The Captain's Daughter

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  Mary slid Josh’s legs over to make room for herself on the couch, then put his legs on top of the yellow dress. He hadn’t mentioned the dress. Maybe Vivienne was right: maybe it wasn’t a good dress on her. Maybe she did look like a prairie girl. She ventured, “Mmm, you smell clean.”

  “Had all the time in the world to shower, babe, you were so late.” Josh smiled again but this time there was something less nice behind the smile: more beery, less cheery. Sometimes Josh’s face changed really quickly like that. Was it normal, for that to happen? Mary didn’t think so, but she didn’t really have anyone she could ask. She didn’t have a best girlfriend the way teenagers in the movies or on TV shows did. She used to. She used to have Alyssa Michaud, before that whole stupid mess with Tyler Wasson.

  Virgin Mary, Tyler Wasson had called her after the big disaster, and then he’d gotten all of those assholes on the basketball team to call her that too. Mary’s eyes burned, thinking about it.

  When Josh, who was new to town, asked Mary to go to the movies with him, Mary figured he thought she was older than she was, even though not very many people mistook her for older. But then it turned out that he knew exactly how old she was, knew she was still in high school. One date led to two and then three and Mary, who had never been on an actual date before, and who thought (at first) that Josh was funny and charming, was smitten. When she thought about that asshole Tyler Wasson she practically put her virginity on a platter and said, “Here you go!”

  Not that Josh had asked, specifically, in so many words.

  As it turned out, she was grateful for the company. All through the winter, through the end of stupid senior year, Mary had somewhere to go after school, on weekends, she had someone who was expecting her, someone who cared where she was and when she was coming back. What was the occasional black mood, the occasional unpredictable silence, compared to that? What did it matter that the dates happened only in the beginning and now he just wanted her to come over and watch TV after work? She had someone, and someone had her.

  Now Mary took a deep breath and let it out super slowly and said, “I brought you something, from the café. Cookies!” And she put the lobster cookies on the secondhand coffee table.

  Josh glanced at them briefly and said, “Great,” with zero enthusiasm. Mary should have given them to Vivienne—she had a sweet tooth. Apparently that was Mary’s fault too; Vivienne barely ate a dessert in her life until she got pregnant with Mary. “Girls ruin your figure,” she said gloomily, chomping on Twizzlers, though Vivienne wore a size two and was by all accounts still considered a knockout.

  “It’s true,” said Daphne and Andi, who claimed to have very different types. “Your mother is indisputably gorgeous.” As a footnote they added, a stitch too quickly, “And you are too. You look just like her.” But Vivienne was the brighter version, an outdoor floodlight to Mary’s low-wattage indoor bulb.

  “They’re still pretty fresh,” she said to Josh, about the cookies. A sticker on the bag said Standard Baking Co., Portland. Just yesterday Eliza Sargent, Charlie Sargent’s daughter, had bought a package of them to bring home to her kids and one for her dad. Mary had taken extra care with Eliza’s coffee; she was just learning to make designs with the cappuccino foam. Summer people loved that stuff, and even though Eliza was not technically a summer person she didn’t seem like a townie either.

  “Oh, look!” Eliza had said, squinting at the cup. “It’s a…what’s that, a lobster claw? Fantastic.”

  It was supposed to be a flower but Mary didn’t want to embarrass either of them by saying so.

  “Okay.” Josh’s eyes were back on the flat-screen.

  Well, this pissed Mary off a little bit. She smoothed the skirt of her yellow dress and said, “Josh. I brought you something. I brought you a present. You could at least acknowledge it.”

  His eyes flicked back at her. “I did,” he said. “I said thanks.”

  He hadn’t said thanks. Mary tried to let it go, but at the same time a bunch of warning bells were all going off one after another in her brain, and the red flags were waving like crazy. If this was how Josh reacted to a little gift, well…what about something way bigger?

  She opened the package of lobster cookies and stole a glance at Josh to see if he noticed or cared. Neither. Mary’s stomach was so funny lately, sometimes she ate nothing at all and sometimes she just wanted to stuff her face with grease and salt. Was this normal?

  Mary gave herself a quick little internal lecture about acting like an adult. In August she’d be eighteen; by next year at this time she’d be a mother. Or not. Who cared if he hadn’t thanked her for the cookies? She hadn’t paid for them, why was she making such a big deal out of it? She had to watch those juvenile reactions, those silly hurt feelings. Those were high school feelings, or even younger, and she wasn’t young anymore.

  She dislodged herself from under Josh’s legs, walked around behind the couch, and squeezed his shoulders.

  “Something wrong?” she asked, leaning close.

  “Shit haul today, that’s all,” he muttered.

  “Again, baby? I’m sorry.”

  It had been a shit haul the day before, too. Come to think of it, a shit haul for a couple of weeks now. Not for everyone in the harbor, but for Josh. “Things will pick up by the end of July,” she said. “They always do.” She made a little sympathetic noise.

  “That’s an old-school Stingray,” said Josh, to the flat-screen.

  This meant nothing to Mary, but she nodded along as though it did. She felt nervous; she was running out of time to get Josh in a better mood. She came back around and sat next to him on the couch. She lifted his hand and traced the veins and muscles with her forefinger. Strong hands, like any fisherman. “Old-school for sure,” she affirmed.

  This was not how the night was supposed to go.

  “Corvette,” he said. “Been sitting in that garage for more than thirty years.”

  To Mary every car on Josh’s show looked just like every other car on Josh’s show. This one was a dull and ugly brown with an unexceptional shape to it. An older woman who looked kind and had her hair pulled back into a headband was standing next to her grown son. They wanted to restore the car in honor of their dead husband/father. Well, that was sweet, but even so. Mary was not going to let her heartstrings get tugged on just then. She had other things on her mind.

  “Hey, babe?”

  Josh grunted and leaned closer to the TV.

  “You want to do something, tonight, something besides this? I came over here after work, I put on this dress, I thought maybe we could—”

  Josh whistled.

  Not at her, though, at the show. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Mary smoothed the skirt of her yellow dress again. Come to think of it, yellow was not a good color on her, washed her right out. On the screen somebody was going on about fuel injections. “A hundred grand, fully restored,” Josh said. “Holy shit. What I wouldn’t do with a hundred grand.”

  Josh hadn’t even heard her—she might as well not be in the room with him at all. He whistled again and said, “A hundred grand. Just sitting in their garage like that.”

  “Josh!” she said, and she knew right away that that wasn’t the tone of voice she should have used. “I’m trying to talk to you!” Her voice going up on the you.

  Josh said, “Jesus goddamn Christ, Mary, I’m trying to watch this goddamn show!”

  Warning bells, all over her body.

  On the television the guy in the leather jacket with the slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair was saying, “Fuel lines, brake lines, water lines, anything that’s rubber is going to have to be replaced.”

  A little flame rose up from Mary’s gut, and she said, slowly and carefully, like she was reading out loud a paper in English class, “I’m leaving, Josh.” She got up.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “I’m leaving,” she said.

  “Mary, don’t, I’m sorry, okay? Jesus, but I was just trying to
watch the show.” He pointed the remote at the television and the screen went dark. “Okay? See? Happy now? I shut it off.”

  She didn’t like the look in his eyes. But she sat, and at first when he put his arm around her she thought, Okay, good, it’s going to be okay and soon I can tell him, and the warning bells momentarily stopped.

  He would turn into the person she wanted him to be. She just had to wait a little longer.

  7

  BARTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  Rob

  It was Taco Night at the Palmer house. Brock was out of town in who-knows-where. (Brock, who did something lucrative in the mystifying world of debt consolidation, was always out of town.) Rob was more than welcome to stay and eat with the girls, Deirdre said. She had a gargantuan taco bar spread the length of her extensive kitchen island, nearly a dozen small white bowls filled with various fixings: scallions, cilantro, olives, pico de gallo, shredded cheese. And so on. “There’s plenty!” she said. “Stay!”

  But Rob had left some paperwork for Cabot Lodge on the boat—a misguided attempt a few days earlier, before Eliza left, to get some quiet work time in, some perspective. He was going to take the launch from the club and pick up the papers and be back in time to collect the girls from Deirdre’s, get them home, and kiss them good night.

  On the way to the club from the Palmers’, he called Eliza’s cell phone twice. She didn’t answer either time. He blamed the service up there in Little Harbor. She’d been gone fifty-one hours and he’d talked to her only once, long enough to learn that her dad had hit his head and sprained his arm. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but she wanted to stay a few more days to make sure all was well. As long as Rob could hold down the fort.

  Could Rob hold down the fort? Of course he could—that was one of the supposed results of leaving the architecture firm of his longtime mentor, Mo Francis, to go into business on his own. More time at home, less time commuting back and forth to Boston. (“You’re here more,” Evie, the miniature grown-up, had told him. “But you’re here less.”)

  “Of course,” he’d told Eliza. “Of course I can hold down the fort. You be with your dad.” Eliza’s dad was a gruff, taciturn specimen of a man, but Evie and Zoe and Eliza went absolutely crazy for him. Rob did his best with Charlie Sargent, just as he knew Eliza did her best with Rob’s often-present, sometimes-abrasive, usually tipsy mother, Judith. Judith and Eliza, to put it gently, sometimes clashed.

  Rob pulled into the club’s entrance and the guy in the booth waved him through. Eliza always slowed down significantly to let the booth guy get a good look at her when she drove to the club. She practically pulled out three different forms of identification and offered her fingerprints, a bank statement, and a description of what she’d had for breakfast. She hadn’t grown up going to yacht clubs—she had a semisecret fear that somebody was going to throw her out, even though, of course, they were members in good standing and had been forever. Rob had learned, all these years into his marriage to Eliza, to approach her relationship to money the way a bounty hunter might approach a criminal: on tiptoe, in the dark, without a warrant.

  In fact, knowing how Eliza felt about their accepting so much from Judith was one of the reasons he’d decided to have the talk with his mom about the money. But he didn’t want to think about that right now.

  Rob passed into the parking lot that served the clubhouse and the tennis courts and continued on toward the dock. He could see her out there, A Family Affair, all fifty-two gorgeous feet of her. They said in the yachting world that there was nothing quite like a Hinckley, and, by golly, they were right. Though speculation in Barton was rampant over the price—was it two and a quarter million? Two point five? Surely not three million?—Rob did not know the figure himself. Nor did he really want to.

  The kid running the launch was young, three shades of cocky, good-looking in the way that was familiar to Rob from his prep-school days. Broad shoulders, good hair, deep-but-not-Miami-deep summer tan. A thoroughbred. One of the Marshall twins, Rob couldn’t say which. The twin said, “You’re not taking her out this close to sunset, alone, are you, sir?”

  “Nope, just want to visit.” He never took the boat out alone; he’d promised Eliza. Also he didn’t want to leave the girls with Deirdre for too long—he really wanted to get those papers and get back to work.

  He climbed aboard the launch, and the Marshall twin started the motor.

  “Nice evening,” attempted the Marshall twin after a few moments of silence.

  “Sure is,” said Rob. Then looked and saw that it was true. The sky was azure and the moon was very faintly outlined, as if politely awaiting its chance to come out.

  He shelved his thoughts about Cabot Lodge and felt for his lucky coin in his pocket. Sometime after Rob’s father, Robert Barnes I, moved to Thailand to live with a beautiful, smooth-skinned, young woman named Malai, he sent Rob a ten-baht coin, featuring King Bhumibol Adulyadej on one side and the Temple of Dawn on the other. This was long ago, when his father’s absence was still new, the wound raw and bleeding, and Rob took the arrival of the coin in the afternoon mail—the envelope tattooed with foreign stamps—as a sign that his father would be coming back soon. He put the coin in the pocket of his school pants on that very first day, making a promise to himself that he’d keep it with him until his father returned.

  Obviously, Rob was wrong about the coin’s significance. His father wasn’t coming back, not then, not ever. And yet it became a habit, moving the coin from his pocket to his dresser each night, returning it to his pocket in the morning, feeling the raised, bespectacled face of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. He’d clung to that coin when Eliza went into early labor with Zoe, when he shot a 79 on the Old Course at St. Andrews, the day he told Mo Francis he was starting out on his own—and every day in between. He’d no sooner leave the house without that coin than he’d leave the house without underwear.

  The Marshall twin pulled the launch alongside A Family Affair, idled, looked to the sky, and squinted. “This boat is fucking awesome, man,” he said. He dropped the cockiness, tapped down the barrier of cool, and became a little kid in front of the biggest toy in the world. “Best boat in the harbor.”

  “I know,” said Rob. He didn’t even attempt modesty, because the Marshall kid was exactly right. Sometimes bigger boats came through. But not better, no sir. Not better.

  “Fifteen minutes?”

  “Yup,” said Rob. “Right. Fifteen minutes. Just want to check on a couple of things, grab something I left.”

  He climbed aboard A Family Affair and walked reverently fore and aft along the boat’s side decks, running his hands along the custom-made stainless hardware, the hand-varnished dorade boxes, the dodger grab rails covered with supple elk hide. He bent to feel the elegantly shaped teak toe rails. Belowdecks, not one, not two, but three cabins, every corner rounded, every detail perfected, down to the dovetail drawers, the custom-built dish rack, the teak flush-mounted knife stand.

  Rob collected the papers and tried hard not to think about the thing with his mother and the money. He tried not to think about the fact that Eliza’s high school boyfriend lived in Little Harbor too. He tried not to think about the “casual drink” Eliza had had with the boyfriend when she’d first arrived. He tried not to think about the way she’d worked that into their only conversation, scrupulously careful to make it sound like no big deal.

  Don’t be an asshole, Rob. Probably it was no big deal. Russell Perkins was just an ex, and everybody had exes! He had Kitty Sutherland, whom he’d dated the first two years of college, before he met Eliza. Headbanded, Kennedy-like, blond-bobbed Kitty Sutherland, who, even in the most grungy of the grunge days in Providence, never exchanged her ballet flats for Doc Martens, her tailored pants for oversized men’s jeans with flannel shirts.

  But Kitty Sutherland meant nothing to him anymore. Could Eliza say the same about Russell Perkins? There was something about those men who worked with their hands, who pulled their livings right out o
f the sea, like some sort of mythical creatures, that made Rob feel hopelessly inadequate. There was a fear, always tickling the back of his mind, that one day he’d lose Eliza to the world she came from. And he couldn’t lose Eliza. She was the light in the darkness, the bird singing in the trees, and every other cliché he could come up with. If he ever lost her, he wouldn’t be able to go on.

  8

  LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE

  Eliza

  Today’s shelter dog was a corgi and Great Pyrenees mix named Elijah. Eliza, packing to go home, squinted at the photograph in Evie’s text and wondered how on earth those two breeds were able to mate. Actually, she wouldn’t mind seeing it, if only to verify that it was possible. It seemed like the beginning of a dirty joke: A corgi and a Great Pyr walk into a bar…

  She texted back, WE CAN’T GET A DOG WHOSE NAME IS SO CLOSE TO MINE, and immediately came the reply: WE CAN CHANGE THE NAME.

  Whoever had thought it was a good idea for young children to be able to text from iPads deserved a swift kick in the pants. Eliza loved Evie to the moon and back, of course, but there were times when it was perfectly fine to be out of touch. In her opinion. How were these kids going to grow up with even a half an ounce of self-sufficiency when they had grown-ups at their constant disposal? She texted back, NOPE! Then she added the blowing-a-kiss emoji (Evie could be sensitive, and an emoji could make all the difference) and turned off her phone. She could always blame Little Harbor’s spotty cell service.

  Of course, there were plenty of parents who wanted to be in close touch with their children 24/7. “It’s ridiculous,” Sheila Rackley had said about Jackie a few weeks ago, all fake-complainy. “She texts me all the time.” You could tell, though, that she was proud of the fact, like she and Jackie were both members of the same popular high school clique.