And She Was Read Free

moved her hands. She was five feet tall, with a round body from which her short arms and legs protruded like sprouts on a potato. Her black hair had been meticulously curled several hours earlier. She wore black boots with high heels that she rocked on from side to side. One of the heels kept kicking out, threatening to come loose.
    She eyed me long enough to make me feel uneasy. “White girl. Fuckin’ blond, white girl.” She didn’t say it like an insult, just an observation.
    “Very white,” I said, then added, “very fuckin’ white,” just to win her over.
    She smiled a touch, not with her mouth so much as with her eyes. Her smooth lids curved downward at the outer corners, and whensomething of a smile snuck up on her, they slid out and up. She had beautiful eyes, Aleut eyes. “Come on,” she said, picking up her bag. “I grabbed his stash when he was in the head.”
    I couldn’t remember the last time a woman, and only a woman, had asked me to snort coke with her. Sure, plenty of women were usually around, attached or attachable women. But the drugs were all acquired and doled out by men. I felt off balance, a little wary.
    She had already slung her purse over one shoulder and started toward the road. She looked back at me without expression. I glanced at the HiTide, where I knew Thad was sleeping sprawled naked across the bed. I pictured his curly hair on the pillow, the curve of his chest muscles over the steady rise and fall of his sleepy lungs. What the hell. The island had cast its spell, and I was used to going along.
    She nodded as I fell in step with her. “Bellie,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Bellie.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Brandy.”
    “Brandy?”
    “Yeah.”
    My name comes straight from the liquor cabinet. I can picture the scene: Mom and Dad bring home their new baby girl, set her on the couch, coo a bit, adjust the blanket. What should we call her? I don’t know. How ’bout Victoria? That’s from Dad, of course. What, you want her to grow up to be all snooty? Jane, then, after your mom. A gouging stare. Teresa? Amy? Jan? The possibilities flash between them, threatening regrets, resentments. Nothing comes without baggage. Dad gets up, yanks open the liquor cabinet. He pours amber liquid into a glass. Get me one, she says. He brings glasses and the bottle over, sets them on the coffee table. I’m not quite asleep and Mom runs the back of her hand along my cheek. Dad holds the bottle over her glass and is pouring. Brandy. She says it all breathless with wonder. Brandy. Dad turns the bottle, assesses the label. Brandy. Then they smile, clink their glasses, down a dose each. Can’t turn out bad with a name like that. I fall to sleep, the crisis of the name melting into a warm bubble of boozy domesticity.
    Bellie led me off to the right, onto a narrower, rockier road. It curved along the side of one of the hills, where the wind eased. Myback released the cold-stiff I didn’t notice until it left. Discarded rotting tangles of net sunk into the mud along the road. Obsolete hunks of machinery tilted out of the grass. We walked maybe half a mile before the trailer came into view, a single wide, white with a dark brown skirt. A porch clung to the south side. A forgotten dory rotted into the shallow soil. She climbed three steps to the porch and gave the door a brutish shove. It gave, caught on something, then swung wide open.
    “This is my place,” she said, tossing her purse on the floor.
    I stepped through the door and into Bellie’s world. Around the open living room window a rainbow of pastel skipped in the breeze. A pink afghan stretched tight across a green plaid sofa. Pillows with purple, pink, and yellow ruffles covered what little plaid the afghan neglected. And everywhere perched collector’s plates decorated with garden cottages and white churches, and rigid figurines of sweet-faced children and painted birds. Above the couch hung a wicker birdcage stuffed with a menace of plastic