Season of Salt and Honey (7 page)

“You give her enough chances for the both of us,” I want to say. And, “You don't know.” Instead I keep my mouth shut.

“Well,” Papa says with a little sigh.

We walk to his car, which he's parked quite a way up the drive, as though he didn't want to wake me with the sound of the engine. I wish I'd put on the boots now; the roots and stones press into my feet.

“Do you want me to call the council?” Papa asks. “Mrs. . . .?”

“Fratelli,” I answer softly.

My work. The tiny cubicle with pinboard partitions around three sides, making a little fortress. I've been there for years—working earnestly; complaining about my boss, my colleagues, and the bureaucracy; going to the office Christmas parties; fighting off lecherous Darren Forthe like most of the other admin girls, bar Bertha Robinson who's in her fifties and has a fine, dark mustache that seems to catch the light; poring over Christal's wedding photos and Amy's baby photos; pondering which skirt to wear with which shoes; dreading Mondays and celebrating Fridays. Now it all seems pointless.

“Yes, please,” I finally answer.

I realize I don't care if they keep my job open for me or not, though I'll have to figure out how to pay our rent at some point. Have to return to the city someday. Not now. It's best not to think too far ahead, lest I notice the large and terrible Alex-shaped hole punched into every day.

“Okay, I'll call,” Papa says gently. He gives me a firm kiss on my cheek and draws me into a long hug, pats my back. “I'll be back soon, darling.”

“Thank you, Papa.”

*  *  *

I make myself a breakfast of fruit and a half container of yogurt, wish for honey, and top it with pine nuts. I get dressed in my jeans and sneakers and stare at
The Swiss Family Robinson
, drum my fingers on the little table and glance out the window. Then I slip the door key into my pocket and go out for a walk.

I avoid the path to the ocean, the thought of it causing my
heart to race; instead I head in the opposite direction. It's the way that Huia went, but there isn't a clear path, just ferns and shrubs around knee height to negotiate. I amble along, not caring if I get lost, listening to birds singing both warnings and love songs.

Only a few weeks ago, Alex and I were working on our wedding vows. We'd left them to the last minute, after selecting flowers and napkins, after picking up the rings, after organizing where his aunt Elizabeth and uncle John would stay the night. The wedding had become a kind of job. I was sitting at the table with a pen and paper; Alex was slumped on the couch. I had to beg his attention while he watched end-of-season ice hockey on TV.

“We can go with the traditional version—love, honor, and obey—though I'm not sure about ‘obey.' Do you think it's a bit . . . old-fashioned?”

“Hmmm?”

“Obey, as in ‘love, honor, and obey'—is it outdated?”

“Nah, I like it. Bring me some chips?”

“Huh?”

“Chips. I need potato chips. Obeying should start now.” He threw his head back and laughed.

I frowned. “You're not taking this seriously.”

I flicked through the papers on the table. I'd printed out several versions of vows I'd found online. I'd thought it would be an easy decision but there were so many options. Some more religious than others; some funny and lighthearted; some till-death-do-us-part serious. I plucked out a relatively nonoffensive version and scanned the words.

Alex lifted himself from the couch and walked behind me to the kitchen. I heard him open a packet of potato chips and then he was standing over me, his hand rustling in the bag. “Let's have a look.”

He leaned over my shoulder and I smelled the salt on his fingers as he placed his hand on the table. His cheek was close to mine, his jaw working noisily. He read and then straightened.

“Well?” I said.

He shrugged. “Looks fine.” He headed to the couch and settled back to the game.

“You've got to help me,” I whined.

“They're fine,” he said again, halfheartedly. “Just choose whichever one you like, Frankie. You know me; I'll say whatever you want. It doesn't matter.”

I stood and went to the couch, took a deep breath. Tried not to be too Italian. Too dramatic. “It
does
matter.”

It mattered because you have to mean what you say, especially in church. Though I'd said all sorts of things in church I might not have meant, made promises I hadn't even thought about. No sex before marriage, for one.

I softened my tone. “Is there anything you don't want to say?”

He shrugged again. “I don't know. I mean . . . do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. All that forever stuff . . . it just seems so . . .”

“So . . .?”

“It's not realistic, is it? Forever. What does that even mean?”

“Forever? Forever means you'll love me forever,” I said.

He glanced at me, then put his hand back into the bag, popped chips into his mouth. He swallowed before answering. “Isn't it actually impossible? Who can promise forever?”

“I can promise forever.” I felt my throat tightening. “You can't promise forever?”

I tried to keep my voice even. I had other things to get done before the wedding, a thousand things. Aunty Connie hadn't finished stitching the beading on the bodice of my dress and I couldn't ask anyone else to do it or she'd be offended. Mrs. Gardner was asking, again, about the food, wondering whether it was a little too exotic for the guests she'd invited. And I hadn't heard from Bella at all. A sister was supposed to help with this stuff. A sister was supposed to be forever. Forever, like a husband. I tried not to start crying.

Alex frowned, unconcerned. “It's not about me. It's the concept. Forever. Who can promise that?”

The lump in my throat seemed to expand till I felt like I couldn't swallow. Tears pricked at my eyes. “
Bedda Matri
,” I swore under my breath, sounding like one of the aunties, wishing the tears away.

Alex looked at me with alarm. “Oh, Frankie, I didn't mean . . .” He sat up and pulled me to him.

I was angry at the falling tears. The wedding was much more work than I'd expected. The girls at work had warned me, but I hadn't believed them. How could it be, when in their photos they'd all looked so beautiful, so radiant, so happy? Besides, I was organized; it would be different for me. My wedding would be a piece of cake.

Unbidden tears continued to pour out of me. I swore at them again. Alex was shushing and cradling me.

“We'll go with those vows. It's okay. I didn't mean to upset you. Hey, don't cry.”

I tried to stop but the tears just keep coming.

Alex brushed them away with his thumb. “Don't cry, baby.”

I sniffed, drew in a deep breath. The roar of the hockey crowd distracted us for a moment; we watched as the puck flew into the goal and the players swooped around the ice raising their sticks, grasping each other in clumsy, padded embraces.

Alex pulled me close and whispered, “I'm sorry. We can have whichever vows you like, okay? Whatever you want.” He planted a kiss on my forehead.

“But you don't want . . . forever. . . .”

“Don't listen to me. I'm no good with this stuff. You know that. You choose, Frankie, I'll say whatever you want. Forever and ever and ever and ever, amen.” He looked into my face and winked. “Love you.” He kissed me.

I wiped my face and pulled away from him a little. I wasn't going to be “that girl,” the needy one, the whining one. I just wanted the day to be here right now. To be standing in my dress, to have Alex looking at me like he was now. To be saying “I do” and becoming Mrs. Gardner.

“Whatever you want, babe, truly,” he said again.

We both looked back to the game. I broke my pre-wedding diet and took a handful of chips. The grease and crunch of them, salt rough against my tongue, was somehow soothing. I curled up against Alex's shoulder and he wrapped his arm around me. I
would be Mrs. soon enough. I'd waited for this and nothing was going to spoil it. I changed the subject.

“When we get married I'll be a Gardner.”

“Too right, babe.”

“People won't know I'm Italian,” I murmured.

Alex nodded, but his eyes were following the puck. “That's good, right? You always say people judge you when they see your name.”

“I guess.”

“You can be American.”

“Yeah.”

The opposing team scored a goal. Alex smacked the side of the couch and I reached for more chips.

I pause, blinking, coming back to the present. The memory leaves me feeling a little sick. I almost hope to feel a ghost arm around me, but there's nothing other than the breeze.

*  *  *

The forest seems to be thinning a little, and ahead of me there's a road, surely connected to the cabin's long driveway but heading in the opposite direction from Edison and Seattle. The road looks like an unnatural dark river winding out of the green and I find myself following it.

I walk past faded mailboxes and driveways that lead to places I can't see, though I guess, by the state of their mailboxes, they're probably summerhouses or cabins much like the Gardners'. The sun is biting by the road, away from the tree canopies that act as parasols. Spring is stretching out her arms and reaching into
summer. I scratch my shoulder and wish for shorts and sandals rather than jeans and sneakers.

Ahead, a house sits close to the road: a small, single-story place painted mint green. Ivy grows up one corner and onto the roof, the green tendrils swaying like a girl's hair let loose from a braid. In front there's a full and busy vegetable garden, with plants jostling for real estate and bees making a steady, low, collective hum. It reminds me of the aunties' gardens, and my nonna's when I was a kid. Tomato plants twist gently skywards, their lazy stems tied to stakes. Leafy heads of herbs—dark parsley, fine-fuzzed purple sage, bright basil that the caterpillars love to punch holes in. Rows and rows of asparagus. Whoever lives here must work in the garden a lot. It's wild but abundant, and I know it takes a special vigilance to maintain a garden of this size.

The light wind lifts the hair from my neck and brings the smell of tomato stalks. The scent, green and full of promise, brings to mind a childhood memory—playing in Aunty Rosa's yard as Papa speaks with a cousin, someone from Italy. I am imagining families of fairies living in the berry bushes: making their clothes from spiderweb silk, flitting with wings that glimmer pink and green like dragonflies'. I am humming to myself. Happy to be close to Papa, close to adult conversation, while Bella plays elsewhere—probably with the boys, probably tearing a sleeve, her shoes kicked off. I turn over leaves and find ladybugs as the cousin speaks to Papa in that rolling, secret, family-only language. “
Brava carusa
,” she's saying, looking at me. “Good girl.”
Brava carusa
,
brava carusa
,
brava carusa—
I add it to the
tune I'm humming. Two feathers, now characters in my hands, climbing a vine. Sisters. One white feather and one brown with spots. “
Brava carusa
,” the cousin says of me, and then something else about Bella that has my Papa frowning and which I now can't remember.

“Hello?”

It's a sweet voice, full of melody, startling me out of my daydreaming. A woman by the door of the house, cradling a mug. She lifts her hand.

“Oh, hi,” I say. “Sorry . . .”

Her hair is red, as red as a pepper at the roots, and then curling and fading to a luminous dark orange at the frayed tips. A bee lands on her, crawls along a strand of hair, then flies away, disappointed she's not the flower it expected. She wears harem-style pants, black with bright splashes of color, and a singlet top.

She steps towards me, her feet bare. “I'm Merriem.”

“Francesca . . . Frankie,” I offer in return. “Sorry, I was just walking and . . .”

She waves away my apology and comes to stand near me, both of us staring at her tomato plants. Her cheeks are round and smooth, covered with freckles.

“I finished all my harvesting yesterday so it would be done by the third quarter, and today I'm at a bit of a loose end,” she says with a shrug, then tips her mug at me. “Want a cup of tea?”

“Oh, no, I should be . . .” I gesture back towards the forest.

“You're staying in the Gardner cabin.”

“Yes. How did you—”

She thumbs towards one of the driveways I passed. “Jack Whittaker.”

“Jack?”

“Looks after the place. Looks after a lot of places around here.”

“Oh, I thought he must. He has a daughter?”

“Huia. You've met her?”

I nod.

“She's a forest sprite, that one. Probably on a first-name basis with most of the animals and birds and bugs in there. You're not a Gardner, are you?”

She studies me curiously. I shake my head.
Could have been
, I think.

“Jack says you were playing a little hide-and-seek yesterday?”

“Oh, well . . . no . . .” I start to explain unsuccessfully.

“It's a good place for a bit of hide-and-seek,” Merriem says wistfully. “That's what got me out this way. Didn't think I'd be here long and then . . . sixteen years.” She gestures to the house. “It's the garden that keeps me here. Verdant little temptress.”

She laughs and it's loud and deep, almost a man's laugh. The kind of laugh that could set a whole room full of people laughing. We look back at her vegetable garden.

“I've just had to cut a lot of my asparagus and scapes, of course, sorrel. . . . Yesterday was a dry sign, Leo, and I was running out of moon.” My face must be blank because she adds, “Vegetables harvest better in the third and fourth quarters of the moon.”