The Captain's Daughter

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re missing something. Maybe cranberries?”

  “I don’t think you put cranberries in waffles,” said Rob doubtfully. (Did you?)

  “Mommy does.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” said Zoe, who had slunk down the stairs in that feline way of hers and into the kitchen without any of them seeing her. Her hair was sleep-tangled but her skin and eyes were luminous. The unfairness of youth. Any day now Zoe was going to wake up to find that she’d turned into a full-fledged beauty. The thought of that made Rob’s stomach twist, so he tried hard to think of the way Zoe used to dance along to Yo Gabba Gabba! and how she still slept with her very first stuffed animal, a blue elephant named Marvin. He said, “Morning, Zoe. Hungry?”

  Zoe stretched and yawned prettily and said, “Not yet. I’ll just have orange juice.”

  Rob was reaching for the orange juice and trying to keep an eye on the next batch of waffles when his phone buzzed. Deirdre, again? (Bad.) Eliza? (Better.)

  “Oooh,” said Judith. “Christine Cabot is calling you.” (Worse.) “Shall I answer?”

  “No,” said Rob. He felt dehydrated. The inside of his head felt like it was covered in peach fuzz. He downed the orange juice he’d just poured for Zoe and, when Zoe frowned, he reached into the cupboard for another glass.

  “Then you probably should,” said Judith.

  Rob let the call go to voice mail. “I’ll call her back.”

  Judith eyed him from over the rim of her mug. “Don’t let the grass grow under your feet, Robbie. I know she’s feeling very anxious.”

  “That’s a funny thing to say,” said Evie. “By the way, these waffles are actually delicious. I was wrong before.”

  “Which part is funny?” asked Judith.

  “The grass growing part.”

  Rob could have hugged Evie for liking the waffles and giving him an injection of confidence at just the right time. “It’s an expression,” he said. “It means, don’t waste time.” He detached the second batch of waffles and loaded up Zoe’s plate. Eliza would be proud: he was feeding their teenager!

  Eliza. His heart hurt.

  He’d better call back Christine Cabot. He said, “Going up to the office!” to the three females in his kitchen. Judith was deep into the first and only section of The Barton Examiner, and Zoe was tapping on her phone, her food untouched. Only Evie answered: “Okay, Daddy! When you come back, can I have another waffle?”

  On the way up the stairs, Rob dusted off some memories of an Eastern Philosophy class he’d taken at Brown. They’d learned all sorts of things in that class—Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto—but the tenet that stuck with him was the most basic, the most unremarkable, the most applicable of all of these, and it came from the great Buddha himself. Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. At certain times in his life—when Zoe was born early, that time he navigated the Hinckley through pea-soup fog—he had leaned on those words, and he leaned on them again now. Yes! That was the answer to it all, that’s what he would do: he would live in the moment.

  In his office he braced himself, and dialed.

  “Rob!” said Christine Cabot. “I’m so glad you called me back! I assume you got my message?” She sounded preternaturally happy—almost exultant. Maybe she’d also taken an Ambien and clocked a solid ten hours of sleep. Maybe Rob should take an Ambien. He might, tonight, if his mother would share.

  “Nope,” he said. “No, I didn’t. I missed your call, so I called you right back.”

  His eyes scanned the office and fell upon the stack of papers from Phineas Tarbox, the papers that Eliza hadn’t (wouldn’t) sign. She was going to leave him, that was why she wouldn’t sign the papers? He’d wondered about that before, but now he was certain.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you, Rob. I left you messages last evening.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Rob. “My mother’s been visiting, we’ve had some things with the girls going on, and Eliza has had to go back up to help her dad…” Also, Mrs. Cabot, I got drunk and got improperly kissed at The Wharf Rat last night.

  “Right,” she said. “Your mother has told me about Eliza’s dad and I’m very sorry to hear about it.” Being sorry, he noticed, didn’t stop Mrs. Cabot from skipping merrily ahead to her next thought. “But anyway, I called you because I’ve got to tell you about something I found, for the house. Something wonderful.”

  Rob said, “Yes?” Though on the inside he was screaming No! No! No! A client finding something for the house at this stage was rarely a good thing. Scratch that. It was never a good thing. Just ask Mo Francis. Ask any architect! A gentle thudding along the edges of his rib cage prevented him from speaking.

  “Floor tile!” said Mrs. Cabot.

  Deep breath. Deeper.

  Mrs. Cabot said, “Anyone there? Are we still connected, Rob?”

  “Now, Mrs. Cabot—you know you’ve already picked out the floors.” He waited for affirmation, but none came, so he went on. “Hand-scraped hardwood everywhere but the kitchen, then tumbled crystal white for the kitchen. Those are the floors that we’ve ordered. Those are the floors that should be here any day now.”

  Rob stared hard out the third-floor window. The Cavanaughs’ peonies had stopped blooming, and then drooped, and then they’d been summarily deadheaded. A stunning display of tiger lilies had taken their place.

  “I know I picked out floors already, Robbie. But this tile,” she said. “This tile is absolutely gorgeous, this tile is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I went with my dear friend Marianne Foley—you know Marianne, your mother and I are on the hospital board with her—to an architectural restoration place up in Vermont. Well, Marianne was looking for a particular kind of faucet, and I wasn’t looking for a blessed thing, but they had just gotten this tile in, and I fell in love with it. I fell absolutely in love.”

  Rob considered interrupting this monologue, but he chose instead to lean his weary head against the windowpane and let the words wash over him. The tile had come from a historic castle in the north of England, and this fact spoke directly—directly!—to Mrs. Cabot’s English roots.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Mrs. Cabot said again. “Thick.”

  Rob swallowed and whispered, “Thick?”

  “Gorgeous and thick. I bought it all! Everything they had. I want to install it throughout, if there’s enough of it, kitchen, living room, everywhere. I’m not sure if there is enough, but it seemed to me like quite a lot of tile.”

  Rob summoned an inner reserve of patience and said, “How thick?”

  “How thick?”

  “Mrs. Cabot? Do you have the tile in front of you?”

  “Not all of it, of course. They’re delivering it directly to the site.”

  Oh, God.

  “Any of it? Do you have any of it?”

  “I do, I took a square with me, to show Jonathan. Not that he cares a nickel about any of this. Do you know that last week he—”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Rob. “But this is important. I need you to find a measuring tape, and I need you to measure the thickness of the tile you have. Not the length or the width, but the thickness. Do you understand?”

  “Certainly,” said Mrs. Cabot. “I know perfectly well what thickness means. Just hang on a minute, Robbie, let’s see…looks like one and—well, let me see here, the tape measure just slipped. Okay, I’ve got it again. It looks like one and three-quarter inches.”

  Was it too early to start drinking? Another deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the thing. I’m sure the tile you have there is beautiful, and I appreciate the connection to your roots, the English castle and all that, and I like an English castle as much as the next guy, but I have to tell you that one and three-quarter inches is not a standard thickness, not for floors. A standard thickness for floors is a half inch.”

  “And?”

  “And. And the doors have been framed
, and the windows too, all to the specifications of half-inch-thick floors. If we change that now, we need to change a lot of things. We basically need to restructure the first floor. We need our structural engineer back. We need to raise the doorframes to accommodate the extra inch and a quarter.” He summoned his best diplomatic voice, honed from a brief, long-ago, and ultimately unsuccessful stint on the Brown debate team, and said, “I urge you, Mrs. Cabot, to consider sticking with the floors you already chose.”

  This time there was no pause; Mrs. Cabot launched in, missilelike, on her target. “Let me get something straight here, Robert.” It was not lost on Rob that she had suddenly switched to his full name, typically employed only by his mother when, during his teenage years, he had gotten up to some trouble with the boys from school. “Are you telling me that it is impossible to use this tile, or that it is merely difficult?”

  Rob’s mind said, “Impossible,” but his mouth was out of sync with his mind. “Difficult,” said his mouth. “Nothing is impossible, with enough time and money.” The second those words hit the air he regretted them. A fly landed on the window in front of him and stopped, the way flies do—it seemed to be studying him, perhaps offering him solace. Rob leaned in and studied the fly’s furry legs, its oversized red eyes.

  What an indulgence, what a colossal waste of money, to order one type of floor and then to arbitrarily choose another instead. What would Charlie Sargent say if he heard his son-in-law at work in this way? He’d probably have some enigmatic Down East way of telling Eliza she’d married an asshole, and he would be right.

  “Wonderful,” said Mrs. Cabot. “I’ve got plenty of both.”

  “But you don’t, actually. You don’t have plenty of time if you want to be in by Thanksgiving.”

  “So, then, I suppose we’d both better get up there when the tile arrives, hadn’t we? Thursday morning, half past nine.”

  “Thursday morning,” said Rob wearily. “Half past nine.”

  As soon as he disconnected the call a sense of panic seized him, and he hurried down the flight of stairs and into his bedroom. But he knew, even before he got up close to his dresser, that it was gone. He slapped the pockets of his shorts, felt their insides frantically, although he knew that if it wasn’t on his dresser it wasn’t anywhere. It was gone, baby, gone. Vanished. The ten-baht. His lucky coin.

  26

  LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE

  Eliza

  Eliza was ten minutes into a reluctant run. It was the middle of the afternoon, which was a terrible time for running, and the sun was high and bright and unrelenting, but she hadn’t wanted to go until she knew for sure her father was asleep. She ran around the Point, and tried to take her mind off her legs’ complaints. She thought she might end her run at the wharf, see if it was almost time for the boats to come in. She understood that her conversation with Russell from the night at The Wheelhouse remained incomplete and that as the person who’d lost her lunch in the scrub grass she was responsible for finishing it, just as she was responsible for apologizing to Rob, without using Evie as the intermediary. If he’d ever answer the phone.

  Eliza ran straight down Main Street to get to the wharf. As she was approaching The Cup she saw a figure near a battered Subaru parked across from the café. The figure was leaning on the car with her head in her crossed-over arms.

  “Mary?” called Eliza, recognizing her. “Mary!” And Mary looked up. “What are you doing?” Eliza thought about saying, What are you doing, girlfriend? but that was just the sort of thing that made Zoe wince and cringe with humiliation, so she stopped herself.

  “Hey,” said Mary, raising her head. She looked tired and defeated. She hit one fist on the hood of the car and said, “I have an appointment in Ellsworth, but my car won’t start.” Her voice had that trying-not-to-cry sound. “I’d open the hood, but I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

  “I wouldn’t know either,” said Eliza. She put her hands on her hips and studied the car. “I’m useless with cars.” She was panting like a dog. “That sounds like such a girl thing to say, but it’s absolutely true. Do you have Triple A or anything?”

  Mary looked confused. “I don’t think so.”

  “I do,” said Eliza. “I definitely do. I think I can use it on a car that isn’t mine. I just need my card, for the number. When’s your appointment?”

  “Four fifteen.”

  Eliza looked at her running watch and switched modes until the real time showed. It was three thirty.

  “Never mind Triple A,” said Eliza. “You won’t make it if we have to wait for someone to come out. I’ll drive you. Let me just run home and get my car.”

  “But—you’re running,” said Mary. “You’re busy.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Eliza. “I was looking for a reason to stop. I hate running. I have such a cramp.” To prove this, she raised one arm over her head and bent to the side. “I can never remember if you’re supposed to lean toward the cramp or away from it.”

  “Toward, I think.” Mary was starting to look a little less stricken.

  “You’re right. I was doing the opposite. Anyway. I would be delighted to take you to Ellsworth for your appointment. My dad sleeps a lot in the afternoons, and I can put Val on call.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Stay here, don’t move. I’ll be back in a flash.”

  ———

  “This is a nice car,” said Mary as they started on the winding road out of Little Harbor.

  “I guess so,” said Eliza. “I’m not a car person, you could put me in this or my dad’s pickup and I’d hardly know the difference.” That was a slight exaggeration, of course: Rob’s car was an Audi A8 and cost nearly one hundred thousand dollars, all in. Nobody could mistake it for a pickup truck. To hide what an idiot she felt like for suggesting that you could, Eliza kept talking: “This is my husband’s. I had to leave him the kid-friendly Pilot, the one with all of the Dorito crumbs, at home.” She glanced at Mary and said, “I’m totally kidding. I don’t let them eat Doritos. Much. I think those things are laced with heroin—they are so addictive. Right?”

  “Right,” said Mary, and she seemed to give a little shudder. Then she said, “This car is so clean.”

  “My husband is not particular about everything,” said Eliza. “But he is particular about his boat, and he is particular about his car. I’m just trying to do right by it, while I have it. It’s killing him to be driving my Pilot around at home. But he needs it, with the kids. Do you have the address of where we’re going?”

  Mary nodded.

  “After I press this button you just say the address and the GPS will pick it up…ready? Go.”

  Mary said the address. She looked serious and slightly embarrassed, which was exactly how Eliza felt every time she spoke out loud to the GPS.

  “Well done,” said Eliza. “So is this an appointment for…?” She nodded significantly toward Mary’s stomach.

  “Yeah,” said Mary. “It’s my first actual prenatal checkup.”

  “Good,” said Eliza. “That’s good, prenatal care. Very important.” She paused. “Does that mean you—”

  “I don’t know,” said Mary. “I’m not sure. But I have some time. In case I decide to…” She paused.

  “I see,” said Eliza.

  They passed houses with broken lobster traps awaiting repair sitting out front, and they passed a house with an old skiff in the front yard with two kids playing in it. Then they passed a couple of brand-new, impressive houses: summer homes. Eliza looked at the area through the eyes of a tourist. Of course people came from all over. It really was a wonderful place to visit. The ice-cold Atlantic, the buttery lobster rolls, the blueberry crisp. Great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there! Wasn’t that how the old saying went?

  She saw Phineas Tarbox’s face suddenly in her mind’s eye; she saw Rob sitting up and saying firmly, “The guardian will be my mother.” Her hands tightened on the steering wheel.

>   They passed the old sardine cannery, now closed, and a couple of antique shops attached to houses, and a sign for pottery pointing toward Machias. Eventually they passed the high school.

  “High school,” sighed Eliza.

  “Yeah,” said Mary.

  “Goodbye and good riddance,” said Eliza, and Mary made a small sound that sounded like affirmation. Eliza continued, “Do people in high school still go out to the Point and drink beer on the rocks?”

  “I guess,” said Mary. There was a wistful tone to her voice that sort of made Eliza want to cry.

  “I used to like that part,” said Eliza. “Among other things.” She divided her high school time into two sections: before she was with Russell, and after. “But the rest of it—”

  “Yeah,” said Mary again.

  “The good thing is, it only lasts four years.”

  “Right.”

  After that the speed limit increased and there was nothing much to look at but trees and the occasional side road leading to a house. Eliza pointed out to Mary where two of her high school friends had lived, and Mary absorbed the information politely, and after a while she said, “What would you do?”

  Eliza was startled by the question. “What would I do about what?” Though of course as soon as the words were out it was obvious.

  “If you were me.”

  Eliza cleared her throat and kept her eyes on the road. “If I were you, right now, in your situation?”

  “Yes,” said Mary fiercely. “Right now, what would you do if you were me, right now. Nobody will tell me. I just need somebody to tell me what to do.”

  “Well,” said Eliza carefully. “That depends on a lot of things.”

  “I figured you would say something like that.”

  Eliza felt like Mary had slapped her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, something vague. Because you would never be dumb enough to get yourself in this position. You don’t know.”