Fiona Range Page 9

  “I’ll go see how she’s doing.” Ginny started to get up.

  “She’s fine,” Uncle Charles said, motioning for her to sit back down. “She’ll be all right. She just needs to be alone a minute so she can collect her thoughts.”

  In the kitchen the water ran full force, but not enough to muffle the sobs.

  “I’m sorry,” Fiona said, desperate for eye contact, but no one would look up, so acutely were they feeling their mother’s pain. “I didn’t think she’d be so upset. I thought she’d be happy.”

  “You do have an interesting sense of timing, Fiona,” Uncle Charles said in a low voice as he took up his fork and knife. “I mean, why here, why now, tonight at Elizabeth and Rudy’s dinner?”

  “Dad!” Elizabeth said.

  “No,” Uncle Charles said. “There’s a time and a place—”

  “That’s right, Dad, so come on!” Jack interrupted with his father glaring at him.

  “No, I know. I shouldn’t have,” Fiona said, looking at each of them. “I mean, I should have waited. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh no, Fiona . . . It’s all right . . . Of course you wanted to tell us . . . We understand,” her cousins kept assuring her as they came and crowded round, patting her arms and shoulders. Elizabeth hugged her while she sat with her head bowed in shame at the cruel lie that in the midst of all this affection and love she could not now retract. It had always been this way. Hurricane Fiona strikes again, Uncle Charles used to laugh, but it had stopped being funny a long time ago.

  A few minutes later Aunt Arlene emerged from the kitchen and took her place at the table. Her eyes were puffy, her nose red as she assured everyone that she was fine, just shocked, that was all. It certainly was a relief though to finally know that her sister was alive and well after all these years. She took a deep breath. “Fiona,” she began in her most gracious tone. “If you should hear from your mother again, would you please tell her that I’d like her to call me—that it would mean a great deal to me. A very great deal.” Her eyes bright with tears, she urged everyone to start eating again. There was a wonderful surprise for dessert.

  “As a matter of fact, Fiona, it’s your favorite,” she said, smiling. “And yours too, Charles.”

  Blueberry pie, Fiona knew, though her uncle looked confused. Later, when they were putting dishes away in the kitchen, Ginny asked if they’d heard about the Glidden baby.

  “I know, it’s such a shame,” Aunt Arlene said. “But let’s not talk about it. Tonight we’re all together, so let’s only have happy thoughts.” She reached across the open dishwasher door for Fiona’s hand. “I know it hasn’t been easy, but thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you for coming.”

  Fiona tried to smile. She felt not only afraid, but precariously displaced. Once again her aunt’s kindness had managed to push her even farther out of the circle.

  Chapter 4

  She stared through the coffee shop window into the brilliant October afternoon. The leaves on the ground were as crisply orange and red as the leaves on the sun-washed trees. The very air seemed charged with shimmering particles of light. Looking closer, she saw waves of jewel-bright insects flying over parked cars and telephone wires, now rippling in swarms against the dusty plate glass. They were tiny orange beetles.

  “Fiona!” Maxine tapped her shoulder. “The bell! Chester! Can’t you hear it?” Maxine was a wreck. When Sandy had dragged in late again this morning, Chester had screamed at her not to bother, to just go back home. He didn’t need her or anyone else for that matter because he’d had it up to here with the whole damn mess. In fact, they could all go home as far as he was concerned, every damn one of them, customers included, because he was sick of it. Goddamn sick of it! Humiliated, Maxine had locked herself in the cooler until Fiona finally convinced her that no one in the dining room had heard his bellowing. They had, of course, but the regulars were used to it.

  “Your clubs’re up,” Chester said, patting his face with a towel. “You can’t let hot toast sit on a cold plate. Condensation! I ring that bell, boom! You gotta come. Boom! Boom! Boom!” he said, ringing it three more times.

  “We’re being invaded by beetles.” She picked up the sandwiches. “Orange ones with black spots. It’s some kind of sign or something.”

  “They’re Asian ladybugs.” He slid a rack of dirty dishes into the dishwasher and pushed the button. “They come every few years.”

  “Come from where?”

  “Well, Asia, obviously. And don’t forget, it’s bad luck if you kill ’em,” he called after her.

  “It’s bad luck if you kill anything,” she called back as she came into the dining room.

  After she had served the men in the middle booth their sandwiches, she stood by the window and watched the ladybugs inch up the glass. In the distance a familiar figure had just turned the corner. It was Patrick Grady in his usual plaid flannel shirt and rumpled pants. He crossed the street in front of Town Hall, where he sat on a bench in the brick square. He folded his arms and stared into the street.

  The little she knew about Grady had come from her aunt, who had described him as an angry, brooding young man. He hadn’t been in Vietnam long when he was shot and burned in a freakish battle where an American miscalculation had killed all the men in his patrol. All but Patrick Grady. His first few months back had been spent in the hospital. Natalie was pregnant with the child conceived in their last days together. According to Fiona’s aunt, there had been trouble between them when he left. When he came home from the hospital it only grew worse. Deeply depressed, he thought everything had changed: the country, the town, people he’d known all his life. With the baby’s birth came violent bouts of paranoia. His tirades and bizarre accusations frightened Natalie. Finally, after yet another terrible scene, she wouldn’t let him near her or the baby. He was convinced that she avoided him because she could not bear the sight of his ugly, scarred face. Leaving his house only at night, he would walk miles alone through the dark. He was in constant pain, and all the medication filled his head with strange ideas. He saw Natalie’s own melancholy and confusion as proof of her betrayal. The more she tried to reason with him, the more convinced he became that Fiona was not his. His refusal to sign paternity papers came as the last blow. It was cold and rainy the day Natalie got into her car and drove away forever, leaving the baby to be raised by her sister and brother-in-law. Patrick Grady turned his bitterness against the world. “Poor Patrick,” people would murmur when Fiona asked about him, then try to change the subject quickly, but she had been a persistent child.

  One day when she was nine Aunt Arlene came into her room and sent Elizabeth downstairs. She said Fiona had to stop embarrassing people with questions about her mother and Patrick Grady. It was a family matter, and if she wanted to know about her mother she was to ask Aunt Arlene. But what about her father? she’d asked. Who would answer those questions? Beyond his obvious problems there was nothing more to know about him, her aunt said. She had already been told everything. He wanted nothing to do with Fiona. Nothing at all. She had to understand and accept that, and if she could not, they were afraid of what he might do. You mean to me? she’d asked in disbelief. Yes, her aunt said. To you.

  Fiona looked up now as the front door opened. Two men came in and sat in the booth by the window. Disappointed that she hadn’t been able to seat them, Maxine hurried to give them place settings, red calico mats with matching napkins she had made herself. Every night she brought home trash bags of soiled place mats and napkins to wash and iron. Chester insisted it was a waste of time and money, but she said she loved doing it. “Fiona will be your waitress,” Maxine said, handing them menus before she left.

  “Fiona?” said the stockier man, smiling over the menu as she set down his glass of water. “Now that’s an unusual name.”

  She smiled.

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “It means beautiful, intelligent, sensitive, and anxious to take your order now sinc
e you’re my last table.”

  “Egg salad sandwich,” he said, laughing. His friend, a thinner man with red hair, couldn’t decide between the egg salad or the shepherd’s pie. Eggs were bad for his cholesterol and the shepherd’s pie might be greasy. “I’ll have a hamburg!” he announced, then snapped the menu shut.

  “Excellent choice. Good and greasy and high in cholesterol!” she said, and both men laughed.

  When she came out of the kitchen they were looking out the window at the scowling man on the bench. She began to scrub the table next to theirs.

  “He was something, really something,” the stocky man was saying. “I mean, one of those purely natural athletes. He could do anything, play any sport. I remember this one time we were all up to the quarry diving and everyone kept climbing to see who could dive and do the most flips from the highest point. And there was this one ledge, at least fifty feet up, this little narrow rim of rock way up the top that one time some guy’d supposedly jumped off of, but not dived! Nobody’d ever dived from it, and Grady’s not only up there ready to dive, but he yells down that it’s going to be a triple. ‘No! No, don’t!’ we all yell back and the girls’re all screaming and crying and begging him not to. ‘Don’t! Don’t do it, Patrick. Please don’t!’ they’re screaming and Jesus, I can still see it like it’s happening right now. he raised his arms up over his head and off he goes, doing a triple, slow and easy like it was the simplest thing in the world.”

  “Is that so?” the thinner man mumbled, swallowing a yawn.

  The stocky man sighed as he moved the salt and pepper shakers back and forth. “It’s hard to put into words, but it was one of those moments you have when you’re a kid. You know, those defining moments, like something goes click, and you realize there’s Patrick Grady and then there’s everybody else.”

  The other man chuckled. Glancing over at Fiona, he said his defining moment involved vomiting in his girlfriend’s parents’ bed.

  Chester was ringing the pickup bell. She hurried into the kitchen, returning so quickly with their orders the hamburg slid from the plate onto the table. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to rearrange the scattered hamburg and chips and pickles. The paper cup of ketchup had landed upside down. “But I heard you mention Patrick Grady before,” she said with a deft scoop of the ketchup blob. “And so I was just thinking you must have known his girlfriend too if you knew him.”

  “Natalie!” he said. “Yes. Natalie Range. We were all in the same class.” His eyes widened. “You’re related to her, aren’t you?” He smiled. “I haven’t been back here in years. I’ve lost touch with just about everybody, but you certainly do look like Natalie Range. She was the prettiest girl in our class. An absolute knockout,” he told his companion, who was eating his hamburg.

  “I’m Fiona Range.” She held out her hand. “Natalie’s daughter,” she said with a surge of unaccustomed pride.

  “Hal Meade. Good to meet you, Fiona,” he said, still shaking her hand. “God, you do look just like her, now that I know.” He glanced out the window. “Did she and Patrick end up getting—”

  “No,” she answered so quickly that he knew not to ask any more.

  When she left work ladybugs were swarming on the back wall of the coffee shop and there were even some on the hood of her car. She drove around the corner into the sun, smiling as they began to fly away. Patrick Grady still sat in front of Town Hall. She pulled up to the curb and quickly got out of the car. As she walked toward him his eyes darted in the opposite direction. Her heart was racing and her mouth was dry, but she stood right in front of him and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you. Just for a minute. I don’t know if you remember, but I spoke to you one night at Pacer’s. I’m . . . I’m . . . ,” she stammered under his hard stare. “You know who I am! You do, don’t you?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing. I just want to be able to say hello at least, that’s all. I see you around all the time, and it seems weird not to say hi or anything.”

  “Doesn’t seem weird to me.”

  “I don’t want anything from you if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “All I want is to be left alone.” He stood up.

  “You know I know who you are.” She stepped closer. “Everyone knows. That’s why this is so ridiculous!”

  He turned and started walking up the street. She hurried after him. “I just want to talk to you, that’s all. Just for a minute.”

  “Get away from me!” he said with such a sudden slash of his arm that she cringed back, convinced he’d meant to hit her.

  “Please!” She caught up with him again. People were probably watching, but she didn’t care. “I just want to tell you something! I got a call last week from my mother, from Natalie, and I . . . I just thought you’d like to know!”

  He stopped on the sidewalk. His mouth twitched as he stared, his gaze still and flat, almost lifeless. “You leave me alone. Do you understand? Just leave me the hell alone,” he growled, leaning so close she could see the pores in his skin, the smooth, almost waxy scars that ribboned from his nose to his ear.

  “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?” she said so softly that for a moment it seemed he hadn’t heard.

  “No. It’s you that should be afraid,” he said, then walked away.

  Last week’s exams were being returned and Fiona tried to hide her confident smile. The test had been so easy that she had finished and left a half hour earlier than anyone else.

  “Good. Very good. Interesting. Good,” murmured Lee Felderson as she came down the row.

  “Yes!” squealed Jen, the pale little blonde in the back row, when she saw her grade. She had taken the test stoned.

  Without a word Lee Felderson placed Fiona’s test facedown on the desk. Fiona turned back the corner and saw the red-inked D. Her face burned and her eyes stung. “Screw this,” she muttered, squeezing the booklet into a ball. For a moment the only sound was the frantic tap of her foot on the tile floor. Everyone’s eyes were on her. She felt like such an ass. Bitch, she thought, glaring as Lee Felderson sat down at her desk.

  “Most everyone did extremely well,” Lee Felderson said, “but a few of you . . . well I’m not sure what happened.” She glanced at Fiona, who was sliding her notebook into her backpack. She wasn’t about to sit here and be humiliated in front of everyone. She stood up and flipped the crumpled blue book into the wastebasket on her way out the door.

  “Fiona!” Lee Felderson called from the doorway.

  “Go to hell!” she muttered. Laughter burst from the classroom as she hurried down the stairs into the cool night air. Well so much for college, she thought as she started her car and turned out of the parking lot in a dusty squeal. “Who needs it,” she muttered. She’d been kidding herself. At this rate it would take thirteen years to graduate. She’d be forty-three and probably still be working at the coffee shop, and by that time who’d even care if she had a degree or not. She sure as hell wouldn’t. Jack, Ginny, and Elizabeth had done it the right way, the way they did everything, on time and diligently. The pieces had always fallen into place for them, while Fiona Range could never do things the simple way, the right way. “God damn it!” She banged the wheel with both hands. “I’m so sick and tired of you,” she yelled at her grim reflection in the rearview mirror. “Always thinking you’re so smart. Always thinking you know all the answers. Jesus Christ, you don’t know anything about anything!”

  The streetlights blurred as she sped into town. She shouldn’t have stormed out like that. She knew herself too well. After the first misstep the next one always came easier. If she didn’t turn around right now and walk back into that classroom and apologize, then she’d never return to school. Just like telling the family that her mother had called. Sometimes she didn’t know where all the lies and anger came from. She pressed down on the accelerator.

  At first I couldn’t believe it, she’d once overheard Aunt Arlene say of her mother. Every car tha
t came by I’d think was her. That whole first year I kept thinking she’d be back. Every holiday I’d think, Well, she’ll change her mind. She’ll come back.

  She was going too fast as she came down Main Street. In the distance the light had just turned red. She took her foot off the gas pedal, but didn’t brake. She didn’t care. If the light turned green or stayed red, either way, she’d just sail on through, keep on driving until she was miles and weeks and, before she knew it, years gone from this phony place. Half a block to go and the light was still red. The speedometer showed fifty miles an hour. If anyone stepped into the street they’d be dead because she wasn’t stopping. She’d go find some warm place where the sand was always sifting onto streets lined with palm trees. She’d write back to say she was with her mother and they were both very happy. “Don’t try to find us,” she said aloud. “It’s better this way.” The light was still red. Please don’t let there be any cars coming through the intersection. She held her breath, then suddenly jammed on the brake. Todd Prescott was coming out of the liquor store with a six-pack in each hand. He opened the door of Sandy’s dented red Chevy Malibu and got in behind the wheel. Fiona’s tires squealed as she pulled into the lot next to him. She rolled down the window.

  “Hey!” she hollered as he looked over and smiled. “What the hell are you doing with Sandy Rudman’s car?”

  “Buying beer?” he said, lifting up a six-pack. “She ran out.”

  “What the hell are you doing? What are you thinking? She’s just a kid!”

  “Oh, no, Fee, you’re not gonna bust me, are you?” He laughed.

  “What do you want with her?” she asked, even angrier now as his grin widened. “Jesus, Todd! Don’t go messing up her life any more than it already is.

  “Are you kidding?” he called, starting the car. “I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to Sandy. I am the proverbial man of her dreams!” He winked, then backed up and drove out.