“Now there are six Starrs,” Scarlett mused.
“Gwen isn’t really a Starr,” I said. “She isn’t Daddy’s daughter.”
“Can’t we adopt her?”
“I think she’s too old. Plus, maybe she doesn’t want to be adopted. She has her own father and mother. This is all new to her, too.”
“I’d rather be a Starr than a Cates,” Scarlett decided. “I’d rather be a Starr than anyone else.”
“Me, too,” I said.
Fishing
I was up early, roused from my sleep by the lonely call of a mourning dove. It sounded extra sad, as if it had looked inside my head and was cooing in sympathy. I wondered where its mate was, and why she didn’t respond. I scooted to the edge of the bed, careful not to wake Scarlett, and peered out the window, searching for the bird. The morning was still grey, wrapped in swaths of cottony mists the sun had yet to burn through. Eventually I spotted it as it took off: a plump grey shape against the colourless sky, perhaps in search of a duet partner. As I watched it fly toward the beach, I spied Daddy leave the lodge and head down to the dock.
Suddenly it felt like the most important thing in the world to get there before he left. The thought of Daddy pulling away from the dock, without me aboard, filled me with red-hot panic. I flew out of bed, still wearing my clothes from last night, and tore after him. I ran all the way there, shoeless, my heart throbbing in my throat. I had to get on the boat.
“Wait!” I cried, my bare feet slapping against the dock. “Wait! I want to come with you!”
When I finally got there, my breathing ragged and face flushed, Daddy was looking up at me, concerned but also a little amused.
“Well, all right. I hear you. You better calm down or you’ll scare the fish.”
Daddy steadied the boat as I climbed in and made a spot for myself between a stained orange life vest and Daddy’s big green tackle box. “Are you all right?” he asked, eyeing me carefully.
I nodded, yes, but didn’t say a word. I didn’t trust myself to speak. I turned my face away, looking out into the gauzy morning, as Daddy started the motor. The engine came to life with a wheeze and eventually settled into a regular putt-putt rhythm as we sliced through the lake, leaving Sandy Shores behind us. I watched the dock and the lodge grow smaller and smaller, until they dissolved into the misty morning like sugar in water.
A lesser fisherman would be lost in all that morning mist, but Daddy knew the lake like the words to his favourite song, and I trusted his sense of direction as he steered us into the unknown — one hand on the engine and the other holding his tattered old fishing hat on his head. We weren’t going full-speed, but the sputtering of the engine was too loud to talk over anyway. As we neared his favourite fishing spot, he cut the engine. “Can’t let the fish know we’re coming,” he explained.
We drifted for a while, through lily pads as big as dinner plates. I let my hand trail over the side of the boat, my fingers pulling up tangles of roots, like handfuls of long green spaghetti.
I hadn’t been fishing with Daddy in ages. We used to go all the time. We’d leave so early that sometimes we were back before anyone had had breakfast. I looked down and saw that my old rod was still in the bottom of the boat. It was slim, painted forest green like the tackle box. I picked it up and tested the line’s tension. I was surprised at how light it felt in my hand.
“Worm or lure?” Daddy asked.
“Lure,” I said, and he opened his tackle box to let me choose.
The tackle box expanded into three compartments, each one packed with oddly shaped and coloured fishing lures. Seeing them was like discovering a box of forgotten childhood toys. Their names came rushing back to me — spinnerbait, spooks, jitterbug, bucktail, crankbait — some were made of wood and jointed in the middle, like insects. They were painted to look like real fish, with yellow eyes and white bellies. Others looked more like birds, or strange fish-bird hybrids, brightly painted, with whirly bits and feathered tails that stirred the water in patterns that attracted hungry fish.
I almost always chose the same lure. It was a plastic mermaid with a black tail and black hair. She had a triple hook at the end of her tail and in her navel. Daddy said it was more of a novelty lure than anything else, something he had picked up as a souvenir, but she was my favourite. Daddy used to call her the Lady of the Lures. He kidded that if I ever turned into a fish, the Lady of the Lures is how he would catch me. I knew he was teasing, but there was a time when I was young enough to wonder if such a transformation was actually possible.
I dug through the lures until I found her. There were chips in her paint and she wasn’t as grand as I remembered her, but she was there all the same, waiting for me. I felt a twinge of guilt, as if she had been aware of my absence and felt abandoned.
“I should have known,” Daddy said, as I secured her to the end of my line.
I waited for him to say more, but the silence stretched out as long as winter, and I eventually turned back to my own line.
“Tell me about the time you broke your rod,” I said. I had heard the story so many times I could tell it myself, but I needed to hear him tell it again.
“First of all, it wasn’t me who broke the rod, it was Big Sandy,” Daddy said, settling into the story. Big Sandy is a legendary muskie that lives in the lake. Fishermen have been trying to catch her for years, but she always gets away. “And it was a damn good rod, too. It belonged to my father who passed it on to me when I was sixteen.”
“Bo’s age,” I realized. When I was younger and listening to this story, sixteen seemed so old. It was practically grown up. Now that Bo was sixteen, and I was only a few years away from it myself, it seemed frighteningly young. It gave the story a whole different colour.
Daddy nodded. “That’s right. I thought I was a big shot fisherman back then. I’d caught more than my fair share of some good-sized pike, which you know about.”
I nodded. Everyone knew about Daddy’s fishing prowess. There was a newspaper cutting from an angling contest he had won when he was only fourteen framed and hanging in the office. In the picture, he was squinting in the sun, holding the award-winning fish with both hands.
“Well, like many fishermen before me, I thought I would go after Big Sandy. The last anyone had seen of her was the fall of ’37. A guest by the name of Henry Tate had her at the end of his line but she got away, taking his best lure with her. He said she was at least six feet long. Later that same day his boat was overturned. Some people said he hit a submerged log, but he swore that Big Sandy swam right under the boat and tipped it over. He thought she did it on purpose.”
This part of the story made me shiver. When I pictured Big Sandy, I imagined a wingless, legless dragon, with a pointed snout full of teeth and muddy scales as tough as nails.
“Now, whether or not that’s true, no one will ever know. The point is, she’s a dangerous fish, and damn hard to catch. So the next year, I get it in my head that my knack for fishing along with my father’s rod is a deadly combination. Deadly for Big Sandy that is, not for me.”
Daddy paused and cast off. The line was so transparent, and the morning had grown so bright, that I couldn’t see it arc against the sky. But I heard the zinging noise it made as it sliced through the air, the lure eventually landing with a plonk.
“I spent most of my sixteenth summer in this very spot, waiting for Big Sandy. Most people thought I was crazy, or at the very least, a lazy son of a gun who was doing his darndest to get out of his chores.” Daddy winked. “I was a man obsessed. I stopped fishing for anything else, throwing everything I caught back in disgust. It had to be Big Sandy or nothing at all.
“And then one day, I got a bite. It was early, about this time, in the dead of summer. The woods were already steaming, and it was so still you could hear a door slam clear across the lake. I knew it was her right away. The pull was unlike anything I had ever had on my line before, like a sea monster had clamped down on my lure and was going to pull
me all the way out to the ocean. I stood, trying to get leverage as the rod started to slip from my grasp. I was gripping the reel so hard I could feel blisters forming, but I was not going to give up without a fight. Then the rod snapped, and I fell forward, hitting my chin against the edge of the boat. I bit my tongue and tasted blood and sure enough, when I caught my reflection in the lake, I looked like something out of one of those horror movies you kids like so much — blood gushing down my chin.
“I took off my shirt and dipped it in the water so I could swab the blood from my face before heading for home. I was leaning over the side of the boat, trying to use my reflection as a guide, when this enormous fish came lunging up toward me. I reared back into the boat just as it surfaced. It snapped its jaws and I saw my lure, lodged in its mouth, before it disappeared back under the water.”
I peered over the edge of the boat at the murky, greenish water, imagining the head of an enormous fish coming toward me.
“I figured she could smell the blood from my cut. That damn fish thought she could make a meal out of your old dad, but it was not to be. Though I wasn’t completely unscathed; she left me with half a fishing rod and a nice little memento to remember her by.”
Daddy pointed to his face. A small scar, about the length of my thumbnail and the width of a pencil, split his chin in two. When I was little and he would tell this story, I would trace the puckered silvery skin with my pinkie and marvel at how he had narrowly escaped being eaten by a large, man-eating fish. I knew now that muskie don’t eat people, but at the time it scared me enough that I kept my fingers and toes inside the boat whenever we drifted into the weedy shallows that Daddy called Muskie Country.
“I haven’t told that story in a long time,” Daddy said. “I thought maybe you’d grown out of it.”
“Never,” I said. “I love that story.”
“It doesn’t seem to have the same effect on your sister.”
I smiled. Scarlett hated fishing more than anything in the world. She claimed the smell of the boat made her “seasick” to her stomach.
“It doesn’t scare you like it used to,” Daddy pointed out. He smiled sadly. “You’ve grown too big and too smart to be fooled by my tall tales.”
Tears burned my eyes. “I don’t feel grown up,” I mumbled, partly to myself and partly so Daddy could hear. “Everything I do goes wrong.”
“You mean the party,” Daddy said softly.
“Are you mad at me, Daddy?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. I was so ashamed, I kept my eyes on the murky water, afraid of seeing the disappointment in Daddy’s eyes.
“Reenie, I’m not pleased with your decision to go ahead and hire that rat Johnny what’s-his-name to come up here without consulting me or your mother first. That sort of decision requires a background check and a few phone calls to make sure we know who we’re getting and what to expect.” He paused, and I waited for him to reel in his line, check his lure and cast again off before he resumed speaking. “But I know your heart was in the right place, and I’m pretty confident you won’t pull something like that again.”
“I won’t, Daddy. I swear.”
“Plus you aren’t responsible for that hoodlum’s actions.”
A little part of me felt relieved, but no matter what Daddy said, I couldn’t shake the heavy feeling that I was responsible.
“But if I hadn’t invited him, none of this would have happened,” I protested, bitterly. “I thought I was so smart, throwing one big party to make everyone happy. I wanted to surprise Gwen and give Bo a chance to play for a real audience. I thought all the excitement would make Mimi happy, and most of all, I wanted you to see that I have what it takes to run Sandy Shores some day.” I paused to take a shaky breath. “But all I did was mess everything up.”
Daddy shook his head. “No, Reenie. If anything, what you did brought everything out into the open. We were headed for disaster the minute Gwen walked in the door. I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be the cozy reunion your mother was hoping for, but it was something she needed to do. Keeping that secret all these years has been hard on her.”
I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Mimi, having a secret child that she could never talk about. When people asked her how many children she had, did she immediately think four, and then have to check herself before responding three? When she sent a birthday card every year for Gwen, did she think about telling her the truth? The only place Mimi could be Gwen’s mother was inside her head. Maybe that’s where her moods came from; when her secret threatened to spill out into the world, she had to lock herself up and be alone with it for a while.
“Is that why she gets so sad?” I asked.
Daddy thought before answering.
“That’s part of it. Some people can’t help feeling sad. Her mother was the same way.”
“Really?”
I had no memories of my grandmother, who died when I was four. The only image I had of her came from a photograph Mimi kept in her family album. In it, she is sitting with baby Bo on her lap. She is square and stout and looks nothing like Mimi. It’s hard to tell anything about what she was like because she still has that stiff expression that people wore in old photos. I knew that she and Mimi didn’t get along, and that she thought acting was frivolous. Mimi had gone to the city against her wishes. If Daddy was right, then it seems like the only thing they shared was sadness.
“That sort of sadness runs in families sometimes,” Daddy said.
“I don’t want to be like that.”
“You aren’t.”
“How do you know?”
Daddy smiled. “Reenie Starr, you are one hundred percent your father’s daughter. You may have your mother’s eyes and her charms, but you and I fell from the same tree.”
“What about Bo?”
Daddy looked at his line, sighed, then continued, “The fact is, your brother has been gunning to get out of here for ages, even before Gwen showed up. I didn’t want to think about it too much, but you can’t look the other way forever.”
“You saw all those people, Daddy. They were all here to see Bo! Maybe he can make it as a musician. Besides, you’ve got me. I’ll stay here and run things, Daddy. I never want to leave. I know I made a big mistake, but I’m learning. If you teach me everything you know, I swear, when I’m older, I can run it. Nobody loves Sandy Shores more than I do.”
“I know that, Maureen. I’ve always known that. Probably longer than you.” Daddy took off his big floppy hat that smelled like the boathouse and dropped it over my head. It was too big for me, and fell over my eyes. I laughed and pushed it back. Daddy was looking right at me. “Does this mean you aren’t going to run away and join the circus? Be a big-time ballerina?”
I groaned. “Ballerinas don’t join the circus, Daddy. You know that. Besides, as it turns out, I’m not very good at dancing.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re good at lots of things.”
I huffed. I couldn’t think of a single thing. “Oh really? Like what?” I asked.
“Like making people laugh, and taking care of Scarlett, and thinking of other people’s feelings. You have a big heart, Reenie. That is something to be proud of.”
The lure neared the boat, slurping and whirring through the water. I watched as Daddy reeled it in one last time, the blades dripping and glinting in the sun, which was now a blazing white disc in the sky. We were in for a hot day.
“That’s enough for today,” Daddy said, smiling sadly. “Can’t stay away forever.”
As he set the lures back in the tackle box and prepared to head back to Sandy Shores, I thought about what he’d said. Maybe people would never ask me to sing for them, or whisper about what a beautiful dancer I was, but they laughed at my jokes. Guests were always happy to see me, and no matter what mood they were in when I stopped to talk to them, they were always smiling when I left. When Scarlett needed comfort, like last night, it was me she came to now. These were things to be proud of.
>
Daddy started the motor and the boat took off, whipping the still air into a breeze that tossed my hair about and reminded me how much I liked being on the water. I felt lighter than I had in days, maybe all summer long. So what if everything was upside down and inside out? I was still Reenie Starr of Sandy Shores. No one could take that away from me.
“I’m not going to run away,” I shouted over the roar of the motor. “I could never leave this place.”
I wasn’t sure if Daddy could hear me, but I forgot that we were the same, and our ears knew how to adjust to the sounds of Sandy Shores, old motorboats included. He smiled and called back, “What did I tell you? You are your father’s daughter.”
* * *
After the spectacle of last night, Saturday at Sandy Shores felt deserted. Even checkout was subdued. Daddy and I manned the office together. He apologized profusely for the events of the night before, offering early bird rates to the guests as they left, but no one took him up on the offer. They thought he was overreacting. One customer said it was the most excitement he’d had all summer. “Just wait till I tell people I got the chance to take a swing at Johnny Skins,” he boasted.
His wife beamed, slipping her arm through her husband’s.
“I can’t imagine what that poor boy would have done without you there,” she said.
A record three couples and four families signed up for next summer at checkout. In a weird way, Johnny had done exactly what I hoped he would do; he’d put us on the map. People were talking about Sandy Shores.
A reporter came sniffing around, but Daddy remained tight-lipped, refusing to give a comment. He had struck a deal with Bert and both parties agreed never to speak of the Sandy Shores concert again. With time it would become a great legend. For years to come, people would call and ask to stay in the room that Johnny Skins had been in. Some places have ghosts or sea monsters, but at Sandy Shores we had Johnny Skins.
Sisters
Grace Cates arrived later that afternoon. She looked pale and drawn and wasn’t as imposing as I remembered. She set up in my parents’ bedroom, Daddy graciously moving into a spare guest room to give her and Mimi privacy. For the next few days she followed my mother like a shadow. They never seemed to be more than an arm’s length away from each other, whispering or crying. I even saw them laughing a few times, despite everything that had gone on. Daddy asked Scarlett if she would like to spend the weekend at her friend Mary-Beth’s house, but she refused, never straying far from the lodge and spending her nights in my bed.
Summer Days, Starry Nights Page 16