Trying the Knot (9 page)

chapter five

After several futile attempts to start the
rusted-out Datsun, Thad finally decided he might as well abandon
the vehicle in the diner parking lot and walk the five blocks to
work at the Portnorth Porthole newspaper. It was the last Friday of
summer, and the town was relatively bustling, especially with
minivans and SUVs piloted by mothers running last minute errands
before sending their kids back into school.

Chelsea accompanied him, and the mid-morning,
lukewarm air tugged gently at her short blond hair as she devoured
the breezes that swept off Lake Huron. She clutched her sweater
between her fingers, which were still shaking from her
confrontation with Ben.

They crossed Main Street and meandered their
way through the little town time forgot until Chelsea made an
impulsive left and headed east to the beach. She would not endure
moseying past all the empty downtown buildings. It was the quiet
well-manicured neighborhoods that soothed her nerves. She
considered Portnorth the most splendid spot on earth, in spite its
warped affliction of habitually vomiting out its brightest and best
while suffering a case of constipation when it came to its
less-than-desirables. However, its easy simplicity and slow pace
never failed to resuscitate her frazzled nerves. The fresh air of
Portnorth was her drug of choice.

As they walked toward the marina, Thad
pointed to the cloudy pink horizon and said, “Red sky at night,
sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.”

“What?”

“It’s just what my granddad used to say,”
said Thad. “It’ll storm later.”

“I hope not. For Kate’s sake, ” she said.
They climbed onto the rocky limestone breakwater, which sheltered
the marina from an ever-encroaching Lake Huron. The air felt still
and heavy. “Remember when we used to play ‘The Day After’ in the
woods at lunch recess?”

“Yes, we’d pretend we were sickly sole
survivors of a nuclear war.”

“Don’t you think this morning has the same
apocalyptic feel?” Chelsea asked.

“It might be we’re still drunk from last
night,” Thad rationalized, straddling two limestone boulders. He
looked tired and hung over. Chelsea squat next to him, and they
watched the blue-green waves beat tirelessly against the rocks.

“It’s the lull of the waves. Once they lure
you in, there’s no escape,” she said cheerily.

Thad thought it sounded morbid, and asked,
“Did you mean what you said earlier, about dropping out of law
school?”

“Of course,” she said. “I can do the work
easily enough, even though Torts were a torturous bore, but it
doesn’t interest me. Truthfully, there are enough lawyers in the
world. The thought of jumping on some Yuppie bandwagon makes me
sick.”

“What’ll you do? You’re so smart, it’s a
shame to let all your brain power go to waste.”

“Now you sound like my mother. She acts as if
I’m a genius,” she said uneasily.

“Well, what do you really want to do with
your life?”

“I don’t know, settle down on the outskirts
of town with a farm boy.”

“Gimme a break,” Thad scoffed. “For as long
as I’ve known you, you’ve always wanted to be a full-blown native
of this godforsaken no man’s land. Trust me, being white trash
isn’t such a romantic notion.”

“Well, it’s not as if my family came over on
the Mayflower,” Chelsea said. “Who’d want to be a descendant of
those persecuting Puritans anyhow?”

“Kate,” Thad answered. “Her mother always
aspired to be an upper-crust, pillar of the community. We were
always the poor relatives.”

“Hardly,” Chelsea protested.

She continued squatting on the rocks and
silently wondered what was up with Ben. No one else thought it
strange Ben found Vange at six in the morning. There were a lot of
unanswered questions floating through her mind, and they required
her sole attention. Why didn’t Vange call anyone? Who was the
father of her miscarried baby? What was she thinking in those final
moments? And, most importantly, what would Kate do when she found
out about Vange’s final fling with Nick?

Thad mistakenly assumed Chelsea’s eyes were
transfixed on the cigar-shaped, rickety sailing vessel tossed on
the rocky shore. “It’s an old fishing tug.”

“What?”

“The boat is a fishing tug,” Thad said. “My
grandfather used to sail on it, before working on a freighter.”

Chelsea said dully, “Oh, I never knew.”

“My grandma used to smoke some of the fish he
caught, and my mom and aunt would peddle it from door to door.”

Together, they made their way along the
lakeshore. As they walked over the wet sand, gentle waves soaked
through their shoes and seagulls squawked and screeched overhead.
They observed a woman interacting with her child. It was the same
snot-nosed kid they’d seen earlier in the morning at the hospital.
Thad moved closer to the sleepy looking toddler.

“Another casualty of PHS’s Sex Ed program,”
Chelsea said under her breath.

“I don’t remember any Sex Ed classes.”

“Exactly.”

Yet another Derry Queen who had once been
crowned Miss Portnorth. There was a seemingly endless supply. She
would have been a member of their graduating class if she had not
dropped out of school and gave birth before her tiara had a chance
to tarnish.

“Brittany Morgan, get your ass away from that
dead fish,” the queen mother yelled, and swept up the
soggy-diapered child into her sunburnt arms.

“Hey,” Thad called, and she waved at him.

Derry Cow, as she was now called, wore faded
pink sweat pants and a tomato colored T-shirt that stated Spoiled
Rotten. Her matted strawberry blond hair hung past her shoulders,
but it was ingeniously shorn above her ears in an extreme
mullet.

“Hey, long time no see,” she said, despite
their having encountered one another at the hospital that
morning.

“It’s kind of early to be combing the beach,”
Thad said.

“Brittany drags me here at all hours. Thinks
she’ll see daddy’s boat. It don’t matter he’s home sitting his big
fat ass in front of the TV sucking down beer and bitching about his
sore hand.”

“Don’t you have an older kid, too?”

“Yeah, little Rocky heads back to
Kindergarten next week, still in school only half a day.” She waved
a fly away from Brittany’s tangled hair. “Wouldn’t happen to have a
light, would’juh?”

“Sure,” Thad said, and he lit her smashed
menthol cigarette. Chelsea stepped away and wrote leisurely with
driftwood in the sand. Thad nodded at the toddler and lied, “She’s
cute.”

“She’s got my hair, but she got Rocky’s
temper,” Derry Cow said, and she sucked deeply on the cigarette.
Her left eye was lightly bruised. “I wish that bastard was back on
the boats, instead of dodging trees in the damn woods.”

“He’s laid off?”

“Yup, times are tough. At least when he’s
sailing the pay check is bigger, and I don’t have to see him for
months. That’s always a perk.”

Thad nodded, and he wondered if the old
cliche was true that all sailors were drunks. He blurted
impulsively, “I heard he knocked up your sister.”

“That nasty snatch,” said the washed up
queen. She swatted the kid when it kicked and screamed to be let
down.

Thad wrapped the child’s filthy foot in his
hand and shook it. Between her simpering whimpers, saliva landed on
his wrist.

“Sorry ‘bout that, it’s like she’s retarded
or something. Hey, you hear about Vangie Whiley? Isn’t it sad? I
hope she pulls through, even if she is a nut job,” Derry Cow said
as she shifted the kid on her hip. Thad wiped his saliva-coated
hand on his thigh. “I was going to ask her to sing at my wedding if
that dumb Dago ever asked me to tie the knot.”

“Hell, maybe she could sing at your sister’s
wedding, too,” Thad added.

“Your friend is leaving,” said the former
queen, pointing to Chelsea. “I never did like her. Thinks her shit
don’t stink, don’t she?”

Thad shrugged, said good-bye and ran to catch
up. By the time he joined her, Chelsea had reached an empty path
beyond the baseball field concession stand. As they made their way
toward the newspaper building, Chelsea commented on how friendly he
had been to the former Derry queen.

“I heard her boyfriend’s knocked up at least
one other girl besides her sister,” Thad said winded. “Her life is
messed up enough without my being a jerk to her.”

Still holding the driftwood, Chelsea pointed
it at him and said, “I hope you weren’t too patronizing.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re as fake as Kate or Nick.”

“How so?”

“You’re a total snob, Thaddeus,” she said, a
matter of fact. “And the worst kind of snob.”

“I’m not a snob.”

“Oh, please,” she said, laughing. “You act so
friendly and interested, when in reality you couldn’t care less how
the former queen of Porknorth wastes away her life. It’s so
phony.”

“I am not a snob,” he repeated.

“Admit it. It’s not as if I’m not one, but
I’m honest about it.” Chelsea walked faster, and Thad let her take
the lead. “You were only nice to her to find out what her plans are
now that her boyfriend knocked up her sister.”

“Not true.”

“Don’t deny it. The only difference between
us is I don’t care.”

“Oh, and I do?”

She smiled to herself, amused by his failing
to catch the irony of his statement. “Not in the least. It’s simply
another salacious tidbit to distract you from your own pitiful
existence.”

“Oh my God, you’re such a bitch.”

“Takes one to know one, and I take that as a
compliment coming from you.”

“What did you write in the sand?”

“Keep your laws off my vagina.”

With the breeze from the lake pushing against
their backsides, they walked past the old museum. Thad, Ben, and
occasionally Chelsea, used to hang out there regularly throughout
grade school. They all suffered intense prepubescent crushes on the
cute girl who worked there. She encouraged them to explore freely,
and they took full advantage of her hospitality. When they weren’t
listening to ancient records on the Victrola or poring over archaic
photographs, they were playing in the simulated general store. On
rainy days, the young curator brought her guitar to work and sang
to them in the turn-of-the-century parlor. They fought more than
once over whom she liked best. That was before junior high, when
Thad became a recluse and Ben became friends with Nick, and Chelsea
stopped climbing trees.

As they approached the Portnorth Porthole
newspaper building, Thad guessed correctly Chelsea was not ready to
go home. “Come upstairs for a while,” he invited. “I’m working on a
Back to School insert of all things. We can day-drink.”

“Sounds fantastic. I’ll need to sneak in a
stiff one to face Nick and Kate,” Chelsea said. She followed him
past the main desk, where their class salutatorian worked as a
receptionist. Chelsea had been valedictorian. She breathed a sigh
of relief as they slunk unnoticed through the empty ground floor
and ascended the backstairs. Although it ended five years ago, it
felt like high school would haunt her forever.

She propped herself up on Thad’s messy desk
and sat crossed-legged. Awaiting a drink, Chelsea appeared to be an
excited eight-year-old anticipating getting her ears pierced for
the first time or something equally risque. Thad poured two shots
of vodka, and she said, “It’s daylight still, but considering the
circumstances hitting the bottle seems justified, don’t you
think?”

“Hell, it’s noon somewhere.”

“I think it’s supposed to be, it’s five
o’clock somewhere,” she corrected. “What the hell, this wedding is
a fiasco.” She raised her glass to her lips.

Thad toasted, “To coma victims
everywhere.”

Chelsea choked, and it took her a few seconds
to recover. She said severely, “I know you probably don’t care, but
I personally think you have an obligation to tell Kate about Nick’s
fling with Vange.”

Thad raised his hands in protest. “You can’t
be serious. What good could come out of it?”

She firmly set her drink down on the
cluttered desk. “Don’t even think about withholding this
information from Kate, not for one minute. Nick might be the reason
why Vange is in the hospital, and if that’s the case, then I don’t
see any alternative – you have to tell Kate.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“You can’t honestly believe that.”

He turned away from her and shuffled over
paper clippings strewn across the floor. He called over his
shoulder, “It seems you really have it in for Nick.”

“Don’t start acting all fraternal toward
Nick. It’s not as if you’ve ever had any loyalty to your fellow
man,” Chelsea said.

“And you do? It seems like you really have it
in for him.”

“For your information, I don’t hold anything
against Nick. And even if I did harbor an old vendetta, I’d be more
than justified,” she said.

With his back to her, he eagerly went back to
work cutting apart articles and piecing them back together in
columns. Dropping the subject, Chelsea settled in on the top of his
desk. Surveying the cluttered sprawling room, she sat fiddling with
radio knobs. A commentator’s foreboding voice speculated whether or
not the upcoming nationwide recession was the result of Fed
chairman Alan Greenspan not lowering interest rates enough, or an
oblivious President George H.W. Bush’s apparent disinterest in
domestic policy.

“Your job seems tedious. Do you plan to work
here forever?” she asked. “What kind of cash do you make?”

“Don’t laugh, a little more than six bucks an
hour.”

“How do you live? You shouldn’t have quit
college,” she marveled.

“Oh, my God, I didn’t drop out, I
finished.”

“You don’t even have a date for the wedding,
do you?”