The Mermaid Chair (19 page)

What matters is giving over to what you love.

C H A P T E R

Twenty

pq

When we arrived at Max’s Café the following Saturday, Mother refused to go inside. She balked on the sidewalk like a spooked horse and wouldn’t move. Kat, Benne, Hepzibah, and I tried to coax her to the door, but she was adamant. “Take me home,” she said. “I mean it, take me home.”

It had required all my tactics of persuasion, plus heavy-handed phone calls from Kat and Hepzibah both, to get her this far, and now it looked as if our well-meaning plan to reintroduce her into some kind of normal existence was going up in smoke.

She didn’t want to face the whispers and stares of people she’d known her whole life—and who could blame her? We’d finally convinced her that she’d have to face them sooner or later, and why not get it over with?

But that was before we stood on the sidewalk and saw the crowd through the café windows. It was only March 4, but there was a tinge of springtime in the breezes, and the place appeared jam-packed, not only with islanders but with tourists.

“If
you
were the village idiot instead of me, would
you
go in there, inviting everybody to make fun of you?” Mother demanded.

“You’re damn right I would,” said Kat. “And I’m not so sure t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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I’m
not
the village idiot. You think people don’t talk about me?

About my big mouth or the air horn on my cart? Or about Benne—you don’t think they talk about her? And what about Hepzibah—they have a field day with her, how she communicates with slave spirits at the cemetery, going around dressed up more African than the Africans?”

My hand went involuntarily to my mouth. I looked at Hepzibah, who had on a gorgeous caramel-and-black African print dress and turban and a necklace made from ostrich eggshell. She was the only person I knew more fearless than Kat, someone who could, if she wanted, clean Kat’s clock, as they say.

She looked down at Kat’s signature black heels and lacy socks and just stared. The socks were a light shade of
pink.

“If you must know, I washed them with Benne’s red night-shirt,” Kat said.

Hepzibah turned to Mother. “If you aren’t giving people around here something to talk about, Nelle, you’ve become too dull.”

“But this is different,” Mother said. “The people in there think I’m . . . insane. I would rather they think I’m dull.”

“Bite . . . your . . . tongue,” said Kat.

It killed Mother that the people she knew believed she’d lost her mind, but it bothered her much more that I might believe it.

The day before, at breakfast, I’d screwed up my courage and asked her in the kindest voice I could, “Do you ever hear voices?

Did a voice tell you to cut off your finger?”

She’d shot me a withering look. “I’m hearing a voice right now,” she said, mocking me. “It’s telling me you should pack your suitcase and go back to Atlanta. Go home, Jessie. I don’t need you here. I don’t want you here either.”

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I felt tears collecting. My bottom lids became bloated with them. It wasn’t just her words but the look on her face, all the bright red bitterness in it.

I turned away, but she saw the tears, and the pressure that had been expanding around our heads broke. “Oh, Jessie,” she said. She let her fingers brush against my arm and stay there with the tips resting near my elbow. It was about the tenderest gesture she’d made toward me since I’d left home for college.

“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I can’t stand you thinking I’ve gone insane, that’s all.” She looked down at her bandage. “There weren’t any voices, okay? I was feeling tired and distraught. I was holding the cleaver, and . . . it just seemed like it would be such a relief to bring it down on my finger.”

For a moment she looked almost as bewildered by what she’d done as I was. Now, though, standing outside Max’s Café, she just seemed scared.

Kat wore a scarf covered with yellow and red hibiscuses tucked around her neck. Whipping it off, she began winding it around Mother’s hand, covering her old gauze bandage, which looked like a big white boxing glove. When Kat was finished, it looked like a big
floral
boxing glove.

“The best defense is a good offense,” she said.

“I’m not wearing this scarf around my hand,” Mother said.

Kat placed her fists on her hips. “Listen to me. Every single person on Egret Island knows you cut off your finger, and when you walk in there, every person with eyeballs is going to stare at you. So go in with a little pizzazz, why don’t you? This will be like shoving it right back in their faces. You’ll be saying,
Yes, this is
the infamous hand with the missing finger. I’ve highlighted it for
you with this colorful bandage. Take a good look.”

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Benne giggled.

Mother turned to Hepzibah for a second opinion.

“I hate to admit this, but I agree with Kat,” Hepzibah said.

“If you go into Max’s and poke a little fun at yourself, you might defuse the whole thing.”

I couldn’t believe that Hepzibah had been sucked into Kat’s screwball idea. “I don’t know about this,” I said.

“That’s right, you don’t,” said Kat, and, latching onto Mother’s arm, she guided her to the door. More to the point, Mother
let
herself be guided, and that was the marvel to me, to see the power these women still had over her.

The door of the restaurant had one of those annoying tin-kling bells attached. It jangled as we came through, and Bonnie Langston, who was plumper than I remembered her, rushed over, pressing her dimpled hand to her lips and suppressing a grin when she spotted the scarf tied around Mother’s hand.

“I find white gauze boring,” Mother told her.

Bonnie led us to a table in the exact middle of the room. And yes, every islander in there twisted around to stare at Mother’s hibiscus-covered hand. Conversations died in midsentence.

And then, like Bonnie, people began to smile.

After we had studied our menus, Kat said, “Jessie, you’ve been here—what? Two weeks?”

“Two and a half.”

“I was wondering if Hugh might be coming for a visit any-time soon.”

“No,” I said, remembering what Benne had told her and feeling monumentally awkward. “He has his practice, you know. He can’t just leave.”

“Even for the weekend?”

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“He’s usually on call then.”

I narrowed my eyes at Benne. For all I knew, she might clink her spoon on her water glass and announce to a hushed room that I was in love with a monk from the abbey.
St. Sin.

Kat gestured at a mason jar that sat on the table beside the salt and pepper shakers. Half filled with quarters and dimes, it was labeled DOG FOOD DONATIONS. “Would you look at this?

Bonnie is collecting money for Max’s dog food.”

Gazing around the room, I noticed a jar on every table.

“She probably uses it to buy all those damn Precious Moments figurines she has all over her B and B,” Kat went on. “I mean, where
is
all this imaginary dog food she supposedly buys with it?” She put her hand on Mother’s arm. “Nelle, you remember that time about a hundred years ago when we ordered six cases of dog food for the first Max? It was from some pet place in Charleston, and they sent all that
cat
food over on the ferry?”

Mother tilted her head, and you could see the memory break the surface of her thoughts and spill into her face. I watched the sheen in her eyes grow, beaming around the table like a sweep of brightness from a lighthouse. She laughed, and all of us stopped to admire the sound.

“Max ate every bit of it,” she said. “He loved it, as I recall.”

Kat leaned in close to her. “Yeah, he started acting very feline after that. All independent and condescending, chasing mice and spitting up hair balls.”

Mother said, “Remember that time the first Max ate a piece of rope, and Kat and I ran down to the ferry and told Shem he had to take us across right then, because we had an emergency.

You remember that, Kat?”

She was almost chirping. The floral bouquet of her hand t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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waved in the air. I sat there in a state of confused wonder—we all did—as if we were witnessing the miracle of birth happening to someone we didn’t know was pregnant.

She went on, “Shem said he couldn’t make an unscheduled ferry run for a dog. I thought Kat was going to assault him. So he says, ‘Okay, ladies, calm down, I’ll take you,’ and halfway across, Max threw up the rope and was perfectly fine.”

Her face was aglitter.
Who is this woman?

No one moved. Mother took a breath and picked up the story. “Well, we had made such a big deal about it, we hated to tell him, ‘Oh, never mind,’ so we pretended it was touch and go and spent a few hours walking Max around McClellanville before catching the ferry back.”

Bonnie appeared then and took our lunch orders. After she left, Hepzibah said, “What about that time, Nelle, we went over to the abbey to help you wash and wax St. Senara’s statue, and Max came along—I believe it was the Max before this one. You remember that?”

Mother tossed back her head and laughed with the most breathtaking hilarity, then said to me, “After we got St. Senara all cleaned, Max hiked his leg on her.”

She seemed to have dropped through a crack in time, and it was the Nelle from thirty-four years ago. The one she’d lost or killed off.

I didn’t want the reminiscing to stop. “Remember the All-Girls Picnics?” I said.

“The All-Girls Picnics!” Kat cried. “Now, that was the most fun any three women ever had.”

Hepzibah said, “This is the second time today I’ve agreed with you, Kat. I’m starting to worry about myself.”

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“And that time you found the turtle skull out in the water—

remember that?” I said, looking at Hepzibah.

“Of course I do. I’m just surprised you do.”

“I always loved that skull,” I said, then slapped my hands together. “We should do it again—have an All-Girls Picnic.”

“We
should,
” Kat said. “What a fine idea!”

Benne, who was sitting next to Mother, leaned over to her and, cupping her hand around her mouth, whispered loud enough for everyone at the table to hear, “You said you would never go to an All-Girls Picnic again.”

Mother glanced around the table. The glint, I noticed, was beginning to leave her eyes.

“That was a long time ago, Benne,” said Hepzibah. “People change their minds. Don’t they, Nelle?”

“I can’t,” she said.

I reached for her hand as if I might pull her back to us. “But why?”

Benne piped up again. “She didn’t want to have fun after your daddy died. Remember? She said, ‘It’s a travesty for me to be out there dancing and carrying on after what happened.’ ”

I shot Kat a look as if to say, Would you shut her up? Kat reached into the breadbasket and handed Benne a biscuit.

“Dad would’ve
wanted
you to keep having the picnics,” I said.

Mother ran her hand up and down her glass of sweet tea.

“Come on, Nelle, do it for us. It’ll be a hoot,” said Kat.

“We’ll invite Max,” Hepzibah added.

Mother shrugged. I could see a sequin or two of light still floating in her eyes. “But no dancing,” she said. “I don’t want any dancing.”

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“We’ll sit on the blanket and just talk, like we’re doing now,”

said Kat. “If anybody dances, we’ll shoot her.”

Bonnie appeared with our lunches, plates of fried oysters and shrimp, crab cakes, red rice, and the black-eyed pea and grits cakes she was famous for. As we ate and talked, the old Nelle receded completely, but I knew that some remnant of my bygone mother still existed, and I felt for the first time that she might be fished up out of her madness, at least partially.

Across the room the door opened, and the little bell made a spangly sound that rippled across the room. I turned instinctively.

He stood just inside the door, his almond-brown head bowed toward the tiles on the floor as if he’d dropped a coin. He looked up with his eyes half closed and scanned the tables, and I felt my heart tumble and crash.

It was Hugh.

C H A P T E R

Twenty-one

pq

Iwatched him for several moments, thinking,
Wait, wait,
that can’t be Hugh. Hugh is in Atlanta.

You know how it is when you see someone completely out of context, someone who isn’t supposed to be there, how you’re mildly disoriented, how it upends your sense of the moment? This was even a little worse than that for me. I sat at the table imagining that through some inexplicable amalgam of ESP, prescient insight, and suspicion,
he knew.

He knew I’d sat in a boat with another man and wished I could float away with him to the other side of the world. He knew about the scene I had visualized a dozen or more times—

the impossible, unbearable one—packing a suitcase and calmly walking out of the house, leaving him. He knew. And he had come, summoned all the way from Atlanta by the stench of my guilt.

When he spotted me, though, he smiled. His normal smile, the mouth ends pulled down, stretched with amusement as if he were resisting the moment his teeth would break through, this smile that had swept over me so many times.

As he walked to the table, I smiled back, an
abnormal
smile.

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Someone
trying
to smile, forcing herself to look normal and happy and carefree.

“Hugh, my goodness! What are you doing here? How did you know where to find us?” I said, folding my napkin, laying it neatly beside my plate. He looked thinner, slighter, different somehow.

He bent down and kissed my cheek. His own cheek was sandpapery, and I could tell he’d been sucking on one of his lemon lozenges. “I went into Caw Caw General to call the house and see if you could pick me up in the cart, and someone told me you were here.” He put his hand on Mother’s shoulder.