The Pirate Queen (11 page)

Pastor Mims quietly said, “You take care, Mrs. Warren. I’ll show myself out.”

His last look at her was one that she had seen before from Bender’s friends when they sensed tension between them. Pastor John looked so intelligent, but Bender was smooth. He had won over another convert to his Bender cult. She imagined them all gathered to pay tribute to him, and that is when she realized that Bender had been building a case for himself, as if the Almighty could not see what she saw.

It occurred to her he’d even been nicer to her since leaving Davidson. She wanted kindness from him, but for other reasons. Whenever she would see a couple quietly talking in a café, touching, and the husband gazing into his wife’s eyes as if he could disappear into them, be lost in love with her, she couldn’t help but feel a pang of something. Nothing as harsh as jealousy. Just a pang of wanting to feel something that others seemed to feel, a love that swallowed her up in completeness.

Bender’s followers would all gather for his funeral and say the
things about him that he had scripted and planted in their thoughts. Then she would stand up in the middle of them and start naming the women who had fawned over his special qualities. Perhaps that is exactly what she ought to invite from the funeral guests; she’d ask each of his girlfriends to stand and recount what Bender had done for her behind closed doors.

Yes, exactly! Pastor Mims would say a prayer and then give her the floor. She would roll out the list like she was reading off the groceries for Sherry. “Erin Guff. Vickie Jaunice. Bernie Mae Milton. Pansy Fulton.” And while each woman was standing up and running out of the church, Saphora Warren would finally be getting the last word.

She sat down on a stool and buried her face in her hands.
What is wrong with me? I’m turning into the very thing I hate. God, help me!

Sherry promised she would see to Bender. She had stopped in Raleigh and stocked up on groceries. When Saphora pulled away from the house, Sherry was out back feeding Eddie and Tobias pigs-in-a-blanket. She would finish up Saphora’s squash dish and feed it to Bender for lunch. Saphora felt tension releasing from her shoulders.

Saphora stopped at the mailbox and was about to pull away when she saw the next-door neighbor getting his mail. She pulled up slowly and stopped. She brought down the car window and smiled, neighborly. “I’m your neighbor, Saphora,” she said.

He was startled but acknowledged her. “I’ve seen you out with your boys playing.”

“Oh. That’s my grandson, Eddie, and Tobias. Tobias lives a few blocks from here.”

“You’re a grandmother? That’s surprising.”

She had heard before that she looked too young for grandkids. But she appreciated it coming from a man who looked twenty years her junior. “My three are all grown. I have four grandchildren,” she said.

“I’d heard my house was next to a surgeon’s house.”

“Your house?”

“For now.”

“I didn’t know it had sold.”

“I used to rent it, then one day decided to buy it. Is he your husband?”

“Bender’s a plastic surgeon and, yes, he is my husband.” She knew not to act surprised that he knew. She’d learned already that Oriental was too close-knit for privacy.

“I’ll keep a look out for him. That’s an interesting name. Bender.”

“His mother gave him her maiden name.” She realized she was divulging a lot while he was saying little. “Your name, though, is a complete mystery.”

“I’m sorry.” He laughed, sliding the mail under one armpit. “Name’s Luke.” He pushed his auburn bangs out of his eyes, then followed by adjusting his glasses. He looked over the tops of the wire frames rather than through them. He was good-looking like Ramsey, but his eyes reflected a tincture of higher IQ.

“Are you a summer resident or all year?” She hoped it wasn’t stepping over the line to ask.

“I live here. I’m local now, bought this place just last month. My wife wanted this house.”

“I’ll try and come over to meet her,” said Saphora.

“I’m a widower.” He slid the envelopes into the other hand. The
fact that he was moving back toward his house told Saphora that standing out in the hot sun baking was not in his plans for the afternoon. “Well, it was good to meet you. You take care.”

She waved and pulled away, thinking it was such a strange thing for a man to buy a house for his wife after she had passed away.

Before she arrived downtown and parked near the Oriental Marina’s dock, she remembered the shoveling sound going on that evening she had been sitting on the upper deck. But solving that mystery wasn’t the kind of question to ask a man she had just met.

Saphora took her sailing lessons on Lake Norman eight years ago. The sailing master told her it was her second nature to sail. Bender had promised that when they moved onto the lake sailing would be a shared activity. But he had also agreed to see a counselor with her to try to improve things between them. The psychologist he chose was a golfing friend who was passive to Bender’s aggression. They went twice and the doctor declared Bender a healthy balance of male spirit and sensitivity.

Saphora took the first sailing class alone. After that she navigated their small craft, the
Evelyn
, around the lake with her best friend, Marcy, who had moved into a condo in uptown Charlotte after her divorce.

Marcy’s job as a rug broker took her away so often that the only time Saphora had taken the sailboat out all summer was when Turner came by on the weekends. The Tuesday that Abigail Weed had descended on her back lawn with the
Southern Living
crew, Marcy was in Indonesia. She had invited Saphora to join her. “Be spontaneous,” she had said. But Saphora was secretly fantasizing about her own getaway.
It was a practical plan to move into a place she and Bender already owned. She planned it so she’d make no waves until circumstances dictated differently. It occurred to her that the fact she had planned to make no waves was exactly why it was never a plan in the first place.

She stopped in at a harbor café and ordered a fish sandwich to go. When she arrived at the dock, Captain Bart Larson, the dock master, waited for her in his lawn chair. He held an open umbrella, she assumed to block the sun that was beginning to beat down.

“Mrs. Warren, there you are,” he said. “Aren’t you a pretty sailor.”

She was happy to hear him say so.

He was tanned from floating in and out of the harbor carting tourists around the islands and the eastern shore. His white brows made a ledge over his eyes. He seemed to be having trouble getting around.

“I had a stupid accident,” he finally told her. He was holding a cane with the other hand. “I was fixing my daughter’s roof, and the whole ladder came down with me. Once you break a bone at my age, it’s hard to get back what you lost.”

She shared concern and then asked, “What am I taking out today?”

“Miss Molly
. She’s mine. Not a rental. Small and skinny like you. But you look salty to me, as if you can manage her.”

Saphora followed him to the sailing rig, a Herreshoff design, he told her; the
Miss Molly
bore the angular sails found on old Chinese rigs. She was an older, small, all-wood craft bearing a deep enough bow to cut a path through the roiling river wakes.

“There’s a storm coming in tonight,” he said. “I figured you’d want to reef your own sails.”

There were no clouds. The blue canopy was everlasting from the north to the south.

“There’s time on the way,” she said.

“Old sailors reef first. That’s why they’re old.”

“I know. I’ll do it now.”

He laughed. He seemed like a man who didn’t mind her having a little fun with him.

She got into the boat and hooked up her halyards. The sails raised into the sky. She did wonder why he gave her his own boat. But she was, after all, going it alone. The
Miss Molly
must have been the only one-man vessel available. “Just a three-hour tour,” she said. “The weatherman’s calling for clear skies, though.” She had listened to the radio driving over.

“The weatherman’s wrong.” He was known, Bernard had told her, for superstitious beliefs, following the Farmer’s Almanac, planting beans by moonlight. A romantic old soul.

“I put a fishing rod in the cabin.”

She had stipulated that she wanted to fish. “Exactly what I need,” she said. She paid the deposit and untied the dock line. If the weather held until Saturday, she’d invite Turner and Ramsey to take a boat out into the open sea. She doubted Gwennie would join them, but if given the choice of staying in the house with Celeste or sailing, there was a good chance of getting Gwennie aboard.

“I’ll have a houseful of company Saturday. Can you reserve a bigger rig for me?”

He checked his schedule. “A cruiser.”

“I’ll take it.” Ramsey and Turner and their boys would be crew enough.

There was a nice wind, so she sailed on a beat up the Neuse. She
tacked alongside the wind that pushed her toward the sound, close hauled, and then changed tack, zigzagging until she was running windward. She let out the sail fully, and
Miss Molly
sped windward, bow toward the Pamlico Sound.

She let her thoughts blow away along with the wind that blew back her hair. She left behind the marina and the problems with Bender. Focusing on navigating the boat elevated her spirits. She realized she had been living under an unfair regimen. There was no doubt that she would take more days for herself and take advantage of Sherry’s time in Oriental. Where was it written that a woman had to silently submit to a life that did not acknowledge her for her worth?

Captain Bart had left her the chart for locating the South River. She sailed in on a tailwind and dropped anchor in one of the coves. Navigating a massive river alone was a chore, though. The Neuse was less predictable than the waters of Lake Norman. She’d be glad to relax and let her sons take the helm Saturday. Ramsey would love it. He had taken to sailing quicker than Turner. He said it was a way to meet girls confident in their abilities. But he talked like that to sound superior to Turner, who did not care an iota. Still, she had sailed alone today on strange waters, and somehow the strangeness had enveloped her with a new sense of worth. But had she taken too long to seize a small slice of autonomy? Was her whole life a waste? Even her daughter had managed to cut ties from the suffocating requirements of being a Warren and find her own personal space to simply be Gwennie. She was always a smart girl, even when she could not escape the Warren harness.

Gwennie fell in love the same summer that Turner took to sailing. Saphora took her to the yacht club for dinner and a swim, where she met a young college student named Paul Stalinsky. He was not
there because of his family’s membership in the club but because he had taken a job as a lifeguard at the club pool. He started coming around the house often, taking out a borrowed boat. He motored right up to the Warren dock, sounding one of those awful horns. Gwennie would go running out of the house and down the back lawn to meet Paul for a boat ride. But Bender discouraged her relationship with Paul. He was a smart student and athletic. He attended UNC Wilmington and would go back in the fall. But when asked about his future plans, he was too ambiguous for Bender. He told Paul that he needed to end a summer romance that was going nowhere.

Gwennie sat out on the porch crying, refusing to go to bed until sometime after midnight and promising to never forgive her dad for sending Paul off the premises.

That summer had held the promise of the kind of memories that draw most families back to the water for more adventures. But each one of them, Turner, Ramsey, and Gwennie, had come up with excuses for not accompanying their parents when Saphora had planned their first trip to the house in Oriental. Not wanting to travel without her kids, Saphora cancelled the trip. That was why the house sat void of a visit by a Warren. She never tried to plan a trip to Oriental again.

She suffered a quiet ache even though Marcy had told her that most older teens did not enjoy the company of parents; that was why so many went off on group trips together.