribute more than dead fish,” I told them. “But I can’t go with you. I’m on early at Mamselle’s tonight.”
Even though I’d joked about H’s poem, I began to feel pretty sorry for myself, knowing what I’d be doing while the others were chilling on beach towels and camp chairs, watching Fry try for the kick-flip surf stunt he claimed he’d already achieved last fall, when no one was looking. Whether he made it official or not, there would still be plenty of wading and splashing. Tanning, wisecracks, and the salty pretzels we hadn’t tasted since Surf Snacks closed last fall.
“Come for an hour.” I loved it that Fry sounded disappointed. “First day without wet suits. You can’t miss that!”
“No can do.” I tried not to picture Shepherd, tapping his polished Italian dress shoe. “My dad wants me to set up and help type the menu.” Of course, even if I got there early, I’d do something wrong, something he could yell at me for.
So I told Margaret I’d see her next week at school, said good-bye to Fry and H, then walked to Mamselle’s, right past the driveway that led to the Baylor place. The little house was so deep in the woods, though, and the trees had leafed out so much, you couldn’t tell anything had changed at all. I wasn’t sorry I was late, didn’t mind that I had no time to follow the path to where you could see the boards the police had put across all the windows and doors. Smell charcoal, like old campfires. And stare past the barricade to where dozens of hardened footprints crisscrossed mud that used to be grass.
The Sparrow
“Not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.”
Once I nursed a feverish child,
as the moon climbed up the sky.
Morning came, his head still burned,
and I cursed God who did not
care if he lived or died.
That night’s boy is grown to man,
who says he’s lost the words.
“But I still know the story, Dad,
you told when I was sick, about
a giant and a fallen bird.”
I’d forgot the tale I dreamed,
half told, half sung till it grew light.
So it’s only now I see from here to
there, that I’ve been mostly wrong,
and God was mostly right.
An Explosion at Mamselle’s, But My Bacon Is Saved
Maybe it was not making the pilgrimage up that driveway (if only to remember the way things used to be). Or maybe it was trading the beach and Fry for Mamselle’s and Shepherd. One thing was sure: By the time I got to the restaurant, my afternoon felt like an old balloon, with hardly any color or air left in it. I didn’t worry about folding the emerald-green napkins into neat swans, and I hardly noticed whether I spelled “foie gras” right. It would all lead to the same place, no matter how fast or slow I went, no matter how careful I was. Shepherd would get that tight, angry look and then explode. Sooner or later.
Tonight I guessed it would be sooner. Marsha had called in sick, and she was just about the only one who could replace the tape in the bar register when it ran out. Shepherd, leaning over the coil of paper, had already used some of his best swearwords, and since my station was right next to the bar, I figured it was only a matter of time before I gave him an excuse to practice the rest.
It was early and only a few tables had been filled, so mine were all empty. (I got customers only when Shepherd was desperate.) So yes, I was almost relieved when he sent me into the kitchen to wash dishes. I knew he didn’t have time to stand around in there, waiting for me to break something. The bad part of kitchen duty, though, was that now he could conveniently forget where I was and never seat anyone at my tables at all.
Still, Manny was glad to see me; and he knew I was better than pushing soap around a plate. “Would you help with the Caesar, sugar?” he asked as soon as I walked in the room, which was already steamy from the sauces and reductions he was heating up. He must have come to work late again, because I could see he was way behind on prep. He was stirring two concoctions in frying pans and racing among three chopping boards full of half-sliced veggies. He was a big man, but he could move gracefully when he had to. Now he wore the inspired, sweaty look he always got when he was under pressure.
I took my apron off so it wouldn’t get dirty, and sat by the long metal counter, mixing oil and mayo, the base for Manny’s low-rent salad dressing. “Eggs are too expensive,” he always said. “We don’t use anchovies, so why not go fake all the way?”
When one of the busboys came to tell me I had a party, I was just pouring what I’d made into a pitcher. I stopped it up, then rushed into the dining room and headed for the white-haired gentleman Shepherd had seated all by himself in the middle of my empty station.
At first, I couldn’t believe Shepherd had actually given me a customer before filling up the other stations. So what if this diner was a senior citizen who probably hadn’t changed his tipping rate in forty years? So what if it was a party of one? But then I realized that, like all my father’s favors, this one was helping him, not me: Since Marsha was out sick (or home free, depending on how you looked at things), that left just me and Laynelle. And if he’d put this old guy at one of Laynelle’s tables, it would have slowed her down
with the four- and six-tops.
Still, a customer was a customer. I was halfway to the table when Shepherd’s high-voltage snarl made me turn around. “Where’s your apron?” He was on me in seconds, covering the distance between us so fast, I barely had time to look down and realize I’d left my apron in the kitchen.
It wasn’t even seven, and there were only a few diners in the whole place. But naturally, each one of them looked up. Wouldn’t you? I mean, here’s a man in a tuxedo, the same man who spoke in a soft, perfume-ad voice when he showed you to your table, who’s now going postal. Yelling. Screaming, actually. “How many fucking servers are in here without a uniform, Sarah?”
I didn’t answer. What was there to say?
“How many times have I told you? How many times are you gonna come in here disrespecting me, the staff, and the customers?” Shepherd seemed to have completely forgotten the customers himself. It wasn’t like him to make a scene in public, not at work, anyway.
Manny coming in late had probably set him off. And Marsha waiting until five o’clock to tell him she wasn’t coming in at all. In the end, though, it didn’t matter who had stoked his fire. It was still me taking the heat.
“You got nothing to say?”
Once he was under way, there was no stopping Shepherd. But I didn’t have to stand there, did I? All hot and hurt, like that busboy with dropsy?
“Get out of here, for crying out loud.” He grabbed my wrist and pushed me toward the kitchen. “Just get out of my sight.”
Which is exactly what I decided to do. If he could fire his waitress, I could fire my father.
“I have something to say.” My lone customer stood up now and came toward us. “And I’d like to say it to you in private, young man.”
When I tell you that the diner who took Shepherd by the arm and walked with him out of earshot was Rufus Baylor, you won’t be half as surprised as I was. Somehow, I’d never dreamed our famous poet would hang around Whale Point any longer than he had to. But there he was, the day after our class, rising up out of his seat and turning those eyes on Shepherd. Leaning down to him, into him, as if they had secrets to share.
In that moment, Baylor looked like a knight in shining armor to me. He was an old man, yes, and his jacket was a little short in the sleeves. He had left his cane by his chair, and I worried about whether I should get it for him. But none of that changed the fact that, when he led Shepherd off toward the front door, when the two of them disappeared, arm in arm, behind a giant potted fern, Rufus Baylor was most definitely and undeniably the Greatest One of All.
* * * *
When Shepherd came back, he was different somehow. Sure, he was extra polite to my party of one, totally stealing my thunder and waiting on the man himself. But even after Rufus Baylor left me a 50 percent tip and drove off in that weird jalopy of his, our new poetry teacher’s influence lingered on. For one thing, the talk he’d had with my father definitely lowered the decibel level. How else could you explain that, for the rest of the night, Shepherd barely yelled at me or anyone else? Unless you count the incident over the dropped soufflé, but since that was only a six on the Richter, I don’t think you should.
“What do you know?” All the way home, Shepherd couldn’t stop talking about his new celebrity BFF. As soon as he’d closed both registers and carefully nosed his precious, polished-until-it-looked-like-it-was-covered-in-plastic Mustang out of the employee lot, he was off and running. “I just chatted up the most important guy in town!”
I guessed it wasn’t the time to point out that said chatting was thanks to me, so I just listened. “He’s staying up at the Hendricks’. They’re in Montreal or some damn place for the summer.”
Rufus Baylor, Poet Laureate, was living in town! Now that I thought about it, that made sense. He couldn’t magically appear out of nowhere for each class, then disappear again until the next. He had to eat and sleep and laugh and talk somewhere between classes, and as it turned out, that somewhere was right around the corner.
The Hendricks were an elderly couple who both used to teach at UNC. Her had once done a feature on student life in North Carolina, so my mother had been assigned to interview them. She’d taken me along, but I was too young then to remember the visit. What I did remember, though, is that we walked over. Walked!
“I think Rufus went to school with them. Something like that. Says he doesn’t want to stay in a hotel.”
“Rufus?!”
“Yeah.” My father sounded smug, proud. “He asked me to call him that. Said it made him feel like home.” We pulled up in front of my house, but Shepherd was still on fast-forward. “He said we have stuff in common, stuff we didn’t even know about.
“He’s quite a guy, that poet of yours.” He didn’t turn off the ignition, but he didn’t reach over and unlock my door, either. “He’s got it upstairs, for sure. And not in a show-off, book kind of way, either. He’s had a life.”
I figured it was a safe bet that anyone who’d made it into their eighties had had a life. Still, it was best to let Shepherd circle around whatever he wanted to say until he decided to say it.
“How about you and me talk some more tomorrow after work?” He glanced at the house, as if my mother were watching. Shepherd had a strict policy: Avoid Katherine Wheeler if you owe her money. And he always owed her money.
“What do you say? I’ll take you for ice cream after we close up?”
Whoa! What? Maybe you can imagine the internal double take I did when Shepherd invited me for ice cream, the mental WTF that boomeranged in my chest. I mean, if you overlooked the fact that my father had forgotten I was allergic to milk, didn’t that invitation sound almost friendly? Almost like someone who cared?
I was too stunned to talk, too tired to process what had happened. So I just nodded. Then I unlocked my own car door and ran for the house. As soon as I got inside, I went straight to my room. Without checking my cell and without stopping in the kitchen to see if Aunt J. had left me something from dinner. Upstairs, I didn’t take my tip money out of my pocket or even brush my teeth. I just fell into bed. I wasn’t sure why Shepherd wanted to talk. Or what we could possibly have to say to each other. But as I drifted to sleep, one thing was certain. I was the newest member of the ever-expanding Whale Point chapter of the Rufus H. Baylor Admiration Society.
* * * *
You would have been, too. Especially if the next night, your father managed to get through an entire Saturday dinner service without blowing a gasket. Well, almost. He kind of lost it when a deuce Laynelle was supposed to serve walked out. He knew their long wait wasn’t her fault, though, and he couldn’t blame Manny or me, either, since it was Shepherd himself who’d sent the wrong customers to the bar while he seated a couple who’d just arrived.
Instead, he had a private meltdown, like a volcano rumbling and steaming away all by itself without hurting anyone. I watched him from across the dining room, looking out over the sea of diners talking and eating, oblivious to the explosion brewing. I watched him slam his fist against the stack of recycled wine barrels he used as a host stand. Hard. But miracle of miracles, the wood didn’t split or fly across the room. And after that? Shepherd shook his head, rubbed his sore knuckles, and simply carried on for the rest of the night. No yelling, no dumping on his favorite victim. Just, “Sarah, that four-top needs a refill.” Or, “Don’t forget to wipe those tables down.” Nearly normal.
And believe me, I knew normal—I’d studied it. When I was little and spent the night at other kids’ houses, I used to watch daddies. As if they were an exotic species, some sort of strange bird whose habits and plumage needed to be listed, memorized, saved for future reference. When I visited Sandy Lee Mercer, and her daddy teased her about liking red, when he hugged her and told her she’d grow up to live in a house with a red roof, drive a red car, and dress all her children in red, I took notes. At Maryann Woods’s house, when her daddy came home and pretended he was too hungry to wait for dinner, when he said he’d hav
e to eat her, instead, and the two of them play-wrestled on the living-room rug, I filed it away.
Daddies were live-in, fathers not necessarily so. Shepherd, as my mother made repeatedly clear, was a biological accident that had happened to me and her. We had to live with the consequences, but we didn’t have to like them. And we certainly didn’t have to like him. If there had been an Olympic event for speed swearing, Shepherd would have won a gold medal. Most Feelings Hurt in a Single Day? Shepherd had set records that would stand for years. Snarkiest Remark? Lowest Blow? Cheapest Trick? Shepherd was the titleholder, hands down. But when it came to nice, he wasn’t even on the field.
I’d learned a long time ago, then, not to want my father around, not to confuse him with someone who might tickle, or hug, or play. But guess what? A few minutes after the staff had left and Mamselle’s went dark, there we were, Shepherd and me, in a booth at Shake It Baby. Just like a regular, everyday, normal father and daughter. Except that Shepherd wasn’t looking at me. Which was okay, because I wasn’t sure I wanted him to see me not looking at him. Baylor might have written a poem about us, another one that could go on and on: Shepherd not looking at me, not looking at him, not looking at . . . You get the idea.
I’d ordered a soy smoothie and Shepherd had something in front of him that was about three feet high, smothered in pistachios and whipped cream. Not that he’d eaten any of it. “Did you know he ran a farm once?” he asked.
“Baylor?” I unwrapped a straw. “You mean with horses and cows, stuff like that?”
“Yeah.” Shepherd caught my eye for a second, then looked down again. “What? You think poets are born that way?” He stirred the goop at the bottom of his bowl, but didn’t lift his spoon. “You think his parents took one look at their baby, and said, ‘Well, I’ll be damned. We got ourselves a poet!’?”