Redhead (Dovetail Cove, 1974) (Dovetail Cove Series) Read online

  “Fan,” Johnny said, putting his bar rag down and giving me a fatherly look, despite the fact that he was probably a bit younger than me at least. “You need to let him go. He has a family. This isn’t good for either of you.”

  “I didn’t ask your opinion,” I said. “I asked you if you’d seen him.” I remember the venom in my words. No one was going to tell me what was good for me. After the life I’d lived, after Denny Munn, I wasn’t taking heat from anyone. And definitely not some bar owner who probably cleared less than me after he paid his lease fee on this building and his business tax.

  Johnny stopped. He looked away from me. He said, “Past the creek, northeast end of town in the new subdivision. That’s where he lives. But no, haven’t seen him in days.”

  He’d acquiesced. I didn’t bother with an apology. I didn’t understand this protectionist nature of his. It might be his personality. After all this time, I didn’t know him that well. I knew what to expect when it came to being a feature on his bar menu, but this? This was new.

  Johnny kept his head bowed. He rubbed his rag in a circle on the bar in front of him over and over again. I didn’t say thank you. I just turned and left.

  I used the phone at the top of the back stairs to call Arnie Dwyer, the town cabbie. He came by a little after eleven and took me out to the new subdivision. I guess it was, oh, about six or seven new homes. They looked like mimeograph copies of each other. Except maybe this one had the big picture window on the right and that one had it on the left. The yards where no one had bought had all gone rancid with weeds and overgrowth, like the construction company had plopped in the homes but the landscapers never showed up and just let the diggings from the basement settle with a half dozen years worth of rain and heat.

  Up ahead, I saw Sean out front of one of the cookie-cutter homes. He was loading his truck with a case of beer and a couple of big, black inner tubes, blown up. He was in shorts, or maybe swim trunks—from this distance I couldn’t tell. I leaned forward and told Arnie to stop. He pulled us over to the shoulder in his dirty old cab and I watched as Sean up in his front yard, flicked his cigarette and caught his two little boys in his arms when they ran to him. He piled them into the cab of his old green truck. Next came his wife, her dark hair up in a bun. She was grinning. Sean was grinning too. He wore his aviator sunglasses. The Ketwood family was going to the beach, taking advantage of the last days of this unprecedented Indian summer, had to be.

  I had Arnie take me down to Neckline Beach. We sat in the idling cab and looked out at the nearly naked beach of sand and crashing ocean. There were Sean and his boys, jumping around in the surf. I so badly wanted to join them. I so badly wanted to head down there and kiss him, then pick up the little red-haired one who was as cute as a button and—

  Over on the blanket, Sean’s wife was taking things from a picnic basket. She was laying out lunch for them. The wind had torn a few strands of hair from her bun. The long grasses at the edge of the sand swayed. It was picturesque. She put up her hand and called to them. I heard her voice. Sean. Boys. Lunch.

  And here I sat: in the back of Arnie’s cab with the meter running.

  “You want to sit here for another bit, Fanny?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “No, Arn, it’s fine. I don’t think I want to go to the beach today. Can you take me back to Beacon Street?”

  He put the cab into gear and did a u-ball in the spot where the tourists all parked their rentals in July and August. “Just as well,” Arnie said absently as he puffed on his cigarette and rolled up his window against the wind off the cove. “Hard to have a day at the beach without a towel. Or a swimsuit.”

  11.

  The following Friday morning, I woke up with a migraine. The weather was still hot. Indian summer, they call it, but I never understood that term.

  By the time I got over to the sink for a glass of water to take four aspirin, my guts were swirling around and around. I heaved and barely made it to the toilet. It was a bachelor-style room so the single sink, toilet and shower were all across the hall in the bathroom I shared with Johnny.

  My stomach settled a bit. I stood and took the aspirin, expecting I’d be ejecting the water and the pills in the next ten minutes. But they stayed down. Now it was my mind whirling. I called Doc Sawbones’ offices and tried to see if he could fit me in.

  Doc was cautionary. “You taking the pills I prescribed?” He was talking about birth control. In those days, you needed a doctor to vouch that you had a menstrual condition that required it. The pills were impossible to get otherwise. I remember Doc laughing when he’d gotten them for me the first time. “No more serious menstrual condition I can imagine,” he’d said, “Than your line of work.” He didn’t say it in a mean-spirited way, but it made me think of the bank manager laughing and ‘letting’ me get the Little Dippers’ account even though I was a lot older than eight.

  Today, I told the doc I was sure—absolutely positive—that I’d been taking the pills every morning. Promise. Cross my heart. Hope to die.

  It felt a bit like when I told Sean I didn’t have a thing to do with Denny’s Caddy falling into the hands of that Portland stranger. The truth was, I couldn’t remember taking the prescription at all that weekend when Sean’s family had taken the ferry to the mainland after the school staff meeting.

  Doc poked and prodded me. He took my blood and he got my in the stirrups. Sure enough, the news was not good. I had to find Sean.

  Part III

  The Boys

  “There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.”

  —Madeleine K. Albright

  1.

  I took two Gravol and went to Sean’s house. I borrowed Johnny’s car, an old Ford that had a sticky clutch and stalled out at low speeds or idle. But I wasn’t going to stalk my client in Arnie’s cab again. When I asked Johnny for the car keys, he looked at me sideways and said, “What you need it for?”

  “I need to get some groceries,” I told him. Another lie. I’m terrible at lying and yet, here I was, telling a third one in a week. “I’ve been eating like an eight-year old boy left alone on summer holidays.”

  He didn’t prod me further (unlike the doc who really seemed to get off on examining me), just gave me the keys and went back to stocking his cabinet of nuts, pretzels, bar napkins and swizzle sticks. I suppose he remembered that I did have a small refrigerator upstairs in my room now. For all he knew, maybe I did keep something other than creamer, ice cubes and Blue Ribbon in it.

  Sean wasn’t at home. At least, his old green truck wasn’t parked where it always was. Even when he was in his work house out in the back field, he nearly never drove the truck back there unless he needed to haul boxes of wire or breaker panels or something.

  Now, it’s fair to wonder how I know this. I told you that I’d call everything out as truth the way I saw it. It wouldn’t be right to hold anything back or bend it to suit me. The whole point of this is to get it out there, after all.

  I admitted earlier to feeling this deep-seated addiction to Sean. It makes sense, even now, that after the run-in with the pack of animals out on the road to the power station, that I still took Sean back into my bed. We hadn’t exchanged money in weeks. And I wasn’t exactly burning the midnight oil with any other clients. I had become, well, let’s call it by the right name—consumed. I was addicted to the man and his presence. Not just his body and what he was doing for me, but his entire being.

  I needed Sean. And, though I was working what many women might feel was a form of repression and a reversal of everything feminist from a decade or so earlier, I thought of myself as a pretty liberal, modern woman. I was a prostitute because it was my own choice. I’d put up with shit from men in order to get a position of power over them.

  And here I was, taking a giant leap backward, at least for me.

  I was sitting out in a parked car waiting for a married man to return home.

  And it wasn’t the first time.
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  When this dawned on me, I put aside my cravings for the man and decided to head back.

  Of course, the bloody engine wouldn’t turn over. I tried and tried. I’m pretty sure I flooded it.

  I opted not to wait for nightfall (and some distant howling that reminded me of the wild pack of animals on the gravel road a week earlier) and knocked on the door of one of the Ketwood’s neighbours. An elderly man named Sammy came out and offered to help after he looked me up and down. He had dogs in his backyard and I realized that I’d maybe made the wrong assumption. The howling might have been them—out in the back sprawling yard behind Sammy’s house. Either way, I didn’t need to be there when Sean and his wife got back.

  And I didn’t need to be here if the howling dogs weren’t Sammy’s.

  Sammy cleaned some spark plugs and tightened some belts. He also did something to Johnny’s starter. If Sammy had been a younger man and I was trying to angle him for a little visit to my upstairs den, I’d have made a joke right then. But since he looked like a Gregory Peck movie and a can of heated beans while he read the TV Guide would be his rousing evening, I opted to stay mum.

  There are times to keep quiet in this life, I’ve learned. When you’re getting laughed at for requesting the Little Dippers’ bank account intended for children and paying an extra quarter per cent. When the town Doc pays for your birth control scrip—all in exchange for a joke about them being an employment expense. Or when you’re getting help with an engine and you don’t have the first clue about how to get one running.

  I thanked old Sam with a kiss on his cheek, thinking it wasn’t a real risk of giving him a heart attack and left him on the side of the road.

  I ended up passing Sean Ketwood and his wife (plus two bobbing shapes in between them in the cab), just as I was crossing the narrow bridge and heading back to the town proper. I don’t think he registered it as me, but then he could have been turning a blind eye.

  It wouldn’t be the first time a client had pretended to be blind in my direction while his wife was in the vicinity.

  2.

  I woke up sick again the next morning. After more Gravol, I again borrowed Johnny’s car. He wanted to know why I was using it again so soon. I didn’t think he was angling for gas money.

  “To get groceries,” I said. “Don’t look at me like that—I didn’t get down to Harlow’s yesterday. The car quit on me. I had to count on the nicest little old man to get me on my way. Instead of risking it blowing a gasket with a load in the trunk, I brought it home.”

  Johnny looked sheepish at me then. And after his profuse apologies, I felt awful lying to him yet again. This need to see Sean once more and confront him was turning me into someone I didn’t like.

  This time I really did go to get some food for my room. I’d been living on takeout for too long. And, besides, I’d not had many paying clients in the last month. I didn’t want to dip into my Little Dippers’ account—despite its name. It made more sense that I’d have some bread and some eggs in my place instead of paying Miguel at the Highliner to crack them for me.

  Besides that—and I didn’t really want to say anything to anyone, or even fully admit it to myself—if I had a bun in the oven, I’d better start ingesting more than coffee, cigarette smoke and 7 Up tinted with cherry juice. At least until I did some homework and found out if the doc could...take care of it for me.

  Part of me wondered how much of my Sean-cravings were because of his seed finding purchase in me. I didn’t know about any of that stuff, how much was hokey mysticism and how much was real science. But I’d heard about wives saying the same thing: that they’d never felt so strongly attracted to their husbands once said husband had broke his bottle over the bow of their ship.

  I also wondered about Sean’s king-talk in all of this. If there was this...thing...on the island that was, as Sean had said, ‘doing the driving’ for him—did that mean that this was part of that plan?

  I pushed all that out of my head and took Johnny’s Ford to Harlow’s Grocer. It started flawlessly. I said a little prayer for Sammy, the old man with the dogs.

  So, there I was, checking the dates on the raisin bread (I like it for French toast, an ingredient that men have found disgusting more often than not—and never fail to inform me), when up walks Sean and his wife. The wife was pushing a grocery cart with only a few things in it. In the basket, up close to Mummy was Sean’s youngest, a red-haired little boy, just as beautiful as his father. Riding out ahead, as if he was on a set of skis, the older boy, who had darker straight hair, rode with either foot above the two shaking wheels.

  The family unit drove past me, and goddamnit if I couldn’t bite my tongue. Of all the times when I should have stayed quiet, this was the one. And I couldn’t do it.

  “Sean,” I said. “Sean, honey?”

  His wife turned first. She glared at me. The women who summer in Dovetail Cove learn who I am pretty fast. But the women who live here all year round have known me since my first week in town. And they’ve come to deplore me.

  That’s a ten dollar word for a two-dollar whore, now ain’t it?

  So, a moment after his wife looks over to see who is calling out her husband’s name in the baked goods section at Harlow’s, Sean himself looks at me. He pulls off his aviator shades and I see the loveliest hue of baby blue underneath his red eyebrows. His wife’s face contorts into a smear of disgust and he only stares coolly in my general direction. All I can think is, those are not his eyes. Those are the eyes of the...thing...the thing doing the driving. The thing that Sean calls the king.

  Wifey looks at her husband and Sean does what so many men have done to me in the presence of their wives. In fact, so many have done it that I’m used to it. What does he do? He shrugs.

  He goddamn shrugs at his wife. As if to say, I have no idea who this hussy is, hon. Let’s head over to the freezer section and get some ice cream if it’s on sale. It sure is hot out for September, ain’t it?

  And upon his shrug, Wifey takes her cue. She takes the three or so steps over to me and she puts her finger in my face and she says what so many wives and girlfriends (and even some mothers) have said to me over the years.

  She says, “Now you listen to me.” She doesn’t use a big voice. She uses that shouted, heated whisper that wives use when they’ve found out. Whether Wifey here actually has found out, I don’t know. Sean, he was still playing it cool, just took over the pushing of the rusty old shopping cart and didn’t even look back. I couldn’t even dwell on those baby blue eyes of his.

  “You listen and you listen good. You will not speak to my husband. You will not acknowledge his presence in public or otherwise. You will not sit outside our home. You will not call him, write him or otherwise communicate with him. I know women like you. I know what you do to marriages—to families. I’m not going to ask if this is clear to you. It is.”

  And, with that, she took her finger out of my face, whirled on her heels and caught up with Sean.

  I did the only thing I could do. I was mad and I’d already broken my wisdom in two by piping up when I shouldn’t have. I’d thrown my chips on the table. Now I had to lay my hand.

  “We need to talk, Sean,” I said, loud enough that a few others in the grocery store could hear me. Both his boys spun to look. “It’s yours,” I called.

  3.

  I would venture to say that if you’ve ever turned a trick, you might have some inkling of what it’s like to walk a mile in my shoes. But I would also venture to say that most of us have real trouble picturing the walk of another on this earth, even those of us that fit certain obvious social classes and stereotypes.

  I know: it’s an awfully funny thing for me to say. I had my clients’ needs and wants down to a formula. I knew what Frankie Moort liked even before he quietly whispered to me under a bed sheet that, “Caroline hasn’t done this for two decades—I’m not sure she would even know how any more. And I’d get on all fours and perform to Frank’s delight.
/>   It was like that with all my clients. In truth, it’s like that with all men.

  But with Sean, I couldn’t predict. I could do the standard things in bed that all men liked and that would satisfy him. But I’m talking bigger than rolling around in the muck of two people’s passion. I’m talking about needs and wants...for life.

  There was a niggling part of me that wanted to believe his crazy talk about the Pacific Tree Frog and the king settling into his driver’s seat. It was madness and ninety-eight percent of my brain told me that it was. I was pretty sure it was some sort of knee-jerk reaction to, I don’t know, childhood abuse? Or maybe the fact that he was married with two kids and didn’t know any other rational way to get attention?

  Maybe he even had a mental illness, and was just a few months shy of needing to be locked up in a sanatorium. Who’s to say?

  Thing was, I played it over and over in my head: that image of him shrugging to his wife and turning to wheel off with the shopping cart holding his two boys.

  Countless men had given me the same reaction (it’s one of the reasons I rarely went out in public unless I got seriously dressed down and disappeared into the woodwork.) But with Sean, I couldn’t get past it.

  I couldn’t get past Wifey’s finger in my face either. Passive was the way to play it, but now that it was done and I was out of Harlow’s with no eggs and my loaf of squished raisin bread just left on the shelf by the Twinkies and the Ho-Hos, I wanted to squeal over to their place in Johnny’s Ford and give her a what-for. A bunch of what-fors while I was at it.

  Just my luck, Sammy’s magic touch would come undone and I’d have to hang my head while I went back to their kitchen door to ask Sean for help getting it started.