Chapter 4
Four
EMBER
I trudge back down the steps, fighting back tears. I hate crying, like really, really, really hate crying, so that only pisses me off more, which turns into a whole snowball spiral of doom. By the time I get back down to the beach, I'm a total disaster.
Faye is back on the blanket, toweling herself off. She takes one look at me and sighs. "Oh boy. Now what, missy?"
I shake my head, barely keeping the onslaught of emotion at bay. “Nothing."
She snorts derisively. "And I'm Norma Jean Mortenson."
I frown at her. "Who?"
A roll of her eyes. "Kids these days. You might know her as Marilyn Monroe."
I sniff a laugh. "Oh."
Tossing the towel aside, Faye half-sits, half-falls to the blanket, snags her bag, and pulls out the container of brownies. "Well, if you don't wanna talk about it, then at least have a brownie."
I hesitate, but who am I kidding? Of course I'm having a brownie. You don't get an ass like mine eating nothing but salad. I plop down beside her and accept the treat. And good lord, it's a monster of a brownie. Over an inch thick and six inches square, it has a thick, gooey layer of chocolate frosting on top and chocolate chips inside it, and it's moist and fluffy yet dense.
"Holy shit, Faye," I say, around a mouthful. “This is amazing."
She grins at me, dabbing away a rogue bit of frosting from her lip with her thumb; the grin is mischievous, which may or may not bode well. "I'm famous in certain circles for my brownies."
"I can see why."
I'm halfway done with the giant brownie when I start paying attention to the actual flavor profile. Chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate…
And something else. Something subtle but definitive.
I look at the last two or three bites of the thing, and then at Faye. "Faye, my dear…is this a pot brownie?"
She pops the last bite into her mouth. "Sure is, missy."
I finish it, wash it down with sparkling water, and then give Faye a long, droll stare. "You could have warned me."
She cackles. "Where's the fun in that?"
"What if I had to pass a drug test?"
"Do you?"
"No, but—"
'Then don't waste my time with pointless hypotheticals. You're a hippie's kid. If that's the first special brownie you've ever had, then I really am Norma Jean Mortenson."
"No, it's not. Not by a long shot."
"You need to relax. You're wound up tighter than a nun's cooter."
I splutter. "Faye!"
"I know whereof I speak, young lady. My aunt was a nun. She was a mean, miserable bitch."
"Not all nuns are like that."
"Known a bunch of ‘em, have you?" she asks.
I laugh. "Not a ton, no, but I did spend two weeks living with nuns in a convent in Northern California."
She blinks at me. "Wasn’t expecting that."
Her expectant silence is heavily leading, so I sigh. "Okay, well, this was before I met Dutchie. Mom had only been dead for like…six months? I was still a mess, emotionally. I had no formal education, no family, no friends, and nowhere to go. I had Mom's bus and like six thousand dollars I found in Mom's stuff. She died in Temecula, so I headed north. I ended up at the convent by accident—the bus ran out of gas and the nuns picked me up, brought me to the convent, and took care of me. They had my bus towed and filled up, gave me a bed, fed me." I shrug. “They were awesome."
Faye harrumphs. "I went to catholic school in the forties and fifties, so my experience with nuns is a bit different."
I laugh. "I bet it is." I glance at her. "Also, are you calling me a mean, miserable bitch?"
She snorts. "No. I was callin' my aunt that." She softens. "Ember, sweetheart, you gotta let it out. Trust me, I know."
She digs in her bag again and comes up with a bottle of peppermint vodka. She sticks her whole head into the bag, rummaging through it with a muttered grumble, and then comes up with a couple bottles of chocolate Ensure.
She cracks one of the bottles open and takes a healthy slug, gesturing at me. "Go on, take 'er down a notch or two so we can fit the vodka in there."
I stare at her. "Faye, we drove here. And we just ate giant pot brownies."
"So?"
"So…we'll be wasted and we have to drive back at some point."
She stabs the sky with a finger. "At some point!" She points down the beach at a stand of trees. "I happen to know there's some good firewood down there. We camp out here. I've got blankets in here."
"You're not supposed to make fires on the beach, I don't think," I argue.
She sighs. "Ember, I was good my whole life. Did everything by the book. Courted my Thomas properly, was a virgin when I married him. Raised our daughter, kept our home like a good wife. When Tina left home, I went to school and got my teaching certificate and taught school. I was on the PTO, and eventually, the school board. I volunteered at church. Never stepped so much as a toe out of line. Never jaywalked, never lusted after a man who wasn’t my husband, never drank too much. Nothing. I kept damn near every single one of the Ten commandments faithfully my whole life."
"I sense a but coming," I say.
She nods. "You do. It was a good life. But when Thomas passed away, it broke me. I didn't want to live. Didn't know how. Eventually, Tina convinced me to see a therapist. It took a few months to find one I liked, but when I did, she changed my life. Told me it was time to live for me. I'd lived my life for everyone else. I followed the rules my parents set as a kid, and then the rules society expected me to live by as a dutiful wife and mother. I lived for my husband and child. I wanted to go to school when Tina started school, but Thomas didn't want me to, so I didn't. I waited, like he wanted."
There's a long pause. She sniffles and then pours vodka into the Ensure, spilling it all over her fingers.
"I had to rebuild who I was." She tilts her head, thinking. “No, actually, I had to build myself from scratch. I was a mother and a wife and a schoolteacher…but then Thomas died and I discovered that without him, I didn't know who I was. It was terrifying."
She opens my Ensure bottle and puts it to my lips. "Drink, missy."
So, I drink it down a few inches and hand her the bottle. She tips a long pour into the bottle, caps them both, and then shakes them vigorously.
She hands me one and opens the other. "Better cold, but I wasn't about to haul ice way the hell down here."
I take a sip, coughing at how strong it is. "Jesus, Faye."
"Whooo-wee!" she crows. “That'll scorch the hair right off your cooter."
“Ohmy god , Faye. You're a lunatic. What is with you and the word 'cooter'?"
She shrugs, cackling. "I dunno. It's funny to me. I like it. Vagina is too technical, pussy is…icky, and even now I can't bring myself to say the other C-word. So, cooter it is."
"I guess that's reason enough," I say.
"Sure is," she agrees, taking another sip. "So, my point in that whole story is this: you gotta just say ‘fuck it’ sometimes. I had to learn who I am now that I have no one to please but me. And that person, apparently, likes crazy hair colors, piercings, tattoos, marijuana, alcohol, cursing, and just generally being a loud, obnoxious pain in the ass."
"So you're saying I should just say ‘fuck it’ and get wasted on the beach with you?"
"Yup!"
"Fine. But if anything happens, I'm blaming you."
She laughs. "Fine by me." She gestured at my drink with hers. "Now drink up. Oh my, what was that phrase my grandson used the other day? Oh! I remember. We have to get litty."
I cackle, and the cackle turns into laughter so hard I snort. "Litty?"
"Ben is a hoot. We were FaceTiming the other day and he was telling me about a party he went to and how all his friends care about is getting litty. I had no clue what that meant. Of course, he had to explain what lit meant first." She taps my bottle with hers. "Here's to saying fuck it and getting litty on the beach with new friends."
"I'll drink to that!" I said, and chugged a bit too much.
Jesus, this shit is strong. I am going to be so fucked up.
Faye regales me with stories of the weird, gross, inappropriate, and hysterical things she encountered in her decades of teaching. She's a world-class storyteller with killer comedic timing and delivery, and after a while my sides literally hurt from laughing so much.
Abruptly, Faye slaps her thighs. "Welp. About time to make a fire. C'mon, missy. I'll show you a thing or two."
I follow her down the beach to the stand of trees—a cluster of pines and birches angling over the sand as if reaching for the horizon. We gather sticks and branches by the armful and carry them back to our spot, and then go back for more. Faye has me dig a wide but shallow depression in the sand, and then she carefully constructs a teepee of the smallest twigs. Next, she rummages in her giant bag and produces a small plastic pouch of Kleenex. She twists a few tissues into wads and stuffs them under the teepee and then rummages in her bag again, this time producing a torch lighter.
"What the hell else do you have in that bag, Faye?" I ask.
She gets the fire flickering before answering. "Anything and everything." She digs in and comes up with a package of Chips Ahoy, puts it back, comes up again with a six-pack of yellow Gatorade, puts that back, and comes up with a gallon Ziploc bag full of cannabis flower.
I splutter a laugh. "Jesus, Faye. Why do you have that much with you?"
She shrugs. “Tossed it in, just in case. Let's see, what else…? Oh! I have my knitting." She shows me a ball of baby blue yarn and a knitting needle. "I also have these." She shows me a pair of red-and-black checkered cinch bags. "They're blankets that scrunch up into these nifty little baggies."
"That thing must weigh a ton," I say.
She pats her shoulder. "Been carrying heavy purses my whole life. I could carry you, probably, if you could fit into a purse."
I laugh. "I could probably fit into that bag." I'm starting to feel the cannabis—light-headed, floaty, breezy. "Ohhh, here we go."
Faye cackles. "That's the good shit kickin' in, huh?"
I splutter a laugh., "You sound more like your grandson than an eighty-year-old woman."
She takes a long sip. "I love that boy more than just about anything. He and his mama don't get along right now, so I spend a lot of time talking to him. He thinks it's funny to teach me the lingo of his generation, and I think it's funny to use it with the other uptight fuddy-duddies at Bingo night."
"Bingo night, huh?" I say. "Didn't have you pegged for a bingo kinda gal."
"I'm not. It's stupid and boring and I never win. But I live alone and the hall is walking distance, and what the hell else am I supposed to do on a Tuesday night? I've knitted about a thousand sweaters that no one wants. The other old folks who play may be uptight old fuddy-duddies, but there is a certain… je ne sais quois , I guess, about being around people who get it."
"Get what, Faye?"
She feeds the fire some bigger sticks. "Being old. Getting left behind. Friends died, husbands or wives died, kids moved away, grandkids either live far or don’t care. The achy joints. Forgetting when you are. I ain't got dementia or nothing, but sometimes I’ll be at home and I'll forget and go looking for Thomas. I’ll call for him and I'll get mad at him for ignoring me. And then I remember.” She gazes at the fire, lost in memory. "I miss him, my Thomas."
"What was he like?" I ask.
"How long do you have?"
"All night, it would seem."
She shakes her head. "Complicated—he was a very complicated man. He could be very tender and sensitive, but he hid it, mostly. His father was a hard, brutal, cruel man, and Thomas learned early to hide his sensitivity behind a mask of toughness. And he was tough. He survived Vietnam. He was a police officer, and even up here in this little one-stoplight town, which it was back then, he saw his share of unpleasant things. But he never lost that sensitivity, even after the war and the police work. He just…I was the only one he showed it to. He had absolutely no sense of humor. None. It was my mission in life to make him laugh, but it was difficult. We went to see Don Rickles in Las Vegas one summer, and I'm sure you don't know who that is, but he was break-a-rib funny. The whole audience was in stitches, but not my Thomas. Nope. Arms crossed, grumpy face on, lookin' like he'd rather be back in the P-O-W camp."
I blink. "Wait, what? He was P-O-W?”
She sniffles. "Yeah. For four months, toward the end of the war. He told me a lot about his other experiences during the war, but he never would talk about that. The only thing he'd say was if something bad happened, like a wreck or bad weather or whatever, he'd say 'well, Faye, this may be bad, but it sure beats the shit out of that camp.'" She adopts a deep, surly, gruff voice when she quotes him, and I obviously never met the man, but I get a sense of who he must've been. "When he did refer to it, it was always that phrase— that camp ."
"He sounds like a very interesting man."
"Oh, he was. You just…you had to dig a little to get to the good stuff. He kept it buried under a nice, thick, crusty layer of grumpy old codger attitude." Faye glances at me. "You gonna unburden yourself yet or what? Don't think I didn't see you fighting tears after Felix Crowe took off. And the way that boy was lookin' at you? I'd'a sworn you'd have had him eating out of your hand by the time I got in from the water, but instead he took off like his tail was on fire. What the hell'd you say to him, anyhow?"
"Nothing, and that's the problem." I sigh woozily. I'm a lot high and a little tipsy, so the truth just sort of tumbles free from the vault, which is normally locked down tighter than Fort Knox. "He asked me out, and I hesitated." It sounds so stupid, said out loud. I groan. “God, I'm an idiot. I'm attracted to him, Faye. Why’d I hesitate?"
She snorts. "Girl, a blind nun would be attracted to that fine hunk of man meat. Even my old Aunt Evelyn, the nun, would've been tempted by Felix Crowe. Did you see the man's abs? You could grate cheese on ‘em!"
"Mmmm," I hum. "Cheese. I'd like to try."
She laughs at me. "Got the munchies, do you?"
“Mmmm-hmm."
"Comin' up!" She tosses me the package of Chips Ahoy. "Now, as to why you hesitated…"
I crunch into a cookie, and I swear, nothing has ever tasted so good. "Dutchie."
“Your husband?"
I nod. "Mmmm-hmmm." I wash the cookie down with sparkling water because I've had enough peppermint vodka chocolate shake. "I don't know what to do."
"You wanna talk about him?"
I shake my head. "Nope."
"How long?"
I swallow hard. "Six months, three weeks, two days…" I glance at my phone and do some math, "eight hours, and five minutes."
She nods knowingly. "Still counting the hours and minutes, are you?”
"Yeah," I say, my voice raspy. I look at her, my eyes blurring. "When does it get easier?"
She grunts, shaking her head. "It doesn't. Time puts layers of scar tissue over it, but if you poke it, it always hurts."
"Oh."
"I ain't got any old lady wisdom that'll suddenly make it all better, Ember. Wish I did. All I got is cold, hard facts. Which is this: you lost him; he's gone and you're not, but you're not allowed to just give up."
"I don't want to keep going. Literally. He and I were on a van life tour of the country. We were gonna see all fifty states together and vlog the whole thing. We have thirty-one. Michigan was thirty-two. I'm stuck here. He—he died in a hospital in Grayling. I…I tried to keep going, for him. We were gonna go up into the U-P and into Wisconsin, but I…I stopped here and…" I shake my head, swallowing hard. "And I can't go any further. Not without him."
The tears blur my eyes again and I fight them off, shaking my head and breathing through it.
I feel a soft, wiry, papery arm circle my shoulders. "No, no, no, no," she murmurs. "You can't do that, missy. You gotta get it out. Holding it in is killing you."
"Can't. I'll break."
"Seems like you already are broken."
“I know," I breathe. "But I…I just can't ."
"Let me have it."
I shake my head.
She pulls me closer, smoothing my hair away, tutting and hushing.
“It hurts so fucking bad, GramGram." I realized what I said as soon as I said it and sat up to look at her. "Faye, I'm sorry. I—"
She touches my lips, her dark eyes warm with compassion and understanding. "A grandma's a grandma, missy. I'd be honored to fill in." She pulls me back into her arms and holds me. "Course it hurts. But you gotta let yourself feel it. It's a powerful thing, that kind of grief. Feels like it'll suck you under if you let it—and it will. But only if you fight it. You can't fight it. You gotta give it its due and then keep on living."
"I don't know how."
“You'll figure it out. Got no choice. But it takes courage."
"I'm afraid, Faye."
"Course you are." She pats my shoulder. "A good place to start is a date with a tall stack of sexy like Felix Crowe."
This gets me spluttering tearful laughter. "Ohmygod, Faye. You're incorrigible."
"If I was even thirty years younger, I'd take a swing at him myself." She giggles. "I wouldn't mind being a cougar, but fortunately for all the younger men out there, Faye's Love Canal is closed for business."
" Un fortunately, you mean," I say. "You're a catch."
She rasps a laugh. "You're a nut. Sweet, but nutty."
"I feel like there's a dirty joke in there somewhere," I say, "But I'm too high to find it." I point at Faye. "And you leave Felix out of it."
We both laugh at that, and then lapse into a long, comfortable silence.
"Faye?" I ask. She harrumphs an interrogatory sound. "Were you ever with anyone else after Thomas passed?"
"No. He was it for me." She grabs my hand and squeezes hard. "But there's a difference, Ember. I had a lifetime with him. I was seventy…four? Seventy-six?—when he died. I was old already. I met Thomas when I was a young girl in grade school. We were together for over fifty years. When he died, I just…there was no possibility of anyone else. Who could ever know me the way Thomas did? I miss sex sometimes, sure, but I was only ever with Thomas in that way, and it is purely unfathomable to me to be intimate with another man." She wraps both of her hands around mine and shakes. "You're young, missy. I know you miss him—I know it hurts. But you got too much life to live to give up and be a spinster like me."
I nod. "I hear you. I'm just not sure I know how to get over him. How to let anyone else in."
I expect a dirty joke or something, but she just sighs and pats my cheek. "I'm not saying it'll be easy, Ember, only that it's necessary."
“Necessary?” I ask. "How is it necessary? What if I just want to be alone the rest of my life?"
"That'd be a big damn shame," she says. "I ain't known you long, but I can tell you’ve got a whole lot of love to give, and for once I'm not being dirty. You shine bright, Ember, and the world needs more lights like yours. You can't keep yours hidden."
"It's not hidden, Faye. It's…dimmed. Broken."
"Dimmed, yes. Broken, no. And if this is you dimmed, missy, when you finally learn how to be happy again, you'll be brighter than the damn sun."
For some stupid reason, I think of Felix. The hurt in his eyes when I hesitated. The way he bolted…he's known sorrow. He's dimmed and broken, too.
I should have said yes. One innocent date couldn't hurt. Right? I admit I'm attracted to him, but as Faye said, who wouldn't be? Attraction isn't the problem, although I haven't felt an attraction to anyone since Dutchie's death.
I just don't know where to start. Especially if he's as fucked up as I am. How do two hurt, closed-off people learn how to let each other in?
Someone has to take the first step, take a risk.
Oh.
Oh… fuck .
He did.
He asked me out.
I guess that explains his reaction when I hesitated—it would have felt like a rejection. I wasn't—I was taken aback, surprised. But to him, it had to have felt like I was shooting him down.
I think I'm gonna have to find Felix and hope he gives me a second chance. I'm not sure it'll go anywhere, because I'm not sure I'm brave enough or strong enough to open myself up to him, but I know I’ll regret it if I don't at least try.