The Queen of Everything (8 page)

Main Street itself was also quiet, except for a
man in a spanking white suit unloading racks of bread from a truck at Johnny's
Market. Officer Ricky Beaker, the Tiny Policeman, was already sitting in Boss
Donuts's window table, looking like he wished something would happen. The change
of weather made everyone sleepy; sudden gray can drop over you like a
quilt.

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What surprised me was seeing Bonnie Randall at
the door of Randall and Stein Booksellers, her dogs waiting patiently beside her
as she worked a key into the lock. I rode up the curve of the sidewalk and slid
to a screechy stop in front of her, startling her so badly that she backed up
against the door as if I were a gunman with a pair of pantyhose over my head or
something. Bonnie was like that. She should have lived in Victorian times,
because she was just the type you read about in those books who have vapors or
consumption, whichever that is.

"Jordan!" she said.

"It's only me," I said. "I'm surprised you're
up so early." I tried to put a Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge in my voice. She was easy
to embarrass.

Bonnie didn't look as if she'd gotten much
sleep. In fact, she looked like hell. Dark half moons cupped her eyes, and the
buttons of her coat matched up with the wrong buttonholes. "I've got this
discussion group. Books. A book." She pointed to the bulging bag at her
feet.

"I just meant, after last night," I
said.

"Last night? Oh. Oh no. This is awkward." She
put her hands up to her face. I'd seen Max do that a hundred times. He thought
it really made him disappear.

"Don't worry about it," I said. "I'm glad you
two made up."

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She peeked up from her hands and studied me a
minute. Then she tilted her head, looked at me with sympathy. "Oh, Jordan," she
said.

"What?" I said. She was making me a little
nervous.

She clutched a handful of her sweater, near her
stomach. Her eyes filled. "It wasn't me," she whispered. "Your father"--she
cleared her throat--"I haven't seen your father in three weeks. He just left me
a message one day and said it was over. "Thanks for everything.' He won't even
take my calls."

"You're kidding," I said. One of the dogs
nuzzled her hand. "This makes me entirely pissed off," I said.

"Jordan, don't. It's okay."

"It's not okay. That is not okay," I said. "He
can't treat you like that."

"I've got to go," she said. She concentrated on
the keys again, gave the door a shove, making the bell that hung off the handle
bang into the glass.

I wanted to say something, but what do you say?
My eyes searched the window display--a row of books on Northwest hiking--and
roamed the contents of the store through the glass. Theater posters on every
inch of wall space, row after row of spines in every size and thickness. Two
tables stacked with half-price books Bonnie would haul out to the
sidewalk.

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Millions of words, and I couldn't find one.
Bonnie held the door for the dogs and went inside. The door closed behind
her.

"Bonnie!" I called through the window. "I'm
sorry."

I just stood there, straddling my bike, looking
at her through the window. I didn't know if she heard me, didn't know if I
should go in. She heaved her bag onto the counter. She looked down and appeared
to concentrate on Unfastening those mismatched buttons. Then she gave a nod. One
small nod.

My throat got tight inside and my eyes hot. I'm
not the crying type usually, but it felt strange to be so suddenly cut off from
someone who had been so much a part of my life. I liked Bonnie. Bonnie made good
brownies and remembered to water our plants. I would miss her. And then another
thought nudged in: If Dad wasn't with Bonnie last night, then who
was
he
with? I pushed hard down on my bike pedal, rode down the sidewalk and pumped
hard down an empty Horseshoe Highway, past the oil tank which had sprouted new
banners: it's a girl! welcome home gaby ! My bike chain ticked with the speed of
going downhill, and I curved onto Deception Loop.

I caught my breath then, let the ticking of the
bike slow, and then pedaled calmly again. Deception Loop wasn't a place to go
fast. There,

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stillness fills you like warm milk, whether you
want it to or not. On certain parts of Deception Loop, the road is dark and
tree-lined and drops right down to rocky beach. On others, like near Asher
House, there are wide stretches of meadow or orchards that meander to the edge
of the strait. But no matter where you are on that road, even when you are
passing by the Rufaro School of Marimba next door to Mother's and hear the
lively shaking of gourd rattles, you can't help but take the journey slow.
Somehow you're supposed to match the rhythm of the huge, sighing whales you know
are down deep in the cold water just next to you.

I bumped along the gravel driveway of Asher
House, parked my bike next to Nathan's workshop, an old outbuilding left over
from when the property was a farm. The building is made of dark wood, which you
can see only when you're inside because Nathan had covered the outside with
copper Jell-O molds set in cement. It was a shiny, cheerful party of fish and
wreaths and hearts and those molds shaped like old ladies' church hats.
Collected from every yard sale in the San Juan Islands for a year.

Nathan sells his sculptures out of the workshop
and also from brochures he has around town. The sculptures are mostly huge,
twirling silver rings and ellipses set inside one another, which that morning
spun in dizzy circles with

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bursts of wind, then slowed again. They hung
from the tree branches, making the firs and hemlocks look like female giants in
flashy drop earrings. Other sculptures displayed on the lawn turned madly on
their own stands, like the one I called "the jester's hat," with its drooping
silver triangles with copper balls on their tips. A length of clothesline was
strung between two trees. Smaller twirling ornaments hung from this, as did the
centerpiece of the yard, a brass-and-steel dragon ( not for sale , a sign said)
whose wings pumped up and down.

This was not a place I brought casual friends
to and said,
This is home.
Sure, Parrish has its share of oddities, even
a nudist club with its own beach out by the Theosophical Society (which I liked
to imagine that old prune Cora Lee peeking at with her binoculars). But this was
an oddity I was supposed to claim. And to new school friends from the
other
section of town, who had moved here from mainland cities and whose
parents walked around all the time with "Those Amusing Islanders" smiles. Who,
if you listened to my mother, wanted to make Parrish into the place they'd just
left.

My mother's yard looked like the yard of a mad
scientist. Dad, who had been there many times, said it was the yard Leonardo da
Vinci might have had if he'd been alive today on Parrish Island, listening to
the Grateful Dead and eating

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bean-sprout sandwiches. Which pretty much
summed up Nathan, if you also made Leonardo a nonpracticing Jewish guy with
muscles, short hair, and little round glasses.

The smell of breakfast cooking had snuck
outside, and it was so delectable and tempting that I decided to call the bowl
of Lucky Charms I'd eaten earlier a prebreakfast snack. Nathan was a great cook,
and you usually didn't have to praise him forever for it either--probably
because he was used to being the slave. I climbed up the porch stairs and let
myself in the back door. Nathan was in the kitchen as I had guessed, standing in
front of the old gas stove in his Levi's, bare feet, and a raggedy T-shirt with
the sleeves cut off. Nathan hardly ever wore shoes.

"Aren't you cold?" I said. I slung my backpack
down on the counter.

"Doing this?" he said over his shoulder to me.
"You can't be cold making bacon."

"Making bacon," Miss Poe, one of Mom's
boarders, repeated, as if she were an advertising executive trying out a jingle.
She already sat at her place at the kitchen table, which Nathan had fashioned
from a huge slab of gnarled wood. "What a lovely sound," she said to the
business section spread out before her. "Makin' bacon." She took a noisy slurp
of herbal tea.
I ought to get her together with Grandpa,
I thought. Which
reminded me.

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"This is from Grandpa," I said. Nathan picked
up the bottle, unscrewed the lid, took a sniff, then dunked in a finger and
licked it. "Yowza," he said.

"Be a man, Nathan," I said.

He screwed the top back on, went back to poking
the bacon with a fork. "You're right, you're right." He sighed dramatically.
"After I'm through in the kitchen I'll down a mug of the stuff and burp the
alphabet."

"I guess that means you'll be wanting the
sports page, too," Miss Poe said. She fed bits of toast to our dog, Homer, under
the table.

"Okay, all right, enough," I said.

"You started it," Miss Poe reminded.

Nathan stood back from the popping bacon
grease, lifted the strips up with a fork, and laid them on a plate padded with
paper towels. "Your mom's upstairs," Nathan said. "Tell her it's the last call
for breakfast."

I found my mother in the second-floor bathroom,
her braid tucked in the back of her shirt as she gathered up a pile of dripping
towels from the floor. "Max thought I'd be mad that he didn't finish his apple,"
she explained. I saw the plunger propped against the toilet, the browning apple
culprit in the bathroom sink, and Max sitting at the edge of the tub.

"Did you do this?" I asked him.

He nodded solemnly. "It don't go
down."

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He pointed to the toilet. He looked
worried.

"No," I said. "Oranges, yes. Apples,
no."

"Jordan," my mother said. "No oranges, Max."
She put the last sopping towel on the pile, lifted the whole wet mess, and raced
down the hall to the laundry chute. I followed her.

"Nathan says last call for
breakfast."

"It's only us left." The towels stuck inside
the curve of the chute, and my mother poked at them with a broomstick handle.
They inched down as reluctantly as a wet bathing suit over chunky thighs until
finally I heard them land on the washing machine with a splat. "Grant's working,
and Hugh took a shower over at Janey's since there's no hot water. Why would a
stopped toilet cause no hot water? Answer me that."

"Old plumbing?" I guessed.

"You could say the same for me, ha ha," she
said. "The Romantic Couple already left for a kayak tour, thank God. You
couldn't get me in a boat on a day like this."

That is what she called the people who came to
stay for the weekend, the
Romantic Couple,
or when there was more than
one set, the
Romantic Couples.
She had said this the way a vegetable
gardener might say
canned green beans
--superior, sarcastic, and a with
touch of sadness that there were people in the world who just didn't Get It.
Years ago, when mom gave Russ Wagner her

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last penny to add on bathrooms to convert the
farmhouse into a proper bed and breakfast, these were the people she imagined
staying with her. But after a while she began to see them belonging to two
camps: the real and homegrown, and the false and canned. I tell you, she could
figure out what file to stick them in faster than any receptionist with a stack
of pink phone messages.

The people who Got It were rewarded. They got
to be Harv and Christine or Barry and June and got blueberry muffins made from
berries from our own bushes. The others were simply Romantic Couples who got
waffles with Reddi-Whip and pamphlets on island activities, and after a while
there were fewer and fewer rooms left for them, because the rooms filled with
other people Mom took a liking to. Permanent people. Like Nathan. Like Miss Poe
with her Red Zinger tea, who got her kicks by letting Homer wear her good jewels
around and who could most often be found sitting out in the meadow
needle-pointing pillows that said stuff like, if you don't

have anything good to say about anyone, sit by
me . Like Hugh Prince, who had been an air-traffic controller at Boeing Field
for years until one night he gave the okay for a star to land. Now he has a
low-stress job with the Parrish Island Water Department and is a regular at the
marimba classes, though I think he just has the

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hots for Janey the goddess who runs the school.
Other folks just came at regular intervals, like Grant Manning, an eternal
oceanography grad student who comes in May and stays through September to study
at the university labs, or for extended periods, the way Big Mama did just
before I moved out.

It started to get to me, when I lived there. I
got tired of everyone always trying to teach me something and seeing people
walking around in their bathrobes and hearing the toilet flushing in the middle
of the night and the back door constancy slamming shut. And I know it sounds
childish, but I wanted to have my mother to myself every now and then too.
There are other things to collect,
I'd say to her,
other than people.
Stamps, say. Spoons from different countries you can hang in a wooden
case.