The Pirate Queen Read online

  She zipped the suitcase closed and grabbed a ball cap she normally wore while running. She pressed it down over the two-hundred-dollar hairstyle Bender had called “perfect, so perfect for you, Saphora.”

  She rolled the suitcase onto the upstairs landing at the exact moment the front door opened. She assumed Sherry was coming back to remind her how to use the warming oven. She stepped up to the edge of the overhang, resting her hands on the balustrade to look down into the entry. But Sherry had not come back. Bender came through the front door instead of the back entry, where he usually parked the blue Lexus, the only car he willingly left out in the rain. His face was white as scallops, and his skin palely gleaming. His shirt was wrinkled, and he had not dressed for the hospital but was wearing a plaid shirt, like the kind he wore tarpon fishing off the coast of Florida. He looked to the back of the house, as if he were looking for her, or maybe for Sherry to mix up a martini in the middle of the day. Had he not said he had an important surgery scheduled with a client from the Peninsula? A nose job, wasn’t it? Maybe it was yesterday. She couldn’t remember.

  “Good grief, Bender. It’s not even four,” she said in the quiet of the afternoon.

  “Saphora,” he said, breathless, as if he had been running. He was looking straight at her, but not as if he was at all perceiving her. He was looking past her. It was not like him. Bender was always direct. “I’m glad I found you,” he said distantly.

  She was thinking about the suitcase beside her on the floor. How to explain? She would send him into the kitchen for a beer and then hide the luggage. He would fall asleep halfway through the drink, and then she would leave. Nothing was keeping her from leaving.

  “There’s cold beer in the kitchen. Some leftovers. You like fried green tomatoes. I can’t have any so you might as well,” she said as if she had not already eaten two. Her pulse drummed in her ears.

  Before she could rattle off the list of dishes she thought might entice him, detour him from his upstairs shower, he said, “I’m sick.”

  The sky was not yet darkening and would not for several hours. Not even a motorboat rumbled distantly from the dock.

  “A glass of club soda then?” she asked, nervous, her thoughts spinning.

  “Come down,” he said, disappearing into the house.

  She caught up with Bender after passing the mud room, where the photographs of their three children hung above the coatrack. The coatrack still hung eye level to a first grader even though their youngest boy, Ramsey, was now married and a dad.

  Saphora had her first child because she was too young to organize her life around birth control. So she spent the first two years of marriage organizing her life around Turner. He was the biggest baby, her mother-in-law said, in four generations of Warrens. The Warren men came small into the world and then grew to be tall men. They were big earners and big spenders. Bender’s mama had called her only son Bender the Spender. She had passed away two years earlier after a vacation in Austria. Bender had said women who married Warren men seldom lived long after their men died. They lost their purpose.

  Turner had seemed like a lonesome little boy. If Saphora had known about temperaments back then, she would have known Turner was born to need people around him. She could have had twenty children and never filled Turner’s need for companionship. She had not thought of putting him in day school until after his sister, Gwennie, was born. Then the youngest came along, another boy whom his brother and sister called Ramsey, after a story that had been read to them in Sunday school. Saphora never told them the difference between Ramsey and Ramses. But the name had suited him the minute he opened his eyes—blue, never to turn another color.

  Saphora read baby books and went to a parenting class at a church, where they tried to rook her into membership. Confidence in mothering came too late. But finally the three of her children were in school and then they were grown.

  Turner married a girl from New York. She took him away from his Lake Norman nest and then sent him back. He was a charmer but not a good provider, and girls these days are smart to catch on. Turner kept his boy, Eddie, on weekends and summers. He called his boy Eddie because his ex named him Schuyler Eduardo Warren even with Turner at her side laughing and telling her she could not possibly mean it. She was not Latino. All of the Warrens debated the middle name privately. Saphora’s sister, Emerald, said it was probably an old lover named Eduardo. But Emerald was prone to gossip out of turn.

  Gwennie was an attorney who never married. Ramsey married a girl who kept him working long hours at a job anyone could do. Ramsey’s first child, Liam, had the temperament to either blow up a building someday or else research incurable diseases. He tortured his brothers, twin boys, until they came running to Saphora, calling her Nana, a name Ramsey’s wife, Celeste, selected when Saphora couldn’t accept any of the pet names for Grandmother.

  As Bender continued down the pass-through that led into the living room, Saphora was thinking about her children back when they were young and under her control. It was strange, as if the house had locked away the echoes of them running through the house calling out to each other, only to let them out at that instant.

  Bender took the upholstered chair that faced away from the bookcases. He looked awkward in the chair, and that is when Saphora realized he had never sat down in that chair until now.

  “You should have seen the Southern Living people, treating us like we were all Hollywood celebrities, snapping pictures of Sherry’s food. I didn’t let on that I was nervous.”

  She figured Vicki Jaunice might have noticed her anxiety when Saphora inadvertently dipped her shrimp into Vicki’s sauce. That was when, for the first time, she decided Vicki had slept with Bender, the same as Bernie Mae Milton and Pansy Fulton.

  Vicki had gotten her start in business when Saphora recommended Vicki’s cosmetics business to all her friends. The home-based business had ballooned into a sizable basement office with six staff members. She should never have let Vicki get a foot in the door with her friends.

  Bender opened a Red Stripe with one twist of the cap, without looking at it or her.

  “Abigail says our house photographs like a castle. Isn’t that good?” she asked. “She’s the SL journalist.” Had she told him that already?

  Bender could not settle comfortably into the chair. He had put on the weight he often did in the winter but would take it off as soon as he could get active again in the summer.

  “I’ve never noticed so many books in this room,” he said.

  “I should give some to the library. But they are, after all, our books.” Saphora kept books from as far back as second grade. She could look at one spine and it was like a time machine, like the blue book titled The Last Affair given to her by a boy who kissed her outside the boys’ locker room. He had never asked her for a date. But he kissed her and then handed her the book. Whenever he passed her in the hallway, he winked at her.

  “Have you noticed a change in me, say, over the past month?” he asked.

  “You’ve gained weight, but then you take it off as you please,” she said. He could gain weight, and women still thought of him as good-looking.

  “I can hardly take the stairs. Then, dizzy spells. You haven’t noticed me complaining of headaches?” He had a controlled tone, normally, but his voice tensed. His long, manicured fingers lay on top of his stomach accusingly. “And nausea.” He took a pair of eyeglasses from a case in the table drawer and carefully pushed them up his nose. Then he got up and, running his finger down a shelf of medical books, pulled three from the bookcase. He placed them on the end table and then sat back down in the chair. A faint moan came out of Bender such as she had never heard before.

  “Maybe you are taking the stairs more slowly,” she said. His expectations of her were often passed off like a quiz. There were curious other seasons of Bender, as she privately called them, where he went on self-assessment tangents. When he did, he swept her and the kids into the assessments too, over their weight;
whether or not she had kept Turner, Gwennie, and Ramsey sweating long enough over a tennis game; or improving their math skills.

  Lately he had focused solely on improving Turner, a relief to Saphora as it took the pressure off her to perform according to Bender’s tightly regimented life.

  “It just seems you would notice.”

  “Tell me what it is I should notice, then, and I’ll try,” she said, her voice strained, like piano strings stretched too far.

  “That I’m dying,” he said, so quietly that a flock of birds outside the window nearly drowned him out.

  “Bender, it’s a mistake,” she said, knowing how he worried himself into illnesses privy to doctors. She quietly assessed the books beside him on the table, volumes she had saved from his first year at Duke med school. He ran his finger over the surfaces. Soft particles rose up in the glare of the lamp. “Tabitha should dust more often.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Saphora said quietly.

  “I’ve gone to two different doctors.”

  “Bender, your health is important to you. It’s not like you let yourself go like some people. You know yourself how technicians make mistakes. It was just last week one of your patients got read the wrong x-ray report.” A doctor wrongly told a woman she had a tumor right behind her nasal cavity. “You’re fine.”

  His hands curled over the ends of the chair arm so tightly that it seemed his fingers might go clean through the upholstery. “Saphora, you’re not listening.”

  Bender had said before that she was not a good listener. She was feeling her oats still, what with her suitcase waiting upstairs. “I can’t stand it when you’re like this.”

  “It’s cancer, of all things.”

  “I’m not listening to any of this.”

  He told her, “You’ll have to call the kids.” He pulled out a pad from the table drawer and the pen from his pocket. “I’m going to see Jim Pennington at Duke. He’s the one to do this.”

  “Yes, of course.” Jim had been Bender’s best friend in med school. They actually met playing on the same soccer team. They remained friends over the years, occasionally socializing with the wives involved.

  “You’re making a list?” she asked. Bender’s list making aggravated her only less than his flittering around with the Peninsula wives.

  “I’ll put the house up for sale,” he said, “if you’d like. I can’t imagine you knocking about in this place all by yourself.” He kept scribbling, as if he were writing out a prescription.

  “Sell the house?” she asked, feeling as if the ground beneath her shifted. It was like him to run back and forth, sneaking off for medical testing without telling her. But here he was making major decisions when the air in her ears was near to exploding. She wanted to yell at him. But she sat quietly. She was a good wife—that’s what he had told a group of his men friends just last week. The doctors played cards out on the back deck Friday nights. She could hear how the conversation went from golf to a botched surgery by a doctor not from their circle. She had taken a swim and come back so she missed what got them talking about wives. But she had let his compliment slide off her as she was already entertaining the idea of running away.

  “Gwen has the best head on her shoulders. Maybe she should tell her brothers.”

  She was the first girl in her class to pass the bar. Gwennie took her father’s pressures on her in stride. Better than Saphora.

  “I’ve been knocking about in this house by myself since we moved into it,” she said, but he was busy working on the list. “You’re jumping ahead of things, Bender. What is it you say all the time? Don’t make decisions if you’re too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.” Her emotions were beginning to tear away, though. She hated showing tears in front of him. He considered her weak when she did.

  “Saphora, stop crying,” he said.

  She pulled open the door on the mahogany commode, where she kept the tissues.

  “I want to die in Oriental.” He took a medical journal into his lap. “If I have to die.”

  “Bender, the hospital is too far from there. Stop acting as if you’re already dying.” He was making her so mad she felt the urge to walk out on him. But she stayed in her chair as if he had tied her into it with ropes.

  “There’s hospice. And Duke is not that far. I’d like to leave in the morning. It’s only three hours.”

  “It’s over three hours, Bender, and that’s a long drive.”

  He went on as though she hadn’t said a word. “Sherry can help out.”

  “For goodness’ sake, Bender! How soon?”

  “Six months. Six years. Doctors never really know those things. We guess.”

  “What about our friends? We’ll be so far out.”

  “We’ll have them up as I’m able.”

  Saphora got him a glass from the cabinet and poured the rest of his beer.

  “Call Sherry. She’ll get the house ready,” he told her.

  “I gave her time off. She worked herself to death for this party you insisted I give.”

  “Call her back. I need her there. Better yet, have her come here tonight.”

  It was the opportune moment Saphora had waited for ever since Bender had appeared so suddenly in the middle of the day. “I’ll call from upstairs. I need to compose myself.”

  She climbed the stairs, swept away by the urge to run for her suitcase and bolt for the door. The luggage was where she left it, behind the upper-landing balustrade. She wheeled it back into the bedroom. A tag from Nantes still dangled like a loose earring from the handle. She had gone to France two years ago, taking Gwennie to Europe for passing the bar. Bender had stayed behind in Lake Norman even after Gwennie had lost her temper with him for never joining them on a single vacation.

  She stowed the luggage, still packed for Oriental, in the storage cubicle of her dressing room. She pulled up Sherry’s telephone number in her BlackBerry. She scrolled past Gwennie’s number, and then there were Ramsey’s and Turner’s numbers sandwiching Sherry’s. Turner’s next nursing shift would be starting come dinnertime. He took any shift to fill up the hours away from his son and the ex-wife who said she loved him but could not stay married to a man with Turner’s low ambitions.

  Gwennie would be the first to call her back. Saphora scrolled back up and called her daughter. She heard the forceful little recorded voice answering mechanically as if she needed to place the thought in the caller’s head that she meant business. Saphora left a message to call her and then added, “This is rather serious, Gwen.” Then she hung up and wondered if she had said too little by saying “rather serious.” Gwennie would surely understand why she had not spilled out over the phone that her daddy was dying.

  Saphora did not want to call Sherry after giving her the rest of Tuesday and also Wednesday off. Bender surely did not mean that he wanted to leave the next morning for Oriental. Her Oriental.

  She walked out of the dressing room, stopping just short of the bedroom. Bender was pulling back the pale blue matelassé coverlet she and Gwennie had picked up in Nantes. He dropped his trousers over the footboard and slid under the coverlet. When he closed his eyes, he said, “When Sherry gets here, have her come upstairs. She can make my calls.”

  “Sherry’s not home.”

  “Call her cell phone, Saphora. For Pete’s sake, think!”

  “Bender, she’s gone off with her husband.” She didn’t tell him they were bowling but left it mysteriously unsaid. He’d not think bowling important enough. But she didn’t want Sherry here tonight in the middle of their shock. “Rest yourself.” Saphora walked into the bathroom, wounded by Bender’s suggestion that she could not think on her own. Her telephone rang. It was Gwennie.

  It rang thrice and then switched to her answering service.

  Bender yelled, “Who was that?”

  Saphora closed the bathroom door. She sat on the closed toilet lid. She pulled paper from the toilet roll, wiping her eyes. She could hear Abigail mysteriously talking as if she were ci
rcling again overhead. “You must be the envy of all your friends.”

  She said through a sob, “Envy’s an expensive piece of real estate.”

  2

  What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now!

  ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, Gift from the Sea

  Bender had deep-sea fished from the time he left behind his mother’s house in Old Salem to take his premed classes until he had bought the seaside house in Oriental. But his ownership of so much stuff kept him working more and fishing less. Yet as Saphora stiffly packed his suitcases upstairs the next morning, he was down in the garage dragging out his rods and lucky hooks. Saphora pulled out the gently used blue cap he said had brought him more good fortune than even the boat he had dubbed the Evelyn. She turned abruptly, thwhapping the cap against the door frame to smack the lint from it.

  Because she brooded in a state of self-pity for too long, dissolving into tears, she hated herself all the more. She did not hear Turner calling her name down the hallway.

  He once told her that she had gotten so accustomed to tuning him out—he was the most talkative of his siblings—that in order to get her to respond after several attempts at calling her “Mama,” he would finally yell, “Miss Saphora,” like one of the lawn boys, and she would turn and answer him.

  So it was when he yelled her name into the bedroom, “Miss Saphora!” that she ran to the marble sink to flush her face with cold water. Because she expected Turner to be working a shift at the hospital uptown, she fully anticipated that a domestic had come up the stairs, sent on an errand from Bender.