Heart of Palm (32 page)

“Maybe I don’t want my life to change.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. He looked at his watch. 9:59. “I gotta go, Mom. Make sure you get ready for Frank. Don’t keep Cryder waiting.”

She hung up. He stared at the phone for a moment, wondering if she had actually hung up
on
him, but then he thrust it back into his pocket. My God, she was stubborn. He had to hand it to her, though—the woman had tenacity. In fact, there were times he had to admit—if he had, in fact, inherited any backbone at all, any
strength
, for Christ’s sake, from either of his parents, it could only have come from Arla.

She did what she could, he conceded. For all of them. Sometimes he thought she was the only one who’d ever looked out for him, at least until he met Elizabeth, that is. Once, when he was a kid, he’d ridden with his family out to Lake Butler to visit some friend or other of Dean’s, and he remembered riding in the back of that old Impala, Frank and Will wedged in on either side of him, Sofia sandwiched in the front between Arla and Dean. When they went past the turnoff to Raiford, Dean wanted to stop. He’d heard the state prison was selling off its cots, replacing them with new ones.

“Paulie says five bucks a cot,” Dean had said. “We’ll get four of them, set ’em up for the kiddos here. Better than them old bed frames we have now. Those are frigging kindling wood. These are made of solid steel. If I pay for ’em today I can come back later with the truck.”

Arla had turned slowly, gazed at him for a long minute.

“What?” Dean said finally. “I mean, just to use as frames. They’ll keep their own mattresses and all.” He slowed the Impala and put the blinker on, but he didn’t turn yet. A sign at the side of the road read
RAIFORD: 4 MILES
.

“Dean,” Arla said. Her voice was low and level, and Carson nudged Frank, nodded at him to watch. “If you think I will have my children sleeping on used prison cots, you are out of your pickled little mind.” Dean shrugged, pitched a cigarette butt out the window, turned the blinker off, and continued straight, toward Lake Butler. Carson caught Arla’s eye in the visor mirror, and though her jaw was set like stone, when she saw Carson looking, she winked.

Ponzi. Ponzi. Ponzi.

Nice try, Mom. It was looking like he was going to end up on a prison cot anyway.

He strode back into the hospital. He could handle this. He could handle anyone, as he’d proven to the world and himself time and time again. He’d handled his fucked-up family. He’d handled putting himself through college. He’d handled the shackles of marriage, Elizabeth’s miscarried first pregnancy, the formation of his own firm, the birth of Bell. He’d handled plenty. He could certainly handle this.

The kid from the waiting room was gone. Carson told the woman at the reception desk who he wanted to see, and she looked at her watch pointedly before directing him back up to the third floor again.

“Room three-twelve,” she said. “Thank you for your patience.”

Screw you, he thought. “Nice glasses,” he said.

He rode the elevator back to the third floor, then exited into the carpeted hallway, where the two nurses looked up at him again but said nothing. He walked down the hall, ticked off the room numbers until he came to 312. This was it. It all came down to this—Arla, Aberdeen, Uncle Henry’s, the money. Everything Carson needed to begin to put his business, his marriage, his
life
back together again was on the other side of this door, and all he needed to do was work the situation, make it submit to his will. Git ’r done. From somewhere down the hallway he could hear the old woman still calling for Timmy and Yvonne, and the horrible old witch was making him nervous all over again. Think of something else, he told himself, but the only thing that came immediately to mind was the shooting on the television downstairs, the dead guy in Orlando. I’ll bet he was a fund manager, he thought fleetingly.
Fuck!

He took a deep breath, rapped twice on the doorframe, and then entered the room. There were two beds, a man in each one, and Carson’s eyes darted back and forth between the two, searching for a man he recognized, and then he found him. His heart did that fluttery thing again, and he clenched his fists, hard, and willed it to stop. He walked to the bed closest to the door and waited until the man in it had raised his eyes to his.

“Hi, Dad,” he said, a taste like sweet bile on his tongue, a queer mingling of fear and joy in his heart.

E
LEVEN

God knows Arla had fought a few battles with her weight over the years, but this was getting ridiculous. This morning she’d stepped off the scale in disgust and kicked at it with her good foot, skinning the thin skin on the knuckles of her toes and bruising her hip against the sink on the recoil.

“Jesus on high,” she said. “Holy hallelujah.”

She wrapped a towel around herself and stomped out of the bathroom. She hadn’t been this heavy since forty years ago, when she was pregnant with Frank, the largest of her four babies, who’d entered the world at a whopping ten pounds—the most decisive and assertive action of his entire life, in Arla’s opinion. She loved all her children equally, but she could not help but see the damndest faults in each one of them. Sofia: addled. Carson: selfish. Frank: malleable. Will: well,
Will
.

She sighed. It was already after eleven, and she was mildly appalled at herself for spending nearly the entire morning in her robe, but then she pushed the thought from her mind. What was the rush? Carson had already been pestering her on the phone, but Frank said he’d pick her up at noon. She’d be ready. She got dressed, picked up her cane, and descended the stairs slowly. She entered the kitchen, where Sofia had come in from cleaning Uncle Henry’s and was eating a honey bun, standing at the window and looking out toward Biaggio’s trailer.

“I think we need to do something about our weight,” Arla said.

Sofia didn’t turn around.

“Who you talking to?” she said.

“You. Us. We’re getting fat,” Arla said.

“Speak for yourself,
maman
. I’m doing just fine.”

Arla snorted. “We’re both getting fat.”

Sofia looked at her, but her gaze was distracted, absent-minded. “Well, maybe,” she conceded.

“Why don’t you make us some coffee?” Arla said. “I need to start the linens.”

She left Sofia and walked into the living room, where she plugged in the iron and regarded a hefty basket of freshly laundered church linens. She pulled a corporal off the top of the pile, smoothed it across the surface of the ironing board. She dipped her hand into a bowl of water on the end of the ironing board and shook her fingers above the cloth, watching the drops of water fall across the white linen, the embroidered cross, the lace edges. She waited for the iron to heat up, then a movement outside the front window caught her eye, and she looked up in time to see Biaggio crossing the yard to his van. He stopped halfway and turned toward Aberdeen, and his face changed as he looked toward the kitchen window. He stood gazing for a moment, then slowly lifted his hand in a wave. He smiled, a different kind of smile than Arla had ever seen before, and then she watched, astonished, as he brought his fingers to his lips and blew a kiss toward the kitchen window. She heard a movement in the kitchen, and then Biaggio turned and walked to his van, started it up, and drove down the long driveway to Monroe Road.

Biaggio?

She put her hand on the ironing board to steady herself for a moment, but the movement wobbled the iron, and it fell over and grazed her fingers on the way down. She jerked her hand back, feeling the burn across her knuckles even as she did so.

“Damn!” she said.

“What?” Sofia called from the kitchen.

“Nothing,” Arla said. “Burnt myself.”

Now what was that all about? Had Sofia seen Biaggio in the driveway, or was she unaware that he was watching her? Did she reciprocate his smile, his gaze, his distant kiss? Oh, my Lord in heaven. What was happening around here? She couldn’t keep up. Elizabeth and Bell living upstairs, Atlanta developers calling, and now this, Biaggio in the driveway blowing kisses.

She sighed, looked up at Dean’s largemouth bass, hanging stupidly on the wall above the entertainment center.
You getting this?
she wanted to say to it.
You see what’s going on around here?
She turned back to the linens, feeling the sting of both her bruised foot and her burned hand. So it was going to be that kind of day, was it.

She righted the iron and resmoothed the corporal on the flat surface of the ironing board, then ran the pointed tip of the iron along the lacy edges, smoothing each fold and wrinkle as she went, feeling her pulse begin to slow, her breathing begin to settle. She’d always liked this, ironing. It never even felt like work, really, just a hobby, of sorts, a soothing, calming hobby, making the wrinkles go away, smoothing out the bumps and crumples and catches in the fabric the way she always wished she could do in her own life. It was so easy, on the linens. Unsightly rumples? Psst, steam, pfft, gone. Stubborn creases? Psst, steam, pfft, gone. Even the stains could be removed. Even the tears could be mended. She rounded the corner of the embroidered cross at the center of the square, careful not to singe the delicate stitching.

When Dean was still here, the ironing had been almost a therapy for Arla. She’d needed it. She remembered the days—the middle days, she’d come to think of them—when the kids were bigger, less needy, but before Will had died and everything had gone dark. When the children were tiny, she and Dean had worked in tandem, consumed with the daily chores of housekeeping and breadwinning and feeding and diapering and clothing those four small people. They were a wonderful distraction. Wonderful. But as the boys grew older, more wild, more independent, and as Sofia retreated further into the compulsions that soon came to define her, Arla had found herself staring at Dean sometimes, wondering who he was, where he’d been, where he was going. The middle years. They were hard. She’d never worried, particularly, about other women. In fact she wondered, sometimes, if he would ever love another woman again, herself included. Back then, he was still in love with the Arla he’d picked up on the side of the road in 1963. She knew this, and it broke her heart as surely as it broke his, because neither of them would ever see that girl again. She was willing to bet he was still in love with that girl today.

After he left, she kept up with him. Nobody knew it, but she did. She called his brother Charlie every now and then, asking where he was, what he was doing, where he was working, staying, sleeping at night. Sometimes Charlie knew, and sometimes he didn’t. And Dean called her, too, checking in on the kids now and then, maybe three or four times a year at first, then less frequently, and then not at all. She knew he’d spent two years in the clink for DUI back in the early nineties and that he had managed to steer clear of the law since then. She knew he’d been working for a time at Georgia Pacific in Palatka, knew he’d had girlfriends here and there but had never settled down. She knew he’d stay occasionally at his friend Tommy Bolla’s in Jacksonville, even knew—thanks to a high school friend she kept in touch with who worked as a nurse at the hospital in Orange Park—that he’d been seeing an oncologist. All those years in the boiler, down in the hole. All those dispersants. They were going to get the best of him yet. She’d never told the kids she had spoken with him. What good would that do?

Dean. He’d been a bitter medicine. But he’d brought her to herself, made her what she was today, for better or for worse. She snorted, amused at the echo of those words. Was she better, or was she worse?

It would have been different, without a doubt, were it not for Will. She and Dean, they might have made it, might have defied the odds. But Will was a blow with which none of them could cope. That black car, that steep ravine, that horrible, horrible night. She’d never hold anything against Dean, after that. All bets were off. Nobody could be expected to carry on after that. All those years playing at being a patriarch—Dean was pulling a weight he had no business pulling, driving a boat he didn’t know how to steer, and Will’s death was the final collision, the impact from which there was no return. After that, when Dean lit out it was a relief, almost, though he’d left her frightened and angry and again cut right down to the bone.

She remembered the last time she spoke to him on the phone, how he’d come close to an apology but never actually said it.

“I’m no good as the driver, Arla,” he said. “We both know that. You’re better off at the wheel.”

She’d nodded in her dark bedroom, alone, the phone held tight to her cheek, and then she told him good-bye and hadn’t spoken to him again. That was five years ago. And even though they were still legally married, she didn’t know if she’d ever speak to him again.

And now this. An offer to buy the house.
Money
, they kept saying to her.
Freedom. Opportunity.
Malarkey. She didn’t need opportunity, didn’t want freedom. The things she wanted, money couldn’t buy. But then the nagging thought came to her again, the nagging guilt. This wasn’t just about her. There was Sofia to consider. Carson. Frank. Elizabeth. Bell. She felt something moving, something large, glacial, in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t know if she’d be able to keep it still for long.