Chapter 11 #2
I don’t watch much TV, but I do read the magazines at Buddy’s when I’m bored, and I know who she’s talking about, an actor with silky hair that flops over his forehead in a way that had my fingers twitching to sketch it, to wonder how I’d render it in wood, how long it would take with my narrowest gouge to re-create the texture.
It is the kind of hair you’d notice, just like Bell’s was.
Bell. After seven years, you’d think I’d forget, but I have the wood shavings in my barn to prove I haven’t.
“Other than that…just really nice clothes. Old Hollywood clothes.” Amber waves a hand like she’s gesturing at the ghost of Cary Grant or Montgomery Clift. “Him standing in front of the old pool tables with a Coors Light sign behind him just looked fucking wrong.”
I fight off a frown as a semi blows past and an empty paper cup rolls behind the dumpster on the ensuing gust of air.
I don’t like the idea of this guy in Old Hollywood clothes.
Busy’s men typically come from the same tax bracket Busy does.
The desperate one. And desperate people will do desperate things, but they rarely have any kind of patience.
Patience is a product of resources, and those aren’t in abundance in Busy’s world or mine, but when it comes to angry or forlorn exes, that’s usually a good thing.
It means they don’t have the money or freedom from court dates or child support payments to hang around long.
It means that if it’s not easy to find Busy, they give up.
I hope to God this guy in Old Hollywood clothes doesn’t have the inclination to be patient because it sounds like he could afford to be.
Busy, what did you get yourself into before you came home?
I thank Amber for letting me know, and then I pop out to the counter to count out the register while the building is empty.
I log the count, grab my sketchbook, and head to the tiny back room that doubles as a stockroom and break room both.
There’s not room for a table, but I set my things down on a shrink-wrapped flat of motor oil and tug off my worn Buddy’s polo.
It’ll be too hot in my car to drive home in it, so I change into a tank top I got in a package of five at Dollar General and shove the polo into a bag along with my sketchbook and some of the spotted bananas I cleared out from the cold display.
There had been a state grant at some point to get more fresh fruit into places like Buddy’s, but the grant’s long gone and the fruit barely sells, and Buddy’s always talking about pulling it from the order list but keeps forgetting to.
He’s told me and Amber we can take whatever we want for now, and we do, although I never take the pomegranate seeds that the distributor sometimes sends as part of their summer fruit package.
Pomegranate will always taste like Bell’s kisses to me now.
It will always taste like the end.
I wave goodbye to Amber, who’s selling scratchers to a woman with wiry, gray hair and an Assembly of God church picnic T-shirt, and get to my car.
I’m not visiting Busy today, so I’m hoping I can work a little bit on my latest commission before the exhaustion and the pain in my shoulder and leg get to be too much.
I drive the twenty minutes home, windows down to compensate for the broken air-conditioning, my mind on the wood in my barn.
I can’t afford store-bought lumber other than pine, but Paxico is the central trunk of Tongie’s grapevine, so when a farmer in the area has to cut down a tree or deal with deadfall after a storm, I usually get a call.
Sometimes it’s nothing I can use for anything other than fence posts, like an old hedge apple tree, and sometimes it’s something I’ll use even if it’ll gum up my tools with sap.
But sometimes I’m lucky. Cherry. Maple. Oak.
None of it great for carving art but most of it good for furniture or, in the case of maple, kitchen utensils, which always do well at the city market in Lawrence when I have the extra money to rent a booth.
The dresser I’m making now is walnut, which dulls my tools, but it’s consistent at least, a nice grain that doesn’t abruptly swerve and twist like cherry will. It’ll be a smooth project, even if it’s a boring one.
I get to the farm, check the mailbox at the turnoff, and then crackle my way up to the farmhouse and park.
The ladder with its broken rung is still propped against the eave, and I promise myself I’ll move it later.
If I’m going to strain my shoulder, then I’m going to do it for something that makes me money first.
Fifteen minutes later, and I’m sliding a board under a router table, glasses and earmuffs on, squinting even though it’s broad daylight because it’s always dark in the barn, and wondering if I should take more ibuprofen now or wait until I’m closer to sleeping.
I can breathe past the pain in my leg, but my shoulder is killing me every time I push a board through, and I want to get through all the side pieces for the drawers before I call it a day.
Or night. Or whatever it’s called when you go to bed at ten in the morning.
Giving up, I turn off the router and go over to the red metal tool cabinet in the corner, where one drawer has been dedicated to medicine, peppermints, and tobacco since I was a little girl making sawdust mountains while my grandpa worked on whatever project needed doing from the unending list around the farm.
I haven’t touched my grandpa’s old pipe—I can’t bear to even after all this time—but the peppermints and medicine are my own now.
I take off the earmuffs—I’m starting to sweat around them, even with the barn’s high ceiling—and tuck them under my armpit while I shake several painkillers into my palm.
I’m about to pop them into my mouth when I hear an amused voice say, “I think you’re only supposed to take two at a time.”
I turn but even before I see him, my body somehow knows, my body somehow remembers, because my heart is slamming against my ribs before I even see the blue eyes, the beauty mark, the blond hair.
Straight blond hair at the moment, straight like the actor from that show…in a haircut as Old Hollywood as the clothes he’s wearing. I think this is the man Amber saw at the bar yesterday.
And I don’t know how this can be, and I don’t understand why, but that man is Ryan Bell.