The smell of baking chocolate was still hanging in the air when Momma and Marnie stormed through the front door. Momma dropped her suitcases onto the tile floor, nostrils flaring. “Do you know what your sister did?”
I’d never seen her look that way at Marnie. Me, sure, but never my perfect, golden-haired sister. I gulped and held my tongue. Marnie stood, shoulders back, red-eyed but defiant.
“She changed the song she was supposed to sing,” Momma said. “Tossed out the patriotic medley we’d worked on. For weeks.” She glared at Marnie. “You remember how many weeks we worked on it?”
Marnie stared past Momma like she was invisible.
“And for what? So she could sing a filthy song by some Top Forty Diva.”
Giving a theatrical sigh, Marnie said, “Beyoncé’s a legend.”
“I don’t care if she’s Cher reincarnated.”
“Cher’s still alive.”
Momma’s face turned crimson. “The judges wanted a show of patriotism, not a song about sex.”
Head held high, Marnie picked up her suitcase and left the room.
Momma sniffed the air. “What’s that smell? Chocolate?”
“I made cookies. Thought they’d make a nice surprise for you.”
“Winners get cookies. Not song-changing losers.” She stomped out of the house, muttering something about getting dinner.
That night, Momma banged plates as she dished out servings of the Caesar salad she’d picked up earlier. Neither my sister nor mother spoke while we ate but, like members of some weird food cult, both speared every crouton they uncovered and placed it on the side of their plates. The fact that Momma failed to tell the deli to hold the dreaded caloric cubes was a testament to how mad she was. Like I needed additional clues. Normally an oversight like this would’ve had me smiling—croutons were my favorite part of any salad. But tonight, the first one I tried to swallow lodged in my throat. After forcing it down, I focused on pushing around the soggy lettuce.
The hum of the refrigerator briefly broke the silence, but not the tension in my gut. Marnie remained serene, seemingly unaffected by the sniffs and stormy stares Momma sent her way.
Unable to sit still any longer, I swung my legs back and forth.
Momma sighed. “Must you make that scraping sound with your shoes?”
I froze. I didn’t know how to act. My whole life, Momma and Marnie had been a team. A sharp rap on the front door made me jump.
Momma rolled her eyes. “Settle down.” She slapped her napkin down and left the table.
Curious, I leaned my chair back and watched Momma put an eye to the peephole. Then her face brightened, and she whipped the door open. “Why Mr. Trask. What brings you here?”
The low murmur of voices followed, then Momma fluttered into the dining room, an overweight, over-tanned man in a shiny suit and bolo tie at her side. “Marnie, you remember Mr. Trask? From today’s competition? He’s come all the way from Nashville to talk to you.”
Her adoring gaze looked nothing like the eye-daggers she’d been throwing minutes earlier.
Marnie dabbed her lips with her napkin, then rose and shook his hand. “It’s lovely to see you again, Mr. Trask.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t place in today’s show.” Still holding her hand, he stepped closer. “In my opinion, you were the best of the bunch.”
The way Mr. Trask smiled at Marnie made my belly twist in a new way. He looked like he wanted to break off a piece of her and gobble it up.
Momma continued to flutter. “Yes. My Marnie is very talented.”
Mr. Trask’s wolfish grin widened. “I’d like to make sure more people know just how talented this little lady is.” He wrapped his other hand around hers, sandwiching her slender fingers between his meaty paws.
Marnie shook back her golden hair. “I know my song choice didn’t exactly fit the criteria…”
“No, but it beautifully demonstrated your vocal range.” He turned to Momma. “I’d like to take Marnie under my wing, act as her representative. Get her into the national spotlight.”
“Oh my.” Momma patted her chest like her heart was a wild animal in need of calming.
“Of course, I’ll have to arrange for professional photos—at my own expense, obviously.” He stroked Marnie’s hand. “Your head shots were adequate, but I think we can do better. Maybe even as soon as this week. And I’d like to bring her to New York to meet my contacts.”
“New York?” Momma’s smile faltered. “I don’t know…”
“Of course, I’d want you to come along, too.”
Momma’s smile returned. “That sounds wonderful.” She turned to me and snapped her fingers. “Get those cookies. Now we’ve got something to celebrate.”
Would they leave me behind when they flew to New York? And for how long this time? I retrieved the plate of neatly arranged cookies and offered them to Mr. Trask.
“They don’t have nuts in them, do they?” His oily gaze slid from me back to Momma as if I couldn’t possibly understand the question. “I’m allergic.”
I opened my mouth, but Momma’s fierce look shut me up.
“I never put nuts in my cookies.” She practically simpered at the man.
He took two. “A multi-talented woman. Master baker as well as an experienced guide to her equally talented daughter.” Mr. Trask leered at my sister again before popping an entire cookie in his mouth.
Though they’d both now been deemed “winners,” Momma and Marnie passed on dessert. Bile mixing with the remnants of Caesar dressing at the back of my throat, I set the plate on the table and retreated to my room.
I didn’t come out even when the sirens screamed to a halt in front of our house.
Whatever else happened, I doubted Momma and Marnie would desert me by rushing to New York anytime soon.
At least not with Mr. Trask.
Edith Maxwell
Edith Maxwell is the Agatha- and Macavity-nominated author of the Quaker Midwife Mysteries, the Local Foods Mysteries, and award-winning short crime fiction. As Maddie Day she authors the Country Store Mysteries and the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. Edith lives north of Boston with her beau and two elderly cats, and gardens and cooks when she isn’t killing people on the page. She is a member of Sisters in Crime National, New England, and Guppy Chapters, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and Mystery Writers of America. Find her at edithmaxwell.com.
The Stonecutter
Edith Maxwell
I first saw the stonecutter working in a pool of illumination as I strolled near the cemetery on a summer evening. Sweat shone on his face as he chiseled a gravestone. Darkness surrounded him. Anyone walking nearby was lit up like on a movie set, but as soon as they passed, the black night swallowed them whole and they ceased to exist. I gazed at him for a few moments from the darkness and wondered who he was.
When I saw him enter the library a few days later, I noticed he did not look American. Portuguese maybe, or Italian. It was the style of his slacks, and leather shoes of a cut not made in this country. It was the set of his jaw, unused to English vowels. It was the open collar of his shirt, the texture of the cloth.
I was in my usual post behind the library’s reference desk when he came in. He leaned forward and spoke to Jill at the main desk, and then headed into the stacks, toward where we keep books on town history. Watching him walk away, I saw an efficiency of movement, tough muscles under that European shirt, a firmness in the slacks.
Part of my job is, of course, helping people find information, so off to the history section I headed. I smoothed my hair as I went. I rounded the corner of the stacks and stopped. He sat at a table, its deep cherry hue gleaming like fine art in the morning light from the window. Several books were open in front of him, and he was copying something in a careful script on a pad of paper. His hair grew low on his forehead, and he had a full head of it combed straight back, dark and thick even though the lines on his face etched many years of living.
The
air was quiet. The man stood and turned to the shelf on his left. His finger ran across the titles with the care of a connoisseur, as if he loved the sensation of the bindings more than the meanings of the words.
“May I help you?” My voice was loud in the stillness, and he turned quickly.
“Yes?” He bowed slightly and his eyebrows rose.
“I wondered if I could help you with anything.” Oh. He didn’t know who I was. “I’m the reference librarian.”
“Ah.” It was a soft, resonant voice. Our eyes linked together. He smiled at me, but his eyebrows, thick like his hair, drooped at their outside edges and his chocolate eyes did the same. “No, I have found what I need. But thank you.” His accent sounded familiar, with its non-English stresses and softening of consonants.
I nodded.
“You have a fine library. A good collection.”
“Thank you. May I ask what you’re working on?”
He then showed me his interest: a book on genealogy, the old logs of fishing captains, a history of Gloucester. He explained that he was researching when some of his relatives had come to New England from Portugal—so I was right about that—and where they had lived in the area.
“I visited Portugal once,” I said as I looked out the window. It had been my first trip alone after James left this world nine years earlier, my first excursion after the trouble with that had blown over. “Here’s what I remember. I was inland in Belmonte, and the sun was intense. The hills were dry, covered with gray olive trees. Rocks pushed up out of the soil. But everyone was generous, they fed me, they wanted to practice their English.”
He nodded in understanding.
“Then I went to Porto on the coast. I ate mariscada and drank real port wine, not the sweet stuff you find here.”
“Yes, yes.” He shook his head in amazement. “I am from Porto.”
“You are?”
He nodded.
“I loved the market on the waterfront,” I said.
“Yes. My grandmother sold fish there. There is nothing like it here.”
“Then I went to the south. The blue and white tiles looked Arabic and the houses could have been Tunisian adobe. The beaches were empty, just beautiful. That’s what I remember.”
We stood there. We smiled at our separate memories, until a teenager slouched by. A tinny sound emitted from her earbuds and broke our bubble.
I cleared my throat. “How long have you been here?”
“We have been here for, let’s see, ten years.”
The “we” deposited a lead weight in my stomach.
“My son and his family, they are here too. But my wife is ill. She does not go out. So I work, and I do my studies here, and I play with my grandchildren.”
“I see.”
Late that evening I sat on my porch with a glass of cognac. A breeze waved the scent of sweet peas past me like a letter from my childhood. Fernando Andrade was his name, he had told me, and then had asked me to join him in a coffee next door. When I told him mine was Eleanor, he called me Eleanora, in a musical five syllables, and I felt foreign and special. We talked over our coffees in the café for as long as I thought I could stretch my break. When he said he wanted to take me to eat mariscada in a Portuguese restaurant he knew in the next town, I didn’t ask why he didn’t have to be at home for dinner. We arranged to meet the following day.
After work the next afternoon, I changed my shoes and crossed over to the park, picking up the pace until I was at my power-walk speed. The air amid the greenery was mild. It smelled of summer: a strong, sweet flower, a distant sprinkler, the earth’s scent rising. I thought more about Fernando. I suddenly wanted to escape this life I had enclosed myself in: comfortable and unspeakably routine.
At home, I showered and then did not dress in my usual tailored clothes. As a sea breeze danced with the curtains, I put on a long maroon skirt and matching silk blouse. My hand was steady as I applied cologne to the backs of my ears, my wrists, my temples, and I could hear Mother saying, “Always put scent where you have a pulse.” I added a dab between my breasts for good measure, shaking my head at my foolishness. I pulled on tall leather boots from Lisbon, as old and comfortable as gloves and, parading in front of the mirror in my own private fashion show, I felt twenty-two, but my reflection showed a woman with silver hair on the path to old age.
“Well, you don’t look half bad, really,” I told my image, surprised at this feeling of anticipation. It had been a long time.
I was waiting on the porch when Fernando drove up in an older model Volvo, pristinely clean and maintained. He met me at the passenger door. When he turned to look at me, I saw raw red lines on one cheek.
“What happened?” I said, alarmed. They looked like scratches from something very sharp.
“Eleanora, it is my wife. She is schizophrenic, and became upset when I said I was leaving.” The pain was in his eyes again. “It is hard for her to stay on her medications. They are hard on her. She paces and sees demons. Sometimes she calls me the devil.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.” The delicious excitement I had felt about the outing agitated with fear of this new information.
He caught my eyes with his. “Don’t worry, she is with my daughter-in-law.”
I watched him and waited. I kept my hand at my side, and prevented it from stroking his other cheek.
He took a breath and let it out. “This has happened before, and it will happen again. Now, if you will come with me, it is time for dinner.”
At Casa do Mar, we ate small, pungent olives the color of night. We drank Dão wine. We feasted on mariscada’s succulent seafood, the tender squid in lulas guisadas, and paper-thin potato slices fried to a crisp. We didn’t only eat. He spoke to me of his years cutting stone, about his love for the permanence of gravestones. He said he would search for a pattern in the granite to match the deceased’s personality.
I told him about not being able to have babies, how I couldn’t bear to be around young children for many years. How, when I finally volunteered to help with the Girl Scouts in our town, I delighted in their energy and fresh approach to life.
We didn’t talk about his wife or James, about the near future or the current war. We rode the wave of the present as if the walls of the restaurant were the edges of the world and our only cares were here in front of us.
We ate slowly. We sipped our wine and asked for more. Finally the waiter cleared our plates. Fernando had joked with him in Portuguese throughout the evening, and now asked the waiter to bring something, but I didn’t understand what.
Two tiny cups of espresso appeared in front of us, and two small glasses of a clear liquid.
“Bica e bagaço.” He pronounced this with great satisfaction. “This is the finest coffee and our national liquor, bagaceiro. We finish all good meals this way.” He took a sip of his coffee and lifted his glass to me.
“Here’s to you, Eleanora.”
“And to you.”
A lilting Fado played in the background as the waiter set tables for the next day. We were the last diners to leave. Fernando pulled out my chair for me, and then offered me his arm. He smelled of smoke and wine and old-world cologne, and the cloth of his shirt was smooth against muscle. Then, halfway to the door, his arms took mine and we were dancing. Slowly we moved to the melancholy Lusian folk song. I stood almost as tall as he, and when my cheek touched the wounds on his, he pulled me closer, and I felt like I’d been there all along.
We began to see each other as often as we could. He cooked mariscada for me in my kitchen while I weeded my herb garden. He told me stories of his grandsons and I made him laugh with tales of my scouts. Once he told me that the only food his wife would eat now was Portuguese kale stew, which no one else in the family liked. We worked on his genealogy together and visited the former house of his great uncle down on the point. We drove north where we didn’t know anyone and walked on a beach arm in arm. We spent long hours in my bedroom, enjoying each other’s bodies and trac
ing the lines of our lives. We went dancing, although we drove into the city to do so.
“Are you happy, Eleanora?” he asked me one day as we sat in the garden at dusk. Iced tea cooled our hands. A gentle wind off the Atlantic swept the mosquitoes away.
I nodded. I didn’t tell him that at night, alone, I dreamed of freedom with him, of a future without his wife.
I asked him the same question.
“I am happy with you, my friend,” he said, clinking his glass with mine, but the pain never really left his eyes.
I saw them in late August near the medical building. She was gaunt and pale, with white streaks piercing her dark hair. A lit cigarette shook in her hand. Fernando looked grim. He held her elbow like he was trying to persuade her to go somewhere she didn’t want to go.
When I asked once why he didn’t place her in an institution where professionals could look after her, he told me, “It is my duty to care for her. I am her husband, after all.”
I looked sharply at him. “What about your duty to love? To me?”
He just shook his head and kissed my hand.
On the last day of September, right before a fierce thunderstorm, he brought me an armful of red carnations. I watched him at my kitchen sink. In the darkening afternoon, he clipped the ends of the stems under running water and arranged each flower with care in a heavy glass vase. His stonecutter’s hands were as gentle with the blooms as they were when they touched me.
“I didn’t know men like you existed,” I said, addressing the compact strength of Fernando’s back.
He turned to me. “I am just me, not ‘men like me.’” A tropical rain blew in and, as the gale beat the windows, we talked into the night. Our conversations sometimes now tasted bittersweet. We wove a cocoon of our passion and caring. We dared not look outside it.
The Best Laid Plans Page 11