Carolina Moon (14 page)

Now Alicia works at the slightly suspicious new business. Her photo was in the newspaper alongside Quee Purdy’s. Alicia is known as “The Massage Therapist” and actually took a workshop somewhere. Her husband, asshole that he is, had said on the radio that he and “the old woman” had a lot in common. She was a “massagist” and he was a “misogynist.” Several of the men sitting around the station had laughed at that one, but Robert sat silent with a pensive look, as he had learned to do. The truth was he didn’t know what
misogynist
meant, but the answer came soon enough. There were call-ins.

“I hate you, you
woman-hater
!” one woman said, and for a minute it sounded just like Alicia. Robert’s heart quickened and blood flooded into his neck.

“You love it. I know you love it,” Jones Jameson whispered in garbled fashion, like he might have the microphone in his mouth.

“Who would have imagined you knew such a big word?” It was a male caller, highway noise in the background.

“I’m Phi Beta Kappa, boy.” Jones Jameson let loose that hideous raucous laugh that he uses to introduce his show. “What’s
your
education?”

The caller hung up, and it left the rest of them sitting there looking at one another, while Jones Jameson proceeded to play “Go Away Little Girl.” Funny how the topic of education makes so many people nervous. Robert notices it especially when he’s left to deal with somebody like Jones Jameson, somebody he knows he hates, but somebody who could beat the hell out of him in a game of Trivial Pursuit. It’s been the curse of his life, this sense of inadequacy.

Now (speaking of inadequate) he is standing at the door of a house his own little house could fit into ten times. It’s an old house on the main street of the town, and there’s a sign in the yard that tells all about when the house was built and how, prior to the construction of the house in 1890, this was the site of a market house where slave auctions were held.

Robert takes his time before ringing the bell. He is at the home of Myra Carter, who claims to be the last person to actually
see
Jones Jameson. She was out walking her funny-looking dog, a shar-pei. She had called the police station yesterday afternoon with this bit of news. Apparently she calls them often.

Robert is taking in the front yard’s neatly pruned privet hedge and circle drive when the door opens. He turns quickly and removes his hat to greet the old socialite whose picture appears so regularly in the local paper’s social column. She has her ugly little dog all hugged up to her chest and kisses its head before inviting Robert in. The skin of her face is loose and doughy looking. She could go on one of those ads where the people look like their dogs. Robert doesn’t know which one is more wrinkled. Myra Carter is telling him how her shar-pei cost her a little over a thousand dollars at a special dog store in Atlanta, which is where her sister lives and has since 1978; her sister can’t wait for the Olympics to come. She tells Robert all about her sister’s house and how it overlooks the Peachtree Mall,
prime real estate
, she says, and holds up a little plastic egg like what women buy hose in. The egg has been cut in half and there’s a tiny cardboard building inside of it with a sign that says in glittered letters, Peachtree Mall. “My niece made me this commemorative egg after I visited her mama. You might know my niece.” Robert shrugs. “Her name is Ruthie. Ruthie Crow. Never married.” Myra nods with this information, studies Robert’s face like he might be a bingo card. “Crow is a
name of her own choosing. You know she’s a poet.” Again she lowers her voice and studies him. “Her rhymes don’t always pay the bills, so she has this little mini-egg business. It doesn’t always pay the bills either, but she’s good to me, so what can I say?”

“Yes, now about—”

“All-occasion, too. The eggs I mean. From the Fourth of July to Halloween is a real dry spell for her, so she takes a long vacation to do poems.”

After she’s told him about every egg Ruthie has constructed, she asks Robert to remind her to tape
Geraldo
if he plans to spend the whole morning in her house talking and finally gets back to Jones Jameson. It seems that little Sharpy had his wrinkled little body up against a tree, leg raised (she gives Robert all the details—this was the dog’s first time raising his leg, which is why she remembers) at about the same time Jones turned the corner in his car. She tries to remember what kind of car but is having a lapse; she knows it’s what her brother-in-law, Ruthie Crow’s daddy, once test-drove with no intention of buying
that’s how expensive it was!
but took the family to the Tastee Freez in it all the same and then swore that he didn’t know why there was a dot of chocolate in the backseat upholstery.

“It’s not important,” Robert says.

“Well, the car dealer sure thought it was!”

“An Audi. We know that part already. It’s been recovered.”

“Are you getting testy?” she asks. “Because if you’re getting testy I’m not going to be able to talk. I have never been able to talk to a testy man. You see, Ruthie’s mama and I grew up with some money; our daddy was a hard worker and a good provider, and then unlike my sister, I just happened to marry somebody who was going to keep on making it, which is what landed me here.” She waves her arms out
into the immense room. “So you, like my brother-in-law, have no right to come here into my home and get testy.”

“I’m sorry.” Robert takes a deep breath, compliments the shitty-looking egg again, and then talks baby talk to Sharpy, which is what brings her back around. At this rate, he will be here all day.

“They found the car?” She is asking now, pulling on his arm like he’s some kid with a secret. “Come on now, you, give me the news.”

“I really can’t discuss it,” he says, but when she clamps her lips tightly and raises a crayoned eyebrow, he goes on to say that she will read all about it in the newspaper in just a few hours. He goes further to compliment the portrait of Mr. Carter there over the mantle. Dr. Howard Randolph Carter III, a doctor back when doctors knew how to do every thing and not just one. “That,” she says and swings her arm toward the face of the stern-looking stiff, “is why in this county there are so many people named Howard and Randy, Randolph and Howie, Carter and Doc. He delivered them all!” She picks up a little feather duster off the mantle and brushes it all over his face; she slaps it a little harder than seems necessary. “He delivered Jones Jameson, for that matter, and it was a difficult birth to be sure, breach, and he came after Howard had already set a broken leg and pronounced somebody dead on arrival. I was kind of his assistant, and so I kept up with what happened in a day. We always felt that the Jamesons
should
have put Howard’s name somewhere in that child’s name, but no, they named him for his paternal grandfather, who was sitting around somewhere waiting and not doing a thing to help.”

Quee’s photo collection has evolved over a long period of time, beginning when Quee was a child. She was looking for a picture of her father, haunted by his image. She soon began collecting old photographs that somehow matched up with what little bit she knew of him. He was a big man, at least six feet four, and his feet were so large that his shoes had to be ordered. She wouldn’t have known this, except that her mother told Quee she was built like him, the big bones and feet, that first time they had had to go to Raleigh to get shoes for her. People could not get over how she had grown, and for years she felt ugly and awful; she stooped down so she’d look smaller. When her mother remarried, something made her spine go stiff and straighten up, like she needed to stand up for herself and her invisible father. She was her own person. And then she saw the ocean for the first time, and it made her feel so small, so helpless in the grand scheme of the world that she decided the only way to survive was to be as strong and powerful as possible.

When she was first married, she studied Lonnie’s family photos regularly. She would see his ears, his eyes on these strangers. And all the while she was collecting her own faces. People who resembled
her. People she wished she knew. They became like secret souvenirs; she would find an old photo to remind
her
of a time or a place or a person, but no one else would have a clue.

When she was twenty, she needed something to remind her of a trip to the beach and bought an old photo postcard in a five-and-dime. The man with her made up the story to go with it: this picture of a couple strolling in their old-timey suits. “They are in love,” he said. “But she’s a good girl and so chances are they may never do anything about it. She may never feel his lips warm against her neck, his hand inch over her belly and down. They will see each other in passing and wonder what would happen if the conditions had been right.”

She kept that card in the corner of her mirror and with every glance she thought of those imagined touches. At night, she touched herself, pressed as if she could hold in the urges, the natural flexing and release of muscle.

SHE BOUGHT AN
old photo of a family picnic, with children lined up, hair plastered and parted, the little girls with lacy socks. There is a table heavy with bowls and baskets, and there is a man seated at the end of the table, suspenders and bowtie and tilted hat. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up, and this alone is the only thing in his appearance that would suggest relaxation. He looked like her grandfather, a man she had loved, a man who smelled of tobacco and the starch of his shirt. And no sooner did she buy the photo but he died. Yes, he was old, and yes, he had been sick, but she believed it meant something. She had somehow glimpsed death coming.

Once she tried to explain to Lonnie how she believed if you could be objective about your own life, even for a split second, you would indeed be able to see patterns emerging; you would see signs and foreshadowings, you would know what was coming.

“Well, thank you, Jesus, that I don’t know,” Lonnie said then and stared long and hard into her eyes. The picture postcard curled into the edge of her mirror, and it seemed for a moment like the paper itself or the people in the picture might scream out, laugh to get his attention. “I don’t ever want to know, Quee.” He pulled her close, his arms squeezing the breath out of her. “Okay?” She nodded but as she looks back it seems that he was darkening and shrinking there before her, like a photo tossed in a fire, like a leaf in autumn. And when he was dying, she often thought of that moment as she watched death creep up his limbs, the skin of his legs mottled and darkening as the body reserved its blood and energy for the heart and brain. She couldn’t help but be fascinated, to understand finally that it truly was possible to watch death pass over a body like a shadow; it was as simple as the sun setting, as simple as a shade drawn down against light. When Lonnie died, she pulled out all the photos she had secretly stashed over the years, and she spent hours cutting and piecing them into frames, arranging them in some sort of order. It seemed to her that if she could arrange them right they had the power to tell her story, maybe parts that she herself didn’t know.

Now the photos fill every square inch of space in the hall leading to her room. She gives them lives and appetites, sex and dreams. She calls it her ghost wall—her orphans’ collected souls, pinned and saved, each opening to her like a window or a door, an unknown world waiting on the other side. There’s not a single one without some semblance of goodness, some form of redemption. There have only been a few photos she saw and refused, only a few that offered no trace of goodness. They were pictures of herself, real pictures from her real childhood—a tall, unhappy girl who pitied and loved no one, not herself, not anybody. The hateful ugly duckling who dear Lonnie could not believe existed.

The last time Tom saw Sarah seems long ago, almost like it never even happened. It was in the early spring—only three months ago—a humid, drizzly day, the kind of day the light stays the same from sunup to sundown. His windshield was streaked with mud, so he pulled into Doug Taylor’s Exxon to borrow the squeegee. It was while he was wiping down the windows of his truck that he saw her standing inside the office. At first he thought he was seeing things, some other person just passing through town. She wasn’t so special-looking; there were hundreds of thousands of people on the face of the earth who could be mistaken for her. Straight, shoulder-length, dirty-blond hair, sharp little features that prompted people to use words like “cute” and “pert,” pale eyes too large for the rest of her, bringing to her face a kind of inward sadness like those pictures of alley cats and orphan children. He still got himself to sleep many nights with a picture of her eyes, her eyes during lovemaking, head rolled back and lids fluttering, breath shallow and rapid, her hands in his hair, on his neck as she pulled him in closer and tighter, harder, and then the slow motion opening of her eyes, her lids matching her slow exhalation.

But now that image was gone because when he heard the news, when he heard how she turned and fell, eyes rolled back, his sexual love, any craving, was replaced with an ache, pity, remorse. To imagine the taste of her skin, the flutter of her eyelids, was a betrayal of her life or whatever was left of it.

BUT THAT DAY,
she stepped outside, leaned forward to see him better. He lifted his hand, and she began walking toward him, her hand self-consciously smoothing back her hair the way she’d done for as long as he could remember. It had been so long, and he felt a wash of guilt, as if she knew how he had mourned her, knew how he had pretended to sleep with her every night for years. She was his shot of liquor or sleeping pill, his way to find sleep.

“Hi.” She laughed for no reason, a nervous laugh, a laugh that might’ve said,
Fancy seeing you here
, though that line would have been his.

“How are you?” they both asked, then laughed, shrugged.

“I live here now,” she said. “Just moved back.”

“Oh, really?” Tommy had heard she was back; sometimes he thought he had
felt
she was back, that some weird current had traveled from her house to his. So many people had mentioned that she was coming back that now he couldn’t remember who had gotten to him first. “When did you come back?” He watched her as she gave him all the information he already knew: two weeks ago, moved into that wonderful old Queen Anne down on the corner of Linden and Fourth Avenue. He had grown up minutes from that house, had passed it walking to and from school his whole life.