Heart of Palm (41 page)

Yes. Yes. Yes
.

It was getting late. She looked at her watch. Almost ten, and still the kitchen and restrooms to clean. She started to get up and then she saw something else on Frank’s desk—a paperweight, it looked like. She reached for it; it was a gray creek stone, smooth and heavy and cool in her hand when she picked it up. She smiled.

She remembered Cullowhee. She remembered the sweet cabin, the watermelon, the little gray fox who came each morning to nose in their trash. She remembered fireworks, soft and diffused in the valley below. And she remembered the hike to the creek, where Frank had probably pocketed this stone.

Frank. When they were kids he used to ask her questions, used to think she had answers. She remembered a day; they were sitting close together on that huge flat rock in the middle of the rushing mountain creek. The sun was warm on her shoulders. The others were on the bank, putting on shoes, gathering towels.

“Where does all this water go?” Frank had asked her. He gestured at the creek. “Where does it go, Sofia?”

“To lakes. To rivers. Back into the earth,” she said.

“To the Intracoastal?”

“Maybe, some. A little. And into the sky to become rain again.”

“So it just keeps going.”

She nodded. “It keeps going.”

They’d climbed off the rock and waded back through the creek to the bank, grabbing onto each other as they slipped and stumbled over the smooth, slick stones.

Now Sofia put the creek stone back on Frank’s desk and pulled her bucket into the kitchen. The grease stench was
still
horrid, and she suddenly understood why. The fryer! It was still running! The
ON
light glowed red in the dim kitchen. Frank. He’d left the fryer on when he closed the restaurant last night. For gosh sakes. He could have burned the whole place down. She walked over to the fryer and flicked the switch. Then she looked around the kitchen and shook her head. You see? They all needed her more than they thought they did.

She finished cleaning the kitchen and the restrooms (no puking last night, thank you sweet heaven) and then went back out to the bar area. She tore off a fresh paper towel and plucked the flattened maraschino cherry off the bar, just as Morgan whistled his way into the kitchen, just as the sound of Frank’s truck approached outside the door.

When she got home to Aberdeen, she found Arla in Will’s old bedroom on the third floor, where she almost never went, dragging out old furniture, sorting through boxes.

“I feel like we should get organized,” Arla said. She cleared her throat and held up a gold-trimmed photo album. “Remember this?” she said. She flipped to a photo of a man on a horse.

“Walter,” Sofia said.

Arla pointed toward a shadowy corner. “And look,” she said. “I found my mother’s old mahogany table.”

The light was dim, but Sofia pulled the table over to the window, ran her fingers across the finish, and smiled. On the surface of the table, faint but visible, were the two foggy, water-stained crescents of Sofia’s seven-year-old fanny.

“You see?” she said to Arla, who walked over to the table and looked down at it. Then she sat heavily on a dusty bench, and Sofia sat next to her.

“I’m not a crier,” Arla said.

“You could be,” Sofia said. “We both could be.”

And, as it turned out, they were.

It came to Sofia that night in a dream, and she sat up so suddenly that she felt dizzy. Biaggio woke immediately, sat up and put his arm around her.

“Sofia,” he said. “What is it?”

She was sweating. But she turned to him and started to laugh.

“She didn’t kill herself,” she said. “It wasn’t suicide. It was the dress.”

“You’re dreaming,” he said. He lay back on the bed, stroked her arm. “Go back to sleep.” The trailer was cool and quiet. Through the jalousie over the bureau she could see the dim outline of Aberdeen, moonlit and austere, down at the end of the long dusty driveway.

But no, she understood now. Gervais (Todd!) was right. Ophelia. In the painting. She
was
singing. She
wasn’t
dead yet. And it wasn’t even suicide! She didn’t want to die! That dress—that crazy Danish dress. It was the damn skirts that pulled her under. All those senseless yards of gilded threads and embroidered folds. She fell in the water singing, and she kept singing, and then she drowned. But she didn’t
want
to die! It wasn’t Hamlet, or the poppies, or any of it! It was just the stupid, boneheaded, shit-for-brains
dress
. For gosh sakes. You’d think someone would have come along and pulled her out. She would have thanked them.

Sofia lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time, listening for the barred owl in the trees overhanging the waterway. When she finally heard him, she smiled, then turned toward Biaggio, pulled her knees to her chest, and slept.

I dreamed you, I dreamed me. I dreamed ten sweet babies and a hot cup of tea.

S
IXTEEN

“Bell wants to see them,” Elizabeth said. “She likes the idea of it—acrobats.” She’d called Frank to invite him. Chinese acrobats at the Utina Fairgrounds Amphitheater. It’d been a week since Dean had returned, a week since Frank had walked out on the mess at Aberdeen and the scuffle with Carson, and though he’d yet to have another face-to-face with his brother, his conscience had gotten the best of him the day after Dean’s return and he’d driven out to Aberdeen again to check on Arla. He’d found his mother operating with a strange stoicism and a matter-of-fact acceptance of Dean’s presence. Sofia seemed changed, somehow, more peaceful, though he was loath to believe that this could have been due to Dean’s return. Bell was a bright dervish, traipsing through the halls of the big house. Elizabeth, though, had seemed to be avoiding him, and he had an idea why. But now—acrobats.

“Where’s Carson?” Frank said.

“Don’t know,” she’d said, and her voice was so flat and final that he hadn’t asked any other questions.

“I’ll pick you up,” he’d said. He hung up and looked at Gooch. “You’re staying home, bud.” Gooch walked through the house and jumped up on Frank’s bed for a nap. Through the open bedroom door, he gave Frank a
look
.

Frank arrived at Aberdeen in a rain shower, the drops hitting the top of his truck like fat grapes. He ducked his head and made a run for the house. Inside, Biaggio and Dean were staring at a large box in the dining room.

“New air conditioner,” Biaggio said. “For Miss Arla’s room upstairs.”

“Damn things are a bitch,” Dean said, scratching his head. “Especially second-floor. We might need Frank.”

Frank didn’t answer. What was Dean now, man of the house again? Johnny-on-the-Spot? Mr. Fix-It?

A few days after he’d arrived at Aberdeen, Dean had called Frank at the restaurant. “I know you don’t like this,” he said to Frank. “Me being here. But it is what it is.”

“And what is that?” Frank said.

“It’s what we make it,” Dean said cryptically.

“Look, what do you want? You’re back for the sale, back for the money, right?”

“Carson asked me to come back.”

“So you decided it would be a good idea?”

“It might be good for your mother.”

“
Good
for her? You coming back?”

“No,” Dean admitted, and Frank had to give him that. Dean was a lot of things, but he’d never been a liar. “No, I mean selling the house.”

“She doesn’t want to.”

“She might change her mind,” Dean said amiably, and then he’d turned chatty, irritatingly so, and he’d told Frank about Sandy Vanderhorn, and the hospital, and detox, and Frank had hung up the phone and stared at it for a long while.

Now a clatter of footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Bell came into the room. “Uncle Frank,” she said. “We going to the acrobats?”

“You bet, Bellarina,” he said. “Where’s your mama?”

“She’s getting ready.”

“You go tell her I’m here?”

Bell left the room again, and Frank turned back to Biaggio and Dean, who was looking at Frank with raised eyebrows.

“You taking Elizabeth out?” Dean said.

“Not taking her out,” Frank said. “Just taking them both to the amphitheater. To see acrobats.”

Dean looked back at Biaggio, who kept his face blank.

“I don’t know,” Dean said.

“You don’t need to know,” Frank said, annoyed. “It’s none of your business.”

“Okay,” Dean said. “Whatever.” He bent over to open the carton on the air conditioner, then gasped, put his hand on his hip bone and straightened back up, in obvious pain. “Damn broken cheek,” he muttered.

“Where’d you get it?” Frank said.

“I told you. This woman took me down,” Dean said. “Sandy Vanderhorn—”

“No,” Frank said.
Jesus
. “The air conditioner. Where’d you get the air conditioner?”

“Home Depot up in Jax,” Biaggio said. “We just got back.”

“Damn, my ass hurts,” Dean said. “We might need Frank.”

“I’m on my way out,” Frank said.

“It will just take a minute,” Dean said. “It’s for your mother. It’s so hot up there. There’s only one window unit in the hallway, trying to cool the whole floor.”

Oh, this was irksome—Dean so solicitous of Arla, so attentive, so God-damned chivalrous. He should have won an Academy Award, Frank thought.

“Just help Biaggio here carry the thing upstairs, Frank,” Dean said.

Frank sighed, took off his cap, and put it and his truck keys on the dining room table. He gripped one side of the air conditioner box and Biaggio gripped the other. “Lift with the knees,” Dean said. “Watch your backs.” He leaned against the mantel and watched them lift the box. Frank wanted to slap him.

“We got it,” he said. He and Biaggio carried the air conditioner up the stairs and entered Arla’s room, where she sat in her wingback chair, waiting.

“Oh, Frank!” she said. “Good, you can help with this.” She seemed calm, Frank noticed, completely herself. When he’d talked to her the day after Dean had arrived at Aberdeen, he had asked her straight up if she would be able to manage having her husband in the house again. “You want him out of there?” he’d said. “You want me to get him out of there?”

She hesitated a moment. “He’s okay,” she said quietly. “He can do what he wants.” And then she’d told him about Sofia and Biaggio, and Frank had cast his eyes to the ceiling, scratched his head.

“So what does that mean now?” he asked.

She sighed. “Frank,” she said. “What does any of this mean?”

Now Dean had made it up the stairs, and he stood in the doorway for a moment, with what seemed to Frank a trace of awkwardness. His wife’s bedroom, Frank thought,
his own
bedroom, once, but then Frank pushed the thought out of his mind.

“All right,” Dean said, entering the room. “Let’s get this sucker mounted.”

They opened the carton, pulled the air conditioner out, and dumped a plastic bag of hardware onto the floor.

Sofia and Bell entered the room, flopped on Arla’s bed.

“Hey, Sofia,” Biaggio said, and Frank noticed how his voice softened, how he hitched his pants self-consciously. Oh, Biaggio, he thought. Run while you still can.

“When do
I
get my own air conditioner?” Sofia said.

“When you’re sixty-two and fat and walk with a cane,” Arla said, and Frank thought he saw Dean stiffen, as he always had, at any mention of Arla’s disfigured foot.

“Well, I’m working on the fat part,” Sofia said.

“You’re not fat,” Biaggio said.

“Puh,” Sofia said. “I might start Pilates.” She raised a leg up off the bed, extended it out straight. Bell mimicked her, raising her legs off the bed and plopping them back down again.

“I already do Pilates,” Bell said. “I do them all the time.”

“What the hell is a Pilate?” Dean said.

“Can we go ahead and get this thing in the window?” Frank said. With himself, Dean, Biaggio, and Arla all hovering around the window and Sofia and Bell lounging on the bed, not to mention the unspeakable amount of rubbish and furniture in the room, he was becoming claustrophobic and a bit panicked.

“Amen, brother,” Sofia said. “I’m ready for some cool air.”

Elizabeth appeared in the doorway. She wore a blue sundress, and he tried not to stare at her but failed. She blinked at the sight of so many people in the room, and when her eyes met Frank’s he shook his head, and she smiled.

“I’ll be downstairs,” she said.

“What you want to do now is open this window,” Dean said. “And get the unit placed right there in the hole.”

Frank gripped one side of the unit and Biaggio took the other and they positioned it on the window frame, the heavier back end of the AC unit extending out the open window and dangling over the porch and yard below.