Julia Watts - Finding H.F.

by Julia Watts

  Chapter Sixteen

  When you sleep in a car, you don’t need an alarm clock. As soon as the sun rises, it blasts through the windows, making my eyes snap open, then close back up in a squint. “We gotta get out of here before we roast alive,” I say, swinging open the door.

  The park is empty, and now that it’s daylight, I can see that it’s also pretty ugly. There’s just a few scraggly pine trees, and the ground is too sandy to grow much grass.

  “Look,” Bo says, pointing at a white bird that just swooped down and landed on a picnic table, “a seagull.”

  I look at the seagull, and he looks at me. He’s pretty—pure white with gray-tipped wings. Even though I’m still mad at Memaw, I think of her for a second. She keeps a bird feeder in the backyard and is always staring out the kitchen window at the cardinals and blue jays. I bet she’s never even seen a seagull. “Well,” I say, “it ain’t a flamingo, but I reckon it’s still a sign that we ain’t in Kentucky anymore.”

  “That’s for sure. It even smells different down here. Have you noticed?”

  I hadn’t, but I take a good, long sniff. For a second I don’t know what I’m smelling, but then I remember it’s a smell that Uncle Bobby described to me from his days in the Navy: the sharp smell of saltwater. I start walking toward the smell. “Come on, Bo.”

  “Come on where? Can’t we see if they’ve unlocked the park bathroom so we can clean up a little first?”

  I look and Bo and can’t help laughing. He’s a mess. His wavy hair is smooshed down on one side where he’s slept on it, and his white shirt and tan pants are all wrinkled. As bad as he looks, I know I look worse. “You look great,” I lie. “Come on.” Without even knowing I’m going to do it, I break into a run.

  Bo trots along behind me, panting, “H.F., unless there’s a man with an ax gainin’ on us, I don’t see why we have to be goin’ so dadblamed fast.”

  I run through the patch of pine trees, then I stop. I don’t look over to see Bo. I’m too busy staring at what’s in front of me. But I hear him beside me, breathing.

  The beach is long and white, not tan like the sand in little kids’ sandboxes. It curves and dips like a woman’s body and stretches to the left and the right as far as I can see. In front of me is the ocean. I say the word again in my head: ocean. It’s a beautiful word for a beautiful thing, but thing seems like such a small word for something that’s bigger than I can even imagine. I think about the globe in our history classroom—how all the continents look like tiny islands compared to the hugeness of the ocean. And it’s so blue.

  “You know,” Bo says, “when I was a little kid and I’d draw pictures of water, I’d always make it blue. But I’d never seen blue water before...just clear water in a blue swimming pool. But this...this is blue.”

  “Like a blue glass marble.”

  “Like Cal Ripken’s eyes.”

  I take off my shoes and let the sand sift between my toes. And then I’m running again, barefoot, toward the water. I pull my T-shirt over my head, then step out of my jeans. I unhook my bra and shuck off my panties and run into the ocean. My toes squish into the wet sand, and the waves pour over me. When I’m up to my waist, I look around toward Bo, who I keep expecting to holler at me for being crazy enough to take my clothes off. But when I look around at him, he’s already got his shoes, shirt, and pants off, and seems to be debating what to do about his underwear. He finally shucks that off too, and runs into the water to meet me.

  We swim and splash and play like a pair of toddlers in the world’s biggest wading pool. Even if somebody walking along the beach was to see us, I don’t think we’d be embarrassed. You don’t expect dolphins playing in the water to be wearing clothes, so why should we?

  “H.F.,” Bo hollers over the sound of the waves, “you know how I said I wanted to live a big life? I think I started livin’ it today!”

  I wrap my arms around Bo and hug him. All his boy parts are touching my girl parts, but there’s none of the spark that I’d feel pressed up against Wendy or Laney. You know how the hateful preachers are always saying that God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve? Well, hugging Bo naked in the ocean, I feel like we’re a new kind of Adam and Eve. We already ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and instead of being punished for it, we learned that the world is big and full of opportunities, and that love is always good: Girls can love girls if they want to, boys can love boys if they want to, and a girl and a boy can love each other as dear friends and nothing more or less. We are naked, and we are not ashamed.

  On the beach I put on all my clothes, and Bo puts on his underwear and pants and turns his shirt into a bag for collecting shells. We walk along the shore, picking up nature’s free souvenirs. I look up in the sky at a seagull, and suddenly Bo picks me up under my arms and sets me down a few inches away from where I was. “Hey, what was that for?”

  “Look where you was about to step.”

  I look down and see what looks like a clear plastic bag with strings dragging behind it.

  “A jellyfish,” Bo says. “I ain’t never seen one before, but I know about ‘em because my cousin got stung by one down in Myrtle Beach. They’re poison.”

  I step back from the little bag; it don’t look like something dangerous. “Your cousin...did he die?”

  “No. Their sting won’t kill you. It’ll just make you hurt real bad.”

  “Well, thanks for savin’ me.” We walk farther down the beach, picking up more shells, but this time I watch where I’m going.

  People are starting to come to the beach. Families with picnic baskets are spreading out blankets. I watch a little girl in a Mickey Mouse hat and sunglasses stand still while her mother rubs suntan lotion on her back, arms, and legs. “Bo,” I say, “I think I’m ready to meet my momma now.”

  In the park restroom, I change into a yellow polo shirt and a clean pair of jeans. The ocean has already washed me clean, so all I have to do is brush my hair and teeth. When I look at myself in the mirror, I look pretty OK. I look like I could be somebody’s daughter.

  Since Tippalula is about the size of Morgan, Palmetto Drive isn’t hard to find. Like you’d think from the name, there are palm trees growing right by the sidewalk, but the houses aren’t that fancy. Mostly they’re just little white frame houses that put me in the mind of Memaw’s. When we get to the house with Momma’s address, it’s also a little white frame house not much different than Memaw’s, except not in as good a shape. The yard needs cutting, and the white paint is chipping off the wood. Memaw’s house has aluminum siding. But I don’t care what Momma’s house looks like. I’ve had a million different fantasies about her, but not one of them was about her being rich.

  Bo parks in front of the house. “You want me to wait here or come with you?”

  “Come with me. I’m as nervous as a cat.”

  I knock on the screen door several times. I’m about to give up and come back later when the door opens. A good-looking shirtless man stands in front of us. He’s young, with shoulder-length brown hair and blue eyes, and for a second, in my nervousness, I wonder if he could be my brother. This is stupid, of course; even though he’s young, he’s still older than me. He stares, waiting for me to say something, till I finally manage to get out, “Does Sondra Simms live here?”

  “She might. Depends on what you’re after.”

  He seems like he’s as nervous as I am, so I say, “I’m not after nothin’. I’m a friend of hers from Kentucky. I was just passin’ through town and thought I’d stop by to say hello.”

  He looks me and Bo up and down, like he’s deciding we’re not too dangerous. “Well, she’s workin’ over at the City Cafe if you want to go see her.” As soon as he says it, he closes the door.

  “You reckon he’s her husband?” Bo says when we’re in the car.

  “Nah, he’s too young. Probably just her roommate. Maybe they’re real good friends like you and me.”

  “Well, he ain’t too much like me,” Bo says. �
��If I was about to answer the phone, I’d put a shirt on.”

  The City Cafe is the same place we drove by last night. It’s a little nicer than the Dixie Diner on the inside, cleaner and maybe remodeled. A waitress in a powder-blue uniform walks up to us. She’s got blond hair, but I still check her name tag on the chance she could be my mother. Her name is Donna.

  “Two?” she asks, looking at Bo and me.

  “Uh, actually, we’re just lookin’ for somebody that works here...Sondra Simms.”

  Donna turns away from us and yells so that everybody in the Florida panhandle can hear her: “Sondra! A coupla kids up here wanna talk to you!”

  When she comes out from the back of the restaurant and walks toward me, it’s like a scene in a movie where everything’s in slow motion. Customers are looking up from their shrimp baskets and bowls of chili to see what she does, to hear what we say.

  She’s still pretty. The dark brown hair I remember from her picture is shoulder length now, and permed. Except for a few tiny lines at the corners, her eyes are just like in the picture, coal black and determined underneath their fringe of dark lashes. She’s put on maybe 20 pounds over the past 16 years, but the extra padding just makes her look like a woman instead of a girl.

  She looks at Bo and me like she’s trying to figure out if she knows us from somewhere. Finally, she says, “Can I help you?”

  I want to say, “Momma,” but Donna is still standing there, and the lunch customers are still staring at us like we’re the free entertainment. “Uh,” I stammer, “could I talk to you outside for a second?”

  She shrugs. “Yeah, but just for a second. I’ve got customers to check back on. Donna, tell Lenny I’m out smoking a cigarette and I’ll be right back, OK?”

  We stand on the sidewalk while my mother takes a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of the pocket of her uniform. She lights one and squints at me through a veil of smoke. “OK, so what do you want? You’re too old to be selling Girl Scout cookies.”

  I had hoped she could tell who I was just by looking at me, but of course she can’t. “Sondra,” I say, even though it sounds weird to call her by her name, “I’m your daughter, Heavenly Faith.”

  She laughs a low, throaty laugh. “No shit? Well, your granny saddled you with a hell of a name, didn’t she?”

  I grin. “Everybody but her calls me H.F.”

  She looks me up and down. “Well, H.F., you need a makeover about as bad as any girl I ever seen. Of course, you wouldn’t know how to fix yourself up being raised by that old woman. Does she still wear that same blue flowered dress to church every Sunday?”

  I know the dress she means. “She did till a couple of years ago. It finally got so faded that she give up and bought her another ‘un. It’s blue with flowers too.”

  My mother laughs, which makes me feel good. We have things in common, I think. She likes me.

  “Well, I guess bein’ raised by her, you’re lucky you’re not walkin’ around in a polyester dress too.” She looks at me harder, then frowns. “There’s not a thing of me in you. I guess you look like your daddy.”

  “My daddy?” I’ve never wanted a daddy like I’ve wanted a momma, but I’ve always been curious who my father might be. Memaw never will say a thing about who Momma was dating when she got pregnant.

  My mother laughs. “Don’t look at me, kid. Livin’ with that Jesus-crazy old woman in that Jesus-crazy little town made me wild as a buck. I don’t remember half of what I did back then. Hell, you’d probably have more luck pickin’ out all the men under the age of 40 in Morgan and linin’ them up to see who looks most like you than you would askin’ me who your daddy is.” She takes one last pull off her cigarette, then stubs it out on the City Cafe’s windowsill. “Speakin’ of men, who’s your boyfriend there?”

  Bo’s been standing there the whole time, and I had plum forgot about him. “This is Bo, but he ain’t my boyfriend.”

  “No,” she says, “he don’t look like boyfriend material. Well, my five minutes is up. I’ve gotta get back to my customers.”

  I don’t mean to be rude, but I still hear myself saying, “Look, since we’re in town, I was wonderin’...could we maybe stop by your house a few minutes this evenin’?”

  She’s already opened the door of the restaurant. “Sure, whatever. I get off at 6.”

  I watch the door close behind her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  We stop at a little grocery store and splurge on Red Delicious apples and cold bottled Cokes and little packs of salted peanuts. We take our snacks down to the beach and stare at the ocean while we eat and drink. Bo and me both empty our packs of peanuts into our Cokes, so that when you turn up your bottle to get a drink, you also get a mouthful of peanuts. The last few swallows of Coke are salty like the ocean. I feel happy.

  I keep wanting to ask Bo what he thinks of my momma, but part of me is scared to ask him—scared he might say he don’t like her, and then I’d have to be mad at him.

  So I don’t ask him. Neither of us says much of anything that afternoon. We just listen to the ocean, let it do all the talking.

  At 6:30 we head back over to Palmetto Drive. This time my mother opens the door. She’s fresh out of the bath, wearing jeans and a T-shirt from some place called Margarita Pete’s that says, ONE TEQUILA, TWO TEQUILA, THREE TEQUILA, FLOOR. With her clean face and regular clothes, she looks more like the girl in the picture I’ve looked at so many times. She holds the door open. “I brought home some shrimp boxes from work. Come on in and eat.”

  Momma must not love pictures and knickknacks and what-nots like Memaw does. There’s nothing hanging on the living room walls but the drab brown paneling. There’s not much in the way of furniture either—a secondhand tan couch and chair and a beat-up coffee table with an overflowing ashtray and rings left from glasses sitting on it. Across from the couch, though, is a TV almost as big as the one at Dave and Bill’s, with a VCR sitting underneath it. I know Memaw would throw a fit if she seen this place, but I don’t mind it so much. I always figured the kind of mother who cleaned house all the time would also be the kind of mother who’d want me to put on a dress.

  We follow Momma into the kitchen, where the guy who answered the door is sitting at a folding card table, drinking a can of Milwaukee’s Best. He still don’t have a shirt on. “This is Travis,” Momma says.

  Bo and me say, “Nice to meet you.”

  Travis mumbles, “Hey.”

  “The shrimp’s on the table,” Momma says. “You can just grab a box. We’ve got beer and water. What do you want?”

  “Water,” I say.

  “Water,” Bo says.

  “Pussies,” Travis says, grinning.

  Momma gives Travis a playful slap on the arm. “Now, I told you to behave yourself. Of course H.F. ain’t gonna drink a beer. I’m sure her memaw told her that so much as one sip would send her straight to hell. Am I right, H.F.?”

  “That’s about the size of it. I don’t believe it, though.” I don’t want her to think I’m some kind of religious fanatic just because Memaw is. “I’ve just never liked the way beer tastes.”

  “Me neither,” Bo says.

  Travis looks at Bo suspiciously, like the fact that he don’t like beer automatically makes him a fag.

  I’ve never ate shrimp before, and it’s real good, except it seems weird to be eating a whole animal in one bite. Momma don’t eat much. She just nibbles a couple of french fries, then pushes the box away and lights up a cigarette. She seems nervous, and I think I know why. It’s Travis. If he wasn’t here, her and me could have a real mother-daughter talk.

  “So,” I say, “you wanna know anything about anybody back in Morgan?”

  She blows out a cloud of smoke. “No.”

  I want to say, You want to know anything about me? but I’m scared of what she’ll say.

  “H.F. is real smart in school, Mrs. Simms,” Bo says. “She don’t hardly study at all, but she still keeps a B average.”

&n
bsp; “So what are you tryin’ to say?” my mother says, her voice on edge. “She keeps a B average, but I dropped out, right?”

  “No, ma’am,” Bo says, backpedaling as fast as he can. “I didn’t mean nothin’ like that. I just...I just thought you might like to know.”

  “Huh,” she says, getting up and taking two beers from the fridge, one for her and one for Travis. “Why don’t we go watch some TV?”

  My mother lays on the couch with her legs stretched across Travis’s lap. I let Bo have the chair. I sit on the carpet, which feels gummy. We watch two shows, one about paramedics rescuing people that have got beat up or burned. The camera stays right on the accident victims while they jabber away about how much they hurt. The other show is about pets that go crazy and attack people. Nobody in the room talks except during commercials.

  During a commercial for some medicine that’s supposed to cure baldness, my mother says to Bo, “So who are you anyhow? You’re not family too, are you?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m just H.F.’s friend. My daddy’s Johnny Martin.”

  My mother’s eyes light up. “No shit? Johnny Martin that used to hang out over at the Hilltop Tavern?”

  “Yes, ma’am. He still does.”

  “Oh, yeah,” my mother smiles. “I remember Johnny. I had me a fake ID, used to sneak out of the house and go to the Hilltop all the time. Johnny’d buy me beer—he used to buy all the girls beer, you know. He was a good-lookin’ fella. I never could figure out what he wanted with that hangdog wife of his.”

  Then the show comes back on, and she stops talking so we can all see the toy poodle that caused a door-to-door salesman to have his big toe amputated. Bo sits in the chair, his lips a straight line of rage because that “hangdog wife” of Johnny Martin’s is his mother.

  By the time the pet show is over, my mother and Travis have drunk two more beers. I told myself I wasn’t going to keep track of how much my mother was drinking, but I can’t stop myself from counting the cans. Suddenly she picks up the remote, puts the TV on mute, and turns to me. “OK, H.F.,” she says, “I give up. I wasn’t gonna say nothing, but I give up. Why did you come all the way down here? Because if you want money, we ain’t got none.”