The Sweetness of Salt (11 page)

chapter

23

Sophie was outside, scraping paint off the side of the house, when I got back from making my phone calls. The muscles in her tattooed arms, bared beneath a sleeveless T-shirt and denim overalls, strained like smooth extension cords under her skin. Two braids, which hung down on either side of her face, had been tied back neatly with her red bandanna. She stopped when she saw me and put down her scraper. “You’re an early riser too, huh?”

“Not really. I couldn’t sleep much.”

She frowned. “You okay? You look like you just ate a plate of worms or something.”

I laughed lightly. “Actually, I just got off the phone with Mom and Dad.”

“Oh, yeah? You tell them you were staying?” Sophie picked up her scraper again, looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

“Of course I did. Why else would I call them?”

“What’d they say?”

I leaned against the side of the house. “Oh, they were thrilled. They told me it was about time I did something like this and that I should stay as long as I could.”

Sophie grinned. “That’s the kind of modern, progressive people they are.” She stopped for a minute, and let her hand fall down against her leg. “Seriously, though. You okay?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“Good.” She pointed to another scraper sitting on top of a pile of rags. “That one’s for you. Watch me first.” She slid the little metal tool across a length of curling paint. Brown flakes dropped like a cascade of dirty snow against her boots, landing in a neat pile on the grass next to them. “Not so hard, right?”

“I guess not.”

She stepped back, making a space for me. “Go ahead. You try it.”

I picked up the scraper and then slid it across a new strip of paint. Halfway through, it caught and stuck, bending the tool backward and spewing minuscule spatters of paint up toward my face. “Ugh!”

“Don’t worry,” Sophie said, brushing at my cheeks with her fingers. “It just takes some practice. You’ll be okay.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a blue bandanna. “Tie this over your hair. Otherwise, you’ll get little flakes of paint in it. They’re impossible to get out.” She nodded at my khaki pants and T-shirt. “You got any crappier clothes than that?”

I shook my head.

“Upstairs,” she said. “Second drawer in my dresser is where I keep all my work clothes. Take whatever you need.”

I plodded upstairs slowly, placing my phone down next to the baby picture of Goober, and got out the clothes. It was weird that I fit into Sophie’s overalls. For the first time I realized that I wasn’t smaller than her anymore. I walked into my room to change and saw a notebook on the dresser. It wasn’t just a regular notebook. It was a sketch notebook, with a charcoal hand and pen drawn on the front. The pages were heavy, like thin cardboard, and there were at least two hundred of them.

“Sophie?” I came back outside again, holding the notebook up questioningly.

Sophie grinned. “You like it?”

“What’s it for?”

“What do you mean, what’s it for? It’s for you, dork. So you can draw. I’m good company, but I’m not gonna be able to entertain you 24-7.” She shrugged. “Not that you need entertaining, but I thought you might want to doodle a little during some of your down time.”

I put a hand on my hip, ready to tell her I didn’t draw or doodle, that she shouldn’t have gone out and bought me something just because she was glad that I was staying. But none of it came out. Instead, I just stood there looking at her, a vague gratefulness rising inside of me.

“It’s not a
pony
, Julia.” Sophie shrugged. “It’s just a sketch pad. Use it if you feel like it, or leave it in your room. It’s not a deal breaker, okay?”

“All right.” I put the pad down gently and picked up the scraper. “You want me to work right here next to you?”

“Nope.” Sophie shook her head. “Other side.” She grunted as her scraper got caught behind a chunk of paint. “Let’s get started. I work on the outside of the house in the mornings, when it’s still cool out. In the afternoon, we’ll move inside. It’s still early. We can work for a few hours and then break for breakfast.”

It didn’t take long to get the general hang of the scraping. But it was just about the most boring thing I’d ever done. And I wasn’t very good at it. It was a messy job, which, with my lack of expertise, I only made messier. In a matter of minutes, my hands and wrists were covered with so much flaked paint that I looked like a giraffe. So were my overalls, my sneakers, and my T-shirt. We were working at eye level now, scraping the sides of the house we could reach easily. It was going to be impossible, I thought, once we got to the lower—or upper—sides of the house. And how long would it take? Weeks? Months? The whole summer?

Across the street, the lights had been turned on inside Perry’s. A few men idled again in front of Stewart’s, coffee cups in hand. The sky was full of light now, waiting for the day—and the rest of Poultney—to awake. I lowered my head and kept scraping.

Sophie meandered over to my side of the building about ninety minutes later. She stood back a few feet behind me, crossed her arms, and surveyed my progress. “Not bad, Jules. You skipped a few spots here”—she reached over and pointed—“and here, but that’s okay. You can get them later.” I bit my tongue. Signing up to help out around the house for a while was one thing. Getting criticized for how I did it was a whole other deal. “Why don’t you put your stuff down and go wash up,” she said. “We can go across the street for breakfast.”

I was ravenous. But my arms were so sore I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to hold a fork properly. I held them under the stream of water, letting the liquid run through my sore fingers. A large blister, smooth and white as a mushroom cap, was beginning to form at the base of my middle one. I rummaged through Sophie’s medicine chest in her bathroom until I found a box of Band-Aids and stuck one over the blister.

Sophie was waiting for me on the front porch. “There you are!” she said. “Hungry?”

I nodded eagerly. “What about Goober?” I asked, falling into step next to her as she crossed the street. “It’s Sunday. She should be coming back today, right? From camping with Greg?”

Sophie lifted her chin a little and then scratched under it. “They actually called last night while you were asleep. Goober begged me to let her stay with Greg for the rest of the week. They’re having a blast.” She shrugged. “What could I say? It’s the summer, right?” I nodded, trying not to let my disappointment show. At this rate, I’d never get a chance to see my niece.

The warm, salty smell inside Perry’s made my stomach rumble. It was only nine o’clock, but the little restaurant was already full. Walt and Lloyd lifted their arms simultaneously as Sophie came into view. Jimmy stared out the window.

“Working hard out there!” Walt said approvingly.

“Looking good!” Lloyd echoed.

Sophie clapped her hand over the top of my shoulder as she paused next to their table. “She’s gonna stay, boys! My baby sister’s gonna stay and help me fix up the house!”

Walt raised his eyebrows. “Hey, that’s great!”

“Sure,” Lloyd said. “I see how it is. You tell us to back off, but your sister comes to town and she gets free rein of the place.” He grinned and sucker punched Sophie lightly in the arm. “How long are you staying?” he asked, looking at me.

I squirmed uncomfortably and picked at the Band-Aid on my hand. “I don’t know yet.” I glanced over at Sophie, who nodded and grinned.

“Long as it takes, boys. She’s gonna stay as long as it takes.”

“Well, let me help you out today.” Lloyd nodded in my direction. “She ain’t gonna make very much progress if she keeps using that scraper the way she is. All she’s doin’ is prettyin’ up the grass.”

I frowned. People sure were generous with criticism around here. And I wasn’t too happy about them sitting in here watching me through the front window while I worked. Even if these guys were supposed to know everything. Honestly, it creeped me out a little.

Lloyd ran a thick finger over the space between his nose and upper lip. “You’re going up, down, over, across, backways, and sideways, Julia. You ain’t gettin’ nowhere that way. You gotta keep that scraper going straight. In the same direction.” He mimed the correct way to use the scraper, holding both hands up near his face and then pushing them forward in a straight line. “Nice and straight. Over and over. The whole time.”

Sophie put her hand over my shoulder again. “Go easy on her, Lloyd. She’s just starting out.”

“Oh, come on, now!” Lloyd said. “Startin’ out’s the easy part. You don’t go easy on someone when they’re just startin’ out. You go easy on someone when they’ve got blisters on top of blisters and they’re about ready to throw a hammer at someone.” He grinned. A large silver tooth flashed on the side like a nickel.

Sophie slapped Lloyd gently on the shoulder and winked at me. “We’ll remember that, Lloyd. Thanks.” She gave a wave to the other men. “We’re gonna go eat. See you a little later.”

“Get the special,” Walt said.

“What is it?”

“Ham and gravy with biscuits. It’ll knock your socks off.”

chapter

24

Neither of us got the special. I ordered the pancakes again, with a side of scrambled eggs, two pieces of bacon, and a large orange juice. Sophie decided on two eggs over easy, a homemade buttermilk biscuit, and three sausage links.

“Can I ask you something?” Sophie asked, after we had settled back against our chairs. Her stubby fingers, tipped with blunt, dirty fingernails, were threaded through the handle of her mug.

“Sure,” I said.

“What’s it feel like to be a valedictorian?”

I shrugged and looked down at my placemat. “You have to come first in your class if you want to stand out.”

“Huh,” Sophie said. “I thought you might’ve given me something a little bit more interesting than that, Julia.”

I began to fold the edge of my napkin back origami style. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Awesome? Incredible? Everything you always dreamed of?”

“Maybe it wasn’t my dream,” I said, folding my napkin more tightly. “Maybe it was someone else’s dream for me.”

Sophie paused, her toast halfway to her mouth.

“My turn,” I said quickly. “I have a question.”

Sophie blinked. Then she picked up her fork and stabbed at the yolk of her egg. Yellow goo bled out slowly. “Go ahead,” she said softly.

“It’s about Maggie,” I said.

Sophie stopped chewing.

“I just want to know what she looked like, Sophie.” I spoke quickly, as if my words might stop her from getting up and running out of the restaurant. “That’s all. Can you just tell me what she looked like?”

Sophie’s jaws resumed working again. She rubbed a piece of toast in the middle of the yolk, and put it in her mouth. “You mean when she was four or when she was a baby, or what?”

“Either, I guess…” I let the words trail off. I hadn’t really thought about it.

Sophie shrugged. “Well, which one? She was around for four years. Do you want to know what she looked like when she was born, when she was one, two, three…”

“Stop it!” The words came out louder than I expected. Walt and Lloyd turned in their seats. I pushed my napkin over my mouth, and lowered my eyes. “Stop it, okay? You’re being a jerk, and you know it.”

Sophie inhaled deeply and then set her fork down. “Listen,” she said. “I’m not trying to be a jerk. If you want to know the truth, I was up all night trying to figure out how to tell you everything, and I still don’t know where to start.”

“You don’t have to start anywhere,” I said miserably. “I know this is going to take time. And I’m staying because I want to give you that. It’s just…it’s hard not knowing.”

“I know.” Sophie put her hand over mine. “And I want to tell you how it happened, you know? The right way. In order, I mean. First this, then this, then that.” She raked her fingers over the top of her bandanna. “I just want to make sure I get it all, okay? There’s so much, Jules. Every time I think I’m ready to start telling you something, I think of something else that I forgot, and then I get so worried about not telling you everything that I just shut down completely.”

For a moment, just for a moment, I tried to imagine what it was that Sophie was going to eventually get around to telling me. Maybe if I were in her shoes, I’d need her to go a little easier on me.

“How about this?” I suggested. “How about if and when a thought comes to you—any thought, it doesn’t have to be in order or from the beginning or whatever—and you feel like talking about it, you just say it. Right then. No matter how weird it sounds or how out of place it might seem. Is that something you think you could do?”

All the air seemed to go out of Sophie, as if someone had pulled a cork out of the top of her head. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay. That might work.”

A few minutes of silence passed. Sophie sipped her coffee, but she didn’t eat any more of her breakfast. I finished my pancakes and eggs and pushed my mug forward when Miriam came back around.

“She was beautiful,” Sophie said after Miriam had left again. I looked up, startled. “She looked a lot like you when she was a baby. Except instead of brown hair, she had this big, thick tuft of black hair. It was like a mohawk or something. It ran the length of her head, from her forehead all the way to the back of her neck, and just stuck straight up. It was the weirdest, cutest thing I’d ever seen. And she had huge eyes. Wide, wide blue eyes, just like yours. Dad used to call them ocean eyes.”

“My eyes are green,” I pointed out.

“They didn’t used to be,” Sophie answered. “When you were a baby, they were blue. They changed to green later.”

I sat back, slightly amazed by this tiny fact.

“I loved that head of hair of hers,” Sophie continued. “I was only four, you know? Little kids get a kick of out of stupid stuff like that. And I was just fascinated with it. I was always trying to brush it, or clip on those little plastic barrettes when she was sleeping.” She shrugged. “It never really worked, though. Maggie had a hard time during her first year. She cried constantly. It was this weird little cry—really soft and sad, almost like she was whimpering. It would’ve been all right, I guess, if it didn’t go on and on and on. It drove me crazy.”

Sophie began to trace the rim of her coffee cup with the pad of her middle finger.

“Dad was really good with her then. I don’t know how he stood all the noise, but he did. He’d stay up all night with her sometimes, just rocking her and singing to her until she fell asleep. He had a terrible voice, but he’d sing to her for hours. ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’ ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby.’ ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ Even when she got older, Maggie could never go to sleep unless Dad sang to her first.”

I barely breathed as Sophie continued to talk, afraid that if I did, I might miss a single spoken—or unspoken—word.

“Mom and Dad thought all the crying was because she had colic. You know that thing that some babies get where they’re just born fussy? They had all these tests done on her, and took her to different doctors, and nobody could find anything, until finally, when she was about six months, I guess, one of the doctors said that he was pretty sure she had asthma. He gave Mom and Dad this tiny little face mask, which they would put over Maggie’s face every night. Her medicine, which was being pushed out by an inhaler connected to the mask, would mist over her nose and mouth, so that she could breathe it in. They did that twice a day, every day, until…”

Sophie’s face darkened. She rolled her bottom lip over her teeth, and then pulled her package of cigarettes out of her pocket.

“You’re not allowed to smoke in here,” I said gently.

“I know.” She withdrew a cigarette and held it between her fingers.

“Anyway, even with the treatment, Maggie still cried. I didn’t understand that it was because she couldn’t breathe right, you know? That she couldn’t catch her breath. All I could see was this new little person who wouldn’t let me touch her hair, who hogged all of Mom and Dad’s time and left me out in the cold.” Sophie ducked her head, scratched the side of her chin, and then winced. “Once, when it seemed like the crying would never stop, I ran into her room and shook the sides of her crib and screamed at her to shut up.” She glanced up at me quickly, trying to gauge my reaction. “And that wasn’t all of it. I told her that I hated her and that I wished she’d never been born.”

“You were four,” I said softly. “You were jealous.”

“I know,” Sophie said in a way that sounded as if someone else had already told her that—and she didn’t believe them, either. “Dad came running into her room that night, pulling at me, dragging me away from Maggie’s crib. He had me by the wrist—hard—and he marched me down to my room and shut the door and told me to stay in there for the rest of the night.” Sophie’s eyes looked through me. “A long time later, after I stopped crying, I crept out into the hallway and sat there and listened to him sing Maggie to sleep. I closed my eyes and pretended that I was in bed, with my purple comforter pulled up to my chin, and that he was really singing to me.”

She looked down at the cigarette, which she had begun to clench, and then snapped it in half. Letting the broken pieces fall to the side, she chewed the inside of her mouth and looked up at me. When she spoke again, her whole voice was different, as if she had flipped a switch inside. “Listen, I don’t want to demonize anyone by telling you all of this. Especially Mom or Dad, okay? Things happened the way they happened and that’s sort of the end of it. I don’t want you to think that I’m blaming anyone. I was always sort of a loner, even when I was real little. I just kind of preferred it that way. It wasn’t Dad’s fault. Or Mom’s.”

“Okay,” I said.

Sophie sat back again in her chair. She looked exhausted suddenly. “Anyway, I don’t even know if I answered your question. About what she looked like.” She leaned forward. “But that’s all I can do for today, okay?”

“Yeah,” I said softly. “Okay.”