Whit considered that for a moment. “Saddle soap and plain soap,” he finally answered. “Sometimes hay. And she sprinkles on baby powder before bed.”
No wonder he’s parked out here in the bushes off the lane, necking with the likes of me, Dee thought. She wasn’t even to her twenties yet, but she had enough experience with males of all ages to know that they were fickle as a pack of crows. Unless you had something shiny and dangly, they just flew right past you.
“That’s enough talking,” Whit said, pulling her on top of him and opening her blouse. “We have to hurry and get you home before your father starts to worry. What have you told him anyway?”
“That I met a nice boy,” Dee lied. In fact, she’d told Cutt nothing. His curiosity stopped at the rim of his evening bottle. Once he passed out, nothing on earth could wake him, not even the noisy fumbling of a girl drunk on love. Whit placed his thumbs over the tips of Dee’s breasts, and an electric current passed from her chest to her groin. She moved her hips against his.
“A nice boy,” he said, and chuckled, pushing her bra down and replacing it with his mouth. “How little you know. I never was that.”
“I don’t believe you,” Dee whispered, and then they didn’t speak any longer.
Mr. Weatherly had the oddest way of answering questions, Dee thought. She was asking him about the upcoming December’s Eve bonfire, and at first she was confused by his rambling response, but as she listened, she realized he was telling her two things at once. Mr. Weatherly was sneaky like that, Dee decided. He never lectured or gave his personal opinion, but sometimes after she was done talking with him, after she watched him hitch up his pants and shuffle away, she would realize that she’d been given a moral lesson of sorts, even if she could never figure out exactly what it was.
Now that the end of November was near, the bonfire had started going up on Tappert’s Green tidier than Dee expected—the base planks crossed over the top of one another and then the bigger pieces of wood leaning up against those in stark rows. Apparently the town elders had decided on a new design for the pyre, square instead of round. The unexpected order of the structure didn’t reassure Dee. It just made the sight of the pyre even creepier to her. Fires didn’t always spring up unbidden. She had never thought much about that simple fact before.
“Aye, every year it gets a little bigger,” Mr. Weatherly mumbled over his plate of turkey and mash at the counter, staring at Dee darkly. “And every year it burns a little faster. Used to be we’d all linger over the coals late as anything, thinking about the future, but Claire put an end to that business with her string of unborns.”
At the mention of Claire’s name, Dee felt a familiar buzz start up at the back of her neck, but now a tiny chill of worry joined that excitement. Lately she’d stopped pestering Mr. Weatherly with questions about the Gilly sisters, especially Claire, but she still woke in the gray smear of dawn and waited for horse’s hooves to sound beneath her window. She still studied Claire during church, memorizing the exact color of her sweater set, trying to decide what shade her lipstick would be called, even though Dee definitely didn’t dare bring up Claire’s name anywhere outside the diner. No more conversations with the postmistress about Claire’s past loves. No more questions to Mr. Upton in his claustrophobic little store about Claire’s favorite foods. Dee didn’t want tongues to start wagging.
Cutt had instructed Dee to ask Mr. Weatherly if they should bother staying open the night of the bonfire in hopes of collecting some extra business. Maybe people would want something hot to drink, he thought, and a little something sweet on their tongues. But Mr. Weatherly just shook his head. “Not likely,” he said, his face as hangdog as Dee had ever seen a man’s. “Not after what Claire did on account of all her unborn babies.”
Nervously, she peeked around the diner, but they were in between lunch and dinner services, and the only other customer was ancient Mrs. Butler huddled in a back booth with her old lady friend, and neither of them could hear a thing. Dee picked up a rag and started polishing the counter, trying not to let her interest show.
“What do you mean, Claire’s unborns?” she said, moving the cloth in tight and calculated circles, hoping that Mr. Weatherly would be distracted by the motion and keep talking. The trick worked. He leaned over his plate and squinted at her.
“You’re sorta young to be telling this kind of thing to,” he proclaimed. “Still got the puppy fat hanging thick around your middle, don’t you? My girl Doreen had that at your age, but she’s as thin as a birch branch now.”
Dee flushed, but then she had to hide her smile behind her hand. If Mr. Weatherly knew the positions she could get that puppy fat into, he might not be so quick to call attention to it. She started circling her rag on the counter again. “What do you mean by unborns?” she asked again.
Mr. Weatherly helped himself to a full bite of mashed potato. “I took a crib delivery up to their house one time, and then, six weeks later, got called to take it back again. Then I noticed people kind of going off the salt around town. Herman Upton was still selling it under the counter, but he got skittish about it. Harlan Friend in the hardware said his wife had switched to boxed. Said it tasted better, too.” He took another bite of potato. “Every time Claire got her dander up and started spouting off about her family’s salt being poison, I figured she must have lost another babe. And then, finally”—he pushed his plate toward Dee, and she quickly dumped it into the plastic bin beneath the counter—“there weren’t no more salt to get rid of but the stuff the fishermen used—and even Claire knew that was a lost cause—and the bonfire salt.”
Dee wrinkled her forehead. “What do you mean?”
Mr. Weatherly fixed her with his stare. “Why do you think we have the blasted thing in the first place?” he said. “It’s not just for our entertainment. Ever since there’s been Gillys in this town, they’ve tossed salt to the fire to see what the future has in store for us. If the smoke flashes blue, that’s good. Red means someone will be falling in love, yellow’s a warning, and black… well, black is… not good….” His voice trailed off, and his eyes looked wet around their rims. Then he fished his wallet out of his pocket. “Claire made us stop, though. She had the constable tell everybody we were in violation of some code or another. He threatened to arrest anyone throwing chemicals into the fire. Kind of took the festivity out of the evening. Claire’s never said nothing about it, but we all know it was her doing. I can only imagine how much it cost her in donations to local law enforcement to pull it off.”
“So why keep having the fire at all?” Dee asked.
Mr. Weatherly jammed his cap on his head. “Sometimes it’s not what we do that matters so much as why we gather to do it in the first place. Besides, I guess it’s too late to change our ways now. We just go on the best we can.” Dee watched him let himself out into the icy clutches of the afternoon, snow flurries whipping around him like devils intent on making mischief, and she wondered if, more than just the bonfire, he maybe was referring to the whole damn town—leached now of its salt, frozen down to its foundations, heavy with the weight of Claire’s unborn babies. She picked up the rag again and wrung it out, trying to lighten at least one little thing around the place the best her hands could do.
In the end Dee was relieved to find that the bonfire was just as Mr. Weatherly had promised it would be. The night was pure and almost clinically cold. The stars buzzed like small insects, and as if in protest, the wood of the newly square pyre groaned and crackled as it caught fire. Dee watched people’s faces twist and dance in the orange light of the flames. The citizens of Prospect clustered into firm little groups, their hands shoved in their pockets. A few souls took deep pulls from flasks and discussed their plans for the upcoming summer, even though to Dee it seemed impossible that the world would ever thaw and that she would gaze on bright green grass again.
She stood alone. Her father had chosen to keep the diner open after all, and though folks recognized her, they didn’t
know her well enough to invite her into their huddles. She watched a group of high-school girls about her age giggling over a boy they liked, but when they saw her looking at them, their faces hardened into blank masks, and Dee quickly moved farther around the other side of the fire, thinking how just a few months ago she could have had a part in their plots and girlish plans. She stepped a little closer to the heat of the blaze and let herself, for a brief moment, regret her mother’s death and wonder what she would have made of this celebration, but before Dee could wallow too much in her own loss, she felt a hand grab her shoulder, and she knew that Whit had found her, as they’d planned.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, “before people realize I’m here.” Dee almost didn’t recognize him herself. He was wearing a watch cap like many of the other men, a dark parka, and jeans. He looked so uncomfortable that she almost burst out laughing, but then her stomach twisted at the thought of the effort he’d made to join her. She wondered where the clothes had come from but decided not to ask. With Whit it was better not to know the little details of the bigger situation.
He let her slip her arm around his waist once they were far enough away from the fire and hidden by shadows. If anyone was looking, Dee thought, they could have been any couple. All anyone would have seen was their posture of togetherness and none of the things that actually kept them separated: their different stations in life, his marriage, their ages. They skirted the edge of the green without speaking and then sauntered to the bottom of Plover Hill and the pear tree, safe in the darkness. Every now and then, a stray spark floated above them, flaring brightly at first and then fading into a white fleck of useless ash. Without preamble Whit leaned Dee up against the trunk and starting unbuttoning her pants.
“Open your legs a little more.” His voice was a hot buzz in her ear, and for a minute it sounded to her like he was asking her to open her heart, so she inched up on her toes and let him lift her thigh.
“Wait.” She tried to shift his hand out from under her leg, but things were too far gone between them, and he took her movement as an invitation to close the deal. It wasn’t unpleasant either, even if the pear tree’s bark did rub her ass an unholy pink, a fact Whit couldn’t see in the dark but one he probably would have appreciated. He liked tangible results, Dee was learning, whether it was a love rash down her neck or a toothy bruise tattooing her soft stomach. She could imagine him wanting to notch his initials into her skin the way people carved the bark of the old pear tree, nicking a crude heart around the letters and sticking them through with an arrow. The sick thing is, she probably would have let him.
She was starting to wonder if maybe she was in a bit over her head. She leaned back against the pear tree’s trunk while Whit did up his trousers, and she closed her eyes, picturing herself driving Claire’s little sports car, hands all buckled up in expensive leather gloves, hair tied inside a giant silk scarf, just like some old-time movie actress. Claire never wore a scarf that way, but if Dee had a flaming head of hair like Claire’s, she wouldn’t either.
“You still haven’t told anyone, have you?” Whit’s voice smacked her like a splintery paddle breaking up still water. Dee opened her eyes and pulled her shirt closed. In the moonlight the line of Whit’s jaw was as hard as the wood behind her back, maybe harder.
“No.” Really, she wanted to ask, who would I tell? Whit Turner might have been richer, older, and a heap and a half more educated than she was, but he was still a man, and like all men, in Dee’s opinion, he still thought with his prick.
“Good.” He leaned in close and pressed his full lips against the bottom of her throat. “I have something special for you,” he said.
They didn’t have much more time, Dee knew. She was supposed to rush back and help her father at the diner. Whit opened her hand and put something into it, and when Dee looked down, she saw a tarnished silver locket in the shape of a heart. She turned it over. On the back, in florid script, was a single W.
“So you don’t forget me.” Whit grinned.
Dee frowned. Compared to the other things he’d dangled in front of her over the past few weeks, this trinket looked shabby, like something one of those high-school boys back in Vermont would have presented to her, convinced it was as precious as all the tea in China. On the other hand, none of them had actually given her jewelry before. She should take what she could get, Dee thought. She let Whit fasten the chain around her neck.
“Don’t make that face,” he said, putting a finger under her chin. “This locket has been around longer than you have, and I just happened to find it again the other day. It means something to me. If I catch you without it”—his expression turned naughty—“I’m going to have to spank you. Although”—he turned serious again—“maybe you should tuck it under your uniform during the day. I wouldn’t want Claire seeing this.” That made Dee giggle, but Whit didn’t laugh with her. He pressed the locket into her chest, hard. “I’m not kidding,” he said. “Don’t lose this. It’s old.”
Dee shrugged. Honestly, she wasn’t interested in the old with Whit. She wanted the new. “I thought this night was supposed to be about the future,” she said with a pout. Immediately she realized she’d said something wrong.
Whit’s face closed up like a fist. “Who told you that?”
She swallowed and pushed a stray piece of hair away from her face. She was starting to shiver. “I heard about it from Mr. Weatherly,” she said vaguely. “About how the Gillys used to burn salt to predict everyone’s futures…” She trailed off into silence, the secret of the babies Claire hadn’t been able to carry a clumsy burden on her tongue. Whit waited for her to finish. “And now they don’t,” she said lamely.
Whit stepped away from her so she couldn’t see his face. When he spoke, his voice cracked. “You know nothing about my past, Dee.”
And then he was gone, melted right into the night. Except not exactly. Turns out he wasn’t as tricky as all that. There was the rustle of his footsteps through the snow for one thing, heading back up the hill to Claire, and the faint glow of his bare hands under the moon. And his scent, peeling away from Dee in long, slow strips like the pieces of paper she’d unwrap off a present she good and sure wanted to make last.
She brushed off her jeans and set to walking the long way back to Bank Street, unwilling to give up the serenity of the night for the harsh lights of the diner. She took slower and slower steps, but in spite of herself she was there before she knew it, facing the slanty windows, the crooked door, and, worst of all, the silhouette of her father, hovering behind the counter like a battle flag hoisted for a fight Dee knew she didn’t have a prayer of winning.
Weeks after the bonfire, she started craving cashews. She began carrying bags of them with her everywhere she went, her pockets bulging like the cheeks of a squirrel.
“What’s with all the nuts?” Cutt asked as she crunched yet another one of the curved kernels between her teeth at the diner’s counter. She’d eaten so many cashews in the past week that her tongue was coated with a strange white scum she couldn’t brush off in the mornings.
She shrugged. “Nothing. I just like them.”
“Since when? I thought your favorite thing was a burger and fries.”
“I’m still eating the burger and fries,” she pointed out. “It’s just that now I’m also eating cashews.”
Cutt squinted at her. “You have circles under your eyes.”
Dee tucked her arms around her chest. Her breasts ached, and she was crabby. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“And what’s with the ratty clothes? Did you lose an argument with a mower?”
She stared down at her faded gray corduroy pants and the navy blue sweater with a hole in one elbow. “They’re clean.”
Cutt snorted. “They look like they’ve been used to clean. Go put on your uniform. It’s hanging in the utility closet.” While she was fetching her work clothes Dee closed her eyes, and Whit’s serious, square jaw swam into view, followed by the m
emory of the fleshy pockets of his palms, the hollow at the bottom of his neck, and the broad ripple of muscle that was his back. There was a spot in between his ribs where, if Dee held her palm, she could feel his heart beating. Since the bonfire they’d still been meeting, but he’d talked even less than usual, and he hadn’t given her anything since the locket. The floor seemed to lurch slightly under her, and she let out a little burp, remembering she was supposed to go change clothes. Her father was waiting for her with the mop when she came back.
“You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?” he asked, peering at her with suspicion. Beads of sweat broke out on Dee’s forehead. Whit had warned her about a thousand and one times that she’d better not let a soul know what they were up to—especially not her father, he’d said, pressing the hard tips of his fingers into the soft upper chunks of her arms. When he’d pulled his hands away, he’d left little dents. At the time Dee had liked it, but now she wished she could get rid of the feeling. She was starting to suspect that once bestowed, Whit’s gifts weren’t so easily disposed of, and she hadn’t thought to worry about that. It had never occurred to her that he might give her something he wouldn’t be willing to take back.
“Nope,” she said, grabbing the mop and avoiding her father’s eyes. “No boys. I’m over boys for good.” That was true. Whit was all man.
“Fine, then,” Cutt said, turning away from her. “I don’t know what guys would want with you anyway. You’re not really the kind of girl they’d marry, Dee.”
She reached for another cashew and crunched it. Given the fact that she was pregnant with Whit’s child, wedlock was turning out to be more problematic for her than Cutt would even begin to guess.