I leaned on the counter at the cash register after Clooney and Mr. Perkins left. The café hadn’t been totally empty since midspring, and the quiet was nice—provided it didn’t presage a bad fall and winter. There was a fine line between a more relaxed pace and a dismal pace.
“Hey, Carrie,” Lindsay called. “I’m taking ten to run up to the apartment. Everything’s good to go for lunch. Ricky’s got the tomato basil and the vegetable beef soups simmering. The quiche is ready for the oven and will go in as soon as the black forest cake and apple caramel pies are done.”
I glanced at the glass case where a fresh fruit flan was already on display, its circles of strawberries, blueberries, kiwis, and bananas shining under their clear glaze.
“Chicken salad’s ready to go, and the pork barbecue is simmering.” She pulled her apron off and laid it on the counter. “I’ll be back before you even know I’m gone.”
I glanced at the clock. Not quite eleven. All of a sudden taking ten sounded wonderful. Only I wanted thirty. I wanted to walk to the boardwalk, sit on a bench, and let the ocean purl and purr while I threw my head back and listened to its murmur. I should be cleaning the bathroom at the back of the café, but the mess there wasn’t going anywhere. The tangy scent of salt water won over the acrid odor of bleach hands-down.
“Go on up, Linds. Only take thirty.”
“Really?”
“Yep. I’m putting the ‘Back at 11:30’ sign on the door.”
“Yes!”
Her feet pounded up the steps to our apartment. She’d collapse on the sofa with our Maine coon cat, Oreo, lying on her like a great black hairy afghan. Lindsay would murmur how wonderful Oreo was, and she’d purr, her golden eyes closing in delight, her white ruff and whiskers the sole breaks in her midnight pelt.
“Why’d she go up there?” Ricky looked at me with sad eyes. “We could have talked, her and me.”
I couldn’t very well tell him that she needed a break from his adoring gaze, and the one place she knew he wouldn’t try to follow was the apartment. He was allergic to cats.
“Andi, feel free to put your feet up or go for a walk,” I said. “Whatever. Just be back by eleven thirty, okay?”
“I’m going to sit down and do a Sudoku.” She grabbed her book and walked to a back booth. She turned to me just before sliding into her seat. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”
Bill. “Then everything will be fine.” I sure hoped that was so, but the bruise coloring her wrist gave me pause.
“Yeah, everything will be fine.” She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself.
I walked to her and wrapped my arms around her in a gentle hug. She didn’t hug me back, but I didn’t let it bother me. I remembered the long-ago days when I was just Andi’s age and the former owner of Carrie’s had hugged me. I hadn’t responded either—I hadn’t known how—but I’d loved those hugs.
If I could be there for Andi as Mary Prudence had been there for me, even if just a little, I’d feel I was doing something to give back all that had been given to me.
“Carrie likes unraveling things. Fixing things. Being the one in charge. Proving she’s able.”
Greg was right. I was the one who always took charge, but then someone had to seize control of the runaway train that had been my early life. I just hoped there was a bit more to me than being a control freak. Like love. Or humor.
I hung the eleven-thirty sign on the door and started for the boardwalk two blocks away. I paused at the first cross street and looked back over my shoulder. Carrie’s Café. The sign had a Caribbean blue background with navy letters outlined in sea green.
Oh, Lord, I still can’t believe it!
I thought of that long-ago morning when we ran away, Lindsay and I. Mom had swayed in the doorway of the bedroom we girls shared. Sunlight shone through the old sheet I’d tacked to our window for a curtain, making her skin look pastier than usual. Her hair was wild, her eyes bleary. She looked ready to collapse. If the alcohol didn’t get her, malnutrition would.
“Carrie!” She tried to look angry, but her facial muscles weren’t cooperating. “Bobby says you came after him with a knife!”
Bobby, Mom’s latest, leaned on the jamb of Mom’s room, fat belly hanging over his boxers, a nasty smile on his fat face. Well, he had to explain the cut on his arm somehow, and he wasn’t about to say he’d asked for it.
I felt then ten-year-old Lindsay slide under the covers until she was invisible. She was shaking, and I hated Bobby for making her afraid.
“He came into our room last night,” I said.
Mom shrugged. “So? He just wanted to say good night.”
I stared at her. “Mom, that’s not what he wanted!”
She laughed. “Don’t be stupid, Carrie. What could he want with you or your sister? He has me.”
I might not be beautiful and Lindsay might be scrawny, but we looked alive, which was more than I could say for her. The dead street lady I’d seen last winter on my way to school looked better than she did. She’d had me when she was my age and was now thirty-two, but she looked at least fifty. Old. Old, old, old.
“I want you to give me your knife.” She held out her hand, and it trembled. She needed a drink already, and it was—I checked my alarm clock that I’d stolen from the mom-and-pop store down the street—7:10 a.m.
I shook my head. “Just tell Bobby to stay out of our room, and there won’t be any trouble.”
“This is Bobby’s house too,” she said, “and he can go anywhere he wants. Maybe next time he’ll turn the knife on you.”
Bobby stared at me, his porky eyes hungry, his intent clear.
“Just let him try.”
In a huff she spun to leave. The quick movement made her dizzy and she grabbed for the wall to steady herself. Now that she faced him, Bobby turned injured victim, clutching his bandaged arm, his face a study in pain.
“Come on, my beauty.” He held out his good arm. “I’ve got just what you need.”
Disgusted with both of them, I flopped back on my pillow. Lindsay squeaked as I squished her.
I moved aside. “Come on up for air, Linds. We’ve got to talk. It’s time.”
I had watched enough TV to know what happened to girls who ran away to the big city, so we ran away to Seaside. We’d heard stories about the place all our lives. When Mom got soggy drunk and no man was around to occupy her, she’d get melancholy, remembering all the halcyon summer days before her father took off and her mother jumped in front of a bus.
“Back when my daddy was working, before we moved to Atlanta, we lived in Camden, New Jersey, and we’d go to Seaside for two weeks every summer.” She’d smile and look pretty for a moment. “We’d stay at the Brookburn, this boardinghouse that had one-room apartments with little refrigerators and two-burner stoves, and I had a cot tucked in a corner. We’d sit on towels on the beach and go in the ocean, which was green, not blue like you see in pictures. Daddy would hold my hands, and I’d jump the waves. At night we’d go on the boardwalk and I’d ride the merry-go-round. Once Daddy took me on the Ferris wheel, and you could see out over the ocean all the way to Europe. At least that’s what he told me.”
Then she’d start to cry and drink until she passed out.
Her stories made me want to live in Seaside, and Lindsay shared that dream.
“Someday, Linds,” I’d tell her as we sat in the library, using the free computer and staring at the sites on the Web full of pictures of pretty beaches and glorious sunsets. Whether we looked at the brilliant transparent blue of the Caribbean or the hypothermic opaque green of the North Atlantic, the sea tugged at us like the cycles of the moon pulled at it.
“Someday,” she’d whisper back, her chair pulled close to mine.
Thanks to Bobby, the day came. It was late spring, a good time to run away.
“I’ll get a job easy,” I told Lindsay as we stuffed what few things we had in our backpacks. “It’s a resort. Resorts need summer help. I can be a waitress or a chambermaid or a cashier. It doesn’t matter.”
“But you’re only sixteen,” Lindsay said, scared.
“I’ll say I’m eighteen and just graduated from high school. I’ll say our mom is in the Army on an overseas tour and our dad’s dead.”
Lindsay looked impressed with the lie. “But where will we sleep?”
“We’ll get a room.” I tried to sound confident. I’d already decided we would sleep under the boardwalk if we had to. Anything was better than here with Bobby or the men who would come after him.
I packed my knife with care, wrapping it in my other pair of jeans. The thought of meeting dangerous men eager to prey on naive girls didn’t frighten me. I’d been keeping my mother’s various “friends” at arm’s length for years, sometimes with words or tears, more often with my large kitchen knife with which I slept. During the day I hid it under a floorboard so no one could steal it from me. I kept Lindsay close every night too, putting her between me and the wall so no letch could get to her except through me and my knife.
Usually waving my weapon around and threatening to cut off parts of a man’s anatomy were enough. Bobby was the first one I ever had to cut, and I’d only succeeded in driving him off because of surprise. When he came back, and I knew he would, he’d be prepared.
I would not give him that chance.
It took us two days to get to Seaside by bus, tickets paid for with money I filched from Bobby’s wallet, which he’d conveniently left on the kitchen table when he went to the hospital to get his arm stitched up. No wallet, no money, boom! You pick your hospital right and you get a free ride.
The first thing we did when we hit Seaside was go to the beach.
“The ocean!” Lindsay cried and ran to the water. We couldn’t stop laughing as we took off our shoes, rolled up our jeans, and went wading. The water was so cold our ankles hurt, but we didn’t care. We hooted and splashed and chased each other like a pair of little kids. Then we collapsed happily in the sand to catch our breaths.
Later that day when we decided to explore Seaside, we walked past a little restaurant called the Surfside, where I spotted a Help Wanted sign in the window.
Heart pounding because, certainly, it couldn’t be this easy, I ducked around the side of the building and pulled a clean T-shirt from my backpack. It was Barbie pink with a purple flower on its front, and it read Seaside in shimmery purple letters under the flower. I’d snitched it from one of the few open stores on the boardwalk, and I thought it was one of the prettiest things I’d ever owned.
I pulled out my brush and dragged it through my hair. I was a natural blonde in a world that wondered if blondes had more fun. I could have answered that question if anyone had bothered to ask me. No. No way. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
“Do I look okay?” I asked Lindsay. My nerves were jumping so badly it was a wonder I could stand still.
She nodded. “You look beautiful.”
I snorted at that overstatement. “You have to wait here for me.”
She looked at me with large, teary brown eyes.
I gave her a quick hug. “Don’t worry, Linds. I’m not going to pick up a guy or go to the bar.” That’s what our mother did when she put on a clean shirt—if she had one—and brushed her hair. “I’m going to answer that Help Wanted sign back there.”
Lindsay’s shoulders relaxed, her trust in me total and weighty. What if I failed her? What if we had to go back home? I stiffened my spine. I couldn’t afford to fail.
“What kind of a job do they have?” Lindsay asked.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care.” I swatted at the sand clinging to my jeans. The denim was damp from the knees down, but at least it was no longer dripping. I hoped the person inside that restaurant would think the holes in the knees were the kind you bought, not the kind that came because you didn’t have enough money to buy new when the old got raggedy. At least I’d stopped growing about four years ago, and though the jeans were threadbare, they were the right length.
Saying a prayer to a God I wasn’t sure existed but I was still careful not to offend because you just never knew, I went inside.
And Mary Prudence Hastings entered our lives.
Smiling at the memories, I crossed the last street before the boardwalk and found myself beside the Sand and Sea. The building was an older one that had gotten a facelift of gray, weathered-looking siding covering its original stuccoed cinder block. All eight units faced the ocean—if you didn’t take into account the shops that lined the boardwalk, impeding your view. Still the advertising could legitimately say, “ocean view,” a real find if you liked your view to be slices of sea glimpsed between buildings. I could see Greg’s pickup in the far corner of the parking area.
As I smiled at the thought of him, the back door of the building slammed open, and an irate Chaz Rudolph stormed out. I recognized him from the café. He was a skinny little guy, and his arms flew as he screamed obscenities. Greg followed him out, all purpose and intense scowl. A man with a badge followed. The constable, no doubt.
Greg stopped on the narrow strip of sandy gravel between the apartment building and the parking lot, arms crossed, legs spread, watching Chaz.
My heart did its usual foolish happy dance, and I sighed. How could I be so idiotic, suffering from a ridiculous case of unrequited love at my age? Such heart palpitations were for sixteen-year-olds like Andi, swooning over unworthy swains like Bill. Or even guys like Ricky, enamored with an older woman like my sister. I was supposed to be mature, to have my act together. All those years of counseling had to be good for something, like discerning the realistic from the unrealistic.
I tore my gaze from Greg and watched Chaz climb into a yellow Hummer. I blinked. Chaz could afford a Hummer, even a used one, but not his rent? His view of reality was more skewed than mine.
Chaz shot Greg a final dirty look, then backed the Hummer out of his slot with a heavy foot and a complete disregard for the neighboring cars, which he sprayed with gravel. The constable went back into the Sand and Sea, but Greg stayed to watch his ex-tenant off the lot. Chaz paused to shift gears, then roared forward.
Right at Greg.