Southernmost Page 13

  “That’s a deal, then,” Bell says.

  They talk money. How much an hour. How much she’ll charge for rent on the cottage—it will take most of his pay—and she welcomes them to eat with her every evening. “I like to cook, but I don’t like to eat by myself,” she says. “Easier to cook for a big bunch. We put breakfast out by the pool every morning for the guests, so y’all are welcome to eat from that, too.”

  “Would you care to pay me in cash?” Asher asks quickly.

  “You in trouble?” Bell asks, and looks at him as if memorizing him.

  “No,” Asher says. “But I’m not wanting to be found.”

  “I know all about that,” Bell says, nodding. She pushes herself up with a grunt, like a big old machine unlatching itself from being still too long.

  “I’m in dire need of groceries, so how about you go on down to Fausto’s. There’s bicycles over by the side entrance, or you can take the Vespa. Up to you.”

  “What is Fausto’s?” Asher asks.

  Bell stops, swings herself around. “How long you been here, sugar?”

  “We drove into town this morning.”

  Bell considers this and takes off for the office again. “Fausto’s is the only grocery store where I’ll trade. Just go up this street here.” She thrusts a tourist’s map at Asher. She settles herself back at the desk and puts on her glasses. “Dog can stay right here with me.” Shady slumps down at her feet and curls up like he can speak her language. “He’ll be fine. And take the Vespa. It’s faster.”

  So Asher has a job. And they have a home. On Olivia Street with the bougainvillea. “Olivia Bougainvillea,” Justin says, as if he has read his father’s mind. Asher lets out a wearied breath. They have either reached a dead end or a whole new beginning.

  6

  Asher has never been on a scooter before, but he figures out how to run the Vespa. Once or twice Bell leans out the doorway to see if he is going to be able to start it, but she doesn’t offer any instructions, and he doesn’t ask. When the engine finally fires, he tells Justin to hold on, and they are off.

  Two days ago Asher had been going crazy in that little trailer out on Cheatham Lake, and now he feels as if they are in a different country.

  They pass houses the color of beads on a bracelet—pink and turquoise and yellow and orange—behind white fences. An old, black couple sits on their porch stringing beans, children play in a yard, a skinny rooster struts down the sidewalk, flowers open like red or purple promises. A woman does a little dance as she sweeps her porch, in a bikini and white earbuds. A small grayish-yellow Methodist church sitting close to the street.

  Asher scans the faces of every person they pass in case he sees Luke, wondering what he would say if he actually saw his brother again. He has a strange dread that he might actually find him while also wanting desperately to find him. How would he feel about seeing Luke holding a man’s hand? The thought makes his stomach roil.

  At Whitehead Street they come into more businesses. There is the courthouse and the post office. The salty air settles on their skin. At one of the stoplights Asher glances down to his waist where Justin’s small hands are latched, his fingers laced together and his little thumbs clenched.

  The grocery has narrow aisles, small metal buggies, fruit and vegetables priced sky-high. The mangos are a kind of pinkish-red that causes his mouth to water even though he has never tasted one before. He realizes for the first time that he is famished. He made Justin eat some fruit before they left but he’s had nothing.

  There is a whole section of key-lime products, all kinds of brands and foods Asher has never seen before.

  People crowd in at the glass case in front of the deli and order up chicken salad and olives and something called hummus. An old man glances down at Justin. “Hello there, little man,” he says in a faraway accent. Wisconsin or the Dakotas, maybe. Asher doesn’t know. Justin puts out his hand and the man laughs with surprise, takes it. As a church child Justin has been taught to greet older men this way. “That’s a real gent,” the man says, looking up at Asher with pale, watery eyes. Harmless.

  Still, Asher puts his hand on Justin’s shoulder, nods to the old man with a tight grin. For all he knows there are posters of them all up and down the interstates between here and Tennessee. Every person they see might report them if they look into their faces long enough. Asher had momentarily felt safe in not being recognized from the breakdown video because Key West felt so exotic—he had briefly fancied that they might as well be in a foreign country. But they are still in America, and the crowd at the deli is at least half tourists, who could be from anywhere, even back home.

  A woman turns from the deli with a plastic bowl in hand and beams down at Justin. “Hey,” she says, a clipped little voice like a bird, her small lipsticked mouth pinching together in a small smile.

  “Hidy,” Justin says. As she clicks away on kitten heels Justin looks up at Asher. “I like this place,” he says.

  The cashier has purple nails—so long that Asher watches in amazement as she taps at the register keys—and eye shadow to match her polish, bleached curls, and enough wrinkles to show a lifetime of drinking, smoking, and sun. Her voice sounds out each word as a hoarse scratch.

  “Where y’all visiting from?” she rasps.

  “Tennessee. We—” Justin stops, interpreting Asher’s finger pressing into his back. They will have to talk about this, about how much to say to people. But he doesn’t know what to tell his son. Asher doesn’t like the idea of Justin lying, but he ought to have thought about that before kidnapping the boy. Too late now. Turns out that kidnapping a child is a lot like having one, period: you have to figure it out as you go along.

  “I’ve been there,” the cashier says. “It’s pretty country.”

  “Yeah, I like it,” Justin says, causing the cashier to look up at Asher and smile, her whole craggy face becoming twice as wrinkled in the doing.

  Then:

  The low buzz of the scooter.

  The island changing with the deepening of light, preparing for evening. Tourists, leaving the Hemingway House, waddling toward Duval Street wearing white visors and white socks with white tennis shoes.

  Justin leaning against his father’s back as the Vespa slices down the street.

  The smell of the ocean.

  Asher lets Justin play with Shady on the porch while he carries the groceries into Bell’s cottage. Bell leaves only the screen door closed behind them, and Asher can hear Justin chattering to the dog.

  Bell’s house has white walls and orange-brown tiled floors like glazed terra-cotta pots. Large, healthy plants stand near all the windows. There are lots of colorful paintings that don’t make any sense but are still nice to look at, framed photographs here and there. Asher tries to study them without appearing to be nosey. A black-and-white picture of a tough-looking woman, a younger Bell, with one foot propped up on the bumper of a truck, a cigarette planted in her mouth; a baby in a just-born hospital picture, the color of the early 1970s; several children sitting on the ground around a worn-out-looking woman in a kitchen chair that had been brought out onto a dusty front yard. A beautiful black woman in a red dress, blowing a kiss toward the camera; a magnolia blossom is shoved into her hair above her right ear.

  In the front room there is an upright piano, rich maple wood, not unlike the one at the Cumberland Valley Church of Life.

  “Do you play?”

  “Yes,” Bell says, barreling on toward the kitchen.

  Asher hasn’t played in years, but he has not missed his fingers on the keys until this very moment. Once upon a time he could not go a day without playing for an hour or so. Once he had sat at a piano like this and felt God in his fingers, had felt the music washing out of him, and in those times everything else floated away and he became the music and he believed, he believed, he believed.

  “You play, too?” Bell asks as she unloads the groceries.

  “Not anymore,” Asher answers.

&nb
sp; “I can finish here. You go on and get settled,” she says, suddenly radiant in the brightness of the yellow kitchen.

  “I think we’ll turn in early tonight,” Asher says.

  “Not gonna eat with us? You’ll miss a good meal.”

  “I appreciate the offer,” he says, already backing toward the door. It’s going to be hard to not be social at this place. But he has too much to worry about. “I’ll see you first thing in the morning.”

  As he slips out the door and onto the porch he looks back just in time to see her watching him on his way out.

  Most everything in the cottage is wicker: couch, love seat, coffee table, bed headboards.

  A small bathroom with a frosted window, a bedroom for Asher and a smaller one for Justin. No dining room, but an old Formica eating table in the big kitchen so much like the one he grew up with.

  Asher is pleased by how little they possess. There is a freedom in not having anything. They have every single thing they need and not one bit more, and that’s how Asher has always wanted to live, really.

  The porch runs the entire length of the house’s front side. A wall of lattice divides it in two so they have their own side and the woman has hers. Evona. Nobody could forget a name like that. There is plenty of cushioned wicker furniture and a couple of wooden rockers and a swing, a set of chimes that ring against one another in the slight breeze coming in off the Atlantic.

  Asher watches the light and shadows move down the porch floor as darkness fully overtakes the island. All is quiet here, no sound other than the chimes and the brush of palm fronds, the occasional murmur of Justin inside as he talks to Shady. This has been the longest day of Asher’s life, but maybe the best. There had been a time when he would have thought this serendipity happened because God was on his side. Now he sees the arrogance of that thought.

  There is a clomping on the porch. He catches sight of the woman breezing past the latticed divider and into her side of the cottage. As soon as she gets inside she turns on music, as if she has rushed home for this sole purpose.

  Violins, drums, the Mamas and the Papas.

  You gotta go where you wanna go

  She is singing along, her voice harmonizing with the recorded ones. A rectangle of yellow light falls onto the porch floor from her living room and occasionally Asher can see her silhouette passing in front of it.

  Once he goes back inside he finds that Justin is asleep, sprawled out across his bed still wearing his Chuck Taylors, lamplight illuminating his face. Shady lifts his head and acknowledges Asher with his good brown eyes (I am too bone-tired to get up) then settles his muzzle back on Justin’s chest. Asher sits on the edge of the bed and watches his son sleep.

  7

  He leaves a note by Justin’s bed—I’m working; stay in the house.

  Bell meets Asher in the courtyard, wearing a seagull-patterned muumuu. Asher studies the knot of tiny pink flowers pushed into her hair at the back of her head and she says, “Frangipani. My favorite. Smell.”

  Asher feels awkward leaning into the back of her head, but he draws in the scent—like the magnolias back home, but more fruity.

  “They smell the best at night,” she says, and takes off across the courtyard. “First thing is we need to set up breakfast.”

  And so Asher’s workday begins. Bell shows him how to do everything: lay out breakfast, clean the rooms, do the laundry, sweep all the porches, put out evening wine-and-cheese service, be on call if folks need pillows or anything else.

  Bell sits heavily in one of the metal chairs and dots her sweating forehead with a handkerchief, cross-stitched at its edges. There is a wall of purple bougainvillea and aloe plants big as tree stumps, and all manner of nature closing in on them at all sides.

  “Evona will tend to the flowers and trees, wash down the walkways, fix anything that needs fixing.”

  “How long she been with you?”

  “Long while,” Bell says. “Best not to ask too many questions of her, and she’ll do the same for you.”

  Asher nods, relieved.

  “The main thing you need to know about Evona is that one day she’ll be as happy as a lark and the next day she’ll be real low.” Bell fixes her eyes on him. “You need to know that. Alright?”

  He nods again. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Yes, but I may or may not answer it.”

  “That’s fair enough.”

  Bell waits, closes her eyes as a breeze moves through the yard.

  “Have you ever heard of anybody here named Luke Sharp?”

  “No. I’d remember a name like that,” she says. “Who is he?”

  “He’s somebody I’d like to find.”

  “Because you hate him or love him?”

  Asher wants to tell her Luke is his brother but then he will have to reveal his own last name. Besides, the less she knows, the better. For Asher and for her. “I’d give anything to see him,” Asher says, “and I think he’s in Key West.”

  “I wish I could help you,” she says. “I don’t believe I know a person in this world named Luke. But I keep to myself most of the time. Except for church.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “Saint Paul’s. The big Episcopal church down on Duval. But I don’t like to go out at all now. I’ve not gone in years and years. They bring me communion on Sundays.”

  Asher wants to ask why she stays at home but that seems too personal. When folks don’t want to get out of the house they most likely don’t want to explain why, he reasons. So he asks if he can pull the Jeep into the garage. He tells her he’d like to get it out of the weather because of its soft top but she is no fool.

  “Long as you can clear out a place for it,” she says. “There’s all kinds of junk piled up in there but if you stack it up neat there might be room.” Bell slaps at his knee and rises. “You think you’re ready to get started, then?”

  “I reckon so,” Asher says.

  “Just holler if there’s something you can’t figure out.”

  Asher goes about his work. The guests show up as soon as breakfast is set out. A woman dressed in silk pajamas and a silk robe piles a plate with one of everything and rushes back to her room. An old liver-spotted man comes for coffee and nothing else. Asher speaks to them but keeps his head down as much as possible. They don’t care. To them he is just the help, someone there whose purpose in life is to put out their breakfast and clean their rooms.

  The silk-robe woman isn’t happy when Asher shows up to clean her room but after he has been turned away twice she finally agrees to sit on the porch and read while he does his work. “Please leave on the radio so I may listen to it while I wait,” she says, each of her words tight and close like they are each alone. Then she puts her hand out, and he doesn’t know if she wants it to be kissed or shaken. He shakes it, briefly. Her smile is a tightening of her mouth. “I am Mrs. Lewis.”

  “Hello, ma’am. I’m Asher,” he says.

  She has tuned into a news station and they are rattling off all the things that are wrong in the world. Israel and Palestine at odds like they have been ever since Asher can remember. The president fighting with Congress. Hostages. Kim Davis campaigning against gay marriage. A car bombing outside an American embassy. Another movie theater shooting. The local news is mostly about the weather—rain in the forecast—and talk of oil still showing up in the Gulf and how cruise ships are impacting the reef. No mention of a man who has kidnapped his son and was last spotted shopping at Fausto’s.

  At least this lady is clean, Asher thinks, even if she isn’t very friendly. She has draped thin, colored scarves over the lamps. Dozens of bottles, tubes, and tubs of makeup are lined up in neat rows on the bathroom sink. She has cleared everything off the desk by the front window. There is a box filled with a dozen or so pens and five white legal pads crowded with slanted cursive writing. She has even made her own bed, but when Asher asks her if she wants fresh sheets she says “Of course” as if it is crazy to think she can use the same
set two days in a row.

  Asher loves finding the symmetry of bedsheets, the finality of clean dishes in a drainer. When he was growing up he had been the one who kept their house. His mother had worked like a mule and been treated like a dog at the high school, where she had been the janitor. The students made fun of her, made messes just so she had to clean them up. She had spent her days scrubbing toilets and scraping dried snot and gravels of gum off the bottoms of desks. More than once his face had burned with shame when he dashed by her in the school hallway as she spread sawdust over vomit or cleaned vulgar graffiti off lockers. Luke had fought people in school when they insulted her. He was suspended for fistfights three times, all in her defense. But Asher, he thinks now, had been a coward.

  As he leaves Mrs. Lewis’s room she puts her hand on the crook of his arm.

  “Wait. I know your face. You look so familiar. Were you ever on TV?”

  “I’ve just got one of those faces, ma’am,” he says, and slips away, his heart pounding.

  By the time Asher gets to the other rooms the guests have gone to the beach or out to eat. He cleans the bathrooms, gathers the towels (the most disgusting part, to his mind), makes the beds, dusts, sanitizes the remotes, Windexes the windows, mirrors, and television screens, puts fresh plastic bags in the ice buckets, new bags in the trash cans, restocks the soaps and bottles, runs the vacuum.

  The thought drifts through his mind that he has become his mother in this aspect: cleaning up after others, being the help. He will not let it make him bitter and angry, though, the way it had her. There is an importance to making things right.

  Most of Asher’s afternoons are taken up by the laundry but he makes a habit of going back to the cottage for a quick lunch. Most of the mornings Justin trails behind him at his insistence, helping Asher here and there, but as the days pass he begs to stay at the house alone. Asher spends a long time each morning emphasizing how Justin can’t go past the porch, he isn’t to talk to any guests, and that he can’t use the pool while unattended because this might draw too much attention to him, a child swimming alone.