Sunburn: A Novel Read online

  “So you’re sticking around?” Mr. #3 asks. Adam, the first man, only this one is into pears, not apples.

  “For now.”

  “You going to keep living at the motel?”

  “Probably not.”

  “We’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll come back to visit. If I’m invited.”

  She waits for him to pick up on the suggestion, the hint of a question mark. She tells herself that she’s bored enough that she might as well take him up on the inevitable pass. She’s going to end up with someone in town, why not this Adam. It’s a hard habit to break, gravitating to a protector, even if she’s never quite found the right one. She’s like Goldilocks—the first one was too rough, the second too weak. But isn’t it the third one that’s always just right? Unless, of course, you break it, like Little Bear’s chair.

  In her mind, she’s already sitting on the edge of Adam’s bed, drinking bourbon and Coke out of a plastic cup, stretching, arching her back, touching the back of his hand. Men are so easy.

  He doesn’t ask her back.

  Screw him.

  Maybe she will do just that, after all.

  5

  When Polly-the-Pink-Lady hints that she might be interested in being invited back to his place, Adam overreacts by not reacting. He plays dim, not a play he can carry. Maybe he should have let her come over. You don’t have to sleep with a good-looking woman just because she comes to your motel room and has a drink after work. It’s not a law or anything.

  Not that this one respects laws or rules. That’s why he’s here. And he was warned. She’ll have sex with you if you get close to her. It’s what she does.

  He has decided not to ask how the client could be so sure of this.

  Then again, this Polly doesn’t always do what she’s expected to do. Who could have predicted she would decamp in the middle of a beach vacation, just up and leave her family? The plan had been to make contact with the husband during the Fenwick trip, get to know him, do some man-on-man bonding. Oh, you live in Baltimore? Whereabouts? I’m on the northeast side, too. The plan was to find out what the husband knew. Go figure, he knew less than nothing. Adam was thrown when she left the beach Sunday morning, went up to the house, and packed her bags.

  Except—he must have had an inkling something was up, because he left the beach, too, kept watch on the house, saw her come out and start dragging the duffel down the highway, then jump in that guy’s car as he followed at a discreet distance.

  Luckily, there are only two ways west from the beach, Route 50 and 404, and almost everyone leaving the Delaware beaches takes 404. When she got out in Belleville, he did, too. Good thing he always has an overnight bag in his truck, packed and ready to go. Sure, he had to drive back to Fenwick the next day and check out of his motel there, pick up the rest of his things, risking that she would move on in the interim. But she was there when he got back, hanging out at the High-Ho.

  Now she has a job at the bar and she has all but invited herself into his bed and he made the wrong move. She’s pissed at him now.

  What can he do? He continues to go to the bar, continues to make it sound as if his truck is like some goddamn Maserati that can’t be easily serviced even in big-town Salisbury. She pulls his drafts with as little commentary as possible. The two old guys get more attention and they barely tip. Her cold shoulder isn’t obvious; she’s too much of a pro to frost a regular. She neutralizes him. That’s the perfect word. He’s invisible, an outline of his former self, drinking beer, leaving a respectable tip at night’s end. Overtipping would be a mistake, even if it’s not his money. She’s ignoring him, he’s ignoring her ignoring him. It’s exhausting and much less fun than their slow dance toward each other when they were on the same side of the bar. It makes him think of a Japanese horror film he saw as a kid, one that no one else seems to remember. He describes it all the time to people and never gets a flash of recognition. The setup was like The Blob, only it was a stream of hot atomic liquid that flowed through the streets of Tokyo and if it touched you, that was it, you were a goner, you were vaporized in a flash.

  How much longer can he linger here in Belleville?

  * * *

  Fate intervenes in the form of a cardboard box of San Marzano tomatoes that someone left in a damp spot. The case, weakened by moisture, breaks open. The cans drop in quick succession on the line cook’s foot, ill-protected in flip-flops of all things. The poor guy might have survived the broken toe, but not the index finger sliced open by the knife he inadvertently grabbed as he fell. The owner—Mr. C, although Adam has yet to learn what the “C” is for—puts up a sign looking for temporary help. Cath says the boss can cook, in a pinch, but he prefers not to in the summer. Hard to figure what he does with his days given how ghostly pale he is.

  So Adam’s after-school job in “Uncle” Claude’s diner in San Mateo, his time at the CIA—Culinary Institute of America, not the spy agency—is going to save this gig. He also spent a season cooking on a rich guy’s yacht, but his instincts tell him not to share that part of his résumé.

  Mr. C takes the help wanted sign down after talking to Adam for five minutes. He says he’ll do most of the cooking, use Adam for the scut work, but he’s lazy and by the third day, he’s letting Adam do everything.

  Customers begin saying nice things about the food. Adam, who can’t phone anything in, pushes Mr. C to upgrade some of his suppliers. To let him use local produce when possible, although it’s still early for tomatoes, and spend a little extra on the things that matter, like beef and seafood. Cheap chicken is fine; people who order a chicken sandwich in a place like this have no taste buds. Besides, the locals seldom order chicken. Adam can’t figure if this is out of fealty to the Kiwanis, who sell barbecue by the roadside on weekends, or because this is chicken country. You drive past those long, low coops, inhale—it puts you off chicken, all due respect, Mr. Perdue.

  Business picks up, which is good for everyone. Mr. C needs both waitresses most nights, one for lunch. The tips are bigger.

  And through it all, Adam keeps it mild and professional with the new barmaid, “Polly Costello.”

  “Polly want a cracker,” he says, shaking a bag of oyster crackers at her, deliberately being cornpone. It doesn’t get a smile. “Is Polly short for something?”

  “No,” she says.

  They don’t speak again, beyond the shorthand of short-order speak—Adam and Eve on a raft, et cetera. Their first real conversation begins with an argument over a steak. Customer orders it medium rare, then complains it’s too red.

  “That’s what medium rare is,” he tells her, maybe with a little more heat than the situation requires. “Medium has some pink. If there’s no hint of pink, it’s on its way to being medium well. Truly rare is closer to blue, maybe a bluish purple.”

  “The customer is always right,” she says.

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I believe that the customer leaves the tip and the tip is my real pay. So the customer is my boss.”

  And you’re not, she’s telling him. Like a little kid: You’re not the boss of me.

  “But I’m here day in, day out. Your customer will only be as happy as my food makes him.”

  “The food was shitty before you got here. It will be shitty after you leave. I’m not worried about the food.”

  “So you think my food is good?” He can’t help feeling a little flattered.

  “I didn’t say that. It’s not as bad as it was. It’s okay. I wouldn’t know. I don’t eat meat.”

  “I can make you a nice salad.”

  “I don’t eat salad.”

  “You don’t eat meat, you don’t eat salad. What do you eat?”

  She doesn’t bother to answer. “Look, please cook it a little more. Is that so hard?”

  “That’s all I needed to hear. ‘Please.’ Was that so hard?”

  The kitchen closes at 9:30, the bar goes to 11:00, but Adam, a neat freak who obsesses over the h
ood, needs that long to clean and prep for the next day. When Polly closes the register at 10:55, he slides a plate across the bar to her. It’s the most perfect grilled cheese and tomato sandwich that ever was. The brown stripes on the buttery white bread are so perfectly symmetrical they could have been put there by a painter. Inside, there is finely chopped bacon, his own secret. Fry the bacon, then chop it. Otherwise, it tears up the sandwich as you bite, fights the cheese, gets stuck in your teeth. He mixes it with some bacon paste, calculating there may be a day when he wants to add this to the menu; the version he prepares for Polly is about as practical as a hand-whittled clothespin. On the side: fries made from fresh potatoes, not the ones in the freezer, blanched in 250-degree oil, then sprinkled with rosemary. A cup of ketchup, but also a cup of homemade aioli, although he’ll call it mayo on the board. With good fries, you want mayo.

  She eats without commentary. She eats every bite, though.

  “There was bacon in there,” he says.

  “I know,” she says. “You testing me?”

  “My sister’s a vegetarian and she says she misses bacon every day.”

  “I didn’t say I was a vegetarian. I said I didn’t eat meat.”

  “I just thought I knew what you would like.”

  “You thought that, huh?” She eats a french fry.

  The bus boy–dishwasher, Jorge, is working in the back, a cramped space overwhelmed by the beat-up Wolf with six burners, a broken salamander, a deep fryer that Adam loves, and a microwave he detests, but relies on more than he likes to admit. They’re not really alone. Adam reminds himself. They’re not alone.

  “This was nice of you,” she says.

  “Thanks.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing. That was just lagniappe, as they say in New Orleans. A little extra something-something.”

  She laughs as if that’s the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard, a man wanting nothing from her.

  “You’ve been kind of standoffish with me. Like we got off on the wrong foot or something. And it’s nicer if people who work together get along.”

  “We get along fine.”

  Every instinct warns him not to reference that one night, when he didn’t ask her back to his room. In fact, he has to turn it around, make it a story about how she gave him the brush-off. Her pride demands this. In her head, that might already be the story.

  “Look, you’re a good-looking woman. You can’t blame men for getting a little mopey around you.”

  She’s interested now. “Mopey? That’s your word for it?”

  “I worry you’re going to make me your friend. Tell me all about the guy you really like.”

  “Not really in the market for a boy friend,” she says. He thinks there’s a pause between the two words. “You still at the motel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “With rent as cheap as it is in this town? You could do better. You should see my place. It’s huge.”

  “I’d like that. To see your place. One day.”

  Bait.

  “I need some furniture. Can you get off next Saturday? During the day?”

  Hook.

  “Maybe.” It will be hard, but if he comes up with a good excuse, promises to be there for the dinner rush, it should be okay. They don’t really do a good lunch business on Saturday, so Mr. C could be persuaded to cook. Schools are out and the roads are clogged with traffic because most of the weekly rentals change over on Saturday. Locals can barely get out of their driveways on the weekends. The people bound for the beach are too close to those salty sea breezes to stop by the time they reach Belleville, while those who are headed home feel as if they’re too early in their journey to abandon their momentum.

  And next weekend is the beginning of the long Fourth of July weekend, so the traffic will be worse than usual.

  “There’s an auction, over to Mardela Springs. I might be able to pick up a few things I need for my new place. But I’d need someone strong. Someone with a truck. You drive a truck, a big one, right?”

  “Pretty big,” he says.

  “Well, let me know. If you can get off on Saturday.”

  She has eaten every bite of the food he put in front of her. The plate barely needs to go in the dishwasher. Who eats like that and has a figure like hers?

  He finds himself thinking of the folktales his mother liked to tell him. Greek and Roman mythology wasn’t enough for Lillian Bosk. She had studied Slavic languages, written a dissertation on Eastern European folktales. She loved to tell him about the ala and Baba Yaga, and what happened when young women came to visit them. The stories differed in key parts—the ala wore a horse’s head while delousing her “human” head; Baba Yaga, in her heyday, was almost a goddess.

  But the stories always ended the same way, with the demon devouring her nosy visitor in one bite.

  6

  The Saturday of the auction is hot, but not humid. Adam’s truck has air-conditioning, but when he asks if they can drive with the windows open, she says yes. Polly always plays the good sport, the girl—woman—who doesn’t mind if her hair gets tousled. Being a good sport sounds like such a good thing, but there’s no good thing that can’t become bad for you. Polly looks at the skies, remembers some tiny shred of poetry from grade school, something about blue skies arching. She never got that. How can a sky arch? It doesn’t touch the ground.

  “What do you need?” he asks her.

  “Everything.” She doubles down on that one word, gives him a quick glance, but level, not through the lashes. She hates women who do that, peer through their lashes.

  “You got a budget? Easy to get carried away at an auction. There’s something about someone else trying to get what you want, even if you don’t want it that bad, that can make you crazy.”

  Tell me about it. She’s been clocking Cath clocking Adam.

  She’s wearing a sundress that she found in the Purple Heart on Main Street. In a vintage shop back in Baltimore, this same dress might cost $50, $75. Here, it was $12. Her body is made for clothes like this—fitted through the bodice, then a big swirl of a skirt, patterned with bright fruits. She found a pair of earrings—purple glass grapes that dangle from her lobes. A little matchy-matchy, but it works. She wears flat sandals and when she starts roaming the dusty rows of furniture and housewares at the auction, it feels as if something is nibbling at her ankles. What kind of bug can live in such dry dust?

  More than once, she feels his gaze on her shoulders. She knows she has a beautiful back, her bones clearly visible, but not in a way that makes her look underfed or scrawny. Her shoulder blades look like wings. Or so she’s been told, by more than one man. Two, to be exact. Both husbands.

  This one says nothing, though. Today, he seems determined not to compliment her.

  Focus on what you need, she tells herself, not what you want.

  She shouldn’t be buying anything, but she did the math: The motel, at $220 a week, was $880 a month. So she’s saving $580 by taking the apartment, which means she can get out west by September, wrap things up mid-October. But she can’t live in a completely empty apartment for two months. She needs utensils, a kitchen table, a couple of chairs.

  She wants an iron bed, a full set of jadeite, a quilt in the log cabin pattern.

  Right off the bat, she finds a little deco table—white-and-black metal top, painted white base, no matching chairs, so it will go cheap, and it does, only $65. Now to find two chairs. There are two white painted ones made of cane, but she passes on those. No man will want to sit on those chairs. Why is she thinking about men, anyway? Then she has the brainstorm of buying only one chair, a lonely wooden chair from some old schoolhouse, which gets his attention.

  “Not planning to entertain?” Adam asks.

  “I never entertain.”

  She has the resolve to pass on the jadeite; she’s not much for cooking and, as she just told Adam, she doesn’t entertain. But she can’t say no to the quilt. It’s so much like one that was
on her frau-frau’s spare bed when she was a child. Hot chocolate and strudel for breakfast, making a tent with cousin Annie, playing War by flashlight. Even though Polly is not planning to spend a single winter’s night in Belleville, she has to have it.

  Then an iron bed comes up. Oh, it’s a beauty. White, with gold details. Polly has a tricky back, prone to going out. Sleeping on a mattress without a box spring isn’t good for her.

  “Looks awfully small,” Adam says.

  “You don’t often find them larger than full,” she says. “People didn’t used to think they needed so much room in bed.”

  “I like a king myself,” he says.

  “Then you’ll probably never have an antique bed.”

  She has set her limit at $150, which is $150 too much. She tries to put up her paddle as if she couldn’t care less, but she feels her heart thrumming in her chest as the price rises. Another woman is bidding—a little older than her, definitely richer. Polly sees the flash of jewels on the other woman’s hands, at her throat. She hates her, she wants to kill her. They are at $175, $200, $225. She wants this bed so bad.

  “Do you have any cash on you?” she asks Adam.

  “Don’t get carried away.”

  “Did I ask your advice? Do you have any cash on you? You know I’m good for it.”

  “You can’t spend more on a bed than you do on your rent.”

  “Don’t tell me what I can do.”

  The choice has slipped away during their argument and the other woman has won the beautiful bed for $275. Polly’s so angry she has to stalk away, fuming. She’s not sure who she’s angrier with—the woman who got her bed or the man who argued with her over what she could afford.

  Or herself, for caring so much about a damn bed.

  But in her mind’s eye, she already owned that bed, covered with the quilt, and, maybe, thrown over the foot, a man’s silk bathrobe that she bought at the Purple Heart. It’s purple, covered with dragons. Too big for her and too hot for the current weather, but it makes her feel like royalty when she pulls it over her naked body, walks around her empty rooms.