Carolina Moon (16 page)

“I have someone, and you don’t want to botch
that
up. Is that it?” She put her hand on his and squeezed back. “Mack knows all about you and how important you were to me.”

“He knows
all
about me?” He pulled his hand out from under hers and played with the key chain that hung from the ignition, a silver dog whistle, remains of his last brief relationship, which had ended almost two years ago.
And how important I was?

“Well not
all
about you,” she said and squeezed his hand. “Really, Tommy, I need to ride around, take in the sights.” She laughed. “Then you take me back to the Exxon and that’s it, I’ll never force you to take me for a ride again.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said and he looked straight ahead as his ears and neck burned. He put the truck in reverse and backed down the drive. What he really wanted to say was “Let’s go to the river.” What he really wanted to say was,
Please just let me drown
.

GROUNDHOG DAY
1985

Dear Wayward One,

It’s our anniversary tonight. Twenty years since we had our own little ceremony out at the Holiday Inn on the highway. My husband always asks me why I love Holiday Inns so much. He recently tried to get me to stay in like a Marriott or something really swank when we went down to Georgia for a little holiday. Nope. Holiday Inn for me. He thinks I’m thrifty—imagine that! Oh no, love, it’s the plain dull furniture, the same arrangement of everything bolted down, the same taste of coffee that he brought back to the room in a styrofoam cup, that
YOU
brought back to the room in a styrofoam cup that next morning. “To my make-believe wife,” you said and leaned down and kissed me. My husband thought I was visiting my childhood friend and of course we did do that! In those days I just couldn’t lie, not like I’ve learned to do lately. Now I am a professional liar. Watch out because you can’t believe a word I say. I mean, maybe you think I’ll tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God because you are dead but honey, dead don’t count. The truth is that I am just as drunk as I can be. I am as drunk as I got that time I wasted all of our screwing time throwing
up there in a rented lavatory that smelled like old piss. Oh dear, am I shocking you dead man? Am I making you feel bad? I can’t imagine it feels as bad as being without a head. HA! I can’t imagine it feels as bad as being the one left behind. I didn’t mean for this to go this way. You see the truth is that my husband and I just got back from the most wonderful dinner out. We drove to the beach. We’re AT the beach in a nice hotel and he has just fallen asleep after some of the best lovemaking I have done in my life. Eat your old decayed heart out! It’s so convenient that we’re here, because you see I don’t have nearly so far to go to mail your little old shitty letter. I guess you wonder why I always go to that same old box. Well, first of all, it gives me a reason to drive down here and hear the waves and second, it is the closest box to where you croaked. SO THERE! If you are some ghost haunting your last spot, then this is as close as I can get to you unless of course I walk down to the point and go up into your room there. The house is disappearing you know. With every high tide, with every high wind, a little bit more is gone. Soon there will be nothing, no place for me to go and stand, should I ever get up the nerve, and no place for you to stand in some foggy stupid form, you stupid ass of a selfish man. Why weren’t you like my husband, my real husband? What’s funniest about that night all those years ago is how we were planning to keep meeting, to take that same trip forever. I
did
call my husband more than I probably should’ve. I was so nervous. You, you weren’t nervous in the least. You put that styrofoam cup up to my lips and you said:
For better or worse, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep your private stock unto me till death do we part.
Well, we parted all right. And I hope you’re jealous in your old dead state. I do. I do. I do.

All the while Tom Lowe works on finishing off Quee’s new deck, he plays the radio, listening like everybody else in town for news about Jones Jameson. It has turned into a hot day, and he has stripped down to no shirt at all and has a bandana tied around his forehead to keep back the sweat. He has yet to see the dingdong doctor Denny, though he finds himself thinking of her off and on, checking every time Quee’s door opens. Most of the visits have been from Ruthie Crow, who is as agitated as a person can get without needing to be put in a straitjacket. She keeps eyeing the pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his shirt, which he’s hung on a lagustrum bush. “Uh-uh-uh, Ruthie,” he says. “Don’t you be a bad girl.” This was kind of flirty, he realizes, but she’s too addicted to nicotine to be thinking of sex.

Sometimes when Tom is working, he thinks back over the old pirate stories; it’s like he’s being read to in a pirate brogue. He loves when Jack Rackham thought Anne Bonny had taken up with another man only to discover that it was really Mary Read in disguise.
You? You? Why, you little wench!
They were some tough-ass women, to be sure. Unlike their male companions, they didn’t get strung up by the neck
because they were pregnant. Supposedly the three oldest professions were medicine and prostitution and piracy. Quee had told him that one day when he was telling her stories about Blackbeard. They’d begun talking about facial hair, and nobody had more facial hair than Blackbeard. Quee said, “I’d pick prostitute.”

“I’d pick pirate,” Tom had said, though clearly he wouldn’t. Oh, he could take the part with the boat and the ocean; he could take the stealing and looting. What he couldn’t take was the murder. That’s when he told Quee the pirate superstitions about drowning and how nobody ever tried to save anybody because it was thought to be interfering with the underworld. Drowning pirates would scream for help, and their friends would yell back, “Give in, matey, it’s meant to be.” Now he keeps hearing
Give in matey, it’s meant to be
, with every scrape of his handsaw, every slam of the hammer. Ruthie is back inside now and since he no longer needs to stand guard over his cigarettes, he can drift along, turning back again to Sarah, wishing, as he does every time he thinks of the day he saw her at the Exxon, that he could have done something to keep her future from happening.

HE DID FINALLY
agree to drive her around, for old time’s sake, to prove that he could be her friend, and he had driven several blocks, Sarah’s hand still just inches from his thigh, when he asked where she wanted to go.

“Show me where you live,” she said, and plucked some dog hair from her shorts.

“In my mind or for real?”

“Do you still go out to your lot?” She relaxed and stretched her legs, leaned her head back on the seat. He felt her watching him and nodded. “Do you go every day?”

“No, not every day.”

“Anytime I think of you, that’s where you are.” She paused. “I love that you do that; I love the story, always have.”

“Is that what it is? A story?”

“A wonderful story.”

“A story you told in college? Maybe tell at cocktail parties?”

“No.” Her hand is there again, patting and then covering his hand on the gearshift. “It’s a story I guess I keep to myself.”

The memory of the river was so strong it pulled him away, although she sat right beside him. He had planned what he would say to her, things like: “So, I guess we broke up, huh?” or “You are some kind of fickle highfalutin bitch” or “How many guys have you fucked since me?” He has also imagined himself
at
her wedding, there in the Presbyterian Church. She would change her mind at the last minute and together they would run to his truck and head for the beach. He could see her in her long white dress, thigh deep in the ocean. Her arms around his neck pulling him down.

“How about where you actually live,” she said, just as they passed the bank and the house where he grew up. His mother had recently added a sunroom and the new brick didn’t quite match up with the old. He didn’t look to see if his mother was there; he would see her soon enough, and he’d hear about how he needed a real job and a real house, a wife and children. She would say, “No woman, or sensible woman I might add, will ever put up with all those mongrels.”

“Why?” he asked, once his mother’s house was two blocks behind them.

“I don’t know. Seems fair. You know where I live.”

“Yeah, well, I used to like my neighborhood, but it’s gone down quite a bit.” He pressed the accelerator, making it through the yellow light at their old elementary school. “A lot of people have moved in and driven down the value of my property.”

“Oh.” She laughed. “Now most people would argue that your property value has gone up since all those people moved in.”

“Depends on your definition of value.” He turned into the subdivision, pausing at the big brick pillars to give her the full effect. “If you value trees, frogs, privacy, well, you might say something has been lost.” He drove slowly past the houses and yards, three-car garages, and little islands of landscaping. “You might want to duck. I bet you know most of the people who live here. And if you don’t, you surely will soon.”

“I’ve been here several times,” she said. “The realtor was determined that we buy a house out here.”

“She probably tried to sell you the one right across the street from my mansion.”

“Yes,” she nodded knowingly. “Yes, she did, but I had no idea that you were the person.”

“The person everybody out here hates?” He turned into his drive and then bumped into and beyond the pines that hid his trailer completely from street view. There were only six dogs then. “Home Sweet Home,” he said and offered her what he thought later sounded more like an apology than he meant for it to. “I was here first.”

“You really
haven’t
changed, Tommy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” This time she grabbed his arm with both hands and inched her way across the seat. “You look the same, sound the same.” She leaned in close. “You even smell the same.”

“And is that good?”

She nodded and then pressed her nose near his collar and breathed in. “Let’s see, there’s tobacco and puppy breath and ocean salt and a little sawdust.” She moved up his neck, her warm breath covering his ear. “Prell Shampoo.”

“Why are you doing this, Sarah?” Now he refused to look at her. He stared straight ahead, his hand gripping the door handle.

“You brought me here.”

“You asked me to.”

“I didn’t make you, though.” Her hands were on his back, first lightly and then palms pressed flat and circling. She pulled his shirt out of his jeans and moved her hands back up.

“Your car will be ready,” he whispered, his heart beating so hard he was sure she could feel it against her breasts as she pressed in closer and closer.

“No, not yet.”

“Your husband might look for you.” That got her attention and pushed her back. “Really, Sarah. This is kind of crazy.”

“Just show me inside. Then we’ll go back. Show me your dogs, okay?” She opened her door and stepped out into the wet, soggy straw. The door creaked louder than usual when he stepped out, and it seemed the whole neighborhood had fallen silent, there were no birds, no crickets; it was so quiet he believed he could hear the mist that was shrouding the world. He opened the door to the leaping and barking of the three dogs. Blackbeard’s tail alone could do considerable damage, which is why Tom stored his dishes high up on a makeshift shelf.

“Home Sweet Home,” he said and grabbed the big bag of dog food to lead the three outside for an unexpected meal this time of day. She stood watching him, her arms crossed over her chest. He barely got back in the half door before she locked her arms behind his neck and pressed against him.

“Why Sarah?” he whispered. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“
To
you?” she stepped back with a wounded look. “Is that how you see it?”

“Yes, yes I do.” He moved away from her and pulled himself up to sit on the side of the bed. “I’d offer you a chair if there was one,” he said.

“I would have gladly offered myself the bed if you didn’t feel you were being taken advantage of.”

“Sarah.” He watched as she stood staring at his belongings all lined up on what was supposed to be another bed. She ran her finger up and down the spine of his giant
World Atlas
, the same book he had used to tutor her in geography years before. What a joke. Even then he knew what a joke it was; he tutored her and yet she was the one going off to a new life.

“You don’t have anything to lose,” she said without turning, and before she could complete the words he was standing, holding her arms and forcing her to listen.

“I have everything to lose,” he said. “And I’d be losing it again.”

“Oh, Tommy, I’m sorry.” She leaned into him and cried. “All this time I’ve just wanted to make things up to you.”

“It can’t be done,” he said and then softened. “What I mean is we can’t change anything.”

“Can we pretend? One minute?” She kissed his cheek lightly and ran her finger around his lips, pressed to silence any rejection. “Do you ever think about what we would have been like?”

“No,” he lied.

“We would have a nineteen-year-old,” she whispered, “somebody older now than we were then.”

“I can’t imagine that.”

“We would have slept this close for nineteen years and there would have been no hiding, no slipping.” She moved her hands up under his denim shirt, flat palms circling, her cheek pressed against his mouth. A slight turn and she spoke again, her lips not an inch from his. “You never think of me, TomCat?”

“Never,” he said and then “always.” When they kissed it was as if they had never been apart, the familiar ways of touching, her hair wrapped around his hand as he pulled her face closer.

“I want you, Tommy.” She stepped back only two steps and there was the bed. “Please.” She had that same desperate look he had clung to all those years. It spelled need, need that seemed to go far beyond the physical. And there was a pull like swimming out and then letting go, letting the current pull and pull; there was the fear of drowning in the undertow, forever lost. Then he was on top of her, her hand guiding him in when Blackbeard began barking, his tail thumping against the camper door.