“I know it’s a lot,” Bud said. “I wasn’t going to say nothing, but I only been gone a week and Travis is that much bigger. Hell, Arlee looks a year older. I don’t want to be someone that comes and goes.”
“You told me we could stay here for the summer,” I said. We looked at each other for a few seconds and then I turned and walked out onto the porch.
Bud’s chair scraped as he stood up and walked over to me. He didn’t touch me, but his voice went deep, melting my heart. “I know you don’t want to leave,” he said. “I know what I’m asking you to do. I know it’s hard.”
The summer sky was so blue it made my eyes smart. The tides promised to mark our days, to keep our place, whether we were there or not. But summertime was not back in a trailer on the side of the road. Hell, I thought. “After the Fourth of July,” I said, not making an effort to hide my long, loud sigh. “We’ll go with you then.”
“Sounds good,” Bud said. “I been cutting the lawn out in front of the trailer. Looks nice. Bet you could make it look some pretty with flowers. Maybe you can bring some of Grand’s with you.”
“Suppose I could,” I said. “I’m going for a walk. Watch the kids for a while?” Without waiting for his reply, I kissed Arlee’s head as I walked toward the front hall.
“I have to leave in about an hour,” Bud called.
“I’ll be back in time,” I said.
I decided to take a seldom-used path through the park. To get to it, I skirted a pile of brush put there by the park rangers to block its faint presence. It was one I knew well, having taken it to and from Andy Barrington’s cottage the winter we’d been together.
Just before I reached the edge of the woods that led to their place, I took a right onto a path as thin as a child’s eyebrow that petered at a little clearing. Not much had changed in the year or two since I’d been there; the blueberry and juniper bushes were a tad taller, but the three flat rocks in the center of the clearing were still the perfect place to sit and think. I had gone there often after Carlie’s disappearance, just to be alone and to talk to her in private. This time, though, I needed to take in what Bud had just sprung on me. I sat down, closed my eyes, and raised my face to the sun. A crow cawed as it passed close by. Something small rustled in the bushes. I whispered, “I don’t want to go.”
“Go where?” someone said, and I jumped to my feet in one leap.
Maureen stood in front of me, her light-brown eyes smiling.
“You scared the crap out of me,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you knew about this place. It’s so pretty. I like talking to God here better than I do in church, but don’t tell my mother. If I wait long enough, seems like Jesus and everyone else pops by.”
“I guess,” I said. “Who else?”
“Dad, mostly. I tell him the things I’ve always wanted to say to him. And sometimes, Grand comes by. She’s funny. We have good talks.”
“You remember Grand?”
“Of course. Sometimes I used to wish I could live with her.”
“Would have been nice to have you for a sister,” I said. “I’ve been coming here for a while, to talk to my mother.”
Maureen frowned into the sun. “I don’t remember her.”
“You were five when she disappeared,” I said. Maureen shifted her weight from one long leg to the other.
“Let’s sit down,” I said. “Pull up a rock.”
She grinned. We sat down on the rocks and she snuggled against me. “I’m so glad you’re married to Bud,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. Mostly, I added to myself.
“I knew you were the one he liked, all along. He liked Susan, but I could tell he liked you better.”
“Well, he put on a good show of pretending he didn’t.”
Susan and Bud actually had been pretty serious, until I stuck myself between them. I hadn’t played fair, but I wasn’t sorry for that. I had Bud, and I was sure Susan was happy wherever she had ended up.
Maureen said, “Don’t tell him I told you this, but when he was going out with Susan, he used to stand outside after she drove off for the night and look up at Grand’s house till all the lights went out.”
“Imagine that,” I said. “What were you doing awake back then?”
“I don’t sleep much,” Maureen said.
“Come on up and give Travis his two a.m. bottle, in that case.”
“I will if you want.”
“I can manage. Anyway, we won’t be here much longer.”
“Why not?”
“Bud wants us to go back to Stoughton Falls. He misses us, he says.”
“No!” Maureen jumped up. “You just got here. You can’t go.”
“We’re staying through the Fourth of July,” I said.
“Want me to tell him to go pound sand?”
I smiled. “I want to be with him, Maureen. I want to be here too, but for now, I’ll go back with him. Maybe we’ll be able to stay longer next summer. We might be down for the holidays.”
Maureen sat back down and we went quiet for a minute, while she talked to Jesus or Sam or maybe Grand and I thought about what the heart makes clear. I had just told Maureen I wanted to be with Bud, and that was the bald truth. Suddenly, she said, “I’m worried about Glen.”
“I know,” I said. “I am too.”
“I don’t know why he wanted me to stop writing to him. I would think that a letter would cheer him up. I admire him. He’s brave.”
“He is,” I agreed. “He’s very brave.”
Without warning, my babies gripped my heart and shook it. I said to Maureen, “I need to get back. Bud has to leave soon.”
“I’ll come too,” she said. We pulled each other up and walked up the path to the crossroads. We looked right, toward the Barringtons’. I shivered. Maureen said in a near whisper, “The man in that house is creepy.”
“Which man?” I whispered back.
“He’s the dad of the guy you used to go out with. Andy’s dad. I used to think that Andy was cute, but my mom prayed for you to stop seeing him, and Bud didn’t like him much either.”
“Why do you think that Edward is creepy?” I asked her as we turned left.
“Well, once . . . don’t tell my mom, I was in the clearing and I heard someone coming up the path. I hid behind the juniper bushes. He got to the rocks and he knelt down and cried and yelled to himself for what seemed like forever. It was weird.”
Edward came to the clearing? I shuddered. “He is creepy. Stay away from him.”
“I can outrun him. He’s an old guy.”
“Don’t get near enough so that you have to do that. Stay away from him. Promise?”
“I feel bad for saying that he was creepy. Jesus says there’s good in everyone.”
“I guess so, but just stay away from him. You can pray for him, you can hope for the best for him, but just stay away.”
“Don’t tell any of this to my mother,” Maureen said.
“I won’t,” I said.
She put her arm around my shoulders. “Let’s walk and talk again, okay?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. We began to hurry. I swore I heard Travis crying before I got to The Cheeks, but when I got home, he was sound asleep.
17
Bud left for Stoughton Falls again almost the minute I got back. Dottie showed up at The Point the next day and I was glad for her company. On Thursday afternoon, she and I took Arlee up to Ray’s to pick up the mail.
Madeline had Travis. “Give me some time with that baby! I won’t wreck him, I promise. After all, look how my girls turned out,” she said, rolling her eyes. Evie hadn’t come home the night before. “If she isn’t dead somewhere,” she told Dottie and me, “I’m going to kill her.”
Dottie had something other than Evie on her mind. A
s we walked along, she said, “I’ve found out that even if I go pro, the bowling tour don’t pay that well. I been adding it up. Unless I want to live in my car, I’ll probably have to back my bowling up with an honest living, like bossing high school girls around a gym. Jesus, don’t I hate the thought of doing that. I remember what pains in the asses we were to the poor suckers who tried to whip us into shape. Thankless job. And them kids won’t care that I’m a champion bowler, so they won’t be as impressed as they should be.”
“Comes back around, I guess,” I said.
“Does,” Dottie said. She stooped down, bundled Arlee into her arms, and made a farting noise into the bend of her little white neck. Arlee screeched and giggled.
Dottie plunked Arlee down on the road and Arlee said, “Agin!”
“We’re almost at the store,” I said. “Dottie will do it some other time.”
Dottie and I grabbed her hands and scooted her up over the front steps of the store.
“Hello, pumpkin!” Ray hollered when he saw her.
“Jeeza!” Arlee said.
“Great,” I muttered to Dottie.
“He’s been called worse, I bet,” Dottie said.
Ray reached in back of him, took the mail from Grand’s slot, and handed it to me. Her written name, Florence Gilham, in faded ink on yellowed paper, was still above the slot. I hadn’t asked Ray to change it, and I never would.
I shuffled envelopes like gin rummy cards. One, two, and three. Bills, bills, and bills.
“I’m going to have to get a job too,” I said to Dottie. “Can I come help you?”
“Might just as well,” Dottie said. “Bring a whistle.”
One small cream-colored envelope with my name and address in block letters on the front postmarked Long Reach. My heart sped up. “Shit,” I said.
“What?” Dottie said.
Ray handed Arlee two lollipops. “One is good,” I said.
“Two is better,” he said.
“I’m not supposed to open this,” I muttered.
“Why not?” Dottie said.
I turned to Ray and held up the envelope. “Where did this come from?” I asked him.
“The mailman,” he said. “He stops in a truck every day and drops off the mail. Been doing it for years. Neither rain, sleet, nor snow stop him from his appointed rounds.”
“Thanks for clearing that up,” I snapped. “I thought maybe you shit it out and put it into the box.”
He gave me a look. So did Dottie. And Arlee. Then Stella came into the store and we all looked at her.
“What?” she said. “What’s happened now?”
“Hi, Stella,” Dottie said. “How the hell are you?”
“Doing good, Dottie. Better than I have for a long time. How about you?”
Dottie walked over to Stella, and Ray walked over to me. “What the hell is up your butt?” he grumbled. “You pissed at me or the mailman?”
“Neither of you,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I took Arlee’s sticky hand, brushed past Dottie and Stella, and went out the door.
“Daw come,” Arlee said.
“She’ll be along in a second,” I said. “We have to go home.”
At the house I showed the letter to Dottie. “I’m supposed to give this to Parker before I open it,” I said. “In case there might be fingerprints.”
“But it’s addressed to you.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“You and Ray and the mailman already messed up the envelope.”
“We did, didn’t we?”
“We could try and steam it open,” Dottie said. “Can’t harm nothing.”
“I could take it out by the corners and pinch the paper along the sides so the middle doesn’t get messed up.”
“Could.”
So we did. Dottie ran it along the teakettle steam and the flap let go. We turned the kettle off, sat down at the kitchen table, and looked at the now-opened letter.
“Well,” Dottie said. “You going to read it?”
My fingers danced along the edges of the white paper folded inside its envelope cave as if it were on fire. “Different postmark. The first one was from Freeport,” I said. “The second one was from Lewiston.”
“That’s weird.”
I held the folded paper in front of me. My fingers trembled.
“Okay. Here goes,” I said. Lined paper. Same flowing cursive as the second one.
Your games are not amusing and I don’t like to look like a fool. I would rather you tell me you do not want to meet me or see me again. Please advise. I love you.
“Who the hell is this from?” I said. “Why the fuck am I getting these letters? Who is sending them?”
My mind cast around for someone, anyone, and I suddenly remembered Patty, the funny, wild friend who had taken the trip with Carlie the weekend she had vanished. Would she know something about the letters? I wished I could show them to her, but she had left for New Jersey right after Carlie had disappeared. I had never heard from her again, even after I had written her a letter.
“I wonder what happened to Patty,” I said to Dottie.
“Christ, you jump around. What does it look like in your head?” She stood up. “I’m going to get Travis. I just heard some yelling. Evie must be home. I’ll be right back.”
Dottie went out the door and I went to the phone and dialed Parker. He showed up about an hour later, his cruiser in front of the house calling attention to the fact that, yes, something was off yet again in Florine land.
“I just handled the edges of the paper,” I told him.
Parker looked as if he didn’t believe me. He picked up the envelope, took reading glasses from his front shirt pocket, and put them on. “Long Reach postal mark,” he said. As he read the short message, I looked over his shoulder at it again. Your games are not amusing and I don’t like to look like a fool. I could agree with that. Then I looked again. Your games are not amusing and I don’t like to look like a fool. Who talked like that? And then it hit me.
“Edward,” I said. My skin crawled.
“Who?” Parker said.
“Edward Barrington.”
“What about him?” Parker said.
“He talks like that. Amusing. Advise. We don’t use fancy words like that around here.”
Parker’s eyebrows bent into a serious-looking V. “Lot of folks use big words, Florine. Don’t go trying to be some kind of detective. Watch out who you accuse of something you got no proof about. And if you want me to help you, stop opening them letters.” His chair scraped as he got up.
He turned to go, and then he turned back. “We don’t even know if these letters have anything to do with Carlie. ‘C’ doesn’t tell us anything. And you know, Barrington ain’t that bad a guy.”
“Well, I know him in a different way,” I said to him.
“Don’t think something about someone because you don’t like them,” Parker said.
“All right, already,” I said. “I get it.”
After Parker left, Arlee bugged me to let her color, so I pulled a box of crayons and a coloring book from a kitchen drawer and we sat down at the table together. She was partial to blues and purples. I started her on a picture of a house just as Dottie walked back in with a sleeping Travis. She put him down in his bassinet on the porch and we went back into the kitchen and sat down. I filled her in on the latest exchange between Parker and me.
“Edward does use big words,” I said. “He talked that way to Andy and me that time he came to take Andy back home with him. And he gives me goose bumps. Wouldn’t hurt for Parker to check on it.”
“Suppose not,” Dottie said. “Not to change the subject, but Evie’s in big trouble. Some guy dropped her off a little while ago. Older. Just dropped her and gunned it out of here. Smells like she went swimming in a keg.”
“’Least she didn’t drown.”
“If she keeps up this happy bullshit, she might. Bert’s about ready to drop her overboard with a rusty anchor wrapped around her legs.”
“Well, let’s hope she wises up,” I said. “Like I did.”
Dottie gave me a look.
“What?” I said.
She left shortly after that and I fed Travis and Arlee, after scrubbing big loops of violet crayon from the surface of the table. Next time, I would put newspapers down on the table’s surface when Arlee colored, until she learned how to stay within the lines. Maybe she never would. That would be fine with me.
18
June faded away in its quiet green way, and Arlee turned two with a little cake, balloons, and everyone who loved her there to help her celebrate. The first week of July slipped into place. Bud took the week off and drove to The Point. I puttered as he did chores and helped Billy replace the old picket fence between the cliff and the house.
It was about twenty feet to the rocks below the ledge where Grand’s house stood. When I had been little, Grand, who had a sixth sense about where I shouldn’t be, would yell out the porch screen for me to “stay away from the cliff” whenever I wanted to slip through the gate to stand looking down. I had long outgrown the urge to toss down clams or mussels to see them break on the rocks, but now I had babies who would want to do the very same thing. Arlee was already mastering the art of running out of sight. I wouldn’t have thought a kid could move so fast, but I was finding out how tricky she could be. So we decided to replace the fence.
When Billy showed up early on the morning of July 3, I noticed dark circles under his eyes. His smile was small and the light in his eyes dim.
“Hey, Florine,” he said.
“Hey,” I answered back. “You want some coffee?”
“Nope,” he said. “Lots to do today. Bud ready?”
“He’s upstairs getting himself pretty for you,” I said. Billy ignored my joke.
“I’ll get to it, then,” he said. He spotted Arlee and his face brightened. “Suffer the little children,” he whispered. He picked her up and she hugged him. His eyes shut tight as he held her, and I saw something sad pass over him. He put her down. “I’ll get cracking,” he said, and went outside.
Written on My Heart Page 13