Ducklings

Ducklings

a Ted Carrol story by Stephen Brooke

I learned of Renee’s passing from my friend Pat. Pat Edwards, that is, the artist. He called me on a Thursday evening.

“Branford told me,” he said. “He knew I’d pass it on.”

I didn’t think I’d ever given Bran my number here, even though it had been a couple years since I’d moved. “You could’ve given out my number, y’know,” I told him. I didn’t know Bran’s number either, did I?

“Wouldn’t do that without asking,” came Pat’s reply. “I’ll do it next time we talk. He’s, um, thinking of moving up here.”

To Ruby? Yeah, I could see Branford there. The place would never have done it for me. What I said was, “You wouldn’t give out his number to me either, would you?”

He chuckled, maybe to cover his embarrassment. “I’ll get you two connected the next time I talk to him.” A pause. “He was going to give me the funeral details.”

To pass to me. Pat barely knew Renee. I went way back with Branford’s sister.

“Okay then. Thanks for letting me know.” We gabbed on a minute or two about nothing before hanging up. Funeral, huh? I knew I wouldn’t go. I’d never go back to Genoa.

~

She sat down next to me.

Well, most of the other seats were taken but I still wished she could have chosen a different spot, another place to park. I wasn't sure why.

Renee lived somewhere in my neighborhood. Yeah, you might guess that since we were on the same school bus but it had a long route, out along roads lined with empty lots, out east of Genoa. Developers had put subdivisions there long before there was much demand for them, while the land was still cheap.

I scooted over but maybe I let my discomfort show. I wasn’t as good at hiding that sort of thing then, less practiced in being someone else.

“Don’t be such a sourpuss,” she said. “You’re as bad as my grandpa.”

I didn’t have an answer for that, so I said nothing. I said a lot of nothing in those days.

~

It was Branford. Yeah, he said, he might move now. It was only Renee that had kept him there. He knew I understood how that went. Being a caregiver for my parents had put me into the same sort of situation, not so long ago.

“The cancer progressed pretty quickly,” Bran told me. He sounded matter-of-fact about it. “She didn’t have much strength to fight it, I guess.”

He couldn’t see me nod over the phone. I remembered Renee that last time I saw her. Maybe she was already sick then and we didn’t know. Maybe no one knew. “She always smoked too much,” I said. It sounded stupid.

“Yeah.” A long pause. “I know you aren’t likely to drive over, ’specially on short notice like this. Hmm, but the funeral is Friday, anyway. Day after tomorrow.”

Friday wasn’t a good day, even if I'd had any intention of going. Most of the shop business was on weekends and weekends started on Friday. “Okay.” I wasn’t going to say anything one way or the other. Bran understood.

~

The summer before, the family had moved to Genoa once again, this time to stay, after three years and four homes in Ohio. We owned a little concrete-block house down there, out in a sand and palmetto subdivision far from town. Redneck territory. Or greaser territory we might have said back then. It was a very different world from the one I'd been living in, homogeneous Columbus suburbs, parochial school. I hadn't even noticed social distinctions there. Or maybe that was because I was younger.

Renee’s house—her folks’ house that is—was across the highway, and a bit east. Not too far to ride the bike. I was always a big bike rider when we were still in Ohio, going all over Columbus. My parents never realized how far I roamed. There wasn’t much of anyplace to go around the new home, just block after empty block. And no shade.

But I got just as restless. Renee said to come over and I debated it back and forth with myself. Maybe I would just ride by and look at the place, I told myself. That wouldn’t hurt and I wouldn’t have to stop. That helped tamp down the anxiety I felt about the whole idea.

I’m surprised that I actually went that far, up a long blacktop lane that turned off Forty-One, with no side roads. I’m even more surprised that I turned my green single-speed at the mailbox that said ‘Perry’ and rode it up the dirt drive past the pickup and the car with its hood up. Two guys were bent over the engine. This wasn’t the same sort of neighborhood as mine. It was older, the houses were older, the lots they sat on were larger.

There I was, and I had no idea what to do next. I was relieved when Renee came out the screen door. Otherwise, I might have been pedaling fast the other way.

~

The coffee was ready. I always turned on the machine before going across the highway to check the surf. It was just starting to get light out.

Cup in hand, I wandered up into the shop, peered out the window toward A-1-A. There was a lot of work yet to do here, converting this old Florida house, Fifties-vintage, into a surf shop. And a lot had been done. I was okay with the place. I was almost okay with my life. It was likely I would stay in Cully Beach.

There had been restless years, too many restless years, some spent in Genoa, some in one city or another on the Atlantic side of the state—Lauderdale, Cocoa. Boca, where I had gone to college, dropped out, returned a decade later to finish my degree. Not that it did me any good, but it felt good.

Renee had been peripheral through those years, a presence on the border of my life, and that was only because of Bran. He’d become a brother to me, and a heck of a better one than my parents had given me.

~

I thought the kid’s name was Brian, and made the mistake of calling him that.

“Bran!” he practically shouted at me.

“His name’s Branford,” Renee informed me. “My folks named him after some town they liked.” She shrugged her bony shoulders. “Up on the Suwanee.” I made a note to myself to look at a map sometime.

She lit up a cigarette. She had been carrying three or four loose in her shirt pocket. I didn’t know anyone else my age who smoked. I didn’t care for the smell of it. Still don’t. Branford, huh? Must be six or seven. He didn’t look much like his sister.

Renee looked perpetually sunburned. Maybe she was, for she was very blond, ash blond, with the palest of watery blue eyes that peered at the world through thick lenses. No one would accuse her of being good-looking. That didn’t bother me any. Never did, never has.

~

Business wasn’t bad. It was still the ‘season’ but we were sliding toward spring, toward the time when tourists were no longer bumper to bumper on weekends, when snow birds would wing north. Things slowed down before Easter, here and everywhere in Florida. Folks wanted to be back home for the holiday.

Just as they waited until after Thanksgiving to head south. It had always been that way. Oh, it would pick back up when the kids got out of school for the summer. Some. Places like Disney got that traffic.

Not little surf shops in little coast towns. They would have some sort of memorial for Renee this morning. At the funeral home; that was the address Bran had given me. Maybe she hadn’t belonged to any church. Then interment someplace, I assumed. Genoa was low, set between the Gulf and the Everglades, so there weren’t much in the way of cemeteries in the area.

And all the suitable spaces were used by golf courses. Someone should combine the two. It would be perfect for Florida.

~

I don't know how she felt about me. We remained friendly but I'd disappeared into another world and sort of dragged her brother along behind me. Not into surfing. Bran never showed much interest in that. But the other stuff, the intellectual stuff I guess you could call it. There wasn’t much of that in his home.

Yeah, I was seven years older so it wasn’t like we hung out a lot. Even less when my folks moved again. That’s what we did. Build a new house every year or so, sell it, build another. We never quite settled in.

Renee, though. We moved, too, moved away from each other, into different worlds. All we had in common was Bran, eventually, though we were the same age, went to the same high school. She dropped out sometime in her senior year. That didn’t surprise me. I didn’t know she got married until Branford told me, a few months later.

“He’s an idiot,” the boy informed me, and I was willing to take his word for it. It didn’t matter, I told myself, or shouldn’t matter, but we had been friends, at least for a while. Bran bowed his dark-blond head over his guitar, peering at his fretting hand. “You should learn to play,” he said. He’d been at it almost a whole year now.

“Someday,” I promised. I couldn’t tell you whether I meant that seriously. Probably not.

But a decade later we were playing together in a band.

~

“I have her ashes now,” Branford informed me. “Wherever I end up, I guess Renee is going with me.”

That made sense. His widowed mom lived somewhere upstate with an older daughter. They wouldn’t want them. “You might like it over here,” I told him.

He chuckled. “It sounds like your kind of place, man. You always had a thing for the east coast.”

“But not yours, huh?” I didn’t really have to ask. It had never been.

He took a few seconds to answer. “Nah. I’m looking for a place without so many people.” He chuckled again. “Maybe I’ll take to painting there like Pat.”

Bran was a decent painter. Talented guy in a lot of ways. “Maybe you can muscle in on his substitute teacher gig too.”

“Had enough of that,” he said. “Had enough a long time ago.”

~

I hadn’t expected Renee to be there. Branford had a trailer out east of town, out past the airport.

I didn’t live much of anywhere right then. I think I slept in my van more nights than not. That’s why we practiced at his place. Sometimes other band members would be there too. Those changed a lot but the two of us were the core. We were the band.

“Yeah, Joe and I are done,” she said. She was hunched on the couch, an unlit cigarette passing back and forth between her hands. Bran wouldn’t let anyone smoke in his place, himself included. Renee was gaunt; her eyes, the same pale blue, peered from dark caves. In contrast, a pot belly protruded, visible even under her loose shirt. It looked like a man’s white dress shirt and was frayed at the cuffs.

Joe. Her second husband? I wasn’t completely sure whether she had married him. So she was on her own again. No man in her life, no children. There had been a couple of miscarriages, I’d heard. Not from her. Not from her brother. I didn’t even know if she had a place to live. Maybe that was why she was here.

“He was a loser,” asserted Branford.

Renee sighed and shook her head. “Nah, Bran, I’m the loser. I never get anything right.” She gave me a long look, long enough to make me start to feel uneasy. “I used to think you were a loser, Teddy.”

“So did I.” I still had my days, my ups and downs. Renee didn’t need to hear any of that. “I messed up plenty.”

“You sure can’t tell it. Damn, you even look like a kid still. And not the dorky kid you used to be.”

Branford snickered at that. “Ted was an ugly duckling.”

“Yeah, a fuckin’ ugly duckling. He swam off by himself and came back all swanny.” She glanced toward her brother. “That’s how the story goes, isn’t it?”

“Pretty much,” he agreed. “But that duckling was pretty miserable as I remember.”

“Hell, aren’t we all?” asked Renee. “Did you have it so bad, Ted?”

I was surprised to hear myself saying, “Bad enough. There were times I came close to ending it.” Times I stared at the ocean and thought of swimming out until I grew too tired to swim further. Times I held a gun to my head. Not many knew about those days, about the depression, the despair. Bran did. Some of it.

Renee was silent for some time. “Stuff can be hard, can’t it Ted? I’m glad you’re still alive.”

This had all gotten far too serious. “Better to be a duckling than a dead duck,” I cracked.

“But even better to be a swan,” replied Renee Perry. “I hope I’m one someday.”

~

There is an African proverb that says no matter how a river winds, it begins at the beginning and ends at the end. So it was with Renee. So it will be with me. We all come to rest somewhere.

I poured myself a small glass of wine. I’d made sure to pick up something decent, or at least as decent as they sold at the Pig, a nice bardolino. Here’s to you, I said, lifting the glass. Here’s to the journey down the river, to ducklings and to swans.

That was good. I might break my rule and have a second glass. A glass for Renee. But no more than that.

To the girl who was not my girlfriend. What if things had been just a little different, if I had been just a little different? But that doesn’t happen, not for me, not for Renee. We start where we start and end where we end.