Chapter 8 #2
“And what if he does? Why should that matter to you?” Sweet Ida, this man was infuriating. Coarse as a brick too.
Cal didn’t respond. He pressed on the brake, and the car rumbled to a standstill behind a low-slung cabriolet waiting to turn east.
“Fine. You don’t like my questions? How about you ask me one?”
It was a surprising offer. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who would want to answer questions. She had plenty of them, but…she wasn’t sure if she wanted to know the answers, exactly. So, she settled on something safe.
“Is Mama Rosa your mother?”
A laugh burst out of his throat, and the small hairs on the back of Fern’s neck stood on end.
“No, she’s just Mama Rosa,” he answered, still grinning. “Rod likes her. And she likes the kale she gets from the Lion’s Den.”
“The Lion’s Den is the place you brought me?”
He nodded, his smile fading again. It never seemed to last long.
“And kale is money?”
Cal gave a slight nod of his head as he let up on the brake and swerved around the cabriolet. It had stalled in the middle of the road, and a man had gotten out of the car to lift the hood.
“You really don’t get out much, do you?” he asked. She weathered the comment with a straight face.
“Has my brother been to the Lion’s Den?”
“Unfortunately,” Cal answered. She’d figured. Buchanan had known Cal on sight.
The bright lights on the Pier came into view. From here, it looked like a carnival stretching into the harbor. Cal turned off and drove into the parking area where dozens of other cars had lined up in the lot. He hadn’t changed his mind about the pretzels.
“I told you—I can’t,” she said.
He turned off the engine and opened his door. “Sure, you can. Nothing wrong with your legs.”
He got out and stood by the open door.
“It’s not about my legs.” She raised her voice so he could hear her over the noise of a trolley arriving along the tracks. The linked cars came to a stop in front of the Pier.
Cal leaned down, his hands bracing the roof.
“It’s about your face, I got it. You don’t like people staring.
Here’s the truth, princess: Somewhere between this car and Pretzel John’s cart, someone’s gonna stare at you.
Maybe a lot of people. Some asshole’ll probably make a comment too.
Who the hell cares? Who the hell are they anyhow? They’re nobody.”
Fern stared up into Cal’s face, his eyes flat, as if bored. “You can’t understand,” she said.
“That so?”
While he wasn’t as handsome as some of the other men she’d met at the Saturday night dinners, he had a face people would appreciate. His dark eyes and broody scowl, his black hair and broad shoulders, they drew ladies’ attention. Fern’s, too.
“No one looks at you with horror,” she said. “No one looks at you like you’re…like you’re disgusting.”
Like it was a pity she was even alive, taking up precious space. Those long glances, filled with something crueler than cold shock, were the stares she dreaded, not the insistent curiosity of children who didn’t realize they weren’t whispering like they thought they were.
Cal looked out to the Pier, his hands still braced on the roof. Fern thought maybe he’d try telling her that no one looked at her that way. That she was making it all up in her head or making it a bigger deal than it was. Buchanan and her mother had tried saying similar things over the years.
But he didn’t.
“You don’t know what I do, Fern, so I guess you can’t know how some people look at me.” He kept his eyes on the trolley. People had stepped off, laughing and talking. “Mostly, I get fear.”
He glanced back at her, and she wanted to know—and yet also never wanted to learn—what he did.
“Come get a pretzel with me,” he coaxed.
So simple. Just walk out there and grab a pretzel at a stand like it was nothing. She wanted to, and she wanted it to be nothing. She wanted to be the girl who smiled and said “sure” and didn’t care. She wanted to be as free as the people who’d just stepped off the trolley, laughing.
Fern reached for the door latch, her fingers sweaty, her wrist trembling.
The humid air pushed against her skin as she got out, the night much too hot for the heavy black overcoat.
She busied herself taking it off. Underneath, the plain, navy-blue, drop-waist dress and even plainer white heels were like something a secretary might wear to the office.
At least she’d done her hair earlier while fighting boredom in her room.
Cal shut his door, and she closed hers, her hand tight on the handle as it latched. She didn’t want to do this and wished once again she’d stayed put earlier.
Fern barely breathed as they walked across the tracks laid out for the trolley.
The lights along the Pier twinkled brightly.
There was music, and loud voices, and somewhere nearby, a girl was laughing so hard she was nearly screaming.
Long ago, Buchanan had tickled her until she’d sounded like that.
The backs of her legs were the most sensitive spots, and he would pin her down and attack until their mother told him to stop and compose himself.
Fern hadn’t thought about that for years.
As they crossed onto the Pier, the entrance flanked by two brick towers, she wondered when Buchanan had grown tired of her.
“Do you come here a lot?” she asked Cal as a group of young men and women leaving the Pier passed them.
Fern stared straight ahead, down the long, wide center of the pier bordered on each side by old warehouses.
Above the warehouses, on parallel, raised promenades, more people strolled, sat at benches and tables, ate ice cream, and generally didn’t seem to care that it was about to rain.
A streetcar trolley moved slowly along the tracks on the upper level.
“Does this look like my kind of scene?” Cal replied as he led them up steps to one of the raised promenades.
Everywhere Fern looked, couples, teenagers, and families were having fun.
She found the girl screaming out with laughter.
She was red-faced and smiling, surrounded by men, and they were teasing her with what looked like a gun.
A man pulled the trigger, and she screamed as a spurt of water shot her in the chest.
“I suppose not,” Fern answered.
Cal was a black cloud of silence, strolling along the promenade at a fast clip.
She kept up with him, glad to be walking quickly.
She hoped that by walking fast, and with a set destination, it would cut back on the amount of staring people could do.
As they passed a few ladies standing in a group, smoking cigarettes, however, she accidentally caught one woman’s eyes, which coasted over her scars.
Pale shock transformed her expression. The woman’s lips parted in astonishment, and Fern sailed past without looking back.
“In a hurry to get to those pretzels?” she asked.
“John boards up early on Monday nights.”
The Pier was at least a quarter mile long.
They passed the entrances to the theater and dance hall, walked through sugary clouds of cotton candy and fried dough, and greasy ones of hamburgers and hotdogs.
If they kept up this pace, Fern would be sweating by the time they reached the end, where it rounded and became an open terrace.
She’d just started to go lightheaded with wonder at not blushing or feeling trapped when she heard her name.
“Fern Adair?”
It came through the din like a foghorn, and for a single, indrawn breath, she considered ignoring it. But Cal slowed and turned. He’d heard it too.
“That’s you, isn’t it? Miss Adair?”
Slowly, she turned. Mr. Matthew Clifton was staring at her from within the entrance to one of the Pier’s restaurants.