Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [26]
Elaine had one of the houses on the island that was not quaint or dripping with gingerbread bric a brac. It was a 1950’s ranch-style house and someone had attached a second story to it. Rocky arrived with a bottle of wine and seltzer water, even after Elaine had said, “No, this is my welcome to you. I’m already guilty of bad manners for letting you be here for months before I invited you in. Maybe I’m that way because of all the summer people; there’s too many of them to get to know.”
Fresh tomato sauce filled the house with an abundant smell that drenched Rocky with sharp images of Bob eating more pasta than humanly possible and suffering with burps that smelled like compost. Rocky suddenly remembered that she liked pasta and bread and butter, but she couldn’t remember the last time that she prepared it. She handed over her offerings to Elaine.
Elaine turned her head to the door leading into the living room and Rocky remembered what her college roommate said about the fundamental difference in facial features. Some faces were destined to be finely chiseled in marble; others were best described in soft clay. Elaine was in the clay category, soft round cheeks, the start of a furrow between her eyebrows.
“Honey, it’s dinner,” said Elaine to the open doorway. Rocky had not seen anyone else with Elaine when they passed each other on the dirt road. She waited to see who honey was.
A young girl appeared, with her hair pulled back tight, her ears sticking out like a mouse. She wore bulky sweatpants, running shoes, and a T-shirt with a partially zipped-up sweatshirt.
“Melissa, this is our neighbor, Rocky. This is my daughter.”
Rocky felt the hit first in her solar plexus, where she always felt it. She put her hand out to Melissa and got back not a solid athlete’s grasp but a cold, dry reluctant hand. Even as the two hands touched, Melissa offered a profound determination to pull away. The skin on Melissa’s face was tight, but because she was young, no one was yet alarmed. Before Rocky could stop herself, she said, “Track or cross-country? Let me guess, you do both.”
Elaine, who was taking the cork out of the wine bottle, stopped in mid pull. “How did you know?”
Rocky flicked a glance at the girl. “I’ve known a few cross-country people. Really, it was the shoes. You wear them only if you really mean business.”
Elaine asked her the sort of questions that she dreaded: where did she came from, what did she do before being an animal control warden. She had settled on a stock answer. “No children, used to work in child care, not married, just coming out of a relationship, and trying out the island.” She was surprised at how well her answers worked, how easy it was to change who she was. Rocky was more comfortable asking the questions and quickly turned it to Melissa.
“I haven’t seen you with your mother before,” said Rocky.
“I stay at my Dad’s in Portland some of the time. Every other weekend. Sometimes more if I have school stuff.”
Elaine’s mouth tightened up as if she had set her teeth together. “We’ve done it for so long, I sort of forget that it must sound strange. We’ve been divorced since Melissa was eight.”
Rocky didn’t have to watch long to see what Melissa was doing with her dinner. The girl patted her stomach and said, “I’m so full from eating after I ran, I don’t know how much I can eat.” She put lettuce, sprouts, and cucumber slices on her plate. She went to the fridge and got a lemon, and squeezed it on her salad. Then she put a golfball-sized portion of spaghetti on her plate with a tablespoon of sauce. She elaborately sliced the cucumber into eight pieces like a pie. The spaghetti was pushed around and rearranged without one strand going into her mouth. She ate a mushroom from the sauce and suddenly stopped.
“Did you put oil in the sauce, Mom?”
“Oil? No. Well, I had to use a tiny bit of oil