Written on My Heart

Book 0: Florine Series

by Morgan Callan Rogers

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The marriage of Florine Gilham and Bud Warner is a cause for celebration down on The Point, the Maine fishing village where they grew up. Yet even as the newlyweds begin their lives together, Florine is drawn back into the memory of her mother, Carlie, who vanished when Florine was twelve. As unexpected clues regarding her fate begin to surface, Florine and Bud face the challenges of trying to solve an old mystery while building a new marriage and raising a family. Morgan Callan Rogers’s Written on My Heart will delight readers who love feisty, poignant characters and the beautiful, unforgettable Maine coast.

Release date: February 2, 2016

Publisher: Plume

Print pages: 384

Sample

About the Author

Praise for Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea

Also by Morgan Callan Rogers

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

 

1

The night before my wedding, my best friend, Dottie Butts, and I sat on my side lawn staring up at the sky. The soft blue of twilight mingled with the dark. All was quiet, save for the sound of Dottie sucking down Narragansett beer from a sixteen-ounce can. Beer and I had never gotten along, so I wasn’t drinking. Besides, I was pregnant. The next morning, Saturday, June 12, 1971, I would get up, dress in a wedding gown once worn by my grandmother, and walk the short length of this very lawn to meet my husband-to-be, Bud Warner, the love of my life and the father of the baby soon to be born. Bud and I were both twenty years old.

Dottie said, “Not many people have a baby shower the night before they get married. You made out pretty good.”

Until just a few hours earlier, the inside of my house had been strewn from hither to yon with baby presents and wrapping paper and ribbon. For almost nine months, I had been collecting what I would need for a girl baby, because I had a strong feeling that she would be a girl and I was going on faith. But the night’s haul had given me enough for three babies of either sex. We were set, no matter what.

“Thanks for getting everyone together and doing that,” I said.

“Just doing my maid-of-honor duty,” Dottie said. “Ma’s been keeping me straight on all the things I’m supposed to do. Don’t come natural to me, being a maid of honor. Not much maid to be had in me.”

“You’re doing fine,” I said. “No reason why you wouldn’t. Besides, you’re my best friend. Matter of fact, you’re my only friend.”

“You need to get out more, then.”

“I won’t be socializing much in a couple of weeks.”

“Guess not,” Dottie said. “You know, I got to thinking. Last time I wore a dress was in high school. Hasn’t come up all through college. Can’t say as I’ve missed it.”

“You said you liked the dress,” I said. “Your exact words in the store were that you thought it was ‘some pretty.’ You look nice in it.” Suddenly, a lazy movement inside of me touched my heart and brought tears to my eyes. I said to Dottie, “Don’t you want to be my maid of honor? You didn’t have to say yes.”

Dottie set her beer can on the lawn and sat up on the edge of the chair. “Florine Gilham, you crying?” she said. “Really? You crying?”

“No.” I sniffed.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, of course I wanted to do this,” she said. “Thick and thin. That’s you and me. I’m thick and you’re thin. You’re the only person can get me to put the dress on, so cut it out.”

“You think it’s pretty, right? Because it is pretty.”

“It’s the prettiest dress ever made, anywhere, in the history of dresses,” Dottie said. “It ain’t its fault I don’t wear dresses. Don’t get so worked up.”

We went back to studying the sky.

Darkness had settled in as we’d been talking, but millions of stars had leaked through it. Three of them contained the souls of my parents and of my grandmother, Grand. One twinkling star contained the spirit of my joyful, lively mother, Carlie, who had vanished when I was twelve. I didn’t know if she was dead or alive, but placing her in the sky with Daddy and Grand made sense to me, as she was as gone to me as they were. Daddy’s star was one of the larger ones, because he had been a big man with a stubborn heart, set in his ways. Grand’s star radiated rays of light. A practical woman, her faith in those on Earth and in heaven had been unshakeable. How I missed those three dear souls.

“They see you,” Dottie said. How she knew what I was thinking was beyond me, but her ability to do that bound her to me. She and I, born one day apart, were more like sisters than friends. Thick and thin, she’d said. She was right.

My eyes filled again. “I don’t want to cry,” I said. “It’s the baby making me do it.”

Dottie laughed. “Mean baby.”

I said, “I just wish so much they were here for everything.”

“Well, you and that baby got them inside of you. ’Course, it ain’t the same as having ’em here, I know that, but it’ll have to do.”

I smiled. “You sound like Grand,” I said.

“Could do worse,” Dottie said. She hoisted herself out of the chair and reached for my hands. “I got to get my beauty sleep,” she said. I grabbed onto her and she groaned as she pulled me up.

“I’m not that big,” I grumbled.

“Oh, yes, you are.” Dottie laughed. “That baby is going to weigh more than my bowling ball. That’s a good twenty pounds, right there.”

“Oh, stop,” I said, “most of it is water weight.”

“Water weight, my ass,” she said.

“Give me the beer can,” I said, “I’ll toss it out for you. Don’t want the path to Pastor Billy strewn with empties instead of rose petals.”

“Guess not.” We stood there for a minute. My marriage would mark a distance between us. We would always be best friends, but my relationships with Bud and the baby would bump her a couple of notches in my heart. Dottie and I had been through everything together. But our paths, while still joined in friendship, would branch off to include other people and places. I wanted to say, How could I have gotten through the last few years without you? Do you know how much you mean to me? But that wasn’t like us, so instead I said, “Well, thanks. See you tomorrow.”

Dottie waved good night as she turned to go. “Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “We got to get you two married, first.”

“That’s going to happen. Come hell or high water,” I called as she walked off into the dark. I listened to the steadiness in her footsteps as she covered the short distance down the hill to her parents’ house. The screen door squealed open, and then shut with a bang. Someone in the house spoke to her and she answered, but I couldn’t hear the conversation.

My ears pitched themselves toward the sounds in the harbor. The water exhaled in a continuous sigh as it traveled out with the tide. Small waves shushed themselves against the rocky beach. I closed my eyes and let the sounds come into me before I looked up at the stars again. “You hear me?” I said to the three that were listening. “Come hell or high water, tomorrow, I’m marrying Bud. Put a good word in for us.”

When I looked down, I got dizzy. I pulled on the handle of the screen door that opened into the hallway of what had once been Grand’s house. It was mine, now—mine and Bud’s, and soon, our baby’s house too.

The women and girls who had attended the baby shower had cleaned and stacked everything so that I wouldn’t have to deal with any of that. It made me grateful for the way we took care of one another. I hauled myself up the stairs to the bathroom and had a long pee.

Afterward, I looked at my face in the mirror over the sink. Usually, my features were sharp, all bones and shade, but my weight gain from carrying the baby had filled in the angles. I looked young and soft, something I’d never thought about myself. I smiled, and the tired, violet half-moons under my hazel eyes disappeared. A pinpoint of light glowed in the center of my pupils.

“Mrs. James Walter Warner,” I whispered. “Mrs. Bud Warner. Florine Warner.”

As if he had heard me, Bud walked through the front door and whistled his way up the stairs.

I met him in the hall and blocked him so that he had to pause on the top riser. We stood face-to-face. The residue of beer and cigarettes from his bachelor party clung to his clothing. His eyes shone from the booze. A crooked smile inched up the right side of his face and he gave me a slow wink.

“Hey,” he whispered.

“Hey,” I whispered back.

Bud put his hands on my belly, leaned forward, and gave me a soft kiss. Then he said, “Back up so’s I can get to the bathroom. ’Gansett’s gone right through me.”

I stepped back to let him pass and I went into the bedroom. I pulled the two window shades down against the night crowding in. I almost split myself apart with a belly-deep yawn and suddenly I was so tired I couldn’t move my arms to take off my clothes.

Bud came into the bedroom.

“Will you undress me?” I said.

Bud grinned. “That’s my girl,” he said.

He used his gentle, warm hands to tug and pull, unfasten and unhook, as I stood there, drunk with exhaustion and with the way he was touching me. Soon, I was naked but for my panties, which rested in a soft cotton puddle on top of my feet.

Bud stepped back and took me in, top to bottom.

“What?” I said.

“Just checking out my work,” he said. He stripped down and I got to admire his thin body. When he saw me taking him in, he shyly looked at the floor. “So much for not seeing the bride the night before her wedding,” he mumbled, trying to turn my attention somewhere else. He thought he was too skinny.

“I like it this way,” I whispered. I took his hands in mine and we looked into each other’s eyes. A rare blush of tenderness wrapped itself around us. No jokes, no rushing to bed, no wisecracks. Bud raised a hand and ran it down my full-moon face. “I love you, Florine,” he said. “Whatever happens, I love you.”

“I love you too. We’re in this, together.”

As far as I was concerned, that was our wedding ceremony. The next day would bring the formal vows with everyone cheering us on, particularly my soon-to-be mother-in-law, Ida, who was overjoyed that Bud and I were going legal. But in that moment, I had heard everything I needed to know.

Bud slipped into bed and I slid in after him. He spooned me and, like that, he fell asleep. The tickle of his breath against my neck was as comforting as a cat’s purr, but as was so often the case these days, I went from sleepy to awake.

I made the best of the hour I was up by thinking about Bud and me and how we had arrived at this place in our lives. I had loved him before I had even known what that meant. I had grown up on the hill above his place.

Four houses stood on The Point, houses built on slabs of granite by generations of fishermen almost as tough as that rock. Grand’s house had been the first one built. Daddy’s house stood across the road from it. Dottie’s house set across the road and below Grand’s house, halfway down the hill. Bud’s house hunkered down on a wide level ledge directly above the wharf and beach.

The Point was one of several fingers of rocky land carved by glaciers and the ceaseless pounding of the North Atlantic. Little harbors, such as the one in The Point, held boats relatively safe from most of the action. Independent types who loved the sea had settled this place. They could have lived in the town of Long Reach, about ten miles up the coast. Life might have been easier that way. But something in their natures chose the elements, and the freedom and challenge of hard work. Daddy, Dottie’s father, Bud’s father, and their ancestors had driven the prows of those boats into the roughshod sea day after day. If nothing else, we were resilient.

Bud was about six months older than Dottie and me. He lived through part of a fall and a whole winter before I barged onto the scene. “As soon as you could run,” his mother, Ida, had told me a short time before the baby shower, “your little legs carried you down the road to our house. You used to play in the driveway with Bud until one of you made the other one mad, and then we would walk you back up the hill.”

“Did I just run loose? Where was Carlie?” I asked Ida. I called my mother Carlie because she had wanted to be called by her first name. “Mama sounds weird to me,” she told me when I asked. I didn’t care what she wanted to be called. I knew who she was to me.

“Your mother was right with you,” Ida said. “You think she’d let you run down the road alone?”

“I don’t remember,” I said. Carlie had taken with her any stories she might have told me. “But I remember playing with Bud.”

Something about him, even then, made me feel strong and protected. He was a calm little boy who had grown into a quiet and easygoing man, unless something really riled him up.

He was the leader of the four of us. Besides Dottie, Bud, and me, our little gang included Glen Clemmons, who was also our age. Glen’s father, Ray, ran the general store, close to the road that led to Long Reach. When we got together as a foursome, each of us contributed to whatever mischief we might decide to get into. Glen had the bad ideas, Dottie complained but went along, I thought Glen’s ideas were fun, and Bud was the voice of reason that no one ever listened to until it was too late.

I might not have tuned in on his advice, but I heard his heart in my heart, always. His presence took root in me. I looked for him, even when we were with other people. Four years after Carlie went missing, I lost Grand to a stroke. My life took a header even as Glen, Dottie, and Bud found ways to get along in the world. Bud hooked up with a pretty, popular girl named Susan. I quit high school and took up with Andy Barrington, the son of rich summer people. At seventeen, I gave my virginity to him and learned how to smoke pot. I also almost died when Andy and I got into a bad car accident.

Bud’s was a welcome presence as I healed. Armed at this point with a real understanding of how short life could be and how fast things could change, I fought for his love, and his own restless heart chose mine.

When I was eighteen, my father died of a heart attack on his lobster boat, the Florine, on a beautiful July day. Bud moved in with me a few days after his funeral. He took a job as a mechanic at Fred’s garage, up on the road to Long Reach. He wasn’t a great cook and he left his dirty clothes on the bedroom floor, but he saved my sanity. He held me close when the dark tried to slink into my soul through the cracks in my heart, and he brought me back into the land of the living.

We lived together for a year. We loved sex, so we shouldn’t have been surprised when we made a baby in the early fall of 1970. When I told him, Bud blinked a few times, shrugged, and said, “Well, we’ll manage.”

We were both only nineteen at the time, but we were made of sturdy stock. It helped that Grand’s house was paid for. Bud and I managed to take care of the taxes and, so far, the day-to-monthly bills, but a new baby would up our spending in a big way. To help with finances, I struck a deal with Ray at the general store and he started to carry more of the bread that I baked from Grand’s recipes. Ray also took orders for my knitting and crocheting, and for Christmas wreaths. Only a few years back, I’d considered all of this a chore. Grand had been determined to make me useful, and I had found it a pain in the butt. But after her death, I began to appreciate what she had taken the time to teach me. Doing these things reminded me of her. I came to love creating something warm, beautiful, and lasting, or something that tasted of comfort, or helping The Point women put together wreaths for the annual Christmas season craft fairs.

As the baby claimed its space inside of me, I thought about whether Bud would ask me to marry him. As long as I had loved him, I had dreamed of being married to him, but after all that had happened, it was enough just to have him with me. I was content with that. But in May, maybe at the urging of his mother, who said nothing with her mouth but everything with her eyes, he had asked me to marry him one night at suppertime.

“Wondering,” he’d said, as I was easing a forkful of peas over my big belly.

“What?” I said.

“Want to get married before the baby comes?”

Several peas jumped ship and tumbled down the slope of my stomach.

Bud scraped his chair back and walked around the table to me. He knelt down beside me and folded my left hand between his own hands. “Florine Gilham,” he said, his dark eyes just as dead serious as I’d ever seen them, “you’re a keeper. I can’t think about my life without you. Will you marry me?”

Could he feel the pulse of the hand cradled between his own? My heartbeat picked up so, the baby turned over. “Of course I will,” I said.

We kissed for a little while and then he broke it off. “Don’t have a ring,” he said.

“Wait,” I said. Bud hoisted me to a standing position and I waddled upstairs to our bedroom.

I headed to the bureau, to Grand’s wooden jewelry box. Her husband, Franklin, my grandfather, had made it for her and carved her name, Florence, into the top. The hinges creaked as I lifted it up and looked inside. Grand never had much use for frippery, as she called it, but a few choice things were tucked inside. I plucked her diamond ring out of its velvet holder, pushed it over my swollen finger to see if it fit, took it off, and then squeezed it tight in the palm of my hand. Once downstairs, I handed it to Bud and he slipped it back onto my finger. Then Bud went back around the table to finish his supper.

In less than twenty-four hours, we would be married.

My husband-to-be turned over in bed and faced the wall, wriggling his back and butt toward me so that we touched. With the effort a whale must make to breach so it can breathe, I shifted my bulk so I was on my back. I draped my right arm over his hip and drifted off to sleep.

2

Our wedding day started with a visit from my late father’s girlfriend, Stella Drowns. No one locked their doors on The Point. She barely knocked before she charged in, hollering, “Yoo-hoo!”

Bud shot straight up in bed. “You fucking hoo?” he said to me. “Is she for real?”

“We’re in bed, Stella,” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Come back later.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she called from the bottom of the stairs. “I’m just so excited about today. I brought you a coffee cake. Figured you could use the sugar and the energy.”

“Could have used the sleep too,” Bud shouted.

“Hope you’re not that cranky all day,” Stella hollered. “Happy wedding day!” She slammed the front door on her way out.

“What did Leeman ever see in her?” Bud said. “She’s out of her mind.”

“Coffee cake,” I said. “He liked her, um, cake.”

Bud rubbed his hands over his face. “You want cake and tea?”

“That’s a great idea.”

He climbed over me and stood naked in the early morning light. He scratched his butt and went across the hall to the bathroom. The baby did the twist in my belly. I put my hand on her to calm her down, but she kept it up, as if the prospect of coffee cake for breakfast and a wedding for lunch excited her as much as it did me.

The front door downstairs opened just as Bud flushed the toilet. I tried to catch him before he headed downstairs, but I was too late.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he yelled.

“That your wedding suit?” I heard Dottie say.

“If people don’t stop barging in, it might be,” Bud said.

“Where you going to put the rings?”

“Glen’s supposed to have them.”

“I say, wear what you got on, then. Supposed to be hot this afternoon.”

“Come on up, Dottie,” I called.

“Why? The entertainment is down here,” she said.

“Wait here,” Bud said to Dottie, and he took every other stair to the bedroom. His face was scarlet. “We’re going to start locking the damn door,” he said. “Right after Dottie leaves.”

I grinned. “What’s done is done. Now she knows why I’m marrying you.”

Bud pulled on a pair of jeans and hauled a white, holey T-shirt over his head. He was still sputtering when he left the bedroom and bounded down the stairs. “That coffee cake is for us,” I heard him growl at Dottie, who was more than familiar with our kitchen and could smell a baked good from miles away.

“Just testing it out,” she answered him. “I approve. Here, I cut a piece for you.”

“Going down to the folks’ house,” Bud called up to me. “See you at the wedding,” and he was gone. I hauled myself and the baby out of bed, shuffled to the window, and pulled up the shade. Dust motes sifted through shafts of sunlight.

“Coming up,” Dottie said from the bottom of the stairs.

“Bring me some coffee cake and some tea. With milk,” I said.

“Hope you’re not going to be this bossy all day,” she grumbled.

“Not promising anything,” I said. I waddled over to the rocking chair and grabbed an old green sweatshirt hanging off the back of it. It had been my father’s once, and he had been a big man. I plunked down on the rocker and tugged my pregnant-lady shorts to just underneath my breasts.

By the time Dottie got upstairs, I was standing in front of the mirror, looking at the blond, red, and brown frizzled curly mop I called hair.

“What the hell am I going to do with this?” I asked her.

She set my tea and a plate mounded with Stella’s coffee cake on the bureau. She stood alongside me at the mirror and ran her hands through her brown pixie cut. “Cut if off,” she said. “That’ll take care of that problem.”

“It’s a serious question,” I said. “What do you think I should do? Up? Down?”

“You’re asking the wrong person. Evie knows about that shit. She’ll fix you up.”

Evie was Dottie’s younger sister. At fourteen, she was a handful. “Evie wants what she wants when she wants it,” Dottie had said more than once, “and the only time she doesn’t want for something, she’s asleep.” What mattered about Evie that day was that she would have good ideas. I changed the subject.

“Stella dropped by with the cake and woke up Bud. He wasn’t awful pleased.”

“She probably just wants to be part of the wedding,” Dottie said.

I sighed. “Oh, I know,” I said. “But I don’t want her fussing around while I get ready. She’ll get weepy about Daddy not being here, and then I’ll get weepier than I already am, and I don’t need that today.”

“I guess not,” Dottie said. “Anyways, Evie’ll be over soon, with Madeline. You don’t want to see either of them before they have their coffee.”

Madeline was Dottie’s mother. For money, she worked at the post office up the road. For joy, she painted seashore and ocean scenes in watercolor. Some of them brightened the walls of our house. Once in a while, she’d sell a painting to a tourist Ray sent down to the house. I loved Madeline. Every time I’d gone to Dottie’s house—and I’d gone there thousands of times—she acted as if I were a long-lost friend who’d just come back from somewhere far away. On my wedding day, she was going to pick flowers from Grand’s side garden to decorate the food and drink tables, and then fashion a bouquet out of peonies and beach roses for me to carry.

“I’m so lucky to have you all,” I said to Dottie. “Hey, leave me at least a piece of that cake, please.”

“It’s all yours,” she said, grabbing a last nibble.

I slipped the remaining piece of coffee cake into my mouth and took a sip of hot tea that coated my tongue with melted, brown sugar–crumb topping. “Mmmmm,” I said. Stella really could cook. She had reeled Daddy in by bringing him a coffee cake and making him a couple of dinners. She drove me crazy, but sometimes she touched my heart and on this day, I loved everyone.

Dottie and I puttered around for a couple of hours, making sure the house was to rights and then suddenly, it was ten o’clock, only three hours away from the wedding. I rushed upstairs for a bath. When Madeline and Evie showed up, I was standing in the bedroom combing the tangles out of my wet hair. Right away, Evie took over.

“Let me do that,” she said. “Wait. Let’s sit you down first. No, not the rocking chair—I need to work on your hair from the back and sides. Dottie!” she hollered downstairs. “Bring up a kitchen chair.” I braced myself against the possibility that Dottie would holler back that Evie could just fetch it herself or else go to hell, but to my surprise, she carried a chair upstairs and set it in front of the mirror, exactly where her sister told her to put it.

“Anything else, Your Highness?” Dottie said.

“Nope,” Evie said. “Go away.”

“I’m the maid of honor. I got rank over you.” Dottie set her solid self down on the mattress and settled in to watch over me as only a best friend can.

I said, “I got rank over both of you. Dottie can stay.”

Evie shrugged. “Well, whoever stays, you got to take off that sweatshirt first. It’ll mess up your hair and we’re only fixing it once.”

I whipped off the shirt and we all admired my swollen boobs and bloated belly, along with the strange line of reddish-brown hair that had sprouted down the center of my stomach during my pregnancy. Dottie took my fancy lacy bra from the wedding-wear hanger and hooked the back for me while Evie scared up some towels from the bathroom. I sat down, and she began wrestling with my hair. I closed my eyes while she worked. I loved the light feel of her quick hands as she gently pulled, brushed, braided, and twisted my hair into shape. She hummed some tune I didn’t recognize in her husky voice as she worked.

Down in the side yard, I heard Bert Butts, Dottie’s father, working with Glen as they set up tables and chairs in the backyard. Madeline’s voice entered the mix, along with the clatter of Grand’s silverware, plates, glasses, and cups. I’d suggested paper plates and cups to her, but she said, “We can break out the good stuff for this day, Florine. Your wedding day is worth it.”

After a while Dottie got restless and wandered downstairs and outside into the side yard to “see if there was something I can do.”

I half dozed in the chair. I jumped when Evie said, “There.”

“You done?” I said, opening my eyes. She stood in front of me and I looked up and into her beautiful blue eyes. A forest of dark lashes surrounded them.

“Looks good,” she said. “But you’re not going to peek until we make you up.”

“I don’t know as I need much,” I said, and Evie rolled her eyes.

“Let’s bury the freckles,” she said.

“I like my freckles.”

“Just for the day,” Evie said. She tilted her head and studied my face. “Humph,” she said, and reached for a bag filled with enough makeup to beautif