Camptown Ladies (45 page)

I knew what I was here for—
fuck the journey!

I spun around, holding the rail to steady myself, the familiar hammering now syncing up my heart. Bang-bang-tap—bang-bang-tap. The hammering becoming a pounding in my chest when I saw, far in the distance, a beautiful half-stone and half-wood home, and the unmistakable dotted silhouettes of my Uncle Freddie and Erica perched on the roof, while a small crew attempted to hammer along
to Erica’s signature beat. I only paused one second to make sure it wasn’t the heat, or another cruel dream.

Then, I ran.

I ran across the room, not stopping to change my white flimsy nightgown, and flew down the stairs, skipping several, nearly plowing over my brother, who was heading up the stairwell. “Jesus!” he said, pressing himself to the wall, so I could fly past him. “Like you’ve never smelled bacon before.”

I ran through the living room and into the kitchen, nearly knocking over Lisa, making her fumble her handful of tomatoes, sending one rolling off the counter to splatter dramatically on top of her bare foot. I howled with laughter as I ran through the rest of the kitchen, backward, pointing to her tomato-splattered foot.

“Aunt Aggie did that!” I screamed at her.

“No, you did it, you fucking idiot! Why are you running in your friggin’ nightgown, blaming your klutziness on your dead aunt?”

I yelled back, “Erica!”

Frederica was at the stove and shouted back, “Si, si, Erica!” as she pointed out the window, toward the house in the distance. My sister spun around to the window as I blasted out the door.

I ran up the dirt road toward the house, barely aware of my braless and barefoot state, and I stopped running only when I could clearly hear Erica’s voice, chastising the workers as she always had—only Erica was shouting one insult at a time and Uncle Freddie was translating in Italian—and the sound of her teasing the men was like music to my ears.

“Rocky and I could have had this done hours ago!” she yelled, “Come on girls, learn from the old guy and pick up the pace before the rain comes! This roof is getting done today, or I’ll toss you off it one by one!”

I let myself walk the rest of the way to the house, breathless, knowing that I had her cornered; she would not get away from me. I could hear Uncle Freddie’s “heh, heh, heh” laugh as he came down a ladder, and he didn’t spot me until he reached the last few steps.

“Marieooche!”
he called out, as he hopped the last two steps like
a young man. I looked for Erica over his head, but I was too far under the roof to see her now.

Uncle Freddie spread his arms as wide as he could before clasping them around me in a bear hug. “She said you were here!” he shouted into my ear.

I looked up for Erica again. “She knew I was here?”

“No, your Aunt Aggie! She was in my dream last night, asking me why you were here. I told her you weren’t here, and she called me a ‘stupid tool.’” He cackled and joy spread across his face at the fresh memory. “Did you or Vince teach her that word?” He laughed again, and I realized how much his laugh had become my aunt’s, or maybe her laugh had become his over the years. I kissed him a proper hello on both cheeks.

“She came to me too, Uncle Freddie. She told me to tell you she loves you.”

“Hmm. You sure it was her?” he laughed, but he was touched by the message.

“She also said she was glad someone else was bossing you around until she could have the job back.”

He smiled and nodded, “That’s your aunt.”

“I came for Erica,” I said.

He nodded again as if he had already known, and he said, “It’s all or nothing, with that one, too,” he cautioned me. “So much like your Aunt Aggie, only she’s a hottie, heh, heh. Don’t tell your Aunt I said that. Even now, she seems to know everything I do.” Then he gently patted the house with pride, and seemed to look at me for approval.

I said, “My uncle is finally a carpenter. You’re living your dream.”

“Except Erica won’t let me forget I’m a stone mason. She insisted we build the houses half and half like this. Our signature style. She might be right. People love them. She calls me Rocky to remind me that I’m still wet behind the ears as a carpenter.” I felt him watch me as I stared up to the roof looking for her.

“Seconda opportunità,”
he whispered.

Second chance. He told us this so many times as kids when we made a mistake and we were given one more chance. Then he
pulled me close to repeat the secret he had told Vince, Lisa, and me what seemed thousands of times. “My father used to say,
In life there are only two things: I o fuori?’
Because in life, either you’re in, or you’re out.”

I nodded, hoping I would get the chance to hear him say that a thousand more times. “I’m in,” I said. “I just hope she is.”

He nodded back at me. “I’m in, until they take me out, heh, heh. Then Aggie can call me all the names she wants.” I saw a tear glint in the corner of his eye, but I knew by the bounce in his step when he walked back to the ladder that he was happy.

Uncle Freddie called out to the crew in Italian and all but one hammer stopped, and the crew began to climb down the ladder one by one, the few youngest hopping off the side of the roof to the porch railing below.

“Rain is just starting,” Uncle Freddie said, “we have to call it a day soon, anyway. Erica hates that, she always wants them to keep working.”

Just then I heard a loud scraping sound, and I ducked my head instinctively, thinking the ladder was falling. But the ladder wasn’t falling. My back was to the house, but I could tell from my Uncle’s face that I wasn’t in danger; he just looked surprised. He called up to the roof, “Erica, what are you doing?”

Erica was pulling the ladder up on to the roof and I turned in time to see the last few steps disappear over the edge. Then I heard the ladder make an angry thud onto the roof, a thudding Erica would have yelled at her workers for, for taking the chance on damaging shingles, especially, a beautiful terracotta roof like this one.

Uncle Freddie gave my cheek a good luck tweak filled with love and maybe a pinch of pity. He of all people knew what it was like to be outmatched by a strong woman. He walked away to rejoin his crew as I heard hammering begin again on the roof.

I carefully avoided stray nails as I walked around to the porch. In one smooth movement, I easily hoisted myself onto the porch railing and when I straightened up, I hopped hard once with my bare feet to pull myself up onto the roof with the strength of my arms. Erica was crouched at the far end of the roof, her back to me, hammering roofing
nails at double her usual speed, a speed fed by anger. I also knew she would have several nails in her fist and a few between her lips.

“Erica.”

I had surprised her by getting on the roof without the ladder and she stopped nailing for a moment, but she didn’t turn around. Instead, she shook her head no, her back still toward me, continuing to hammer away.

“Erica,” I said, louder.

She finally turned, as she spat the nails onto the clay. She spat her words, too. “Why the fuck did you come here?”

It had been so long since I had seen her face, I was equally startled by her anger as I was by her perfection, so much I had forgotten about her. Her face was reddened and I wondered if a few of her tears had hit the roof along with the raindrops that were now pelting us both.

Erica yelled, “Answer me! Why did you come to the one place where I finally stopped thinking I’d see you everywhere went? Now you ruined that. Why?”

“Because I love you,” I said.

“You think I didn’t know that, Marie? That’s why I left!”

“What you don’t know—”

“No! What you don’t know is that I can’t hear any of this!” Then she said to herself, “I did the stupidest thing imaginable.”

I said, “Running away to Italy—”

“No! I kissed you on a rooftop in the middle of a storm. I came to that campground for you and kissed you, knowing I couldn’t ever have you. Running away was the smartest thing I ever did! Until you followed me here, and now I have to start over again.”

I moved toward her and she stood up so quickly near the edge of the roof that she startled me. Gently, I said, “Erica, listen to me—”

“No! Go! Will you just go? Take the ladder, and go. Please. Go before Vince finds out you came for me. I won’t ruin what you have with him, with your family, just because you think you can’t let this go. Because you can, just like I have, or like I did.”

Now Erica was crying hard and I wanted to move toward her again, but she was too close to the edge and my stomach lurched at
the fear of her falling backward to get away from me, not to mention my own memory of falling for this woman on a roof, in more ways than one.

Instead of moving toward her, I lowered myself down to the roof until I was kneeling on the shingles, still warm from the disappearing sun. I imagined I looked like one of those tacky religious paintings, a woman kneeling in a nightgown with the backdrop of an Italian garden and countryside in the distance, the thick and dramatic clouds in the sky leaving open areas where the sun still blasted through in rays, like God was shining a spotlight down on his flock. (Except that I was on top of a roof, begging for a lesbo lover.)

I also imagined my Aunt Aggie peeking through one of the holes in the clouds, her giant eye behind her horn-rimmed glasses that, by some miracle, seemed comically back in style, and I imagined her shouting down that I was making a fool of myself in the rain. She would have been right. I knelt there and waited, knowing that while I’d had days to think about the possibility of finding her in Italy, Erica had only minutes to absorb the idea of me being here.

When she finally seemed convinced I would not come any closer, she calmed down a little as she wiped her face with the shoulder of her t-shirt. Then she shook her head again, this time slowly, sadly as she said, “You can let this go, just like I did.” she said. “I just hate that I have to do it all over again. Now I have to imagine that you could be here, too, instead of just in my dreams.”

Then she moved closer to me and grabbed me by the shoulders and pleaded, softly, but still so angry, “Why did you have to come here?” Then she knelt down in front of me as if she had given up, and hung her head down, crying invisible tears as the sky opened up and dumped buckets of heavy rain on us.

I was about to answer, to tell her everything, when the increasing roar of what I assumed was insanely close thunder turned out to be the engine of a speeding flatbed truck below us. We looked over the roof edge to the gravel road, where the careening truck sent workers scattering as it made a wild half-circle close to the house, kicking up mud, and finally skidding to a hard stop. I heard Uncle Freddie’s laugh as Frederica leaned out and waved wildly to us
from the passenger seat, shouting God knows what to us in Italian. When Lisa jumped out from the driver’s seat, I knew Erica was thinking what I was: She should have recognized her driving.

Lisa yelled casually, “Hey there, Erica, hope you’re not getting too comfy here! We’ll be needing you back at Camptown Ladies. I have
huge
expansion plans!”

Erica looked back at me, confused. Her cheeks, which before were streaked with tears in the dust, were now washed clean by the rain. Erica looked back to the truck to see Lisa prying Vince by the seat of his pants as he backed out of the tiny back seat. Lisa took joy in flinging him into the rain. He lost his footing and landed on his ass on the ground. He looked up at us with a giant smile and awkwardly waved his hand covered in mud.

“Hey, Erica,” Vince said, “I thought I’d bring both my sisters over, you know, so you could take your pick.” Then he laughed at his own joke as Lisa helped him up.

I said softly to Erica, “Vince is happy. He fell in love with Buddy’s mom, Katie. And he wants us to be happy, if you still want to be with me.”

She blinked at me, bewildered, and I leaned closer to her, taking her face in both of my hands. “Will you let me love you? It’s OK now, if you still want this. I love you, Erica. If you still want this.”

Erica breathed out a gasp of air and said, “Is this really happening?”

“If you want it to,” I said.

She slowly nodded yes as I felt my own tears warm my cheeks in the rain.

Vince yelled up, “Mare, friggin’ kiss her already before you both get struck by lightning!”

We both knew I had already been struck by lightning. Still, I kissed Erica anyway and Erica fell against me at last, her arms no longer holding me stiffly away, and we kissed as the sheets of rain washed over us both. It was sweet how she tightened her grip on me as if I might pull away. Not a chance. Not ever. This was the woman I would spend the rest of my life with. Even as I was ecstatically holding her, I knew also that my happiness came from knowing my brother and sister were sharing this with me.