Ferris Beach (40 page)

“Here’s your present.” He handed me a small box carefully wrapped in gold paper, a white bow on top. It was a signet ring, my initials in fancy script, but when I tried to say thank you, everything caught up with me, and I ended up having to turn away and stare at my porch, the light over the door glowing, blurring as I tried not to cry. We just sat there until people started leaving, my name being called out with good-byes, called by people who were strangers to me. I was relieved when enough people had left that Merle and I could say good-bye as well. Misty and Sally Jean both hugged me, both oohed and aahed over my ring as they talked nonstop about the party. Mr. Rhodes went around picking up paper cups and drink cans and blowing out the tiki torches. It seemed I saw him linger in one corner of the yard, the little native face staring back, before he cupped his hand and blew out the light.

Merle and I sat on my front porch until midnight. The gates of Whispering Pines were like the entrance to a cave, the shrubs along our drive had grown so high. “You know, there still might be a way I can stay here,” he said. “I’ll talk to my dad again.” He stared straight ahead, hands in the back pockets of his worn jeans as he leaned against the porch rail and stared at the gates. “If only . . .” He stopped, eyes focused in the direction of the magnolia tree, and then the hedge of canna lilies, behind which his old neighborhood was springing back in a row of convenience stores and service stations. And then we just stood there, our
heads pressed together, as we rocked back and forth. When he left, I stayed out on the curb and watched until he disappeared in the direction of the trailer park. There was a slight breeze, warm and filled with the heavy scent of gardenias. As I was standing there, turning a slow circle, head tilted back to the sky, I saw the light go on in my father’s study. Then, within minutes came Judy Garland’s voice, the sound sending a chill over me,
what’ll I do,
and suddenly I had the feeling that he was there in his ink-stained chair, pen and pad on his lap as he sang along, and all I had to do was run inside and find him.

I stopped in the doorway, heart pounding as I saw her there, staring at the record as it turned. On her lap she held his little obituary box, filled with the yellowed newsprint carefully cut during “Gunsmoke.” I sighed and she turned as if snapping from a spell. “Have fun?” she asked, eyes puffy, a can of Schlitz neatly dressed out in a Coca-Cola skirt.

“I thought—” I took a step forward and then leaned against the open door, stared at the album cover there on the floor, a young Judy Garland with those sad brown eyes staring back at me.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” She was there then, face next to mine as she pulled me close. “I wasn’t thinking you’d be home this early. I lost track of the time is all.” She pointed to the box on the desk. “You know Fred would want his own write-up in the collection.” She nodded with each word, smiled, and then turned away long enough to pull a balled-up Kleenex from her robe pocket and dab her eyes. “Maybe I should have waited for ‘Gun-smoke’ to come on, right?” She laughed, closed the box, and put it in the top desk drawer. “But Angela is coming on Friday and might spend the night. Who knows what all Fred had going on with the lawyer that I don’t know about.” She shrugged. “I mean, what do we do with all of his old mess, Katie?” she asked, with a bewildered look on her face that then softened to a smile. “I mean, I
cant
throw it away. Clothes, yes, because some poor soul
can wear them and maybe get a new start in life; there are
plenty
of homeless, helpless, poor people, right?”

I nodded, ready to recite “Lord Forgive Me When I Whine” along with her, but she took a different path. “But these,” she said, and opened another drawer, lifted a huge stack of loose papers, all covered in his sloppy little script. She held them to her chest. “Did you know that he has pages and pages about someone who cleans the beauty shop at night, puts a chemical in some hair dye?” She put the stack back in the drawer, her large hand patting it affectionately. “You see, there’s this one woman who has her hair dyed regularly, and it’s a strange shade of red, so strange that the killer knows this bottle of dye is
only
used on her.” She shook her head. “It’s a horrible story, and it doesn’t work at all. I mean, wouldn’t they suspect this man?” She took a sip of her skirted beer and motioned that we leave the room. I watched her turning off the stereo, turning out the light, and then closing the door behind us.

“Oh, by the way,” she said as I turned to go up the stairs, “your father picked out a car for you a couple of weeks ago. It’s not new, but it’s in good shape.” She patted my hand and then left hers there on top as I gripped the stair post. “Now, if you don’t like it, I’m sure we can pick something else, really. Your father’s taste was—” She stared down at her bedroom shoes, shook her head as if the sight of those shoes I had given her so long before mirrored her thought regarding my father’s taste. “Your father bought you a used taxi, Mary Katherine.” She said the words hastily, but firmly. “He had the meter removed and the plexiglass between the seats removed, and he had it painted dark green.” She paused, took in a deep breath. “He thought you would enjoy a car big enough to carry around a lot of friends, so he asked that they leave the little pull-out stool. He said it was the safest car made,
built like a tank.
He was so thrilled when he found it, really, that’s all I heard.” Her hand tightened on my own. “You have to remember that there are a lot of teenagers who never have a car
all their own, certainly no one in my generation did. I was not in favor of this decision, but your father insisted, so I want you to keep in mind how
lucky
you are.” Her voice softened. “But if you don’t want this car, well”—she squeezed even harder, took another sip of Schlitz—“I’ll drive the Checker and you can drive the wagon. You sleep on it.” She turned then and disappeared down the hall, stooping to turn on her nightlight, leaving her door open so she could see the yellow glow. “Happy birthday,” I heard her call when I was halfway up the stairs, and I wished that she would ask me to come and get in her bed, to lie there in my father’s spot as we talked; or I wished that she would appear in my doorway the way Angela had done so many times, to stretch out close to me and ask how I was feeling, to tuck in the covers the way Mo Rhodes used to do, to lean over and press her lips to my forehead, lips to my cheek. I wanted to ask her how she felt on my birthday, how she felt that moment when she first saw me; had she ever regretted it, ever regretted any second of her life? Had she been different when she was thirty-four years old and wanted Angela to love her, to think of her as a mother or even as a friend as the two giggled side by side in the movies? I woke throughout the night thinking that I felt her beside me—but nothing, a ghost of my own creation.

Merle spent several late afternoons of that last week working in Mrs. Poole’s yard, which meant we spent those afternoons together as I followed him around, helping prune bushes and rake the cut grass. “Your daughter is chasing him,” I overheard Mrs. Poole say to my mother as they stood on the sidewalk; Sally Jean crossed the street to join them, while I waited for Merle to walk from the direction of the warehouse. Mrs. Poole was still mad that I had bought
boys’
Levi’s with my gift certificate. “I’m paying that boy to work, not court.”

“But he’s moving soon,” Sally Jean said, and then turned to my mother. “We have had such a time laughing over Fred buying that taxicab.” She nudged my mother’s arm. “It’s a hoot. I think it’s really—” She paused, taking her time. “It’s
eccentric.”
She nodded confidently with her choice of words. “And that’s nice. What a wonderful man he was.”

“I think it’s”—Mrs. Poole leaned forward and then backed down as my mother stared at her—“not my style. I’m getting a new car as well.”

Those afternoons when Merle took a break and waited for further instructions from Mrs. Poole, I sat with him either outside in her swing or inside on her sun porch. We talked about everything except his move by then, the avoidance of the subject and the suddenness of the passing days making our conversations stiffer than normal, our quick kisses as awkward and fumbling as they’d been in the beginning. We talked mostly about things that we’d like to do; he wanted to travel across the country, to see the Grand Canyon, giant redwoods, Old Faithful. I wanted to breed and raise Abyssinians and to drive an inconspicuous Toyota like everyone else in my class who had a car. Or better, I wanted the self-confidence to be able to drive the Checker without feeling like a large green monster. Merle wanted a car, period, no motorcycles ever, just the mention of which led us all the way back around to our beginning. I told him about Angela and how I had spent years wishing that she was my mother, that Misty and I had figured it out so many times, all the ways that it could have been true, all the reasons to believe it. “I guess I just wanted to have a secret,” I said. “Something to make my life exciting and mysterious.”

Merle shrugged, said he thought there were a lot of secrets better kept that way. “Like, don’t you wish.” We were sitting in the far sunny corner of Mrs. Poole’s porch, beside a round table filled with geraniums. “Like, don’t you wish you’d never been in the tree that night? Don’t you wish that we’d just decided to start talking to one another one day at school or over here when I was working?” I nodded along; I didn’t tell him that so many times I had wondered if that very event had somehow created our bond, that I had wondered if he would have even looked at me twice had I not witnessed it all.

He leaned closer to me. “Aren’t you sorry that you saw what
happened that night?” My father used to say that information is only good if you plan to use it. Why should Misty’s family be haunted by unnecessary knowledge? Why should anyone need to know who Angela’s father was? Why put a secret door in a story if you’re not going to open it? At the time I had interpreted the last question as an intimation that there
was
a secret door, a door soon to be opened. But would I have done anything with that information other than to tuck it away like a secret, the same way I tucked away Perry’s cold stare and flat voice as she thrust that worn-out carcoat towards me—and the way I tucked away her look of horror as she lay pinned on the ground.

My mother was preoccupied for days on end as she went through my father’s things; she was having a hard time sorting the important papers from his doodles. She made steady calls and visits to the lawyer. There was a determined look on her face, and I knew that she wanted everything neat and tidy before Angela arrived.

“I still can’t believe you’d even want an outsider here,” Mrs. Poole said. “When Mr. Bo died, I did not invite anyone to hear my business.”

“Angela is family,” my mother said, nodding as I entered the room where she had a stack of shoeboxes, each with a label neatly written in her handwriting. “Fred was her legal guardian until she turned twenty-one.”

“Where
is
her daddy?” Mrs. Poole asked, and raised her eyebrows as if in an attempt to stop her twitch. “I never got all that straight.”

“Her father”—my mother was speaking through clenched teeth, her Boston accent surfacing—“died in Korea.” She looked at me in a way that commanded I pretend I had heard this story a million and one times.

“Oh, my,” Mrs. Poole said. “I had no idea, I was beginning to think . . .” Her voice trailed off as she stared at the canna lilies
and crumpled up an empty cigarette pack. “Well, at least she can take comfort that he died for a good cause and not of a rotten liver.”

“Pardon?” Mama’s eyebrows went straight up as she waited for an explanation for Mrs. Poole’s slip of the tongue.
Bo Poole died of consumption, all right,
I could hear my father saying.

“Pardon?” Mrs. Poole repeated, realizing her slip. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You said something about a rotten liver,” I said, and though my mother turned suddenly, face flushed, I knew she was glad I had pursued the subject.

“I said”—Mrs. Poole lit a cigarette and took a deep drag—“I said I hope Maralee Landell never again cooks that old rotten liver and onions.” She nodded emphatically. “I thought I’d die from it, which, as I was saying, would not be a very noble way to die like it is to die for your country.” She thumped her ash, making little gray flecks land on the table. “Now, my Mr. Bo, well, he was one of the military’s finest, you know.”

“Just like Angela’s father,” my mother added, as Mrs. Poole stared back with her lips screwed up tight.

“I am
tired,”
Mrs. Poole said fiercely. “Of people talking about Toyotas! They are of the Japanese and by the Japanese, and is
this
why Robert Manchester Poole risked his life in the Pacific? For better gas mileage?” She beat her fist on the table, and I watched my mother beginning to shake, first her shoulders and then her chest, hands pressed to her face before she suddenly let out a laugh like I hadn’t seen in years, tears rolling down her cheeks as she begged Mrs. Poole to stop making her laugh so. “Give me a Lincoln!” Mrs. Poole said, clearly annoyed that my mother wasn’t taking her seriously.

“Or give me death!” my mother screamed. She laughed for a solid five minutes, Mrs. Poole smoking like a dragon and shaking her head the whole while. When Mama finally pulled herself together, she apologized to Mrs. Poole. “I just don’t know what
crept over me,” she said, eyes still glistening, her large hand on my arm.

“You need to make yourself an appointment, Cleva.” Mrs. Poole nodded knowingly.

“That wasn’t true, was it? About Angela’s father?” I whispered later, as my mother was writing
old gradebooks and exams
on another shoebox, placing it on top of one that read,
Fred’s ideas.
She stopped her writing, black Magic Marker held and bleeding onto the cardboard.

“No,” she said, and shook her head. “You know all there is to know about Angela.” She lifted her hand as if in a pledge. “At least you know what / know about Angela.” She finished her writing and then put the cap on the marker. “Her mother got pregnant and
never
told who the father was.”