Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) (3 page)

“Did not,” Glen said. “That kid, Andy, lit a firecracker with a candle, and when everything got to hissing, he threw the candle and ran like hell, the bastard.”

“We got to get home,” Bud said. “We got to beat Parker.”

But we were too late. When we scrabbled over The Cheeks, and down the path that led to my yard, our folks, along with Parker, were already there.

Parker went off with Glen and Ray. Bud and Dottie got hauled off by their own parents. I was left with Daddy and Carlie.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Daddy asked.

“How'd you get so wet?” Carlie asked, touching my shirt, and then she smelled her hand. “Did you roll in pee?” she asked. “Lee, smell her.”

“I can smell her,” Daddy said. “You're in big trouble, Florine.”

After Carlie had scrubbed the pee out of my hair and thrown away the clothes I'd been wearing, we all sat down at the kitchen table.

“It wasn't our fault,” I said. And then I asked, “Will I go to jail?”

“Might be best,” Daddy said.

“Don't scare her,” Carlie said. “She'll go to jail over my dead body.”

The next morning, Sam and Ida Warner with Bud; Bert and Madeline Butts with Dottie; Ray Clemmons and Glen (his mother, Germaine, lived in Long Reach and was seldom seen by any of us); and we Gilhams formed a caravan and drove up to apologize. Our fathers set the rules. We were not to look at each other. We were to face front and speak only when spoken to except for the apology each of us was to give to Mr. Edward Barrington, the owner of the cottage.

We took the road that joined The Point to Route 100, turned right, went three fourths of a mile, turned left onto a dirt road, bumped along, then parked in the driveway where we'd hidden the night before. We got out and Ray knocked on the back door.

A woman the color of Grand's cherry headboard swung open the screen door. Her nametag read L
OUISA
. She said, “Can I help you?” through her milk chocolate lips.

“We brought our kids to apologize to Mr. Barrington,” Daddy said.

Louisa walked down the steps and looked us over as if we were yesterday's fish. “So, you're the ones?” she said and she frowned. “Come with me,” she said. We all trooped around to the side of the house and stopped in front of the lattice. It was black where the fire had licked up it. A porch screen was scorched, as was some of the wood over it.

Louisa pointed to a tangled mound of shriveled branches. “Look what you children did to Mrs. Barrington's rose bush. It grew the biggest, yellowest roses. She cared for that thing like it was a baby. Dead now, just gone. How you gonna be sorry for that?”

“Just tell Mr. Barrington we're here,” Ray said.

“Oh, I'll tell him,” Louisa muttered. She climbed up the porch steps and went inside.

“Jesus,” Ray said to Glen. “This is going to cost us some bucks.”

Glen muttered something.

“Shut up,” Ray said and cuffed him one up the side of the head.

Mr. Barrington came to us by way of the screened porch, with Andy following him. In the daylight, Mr. Barrington was tall, with the same blond hair and dark eyes as his son, and although he was a handsome man, his face looked as if it could go from sun to squall in a split pea second. Andy looked down at the ground. His fingers curled and uncurled as he stood beside his father.

“Good morning,” Mr. Barrington said in a deep, soft voice. He stepped back and looked at us. Daddy pushed me forward, as I was first in line.

“You got something to say to Mr. Barrington?” he said.

I looked at a spot on Mr. Barrington's chest and said, “I'm sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?” he said. I looked up at him and blinked. I hadn't expected a question. His dark eyes snapped.

I shrugged. “I guess I'm sorry we came here.”

“You guess?” he said.

“I'm really sorry we came here,” I said.

Carlie squeezed my shoulders and said, clear, “She's a good kid for the most part.”

Mr. Barrington smirked and moved on. Carlie squeezed my shoulders, harder.

Dottie said she was sorry in a loud voice and she added a “Sir.”

Bud mumbled and his father, Sam, made him repeat it.

Mr. Barrington said to Glen, “How's your hand?”

“Okay,” Glen muttered. “I'm sorry.”

“He don't mean no harm,” Ray said. “He's a little thick in the head, sometimes.”

Mr. Barrington nodded. “It seems to be going around,” he said, and indicated his son cowering in back of him. “I appreciate you coming up. We've been good neighbors. I'll let you know what the insurance company says and we can settle up.”

“Sounds fair,” Daddy said.

Andy glanced at me and I narrowed my eyes at him. He looked off toward the woods and scratched his head. I hoped he had a tick drilling into his scalp.

“Lucky he didn't press charges,” Daddy said as the truck bumped down the road.

Carlie snuggled me beneath her arm. “My little criminal,” she whispered. I pulled away and almost said, “I'm not little,” but decided against it. Quiet seemed the best resort. When Mr. Barrington sent us a bill, Daddy paid his part.

“There goes any trip money we might have had,” he said to Carlie.

“That's just another sad excuse,” she said.

3

C
arlie went back to the Lobster Shack on Thursday, the first of August. “Got a double today,” she said to me. “Go to Grand's house before lunch.” She left me sitting in the living room, eating peanut butter toast and watching
The Match Game
.

When Dottie's head popped up in the living room window I hauled up the screen, pulled her inside, and she tumbled onto the floor with a big grin.

She told me that her mother, Madeline, had gone up to town with Evie, her little sister. “I can't stay long,” she said. “She finds me gone, I'm dead. She's on the warpath, for sure. Christ, she makes me clean the house mornings, then I have to stay in my room afternoons. I might lose what mind I do have, and I don't have much to begin with.”

“How you doing?” she asked. She punched my shoulder and I winced. “How'd you get burned?” she asked.

“Went to the beach a couple days ago with Carlie,” I said.

“She's some harsh with the punishment,” Dottie said. “What you got to eat?” she asked. We both had our heads in the refrigerator when the screen door whined open so fast I jumped and yelled, “Jesus!”

“Unless Jesus is in that refrigerator, he'll want an apology,” Grand said to us.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“You should be. Jesus died for your sins.” She looked at Dottie. “I imagine I never saw you, Dorothea?” she said.

“Oh, for sure,” Dottie said. She hightailed it out of the house.

“You got to come over now,” Grand said to me. “I'm halfway through making bread for the bean supper tomorrow. I got to have some help.” She hustled out of the house, her square behind shifting from side to side as I trotted after her.

I called her Grand because she was. She stood five foot nine inches tall and was what people refer to as a big-boned woman. She'd lugged me on her boxy hips until she was sure I could walk around without killing myself.

Her house was the oldest one on The Point. It stood alone on a ledge across the driveway from our house. The front yard was a fifty-foot-wide lip of grass hanging over the ledge, which dropped down to the shore about twenty feet below. A side yard held both a flower and vegetable garden. Wide windows on a year-round porch looked out over the water and let us track which boats went out and when they came back in. A big kitchen with windows on the sunny side of the house faced our house across the road. Two bedrooms and a bathroom made up the second floor. A front hall led to a cozy living room on one side and the kitchen on the other.

At the end of the front hall stood a mahogany china cabinet filled with Grand's collection of red ruby glassware, including a water pitcher, glasses, cups and saucers, candy dishes, and pickle and onion dishes. Four times a year, Grand and I would take each piece of glass out and wash it carefully, dry it, and put it back into the lemon-waxed and polished cabinet. My favorite piece was a small red ruby heart that sat in the middle of the three-shelved cabinet. I loved to hold it up to the sun so I could play the rich color against the walls. My grandfather, Franklin, had given this piece to Grand as a wedding gift. He had keeled over dead from a heart attack at a potluck supper when Daddy was ten, so Grand held that heart dear.

Summer days, we sat on the porch in our rocking chairs and I slugged down a soda and read one of my father's Hardy Boys mysteries from books so old that insects had bored their way through some of the words and the spaces from start to finish. If I held the books upside down and shook them, dried-up bug parts fell out.

No time to rock and read today, though. Grand had to make bread, and she had evidently decided that it was time to teach me how to do it. She gave me a flowered apron to tie around my waist, then pointed me toward the front of her old wooden kitchen table, which was so big it could seat ten people. The strong smell of yeast from the big, mustard-yellow bread bowl on that table knocked me back a step or two.

“What do I do?” I asked, trying not to breathe.

“That's already risen once,” she said. “Punch it down. Then sprinkle some flour on the table, slap it down and knead it. Then punch it down some more, pick it up, shape it into a loaf, stick it in one of them pans and put it on the windowsill.”

The thought of touching the blob of greasy dough twisted my stomach, but I did what she asked and pushed my fist into its pasty white bulk. It hissed yeast like a secret fart.

“Jumped up Christmas,” Grand said. “It's dough, Florine. Don't be so spleeny. Put some muscle into it. Watch me.”

She plowed her big fist into the dough, pushed and pulled it, smacked it down, kneaded it, shaped it, then plunked it into a pan. She put a dishtowel over it and set it on the sunny windowsill near four others.

“Sun will power it up,” she said. “Now hurry. We want 'em all to rise up together.”

I gave the next bowl my all, beating hell out of it best I could. By the time I'd set my second pan on the windowsill, she had a third toad of dough on deck.

We sweated buckets.

“Can you tell me why I agreed to do this, Florine?” Grand said.

I knew why. Yesterday, Stella Drowns had cornered us in Ray's. Stella lived above the store in a little apartment. She ran the deli, picked crabmeat, and did other jobs Ray didn't have time to do. I hated her because she was mean to Carlie. Before Carlie, Daddy had dated Stella off and on for years. Word had it that Stella couldn't get him to ask her to marry him soon enough, so she left The Point to see if he'd chase her. He didn't, Carlie showed up, and they were married by the time Stella decided to come back.

Stella was thin and pale, with a pillow of black hair that shone like a wet mussel shell. She wore red lipstick and mascara and painted the nails on her long fingers. Her light gray eyes were rimmed with black. She was pretty, except for a long scar that ran down her right cheek and petered out under her chin. Stella was the only one out of six high school students to have lived through a bad car crash up on Pine Pitch Hill. The story went that glass had filleted her cheek and set it to flapping against her nose and eye. They'd had to stitch it back on.

Once, when I'd gone into Ray's store alone, she caught me staring at the scar. She ran a finger down the length of it and said, “You looking at this, Florine?” She leaned over the counter and her voice went low. “Imagine all those kids dying around me on a summer night and there I was, right as rain, but for the blood running into my eyes. Stare as much as you want to, dearie, to remind you of what not to do.”

She could be scary, but she also knew how to charm. A couple of days ago, when Grand and I had happened in to buy milk, Stella had buttered up Grand about her bread-making talents. Now Grand was helping to bake bread for around the one hundred people who would be coming to the Saturday night supper. I called Stella names I was sure Grand didn't know I knew as we beat up the dough to get it ready.

“My arms hurt,” I bitched.

“Least you got arms,” Grand said.

A boat horn sounded.

“Jehovah,” she said, “they're coming in.” Grand greeted the lobster boats every afternoon. She never missed a day. It would have been bad luck, she always said.

We got to the porch windows just as two good-sized boats drifted past Grand's house. The red boat, Bert Butts's
Maddie Dee
, chugged along in front of Daddy's
Carlie Flo
. Her dark green hull carved an easy path through the channel. Bert gave a blart on the
Maddie Dee
's horn, and Daddy waved to us.

“I'm going to meet Daddy,” I told Grand.

“Bring him back up and we'll have supper,” she said.

I shed the apron and ran down to the wharf to meet him.

4

S
am Warner tossed me a line from the boat and I looped it over a piling. “Hope you're behaving yourself,” he said. I noticed that Bud was with them. I started to give him a smile, but Sam spat over the gunwale and gave Bud the eye. Bud moved to the stern and looked back to where they'd just come from.

Daddy squinted his blue-sky eyes at me and asked, “What do you have all over your face and your arms?”

“Flour,” I said. “Grand and I are baking bread.”

A truck rattled down the road to the wharf; Stinnie Flaherty, come to buy lobsters fresh off the boat so he could turn around and up the price to restaurants and fish markets. Tall and bony, except for his potbelly, Stinnie usually had a cigarette dangling from the right corner of his mouth. He was out of his truck the minute it stopped. He passed me with a grunt and started haggling with Daddy and Sam. While they went back and forth, Bud gave me a sly smile and slipped onto the wharf. “How's it going?” I asked.

“Okay,” he said. “You?”

“Okay.”

A cream-colored car crept down the steep dirt hill, popping pebbles under its tires as it came. It looked too new for the likes of us. It pulled up beside Stinnie's truck. The driver's door opened and Mr. Barrington climbed out. Andy stared at us through the windshield, then he opened the passenger door and followed his father. Mr. Barrington brushed past us, walked up to Daddy, and said, “Would you sell us lobsters for tonight? We have unexpected guests.”

“Could,” Daddy said. “Had a good day.”

Andy gave Bud and me a nervous smile, but I didn't smile back and Bud shot him a look that made him walk to the other side of the wharf.

“If we pushed him in no one would miss him,” Bud mumbled into my ear. His breath tickled and I giggled.

“Bud, get over here,” Sam said and Bud went.

“You should be buying them lobsters from me,” Stinnie grumbled at Mr. Barrington.

“Why?” Mr. Barrington said. “All they did was cross from the boat to the wharf and you've jacked the price.”

“Cost of labor,” Stinnie said, waggling his cigarette.

Daddy said, “I got some cripples I was going to have for supper.”

“How many?” Mr. Barrington said.

“Six or so,” Daddy said.

“Louisa can make stew. It'll taste the same,” Mr. Barrington said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money held together by a silver clip. He took off the clip and said, “How much?” to Daddy.

“Fifteen dollars ought to do it.”

“Jesus,” Stinnie said, “what the hell? I can sell you two-clawed for three bucks a pound.”

“Never mind,” Mr. Barrington said. “Louisa makes a fine stew.” When he peeled off two bills for Daddy, the whole wad fell apart. Some of the money fell onto the wharf, and some of it fell in the water beside the
Carlie Flo
.

Bud wasted no time shucking off his shirt and sneakers. He dove into the water and gathered up the bills. We stood and watched him.

Andy wandered over to me. “I could have done that,” he said.

“Doubt it,” I said.

“Look, I'm sorry,” he said. “I got caught, too, just so you know. They're threatening to send me back to Connecticut for the rest of the summer.”

“Good riddance,” I said, and he shut up.

Bud climbed up the ladder attached to the edge of the wharf and handed the money to Mr. Barrington, who handed him back a ten-dollar bill.

Sam took it from Bud and held it out to Mr. Barrington. “Doesn't need it,” he said.

“Let him take it,” Mr. Barrington said.

“He's fine,” Sam said.

“He worked for it,” Mr. Barrington said.

Sam said, “Well, he did, I guess. But five is good enough.”

Mr. Barrington handed Bud a five.

Bud grinned at me until Sam poked him and said, “Say thank you,” and Bud did.

Mr. Barrington smiled at me. “How are you doing, Florine?” he said and winked.

“Fine,” I said.

“That's good,” Mr. Barrington said. He said to Daddy, “She's a little pistol.”

“She's like her mother,” Daddy said.

“Could be,” Mr. Barrington said, and he and Andy went back to the car. It bore them up the hill and out of sight with their cripples.

Stinnie followed Mr. Barrington up the hill in his rickety old truck. Sam and Daddy walked up the hill ahead of Bud and me.

From this angle, the four houses on The Point set like crooked teeth stuck into tough grass and granite gums. The Warners' house was closest to the water and above it sat the Buttses' house. Our house huddled under a line of tall pines and across the road from us was Grand's house. Summer visitors didn't see this view much. They liked standing at the top of the hill and taking pictures of the harbor. “So picturesque,” they said. “You must love living here.” We didn't see many tourists in January, though, when the wind staggered off the water like a nasty drunk and slapped us all silly.

“What are you going to do with the money?” I asked Bud as we walked along.

“Put it away. Going to buy a car,” he said.

“You can't drive yet.”

“I will sometime.”

Sam and Daddy talked about Mr. Barrington.

“Got himself a wad,” Sam said.

“He don't have nothing we don't have,” Daddy said.

“Hell he don't,” Sam said, and they laughed.

Bud and Sam turned off, and we continued on to Grand's house. Sometimes we joined Carlie for dinner at the Shack, but Daddy liked to clean up and settle down at home, and Grand liked to cook for us, so we ate with her.

The smell of warm bread and frying fish in Grand's kitchen drew us in the finest way. She sent me out for cucumbers from the garden and I sliced them up into a red ruby bowl and covered them with cider vinegar and salt and pepper.

I told the story of the money and Daddy said that the day had been good on the water. Grand told Daddy that I might be a decent baker if I put my heart into it, and soon after supper, we went home. Later that night, Daddy and I sat in the living room, him watching a Red Sox game and me reading a Trixie Belden book until my eyelids drooped and I went to bed. I was dreaming that I had fallen into a bowl of slimy bread dough and couldn't get out, when I heard Daddy say, “What the hell did you do?”

“I fell into this bowl,” I told him, before I figured that he was talking outside of my dream. I opened my eyes. The Mickey Mouse clock beside my bed said one o'clock.

“I liked your hair,” Daddy said. “Why'd you change it?”

“For the fun of it,” Carlie said. “Don't you understand fun? Let me answer that. Nope.” The refrigerator door opened. “Nothing to eat?” she said. “Doesn't the woman of the house ever shop?” She sounded as if she was talking through heavy syrup.

“You drunk as you appear to be?” Daddy said.

“Probably, but mostly hungry. Suppose Grand would mind if I raided her fridge?”

“I can't get over your hair. I liked it red, just fine,” Daddy said.

“It's there, for heaven's sake,” Carlie snapped. “It's just covered up.”

I opened my bedroom door and looked into the kitchen. Carlie stood in front of the refrigerator door with a jar of mayonnaise in her hand. She stuck a finger full of it into her mouth and smiled at me. “Hey sweetie!” she called, and her voice turned up at the corners. “What you doing up?”

Carlie's hair was as blond as Marilyn Monroe's. The curl was gone and it was straight as meadow grass, except for a little flip at the ends. She'd gone heavy on the green eye shadow and spread bright red lipstick on her bow mouth.

She put the mayonnaise jar back in the refrigerator. “So, what do you think, Florine? Some of us did our hair. You should see Patty. Her hair is redder than mine.”

“It's different,” I said. Her shoulders slumped, so I added, “But I like it.” She came over and hugged me. She smelled like beer and cigarettes.

“Maybe you can get your father to like it,” she said.

“It ain't that I don't like it,” Daddy said. “It's that you didn't let me know beforehand.” Carlie broke our hug at the sad sound of his voice. He walked into their bedroom and shut the door.

“Oh, Leeman,” Carlie said, but so soft he couldn't have heard her. Her eyes filled with tears and she stepped over to the kitchen counter to find something to blow her nose on. She reached into the junk drawer and came up with a napkin from the Shack.

“Go to bed, Florine. I have to talk to your father,” she said.

She walked into their bedroom. I went back to bed and listened to a low murmur from her, an occasional grunt from him. Then the sounds stopped and I went to sleep.

In the morning, after Daddy had gone out on the water, I came out of my bedroom to find Carlie slumped at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of coffee. Her new blond hair was bed-messed and hung down over her shoulders, limp and pale. I touched it, and it was soft. I stroked it from top to tip and back again.

“It's nice,” I said. “Takes some getting used to, but it's pretty.”

“Your father is upset with me,” she said in a hoarse crow's voice.

“Can I have some coffee?”

“Lots of milk,” she said. I rolled my eyes. Surely I was old enough to drink regular coffee, but I settled for fixing a glass of milk with enough coffee to color it, then added three teaspoons of sugar. I sat down and looked at Carlie. Her lashes were clumped with old mascara and most of the eye shadow had rubbed off during the night.

She picked up a piece of her hair and frowned as she studied it. “Looks like shit disguised as straw,” she said. “Do you think I should dye it back?”

I shrugged and chugged the coffee milk, held the glass to my mouth and watched the melted sugar flow toward my tongue in a slow sweet stream. The sugar flooded my mouth and breached my taste buds back to my ears.

“Maybe you should ask Grand what she thinks,” I said.

“Oh shit,” Carlie said. “Grand. I wonder what she'll say.”

“Let's get dressed and go over and find out. I bet she likes it,” I said.

When she saw Carlie's hair, Grand said, “Well, now, that's a change.”

“Leeman hates it,” Carlie said.

“He'll get over it,” Grand said. “Hattie Butts and Cora Brown and I liked to do each other up. Least Leeman noticed. Franklin never did. I don't see the harm in it.”

After our visit, Carlie felt better. Still, we cleaned house until it sparkled and made Daddy a good supper. Carlie got a phone call from Patty midway through the day and I caught the words, “I really screwed up this time,” before they hung up.

Daddy came home to the smell of supper and the table set. Carlie moved her chair close to his and he kept looking at her, trying, I guess, to learn who she was with this new hair. About halfway through the meal, I realized I might as well be wallpaper. Carlie kept rubbing his leg under the table and Daddy's eyes were getting bright. When Carlie asked me to go to Ray's for some dessert and to take my time, I knew enough to go.

Stella Drowns was the only one in the store. I headed for the cream horns, took two of them to the counter, and handed Stella a dollar.

“You still being punished for the fire?” she asked.

“I didn't set it.”

“Not what I asked,” she said. She smiled, shifting the scar a few inches up on her cheek. “Think you've learned your lesson?” she asked.

“Can I have my cream horns?” I said.

“Not getting it until you answer me,” she said.

“Give me back my money,” I said.

She slapped my dollar into my palm.

“You're a witch,” I said, and left the store, determined to tell Daddie and Carlie about her. When I got close to our house, I heard Elvis on the record player. I started to go inside, but then I stopped, wondering at the sight of Daddy holding Carlie to him as he led her in a clumsy slow dance across the kitchen floor. When they saw me in the doorway, I said, “I'm staying at Grand's house. I need my PJ's.” I started to walk past them, but they opened their arms as if they were a bridge and then they brought down their arms. Carlie giggled on one side of me, and Daddy's soft chuckle moved against my ear. “Let me go,” I said, in a muffled voice. When they freed me, I grabbed my pajamas and ran out the door.

Grand cut me a big piece of her chocolate cake and we watched television, then went up to bed. I snuggled down in Daddy's old bedroom to go to sleep. Just before I dropped off, Stella's voice hissed at me, “Think you've learned your lesson?”