predicted one at every intersection sooner or later the law of
averages made you a prophet. It was a trick mediums had been
using for hundreds of years.
Besides, there's no theatre sign.
But there was another sign. It was Mary the Mother of God, the
ghost of all her childhood days, holding out her hands the way she
did on the medallion Carol's grandmother had given her for her
tenth birthday. Her grandmother had pressed it into her hand and
looped the chain around her fingers, saying, "Wear her always as
you grow, because all the hard days are coming. " She had worn it,
all right. At Our Lady of Angels grammar and middle school she
had worn it, then at St. Vincent de Paul high. She wore the medal
until breasts grew around it like ordinary miracles, and then
someplace, probably on the class trip to Hampton Beach, she had
lost it. Coming home on the bus she had tongue-kissed for the first
time. Butch Soucy had been the boy; and she had been able to taste
the cotton candy he'd eaten.
Mary on that long-gone medallion and Mary on this billboard had
exactly the same look, the one that made you feel guilty of
thinking impure thoughts even when all you were thinking about
was a peanut-butter sandwich. Beneath Mary, the sign said
"Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida Homeless Won't You
Help Us?"
Hey there, Mary, what's the story.
More than one voice this time; many voices, girls' voices, chanting
ghost voices. There were ordinary miracles; there were also
ordinary ghosts. You found these things out as you got older.
"What's wrong with you?" She knew that voice as well as she did
the eyebrow-and-dimple look. Bill's I'm-only-pretending-to-be-
pissed tone of voice, the one that meant he really was pissed, at
least a little.
"Nothing." She gave him the best smile she could manage.
"You really don't seem like yourself Maybe you shouldn't have
slept on the plane.
'You're probably right," she said, and not just to be agreeable,
either. After all, how many women got a second honeymoon on
Captiva Island for their twenty-fifth anniversary? Round trip on a
chartered Learjet? Ten days at one of those places where your
money was no good (at least until MasterCard coughed up the bill
at the end of the month) and if you wanted a massage a big
Swedish babe would come and pummel you in your six-room
beach house?
Things had been different at the start. Bill, whom she'd first met at
a crosstown high-school dance and then met again at college three
years later (another ordinarv miracle), had begun their married life
working as a janitor, because there were no openings in the
computer industry. It was 1973, and computers were essentially
going nowhere and they were living in a grotty place in Revere,
not on the beach but close to it, and all night people kept going up
the stairs to buy drugs from the two sallow creatures who lived in
the apartment above them and listened endlessly to dopey records
from the sixties. Carol used to lie awake waiting for the shouting to
start, thinking, We won't ever get out of here, we'll grow old and
die within earshot of Cream and Blue Cheer and the fucking
Dodgem cars down on the beach.
Bill, exhausted at the end of his shift, would sleep through the
noise, lying on his side, sometimes with one hand on her hip. And
when it wasn't there she often put it there, especially if the
creatures upstairs were arguing with their customers. Bill was all
she had. Her parents had practically disowned her when she
married him. He was a Catholic, but the wrong sort of Catholic.
Gram had asked why she wanted to go with that boy when anyone
could tell he was shanty; how could she fall for all his foolish talk,
why did she want to break her father's heart. And what could she
say?
It was a long distance from that place in Revere to a private jet
soaring at forty-one thousand feet; a long way to this rental car;
which was a Crown Victoria-what the goodfellas in the gangster
movies invariably called a Crown Vic heading for ten days in a
place where the tab would probably be... well, she didn't even want
to think about it.
Floyd?... Ohshit.
"Carol? What is it now?"
"Nothing," she said. Up ahead by the road was a little pink
bungalow, the porch flanked by palms - seeing those trees with
their fringy heads lifted against the blue sky made her think of
Japanese Zeros coming in low; their underwing machine guns
firing, such an association clearly the result of a youth misspent in
front of the TV - and as they passed a black woman would come
out. She would be drying her hands on a piece of pink towelling
and would watch them expressionlessly as they passed, rich folks
in a Crown Vic headed for Captiva, and she'd have no idea that
Carol Shelton once lay awake in a ninety-dollar-a-month
apartment, listening to the records and the drug deals upstairs,
feeling something alive inside her, something that made her think
of a cigarette that had fallen down behind the drapes at a party,
small and unseen but smoldering away next to the fabric.
"Hon?"
"Nothing, I said." They passed the house. There was no woman.
An old man - white, not black-sat in a rocking chair, watching
them pass. There were rimless glasses on his nose and a piece of
ragged pink towelling, the same shade as the house, across his lap.
"I'm fine now. Just anxious to get there and change into some
shorts."
His hand touched her hip where he had so often touched her during
those first days - and then crept a little farther inland. She thought
about stopping him (Roman hands and Russian fingers, they used
to say) and didn't. They were, after all, on their second
honeymoon. Also, it would make that expression go away.
"Maybe," he said, "we could take a pause. You know, after the
dress comes off and before the shorts go on.
"I think that's a lovely idea," she said, and put her hand over his,
pressed both more tightly against her. Ahead was a sign that would
read "Palm House 3 Mi. on Left" when they got close enough to
see it.
The sign actually read "Palm House 2 Mi. on Left." Beyond it was
another sign, Mother Mary again, with her hands outstretched and
that little electric shimmy that wasn't quite a halo around her head.
This version read "Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida
Sick - Won't You Help Us?"
Bill said, "The next one ought to say 'Burma Shave."'
She didn't understand what he meant, but it was clearly a joke and
so she smiled. The next one would say "Mother of Mercy Charities
Help the Florida Hungry;" but she couldn't tell him that. Dear Bill.
Dear in spite of his sometimes stupid expressions and his
sometimes unclear allusions. He'll most likely leave you, and you
know something? If you go through with it that's probably the best
luck you can expect. This according to her father. Dear Bill, who
had proved that just once, just that one crucial time, her judgment
had been far better than her father's. She was still married to the
man her Gram had called "the big boaster." At a price, true, but
everyone paid a price.
Her head itched. She scratched at it absently, watching for the next
Mother of Mercy billboard.
Horrible as it was to say, things had started turning around when
she lost the baby. That was just before Bill got a job with Beach
Computers, out on Route 128; that was when the first winds of
change in the industry began to blow.
Lost the baby, had a miscarriage - they all believed that except