The Gilly Salt Sisters (32 page)

R
ight from the start, Whit Turner seemed to like to give Dee things, which was tremendous, because she enjoyed taking them. She didn’t feel a lick bad about the arrangement either. In fact, the opposite was true. The more she got from Whit, the more she wanted, and as a result their affair moved quicker than it otherwise might have, which suited Dee just fine. It wasn’t like she’d found anything else to occupy her during her first month in town.

Dee learned about Whit’s quirks and preferences on the down low. They met a few times a week in hidden kinds of spots—on the beach, cradled in the sand dunes, or at a picnic table behind a clam shack closed for the season. Always at night and always in secret, but that just made it more exciting whenever Whit sauntered into the diner, ordered up some coffee and eggs, and winked at her when her father wasn’t looking.

By the middle of November, Dee had started looking forward to Whit’s gifts with an open greed she didn’t know she had. It was all she could do not to snatch the things he presented to her out of his hands with her teeth and then turn her bite on him. In short order he bestowed upon her a bottle of fancy skin lotion, a lipstick in a silver case, and a box of chocolates too pretty to eat.

The night of the first snow, he nibbled the side of her neck
and asked her, “Which do you like better, satin or silk?” Before she could answer, he pulled out a pair of black French panties. Dee didn’t bother to point out that she couldn’t tell the first difference between either kind of fabric. All the textures of her life were exactly the same: rough.

“They’re so soft,” she breathed, rubbing a little of the lace between her thumb and forefinger. She couldn’t wait to slip them on or, better yet, have Whit do it for her. She leaned back in the passenger seat of his car and pulled off the cotton underpants she was wearing, letting her head fall onto the top of the seat to see if Whit was watching. He was.

“Don’t bother,” he growled, reaching across the seat to pin her to the leather.

The next time they were together, he gave her a tiny sample bottle of perfume. It didn’t smell too good to Dee, to be honest, but she’d smell any way Whit wanted her to if it meant they could keep riding around in his car, parking in places where they could see the stars.

“It’s very expensive,” he said. “Here, try it.” He dabbed a dot behind one of Dee’s ears, and she inhaled and grew almost dizzy. She’d never worn real perfume before. She put the lid back on the bottle and turned to face Whit.

“Does Claire wear this?” she asked. She pictured bending over to serve Claire breakfast the next morning and watching her pert nose wrinkle.

What’s that smell?
Claire would say, not quite believing what her nostrils were telling her.
It’s familiar.
And Dee would just waltz off without a word.

At the mention of his wife’s name, Whit’s face grew hard and still. He dropped his fingers from Dee’s hair. “She doesn’t like perfume, and she’d be furious if she found out about our meetings, so you better not say anything.”

Dee closed her fingers tightly around the bottle. Whit didn’t need to bring up Claire’s temper. Dee had experienced it for
herself in the diner the single time she didn’t get Claire’s order right. If Claire never raised her voice, Dee thought, it was because she didn’t have to. Her silence was far more terrifying.

“I won’t say anything,” Dee promised, and Whit leaned over and buried his nose at the base of her throat.

“It’s nice to have a woman smell the way I want her to for a change,” he said.

Dee put her hand on his cheek, flattered that he’d called her a woman and not a chubby kid, which was all she ever saw when she looked in the mirror, silk French panties or no. She remembered Mr. Weatherly telling her that Claire had been near to her age when she’d gotten married, and Dee wondered if that’s when Claire had made the transition from awkward girl to a pair of arched eyebrows and a stare that could stop a speeding truck. Now more than ever, Dee wondered what the link between her and Claire might be. The only common factor they seemed to have between them was the absence of one. Whit probably liked her, Dee thought, not because she reminded him of Claire but because she was so fundamentally Claire’s opposite. She dabbed more perfume on her wrist and took another sniff before she turned to Whit. “What does Claire smell like, then?” she asked.

Whit considered that for a moment. “Saddle soap and plain soap,” he finally answered. “Sometimes hay. And she sprinkles on baby powder before bed.”

No wonder he’s parked out here in the bushes off the lane, necking with the likes of me
, Dee thought. She wasn’t even to her twenties yet, but she had enough experience with males of all ages to know that they were fickle as a pack of crows. Unless you had something shiny and dangly, they just flew right past you.

“That’s enough talking,” Whit said, pulling her on top of him and opening her blouse. “We have to hurry and get you home before your father starts to worry. What have you told him anyway?”

“That I met a nice boy,” Dee lied. In fact, she’d told Cutt nothing. His curiosity stopped at the rim of his evening bottle. Once
he passed out, nothing on earth could wake him, not even the noisy fumbling of a girl drunk on love. Whit placed his thumbs over the tips of Dee’s breasts, and an electric current passed from her chest to her groin. She moved her hips against his.

“A nice boy,” he said, and chuckled, pushing her bra down and replacing it with his mouth. “How little you know. I never was that.”

“I don’t believe you,” Dee whispered, and then they didn’t speak any longer.

M
r. Weatherly had the oddest way of answering questions, Dee thought. She was asking him about the upcoming December’s Eve bonfire, and at first she was confused by his rambling response, but as she listened, she realized he was telling her two things at once. Mr. Weatherly was sneaky like that, Dee decided. He never lectured or gave his personal opinion, but sometimes after she was done talking with him, after she watched him hitch up his pants and shuffle away, she would realize that she’d been given a moral lesson of sorts, even if she could never figure out exactly what it was.

Now that the end of November was near, the bonfire had started going up on Tappert’s Green tidier than Dee expected—the base planks crossed over the top of one another and then the bigger pieces of wood leaning up against those in stark rows. Apparently the town elders had decided on a new design for the pyre, square instead of round. The unexpected order of the structure didn’t reassure Dee. It just made the sight of the pyre even creepier to her. Fires didn’t always spring up unbidden. She had never thought much about that simple fact before.

“Aye, every year it gets a little bigger,” Mr. Weatherly mumbled over his plate of turkey and mash at the counter, staring at Dee darkly. “And every year it burns a little faster. Used to be we’d all linger over the coals late as anything, thinking about the future, but Claire put an end to that business with her string of unborns.”

At the mention of Claire’s name, Dee felt a familiar buzz start up at the back of her neck, but now a tiny chill of worry joined that excitement. Lately she’d stopped pestering Mr. Weatherly with questions about the Gilly sisters, especially Claire, but she still woke in the gray smear of dawn and waited for horse’s hooves to sound beneath her window. She still studied Claire during church, memorizing the exact color of her sweater set, trying to decide what shade her lipstick would be called, even though Dee definitely didn’t dare bring up Claire’s name anywhere outside the diner. No more conversations with the postmistress about Claire’s past loves. No more questions to Mr. Upton in his claustrophobic little store about Claire’s favorite foods. Dee didn’t want tongues to start wagging.

Cutt had instructed Dee to ask Mr. Weatherly if they should bother staying open the night of the bonfire in hopes of collecting some extra business. Maybe people would want something hot to drink, he thought, and a little something sweet on their tongues. But Mr. Weatherly just shook his head. “Not likely,” he said, his face as hangdog as Dee had ever seen a man’s. “Not after what Claire did on account of all her unborn babies.”

Nervously, she peeked around the diner, but they were in between lunch and dinner services, and the only other customer was ancient Mrs. Butler huddled in a back booth with her old lady friend, and neither of them could hear a thing. Dee picked up a rag and started polishing the counter, trying not to let her interest show.

“What do you mean, Claire’s unborns?” she said, moving the cloth in tight and calculated circles, hoping that Mr. Weatherly would be distracted by the motion and keep talking. The trick worked. He leaned over his plate and squinted at her.

“You’re sorta young to be telling this kind of thing to,” he proclaimed. “Still got the puppy fat hanging thick around your middle, don’t you? My girl Doreen had that at your age, but she’s as thin as a birch branch now.”

Dee flushed, but then she had to hide her smile behind her
hand. If Mr. Weatherly knew the positions she could get that puppy fat into, he might not be so quick to call attention to it. She started circling her rag on the counter again. “What do you mean by
unborns
?” she asked again.

Mr. Weatherly helped himself to a full bite of mashed potato. “I took a crib delivery up to their house one time, and then, six weeks later, got called to take it back again. Then I noticed people kind of going off the salt around town. Herman Upton was still selling it under the counter, but he got skittish about it. Harlan Friend in the hardware said his wife had switched to boxed. Said it tasted better, too.” He took another bite of potato. “Every time Claire got her dander up and started spouting off about her family’s salt being poison, I figured she must have lost another babe. And then, finally”—he pushed his plate toward Dee, and she quickly dumped it into the plastic bin beneath the counter—“there weren’t no more salt to get rid of but the stuff the fishermen used—and even Claire knew that was a lost cause—and the bonfire salt.”

Dee wrinkled her forehead. “What do you mean?”

Mr. Weatherly fixed her with his stare. “Why do you think we have the blasted thing in the first place?” he said. “It’s not just for our entertainment. Ever since there’s been Gillys in this town, they’ve tossed salt to the fire to see what the future has in store for us. If the smoke flashes blue, that’s good. Red means someone will be falling in love, yellow’s a warning, and black… well, black is… not good….” His voice trailed off, and his eyes looked wet around their rims. Then he fished his wallet out of his pocket. “Claire made us stop, though. She had the constable tell everybody we were in violation of some code or another. He threatened to arrest anyone throwing chemicals into the fire. Kind of took the festivity out of the evening. Claire’s never said nothing about it, but we all know it was her doing. I can only imagine how much it cost her in donations to local law enforcement to pull it off.”

“So why keep having the fire at all?” Dee asked.

Mr. Weatherly jammed his cap on his head. “Sometimes it’s not what we do that matters so much as why we gather to do it in the first place. Besides, I guess it’s too late to change our ways now. We just go on the best we can.” Dee watched him let himself out into the icy clutches of the afternoon, snow flurries whipping around him like devils intent on making mischief, and she wondered if, more than just the bonfire, he maybe was referring to the whole damn town—leached now of its salt, frozen down to its foundations, heavy with the weight of Claire’s unborn babies. She picked up the rag again and wrung it out, trying to lighten at least one little thing around the place the best her hands could do.

I
n the end Dee was relieved to find that the bonfire was just as Mr. Weatherly had promised it would be. The night was pure and almost clinically cold. The stars buzzed like small insects, and as if in protest, the wood of the newly square pyre groaned and crackled as it caught fire. Dee watched people’s faces twist and dance in the orange light of the flames. The citizens of Prospect clustered into firm little groups, their hands shoved in their pockets. A few souls took deep pulls from flasks and discussed their plans for the upcoming summer, even though to Dee it seemed impossible that the world would ever thaw and that she would gaze on bright green grass again.