FLYNNIE & BABE from My Last Romance and other passions

     The clouds over the mainland are low and dark. The thin strip of sky that shows between them and the sparkle of lights along the shore is coral and shimmering—that usually means lightning. They must be getting one heck of a storm. I’d say it’s headed this way. The air has that ozone smell that means storm-coming. The gulls are screeching, soaring across the channel in swirling clouds. The lower they fly, the more scared they are. From up here on Flynnie’s bluff they appear to be coming straight at me.
     There’s something sad and dreamy about all those gold lights twinkling away over there. I don’t want to be there—I love life on this island. But they make me wonder if I’m missing anything. It’s like standing outside on the sidewalk and watching through a window at people dancing. I don’t like dancing but they look like they are so happy. I wonder if I’ve missed something.

     Autumn is definitely here. The flowers in Flynnie’s garden look worn out except for the climbing roses that twine over the picket fence. The heads of the sunflowers droop all the way down as though they were put up before a firing squad. Maybe there was a coup in the garden today and the sunflowers lost.
     Flynnie’s garden is like a party in the summer—snapdragons and hollyhocks, Japanese lanterns and columbines, moss roses and lilies of the valley peeping out between the marigolds. Fat yellow bumblebees, droopy with pollen, drone lazily between blossoms. The hummingbirds dart nervously in and out of clematis. Flynnie takes a lot of pride in his garden. As many people come up here to look at the garden as come to stuff themselves with his fat, juicy clams, spicy french fries, and crunchy onion rings.
     Flynnie’s was the first place I ate at when I moved here all those years ago. During the winter Flynnie’s is filled with the artists and locals who live here year round but when the tourist season is in full swing the artists stay away. Flynnie’s Clam Shack is one of the island’s main attractions. When the tourist ferries arrive and all those determined-looking folks armed with backpacks, water bottles, digital cameras, camcorders, and Chamber of Commerce maps, fill the streets it seems every map has Flynnie’s circled on it.
     It won’t be long now until the tourist boats only run on weekends—and after Christmas not at all. Then all of us will get out our fleece or down jackets and tramp the headlands looking for renewed inspiration to paint. We’ll paint all day and gather at Flynnie’s in the evenings to drink and eat and congratulate ourselves for being the lucky ones who get to stay.
     The candy pink and white striped umbrellas over the tables on the deck are flapping with increased fury. There’s a storm coming alright. I run around the deck cranking them down. Where the hell is Flynnie? The inside lights are on but I can’t see him.
     “Flynnie!” I love this place. It is plain and open with plank floors, wooden tables and chairs, ceiling fans and big, double-hung windows which I begin slamming shut. The wind is getting steadier now and paper-lined straw baskets bearing the remains of clam dinners skid across the tables and topple to the floor. Before the first abandoned clam lands, Mad Max comes bounding out of nowhere to snarf it up. As I close the windows a few more baskets go flying and Max occupies himself roaming the wasteland of the floor in search of fallen goodies. That dog loves clams and makes sure Flynnie’s floors are always clean. Flynnie says Max is the offspring of a female chow he once had who mated with a vacuum cleaner.
     “Flynnie!!!” I gather up the baskets, dump the remains in a trash barrel and stack them at the end of the service bay.
     “That you, Babe?” Flynnie’s voice comes down the stairs from his upstairs apartment—a slightly smaller and much cosier version of this room.
     “Yeah. Want me to come up?”
     “Right down,” he hollers drowning me out.
     I plop on a tall wooden stool by the bar. Two or three nearly empty beer mugs sit on paper coasters among a litter of peanut shells.
     “Max,” I call, “beer!” And, doing it just as Flynnie has taught me, I toss the remaining beer from one mug with a snap of the wrist. Max bounds across the floor and, with an experienced leap, catches the beer in his open mouth. Max has been known to catch as much as four ounces right out of the air without spilling a drop.
     “What happened now?” Flynnie asks trotting down the stairs, “Your knight in shining armor turn in his white stallion for a skateboard.” He grins and the gleam of his white teeth against his dark face makes me smile. It’s a good thing for Flynnie that he has that grin because the rest of him is kind of cartoon-like. His gray-streaked, sandy hair sticks straight up and his beard radiates out around his face making him look like a cross between an Aztec Sun God and a Kodiak bear. His eyes are buried under bushy, pale eyebrows. They disappear completely when he laughs. Flynnie’s age is a mystery to everyone. He claims to be really old and there’s nothing to tip you off one way or the other. His skin has been tanned to leather since I’ve known him and it doesn’t get lighter in the winter. His voice is sort of raspy, like he’s getting a cold, and his hands are huge with bulging veins and knobby knuckles. They’re kind of scary looking—like they’ve spent more than a little time wrapped around somebody’s throat. He’s wearing a blue chambray shirt with the neck open and sleeves rolled above his elbows. The veins on his arms stand out thick and hard. The sturdy, dark legs below his khaki shorts are so bowed you could sail a Frisbee between them.
     “Men suck, Flynnie,” I tell him. Flynnie knows more about my personal life than anyone.
     “I know, Babe.” He lays his ever-present journal on the bar and draws us each a draft. “We’re bastards.”
     “Don’t say that!” I hate it when he agrees with me. “That’s just so damn easy for you guys. You say ‘hey, what did you expect, I’m an asshole’ like that’s some kind of an excuse.”
     He refills a basket with peanuts from under the bar and pushes it toward me. “Well, it is an excuse. A lousy excuse but an excuse all the same.”
     “Flynnie, this guy worked harder to get me to fall for him than any guy I’ve ever met. I tried so hard not to make the same mistake I made the last time but look what happened!”
     He comes around the bar and sits on the stool next to me. “What happened?”
     I shrugged. “He’s going back to his wife.”
     “Yeah? Sounds like you got a better deal than she did.”
     I kick the toe of my sandal against the bar. “That doesn’t help, Flynnie.”
          He sighs. “No, I don’t suppose it does.”
“Why did he do it, Flynnie?” I promised myself I wouldn’t cry again but I can feel my throat tightening. “Why would he chase me like he did and then turn around and do this? I don’t get it. What’s wrong with me.”
     Flynnie gives me a hard look. “You know better than to ask that. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re smart, you’re pretty, you’re a good artist, you’ve got those big knockers.” He gives me a Flynnie wink—at least that’s what I think it is when his invisible eye twitches back in his head like that.
     “Let me tell you something, being pretty and having big knockers isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
     “No?” He sips his beer. “I don’t think very many people—male or female—would agree with you on that. I see how the guys in here look at you when you come around. There are a lot of women who would love to have guys look at them like that.”
     I glance at myself in the mirror behind the bar and then look away fast. That’s the thing I can’t ever explain to Flynnie—I don’t know what in the heck it is he sees when he looks at me but I sure don’t see it. “You know what, Flynnie, that’s just bullshit.”
     “It is not bullshit. There are girls half your age in town who wish they got the attention you do.”
I stare at him. “So what? So what if guys look at my boobs and my whatever else they look at. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean they love me or even like me. It just means I have big boobs. Big deal. It’s not like they’ve done me any good!”
     Flynnie laughs and claps his hand over his mouth to avoid spitting beer.
     “I’m serious.” Now I’m pissed. “I’ve had these monsters since I was fifteen. I’ve been hauling them around for almost twenty-five years now and all they’ve done is make my life miserable. And now they’re starting to go south! Why the hell would anyone want this?”
     Flynnie is smiling. He swivels his chair toward me and reaches out one of those big, scary-looking hands to brush my hair back from my face. “I never thought of it that way,” he says quietly.
     “Well, why would you?” I pull back and then instantly regret it. His hand falls back in his lap.
     “I’m sorry,” I lower my voice and look up at him. His expression is inscrutable. “I didn’t mean to be gross.”
     He shakes his head. “You weren’t gross.”
     “I just want to be happy. All my life I’ve dreamed about having a nice guy and a nice home and maybe some kids. What’s so wrong about that?”
     “There’s nothing wrong with it, Babe, it’s just not right for everyone.” He turns back to his beer. “Being married and having kids is for people who don’t want to do anything else.”
     “Why aren’t you married?” As long as I’ve known Flynnie we’ve never talked about that.
     He sips his beer. “I have been. I’m just no good at it.”
     “Really?” Flynnie married is hard to imagine.
     “Well, let me rephrase that. I’m real good at getting married. I’m just no good at staying married.”
     I stare at him. “You’ve been married more than once?”
     He smiles slowly and holds up three fingers.
     “You’re kidding me?”
     “Why?”
     “But... no kids?”
     “No. No kids—none of the marriages lasted very long.”
     “What happened?”
     He shrugs. “For what it’s worth they all left me. Not the other way around.”
     “I can’t believe you. You’re such a nice guy. I can’t imagine anyone leaving you.”
     “You know Suze Crawley that works at the post office?”
     “Sure, of course.” Suze is a big, energetic woman who wears long, flowered skirts with Birkenstocks, has a thick braid down her back, and grows herbs in the sunny windows of the tiny post office building on Center Street. All the letters that arrive around the world from our town smell like Suze’s thyme and coriander.
     “She was my second wife.” He reaches over the counter and fills his beer mug from the tap. “Ready for another?”
     I let him fill my mug while I try to imagine him and Suze together. Funny thing is, I can. Easily.
     “Flynnie, I think you and Suze would be good together.”
     He nods. “I thought so too.”
     “But?”
     He shrugs. “She said I was too romantic. Lots of women like that idea in theory but they find it hard to live with.”
     “Because you write poetry?”
     That’s one of the more enigmatic things about Flynnie. He is forever sending off poems to these obscure little magazines with odd names and getting back checks for miniscule amounts. When the published piece finally arrives in the mail he mounts the page with his poem next to the magazine cover on tan cardboard. He frames it and hangs it on the wall of the stairway leading to his apartment. He says he is waiting for the day when the check covers the cost of the frame—then he’ll consider himself a success. I glance up at the wall across the darkening room. There must be thirty or more poems there.
     “Naw,” he says. “She always liked my poems. She thought I’d be a great poet someday.” He frowns at his beer letting his mind drift. “No. I’m not sure what it was, really. She said being my Muse was too hard. To tell the truth, I never knew what she meant by that. Suze is a beautiful woman. I didn’t think I ever expected anything more from her than letting me love her for that.”
     I study him trying to figure out if he is being serious. I like Suze. She’s always friendly and nice but “beautiful”?
     “How long ago was that?”
     He shrugs. “Ten years, maybe. It always took me more time to get over a woman than I actually spent with her. Figure that out.”
     “Did you write a poem about her?”
     “Every poem I wrote was about her—well, while I was with her. It was like that with all of them...” His voice trails off as a wall of rain crackles against the windows. The lights dim for a moment and thunder rolls in. Mad Max whimpers and crawls across the floor to cower under Flynnie’s bar stool.
“Come on, Max,” Flynnie coos sliding off the barstool and hunkering down to stroke the shaking dog. “Don’t be scared. I’m here.” Max huddles against him as a brilliant flash of lightning floods the room. Through the windows I can see the waves churning up in the channel.
     “Damn. Danny Choate and I were going to go diving for lobsters in the morning. Now the floor will be too murky.” He stands up and walks to the window as the lights flicker out but then blink back on. “I’d say business is closed for this night—we’ll be losing power soon.” He turns to me. “Want to come upstairs and I’ll fix us some supper?”
     “Sure.” I stack the dishwasher then wipe down the bar and the tables as Flynnie cashes out and locks up. I watch him out of the corner of my eye. Flynnie the poet. Flynnie the husband of three women. Flynnie the guy who thought Suze Crawley was beautiful and wanted only to love her for that.
As we climb the stairs a loud crack of thunder sends Max flying up the steps past us knocking me backwards.
     “What a noble beast,” Flynnie laughs as he catches me and sets me back on my feet. “There’s nothing to fear when Max is on guard. Dog-butt stew, Max!” he hollers up the steps but Max is long gone—under the bed for sure. “I’m going to cook up a batch of dog butt stew!”
     Sometimes Flynnie and Max remind me of an old married couple.
     Upstairs the rain hammers the roof sounding wild and wonderful. Flynnie lights a few lamps and pops in a CD of Celtic music. The violins, flutes and bodhrans, underscored by pelting rain, fill the big open room. I love this space. It always reminds me of an attic belonging to some whimsical grandmother in a fairy tale. The beamed ceiling slants down to a few feet above the floor and the room is crowded with peculiar treasures—pirate’s chests supporting oil lamps and piles of books, old sofas covered in patchwork quilts, a wooden cigar-store Indian guards the alcove that serves as a bedroom. An enormous balsa wood and rice paper airplane hangs from the apex of the ceiling. A fire smoulders in the pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room and Flynnie’s still-warm coffee cup rests on the arm of his home-made couch. Flynnie built this place himself, including most of the furniture in it. The foundation is the remains of an old barn—stone stalls and tack rooms where his woodshop is now. But from the first floor on up every board was put in place by Flynnie’s big hands.
     “Make yourself at home?” Flynnie mumbles, his head in the refrigerator. “You don’t mind lobster, do you? I can make an omelette.”
     “Flynnie, for most people lobster is a treat. We don’t live on it all summer.”
“Most people don’t go diving every few days.”
     “Yeah.” I pick up the yellow legal pad by the sofa. He is working on a poem. “Lobster-diving isn’t a popular sport in Kentucky.”
     “No wonder you left it.” He assembles the ingredients for his masterpiece on the counter. Everything Flynnie has ever cooked for me was delicious. “Why do people live in places like that?”
     The power goes out just as we are sitting down to eat. Flynnie fires up the oil lamps and the soft flickering glow makes the room even cosier.
     “One of these days, I’m going to rig up a way to run the CD player on lamp oil,” he says but the rain is hammering the roof so hard we wouldn’t hear it anyway.
     We clear the dishes away in silence, the rain isn’t letting up and it makes conversation more like a shouting match.
     As I stack the plates in the drying rack the little bird in the cuckoo clock cuckoos eleven.
     “Are you staying?” he asks not looking at me.
     “I guess so.”
     He nods and gets me a clean white t-shirt from his dresser. “Here, you get first turn in the bathroom.”
     While Flynnie splashes around in his bathroom, I snuggle down in his comfortable bed and stare up at the rain pelting the skylight above. This is how it is with Flynnie and me. I get my feelings hurt, or have a bad day, or just feel lonely, so I climb Flynnie’s bluff and he makes everything alright. He comforts me and bolsters my ego. He makes me dinner and invites me to spend the night. We crawl into his warm bed, chat for awhile and then drift off to sleep. Deep in the night a foghorn blows, Max barks in his sleep, or a ship’s bell clangs in the channel. Sleepily we move into each others’ arms. That’s when the real enchantment starts for then Flynnie is at his best.
     We do not speak. We pretend this is all happening in a dream. Flynnie makes love to me so sweetly, so deeply, so caressingly that I am reduced to the tender, beautiful, lovable girl that he seems to see me as but which I can never accept. When finally the first pink of dawn grows out of the far horizon I sleep the best sleeps of my life.
     It is always the same. When I wake there is coffee on the stove and hot muffins on the table with a note saying “gone fishing” or “diving with Danny” or “business on the mainland”, followed by “hope your day is wonderful.” And the next time we see each other we act as though nothing has happened.
     Flynnie carries an oil lamp to the bed and when he is snuggled in beside me, blows it out and puts it on the floor. He slides his arm under my head and says, “Sweet dreams.”
     “Flynnie,” I say, “do you love me?”
     There is a long silence filled with rain and distant fog horns.
     “Yes,” he says. “I do.”
     “Why haven’t you ever said that to me before?”
     He rolls onto his side and traces my cheekbones with his fingertips. “Good question,” he says finally.      “I guess because I know that you’re still looking for Mr. Wonderful and I ain’t him.” He sighs. “And I’m tired of getting my heart broken.”
     “Oh, Flynnie.” I kiss his fingertip and move closer to him.
     He leans over and kisses me softly. “Go to sleep, Babe.”
     “No,” I whisper. “I don’t want to keep pretending nothing happens when we’re together. I don’t want to wake up in an empty bed tomorrow.”
     He is quiet for a long time. “When you pretend something doesn’t happen, it makes it easier when it stops happening.”
     He is lying very still not touching me. I push back the quilt and touch his face with my fingertips drawing them along the plane of his hard, lined cheeks and down through the prickle of his beard.
     “You’re a beautiful man, Flynnie,” I whisper. I slip my arms around him kissing his mouth softly. “You’re the most beautiful man I know.”
     The sound he makes is strange—half a laugh, half a sob.
     “I’m going to make everything alright,” I tell him, snuggling close, sliding my leg between his thick, bowed legs. “I’m going to make sure you never get up and leave me again.”
     In the darkness I feel his smile.

©2005 Kathleen Valentine • All rights reserved

This story appears in My Last Romance and other passions. Learn how to order...

      "An empty frying pan means a sunny day tomorrow."
      He laughs and his belly rattles the dishes on the counter.
      "Well, I'll just eat them as a community service then," he says. "Effie Parnell likes to hang her wash out on Thursdays and gets damn cranky if the sun ain't shining."
      I carry his plate back into the kitchen. The bell on the back of the door jingles and two city hunters in neon orange caps and camouflage jackets head for the beer coolers.
      "So, what's Old Bruno think about this being a cyber-cafe now?" He raises his voice so I can hear him even though I'm not ten feet away and the kitchen door is standing wide open. He pronounces the word "ka-FEE".
      I pretend to think about it as I spoon the sausages onto his plate and add another scoop of baked beans.
      "I don’t think Pa has any idea what the internet is," I say putting the plate down in front of him. "He just knows it makes money and that’s good enough for him."
      As though on cue I see the hunters settle into the folding metal chairs at the two work stations tucked between the camping supplies and the display of sweatshirts, baseball caps, coffee mugs, and other junk with the words Pine Creek Gorge, Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon on them. I glance at the clock but those two have been in here before and never argue when I tell them what they owe for on-line time.
      "How's the old reprobate doin, anyway?" Cletus says spearing the sausage with his fork sending a spray of hot grease in my direction. I jump back.
      "Not good." I grab a dishrag and wipe the counter around his plate. "He hasn’t been downstairs in weeks now. I keep telling him he should see a doctor but you know him." Cletus laughs while he chews, his cheeks puffing out like a blowfish.
      "I sure do. All Bruno's problems can be found in one place - the bottom of a rum bottle."
      "You could go up and see him," I offer. "Might do him some good to talk to someone besides me." Like that's gonna happen. The last thing Cletus Wilkes is likely to do is haul his fat ass up two flights of steps to the rooms above the store.
      "Some other time," he says. "You tell him I was askin after him though."
      "Excuse me."
      One of the hunters is leaning over the counter. He has a pair of iridescent orange sunglasses on a Philadelphia Eagles lanyard around his neck.
      "Sign out front says you dress out deer here."
      "That’s right," I walk to the end of the counter just glad to be away from Cletus's slurping sounds for a minute. He sounds like a pack of coyotes on a dead cow.
      "You fellas get lucky?"
      "One guy in our group, so far, what's it going to cost him to have you take care of it?"
      "Depends," I retrieve a price list from under the counter. "We can just dress it out for you or cut it up and package it or..." I explain the different cuts of roasts, chops, and steaks plus our sausage making and smokehouse options.
      "Says here you can store the meat, too."
      "Yeah, we have a big walk-in freezer downstairs. Some folks don’t have room for a whole deer at home."
      "Can I take this with me?" He indicates the brochure.
      "Sure." I smile at him. The men that come in here from the city never give me a second glance, they like their women to have some body on them, and that's just fine with me.
      "You ain't cuttin up them deer by yourself, are ya?" Cletus asks.
      "Nope. I used to but I got Porky Heinz coming in whenever I need him to do the skinning and butchering. He was working at the IGA up there in Binghamton till his mama got sick and he come home to look after her. He’s a pretty good butcher."
      Cletus nods. "Good thinkin. You got your hands full runnin this place now that Old Bruno’s taken to his bed." He looks around. "Place looks real good, I have to say."
      "Yeah. Business is growing. We got a lot a hunters up from Philly and Baltimore this year. City boys tryin to have an 'authentic' wilderness experience." I laugh, I heard about that on the talk radio last week. I like listening to the talk radio while I work in the big kitchen in the basement where Porky cuts up deer for the city fellas and I make the sausages and pies we sell.
      "Glad to see you doin so well," Cletus shovels beans into his big mouth. "I used to worry about you and Old Bruno bein stuck out here so far in the woods alone but it looks like you’re doin jest fine."
      Lying sack of shit, I think but I just smile.
      "Sorry to bother you again." I look up. The hunter is back.
      "No bother."
      "Do you have any 7mm cartridges? Remington Magnum."
      "I'll look." I know darn well we don’t but these city guys think we're a bunch of hicks if I don't at least make an attempt.
      "What you huntin with?" Cletus asks as I enter the storeroom.
      "It's a custom-built," the hunter tells him, "bolt-action."
      "Got one a them built-in range finders in the scope?"
      "Yes."
      I can hear Cletus snort all the way in the closet. "Figgers."
      "Sorry," I tell the hunter. "All I have is 30.06." I hold up a box.
      "Naw, that's okay. I think I've got enough for now. Do you have any pies left?"
      "Just Dutch apple and lemon meringue. I’ll have fresh ones tomorrow."
      He nods. "Wrap up an apple for me."
      As I'm boxing the pie, Cletus eyes it with disdain. "Don't tell me I'm too late for a piece a your mincemeat pie today?"
      I give him a smile. "I keep the mincemeat in the kitchen. It’'s just for my favorite regulars. Too much work to make it for everybody."
      Cletus looks genuinely relieved. "Your momma made the best homemade mincemeat pies I ever had in my life. She musta passed her pie-making genes on to you."
      "You fellas just like the mincemeat because of all the booze in it," I tell him as I finish tying the string on the pie box. "Mama used a good amount of suet in her mincemeat. It helps marry all them spices. I've got plenty of suet."
      "Well, if Porky’s makin deer sausage I reckon he's butcherin some pigs, too."
      I keep my back to him. "Something like that."
      "I can't hardly b'lieve you can cook like she done. You was just a little kid when she passed on."
      "I was ten," I tell him trying to keep the edge out of my voice. Ten years old and forty miles from civilization with a drunken father, not that any of that concerned you, Chief of Police Cletus Wilkes.
      Cletus shakes his head, "It's a wonder you was old enough to remember."
      "I started helping her when I was old enough to stand," I say. Somebody had to, I think. "Pa had me stuffing sausages when I was big enough to reach the grinder. I made them sausages you're eating now."
      "Well, they're fine. It's a wonder you have the time to run this store and do all the cookin and still take care a your old man. Harry Jenkins says he and the missus drive out here every Sunday after services just so's they can have some of your mincemeat pie."
      The Reverend Harry Jenkins is the pastor of the Baptist Church my folks belonged to, not that I can remember ever going there except on Christmas and, after Momma died, not even then.
      "Yeah, him and Barty Hollaway used to come out to play pinochle with Pa. Whitey Pringle, too. I made Reverend Jenkins take them each a couple pounds of sausage and a pie just this past Sunday."
      "Ain't you a sweetheart!" Cletus chuckles. "I 'member some of those card games. I filled in often enough. You was always lurkin around - skinny kid with those big, wide eyes a yours..." He widens his eyes and mugs for me. I look away to hide my disgust. "Bringin us sandwiches and pie. You was so obligin."
      Like I had a choice. I carry the box over to the counter by the cash register. The hunters are both looking at the same PC monitor laughing at some Flash movie one got in his email. Snow falls like glitter through the lights in the parking lot. Only four o'clock and it's dark outside. Winter is closing in.
      "Looks like more snow," Cletus says, cutting the last sausage into small pieces as though it will be the last sausage he ever eats and he wants to make it last.
      "Never know what will happen during a long winter." I turn my back to him and start refilling the coffee-maker. I normally get half a dozen fellows in around supper time and, when the days are short, supper time comes early.
      "Your Pa sure is lucky to have you. Don’t know what he’d do being sick and all way out here in the middle of nowhere. I'm real glad you worked things out with him. I recall a few years back you wasn’t too happy here."
      I grit my teeth and control my breathing. I was fucking miserable, I want to scream at him. I was beaten and abused and used like a whore and you fat fucks just brought him more booze and played cards and pretended not to see anything. I take a deep breath.
      Not any more.
      "Well, all that's changed now," I say to the coffeemaker. "I turned eighteen and can sign the checks and keep the store running. If Pa kicks the bucket over the winter I'll just stick him down in the meat locker until Spring."
      Cletus almost chokes himself laughing. "You do that. You got room for two-hundred and seventy pounds of useless meat down there?"
      I turn around. "Yes, I do."
      A bewildered look flashes across his face. "You know," he says gravely. "Your father always loved you."
      Right. Every chance he got till he was too fat to find his dick.
      "I know," I say. "Only thing I worry about is that he'll get up in the middle of the night and try to go hunting again. He hasn't done that in some time and I always found him and brought him back but if he were to go out when I was sleeping, well, who knows what could happen?"
      He studies me a minute. "We got SUVs now and cell phones down to the station. If anything happens all you gotta do is call." I watch the cluelessness muddle up his dumb look. Cletus has cultivated that for so long it has settled in permanently.
      "We'll be fine. Frankly, I think this is going to be a real good winter," I lighten my tone of voice. "Hunters are already starting to bring in deer to be processed and I’ve got a lot of plans for the store here. I might start having some of the ladies in town bake pies for me and Porky comes in when I need him. But don’t worry..." I give him my best smile and this time it’s for real. "I'll still make sausages and mincemeat pies with my own hands just for Pa’s special friends."
      Cletus grins happily.
      "You’re a good girl, honey. Still takin care of us and all."
      "Glad to," I say. I put my hands on the counter, lean forward and fix him with a reassuring smile. "I put aside a whole shelf full of meat downstairs that I’m keeping special just for you boys."
      About two hundred and seventy pounds of it.
      "You ready for that mincemeat pie?" I tease. "With a nice scoop of ice cream on it?"
      Cletus claps his big, fleshy hands together and rubs them vigorously. "You bet, honey, you bet."
      I go to the kitchen and take out the very special mincemeat pie I keep on hand. I keep it in a separate compartment next to my very special home-made sausage.
      "The secret to making mincemeat," I tell him as I scoop vanilla ice cream onto it, "is to make sure the suet you use has been soaked in liquor for a good long time."

© 2005 Kathleen Valentine • All rights reserved.

This story originally appeared in Windchill: Crime Stories by New England Writers published by Level Best Books.

      The Old Mermaid Inn is gone.
      I cannot convey in those six words the depth of my sadness in writing them. Why I think it should be here after all these years, I don’t know—except that there was a timelessness about The Old Mermaid Inn which ignited my imagination and set my life aflame.

   Part One
August 1960 - August 1963

-Chapter 1-

      In 1960 my hero was a sixteen-year old chess player named Bobby Fischer, not a sports figure of high regard in the coffee shops and bar rooms of Plainview, Ohio. That summer every radio in Plainview was turned to KDKA-Pittsburgh listening to Bob “Voice of the Pirates” Prince. Things were looking good for the Buckos and the names repeated with respect around town were Vernon Law and Dick Groat. Once in awhile some stranger passing through would comment that Roger Maris was having quite a year only to find himself the object of cold stares from faces fired hard and brown by sun glinting off of John Deere tractors in Plainview’s miles of alfalfa fields. The Yankees were the enemy, second only to communists, and there were no communists in Plainview.

     In 1960 the Queen of England had a baby and her sister married a photographer. An Australian ran a three and a half-minute mile during the summer Olympics in Rome.
      In 1960 Howie Goetz celebrated Floyd Patterson’s knock-out victory over Ingemar Johanssen by backing me up against the fiberglass tool shed behind the Grange building and shoving his hand inside my bra. I bit his lip hard enough to draw blood. During the summer of 1960, while my friends sunned themselves on the banks of Silver Trout Creek to the lyrics of Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini, I plotted my escape from Plainview.
      That summer, blowing out the candles on my eighteenth birthday cake, white angel food with marshmallow frosting, I closed my eyes and wished for adventure. How could I know that I was as green as the tender shoots breaking free of the earth in my father’s cornfields? All I knew of adventure was from books and dreams and the pictures on the feed store calendar hanging on the back of the door in my mother’s kitchen. I was restless, aching to my bones for any experience that was not steeped in rural sobriety. I was sick of quiet pastures, squawking chickens, and hulking farm boys who spat out dank, sodden lumps of tobacco before mashing their mouths against mine.
      When the time came to choose a college I disregarded academic merits in favor of my fantasy of sun-swept aquamarine waters scenting air filled with seagull calls and the seductive worldliness of handsome sailors with the constellations of the northern seas in their eyes. During my freshman year in high school, a current events teacher showed a film on the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway that captured my imagination like nothing in Plainview could. I followed the progress of the great engineering marvel with fascination and when the royal yacht Brittania carried the Queen of England and President Eisenhower through the Seaway on April 25, 1959, I was thrilled. Something momentous had happened in all our lives, I thought. Suddenly the far away worlds of Europe and Africa were as near as Lake Erie and I longed for access to those worlds and all their enticing mysteries. I was a romantic girl, my mother chided, a dreamer who would have to grow up one of these days. But the inner life of a young girl is not so easily dismissed. In my daydreams I formed a place into which I could slip and find succor like the familiar sweater you put on the first cold autumn morning when the world turns serious and you believe that something is beginning.
      My parents preferred the assurance of proximity. They pointed out the convenience and reputations of local teacher and agricultural colleges. I wanted mystery. I spent hours in the high school library searching for schools in towns bordering the Great Lakes. If I could be close to those legendary inland waters I knew my fantasies would be fulfilled.
      “It’s just so far away,” my mother said as she stiffened bread in a blue plastic dishpan. “Honestly, Clair, why can’t you go somewhere nearby? You know how your father worries about you.”
      “I wish he wouldn’t. I’m a big girl and I’ve always been reliable. I don’t know why he thinks I can’t be on my own.”
      “You’re his only girl.” She sprinkled flour from the canister shaped like a Guernsey cow. The cow was for flour, sugar came from a pink pig. The rooster held coffee, and the hen had tea bags. I looked at the pair of salt and pepper shakers on the table in front of me, a pair of brooding hens. Everything in our house said farm—screamed farm. When I was little my father would hide navy beans under the salt shaker and when one of my brothers or I lifted it he would act surprised and say “Godfrey Daniel, Louise, the chickens are laying again.”
      “I have to be on my own sometime.”
      She shook her head. “I don’t want you going to a big city. I’d never get a night’s sleep for worrying.”
      “You don’t have to worry. Look. Chesterton College.” I picked up the brochure on top of the pile in front of me. “Doesn’t this look beautiful? It’s on an old estate out in the country so it’s very private. You have to take a bus into the city and Port Presque Isle isn’t really a city, Mom, more of a big town. It’s not like I’m going to Cleveland or Chicago.”
      “It looks hoitey-toitey,” she sniffed with a sideways glance. “I wonder what kind of people send their children to places like that. If you went to the teachers college over in Robinsonville you could live at home and save money.”
      “Aw, Mom,” I groaned, the last thing I could imagine was living at home to save money. “I can get a job. See, they have a work-study program that I can enroll in. I could work in the library or the cafeteria. It would be good experience for me.”
      She punched down hard on the dough and I could tell from the way her jaw was working that she was trying not to say what I knew she wanted to say. Girls who go off to the city get “reputations”.       And in Plainview a reputation is a disgrace to the entire family. Never mind that half the girls in Plainview are waltzing down the aisle in the months after high school graduation, and being rushed to the maternity ward a few months after that. Married girls don’t have reputations, they have husbands. And husbands make everything all right.
      “Mom,” I grasped for my trump card, “Do you think I’m a good girl or not?”
      She turned and regarded me with her soft brown eyes. There was a dusting of flour along her right cheekbone. My mother had been a beauty in her day. In her wedding pictures on the sideboard in the dining room she has a charm that makes it easy to understand why the big, bashful looking guy standing next to her seems so amazed that they are there in their wedding clothes.
      “Clair, yes, I think you are a good girl but I also think you have a dangerous imagination. You get these crazy notions in your head about things that aren’t normal.”
      I stared at her. “Normal?”
      She shook her head and turned back to her bread. “Normal for people like us.” She sighed, gave the bread another punch and then turned back to me looking down as she picked sticky bits of dough from her fingers. “There are all kinds of people in the world and I’m not saying that they’re bad people but they don’t have our values. Your father and I want our children to have happy, healthy, normal lives. It doesn’t make sense to take chances with people who aren’t like us. Can you understand that?”
      “Come on, Mom, that sounds so elitist!”
      “Elitist?” She looked up stunned. “How can you say that? We’re normal. Normal, regular, down-to-earth people, Clair. That’s not elitist, that’s sensible. You think we’re trying to keep you from having fun but we’re not. You can have all the fun you want but please do it in a sensible way.”
      Sometimes I think my mother wasn’t prepared for a child like me. Both of my brothers were like my parents, solid, sensible, content with life as they found it. Gordon, Jr. wanted nothing more than to follow in my father’s footsteps and work the family farm. My younger brother Errol liked working with wood. He was always out in the barn building things. Daddy said he had a “good future ahead”. I was their only problem child.
      “It’s that red hair of yours. Your Grandmother Wagner told me not to have any redheaded children.” She sounded serious but I could tell she was smiling.
      Mine was not a family that raised its children to be foolhardy. My parents were kind people, funny in their own way but, above all, sensible, a quality in which my mother took great pride.
      “You know what my problem is?” she would say to the ladies of her church Sodality as they piled homemade cookies on styrofoam trays covered with aluminum foil and wrapped them in cellophane for the weekly Sunday morning bake sale, “I’m too darn sensible. I mean you read all these stories about women who go off to the city and meet some good looking guy who wines them and dines them and then takes advantage and I think, now how am I supposed to feel sorry for that kind of foolishness? I’m too practical, that’s the way I am. Why take chances?”
      In the end they relented, of course. Climbing the stone steps from the basement carrying my Grandfather Wagner’s battered leather trunk, the one that had come on the train with him from New England as he searched for fertile farmland, I considered my mother’s words. The stairwell smelled of century-old must and parsley that hung in fat bunches from pegs on the wall. A ray of sunshine pierced through dusty basement windows and illuminated jars of preserves lining the shelves my father had built along the steps. Patterns of colored light tinted by carefully put up plums, peaches, tomatoes, and blackberries washed over my arms and I thought then that I would break this family curse. I would do nothing sensible, nothing practical.
      I remembered my mother’s ultimate nightmare and that became my goal—to do something I would regret for the rest of my life.
      I was too young then to know how common a lifetime of regrets is.

© 2007 Kathleen Valentine • All rights reserved.

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