“Don’t forget to smile,” I teased. But no sooner had we closed the dining room doors and vacuumed the rug then it was time to set the tables for lunch.
It was after three before we got our break, too late for any excursion, but at least we had it fairly easy the rest of the day. We did the bed turndowns during dinner, distributed the program for the following day, followed the chocolate-on-every-pillow routine.
Pamela and I usually went up on the observation deck after we’d finished, provided no passengers were up there and we could have it to ourselves. We stretched out on the lounge chairs or propped our feet on the railing. Pamela looked a little less harried this week, I thought.
“Things settling down on the mom front?” I asked, keeping it general.
She slowly turned her head in my direction and gave me a sardonic smile. “No, not really.”
“Okayyyy,” I said. “But I haven’t heard your cell phone ringing so much.”
“Because I don’t bring it with me on breaks, and I keep it turned off in crew quarters, that’s why. If Mom has a real emergency, she can call the main office and they’d get in touch with the ship.”
“True,” I said, and leaned my head back, enjoying the last rays of the sun that warmed without roasting.
But I’d left the conversation open, and Pamela was in a pensive mood: “It’s all about her, you know? I finally figured that out the other day. Her car! Her doctor’s appointment! Her schedule! It’s like nobody else ever has problems!”
I followed the trail of a plane so high, I could barely see it—just a blinking dot of light across the ocean of sky. “I thought your mom was doing better for a while. What do you think—that things not working out with that guy started her off again?”
“That and the fact that Meredith’s still in the picture.”
“She and your dad ever going to get married?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if she moves in with Dad after I leave for college. Meredith’s good for him in a lot of ways. If they do ever marry, Mom will be the last person they’ll tell.”
“Well, you seem to be taking all this remarkably well,” I told her.
“I made a deal with myself,” Pamela said. “I’ll check my cell phone twice a day to make sure there’s no emergency, and I’ll text Mom once a week, just to keep in touch. But that’s it.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
Finally I got to Tangier Island. Quinton told us that if there was an excursion along the cruise that we really wanted to take, we could go if we found someone who’d trade jobs with us. Emily said she’d take my tables at breakfast and lunch if I’d take her galley duty that evening. So on Wednesday morning I stood in line at Crisfield with the Seascape tour group to board the ferry to the island, and I was pleasantly surprised to find Mitch waiting too.
“I figured this was the last port of call you’d want,” I said.
He smiled down at me, the bill of his cap facing forward now to shield his eyes from the sun. He wore a nondescript T-shirt of an indeterminate color—khaki, perhaps—and cargo shorts and old deck shoes without socks. And he was perfectly put together.
“Why’d you think that?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Just imagined you’d probably been here before.”
“Five or six years ago. Wanted to see if it’s changed.”
“Good! Then you can show me around.”
“Glad to.” The smile again.
Mitch was one of those people who made you happy just by being there. I’m not sure what it was. He gave off a feeling of quiet acceptance. Whatever or whoever you were was okay with him. No agenda.
Stephanie, a sailor cap perched jauntily on her head, was handing out touristy maps of the seahorse-shaped island—Cod Harbor, Whale Point, the tidal flats… . . Except for a couple of the other male stewards, Mitch and I were the only crew members on the ferry.
We sat on the back bench in the little throng of passengers who were listening to Stephanie’s introduction to the island. She was speaking at a higher pitch than normal, trying to be heard above the drumming of the engine as the ferry moved across the water.
“Tangier—the place where time stands still,” she was saying, “the most unbelievable sunsets you’ll ever see. No cars, no buses …”
I wasn’t prepared, I guess, for how wide the bay was, now that I could really pay attention to it. Looking at it on a map, the bay looks like the trunk of a tree, with rivers forming its limbs, then creeks branching off into smaller and smaller streams beyond. You’d think you would see a shore—both shores, perhaps—wherever you were on the bay. But here we were in the widest part, and I couldn’t see land ahead or behind us or on either side.
It was cool on the ferry when the sun went behind a cloud, and we were just far enough to one side of the boat’s cabin that we got the wind from the bow. I wished I’d brought a jacket. Mitch noticed the way I was hugging myself and pointed wordlessly to the goose bumps on my arms, one eyebrow raised in a curious, bemused way.
“Feels good to be cold for a change,” I lied, but I knew that the minute the boat stopped, we’d get the unrelenting heat of the summer sun.
Slowly, slowly, a few blurred objects came into view as I got my first glimpse of the island—the steeple of a church, a water tower… . The base of all the low buildings seemed to be level with the choppy gray water as we approached. There was scarcely a tree higher than the roof of a house. The ferryboat’s engine noise dropped to a mutter as we entered a narrow channel, and a white egret, balancing on one leg, didn’t even move as its yellow eye followed us over to the dock.
Islanders waited there for relatives returning from the mainland, with small wagons or shopping carts to haul purchases back to their homes. Already my ears picked up the remnants of Old English in their dialect. As we waited to disembark, I heard one woman ask another if she had been able to see all her grandchildren this trip, and the woman replied, “Ever’ one of ’em, and theer mamas let them speak theer mooinds no matter what they say. But, Lor’, live and let live. Day I cain’t go across the sound to see ’em, I know I’ll doie.”
Mitch and I smiled at each other, and as we stepped off the ferry, he lifted the woman’s heavy bundle for her and placed it in the waiting cart of a friend.
“Much obliged,” the round-faced woman said.
“Good day for strollin’,” the friend remarked, and probably saw us as a couple.
We followed the Seascape’s tour group through the line of crab shanties and boat sheds, stopping to let a golf cart pass, the island’s method of transporting tourists around. But when we reached King Street, which served as the backbone of the island, Mitch put one hand on my shoulder and we set off in a different direction.
“Let’s see it on our own,” he said. “I’d like to mosey around the way I did six years ago when I was here.”
“Okay, let’s mosey,” I said, liking the idea. “What were you here for then?”
“Came with my dad to see about a boat for sale. Didn’t end up buying it, but I got to look around a bit.”
There wasn’t much of a breeze, strangely. You’d think that an island would always have one, and there wasn’t much shade, either. But I liked the feeling that I was here on an island in the middle of the bay and that I couldn’t see land in any direction.
We headed for the salt marsh, ambling over to where two young boys—maybe ten and twelve—sat in a rowboat untangling some fishing line, both of them barefoot.
“How ya doin’?” Mitch asked them.
They shielded their eyes against the sun and looked up, lips parted, showing adult teeth they hadn’t quite grown into.
“Mornin’,” one of them said while the other went back to work on the tangled line.
“Catch anything yet?” Mitch asked.
“Nary a one,” said the first boy. His tousled blond hair hung loose almost to his shoulders, wind-blown and sun-bleached. He could have been Emily’s
cousin, he had so many freckles. But then he brightened. “This here’s my boat,” he said proudly. “I’ll be savin’ up for a motor, and then I can take her out beyond the flats!”
“Hey! Good for you!” Mitch said, and watched them some more. The two were working together now to untangle the line, so we moved on. I heard Mitch chuckle.
I looked up at him. “What?”
“That was the biggest day of my life so far, when I got my first boat,” he said. “I know just what that kid’s feeling.”
“Sort of like getting your own car?”
“Exactly. There’s no fence out there on the water. You can go wherever you like.”
As we walked across a large piece of plywood the boys had constructed as a sort of bridge to get to the next little ridge, Mitch grabbed my hand to help me across, and when we stepped off the other end, we jauntily fell into step walking arm in arm as we started our tour of the island.
It really was a walk back in time—a decaying trawler beached on a spit of sand; a couple of leather-faced watermen mending their nets; and, as we made another turn, the weather-beaten clapboard houses, some with raised graves and headstones in the front yard to protect them from the sea.
A sun-bonneted woman on a bicycle rode by, taking her time, her bedroom-slippered feet pressing down on the pedals.
Miss Molly’s Bed and Breakfast, Hilda Crockett’s Chesapeake House, Shirley’s Bay View Inn, Spanky’s Ice Cream, Lorraine’s Sandwich Shop … Everything, it seemed, was named for somebody. Some of the names—Pruitt, Crockett, Parks—appeared again and again, as though there were mainlanders, like me, and then there were the real settlers, who had watched sunsets from these houses forever.
“You hungry for a soft-shell crab sandwich?” Mitch asked me, reading a sign in a window.
“There is such a thing?”
“Yep.”
“I’m game if you are,” I said, and thought how much more willing I was to try something new with him than I was with Ryan McGowan last spring—Ryan, who had tried to change me from the inside out.
I don’t think we’d passed a single person who didn’t say hello, and the same happened when Mitch opened the screen door and we went inside the shop.
“You Earl Park’s youngest?” asked the sixtyish man at the deep fryer. The lenses of his glasses were spotted with grease and foggy with steam.
“No, sir, I’m up in Dorchester County,” Mitch said.
“Oh. Murland, then,” the man said, giving us a welcoming smile, and I remembered that Tangier belongs to Virginia. Strange, the invisible line that travels across bay waters.
“Yeah, I was here six years ago and just wanted to see if things had changed,” Mitch said.
“Boot the same, but thar’s less of it,” the man said, wiping his hands on his thick apron and coming closer to the counter. “Ever’ year the bay takes a bit more of the island. Some day, they say, it’ll take a boite and swaller it down. What’ll you folks have?”
We placed our order and sat down at one of the few small tables by the window. The spicy scent of seasonings filled the air and made me realize how hungry I was.
“Lucky we got a table. I expect some of the tour group will be in here after a while,” I said.
“No, they’ve got reservations at Hilda Crockett’s—that’s part of the tour,” Mitch said. “Walk in there, you come out two pounds heavier, your wallet a little lighter.” He took off his cap and placed it on the empty chair beside us. “Hilda used to advertise, ‘If you leave hungry, it will be your fault, not ours.’ Probably still does.”
I watched him settle back in his chair. “You look more contented here,” I told him. “More relaxed.”
“More contented than where?”
“Back on board.”
“Expect I am. Always figured I could feel at home most anywhere, though, long as it was on the bay. You ever feel that way about Silver Spring?”
No one had ever asked me that before. I started to say, It’s a much bigger place, then realized that—compared to the bay—it was a speck on a map.
“I know the major streets,” I said, “and if you dropped me off someplace, I could get somewhere I recognized. But I wouldn’t call that ‘feeling at home.’”
“Well, that’s what I mean by home,” Mitch explained. “Bay’s sort of like a big, spread-out family—the watermen part of it, anyway. I don’t feel the same about Baltimore or Annapolis, but leave me on an island—Smith, Tangier—along the coast or in the marshes, it’s pretty much home territory, whether I’ve been there before or not.”
We sat smiling at each other, and I was about to ask about his family when the counterman appeared with a platter in each hand. He set one down in front of me—fries at one end, coleslaw at the other, and in the middle, two pieces of white bread with a crab in between, its spindly, golden-brown legs hanging out at each side.
“Ulp!” I said, looking from my sandwich to Mitch and back again.
“If you don’t want it, I’ll eat yours, too, and you can order something else,” he said.
And that’s all it took to make me try it. I imagined fried onion rings. I imagined crusty Popeye’s chicken. I took a bite of bread and lettuce and mayonnaise and something crispy and delicious, and the second bite was even better.
As we finished lunch, I told him about going out with Ryan after the spring play and how he had introduced me to oysters on the half shell, as well as all the things he found wrong with me.
“I’m glad this time was different,” Mitch said. “Having fun?”
“Yes. I’m glad you came along.”
“Something new to tell the boyfriend,” he said, and his eyes were laughing as he wiped his mouth.
“You going to tell your girlfriend?”
“I would if I had one.”
“That’s hard to believe—that there’s no one to tell.”
He kept his eyes on me as he took a long swallow of Coke, but he had the same amused expression on his face. “There are only three hundred people in Vienna, Maryland, where I live, and most of them are middle-aged.”
“Where exactly is Vienna, by the way?”
Mitch put on his country-boy accent: “Wah, it’s haafway ’tween the Nanticoke and the Chicamacomico Rivers,” he said. “And of the nine gals my age in town, two of them’s my cousins.”
I laughed. “Where do you go to meet people, then?”
“Salisbury. Quantico, if you want to watch a bunch of Marines get drunk. But every once in a while a friend knows a friend… . That’s the best way.”
“So now you’re cruising a cruise ship?” I said, and watched his grin spread across his whole face.
“There are some nice girls on that ship,” Mitch said. Then, checking his watch, “Want to see the rest of the island?”
“I do,” I said, wiping the grease off my mouth and chin.
“What we can’t do,” Mitch said as he scooted away from the table, “is miss the ferry. Do that, and we’d have to hire one of the watermen to carry us back.”
We set out again up King Street. We passed the town hall and the New Testament Church; passed a girl of maybe thirteen or fourteen, leaning against a gate, ankles crossed. She was toying with a locket around her neck, talking with a boy about the same age who straddled a motorbike. And we could tell by the look in their eyes as we passed that they’d be seeing each other again.
12
THE GUESTS
Sometimes we fell into the rhythm of ship life so completely that it was as though fall and college and classes and grades were off in the distant future, not just weeks away.
Gwen and I had long ago decided we’d be roommates when we entered the University of Maryland. Then she found out that pre-med students could room for half the cost at a big house near campus, donated by a wealthy alumnus, and it would be crazy for her not to stay there for her eight years. So I was in the market for a roommate.
I’d indicated on Facebook that I was looking for a roomie, b
ut being at sea most of the summer, I didn’t get a chance very often to check and see if there were any takers. Like many colleges, the U of Maryland assigns roommates for the first year, but if two people both request each other, the housing office usually okays it. I’d posted my cell phone number and e-mail address, though, and now and then I heard from girls wanting to know if I was going to pledge a sorority or if I was into sports. As I only had a short time each day to use my cell phone, and even less chance to check my e-mail, I answered some messages too late or not at all.
Then late one night in the dining room, when we were checking our e-mails, I got one from a Margaret Sanderson—“Meggie,” she called herself—who said she was the niece of one of Dad’s customers at the Melody Inn, and she’d heard all about me and was so excited that I was going to Maryland too. I read on Facebook you were looking for a roommate, and so am I, she texted. My aunt loves your dad’s store, and so do I. Haven’t decided on a major yet, have you?
The message was three days old, and I hadn’t had a chance to answer yet, but Meggie seemed possible.
Right now I’m working on a cruise ship, I e-mailed back, but let’s introduce ourselves.
Ten minutes later, she answered:
Great! I hope I don’t sound like I’m bragging, but I’ve got a
3.98 GPA. I write novellas, but none have been published
yet (who knows? you may be a character in one someday!!!),
and I’ve had a crush on a guy who doesn’t even know me
for, like, forever. But I could write about myself all day, who
couldn’t? Why don’t we each ask three friends to say what
they like about us (or not!!!)? Here are mine.
I stared at my screen. She was serious!
Hi. I’m Paige, probably Meggie’s best friend. If Meggie has
a fault, it’s that she’s totally honest. She tells you just what
she thinks whether you want to hear it or not. But when my
cat died, she stayed with me all night just to make sure I
was all right.
The next paragraph read:
Alice on Board Page 11