Island Girl (21 page)

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Authors: Lynda Simmons

BOOK: Island Girl
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“Over here,” she said to him. “See? We found a cage and made a nest inside a box.”
Cage, box. What the hell was going on? I pushed past her to the stairs, swung back the door, and tried to make sense of the scene in my kitchen at least.
Two women on my couch, reading magazines and eating more of those muffins. Another leaning back over the sink and a third finishing her coffee at my workstation while Grace cut her hair. And everywhere at once, it seemed, was Mary Anne in one of her long skirts and ridiculous off-the-shoulder blouses, pouring coffee, serving muffins, and flapping her hands like a bird.
The women called out hello one after the other. Hi. How are you? Welcome, welcome. As though I was the unexpected surprise and not them.
“Mom,” Grace said. “Where’s Mark?”
Music came at me again from somewhere. The CD player on the shelf. But it was the wrong music. Too loud, too fast. Completely, utterly wrong.
“Ruby, sweetie,” Mary Anne said. “Good to see you. How are you feeling?”
She kissed me on the cheek and held out a cup. “I saw you at the gate, so I made a cup of tea.”
I ignored her and went straight to Grace. “What’s going on? Why didn’t you call me?”
She looked confused. “You said you didn’t want to work today.”
I shook my head. “I would never say such a thing. Never. What are you trying to pull?”
Grace’s cheeks pinkened and the women hushed, and somewhere outside that bloody bird kept on singing and singing.
“You told me last night,” Grace insisted. “You said you were going to stay and take care of Mark and that you’d be too tired to work this morning.”
That was why I was at his house, in his bed. To look after him and his aching knee. That made some sense, but the rest of Grace’s story was impossible. “Did I also tell you to handle everything on your own today?”
She looked down at the floor. “No. You told me to cancel the appointments.”
I drew my head back. “I what?”
“I swear it’s true.” Her eyes were bright and shiny. Any second now the lying bitch was going to cry. “You sent me home to call everyone and cancel.”
“She’s telling the truth,” said the girl with the stop-sign red hair. “I was there and so was my dad.”
I stared at the girl. The one who had stolen something from the lighthouse. Hidden it here in my home with Grace.
“Mom?”
I spun around. Pulled back my hand. Slapped that lying bitch right across the mouth. Watched her face crumple. The tears fall. If Mary Anne hadn’t grabbed her away, I’d have smacked her again. “I don’t know what you’ve cooked up here,” I said to Grace. “But it is about to stop.” I snatched the scissors from her hands. “Get out. I can’t look at you right now.”
“Ruby, it’s okay,” the woman in the chair said. “She does my hair every week. She knows what she’s doing. And she’s doing a great job.”
“A great job?” I had to laugh. “Look at this place. There’s water all over the floor. Hair everywhere. And what kind of music is that? This is Chez Ruby. We play Big Band here. Benny Good-man, Artie Shaw. Not this, this, drivel.”
“Ruby, really,” one of the couch potatoes said.
“It’s okay,” Grace said. “I understand. She’s been sick. She had cancer.”
The couch potatoes said, “Oh my.” Mary Anne’s eyebrows shot up and the woman in the chair said, “You poor thing.”
I looked over at Grace. “What are you talking about?”
“Mom, I know,” she said. “I know.”
I shook my head, punched a button on the CD player. Blessed silence. Except for that bird. I pointed the scissors at the window. “Will someone kill that thing?”
“Mom, please,” Grace whined, and I turned on her.
“Just answer me this. If I did tell you to cancel the appointments, then what are they doing here?”
“I didn’t think it would be good to cancel. I thought that if they just came I could—”
“What? You could what? Handle my shop alone? Make it Chez Grace for a day? Who were you kidding? You’re not capable of it, Gracie. Not for an instant. Do you hear me?”
“Ruby, put the scissors down.”
I turned, saw Mark in the doorway. “I can’t,” I told him. “I have work to do.”
“No, you don’t. We’re going canoeing, remember?”
“I can’t go anywhere now. I have clients. Grace can’t handle this alone.” I looked around. “Where’s my notebook? I need my notebook.”
“I don’t know about the notebook,” Mark said. “But I do know that Grace is doing okay on her own.”
I stared at him. “Mark, look around. She’s made a mockery of everything. And she’s taking too long, she always takes too long. Judy needs to be out by noon. She’ll never make it.” I turned to the woman in the chair. “What’s your name?”
“Ruby, it’s me,” she said. “Joannie from Algonquin Island.”
“Do you need to be out by noon?” She shook her head. “Then get out of the chair. Call Judy. Tell her to get in here.” I swung around to the women on the couch. “The rest of you . . . I don’t know. I’ll figure something out. But right now I need my goddamn notebook.”
Mark put his hands on my shoulders. “Ruby, give me the scissors.”
Maybe it was the way the silence suddenly pressed in on me or the looks on the faces all around me. I don’t think I’ll ever know what stopped me, what made me come back to the moment. But for some reason, I was acutely aware of what I had just done.
My daughter was outside, crying. My best friend was on the verge herself, and my clients—women I’d known for years, women I considered friends—were staring at me as though they’d never seen me before. They were right. They hadn’t. This was the new Ruby. Big Al’s girl. And she was down by more than a few points.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly and handed him the scissors. “I’m so sorry.”
Sweet, wonderful Mary Anne put her arms around me. Turned me away from all those accusing eyes and rounded mouths. “It’s okay,” she said. “You had a really rough night. It’s no wonder you’re a little tense.”
Avoid stress. Meds, exercise, sleep. Please God. I needed to sleep.
Another woman from Algonquin Island appeared at the door. This one I knew.
“Don’t get upset,” Mary Anne said. “I called her. She’s here to help.”
It was Lori, who worked at a salon in the city. Lori, who wanted to open her own place here on the Island. Lori, who was my worst nightmare and had somehow become the cavalry.
I had to laugh. It was that or cry and Grace was doing enough of that for both of us. “I’m sorry,” I said again.
Mary Anne waved a hand. “No more of that,” she said, guiding me past Lori to the door. “You take yourself canoeing. We’ll talk later.” She lowered her voice. “And Ruby, we will definitely talk later.”
I nodded and let her pass me off to Mark. “I have to kill that bird,” I told him as we stepped outside.
“Later,” he said, and for the first time in my life, I let myself be led away.
LIZ
 
The last time I woke to the sound of cartoons, I was nineteen years old and married to Antony Andreou. We’d only known each other six weeks when we decided it was meant to be—and the announcement of our engagement was equally appalling to both families. While his mother wept for days over the tragedy of a son brought low by the siren song of a barbarian, Ruby assumed the whole thing was about her—one more way for me to thumb my nose at her lifestyle, her choices, her many, many sacrifices.
She couldn’t understand that my decision to marry Tony had nothing to do with spite and everything to do with a match made in heaven, love at first sight, two hearts colliding—all of those wonderfully romantic notions that can still make me sigh if I’m ever dumb enough to turn on
Sleepless in Seattle
, or
Ever After
, or any of those made-for-women movies that offend me deeply on one level and are irresistible on another.
I can’t explain this weakness other than to say that I was young and impressionable when Mark moved in with us. Maybe it was the way he looked at my mother, or the way he defended her even when she was wrong, or the fact that he wasn’t afraid to say “I love you” out loud and often that made my little girl’s heart believe in charming princes and happily ever after.
Poor Grace was equally afflicted, and even though my mother’s fairy tale ended with Mark’s bags at the ferry dock and every lock on our house changed, it was too late for either of us. The damage had been done. We were full-blown romantics, and when I said “I do” at City Hall, promising to love, honor, and spend my life with Tony, I meant it. How could I have known that Scooby-Doo would turn our love into to a lie?
The problem was that while Tony was prepared to fight for the right to marry the woman he loved, he saw no reason to fight the offer of a free room in his parent’s basement.
We have to buy a house, right? Houses cost money, right? So we move into my old room, you finish law school while I go to work, and in five years, bam, we got a down payment. Makes sense, right?
It might have if not for the big TV in Tony’s room.
In all the weeks leading up to the wedding, no one had ever mentioned the fact that his five-year-old brother, George, had been eating breakfast and watching early morning cartoons on Tony’s television every day since he was born. I know for a fact that this omission had nothing to do with subterfuge and everything to do with being Greek, because if his mother had foreseen any difficulty in our future, she would have told me about it the moment her baby boy presented the barbarian slut as his intended.
The reason no one mentioned George’s little ritual was because no one saw it as a problem. Not even Tony.
You have to get up for school, right? I have to go work, right? So where’s the problem? Unlock the door. Let the boy watch the TV.
Even if I refused, Georgie had his own controller and at 5:30 A.M. on the dot, the fat little bastard would flick on the TV, crank up the volume, and wait while the Flintstones or the Freakazoids or Scooby Doo came blasting into our room.
Rets ret roing, reryrone
.
The little shit knew he had me because not only was that television huge, it also had a five-speaker sound system and a subwoofer that could make your chest hum. The moment Scooby opened his mouth, I’d sit bolt upright, Tony would leap out of bed, and his mother would start stomping on the kitchen floor above us.
What, are you crazy down there? Let him in before we all go deaf.
The few times I unplugged the goddamn television, the kid stood outside the door and howled like I’d cut off his arm or something. Which of course brought everybody down those stairs in seconds, all of them hollering and pointing fingers at the selfish bitch. I didn’t stand a chance in that ten-by-twelve-foot hellhole.
By the end of the first month I’d thrown the clock, the phone, and our remote control at the television. By the end of the third I’d smacked Tony with all of them, and by the end of the sixth, our marriage was over. Tony couldn’t tell the little shit no, I couldn’t live with the kid barging in every morning with a smirk on his face and toast in his hand, and his mother couldn’t get me packed up fast enough.
Rets ret roing, rararian
.
Ruby laughed when I turned up with my bags. “Nothing lasts forever,” she said. “But six months is embarrassing, even for you.”
She didn’t understand that I wasn’t embarrassed, I was heart-broken. My lifelong love, my vow eternal, shattered by Scooby fucking Doo. And I can honestly say that cartoons have never been heard in my home since—until this morning.
I was lying there with my eyes closed—because I knew from experience that it was going to hurt to open them—listening to what could only be cartoons and thinking about Tony for the first time in years. While it wasn’t Scooby I was hearing—or the Flintstones or anything else I recognized—the music, the voices, the overdone sound effects left no room for doubt. Cartoons were definitely playing close by, and my poor hungover brain could only wonder where I was and who had turned on the television. And how come my left shoulder hurt?
Raising my right hand to block out the light, I finally opened one eye. Saw a black bedside table, a glass of water, a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol, and a framed picture of Grace and me as kids—tongues out, eyes crossed, index fingers up our noses. Definitely my room. But who was in here with me?
I lowered my hand and closed my eye again. “Whoever opened those curtains is dead.”
“Finally, you’re awake,” a woman said. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
Her voice was close, familiar, and slightly pissed off—which was funny considering it was my place, my television, and my curtains that were open. “Happily no,” I said, lifting my head this time and squinting into the light.
“Well, it’s noon,” Brenda the Former Bartender said and rose from the sofa in front of the television. On the screen, a new show began—Bugs and Daffy stepping out in top hat and tails. O
verture, curtains, lights.
I half-expected George to come bounding into the room and smear jam on my pillow.

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