Pieces of the Heart (4 page)

“I’m sorry; I didn’t realize you had company.” She was about to give him a polite smile when she saw that the man was holding her teacup—the New Orleans mug with the chip at the top—and he was wearing a bright plaid shirt with white buttons running down the front. She stopped in front of him. “Excuse me, but do you drive a black Nissan pickup?”

He straightened, making him the same height as the bear, and smiled at Caroline. “Yes, I do, but she’s not for sale.”

She felt the blood rush to her head at about the same time all of her doctor’s warnings took refuge somewhere outside conscious thought. A tinge of conscience brushed her brain as she realized that this man was a total stranger and probably had no clue that he had nearly killed her. Then she remembered what he and Rainy had been talking about, and how the closing of Rainy Days would be like another death to her, and that was the last thing she would ever give up.

She jabbed her index finger at him like an angry wasp. “You have a lot of nerve. You almost ran me over with your stupid truck, dumped mud and muck and God knows what else all over me, and then you have the audacity to even
think
you could possibly buy this store and pretend you belong here just so you can yuk it up with your buddies from whatever city you crawled out of.”

She didn’t even pause for breath or consider that she was essentially just a visitor from Atlanta, even when she noticed that Rainy was trying not to smile and the stranger had a similar expression. “I wish all you damned tourists would just go home. You come up here with your fancy cars and funny clothes and do nothing but pollute our air and crowd our roads. It’s too late in the season, buddy. Why don’t you just go on home to Charlotte or Atlanta or wherever you’re from and shoot each other so there’s less of you all to bother us.”

Neither Rainy nor the stranger had moved during her entire tirade, and he continued staring at her with that strange half smile. Caroline remained where she was, taking deep breaths and waiting for a reaction. Finally she turned to Rainy. “I’m sorry; I’m not in the mood to chat anymore. I’ll stop by another time so we can catch up in
privacy
.”

She kissed Rainy on the cheek and headed for the door, feeling completely righteous.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

Caroline turned to face the stranger, tossing around in her head whether she should accept his apology or not. “Yes?”

“You might want to remove that patch of toilet paper sticking to your cheek before you leave. It looks kinda funny.”

Rainy had the good sense to keep quiet as Caroline, with as much dignity as she could summon, pulled open the door and left the shop.

J
EWEL REED PAUSED FOR A MOMENT WITH HER BACK AGAINST THE bedroom door, listening for the sound of the buzz saw coming from her father’s workroom. The reassuring whine of the tool started up again, drowning out even the waverunner on the lake and giving Jewel a chance to sneak into the unused bedroom, snapping the door shut behind her.

The blinds were closed, blocking out the morning sun. Small arms of escaped sunbeams reached toward the stack of cardboard boxes, the packing tape still sealed along the seams. One year wasn’t a long time to have lived in a new place, but it was sure long enough to have unpacked all the moving boxes already.

She listened furtively again for the sound of the saw before turning back to the boxes. It wasn’t as if her father had actually
said
she wasn’t supposed to be messing with her mother’s things, so what she was doing wasn’t
technically
wrong. Besides, if she was real careful, he’d never find out.

She headed to the trunk pushed up against the wall between the windows with three boxes stacked on it. Jewel grunted as she tried to lift the one on top. Inch by inch, she shifted it closer and closer to the edge of the box beneath, then stumbled backward to catch it as it pitched forward. Unable to grab the smooth surface, she watched the box slide to the hardwood floor, landing with a loud thump.

Jewel froze, holding her breath and listening for her dad to call up to her. She heard the sound of the buzz saw instead and she sighed with relief before turning her attention to the box that had conveniently landed on its bottom. With nails nearly chewed to the quick, she managed to pick at the packing tape until she could pry it up and pull it off with a satisfying rip.

Crumpled white packing paper lay on top, and Jewel placed her hands on it, ready to toss it aside, but paused. These were her mother’s things—things she had owned, touched, and used during her brief life and were deemed too personal to be given away by her father. She felt her first twinge of guilt and glanced back at the closed door. It was almost like prying into her parents’ personal love story, the quieted words between them now contained inside the cardboard boxes and trunk in front of her.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Thinking about her mother always made her want to cry, but she had promised herself that she wouldn’t. Ever since her mom had died almost three years ago, her dad had been looking at her funny, as if wondering why she wouldn’t cry. She couldn’t tell him. She didn’t really know him, after all. It had always been mostly her and her mother because her dad was always working. But if he had asked, she would have told him that crying for her mother would have been like a permanent good-bye. It was what people did when they said good-bye to people they wouldn’t see for a while, or when something precious was broken. Or at a funeral. It was acknowledging that something was gone from your life for good.

Lifting the first wad of paper, she threw it to the floor. Her mom wasn’t gone from her life. Jewel couldn’t see her, but she was there. She felt her. And she saw her mother every time she looked in a mirror—just the thirteen-year-old version of herself with the same long red curly hair.

As she grabbed the next wad of paper, she had the reassuring thought that maybe her mom was making her do this. Her dad seemed to be frozen when it came to grieving for her mom. Sure, he had packed them up and moved them from Charleston to Hicksville, quit his job as a lawyer and started making furniture. He said it was a new beginning for both of them. He had even started trying to have conversations with her.

As if that wasn’t retarded enough, he’d left her mom’s things in boxes in the extra room, like monuments to dead people you saw in old cemeteries. But her mother hadn’t wanted a monument. Her ashes had been scattered into the Atlantic Ocean, flooding the wind with the spirit of the wonderful person who had been her mother. Jewel remembered how the sky had darkened for a moment, then brightened with sharp bands of sunlight electrifying it. But only she and her Grandma Rainy had noticed, probably because everybody else had been busy crying. Crying over things you couldn’t bring back made you miss out on the really cool things life seemed to throw at you when you least expected it.

She bent inside the box and lifted wrapped items that felt a lot like the metal and glass holders for her mom’s yoga candles and placed them on the floor beside the box. She leaned in again, her hands grabbing hold of a soft, cotton gauze skirt, and she knew before looking at it what it would be. It was the red-and-gold sari her mother had brought back from her parents’ honeymoon to India. Every time her mother wore it, she’d say how she and Jewel’s father were going to go back again someday when he wasn’t so busy at work. But they never did.

Jewel lifted the sari and several more items of clothing out of the box, raising them to her face and sniffing deeply, smelling her mother’s scent of floral soap and earth.
I miss you, Mom. I miss you so much.
She swallowed thickly as she put the clothing on the floor next to the candleholders, wondering if her dad had kept her mother’s nightgown to help him go to sleep at night. Jewel didn’t hear him stumbling about the darkened house in the middle of the night anymore, so maybe he’d found something of her mother’s to help him get through the long nights.

She peered in the half-empty box again and saw what looked like a folded quilt—something she’d never seen before. Wrinkling her brow, she pulled it out, catching the scent of mothballs as she did. The fabrics were dark blue and maroon, colors she didn’t associate with her mom. In fact, she didn’t associate quilts with her mom at all. She looked closer at the panel covering the top fold and read the quilted lettering: HPHS 1992.
Hart’s Peak High School?
Below it was a brown fabric football, the hand-stitching around the edges tiny and perfect. Nineteen-ninety had been her mother’s graduation year, but what was the football all about? To her knowledge, her mother had never willingly watched a football game in her entire life. Or quilted.

But this quilt was different from other quilts she’d seen. It looked like it had been pieced together from a scrapbook—with silk-screened photos and pieces of material that looked like they were from baby blankets or favorite shirts.

As she moved toward the window to get a better look at it, something fell from inside the folds of the quilt and hit her on the foot. Crying out in pain, she dropped the quilt and bent down to see what had fallen.

The large floral journal had landed on its side and was now propped up against the wall, the stiff front cover opened and lying flat on the floor, the pages waving at her as they flipped through to the end.

Picking it up, she placed it in her lap and studied the inside cover. In a young girl’s hand, doodles and circles chased flowers and bees along the border, and sketched in large, cloudlike letters were the words,
This diary belongs to Shelby Ann Martin. Keep Out. Private Property.

Mom,
Jewel thought, brushing her fingers over the lettering in the same way her mother had brushed her fingers over her face when she was a child.

She stared at it for several minutes, listening to the intermittent sound of the buzz saw coming from her father’s workroom. Her mother’s girlhood diary. Some small part of her told her to put it away. But a greater part wanted to read it, to read about her mother and the girl she had once been. Jewel hugged it to her chest. Maybe this was her mom’s way of sharing her past. Sort of a compensation for there being no more years to share.

With confidence now, she opened the front cover, pausing for a moment to stare at the first page covered in various incarnations of her mother’s signature. The last was close to her adult signature, recognized by its similarity to the one she’d used on Jewel’s report cards and permission slips for swim team.

She sat back against the wall and began to read.

Jewel lifted her gaze from the small, rounded cursive lettering and stared at the closed door, realizing that the buzz saw sounds had stopped. She stood and placed everything except the diary back into the box, stuffing the quilt on top. She had to leave the top open because the packing tape was all gone but she shoved the quilt in far enough so that it didn’t stick out over the edges of the box.

She picked up the journal and quickly left the room, closing the door softly behind her.