Heart of Palm (19 page)

“Oh, sweetie,” he said. She glanced at Bell, who was coloring a picture of a butterfly, the tiny iPod earbuds dangling from her ears, oblivious. “
Hakuna matata,
” Bell sang softly. Elizabeth pulled back from Tony and cleared her throat.

“I’m leaving Carson,” she said.

“I know, I know.” He offered her a box of tissues, and she took one.

“How did you know?” she said.

“I always knew. I just didn’t know
when
.”

She blew her nose, wiped her eyes.

“Well, thanks for telling
me
,” she said.

He fished in a cabinet and emerged with a bowl of chocolates.

“No telling you something like that,” he said. “You have to find it out on your own.”

“What are you, the Wizard of Oz?” She picked through the bowl of chocolates and found the dark.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I’m Glinda.” He smiled. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out. I might give it another couple weeks,” Elizabeth said. “Just trying to get it all organized. And Bell’s birthday is coming up. After that, maybe I’ll go stay with Arla at Aberdeen.” She hadn’t actually considered this as an option until she said it out loud. But it made sense. With Carson holding the purse strings, Elizabeth didn’t have the money to get her own place, didn’t know how she’d even get access to money like that without his agreement. Which he would not be willing to give; Jesus, if she knew anything, she knew Carson. Granted, Arla was Carson’s mother, but she and Sofia had the space at Aberdeen, and Bell would feel secure, safe. Maybe Elizabeth could pitch it to Bell as a summer vacation. Maybe Bell would simply feel that they were on holiday, just on an extended visit with Granny while Daddy worked through the summer. And maybe they would be.

“Well, my God. She’s got the space out there, now doesn’t she?” Tony said. “That big old house. I’ll bet she’d love to have you. I know Arla. You’re her family. You’re everything.”

“Carson’s her family,” Elizabeth pointed out.

“You all are,” Tony said. “All you Bravos.” Which made Elizabeth tear up again. Which made Tony reach again for the tissues. “All right, now, sweetie,” he said. “You just let it out.”

Another stylist entered the salon, a young woman smelling of cigarette smoke, dressed in tight black jeans and platform shoes. The woman stored her purse in the cabinet at the station next to Tony’s, then leaned against the counter, looked at Elizabeth’s red eyes, and raised her eyebrows at Tony.

“Never you mind, Alicia,” he said. “None of your business.” Alicia moved away toward the front desk.

“The help I get,” he whispered to Elizabeth. “I swear to Jesus, I don’t know if they’re worth it. You oughta come back to me, Elizabeth.” He raised his voice. “You gonna stand there and hold up the desk all day, Alicia?” he said. “We got product needs to be stocked, you feel like maybe you could manage it.”

He put his hands on Elizabeth’s shoulders, pulled her back in the chair, and then fluffed her hair in his fingers.

“All right,” she said. “Cut it all off.”

“Oh, like hell I will,” he said. He pumped his foot against a metal bar at the base of the chair, then tightened a black cape around her neck. “We’re doing highlights.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes, listened to Bell’s humming across the room, felt Tony’s deft hands working through her hair, sectioning out thick strands, painting them with peroxide and wrapping them in foil. This was ridiculous, really. She’d just come in for her usual trim. She’d never had highlights before. She caught herself wondering what Frank would think of them.

And there it was. Frank. Her husband’s brother. Her first crush, puppy love, a man who’d been hovering around the periphery of her heart for almost as long as she could remember. The Bravo she didn’t choose. The Bravo she didn’t marry. What a stupid, foolish girl. But how could she be expected to make such a decision at nineteen? How could anyone be expected to write her own future, write it in stone, no less, before she was even old enough to legally sip Chardonnay?

It was not that she didn’t love Carson. She loved him, even now. She loved his intensity, loved his power, loved his passion, the way he walked so definitively through the world, the way he carried her along with him, an adjunct to his force, an accessory to his incomprehensible confidence. She’d grown up in a world of uncertainty, ambiguity, hesitation. He was sure of himself in a way she didn’t think she could ever be, and when he picked her out for himself she was amazed, grateful. She’d never been attached to anything as stable, as commanding as Carson Bravo. He seemed to know no fear. The first time he’d looked at her, really looked at her, she’d been so young, sitting with Frank at the time, come to think of it, Frank’s arm around her shoulders, but when Carson looked at her with that pure, defiant desire in his eyes, she caught her breath, felt herself slipping under his spell. She loved him then, loved him still. Holly or no Holly. But she was so tired of being angry. So tired of being disappointed, tired of being tired.

Tony’s comb caught at her hair and pulled.

“Ow,” she said. She opened her eyes.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Tony said. “No pain, no gain.” He painted another thick row of peroxide along a strand of hair.

She blinked her eyes to hold back the tears. When she left the salon, her hair was brighter, blonder, softer. She stared at her reflection in the car’s rearview mirror.

“You’re so different, Mama,” Bell said from the backseat.

“Not really,” Elizabeth said. “I’m really exactly the same.” For now, she thought, pulling out of the salon and heading south toward St. Augustine, toward Carson, toward home. But maybe not for long.

Bell’s birthday, a searing hot Tuesday in late July, dawned bright and brutal, the temperature topping ninety before the sun had even cleared the horizon. For the past two weeks, Elizabeth had been waking every morning in a state of paralysis, the sound of Carson breathing beside her a colossal question mark for which she still seemed to have no answer. But Bell’s birthday. It gave shape to the holding pattern, as least for a day. When she’d asked the child last week what she wanted for her birthday, Bell had confounded her by requesting only a ride on the St. Augustine trolley, an ice cream at Dairy Queen. It sounded simple enough until Bell had added: “With Brooke,” referring to her playmate from kindergarten. “And Granny. And Aunt Sofia. A girls’ day,” she’d said.

“It’s hot for the trolley,” Elizabeth said. “Is there something else?”

“The trolley,” Bell said. “It’s not hot.”

So Elizabeth made the calls, made the arrangements. Brooke and her mother, Myra, to arrive at noon. Biaggio to bring Arla and Sofia to Elizabeth’s house as soon as Sofia was finished cleaning Uncle Henry’s. In the afternoon, Elizabeth would bring Arla and Sofia back to Aberdeen.

Carson left early for the office. He’d kissed Elizabeth absently, and she willed herself not to stiffen at his touch.

“It’s Bell’s birthday,” she said. “Don’t forget.”

“Bell, baby, Bell!” Carson boomed. He walked down the hallway into his daughter’s bedroom, waking her up. “How’s my six-year-old princess?”

“Seven,” Bell said. Elizabeth could see them through the open doorway, could see her daughter sit up in bed, her hair sweetly mussed. “Seven years old.”

“Exactly,” Carson said. “Almost driving.” He blew a raspberry on her belly, returned to the kitchen. “How can I have a seven-year-old daughter?” he said. “How can this be?” Elizabeth didn’t answer, and he snapped his cell phone into a clip on his hip and walked out the back door, whistling.

Today.
Today I make a decision
. “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” The Clash. Funny, she’d always thought of that song as a hypothetical. Today it seemed like dare.

Myra and Brooke arrived at noon on the dot. Elizabeth watched out the window as Myra parked at the curb—an expensive-looking Volkswagen, sea foam green—and got out. Elizabeth had spoken to Myra a few times, standing outside the kindergarten waiting for dismissal, but she’d never actually felt the impulse to socialize with her, and now she remembered why. Myra wore a tiny plaid sundress, looked more like a beach cover-up, and her shoulders were sinewy and tanned. Her dark hair was artfully arranged in a rakish bun designed to look impetuous, rushed. Her breasts were perfect—great freckled orbs. Oh, wouldn’t Carson love this one. Brooke, the little girl, wore shorts and a pink halter top, two impossibly high ponytails erupting from the sides of her head. Myra fetched an enormous yellow handbag and a wrapped gift from the backseat.

“Come in,” Elizabeth said, answering the door. “We’re just waiting on my in-laws.”

“Oh, I love your house,” Myra said. “It’s so cute!” She looked around for a place to deposit her handbag. Bell took Brooke to see her room. “I mean, so cozy,” Myra said. “Really. Our place is so big. It gets on my nerves.”

“Would you like some iced tea?” Elizabeth said.

“Love some.”

Elizabeth led her to the kitchen, poured two tall glasses of tea. She glanced at the clock. 12:03.

“So who are we waiting for?” Myra said.

“My mother-in-law and sister-in-law,” Elizabeth said. “Bell wanted a girls’ day,” she added, apologetically.

“And where do they live?”

“Utina.”

“Where’s that?” Myra tipped her head.

“It’s where I grew up,” Elizabeth said. “Just north of here.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s just up the road.”

Myra gazed at her, an open look, as though she was assessing Elizabeth’s intellect. “Okay,” she said agreeably. She had a diamond on her finger the size of a marble.

“I just love your kitchen,” Myra said. “It’s adorable.”

Elizabeth looked at the clock again.

“So what does your husband do?” Myra said.

“Investment counseling,” Elizabeth said. How she hated the sound of it now—investment counseling—so arrogant, so presumptuous. Making it sound as if it were such a
problem
to have so much money that you actually needed “counseling” to know how to manage it. She thought of the days when she’d helped Carson build the practice, the days before Bell, when they’d been excited about the future, when they’d worked so hard to get the business off the ground, build the client list, figure out marketing, operations, accounting, all of it. She’d worked with him for all those years, postponing children on his insistence, even as the regret and loss of her long-ago miscarriage grew like a cancer inside her. When her mid-thirties approached she put her foot down, and he acquiesced, granting her the pregnancy, as if it was a transfer or a reassignment. The minute she got pregnant she cut her hours, worked part-time, spent her afternoons walking the beach on Anastasia, stopping to rest under the pier and feeling her baby make small, miraculous kicks inside her. And then when Bell arrived Elizabeth seized the opportunity and bailed from the business. She was grateful, by then, to distance herself from the constant smell of money, the ubiquitous aura of wealth. She’d grown up in South Utina. She knew the other side.

But the explanation of Carson’s job seemed to satisfy Myra. “He has a firm,” Elizabeth added. “Bravo Investments.”

“Oh, yes! A little building? Out on US1?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen the sign. I love that little place. It’s precious.”

“And how about you?” Elizabeth said. “Or your husband—?” This always sounded so awkward, so ridiculously antiquated, this assumption that the wife would stay home, the husband work, like it was 1955 or something, but so far, in Elizabeth’s experience with the young mothers of St. Augustine, at least in the circles Carson’s business kept them in, it seemed to be the case.

“He’s a veep at CSX Railway,” Myra said. “Marketing.”

“A veep?”

“VP. Vice-prez.” Myra looked at her again, that open stare.

“He commutes all the way to Jacksonville?”

“Oh, yes, been doing it for years,” Myra said. “He doesn’t mind. He tells me it justifies the Beemer. Whatever.”

A movement at the front door. Thank God. Elizabeth went to the door, opened it, found Biaggio standing there with an oversize cardboard carton. Behind him, in the driveway, Arla and Sofia were struggling out of Biaggio’s van, a rusted silver Ford Windstar. Biaggio’s shirt was wet with perspiration, his face folded in dismay.

“Come in,” Elizabeth said, swinging the door wide. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing,” Biaggio said, exhaling. “The ladies just having a little disagreement out there.” He stepped into the house, hefting the cardboard box. “The AC’s busted in the van. Hooo-doggy.”

“What on Earth do you have in there?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s all from Miss Arla. I gotta put it down.” He moved toward the kitchen, his huge loping frame looking awkward and dangerous in Elizabeth’s house, which was, she now saw through Myra’s eyes, rather small.

Arla and Sofia reached the front door, and Sofia entered first, exhaling noisily and rolling her eyes at Elizabeth.

“Oh, my
God
, Mother,” she said. “Can you
stop
?”