Because it’s only Thursday and the feast doesn’t open until tomorrow night, Ruby doesn’t want to set up camp on the overheated asphalt of the St. Sebastian’s parking lot. The rest of the roustabouts, rides and games people, have air-conditioned campers and have already commandeered the available outlets from the carnival generator. It’ll be a long day sitting around if she sets up now and a longer night hoping her laptop battery lasts long enough to watch a movie. At another venue Ruby might be more inclined to set up and hang out, but with these folks, not so much. She’s basically an interloper, an unknown. Except for Joe, there isn’t anybody she knows from previous associations.
Remaining within the boundaries of Harmony Farms doesn’t preclude camping instead of enjoying the Dew Drop Inn’s relative luxury. Despite Joe Benini’s generous offer of only 40 percent of her take, Ruby really needs to start economizing. The question becomes where should she set up her modest camp tonight? The state park isn’t an option; no overnight camping. Her one and only night there, the stormy night she discovered her new and extraordinary powers—and the Hitchhiker—had happened under the radar. It now being full summer, she just doesn’t dare park there and hope for a second helping of grace. When she hasn’t indulged in the Dew Drop’s hospitality, Ruby has camped at a little family campground on North Farms Road, but a quick call lets her know that they’re full up for the rest of the week. “It’s the Feast, you know,” says the host.
With her little camp toilet, all Ruby needs is a place to plug in. If this town had a Walmart, she could, as she has done many times over the years, dock at one of the camper-friendly parking spots and use their bathrooms. Buy a cheap dinner at the in-store Subway. Alas, this is tony Harmony Farms.
The Hitchhiker seems to know that they are no longer leaving town because she’s hopped up on the passenger seat and is cheerfully gazing out the window, the frond-like tip of her tail beating a happy tattoo against the back of the seat.
“Okay, where do we go?”
“Boy boy boy.”
It takes Ruby a second to realize that the dog is thinking about her pal, the dog self-named Boy. Bull’s yard. It wouldn’t be the same as staying with him. Just hooking up to his power source. He did offer, after all. Ruby points the Westie in the direction of Cumberland Farms. Even without psychic powers, she knows that the best place to find Bull Harrison at this time of day is at Cumbie’s.
Sure enough, there he is, leaning against the wall like some kind of 3-D mural. Boy is flat out on his side but lifts his head at the sound of Ruby’s van as if he recognizes the puttering engine. His rudder tail beats time against the hot cement, and he hauls himself up to his feet to go greet her halfway across the parking lot.
“Thought you blew town.” Bull drops his cigarette butt. Steps on it.
“I was practically gone and then I spotted the St. Sebastian’s Days. Friend of mine is the amusements guy. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.”
“Shaking off Cynthia?”
“Something like that. But, hey, I’ve got a favor to ask of you.”
“Shoot.”
Ruby lays it out: She’ll spend the next couple of nights parked in his yard. Nothing more than space and an outlet to plug into. She won’t get in his way, won’t need anything else.
Bull sweeps his trucker hat off his head. “I’d be honored.”
Boy beats time with his tail and the Hitchhiker dances on her hind legs.
Never have I ever been so happy to see a friend. When I was in my former career, I had many acquaintances, but few with whom I could share a joke, ramble around a property, play tug-o’-war. Boy is a pushover in that game. He thinks that he has to be gentle with me, but he’s mistaken. All to my advantage, I can tell you. I could hold on to that knotted end for the whole day and he would only tire out. He and I have something in common that makes our friendship different. We have both endured difficult times.
The Hitchhiker is all played out and sound asleep on the fold-out bed. She snores lightly. She and Boy have been chasing each other around Bull’s ragged yard all afternoon. Ruby has tucked the Westfalia up against the hedge, and a long yellow extension cord ties her into Bull’s only outside outlet. She’s pulled the café curtains almost closed, leaving a crack so that she can see the yellow light of his kitchen. Beyond that, a half moon, bright in a clear night sky. She’s set up the screens in the windows so the sound of insects and the muted hiss of the few cars that pass by are playing as background music. On the table in front of her, an array of tarot cards. It’s not often that Ruby reads her own cards, but it’s a little like testing the brakes on the van—pump and see if they hold. Since the early days of Maggie Dean’s insistence that she learn the tarot, Ruby has come to believe that the cards do, on occasion, hold clues to the future. It’s not the same as the intense feeling of connection that she sometimes gets with physical contact, but there’s enough of a vibe to detect a narrative. Tonight they tell her nothing more than she will move on. Well, duh. Although she’s been thinking of heading in a more southerly route, the cards suggest that north is the best direction to take.
She taps the cards into alignment and puts them away. Pulls out her laptop. That Bull has Wi-Fi is a bit of a surprise, and he was quick to hand her a scrap of paper with his password on it. “In case you wanna watch TV or something.”
Ruby has received no response from the convent. After much dithering, she had finally sent off a brief query: Does the convent keep permanent records of the girls once in its care? She didn’t identify herself as a former Sacred Heart girl. She might have implied that she was writing a novel. Nonetheless, she has gotten no response.
What she needs is a contact person. Ruby pulls up the Sacred Heart website once again. Studies the bare-bones information there, doesn’t recognize the Mother Superior, whose smiling photo on the website suggests a cheerful middle-aged woman, only her short cropped gray hair and a large pectoral cross suggesting a vocation. A staff list allows for first and last names, none of the married-to-Jesus made-up names of the nuns of her youth. If one of these ladies is a survivor of Ruby’s days at the orphanage, she can’t tell by their names. No Sister Gertrude or Sister Martha Joseph; no Sister Clothilde. The staff list includes an office administrator. If anyone knows where things are, it’s always the chief of the clerical staff. Ruby opens a blank email document, types in the office administrator’s email, B. Johnson. Betty? Barbara? Ben?
“I am writing to ask if you have records of the girls who would have been put into the care of the order in…”
Ruby puts in her year of birth, which she knows; the month, which she estimates; and leaves off the day as she has never known the exact date of her birth. Anytime she’s been forced to use a birth date, she uses what she considers her best in terms of numerology. She types in her assigned name. Not for the first time does she think that the nuns betrayed a remarkable lack of imagination in naming her Mary, and with such a generic last name. If there was ever any doubt that she’d been dropped on the doorstep, nameless, being called Mary Jones was proof enough of that. She supposes she should have been grateful that she wasn’t called Jane Doe.
What kind of mother drops her kid off at an orphanage nameless? The very least she could have done was pin a tiny note to the swaddling: Please take care of my baby Victoria, or Renata, or what have you.
Unless. Unless it wasn’t her mother who left her on that doorstep. Ruby lifts her fingers from the keyboard. She can feel her heart pounding in her chest. In all these years, it has never occurred to her before that someone else might have done the deed; an angry and embarrassed grandparent, or a kidnapper with second thoughts. In all her life, Ruby has been stuck with the origin story she had interpreted for herself from the scant clues offered to her by the nuns. Left with us. No one to claim you. Always, always assumed it was her mother.
“… If you are willing, please let me know as soon as you can. It means a great deal to me.”
First step. Find out if there is a slip of paper somewhere in the bowels of that redbrick building that has her name, however generic, on it. And, if there is something there, will it be enough to start a search she should have begun eons ago?
As the first of the St. Sebastian Days doesn’t begin until five o’clock, Ruby decides that a quick trip to the local Laundromat is a good use of her time. She loves the Tons of Suds for its unabashed utility. Nothing froufrou here. Good old-fashioned coin-op washers that don’t require an engineering degree to operate, a temperamental dollar-bill changer, and only three kinds of detergent in little boxes. It smells wonderful.
The attendant is a tiny Asian woman whose English is limited but who manages to keep the customers in order, admonishing against ignoring the lint traps and taking too long at the folding tables. Cheerfully opening the cranky bill changer to fish out coins. Somehow she knows that Ruby is a fortune-teller and each time Ruby comes in, says: “You tell my fortune. I give you extra dry time.”
Ruby doesn’t know how much the little lady understands of what she tells her, but she always smiles and seems pleased to hear that only good things are in store for her. A visit from a daughter, a grandson’s good grades. She prefers the tea leaves over the cards. Prefers green tea over black.
Ruby is just folding her laundry when Polly Schaeffer comes through the door. She’s toting a basket of towels and blankets and the smell from across the room is very animal shelter.
“Damned washer quit on me. I’m not looking forward to begging the town for the money to get a new one.” Despite her title of “assistant,” Polly is actually the only animal control officer. Paid as an assistant, she is also expected to manage the office as if she was in charge.
Polly has long complained that the town considers its animal shelter extremely low on the scale of need against that of playgrounds and fire trucks and office personnel. “Tax office has plenty of paper, I can tell you that. Me, I have to buy my own or wait till the budget is passed. If I don’t anticipate a need, it has to wait maybe a whole year. And I didn’t figure on a broken washer.”
“When does the budget get passed?”
“Spring.”
“Oh.”
“I’m doing this on my own dime.” Polly shoves a massive armful of stinky towels into an empty washer. The Asian woman frowns, turns her back, and goes into her office. Shuts the door.
Polly slams the washer lid, remembers the detergent, opens it, dumps in half a box. She jams coins into the slots and rams the mechanism in. Turns. “Hey, I thought you left town.” Polly throws her arms around Ruby.
“How could I pass up the opportunity to read cards at the St. Sebastian’s Days?” Ruby extricates herself from Polly’s exuberance.
“To say nothing of the fact that the world’s best food is served there.”
“It will be nice not to have to think about what’s for dinner for a couple of days.”
“Are you back at the Dew Drop?”
“Not exactly.” Ruby tells Polly about her temporary campsite, waits to see if Polly is appalled, or jealous.
“You know, he’s one of the good ones. Nothing in his life has been anything close to a fair shake.”
Ruby instantly imagines self-inflicted losses. Bull has all the aspects of a man who has long ago lost control of his own life. And that generally means the loss of control over the lives of others. “What’s his story?”
Polly shifts in her seat. “His wife was killed when her brakes failed, and he was left with two young sons. One of them, Cooper, turned out okay. Cooper was our dog officer here a couple of years ago. He’s the one who arrested Don Boykin for animal cruelty. You know, Cynthia’s now ex-husband.”
“And Boy was the dog. Bull did tell me that.” More precisely, Boy told her about it. The taste of abject fear had filled her mouth, and with it the sensation of exquisite pain. She didn’t feel the pain in herself, but in her mind. She had run her hand down the length of the dog, along his flanks, and felt the lumpy scars of shotgun pellets. She had heard the blast of the double barrel in her ears, and endured in a touch the long weeks of suffering.
“Cooper suggested me for the ACO job when he left town to go back to the Boston PD as a K-9 officer.”
“And the other son?” This is the one she knows is gone, the one that throws Bull’s aura into a smudgy gray.
“The other son, Jimmy, well he was just bad news from the beginning. Jimmy was running drugs or something and ended up going through the ice on the lake trying to get away. Drowned.”
“Oh, that’s awful. Poor guy.”
“Between you and me, I think Bull’s better off without him; but that’s just me.”
With their laundry done, Ruby and Polly grab lunch and then head to the animal shelter with the basketful of clean blankets and towels. Polly has a couple of dogs in house, and asks Ruby to “take a look” and see if there are any clues she can give toward locating the animals’ owners.
The Hitchhiker seems reluctant to go into the building; she pulls back on the leash. Ruby scoops her up, presses her face against the dog’s head. “It’s okay, Hitch.”
“They are not happy in there.”
“They need to find their owners.”
“If you go in there, will I lose you?”
“Hitch, you belong to me, don’t worry. You won’t lose me.”
Inside the building Polly brings Ruby to where two dogs are in separate pens. One is a bulldog type, the other more of a terrier. “Where did they come from?”
“The big one was wandering around the state park; some picnickers called me. He was scaring the kids. The other one was rooting around garbage cans on Maple Ave.”
“They want to be together. I think they’re a pair.” Ruby squats in front of the cages. Presses one palm against one door, and the other palm against the other. Both dogs sniff and at the touch of their noses, she gets a good blast of connection. “Something happened to their person. He didn’t come home. They dug out of their pen, not for the first time. They sat in the driveway for a long time, and then forgot to wait.”
“Can they tell me their address?” Polly is only slightly joking.
“How long have they been here?”
“Just since yesterday.”
“So, hypothetically if their person had gone away and their dog sitter didn’t show up, then their person might not even know that they’re missing.”
“Hypothetically. Yes.”
“Or, if they were gone when the supposed caretaker arrived, he or she might have figured that the person took the dogs with him or her.”
“Again, hypothetically.”
“That’s the best I’ve got. What happens if no one comes to claim them?”
“We work with rescues to re-home.”
“How long before you do that?”
“We’ll give them a week, ten days if we don’t get crowded.”
Ruby pulls herself up to her feet. “I bet they get claimed sooner than that.”
“Psychic vibe?”
“No. Just a hopeful hunch.”
The Hitchhiker has discovered that being free in a place where all others are behind bars is energizing and she’s also discovered Polly’s store of treats. The dog presses her nose between the links in the kennel separating her from the other two dogs. “The treats are good. You should try some.”
The two dogs bark in plain language to get back.
Ruby pulls her van into the rectangle delineated by the traffic cones and slides open her door. She pops up the folding table, pulls the café curtains, adds an array of fairy lights, and pulls on her caftan. Loosens her hair. Ready for business.
The feast has wound down for the night. Ruby closes the van door, gets behind the wheel. Her cell phone is on the dashboard and she reaches for it. No texts, one email. She is really tired, and almost doesn’t look at the email but then does.
Hi, Ms. Heartwood. Yes, we do have an archive. As the records are not digitized, there is no way for me to take the time to go through them for you. You are welcome to visit.
Best regards,
B. Johnson
Office Administrator
Sacred Heart Convent and School