His radio was turned up loud enough to drown out the canned music that played all day, every day, at Jolley's market. His mouth moved with the lyrics, and for a minute Fern watched his lips in fascination. The skin on the right side of his face was rippled, the way the sand looks when the wind blows across it and creates waves. Where there weren't ripples there were pock marks and the right side of his face and neck was spotted with black marks, like a prankster had taken a felt tip marker to his cheek while he slept. As she watched, he reached a hand to his face and rubbed at the marks that marred his skin, scratching as if they bothered him.
A long, thick scar ran from the corner of his mouth and up the side of his face, disappearing into the bandana on his head. His right eye was glassy and fixed, and a scar ran vertically through his eyelid, extending above his eye through his eyebrow and below his eye in a straight line with his nose intersecting the scar that started at the corner of his mouth.
Ambrose was still imposing, tall and straight, and his wide shoulders and long arms were still corded with muscles. But he was leaner, even leaner than he'd been during wrestling season, when the boys were so lean their cheeks were hollow and their eyes sunken in their faces. He'd been running the night Fern had first seen him. She wondered briefly if he was trying to get back in shape, and if so . . . why? Fern didn't love exercise, so it was hard to imagine him running for the joy of it, although she was sure that was a possibility. Her idea of exercise was to turn on the radio and dance around her room, shaking her little body until she worked up a good sweat. It had served her well enough. She definitely wasn't fat.
Fern wished she dared approach him, dared talk to him. But she didn't know how. Didn't know if he would want her to, so she stayed hidden for several moments more before she made her way to the exit and headed for home.
A small whiteboard was mounted just outside the bakery door in the hallway that led to Mr. Morgan's office and the employee break-room. It had been there forever, and it had never had anything written on it, as far as Fern could tell. Maybe Elliott Young had thought it would make a good place to write schedules or reminders, but he’d never gotten around to it. Fern decided it would be perfect. She wouldn't be able to put anything too suggestive there . . . but suggestive wasn't really her style, after all. If she wrote on the board at about eight o'clock, after the bakery was officially closed for the night and before Ambrose arrived to start his preparations in the kitchen, he would be the only one to see what was written on the board. And he could erase it if he didn't want anyone else to see it.
The key was to write something that would make him smile–something that he would know was meant for him–without cluing anyone else in and without making herself feel like an idiot. She struggled with the words for two days. Everything from “Hi. Glad you're back!” to “I couldn’t care less if your face isn't perfect, I still want to have your babies.” Neither seemed quite right. And then she knew what she would do.
In big black letters she wrote KITES OR BALLOONS across the whiteboard, and she taped a red balloon, his favorite color, to the side. He would know it was Fern. Once upon a time, they had asked each other a million questions just like this. In fact, Ambrose had been the first to ask this particular question. Kites or Balloons? Fern had said kites because if she were a kite she could fly, but someone would always be holding onto her. Ambrose had said balloons: “I like the idea of flying away and letting the wind take me. I don't think I want anyone holding onto me.” Fern wondered if his response would be the same now as it had been then.
When Ambrose had discovered she was writing the letters instead of Rita, and the correspondence had come to a screeching halt, Fern had missed questions like these the very most. In his responses, sometimes with only a word or a funny one-liner, she had started to know Ambrose and had begun to reveal herself as well. And she had revealed Fern, not Rita.
Fern watched the white board for two days, but the words stayed there, unacknowledged, unanswered. So she erased them and tried again. SHAKESPEARE OR EMINEM, she wrote. He had to remember that one. Back then, she thought for sure he would share her secret fascination with the rhyming ability of the white rapper. Ambrose's response had been, surprisingly, Shakespeare. Ambrose had then sent her some of Shakespeare's sonnets, and told her Shakespeare would have been an incredible rapper. She had also discovered that Ambrose was much more than a pretty face. He was a jock with a poet's soul, and the heroes in Fern's novels had nothing on him. Nothing.
The following day the whiteboard also had nothing on it. Nothing. Strike two. Time to get a little more blunt. She erased SHAKESPEARE OR EMINEM and wrote HIDE OR SEEK? He'd been the one to ask that one the first time around. And she had circled seek . . . because wasn't that what she had been doing? Seeking him out, discovering him?
Fern wondered if she should pick a different either/or, since he was so obviously hiding. But maybe it would provoke a response. When she arrived at three the next afternoon she glanced at the board as she walked by, not hoping for much, and came to a screeching halt. Ambrose had erased her question and written one of his own.
DEAF OR BLIND?
This was a question she had asked him before. At the time, he had chosen deaf. She had agreed, but had listed all her favorite songs in response, indicating what she would have to give up in exchange for her eyesight. Her list of songs had prompted questions about country or classical, rock or pop, show tunes or a bullet to the brain. Ambrose had claimed he would rather take the bullet, which inspired a slew of either/or questions about ways to die. Fern didn't think she would be using any of those questions in the present situation.