Accidental Happiness (14 page)

Most of the parishioners had begun to gather their leftovers. I’d managed to get more than enough material for my story. I’d also consumed just enough fried chicken and peach cobbler to make me queasy.

Jake packed up to go, assuring me that he could find his way back to town.

“Have you seen Angel?” I asked him as he put the last of his equipment back in his car.

“Well, earlier, a bunch of mother hens were feeding her within an inch of her life,” he said, closing the door to the backseat of his car. “Wait a minute. I saw her after that, heading up the path to the graveyard, I think. That wasn’t long ago, just when I was finishing my shots.”

“Well, I better find her,” I said, glancing up toward the cemetery.

I’d already sent her to the Emergency Room. Reese wouldn’t take it too well if, on top of everything, I lost her.

Angel wandered around the headstones. I watched her from midway up the path. She stepped lightly, occasionally reaching out to touch a stone with her fingertips—a soft gesture that seemed to suggest some fondness for the soul resting beneath the marker. But she didn’t know any of them. I didn’t know any of them—except one.

From a distance she could have been any young girl; but through my own distortion, I thought again of my sister, Elise. The image from my dream took an immediate presence in my thoughts, and I pushed against the feelings of panic that followed. She wasn’t Elise. With her self-possession, her calm resolve, she was everything that my needy younger sister had never been.

“Hi,” I said when I was still a distance away. I didn’t want to scare her, make her imagine some voice from the beyond.

“Hey,” she said, barely looking up at me. She didn’t frighten easily. Her accent echoed the lush tones of her mother’s Southern singsong.

She appeared entirely at ease among the dead. Strange, for a child. Then again, most everything about Angel seemed strange. Her demeanor around me had moved from downright cold to a mild disdain. All in all, an improvement. I didn’t care to be Aunty Gina, but I’d just as soon not be Cruella de Ville either.

“See anything interesting?” My tone carried effort, condescension; but I had no internal guidepost when it came to children. Honesty would have rendered my interaction fearful, and very nearly mean. I wanted to do better than that, even if it rang false to both of us. “Any good epitaphs?”

I realized that she probably didn’t know that word, but before I could speak, she looked up at me with clear eyes. “Where is he?” she asked.

“Who?” I bought a moment of time, if not composure, with the question; but I didn’t really need to ask.

She seemed to study her response. I wondered why she would want to know, why she took such care in the asking.

“Your husband,” she said. “You said before at breakfast that he was buried here.”

I looked at her, hoped to see some betrayal of motive. But she was seven years old. What deeper concern could there have been?

“Over here,” I told her, walking toward the spot. As a new grave, Benjamin’s plot had been tended with special care to get the covering to take. The grass was literally greener on top of his patch of land. I could have found a joke in that somewhere if I hadn’t felt so miserable. “I don’t have a headstone yet. I’ve still got to decide on the engraving.”

Again, she just nodded, walked over, and stood by the grave.

I came up beside her, stood there mute, unable to choose words that made sense. The rising pressure in my chest, something I’d come to define as physical grief, began its familiar swell. I wanted Benjamin with me. I wanted with a fierce internal drive that felt like a scream. But no sound came. Fighting tears, I looked over at Angel, hoping to find inspiration for diversion, for small talk. Instead, I found her crying. Large, quiet tears with only small catches in her breath to mark their existence. She looked broken.

“Angel.” I said her name out loud and it sounded to my ears like a word I had invented.

She turned and saw my face, my tears. The corners of her mouth pulled down in the terrible show of misery that children cannot disguise. With instincts that had escaped my notice for thirty-three years, I reached to touch her, pull her toward me, and to my amazement, she let me. She felt soft, altogether different from the prickly associations I’d come to have with her. She was just a little girl.

She pulled up the hem of her T-shirt, wiped her whole face, then stepped away from me, looked up as if she expected something. I had no idea what to offer.

As I stared at her, the questions came full in my head. In the rush of our shared misery, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask why she felt such emotion for a man she’d never known. I thought of her comment to Lane about the salt pond. Even as these thoughts were forming, I knew at least part of the answer.

“When did you meet Benjamin?” I asked. I kept my voice gentle, without accusation. She’d be skittish. It was a secret Reese had bound her to keep; betrayal would not come easily.

She looked at me, didn’t speak. But at least she had none of the defiance that had marked our infrequent interactions. I reasoned that she wanted to tell me.

“It’s okay, Angel. I understand why it was a secret. But it’s okay now. Tell me about your time with Benjamin.” She sat down, cross-legged, on the grass just next to the grave, her eyes down.

The elevation of the graveyard allowed for a small breeze off the water through the trees. Strands of Angel’s curls, dark like her mother’s, blew around her face, left her in constant battle with her good hand to free herself from the nuisance.

“Here,” I said, taking the elastic out of my hair and pulling her hair back into a ponytail. Only afterward did it strike me as odd that I would offer such a gesture—or that she would accept.

“Thank you,” she said.

She scratched at a small rock, her fingernails digging at a stone half buried in the ground. I sat beside her, my Sunday pants sacrificed to the South Carolina soil.

“He was funny, wasn’t he?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Benjamin.” I tried to convey an air of camaraderie, shared knowledge. “What did y’all do? Go to the salt pond?” My heart was flying in my chest, but I kept a surface calm. It took most of what I had inside me to do it.

“He said you like puzzles.” Her voice stayed at whisper level, and I leaned forward enough to hear her. I forced myself to stay quiet, to wait. “The puzzles on the computer where the numbers get out of order and you have to put them back,” she said. “He had a computer he carried in his car with the puzzle on it. He could do them real fast, but he said you were faster.”

My satchel with my notebook and tape recorder lay on the ground beside me. I reached in and found my Palm Pilot, turned it on and tapped the icon for the number game, then handed it to her. She stared at the screen, and I saw shades of a smile play at the corners of her mouth.

“This one is different from his. How do you do it on here?” she asked.

“With this.” I leaned over, touched the spaces with the stylus to show her how to move the numbers, then gave it to her to try.

She worked as if it mattered, as if something real depended on the outcome, on how quickly she completed the task. I saw her mistakes, wanted to help her, but I sat back, thought of Benjamin. For someone who stayed in constant motion, Ben had reserves of patience that contradicted everything else about him. I could see him with her, could almost accept that it had happened. But then I would see him coming home to me. His silence implied more than I wanted to believe. What had Reese been doing while he taught Angel puzzles, while they explored the pond?

“I did it,” Angel said. The hesitation in her voice had disappeared. She handed it to me, her face open and glad, but with images of the three of them in my head, my generosity grew thin.

“That was fast,” I said, trying, but my words came out void of the enthusiasm they suggested.

I watched her expression, saw the confusion at my reversal, and wanted to offer more. I wanted to be a better person than I was; but it hurt too much. Benjamin had lied to me.

She handed me the organizer, and I saw the numbers laid out in perfect order. She tried to stand, but found balance awkward with her shoulder sling, so I held my hand to steady her. Her small arm steeled against my efforts and she stepped away from me as soon as she had firm ground under her feet. I admired her instinct for self-preservation. And I thought again of Elise, wondered how I’d ever compared the two of them.

“We should get back to the marina,” I said, but she had already gone ahead of me.

We worked our way down the path, leaving Benjamin silent behind us. As before, he was unable to tell me the truth about Angel. The truth about Reese.

Through the stained glass of the chapel, I saw a figure moving, alone near the altar. Most likely the preacher. I thought of his wife, unhappy and withdrawing from him—if Miss Ronnie’s assessment held any weight. As Angel got in my car for the long ride home, I realized that feeling lonely had little in common with being alone.

Conscience got the best of me on the drive home. I’d changed the rules after getting her to open up with me. She was a kid, just a little girl. I had to keep telling myself that because I wanted to make her into someone manipulative. Someone to blame.

“Listen, there’s a stand that’s on our way. It sells homemade ice cream,” I said. “You have enough room left after lunch to get a cone?”

I’d seen documentaries of wild animals, lured to benevolent capture by scientists wielding fresh chunks of meat. Angel, I sensed, had been hunting for herself during much of her existence, with varying degrees of success. At the mention of ice cream, she turned to me, looked suspicious. I put my attention on the road ahead, gave her time to decide.

“What kinds do they have?” she asked finally.

“They change the flavors every week. My favorite, when they have it, is pink bubble gum. They actually put pieces of gum in the ice cream.”

I glanced over at her again. Her small smile took me by surprise, brought me close to a sappy, Hallmark variety of emotion. I took a breath, blinked, and hoped she hadn’t noticed. I had a hunch that any overt display could scare her off.

“How ’bout it?”

“Okay.” One small word, but it seemed like so much more. She looked out the window again, but the air in the car had changed. I felt myself relax as I kept an eye out for the roadside stand.

We finished our cones, standing in the sandy lot by the car. The heat melted them faster than we could eat, and we ended up sticky and laughing. She looked happy, and I felt it too, watching her, thinking that I’d somehow allowed it to happen.

Back on the road, my cell phone rang. It cut through the relaxed silence between Angel and me with alarming volume. When I pushed the button and said hello, Lane’s greeting served as a calming antidote to the obnoxious ring tone.

“Listen, Reese just left,” she said. “They called her here from Ollie’s wondering if she could come in tonight. Somebody got sick and left an open shift.”

For a minute I wondered if I’d have Angel for the day. In spite of our softer moments, I didn’t want an extended
Sesame Street
session on my boat.

“Well, if she’s working, what’s Angel going to do?”

“Bring her over here,” Lane said, with no apparent resentment. “I’m going to look after her.”

“Lane, you’re not a day care center,” I protested. “You can’t start doing this.”

“Can she hear you?” Lane asked in a reflexive whisper, and I realized that, of course, Angel would know what I was saying.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, wondering why everyone else seemed to be born with parental instincts. “We can talk later. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

After I hung up, I waited for Angel to ask what was going on, but she didn’t. She asked fewer questions than any child I’d ever seen. All the ground we’d covered seemed lost, moot.

“You’re mom’s had to go into work at the restaurant,” I said. “You’re going to Lane’s house.”

“Okay.” She turned her head to look at the flat expanse of tidal marsh outside her window.

If it bothered her, she didn’t show it. But then, I got the sense she kept a lot of feelings to herself. I wanted to say more, to sound cheerful or comforting. But any effort would emphasize my knee-jerk response to Lane’s babysitting and further highlight Angel’s ragtag, gypsy status.

By the time we got back to the marina, I’d convinced myself that Angel was okay, that she hadn’t caught the gist of what I’d said to Lane. But as she was getting out of the car, she took the elastic band out of her hair, laid it on the console between our seats.

“Thank you for taking me,” she said with perfect articulation. Her starched-and-pressed manners told me more than I wanted to know.

11

Reese

R
eese stood at the bar, balanced a tray of drinks with her right hand. The weakness through her arm caused her to reach up with her other hand and steady the tray. She’d be okay, she just had to concentrate. Her choice of work didn’t suit her recent problems, but there didn’t seem to be too many other options. Waitress jobs were always available, and she knew how to bring in tips with just a little banter and a frequent smile.

“Thanks for coming in on short notice,” Randy, the manager, said as he came up beside her. “And you don’t have to dress fancy, darlin’,” he said. “Most of the girls just wear shorts and T-shirts in the summer. It gets hot comin’ in and out of the kitchen.”

She glanced down at her peasant blouse and muslin skirt, thinking she’d have to go shopping for regular shorts.

“But thanks again for comin’ in.” He shifted the position of his belt, a habit Reese had noticed in him. “One hand shy on a Sunday night in high season is a real problem.”

“That’s okay.” She smiled back at him. “I need the work.”

“I like to hear that.” The sound of a crash in the kitchen interrupted his good humor. “Oh, hell!” He shook his head as he left her to her drinks.

The bartender set the last of her drink order on the tray and she started for the table of six women, celebrating someone’s birthday. “If they want me to sing, they’re out of luck,” she mumbled to herself. Women tipped other women badly. The rule almost always held. But this group looked a little older; maybe they would be more generous.

“Long Island iced tea?” she asked as she arrived at the table.

“That’s me.” A red-haired woman raised her hand. She looked to be about fifty. She seemed fit, good color and a strong voice; but beside her chair rested a walking cane. To most people that would have seemed baffling, but not to Reese. She thought of her episodes, the bad ones that required a cane. She’d even gone briefly into a wheelchair once, but that had been a long time ago. Still, the possibility remained.

“Daiquiri,” she said, putting the pink beverage at the place of a stout black woman in an expensive blouse.

The rest were piña coladas, the prime drink selection of coastal vacations. As she lowered the tray to serve the concoctions, her arm began to give way and she grabbed the edge with her other hand. But another hand steadied the tray from the opposite side. The woman with the cane. She glanced up at Reese; her kind expression seemed to read everything that Reese normally kept to herself. Maybe the slight falter in her step had given the woman a heads-up, or maybe she had simply been the closest to the tray. Either way, Reese felt a wash of gratitude.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No problem,” the woman answered.

Reese headed to the kitchen to check on their appetizers, wondering if she could possibly make it through the shift without a mishap.