“Did you want lemon or milk in this?” she asked.
“Lemon, please,” I said.
“Good, because I ran out of milk this morning.”
She brought me the tea in a mug. “Here,” she said, “drink this while it’s hot,” and handed me the mug and a paper napkin. I opened the napkin and spread it on my lap. I warmed my hands on the steaming mug.
“Taste it,” she said.
I sipped at the tea.
“Nice, huh?” she said.
“Mm, delicious.”
“I told you,” she said, smiling.
She sat opposite me on a low stool, tucking the faded housedress between her legs. The fire crackled and spit.
“When are you leaving?” I asked.
“The sooner the better,” she said.
“Yes, but when?”
“I thought the middle of March. Italy’s no great shakes in February, you know. I thought I’d get there just as spring arrives.”
“Good timing,” I said.
“Oh sure.”
“Where will you be going first?” I asked.
“Sicily, I think. It’s all the way to the south. It should be nice and warm there in March.”
“But you don’t know yet.”
“No, not yet. Well, I have time. I’m trying to get a cheap ticket on a charter flight. You know Mom.”
“Where will you be staying?”
“Oh, I’ll find a place, don’t worry. I always do.”
“I wish you’d keep in touch this time.”
“I’ll call you, sure.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. You want to see what I’ve been making? I think the jewelry’s taking some new and very exciting turns, really. I’m so happy with it. Come,” she said, “let me show you,” and took my hand and pulled me out of the easy chair so suddenly that I spilled tea getting up.
“Ooops!” I said, and started dabbing with the paper napkin.
“Leave that,” Annie said, “I’ll get it later. Come.”
Her jewelry seemed to have become amorphous somehow, almost misshapen. She proudly exhibited rings that resembled mangled male organs, pins that were presumably vaginas but appeared more like runny eggs, earrings that seemed too spiky and even dangerous to wear.
“Beautiful, huh?”
“She said modestly.”
“Well, don’t you think so?” she asked.
“Gorgeous, yes.”
“Come on!” she said, and punched me playfully on the arm. “I worked hard on this stuff.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Truly.”
But it wasn’t.
We met her friends for dinner at seven-thirty that Saturday night. The place Annie chose was a Thai restaurant on the edge of a marsh. Wide windows framed tufted brown stalks lighted from spots mounted on the building’s roof. The menu was moderately priced, but I had the feeling that Annie and her friends considered the place elegant. All of them behaved as if dining out was a rare occurrence, a treat to be savored, and remembered, and perhaps cherished. There was certainly a holiday atmosphere around the table as we settled in and ordered drinks. I began to feel relaxed for the first time since I’d left New York.
Jessie Kilgallen was the woman who ran the organic food store. Some thirty-eight years old, dressed for the climate in jeans, a bulky blue turtleneck sweater, and a woolen ski cap and padded blue parka, neither of which she removed. The restaurant was, in fact, a bit chilly. Everything in Maine, in February, seemed a bit chilly.
Buck Crowley was in his mid-forties, I guessed, a broad-shouldered man with a gruff and hearty manner and a ruddy complexion that hinted at a great deal of time spent outdoors. He was wearing a bristly reddish-brown mustache and sporting a red plaid woolen shirt and wide red suspenders. He snapped one of the suspenders and asked, “Why do firemen wear red suspenders?”
“Oh God, not that one,” Jessie said.
“Why do firemen wear red suspenders?” I asked dutifully.
“To hold up their pants,” he said, and Jessie rolled her eyes.
Buck was not a fireman. He was, instead, a painter — I now noticed the traces of paint on his fingers and under his fingernails — who’d been living here in Maine for the past almost ten years, since right after the Gulf War, where he’d served in the First Infantry Division.
“I drove an M1-A1 Abrams tank equipped with a plow,” he said. “Our job was to cut lanes through a ten-mile-wide stretch of barbed wire, minefields, bunkers, and trenches north of the Iraqi-Saudi Arabian border. This was in February of ’91,” he said. “The war was almost over.”
“Buck was a war hero,” Annie said.
“Some hero,” Jessie said. “He buried people alive in their trenches.”
“We bulldozed the trenches so the ragheads wouldn’t use them for cover,” Buck said. “It saved a lot of hand to hand fighting. You know, Jess, a lot of you bleeding heart individuals...”
“Oh, that’s me, all right,” Jessie said, “a bleeding heart individual.”
“A lot of you have the notion that burying guys alive is nastier than blowing them up with hand grenades or sticking them in the gut with bayonets. Well, it’s not.”
“I’m sure I’d prefer being buried alive, you’re right,” Jessie said.
“We killed maybe a thousand of the cocksuckers,” Buck said.
The word caused Jessie to raise her eyebrows, but she made no comment otherwise. Neither did Annie. Our drinks came. Buck had ordered a vodka martini straight up, “a pair of olives, please.” I had ordered Johnnie Walker Black, on the rocks. The two women had ordered Chardonnay. We toasted Annie’s imminent trip abroad...
“Safe journey, hon,” Buck said.
“Sweet dreams,” Jessie said.
“Come home soon,” I said.
And we drank.
A waiter brought us menus.
“The secret of Thai cooking,” Annie said, “is in...”
“She knows the secrets of the entire universe,” Jessie said.
“I do happen to know Thai cooking,” Annie said. “The secret is in harmonizing the four primary flavors.”
“She’s a very good cook, in fact,” Buck said, as though confiding something confidential to me. I had the feeling he was trying to tell me he’d been sleeping with my sister.
“Salty, sweet, spicy, and sour,” Annie said. “Or bitter, if you want to add a fifth flavor, but that’s not essential.”
“The question is what should we eat?” Jessie said, tapping the menu and grinning at me as if she’d just made a joke to rival the one about the red suspenders.
“It’s like the primary colors in painting,” Buck said.
“I didn’t know there were four primary colors,” Jessie said.
“Well, no, just three. But it’s the same thing. It’s a matter of balance.”
“That’s it exactly,” Annie said. “So here’s what I’d suggest, if you’d care for my expert opinion.”
“Annie Gulliver, Expert,” Jessie said.
We started with a hot and sour shrimp soup, and then my sister ordered something that turned out to be beef fried with hot pepper, garlic, and sweet basil. She also ordered fresh broccoli fried in garlic and oyster sauce, and chicken cooked in coconut milk with lemon grass and galanga...