Carolina Moon Read online

  “They might think that means he’s one of those bisexuals,” Quee whispers and pats her on the shoulder. “Or they just think he’s a jerk.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But that doesn’t make you a jerk,” Quee says. “There is no such thing as a jerk by marriage. You are not going to wake up one day and be like him. There is nothing in this world to stop you from walking out and starting over.”

  “It’s that easy?”

  “That easy.” The bell rings down the hall, and Quee simply closes the kitchen door. “That’s what Denny did. She’ll be here any minute now.”

  “I thought you said Denny had a breakdown.”

  “I did, but it was just a little one.” Quee takes Alicia’s hands into her own and slaps them, massages, as if she’s reviving some small animal. “I mean don’t we all have little breakdowns all the time? It’s just some people’s are more noticeable than others.”

  “You think?”

  “Damn right. Don’t ever let anybody take away your right to have a little breakdown. Hell, foam at the mouth, check in somewhere. You have as much right as anybody to be left alone. And folks’ll definitely leave you alone if they think there’s been a little breakdown. My, yes.”

  “What about Taylor?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Quee runs out of steam with her lecture. Children change the whole operation regardless of what that operation might be.

  “If not for Taylor, I’d have done all sorts of things, Quee.” It is only now with the mention of her son that there is some life in that washed-out body. “He is all that I have, and I want him to have a good life.”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  Alicia leans forward and puts her face down against the table. She looks like there are no tears left in her, and it is one of those odd times when Quee has absolutely no idea what to say. She feels herself looming large and lifeless, clumsy and inadequate. It’s not a feeling that comes to her often.

  “You know I’ll keep Taylor for you anytime,” she says now. “I love that little booger, you know it.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can move in if you like, anything, you name it.”

  “I’ve got a lot to take care of,” Alicia says, voice slow and eyes closed. Upstairs, Tommy’s hammering is rhythmic and comforting, interrupted off and on by the thud and roll of a pecan on the metal awning over her kitchen window. Quee waits there until Alicia’s breathing is regular with the exhaustion that has finally taken over. She can see into the next room where Taylor is all set up in front of the television set, that big yellow bird marching around. It’s times like this she starts to hope there is no heaven and no afterlife. She hopes Lonnie is not looking down on her world right now.

  Mack McCallister’s neighbors include a single mother of ethnic origin, who is into yard ornaments that reflect her Catholicism, and a bunch of twenty-year-olds who attend a small college in the next town and who, it seems, are majoring in beer drinking and peeing in the yard. The college kids are split up in two sides of a dilapidated duplex with peeling paint; they used to like to torture each other by blasting undesirable music back and forth. One night in the spring it was a war between Alan Sherman and Ray Stevens. When Mack heard “Hello, Muddah” for the third time and then “Guitarzan” for the eleventh, he went out on the lovely, lattice-trimmed porch of his perfectly renovated Queen Anne cottage and began shouting. “This isn’t the goddamned trailer park!” he said. He was barefooted and in his pajama pants. The music stopped, but there was a price to pay. There were seven scrawny-looking guys peeping at him from their windows, seven guys who were seeing him as the authority, the other side, the what’s up your butt breed. “Loosen up, dude,” one guy had shouted before being shushed by his friends.

  “Yeah, right, like you never acted that way.” Sarah had been there, moving and talking; she stood in her thin cotton nightgown, half-hidden by the screen door. “I think the first time I ever met you, you were wearing a toga and singing ‘Brick House’ into a long-neck Budweiser.” She slipped over and sat in the swing, her legs pulled up under her gown. They had only been in the house a month, the U-Haul boxes with his books still lining the wall. After ten years of criminal law in Raleigh, he had finally broken down and accepted her dad’s offer to join his firm. “You’re the son I never had,” her father kept saying, but what he really meant was that he had one child; he had Sarah, and he wanted her back in his and Sarah’s mother’s lives full-time.

  She said it was her dream. She never wanted anything else but to be with all of the people she loves, and this house! She wanted this pale purple house her whole life. “It wasn’t always this color,” she had said when the Realtor brought them to see it. “It was white for many years, but now”—she ran her fingers along the porch rail—“the trim shows up beautifully. It would look good yellow or gray for that matter, if you don’t like it this color.”

  “What?” he asked, far more concerned with the asking price and the foundation than the cosmetics. “Don’t like purple?”

  “Mauve,” she said, “it’s mauve.” Her period was ten days late that time, and she was absolutely sure that she was pregnant. They had been trying for the past four years. “Say mauve,” she pinched his cheeks and kissed him, then fairly floated through the house. “Oh, it’s just as I imagined,” she said. “I always came here to trick-or-treat hoping that I’d get asked in, but a really old woman lived here and she rarely even came to the door.”

  “I thought a banker lived here. The banker whose wife is a potter,” the Realtor said, seemingly upset that she didn’t know the whole history of this house. Sarah waved her hand. “There was even another family before them; they are the ones who painted it mauve. The wife was from San Francisco and knew about these things, and then the husband got transferred back to Charlotte.” Sarah knew far more about the town’s real estate than their broker, who was not having to even try to sell the house. Clearly, as far as Sarah was concerned, it was sold.

  “But think, now,” Mack said. “Everybody always says location, location, location.” He tilted his head in the direction of the duplex and then to the other little white house where the Virgin Mary stood smack between two mangy boxwoods.

  “Well, but it’s not like I don’t know this town. I know this town!”

  “But what about the neighborhood? What about the house in the new area?” He had liked the new houses they saw, the cathedral ceilings and Palladian windows, the big master baths with shower stalls and Jacuzzis.

  “Up and coming,” the Realtor said. “That neighborhood is more or less the threshold into the other neighborhood that abuts it.” Sarah liked to imitate the Realtor, and whenever they were riding through town would refer to the other neighborhood. “In other words, the neighborhood.”

  But there was no changing her mind. That was months ago, and now here he is with the college boys on one side and the illuminated Holy Mother on the other. He keeps hoping that he’ll turn and see Sarah there in the doorway, that there will be some act of grace, some voice saying that a mistake was made, rewind, start over. Somebody fucked up the instructions. The pretty little thirty-eight-year-old in Fulton, North Carolina, was not supposed to have an aneurism, but amnio, amniocentesis—she’s supposed to be pregnant, you idiot, not in a coma.

  Next door, the guys are playing their music at a reasonable level. They are coming and going with their dates. They wave or nod politely to him; they saw the ambulance that night, heard all of the commotion, saw him squat down and put his face against the stone steps and sob. They rarely have disco or Ray Stevens wars anymore. For all of their youth and wildness, they respect his sorrow. Mack watches them and feels like he’s from another time altogether. If not for the occasional sound of Eric Clapton or Mick Jagger, he would be. If not for the calls and regular visits from June, Sarah’s oldest friend, he might lose touch altogether.

  They said it was something she had lived with since birth. Perhaps it was there in utero, waiting, ticking, feeding
itself on her life. Maybe she had a sensation, a premonition, the kind that wakes you in the middle of the night, the kind you never breathe aloud. Every birthday balloon that popped, every firecracker on the Fourth of July, a foreshadowing of what she would one day suddenly feel there behind those pale blue eyes, a pressure that made her turn from the kitchen sink, her hands in yellow rubber gloves as she squeezed Spic & Span from a sponge. She was tackling the film of grease on the kitchen cabinets. She had the windows open and the lace curtain was moving back and forth, casting a filagreed shadow at her feet. “Mack,” she called, barely audible, and he got there just in time to see her reaching, dripping gloves, wide eyes. He got to her just in time to keep her head from hitting the floor, and he sat there for several minutes just stroking her hair, wetting a cool cloth for her head. She had fainted before. He was actually sitting there feeling happy, thinking that maybe this time she really was pregnant. Later he had cursed those old movies that have it happen that way. The woman gets light-headed and faints when with child. But not the healthy woman. That woman scrubs her kitchen and eats an enormous lunch and at night straddles her husband’s hips and laughs at the bulge of her body. The woman gets light-headed and faints when there’s a bomb in her brain, when a vessel bursts open and fills her head with blood. He thinks of her there in the kitchen, and the sound that fills his mind is loud and rushing like the sound of a train, the sound of the surf, rushing, pounding. And yet it seems that it all happened without any sound at all.

  DURING COLLEGE, MACK had once seen two men in a bus station. It was hard to tell what their relationship might be. They could have been brothers or lovers, even father and son. Their gestures were wild, furious. One, or maybe both, deaf, so that their anger came out of their fingertips, harsh angry signs in absolute silence. It happened long before he met Sarah, long before he glimpsed any sense of his future, and yet now, for some reason, it’s a memory that haunts him. He thought of it a lot in the six weeks she was in the hospital, and now he thinks of it when he lies in his bed at night without her there beside him. The doctors insisted that a hospital bed be brought in; it would make the nurse’s job possible—the turning and the tubes, the bathing—but he is still resentful.

  Sometimes he can’t help but wonder where his life would have gone if he had chosen another route, if he hadn’t asked her to marry him. He would be in a house somewhere, wife, a couple of kids, and the news would eventually reach him through an old fraternity buddy or somebody who had been in one of his classes and seen him with her all the time. He and his wife would have been at a cocktail party or have driven up to the football game and there, while eating and drinking out of the trunk of somebody’s Saab, somebody would have said, “Hey, Mack, remember that girl you dated for a while? That blond girl from the Kappa house?” And he would have put down his food and drink and sat there, stunned that something so horrible could happen to someone so young. Life would have continued in spite of the moment, his own life bright and lively, moving around and behind him. He would have sent a card or some flowers like that old boyfriend of hers, TomCat, she had called him, who appeared at the door late one afternoon a couple of weeks ago.

  Mack feels guilty when he thinks that way. He smoothes his hands over his forehead. She is there beside him, breathing in silence. Maybe if he hadn’t married her, if he hadn’t been the one in her life, it wouldn’t have happened. Maybe it was somehow related to their not being able to have a baby. Maybe she felt pressure from him, from her family, her mother who forever made reference to her grandchildren—future heirs of this small-town kingdom.

  “That’s absolutely insane,” June said earlier today. She had come over with bags from Wendy’s and they sat out on the porch to eat. She was wearing cutoffs and a big paint-splotched T-shirt, her dark hair yanked up on top of her head. She had spent the day painting her living room red to celebrate having discovered that the man she had been dating long-distance (she had been referring to “Ted” now for over a year) was not worthy of her time and had asked Mack if he felt like hearing the sordid details. The rest of her message was unspoken but loud and clear. She needed to talk to Sarah; she needed to tell Sarah all of these things, and he was the closest thing she could find.

  “Mack,” she said his name sternly. “They said it was inevitable. Think about it.” She pushed her fries aside. “It could have happened when we were in high school. We could have been cheerleading in our little black and yellow skirts, yelling things like ‘Sock it to ’em, Wildcats.’” She waited for him to smile. “Oh, Sarah was the only person who looked good in that horrible suit with those skinny little legs of hers!” She pushed off the floor of the porch, the swing rocking as she looked out into the yard. “I could have been the one who was there with her, Mack,” she whispered. “It could have just as easily happened at a touchdown or when we were eleven and got up at six to watch Dracula on Sunrise Theatre. It could have happened on the Girl Scout campout or in the junior high cafeteria, or when we lay across her bed eating M&Ms and potato chips, with her hair turned over those huge pink rollers when she was getting ready for the prom!” She stopped and took in a deep breath. “We’re lucky we had her, you know?” There was finality in her voice before she went back and corrected herself. “Lucky we have her. It could have happened the day she was born.”

  “That would have been a loss.” He leaned forward and put his head on his knees. By now June was used to seeing this. He could be himself with her. They took turns telling their stories about Sarah, when they met her, things she had said and done. June’s stories of whispered secrets and knowing looks were just as romantic and intimate as his. They took turns talking; they took turns crying, the other standing guard, and ready in case Sarah should suddenly call out.

  Mack watched the woman next door herding her children from the beat-up old Dodge into the house. Each one carried a big plastic bag from Wal-Mart. For the first time he noticed the swell of the woman’s abdomen under her loose shirt. He had never seen a man, any man, anywhere near the house. If Sarah were observing it, she would suggest that it’s the second coming, that they could rent out rooms to the wise men and shepherd, park the camels in the backyard. June would probably be amused in the same way, but instead he kept the conversation where it was; he wanted to stay way back there with the Sarah he never knew, the Sarah who had a future with him, an unknown guy growing up two hundred miles away; the Sarah who had a future. “I never saw Sarah in hair rollers!”

  “Oh, God.” June waved her hand, her nubby nails torn and bitten raw. “She was the roller queen! It was like the height of what to do. I haven’t even seen these rollers in years, big hard pink plastic and you had to use mega bobby pins to hold them in. What you did was this.” She loosened her hair and then stood and bent over so that her long dark hair hung over her head and brushed the rough boards of the porch. She gathered her hair in one hand and then stood back up, a high ponytail like Pebbles Flintstone or somebody might wear up on top of her head. “Then you take this ponytail and split it into four equal parts and roll each part onto a great big pink roller.”

  “A reason?”

  “It was easy to sleep in and it gave long, parted-down-the-middle hair that kind of poofy That Girl look.” She let go of her hair, and it fell around her shoulders. “For girls with frizzy hair it straightened; for girls with thin hair, it gave body.” She came and sat beside him on the steps. “Come to think of it, it was a perfect solution for all people! Why did we ever stop doing it?”

  “Why did you?”

  “The shag.”

  “The dance?”

  “No, the Do, it was the style! The shag did it, and then of course there was that awful wedge, you know like Dorothy Hamill. The wedge was hell to grow out. You probably met Sarah when she had a wedge.”

  “Wedge or wedgie?”

  “God, you’re as bad as Sarah says!”

  “Sarah says I’m bad?” he asked. It had been a long time since he had talked about her in the present
tense and it felt wonderful. “What else has she said about me?”

  “First of all, the way she says ‘bad’ really means good, you know that. And, everything else she ever said was really, really good.” She paused. “She said you were perfect.”

  “Did she have any doubts about marrying me?”

  “No.”

  “None?”

  “No fair!” June forced a laugh. “You’re trying to get top-secret information. Sarah would kill me!”

  “So she did?”

  “Did you?” June asked, and he shook his head. “Sarah married you because Sarah wanted to marry you. Sarah loved you.” Again the past tense stopped them cold but they didn’t go through the motions of changing it.

  “So who did she go to the prom with?” he asked. “That TomCat guy?”

  “Yeah, Tommy Lowe. Nice guy. He’s still around here.”

  “Yeah, he brought some flowers one day. Stayed maybe three minutes.” He watched the woman next door come out and clip the weeds around the Madonna. “He never really looked me in the eye, never sat down; he went and stood beside Sarah, tapped her on the shoulder and then left. It was like he had decided not to really look at her or something. He tiptoed like she was just asleep.” He started to tell how the presence of the guy had made Mack feel like he didn’t belong in his own house. How he had felt this history settle onto his chest like a rock. Now that she had lost so much weight and was so plain and washed out, she was probably much closer to being the girl that Tom Lowe had loved. And Mack was struck immediately by his own similarities to Tom Lowe. They were about the same height, of a similar build, straight dark hair and light eyes. It was the first time in his whole marriage that he had actually stopped and wondered if he was the substitute, and now there was no way to know. Unless June knew. It was not the kind of thing he could ask her. He couldn’t bring himself to talk about any of it.