Carolina Moon (7 page)

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.

Now June was watching the woman next door. She leaned in close
and began singing “Let It Be.” She nudged him with her elbow. “Mother Mary comes to me . . . ,” she was singing in his ear, her breath and laugh tickling his neck. It was exactly what Sarah would have done, and before he knew it, he had his arms wrapped around her and had pulled her close. Her hair smelled like Sarah, her clothes. If things were different, Sarah would be over in the swing singing along with her. June would talk about the old boyfriend or a recent date, and they would say things like, “Excluding present company, men are just that way. . . .”

She hugged him back, and that’s when he realized things were different. There had been no local dates, no mention of any new prospects, like she used to run by Sarah. She had brought dinner by on several occasions. She called him at the end of the day to talk about her fifth-grade class and to ask why she hadn’t gone to law school. She was trying to fill in his empty spaces, and she was relying on him to fill in hers.

“So, that old TomCat is good-looking, why don’t you ask him out?” Reluctantly he pulled away so that he could look at her.

“Nah.” She sat back, her hands folded in her lap. “TomCat is an old friend, you know? It would almost be incestuous.” The woman next door had gone inside and two of the children were running around Mary. It looked like Mother Mary was their base in a game of tag. “It would be like being with you!” She nudged him again and laughed.

“So Sarah and TomCat were that close, huh?”

She shrugged. “They were close.”

“Her parents didn’t like him?”

“Oh, I’m sure they did,” she said. “I mean you’d have to like him, you know? Sweet guy with a hard life.”

“So what happened?”

“In his life?” she asked, and he shook his head. Sarah had told him
much of that story. More than he wanted, really. Who wants to feel waves of pity for the competition?

“They just grew apart.” She looked at him as if to say,
You know all of this, this is old news
, but she quickly changed the tone. “And then you happened, Mack McCallister.
You
happened.”

NOW MACK FINDS
himself thinking of June when he’s lying in bed and at odd times during the day. He sniffs his shirt for traces of her cologne. He studies the bathroom after she’s been there, a single long coarse hair occasionally in the sink over which she has stood and brushed. Now there are nights when he catches himself thinking of her eyes, her hips, thin and boyish, and he feels guilty. But it feels so good to picture her, feels so good to rewind and replay words exchanged between the two of them. He tells himself that he will just let it all go, that he’ll call Sarah’s mother and talk to her, cry to her, that he will call his own mother, and then the phone will ring and he can’t get there fast enough, or like now he will pick up and dial her number as quickly and easily as Sarah always has. When the machine answers and beeps, he catches himself sighing and then delivers in practiced monotone how he so occupied her time today that they never got around to talking about Ted, and how if she still needed a friend he was here, and he hoped that she knew that he would love to hear all about that asshole Ted.

“Mack? Is that you?” She is all out of breath. “Hold on, I was just bringing in the groceries.” He tries to imagine June in her own world, but it’s now been over a year since he and Sarah were over there. It was a place Sarah usually went to alone. If there was a double date, they usually went out or came here to his and Sarah’s house. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“What’s up? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, the same. I just wanted to say that I wasn’t a very good friend to you today and I’m sorry.”

“But you were. Really.”

Mack sits now with his hand covering Sarah’s hand. The sitter’s needlepoint is in the chair by the bed; Sarah’s parents had hired her to be there while he’s at work. They had known her for years. They wrote her check. They came and paid the sitter, just as they had done years before when Sarah was a child and they went out on Saturday nights.

“Please let her come home with us,” Sarah’s mother kept saying, and there were times like now—June inviting him over for dinner—that he wishes he could.

“Of course you can’t,” June says. “I’m so stupid.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’ll bring dinner there, how about that?” she asks. “It’s just pasta and some kind of sauce you know. Easy stuff and a salad.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Thanks.” He hangs up the phone and comes back over to readjust the tape on the feeding tube entering her nostril, makes sure there are no kinks in the line. This is when he feels guilty. Times like this when what he really wants to do is step out into the night and into his car and go for a long drive. No planning, no scheduling. He gently rests his head on her chest and listens to the dull thud, wishing with all his might that something would happen, that someone or something would intervene.

Amazing how slow a satellite post office can get, even during the vacation season. Wallace Johnson suspects that it all has a lot to do with busy, busy lives and a lot to do with computers. About once a month, somebody will come bustling in, all wildeyed with a sack of papers, looking over that small room for a fax machine. He tells them that all they have is a copying machine, which
used
to be what everybody in a hurry needed, and overnight mail, which may or may not really make it overnight depending on when you sign off. It’s a very different speed people live in now, even when they’re on vacation. As far as Wallace is concerned, that’s their loss. He would just as soon read. The paper. The tide chart. The little descriptions of all the stamps issued: lighthouses, comedians, Elvis and Einstein. If you can name it, it’s probably on a stamp. And when he’s all alone, like now, he likes to read the letters.

APRIL
1973

Dear Wayward One,

My whole life I have studied architecture. Not anything formal of course, just shapes and angles, windows facing east like the old-timey
graves. Let me see the sun rise on Judgment Day. Oh God, what if there IS a judgment day? It’s starting to worry me a little. You know now people don’t seem to give a damn how they’re buried—one on top of another, right side up. I guess I always liked the notion of those mausoleums, but that’s just because my whole life I have had a romance with little houses—playhouses, dollhouses, little dioramas like folks used to make out of a shoebox, a little wax paper window at a far end. I once made the Sahara Desert and my teacher said it wasn’t anything but a box of sand. She was not what I’d call a real imaginative sort. I like the notion of dark little houses, little windows and lifeless curtains. I see such houses and I think of all the folks who pass them by without a single notice, because of that exterior paint or maybe because it’s, say, over a business establishment or something. Imagine then that what you can’t see behind those tired dirty drapes is a love-filled life: maybe there’s a mama and a daddy curled up in their bed, and they are happy just because they have each other. And in the next room their children sleep and dream of ways to make those parents glad that they gave them life, glad that they have to work so hard to keep them all moving and growing and going. They have a plan and a purpose. I felt that I had a plan way back, when I sat under my house. I still do, though certainly my plans have changed numerous times over the years. You see, I thought we were like that couple in my dream. I thought we were that secret secret love—something pure and perfect beating behind the most sordid of scenes, or what would look that way to anybody just passing by and giving that old beach house a once-over. What will always give me a start is how I drove off, imagining you with that pillow clutched to your chest, your strong tan leg thrown over the blanket where I had been lying just moments before. Remember how I told you I had the hot foot, had to sleep with my left foot out from under the covers. You laughed great big when I said that my mama had a hot foot, as well as her mama
before her. You laughed like a man who might roll over and invite me for another romp, a man who might get up and have a sip of liquor and then write some words. You might put on one of your albums and croon along, slow dance. That was not the laugh of a man who would in less than fifteen minutes blow himself to kingdom come. I drove away through that old Green Swamp that night with my legs shaking, that good tired shaking, and my eyes peeled for headlights coming toward me. I was concerned about some fool drunk driver crossing the line; I was concerned about getting home and into the shower so that my husband would not trace you on me. He still looks at me sometimes, and it’s a look that leaves me wondering if he knows everything there is to know about me or if he knows absolutely nothing. And now I think you must have looked at me and seen those same possibilities. You were always saying how we were soulmates and how I could read you better than you could read yourself, but no, honey, not then, not now. I pictured you with a sheet wrapped around your waist, a cigarette glowing in your hand as you watched my taillights get smaller and smaller. And an hour later when I was showered and fresh, when I had told my husband all about helping this poor old soul with a flat tire and waiting and waiting all night long for the man from the Esso station, when he had asked me just enough questions that seemed to satisfy truth, then we were the ones all curled up behind still drapes. I remember falling asleep that way, my husband’s hand drawn close between my thighs where he said I felt like a furnace. And all the while I thought of you stretched out in those cotton sheets, your lids fluttering with thoughts, ever racing, ever producing those beautifully brilliant thoughts. What I heard the next day was that your brains were everywhere. What brilliance. What generosity. Brains all over this godforsaken world.