We piled onto Kat’s golf cart, parked at the end of the pier. Benne sat on the back with my suitcase, and I climbed into the front seat, glancing warily at the air horn, thinking of the last harrowing ride in her cart.
“Don’t worry,” Kat said. “I won’t use the horn unless someone is crazy enough to step out in front of me.”
“I hate that odious thing,” I said.
“Yes, well, hate it all you want, but it has saved the lives of countless tourists.”
“Mama used to aim for tourists,” Benne said.
“Oh, I did not.”
“I believe it’s impossible for Benne to tell a lie,” I said, and Kat huffed as she pulled onto the narrow pavement.
Overhead the sky was turning orange. I had the sense of darkness pressing in, pooling behind the brightness. As we swept past the island shops, no one spoke, not even Benne.
The storefronts all had window boxes gorged with lavender pansies, even the tiny post office. Shem’s Bait & Tackle had been painted the color of persimmons, and the carved wooden pelican outside Caw Caw General Store now wore a pony saddle, I imagined so that children could sit on it. We passed a handful of tourists in front of Egret Expeditions, signing up for boat tours and bird walks. Even at the nadir of winter, the place seemed alive.
I pointed to a small store wedged between Max’s Café and the Island Dog B&B. It had a blue-and-white-striped awning and a sign in the window that read THE MERMAID’S TALE. “Didn’t that used to be a fish market?”
“It went out of business,” Kat said.
“That’s Mama’s store now,” said Benne.
“No kidding? You own it? That gift shop?” I was surprised. I’d known Kat my whole life, and she’d never shown the least interest in shopkeeping. After her husband died—which had to be twenty years ago at least—she and Benne had lived contentedly off his pension and a little Social Security.
“I opened it last spring,” Kat said.
“Who’s minding the store right now?”
“When I’m there, it’s open; when I’m not, it’s closed,” she said.
“I like the name,” I told her.
“I wanted to call it ‘Fin Fatale,’ but your mother nixed that. The woman has no sense of humor.”
“She never did.”
“That’s not true. Once upon a time, she had a great sense of humor,” Kat said.
She lit out down the road, heading into the tinted light. I watched her lean forward as if she were willing the cart to surpass the eighteen-mile-per-hour speed limit, and so many things swam up to me—scraps of my mother’s laughter, times when we were still normal and happy. Kat was right—Mother had possessed a great sense of humor once. I thought of the time she made coconut shrimp and served it wearing a hula skirt. That time Mike was eight and got his poor penis stuck in a Coke bottle while urinating into it—for reasons none of us ever understood. His penis had, shall we say, expanded somewhat after entry. Mother had tried to act concerned but broke down laughing. She told him, “Mike, go sit in your room and picture Mother Teresa, and your penis will come right out.”
“The biggest sellers in the shop are yellow signs that say ‘Mermaid Xing,’” Kat was telling me. “Plus our mermaid booklets. You remember Father Dominic? He wrote up the story of St. Senara for us, and we got it printed in a little booklet titled The Mermaid’s Tale, same name as the store. We can’t keep them in stock. Dominic is always coming in wearing that damn fool hat of his, wanting to autograph copies. I tell him, ‘For God’s sake, Dominic, it’s not like you’re Pat Conroy.’”
I laughed. As a child I’d often bumped into Father Dominic as I played on the monastery grounds, waiting for Mother to finish in the kitchen; he’d always told me knock-knock jokes. But there had been another side to him, something somber I couldn’t quite put my finger on. He had been one of the monks who’d come to the house that day bearing the remains of my father’s boat, who’d stood there as Mother burned the boards in the fireplace.
“He still wears the straw hat?”
“Same one. The straw is starting to rot,” she said.
We lapsed into silence as we skirted the back edge of the island, most of it an undeveloped tangle of wind-pruned trees. We came around a curve where the trees opened onto a prairie of caramel grasses and, beyond it, the ocean. The water was inking into purple, and something about this brought everything back, the reason I was here, what Mother had done with the cleaver. Her life had gotten so twisted and confused.
I wondered, if I’d been a better daughter, whether any of this would’ve happened. Shouldn’t I have seen it coming? As far as I knew, she could be home at this very moment lopping off the rest of her fingers.
Why her finger? I thought. Why that?
Benne was singing to herself on the backseat. I leaned over to Kat. “What happened to her finger? The one she cut off?”
“It’s in a mayonnaise jar by her bed,” she answered matter-of-factly.
The spire of the abbey church came into view just as the paved road ran out. Kat didn’t bother to slow down, and we bounced a foot in the air as we came onto the hard-caked dirt. Clouds of dust roiled up. “Hold on!” she shouted to Benne.
Kat’s hair flew completely out of its bobby pins and fluttered behind her as we sailed by the monastery gate. Just past it sat the Star of the Sea Chapel, the white clapboard parish church where the monks said mass for the islanders and where all Egret Island children, including me, had attended grammar school. Every grade had been simultaneously taught by Anna Legare, who’d told me point-blank when I was ten that I was a born artist. She’d hung my endless sketches of boat wrecks on the chapel wall when I was eleven and invited the whole island to the “show.” Kat had bought one for a quarter.
“Whatever happened to that picture of mine you bought and hung in your kitchen?”
“I still have it. It’s hanging in the Mermaid’s Tale now.”
As we passed her driveway, I noticed the MERMAID XING sign nailed to a post beside the mailbox.
A few seconds later, we slowed in front of Mother’s house, built in the style of an 1820s tidewater cottage, like most of the island homes. It stood on stilts in a forest of palmetto palms, with dormers and black shutters and a wide veranda that stretched across the front.
The house had always been some lush shade of green, but at the moment it was washed-out aqua. The yard was infested with yucca bristle and dollar weed, and standing in the middle of it was Mother’s appalling bathtub grotto.
Over a decade ago, she’d enlisted Shem to bury an upright bathtub halfway into the ground, and, being slow to grasp the point, he’d left the end of the tub with the faucets on it exposed. Mother had gone ahead anyway and placed a concrete statue of Mary inside the porcelain arch. Now the tub had splotches of rust and some sort of plastic flower wired to the spigot.
The first time I saw the tub, I told Mother that all those tears Mary’s statues reportedly cried were because of the extreme tackiness of her devotees. Dee, naturally, had thought the Bathtub Madonna was awesome.
As we rolled to a stop and Benne leaped off the back, I saw Hepzibah standing on the porch. She wore one of her African outfits, a batik shift in scarlet and saffron colors that came to her ankles and a matching cloth coiled around her head. She looked tall and resplendent standing there.
“Well, if it isn’t our Hottentot queen,” said Kat, waving to her. She laid her hand on my arm. “Jessie, if your mother says fish fly, just nod and say, ‘Yes, ma’am, fish fly.’ Don’t argue with her about anything, all right?”
“Some fish can fly,” said Benne. “I saw a picture in a book.”
Kat ignored her. She kept her eyes on my face. “Don’t upset her.”
I pulled away. “I’m not planning on upsetting anybody.”
Hepzibah met me halfway on the porch steps, trailing the aroma of okra gumbo, and I knew she’d made us dinner. “We glad fa see oona,” she said, lapsing into Gullah the way she used to whenever she greeted me.
I smiled, looked past her at the window lit from within. I stared at the wooden frame, how it was splintering a little, at a little smear glowing on the pane, and tears came, just enough so I couldn’t hide them.
“Now, what’s this about?” said Hepzibah, and she pulled me into the dizzying designs on her dress.
I stepped back from her. It struck me as a ludicrous question. I might’ve said, Well, for starters, there’s a mayonnaise jar in the house with my mother’s finger inside it, but that would have been rude and undeserved, and besides, it wasn’t my mother I was thinking about. It was my father.
The last time I’d seen Joseph Dubois, he’d been sitting at that window peeling an apple without breaking the skin—a minor stunt in his renowned repertoire of tricks. He was making a whirly girl. I’d sat on the floor that night in a puddle of lamplight and watched the irresistible way the peel had spun off the blade of his knife, nervous over whether he would make it all the way to the end without breaking it. I’d risen up on my knees as he’d come to the last turn. If he made it, I would get to hang the red spiral in my bedroom window with the other whirly girls he’d created, all of them suspended by sewing thread, bobbing at the glass pane in various stages of puckered decay.
“A whirly girl for my Whirly Girl,” he’d said, calling me by his pet name and dropping it into my open palms.
Those were his last words to me.
I’d dashed to my room without looking back, without letting him know that what I loved best about this ritual was the part where he called me his Whirly Girl, how I imagined myself one of his perfect creations, the apple skins in my window a strange still frame of self-portraits.
Seeing my tears, Kat clattered up the steps in her heels and hovered over me with her arms flapping around her sides. She reminded me of a clapper rail, one of the noisiest birds in the marsh, a big hen of a bird, and I felt my anger at her melt before she spoke. “Jessie, I talk too much and can’t keep my damn foot out of my mouth. Of course you wouldn’t go in there and upset your mother. I—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It wasn’t that. Really.”
Benne plodded up the steps, lugging my suitcase. She set it at the door. I thanked them all and said they could go, that I would be fine. I said the tears were because I was tired, that’s all.
They drove away in the golf cart, lumbering over a series of tree roots—“island speed bumps,” Kat called them. I told myself I should go inside, but I stood on the porch for a few minutes in a breeze that had chilled and darkened and smelled of the marsh, finishing whatever had come over me earlier—that little baptism of sadness.