Little Gale Gumbo (33 page)

Dahlia followed her sister to the front, dropping into the window booth. “Sounds like ol' Wayne's getting serious.”

“Maybe.” Josie shrugged, joining Dahlia on the opposite bench. “I do love him, you know.”

Dahlia leaned across the table. “Well, it doesn't mean you have to marry him, Joze. You're twenty-one, for Christ's sake.”

“So? Momma got married at eighteen.”

“And look what a fucking disaster that turned out to be.”

Josie sighed. “I'm not like you, Dahl,” she said softly. “I don't want to be alone.”

“I never said I wanted to be alone.” Dahlia turned to the window. “I thought I saw Jack leaving here while I was parking.”

“You did,” Josie said, watching her sister's wistful expression. She'd worried Dahlia might have seen Jack. The island seemed to get smaller every day.

“He was getting pralines for Irene. You remember how much she loves them.”

Dahlia nodded, smiling sadly. If only she could forget.

A heavy silence landed between them. Dahlia rose, needing air. Lots of it, she decided.

She climbed out from the booth, kissing her sister on the cheek. “See you in a few days, sweetie.”

“A few days?” Josie turned, strangely panicked. “Where are you going?”

But Josie knew, of course, even as Dahlia grabbed a stack of pralines on her way by the counter.

“You give Matty my love, you hear me?” Josie yelled as the kitchen door swung closed, as if she were offering for the first time, instead of the hundredth.

 

“You sure you won't have some of this, Jo?”

Wayne pushed his plate of linguine with mussels across the stiff white tablecloth. Josie shook her head. She'd barely managed to eat half of the filet mignon he'd insisted on ordering for her. Dahlia's spur-of-the-minute road trip had left her annoyed and undone, and she felt guilty for it. Josie knew how much Wayne had planned for this evening, how much he loved her.

“Save room for dessert,” he said when she set down her fork.

“Dessert? Wayne, I can't even finish dinner. . . .”

“Oh, come on,” he urged gently. “I already special-ordered it. I had to. It takes a while to make.”

The hope in his soft eyes, made brighter by the table's candle, seemed almost stubborn. Josie knew he was determined to see this night through. And somewhere between the parking garage and the waiter handing them their menus, she'd known why he had gone to so much trouble. Just as she knew what was in the ramekin even before it arrived in front of her, a small ring box, set in a nest of rose petals, and a thousand feelings charged through her.

“Let me,” Wayne said, his hands shaking as he slid the ring on her finger.

Josie could sense the tables around them growing quiet, hear the telltale shifting of chairs, diners turning to watch. After years of being watched so closely, she wished Wayne had chosen a more private space to propose, but it didn't matter now. What mattered, Josie told herself, lifting her eyes to find Wayne's crinkling with excitement and watery with tears, was that he loved her and he always had. With luck, he always would.

When she returned home, Camille and Ben were asleep, and Josie told herself it wasn't fair to wake them, that the news of her engagement could wait until morning. Passing through the parlor, she saw one of Camille's red love candles on the sideboard, and her heart sank to think her mother had as little faith as Josie did herself in her answer.

She walked back to the kitchen and found the sheet of paper on the fridge with Matthew's summer address and a phone number where he could be reached in an emergency, which, Josie realized as she dialed, was exactly what this was.

 

By ten that night, the apartment above the stables had finally quieted after a rowdy dinner of lobsters that one of Matthew's roommates had acquired from an enamored waitress in Edgar-town. The cramped kitchen had emptied out quickly, no one wanting to clean up the soaking newspapers that still lay stuck to the table like papier-mâché, covered in piles of red-orange shells, drained butter dishes, and empty beer bottles.

Matthew had been down on the beach when Josie's call came in, and the message he received when he returned, sandy and still drunk, seemed almost expected to him. But not so an hour later, when he was deep asleep and a knock came on his bedroom door, his roommate Doug leaning in to announce, “Yo, Matt. There's someone here to see you. Someone hot.”

Dahlia.

Matthew tore down the hall, down the stairs, caring too late that he'd be winded when he arrived, that she'd see again how glad he was to see her, when he should be angry that she'd not bothered to call first, that she'd just presumed to find him available. Which he was. And he would have been no matter what.

“You look skinny,” she told him as he carried her bag up the stairs. He introduced her to the two roommates who were still awake, sprawled out and drinking beer in one of the front bedrooms. They offered her a bottle and she accepted it.

“My room's back here,” Matthew said, leading her down a narrow hallway and into a low-ceilinged room with faded travel posters on the wall to hide chunks of missing plaster.

Dahlia fell onto his bed. “I'm starved,” she said. “Let's get dinner.”

“Shit, I just gorged myself on lobster. And it's almost midnight.”

She grabbed his shirt off the end of the bed and tossed it at him. “Then we'd better hurry.”

 

Nell's was the only place still open when they finally made it into Vineyard Haven. They carried paper trays of fried clams and onion rings down to the docks and watched the floating lights of the yachts in the harbor, the dark sea crowded with them.

“I think Wayne's going to ask Josie to marry him,” Dahlia said.

“He did. She just called.”

“Of course she called. She wanted you to tell her not to.”

“Why would she want me to do that?”

Dahlia gave him a flat look. “Oh, please.”

“What?”

“Why do you think?”

He shrugged lamely. “How should I know?”

She dragged an onion ring through a pile of ketchup, smiling. “Did you know that when we were kids, she used to keep a strand of your hair in her shoe to make you fall in love with her?”

“You're so full of shit. . . .”

“I swear to God. She used to sleep with one of your unwashed socks under her pillow too.”

“What the hell for?”

“So you'd never leave her.”

“Jesus.”

Matthew frowned at his pile of clams. He knew there was no point in playing dumb anymore. He'd always had his suspicions, grinding tremors in his stomach, but hearing Dahlia say it out loud sealed it.

“Funny, isn't it?” he said.

“What?”

“Her wanting it to be me, and me wanting it to be you.”

“Matty . . .” Dahlia turned her gaze to the water. “I didn't come here to start this. . . .”

“Then why did you come?” he demanded.

“I don't know. I just thought you might like to see a friendly face.” She sighed. “Why does everything always have to mean something?”

“Fuck, because it does, Dee. You'd think so too if I was Jack.”

Matthew knew it had been the wrong thing to say. Dahlia's eyes darted to him, looking wounded. “I don't want to talk about Jack.”

“Fine,” Matthew said, rising. “That makes two of us.”

But even as they walked back to the car and drove the green VW Bug down the island's dark and twisting roads, Matthew knew there would be no salvaging the night. Back at the stable, he gave Dahlia sheets for the pullout, but by three a.m., she had padded into his room and slid into bed behind him. His skin smelled of salt; his fingers, draped over his shoulder, still reeked of lobster.

“He's marrying Mandy Kinney,” Dahlia whispered. “She's pregnant.”

Matthew rolled around to face Dahlia and pulled her against him. He felt her tears wet his neck, even as her hands slipped inside his boxers.

 

When Ben opened the café the next morning, Wayne and Josie had still not arrived for work. Camille was in the kitchen, flattening garlic cloves with the heel of her hand. Ben could see she was anxious.

“I didn't even hear her come in last night. Did you?” she asked.

“It's obviously a good sign,” Ben said. “Maybe they just went ahead and eloped.”

Camille gasped. “Don't you dare say it. A mother deserves at least one wedding, doesn't she?”

“I agree.” Reaching over to take the pan of corn bread Camille had just pulled from the oven, Ben kissed her cheek and whispered, “Why do you think I've been offering for years?”

Camille blushed, smiling down at her crowded cutting board. It had become a joke between them, his asking and her declining. After nearly seven years as best friends, six as business partners and almost as many as lovers, they had both come to the conclusion that marriage would have been redundant. Even if she were to ask Charles for a divorce, which Ben knew would have been far more trouble for both of them than it was worth. As it was, they were as good as married. Maybe even better.

“Sorry we're late.”

Josie appeared, hurrying to tie on her apron. Wayne followed, looking flushed. After a few moments of silence while they unloaded muffins and pralines from the pantry, Camille slammed down her knife and exclaimed, “Now you both just stop this right now and 'fess up before I expire!”

They all burst out laughing and the news was shared quickly with handshakes and hugs before the day's first customers forced Wayne and Ben out to the front.

When they were alone, Camille drew Josie to her and kept her close.

“Are you happy, baby?”

Josie nodded, tears rising. “I want to be, Momma. I know I can be now.”

Camille smoothed her daughter's long red hair. “It's all going to work out. You'll see.”

“Is that why you dressed the love candle?” Josie pulled back, the hurt so clear on her face. “I saw it on my way upstairs last night.”

“Oh, baby girl . . .” Camille cradled Josie's cheeks in her hands as her own eyes began to water. “That candle wasn't for you. It was for your sister. Because she doesn't know that she can be loved. And I'm starting to worry that she never will.”

Twenty-five

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was going to be another rainy week, Wayne thought as he turned the café's Closed sign around at four o'clock. The forecast had predicted storms by the next morning, and sure enough, the afternoon sky was already blooming with heavy clouds. He hoped Josie didn't get caught in any showers on her way back from the store. He'd pressed her to take the car, but she'd insisted on walking, claiming she needed the fresh air, a request she'd been making more and more often. He knew she missed her sister. Dahlia had been living on the Cape for most of the summer, tending to the gardens of a lawyer from Boston. Probably tending to the lawyer too, Wayne had suspected but never said outright. Matthew had also left the island for the season, working at a summer camp up north. Wayne wasn't sure whose absence upset his wife more. Two years into their marriage and he hadn't yet figured out how to be Josie's whole world.

He gave the sky one last look, then moved into the back to clean up. He had filled the sink when he heard the bells of the front door jingling and he cursed under his breath, realizing he'd turned the sign but not the lock. When he came out from the kitchen, he found a red-haired man wandering the length of the counter, peering into the empty cases.

“Sorry, sir. We're closed.”

When the man stood up and Wayne could see the trumpet case in his hand, he felt as if he'd swallowed ice cream too fast.

Charles Bergeron looked just as Wayne had imagined him, rangy and slick. Everything about the older man seemed to wear a slippery shine: his pumpkin orange hair, his green polyester shirt, his pointed shoes. Only his eyes, the same blue as Josie's, didn't shine. They were as dull as a pair of unwashed headlights.

“Camille here?”

“No,” Wayne said. “She had to run an errand.... You're Charles, aren't you?”

Charles's pale eyes narrowed on Wayne, as if he weren't sure whether to be flattered or nervous at being identified.

Charles answered slowly, his long nostrils flaring out. “Do I know you?”