Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [11]
“Sniff?” Victoria asked, and then breathed in deeply through her nose. “Sniff what?”
“Exactly my point,” Clarise said. “There’s nothing. Nothing to smell but the sweetness of this Dixie Peach hair grease.” Clarise moved across the table to do Bliss’s bang. Both Bliss and Shern had stopped arguing, and all three were starkly silent, the perplexity of their mother’s words hanging over the breakfast room.
“Nothing, just nothing,” Clarise continued to mutter.
“Huh?” Bliss asked.
“Don’t say ‘Huh,’” Clarise snapped. She yanked on Bliss’s hair when she said it. “Say, ‘Excuse me, please, I didn’t understand you.’”
“Excuse me, please, I didn’t understand you.” Bliss rubbed her scalp where her mother had just yanked her head and started to cry. “I’m sorry, Mommie.”
“Okay, okay, don’t cry, my darling.” Clarise rubbed Bliss’s scalp and kissed her forehead. “Mommie didn’t mean to hurt you, but you must speak correct English, and you must learn to read the signs.”
“Signs?” All three girls looked at their mother and hardly breathed as if she were about to explain to them the meaning of life on earth.
“Where are the brownies?” Clarise shouted it and banged the table.
They stared at Clarise with frightened circle eyes and were quiet as deer until Victoria smacked herself on the forehead with the revelation that this was Tuesday night, and their mother was not talking in some kind of code but actually meant brownies.
“Hey, where are the brownies?” Victoria asked. “It is Tuesday night after all.”
“And we don’t smell the brownies, right, Mommie? Isn’t that what you meant when you told Tori to sniff?” Bliss asked.
“You mean, Daddy’s not in his studio making them?” Shern asked. Clarise was rolling Shern’s hair around a curler now, and Shern wished she had a thousand more to do. Her mother’s hands were so warm and hard against her forehead, her fingers dancing on her forehead as she locked the curler in place. She just wanted the feel of her mother’s fingers to dull the sharp breaths of worry catching in her throat. “Does that mean something’s terribly wrong, Mommie?” Shern asked.
“Is something wrong with Daddy?” Bliss whined.
“My girls are so bright,” Clarise said. “I’ve been blessed with such smart, geniuslike girls.”
“What is it, Mommie? We can handle it, whatever it is. Please tell us what’s wrong with Daddy,” Victoria begged. “Where is he anyhow? I was sure he was in his studio.” Victoria let a sob slip through even though she wanted to be strong and mature amid this dark cloud of a revelation that was hanging over the gold-candled chandelier in the kitchen and getting ready to fall on their heads.
“Please tell us, Mommie.” Bliss got up from her seat and jumped up and down. “Please, Mommie, please. Tell us what’s wrong with Daddy.”
“Is it really bad?” Victoria cried openly now despite her attempts to act mature.
“It is something terrible, isn’t it?” Shern neither cried nor begged. She sat up straight as a board and stared at her mother, trying to let her emotions neither out nor in. She just wanted not to feel, as she watched her mother’s face, her beautiful, exotic face, go from pale to flushed to a blankness that looked like grief.
“Now I smell the sea,” Clarise said as she stared into the darkening breakfast room. “It’s an oily smell tinged with the sweet, sour scent of your father’s breath.”
At that instant Finch’s breath was mixing with the sea as he clung to the side of the crabbing boat that had just spilled his catch—his brainchildren that were going to redirect his business, his precious crabs—and him into the sea’s demanding arms. He’d stayed out too long, he now realized. “Be back by sunset,” his second cousin had warned. “This sea does a strange thing at sunset, and my boat seen better days.” But the catch had been so substantial: the crabs had just climbed into his net as if they were saying, “Take me, Finch. I’ll be a part of your all-you-can-eat buffet.” He was so excited and laughing and counting the money to be made as he hauled in net after net he didn