by North, Will
“Where is she now?”
“She had a string of ‘gentlemen friends’ and finally married the richest one, a Detroit auto parts dealer. Lives in Florida, now.
“And isn’t coming.”
“Right.
“And Tyler’s upset?”
“Right. Except he hasn’t figured out that’s the reason. Thinks it’s just jitters. You know how he always seems to need to be in the spotlight, like he’s on stage? That’s Amanda’s influence, too. It’s like she’s always in the wings, watching to see if he measures up. So everything’s a performance for him. It’s why he flirts so much, too. He keeps searching for admiration, appreciation.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Uh-uh. But one of these days, soon, he’ll stop trying so hard to be someone who has to impress, to be someone he isn’t. He’ll understand that the someone he is, is just fine. That’s the man I am marrying: the Tyler on the inside.”
Try as he might, though, Colin saw only Tyler’s capriciousness, his serial infidelity, his curious disconnect from day to day reality. In the end, he put this all down to jealousy. He loved Pete. He was not a reliable judge.
Seven and a half months later, when Pete called to say she’d just given birth to their first child, Justine, Colin understood the precipitous marriage. He worked the months backward and they spelled, “Spring Break Mistake.” It was typical that the families’ code of silence had been maintained until it could be held no longer.
There were so many secrets.
Tyler, Colin later learned from Pete, had pressed for an abortion. He argued, he said, the case of reason: they were too young; he was still in law school (at New York University, conveniently close to Sarah Lawrence College); she hadn’t finished her undergraduate degree.
The truth was that despite his lifelong connection to Pete, monogamy terrified him. And then there was the baby. What Tyler understood all too clearly was that he’d never had to be responsible for anything, including himself. And to the extent that he reflected at all on the prospect of having a child, what he struggled with was the near certainty that he did not have whatever it took to be a father. How could he? He’d never known his own.
Pete struggled, too, but not with the decision to have the child. Though eventually, in 1994, the Seventy-First General Convention of the Episcopal Church would endorse a woman’s right to “reach an informed decision about the termination of her pregnancy,” in 1986 it was still opposed, and so was she. She never even presented it as an option when she told her father she was pregnant. Her father was now so deeply engaged in church matters and disengaged from his daughter’s life that the announcement of her pregnancy occasioned little more than a raised eyebrow and a question: “Who…?” Informed that Tyler was the father, he merely nodded, as if this was a foregone if nonetheless premature conclusion, and returned to his paperwork. He had every confidence in his daughter.
No, what Pete struggled with was Tyler. That Tyler did not want the baby cracked the topography of their relationship like a tectonic shift. If he was not the man she’d thought he was, if theirs was not the love she believed it was, then in what reality was she living? How could they have known each other all these years, how could they have been lovers, without her knowing this about him? And what did it mean? That he didn’t love her? That he was weak? Or just that he was frightened? In the end, she chose to believe the latter, loved him all the more for it, took charge of planning the wedding, and shouldered the task of reassuring and encouraging him—a job that, in time, she would come to understand was her permanent employment.
It would be years before she would realize she’d been right on all three counts. By then, it was too late.
eleven
AFTER HE LEFT COLIN at the intersection of Quartermaster Drive and the Vashon Highway, Young Adam pedaled fast southward past the marina on the inner harbor and coasted downhill to the blinking light in the middle of Burton. Apart from Vashon Village, the commercial center of the island, the hamlet of Burton was the only other spot with a palpable sense of community. Elsewhere, settlement was dispersed and largely rural.
Burton, though, as far as most locals were concerned, had it all—or at least what you needed in a pinch. There was a Unitarian church, the kind of place where the hymns tended to be vaguely reverent folk songs sung to guitar accompaniment and one of the highlights of the worship year was the annual “Blessing of the Pets” at which cats, dogs, birds, the occasional potbellied pig, and, in one case, a little girl’s pet barnacle did their best to behave and be blessed. There was a branch post office so small three customers made a crowd and a satellite fire and rescue station whose volunteer vehicle drivers had the good sense to keep the sirens off until they’d cleared the immediate neighborhood. Sharing a low building that housed the post office was a shop called “Found Objects” run by two woman with unerring eyes for the sorts of antique or simply used things you never knew you needed until you saw them there and then you had to have them, although actually getting them was made difficult by the shop’s somewhat whimsical hours of operation. Across from Found Objects was the Burton Texaco Station, which, unlike most service stations, actually repaired cars. Somewhat perversely, though, Burton Texaco did not sell Texaco gasoline, or any other brand for that matter, and hadn’t for nearly two decades. Attempts by the owners to change the name accordingly had been notably unsuccessful; everyone still called it “the Texaco.” On the northwest corner of the intersection, housed in the historic old Masonic Hall, was the Quartermaster Gallery, an exhibit space that served the island’s unusually large population of fine artists and was typically the highlight of the island’s monthly “First Friday” gallery tour, in part because there was always cheese and wine. In its shadow was the walk-up Burton coffee stand, which functioned as the neighborhood’s al fresco gathering spot thanks to the excellence of its coffee, the unpredictable and therefore ever-entertaining mood shifts of its alternating baristas, the dogged loyalty of its zany regulars, and the addition of an awning to keep out the rain. The chill of winter was made infinitely more bearable thanks to an outdoor propane heater one of the customers had found on Craigslist and given to the comely proprietor.
On the southwest corner stood the rambling, vaguely Victorian but actually fairly new Harbor Inn, which boasted a large and friendly dining room and a few bright rooms upstairs for overnight visitors. On the southeast corner directly across from the Inn was the Burton Mercantile, the indispensable general store that anchored both the intersection and the community. The Merc, as it was known, was the kind of place you could find almost anything you ever needed short of clothing and fresh meat or fish, and if it wasn’t there you probably didn’t need it: hardware for your boat; building supplies for whatever may have broken at home but was too small to go up to town for; gardening tools; canned, packaged, and frozen groceries; basic fresh produce of the sort you’d need if more people invited themselves to dinner than you’d planned for and you needed to stretch the menu; cleaning supplies, should you ever be motivated to clean; beer and wine (a remarkably sophisticated selection); gourmet ice cream (because Betty Walsh, its beloved Irish owner, had a sweet tooth and couldn’t tolerate anything less than the best); newspapers and magazines; free coffee and a well-worn couch for regulars to sit on while they drank it; free biscuits for any dog who happened to wander in, with or without an owner; and free advice from Betty on almost any subject—political, financial, or personal. The Merc was open every day but Monday and most holidays too, though Betty closed early at Christmas and New Year’s Day. She closed completely, of course, on St. Patrick’s Day.
***
YOUNG ADAM LEANED his bike against the wall outside the store, drifted through the double doors set into the corner of the old wooden two-story building—Betty lived upstairs—and scanned the Merc’s narrow aisles.
“You looking for something special there, Young Adam?” Betty called from behind the counter.
“Mom.�
�
“Well, now, moms are special, all right, but I don’t stock them anymore. Never could unload the inventory before the sell-by date. Turns out most folks have a mom, you see. No real demand.”
“Very funny, ma’am.”
“Don’t you ‘ma’am’ me, wise guy; makes me feel old!”
“Yes, ma’am…”
Betty barked a laugh.
No one in Burton had a clue about Betty Walsh’s age, nor had the courage to ask. Neither young nor old, she was a compact bundle of apparently inexhaustible energy. She’d been around long enough to know everyone’s secrets and also to know to keep them to herself. Her hair was a close-cut brown helmet with flashes of gray. Her face seemed set in a permanent look of impending and inevitable mischief-making. It was known that she had a husband in Montana and that that was just exactly where she liked him to be. She visited him once a month and came back each time swearing—colorfully—that this visit would be the last.
The Merc was the kind of place with signs behind the register that said things like, “I have an attitude and I know how to use it!” and “The deadline for all complaints was yesterday!” It was rumored that the Mercantile was up for sale, but the rumor was itself an antique, at least a decade old. If you asked Betty directly, she’d say, “Sure! Make me an offer!” But most people doubted any offer would be good enough. Not to mention that if she ever made a move to leave, the entire population of Burton would almost certainly throw their bodies across the Highway to block her exit. Even if the store remained after her departure, Burton would have lost its soul.
Betty was besotted with Adam and had been since he toddled up to the counter all by himself one summer’s day at the age of perhaps three and spoke two of the words he’d learned so far: “ice cream.” After she stopped laughing, the first thing she did was phone the frantic Strongs, who’d been searching the beach for the little boy. The second thing she did was give the kid an ice cream bar. Ever since, the highlight of each summer for Betty was the first day Young Adam burst through the door yelling, “Ice Cream!” It was their running gag.
“So, your mom’s gone missing, then?” Betty was teasing the boy.
Adam looked at her with a face as bleak as a shattered World War I battlefield, shrugged, and slipped out of the store as quietly as he’d entered.
Betty walked to the door and watched the boy ride east along Burton Drive toward the peninsula. From the couch behind her, Flo, a silver-haired widow who spent part of most days in the store to keep Betty company, though Betty knew it was actually the other way around, said, “Odd boy, that one.”
“No, Flo, you’re wrong; nothing odd about that kid at all, except this morning. And that’s what’s odd…”
***
ADAM HESITATED AT the turnoff that would take him down to the beach and the summer houses and decided to keep going straight instead, standing on his pedals to pump his bike up the hill to the T-junction at the top where the two-mile loop road around the knob of the Burton Peninsula began and ended. He wanted to go home, but he wanted to go home and find Mom there. And because he was not, by nature, an optimist, he didn’t go home.
At the top, he turned right, sat back down on the bike seat, and pedaled slowly as he caught his breath. It was too late to see morning deer, but the air was thick with birdsong and the fragrance of cedar and fir, all second growth, that had flourished after his great-grandfather had logged over the area. As he passed the old Baptist summer camp that occupied a segment of the peninsula, he heard the keening cry of one of the many bald eagles that perched on the high snags over the harbor, watching for fish. Many of the cottages along the loop road still had apple orchards, a half dozen or so trees, in their yards. Gnarled, unpruned, and choked with sucker branches, they were nonetheless thick with just-ripening apples now, despite the neglect. The abandoned apple trees had troubled him awhile back. It had been Uncle Colin’s receptionist, Olivia, who’d told him the stories of those days before the Second World War when Japanese American families like hers, and a few stubborn Scandinavians, had turned the little island into a fruit basket bulging not only with apples, but stone fruit and berries too. Olivia’s grandfather had built a thriving business canning island fruit and shipping it all over the country. All that changed a few months after Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese farmers and their families were “evacuated” from the island, first to a holding area near Tacoma and then to a dusty desert camp at Tule Lake, in California. After that, the fruit farms never really recovered. The remnant apple trees, clustered in ragged rows, were like orphans; they looked as if they longed for their families to return and look after them.
At Jensen Point Park, he coasted down into the parking lot, stopped by the big doors of the boat house, punched his kickstand down, and ducked his head into the barnlike building where the rowing club’s shells were stored—shining, sleek, and looking fast as white barracudas.
“Hey, Adam! When we gonna be able to recruit you for junior crew, fella?”
It was Amy, one of his mom’s pals, a broad-shouldered lady—kinda young, but he could never work out ages—who had a couple of kids who sometimes came down to the beach. She was rinsing the salt off her rowing shell. She had close-cropped dark hair and a face that seemed sad until she smiled, when it suddenly became radiant. It always amazed him.
“Soon, Amy,” he answered with more confidence than he felt. “Maybe next year.”
“You’ll be ace, kid,” she said, returning to her shell.
He hoped he would be.
He was proud that his mother rowed. Because she was little and light, she was often pressed into service as coxswain in the long boats, the eights. But in her own single shell, she flew. Early in the morning, before the wind kicked up, he’d watch her streak across the glassy surface of the outer harbor, reaching and pulling, reaching and pulling, smooth and regular as a machine, and marvel at how strong she was.
He looked up and saw her shell, racked in its normal place. It was dry.
He wandered out to the beach and sat on the edge of the barnacle-encrusted concrete boat ramp. On the bow of the crew instructor’s outboard skiff, anchored just offshore, a cormorant, black as a nightmare, perched with its wings spread wide. He knew the birds did this to dry off in the sun after diving for fish, but it always seemed to him as if the bird were signaling, “Don’t shoot; I’m unarmed!”
As he sat there, it suddenly occurred to him that he’d gone to Colin’s hoping his mother would be there. Why did he think that? Sure, Colin was a family friend and had been for as long as he could remember, at least in the summer. But his mom had lots of friends and relatives on the beach. Not to mention her girlfriends in the rowing club. Why Colin?
He thought some more. The funny thing about Colin was that being around him made everything better, in a quiet, easy way. Not like his own father; at the beach his dad was all frantic movement: running around hustling up a game of tennis, or softball, or touch football, or dragging everyone out to go swimming or fishing. Adam had read someplace that sharks had to be constantly on the move just to stay alive. That was like his father. Except, of course, when he was glum or angry, and you could never tell when those moods might take him over. If his mom was around, she’d put a finger to her lips and whisper, “Bleakies…” It was the family signal to steer clear.
And then there were the weird, unpredictable things his dad did, especially out here on the beach—like swerving the fishing skiff when you least expected it so you got thrown off balance, or pushing you off the swimming platform when you weren’t looking, or getting you lost on walks in the Burton Woods. You didn’t expect that kind of thing from your dad. But eventually, Adam did.
Earlier this summer he’d been sitting on the porch reading Sherlock Holmes stories when he heard their neighbor, Peggy March, laughing at something his dad was up to with the other kids out on the lawn. Mrs. March was sitting on the steps beside his mom. “Tyler’s so playful, so full of energy,” Mrs. March had s
aid. “My Rob is such a stick in the mud.” Adam looked over at his mother, but she said nothing. Then, a moment later, mostly to herself, she said, “I rather think ‘erratic’ would be more accurate.” But by then Peggy had gone off to be with Tyler and the other kids.
twelve
THE FRIDAY BEFORE LABOR DAY, Soren Sorensen stood in front of the printer in the shipping company’s office as it scrolled out his letter of resignation. Outside at the dock, one of his freighters sat idle. The ship was seaworthy, but hardly pretty. Streaks of rust stained its formerly white hull like dried blood. The dock, normally a noisy storm of semi-organized chaos, was quiet as a grave. He had shipping orders, but he couldn’t fulfill them. Pacific Pioneer no longer had credit at the Ballard Locks fuel dock. His two other vessels were impounded over at Harbor Island, the shipping center on the south end of Seattle’s Elliott Bay. He was dead in the water.
He’d always loved the way the south-facing windows flooded his office with light and sent ripples from the surface of the shipping channel dancing across the ceiling. He sat at his desk and signed the letter. Three and a half decades of service as Pacific Pioneer’s general manager and this is how it was ending. Such a terrible, stupid waste.
He set the letter on top of a thick stack of copies of older letters, faxes, and emails, slipped the entire package into an envelope, and left it at the door for the legal services messenger company. The Labor Day weekend was here and he thought about the irony. For the first quarter century after Robbie Petersen put the business in his hands, managing the shipping company had been a labor of love, as rewarding to him as seeing his kids grow. Sure, there were always problems in the cargo business, especially when you worked in an environment as hostile as western Alaska—storms, rogue seas, breakdowns. But he’d loved the job. “The perfect job for someone with a ten-minute attention span,” he’d often joked with his wife, because something was always coming up. The crewmen who had come and gone had been like family, and many still kept in touch.