The Cove Page 5

  Biting his lower lip, Ben shook his head, wishing to God she would let it drop.

  “So tell me. Why ‘Gunner?’”

  “It’s slang for — for …” He shrugged and let it drop, hoping she wouldn’t pick it up.

  Julia started to say something but then caught herself and started smiling broadly. Then she laughed out loud.

  “Oh, I get it … Gunner,” she said.

  In spite of his embarrassment, Ben was charmed by the mischievous light in her eyes.

  “I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on you,” she said.

  Ben had no idea what to say to that, but before he could say anything, Wally took a hard turn to port and came around so they were heading back to the harbor. The boat bounced hard over its own wake, and Ben used the rocking motion to shift even closer to Julia. His body tensed, and he was waiting for rejection as he slid his arm around behind her. His smile widened when she leaned hard against him, not rejecting him at all.

  For the first time, he thought about how good it was to be back home.

  The sounds of festivities still going on down on the wharf receded as Ben and Julia made their way up the slope back to the parking lot behind the fire station. They walked slowly, and Ben found himself struggling to think of some clever way to draw out their time together.

  “You sure you have to get back?” he asked. He kicked at a tuft of weeds and sent a spray of dandelion seeds flying.

  Julia nodded. She had her hands clasped behind her back and walked with a swing in her step that was charmingly little girlish. Ben found it incredibly attractive, and he was desperate not to let her leave him. Not yet. They were silent until they got to her car. Then she turned around and, leaning her back against the car, took a deep breath. She smiled as she looked up at the perfectly cloudless sky. High overhead, a seagull wheeled in a wide circle.

  “Thanks for a fun morning,” Julia said.

  “And afternoon,” Ben added as he glanced out over the town to the clock on the Congregation Church steeple. It showed that it was a little after one o’clock.

  Where did the time go? he wondered.

  Ben wanted to reach out and touch her but knew it wouldn’t be right to hug and kiss her even though that’s exactly what he wanted to do. Shaking hands certainly wasn’t going to cut it, was it?

  “I was thinking —” he began, but he stopped when she lowered her gaze and looked straight into his eyes. Her brown eyes sparkled like chocolate melting in the sun. The coy smile she gave him was almost too much to bear.

  “Thinking what?” she said.

  Ben cleared his throat and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He didn’t like how nervous he felt standing next to her without taking her into his arms.

  Ease off, dude, a voice in his mind whispered.

  “I was thinking maybe we should hang out sometime.”

  Julia’s smile widened, exposing her teeth.

  “’Hang out.’ That sounds so quaint.”

  This was at least the third time she had called something he said “quaint.” Ben couldn’t tell if she was making fun of him or not.

  “Yeah … I suspect things at The Local will be howling until all hours tonight. You want to see a slice of what life is really like in The Cove, you ought to come down later.”

  “Sorry. Not tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “I … can’t.”

  There was a finality in her voice that told Ben not to push any harder.

  “Some other time, maybe” she said. “That’d be great.”

  “Cool,” Ben said and immediately cursed himself for sounding like a nervous high school kid who was trying to ask the head cheerleader to the prom. Would Julia think saying cool was “quaint,” too?

  “Well …” she said. “I should get back and make lunch for my dad. He’ll be wondering where I am.”

  Saying that, though, she didn’t make a move to get into her car.

  Is she waiting for something? Ben wondered.

  He started leaning forward to give her a quick hug — nothing sexual … a friendly hug … nothing more — but she sensed what was coming and twisted away. She appeared to be laughing to herself as she opened the car door and sat down on the seat. Her hands gripped the steering wheel.

  Ben held the door open for her and, once she was settled, nodded to her and swung it shut. He looked at her through the window, surprised by the intensity of his longing to hold her in his arms and kiss her.

  What the hell is happening here? he wondered.

  But it didn’t matter.

  He’d been without a woman — without any women — in his life for too long. It was good to feel this kind of attraction again, even if it never went anywhere.

  Julia rolled her window down and smiled up at him, her teeth gleaming in the sunlight.

  “Give me a call, then. We’ll do something sometime,” she said.

  “Absolutely.”

  Ben raised his hand and gave her a little wave as she started up her car. The engine ran with a smooth purr.

  “Your number’s in the phone book?”

  “The only ‘Capozzas’ on Steeple Road.”

  Ben was still smiling as she shifted the car into reverse and backed around. Her tires raised a thin cloud of dust that drifted into his face as she drove away. She tooted the horn once and stuck her hand out the window to wave goodbye. Ben waved after her and watched the dust slowly settle onto his sneakers. It filled his nostrils with a dryness that instantly reminded him of Iraq, but he pushed such thoughts aside as he watched her car disappear around the corner.

  Even after it was gone, he didn’t move.

  He was listening to the quickly receding sound of her engine and the tires on pavement. Once she crested the hill, the sounds were gone. Only then did he turn around and start down the hill toward the wharf where the party was still going full steam.

  “There you go, Dad.”

  Julia smiled as she placed the paper plate with an egg salad sandwich, neatly cut into quarters, onto the placemat in front of her father. She walked over to the counter and got her own lunch — a bowl of freshly hulled strawberries topped with whipped cream — and sat down at the table opposite her father.

  She watched, not eating yet as he reached for his sandwich. His hand was shaking out of control, and it was painfully obvious that his Parkinson’s was getting worse. As he gripped the wedge of bread and raised it to his mouth, globs of egg salad squeezed out and dropped onto the table and landed in his lap. Julia started to get up and come to him to clean up the mess, but she checked herself. He’d make an even worse mess before the meal was over, she was sure.

  Frank Capozza, her father, was losing his battle with Parkinson’s disease. It had come on him slowly, at first registering as a slight tremor in his hands and sometimes as an almost imperceptible nodding of his head as if he had started to drift off to sleep and then caught himself. He had fought it bravely for many years, staying rock solid throughout his wife’s illness and death. After that, as if on cue, the debilitating disease had surged along his nerves like wildfire, reducing his muscles to useless, dead tissue.

  Most days, his hands shook so badly he could no longer hold a newspaper or book. His head bobbed up and down like it was attached to a too-loose hinge. His voice, once so strong and commanding — especially when he was on a job site, overseeing the crew laying floor tiles or grouting a bathroom wall — rattled now like dice being shaken in a cup. Getting around the house these days was more shuffling than walking. He wore out a pair of bedroom slippers — which is all he ever wore — about every month. Frank’s mind was still sharp, though, and he took every increased failing of his body personally and with simmering resentment.

  Meals were the worst. They had become a battleground because Frank was determined to feed himself, to exert enough control over his muscles to propel his hand to his mouth, no matter how long it took. But his nerves were no longer receiving coherent messages from his bra
in, and they were as likely to bring his hand down to his lap or — worse — lock his arm in a spasm that would fling food across the room. He fiercely declined any offer of help from Julia, and she was growing increasingly worried about how feeble he was and how much weight her once robust father had lost. Since mid-winter, he looked nearly skeletal.

  Today’s meal was going well, at least so far. Within minutes, two triangles of the sandwich were gone, and other than that first mess, there was only a light yellow smear of egg yolk across his left cheek. It looked like he had tried to paint his face with mustard.

  “How ’bout a strawberry?” she asked.

  Before he answered, she bit into a big one and closed her eyes for a moment, savoring the explosion of sweetness and the crunch of the tiny seeds.

  Frank shook his head as though an insect was buzzing around him, and he was trying to shoo it away.

  “You look happy today, Jewel,” he said after a moment. “Did something happen I don’t know about?”

  “I dunno. Maybe,” Julia said. “I’m not sure.” She smiled distantly, wishing she knew the answer to that herself. Realizing she was drifting away, thinking about Ben, she blinked her eyes and focused on her dad. “But never mind me. You eat. Strawberry?”

  He nodded, and she held out a plump berry to him before realizing he couldn’t possibly reach across the table to get it. Standing up, she went to his side and knelt down beside him, positioned to pop the strawberry into his mouth when he gained enough control to open it. After what looked like a great effort — an effort that ignited his rage — he managed to drop his bottom jaw open. When he closed his lips and bit down on the strawberry, a thin stream of pink juice trickled from the corner of his mouth. Julia took his napkin and quickly wiped it away, then went back to her chair.

  She watched intently as he focused on his hand, willing it to rise and pick up another triangle of sandwich and bring it to his mouth. She studied the back of his hand, remembering the thick tangle of black hairs that had once covered his hands, wrists, and forearms. Now, the hair was sparse and as white as tiny threads of cotton. The skin beneath was almost translucent, lined with blue veins and sprinkled with coffee-stain age spots.

  How could this be the same man who, when she was a little girl, had greeted her so cheerfully when he came home from working at the tile company by swinging her up over his head time and again, tossing her into the air where she experienced a thrilling moment of freefall, and then catching her, safe and secure in big, strong hands?

  Her eyes misted as she recalled the stories he’d told her about his youth as a street kid who was tough enough to run with the Rockets, one of the Italian gangs who ruled the streets of Waterbury, Connecticut, back in the early fifties. But he also had been tender hearted and gallant enough to win the heart and, eventually, the hand of Patricia Corsetti, the prettiest girl at Holy Cross High School.

  Now he looked so feeble … so helpless.

  It wasn’t fair.

  “Yikes. Watch it there, Dad,” she said when his fingers suddenly clenched and squeezed another glob of egg salad onto his lap. It landed with a dull plopping sound. Julia started to get up again, but he glared at her.

  “I don’t need your damned help,” he said. His voice was tight with command, but it was so shaky the effect wasn’t quite what he’d obviously intended. After a moment, his expression collapsed, and he looked at her with a pitiful look that couldn’t hide his repressed frustration.

  Julia leaned back in her chair and popped a strawberry into her mouth, trying to make it look as though his outburst hadn’t affected her in the least as she chewed and swallowed. But how could it not when her frustration with her own circumstances was probably as intense as his?

  Her father finally managed to get another mouthful of sandwich without mishap. He chewed noisily, his features relaxing slightly. As soon as he swallowed, he looked at Julia again and said, “You’re just like your mother, you know that?”

  “How so?”

  “I mean, you wear your heart on your sleeve.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, I ask you if something happened to you today, and you don’t say a word, but it’s clear as day something happened. I can tell by the look in your eyes.”

  “I’m that transparent?”

  Julia wasn’t sure if he nodded in agreement or if his head started shaking up and down because of his condition.

  “To me, you are … So tell me. What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. I went to the boat launch down at Huckins Wharf this morning.”

  “A boat launch? Are you sure that’s all?”

  They were both silent for several seconds as Frank tried to take another bite of sandwich. Julia was breathing heavily. Again, she had to fight the urge to get up and help him. She couldn’t stand to watch him struggle so much, but she knew that his pride wouldn’t allow him to give in. He took any assistance only grudgingly.

  “Yeah …” she finally said. “They were launching a new lobster boat, and I went to check it out. I wanted to see what the big to-do was all about.” She paused and took a breath as she thought about her too-short time with Ben. “You want another strawberry?”

  “Eat, eat, eat … All the time with you, it’s eat.”

  “You have to keep your strength up, Dad.”

  Frank looked at her and then lowered his gaze, his scowl deepening. Julia knew that his unasked question was: Keep my strength up for what?

  “So who is he?” her father said after another long silence. He rested his hands on the edge of the table, where they twitched, his fingernails clicking like insects on the wood next to his placemat.

  “Who’s who?” Julia asked with an innocent shrug, but she fidgeted because she knew that he knew.

  “It’s obvious you met someone, and from the glow on your face, I’d say it was a man. So tell me. Who is he?”

  Julia smiled thinly and shook her head, finally yielding. It was so like her dad to see through her like this. Growing up, she had never been able to get away with any mischief … not much, anyway … not when her dad was around. It was only once she was in high school, and he was spending eighty hours and more a week at his tile business that she had started acting out.

  “Ben … His name’s Ben Brown.

  Frank lowered his gaze, his eyes crinkling at the corners. His head kept jerking up and down like it was tied to a string someone standing behind him was yanking.

  “So who’s this Ben Brown character?”

  “He lives in town,” she said, ignoring the slight jab. “He’s a soldier … just got back from Iraq.” She could feel herself warming up just being able to speak about Ben to someone. “His family’s lived here, like, forever, fishing … lobstering. His father was the one launching the new boat.”

  “That would be Walter Brown, correct?”

  Julia nodded, wondering but not asking how her father knew about Capt’n Wally.

  “It was kinda interesting,” she said, hoping to evade any more direct questions about Ben. “Practically the whole town turned out for it. I was surprised by what a big deal it was.”

  “It’s a big deal, I guess, in a town like this.”

  “I think most of the people turned out for the free food and booze,” Julia said with a tight smile. She cringed at the memory of bumping into Tom at the celebrations.

  “That, too,” her father said, “but if they were good, decent Catholics, they would have had a priest come down and bless the boat.”

  “I didn’t see a priest around.”

  “Not surprised,” Frank said, his head shaking. He started to reach for his last piece of sandwich, but suddenly his arm locked in another spasm. With a guttural curse, he brought his fist down on the table hard enough to make the silverware and plates jump.

  Julia got up and hurried over to him. Her chest was tight with tension as she wrapped her arms around him and held him close.

  “Hug me,” she said, her voice
muffled against him as she fought back tears. “Don’t say a word … Just hug me.”

  It would do no good to cry in front of her father. Tears were for later … once she was alone …

  Her father raised his right arm and draped it over her shoulder. Muscle tremors vibrated through his body as he tried to pull her close, but there was so little strength in his embrace it felt like a wind-blown tree branch was grazing her back.

  And as she clung tightly to him she thought, Is that what Ben Brown is? A chance to — finally — beat the odds?

  It was getting late, but for the die-hards, the party was just getting started. Throughout the afternoon, as food and drink ran out, people migrated up the hill to The Local. Once the sun started to set, the place was packed. Music, mostly indistinguishable heavy metal mixed occasionally with some twangy country songs, was buried beneath the cacophony of voices in shouted conversations and laughter. It was impossible to tell if there were any genuine arguments going on or if people were simply shouting to be heard. If the state hadn’t banned smoking in bars, there would have been a multi-layered haze of cigarette and other types of smoke hovering overhead. Instead, people went outside, lit up and smoked, and then came back in, picking up right where they had left off.

  By eight o’clock, Ben was buzzed. Not as bad as some people in the bar, but he certainly had had more to drink than he was used to. The problem was, friend after friend and even a few people he wasn’t all that fond of came up and congratulated him for making it back home alive, unlike those poor kids from South Portland and a bunch of other towns in Maine who didn’t make it. They bought him round after round, making Ben wonder how long these good feelings would last.

  Probably not the night.

  It would have been impolite to refuse, so by nine o’clock, he was well on his way to being looped.

  Most of the questions and comments he heard were exactly what he’d expected. He went on automatic until his responses pretty much became a mantra: He hadn’t done anything special over there; he was damned proud of the job his fellow soldiers had done — and were still doing; yes, the people really live like that. Almost everyone he talked to agreed (now, anyway, not back when the war first started) that the war had been a huge mistake and would only be worth it when and if — Big if! — the Iraqis took charge and went after the militias so they could get their government up and running.