I slink back to the dining room, where Enola is telling Leah about the animal tents at the Florida State Fair and Doyle, thankfully, is using his fork. Alice returns with the coffee as though nothing happened and the rest of the meal is unremarkable, except for my shame. Dinner is over when Leah sighs and clears the coffee cups. Alice rises to help and Doyle and Enola scoot for the door.
“Simon, stay,” Frank says before I can leave. “Have a beer with me.”
“No, no. I need to get back.” I say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” yet I wind up on the porch, holding a beer. Our shadows are framed by the silhouettes of horseshoe crabs drying on the railing.
“I don’t feel right about taking your money, Frank.”
“What else are you going to do? Can’t let the place fall in.” He takes a pull from his bottle. “You can pay it off like a loan.”
I don’t want to talk about money anymore. “Enola said you gave her my mom’s tarot cards.”
“Did I?” He scratches his head.
“Right before she left. You gave them to her.”
“Ah, I remember. They weren’t the sort of thing you’d expressed interest in. Enola came by, said she was traveling like your mom did.” He drinks. I do the same. “It felt like giving them back to your mother.”
“Why didn’t my dad have them?”
“Paulina and I were close, I was just as much her friend as his. I knew her one day longer than your dad. I’m the reason they met.” He taps his foot, tap, tap, tap, twitching out the story. “It was the hottest damned summer and nobody was taking boats out because the sun would bake you until your skin split. Her show was in town, I forget the name of it.”
“Carnival Lareille.”
“Lareille, that’s right. Don’t get old — you hit my age and you’ve forgotten more than you’ve ever learned.” He drains his beer and looks across the street to where lights pulse in the front room of my house. Doyle at play. “I figured I’d have a drink, cool off on some of the rides, maybe meet a girl. I saw a line outside this tent where you could get your fortune told. I thought what the hell, and there she was. Prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Your mom, she was striking.”
I’ve heard my father’s side, how Frank had taken him to the show the next night, how that night Mom had been a mermaid in a glass tank, holding her breath for impossible lengths of time, how he loved her at first sight.
“What did she tell you?”
“That I’d find a good woman and that my life would settle, even though you long to drift like a boat, she said. She was good.” He stands up, stretches his back, and sets his empty bottle on the porch railing. “Your mom gave me the cards before,” he gestures to the water. “I guess it was her way of saying goodbye. Wish I’d known.”
She’d told me goodbye and I hadn’t known either. “Was she acting strange at all?”
Frank coughs. “Strange was relative with your mother. If she’d seemed different to me or your dad we would have tied her down to stop her.” He looks at my beer and grunts, “Drink up. I’ll show you the shop and we’ll talk about you paying me back. I’d straight up give you money, but the wife would murder me if Alice didn’t skin me first. Something going on with you two? She looked ready to kill you all night.”
“Not that I know of.” Not anymore. He steers me behind the house to the large barn that serves as his workshop.
I’ve looked at the workshop but have never been inside; it was off-limits growing up. The walls are lined with tools, vises, lathes, saws, and things I can’t begin to know the purpose of. At the end of the barn are two drafting tables. Frank leans against one. In the heart of the room a boat’s skeleton waits for its skin.
“Sloop?” I ask, shrugging at the frame.
“Too small for a sloop. A dory, or will be.” He makes a note on a drawing. “You’ll learn. You can work the money off with me, do some of the first part of the finishing, the first sealing coats, nothing detailed. If you do get a job you can work weekends.”
Alice must have told him I was let go. I told her nothing about the house or the money — I broke more rules than she did — but still, it was my failing to disclose.
Behind the drafting table, just past his head, is the most extraordinary thing: a huge dark purple curtain that hangs the full length of the wall. By all appearances it’s velvet. Something about it reminds me of sketches from the book. Curtains drawn over a cage, drapes on the inside of a wagon. “Where’d you get that?”
“What?”
“That’s a theatrical curtain.” At the bottom there’s a chain to weigh it down and seal out light. “Seems out of place in a workshop.” I look around the barn and see a series of small portraits in oval frames hanging in the open wall spaces. Relatives? There’s something vaguely Slavic about them, the moustaches on the men, the curved shape of a young woman’s brow.
“It keeps the glare off the drawings in the afternoon and shuts out drafts in the winter. Was in a box of stuff that belonged to my dad. The pictures were in there too.”
“Family heirlooms, then.”
He shrugs. “Guess so.”
“Do you know anything about them?”
“Nope. I never really went in for heirloom stuff. Things are things, you know? I just like them. They make the place look a little nicer, keep it warm.”
There’s a knock on the barn door, Leah with more beer. I refuse but a bottle winds up in my hand. Leah leans in to kiss her husband’s cheek and brush sawdust from his shoulder, gestures made soft by habit. Out one of the windows I can see the Sound all the way to the harbor. The lights from the ferry amble toward Middle Ground Light and eventually Connecticut. People spend their entire lives moving back and forth over the same water, moving but staying.
When my bottle thumps on the drafting table it startles the both of us. A wide sweat mark swipes across the drawing, blurring the ink. I look back up at the curtains. They couldn’t be the same ones, of course. But they’re striking, individual, but very familiar. My eyes come to rest on the oval-shaped painting of a bearded man. His gaze is unsettling. I should check in the book for him, just in case. If only to prove that I’m imagining things.
“The paintings, are they relatives?”
“Might be. Don’t really know. Like I said, they were in a box with the curtains and some of my dad’s things. They were probably my grandfather’s. I think I remember seeing them at his place when I was a kid. He kind of liked to accumulate things.”
The bearded man stares back at me, demanding I look at him, look for him. I’m sure I’ve seen that face staring out at me from a page. “Frank, I’m sorry. I need to go.”
Enola and Doyle are lying on their backs in the sea grass by the bluff, looking at the stars. Enola has one hand behind her head, and the other tucked away in her pocket. The cards again. They don’t notice when I walk past.
* * *
The book is on my desk, closed as I’d left it. I start at the beginning, methodically searching for sketches, here a drawing of a tiny horse, one of what looks to be a llama, and there, the frame of a skeleton — the very beginning of a tarot card. A note about shoes and boots, costuming, a wig — and there they are, the curtains — draped over what looks like an animal cage with a young boy sitting inside. Not ten pages after, sketches of a wagon interior, hung with small oval paintings. And after, yes, there is the painting of the bearded man — Peabody’s rendition. I’ve seen the actual thing; it’s more eastern, the book’s sketch vaguely anglicized. An interpretation.
Churchwarry picks up and asks me to wait while he gets rid of someone on the other line. “Dante fanatic. Insufferable man. Thinks he’s my only customer,” he says. “Did you get Binding Charms?”