Calico (11 page)

“Because my father…he doesn’t like people coming to the house. Especially boys.”

“I’m your neighbor, though.”

“Still. He hates strangers over here. He’s protective.”

“Of you?”

She gives me a strange, strange look. “Of everything. Me. The house. Everything inside it. I’m not allowed to have people over here.”

“Not ever?”

“No. Not ever.”

“All right. I won’t knock. But I’ll be waiting outside my place for you at eight. You gonna walk with me?”

She thinks about this for a second. Eventually, she nods. “Just don’t come to the house.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to leave my window open. If you want to come and sleep in my bed after all, just call me. I don’t mind crashing out on the floor.”

Coralie blinks at me some more. I can’t tell if she’s considering accepting this offer, or if she’s wondering how I can be so sleazy and persistent. “I’m sure I’ll be fine right here,” she says slowly, her voice wavering.
 

“Well. Like I said. If you change your mind…”

I lean back in, and I stand there, watching her for a second. She seems so breakable, sitting there all huddled up like that. I don’t like it. For the past few years, I’ve hung around with girls at school, driven by this powerful desire to have them stick their hands down my pants. The desire that drives me now isn’t that, though. I’m caught off guard by how badly I want to take care of this pale, interesting girl, perched on the rooftop opposite my bedroom.
 

She’s like the rarest of birds, endangered and at risk of expiration, and I want to fold my body around hers in order to protect it, not to glean some sort of sexual gratification from it. It’s not as though she isn’t pretty; she has this strange, ethereal quality to her that makes me feel a little dizzy. If I’m honest, that could actually be the beer, but whatever. I’d like to kiss her. I’d like to make sure she’s safe even more, though.
 

I drag my Nirvana t-shirt off over my head and discard it on the floor, and then the jeans come off, too. I collapse onto my bed, on top of the sheets, wondering if I’ll find a bruised, fragile butterfly curled up into a ball next to me when I wake.

I don’t.

CHAPTER NINE

CORALIE
 

Gumbo

NOW

Sheriff Mason is a woman, which, for some reason, surprises me. I was expecting an old, pot-bellied guy with a grand, waxed moustache and a cowboy hat. Instead, Amanda Mason is a thirty something blonde, thin as a rail, with a strangely shaped birthmark on her face, below her right cheek bone—it kind of looks like a tiny postage stamp.
 

“We’re ruling suicide, yes. We were planning on waiting until after the funeral, though. Doubt Sam’ll dig him up or anything. Doesn’t seem like he’d have the stomach for it.”

I very much doubt Sam has the stomach for it, either. I smile at Mason, tapping my fingers against the paperwork I need to give to the county morgue in order for them to release my father’s body. “Thank you, Sheriff. I know it’s a little underhanded, but I appreciate it. I’m sure my father does, too.”

She gives me a saccharine sweet smile, pursing her lips. “Frankly, Coralie, I didn’t care all that much for your father. He made a pretty good show of church-going and helping in the community, but I know a bad soul when I see one. Call it southern intuition. And people talk, of course. Talk about how he treated you and your momma. A man that hits a woman loses the right to call himself so, if you ask me. Still. I don’t want any headaches. And people should be buried where they wanna be buried, regardless of how they end up dead. It ain’t up to us to judge people in this life. That’ll happen on the other side, no doubt, when we meet our maker.”

It’s strange to hear someone so young talking about God. I guess I’ve been away for so long now that I forget it’s more common than not for people to be believers around these parts. Seems so…
unfashionable
.
 

I leave the station, still feeling brutalized by my run-in with Callan. The county morgue is already closed for the day. I can’t take the paperwork over there without being able to hand it to someone in person apparently, and I don’t really feel like going back to my hotel, so I drive the Porsche over to Friday’s place. It feels dangerous. Callan’s place is right across the street, as is my old home; being within a mile vicinity of either house feels like I’m inviting trouble and pain into my life, but I need to see her. She’s the only person capable of helping me get a grip on my life. It feels as though everything is spinning hectically out of control, and if I don’t right my trajectory now, then I’ll be a wreck by the end of the week.
 

When she opens her front door, Friday is wearing a huge tent-like housecoat and a pair of old slippers, hair in huge curlers, and she’s brandishing a spatula in her hand. She holds it out to me. “Perfect. You stir while I finish off the bread, child.”

She had no idea I was coming, of course, but once again this is the Port Royal way—someone will always show up for dinner if you make enough food. In the kitchen, the small, rectangle dining table I used to eat at as a child is already set for five people. “Expecting a big party tonight, Friday?” I ask. She steers me toward a huge pot of gumbo, which smells incredible.

“Sure I am. You one of them.”

I don’t really feel like sticking around if other people will be showing up, but then again some company might be just what I need. It’s taking everything I’ve got to not go drink myself into a stupor back in my sterile king sized bed right now.

“Can you still make that like I taught you, baby girl?” Friday asks.
 

I make a
mmm
ing sound, inhaling the warm, spicy, delicious smells coming off the large vat of stew on the hot plate. “I sure can. Not as often as I’d like, though. My boyfriend, Ben, he doesn’t like spicy food. Gives him indigestion.”

Friday pauses in her violent kneading of dough and places on hand on her hips, shooting me a much-displeased look. “Child, you can’t be with a man that don’t eat spicy food. Must mean he’s
terrible
in bed. No passion. No fire in his belly.”

I laugh. Friday and I have never talked about my sex life. It’s incredibly weird that she’s referring to it now. “We do just fine, thanks.”

“Just fine ain’t good enough, Coralie. You’re a fiery woman now. Fully grown. You have needs that must be met. A fancy Los Angeles boy that don’t eat no spicy food ain’t gonna be meeting those needs, sure as eggs is eggs.”

The truth is, Ben’s never made me come. Not properly. He’s managed it with his fingers a couple of times, and once with his mouth, but I don’t want to share that information with the elderly woman standing on the other side of the kitchen. It would only be fuel for the fire. “I’m happy, Friday. That’s good, isn’t it?”

“I don’t see you doin’ no cartwheels.”

“I’m too old for cartwheels.”

Friday thumps the bread dough with her fist, making a horrified sound. “Bullshit! You’re never too old for cartwheels. Hell, my older sister’s doing jumpin’ jacks and head stands right now. It’s her seventieth birthday next month, and she found a man to blow steam outta her ears.”

“
Tuesday
? Tuesday’s dating?” Friday’s mother was a pragmatic woman. She named her daughters after the days of the week they were born on: Friday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday died of pneumonia a year before I was born, but I know Tuesday just fine.
 

Friday nods with a certain gravity. “Yes, ma’am. She met her beau at a bridge night over in Pickens County. He’s a retired fire fighter, if you can believe that.”

Friday always assumes I will have trouble believing the things she tells me. It’s a turn of phrase, of course, but I feel warm every time I hear her say it. It reminds me of listening to her gossip for hours when I was younger, as we cooked or read or watched television together during the brief stints of time when my father would allow me to come over here.
 

She sets off humming after a while, and we fall into an easy silence. It’s hard to believe it’s been twelve years since we’ve done this. I’ve kept in touch with her, though, through letters (infrequent) and telephone calls (at least once a month). I begin to feel calm wash over me as I stir and she hums.
 

A loud knock eventually disturbs the silence. Friday casts a look over her shoulder. “Get that for me, will you, child? I ain’t never gonna get this into the oven otherwise.”

“Sure.” I go and open the front door, clutching the spatula the same way she did when she answered the door to me. I come very close to using it as a weapon when I see the man standing on the other side of the door. “You have got to be kidding me.”

Callan Cross holds up a bottle of wine, his lips forming a tight smile. He looks fucking incredible. He’s wearing a deep maroon colored button down shirt with a black paisley pattern printed on it. The cuffs, which he has rolled up to his elbows, are a slightly darker shade, close to purple. Black skinny jeans and a pair of Chucks give him an effortless New York hipster vibe. He’s put some sort of product in his hair, taming his curls. Basically, he looks edible.
 

“I know,” he says, wincing. “They were out of Malbec at the liquor store. I had to get a blend.”

“Why are you here, Callan?”
 

“Because Friday invited me earlier. And because I knew you’d be here.”

“
I
didn’t even know I was going to be here.”

“Of course you did,” he says, pushing past me. “Where else would you be on a Tuesday night?”

That’s right, of course. Tuesday nights were always dinner night at Beauchamp household. Back in high school, I was here every Tuesday night for years. Tuesdays were always tricky for Callan: he had basketball and then football, depending on the season, but he would come here and pick me up after every game, sweaty and disheveled, making me feel things I didn’t know how to handle at the time. I’m surprised Callan remembered my Tuesday night ritual from so long ago, when it had entirely slipped my mind.
 

“
Callan
.” I’m stern, almost to the point of rudeness. “I don’t want to see you right now.”

Callan Cross, my beautiful Cal, the guy I’ve dreamed about for so long, shrugs his shoulders. “Too bad. I haven’t had proper gumbo in years. If you want to leave, you’re more than welcome, though.” He grins in the most infuriating way, sidling past me and sauntering down the hallway, hollering as he goes. “Friday! Friday, where are you, you sexy woman. I can contain myself no longer.” I watch his back vanish through the doorway to the kitchen, and it feels so normal to follow after him. So normal that he’s here, and he’s acting like all of this was just meant to be.
 

I want to walk straight out of Friday’s house, down her porch steps, get back into my car and drive away, but I can’t. My car keys are in my purse, which is sitting on Friday’s dining table. If I had the very first clue about hot-wiring a car, and I wasn’t worried about paying for damages to the rental company, I would totally jimmy the damn Porsche open and just leave my stuff here. Sadly, grand theft auto wasn’t an adolescent pastime of mine.

I just stand there, listening to the dip and swell of Callan’s voice as he talks with Friday in the kitchen. He says something, his voice a low, familiar rumble, and Friday screeches with laughter; he always did know how to get a reaction out of the old girl. Suddenly, this whole situation is just too much. I can’t do it. God knows how Callan can. Just being in the same town as him, breathing the same air, seeing the same sunrise and the same sunset, reliving the same memories as him, is far too difficult. I want to be back in California, back in my safe little bubble. I don’t want to have to face this—the ghost of my father, and the bitter sweet memories of a man who I loved so much once upon a time that I would have died for him.
 

Now, I just feel like I’m dying in general, and I don’t know what to do.

“Coralie?”
 

I spin around, and a woman climbing out of the passenger seat of a red sedan is staring at me like
she’s
the one who’s seen a ghost. I’d know her pump-water straight, dark hair anywhere. The high register of her voice isn’t one I’d ever be likely to forget, either. Tina Fulsom.
 

Tina was a cheerleader back in high school. Not the kind who terrorized the lower echelons of the high school caste system, or lorded her popularity over the other, less popular kids. No, Port Royal High never even had cheerleaders like that. Tina was a curvy kid, had huge boobs even before the rest of us had training bras, and she always seemed to be on some sort of crusade: a crusade to save the rainforest/starving kids in Africa/homeless people of New York/the public library/Port Royal’s declining yacht club. In her hand, she would always be carrying a clipboard complete with a pen on a piece of string, and she had the most annoying way of roping you into pacing the school grounds, encouraging people to sign what seemed like an endless, incredibly pointless petition.
 

Tina’s problem was that she was too empathetic. She felt everyone else’s pain to such a degree that her parents made her stop watching the news in her senior year after her mother found her pulled over at the side of the road, bawling her eyes out following a particularly heart wrenching piece about the stray dog situation in Charleston.

Right now, Tina’s already welling up as she slowly approaches Friday’s house. “Oh my lord, I can’t believe you’re here,” she says. Her voice warbles, clearly on the brink of breaking. “I’m so sorry you ever had to step foot back in Port Royal.”

Behind her, another face I recognize climbs out of the sedan: Shane Flood. The tall, reedy guy from high school, always struggling to find pants that would accommodate his ridiculously long legs, appears to be growing out more than up these days. Kids used to give him hell over the three or four inch gap between his ankles and the bottoms of his jeans. The first time I ever saw Callan hit anyone was when he handed out a right hook to a smart-ass basketball player who dared to mock Shane Flood. Shane doesn’t say anything. He climbs up the steps toward me, and by the time he reaches the third step he’s already high enough that he can embrace me and wrap me up in his arms. When I look down, his pants are so long, he’s had to roll them up a couple of times.