The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley (autobiographies to read .TXT) 📗

Husband. Would she ever tire of that word?

“Oh! I forgot. I found something today.” She left Tom’s embrace and, giggling, crossed the tiny room, stopping in front of the bookcase. “Gimby brought it in.” Tom watched patiently, amused, as he already knew the “something” Piper found was going to be a record.

It was a collection she had started years ago, when they were walking through Gimby’s antiques shop after school one day—neither one wanting to go home, to be away from the other for a second. They were browsing through dusty old albums, obscure ones with psychedelic covers that Gimby had picked up from yard sales on the mainland over the years. Problem was, people rarely got rid of anything good—so the collection was mostly music no one had ever heard of. Piper had stopped at an electric blue cover, a word catching her eye.

“Well, we have to buy this one,” she’d said.

Tom had glanced at the band name—the Who—surprised Gimby had something recognizable, and then at the song title Piper was pointing at: “Tommy Can You Hear Me?”

It became the first of many in Piper’s “Tom” record collection.

Now, in their den, she clapped her hands together, the excitement spreading her already large smile wider, her brown eyes even brighter. “Listen!”

A catchy banjo riff twanged into the air and a woman’s southern drawl spoke over the top of it. “It’s Dolly Parton,” Piper whispered, still grinning. She held up a finger. “Wait for it.”

Tom cocked an eyebrow at her but did as he was told. They listened as Dolly told her story, something about tent revivals, and then finally, the words Piper—and Tom—had been waiting for.

So preacher Tom wherever you may be—

“It’s called ‘Preacher Tom’! Have you ever heard of it?”

Tom shook his head no as Dolly started singing.

“This is . . .” Tom cocked his head, searching for the word to best encapsulate what he was hearing. “Awful.”

“I know! Might be the worst one yet.” Piper closed the gap between them and grabbed his hands, pulling him around in circles as she alternated jouncing her feet up and down as if she were in a square dance. Tom couldn’t help but allow himself—as always—to get pulled into her orbit. He wrapped his arm around Piper’s back and held it there sturdily and then started spinning her around the tiny room, making sharp turns every few steps to avoid the couch, the easy chair, the overturned crates that doubled as lamp stands and book stands and catch-all stands.

When the record started skipping toward the end of the song, Tom and Piper collapsed on the couch, causing the rusted springs within it to squeak and groan under their collective weight. Dizzy and out of breath, Tom turned toward his wife, staring at her profile—the freckles dotting the bridge of her nose, the errant corkscrew curls escaping from beneath her knotted silk kerchief, the way her nut-brown skin glowed, as if she had swallowed sunshine itself. He gently grabbed one of the loose tendrils, snaking a finger into it, around it, as though, if he tried hard enough, he could meld them together, and they’d be entwined just like that forever.

She’s not magic, son. He heard his dad’s voice, the thing he said to him all those years ago when he noticed Tom’s gaze glued in Piper’s direction, anytime she was anywhere in the vicinity. “Huh?” Tom had said, trying to drag his eyes away from her.

“She puts her pants on one leg at a time just like ever’body else. Do you good to ’member that.”

And of course, the more he got to know Piper, and learned her all-too-human flaws—like how she dispensed toothpaste by pushing right in the center of the tube, or how she couldn’t get rid of her favorite house slippers even though they smelled like rotten cheese, or how she was constantly running late, everywhere and for everything—the more he knew his dad was right. It was just that there were times, like now, when she looked as if she had eaten the sun for lunch, that he wondered if maybe his dad was just a little bit wrong, too.

Piper turned toward him, and maybe it was all that beaming light warming him from the inside out, or maybe it was just that they were young and newly wed, but his hand snaked around her neck and he reeled her in gently until their lips were a breath apart. “Preacher Tom,” she whispered coquettishly. “This is quite the compromising position.” And she giggled into his mouth when he kissed her.

Much later, when they were both out of breath again, and Piper got up to draw a hot bath, Tom plucked the book he was in the middle of off the overturned crates. He had only just found the sentence where he had left off when Piper came flying back into the den, wrapped only in a tattered terry-cloth towel.

“Tom! We’re late! We’re late! We have to go.”

Tom eyed her from where he was lounging on the couch, then flitted his eyes to the football-size pewter crab on the wall, with a clock in the center of its shell: 6:56. Weariness overtook him. He had forgotten about the meeting at the church. Or rather, he had hoped Piper had forgotten about it.

“Come on! Why aren’t you moving? Get dressed.” She started picking up clothes that had been strewn on the floor and tugging her own on while tossing Tom’s in his direction. His blue jeans hit him in the shoulder.

He clapped his book shut. “Do we really have to go?”

She stopped abruptly, like a spinning top paused with the tip of a finger. And when she looked at him, she could see it then, the thing she’d been trying to ignore for days. The dullness in his typically bright slate eyes. The grayish-purple half-moons hugging his lower lashes. The four days of stubble he had let grow on his typically fastidiously clean-shaven