“Guy from out of town, think he was from down your way. A southerner.”
She snorted. “Yeah.” Only in Little Harbor would someone from Massachusetts be considered a “southerner.” “So what’d you tell him?”
“I gave him the best advice I have for someone like that.”
They neared the co-op, where they would turn in the lobsters and fuel up and pick up the next day’s bait.
“Which is?”
“Which is. Sell the traps, use the money to buy some lobsters.”
She should have known it—that was one of the oldest punch lines in the book, a joke as old as the lobsters themselves.
“Holy cow,” she said. “All this time I’ve been gone, nobody’s thought of any new jokes?”
“Nope,” said Russell. “No need to, when the old ones’ll do.” He took a deep breath and smiled, and Eliza smiled back.
20
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza
It was after they’d turned in the catch and tied up the boat and taken the skiff to the wharf that Eliza realized she’d forgotten her phone at her father’s house that morning. She hadn’t noticed it earlier because even if she’d had it she would have been too nervous to take it out on the boat. Eliza was notorious for inflicting water damage on her electronics and the electronics of those around her. She purchased every extra protection plan Apple had to offer.
Now, though, she noticed the phone’s absence. She hadn’t talked to the girls all day, she hadn’t checked in with Rob, she hadn’t seen which pathetic stray dogs Evie had fallen in love with or what Zoe was up to on social media or what Eliza’s own four hundred and sixty-two Facebook friends had been doing on this faultless summer day. They were probably swimming and sailing and mentioning casually that their children were growing up to either rule or change the world; on Facebook, Eliza’s friends were often certain that their offspring were going to do one or the other. Statistically speaking, though, well, most of them weren’t, were they?
(Privately Eliza thought Evie might beat the statistics, but she would never declare that via social media. Much better to let it all come out as a surprise in a decade or two.)
She borrowed Russell’s phone to call Rob. She dialed the number while Russell went off to talk to some of the other fishermen. She’d forgotten about that, that easy camaraderie of men and women just off the water, the way they talked about the day’s catch and the weather that had just blown through and the weather that was coming up next. It was different from how she and the other women of Barton were around each other. Or maybe it wasn’t different at all, maybe it was the exact same sort of relationship, just in a different context.
She saw Josh, the boyfriend of Mary from the café, skirting the outside of Russell’s circle without joining in. Something unsettling about that guy, something shady about his body language. And also. He looked too old for Mary, what was he, twenty-five, twenty-eight? If Eliza had known Mary well enough, if she had had less on her own plate, she would have sat her down and said, “Run, Mary, run!”
Maybe she’d do it anyway.
Rob answered after the second ring, even though Russell’s number wasn’t associated with a contact on Rob’s phone. As a general rule, Eliza ignored numbers that weren’t associated with a contact on her own phone, but that just showed you that Rob was more trusting about the world than she was.
“Hey!” she said. “It’s me, don’t be fooled by the number, I left my phone back at the house.”
“Hey,” said Rob. His voice was strained. “I left you about a hundred messages today.”
“I didn’t get them. Like I said, I left my phone back at the house.”
“Left it and went where?” His words sounded like someone had taken a pair of scissors to them and snipped.
“Whoa, Rob.”
“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. “But we needed you today. We’ve been trying to call, the girls have been sending messages, we even tried your dad’s house, no answer, you had us all scared to death—”
“My dad had a doctor’s appointment. Val took him. That’s why there was no answer, he had to get his stitches removed.” This conversation was not distantly related to the conversation she’d been anticipating. She said, “What’s going on, why do you sound like that? Did something happen?”
“Of course it did.”
“What? Rob, what?” Oh dear God, her children, something had happened to her children! Her heart thumped and careened. All day she’d spent out on a lobster boat, avoiding the lines that could trip you up and the hydraulic hauler that could cut the tips of your fingers clean off (it had happened!), thinking about high school, when the real danger was back in Barton.
“Nothing specific, but, I mean, it’s been a whole day, a hundred things have happened, a hundred different things, and we all tried to get in touch with you and none of us could. Christine Cabot is driving me out of my fucking mind and I can’t concentrate with the girls in and out, and Zoe wanted a ride somewhere and when I couldn’t take her because I was on the phone with Ruggman, and I can never get Ruggman on the phone, she completely flipped out—”
Rob never swore. Well, sometimes he swore, but when he did he used temperate, harmless swears, like bastard and damn it: gentlemanly swears. Sometimes he apologized after: it was adorable. He never pulled out the big, bold swears. In fact, Eliza felt that she’d had to rein in her own tendencies over the years, tendencies born of hour upon hour upon hour spent in a workingman’s world. Normally she would have made a joke out of Rob’s swearing just now, but she was starting to get peeved. A hundred things happened every day, and Eliza was there for most of them. When Rob worked for Mo Francis he was gone thousands of hours a week, and he was commuting back and forth to Boston every single day, and he was at the beck and call of not only Mo but all of Mo’s clients, and guess who took care of the hundred things every single day?
Welcome to motherhood, she wanted to say.
“Come on, Rob, don’t scare me like that. I was hauling traps today, that’s all, and I didn’t bring my phone with me.” She was about to continue, to tell him all about what it had been like to be back on the water, about how hard she’d worked and how good she’d felt and how rotten the herring had smelled but how she’d stuck her hands right in the bait box anyway. Before she got a chance he spoke again, more sharply.
“What do you mean you were hauling traps? I thought your dad’s arm was in a sling. I thought he couldn’t work! You just said he had to get his stitches out.”
“His arm is in a sling. I didn’t go with my dad. I went with Russell.”
A long, pregnant pause.
“Huh.”
“What’s that mean?” She saw Russell slap one of the men on the back by way of goodbye and walk back toward her. More boats were coming in now, the harbor was almost full, and there was a line of skiffs tied up at the wharf. It was a gorgeous sight that set Eliza’s heart rocking. They were hours from sunset but pretty much everyone out there had put in a legitimate twelve-hour day. Eliza’s back muscles were beginning to ache, and her legs quivered. Even her forearms hurt, especially her forearms! She opened the passenger side of the truck and leaned against the seat. Somebody else stopped Russell to talk, a guy about her dad’s age. The truck directly in her view had a bumper sticker that said FUCK THE WHALES AND SAVE THE FISHERMEN. Lovely. It would be fun to try to explain that one to Evie, shepherdess to the vulnerable mammals of the world.
“Whose phone is this? Is this Russell’s phone?”
She didn’t answer.
“Eliza?”
“Yes. This is Russell’s phone.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Was Rob giving her permission? “Okay, what?”
“Okay, nothing. Okay, that makes sense.”
Was Rob jealous of Russell? That would be like Eliza being jealous of Kitty Sutherland. Would Eliza be jealous if Rob spent the day hauling traps with Kitty Sutherland? That image was enough to m
ake her nearly laugh out loud: Kitty Sutherland hauling traps, wearing a Lilly Pulitzer headband and pedal pushers and rosy-pink nail polish that matched her rosy-pink lipstick. Kitty Sutherland getting her hands dirty in anything other than Canyon Ranch mud bath.
Actually, the image of Rob hauling traps was pretty funny too. He would absolutely get a sunburn, he had such Aryan skin.
No, Eliza would not be jealous if Rob hauled traps with Kitty Sutherland.
But then again, Rob and Kitty didn’t have the same history together that Eliza and Russell had. They didn’t, for example, have the Thing They Would Never Talk About.
She studied the craggy shoreline and the curve of water that led out of the harbor. There was still a boat moving in from the distance, kingly, postcard perfect.
“I’m sorry, Eliza, but I thought you were going back up there for your dad, and now you’re riding around on lobster boats with your ex-boyfriend. I’m just a little confused about what exactly you’re doing there.”
She closed her eyes and tried to think of the nicest things she could about Rob.
She thought of the way her heart still cartwheeled when they kissed, and how sex with him was more than sex, it was an anchor to the world. She thought of the way it felt to lay her head on his chest at the end of the day. She thought of how his hands had looked holding five-pound Zoe for the first time. She thought of the way at a party he always searched the room for her if she was talking to someone else. She thought of the way he was so patient teaching Evie how to serve a tennis ball—Evie’s serve had been awful when she’d started playing tennis and now it was killer. When Eliza got sick, he brought her apple juice, which was the only kind of juice she liked, and he brought it in a tall glass with crushed ice and a bendy straw, which was the only way she drank it.
Rob said, “Eliza? Are you there?”
Deep breath. There were so many more things. He was always very kind to ladies of the seventy-five-plus set at the club. He managed to combine a sort of Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey charm with a dash of appropriate and refined flirting; he made the ladies think fondly of their first beaus, of dancing to Glenn Miller and drinking Singapore Slings.
“You know what I’m doing here,” she said.
“I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure. It’s been, what, five days since your dad told you he’s not coming to Boston for treatment? And now you’re hauling lobster traps?”
Eliza fingered a little tear in the pickup’s seat. “The reason I was hauling, Rob, is because I was helping. My dad needed help, because he can’t haul his traps right now, and they’d been sitting out there for days. So I helped haul them and reset them.”
“I see.”
“Do you? I’m not sure you do. You’ve never lived in a place like this, you don’t understand how it works.”
“I understand the concept of people helping people out, Eliza, I’m not the Bubble Boy.”
Except for the bubble of money that you’ve always lived inside, thought Eliza.
Rob went on. “What it sounds like to me is that you’ve spent, what, a bunch of days in Little Harbor since the girls got out of school, and I know your dad is sick, and I know that’s awful, Eliza, and we all want to help you help him, but I wonder if you’re latching on to something else.”
“What something else is that?”
Russell, seeing Eliza was still on the phone, stepped away again.
“Come on, Eliza.”
“What?”
“The idea that the life you’re playing at is more appealing than the one you actually live.”
“Rob, I’m not playing!”
But he was still talking, he talked right over her. “If that life was so appealing, Eliza, you never would have tried so hard to get out of the place you came from.”
“What do you mean? Away from people who work with their hands?”
“Give me a break, Eliza. No, of course not. I mean, come on. I work with my hands.”
She was an elastic, and she was stretching and stretching and she was overcome by the idea that deep down she was still the same scrappy lobsterman’s daughter, listening to the men curse around her, salty water, salty language, that she’d never fit into Rob’s life, she was a square peg trying to wrench herself into a round hole, always had been.
And then the elastic broke. And she said the worst thing she could think of. She said, “No you don’t, Rob. You don’t work with your hands.” She paused, for effect, but also to see if she might stop herself. She didn’t. “You just draw the pictures so other people can build what you draw with their hands.”
And that was the last thing she had the chance to say before Rob hung up.
21
BARTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Rob
Rob surveyed the kitchen. Earlier in the day Evie had attempted to make egg salad, and there were eggshells strewn across the counter, little bits of hard-boiled yolk chunks scattered in piles. The kitchen looked like a bunch of chickens had partied hard and then gotten the heck out of dodge without cleaning up after themselves. In his third-floor office, he knew, the Cabot file was in similar disarray. Rob closed his eyes and imagined himself aboard A Family Affair, light and variable winds, the ocean wide and inviting. The boat was equipped for serious sailing, a trip down to the Caribbean, but Rob would give anything for just half a day’s sail from the yacht club and back. An hour, even. A cruise around the harbor.
Eliza’s words floated back to him. You don’t work with your hands. You just draw the pictures so other people can build what you draw with their hands.
He knew, of course, that these problems were trivial in comparison with what Charlie Sargent was facing. And yet.
He pictured Eliza in some borrowed lobstering gear, her hair tied back to keep it out of the wind. He pictured her emptying a trap, throwing it back over the side. He pictured her losing her balance when the boat started up again, leaning into the ex-boyfriend, his strong workman’s hand steadying her, Eliza laughing.
His biggest fear, the fear that had plagued him since the first time Eliza had taken him to Little Harbor, was coming true. Eliza had realized that she belonged there instead of here. That’s why she wouldn’t sign the Phineas Tarbox papers. He was going to lose her.
You just draw the pictures.
The words stung.
Zoe had left her phone on the kitchen counter when she’d gone upstairs, and Rob picked it up.
Zoe got more texts in ten minutes than Rob got in an entire day. He scrolled through. Most of the texts seemed to be pieces of enormous strings of other texts; they were all plump with emojis and most of them appeared to be requests for one friend to go like another friend’s Instagram post.
He didn’t hear the footsteps behind him. Zoe was as quiet as a burglar. “Is that my phone?” asked Zoe suspiciously. “Are you looking at my phone?”
Rob gave her the stink eye and said, “I pay the bill, I can look at the phone.” What had happened to the patient dad he used to be, the one who had turned Evie’s tennis serve from her Achilles’ heel into her secret weapon? Where was the guy who had taught Zoe how to tie a cleat knot? Zoe rolled her eyes and let out a small dissatisfied huff. Rob looked down at the phone and said, “Who is Stanley? I didn’t know you had a friend named Stanley.”
“That’s Sofia,” said Zoe. “That’s just a nickname. We all have them.” Rob could see her trying to restrain herself from reaching for the phone.
“What’s yours?”
“Bob.”
“Interesting.” A wave of exhaustion slapped Rob. He didn’t understand Zoe’s world. He didn’t even understand his own world! Was Eliza going to call him back? Was she going to apologize for what she’d said to him? Was he going to apologize to her? How far over the line had he stepped? How far had she? His insides felt scraped out, empty. What was it like to know you had a tumor in your brain, that it was just a matter of time until it grew big enough to kill you? What was it like to know your father did?
“I was,” said Rob.
Zoe gazed at him. “Were you two fighting?” Ever since the parents of her friend Hannah Coogan had announced their divorce, Zoe had been ultrasensitive about any possible discord between her parents. This fact made Rob feel tender toward and protective of Zoe.
Then Zoe did something with her face—a lift of the eyebrow, a thing with her mouth that was part grimace and part smile—that made her look exactly like Eliza, and Rob felt himself soften further.
“No,” he said gently.
“Oh,” Zoe said. “It sounded like you were.”
“Conversations sound different when you only hear one side of them.”
“Right.” Zoe chewed on a thumbnail and said, “When’s she coming back?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What Grandpa has is really bad, right?”
Rob considered Zoe. When she was born she’d weighed the same as a bag of sugar; he used to gaze at her tiny scrunched-up features and try to imagine what she’d look like as a toddler, a teenager, an adult. Impossible, he’d think. She’ll never get that big. She’ll never not need us the way she does now. But she had gotten big. She was old enough for the truth, and yet still he wanted to keep it from her.
“Dad?”
He opened his arms, and Zoe stepped into them. She was tall enough now that he could rest his chin on the top of her head. “Yes,” he said. “What Grandpa has is really bad.”
He sighed and prepared himself to climb the stairs to the office and to face the Cabot file. As he turned to exit the kitchen, he heard a rattling sound and Evie flew through on her scooter. She was broadly smiling and one of her legs was pumping against the floor. She came to a stop in front of Rob and Zoe and contemplated them.
“You’re not allowed to ride that in the house,” Zoe said. “Dad, she’s not allowed to ride that in the house. Tell her.”
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