Season of Salt and Honey (23 page)

Once, on a trip to Italy, we flew from Sicily to Rome in a small plane, small enough that the hostess let us see inside the cockpit. Papa came with us, Bella gripping the leg of his pants, both of us with our hair in braids. The pilot patted our heads. He had a coffee beside him, with a cookie on the saucer, and he smelled like Nonno's cigarettes. Bella hid herself behind Papa and sucked on her thumb, an old habit that Aunty Connie was trying to break. But I was transfixed. The cockpit was a marvel of buttons and levers and flashing lights. The pilot showed us which buttons did what, his set of headphones, and the gold wings on the band of his hat. The endless sky beyond, laid out in limitless possibility,
was the most brilliant blue. A proper blue, light and bright, not like the ocean or the sky in Washington. In our seats we were just in a plane; here in the cockpit, we became a bird.

The hostess offered us candy. I took one but put it into my pocket. This was no time for eating candy. My heart was dancing in my chest.

When Papa led us back to our seats I kept glancing over my shoulder, wishing I could remain in that cockpit. I could still see the sky, streaked with clouds that looked like steamed milk. But the pilot waved and the curtain, with its severe pleats and squares of Velcro, was fastened shut once more.

Back in our seats, I looked at Papa. His face was thin and tired, the face he'd grown over the past year. He looked like a different man from the one who had kissed my mother full on the lips every morning, and brought her Italian chocolates studded with roasted hazelnuts every Friday. “Look after your papa,” Aunty Rosa had reminded me before we went on the trip. “He loves you girls, you know. Take care of him.”

I did love him and wanted to take care of him. He was my papa and I'd carry the world if he asked me to. I already planned to have a good, safe life and keep him company forever. But seeing that big, blue sky made me feel like my insides had been rearranged. The idea of going anywhere in the world, of running away. Of flying. It made me feel thrilled and a bit sick all at once. Like driving on an open road when no one knows where you are.

I wanted to go to Europe for our honeymoon. I'd collected travel brochures from my cousin Giulia, the travel agent. Alex wasn't keen. We were in bed one night and he'd slipped his hand
into my hair, rolled a strand around his finger. I could smell the hand soap from our bathroom on his broad fingers. Lavender.

“I've been thinking about France,” I said.

“In general?” he teased.

“After the wedding.”

“What's wrong with Hawaii?”

“Nothing is wrong with Hawaii.” There was a great deal on flights and a five-star resort in Oahu. It was all-inclusive: room, food, cocktails by the pool. The photos showed huge beds covered in crisp, white linen, and palm trees curving in from the shore. “I just thought . . .”

“It's a really good deal,” Alex reminded me.

“I know.”

But I've never been to France, I wanted to say. I kept finding myself staring at flight prices to Paris at the travel agency where Giulia worked. Mama and Papa had been to Paris once, on their way back from Italy, before she had me and Bella. Mama kept a tiny Eiffel Tower statuette on her dresser, right under the mirror where she put on her earrings or checked her hair. I imagined crowded cafés and buttery croissants, the earnest quiet of the Louvre, the gray rooftops and slow-moving Seine. Plus, I wanted to show Alex Italy. Perhaps that was the real truth of it. Italy was right next door.

“You don't want to go to Hawaii?” Alex asked.

“It's not that. I just thought France could be something different. We could see Paris.”

He frowned. “I don't know that I'm a Paris kind of person, babe.”

“But you've never been to Europe.”

“Yeah, it just doesn't . . . appeal. There's everything you could ever want right here in the States. Cities, country, deserts, mountains, sea.”

“Sure, but—”

He lifted my chin with a finger, looked into my eyes. “My Italian girl.” His voice was sweet. “You need to go, don't you?”

My heart lifted. “Are you sure?”

“Of course. We're getting married, not shackled. You should go.”

You
should go.

“Your dad will be going back again soon, right? Or your aunties? When did they last go back? It feels like last year. Was it last year?”

I said nothing.

“Frankie?”

“Three years ago. They went three years ago.”

“There you go. They're due, right?”

I nodded.

He pulled me in tighter, kissing my hair. “One last trip before we have kids. You should do it.”

“Yeah,” I said in a small voice, as he reached over to turn out the light.

*  *  *

When I spot a small truck stop, I pull over and get out of the car. I fill up with petrol and then head inside. The shop smells like linoleum and dust and petrol and fried food. There's a warmer with hot dogs and burgers in foil bags like presents. The attendant looks at me warily. He's chewing gum.

I point to the coffee machine behind him.

“Milk or sugar?”

“Neither.”

“Huh,” he grunts as I hand over coins retrieved from the glove box.

There's a tiny counter by the window, which I sit at, the steam from my coffee warming my face. It smells dreadful. Burnt and acrid. Taupe-colored bubbles cluster on its surface.

The attendant grunts again and I turn to see him flipping the pages of a tabloid magazine. The cover story, I notice, is about an actress who has lost her baby weight. There's another headline about a celebrity who's getting thin for her wedding, and yet another who's checked into rehab and wears dark glasses almost as big as her petite face. The attendant doesn't seem to notice my staring.

It's so quiet in here, despite a ceiling fan, covered in grease and old dust, which clicks on every rotation. It feels peaceful. I wonder, for a moment, if I could stay here forever. Like one of those cardboard cutouts they have of celebrities or NASCAR drivers advertising something or other. Car oil, chocolate bars, pop. I could stay till I get shuffled into a corner by the toiletry products that rarely get purchased—tampons and deodorants. Stay till my cardboard becomes thin and nibbled at by moths, my colors fading. No one would notice.

A bell on the door jingles and a trucker steps inside, his feet heavy. He's exhaling noisily, almost puffing, and has to lift his whole stomach to pull up his pants. He nods to the attendant. “Bruce.”

“Big John.” The attendant slips his magazine underneath the counter as Big John helps himself to a packet burger. “Okay out there?”

“Good, yeah. Quiet. No rain.”

I glance out the window and see Big John's big truck, like the one that passed me on the road. Filled up with logs, all the same size and shape.

“White?” Bruce asks.

“That's right. And some sugars. None of them diet ones, eh?”

I stare down at my coffee. The bubbles have burst and now there's just a strange light brown ring around the outer edge. Big John takes a stool at the other end of the counter, though it's so small there's only a couple of feet between us. He glances at me before unwrapping his burger. The smell of it fills the air. Meat and grease mainly, something sweet, the sauce perhaps. It looks like someone sat on it. The lettuce hangs dejectedly out the sides, darkened from the heat of the warmer.

“Not from round here,” he says.

I lift my gaze from burger to devourer. Shake my head. I wrap my fingers around my coffee cup, more for a sense of purpose than an intention to drink it.

“What brings you?”

When I blink at him, he answers for me. “Getting out of town?”

“Yeah.”

Big John chews his burger slowly. He's in no rush to get back to his truck. Some sauce falls to his chin and he reaches for a napkin. I notice that Bruce is back to reading his magazine. He's
towards the middle of it now, where he's surely learning the secret to slim thighs. It probably doesn't involve truck stop burgers.

“No one's from round here is what I notice. Well, maybe Bruce,” Big John says.

Bruce hears his name and lifts his head. Big John waves his palm to reassure him we don't need anything. Bruce's head drops back to his glossy pages.

“I think he might be from Oregon,” he says.

Big John looks as though he might ask Bruce where he's from, then decides against it and continues with his burger. It's spilling sauce all over the place and he mops up the drops with a surprising amount of care and attention.

“I'm Canadian,” he says.

“I met some New Zealanders,” I reply, surprising myself. I hadn't intended on saying anything.

Big John smiles at me. “Really? Well, that is something.”

“My fiancé didn't want to travel. We were saving for a house. A wedding, then a house. That was the plan.”

I look quickly at my coffee, pick at the seam of the cup with my fingernail. Warmth blooms over my cheeks. I can no longer be the cardboard cutout.

“I'm Italian. Italian-American,” I mumble. “Someone told me once that if you dig from Italy straight through to the other side of the world you come out in New Zealand.”

Big John's jaw pauses on his mouthful. He swallows. “Is that true?”

“No, it's not. As it turns out.”

He chuckles. He's moved the foil bag so it catches the last
drips of sauce. He presses his finger into one of the puddles and brings it to his mouth. “People do talk some shit.”

I nod.

“How long you going to be gone?” he asks before stuffing the last of the burger into his big mouth. It seems to vanish within his stubbled cheeks. There's not a crumb or drop of sauce on his face. He starts to clean his hands carefully, one finger at a time.

“Pardon me?” I say.

Big John swallows. The silence goes on for longer than socially normal. I wait.

“Till you're back. To your regular life, I mean.”

“Oh, I . . .” The first thought I have is that he's asking about the cabin. With Daniel and Bella playing vacation out front, and laundry to be done and trash to clear. Meals to think about. Huia to forage with. Merriem. Jack.

“Don't mean to pry,” he apologizes in a soft voice. He smiles and stands.

“No, it's okay.” But I still can't seem to answer him.
My regular life.

After pouring three sugar packets into his coffee, Big John presses a takeaway lid on top and picks up the cup. He touches the rim of his cap like an old-fashioned gentleman. Though his cap is no gentleman's—it's pink, tomato red once maybe, and the fabric is worn, fraying at the peak. “I'll leave you to your coffee.” Then, turning his head a little, “Bruce.”

“Big John.”

I want to say “Big John” too, but I don't actually know him. Instead I nod good-bye.

“Have a good break, miss.”

“Yes. Thanks.”

I look down at my own coffee again as Big John leaves and the bell on the door jingles. A gust of air skates in and the place is fragranced, for a very short instant, with the scent of cut timber. Then it is gone, along with Big John.

I stand, leaving the full coffee cup, and head back to my car.

• • • •

T
here are three days of peace.

The forest wakes a little earlier each day. The sun stretches thin fingers down through the trees; the birds sing or chirp or cry or squawk. I watch the dust spinning in stripes of light. There are the same smells: coffee, the loamy soil, salt in the towels, burning wood, marshmallows starting to fizz and caramel.

Daniel and Bella swim every day, their skin drying salt-dusted and smelling like Alex after a surf.

I make espresso each morning, dark and strong. Daniel drives to wherever it is he takes the garbage. Bella has begun to sketch each afternoon, in a large notepad with a piece of charcoal.

I do the laundry at Merriem's house. She has a machine but I wash by hand in the deep laundry sink instead. There's something nice about having my arms plunged into warm water and making things clean. I wash Daniel's socks, a T-shirt that looks like one of Alex's old ones, Bella's underwear and tank tops. I realize that we're the same size, though we probably always were. I wash the contents of Merriem's laundry basket too: a long, mint-green satin slip; socks with bright spots; a faded paisley head scarf.

I seem to end up at Merriem's in the afternoons regardless of whether there is laundry to do or not, as though there is a magnetic pull to the green cottage, with its yard full of bees making honey, and I'm not the only one drawn to its homely charms. Huia visits after Jellybeans and before Jack hurries over to see where she is. We eat slices of date loaf with butter and drink hot tea while she asks Merriem about foraging and me about dancing and Italy and my favorite color and whether I would choose wings if I had to choose between them or a prehensile tail. I have to ask her what prehensile means. Huia points out birds that visit Merriem's yard for its spring treasures and tells me their names, where they're from, and how common they are. She is a skipping, pint-sized, bird encyclopedia. Jack fixes washers or changes lightbulbs while we talk, then tells Huia it's time to go home, which she negotiates over for at least another forty minutes.

There is a rhythm.

On the third night, I go to bed early while Bella and Daniel stay up tending the fire. As I close my eyes I hear a guitar. The music makes everything else go quiet. The strings picked over so tenderly, notes plucked out so beautifully they seem to tell a story. Of tears. Of loss. Like one of those Portuguese folk songs, where the singer wails and it cracks your heart like an egg.

The tempo picks up, the guitar talking fast, begging. And then slows again, slowly, slowly, like falling. One note. Then another. Putting one foot in front of the other. Slow and steady.