One Year in Coal Harbor

by Polly Horvath

  “I know you never liked Ruffian much, but you didn’t send him deliberately to his death,” said Ked.

  “That’s what Uncle Jack told me,” I said.

  “You just had a temper tantrum. I chose to live with people who said they wanted me rather than someone who didn’t. Knowing that without me around to call 911, my dad is going to OD.”

  “You couldn’t keep living there. He tried to kill you.”

  “Well, he didn’t strangle me or shoot me. Leaving me on the ice, he probably thought I had a fifty-fifty chance.” Ked smiled wryly.

  “You made the right choice,” I said. “And people didn’t just say they want you, they really do.”

  But Ked just shook his head.

  He still thinks he’s a nuisance, I thought. All those years of being told he was, he can’t quite believe otherwise. I wished for something so big that he had to believe people thought he had something to offer. Something that made him accept that he had a right to plant his feet here too. I didn’t know what such a thing could be but I thought somewhere in this town, someone should be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat for him. I wanted to be like Uncle Jack and believe not in justice but in the occasional miracle but I didn’t know what I believed in anymore.

  Ked still fished every Saturday with my dad and had dinner with us every Saturday night. And he still bought the seer lunch every Sunday at The Girl on the Red Swing because he got to be so good at fishing that my dad started to pay him.

  We sent Just Throw Some Melted Butter on It and Call It a Day to a publisher and they rejected it with a form letter so we never even found out what they didn’t like about it. Miss Lark’s book of cat poems, wittily titled Cat Poems, was published. One of Eleanor’s cat pictures was chosen to illustrate the poem about the dead cat. She drew it lying on its back with all four paws in the air. It was supposed to be touching but it was just ridiculous. Plus she got her name in the book. And it turned out she even got paid. I tried to stir Ked up about this but he didn’t seem to mind so much. He was listless a lot lately.

  I thought about what my mother had said when Miss Connon had her nervous breakdown. A person can be depleted.

  I asked my dad what Ked was like on Saturdays when they were fishing but he said he seemed much the same as always.

  And things moved on, of course, in Coal Harbor.

  Miss Connon got better and came back to school. Her cousin stayed on in Coal Harbor because she had come to like living here. She was a hairdresser.

  The granny from the protest meeting bought Uncle Jack’s unfinished restaurant and sank her savings into making a salon. She hired the former vegetarian war orphan to cut hair and Miss Connon’s cousin to do perms and coloring. The salon immediately took off and forever after the granny referred to it as “my business enterprise” as if it were General Electric or something. But we all forgave her that because you could get really good haircuts there.

  When the former vegetarian war orphan cut his own hair, getting rid of the dreads and his beard, he turned out to be quite handsome underneath. One day Miss Connon came in to get her hair cut and (this is the part I love), he asked her out.

  Uncle Jack and I were having dinner one night at The Girl on the Red Swing when they came in. “What’s to come of that, huh?” he said, winking at me and picking marshmallows out of his clam chowder.

  The B and B really took off and it kept Kate hopping because she mostly ran it while Uncle Jack continued with real estate.

  Evie and Bert did the usual gangbusters business at The Girl on the Red Swing. Evie finally printed on the menu, “Mini Marshmallows Optional,” because some people found it disturbing that they were in everything. Waffles, on the other hand, remained nonnegotiable. I think we were all glad about that.

  Six months after Ked returned, Kate and Uncle Jack had a baby girl. “Eleven more to go,” Uncle Jack always teased Kate, and she always blushed. But sometimes I’d catch a glint in his eye that made me think he was partly serious too. They named their little girl Daisy. Excellent, I thought, we’ve got kind of a family flower thing happening here.

  Two months after Daisy’s birth the seer died.

  It was sad, even though he’d been old and ill a long time. He didn’t have much to leave. No money to speak of. He had rented his rooms. But all he did have he left to Ked.

  Including his boat.

  Polynesian Jell-O Salad

  This is Polynesian because of the pineapple. Bring a can of pineapple tidbits, half a cup of water and one quarter cup of sugar to a boil. Add a small package of lime Jell-O and chill until it starts to gel. Fold in half a cup of whipped cream, half a cup of cottage cheese, half a cup of mini marshmallows and half a cup of nut pieces, whatever kind you like. Chill until solid.

  This was the last recipe in the ill-fated Just Throw Some Melted Butter on It and Call It a Day. But the recipes found a new home in Coal Harbor’s youth cookbook, which my mother was putting together for Fishermen’s Aid. Uncle Jack’s commission had had to go to help buy the mountain, so Fishermen’s Aid got nothing and my mom started the cookbook drive again. Ked and I donated all our recipes and tried to credit Evie where we could because so many of them came from her. It was a bonanza for people who wanted to learn to cook with marshmallows. Of course other kids contributed too, including Eleanor Milkmouse (although not from her family’s ultravaluable six-hundred-year-old file). After her recipe she appended a list of seventeen ways to chop without using a sharp instrument. Oh, it just drove me crazy!