Cavedweller (24 page)

Dede giggled at Amanda’s constant harping on sin, but it worried Delia. Amanda started going in to Clint every day to read to him from her Bible, beginning with the Book of Job and working her way through the Psalms. The night she reached Psalm 107—Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound in affliction and iron—Cissy came to the door twice and saw Clint with his teeth clenched and his eyes focused on the ceiling. He looked as if every word out of Amanda’s mouth was grating on his bones.

“She keeps that up, she’ll kill him.”

Cissy jumped. Dede was standing in the hall behind her.

“’Course, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it?” Dede nodded in Clint’s direction. The man was starting to rock slightly under the impact of Amanda’s implacable recitation.

“You hate him that much?”

“Oh yeah,” Dede said with a blinding smile. “Grandma Windsor always said it took blood to know blood. My blood knows his blood and hates every drop that moves through his veins.” Her smile flattened into a look of cold assessment. “You don’t hate him at all, do you?”

Cissy looked back at the narrow bed and the body huddled under the sheets. Clint’s head was turned to the door. His lips were pulled back from his teeth, and his eyes searched Cissy’s.

“No,” she said. “I don’t hate him.”

“More fool you,” Dede laughed, “more fool you.”

 

 

“
W
here are you from?” Dede asked Rosemary, who was looking into the bathroom mirror over her shoulder. Rosemary used a tissue to wipe away the excess foundation she had applied to Dede’s cheekbone and smiled at the girl’s pleased expression. “I was born in a hospital in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Raised in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, and Ceylon. My father was an engineer for a petroleum outfit. He invented a process for purifying certain oils you wouldn’t know how to pronounce.” She drew one finger along her right eyebrow, then the left, smoothing the fine hairs. “I’m your granddaddy’s worst nightmare, child, a black Yankee woman raised to be rich and bossy.”

Rosemary laughed, a full, joyful tone that Cissy heard in the next room. She knew that laugh. For an instant she could see it all again, Rosemary in California in a tiger-striped bikini and big purple heart-shaped sunglasses. She went to the door of the bathroom, where Dede and Rosemary were still giggling.

“You were with Booger,” Cissy said, not thinking how she knew.

“That silly man?” Rosemary waved an arm and Dede cocked her head expectantly. “I was never
with
that man. I let him hang out with me for a while, be seen with me. That was all. Booger had talent but he didn’t have style. My men have style, always have had style.”

“Amen,” said Delia, coming down the hall with an armload of sheets.

What was she? Amanda wondered. Some kind of prostitute? In her mind, that was the only way Rosemary made sense. If not, where did it come from—the arrogance, the jewelry and clothes, the glossy look of that skin? Sin, it had to come from sin.

“Doesn’t she have a job she has to go back to?” Amanda asked Delia, echoing M.T.’s question.

“Rosemary owns things,” Delia said. “And she’s always been good with money.”

“Owns what?” Dede was fascinated.

“Shopping centers, mostly,” said Rosemary in a bland, honey-coated voice. “I’m partial to commerce, not just property. I like my money to make money. That was what my father told me, that money is meant to be put to work or given away.”

“You given a lot away?” asked Dede.

“Oh, honey, I’ve given away more than most people ever get.” Rosemary put her arms around Dede’s shoulders and laughed like a bird, high and bright. “Isn’t that right, Delia, haven’t I given away more than we could count?”

Delia nodded, and Amanda glared. Dede leaned back into Rosemary’s embrace. Delia shifted the sheets in her arms and gave her friend a long look. Cissy wanted to ask about all that money and all those years in California, and all the things she thought she remembered from when she was a little girl, but the look in Delia’s eyes stopped her. The gleam there implied a world of story behind the tale Rosemary was spinning. Treasured daughter, careful education, loving daddy, California shine—there was something else, another story, not so simple, from the look in Delia’s eyes.

Rosemary picked up her glass of soda and drank deeply. “Can I have a sip?” Dede asked.

“You don’t need none of
that,”
Rosemary said curtly.

 

 

“
D
rinks a lot, don’t she?” Cissy said to Delia a few days later. Rosemary had gone to the Piggly Wiggly, and they were cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast. “After we go to bed, Rosemary sits up and drinks like a fish.”

“I’ve never understood that comment.” Delia held a towel over the wastebin and shook out crumbs. She gave the towel one last flick and then folded it half over half. “It’s just the strangest thing to say. You imagine fish absorb water like taking in air?”

“Maybe it’s the way she consumes as much as she would displace if she was dropped in a pool.”

Delia put the kettle under the faucet and ran cold water into it.

“Well, she drinks at night, don’t she?”

“You don’t know that,” Delia said.

Amanda appeared in the doorway. “She does. I been keeping track. She did a fifth the first two weeks, another bottle half gone since last Saturday. Talks big, but look at what she’s doing. That woman is drinking herself drunk every night after we go to bed.”

Delia slammed the kettle down on the burner and then turned to Amanda and Cissy. “Rosemary is my friend,” she said. “Maybe you haven’t figured it out, but this is no place a woman like her comes to visit for fun. She’s here to help me. If you’d look a little closer, you would see what kind of woman she is.” Delia paused for a moment, her eyes dark in her pale face.

“God,” she said, and it was not a curse. “God knows you could look a little closer, see yourselves now and then. While Rosemary is here, you will treat her with respect. You will not make rude comments on what you cannot understand.”

Cissy dropped her eyes. Even Amanda looked abashed as Delia turned her back on them. Cissy sat at the table for a while trying to figure it out, why Delia would get so angry so fast. Amanda had said worse, far worse, many times over. But this was clearly the straw on Delia’s back.

Cissy was still thinking about Delia’s outburst that evening as she sat in Clint’s room reading Tim O’Brien’s
Going After Cacciato,
another loan from Nolan. She looked out the window to the shadowed backyard. A thread of smoke hung in a line above the stoop.

Rosemary was sitting on the third step, big eyes catching the reflection of the lights from the house. Cissy went outside to join her, took a breath, and smelled the liquor on the night air.

“You still have that striped bikini and the purple sunglasses?” she asked.

Rosemary laughed. “You remember that? But hell, why wouldn’t you. Every woman in Los Angeles has a striped bikini, and for a while there we all had those sunglasses too.” Rosemary stubbed out her cigarette and shook another out of the pack lying next to her hip. She tapped it on the back of her wrist.

“Yours were heart-shaped,” Cissy said. It had been another hot day. The wooden step under Cissy’s thighs was just beginning to cool as the night came on.

“Uh-huh.” Rosemary put the cigarette in her mouth. With graceful motions she used her silver lighter to spark a flame.

Cissy watched her inhale, remembering when Delia gave Rosemary that lighter at a party in Venice Beach. It had an inscription on the bottom, Cissy knew, something about friendship and laughter. “Why’d you come?” Cissy asked.

“Well, Clint’s dying, isn’t he?” Rosemary blew smoke in a pale stream, then leaned over and reached for the bottle of bourbon that was between her legs. She took a sip. “That’s cause enough for a party. And your mama asked me to come. She doesn’t ask for help easily, you know.”

“You knew Clint?”

Rosemary looked into Cissy’s face, her eyes glittering. Then she turned and stared out at the yard. “I knew about him. I think I knew a little more than most. When he had that abandonment notice served on Delia, she just about killed herself. Your mama might have run off and left your sisters, but she tried for years to work something out with that man. He wouldn’t even let her send presents to them, but she did anyway. Wouldn’t let her have pictures or tell her anything about how they were doing. His idea was that she should crawl back here and beg his forgiveness, let him knock her around and use them girls against her all over again. A whole lot of reasons to hate a man I never met.”

“He’s not so bad.” Heat rose in Cissy’s cheeks.

“No? You sure of that?”

“He’s sorry, anyway.”

Rosemary’s face did not soften. “Maybe. The preachers say people can change. Me, I don’t know.”

“People change.” Cissy said it with more certainty than she felt. She remembered what M.T. had told her. “You the way to her heart. He can’t get there through Dede and Amanda because they hate him so much. But you. You the way. Get you and he’s got her. Don’t you think the man knows what he’s doing?”

“Maybe,” Rosemary said again in a voice as dark as her eyes, as silken as her hair. “Mostly, though, I think people die and start over. Get another chance next time.”

“Next life?” Cissy almost laughed. Another Buddhist come to Cayro. She started to speak, but Rosemary waved her cigarette in the air and the gesture stopped her. The brown cheek was wet.

“Go inside,” Rosemary said. “Nights here are too hot to be sober. And I can’t properly drink with you sitting there watching me.”

She remembered Delia’s angry words. You should look close and see. She looked close. Pain, and stubbornness. Who was Rosemary?

“This an’t bad,” Cissy said. “It’s almost cool now. You should have been here last August. It was so hot I thought I’d melt out of my underpants.”

Rosemary shrugged and took another little sip from the bottle.

Cissy propped her elbows on her knees and rested her chin on her hands. She listened to the crickets and the cars pulling into the gravel parking lot by the convenience store just past the Reitower house. Nadine Reitower had complained so fiercely about people using her driveway when they stopped at the little store that the owners had created the lot. No one ever turned in the driveway of Clint’s house except Deputy Tyler, who sometimes idled there to watch who was buying beer. Delia swore one of these days someone was going to kill themselves pulling drunk out of that store on their way back up to the highway. The deputy seemed to agree.

Rosemary seemed to be listening too, as she hugged that bottle against her hip. Her head moved slightly, as if she were counting time to some music only she could hear, and her gold necklace glinted.

“How’d you get that scar?” Cissy asked suddenly.

Rosemary paused with the bottle lifted slightly. “Why do you care?”

“Just curious.”

“You tell people how your eye got hurt?”

Cissy’s face burned. “Nobody asks.”

“Oh, people that polite around here?” Rosemary took another sip.

“I’m sorry,” Cissy said.

“Uh-huh.” Rosemary swirled the liquid in the bottle.

“Really, I’m sorry I asked.”

“Yeah.” Rosemary used the stub of her cigarette to light another and took a deep drag. “It was like your eye,” she said after a long silence. “Stupid damn accident. I ran into a wire fence in Rio when I was a girl. Just about cut my throat.” One finger traced the scar delicately.

“Most people see it, they think somebody did it to me.” The finger stroked the dark line under the necklace. In the light from the house it might have been a crease of skin or a shadow’s edge. “I always hated telling people I did it to myself. Used to make up lies about it, anything to avoid saying I got it doing something my mother had told me a hundred times not to do, running in the dark, just running in the dark.”

“Must have been scary.” Cissy watched Rosemary’s long fingers wrap around her throat.

“It was not a good time,” Rosemary said.

“It’s kind of dramatic.” Cissy wanted to comfort Rosemary in some way, give her back what she felt she had taken. “Dede thinks it’s kind of cool, sexy even.”

“Your sister has a lot of romantic notions.” Rosemary flicked ashes into the grass, her voice without inflection.

“She likes you,” Cissy said.

“I like her.”

“She says you coming here is the best thing that ever happened, that you are just what Cayro needs. I told her I couldn’t see why you came in the first place. You told Delia you would never come to Georgia.”

“You remember that too? Didn’t think you were paying attention.” The tip of Rosemary’s cigarette glowed brighter than a firefly. “But Delia warned me you never forgot anything. Trust a child, she told me, to remember what you want to forget.”

“Why don’t you have no children of your own?”

The cigarette drooped. Rosemary took it out of her mouth and exhaled smoke. “I just don’t,” she said. “And now I never will. Delia tell you about that?” She ground the cigarette out on the step and tossed the butt into the grass.

“No. She said you had your own reasons for coming.”

The sprinkler at the side of the house came on. Delia or Dede watered every other evening in the height of summer. A cool pocket of air drifted over them, and Rosemary waved her hand again, in the same arresting gesture as before.

“All this,” she said. “You with your hard little pinball eyes, that man in there eating her up every minute, Amanda with her pinched mouth and nasty looks, Dede like a big old sucker snake swallowing the air wherever she goes—all this, and still Delia is happy.” She shook her head slowly. “Happiest I’ve ever seen her.”

Cissy raised her chin. Pinball eyes. She did not have pinball eyes.