“It doesn’t matter what I care, Ruth. Whatever happens to you or your mother won’t have anything to do with me. Believe me. I got nothing to do with it. I learned that a long time ago.”
“Me or my mother?”
“That’s right. I got no say in any decisions involving either one of you. So what the hell.”
“My mother? What are you, kidding me? You could totally dominate my mother if you bothered. She’s never in her life made a decision on her own, Dad.”
“I got no say over her.”
“Who does, then?”
“You know who.”
Ruth and her father looked at each other for a long minute. “You could stand up to the Ellises if you wanted to, Dad.”
“No, I couldn’t, Ruth. And neither can you.”
“Liar.”
“I told you to stop saying that.”
“Pussy,” Ruth said, to her own immense surprise.
“If you don’t watch your fucking mouth,” Ruth’s father said, and he walked out of the house.
That was the incident.
Ruth finished cleaning up the kitchen and headed over to Mrs. Pommeroy’s. She cried for about an hour on her bed while Mrs. Pommeroy stroked her hair and said, “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
Ruth said, “He’s just such a pussy.”
“Where did you learn that word, hon?”
“He’s such a fucking coward. It’s pathetic. Why can’t he be more like Angus Addams? Why can’t he stand up for something?”
“You wouldn’t really want Angus Addams for a father, would you, Ruth?”
This made Ruth cry harder, and Mrs. Pommeroy said, “Oh, sweetheart. You’re sure having a tough time this year.”
Robin came into the room and said, “What’s all the noise? Who’s blubbering?” Ruth shouted, “Get him out of here!” Robin said, “It’s my house, bitch.” And Mrs. Pommeroy said, “You two are like brother and sister.”
Ruth stopped crying and said, “I can’t believe this fucking place.”
Ruth stayed at the Pommeroy house through July and August and on into the beginning of September. Sometimes she went next door to her house, to her father’s house, when she knew he’d be out hauling, and picked up a clean blouse or a book to read, or tried to guess what he’d been eating. She had nothing to do. She had no job. She had given up even pretending that she wanted to work as a sternman, and nobody asked her anymore what plans she had. She was clearly never going to be offered work on a boat. And for people who didn’t work on boats on Fort Niles in 1976, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do.
Ruth had nothing to occupy herself. At least Mrs. Pommeroy could do needlepoint. And Kitty Pommeroy had her alcoholism for companionship. Webster Pommeroy had the mudflats to sift through, and Senator Simon had his dream of the Museum of Natural History. Ruth had nothing. Sometimes she thought she most resembled the oldest citizens of Fort Niles, the tiny ancient women who sat at their front windows and parted the curtains to see what was going on out there, on the rare instances that anyone walked past their homes.
She was sharing Mrs. Pommeroy’s home with Webster and Robin and Timothy Pommeroy, and with Robin’s fat wife, Opal, and their big baby, Eddie. She was also sharing it with Kitty Pommeroy, who’d been thrown out of her house by Ruth’s Uncle Len Thomas. Len had taken up Florida Cobb, of all desperate women. Florida Cobb, Russ and Ivy Cobb’s grown daughter, who rarely said a word and who’d spent her life gaining weight and painting pictures on sand dollars, was now living with Len Thomas. Kitty was in bad shape over this. She’d threatened Len with a shotgun, but he took it away from her and blasted it into her oven.
“I thought Florida Cobb was my goddamn friend,” Kitty said to Ruth, although Florida Cobb had never been anyone’s friend.
Kitty told Mrs. Pommeroy the whole sad story of her last night at home with Len Thomas. Ruth could hear the two women talking in Mrs. Pommeroy’s bedroom, with the door shut. She could hear Kitty sobbing and sobbing. When Mrs. Pommeroy finally came out, Ruth asked, “What did she say? What’s the story?”
“I don’t want to hear it twice, Ruth,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.
“Twice?”
“I don’t want to hear it once out of her mouth and once out of mine. Just forget it. She’ll be staying here from now on.”
Ruth was beginning to realize that Kitty Pommeroy woke up every day more drunk