The Gilly Salt Sisters

by Tiffany Baker

  Even surrounded by admirers, Claire moved like she was in a private bubble. Dee observed her on Sunday after Mass, crowded in by a gaggle of old ladies, not listening to a thing any of them said. It was odd, Dee thought. Even though everyone in town seemed to hate Claire for her good looks, her good luck, and the way she stared down her nose at them when she talked, they seemed to love her for it, too, the way peasants in a fairy tale flocked around the feet of their queen, not because she was nice or did good deeds or anything but simply because she was theirs.

  Dee understood that sentiment better than anyone. After all, she’d just lost the most important person in her life. Instead of the press of her mother’s fingers against her cheek, instead of her voice whispering good night and the sound of her singing in the kitchen, Dee had only the bearish grumbling of her father and the impersonal clatter of the diner. She was in a strange town, cast loose in a blurry landscape of dunes, grasses, and undulating waves. Nothing felt certain to her.

  Maybe that’s why she started waking earlier each morning, her nerves trembling to hear the beat of horse’s hooves, her heart thumping in time with them. When the instant finally arrived, she’d peel back a dingy corner of curtain and hold her breath, watching Claire’s graceful back arch and bow over her horse, her loose hair flaring around her. And in that moment, Dee would find herself wishing more than anything that Claire could be hers, too.

  The very first time Dee ever waited on Whit Turner, he told her she had an ass so fine she should sit it on a plate and serve it to him hot. Then he ordered himself some breakfast. “Two eggs fried, coffee black, white toast, and by the way,” he said, handing her the menu with a wink and a dazzling smile, “I’m Whit Turner.”

  Dee stuck her order pad in her apron pocket and looked him right in the eyes, trying to decide if Whit was one of those men who wanted a girl to blush and squirm when he talked a loose streak or to look him in the eye and answer him back. Given the leer he had pasted across his mug, she decided on sass.

  “I know who you are,” she said. “Your wife was in earlier. And you’d better watch it. I have family, too.” She tossed her head in the direction of the counter. “That’s my father up there.”

  Whit drank in her breasts and hips as if he were sipping on bourbon. “You don’t look like the kind of girl who worries about what her father thinks,” he finally said. “In fact, you seem to be the exact opposite.”

  It wasn’t the first time Dee had heard something like that. Her mother always claimed that Dee had just busted open at the seams when she turned thirteen, and there was no stuffing her back. It was true, too. Old men, young men, even little boys tended to gobble her body up with their eyes—and sometimes their hands, if she didn’t watch it. She got pinched in line at the movies, wolf-whistled at in parking lots, and groped at high-school parties. By the time she was fifteen, Dee could sit in church next to her father and count the men who would run their fingers up under her blouse given a chance, and by the time her mother died, she’d become the kind of girl who would let them.

  Whit Turner wouldn’t necessarily have been one of her calls. For one thing, he sat so square-jawed and proud in his pew on Sundays. For another, his clothes were too fine, and he lived in that big house on the only hill in town. Also, he was married to Claire. That right there was enough of a basis for him to keep it in his pants, in Dee’s opinion. Claire seemed like the kind of woman who wouldn’t wait to serve her revenge cold.

  Dee left Whit alone to eat his meal. It was late for breakfast in Prospect—nine o’clock—and the diner was empty. People in town seemed to like to eat at regular hours, which meant the diner was packed at seven in the morning, again at noon, and sometimes around six o’clock in the evening, and then it grew pretty quiet the rest of the time. Dee wondered if Whit had picked a down hour for a particular reason and, if so, what that reason might be. Perhaps a row with Claire? Claire had eaten by herself at the crack of dawn, as usual, Dee remembered, but she hadn’t seemed upset about it. On the other hand, it was difficult to tell what state of mind Claire was in most of the time.

  When Dee came back with the check, Whit wiped his mouth slowly. He flicked his eyes to the counter, making sure her father couldn’t see, and then reached out and circled her plump wrist with his forefinger and thumb, rubbing the spot where her pulse beat under her skin. A charge went through her, a jolt of pure energy running up her veins, and she knew right then she was sunk.

  “Let’s do it again,” he said, sliding a bill—a five—into her apron pocket. He was a much better tipper than Claire.

  She should have returned the money, of course. She knew that even then. She should have pulled her wrist out of the delicious circle of his fingers and hung her head like she was ashamed or embarrassed, the way small children did when they were shy. But her skin tingled where Whit touched her, and her brain started ticking through the colors of lipstick and eye shadow she could buy with five dollars, not that her father would have let her wear any of that stuff. She always had to put it on after she left the house. She licked her bottom lip with the tip of her tongue and bit down just enough to make her mouth that much pinker. Then she leaned forward, close enough to inhale the leather-and-pine scent of Whit’s aftershave, and she whispered “Okay” into the tender part of his ear.

  Most men would have jumped, or shivered, Dee knew, or at least flinched, but Whit gave away nothing, and that’s exactly how he hooked her. He crumpled up his napkin like she wasn’t even there, and then he slid out of the booth. “Thank you, sir,” he called to Cutt as he passed the counter and breezed out the door, ringing the little bell above it and leaving Dee rooted in the back of the diner, her mouth hung half open in a stupid and confused way. She watched him glide past the diner windows to his car (some model that was heavy, black, and very luxurious to her eyes), and then she watched his car disappear into the distance, feeling the whole time as if a long string inside her were unwinding faster than she liked.

  Her father’s rough voice tied it back up again. “Now, that man’s a gentleman,” he said, slamming the cash register closed. “Wealthy as hell, but honest as wood.”

  Dee didn’t say a thing.

  They served meat loaf for lunch that day—hot and filling—and it was their busiest service yet. The counter was packed, and so were half the booths. Dee didn’t have time to think about Whit or Claire or anyone else, and that was a blessing, but after the service, business fell back to nothing again, and the fidgets crept over her. Dee hung her apron and headed out.

  The day had turned moody and gray. Clouds had piled up on the horizon like trucks in a traffic jam, and a nervous wind was swirling down low and then lower. Dee wrapped her scarf tighter around her throat and jammed her hands into her pockets, not bothered at all by the day’s turn for the worse. In fact, it suited her mood just fine.

  A minute’s walk had her at the end of Bank Street, where the water stretched wide and colorless on one side and Tappert’s Green spread itself out on the other. Today there weren’t any picnickers or tourists, just a group of insolent crows nosing around in the dying grass for grubs. Dee shivered and stamped her feet to scare them, but they just turned their blank eyes toward her and opened their beaks and screamed. If they were dogs, Dee thought, they probably would have tried to bite her.

  Plover Hill began behind Tappert’s Green, and right before the ground tilted up, there was a single pear tree stuck in the ground, surrounded by thick shrubbery. Although Mr. Weatherly hadn’t told her very much about the tree, now that she was there, Dee saw why he didn’t need to. If there was one thing she could always identify, it was a local make-out spot, and she’d clearly just hit Prospect’s jackpot in that department. Behind the tree the earth dipped into the shrubs, creating a private hollow. The trunk of the tree was as notched as a totem pole, carved everywhere in hearts and linked letters pierced through with arrows. Dee ran her fingers over the initials and lines, some of them finer than others, and wondered which of the coup
les had lasted the ages and which were as doomed as the rotten pears on the grass.

  A blast of wind rattled one of the tree’s last leaves past her face, and she peered up through the branches at the gables and porches of Turner House, crouched on the top of Plover Hill. For its bulk it should have been a prettier structure, but too many Turners had tried to one-up each other over the ages and none of the pieces of the place went together too well. It was a grand house, all right, Dee thought, but at the same time it tried too hard.

  She leaned against the tree, imagining what the rooms inside Turner House looked like—if they were cozy and cluttered with books and rugs or more formal and filled with crystal and lots of silver picture frames. She couldn’t figure how Claire had made the leap from the jumble of junk lying around Salt Creek Farm to the shingled monstrosity looming above her, and then she thought how much more ill-fitted Jo, with her scars and clumsy accent, would have been to the place. Probably the right sister had married Whit Turner after all.

  What would she do if she lived in such a house, Dee wondered, and were married to a handsome man like Whit? Another gust of wind whipped dust into her eyes, and she blinked, turning away from the tree and setting off in the opposite direction, back toward the diner, trying not to linger too much on the memory of Whit’s hot fingers looped around her wrist and what kind of delicious trouble they might mean.

  Chapter Five

  Harbor Bank was in a communicative mood, it turned out. Its second letter arrived on Salt Creek Farm as plain as the first, but this time the words were more colorful. “Second Notice,” a heading read in big red type. “It is urgent that you contact us immediately regarding the status of your loan,” the smaller text said. “Failure to do so will result in legal action.”

  Double well.

  This time Jo did what the letter suggested and picked up the phone. It was rare that she ever called anyone, and her fingers shook as she dialed out the number. On the third try, she got it right.

  “Harbor Bank,” a bored female voice answered, “how may I direct your call?”

  Jo thought she would stick with the bare facts, the way the bank had. “This is Joanna Gilly,” she said. “From Salt Creek Farm out on the Cape. I need to talk to someone about the terms of my loan.”

  “One moment.” The bored lady sighed and transferred her to a Mr. Monaghy.

  “Gil Monaghy,” he said, and his voice was far from bored. In fact, it had a whole circus going on in it. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can explain to me why my mortgage payments have gone up,” Jo barked with no preamble, “and what you want me to do about it.”

  It turned out that Gil Monaghy had exactly the right kind of voice to explain that when Jo’s mother had taken out a second mortgage on the marsh, she’d done it with the agreement that after a set number of years the interest would dramatically increase if the loan wasn’t paid off. Now it had come time to pay the piper. “It’s not that you’ve fallen behind on your rate of payments,” he explained, “it’s just that you’ve had a new amount due for several months, and you’ve fallen behind on the difference.”

  “How much do I owe?” Jo asked, and Mr. Monaghy stated the number into the phone as if he were talking about lemonade money.

  Jo’s heart clattered around while she searched for the right response. “That’s a lot,” she finally said. “What if I don’t have it?” The truth was, she thought she could just about cover it. She had a nest egg socked away, started by her mother, but this would wipe it clean out.

  “Then, regrettably, we have to take action.”

  Jo knew what that meant. It was code for a bunch of suits coming to take possession of the marsh. “What if I can pay the difference in back payments but I can’t keep up with the new balance every month?” Jo asked.

  Mr. Monaghy sighed. “Then we will start this process all over again. I highly discourage it.” His voice gentled. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “it may be time to think about selling the property. Have you considered that?”

  Jo snorted. “Trust me, it’s not an option. No one wants it.” Except Whit Turner, she thought, the last soul on earth to whom she’d ever sell. And without further ado, she hung up on Mr. Monaghy and his suggestions.

  There were some things Jo just knew you couldn’t pull off: upending a stone, for instance, once it was sunk in the earth, or trying to wake the dead. Most of all, when it came to Gilly salt, you had to take it as it came.

  Maybe, Jo thought, if she got lucky, the bank would also learn that lesson in time.

  Given that she had already ruined her day in conversation with Mr. Monaghy, and given that winter was lurking around the bend, Jo decided to go ahead and make things fully awful for herself and drown the last clutch of the marsh’s feral kittens. It was a monstrous business, she knew full well, but there was an art to dousing the creatures that most people weren’t aware of. When it was done right, the poor things didn’t suffer.

  Mama used to dump them pell-mell into a hole she’d dig any old where, scatter the lime, and be done with them, but after she passed, Jo started taking more care, because it was just her out there and she could. She had a special spot she liked to take the cats out to, near the graves. Even the dead needed new blood around them occasionally, Jo figured, and this way the cats at least served some sort of purpose. It made the whole business a little easier to bear. Jo could take a creature dying—she could even take it expiring in the palms of her hands—but she did despair at the stupid waste of it.

  This litter was smaller than usual. Jo tied the cats into a large feed sack. It was the kind she didn’t think got sold anymore, with red and white words stamped across the burlap in block letters. Then she fetched a tin washtub, filled it with icy water from the hose, and carried the kittens and her equipment out behind the barn.

  She worked quickly, trying not to think too much about what it was she was doing. As she went, she curled the little bodies side to side with their paws tucked and their tails wrapped around them. They were very young, these kittens, barely into fur, and their still bodies looked even tinier wetted down in the chilly air.

  Just then she heard a squeak behind her, too loud to be feline. She startled and turned, amazed to find Dee Pitman, that nosy child from town, standing right there behind her, stuttering and stammering like a cornered titmouse. “What… w-what are you doing?” Dee yelped, and Jo sighed and rose, remembering how horrified she’d been the first time she’d watched her mother do the job. She’d been six.

  “Can’t we keep them as pets?” she’d asked, watching Mama submerge cat after cat. “Can’t we keep just one?”

  Mama had simply squinted at her. “Sometimes the biggest kindness sits on the back of cruelty,” she said. “The sooner you learn that, the better.” And then she’d made Jo finish up.

  Jo smacked her hands together now and eyeballed Dee. “They didn’t have a chance in hell,” she said, ignoring the mewing coming from the last kitten in the sack. “They’re feral. The mama cat’s gone, and they’re too little to live on their own yet.” Dee didn’t say anything, so Jo continued. “Every year there’s more of them. They’re a curse and a plague, make no mistake.” She nudged the sack with her toe. “Damn place is going to hell.”

  Dee found her voice. “Because of the kittens?”

  Jo was confused. Who would be dumb enough to think a bunch of cats could cause the kinds of problems she was facing? Obviously, Cutt’s daughter wasn’t the brightest girl if she couldn’t figure that out. Then again, Dee didn’t know the full extent of Jo’s worries with the bank and all. No one did, and Jo wanted to keep it that way. She narrowed her good eye. “How’s the diner business?” she asked to change the subject. “Is the salt doing you fine?”

  Dee blushed and avoided her gaze. “Actually, that’s kind of why I’m out here. Um, it turns out we won’t be needing as much salt as we thought. The diners aren’t really eating it. They prefer the store-bought kind. They say yours is… tainted.”


  Instantly Jo pictured one of Claire’s bony hands plucking a salt bowl off the diner’s counter and then imagined her saying in the calmest way, almost as if she were sorry to have to do it, If you only knew what was in this stuff, you’d never eat it again. Jo sighed again. “Don’t tell me. My sister swanned into your father’s diner and made you think twice.”

  Dee looked uncomfortable. “It wasn’t a big deal,” she said, keeping her face turned away from the three kittens. “But maybe it’s better if your salt’s not right out in the open.”

  Jo let out a harsh bark of laughter. “With my sister, Claire, everything’s a big deal. You’ll see. But mark my words, if you stop serving the salt, the Lighthouse will fall right back into the ruin that you found it in. You best tell your customers that there’s no truth to Claire’s tales.”

  “How do you know?” Dee asked.

  Jo shrugged. “If I were in your shoes, I’d pick the side of the salt, that’s all.”

  This advice didn’t seem to make Dee feel any better. She looked down at the row of inert kittens. “What do you do with them after?” she asked as Jo knelt again and reached into the bag. Dee turned her face away as Jo pulled out the last squealing kitten.

  “Lime and a deep hole,” Jo said, and plunged her arm into the washtub.

  Dee fled over the bank of dunes to Drake’s Beach without another word, the image of limp kitten corpses no doubt lingering in her mind. The afternoon was starting to bunch up on itself, and the light was dying. Cutt would probably be parading around in the diner’s kitchen, Jo thought, snapping a dish towel and wondering where the hell his daughter was, and soon folks would start trickling in for the dinner special, not as many as for lunch, but some, and in the middle of it all would be the spaces where the dishes of Jo’s salt should have been waiting to work their magic, the pale circles of them as blank and mysterious as so many little moons.