Her smile was sultry, close-lipped. Thank you, her eyes said, with the barest gleam of triumph. She’d gotten what she’d come for.
As if in afterthought, she asked, “How will I know Carly?”
You’ll know, he thought but couldn’t bring himself to say. “Black T-bird, red interior, white dress,” he said instead.
Standing in the open doorway, he watched her go. Even from this angle, it was easy to see the ways in which she favored Sarah. Same broad shoulders and slim hips; same elegant, straight-spined gait; same whorl in the curls at the back of her head—though white blond instead of dark chestnut.
When she reached the Chrysler, she gave a small wave good-bye. Avery, fighting off a fog of confusion, went back into the kitchen. He busied himself with emptying the ashtray, closing the open window, locking the rear door, erasing all evidence of her visit. But the scent of her perfume—spiced roses—still hung over the sink.
There’ll be hundreds of people watching the parade. What’s the harm in inviting one more? Who you trying to kid?
That kiss at the end, it was nothing. Would Sarah think so?
Well, if Sarah was here…He’d already calculated the meaning and potential measure of what he’d done. And he was not proud.
—
STEVE WAS TAKING A smoke break in the office. The mechanic stood in his habitual at-ease stance—one foot on the rung of the stool, forearms crisscrossed atop his jacked-up knee. He was frowning down at the desktop when Avery returned.
“Looky here,” Steve said. A wave of his cigarette hand sent smoke curling over the front pages of the two newspapers, the local Orlando Sentinel and Kitty’s discarded New York Times, laid out carefully side by side.
The Sentinel was dominated by two large images: the recently installed HAWK and Nike Hercules air defense missiles at Boca Chica Naval Air Station on Key West, their menacing tips trained south toward Havana, and a line of US tanks at the ready in Berlin. Both photos bristled with American strength, firepower, and defiance of the Soviet threat.
The Times, meanwhile, featured enlarged, carefully labeled surveillance photos: President Kennedy’s “unmistakable evidence” of two Soviet medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) sites near San Cristóbal, Cuba, and two intercontinental range (ICBM) sites at Guanajay and Remedios. Avery marveled at the small shapes labeled SOVIET CONVOY, MISSILE TRANSPORTERS, ERECTOR/LAUNCHERS, and slash-marked LAUNCH PADS identified by US intelligence.
He cocked an eyebrow in Steve’s direction. “Any mention of the U-2s? Where they’re stationed?”
Steve took a long drag. “Not a peep.”
Since Saturday, Avery had searched the Orlando Sentinel, which Steve insisted on calling the Slantinel, for an explanation, an update, or even a mention of the onslaught of military activity overhead at McCoy, and outside clogging the train tracks and traffic on the Trail. So far, the local paper had been mum. Even after the President’s speech, the term U-2—the name of the all-important spy planes based nearby—had been notably absent from any reporting.
“Somebody’s called a gag,” Steve told him. “Keep the yokels in the dark; sidestep a panic that might slow down the convoys.”
“Since when did the military trump freedom of the press?”
“Betcha a buck they’ll never put the name of that plane in print.”
“Bet you’re right,” Avery replied, turning back to the Times text. “Says here San Cristóbal is in western Cuba.”
Steve’s look said he’d made the same connection—Emilio was from western Cuba.
Avery remembered the teenager’s suspicions, his tale of corner fences crushed by too-long trucks. How would confirmation of his worst fears affect the boy? “Think we ought to keep this from him?”
“It’s the kid’s own mama, right? Seems to me he’s got a right to know.”
Avery felt the color draining from his face. Had Steve made the connection between Kitty and Sarah? Had he guessed the truth about Charlotte?
After a moment of awkward silence, Steve ground out his cigarette. “Well, if you’ve got the pumps, guess I’ll get back to it.”
Avery nodded without looking at him.
Steve took a few steps, then stopped. “Who was she, by the way?”
“She who?” Avery asked, as casually as he could manage.
“C’mon…the blond bombshell with the legs?” He made a sound like the growl of a cat.
Had Kitty’s hair and legs distracted Steve’s attention from her face? Was it possible he didn’t know? Avery tucked two fingers into his shirt pocket and came out with Kitty’s card, offered it up for Steve’s inspection.
“Bayshore Realty?”
Avery shrugged. “She’s got a client interested in local rental property. Did a title search and my name came up on multiple addresses.” Which was true. “Wanted to pick my brain about local rents, taxes, schools, and so forth.” Which was not.
Steve looked wounded. “I own my own duplex. She coulda picked my brain. And anythin’ else she had a mind to.”
“Luck of the draw, I guess,” Avery said carefully.
Steve sniffed the card. “Wild Rose of Sharon,” he announced with a sigh and handed it back. “My first wife’s favorite.”
Avery moved behind the desk. As Steve went back to the service bay, he unlocked the middle desk drawer. Then he stashed Kitty’s fragrant card in his zippered leather bank pouch, beside the shiny jumble of Charlotte’s dog tags.
—
THE PHONE ON THE NIGHTSTAND woke Sarah, dazed from a dreamless sleep. She rolled onto her back then onto her other side, noting the time—nearly eleven—and grabbed the receiver off its cradle.
“He-hello, Avery residence.”
“Sarah, it’s Edith. You been to the Cherry Plaza yet?”
“You said one o’clock, remember?” She sat up, finger raking tangled hair out of her eyes.
“Glad I caught you, then. Listen, I just heard from General Betts’s office—not the general himself, his attaché—who’s asked that we soft-pedal any criticism of the public shelters. Bad for the public morale, he said.”
Sarah, still groggy and bone-weary from weeks of Edith’s unending demands, felt the hard flash of resentment. “Is he saying public morale’s more important than the truth?”
“Well, at this point, it is whatever it is. And we don’t want to be responsible for setting off any sort of panic.”
“But…”
“Besides, Sarah—and I’m sure you learned this from your mother, as I did from mine—‘you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.’ ”
That phrase, Sarah remembered, had indeed been one of her childhood’s staples. Mama used it often, until one particularly embarrassing night at the Tuscaloosa Country Club, when Daddy punched a fellow club member in the face and broke his nose. “Oh, Colton,” Mama cried then, “what were you thinking?” “The man’s an ass, Dolores. And everybody knows it.” “But surely—” “Now don’t start with that crap about catchin’ more flies with honey. Makin’ nice with a bully is a complete waste of time—‘turn the other cheek’ with a guy like that, you’re just askin’ for a second slap on the face!”
“Sarah?” Edith croaked. “You still there?”
“What flies, Edith?”
“Pardon me?”
“Exactly what flies are we trying to catch?”
“Oh, my dear, surely I’ve mentioned it. The general has as much as guaranteed us spots in the best shelter in town.”
“Which is…?”
“The storage vault at LaBelle Furs!” Edith’s voice quivered with excitement. “All the best families will be there!”
So that’s what all this—the committee work, the shelter show, the inspections—was about? Edith being able to ride out a disaster in fur-lined luxury? Sarah dropped the hand holding the receiver into her lap. It was pale blue, a new special-order Princess phone whose Southern Bell slogan, she remembered, was, “It’s little…it’s lovely…it lights.”
Sarah raised the receiver back to her ear just long enough to say, “Edith, I have to go,” then recradled the phone.
Her first thought—Of all the nerve!—was quickly followed by: Why didn’t I see that coming? She jammed bare feet into her slippers, pulled on her robe, and pointedly ignored the insistent ringing of the phone—Edith, no doubt, calling back. In the bathroom, she scrubbed her face, brushed her teeth, and avoided her sad and drawn image in the mirror.
Shading her eyes against the light in the kitchen—sunshine filtered bright white by the fog over the lake—she made her way to the coffeepot. She dumped out the cold coffee left from Wes and started a new pot, then went onto the porch, where the birds cawed loudly for food and fresh water. Afterward, she stood for a moment staring out at the fog-draped lake.
It was a day like this—damply gray and still—they’d buried Robbie on the bluff overlooking the mist-covered Black Warrior River. At the church, he’d looked so small, so peaceful in his blue velvet Easter suit, the one that had so perfectly matched the color of his eyes. During the service, she’d imagined, it was as if he’d only climbed in there to take a nap. But later, seated graveside at the family plot, with the old willow oaks weeping long yellow leaves like tears, she’d panicked at the sight of the closed casket. He can’t breathe in there—we’ve got to get him out! She’d squeezed her sister’s hand so hard that Kitty yelped and yanked it away. When Mama turned, her face shiny with tears, sad eyes staring them both into silence, Sarah’s chest had grown so tight that she herself could hardly breathe. Horrible, horrible! she was thinking when, just as the casket disappeared from view, she heard the whisper. In hindsight, Mama said, it was just the rustling of dead leaves beneath the funeral director’s feet. But Sarah insisted she’d heard the whispered words clearly: “I am too tender for this world.” She didn’t know then (and couldn’t say for sure now) where that voice came from. Was it little Robbie’s last good-bye to her? Or her own eight-year-old’s heart, crushed by death’s awful randomness and a great load of grief she’d been too young to comprehend?
“Well, I don’t know,” Sarah said lamely to no one. She strode back into the kitchen, swiping off sudden tears with the cuff of her robe. No time for that! She stood, tapping long fingers on the counter, until the coffee was ready. Cup in hand, she moved through the living room, switched on the stereo to radio function, and tuned in WDBO too soon for the noon news.
In the dining room, she fingered Charlotte’s white dress, unsure where to begin. Should she focus on the machine-sewn alterations, then hand-stitch the hem afterward? And why in the world had she finished up the red dress first, which was for Saturday night’s dance, when Charlotte needed the white one for Friday’s parade? She stared into her coffee cup, willing it to wake her up, wishing she could make it through a single day—just one—without feeling like a poor imitation of a previous self, someone she used to be. Though who that was, and whether that Sarah was worth imitating, was beyond her, lost in a fog that day by day took longer and longer to lift.
She chose, finally, to forgo the sewing machine until after the caffeine kicked in. Instead, she unhung the dress and moved to the other end of the table, where the light was better for hand sewing. She opened her sewing box, selected a needle, some white thread, her grandmother’s small stork-shaped scissors, and her mother’s silver thimble. Donning her reading glasses, she squinted, licked the end of thread, and poked it through the eye of the needle. She pulled it long, snipped it, paired the two ends between her fingertips, and rolled them into a knot. Whenever Mama did that, she’d quote President Roosevelt: “When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on!”
“Oh, Mama, I’m trying,” Sarah said aloud, pushing the needle point in and out, up and down like a small boat through the white sea of satin, pulling the thread behind it in a thin wake.
But knots—she sighed deeply, hurting as she thought of it—like families, like dreams, like life, for that matter, can be slippery things, unwilling or unable to be held.
“Only five, Wes? You can’t be serious!”
“But I’m flat-out empty with a twenty-gallon tank.”
“What’s next—ration coupons? War bonds?”
Avery played the role of beleaguered businessman. We’re undersupplied, he told them, with no assurances from the depot of any more gas anytime soon. Need to stretch what we have as far as we can.
Just after noon, hoping to cut down on complaints, he unearthed a pair of A-frame signs from the back room. Normally the signs hawked a seasonal promotion—AUTHENTIC TOY FIRE TRUCK! ONLY $3.99 WITH FILL-UP OF TEXACO FIRE-CHIEF GASOLINE—but today, Avery covered them with plain white paper and painted in large green letters:
LIMIT TODAY:
5 GAL.
PER CUSTOMER
He left room at the bottom for a line he suspected he’d have to add soon, OUT OF ETHYL—the name most customers called his mid-grade Fire Chief gas with, the red pump proudly proclaimed, “natural, no-knock additives.”
All the while, working on the signs, he mulled over the gap between good old reliable Wes, Rotarian, deacon, roadside Samaritan, and the man who’d just taken Kitty to the cottage, ostensibly betrayed his wife, and perpetuated a seventeen-year-old lie to his daughter.
Yesterday, he would have described himself in the plainest of terms: solid citizen, honest businessman, devoted husband and father. He might have even said that, despite the occasional bump in the road, he was living his version of the American dream.
But today? Even though nothing had happened, really, with Kitty, he felt guilty; his perfect record—in seventeen years, he’d never seriously considered another woman—sullied. Not that there hadn’t been more than a few opportunities over the years. Marion Halden came to mind, the young and needy war widow who’d been their neighbor on Princeton for a while. And Vivian Whitley, his tenant on Harvard Street, who was periodically short on rent money and long on suggestions. More recently, there was redheaded Annie Flynn, a local divorcée who’d flat-out offered to trade him “regular service under the hood, yours for mine.” But in all this time, he’d never strayed, not once. Why was that?
First and foremost, fidelity.
After posting the completed signs at each entrance, Avery stared out at the traffic, and pictured the words—First and foremost, fidelity—written in Sarah’s careful hand. Back then, he was still on Tinian Island and courting her in letters. Working up the nerve to pop the question, he’d asked her instead, “What qualities are you looking for in a husband?”
“First and foremost, fidelity,” she’d written in reply. It was several years later, after her father’s very long, very emotional funeral—the eulogies went on forever, with more than a few female mourners weeping loudly and uncontrollably—that Sarah explained why she and her mother had sat stiffly through the whole thing in stone-faced silence. “Oh, Wes,” she told him. They were standing outside the church, scanning the departing crowd for Kitty, who never showed. “Daddy had affairs with half the women here. You can’t imagine the hell he put Mama through for years!”
First and foremost, fidelity. Her need for fidelity had paired well with his careful nature (from age ten, he’d thought of himself as the careful son of a careless father), which made what happened today at the cottage all the more confounding. Certainly Sarah would see his helping Kitty—never mind his kissing her!—as a betrayal. He’d surprised himself by how simply, how easily, he’d done it.
Now, cleaning the windshield of Lee Vomac’s pickup, he caught a whiff of spiced roses and bent his head in a quick, guilty sniff. The scent of her was trapped in the crease of his right inner elbow. He studied the skin there, so much paler than his suntanned forearm, and thought, This Kitty thing has to be contained! But how?
Moments later, clicking off the gas nozzle at exactly five gallons, somethin
g else clicked, though not audibly, inside his head. It was a signal, a mental alarm sounded by that back part of his brain tasked with sorting and filing, tasked with noting a curious link or worrisome connection, and returning it, with a silent click, to conscious thought.
Two mental images, from different times and places, surfaced simultaneously: Kitty handing him her card at the cottage, saying, “The number on the back is the Cherry Plaza Hotel”; and, earlier this morning, Sarah’s note, retrieved from the kitchen floor and replaced beside the phone jack, reading, WED: Cherry Plaza, 1:00.
The coincidence, and its potential consequences, set off a small tremor in his chest.
Within the hour, Sarah would be arriving at Orlando’s Cherry Plaza, the very same luxury hotel on downtown Lake Eola where Kitty was staying! What were the chances of Kitty emerging from lunch in the lobby’s lakefront restaurant just as Sarah arrived to check their public shelter supplies? Would the two sisters recognize each other? Of course. Would Kitty—who seemed as prickly about Sarah as Sarah could be about her—say why she was there, and what happened at the cottage this morning? Nightmare!
He checked his watch: twelve fifty-two. And felt a small ball of fear forming in his stomach. No doubt Sarah was already en route. It was too late to stop her. Should he try to reach Kitty instead?
He holstered the nozzle, collected $1.55 for Vomac’s gas, then turned quickly toward the office. But Steve was already at the desk breaking for lunch. No way could Avery fish out Kitty’s card and make that call in front of him. And—Oh, for crying out loud!—here came Sonny Geiger strolling in off Princeton.
Geiger was a fellow mechanic who maintained the fleet of trucks and tractors for Dr. Phillips’s Granada Groves, the giant citrus packinghouse that abutted the train tracks behind the station.
“How’s it goin’, boys?” Geiger boomed, filling the office doorway in his usual plaid shirt, denim overalls, and green mesh John Deere cap. He had the habit of punctuating his sentences with an audible suck, like a small kissing sound, on his toothpick.
A Place We Knew Well Page 13