by Liza Nelson
“Oh my dear, the air in Esmeralda is getting worse and worse.” I was barely inside the door when she started in. “Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed. If a breeze comes up from the south as it did today, carrying along those absolutely poisonous fumes from the mill, all clarity is lost. I cannot breathe. I cannot taste. I certainly cannot paint.”
“You could move.”
We have this conversation, or its variations, at least once a month. Bad air has developed into one of Cleo’s favorite topics since she decided that Esmeralda could become the next Key West. She has been talking to moneyed friends about building a new marina, renovating the warehouses along Dock Street, even opening a bed-and-breakfast in the Guilfree house across the street from the gallery. Can you imagine a bed-and-breakfast in Esmeralda? The fact is that half the population here works at B&W Mill. Cleo’s own adored husband ran the place until he keeled over with that stroke. He’s the reason she ended up here and will probably never leave. The mill is the bane of her existence, and mine, too, half the time, but thank the gods for it. The mill keeps this town honest, the mill and the lack of a good beach like the ones you find once you get west of Port St. Joe. Imagine Esmeralda poked through with cafe awnings and T-shirt shops. Now they would keep me from breathing.
“I’m surprised George didn’t take care of the odor problems for you when he was in charge,” I teased, kicking off my shoes and dropping into one of the painted twig chairs Cleo gets from a man in his late eighties up near Weewahitchee.
“He had his engineers working on it when he had his stroke. But this new man”—who arrived right after George’s death seven years ago, although to Cleo he will always be the new man—“he will never lift a finger.”
“Oh well, there’s always air-conditioning.”
“Never. I love my fans and so do you.”
“Yes, damn it, I do,” I admitted. Air-conditioning is a sin of modern life, and I make that assertion as a licensed HVAC technician. “Why choose to live in a warm climate and then be chilly all the time?”
I studied the antique mahogany and wicker blades revolving slowly overhead pulling up the smoke from my cigarette in a dancing curve until some small creaking or shuffle pulled my attention toward the door.
Joe Rainey stood on the porch, framed by the pink molding around Cleo’s window display. Of all the people I would not have expected to see. He was studying the grouping of my newest pieces we’d arranged out there the week before with my Egg of Life as the centerpiece.
“Come in, Joe, come in, come in,” Cleo said with sudden gaiety.
“You know him?” I was about to ask, but Cleo was already flittering toward the front door, all aglow, the way she gets around certain favorite customers, although Joe Rainey seemed an unlikely candidate for Cleo’s attentions. The man shoes horses, for God’s sake. How much money, or interest, could he have to invest in art?
“Do you remember my painting Florida Siesta, Godiva?” I did actually, a small, rather exquisite re-creation of the midday view from Cleo’s bedroom window. “Joe bought it, when was that, three years ago? I have not been able to convince him to buy anything since, but I keep trying.” Cleo giggled, part aging coquette, part saleswoman. “At least he does drop by occasionally.”
Not when I’ve been around. At least not until now. It was a little bizarre to cross paths again so soon. Definitely bizarre. He held out his hand. As I shook it, I noticed bits of blue paint around my cuticles and wished I’d cleaned up before coming over.
“I opened The Pink Heron eight months after George died, you know,” Cleo said, picking up our previous conversation as if she’d never stopped, thrilled to have her audience enlarged. She patted Joe’s arm apologetically. “I suppose I’ve told you this story before.”
“I think you may have mentioned it.” He smiled and took Cleo’s long, bony, pink-nailed hand in his, ever gallant I must say. “But not the details.”
“My Fairfield County friends were pressuring me to sell the house and move to Sarasota or Palm Springs. Starting the gallery was my excuse to stay. You know, I’d run one years before, but of course, my friends said the idea of an art gallery in Esmeralda was preposterous.”
“They were right,” I said on cue. I’ve heard this story a million times.
“Of course they were right. Opening the gallery was a preposterous idea. But George had left me plenty of money. And, of course, we’d been so happy here for those fifteen years.”
“You’re such a romantic, Cleo, under all the pink icing.”
“Under all this pink icing, as you call it, I’m tough as life requires. Believe you me. I did steal the man away from his first wife, after all.”
“Cleo!” I laughed, abashed that she had edited her familiar script to include that little bombshell. And in front of Joe Rainey, who was basically a stranger, not that he showed the slightest embarrassment. What a laconic Jimmy Stewart cowboy he was, leaning back in his dusty boots and smiling Cleo’s story along.
“Just because I’m old, doesn’t mean I haven’t lived. We met at one of those awful bridge parties they were always having in New Canaan. The two of us had been assigned to different tables. Well, you know they like to put five at each table so someone’s always rotated out. We ended up on the out rotation at the same time. There was a glorious deck overlooking the pool. We started talking, some mundane topic, olive varieties I believe. We’d both been to the south of France and agreed that American olives would never taste adequate again. And so it began.
“We weren’t youngsters, but it was a grand passion I can tell you.” Cleo turned to Joe. “That’s what this one needs over in that dank little shack of hers.”
“That is not what I need, and Paradise is no shack.”
I could have wrung her elegant old neck or strangled her with her pink pearl choker. She was behaving like some bizarre, perverse version of my mother, talking about me in the third person. Besides, my antennae were definitely receiving signals, and I goddamn hated what they were telling me. Or not so much telling me as vibrating through me.
Coincidence can be a dangerously powerful aphrodisiac. Out of the void, this man Joe Rainey and I had been thrown together twice in a week. We had nothing in common to have so much in common. These newfound meaningful connecting points of his child and my patroness. Then, to top things off, coming out of the gallery, we discovered we were parked in the same direction and had to walk together another three blocks.
It was that creamy hour between late afternoon and early evening when the air softens and you want to move slower, to hold off the night. As we were passing by, the yellow light inside the Chit Chat looked so inviting, I don’t remember which of us voiced the suggestion, but there was no way not to stop in for a slice of jam pie. We sat there in a corner booth talking for maybe half an hour, the only customers so near closing time.
At first we talked about David Franklin. Joe Rainey told me that the insurance companies and the lawyers were having a field day. “I know this is not a noble thought, not one that should be spoken out loud,” he said and I felt temptingly at risk, “but I have to admit that I am relieved it was David’s babysitter who was negligent. I could not have afforded a lawsuit.”
“Wow, I’ve never considered issues of legal liability about anything,” I blurted out.
Moral liability was another matter. In a few days David was being transferred to the hospital in Perry almost an hour away. They were still hoping he might walk eventually. I had visited him several times already and knew I’d be visiting him regularly from now until whenever. It might not be rational but I felt responsible.
“Something like this happens and everyone feels guilty, I guess. Last night was the first Philip has slept through without nightmares. Since the accident Mari is uncomfortable with babysitters at other people’s houses, and frankly so am I. Babysitters period. I don’t want him out of our sight. She gets off early when she can, but a lot of days she can’t get home before six. So I pick him u
p after school and bring him along on shoeing jobs. Damn, if I don’t find myself looking forward to those afternoons, having him by me handing me tools, picking up the old shoes, feeding the hoof scraps to the farm dogs.”
“Philip is a good boy.”
“He is, isn’t he?” Joe smiled that crooked insidious smile, and I caught our reflection in the mirror above the jukebox, our two heads bent together over our mugs of tea and coffee. A cliche classic if ever there was one.
When he called last night, I was too surprised to hang up right away.
“Philip rode my horse today,” he said with fatherly pride. “For the first time. Did real well, too.”
“I’ll bet he did.” I smiled, picturing the two of them. Joe’s attachment to Philip was pretty endearing.
“You should come out here and ride sometime. With a name like Godiva. Wasn’t she a rider?”
“Well, yes.”
“And your daughter, too. Young girls love horses. It would give Philip a kick.” This line of talk seemed innocent enough. But still.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Actually, horses are one of the few things in the world that I am afraid of.” It was true, I am; but when he laughed, I knew I should not have told him. The laughter was too comfortable. I remembered how I’d felt sitting in his truck, in the cafe. How at ease we were alone together with quiet between us.
Two nights later, he called again.
“It’s me,” he said and this time I was not surprised.
“Hello, me.” I put down the book I’d been reading, stubbed out my cigarette and sighed. Some bridge had been crossed. The conversation took on its own rhythm, drifted to whatever came to mind. What we said was not the point. Charged with the velvety intimacy of the telephone late at night, we gradually reached that point, nothing left to be said, only the desire not to disconnect. It was lovely.
Not that it will go any further. He is a married man. I have never been a homewrecker and do not intend to become one now. My God, he is also Philip’s father. I care about Philip. I owe Philip. Philip trusts me. So I’m staying clear, even if the marriage is breaking down. And I’ve been hit on by married men in this town enough to know better than to trust what a man says about his marriage. Not that Joe has said anything in so many words.
Anyhow, he’s too short and he’s stoop-shouldered, bending over all those horses’ feet I suppose. I don’t even know if he’s intelligent. God, as if that’s ever mattered before, as if I need to defend his mental pedigree just because he seems able to set off a few bells where I wish he couldn’t.
What attracts a woman to a particular man, anyway? I swear, I have not the slightest clue why Joe Rainey might grab my heart. Of all the men I could possibly lose my head over, what makes him so special? Is it purely physical, some chemical reaction that came over me in the Chit Chat? He’s too stoop-shouldered. I already used that one, didn’t I? Well then, squinty-eyed. And there’s that scar on his cheek. His ears point at the top. I have my mantra of his deficiencies, but it has proven as useless as bug repellent in the marshes around here. For every deficiency, I remember, what? His childlike nervousness, tearing up shreds of napkin as we talked. His hands, big, reliable worker hands. His brownness, the very male brownness of a man who works outdoors.
Listen to me. No, don’t.
“Watch yourself. Men get in the way if you don’t keep vigilance,” clear-eyed, pure Evie Pinkston told me long ago in Ann Arbor, as I was walking out the kitchen door of our apartment on my way to meet some guy from my psychology class for pizza and, probably, sex. “Stay away from any man you might lose sleep over,” she warned.
I have lost enough sleep in my time, and for what? I do not intend to lose any more. This Joe Rainey thing, I’m only playing with myself a little. I am going to put him out of my mind. I have no room in my life for any man. Nada. No room at the inn. No vacancy. Men need not apply.
Three
I’VE NEVER BEEN ALL that enthusiastic about women cluttering up my life, either, come to think of it. I don’t trust them, at least not the ones my age. They’re too ready to bitch and moan over all their lost potential. “You lost it, you find it,” I want to tell them, only they probably didn’t lose it; they probably frittered it away. That’s why I like Cleo. She may whine about the weather or the air but never about her own life. She’s all, shut up and get it done. Like me. Okay, I’m not exactly tight-lipped, but I do not whine.
And now there’s Louise Culpepper. My new pal. She doesn’t strike me as a whiner, either. Although we’ve been acquainted one way or another for a while, it wasn’t until school started back in September that we began what you’d call a friendship, which, I guess, I would call it. That morning, maybe the second week of school, I was on my way across the playground, grappling with a large rectangular carton full of lightbulbs, when I ran across Louise sitting on the cement steps, watching over her class’s recess. She was catching a bit of breeze, an unconscious smile playing on her lips.
The thing I’ve noticed about teaching small children, and working around kids so much I’ve noticed a lot, is that a teacher can’t turn her back for a second, not one second, or something disastrous, a fight, or an injury or tears of one sort or another, is bound to happen. She better be there on top of them all the time. So she—and let’s face it, when I’m talking teacher, I’m talking she— better like children. Not all teachers do. Some teachers, I’d say a lot of Gulfside teachers, would admit without a tincture of shame that they hate the kids. Not to me they wouldn’t, of course, but I hear them in their lounge while they catch a smoke. Complaining, complaining, complaining. I feel sorry for those poor kids they’re supposed to be teaching. I feel sorry for the teachers, too. How do they face each day?
Now Louise Culpepper is not like that. Maybe because she didn’t start back into teaching until her youngest began school himself, Louise has stayed enthusiastic. I can tell just looking at how much color she uses to decorate her room. Not to mention that she was the only teacher who actually came up to me after she saw my cafeteria constellations to say she was going to add them to her lesson plans. I was genuinely flattered.
Anyway, I followed Louise’s smile from the steps to a gaggle of little girls trying cartwheels. What is it about little girls and cartwheels, some rite of passage we must all go through? As I was passing by, one of the girls, Carolyne Fenster I think is her name, put her right hand down flat and pointed her little rear end up to the sky, then crumpled when her left hand couldn’t carry her weight.
“I love it!” I could not help calling over to her, she was trying so hard. I carefully put my carton aside and squatted down in the dusty dirt. These girls were a hell of a lot more interesting than my lightbulbs. “Okey dokey, who can do one more for me?”
I was wearing my standard work uniform: a bright purple T-shirt and overall shorts. I pulled off my baseball cap and pointed my own rear skyward. God, it had been a long time since I’d done a cartwheel, probably ten years, back when Dylan was learning. But over I went. When I came right side up, my face was burning with all the blood that had rushed up there, and my cheeks were probably the color of my hair—damn redhead complexion does not give me a break—but I’d done one heck of a cartwheel.
I flashed Louise the victory sign. Now if she’d been Esther Parks, the other second-grade teacher, I’d probably have been in big trouble. Esther Parks can be funny about what she deems proper conduct. When Dylan was in her class, Dylan’s reading improved dramatically, I admit it; but Esther was unwilling to give the least little bit of slack for Dylan’s creative tendencies, the very tendencies I was trying so hard to nurture. Esther likes to run what she calls a tight ship, and that does not include her students fraternizing with the school’s “lady custodian,” as she has always referred to me. Fortunately, Esther was over near the jungle gym, too busy scolding some boys with sticks in their hands to notice me or anyone else.
I began actively coachi
ng the girls. Brushing the gravel off her knees and grimacing, Carolyne Fenster tried again, without much more success than on her first try, but I got her friends clapping to encourage her. Not being a teacher, I can do things like have fun with the kids. If I were a man, I suppose there would be concern that I harbored dirty motives, but as a woman I’m deemed harmless.
“Beautiful! That was one incredible cartwheel, wasn’t it?” I turned toward the steps to include Louise in our little charmed circle.
She nodded and smiled. Each of the girls did a cartwheel, more or less. I picked up my carton and walked over to Louise on the step. She was clearly surprised but not standoffish; more what I’d call shy, almost flustered.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” I said, setting the carton down again.
“Yes, well, me too.” I could see a bead of pulse in her forehead between her brows. “According to the book of astronomy I took out of the library, you were very exact in your representation of the Florida night sky,” she said.
“Well, I did try. Why do a thing halfway?” I sat on the step below her and waited for her to take her next conversational turn. Instead, we sat in a widening pool of silence.
I recognized that Louise was in a funny position. She would not want to be seen as presuming. Every teacher at Gulfside realizes, if she wants her classroom to run smoothly, she is pretty much dependent on yours truly. Mr. Jenks is supposed to handle major repairs, but Gulfside shares him with the middle school. So I am the crew of one who makes sure the lights are burning, the floors are mopped and no one has an air unit on the fritz; I am the one who can find extra shelves for a supply closet, and sometimes extra supplies as well.
“I guess we have some kids in common these days,” I offered. “Dylan and Cass have struck up quite the friendship.”
“Yes, it does seem to be lasting. So few of Cass’s do.”