Free Written on My Heart by Morgan Callan Rogers

wouldn’t pass that on lest it seem disrespectful. She was right, though; he
was
a good-looking fella. He reminded me of Daddy. His eyes took on the color blue in a serious way, and his skin was ruddy for life. His age was up for debate, but Maureen Warner said she thought that he was about twenty-nine or thirty. “There’s barely seventeen years of difference between him and me. If we get married when I’m eighteen, he’ll only be thirty-five or so. That’s not so old,” she told me one day.
    â€œThat’s pretty old,” I said.
    She lifted her stubborn chin and shook her head. “Not really.”
    â€œWell,” I said, “my parents were twelve years apart. That worked out until Carlie went missing. But they were happy before that, as far as I know.”
    Whenever I saw Billy, I thought about Maureen’s crush on him.
    As he and Bud removed the busted window from its frame in the kitchen, the summer breeze sifting off the water laid its warm fingerson every person and item in the house. I brought Arlee downstairs and put her in her bassinet and in a rare moment of idleness, I watched the men work.
    Bud looked awful, as was to be expected. He hadn’t slept all night. When he had seen the cuts on my cheek earlier in the morning, I had to talk him out of letting Stella have it.
    â€œWe’ll deal with it later,” I said. “We have enough going on today.”
    â€œWell, that’s bullshit,” he said, but he left it alone. As I watched, he turned away from Billy and me and wandered down toward his mother’s house.
    â€œHe’s in a state today,” I said.
    Billy nodded. “That’s to be expected.”
    â€œYes,” I said. I wanted to follow him and take him walking. I would hook my arm through his elbow and we would find ourselves beneath two rows of tipsy pines that had nothing to do but shade us as we strolled underneath them.
    â€œI bet Sam would want to be buried at sea,” I said to Billy. “Like Daddy.”
    Daddy’s remains were drifting along the floor of the ocean somewhere, although he had a grave in the cemetery up on the hill near the white church where Billy preached. The men, including Billy, had spirited his body away at some point during the day of his funeral. They had roused me at midnight and we had taken him home to his beloved sea, said goodbye to him, and dropped him overboard. We had told no one. As far as I knew, Stella thought Daddy was buried in the cemetery. His plot was the most flowered and watered one in the whole place.
    Billy didn’t answer me. Instead, he walked through the empty window frame into the kitchen and went to the bassinet on the porch. He looked down at a sleeping Arlee, a smile around his eyes. “I remember your mother well,” he said. “This little girl looks like her.”
    â€œCarlie had more hair and she was bigger,” I said. Billy smiled.
    â€œYou’re God’s little wiseass,” he said. “That’s for sure.” He frowned at my cheek. “You probably should have that checked out.”
    â€œIt’ll heal,” I said.
    â€œI’m going to see Stella after I leave here,” Billy said.
    I moved over to the missing window and looked over at the house across the driveway. No sound. No movement. I shivered.
    â€œShe was so crazy last night,” I said. “Not sure what set her off.”
    â€œLoneliness. Grief. Watching you continue on with your new family. Missing Leeman something awful, I imagine.”
    â€œI know all that. I just don’t know why now.”
    â€œNo reason that makes any sense to any of us, or maybe to her. She’s been to see me a couple of times, just to set and talk. That’s something you could do, if you had a mind to do it.”
    â€œThat’s right,” I said. “I could. If I had a mind.”
    Billy smiled and shook his head. He walked back through the