The Captain's Daughter

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  She sat down on the edge of the worn-to-bits sofa. She’d wanted to buy Charlie a new one the previous year but he wouldn’t have it. She’d wanted to do lots of things for him at all different times and he wouldn’t have most of them. He said things like, “What I have’ll do just fine” and “You and Rob don’t need to spend your money on me.” She couldn’t get him to understand that in Rob’s world you didn’t spend money and then find it was gone—it was practically a renewable resource, like sunlight.

  “He’s going to be just fine,” said Val, but there was a catch in her voice that made Eliza look more carefully at her. Val handed Charlie a cup of water and shook two Advils out of a bottle that was sitting on the side table and said, “Here, Charlie, it’s been four hours.” To Eliza she said, “For the pain.” If Eliza didn’t know better she’d think they were an old married couple. Charlie took the cup unsteadily. She leaned forward to help him lift the cup to his lips, but he regained the balance in his arm and did it on his own.

  “I’ll be just fine,” repeated Charlie, when he’d swallowed the pills and handed the cup back to Val. “Might have to take a couple more days off of hauling, that’s all.” He smiled and looked a little bit more like himself.

  “A couple more?” said Eliza. “I think it’s going to take longer than that!”

  Charlie cast about for a way to change the subject: he asked about the girls, and about Rob. Then he said, “I keep telling Val that she’s going to have to get a cappuccino maker down to Val’s, to keep up with the competition over at The Cup.”

  Val made a soft hissing sound and said, “Believe me, that place is no competition to me. And I don’t know of any fisherman who wants his coffee served up with a boatload of foamed milk, a sprinkle of cinnamon on top. No sir. Do you, Charlie?”

  “No,” said Charlie. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “No, I don’t guess that I do.”

  Val woke up each day even earlier than the fishermen, since she was the one who served most of them their breakfasts. By this time in the evening she always showed her fatigue. All the lobstermen (and two women, though they usually got called lobstermen too, that was the way they wanted it) were too; it was a funny life, up before dawn, in bed not too long after sunset, sometimes before.

  But now Val looked more than tired. She looked like her body had been taken apart and then put back together haphazardly, with some of the pieces not tightened all the way. And if Eliza had to put Val’s expression into a single word, she might say that Val looked scared. Val, who wasn’t scared of anything.

  She thought of her phone ringing at the club, Russell telling her she’d better come home, the ten seconds when she’d thought her father was gone.

  Wait, was that today, the Bloody Marys at the club? It seemed like another world suddenly, to Eliza, like someone else’s life.

  3

  LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE

  Mary

  Mary Brown wiped table four with the cloth. The cloth was bamboo and reusable, although she sometimes forgot the reusable part and had had to dig one out of the garbage more than once under the slightly kind, slightly judgmental eyes of Andi and Daphne, the café’s co-owners. Mary thought that it wouldn’t kill them every now and then to wave a hand and say, “Don’t worry, Mary, it’s only a silly cloth!” but they never did; they just let her keep on digging. That was the only part of Mary’s job she didn’t love.

  Sometimes when she made mistakes like that she sang a little song to herself: Mary Brown, get out of town, Mary Brown, go upside down. It helped get her mind off the embarrassment. Mary embarrassed extremely easily. That was her cross to bear (an expression she inherited from her mother, as in: Single motherhood, that is my cross to bear).

  One of Mary’s other crosses to bear was the fact that her name was the absolute plainest thing anybody could dream of. And yet at the same time so very easy to make fun of. Bloody Mary. Virgin Mary. Mary, Queen of Snots. Trevor Spaulding, awful boy, had come up with that last one in the fifth grade.

  Mary’s own mother was named Vivienne, which was, in her own words, a name that turned out to be way too extravagant for the life she’d ended up in. A mother at eighteen, married at nineteen, divorced at twenty. Now she worked in a salon in Ellsworth called A Cut Above where she highlighted hair and waxed eyebrows. Mary’s mother had made lots of mistakes (in general, not with the hair and the eyebrows) and she liked to remind Mary about it. “Don’t screw up like I did, Mary.” “It’s not worth it, Mary.” “Five minutes of pleasure for a lifetime of pain, Mary.”

  And then, realizing that she was talking to her own daughter, the result of the five minutes of pleasure, she tried to walk it back. “That’s not what I meant, Mary. I just meant: stay in school.”

  No wonder Mary was so easily embarrassed.

  “Table three needs a wipe-down!” sang Daphne from the other side of the café. “When you get to it.”

  “Of course,” said Mary agreeably. She liked wiping down the tables—she found it very soothing and satisfactory. You could see where the work began and where it ended. Unlike most things.

  Daphne and Andi were lesbians, and they were married. To each other. (Mary had to clarify the married part more than once for her mother, who tagged Daphne and Andi’s sexual preference at the end of their name like a suffix, always with Andi’s name first: Andi and Daphne, the Lesbians.)

  Mary didn’t care a nickel about what people did together in bed—she was really very open-minded. Not exactly adventurous (her boyfriend, Josh, said) but definitely open-minded. Even so, sometimes she did have to fight back a giggle when Daphne and Andi used the word wife to describe each other, only because of how proudly they said it, how they lifted their chins a fraction of an inch as though saying, Go on, challenge us, we dare you. We have a marriage certificate and we file our tax returns jointly.

  Honestly, Mary didn’t really know much about tax returns (she was seventeen), but Daphne and Andi talked about them like they were a very important marker of a real relationship.

  “Earth to Mary!” said Andi now. Sometimes Andi snuck up on Mary like a ghost, startling her right out of her thoughts. Mary’s thoughts had a nervy habit of wandering. This had often been a problem at school, except in math. She didn’t even have to pay attention to the teaching in math, not really, she just looked at the work after and it made a sort of automatic sense; the numbers floated right where they were supposed to be. Her spelling, on the other hand, was atrocious.

  Last year’s math teacher, Ms. Berry, had pulled Mary aside and asked her if she knew what an aptitude for math she had and if she understood how critical girls with good math skills were going to be to America’s ability to keep up with other countries.

  “Just think about it, Mary,” Ms. Berry had said, two weeks before graduation.

  Mary thought about it. But by then Mary already knew what her future held, and it wasn’t more math classes.

  Her cell phone in her apron pocket buzzed and she stole a look at it. Josh: WHEN R U COMING?

  “Customers, Mary, all hands on deck!” said Andi.

  Mary put the phone back in her pocket and glanced out the window of the café—there were only two customers approaching, it was hardly an all hands on deck situation, but Andi and Daphne had relocated to Little Harbor from New York City and they liked to use nautical phrases whenever they could. Not that the fishermen Mary knew ever actually said all hands on deck. And Mary knew a lot of fishermen.

  “I’m on it!” Mary called out. She took her place behind the counter, depositing the bamboo towel correctly in the to-be-washed bin, and waited for the door to open. “I am at your service,” she told Daphne. Under cover of the counter she slid her phone out and texted Josh back SOON, BABY. She felt a little thump of anticipation when the bell on the door jangled. The sound reminded her of Christmas, those first couple of minutes after you open your eyes and you think, Anything could happen today!

  Vivienne said Mary was more optimistic than she
had a right to be.

  Mary loved waiting on customers. She loved the way the café made her feel: competent and valuable, in a way that nobody and nothing else made her feel.

  “You wouldn’t last a minute in New York City,” Daphne always told Mary. “You’re way too trusting and sweet. And I mean that as a compliment.” The way she said it, though? Somehow Mary didn’t take it as a compliment. She’d never been to New York City.

  In the summer the café was open until eight; they served dinner salads and “small plates,” mostly to summer people just off their sailboats, and they had just gotten a beer and wine license, which, to hear Andi tell it, had been like pulling fucking teeth. Sometimes Andi didn’t have the nicest language.

  “Small plates?” said Vivienne scornfully when she’d come in at the beginning of the summer to get a look at the place. When Vivienne was growing up in Little Harbor the lot where the café was now had been a dying gas station. “Smaller than what?”

  Vivienne refused to call Daphne and Andi’s place a café, she insisted on saying coffee shop, even though it was right there on the sign, same font but smaller letters as the name of the place. The Cup, it said, a café for all.

  “A coffee shop for some,” Vivienne called it, because she said that only the summer people went there. (True.) And then she laughed in that way she had, that made her sound older than she was. Smoker’s laugh. Another mistake. “Don’t ever start, Mary, once you get in the habit it’s impossible to stop.” If she ever saw Mary with a cigarette, she said, she would smack her from here to next week. That was just an expression, of course.

  The Cup served two different kinds of white wine, two kinds of red, one champagne (“Technically,” said Andi, “it’s not champagne, it’s not from France, so it’s sparkling wine, but call it what you want”), and a light beer and a dark beer, both from the Atlantic Brewing Company in Bar Harbor. Local. The summer people loved local beer. They loved local everything, local marmalade and chutney from Nellie’s in Blue Hill, fair trade organic coffee beans from Wicked Joe in Topsham, lobsters pulled from traps right in Little Harbor and sold straight off the boat at the co-op. They liked local until the summer ended and the days got shorter and the wind got colder and they high-tailed it back to Boston or New York or Philadelphia or their winter ski condos in Colorado or Park City, Utah.

  One of the customers coming in now was Russell Perkins. Mary wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Russell Perkins in The Cup—he went to Val’s. Obviously. The Cup wasn’t open early enough for the lobstermen. (“Not our target market,” said Andi, shrugging.) But here he was, dressed in regular clothes, not fishing gear. Mary squinted at him and tried to be offended by his presence. Was he walking in like he owned the place, sort of?

  This question was out of an attempted loyalty to Josh, who despised Russell Perkins. Russell was one of those guys who always dropped his traps in the right place, always sensed the movement of the lobsters before they knew where they were going themselves, always caught more than everyone else. Well, more than Josh, anyway, who had bad luck dropping his traps. “Not that I’m keeping track,” said Josh. Though of course he was. Mary got nervous when Josh had a bad day out on the water. He was like a little boy on the edge of a big tantrum, his face screwed up with confusion and pain. Sometimes it felt like a full-time job, making him feel better. Sometimes it felt impossible: it felt like the kind of job she didn’t want to spend her life doing.

  But despite her efforts, Mary found Russell sort of charming. Okay, very charming, extremely charming. Look at him now, smiling at her, in a way that wouldn’t let her not smile back. He was so handsome. For an older man. (“Never date an older man,” was Vivienne’s advice. Another mistake. They were only after one thing.) Too late for that: Josh was twenty-four.

  Russell was with a woman Mary didn’t recognize. A summer person? The woman was wearing white shorts and a silky-looking tank top that said I have money. She had super-long legs, lots of freckles, and masses of dark curly hair that Mary (who was, after all, her mother’s daughter) could tell was tamed by an experienced hairstylist and probably some very expensive product. Her bag was baby-blue leather; it looked soft as butter and had a little gold tag with a word Mary couldn’t read. She was stunning, actually. What was Russell Perkins doing coming into The Cup with a stunning summer person?

  “Hey, Mary,” said Russell, and Mary said, “Hey, Russell.”

  The summer person looked up at the menu and squinted in a way that made little lines pop out at the corners of her eyes. Now that the woman was closer Mary could read the word on her bag: Givenchy. “I can’t believe it,” she said to Russell. She was standing close to him; their arms were touching. “You can get a cappuccino in Little Harbor! Knock me over with a feather. Val told me, but I didn’t believe her. She’s freaking out, though she won’t admit it.” The woman reached into her blue butter bag and pulled out a long brown wallet with a bright gold zipper. “My treat, get whatever you want. Are we doing coffee or beers?” She smiled at Mary in a friendly way, and then said, “You look so familiar to me. Why is that?”

  “That’s Vivienne’s girl, Mary,” said Russell. “Looks just exactly like her mama.” He winked at Mary and Mary tried even harder to dislike him but she couldn’t help it: she smiled. To the woman Russell said, “Better make it drinks, I’m up at four tomorrow, no coffee for me.”

  “Vivienne?” The woman closed her eyes and put one finger on her chin like she was drawing a memory out of it.

  “Vivienne Brown, a year behind us.” Russell rocked back on his heels and stretched his hands in front of him and cracked his knuckles.

  “Oh!” said the woman. “Right. Vivienne. Of course. I remember her, such a pretty girl. You do look just like her, wow.” Her voice was deep and musical and seemed to travel all over the place in just that one sentence. She put her hand on Russell’s arm. Mary had never seen this woman before, but there was something so natural about the gesture that made Mary experience a flash of something. Envy? She supposed this was what people meant when they talked about chemistry.

  Mary’s phone buzzed again, another text. HURRY UP IM LONLY. It was only six thirty. They were still open for another hour and a half and then there was cleanup to do. She wouldn’t get to Josh’s until almost eight thirty. He went to bed before ten to be up at four to haul, just like Russell, just like all the lobstermen. Josh wanted her to quit her job at The Cup, get something with hours that matched his better. “See if Val’s hiring,” he said. “Work the breakfast shift, it’ll be perfect.” Mary didn’t want to work the breakfast shift, didn’t want to get up at four, didn’t want to spend all of her time around a bunch of stinky lobstermen, didn’t want to give up Andi and Daphne and her own personal apron with a screen print of a coffee cup with steam coming off the top. So she had told Josh she’d asked and Val didn’t need anyone. (A red flag: that she needed to lie.)

  “We have decaf,” said Mary now, in her best customer service voice. Andi, who was counting bags of beans, nodded her approval.

  “Drinks,” said the woman firmly. “Beer, Russell? What kind? Do you mind if I have something else, I can’t drink beer anymore, it gives me such a bloated belly, let’s see, wine, or…ooooh, you have champagne? Do you close soon? Eight? Okay, good, I need to get back to my dad anyway, we’ll be quick, promise.” She smiled even more brightly and said, “I’ll pound my champagne.”

  “Not necessary, Eliza. What would your dad say?” Russell laughed.

  Eliza. Okay, now it was coming together. Eliza Sargent, Charlie Sargent’s daughter. Charlie Sargent had been taken in by the Coast Guard yesterday, Josh told her all about it the night before in that weirdly happy voice that he used when he talked about other people’s misfortunes. This was a red flag, though a small one. Mary was trying to ignore the small red flags, considering the situation.

  Charlie Sargent came into The Cup sometimes in the early evening and bought a few of the lobster cookies. The cookies were shaped like lobs
ters, not made out of them. He always winked at Mary when he paid and said, “Don’t tell Val.” He must be okay enough, if Eliza Sargent was here at The Cup, standing close to Russell Perkins.

  Mary hadn’t told anybody about her secret, not even Josh. She would tell him soon. Maybe not tonight, maybe tomorrow.

  The ringing of a cell phone interrupted her thoughts and Charlie Sargent’s daughter reached into her bag and pulled out a phone. “Sorry,” she said in Russell’s direction, before she answered, saying, “Hi, honey. Sweetie—Evie? Evie, I can’t quite understand you…Evie, you have to stop crying if you want me to be able to understand you.”

  There was such kindness and love in Eliza Sargent’s voice that Mary felt, ridiculously, tears rise to her eyes. She was so emotional lately, she cried over the stupidest things. Just the other day that blond woman with the ringlets getting kicked off The Bachelor, that got her going.

  Eliza moved away from the counter, so Mary could no longer see her expression. After a couple of minutes she returned to Russell’s side, slipping the phone back into her bag. She rolled her eyes in an exaggerated way that indicated she didn’t mean any harm by it and said to Russell, “My second call from a crying girl in just over twenty-four hours. Evie got to the end of Bridge to Terabithia. I don’t blame her, I felt the same way, when I read it.”

  Russell said, “Never read it.” He winked at Mary again. Funny how winks could be creepy from some people and perfectly acceptable from others. Russell’s were acceptable, even enchanting.

  “Did you order?” asked Eliza. “I’ll have a glass of Cabernet after all, not champagne. I know, it seems crazy, it’s summertime, we should all be drinking white or rosé. So sue me.” She shrugged like someone who didn’t expect to get sued at all.