Lisa's paddle dipped and swung to and fro. Behind her, Jay hummed under his breath, a song that Lisa didn't recognize. They passed a number of houses on the curving shore and entered a cove. Nearby a silvery fish flipped out of the river and slapped back in, spreading a pattern of concentric circles on the surface.
"Having fun?" Lisa called over her shoulder to everyone in general.
Connie said, "Yes!"
They passed a fisherman in a small boat with an outboard motor; he sat motionless, and after the canoe slowed to a stop, Lisa stilled her paddle in the water so that it wouldn't drip and scare away the fish. The canoe rocked to and fro on the gentle current, and the fisherman was intent on his slack line.
Suddenly something bit. Jay said, "Whoa!" when the pole bent under the weight of the strike, and he pushed the canoe forward with his paddle to provide a better view. The fisherman played the fish skillfully, letting out the line so that it could run, then reeling it in. The catch was a big, shiny snook, a good two feet long, and Jay whistled in admiration as the fisherman maneuvered his glistening trophy into the boat.
Now that the show was over, they left the cove, and presently, beyond the heavy domed spread of mangroves, they approached a shadowy bank where soft fragrant brown pine needles spread a thick carpet beneath the trees. Lisa and Jay paddled onto the narrow strip of white sand, and Jay held the canoe steady while Lisa and Connie stepped out.
"I'll bring the cooler," Jay said, and Lisa took the drinks out and popped the tops while Connie wriggled out of the life vest and proceeded to explore the bank. Lisa sat down and settled her back more comfortably against the trunk of a pine tree.
The sun filtered through the pine needles overhead in gently moving patches as Jay brought the cooler ashore. Somewhere behind them Connie flitted through the shadows, and the high fluting notes of a mockingbird trilled overhead.
"Connie seems a little overwhelmed," Lisa said when she was sure Connie was out of hearing range.
"Her grandmother almost didn't let her out of the house today," Jay said. He sat beside her and stretched his legs out full-length before swallowing a long draft of root beer, the muscles of his throat working rhythmically. When he was finished he cupped the can loosely in his hand and watched the rivulets of condensation run into the pine needles where it rested. His mood seemed thoughtful, contemplative.
"Why didn't Connie's grandmother want her to come?"
"Nina resents raising Connie and her four cousins, and she tries to make things hard for her."
"You'd think that a grandmother would have a child's best interests at heart," Lisa said.
"Nina may not even be her grandmother. Connie's parents and aunt and uncle rode away one day, leaving Nina to care for their children while they harvested crops in Apopka. They left a twenty-dollar bill and three cans of chili and never came back. That was two years ago, and Connie and her cousins have been living with Nina ever since."
"Isn't Connie in contact with her parents?" Lisa asked. She remembered how Connie had said that her father had taught her how to step over logs in order to watch out for snakes, and she thought that Connie had spoken of her father with pride and love.
"Her mother called the school about a year ago and told Sister Maria that she'd left Connie's father in Texas and had a new husband. Connie's father can't read or write, but somebody wrote her a letter from him about six months ago. He said he wants to get the two of them back together soon. Connie treasures that scrap of paper beyond anything she owns."
"Poor Connie," Lisa said.
"Her story gets worse. When they first arrived here and Connie enrolled at the mission school, she told me that Nina insisted on turning off the lights in their house at eight o'clock every night. Connie was upset because she couldn't study. I bought Connie a battery-powered lamp, and she was thrilled, but one of the other kids in the house broke it."
"So Connie still can't study at night?"
"We found a neighbor who would let her curl up in a bright corner of her house with her schoolbooks after dark, but that lasted only until Nina stormed into the house and demanded that Connie come home. Now Connie hauls herself out of bed earlier in the morning than anyone else and hurries to the church, where Sister Maria lets her study before Mass and school."
"Maybe Nina thinks Connie spends the time praying," Lisa said dryly.
"Exactly. And Sister Maria wisely says nothing to enlighten her," Jay replied with a chuckle.
"How about the other kids in the house? Is Nina cruel to them?"
"They're boys, and she seems to have a soft spot in her heart for them. Connie rubs her the wrong way for some reason."
"How did you get involved with Connie, anyway?"
"I went to work at Faith Mission School, and Connie was a standout."
"Did you know some of the nuns? Is that how you became a volunteer teacher?" Lisa asked.
He shook his head. "I'd been a volunteer art teacher at a West Palm Beach after-school program that closed, and the housemother suggested that I call Sister Maria Francisco, who desperately needed an art teacher but couldn't afford to pay. A trip out there showed me that it was like no other place I'd ever seen. I fell in love with the kids and admired the nuns. So—" and he shrugged his shoulders and laughed as if to say that he'd had no choice but to help.
"Most people wouldn't have cared," Lisa said softly in a way that told him that she admired him, which only embarrassed him. He didn't want admiration because he didn't think he deserved it. The way he saw it, he could never give too much. Never.
"I don't do enough," he said tersely. "I don't have as much time to devote to the mission as I would like. Or to Connie."
At that moment, Connie crashed through the clearing. "I saw a deer! It ran away when it saw me! I know it was a deer!" she cried.
"I'm sure it was," Lisa said, collecting herself quickly. "Sometimes I see them tiptoeing out of the woods near my house before it gets dark at night."
"I never saw a deer before," Connie said, settling herself comfortably between Jay and Lisa and accepting the drink that Jay dug out of the cooler.
"Not even at the zoo?" Lisa asked.
"I've never been to a zoo," Connie said. "Once we passed a zoo sign on the highway, but Daddy said we had to keep going because the boss man up the road wouldn't wait and the crop wouldn't, either, so we never went."
"How about it, Lisa? Would you like to go to the zoo with Connie and me sometime?" Jay asked.
A quick look at him told her that he was serious.
She drew a deep breath. "That sounds like fun," she said, hoping she sounded casual.
"Good," he said with more enthusiasm than she had expected. "I think we should go to the zoo in Miami and make a whole day of it."
"When will we go? I can't wait," Connie said. She looked as though she could barely contain herself.
"Well, doodlebug, I'll have to look at my schedule and see if next weekend is free. That is, if Lisa can go then."
"Next weekend would be fine," Lisa said. A whole day with Jay Quillian! She let out a long breath that she hadn't even been aware she was holding.
"Yay!" Connie said, hopping up and running down to the water, where she splashed for a while in the shadows and soon interested herself in the fiddler crabs that scurried in the sand.
"Now," Jay said to Lisa as he sprawled out more comfortably so that his face was fully in sunlight, "tell me more about yourself. Do you go canoeing often?" He was regarding her with an intriguing mixture of interest and pleasure.
"I head for the canoe whenever I want to get away from the house," Lisa admitted before she could stop herself, thinking of Adele's sour expression over breakfast that morning.
"Your housemate—is she the one I talked with on the phone?"
"Are you the one who called?" she asked.
"Yup. The lady didn't give me a chance to mention my name before she hung up." He smiled at her, and she could only return his smile with embarrassment.
&nb
sp; "You'd have to understand Adele," she said.
"Maybe you should find another housemate," Jay pointed out.
"I couldn't do that," Lisa said quickly.
"Why not? Who is she—your aunt? Mother? Grandmother?"
Lisa gazed across the river, a host of visible emotions playing over her face.
"Adele isn't my mother, although she's more or less taken that role since my mother died. And she lives with me because she doesn't have anywhere else to go. I really do like her. She's had a lot of difficulties, that's all."
A quick glance at Lisa's expression told Jay that she was sincere. Sincere—and something else. Worried? Guilty? He wondered why.
"What's her story?" he asked gently.
"The long version or the short?" she asked.
"Short," he said. "Unless you prefer the long, of course."
Lisa took a swig of root beer. She still found it hard to talk about Megan's death.
"Adele was the mother of my best friend when I was growing up. My friend died years ago, and Adele's marriage fell apart when her husband left her in the aftermath of the tragedy. Adele remarried happily, but that husband died. She sold her house to pay his medical expenses, so I invited her to live with me. At first it was a temporary arrangement, but as time passed, we realized that it was impractical for either of us to consider anything else. Fortunately I remember Adele from the days when her disposition was unfailingly sweet. Everyone loved her then. Now maybe I'm the only one in the world who does," Lisa said wistfully.
"Both your parents are dead?"
She nodded. "That's how I ended up with this house. It was supposed to be a retirement home for him and Mother, but shortly after they moved in, he had a heart attack and was dead on arrival at the hospital. Mother died a few months later. My sister and I will always believe that she died of a broken heart."
"I didn't know you had a sister," he said.
"She's six years my senior. Her name is Heather, and she lives with her husband and three children in New York. I don't see her often."
"That makes it even sadder that your parents died. I'm sorry," he said.
Lisa gazed off into the distance. She'd thought about this a lot. "When Dad had his heart attack, he was in his boat, fishing with a group of his friends, when he felt a pain in his chest. The last thing he saw was the sunlight on the rippling water and the blue sky above the mangrove trees. That's not so bad when you think about it." She glanced at Jay, sharing a sad smile.
"You must miss them terribly," he said. At least he still had his mother and stepfather, though they lived on the other side of the country.
"I do, but I like living in the house. The problem was that I didn't feel comfortable living there alone. My arrangement with Adele works out well in many ways. I don't mean to give the impression that she's impossible. In fact, I think if she had interests that took her out of the house, that drew her out of herself, she'd be okay."
"Maybe she needs a job," he suggested.
"Adele works three days a week at a gift shop only a couple of miles from the house. She hardly ever goes anywhere else. I've tried to get her to see a counselor, but she won't hear of it."
"That's too bad. It might help her," he said. He'd had a lot of counseling himself a long time ago. It had helped him to become a different person, a better person.
"Adele says anyone would be depressed if they were in her place, and perhaps she's right. At least she's got me. That's what she always says, anyway."
"She's lucky," he said, and he meant it.
Lisa was sitting with her legs crossed, leaning back slightly; she was a small-breasted but well-proportioned woman, with a tiny waist and ankles. Her legs were tanned honey-gold and were slim and shapely. He noticed for the first time that her eyes were a changeable hazel, the outer rims of the irises dark, almost black, and the inner part pale and shaded soft brown like the bark of the tree trunk behind her. Tendrils of yellow hair trailing around her face wafted slightly in the breeze from the river, and again he thought how beautiful she was. He sensed that she had the potential to become someone important to him, someone whose eyes would glow when he walked into a room, whose hand would seek his at quiet times.
The idea, cropping up unexpectedly as it did, pleased him. He focused on her lips, which were full and expressive. Her teeth were small and white. Suddenly everything, absolutely everything, about her seemed important, and he was seized with a desire to know the deep recesses of her mind, the depths of her emotion, and the geography of her body.
At that moment Connie bounded up, and he was forced to abandon his thoughts. Lisa reluctantly cast an eye toward the sun, which was falling lower in the western sky. "We'd better go," she said. "The trip back always seems longer than the trip out."
The three of them loaded the canoe and pushed off from the clearing. As they were paddling home, Connie said suddenly, "Lisa, do you think I could ever learn to paddle?"
Lisa looked over one shoulder at Jay. He nodded almost imperceptibly.
"Of course you can," she said warmly. "I'll teach you next time."
"Is there really going to be a next time?" Connie asked, her eyes wide.
"Yes," Jay said, his eyes warm with pleasure. "Yes, there really is."
Chapter 4
It was cloyingly hot and humid, a real tropical day in South Florida. When Lisa glanced out and saw Jay and some of the children working in the school garden that afternoon, she took pity on them because of the heat and carried a pitcher of fresh lemonade outside.
In the garden, just as in the surrounding fields, beans and tomatoes grew in lush profusion. The children were pulling weeds and toting buckets of water, and one boy was trundling a wheelbarrow to and fro. When the children saw Lisa approaching, they dropped whatever they were doing and ran to greet her.
"Lisa, Lisa, we're growing radishes and scalawags for you to use in the kitchen," Connie said as she threw her arms around Lisa's waist.
Pedro whooped with laughter. "The onions are called scallions, not scalawags!"
"You're the scalawag," said one of the others, which prompted Lisa to put an end to their conversation.
"Somebody hold the cups while I pour," she instructed, and Connie did the honors.
"I like this lemonade," Pedro said, smacking his lips.
"That's enough, kids," Jay called when he saw the admiring group circling Lisa. "Get back to work before Sister Maria comes out and sees you slacking off. She'll drag you into her after-school study hall."
After the children scampered away, Lisa leaned on the fence, grateful for the chance to have a few minutes' private conversation with Jay.
Jay was wresting a huge encroaching vine from the thick black muck, but he dropped it and wiped his hands on a rag while Lisa poured him a glass of lemonade. As she handed it to him, she watched a small trickle of sweat slide down his chest, and she her own thin blouse was beginning to stick to her back. It must be miserable working out here in this heat.
"Connie's grandmother won't let her go to the zoo," Jay said abruptly, leaning on the fence beside her.
"Won't let her go? But why?" Lisa asked.
Jay drank deeply before crushing the paper cup in his fist and dropping it into the bag she held. He reached down and ripped a vine out of the soil by its roots as though he were grappling with Nina herself.
"When Connie told me about it, I went to talk with Nina, but before I'd managed to get ten words out, the woman slammed the door in my face. She could use a charm-school course, that's for sure," he said.
"Connie must be so disappointed," Lisa replied in dismay.
Jay shrugged and wiped his forehead. He picked up the hoe and returned to his task. "She—certainly—is," he said, timing his words to fall between vigorous chops. He stopped again. "So am I for that matter," he said, managing a smile at last. His hair had fallen across his forehead and glistened with sweat. A gnat hovered around his right eyelid.
Lisa stared across an expanse of the E
verglades that glimmered wide and green and boundless like the future, or at least the way the future could be if Jay were a part of it.
"Maybe I should speak with Nina," she said slowly.
"You can try it, but I can't offer any hope," Jay said. "The woman seems suspicious of everyone who tries to talk to her about Connie."
Jay had said nothing about their going to the zoo together if Connie couldn't go. Perhaps he wouldn't want to.
"I'll do it now," Lisa said, hoisting the sack of used paper cups in one hand.
"Don't," Jay said. "You'll be wasting your time."
"Maybe not," Lisa replied. "Where do Nina and Connie live?"
"Three doors down from the community center," Jay said.
"At least I can try," Lisa said.
"Let me know how it turns out," Jay called after her as she turned to go. The overtone of disgust in his voice warned her that he saw no point in approaching Connie's grandmother.
Feeling defeated before she'd even begun, Lisa climbed into her car and sat behind the wheel for a moment, watching the man and the children working together.
If you don't tend the garden, nothing will grow, Lisa thought fiercely. The same thing applied to relationships, and now that the seed had been planted, she was not about to let her budding relationship with Jay Quillian wither and die.
She threw the car into gear and backed out onto the road. It was late afternoon, and Nina should have returned from her work in the fields by this time.
* * *
A pair of small scrappy boys in dirty blue jeans stared curiously as Lisa stepped out of her car in front of the small drab house.
"I'm looking for Nina," she told the boys. "Is she around?"
"Inside," one of the boys said. The other one gaped at her openmouthed.
"Thanks," Lisa replied. The boys stopped jabbing each other and watched silently as she knocked.
A woman whose face was baked hard by the sun opened the door slightly. She eyed Lisa through the tiny chink between the warped door and its frame.
Sunshine and Shadows Page 5