The Moon Always Rising

by Alice C. Early

  Toad Hall was spotless; Finney, Vivian, and Eulia must have been plotting their move ever since she’d announced her mother’s visit. She felt both abandoned and a little panicked to be without their company and buffering. Giulietta’s case was small, enough for only a short visit, and Els began to fret that she might run off, leaving her questions unanswered.

  Giulietta settled into the lemon suede chair and looked around the walls at Els’s canvasses. “This is perfetto, this frog house,” she said. “I wash off the jet lag in that shower simpatico outside, then we make dinner, va bene?”

  “We’re closed tonight. I thought we’d go out.”

  “Assurdo!” Giulietta said. “Your kitchen is full of food. We make a little pasta, have a little wine. Talk.”

  “Talk,” Els said. “My fondest wish.” But she sensed a wariness in her mother that matched her own.

  Wearing a red linen shift, with one of Eulia’s chef’s aprons tied under her breasts, Giulietta moved instinctively around the unfamiliar kitchen, finding any implement she needed, making the restaurant stove her own. She gave Els jobs to do—chop the garlic, test the pasta. When they sat down to eat, Els felt pride in helping to create the meal, that she deserved to share it, that it was already shared.

  Giulietta recounted her trip and, with much laughter, caught Els up on their family in Italy, cousins her own age she’d never met. When Els tried to talk about Harald or Burtie, her mother cut her off, and when she teared up in describing Mallo’s death, Giulietta stared into her wine and said, “So much sadness for you, cara, all together.” When Giulietta dismissed the bank failure and the struggle to create and manage the pub with a wave of her hand, it dawned on Els that her mother was both engaging and self-absorbed—as gifted a storyteller as she was a spotlight hog—and not nearly as empathetic as the fantasy Mum she’d carried in her heart all these years. When Els described finding Giulietta’s birthday paintings, her mother looked away toward the screen door, where insects had clustered.

  By the time Giulietta poured the last of the red wine into her glass, Els had nearly finished a bottle of white and the candles had puddled wax onto the table. Els grasped the blue bead and ran it along its chain, and the talisman combined with the wine made her bold enough to ask, “Mum, why would Father have kept your gifts from me?”

  Giulietta looked at her. “I cannot go into all that.”

  “You came halfway around the world to see me, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Cara,” Giulietta said. “We both drink a lot of vino. My head is tired from all the planes.”

  “Mum,” Els said, “I’m desperate to know why you abandoned me . . . us.”

  “Is that what they tell you, those Cairnoch people, Grandmother Beatrice? Your father, Mr. Big Laird?”

  “Nobody would speak to me about it. I worked it out that it was your idea.”

  “Bastardo,” Giulietta said.

  Els reached for her mother’s hand. “Promise me you won’t leave until you give me some answers.”

  Giulietta gave Els a wan smile and squeezed her hand. Els squeezed back. The walk-in’s compressor clicked on and the lights dimmed. Insects ticked against the window.

  Still holding Els’s fingers, Giulietta sipped her wine. The candlelight softened her face, shaving away some of the twenty-one years that separated them and making her hazel eyes look almost green. “Who is this sailor?” she asked.

  “Just a friend,” Els said, removing her hand. “American.”

  “When do I meet him?”

  “He’s mostly away on charters.” She ran her index finger and thumb up and down the stem of her wine glass. “How long are you staying?”

  “We go giorno per giorno,” Giulietta said. She swept bread crumbs onto her plate. “Tell tuo amore I want to visit his big boat.” Resting her chin in her hands, she closed her eyes. “It is four in the morning in Napoli,” she said. “I sleep only two winks on the plane from Milano to JFK.”

  Els stood up. “I’ll wash up.”

  Giulietta rose with a little wobble, and Els took her arm.

  “I am not so old, yet,” Giulietta said. She slipped her arm free and walked ahead of Els up the path lit with fairy lights. At Toad Hall, she leaned against the door and Els reached to turn the handle.

  Giulietta held Els’s face and kissed her again on both cheeks. “I never want to see you in New York or London,” she said. “There, I fear you are too much your father’s daughter.” She touched Els’s chin with her fingertips. “Here, you are mine.” She stepped into Toad Hall and closed the door.

  CHAPTER 39

  Els kept a watchful eye on the gate the day Liz was due back. She was stunned when the Jeep raced up the drive with Liz at the wheel and Giulietta in the passenger seat, her hands and hair flying, both of them laughing. Els set down Rum Wallops for the sunset drinkers on the gallery and hurried to the court.

  Liz jumped out, grinning, but a question hung in his eyes. The blue of them reminded her of mountain harebells, as it had that first moment on Iguana.

  “I don’t see you for a month,” Els said, “and my mother finds you before I do?”

  “I am at Oualie,” Giulietta said. “This huge boat sails in, and Mr. Barrett tells me it belongs to your sailor. I swim there to meet him.”

  “Jason and I were setting things to rights on Iguana when Mama G here climbed up the ladder and invited herself aboard,” Liz said. “You should try it sometime.”

  “And trigger another panic attack?” Els said. “He saved my life, Mum. I may be a regular fish in a pool, but I’ve always been terrified of dark water, and I got tossed into the sea the day we met. I might have drowned if he hadn’t pulled me out.”

  That fleeting shudder passed through Giulietta again as she looked from Els to Liz. She climbed out of the Jeep and kissed Liz on both cheeks. “Ciao, Capitano. Grazie mille. I make you special pasta when you come back.” She walked across the court, her hips swaying with what Els thought was a slight exaggeration. The back of her red linen dress bore a wet mark in the shape of a bikini bottom.

  “That was the longest month on record,” Els said. She stepped into Liz’s embrace and nestled her cheek against his chest. He kissed her hair and took a breath. As he let it out, he pulled her closer with a fierceness that surprised her. “Anything wrong?” she asked, leaning back to look into his eyes.

  “I had plenty of time to worry that your feelings might have changed.”

  “What, a stubborn Scot like me?”

  “Stubborn as her father, and sexier than her mother,” he whispered.

  Giulietta was on the gallery chatting up the guests. Els was sure she was watching them behind her sunglasses. Surprising herself, she kissed Liz with abandon, a real movie kiss. When she let him go, he faked a swoon and grinned. She led him to the palm shade near the drive, in clear view of the gallery but out of hearing range.

  “You didn’t tell me your mother was coming,” he said.

  “I invited her after you left. I’ve been a mild wreck ever since.”

  “Why? She’s charming.”

  “To you.”

  She turned her back to the gallery and put her arm around Liz, pulled his hip against hers, and slid her fingers into the back pocket of his shorts. The low sun was a golden ball caught in clouds that would soon drape the sky with flaming gauze. Pinky stood at the ready to shoot off the cannon.

  “It’s hard enough meeting my mother for the first time when we both have so much history,” she said. “But she’s elusive about hers, at least as it regards me. If I ask her an important question, she blanks me or changes the subject.”

  “She complained you were elusive about me.”

  “What was there to say? This intriguing man and I spent an evening pouring our souls out to one another and I haven’t heard from him since, except for a few radio messages via Barrett Cobb?”

  “I’ve never been any good on the phone,” he said. “But we had some beautiful days, and I wished you we
re there.”

  “Is that how I’m going to see more of you, become a deckhand? Your drinks waitress, perhaps?”

  “If I get you onto Iguana,” he said, “there won’t be any guests around.”

  “What’s this Mama G business?”

  “She went into perturbed Italian when I called her Mrs. Gordon,” Liz said. “Jason gave her the nickname.”

  “What did she worm out of you?”

  “Besides my marital status, financial prospects, and zodiac sign? Not much.” He tightened his grip on her shoulder. “She asked me if we’re lovers. I told her that was none of her business, which I’m sure she took as a yes.”

  Els found her present display of possessiveness perplexing, unsure if it was aimed mostly at Giulietta or Liz, and recoiled at the idea of how “dem say” would feed on it.

  “I’d love to join the two of you tonight,” he said. “But a Swedish family arrives in less than an hour and wants dinner aboard. We’re back in a week. First time in years we aren’t booked for Thanksgiving weekend.” He kissed her shoulder. “I’ll have four whole days to make it up to you.”

  She bumped his hip. “I’ll be counting the ways.”

  The sun oozed into the sea. Pinky fired the cannon.

  Els sat on her heels, her bare knees deep in the red soil of the newly turned herb bed Giulietta had pronounced a necessity for any restaurant. Giulietta, her hair bound in one of Jack’s bandanas, wiped her brow with the back of her wrist, leaving a streak of mud. They were both perspiring freely, though the sun was barely peeking over the mountain.

  “How soon can we eat it?” Els asked.

  “When they are about this high, you pinch the tops to make them grow full, and we eat the tops. Maybe you order mozzarella from Puerto Rico and we make caprese salad for Christmas with Finney’s tomatoes.”

  “You plan to stay five more weeks, then?”

  Giulietta shrugged. “Rinaldo visits his daughter and grandchildren in Amalfi for Christmas.”

  “Tell me about him,” Els said, keeping her eyes on her mother’s hands, which were placing the basil seeds at precise intervals along the row.

  “He is four years younger than me. His wife dies of cancer six years ago. He was my psichiatra. He falls heads over heel in love with me, so he sends me to a colleague.”

  “Some other doctor wrote about permission to visit you when I was twelve,” Els said. “Had I known, I’d have badgered Father until he let me come.”

  Giulietta stopped seeding and looked at Els. “After that, I am hopeless for a time. I visit this shrink and that one. Stregoni. They try every medication in the sink. I become too bright, too black, too blah. Rinaldo finds the right combination. No up and down now.”

  “You seem constantly up to me.”

  “You prefer I am in a pit of blackness, hiding in your frog house?” Giulietta said. “Even Rinaldo cannot love me like that.”

  Els kneaded the dirt. The confirmation that her mother was bipolar answered some questions, but raised the specter that her own moodiness came from the same cause. She didn’t think of herself as either manic or depressive, just explosive, and even that was abating since she’d moved to Nevis. She tickled dirt over the row of seeds and firmed it gently, the way Harald had taught her to do. “Am I to have a stepfather?”

  “Forse si, forse no,” Giulietta said. “Rinaldo proposes every year on my birthday. He asks me to allow a divorce.”

  “Why did you hold out all these years?”

  “I do not give Big Laird his freedom, his happiness.” Giulietta tamped down the soil Els had already firmed.

  Els stood up and slapped the soil off her knees. “What did Father do to deserve such spite?”

  “He thinks he is God in that house, makes rules for everybody.” Giulietta heaved herself to her feet. Her smile was cold. “Only one real God.” She looked heavenward. “I tell Big Laird I cannot break His rules.”

  “Since when are you devout?” Els said. “Don’t pretend you aren’t living in sin with Rinaldo.”

  “That is not your business.”

  “I won’t speculate on your sex life if you don’t speculate on mine. When did Father ask for freedom to remarry?”

  “First time when you are about five, then three more times,” Giulietta said. “I tell him his puttana becomes honest woman only when I am dead.” She yanked off her bandana, shook out her hair, and strode to Toad Hall.

  The next night, when the guests and staff had departed and Giulietta had gone to bed, Els took a glass of wine to the secret garden. Even though it was now outfitted as a dining space for private parties, it was still her favorite spot for late-evening or early-morning solitude and appreciation of the forest and ocean sounds and smells. With the moon overhead, the white Phalaenopsis orchids she’d nestled into the foundation crevices hung like moths among the ferns.

  “May I join you?” Jack stood under the bougainvillea arch, smiling his most ingratiating smile.

  “What, you finally figured out a civilized way to arrive?”

  “Is it hunky-dory with Mummy, or is the four-day fish turning smelly?”

  “She’s clearly staying beyond a week,” she said. “And since she’s been tight-lipped about anything I want to know, I’m prepared to wait her out. That fish can stink all it wants as long as I get my answers.” She looked up at the traces of clouds. “As a guest, she’s both easier and harder than I expected. As a mother, too, actually.”

  “What did you think, that she’d fall on your neck, prostrate herself to make it all up to you?”

  “That she’d be more curious about me. More sympathetic.”

  “You’ve got me for sympathy,” he said.

  “You’re as sympathetic as a drill sergeant.”

  “I know what anniversary this is.” His voice was gentle.

  The palm shadows along the drive melded and parted in the breeze. “Kind of you to take note,” she said. “It’s so isolating, grieving alone. The world is supremely uninterested. Nature shrugs.” She sipped her wine. “Well, I got through the day. What a difference a year makes. New home, new business, partially reclaimed Mum.” She bent and yanked out a shoot of coralita vine. “So, both of us have passed the two-year mark—your death, Mallo’s. I hear that’s the big healing point. Aren’t we now supposed to just move on?”

  “I will if you will,” he said.

  “I already have,” she said, struck by the truth of it, the sea change in her only clear in retrospect.

  “Then try working on what’s holding me.”

  “Jealous of my progress?”

  “Running out of time.”

  She scrutinized him. He was even less substantial than the last time, as worn through as old cloth. “If I can’t manage your release in time, are you doomed to stick around forever? My own private jumbie?”

  “I’m not a pet.”

  “Pets are supposed to give us unconditional love,” she said. “All I get from you is unspecified wheedling. Come on, Jack, stop being so cryptic and just tell me what will release you.”

  “Admitting the truth,” he said. He thinned, became lacy, and then there was only the bougainvillea.

  Giulietta injected activity and laughter into the daily life at the pub. She often bested the men at dominoes and was the most boisterous player, encouraging the female customers to join in and cheering on the old men. Els watched the guests respond to her and tried to adopt a more welcoming demeanor.

  Every day, Els brought Eulia, Peanut, and Vivian to spend the morning in the kitchen with Giulietta, who babbled in a combination of English and Italian while she taught Eulia to make pasta, gnocchi, and ricotta. Els mused that she might have learned to cook and be hospitable had her mother stayed at home.

  On a Tuesday when the pub was closed, Giulietta announced she would make dinner for Els’s “new family.” Els wondered if she thought Vivian had accepted or even usurped her motherly role, and whether Giulietta might be affronted or relieved to be shut of it
. Giulietta was a bit standoffish around the Flemings, except for Eulia, with whom she was more affectionate than with Els.

  “It’s true, they’re more than friends,” Els said. “You’ll leave me again, and they’ll be here.”

  With Els guiding her around the stocking clerks at Best Buy, Giulietta made up her menu, scowled over the produce, and held her nose dramatically at the odor of dried salt fish that permeated the back of the store. There was the usual chaos at checkout, little sense of a queue in the cramped space around the registers. When a young man in a Miami Heat tank top began flirting with one of the cashiers, Giulietta sent a burst of Italian his way, telling him to do his courting in the street.

  He squinted at her. “You interferin’ with me?”

  “Mum, let’s not have a scene,” Els said.

  Giulietta stepped toward the man. “Who else but you make pretty girl forget her business, make customers queue all the way back to that stinky fish? Burning balls don’t make you hot stuff.” A few customers chuckled; others stared at the floor.

  The young man patted the flaming basketball logo on his chest, turned to the cashier, and said, “Hear that, baby? Plenty hot stuff, all for you.”

  “Big hot nothing,” Giulietta said.

  “Woman, keep outta dis.” Mr. Heat turned to the other customers. “All a’ you my witness. She start this.” He backed away and slouched out the door, throwing an incomprehensible comment over his shoulder.

  Giulietta followed him, berating him in Italian. Els left their basket and hurried after them. When she got outside, her mother and Mr. Heat were shouting at each other in the gravel car park. Els grabbed at Giulietta’s arm, but her mother swatted her away.

  The altercation soon attracted an audience. Schoolgirls giggled into their hands. Young men clapped and hooted.

  When a policeman pushed his way through the bystanders, Mr. Heat said to him, “De woman mek big ruckus when ah wasn’t even talkin’ to she.”