The Gilly Salt Sisters (11 page)

The woman turned as pink as her lipstick. She folded her hands in her lap and hung her head. “Oh, I’m not so hungry after all,” she said. “Someone else can have my slice.” Naturally, there weren’t any takers—not after that little display—and so when the ladies got up in unison and left forty minutes later, letting Claire march them out the door in her scarlet coat like she was heading a parade, there were five full slices of cake left over and a smaller tip than Dee would have expected from
the
Claire Gilly Turner. She
collected the plates and empty mugs and watched Claire cross the street, her hips swinging like a baton while her shoulders barely moved.

“Why do you think Claire Turner bothered staying in a town like this?” Dee mused out loud, bringing the tray up to the counter.

Cutt snorted. “People like her are never going to be your concern, Dee. Just take her business and be glad for it. Did she leave a tip? Give it here.”

Dee sucked her teeth but handed him the coins from her pocket.
It’s a free country
, she thought viciously.
I can wonder what I please.

Her father glowered at her. “You better mind your own beeswax if you know what’s good for you.” He handed her a rag soaked in ammonia. “Now go wipe the table clean.”

She swiped one of the pieces of cake from the tray, shrugging when Cutt snickered and told her it would make her fatter. “Waste not want not,” she said. Knowing what was good for her was never one of her strong suits.

A
fter that initial visit, Claire started eating breakfast at the diner almost every day. If she’d been out riding, she came in a little after sunrise, leaving her horse tied out front as if Prospect were the Wild West, stepping through the door while she smacked mud off her breeches and her tall leather boots. On the days she didn’t ride, she arrived in town in a ruby convertible, driving the same way she rode her horse: like she was fleeing the flames of purgatory, the top peeled back to the elements. Each time Dee was ready for her. In fact, it became almost like a game. Claire would prance inside, and Dee would pull out the menu. Before Claire would sit down, she’d wait for Dee to remove the salt dish from the table. Only then would she fold herself onto the maroon leather and ask, “What’s good today?”

Depending on the day, Dee would have a different answer. Tuesday was a hash-brown special, and on Friday they did a
pancake meal, but it didn’t matter, because Claire would always order the same thing: a boiled egg on white toast and coffee with extra cream. At first Dee wrote it down, but after a while she quit bothering. She’d walk back to the kitchen to put in her order and wonder why a woman with hair that red and eyes that green ate such boring food. Could Claire maybe be right when she said the salt was toxic? Nothing she ordered was flavored and Dee never saw her reach for salt on the table. Maybe there really was a good reason she wouldn’t eat it.

Dee got to be familiar with the kinds of colors Claire liked for her clothes—blues and greens—and figured out that if she had her hair pinned up really tight, it meant she was in a raging bad mood. After Claire was finished eating, she left her napkin folded in thirds and a laughable tip. For a rich lady, Dee thought, Claire was pretty tight with the coins. Other than ordering, she never said anything, not even thank you. She just sat there like the Sphinx, with her legs crossed at the knee, the front page of the newspaper held open, her eyes stuck to the print.
You don’t know me, but I’m learning all about you
, Dee would think, sliding Claire’s plate across the table. She saw how raggedy Claire’s cuticles were and figured Claire was a nail biter, just like her.

From the post office clerk, Dee learned that Claire hadn’t received one personal letter in twelve years. “Only mail that comes through here is for her husband, Whit,” said the matron, pushing Cutt’s bills over to Dee. “Imagine that. Not even a magazine. Nothing. Even the invitations are addressed to both him and her. You’d think that boyfriend she used to be so crazy about would write her now and then, but I guess with him being a priest and all, that’s not such a good idea.” She shook her head. “Still, what could be the harm in sending a Christmas card or two? But I guess Mr. Turner wouldn’t like it.”

Dee gathered the envelopes into a neat bundle, her brain buzzing. There wasn’t much to discuss in a place the size of Prospect, so Claire made a natural talking point. She was like one of those bad girls from the Old Testament, Dee thought: Bathsheba,
maybe, or Jezebel, or Rahab, with her red rope hanging out the window. Those weren’t girls who were just plain trouble. Those were women who had themselves some serious
plans
.

“What boyfriend?” Dee asked, trying to keep her voice casual. The postmistress blinked at her. People in town were forever having to stop and explain things to Dee—why she couldn’t park her father’s sedan on the left side of Bank Street on Tuesday, for instance, or the number of ships that had sunk right there in the bay.

The honking voice of the postmistress broke into her thoughts now. “Why, Ethan Stone,” she was saying. “He was Claire Turner’s first love, the one we all thought she’d marry, but dang if that boy didn’t pick the priesthood over her pretty red hair and break her heart. She married Whit Turner soon after that, and it’s worked out real nice for her, as you can see, but”—she leaned across the counter and dropped her voice to a whisper—“she’s not fooling me. She’s still a Gilly, and that won’t ever change. She can leave the salt behind, but it’s never going to leave her, Turner riches or no, and that’s a damn fact.” And with that she slammed the latticed brass grate down behind the window and broke for lunch.

I
t took a while for Dee to adjust to the idea of Claire as a heartbroken wretch, but after a while the theory started to make some sense to her. Just as a block of ice sometimes still had a liquid center, Dee thought, maybe Claire did, too.

After Claire ate breakfast, it was her habit to run errands. If the diner wasn’t busy, Dee would sit at the counter and watch her flit in and out of the bank and the post office. It seemed Claire couldn’t go anywhere without at least three of her snobby friends stopping her so they could eye up her outfit and purse and find out which parties she was going to that week, and the men in town were even worse. Old, young—it didn’t matter. When Claire walked by them, they stopped in their tracks and smiled like dogs being thrown a bone.

Even surrounded by admirers, Claire moved like she was in a private bubble. Dee observed her on Sunday after Mass, crowded in by a gaggle of old ladies, not listening to a thing any of them said. It was odd, Dee thought. Even though everyone in town seemed to hate Claire for her good looks, her good luck, and the way she stared down her nose at them when she talked, they seemed to love her for it, too, the way peasants in a fairy tale flocked around the feet of their queen, not because she was nice or did good deeds or anything but simply because she was
theirs
.

Dee understood that sentiment better than anyone. After all, she’d just lost the most important person in her life. Instead of the press of her mother’s fingers against her cheek, instead of her voice whispering good night and the sound of her singing in the kitchen, Dee had only the bearish grumbling of her father and the impersonal clatter of the diner. She was in a strange town, cast loose in a blurry landscape of dunes, grasses, and undulating waves. Nothing felt certain to her.

Maybe that’s why she started waking earlier each morning, her nerves trembling to hear the beat of horse’s hooves, her heart thumping in time with them. When the instant finally arrived, she’d peel back a dingy corner of curtain and hold her breath, watching Claire’s graceful back arch and bow over her horse, her loose hair flaring around her. And in that moment, Dee would find herself wishing more than anything that Claire could be hers, too.

T
he very first time Dee ever waited on Whit Turner, he told her she had an ass so fine she should sit it on a plate and serve it to him hot. Then he ordered himself some breakfast. “Two eggs fried, coffee black, white toast, and by the way,” he said, handing her the menu with a wink and a dazzling smile, “I’m Whit Turner.”

Dee stuck her order pad in her apron pocket and looked him right in the eyes, trying to decide if Whit was one of those men who wanted a girl to blush and squirm when he talked a loose
streak or to look him in the eye and answer him back. Given the leer he had pasted across his mug, she decided on sass.

“I know who you are,” she said. “Your wife was in earlier. And you’d better watch it. I have family, too.” She tossed her head in the direction of the counter. “That’s my father up there.”

Whit drank in her breasts and hips as if he were sipping on bourbon. “You don’t look like the kind of girl who worries about what her father thinks,” he finally said. “In fact, you seem to be the exact opposite.”

It wasn’t the first time Dee had heard something like that. Her mother always claimed that Dee had just busted open at the seams when she turned thirteen, and there was no stuffing her back. It was true, too. Old men, young men, even little boys tended to gobble her body up with their eyes—and sometimes their hands, if she didn’t watch it. She got pinched in line at the movies, wolf-whistled at in parking lots, and groped at high-school parties. By the time she was fifteen, Dee could sit in church next to her father and count the men who would run their fingers up under her blouse given a chance, and by the time her mother died, she’d become the kind of girl who would let them.

Whit Turner wouldn’t necessarily have been one of her calls. For one thing, he sat so square-jawed and proud in his pew on Sundays. For another, his clothes were too fine, and he lived in that big house on the only hill in town. Also, he was married to Claire. That right there was enough of a basis for him to keep it in his pants, in Dee’s opinion. Claire seemed like the kind of woman who wouldn’t wait to serve her revenge cold.

Dee left Whit alone to eat his meal. It was late for breakfast in Prospect—nine o’clock—and the diner was empty. People in town seemed to like to eat at regular hours, which meant the diner was packed at seven in the morning, again at noon, and sometimes around six o’clock in the evening, and then it grew pretty quiet the rest of the time. Dee wondered if Whit had picked a down hour for a particular reason and, if so, what that reason might be. Perhaps a row with Claire? Claire had eaten by
herself at the crack of dawn, as usual, Dee remembered, but she hadn’t seemed upset about it. On the other hand, it was difficult to tell what state of mind Claire was in most of the time.

When Dee came back with the check, Whit wiped his mouth slowly. He flicked his eyes to the counter, making sure her father couldn’t see, and then reached out and circled her plump wrist with his forefinger and thumb, rubbing the spot where her pulse beat under her skin. A charge went through her, a jolt of pure energy running up her veins, and she knew right then she was sunk.

“Let’s do it again,” he said, sliding a bill—a five—into her apron pocket. He was a much better tipper than Claire.