Heart of Palm (33 page)

The bass on the wall caught her eye again, and she stared at it. Then she looked down at the corporal on the ironing board, at the spreading brown burns the iron had seared into the white fabric, and she jerked the iron back up.

“Shit,” she said. “Holy shit.”

Something smelled awful, and it wasn’t just the burned linens. She tossed the ruined corporal back into the laundry basket and unplugged the iron. Then she grasped her cane and went back into the kitchen, where Sofia still stood at the counter, staring idly out the window.

“What is that smell?” Arla said.

Sofia turned and looked at her abstractedly, then jerked to awareness and bolted to the stove, where a Tupperware bowl had been reduced to acrid molten plastic against a red-hot heating element on a back burner. On the counter next to the stovetop, a metal saucepan sat clean and dry.

“Gosh sakes,” Sofia muttered. She turned off the burner. “There go the grits.”

“What in the world?” Arla said.

“They were leftover in the fridge. I meant to put them in the pot. I guess I forgot that part,” Sofia said.

“Holy Mary, mother of God,” Arla said. “Honestly, Sofia. Are you trying to kill us?”

And here was the rub. How could Arla ever be expected to pay any attention at all to her own health and well-being, to actually think about
herself
now and then, to focus on
her own
needs and maintain
her own
figure and sanity when she had to be on watch every second of every God-damned day for Sofia’s next act? Holy Lord. Arla was sixty-two. She felt, suddenly, as if she were a hundred.

“Mother,” Sofia said icily. “It’s a piece of Tupperware. It’s not the end of the world.”

“It’s what that Tupperware represents, Sofia. Where is your mind?” Arla cringed a little bit when she said it. Where, indeed?

The whole kitchen smelled like melted plastic, and the only thing Arla wanted was a Little Debbie honey bun, or three, and God
damn
, pardon the French, her blessed fat ass, but today was clearly not the day to start with the reducing.

Elizabeth entered the kitchen.

“What do I smell?” she said.

“Ask Sofia,” Arla said.

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows, looked at Sofia, but said nothing. She walked over to the stove, studied the mess, then pulled a knife out of a drawer and started scraping plastic off the burner.

“Let’s get it while it’s still warm,” she said. “Before it really sticks.”

That was Elizabeth. Always knowing just what to do. Always helping to
solve
the problems, not
add
to them, unlike her own daughter, who seemed to lie awake at night thinking of new ways to torment her. It was nice, having Elizabeth and Bell here at Aberdeen. If you didn’t count Carson as part of the equation, and if you didn’t worry yourself too much wondering what was going to become of the only marriage any of her children had ever managed to negotiate, it was downright pleasant.

Oh, it broke her heart, it did, what Carson was doing to Elizabeth. Why were these Bravo men so selfish? Arla picked up the box of Little Debbies, left Sofia sulking at the stove, and went out to the back porch.

Normally she wouldn’t have tried the back steps. Her bad foot was never to be trusted, and these days, with her height and ever-increasing weight, the descent down the steps was treacherous, at best. Years ago Frank and Carson had built her a ramp off the front porch, which was what she used to get in and out of the house, but today she was driven by an overwhelming desire to get away from the house and to get away from Sofia, quickly, and she simply couldn’t be bothered with walking to the front of the house.

She tucked the package of honey buns under her arm, linked her cane over her elbow, and gripped the railing, taking the steps one by one until she was on the flat, gravelly sand of the backyard. She lumbered down to the water, sat at the stone picnic table. This table. It had been here forever, since Dean had liberated it from a state park when they’d first moved to Aberdeen. How he got it into the back of his pickup truck she’d never know, but it took six Utina men and a couple of cases of beer to get it out and down the slippery, leaf-covered slope of land to this small clearing on the banks of the Intracoastal. Arla always liked the table. It had staying power. Which was more than she could say for the man who’d put it there.

She opened the first honey bun and looked at it. The sugar had crystallized along the edge and, given the humidity, had made a creamy paste of white frosting. She licked the inside of the plastic wrapper, then downed the bun in three bites. Bottoms up, she said to herself.

It hadn’t always been this way, she conceded, running her tongue along her teeth to collect the remnants of sugar. She used to care about her weight. Used to care about her hair, her clothes, her lipstick. Used to savor the feeling of a man’s stare on her legs, count the double takes she’d cause, like a ripple, when she entered a room. She’d been beautiful. She knew she was beautiful. But she’d started too early. Married at eighteen. Her first child, Sofia, at nineteen. She’d started early, so she’d aged early. She’d given up fighting it. She’d bought the pants with the elastic waistband, had given up skirts for shorts, had purchased her last tube of mascara a long, long time ago. So what? Here at Aberdeen, her husband long gone, what did it matter? It didn’t. At Aberdeen, nothing mattered. And she liked it that way.

Aberdeen. What kind of name was that for a house? And what kind of man names a house, anyway? She slapped at a fat mosquito on her forearm, and the insect promptly gave up the ghost but left a thick smear of blood in its place. Good Lord. Was there no end of nuisances? She opened the second honey bun.

She remembered once, as a child—maybe nine? ten?—when she’d gone with her father to a wealthy client’s house on the bank of the St. Johns River, and she’d stood, astonished, looking out over the river, where fields of aquatic flowers spread across the surface of the water like blankets. Arla couldn’t see the water beneath. It was like the whole river had turned to foliage. The plants were lush green, bold purple flowers bursting out of the centers, and the sight was dazzling, unreal, all the water as far as she could see covered with a thick green and purple carpet. “What is it?” she’d said to her father, and the client, an old man, had snorted, shook his head. “Water hyacinth,” he said. “It’s invasive. It’ll clog the whole waterway.”

“It’s beautiful,” she’d said.

“Yeah, it’s beautiful,” the old man had said. “A beautiful nuisance.”

The phrase had rung in her ears for many, many years. Was that what she was? Arla Bolton. Arla Bravo. A beautiful nuisance.

She looked to the right, where the footpath to Uncle Henry’s had once been clear and well traveled, and now had become faded and overgrown. Back in the day, when she’d first bought Uncle Henry’s, she’d used the path regularly, picking with her cane to and from the restaurant two, three, sometimes four times a day. It was a fifteen-minute walk through the woods to emerge on the other side at the edge of Uncle Henry’s parking lot. But Arla hadn’t walked the path in many years. She thought of Drusilla Jane Ashby—the name carved on the mysterious headstone in a thicket of palmettos. When she was younger, she’d go into the woods, sit on a stump, and talk to Drusilla, chatting with the dead woman as if she were a sister, or a friend.

That’s what she did the day Dean left.

She’d been in the kitchen with Sofia, and it was October, the day before Halloween, Will dead and buried more than three years already, and Dean had come into the kitchen with a funny heaviness in his step, and he’d said,
Arla, I gotta go
.

She thought he meant to the bathroom, that’s how dumb she was, and she’d said “Go, then,” but then she looked at him, and Sofia looked up and saw him there, and Sofia’s mouth slowly opened with understanding and she got up and left the kitchen, left Arla facing Dean under the slow
tick-tick
of the Felix the Cat clock on the wall.

“I can’t do it,” he said.

“You’ve been doing it this long,” she said.

“Not very well,” he said, which was true, she would give him that, and then he said it again, “I gotta go.”

She felt consumed by pragmatism then, wanting to know the details, the logistics. “Where will you go?” she said.

“Not sure.”

“Will you come back?”

“Not sure.”

“Do you have money?”

“A little.”

“Well,” she said. She sat down at the table. “Dean,” she said, and then she stared out the window.

“You mad?” he said.

“I will be,” she said.

He packed two suitcases and put them in the back of his truck. He waited until Carson and Frank got home from wherever they’d been, and then he called Sofia back to the kitchen and told them all he was leaving.

“Nice,” Carson said. “Beautiful.”

Frank said nothing. Sofia stared at the floor. And then Dean had walked out to the truck and was gone, just like that, nothing more, his tan forearm hanging out the truck’s door like always, the sound of that damn loose muffler hitting the trees and bouncing back for a long, long time.

“Fuck him,” Carson said.

“Watch your mouth,” Arla said.

“Double fuck him to hell,” Carson said, and he’d slammed his fist into the wall then and stared at it as the blood beaded across his knuckles.

“All right,” Frank said. “All right now.”

Sofia cried a little bit but after a while she stopped and she went upstairs to her room. Arla had stayed in the kitchen and drunk three glasses of Chablis, one after the other, and then she walked out into the path and picked her steps slowly until she came to Drusilla’s grave. She sat down, told Drusilla that Dean was gone.

“No, I’m not surprised, not really,” she’d said to the headstone. “I just wish—” What did she wish? “I just wish he hadn’t left such a mess. I just don’t know how I’ll ever clean it all up.”

That night was cold, the strangeness of the coming winter always so odd here in Florida, always taking Arla by surprise, an unexpected guest—dressed all wrong, awkward, mismatched. The little thicket in the woods was dark and dry, and somewhere out across the water an anhinga called and something big jumped in the shallows and Arla had sat for a long, long time, until her hands were brittle and sore from the cold and she’d walked back to the house, to Aberdeen, alone.

Aberdeen, she thought now, twenty years later. She turned back from the concrete picnic table to regard the house. How she loved it. How she hated it. When she and Dean were first married they’d driven in his truck down to Palatka to buy that secondhand Impala, and the car’s owner had a strange dog in a kennel on his porch, a hunting terrier that had been trapped in its kennel for nearly a week after its owner, the Impala owner’s uncle, had died. By some miracle, it’d had enough food and water in the crate to survive. When the dead hunter’s family had found it a week later, they opened the door to the crate, but the dog wouldn’t come out. Stockholm syndrome, or something like that. Bravo syndrome. Aberdeen syndrome.

She thought of that strange old song Will used to play on his guitar, “The Northern Lights of Aberdeen.” It was a Scottish song, he’d said, and she had no idea where he dug it up, but it was a pretty thing, soulful and sad, and it made her think about Scotland, a place she’d never been, and about seeing the northern lights, a sight she’d always wanted to see. She saw a special once on PBS. Someone had filmed the aurora borealis off John o’ Groats at the very northern tip of Scotland, and she’d been mesmerized by the notion of it, the sky exploding in light and color in what seemed an act not of nature or even of artistry but of sheer defiance.

Will ye come back aga’ tae me, though death upon ye be.

Though sea and brae be in between, come back tae Aberdeen.

If ye canna’ come, send word tae me, in lights that bonnie be.

If ye canna’ come, though sure I dee, I’ll love the light for thee.

She thought of ice, and cold bright light, and purple sheets of luminescence in the sky. She thought of green flashes, of dancing bolts of copper, and snow and fevers and magic. She thought of Cullowhee. A bead of sweat trickled down her back, and she felt her clothes turning damp in the humidity. Somewhere down near the water, a long shape slithered through the reeds.

“Mother!” Sofia was yelling from the back porch. “Frank is here. He says you have a meeting!”

How did she ever get so tired? Once before I die, she said to herself, I am going to go somewhere cold, somewhere north, and I am going to see the aurora borealis. Once. And though she knew this was a lie, she was comforted by it. She closed up the box of honey buns, picked up her cane, and started for the house.

T
WELVE

Carson hadn’t expected Dean to have changed much. He hadn’t thought about it, honestly, until this moment. “A guy his age,” Cryder had said. How old was Dean? Carson did a few quick calculations—sixty-five, he decided. Dean Bravo had made it to sixty-five. Amazing.