Susan Phillips - The Great Escape

The usher handed them bulletins and gestured toward a pew in the second row. So much for her plans to sit in the back.

After they were seated, her discomfort grew. Was this how it felt to be a black person going solo into the white world? Or maybe her own insecurity was at play, and all her reading had made her more racially conscious than she needed to be.

Heart of Charity Missionary was the second oldest church on the island, a squat, red brick building that would never win points for style, although the airy sanctuary looked as though it had been recently remodeled. The walls were ivory, the high ceiling paneled in blond wood. A purple cloth covered the altar, and three silver crosses hung on the front wall. The congregation was small, and the air smelled of perfume, aftershave, and stargazer lilies.

The people sitting nearby smiled in welcome. The men wore suits, the older women hats, and the younger women bright summer dresses. After the opening hymn, a woman she assumed was the minister, but who turned out to be a deacon, greeted the congregation and announced upcoming events. Bree felt herself flush as the woman looked at her. “We have some visitors today. Would you introduce yourselves?”

Bree hadn’t been prepared for this, and before she found her voice, she heard Toby speak up. “I’m Toby Wheeler,” he said. “And this is Bree.”

“Welcome, Toby and Bree,” the woman said. “God has blessed us bringing you to join us today.”

“Whatever,” Toby muttered under his breath as the congregation delivered a chorus of “amens.” But unlike her cynical ward, Bree felt herself begin to relax.

The service began in earnest. She was used to cool, cerebral religion, but this was hot religion, loud in supplication and praise. Afterward, she lost count of the number of people who came up to greet her, and not one of them asked what a paleface like herself was doing in their church. A woman talked to Toby about their Sunday school program, and the minister, a man Bree recognized from the gift shop in town, said he hoped they’d come back.

“What do you think?” she asked Toby as they headed back to her used Chevy Cobalt.

“It was okay.” He pulled his shirttail out of his pants. “But my friends are at Big Mike’s church.”

The only friends he talked about were a set of twins who weren’t on the island now. Myra hadn’t done him a service by keeping him so isolated. “Maybe you could make some new friends here,” she said.

“I don’t want to.” He jerked open the car door. “I’m calling Big Mike and telling him I’m going to church with him next week.”

She waited for the familiar weight of defeat to claim her. But it didn’t happen. Instead she grabbed the car door before he could slam it shut and leaned down. “I’m the boss, I like this church, and we’re coming back next week.”

“That’s not fair!”

He tried to wrestle the door away from her, but she held on, and in the same tone she’d heard Lucy use, she staked her ground. “Neither is life. Get used to it.”

“ALL SHE CAN THINK ABOUT is black, black, black,” Toby complained to Lucy, those thickly lashed golden eyes flashing in outrage. “Like that’s all I am. This black kid. Not even me. She’s prejudiced. She’s a ray-shist.”

“Racist,” Bree called out from behind the counter where she was nailing a new set of shelves in place after moving her precious bumblebee Christmas ornaments to safety. They’d been such a success that she’d placed a second order.

“A racist,” he repeated. “Just like Ames in Roots.”

“The sadistic overseer.” Bree popped up long enough to explain.

“Right.” Lucy smiled. Bree had been watching the old miniseries with Toby this week, and it was hard to say which of them was more caught up in it. “Kids need to know about their heritage,” Lucy said. “Being African American is part of your heritage just like it is my brother Andre’s.”

“But what about the white part?” Toby countered. “What about that?”

Bree’s head reappeared. “I told you. Your grandmother’s people were Vermont farmers.”

“Then why don’t we study Vermont farmers?” he retorted. “Why is one part of me more important than the other?”

Bree held her ground. “Not more important. But significant.” She ducked behind the counter again.

Despite their squabbling, Lucy detected a change in their relationship. They looked each other in the eye and talked more frequently, even though their conversation was often adversarial. She’d also noticed changes in Bree. She stood straighter, smoked less, and spoke with more confidence. It was as if the therapeutic powers of her honey were giving her strength.

So far that day, Lucy had tried to convince Temple to stop exercising five hours a day and consider Lucy’s “Good Enough” approach, but not surprisingly, Temple wasn’t buying it. Lucy had more success with the bread she’d baked in Bree’s kitchen. Now she was helping Bree finish painting four old Adirondack chairs in Easter egg colors of periwinkle, light blue, peach, and nursery yellow. They would offer a comfortable place to relax in the shade of the old oak that sheltered the farm stand. Bree also hoped their cheerful colors would attract the attention of drivers passing by.

Maybe the chairs were working because she heard a car stop behind her. She turned and saw a dark gray SUV with Illinois plates. Her heart gave a little leap. As far as she knew, this was the first time Panda had stopped here on any of the sorties he’d made into town since he’d loosened the reins on Temple. Now he got out and ambled toward her. “So this is where you’ve been spending your time.” He nodded at Toby. “Hey, Toby. Lucy make any more bread today?”

Toby had begun to feel at ease with Panda. Last week they’d even gone out on the kayaks together. “Whole wheat. But it’s still good.”

“I know. I like the heels.”

“Me, too.”

“Done.” With one final slam of the hammer, Bree rose from behind the counter. “Oh, sorry,” she said as she spotted Panda. “I was making so much noise I didn’t hear a car. Can I help you?”

Lucy stepped forward. “Bree, this is Patrick Shade, aka Panda. Panda, Bree West.”

“West?” The smile on Panda’s face faded. He grew unnaturally still. He gave a brusque nod and, without another word, got in his car and drove off.

THE SUV DISAPPEARED FROM SIGHT. Bree quickly turned back to the shelves that lined the farm stand and began rehanging the bumblebee Christmas ornaments on the tree branch display she’d erected above her pots of lip balm, beeswax candles, and flower-shaped soaps. She hung them crookedly, not trying to balance the arrangement.

As Toby went off to get a drink, Lucy tried to figure out what had just happened. “Do you and Panda know each other?”

The branch display began to tilt precariously. Bree grabbed two of the ornaments and moved them. “I’ve never met him.”

“But you know him?”

Bree shifted another ornament. “No.”

Lucy didn’t believe her. “You’d think by now you could trust me a little.”

Bree moved the soap basket a few inches to the left. Her shoulders lifted as she took a deep breath. “I used to live in his house.”

Lucy was stunned. “The Remington place?”

Bree fumbled in her pocket for her cigarettes. “Sabrina Remington West. My full name.”

“Why didn’t you ever mention this?”

Bree gazed toward the trees in the general direction of her old house. She was quiet for so long that Lucy didn’t think she was going to answer. Finally she said, “I don’t like talking about it or even thinking about it, which is crazy, because I think about it all the time.”

“Why’s that?”

Bree shoved her hands deeper into the pockets. “I have a lot of memories attached to the house. Complicated ones.”

Lucy understood complicated memories.

“I spent every summer there when I was growing up,” Bree said. “I stopped coming when I was around eighteen, but the rest of my family used it for years until my father died and Mother went into a nursing home. Finally it got too expensive to maintain, so my brothers put it on the market.”

“And Panda bought it.”

She nodded. “I knew about him, but we’d never met. It was a shock finally seeing him.” She examined her broken fingernails. “It’s hard to think of someone else living there.” She regarded Lucy apologetically. “I should have told you, but I’m not used to confiding in people.”

“You didn’t really owe me an explanation.”

“Not true. Your friendship has meant more to me than you can ever imagine.” Once again, she started patting her pockets. “Damn it, where are my cigarettes?”

“You left them at the cottage, remember? You’re trying to stop.”

“Shit.” She sagged into the pale yellow Adirondack chair and said, almost defiantly, “I knew Scott was having affairs.”

It took Lucy a moment to adjust to the change of subject. “Your husband?”

“In name only.” Her mouth twisted bitterly. “I was flattered when he fell in love with me, but we’d been married for barely two years before he started screwing around. I found out right away.”

“That must have hurt.”

“It hurt all right, but I made excuses for him. He had an advanced degree. I’d left college after my freshman year to marry him, so I decided I wasn’t smart enough to hold his interest. But it kept happening and, believe me, all of those other women weren’t smart.”

“What did he say when you confronted him?”

She set an elbow on the chair and curled her hand tightly around the end of the arm. “I didn’t. I pretended not to know.” Her voice was full of pain. “Can you imagine? How gutless is that?”

“You must have had a reason.”

“Sure. I didn’t want to give up my life.” She stared blindly toward the road. “I’m one of those women the feminist movement passed by. I had no career ambitions. I wanted what the women I saw around me had while I was growing up. A husband, children—good luck with that. Scott refused to even talk about kids.” She rose from the chair. “I wanted a beautiful house. Never having to worry about money. Knowing exactly where I fit. I wanted that security so much I was willing to sell my self-respect to get it. Even at the end … A year ago …” She stopped, hugged herself, her expression bleak. “I wasn’t the one who walked out. He walked out on me. I was still hanging on, the faithful doormat wife.”

Lucy’s heart filled with pity. “Bree …”

Bree refused to look at her. “What kind of woman lets herself get treated that way? Where was my pride? My backbone?”

“Maybe you’re finding it now.”

But Bree was too caught up in self-loathing to accept comfort. “When I look in the mirror, all I feel is disgust.”

“Clean off your mirror and take another look. I see an amazing woman who’s building a good business and also taking responsibility for a kid who’s not exactly easy.”

“Some business. A broken-down farm stand in the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s not broken-down. Look around. This is the Taj Mahal of farm stands. The honey is the best I’ve ever tasted, new customers are stopping all the time, you keep adding more products, and you’re making a profit.”

“Which I’m plowing right back into new jars and Christmas ornaments, not to mention soap molds and a few gallons of cocoa butter for the lotions. What happens when Labor Day comes and the tourists leave? What happens when winter’s here and Toby stages a full-out teenage rebellion?”

Lucy had no easy answer for that. “You’ve figured everything else out. I’m betting you’ll figure that out, too.”

Lucy could see that Bree wasn’t buying it, and her own need to make other people feel better asserted itself. “What if Scott showed up today and said he’d made a mistake? What if he said he wanted you back, and he’d never screw around on you again? What would you do?”

Bree thought it over. “If Scott showed up?” she said slowly.

“Just supposing.”

“If Scott showed up …” Her jaw set. “I’d tell him to go screw himself.”

Lucy grinned. “Exactly what I thought.”

LUCY WAITED UNTIL PANDA FINISHED his afternoon workout before she went upstairs to find him. Bree’s story explained her reaction to meeting him, but not his to seeing her. He stood in the middle of the small, overcrowded bedroom he’d taken for himself. As he pulled his damp T-shirt over his head, the sight of that sweaty, too-ripped chest distracted her. But only momentarily. “Why were you so rude to Bree?”

He sat on the side of the bed to take off his sneakers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do.” One of his sneakers hit the floor. “When I introduced Bree, you threw yourself in your car and raced off like a teenager trying to beat curfew. You didn’t even say hello.”