[title subtitle=”fiction: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
Tandy was starving. For twenty-two hours he’d driven; for eight of those, the windshield wipers worked full speed, the rain like a river drowning his old Chevy truck. Back home in Arkansas the drought was the worst in fifty years. Wildfires sprang up, the foundations of houses cracked as the ground shriveled beneath them, and roofers brave enough to show up for work found stacks of shingles melting on shorn rooftops.
He’d passed Leo’s Diner, its neon sign glowing pink, and then turned back. The road was empty here, the whoosh of water keeping sensible people at home. He heard the lyrics from “It Never Rains in California” sweep through his brain, his mother’s favorite song. What would she think? he wondered, if she knew he’d driven all the way to Swami’s Beach, with only a vague sense of how to get to California and a map he found in his glove compartment that was printed in 1989.
Inside, a carousel of pies turned in a glass case. Coffee mugs sat upside down on the scratched, mismatched tables. Something loud and frenetic was playing on the radio, some band he would have known if he’d kept up with music, although he had not.
The waitress, a stout twenty-something with a tattoo of a dolphin that peeked through the neckline of her tank top and swam toward her throat, brought him water in a red plastic tumbler.
“What brings you out on a day like this?” she asked.
Tandy wiped the rain from his face with a fistful of paper napkins. “Just, you know, out for a drive.”
She tilted her head and looked at him, and he felt the way he did when his mother accused him of some wrong he had not been guilty of, yet still felt remorse for.
“What can I bring you?” she asked.
“What’s good?” he asked, and he realized he was twisting his watch back and forth across his wrist.
The waitress nodded to the board where a dozen choices were written in pastel chalk. Omelet, spaghetti and zinfandel were misspelled.“That’s everything we have,” she said, and tapped her pen against the green pad she had pulled from her pocket.
Tandy ordered the spaghetti and wine and coconut cream pie, something Laurie would have hated. Laurie counted calories —well, she counted Weight Watchers points — the math a foreign language to Tandy. If she had the pie, she’d starve for a week. He looked at his watch. It was six at night, on the money, back in Arkansas. Laurie would be home by now. He wondered if she’d miss him.
The breakup was so quick he was still trying to sort it out. He said he wasn’t happy and she asked who was. She folded her arms across her chest, a defensive move he’d seen her do a thousand times, he supposed. He said he was looking for adventure, and until the moment he said it, he had not known how true it was.
“Adventure? You won’t even go dancing,” Laurie said. She looked him up and down. She narrowed her eyes. She seemed to hate what she was seeing.
“Dancing, well no, I wouldn’t go dancing,” Tandy said. “I’d go and watch you, I guess.” He frowned, knowing he never would. “I was thinking more about learning to sail. Figure out what a boom is, where the heck starboard is.”
Even to Tandy, it sounded lame. If he sailed it would be on a lake where the bass boats would fight him, where power boats would crush him in their wake.
“Sounds like a plan,” Laurie said, and turned to walk away. But then she turned back, she touched her throat. She put one hand on her hip. “Sail away, Tandy. You might as well. You’ve been drifting away from me for months.”
Tandy’s mother used to say, “Every marriage is a mystery.” He’d thought it was a beautiful expression, but now he knew better. She must have been saying, “How the heck does anyone tolerate another through the mundane days that make up an entire lifetime?” Maybe he’d only lived with Laurie because he was trying to trick a system that couldn’t be tricked. I’m thirty-one, he thought, and I just had a straight-up epiphany.
By then Laurie was on the phone, the bedroom door ajar. She was telling someone on the other end how hard it was to live with Tandy. “Daddy,” she said, “was either mad or happy. That I understand. Oh, he’d yell, of course, but then he’d get over it. This brooding business is for the birds.” There was a pause, and Laurie’s voice dropped. “No,” she said, “you’re not a bit moody. You’re straight-up perfect.”
So Tandy grabbed his backpack and stuffed in a week’s worth of clothes. He hoped Laurie would tell him to stop, would explain the call, but she only stood in the doorway, looking the way you do when you watch the polar bears at the zoo for the umpteenth time. A little curious maybe, but ninety-nine percent sure there’s nothing they can do that has the power to surprise you.
The waitress brought Tandy’s food. He breathed deep, stretched his weary arms, and then pulled his phone from his jacket pocket and checked again to see if Laurie had called. She had not. He hit the camera icon and snapped a picture of the table, the first time he’d ever taken a food photo. It was something his sister did all the time — the too-skinny sister who talked about food the way evangelists discussed the Bible. He then tore into the pie, pushing the spaghetti aside. He drank the zinfandel quickly, and asked for more.
“You got a name?” the waitress asked, and Tandy told her.
“I’m Merrill,” she said. “You look weary.”
It took Tandy off guard. “I believe I am.”
And then she sat down heavily in the chair across from him, smelling like tomato sauce and strong coffee. The diner, which was about the size of an RV, shook when a semi drove by. Merrill lifted her foot and put it on the chair beside her. She had on red flip flops, a bad choice for a waitress, he thought, and a toe ring on her pudgy middle toe.
“You’re not from around here,” Merrill said. “You sound like you could be on that TV show Nashville. “
“I’m from Arkansas,” Tandy said. “Pretty place. Mountains, deer everywhere, pine forests.”
“So what brings you here?” Merrill asked. “Work? No, that’s not right, is it? And you don’t look like a man on vacation.” Merrill tapped her forehead. “I know, woman trouble. Definitely woman trouble.”
“Yeah,” Tandy answered, his face growing hot.
“Me, I got man trouble. All the time. Like serious man issues, but I never stop. Just go from one Joe to the next. At some point, my grandmother used to say, you have to believe somebody’s BS, because it’s all BS. That’s where I mess up. I believe everybody’s I love you and you’re my soul-mate and I only need the money ‘til payday.”
Merrill rubbed her eyes, leaving tracks of mascara under her dark eyes. The ends of her black braids shone Kool-Aid orange in the fluorescent light. There was a rash around her left ring finger in a wide circle.
“Married?” Tandy asked.
“Not hardly” Merrill said, and then laughed, a little too loud, Tandy thought. “There was this guy. His name was Jonathan. Used to wear his football ring on my wedding finger — California state high school champions 1999 — but I gave it back last week.”
“Sorry,” Tandy said, but Merrill brushed off the apology. “Nothing to be sorry about. He was nice enough — liked to gamble more than he should have — Vegas and what not. Mostly though, he just wanted someone to look after him, wash his clothes, tell him when to shave. Felt a little creepy after a while. Like this one time when we were fighting, I swear I almost said, ‘Jonathan, go to your room!’ That’s when I knew.”
The jukebox was quiet now. Rain thrummed against the plate glass windows. The ice machine started up, a churning sound that rumbled across the space.
Merrill reached over and took Tandy’s hand. He wound his fingers between hers, amazed at how easy it was.
“I get off in about an hour,” Merrill said. “I could show you around Encinitas. Nice places to see if the rain stops. I have a friend who has a boat,” Merrill said, and pointed past the rain-soaked parking lot.
“A sailboat?” Tandy asked, and felt his pulse racing.
“How’d you know?” Merrill asked.
Tandy smiled.“I had a feeling,” he said.
“You ever been sailing?”
“Nah, not much sailing going on in Arkansas.”
“It’s not a big one,” Merrill said. “Twelve footer, one sail, built before I was born. But I can sail it as easy as I can breathe.” She pulled her hand away from Tandy and rubbed her thumb across her forehead. “You won’t believe how much you’ll love it. On the water, away from all this, nothing else matters. Your woman trouble, my man trouble, it won’t matter. If I could marry the water, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d do it in a second. No BS out on the water.” She looked as if she might cry. “The water just…” she stopped for a second and then said “The water just is.”
Tandy felt his mood lighten. “What about adventure?” he asked.
Merrill nodded. She tapped the dolphin tattoo on her chest, once, twice, three times. “Sure,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “Adventure. Mystery. It’s all there.”
Tandy peered out the windows. The bed of his truck looked like a watering trough. Back home the earth cracked, the farmers met at the truck stop to bellyache over lost crops. Ranchers were selling off cattle. Nothing to feed them. Laurie would be watching House Hunters now, like it was a game show. If the couple didn’t pick the house she did, she’d throw the remote at the TV. Tandy reached for his wallet. He had enough cash to last a week, two if he was careful. Merrill smiled at him. She had a little gap between her two front teeth, and he thought she was beautiful.
Just then, his phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket and there on the screen was Laurie’s name.
If he answered it, he might not have the nerve to stay where he was. He looked back at Merrill, who had started to clear the table. She’d placed his wine glass atop two white plates, and the glass was listing to the right. The rain slowed and the sun broke through. Merrill seemed to glow in it. He shut off his phone and put it away, deep in his pocket, so far out of sight it hardly even mattered.
