The Book of Lost Friends(15)

The air is wet and muddy smelling, courtesy of a weak tropical depression spinning off the coast. The sky outside the bedroom window hangs close above the live oaks, pillowy and saturated. A drip that started in the kitchen ceiling yesterday plays a tinny tune in the largest pan I own. I’ve been by the office of the broker who rented the house to me. There was a notice on the door: CLOSED FOR MEDICAL EMERGENCY. I left a note in the drop box, but so far no one has come by about the roof. They can’t call, as my new home is phoneless at present. That’s another one of the things I can’t afford until my first paycheck comes in.

The power is out. I realize that when I roll over and look at the blank clock on the nightstand. I have no idea how late I’ve slept.

Doesn’t matter, I tell myself. You can lie here all day. The neighbors won’t say anything.

That’s a little joke between me and me. A thin bit of cheer.

This house is bordered on two sides by farm fields and on the third by a cemetery. I’m not superstitious, so the proximity doesn’t bother me. It’s nice to have a quiet place to walk, where no one casts surreptitious glances my way, silently seeming to inquire, What are you doing here, and how soon are you leaving? It’s the general assumption that I, like most new teachers and coaches who join the staff, am in Augustine only until something better comes along.

The hollow sense of loneliness I’ve begun to struggle with is familiar, yet somehow it reaches deeper now than in childhood, when my mother’s flight attendant job kept her away four or five days out of seven. Depending on where we were living at the time, I stayed home in the care of sitters, neighbors, daycare providers, my mother’s live-in boyfriends, and a teacher or two who watched kids for extra money. Whatever worked, wherever we were. Extended family wasn’t an option. My mother had been spurned by her parents when she married my father, a foreigner. An Italian, for heaven’s sake. It was an unforgivable affront, and perhaps for her that was part of his appeal, because, in reality, the marriage didn’t last all that long. Of course, my father was drop-dead gorgeous, so it could have just been a case of hot-blooded attraction that wore off.

All of my mother’s moving and repositioning and start-stop relationships gave me an uncanny skill in building a community outside the home. I was adept at ingratiating myself with other people’s moms, friendly neighbors with dogs to walk, lonely grandparents who weren’t getting enough attention from their own families.

I’m good at friend finding. At least I thought I was.

But Augustine, Louisiana, is putting me to the test. It calls up memories of my ill-fated teenage attempt to connect with my paternal relatives after they’d moved to New York. My mother and I were confronting issues we couldn’t surmount. I needed my father and his family to open their arms to me, take me in, offer support. Instead, I felt like a stranger in a strange land, and not a welcome one.

Augustine reprises that crippling feeling of rejection. I smile at people here, I get stares in return. I crack a joke, no one laughs. I say Good morning!, I get grunts and curt nods, and, if I’m lucky, one-word answers.

Maybe I’m trying too hard?

I’ve literally learned more about Augustine from the residents of the cemetery next door than I have from its ambulatory, breathing citizens. To work off the stress of the day, I’ve taken to studying the raised crypts and aboveground mausoleums. The markers date back to the Civil War and beyond. There are so many stories hidden in that place. Women resting next to the babies they birthed, dead on the same day. Children granted tragically short lives. Whole broods gone within weeks of one another. Confederate soldiers with CSA emblazoned on their tombstones. Veterans from two world wars, Korea, Vietnam. It looks like no one has been buried there in a while, though. The newest grave belongs to Hazel Annie Burrell. Beloved wife, mother, grandmother, laid to rest twelve years ago, in 1975.

Plink, clink, plink. The leak in the kitchen moves from soprano to alto as I lie there thinking that, with all this rain, I can’t even go walking. I am stuck here alone in this scatter-furnished house with only the basics—roughly half of the contents of a graduate-student apartment. The other half remained with Christopher, who at the last minute decided against our planned elopement and cross-country move from Berkeley to Louisiana. The breakup wasn’t all his fault. I was the one who’d kept secrets, who hadn’t told him everything until after the engagement. Maybe the fact that I’d held out so long spoke for itself.

Still, I miss being part of a duo in this plan for a new adventure. At the same time, there’s no denying that, after four years together as a couple, I don’t miss Christopher as much as I probably should.

The impending breach of my drip catcher distracts me from overanalyzing and nudges me from the bed. Time to empty the pan. Then I’ll get dressed and go to town, see who else I can call for help in getting the roof situation resolved. There must be somebody.

Through the haze on the kitchen window, I make out the shape of someone walking the cemetery lane nearby. I lean closer, clear a swatch with my palm, see a man and a large yellow dog. A black umbrella partially hides the man’s portly frame.

Momentarily, I think of Principal Pevoto, and my stomach tenses up. I’ve worn out my welcome with him this week. Your expectations are too high, Miss Silva. Your requests for supplies are outlandish. Your hopes for the students are unrealistic. He will not help me track down the rest of my classroom set of Animal Farm, which have vanished one and two at a time, until we’re down to only fifteen copies. The science teacher across the hall found one stuffed in a lab drawer, and I rescued another from the trash can in the hall. The kids are actually stealing them so they won’t have to read them.