The Book of Eleanor (10 page)

“Grey, this is Yvette, Brian’s wife.” She nuzzled the baby, making her giggle. “And mother to this little imp, Georgie girl.”

I nodded to Yvette, noting how pretty she was with thick, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, and large brown eyes. “Hello, Yvette.”

“Hey, Anna, Hey, Grey. Most just call me Vetty,” she told me.

She pulled a chair from a line of them resting against a nearby wall and took a seat next to me at the table. Angie pulled over a high chair, but sat and stood the baby on her thighs, still cooing and making funny faces at the child. Sanchez leaned to coo to the baby in Spanish.

“Ah, New York?” I asked Vetty. Her accent was distinctive.

She laughed. “Brooklyn. You know the area?”

“Not really. Just went to school with a gal from up that way.” I watched Angie interact with the baby. She was a natural with kids, I could tell.

“It’s real different from here,” she offered.

“I think South Texas is like no place else anyway,” I added. “How did you end up here?”

“Dad’s an oil rigger, and he didn’t like the schools in Corpus, so he moved me, my mom, and my brother down here so we could go to better schools.”

“And that’s how she met Brian,” Sanchez explained, all the while making ridiculous expressions to make the baby laugh.

Vetty was a talker. I soon knew all about her life chasing oil through the state of Texas with her family when she was younger.

When the food came, I stared at the lovely offerings as if held spellbound by a snake charmer—huge baskets of brown, steaming hush puppies, mounds of golden french fries, and a heaping platter of fried shrimp, artfully arranged with lemon wedges and small, dark green bowls of cocktail sauce.

Couscous was like an alchemist in the kitchen. I’m not sure what he did to the food, but I ate like a fiend until I thought my stomach would burst. I hadn’t enjoyed eating much since Mary died, but this food was irresistibly delicious. All of us had a healthy appetite. Soon, the table looked like a war zone, yet Carolina brought over even more food—a stainless pot full of boiled shrimp, heavily coated with a spicy powder. Though ready to burst, I had to try just one. I groaned at the beauty of it.

Angie’s and Sanchez’s laughter made me blush.

“Oh, yeah,” Angie intoned. “Welcome to the island. Spunky’s has
the
best food.”

“I agree,” said Vetty, leaning back and patting her tummy. She looked over at Georgie, who was gumming a teething biscuit into a smeared mess. It was even in her hair. “Your turn’s coming, little bit,” she said. Georgie offered a biscuit-adorned grin in return and pounded the treat on the high chair tray, apparently in hearty agreement.

I noted that food was regularly going out of the kitchen as the three of us ate, so I was not too surprised to see that the outdoor tables were mostly filled with customers when Angie and I left the back kitchen part of the restaurant.

“Sanchez seems nice. And I like Vetty, too,” I said as we made our way onto the beach.

After Sanchez departed, we had left Vetty cleaning up the table while Georgie babbled from her perch in the high chair. I felt guilty for not helping, but she shooed us out and informed us that she was supposed to be working anyway because she was being paid.

“Yeah, Anna and I go way back, and if you ask me, all Couscous’s clan are good people. Without a doubt.”

“I agree. They wouldn’t even let us pay anything for all that food.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “He’s pretty aggravating about that.”

We walked on the cool, hard-packed sand just beyond the water’s edge. The insistent wind seemed bent on forcing our bodies into one another.

“How did you meet him? Couscous,” I clarified.

She laughed and leaned into me so I could hear her over the wind and waves. “I met him when he was about three hundred pounds lighter. He came into town from Las Vegas and Mama hired him as a chef at the restaurant.”

“Figures,” I responded. “Did he work there long?”

“A couple years. Unbeknownst to us, he was a huge lotto player, and lo and behold, one day he won the Texas State Lottery.”

I stared at her. “No way!”

She shook her head as if bewildered. “Yes, way. A couple million.”

“And he opened a restaurant?”

She shrugged. “What can I say? He loves to cook.”

We laughed together. I realized it had been a long, long time since I had felt this relaxed and so completely at ease.

“May I hug you goodbye?” Angie asked me abruptly when we reached my car.

I pondered the question. Not the idea of the hug, but rather that she felt she had to ask. I smiled and held out my arms. “Of course.”

She drew me into her embrace. My body fell limp, reacting immediately to the powerful strength I felt in her. Her body was strong. Though probably a ridiculous notion, I felt her spirit was strong too. She held me gently, a hand firmly cradling my shoulder. Comfort washed across me…and attraction. I held her tightly, my head tucked into the curve of her neck, and imagined being loved again.

We held each other longer than might be considered seemly, and I know my cheeks were pink when I finally stepped back. She didn’t seem to notice. She waited while I unlocked the door, got inside my car, and started the engine.

“Thank you, for everything,” I said when I rolled down the window. “You still owe me a story, though, about the…the center?”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot. Come by the restaurant sometime when you can,” she called. She moved to one side and swung herself into a bright yellow Jeep. “I’m there most mornings and evenings.”

I waved to show I’d heard.

I drove home pensively, thinking about Angie the whole way. I loved the way her nose crinkled when she laughed, and how her lips and eyebrows were a pale flaxen color bleached even lighter by the sun’s energy. I also loved to study the patterns made by the light freckles that peppered her cheeks. The gamine contours of her face were enchanting. I realized with some amazement that I couldn’t wait to see her again.

I’d felt her. Really felt her, and she was an amazing person. I wasn’t sure what a “Suzy deadline” was, but everything else I’d picked up from my hug with Grey Graham had proven what I had surmised about her from that very first day.

I saw that she had recently lost “Mary,” someone she’d been very close to. Was it a partner? I wasn’t sure, but I knew that I needed to get to know her on this earthly plane. I set that as a new, short-term life goal on the drive home.

My small cottage on the causeway side of North Shore may have been small, but I had been really comfortable there since moving from Cathy’s apartment. I’d never been much on having a lot of stuff. It seemed like I was happy with all the stuff that nature provided me outside, so some would have considered my living style to be extremely minimalistic.

Mama, the packrat of the family, said it was just sad. She attributed it to me avoiding the energies I picked up from objects. I suppose some of that was true. All I was sure of is that I wasn’t willing to expend energy on things that weren’t important to me.

After letting in Buddy, the neighborhood’s stray cat, I put some food in his bowl and relaxed on the sofa, staring out at the sun-bleached scrub grass beyond my sliding glass door. The ocean was ten feet from the door, but the soothing water just wouldn’t distract me today.

I listened to Buddy crunching his dry food and absently mewing enjoyment to himself, and let my thoughts roam. This could be a risky endeavor as, when fully relaxed, often too much information creeps in. I’d learned as a child to dampen down my intuitive abilities and I carried that self-made buffer around daily. Only at home alone would I let my guard down, and even then I picked up some pretty weird messages from time to time.

I would always remember when Cerise Hernandez came to me. She’d been dead six months and had been bothered the entire time by her mother’s extreme grief. She wanted me to let everyone know where her body could be found so that her mother would accept her death and get on with her own life. That had been a bit freaky. I’d done as she asked, leading the police to her body, accidentally entombed in a refrigerator when hiding from her brother, but I wanted those on the other side to know I wasn’t in the business of carrying messages for them. I needed to keep both feet firmly on the side of the living, so I ignored a lot when I was open.

Leaning forward, I lit the thick candle resting in the center of my coffee table. It was a good focal point, helping sharpen my thoughts so they would go where I wanted them to go and not where they were pulled. Today, I wanted to think about the SPICEY and about Grey.

I sensed huge changes coming in my life. Unfortunately, I was better with static energies from the past rather than visions of the future, so those upcoming changes would remain a mystery until they transpired.

I stared at the candle and focused on what Frankee had said, that maybe it was time to let the school close. Was that a message I should take to heart?

The kids I taught were all special needs kids, students who could be reasonably mainstreamed into the regular public school system. But would they be happy there? Their parents and I agreed on this one fact: probably not. There were a lot of fine teachers in Port Isabel schools. The problem is they were all overworked and underpaid. When it took me six tries to gain Tommy’s attention so he could soak up one important fact, it was evident that other teachers were just being set up to fail these kids. No, we had to keep the school open. The problem was
how
?

I thought about a fundraiser or a grant. Would that give us enough time to get the word out and get the funds in? I doubted it. So what to do? My meager salary was paid by a grant and the parents paid a stiff activities fee already. As I had so many times before, I would wait. Wait for the issue to resolve the way it would while shifting energies as far in what I considered the direction of right and correct as I could.

Buddy approached the sofa. I leaned forward to give him a few quick scratches before he had to head back outside to patrol his territory. He never stayed long. I rose and let him out through the glass doors.

I followed him outside and strolled down to the water’s edge. My neighbor, Jimmy Carson, was about a quarter mile out in water that came almost to the top of his waders. He saw me and waved.

“Fishing for a late supper?” I called to him.

“You know it,” he called back cheerfully and recast his line. “Red snapper are running.”

I looked down and watched a sea hare undulate by in its indigo-purple beauty. Ducks over by the breakwater disagreed violently and let everyone know about it with their loud calls.

I thought of Grey and wondered if she would come to love me. We’d had such a good afternoon together, and I had sensed her reacting positively to me. Hope swelled in my heart. I wish we’d been alone, so I could have talked with her more intimately.

I couldn’t see the future, but I did see feelings. And they were there. Growing slowly, but there. I hugged myself and lifted my eyes to the horizon, trying to feel Grey again.

I’m not 100 percent sure why you came to Marks & Crocker, Suzy.

I was denied a raise at my other job, sir.

Ah, yes, receptionist for that financial firm downtown.

Yes, sir, that’s the one.

But you’re a very good worker, Suzy, I can’t understand that.

My manager decided I was slacking. He said every time he saw me, I was either chatting with someone in the lobby or talking on the phone.

I studied my scribbled notes for the comic strip and wondered if the joke was too subtle. I leaned back and yawned, hoping that I would get a good night’s sleep tonight. I rubbed Oscar Marie’s ears. She was on her usual perch on the flat, narrow surface at the back top of my drafting table. She purred with delight.

“Let’s try and sleep through the night tonight, old girl,” I told her. I glanced at the closed door to the Bookmark, refusing to dwell on the night before.

I looked back at the strip and lifted my two main markers.

I had always enjoyed drawing Suzy. In fact, the character with her dark page boy and overlarge glasses had been one of the first characters I had doodled while still a young child. The name had been the same then too, but over the years, she had worked many different careers as a nurse, a stewardess, and at times a firefighter and a doctor. In fact, I wasn’t sure there wasn’t any career she hadn’t attempted at least once.

For the past ten years, though, she had been cemented in as a receptionist for the Marks & Crocker legal firm. Now I suppose she would be there forever. Syndication had a way of stagnating a strip. Now it was up to me to bring her to life each week within those confines. Not always an easy task.

Luckily, her boss was a chauvinist idiot and Suzy herself, well, I liked to say she was a little clueless most of the time.

I started with the final frame. Using a thin black marker, I sketched Suzy sitting at her desk, wearing a headset unplugged from the phone and slung by its skinny black cord over one shoulder. I usually tried to follow Dallas weather patterns and today was a cold day there, so I sketched in a button-down cardigan. Her legs were crossed, and one kitten-heeled pump dangled from the toes of the upper foot, the sight just visible in the kneehole of her desk.

Alexander Marks sat in a rolling office chair on the opposite side of her desk, his legs extended and his feet propped on her desk. She had just delivered her punch line so he was looking at her with a raised disbelieving eyebrow, his characteristic unlit cigar hanging from the corner of his droopy lips. I opened his mouth a little so that the cigar drooped comically. There, that helped. I reached for the correction fluid and all hell broke loose.

Oscar Marie hissed and spit, and the paper panel was pulled from beneath my hands and tossed on the floor. I felt a frigid wind, just like the night before, sweep across me and race away.