Hatteras Girl (Heart of Carolina Book #3) (8 page)

When he appears at the door to the men’s room, I notice that the zipper on his shorts is undone. “Zane,” I say, “you need to zip up your fly.”

“Where’s a fly?” His eyes scan over my head.

“Your fly. That’s another word for zipper.”

He looks down and says, “I don’t see a fly,” but he does zip up the gap in his shorts. Then he burps, and when I tell him he needs to say excuse me, he only burps louder.

Under her breath, Cassidy asks me, “Who does he belong to?”

“I live with him.” I force a smile. “We have lots of fun.”

She looks alarmed. “Does he have a mother?”

“Yes, Cassidy. You know Minnie.”

She gives a tentative nod. Then she confesses that she’s so hungry she could eat five burgers from the Grille.

“Want me to order you takeout while I’m there?” I ask.

“I wish. Gotta drink some water and maybe then the craving will go away.”

“What about mints?” I ask. Ropey went through a whole box of Life Savers when he was on a diet. “Will some of them help?”

“The sugar-free ones are allowed on my diet. But I ate them all yesterday.”

There are days that I’m grateful to be five-feet-ten with a high metabolism. “Good luck,” I tell her as Zane and I leave to drive to the restaurant.

Zane says, “Good luck. Be careful of germs.” He thinks this is a funny line and laughs all the way to the parking lot.

“I’m funny,” he tells me as I strap him into his car seat.

“You think?”

“Yeah.” His laugh reminds me of chimpanzees at the zoo.

I remember the day Minnie called to say she was pregnant. I was in my Charlotte apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, watching a car outside my window try to parallel park when my cell rang. Without any preliminaries, all I heard was, “I’m going to have a baby! I’m going to have a baby!” Minnie was on the verge of hyperventilating, she was so excited. “At last! I’d given up hope. Oh, Jackie, oh, Jackie, can you believe it?”

The car I was watching at the time was not as blessed. I saw it scrape the fender of another car, and then end up on the curb, its passenger door dented by a telephone pole.

Inside the Grille, I enjoy Buck’s comical banter with Betty Lynn as I sip my Diet Pepsi. Zane spins around on the barstool next to me.

“Do you know that Buck is an artist?” Betty Lynn asks me when she comes over after filling four glasses with sweet iced tea.

“He is?”

Before she heads off with her tray, Betty Lynn says, “He paints with acrylics. We might even put one of his pictures on the wall here, right, Buck?”

Suddenly, I realize Zane is not happy with his Mountain Dew, or as he calls it, “Mountain Doom.” He’s tossed the straw paper onto the floor and crumpled the straw with his fingers so that it resembles an earthworm in Sheerly’s garden.

With a bottom lip curved over the upper one, he sits with eyes closed. I hear the hissing in his throat rapidly make its way to his mouth. “I want . . . I want . . . I want a milkshake!”

“Zane.” I’m amazed that this little creature seated next to me on a barstool, his chin just above the counter, could own such a booming cry.

A man with dark hair and eyes that flash
handsome
is seated at the end of the counter near a New Orleans poster that has a shot of Bourbon Street. In a pleasant voice, he calls Buck over for a refill and orders a bacon cheeseburger. I hear this man asking if the burger can be well done.

Quietly, I say to Zane, “Drink your soda.” I smile, hoping somehow this gesture will make Zane behave.

“But I want a milkshake!”

“Zane, your inside voice. Please.”

“I do, I do, I do!”

I stare into my Pepsi. Maybe if I ignore him, his attitude will go away.

Buck strides over to us. “Hi, Zane.” His smile lights his whole face.

“I want a milkshake! Get me one.” Zane’s eyes are pits of fire. “Now!”

With calmness, I state, “Your mom said you couldn’t have one right now.”

“Why?” His throat has to hurt from yelling. My ears ache from listening. “Why?”

“Because she said so.” I have to do better on my child psychology.

“Zane,” says Buck, touching the child’s arm. When he has Zane’s attention, he continues. “Do you like boats? Big boats? Would you like to go on a ride?” Tenderness fills the man’s voice as he says, “Maybe one day we could take a picnic and ride on a boat.”

Fear hits the boy’s eyes like a tidal wave. “No!”

I want to stop Buck somehow as he continues with the boat theme. “Boats are fun, aren’t they?”

“No!” Zane wails. “No!”

Everyone in the restaurant is focused on this child, even the handsome man with the burger. I feel dozens of eyes staring at this scene we are making. I know they think that I’m the adult responsible for him; some may even think I’m his mother. They want me to make him shut up. I just want to sink into the floor.

Zane twitches on the stool and then slides off of it. “No!” He heads toward the dining area, the lights from the soles of his tennis shoes shooting off tiny beams.

I rush after Zane, stop him right before he collides with Betty Lynn. Betty Lynn doesn’t seem bothered by the commotion. She leans over toward my right ear and whispers, “Jackie, I want to introduce you—”

Grabbing Zane’s hand firmly as his squeals sound higher pitched than a swarm of seagulls that have found tasty prey, I tell Betty Lynn we are leaving. Now. Then I push open the front door, welcome the sunshine, and don’t look back.

Somehow we make it across the parking lot. “I want my daddy!” Zane yells as I open the passenger door for him and help him into his car seat. I fumble with the restraint around his waist. “I want to see him!”

Breathing deeply, I nod. Although I’m embarrassed by Zane’s outburst and wish Buck hadn’t continued talking to him about boats, I can’t blame Buck. He doesn’t realize that Zane hates any mention of boats. Buck has most likely forgotten that Zane’s father died on a fishing boat.

Once Zane is strapped in, I settle into the driver’s seat. A sigh escapes my lungs as I let relief bathe me. Although the truck is baking under an afternoon sun, it takes me a while to turn on the engine and the air-conditioner. Once I do, I take a long look at the little boy in his car seat beside me. Sweat beads dot his nose. Tears stain his glowing cheeks. I don’t know whether to scold him or pat his hand.

“My daddy bought me milkshakes.”

I think back to Minnie and Lawrence’s wedding, which was held at Hatteras Christian Assembly Church. Lawrence made sure all the guests were taken care of. “Now go back for more wedding cake, Ms. Sheerly,” he told my aunt a number of times. “We are celebrating today without any diets!” To which Sheerly had obliged and loaded another slice of the chocolate cream cake with the tiny toy bride and groom on the top tier. When she and her friends later sang love songs to the blissful couple, there were flecks of chocolate on her peach suit.

I have happy memories from that day, and I’m glad Zane has happy memories of milkshakes.

I lean back in my seat, grateful for the semi-cool air blowing through the vents. “I miss your daddy, too.”

Zane glares at me as his arms cross his chest. “You didn’t know him.”

“I did.”

“Then what was his favorite color?” He squints.

My memory takes me to a green tie Lawrence often wore to church on Sunday. “Green.” I make my voice soft. “Like your eyes.”

“He liked yellow.”

I have no memory of Zane’s father favoring this color, but I say, “Yes, of course. Yellow was a color he liked a lot.”

“The bestest?”

I nod. “The bestest.”

Zane wipes the back of his hand over his nose and sniffs. “Okay, I guess you did know him, then.”

I reach over and pat Zane’s dry hand. As my fingers touch his skin, he grabs my thumb. Our eyes lock, and I do what I never thought I would.

I hug this fretful, sad child.

He lets me. The next thing I know, his arms have lifted and his hands circle my head, fluffing my hair just like he does to the fur of his stuffed squirrel, Popacorn.

The drive home is silent except for the rumble of my truck’s tires over the narrow road, the air-conditioning wheezing through the vents, and the sound of Zane sucking his thumb.

11

When my mother calls,
Zane has fallen asleep on the living room floor, breathing softly. His head rests against Popacorn’s dirty fur, fingers clutching one of the stuffed paws. His mouth curves under a button nose, and his eyelids are like rose petals—delicate and velvet. If you didn’t know any differently, you could think this little boy was an angel.

Passing him, I make my way upstairs with light steps, talking in a low tone to my mother until I get into my bedroom and close the door. “Mom, how did you put up with Ron and me?” I blurt.

She laughs. “I think to myself, they are adults, they are on their own.”

“No, when we were Zane’s age.”

“Zane.” My mother says his name like it’s a virus. “What he doing? Bad boy again?”

“Just answer, please.” I rub my temple, hoping to alleviate the pain.

“I give you lots of timeouts in bear chair. You remember?”

I do remember that chair, always placed in the corner of the den in our house in Nags Head. I hated being sent to it, but I knew that when Mom said I must go, there was no point in disobeying. Ron, on the other hand, was able to miss many deserved sessions in that chair. He was sneaky, rarely got caught. He never stood in front of Mom, telling her he wanted a chocolate cookie right now, right this very minute, or he was going to run away to Mexico.

“Zane is driving you crazy? What he done now?” My mother’s escalating voice doesn’t soothe my headache.

“Well. . . .” I wonder where to start.

“Where is his mother?”

“Minnie works a lot.”

“She needs to stop work and grow up with her child.”

“She needs money.”

“Where is her father? Grandparents? Why they not help? Grandparents are supposed to help out.”

Minnie’s father hasn’t been part of her life since she was sixteen. As Sheerly tells her customers, one day this man “literally up and left.”

“She has no living grandparents,” I say to my mother.

“Oh, what happened to Minnie grandparents?”

“They died.”

“Died?”

“Mom, they were old. Irvy is seventy-four years old now.” I picture Irvy taking a nap in her wheelchair, her knees covered by the crocheted blanket, her arms weak and flat against her sides.

“Hard to believe so much time go by so quickly.”

I sigh. Mom and Dad used to live here in Nags Head, but since they moved back to Charlotte when Dad took an accounting position with a small firm, they’ve lost touch with those of us who still wake each day to the coastal sun.

“You need bear chair for Zane? Give him timeouts?” I hear pages rustling and know exactly what my mother is doing. She is the most avid coupon-clipper in Charlotte.

“You still have it?”

“In the attic.” The sound of scissors cutting paper enters my ear along with her voice. She never rips out those money-saving squares, always cuts carefully on the dotted lines. “I keep there for memory.” Then she says, “I don’t want to get blind and deaf.”

“What?” I’m surprised by the change in subject.

She goes into a story about her sister in Korea buying the wrong spices to make
kimchi
. She claims that her sister is going blind and deaf. She uses the Korean words for the spices, even though I know she knows I haven’t a clue what they are.

“How would you cut coupons if you couldn’t see?” I ask her.

The attempt at levity slides over her head. “I save ton of money.”

“I know you do.” I end the call then and head to the kitchen to make dinner.

When Minnie comes home at seven, she carries a vase of pink and gold Gerber daisies. “Sheerly gave these to me.” Mechanically, she walks over to the kitchen sink to put water in the vase. “She remembered that today’s the day . . .” Placing the vase on the counter, she reaches for the bottle of Rizatriptan, her prescribed migraine medication.

I think of my to-do list and realize that with Zane’s outburst, I have failed to do what I wanted to do.

We eat in near silence; I consume the remorse of having failed Minnie once again. I was planning to tell her about Zane and his behavior at the Grille, possibly tell her that she needs to invest in a book on discipline, but decide that I’ll wait until a less significant day. Zane begs for more macaroni and cheese and then asks if he has to eat the
yucky
cucumbers in the tossed salad.

Minnie only stares at the salt shaker, so I tell him he doesn’t have to and add another helping of the cheesy macaroni I made to his plate.

I clean up the kitchen with calculated slowness, and then head to my bedroom. I plan to absorb the rest of my evening in editing my interview with Davis Erickson.

Later, Zane comes in to give me a good-night kiss. The wetness from it is still on my cheek when Minnie enters my bedroom. I’m stretched out on my double bed, taking a break from looking over the printed pages about Rexy Properties, how Davis got into the realty business, and what he likes to do for fun. Selena likes my interviews to make our readers feel that the business proprietors we feature are real people with “heart and soul.” With that in mind, I’ve added that Davis enjoys boating and playing golf. His favorite meal is a rib eye with a baked potato. The guitarist Manex Jethro is his inspiration.

He certainly sounded interesting during our phone conversation, and I think I’ve captured some of that in my piece, so Selena should be pleased. But when I see Minnie all I can think about is the price he gave me for the Bailey House and how we’ll never be able to afford it. If Mr. and Mrs. Bailey were still living, I bet they’d just
give
it to us, the way they always gave us afternoon snacks on scented napkins.

Minnie stands at my opened door and says, “I found a bed and breakfast we could get.” She enters my room, closes the door so that Zane won’t hear us. “I saw it online. It’s called The Lexington Manor.” She sits at my computer, her bracelets clicking as her fingers race across the keyboard, bringing up the Web site for me to see. “See?”