“You doing okay?” Ford asked. “After last night, I mean.”
“Never better,” I assured him, giving it all the warmth I could. Then abandoned my concern about Levi and said, “I bought something today I want to model for you. But maybe I should wait. The doctor was serious about no strenuous exercise.”
The man laughed as if we were conspirators, then replied with a suggestion so bawdy I was taken aback-but only for a moment because secretly, in my mind, I had already pictured that very thing happening. Ford, whom I had never heard speak crudely to a woman, or even to a man, had just opened a private door to me, it felt like. Better yet, his intimate thoughts mirrored my own, which encouraged me to speak freely about my own secret wants when and if the chance came. I’m picky about men, I seldom date, so what I felt was new in my experience.
“Did you just say what I thought you said?” I smiled.
“You’re offended.”
“I’m not!” I said. “The doctor ordered you to stay in bed, so someone needs to be handy. And I’ve got some ideas about tonight myself.”
Because my ears were warm when I put the phone away, I sat stiffly, both hands on the steering wheel. Didn’t risk a glance at Levi, who rode in silence, while I downshifted into second and watched for landmarks. Ahead, opposite a hand-painted Acreage for Sale sign, a mailbox gathered weeds at the intersection of a shell road. The box, which looked too small to hold mail-order wigs, had been shotgunned, the pellet holes rimmed with rust. Same with a yellow Deer Crossing sign and another that read Dead End.
“Redneck graffiti,” I muttered, turning onto the shell road, then downshifting again. The road was a mess of potholes and ruts. It hadn’t been graded for years-not since I’d brought Loretta to console Mrs. Helms after her son, Mica, had been sentenced to prison for operating a meth lab. Her daughter, Crystal-the sweetest, quietest girl in my fourth-grade class-was already in jail for other drug-related crimes, so Loretta had treated the occasion like a funeral, bringing along a basket of baked goods and a pan of lasagna. My mother’s actual intentions were to convince her childhood friend to move into the village, which Mrs. Helms had done, but she had recently returned to live alone in the family home. No idea why-the bay-front cabin she’d inherited was the nicest in Munchkinville.
After several hundred yards of zigzagging, I told Levi, “Hold tight!” because we were approaching a hole deep enough to hold water. It hadn’t rained for two weeks, so I expected the truck to bang hard and it did. Levi, still in a trance, seemed not to hear but awoke when his head banged the roof.
“Ooh-ee!” he said, which is the equivalent of Ouch! to a Southern child who had not progressed beyond the age of ten. Then his eyes widened and his head began to swivel, taking in details as if trying to figure out where we were.
“Tighten that seat belt,” I advised. “We’ve still got a quarter mile to go and there’s another big hole ahead.”
“No,” he said. “Stop!”
I couldn’t stop. Water might have killed the engine, so I spun the wheels and worked the clutch until we had cleared the second hole, Levi repeating, “No!… No!… No!” the whole time.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, when we’d reached a smooth stretch.
The poor man was terrified. “Can’t,” he said. “I want to go back.”
It had taken us twenty minutes to travel a few miles; the sun was now above the trees, which didn’t give me time to waste. “We will,” I said patiently. “Soon as I’m done with my business. We’ll stop at the marina, too, and I’ll buy you a bottle of pop. How’s that sound?”
“No!” Levi yelled, fighting with his seat belt.
I reached to comfort him by patting his arm, but that only scared the poor creature more. There was nothing I could do but sit and watch as he kicked open the door and took off, running. Not toward the main road either. He bolted into a thicket of buttonwood trees that signaled the beginning of mangroves where, a hundred years ago, the Helms family had homestead a piece of high ground on what had once been a cattle trail that led to the bay.
“Pay Day Road,” locals still called the shell lane. The name dated back to the 1990s when off-loading marijuana bales required a remote place that was hard to find by land or water. Pot hauling, as it was known, had saved some fishermen from going broke, had made a few others wealthy, but had spelled trouble for the Helms family, particularly their young children, who had learned the trade too early to save themselves.
I thought about getting out and calling to Levi but decided against it. The decision wasn’t purely selfishness, but my eagerness to get to Sanibel Island played a role. By truck, it was several miles to Sulfur Wells, but there was also an old horse trail through the backcountry that cut the distance in half. Walkin’ Levi would know the trail, so he’d probably be home long before me.
But what was it about Pay Day Road that had scared the poor man? The Helms family had once kept pit bulls, I remembered. Not fighting dogs-not since old Mr. Helms had died, anyway-but for protection.
Levi’s afraid of dogs, I thought. Shy people who traveled on foot had every reason to fear pit bulls. It made sense.
Even so, I felt a creeping uneasiness that caused me to take a precaution. My cell phone showed only one bar, but it was enough to include a locator map when I messaged Marion Ford and another friend, Nathan Pace, who is a bodybuilder but a sweet man nonetheless.
Here checking on Loretta’s friend. Will text again in 30.
I signed the note H4, a signature I reserve for friends, and also to remind myself I’m the fourth Hannah Smith in my family, so have more reasons than most to be cautious. My great-great-grandmother-known as Big Six because of her height and strength-and my wild aunt, Hannah Three, had both come to violent ends due to their own recklessness and their poor judgment in men. The history inherited with my name, although I’ve never admitted it, is a secret reason I’m careful about dating. The fear that history repeats itself is silly and superstitious, I suppose, but I’m also aware that my own judgment is often less than perfect.
I sent the text, waited for the message to clear, then put the truck in gear.
Ahead, mangrove trees leaned in to form a tunnel that sprinkled sunlight on the windshield. The shell road became sand and showed tire tracks coming or going. Both maybe. Definitely fresh.
A UPS truck, I hoped, delivering the wig Loretta had mentioned.
5
The house where Rosanna Helms’s husband, Dwight, had been born, and where his mother had been born, resembled a tobacco barn on pilings that, for a hundred years, had been jettisoning the junk that now surrounded the place. Oil drums, trailers, crab traps, pieces of Mica’s Harley-Davidson scattered around a hot-water heater, rusting near a satellite dish, and a bicycle frame perched trophylike atop a sheen of glass fishing net-Crystal’s bike, I remembered the pink streamers.
Crystal and I had played in this yard as children. She had been a shy, big-boned girl who enjoyed Barbie dolls, which I’d tolerated out of boredom more than politeness. But she was also game enough to paddle a canoe I’d found in the mangroves, then patched with roofing tar. We had never been close, but childhood is a powerful link, so it felt strange to be here alone, an adult woman sent to check on a playmate’s mother, a mother who had chosen to live amid the wreckage of her own shattered family. I had never liked the feel of this place. I didn’t like being here now.