20. Ruby
Shipwreck Key has gotten dressed up for the holiday season in Ruby’s absence. The first thing she notices when her boat pulls up to the dock is that Seadog Lane is draped in lights.
“Welcome back, Mrs. Hudson!” Bev Byer shouts in her direction as she walks up from the dock with Banks behind her, carrying both of their suitcases.
Ruby shields her eyes with one hand. “It’s not even Thanksgiving!” she calls back. “Have we transformed into Christmas Key?”
“Oh, I wish!” Bev says. “Love the charm of that place. But I suppose we’ve got our own measure of enchantment here. Pour you a drink?”
Ruby glances at her watch. “It’s only eleven in the morning, Bev.”
“A pirate rinses the night from his mouth with a swig of rum,” he says with a faux growl.
“Well, in that case, I suppose I could sip a mimosa here while Banks grabs the golf cart.”
“I’ve been given my orders,” Banks says. He sets the suitcases at the front door of The Frog’s Grog, gives Ruby a small salute, and starts walking towards her house to pick up the golf cart. It’s not too far, and he’s been cooped up on the plane and the boat, so Ruby lets him go as she follows Bev into the dark, cool bar.
“So, what have I missed while I was gone?” Ruby sits at the bar; she’s the only patron in the joint that morning.
“Bit of this, bit of that,” Bev says. He takes a bottle of champagne from the fridge behind the counter as well as a container of orange juice. “Your girls turned the bookstore into a nightclub, Phyllis and Joe finally told us all they were dating and threw a wedding on the beach,” he says, referring to Phyllis Stein, who owns the island grocery store, and Joe Youngblood, her decades-long employee, “and Sunday stood on the shore every night, keening into the wind about her beloved returning to her.”
“Well, I brought him back safe and sound,” Ruby says, “so she can calm down with the keening.”
Bev sets the champagne flute in front of Ruby and leans both of his weathered hands on the bar. “The truth is, not a whole helluva lot happened, but then nothing ever really does. Looked like the bookstore did decent foot traffic, and we had a couple of days of visitors—bigger boats full of day-trippers. I poured some rum for them, they strolled about, and then they left.”
“How is Tilly?”
Bev leans more heavily on the bar, lets his head hang, and emits the deepest, most grandfatherly sigh she’s ever heard. “She’ll be the death of me,” he admits, looking hangdog and defeated.
Ruby sips her mimosa. Tilly is one of her bookstore employees, and she’s also the nineteen-year-old granddaughter Bev’s been raising alone for more than a decade. “What’s going on there? Is she getting restless living on this island instead of in a bigger city?”
“You have no idea,” he says. To distract himself, Bev grabs a rag and wipes down the bar, rubbing small circles into the highly polished wood. “Her latest idea is to move to Tampa and go to tattoo school. Then she wants to open a tattoo parlor here on the island.”
Ruby nearly chokes on her drink. “Do we have a market for that?”
Bev drops the rag and puts both hands in the air. “Apparently I’m not allowed to judge whether the islanders are ‘tattoo type of people’ or not. I’ve already been dressed down for that.”
“But you have one,” Ruby nods at the tattoo that’s visible beneath the edge of Bev’s white t-shirt sleeve. She’s holding the champagne flute by its stem as she squints at it, head tilted to one side so she can assess his ink work. “What is it?”
Bev shoves the t-shirt sleeve up roughly to his shoulder, revealing a large, faded anchor with a mermaid wrapped around it. Ruby can see it more clearly now, but the ink has become muddied in places, and with some of the recent tattoos she’s seen, she’s pretty sure a current artist could have made it something far more colorful and beautiful.
“The mermaid is my wife,” Bev explains, looking at his bicep fondly as he runs a hand over the tattoo. “But back in my day, only the real outliers got inked. Military men, bikers, outlaws. Now every teenage girl has a damn rose on her ankle, or some kind of Roman numerals running up her arm for some reason or another.” Disapproval is written all over his face. “I don’t agree with it myself, and while I loved my beautiful wife, I sure as hell wish I’d thought more about getting something drawn onto me that would last forever.”
“Mmmm,” Ruby says, nodding. She puts her glass to her lips as she listens.
“But you can’t convince a girl on the cusp of twenty that she’s wrong—her birthday is this weekend, in fact—and I’ve seen the applications to different tattoo schools she’s been filling out.” He makes a face that looks like a cross between distrust and disappointment. “When she moved here, she was a little sprite of a girl. Thought she’d stay forever, maybe take over this place.” Bev gestures at the tables and the rafters of The Frog’s Grog. “Now here she is, wanting to up and leave for a bit. Don’t know what I’ll do without her.”
Ruby sets her nearly empty mimosa glass on the bar and stands up as Banks pushes open the door to the bar, letting in a flood of morning sunlight. She looks directly at Bev with a gentle, knowing smile. “You’ll miss her, and you’ll wait for her to come back to you—even for a visit,” she says, setting a twenty on the bar. “And on that note, my own girls should be waiting at home for me, so I’m going to go and see them.”
“Good to have you back, chief,” Bev says, sliding the twenty across the bar and punching a few buttons on his register so that it flies open.
Ruby takes a moment to consider this. She’s been across the country and up to New York, she’s traveled the length of the west coast from L.A. to Seattle, and now she’s home again. Of course, being home means it’s time to truly start planning a proper goodbye for her mother, but armed with a new understanding of who Patty was and what she meant to other people, Ruby actually feels ready. “It’s good to be back.”
“Mom!” Athena yells from the open window on the second floor of Ruby’s house. She’s standing there, shaking a sheet out the window, grinning from ear to ear with a red bandanna wrapped around her head. Ruby’s older daughter disappears from the window as Banks parks the golf cart, but she immediately pops out the front door of the house with both arms waving. “You’re back!”
Ruby is more exhausted from the journey than she’d imagined she would be. She steps from the golf cart tiredly, wrapping Athena in both arms and holding her as tight as she can. It’s impossible not to flash forward as she hugs her baby girl, imagining Harlow and Athena as much older women, making final arrangements for her once she’s gone. But Ruby doesn’t want to think of that now, so she releases Athena and glances around.
“Where’s Harlow?”
Banks grabs Ruby’s suitcase and gives Athena a single nod as he takes it inside the house and deposits it there.
“She’s swimming—we thought you wouldn’t be home until later.”
“And what are you doing up there—waving a white flag in surrender? Sending a message to a boy to tell him not to come because your mother is home?” Ruby lifts her chin at the open bedroom window where Athena had been airing out the bedsheet.
“Ha. As if I’d invite a man to visit us here in paradise.” Athena purses her lips, but then breaks into a smile. “Besides, Elijah is on the island. We’ve been hanging out a little.” She gives one light, carefree shrug of her left shoulder. “You know—nothing serious.”
Elijah Hartley is Marigold Pim and Cobb Hartley’s son, and because Elijah himself is fairly well-known, being the only progeny of a former supermodel and an incredibly famous rockstar, he and Athena seem to really get one another. Ruby is happy that Athena is spending time with him, as Elijah is truly a smart, talented, kind young man. The kids had met up in Europe during the summer to travel together, and while Athena hasn’t spoken about him much since, Ruby is well aware that that doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on there.
“Hey, that’s understandable,” Ruby says. She watches her daughter’s face as it glows from talking about Elijah. Athena had been burned quite badly in her first adult love affair: Diego, a coworker she’d fallen hard for at the Library of Congress in D.C., had neglected to tell her that he was just days away from his own wedding when he’d taken Athena back to his apartment for the night. Ruby had been so sure her daughter would never trust men again, but now here she is, looking calm and happy talking about Elijah Hartley. It pleases Ruby to no end to know that her girl is resilient enough to put herself back out there, and she’s not going to spoil the whole thing by asking too many questions.
“Mom!” Harlow’s voice comes from inside the house. Both the front door and the back windows, which face the water, are wide open, so Harlow has come in to find her mother and sister standing on the porch within view. “Welcome home!”
Ruby rushes through the door and straight into the arms of her youngest daughter, her wild child, her untamable girl.
“I missed you, Lolo,” she says, nuzzling her face in Harlow’s damp blonde locks. Harlow is standing in the middle of the living room wearing a red bikini with a towel slung around her hips. Her bare feet are sandy, and a stream of water trickles down her spine.
“We missed you too. We didn’t even watch The Golden Girls without you.”
“What did you do instead?”
Athena closes the front door after waving at Banks, who is headed to the guest house to unpack his own belongings. She turns to face Ruby and Harlow. “We made tacos, we both took our laptops to the bookstore and to the coffee shop because we had work to do, and we pretty much watched Sex and the City in its entirety.”
Ruby flops on the couch in the middle of the living space and sighs deeply, relaxing into the pillows. She’s so happy to be home.
“That sounds amazing,” she says to her girls, smiling up at them.
“Hey, why don’t you catch a few winks here, Mom?” Harlow says, holding her towel in place as she reaches for a soft chenille blanket that’s tossed over the back of the couch.
Athena slips Ruby’s shoes off her feet and lifts her mother’s ankles gently, swinging them around so that she’s now lying flat on the couch. Harlow spreads the blanket over Ruby and she’s instantly transported to a weightless, happy place.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Ruby says as her eyes close. “Wake me up in a little bit and I’ll make you girls some lunch…”
In the end Ruby does not wake up to make lunch—or dinner. When she finally opens her eyes, she finds that her daughters have worked around her all afternoon and evening, taking her suitcase upstairs, fixing a pot of soup and some grilled cheese sandwiches, and that they’ve let Sunday in. Ruby sits up on the couch with bleary eyes as she looks around and finds her best friend curled up on a chair across from her, sipping a glass of iced tea and holding a book on her lap.
“Morning, sunshine,” Sunday says with a big smile. “How do you feel?”
Ruby pushes the blanket off her body and swings her legs around so that her feet are on the floor. Harlow brings her a glass of iced tea and sets it on a coaster on the coffee table.
“Thanks, honey,” she says to Harlow. “Um, I feel better, I think.” Ruby drinks the cold tea gratefully. “I just got hit by this wave of exhaustion. It feels so good to be home.”
“Dinner!” Athena calls from the kitchen. The women traipse in to the dining room table and sit in front of hearty bowls of tomato soup with large soup spoons laid out on Ruby’s favorite autumn leaf patterned napkins.
She lifts one up and looks at it before spreading it on her lap. “These were your grandmother’s,” Ruby says to the girls with a sad smile. She’s still not fully with it yet after her five hour nap, and her spoon clinks against the side of her bowl. “No matter how late she came home, my mother and I always sat at the table together to eat, and she always used her good linens. Never once in my life did I eat off a paper plate in my mom’s house.”
“Tell us about the trip,” Sunday prompts, running her spoon through the tomato soup.
“Wait, does Banks want to join us?” Ruby interrupts. She’s just realized that Sunday is here instead of with her boyfriend, and she doesn’t want to leave Banks out. Plus he’s probably starving.
“I came over here because he fell asleep,” Sunday said. “Did somebody drug you two on the plane?”
Ruby shakes her head and takes her first bite of tangy tomato soup. “No, I think it was just a lot of human interaction and travel all packed into a week. But I’m so glad I went. I needed to meet these people in person, and I needed to know more about my mother’s life. I’m completely bowled over by the relationships she had that I knew nothing about.” Ruby goes quiet for a moment and the only sound is of the spoons touching ceramic bowls as the women eat their soup. “At first it left me feeling a little lonely. I thought maybe my mother was a stranger to me, or that she’d somehow replaced the relationship she should have had with me by bringing all these other people into her life. But that wasn’t true at all. She and Ellen go all the way back to childhood, Carmen simply happened to be a kindred spirit, and she’s known Lyle for decades, though I don’t think I’ll ever fully comprehend what that relationship looked like.”
“Maybe you don’t need all the answers,” Sunday says.
“I know now that I truly don’t.” Ruby reaches for one of the triangles of grilled cheese sandwich on her plate. It’s gooey and warm, and she dips a corner of it into her soup. “But I think the biggest mystery to me will always be why she never told me about Trixie. That’s a huge piece of her life and something that undoubtedly changed her. Why would she have kept it from me?”
Unbidden tears come to Ruby’s eyes for what must be the millionth time since she and her mother sat at this very table while Patty told her about the cancer. That was just over two months ago, but it feels like a lifetime has passed since she realized that she was about to lose her mom.
”Listen, I can speak to secrets of that magnitude,” Sunday says, setting her spoon in her bowl and placing both elbows on the table as she levels her gaze at her best friend. Sunday herself had given birth to a baby at a young age and had chosen to put him up for adoption, and she knows the heartache of being a young mother without her child. ”When it comes to being an unwed mother--especially at that time--there is a shame that follows you wherever you go, even if you reject that feeling. Even if you yourself aren”t ashamed. Not to mention the pain that you feel every time you think of the baby who is not in your arms. I”m sure your mother felt a bit of both of those things, as well as many other emotions that might have simply been easier for her to bury and put behind her.”
”That”s true.” Ruby nods thoughtfully. ”You”re right.”
”Why are people always so hard on the women?” Harlow asks. She looks annoyed, and Ruby almost wants to chuckle at her youthful indignation. There was a time in her life when she, too, couldn”t wrap her head around the injustices that women faced. She”d believed that some of it must simply be a misunderstanding, that if men only understood how their actions affected women, they might change. But then she”d grown up. She”d matured and realized that women sometimes get blamed and put into boxes and held back by all the things that men can”t bear to stomach or take on themselves. She’d discovered that women usually carry far more on their backs than they get credit for, and that they are almost always their own harshest critics.
”Well, babe,” Ruby says, looking at her daughters” faces. She”s tempted to tell them everything that”s in her head, but as she takes in their unlined, hopeful, sweet faces, she knows that life will teach them what they need to know about womanhood, and that what life doesn”t teach them, they”ll make up for themselves. That”s the beauty about being a young woman these days, Ruby thinks. Some of the rules are just waiting to be rewritten.
Sunday jumps in and offers her own answer, which Ruby is grateful for: ”Listen, girls. We get to do the good stuff: we get to birth babies, if we”re blessed with them and if we choose to be mothers. We get to soothe and nurture everyone around us, if we have those inclinations. And we get to have soft curves and tender hearts. Everywhere you go you”ll find someone who tells you that something about you isn”t okay, or that you”ve done something wrong, but all you have to do is shut out that negativity. Be you. Accept that life is hard for everyone, and be kind to people no matter what--especially yourself.”
”Good advice,” Ruby says with a firm nod.
”Now, as for your mother.” Sunday turns to Ruby. ”Patty was a tough lady who did amazing things everywhere she went, but maybe a part of her toughness was the fact that she tucked her own soft spots away from everyone--including you. So I think you have to respect that.”
”I do,” Ruby says sincerely. ”She had every right, I just wish she”d felt like she could have told me.”
Athena, the older and wiser of her daughters, shrugs and reaches for the carafe of iced tea to refill her glass. ”She knew she could have, Mom. You”re totally the kind of person that people tell their secrets to. It was just that she wanted you to live your own life without having to carry the weight of hers on your back.”
Ruby and Sunday look at one another, eyes wide.
”Out of the mouths of babes,” Sunday says.
”Out of the mouths of babes,” Ruby repeats as she shakes her head.
Her girls never cease to amaze her, and she can only hope that neither of them ever feels the need to carry the weight of her life on their backs.