Last Known Address

Feeling adrift, C.C. looked at her friends. Shelly was pulling little bits off her paper napkin, already a small pile forming on her bread plate. Meg looked like she might burst into tears again. Poor Meg. She couldn’t control the breakdowns yet. But she would. Eventually. It was only recently that C.C. trusted herself not to break down in public. Right after Lenny died she couldn’t even speak, much less go out. It had taken weeks before she did anything besides go to the grocery store. And here Meg was, ‘the event’ still so recent, and she was on a road trip, of all things. In a way, Grant leaving was worse than Lenny dying. Grant had made a choice to leave Meg. Lenny had simply been called by God. Though she had doubted many times, C.C. still preferred to think there was some sort of intention somewhere in the universe. If not God, then…C.C. sighed. Something. Surely there had to be something.

She looked up, waved at Purdy till she got his attention, circling her finger around the table and lifting her mug. Purdy nodded, grinned, and bustled into action behind the bar.

‘This round’s on me,’ she said to her friends, her mug still in the air. ‘I’m sorry. I got us into this mess.’ As she said ‘mess’, she gestured broadly with the mug, which slipped from her grasp, and shattered on the hard floor.

‘DOWN!’

C.C. looked up, her heart pounding, first from the mug breaking, then from the shout. Purdy was cowering on the floor, at the end of the bar, his dishtowel wadded and held protectively near his head. Nobody moved for several seconds. Purdy suddenly stood, red-faced, and rapidly disappeared behind the swinging kitchen door.

C.C. had thought he was yelling at her. But clearly he was not. Still, she felt the heat of embarrassment. Then confusion.

‘Wow. What do you suppose that was about?’ asked Shelly.

Meg looked wan, said nothing. C.C. stared at the black, swinging kitchen door, then at the jagged pieces of mug littering the floor. ‘We should just turn around, go home. This is another very bad omen.’

‘C.C!’ Shelly and Meg said in unison.

‘Well, it is! Look, I did get us into this. When I inherited Aunt Georgie’s old house, I was just going to sell it, you know, just get rid of it, take that pittance the real-estate agent was offering and be done with it. But then Shelly told me about flip investments, and, then, well, Meg’s situation and all…’ C.C. hesitated, then went ahead and said it: ‘Well, it just seemed like a sign, like maybe we could all finally really do the Great Escape. I thought it’d be fun, all of us getting away, work on the house together, maybe all make a little money on it…’ Her voice trailed off. Quietly, she added, ‘But so far, it’s just costing us.’

The kitchen door flapped open again. Purdy was walking slowly toward them with a broom and dustpan. He didn’t look at them as he squatted and began to sweep up the pieces.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said C.C., scooting to the edge of the bench. ‘Here, let me do that. And, of course, please put it on our bill.’

‘No, no,’ he said gently, but keeping his head down. ‘It’s really okay. Doesn’t matter. These are…ancient.’ He rose, staring at the dustpan filled with mug pieces. He turned and walked back to the kitchen, his steps tight and uncertain.

C.C. watched him go, feeling at an utter loss in a way she didn’t quite understand. She was always interested in people’s stories, whether she knew them or not. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to know this man’s story. She was pretty sure, whatever it was, it was a sad one.

‘Well, I’m the one who told you about the whole flip thing,’ said Shelly. ‘So really, it’s because of me that we’re even here.’

‘Look,’ said Meg, with a resolve that C.C. hadn’t heard in a while, ‘the only extra to all of us is going to be the motel. It’s my car, so it’s my repair bill. Plus, if I hadn’t wanted to do that little detour onto that country road, we would be farther along by now.’

C.C. opened her mouth to object, but Meg raised her palm, again surprising C.C.

‘The alternator and battery didn’t go out just because we’re on this trip. They went out because they were old, used up. If I’d been driving around Wisataukee, a block from my house, they still would have gone out.’

‘Well, then, I agree with Shelly,’ said C.C. ‘It’s all her fault.’ She playfully stuck her tongue out at Shelly.

Shelly laughed and put her finger on her chest. ‘Yeah. And I’ll take the credit when we all make a tidy little profit on the deal when we’re done. C’mon, show us the pictures again. That’ll lift our spirits, seeing the old cash cow.’

Even Meg smiled. But C.C. laughed. Where her own drug of choice was food, Shelly’s was money: her moods went up and down with her financial bottom line. She had done well as a real-estate agent, and then better, doing flips and small development projects. But she’d gone into a real depression–of every kind-when that big development deal went south.

C.C. gasped. There was that phrase again. It had to be an omen! But she didn’t know if it was a good one or a bad one. It didn’t seem great at the moment.

‘C’mon! You have that little picture book with you, don’t you?’ prodded Shelly, slapping the table lightly.

C.C. nodded. She opened her huge purse and pulled out a small, white vinyl album with a clear plastic pocket on the front. Before they’d left, she’d placed her wedding present from Lenny in the pocket: a necklace, a tiny, gold horseshoe with dots of green peridot stones set within, on a fine, gold chain. She trusted it: all the confusion and upheaval of her life had seemed to settle right down, everything falling into place, after she’d married Lenny. She touched it now, tenderly, with just her index finger. Then she thought about the car breaking down, the rift between herself and Kathryn, Grant leaving poor Meg like that, Shelly’s money woes. She pulled the necklace out and swung it around the table, as if it were a thurible, closing her eyes and silently saying as much of the prayer for travelers (which she’d found on the internet the day before) as she could remember, which was not much. Something about angels flying with them, protecting them.

‘For luck,’ she said, when she opened her eyes and found Meg and Shelly staring at her.

She poked the necklace back into the pocket, and placed the album sideways in the middle of the table so they could all see. She opened the cover slowly, her heart opening in its own way, right along with it. Meg and Shelly both turned, as did she, the better to see the pictures. The first page contained an old four-inch-by-four-inch black and white photo with scalloped white edges, pulled from her mother’s old photo album. C.C. thought that in black and white the house looked even more stately than in the later, color pictures. Or maybe it was just that the photo was old, taken in a time when the house had been maintained. She flipped the page to one that showed the expansive front lawn, in which three dogwoods, each heavily laden with blossoms, stood evenly spaced. She remembered planting those with Aunt Georgie, the weekend after the funerals. One each for her mother, her father and her sister. The dogwood had been her mother’s favorite flower. Aunt Georgie had referred to the house as Dogs’ Wood ever after, even having stationery made with that name in the address.

The picture was too small to see them clearly, but C.C. knew that between two of the trees stood a small dark metal statue of a dog with a ring in its mouth, and between the other two, a stone birdbath. An old Thunderbird four-seater was parked on the dirt street in front. C.C. touched the edge of the picture. The car had been her mother’s, and, like everything else, including C.C. herself, had been bequeathed to Georgie. Her mother had told some wild stories about her escapades with Georgie in that car. Both C.C. and her sister, Theresa, had loved her mother’s stories, especially while poring over the old photo albums with her, leaning against her on the big settee, like bookends, C.C.’s knees covered demurely by her skirt, her bobby-socked feet tucked neatly under her, Theresa’s knees worn through her dirty jeans, her bare feet on the coffee table, till Momma swatted them off. And they each had their favorite stories. ‘Tell us the story about your wedding dress!’ C.C. would beg. ‘No! Tell us about when you made Aunt Georgie climb a tree to get the bowl of butter and sugar!’ Their mother had often said about her two girls that they were like two acorns falling from an oak: if they had landed in the same place they’d grow up in each other’s shade, neither one becoming all she was meant to be. ‘Nature knows what she’s doing,’ she’d said, ‘and that’s why you’re so different!’ ‘Like you and Aunt Georgie,’ Theresa would point out, and Momma would smile and nod.

And different they were, and it made for a good balance. Occasionally the girls would argue, but mostly they adored each other, each accepting her sister’s different interests. Theresa would protect C.C. any time a bully threatened. C.C. did Theresa’s makeup for her when she finally relented and said she’d go to the formal dance with Jerry Happ. That had been Theresa’s last date. It was no wonder that C.C. had married Billy so young–too young and too quick–longing to recreate the family she’d lost. C.C. flipped the page.

As the pages turned, the decades flew by, the pictures changing to color. Some of the recent ones had been sent digitally by the estate attorney in Fleurville. Toward the end of the book a grainy and too-yellow color print she’d made when her color cartridge was low, showed the house from the front again. The graceful veranda, with its white slatted railing, had always made the young C.C. think of a toothy smile, the dormers on the roof, shining eyes. Now the smile was missing a few teeth, and the eyes were shut by blinds. Strips of the blue paint peeled in several places, and the white trim seemed dirty and worn. Weeds were marching in on every side of the porch, as if ready to climb on up and enter the house itself.

‘It’s got great bones, C.C.,’ Shelly said again, as she had said months ago on first seeing the pictures. ‘It’ll be an absolute gem. We’ll get a good price for it, once we spiff it up. You’ll see.’

‘I am so looking forward to seeing this place in person,’ said Meg. ‘After all the stories I’ve heard about it over the years. Especially about you and Theresa.’ C.C. reached across the table and took her hand. Dear Meg. Meg was like her sister, in many ways. In fact, C.C. had first met Meg on Theresa’s birthday, an omen to be sure. It was when she worked for Welcome Wagon of Wisataukee. C.C. smiled, remembering. She’d loved the job, greeting new arrivals to town, giving them maps, and samples and coupons from local businesses. And her boss had been very accommodating about giving her only homes on the bus route. But Meg’s driveway was so long, and carrying that big basket of goodies had her pretty much winded by the time she knocked on the door. Meg opened it just a crack at first, looking fearful. (Meg later told her it was because she was afraid that C.C. was a Jehovah’s Witness or something.) When C.C. introduced herself as the Welcome Wagon of Wisataukee woman, Meg looked amused and relieved. Her first words to C.C. were, ‘Nice alliteration. Come on in.’ They liked to say it was ‘friends at first sight’.

But Meg had actually met Shelly first. She’d been their real-estate agent–hers and Grant’s. Meg had invited both C.C. and Shelly to brunch not long after meeting C.C., and brunch had lasted all day, with a walk in the woods, and then drinks on the patio, then dinner. The Trio, as they’d christened themselves, was born.

C.C. flipped the last page of the album. To the only picture not of Dogs’ Wood. She’d stuck this one in mere hours ago, a sudden inspiration, just before they’d picked her up from her house. Meg and Shelly hadn’t seen it yet. At least not in a long time. She twisted it fully toward them.

‘Ohhh…’ said Meg, her eyes filling immediately.

Even Shelly’s face softened. ‘Damn. Look how young we were,’ she said. She covered her pile of shredded napkin protectively with her cupped palm.

‘Cept I look beat from that damn hike you two dragged me on!’ said C.C., forcing a smile. No one spoke.

‘Grant took this picture of us,’ Meg said finally, her voice barely audible.

In the photo, their beaming, sunburned faces nearly matched the Bloody Marys in their raised glasses. Their free arms rested over another’s shoulders, an ease and comfort and comraderie already evident. Each face was animated, lips forming words in unison. It had been the first of many times they’d raised their glasses and lustily toasted, ‘To friendship!’

Purdy arrived at their table and set the tray down with the new round, just as the bell on the restaurant door jingled again. He seemed to grit his teeth, but continued quickly handing out new napkins, followed by their drinks on top.

‘Again,’ said C.C., ‘I’m so sorry about the mug. Please let me reimburse—’

He lowered his eyes, shook his head, said softly, ‘Ma’am–C.C. It’s okay. Really.’

‘Well, thank you. And thank you for that delicious cornbread! That was about the best I’ve ever had. And that’s saying something, from a southerner!’ Without even thinking about it, she touched his forearm lightly with her fingertips as she added, ‘I don’t suppose you ever share that secret ingredient?’ When he finally looked at her, she smiled. And he did. His eyes stayed on hers, just a few seconds, but some considerable something passed between them. He hadn’t answered her about the ingredient, but his eyes spoke to her somehow.

As he walked away, C.C. was taken hold by a sudden, unbidden memory, but it came very clearly. It was a day bus tour she and Lenny had taken, just a few years ago. To see fall colors. It was late afternoon and they were headed home, when the bus passed a terrible accident, just as emergency personnel were arriving. Had they been moments earlier, the bus would have been involved. As they were directed slowly past the smoking wreckage, C.C. had quickly turned her head away from the window. When she did, she saw a man across the aisle looking past her, out the window. Then he too looked away, and their eyes met, very briefly. At the terminal, they’d all silently disembarked, and she and Lenny flowed into the mass migration into the station. Later, as they headed out of the terminal, the man from the bus walked past them, the opposite direction. Their eyes met again, locked, a mere second. They’d said nothing, but C.C. knew right away that in both their eyes were the words: ‘We’re alive. We’re alive.’

She watched Purdy talking to a very old woman, helping her to a small table in the middle of the restaurant. The old woman said something and they both laughed. He seemed like such a nice man. Yet, there was something about him that gave C.C. a certain unease.

‘Ceece? You okay?’ Shelly was snapping her fingers, mid-air. She and Meg were both looking at her.

C.C. nodded, picked up her mug, raised it toward the middle of the table. The other two lifted their mugs. ‘Here’s to the Great Escape, and–’ in unison, they added–‘to friendship,’ with a tender clink of their mugs.

CHAPTER FOUR Shelly

Shelly pulled the pillow into a tight crescent around her ears, willing herself back to her dream, uncertain what had woken her. She’d been dreaming something about a castle. In England? Ireland? She couldn’t remember, but it was fabulous–gold faucets, jeweled chandeliers, thick, pillowy beds with equally thick and pillowy comforters, huge colorful rugs across vast stone floors. She drifted back, sliding into sleep again like Alice down the rabbit hole. What a beautiful room! A living room, or maybe a library. For a giant. Huge brocade couches and massive French wingback chairs, all with thick, carved figures in their wood trim, leather-spined books floor to ceiling on the back wall, the furniture circling a roaring fire in a fireplace so big you could park a small car in it. She stepped around the huge, high-backed chair, easily three times her height. Startled, she jumped backward, stumbling. A giant chicken was sitting in the chair, roosting on an enormous egg. Shelly immediately wanted that egg. She couldn’t help herself. She knew she shouldn’t, knew that this gargantuan bird could really hurt her, peck her to death, or get its claws into her hair, carry her off to its lair. But she was driven by an uncontrollable urge. The chicken crowed. Could hens crow, dream-Shelly wondered, despite her fear. Her heart racing, she stepped toward the chicken, wanting desperately to retreat but feeling possessed. She reached for the egg. The chicken screamed at her, wings flapping, feathers flying. As she jumped back again, she screamed, but no sound came out. All she could hear was the chicken crowing as she fell into blackness.

Her eyes jerked open. Her fingers dug into the mattress. She was caught in the tug of war between dream and adrenalin, both pulling her hard to their reality. Adrenalin won. Her heart pounding, she glanced left and right in the dark room. Nothing looked familiar. Finally, she made out the other bed, Meg and C.C. asleep in it. A loud staccato crowing from outside their window broke the dark morning stillness.

Shelly took a moment to wade mentally through the webby remnants of sleep, weighing what was dream, what was real. Finally, she muttered, ‘Is that a fucking rooster?’

Somehow, neither the rooster nor her mumbling woke her friends. How she envied their ability to sleep so deeply! She untangled herself from the twisted bedcovers, threw them off and stood, stretching her hands over her head, then rubbing her upper arms vigorously, urging some blood to start circulating through her body. She looked at the red numbers of the digital clock on the bedside table: 5.18. Shit. No normal person should be awake at this hour. She lifted just the edge of the orange window curtain and peered out.

The sun had little more than peeked above the eastern horizon, just enough to streak the few clouds in the sky with shades of purple and pink, casting a hoary light upon the town. Down the road a bit, Shelly saw something moving. It wobbled into a yellow-orange circle of light from a lone streetlamp. A rooster. How fucking bucolic! He was strutting down the dirt road, as officious as a rabbi headed to temple. He stopped, ruffled his wings slightly in the light, as if spotlit on a stage. He pointed his beak skyward and let loose again. She would have laughed if she hadn’t shuddered. He was nearly exactly in the middle of the circle of light. She surmised that he must have come from the other direction, worked his way past their window, and on down the street. He finished his crow in the spotlight, and strutted off again, same direction. Still holding the corner of the ugly curtain, she wondered if maybe it was his job, waking up the town. That he’d worked out some sort of deal with the Tupper officials that he would walk down Main Street (which, frankly, she was surprised wasn’t called Purdy Street) and wake everyone up in exchange for–what? Maybe for being fed and not eaten. And maybe let into the coop with the hens every now and then. Shelly’s lip curled as she took a last look at the bird, then shuddered again, as if she’d just swallowed down a particularly vile substance. Birds of all kinds gave her the willies.

She sat heavily back on the edge of the bed, rubbed her face, collapsed sideways onto her pillow. She ached with fatigue. Or cold. Or age. Fifty was not old, Shelly knew (she’d been fifty for almost three years now), and she had spent a lot of breath reminding her two friends of that fact, who you’d think had one foot in the grave the way they complained about their age. Meg was only two years older than she, C.C. was only forty-nine. In Shelly’s opinion, it was a bit of a cop-out to succumb to the minor aches and pains of middle age. Wait till old age. There’d be plenty of time for complaining then.

Shelly closed her eyes, but sleep was gone, so she opened them, stared upward. C.C.’s nightlight (so she could find the bathroom) provided just enough of a glow for Shelly to make out the brown water stain on one of the ceiling panels above her. She stared at it for a minute, its dark brown edges making her crave a cup of coffee. She looked over at Meg and C.C., still and silent in their bed. They’d said they wanted to share a bed and gotten no argument from her. She knew they were being generous. They were well aware of her need to sleep alone. It was hard enough for her to share a room, let alone a bed. Even with men. Especially with men. Men made too damn much noise at night–snoring, sputtering, farting. Breathing. Then they woke up at some ungodly hour, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, snuggling up and grabbing her, ready for some more action, right when she felt like she’d finally just gotten to sleep. No, sir. It’d been years since she’d allowed a man to spend the night in her room. Down the hall, maybe. Better they should go to their own home and sleep. After her second divorce she’d vowed she would remain single and not even cohabit for the remainder of her life. That had been the one vow she’d kept. That, and not speaking to Nina.

Shelly sat up again, looking at her friends. She shook her head in dismay. They were both on their backs, C.C.’s hands neatly on the fold of the sheet over the blanket on her protruding chest, fingertips over fingertips, as if she’d been posed by a mortician. Meg was also on her back, but her hands and arms were under the covers. Probably cold. The poor thing had no meat on her bones anymore. On the table next to Meg’s head was an envelope addressed to Grant, at their house. Meg must have written it last night. Yet another letter to the asshole.

Shelly sighed, gazing at her friends. They looked like two pens in an engineer’s pocket protector, both of them trained by years of habit to sleep in exactly one-half of the bed. Or less.

Not her, by God. Not Rochelle Hannah Kostens. Never again. She flopped back on her bed, spread-eagled, taking up the whole bed, just because she could.

Twenty minutes later, showered, her curly hair (‘salt and cayenne pepper’, she called it) pulled back in a short ponytail, her face without makeup, Shelly stepped out into the buttery morning light. The clean smell of moist earth and the slow unfurling of spring made her inhale twice, deeply, relishing the scent of possibility. She admired the sky: the clouds were gone and that dusky blue of dawn, not night but not yet day, domed the earth. She checked her watch: 5.56. She had asked Purdy last night when he would open the restaurant for breakfast; she did not like to wait long for that first cup of coffee. ‘Six a.m. sharp, ma’am. Coffee’ll be fresh-brewed at six a.m.’

She strode down the street, watching for the rooster, not wanting it to sneak up behind her and crow. She didn’t see the bird anywhere but walked faster, feeling like she could be attacked by uncooked poultry at any moment. Her distaste for birds came, like so many things, from her youth. (Funny, she thought, how more and more years now qualified as ‘her youth’.) But she really had been young when the Tweety Incident happened. She was ten, at her friend Rachel’s house. Rachel had a new parakeet she’d rather uncreatively named Tweety. Extolling his many virtues, Rachel had coaxed Tweety out of his cage onto her finger, then onto Shelly’s shoulder. At first, Shelly, though nervous, was charmed. Then Tweety pooped a dribbly grayish blob onto her new green shirt. Shelly screamed and Tweety tried to take flight but became momentarily tangled in her long, curly hair. In her preadolescent panic, her brain locked up and all she could think of was the fire-safety lesson they’d all received at school the day before. So she’d stopped, dropped and rolled, with Tweety flapping madly to free himself through the stop, drop and half the roll. In the nick of time, he liberated himself from Shelly’s long locks and flew around the kitchen vocalizing his outrage as Shelly continued to roll. Tweety was completely unharmed. Shelly was not so lucky. She rolled into the corner cabinet of the Gold-mans’ brand-new kitchen island and cut her forehead, requiring three stitches. After that day, Tweety squawked loudly every time he saw Shelly, till Rachel fed him a bird cookie of some sort to calm him down. Shelly felt she deserved a cookie, not the damn bird. But all she’d gotten from the incident was a scar on her forehead, the humiliating nickname of ‘Drop and Roll’, which lasted all through junior high school, and a phobia for birds that had lasted her whole life.