Harry punched the end of his shoelace in and out of the eyelets in his sneakers. The corners of his mouth trembled.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Petie said. “He doesn’t mean to be such a shit.” She retrieved the Life Savers and offered the boy another one. He popped it in his mouth.
“What exactly did he do?” Petie asked. “If I knew, I could try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s okay. I won’t tell on you, cross my heart.” Petie crossed her heart.
The boy’s answer came out in a whisper. “He touched my weenie.” He worked his shoelace in and out.
“Your—oh.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t want him to do it anymore.”
“Has he done that to you before?”
The boy nodded miserably.
Jesus.
Petie patted the boy’s matchstick arm. “Come on. I’ve got to take you back to the gym now, your teacher needs to know where you are. Okay? I’ll make sure that child never lays a hand on you again. I promise.”
She pushed herself out into the room, and reluctantly the boy emerged from under the sinks, too. She took Harry’s sticky hand and walked him back to the gym. The teacher saw them, and looked at Petie inquiringly.
“He’s fine,” Petie said, handing him over. “He didn’t want to talk about it. Have you seen my kids?”
The teacher stood Harry in front of her and put her hands on his shoulders. “I think they’re over there. Well, Loose is. I don’t see—”
Petie put two fingers to her mouth and blew an ear-shattering whistle. The entire gym froze. Loose turned reluctantly from a little knot of boys across the room and shuffled Petie’s way, Ryan emerged from beneath a set of risers, and the room broke up again into a kaleidoscope of children.
“Time to go home.” Petie took Loose roughly by the arm and steered him out of the gym. Ryan trailed after.
In the car, Petie slapped the back of Loose’s head hard with her open hand. “Why did you pick on that poor little kid? Jesus fucking Christ, Loose, he’s about half your size and he was scared to death.”
“It wasn’t me, it was some other kids,” Loose lied hopefully.
“Bullshit. Bullshit.”
The three of them were silent the rest of the way home. Both boys got out of the car as quickly as possible and walked ahead, jackets zipped tight.
“Get out of my sight,” Petie hissed at Loose once they were inside. “I mean it. You stay away from me.” They stared at each other in the middle of the kitchen. Petie took in the crewcut head, round as shot, the honey-colored eyes underslung with bags, as though prematurely debauched.
She whispered, “God almighty, you look just like your grandfather.”
Loose ran from the room.
“The son of a bitch.”
She stood alone in the kitchen, an incipient migraine clamped onto her temples like the furious red-hot hand of God.
Chapter 8
EVER SINCE she went back to work at the Sea View, Petie had been keeping her thoughts to herself. Rose didn’t press; it went that way with Petie sometimes. When Petie bleached out her hair she’d also stopped talking for five days. That had passed. This would pass. The thing with Petie was, you couldn’t expect to understand all the time. Sometimes you just had to settle back and catch a glimpse of whatever you could from the passenger side.
And then, Rose had been busy. For a week she had taken over at Souperior’s in the afternoons so Nadine could go check in with Gordon and then come back by five. When Gordon had finally begun to improve, Nadine invited Rose to stay on for a few more afternoons to learn the simple bookkeeping and purchasing systems, in case they ever needed her to take over. Rose’s life was gliding by in a lovely blur of good soup and purposeful days and warm uncomplicated nights with Christie. A good life.
Once, a long time ago in Doggett, Rose had lain beside Pogo and said, How do you think this will end? It had been a hot rich sweet night, full of growing things within and without, ten o’clock and just dark, the kind of night through which it was best to lie beside someone. Carissa had been two months from being born. Rose had been lying on her back, hands clasped contentedly around her belly, breathing in the fragrances and thinking about a miniseries installment she and Pogo were watching on TV. She’d turned her head on the pillow and said, How do you think it’s going to end?
And Pogo had said softly into the darkness, I don’t know, darlin’. Probably one day I’ll just go.
Less than a year later Pogo was gone, but from it Rose had learned that by anticipating neither misery nor joy, she might attain serenity. Christie would go back to Alaska again one day soon; Gordon would get sicker. But not right now. None of those things was going to happen right now, or even, probably, tomorrow.
On Petie’s last day with Souperior’s they decided to make one of their favorite soups, a creation that had had no name until Gordon dubbed it Crab Pot Chaos for Local Flavor. Crab season wouldn’t start for another two weeks, but Rose had sweet-talked Dooley Burden into setting a couple of crab rings off the docks yesterday in exchange for a couple of rounds at the Wayside. That night Jim Christie had brought home twelve pounds of prime Dungeness and the report that Dooley had been drunk by nine.
By eight-fifteen the next morning Rose’s house reeked of crab, and Carissa, Rose and Petie were all bellied up to Rose’s kitchen table, picking. In the center was a growing mound of crabmeat sweet as butter; everywhere else, shells. On a nearby counter a box of Band-Aids stood at the ready. Rose always cut herself to pieces on the shells once her hands turned cold and slippery. No matter; she liked picking anyway. Like crafts, it freed the mind. Better than crafts, good food came out at the end of it. Perfect work.
“Cute outfit,” Petie said to Carissa. She blew a puff of air at her bangs to get them out of her eyes; the rest of her hair was pulled back in a messy French braid, the first hairdo of any kind Rose had seen on her in years.
“Thanks.” Carissa smiled with delight. She was wearing a short flippy skirt with a big sweater, striped tights and huge thick-soled shoes. “Mom made the skirt yesterday, I think it’s so cool. Pay Less had this great fabric sale last week.”
“We made her a cute top to go with it,” Rose said. “We got some fabric for a pair of leggings, too. It’s this funny tropical print.”
“Mom says she’s going to put the monkey over my butt. There’s this one monkey in the print, peeking out from behind a big bunch of bananas.” Carissa giggled.
“It would just be our little joke,” Rose explained. “No one sees anyone’s butt anymore, anyway, with all the big sweaters and shirts you guys wear.”
“You’re lucky you’ve got the mother you do,” Petie told Carissa. “God obviously had a plan when he gave me boys. I can sew shirts like nobody’s business but I couldn’t give fashion advice to a cow.”
Petie’s small quick hands broke open a crab body and, with a crab claw, flicked out the yellow intestines, green liver and other muck, ripped off the gills and broke open the cartilage compartments for the succulent lump meat. She had picked crabs all one winter at a processing plant over in Sawyer and she was twice as fast as anyone else at the table. By long-standing agreement, she did all the bodies because the guts made Rose queasy, and Rose did all the legs because Petie didn’t have the patience. It was a good system. They both passed body parts to Carissa whenever she ran short.
Rose told Petie, “I like your hair that way. It’s real pretty.”
“It’s pretty ratty, you mean,” Petie said. “I would have done better if I’d had more arms.”
Carissa giggled.
“You should put some makeup on,” Carissa said. Rose had recently let her buy her first cosmetics.
“Sweetie, if I went to a makeup counter they’d take one look at me and say, Oh, please.”
“You used to wear makeup,” Rose said.
“Well, yeah, like a racoon, but that was before.”
For a few minutes the only sounds were the crac
king of shells and cartilage and the sucking wet sound of meat being extracted. Rose wished she hadn’t said anything about Petie’s hair. She’d probably scared her off, now, and it had been so long since Petie had taken any interest in herself. Years ago, way back in high school, Petie had worn rings of black eyeliner and mascara around her eyes, plus pearl lipstick and shiny eye shadow, all applied from a shoe box stowed under Rose’s bed. Petie and Old Man had been up in the trailer by then, and Petie came to Rose’s house every morning and used the shower. She had had her own house key, her own towel, her own place in Rose’s closet for some of her clothes. Rose and her mother had lived in the tiny old cottage off Third then: four rooms, nine hundred square feet total including the crawl spaces, the whole house saggy and faded as an old shirtwaist and powdery with dry rot. Rose’s father had left them when Rose was two years old, and her mother supported them by doing dress alterations and custom sewing, often enlisting Rose’s help and even sometimes Petie’s for the big jobs like the Sawyer High cheerleader uniforms and, once, uniforms for the entire high school band. She was a proud, brittle woman who brooked no disagreement with Rose over the fact that, while she liked Petie, Petie was still trash. Eight years ago, just before she died, she told Rose that Petie had been her greatest act of Christian charity. Small wonder Petie hadn’t been able to stand her. Still, Petie had come every morning, doing her makeup in a broken wall mirror she’d found and given to Rose so they could see what they were doing.
Rose bore down and cracked a claw. “Mama used to say you had hair like a Chinaman,” she said. “Remember her saying that? From the back Petie looks just like one of those Chinamen I saw down in San Francisco, she’d say. Small and with that hair.” When she was eighteen Rose’s mother had gone to San Francisco for a week with her father, and she never let anyone forget it.
Petie nodded. “She was always so afraid I was going to rub off on you.”
“Well.”
“Her worst fear was that I’d somehow infect you and you’d end up spending your life in a twelve-foot camp trailer somewhere. You know that’s true,” Petie said.
“Well, she worried about the same thing for you.”
“No, she expected that for me. What she worried about was that I’d take you along.”
Rose chuckled. “Well, then she’s up there feeling stupid right now, isn’t she? Seeing Eddie with his good job, and you finally being able to ease up a little.”
“Who are you guys talking about, anyway?” Carissa said.
“Grandma.”
“Oh.” Carissa wrinkled her nose. “She always smelled like mothballs. I don’t remember her much.”
“I do,” said Petie. “On the other hand, she was good to me.”
Rose sighed and swept over a new pile of legs Petie had separated from the bodies. “Nadine was sure pleased for you about your being able to go back to the Sea View.”
Petie smiled. “No kidding. I thought she was going to start crying when she laid me off.”
Rose laughed softly. Poor Nadine. She still had hopes that one day Petie would at least like her from a distance. Nadine deserved to be liked.
“Did you bear that Rhonda’s run off with Clayton See?” Petie said. “I give it five weeks, six at the outside. Jesus, I mean he’s even stupider than she is.”
“Well,” Rose said idly, and sucked on the first bad cut of the morning, one on the ball of her thumb. Outside a little wind sprang up out of nowhere, knocking hard little pinecones out of the trees and down onto the flatish roof of her double-wide. They sounded like chipmunks bowling. It was probably rough out on the water, where Jim was. Boats were lost this time of year, even when they weren’t crabbing. Last year the San Pedro had gone down in plain sight of the jetty. Cal Hansen hadn’t washed in for four days and another crewman whose name Rose couldn’t remember—a Sawyer boy, college kid on semester break—had never been found at all.
“Hey, how’s Gordon?” Petie asked. “Is he feeling better?”
“Yes. He thinks he’s over the worst of it. They gave him some new antibiotics that cost ten dollars a tablet.”
“Whoa,” Petie said. “What did you think of his apartment?”
“I thought it was beautiful. You’d never know you were in Sawyer at all.”
“I liked the drawings,” Carissa said, watching out of the corner of her eye to see what Petie or Rose might say.
“You let her see those?” Petie said to Rose. “Carissa, you’re too young to see pictures of naked men.”
“I thought they were beautiful,” Carissa said. “The man in the pictures was Gordon’s lover. His name was Johnny and he was twenty-nine, and he died of HIV. That’s why Gordon and Nadine came up here. Gordon said all his friends had died, that Johnny was the last one. He said he wanted to die someplace where it didn’t surprise him to be alone. I think he meant except for Nadine.”
“Jesus,” Petie said. “So you told her about Gordon?”
“She knows she has to keep it a secret,” Rose said. “Right?”
Carissa nodded vigorously. “I know how to keep a secret.”
The table grew quiet again. Petie picked the meat from the body of the last crab and absently started stacking backs, one shell on top of the other like Yertle the Turtle.
“Carissa, get the popcorn bowl for Petie to put the crabmeat in, okay, and then put all the newspaper and shells in one of those Hefty bags Jim keeps by the back door. I’ll get him to take it up to the dump tonight so the house doesn’t stink.”
“It already stinks,” Carissa said.
“So it doesn’t stink worse. Please, hon.”
As soon as Carissa left the room Rose said to Petie, “What’s going on with you? Something’s happened.”
Petie blew out a breath. “Loose’s been grabbing some little kid’s dick at school.”
“What?”
Irritably Petie snatched the elastic band from her French braid and shook out her hair. “Just what I said. He’s been cornering some littler kid and grabbing his dick.”
“Well, maybe it’s just a phase. I mean, Loose has always been such a physical kid, and kids their age play doctor all the time. We used to.”
“It’s not the same thing. The kid’s name is Harry, he’s a runt and he definitely was not playing doctor.”
Rose stared across the table with concern.
Petie said, very low, “I look at that child and he makes me sick.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I told him if I ever hear of him doing that shit again I’m going to beat him senseless.”
Rose looked at her hands. Several of her fingers were bloody; all of them stung.
“No one does shit like that around me,” Petie hissed. Her face was pinched and white. “No one.”
LATER THAT day, along with a final paycheck, Nadine presented Petie with a small blank book made of beach grass paper. All of it—the paper itself, the binding, the pen-and-ink cover illustration of a steaming soup pot—was done by Gordon. Inside, on the front page, he’d calligraphed Thanks for the warm memories. Nadine and Gordon Latimer. It was very beautiful, although God only knew what Petie would make of it. They held a long-standing position that a gift must be something in which the giver as well as the recipient could invest. Otherwise, it put the material exchange above the mutual emotional bond the gift was meant to express. The integrity of the emotional exchange was the thing; otherwise, why not just give Petie a six-pack of Bud or some hunting socks and be done with it?
In the midst of Nadine’s ruminations Petie had arrived with the final delivery of soup—just ten minutes before the cafe was due to open. Nadine had gotten over worrying about it. Petie and Rose hadn’t failed her once, and besides, it wasn’t as though there were customers lined up along the sidewalk waiting for her to unlock the doors. Although, bizarrely, business had picked up. About a week ago a large party of local people had come in unannounced for dinner—some kind of motorcycle club, Nadine gathered. Fortuitously,
Rose and Petie had fixed a couple of their most sturdy soups that day and Petie had baked one of her plainer breads. The surprise audition had turned out to be a success, and now other Hubbard people had begun dropping by for lunch.
Between them, Petie and Nadine wrestled the two vats into the kitchen—chowder plus Crab Pot Chaos. Nadine let out a little cry of pleasure when she peeked under the lid, although her menu had called for navy bean.
“Our favorite!” she said. “I’ll bring some home to Gordon after lunch, he’d never forgive me if I didn’t.”
“Twelve crabs, and we have the cuts to prove it,” Petie said, holding out her hands. “How’s he doing?”
“Better. He’s better.”
“Good.” Petie nodded curtly and turned and walked out of the cafe to get the bread. Nadine accepted a tray from the car’s backseat.
“We’re going to miss this,” Nadine said, holding the cafe door open for Petie with her hip. “I only committed to the Riseria for two weeks, you know, in case you change your mind.”
“Never happen.” Laden with the other tray, Petie led the way back to the kitchen. Nadine had envisioned them lingering there for a minute or two, sentimentally, but after Petie put her tray down she headed straight back out through the cafe and to the front door. At the door she turned—Nadine jumped—and clapped Nadine lightly on the shoulder. “So, good luck,” she said. She hitched her purse up on her shoulder and stood there, small and fierce and somehow slightly menacing. “Were you going to pay me now, or do you need me to stop back?”
“What? Oh! No. I’ve got it right here. And this is something from Gordon and me. just to say thank you.” It was then that she handed over the little book. Her hand trembled slightly as she held it out.
Petie pocketed the check and gift with barely a glance, and that had been it. Nadine would have to make up something more graceful for Gordon. It was the first present either of them had given since Johnny’s birthday, two months before he died. Get what you like, Johnny had insisted to Gordon. I mean, it’s going to be willed back to you anyway, sweetie, so you might as well go for something with carryover. Blind from cytomegalovirus by then, and too frail to leave their home except for appointments at the medical center, Johnny announced that he had become nothing but two ears and an asshole, and the one gave him life and the other took it away. So Gordon and Nadine had fed him as well as they knew how with Puccini and chants and Peruvian flute music and Paul Horn at the Taj Mahal and, for his final birthday, the best portable CD system they could find, so he could have it with him in the hospital. The last music he asked for on the day he died was Fanfare for the Common Man. If there was a piece in the world that could have been more terrible to hear bursting like false hope into that room, Nadine couldn’t imagine it.
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