The Summer I Dared: A Novel

by Barbara Delinsky

  “She decided she liked her independence too much to give it up. She has a nice life, Mom.”

  Janet studied the shelves of dishwasher detergent. “But she has no family.”

  “Her friends are her family.”

  They rounded the end of the aisle and came face-to-face with condiments. “I need mustard. And cucumber chips. Choose whatever brand you like. Did she never want children?”

  Julia chose her favorites and set the jars in the cart. “She kept waiting for a husband. She’s pretty conventional that way. By the time she realized there wouldn’t be one, when she might have considered a sperm donor, she was already perimenopausal. It hit early.”

  “With me, too. Maybe you, in a few years.”

  Julia thought of what she and Noah had done, all unprotected, because they were, after all, forty, with children who were grown, or nearly so. Women with twenty-year-old children didn’t get pregnant. At least, she hoped they didn’t. This wasn’t the time for it at all.

  “Why does that embarrass you?” Janet asked curiously.

  Julia’s eyes flew to hers. “It doesn’t.”

  “You’re blushing.”

  “Oh. No. Here’s the bread. What kind would you like?”

  “I like rye. Your father does not.”

  “I do.” Julia reached for rye.

  They hit the deli department next, took a number, and waited their turn. They stood close and spoke low, similar in height and looks, if years apart.

  “I didn’t expect Zoe to stay on that island,” Janet said. “She used to be adventurous.”

  “She used to be twenty.”

  “She was reckless then. What’s her house like?”

  “It’s nothing like yours.”

  “Obviously. What kind of sandwiches do we want to make? I like their seafood salad.”

  Julia’s first instinct was to go along with that. Old habits died hard.

  But no seafood salad here could compare with that at the Harbor Grill, and the new Julia had a voice. “Turkey breast for me. Let’s buy some of each,” which was what they did.

  At the dairy case, Janet reached for a quart of milk. “So, what’s it like?”

  “Zoe’s house?” Julia described the farmhouse as they returned to the front of the store. “Is there anything else you need?”

  “Yes. Paper towels. I want the eight-pack. Your father buys one roll at a time. Can you imagine? Not only does it cost more, but he has to think about it every week, rather than once in two months. He shops like a man.”

  “If you went with him, you could teach him.”

  “But then I’d have to go myself, and I’m too busy.”

  Julia thought about that during the drive home. Out on the patio again, now with sandwiches and drinks, she was comfortable enough to be bold. “Dad feels some of that, you know.”

  “Some of what?”

  “Your being too busy. It’s the bottom line of why he went to Maine.”

  “He was angry that I didn’t call you,” Janet argued.

  Julia disagreed. “He was angry that you said you were too busy to do it, because it tapped into his anger about that. He wants more of your time, Mom. He’s getting old enough to relax some about work. He wants you to do the same.”

  “Retirement. It’s a frightening word. I’m not ready.”

  “No one’s asking you to retire. Can’t you just cut back some?”

  To her credit, Janet didn’t summarily dismiss the idea. “I can, but I’m not sure I want to. Cutting back—going into even semiretirement— it’s a whole new stage. Some of my friends are having a hard time.” She shot Julia an awkward look. “You know, being with their husbands all the time.”

  “Do you love Dad?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then, what’s the problem?”

  “We’ve been used to something else. I’m not sure how it would work. He might hate having me around all the time.”

  “He wouldn’t. He worships you. He would feel honored if you chose to spend more time with him.”

  Janet was clearly unsure of that, because she got blustery. “Well, he needs to tell me that.”

  “Maybe he’s afraid. You’re an intimidating woman.”

  “He’s my husband, for goodness sakes. He can say what he likes to me.”

  “Not always.”

  The words lingered. Julia could feel them in Janet’s silence and wondered if she had gone too far. Janet hadn’t asked for her opinion. Janet had opinions aplenty of her own. Traditionally, Julia did what Janet asked, not the other way around.

  But the status quo didn’t work for Julia anymore. She wanted a better relationship with her mother. As she saw it, this was one way to make the most of surviving the Amelia Celeste.

  They didn’t talk much for a while, and Julia was fearing the worst. As soon as they finished their sandwiches, though, Janet suggested—as amiably as you please—that they go shopping. She claimed that she wanted to pick up a few things she needed. In truth, she seemed more intent on buying for Julia. When she took yet one more pair of slacks from the rack and said, “Try these on. They would look good on you,” Julia called her on it.

  “I thought we were shopping for you.”

  “I have plenty. You’re the one whose clothes went down with the ship.”

  “It was a boat, not a ship, and the clothes I lost were for a two-week vacation.”

  “The rest are back in New York with your husband, from whom you are now separated. Are you aware of that?”

  Julia felt a tiny jolt. Being separated from Monte was still totally new. “It’s okay,” she said. “Those clothes aren’t appropriate for Maine.”

  “Well, these are,” Janet remarked. The pants she pulled out were casual, and the tops sporty. She even led Julia to the workout section and insisted she buy warm-up suits for hanging around the house, and again she insisted on paying.

  “I can afford these, Mom. Monte won’t leave me penniless.”

  “I’m not thinking of Monte,” Janet said. “I’m thinking of me. Indulge me, please.”

  Noah and Ian were late returning to the dock, not because they chose to work longer, but because the sea was that rough. Even with spindles sticking up, finding buoys was a challenge. Same with pulling traps onto the boat. The surf swelled and sucked with enough force to make even emptying the lobster tanks at Foss’s harder than usual. Back in the Leila Sue’s slip, the shouting from boat to boat was on that theme.

  “You goin’ out tomorrow, Hayes?” yelled Mickey Kling as he hosed off the Mickey ’n Mike.

  From the deck of the Willa B., Hayes Miller yelled back, “Gonna have to, if the forecast holds, or I’ll lose a bundle. You?”

  “We’ll move a few in the morning, but if it gets much worse than this, I’m turning around. Hey, Noah! I hear you dumped some rotten fruit!”

  Noah raised a hand in acknowledgment and went back to scrubbing his deck. After emptying out Haber and Welk’s traps, he had moved a few of his own to deeper water, but there were many more in the path of the storm.

  Ian wanted his Sunday off. His body was still adjusting to the daily rigor of hauling. Noah might take pity on him and leave him home, but he was surely going out himself. He was a lobsterman. Women might come and go, but there were always buoys, traps, and bugs. Totally aside from the practical need to get his traps away from the rocks, the work was a diversion. Add the risk of angry seas, and it was even better.

  Julia and Janet hung out back at the house doing not much of anything at all, and it was time well spent. For Julia, the patio was an oasis. Even without talk, she felt closer to Janet. Then came dinner. Dressing up some, they went to a restaurant on North Charles. There, surrounded by teak, marble, and brass, they shared a bottle of wine and an order of Chateaubriand, and it was so startlingly companionable that Julia dared sit back and ask, “What do you think of me?”

  Janet gave her a quizzical look. “What kind of question is that?”

  “I�
��ve always felt overshadowed. Irrelevant, often. Do you see me that way?”

  “Good Lord, no. You’re my daughter.”

  “Do you like me?”

  “You’re my daughter,” Janet repeated, as though that answered the question. But Julia was mellow enough to continue on.

  “Are you proud of me?”

  “Other than the state of your fingernails?”

  Which were clean but bare. “I’m serious.”

  “Yes, I’m proud of you.”

  “Why?”

  “Julia.” Janet seemed almost embarrassed.

  “I really want to know,” Julia insisted and realized she sounded like Molly, which wasn’t a bad thing at all. Molly was forthright when it came to her own needs and wants. Julia had to be more like that. “Remember what I said to you on the phone from Maine? I haven’t done anything like what you have in life. Are you disappointed? Did you have higher hopes for me? Would you find value in me as a friend?”

  Janet seemed startled. “How could I be disappointed, when you do all the things I can’t?”

  “You could if you wanted to.”

  “No. I don’t have the patience you do. I don’t have the temperament you have. I’m not the agreeable person you are.”

  “Maybe being agreeable isn’t always good.”

  “Turn that around, please. What if everyone in the world were—for want of a better word—as difficult as I am? How would anything get done? You’re the grease, Julia. You make things happen. What I do is only a small part of the job.”

  “What you do is important,” Julia said. For all her resentment of the word, it had to be used.

  Janet sighed. “Not as important as I’d like to think.”

  You’re the grease, Julia. You make things happen.

  Julia slept on those thoughts. When she woke up in the middle of the night realizing that her marriage was done, the words gave her a sense of hope. If she could make things happen, she could take care of herself. That was what she needed to do.

  Noah slept fitfully. He kept his cell phone close, thinking he could snatch it right up if she called, which she didn’t, but he was in and out of bed anyway, monitoring the weather band. Though the fog remained thick, the wind eased and the rain held off. Reports had the storm approaching over water from the southeast, which meant it could be volatile, but not until noon. He figured he could accomplish a lot before then, and return to port with time to spare.

  At four in the morning, he began fixing breakfast. He had his cell phone beside him here too, on the chance she woke up from wherever she was, remembered what they had been doing at this time two nights before, and decided to call. She didn’t. Which was just as well. Because bacon had just begun sizzling when Ian appeared. The boy’s feet were bare, but he wore a sweatshirt and jeans, and appeared to have every intention of coming along.

  “You could’ve slept,” Noah said

  Ian leaned against the doorjamb. “You can’t go out alone.”

  “I’ve gone out alone many a time.”

  “None of the others will be working alone today. It isn’t safe.”

  “The storm’ll hold off. I’ll be back by noon.”

  “I’m coming.”

  He sounded determined, and, argument aside, Noah was pleased. It was a bright spot in what promised to be a dismal day. Still, he felt obligated to ask, “Are you sure you want to?”

  “I don’t think you should go alone, and there’s no one else you can take.”

  “You’re it by default?”

  “Looks that way,” the boy said, folding his arms on his chest. In that instant, everything about him—looks, build, stubbornness—spoke of the grandfather he had barely known.

  Yes, a bright spot. Feeling strengthened, Noah added extra bacon and eggs to the pan. “Make some sandwiches, okay? You’re hungry by ten.”

  Thirty minutes later, they set off. Riding that surge of strength, defiant almost, Noah left the cell phone on the kitchen counter. If she hadn’t called during the quiet times, she wouldn’t now, and he was tired of waiting. He had more important things to do. He tried to close Lucas in the house, but the dog squirmed out of his hands and ran toward the truck. Noah wondered if Lucas was feeling as brash as he was. Lucas had loved Julia, too.

  The fog was even thicker at the harbor. Rick met them with muffins at the side door of the Grill. “Rain’s coming, Noah. Are you sure you’re game for the ark?”

  Noah snickered, handed Ian a thermos and took his own. “If I’m not back by noon, send the troops.”

  Once aboard the Leila Sue, he got the engine going and turned on the electronics. He figured he would need all the navigational help he could get, starting with leaving the harbor. Dawn was barely rising, the black of night had just begun its first fade into gray. With Ian and Lucas a muted shadow in the stern, he carefully piloted the boat around moorings. More lobster boats were tied up than gone. Either the fleet was staying ashore, or he had simply beat them to it. The VHF was correspondingly quiet.

  Clearing the harbor marker, he opened up the throttle and, using the loran, headed full tilt for the farthest of his traps. They lay forty minutes out, in an area of rocks and ledges that might have been an island in the days of Atlantis but, in modernity, had never quite made it to island status. This was prime molt territory. The shallows here had been fertile lobstering ground for the past several weeks.

  The waves were light. He stopped once along the way to move a trio of strings, simply because they were close. Then he continued on. The world was a soupy, monochromatic gray, the fog thick enough to wet his windows. He kept his wipers on. Following his instruments, he reached the first of these most distant bright blue-orange-orange buoys, and threw the throttle into neutral. Ian gaffed the buoy and pulled it aboard; Noah hitched the warp over the hauler and turned it on. In no time the first trap was up, then the second. They each took one, tossing back seaweed, a cod, two shorts, and a handful of starfish into the sea, and dumping a total of three keepers in the tank. When the traps were stacked in the stern, ready for deeper water, Noah headed for the next buoy. The traps they pulled here held no keepers. Once the rest was tossed back, they joined the pile.

  Bound for the third buoy, Noah returned to the wheel just as the idle stumbled. He raised the throttle and got a sputter, a surge, a misfire. He shifted back, then forward again. Another sputter came, then the rattle of an almost-catch, then nothing. Other than the sound of waves slapping the hull and wipers on the windshield, all was still.

  “Swell,” he muttered under his breath.

  Ian came up beside him. “You can’t be out of gas. We filled up two days ago.”

  “It’s not gas,” Noah said, heading for the stern.

  Ian followed. “A dead battery?”

  “No. The wipers are working.” He began moving traps. “Give me a hand.” When the traps had been shifted out of the way, he opened the engine compartment. He checked the fuel tank, fingered the lines, searched for anything else that might be amiss, and saw nothing. Then, on the impulse of a split-second premonition, he scrambled around traps, hung over the stern to see the exhaust, and swore softly.

  “What?” Ian asked, leaning over beside him.

  “Steam,” Noah said in dismay.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Water in the tank. We’re not going anywhere.”

  “How’d water get in the tank?”

  “The same way my buoys were painted gray.”

  “Haber and Welk?”

  “Them, or someone else.”

  “Maybe the gas you bought was bad.”

  That was Noah’s first thought, too, but it couldn’t be. “I’d have known it long before now.”

  “But—why are they picking on you?”

  “Consolidating their efforts? Who knows?”

  Still, Ian fought it. “If there’s water in the tank, how’d we get this far?”

  “Water’s heavier than gas. It sinks to the bottom of the tank, wh
ich is where the fuel line pulls from. At the end of a day, there’s always gas left in the fuel lines, the filter, and the carburetor bowl. That’s what got us here.” Unfortunately, they weren’t going anywhere else without help. Scrambling to his feet, he went to the VHF, but when he tried to get it going, nothing happened. He fiddled with the connectors. That usually did the trick. This time the wires came free in his hand. They had been cut and tucked back in, which he would have seen if he had been more diligent back at the dock.

  He swore again.

  “No radio?” Ian asked.

  “No.”

  “Cell phone?”

  “Back at the house.”

  “How do we get the water out of the tank?”

  “We pump out the whole thing,” which he knew they couldn’t do here and which would be a waste of effort even if they could, since they had nothing to put back in its place.

  “So how do we get help?”

  Noah ducked into the cabin and emerged with a flare kit. On the deck again, he opened it, loaded the flare into a gun, aimed the gun in the general direction of Big Sawyer, and fired. He and Ian stood looking up.

  “I don’t see anything,” Ian said.

  “It’s up in the fog.”

  “If we can’t see it, how can anyone else?”

  “They may not,” Noah said, “but this is the best we can do. We have six flares. We’ll shoot them up every few minutes. Either someone will see it, or catch us on radar. Or noon will come and go, and they’ll send someone out.”

  “How will they know where we are?”

  “They’ll know.” His friends knew where he fished. They would find him, but only if the Leila Sue stayed put. Anchoring would work for now. A thirty-five-pound plow was more than enough anchor for a thirty-four-foot boat. If the seas rose and the wind picked up, that would change things. Being anchored this close to the rocks could become dangerous then. Traps had the buffer of water. The potential damage to a boat against rocks was that much worse. And to the people aboard?

  He couldn’t go there yet.

  “The radar’s still working,” Ian pointed out hopefully.

  “The instruments work off the battery,” Noah said and promptly turned them all off, though not before getting a fix on the Leila Sue’s bearings and entering it in his log. “The battery gets its charge from the engine.”