Neither Ruggman nor the structural engineer seemed as put off by the prospect of accommodating the extra inch and a quarter as Rob thought they would be. Then again, Ruggman’s thick and craggy face didn’t lend itself easily to emotional nakedness: he could have been cursing both Rob and Christine Cabot and they’d never know it.
Ruggman grunted twice as he turned the tile over and over in his giant paws, and then he and the structural engineer set to work immediately on their tasks, conferring like a couple of political operatives, Ruggman punching numbers into his cell phone and the two of them walking back and forth along the rich brown mud that would one day be the back lawn of Cabot Lodge.
“Mark said he thought we wouldn’t be too delayed by this,” said Mrs. Cabot.
Guardedly, Rob said, “Hmm.” He didn’t agree. Was Ruggman committing the ultimate sin, was he telling the client what she wanted to hear rather than what she needed to hear? It was possible. It was likely. They all did it sometimes. He’d been doing it for months.
Mrs. Cabot smiled and issued an extended sigh. “Mark is really great,” she said. “Don’t you think so, Robbie? Very salt-of-the-earth.”
Ruggman had his back to Mrs. Cabot and Rob, and he was on the phone; it was impossible to read his expression.
“Very,” said Rob. “Definitely.”
“I’m going to feel like Lady Grantham, living with this tile!” said Mrs. Cabot. “I can’t believe I found this.”
Rob didn’t answer; he was looking out at the way the land sloped toward the lake. He could see two children on the dock that belonged to the house next door. That reminded him of his own two children; he should call to check in. He turned toward Mrs. Cabot, looking for a way to extricate himself.
“Do you watch Downton Abbey?” Mrs. Cabot asked.
“What? No. No, I don’t. Eliza does, I think. Yes, she definitely does. Is that the one with the accents?”
“It is,” said Mrs. Cabot. She didn’t look like herself today; she looked almost, for lack of a better word, happy. “Actually, I guess it’s not Lady Grantham I’d feel like, because she lives in a different house, a smaller house, and I’m not sure if that house would have tiles or not. I would be one of the Crawleys.”
Some of that slope would be filled in once the construction on the massive patio began. Rob allowed himself to imagine the patio, the heat lamps, the Thanksgiving appetizers laid out on the Cabots’ outdoor tables, which, along with all of the furniture, had been ordered and signed for and duly delivered into storage until the high-end cushions were ready to receive the bottoms of Christine Cabot, her progeny, and her progeny’s progeny.
Rob didn’t have the outdoor plans on him, but it seemed to him, just eyeballing it, that the edge of the patio would be closer to the lake than it should be. He was chewing on this concern when Christine Cabot moved closer to him.
Another pearl of wisdom from Mo Francis: Trust your gut. If you think something is wrong, it probably is.
He swallowed it down. Mo Francis hadn’t always been right.
“You were always such a good boy, Robbie,” said Mrs. Cabot. “I remember when your father first moved to Thailand and your mother was a wreck, you were such a comfort to her. Such a comfort.”
Rob remembered it differently; he remembered that a bottle of top-shelf gin had been more of a comfort to Judith than he himself had been, but he thought he’d let that go.
“You know, Robbie,” said Mrs. Cabot, “I do have a friend who’d like to build a house of a similar caliber up here.”
Rob perked up. Mrs. Cabot had mentioned this mythical friend before, but she’d never actually produced a name or given Rob a contact number. She’d just dangled the fact of her existence in front of him like a lure. He knew from Ruggman that there were a few choice waterfront parcels for sale, and he knew from Ruggman’s assistant, Sharon, whose sister worked at Sebago Properties, the firm that had the listings, that there had been lots of lookers but no offers.
“Nadine Edwards,” she said. Rob thought, Finally, a name! He filed it away in his mental cabinet; he’d google the heck out of her later.
28
BARTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Deirdre
Deirdre was driving to the post office to mail the invitations to the gala. Lots of people went electronic these days, even for high-end events, but Deirdre did not believe that an email—no matter how elegantly put together—could carry the same weight as an actual hold-in-your-hand invitation. She believed in old-fashioned, cream-colored heavy paper with a proper font—Adagio or Belluccia—that you could magnetize to your refrigerator or affix to your kitchen bulletin board; something you’d walk by several times a day and that would cause you to feel the little flutter of excitement that reminded you that you had a Big Event to look forward to.
Deirdre parked her Tahoe on Main Street, not far from the post office, and was carefully removing the bag of invitations from the passenger seat when she heard her name. Ugh. There was no mistaking Sheila Rackley’s voice, high and quivering, like a violin with a loose string. She waved quickly and continued toward the post office, but Sheila caught up and turned in front of her like a traffic cop, forcing Deirdre to choose between stopping or ramming right into her. Deirdre stopped.
“What’ve you got there?” Sheila asked breathlessly. She was wearing exercise clothes and sneakers, and she jogged in place a little bit, probably for show.
“Invitations. To the gala.”
“Oooooooh. I hope there’s one in there for me!”
“Of course there is,” said Deirdre reluctantly. “You’re on the decorating committee. I’m not going to not invite you.”
“It’s been on my calendar forever,” said Sheila. She made a motion like she was writing something in the air above Deirdre’s head.
Deirdre said, “Great. Well…,” and tried to step around Sheila, but Sheila mirrored her movement, like the two of them were learning a complicated dance together, and kept talking. “Why’d you pick East Africa, anyway? I never asked you that.” She squinted at Deirdre. “Did you go there for study abroad or something?”
No, Deirdre had done a semester abroad in Florence, where she’d studied a lot of Chianti.
The truth was, Deirdre wasn’t one hundred percent sure why she had chosen East Africa. Plenty of areas of the world were war-torn, ravaged, intolerably destitute. She could have chosen India or Bangladesh or, for heaven’s sake, Iraq or Afghanistan.
Maybe because the names of the countries, when spoken one after another, were like a kind of poetry.
Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea.
Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda.
Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda.
And also because the kids in the EANY posters seized her heart and wouldn’t let go.
Not that she could explain any of this to Sheila Rackley.
Sheila had pulled her phone out of her bag and was texting while she was talking to Deirdre. The woman was intolerable. Why had Deirdre put her on the decorating committee? Could she even decorate?
“Kristi’s been keeping Sofia busy!” said Sheila, eyes fixed on her screen. Tap tap tap.
“I guess so,” said Deirdre. The morning was bright and sunny; she kept her sunglasses noncommittally over her eyes, although Sheila had used hers to push back her hair, revealing harsh brown roots at the base of her scalp.
“I don’t know how you can stand so much time away from Sofia in the summer. I couldn’t do it.” Deirdre looked to the right and to the left of Sheila; Sheila’s children were nowhere in evidence.
“Oh, brother, Sheila.”
“What?”
“Grow up. We’re not seventeen. This isn’t study hall. Stop trying to stir the pot.” She massaged the invitations.
“I was just making conversation!”
“Uh-huh,” said Deirdre.
“I was!” Sheila’s phone buzzed, and she glanced down at it.
“Excuse me, Sheila.” Deirdre moved past Sheila and up th
e walk that led to the post office, where she was finally going to get her beautiful gala invitations in the mail.
29
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza
“Buy you a coffee?” said Eliza.
Russell glanced up at her, then back down, and concentrated on the knot he was using to tie the skiff to the float at the end of the wharf. A cleat hitch. Russell said, “I don’t drink coffee in the afternoon, keeps me up past my bedtime. You know that.”
“I’m not even a lobsterman and I can’t drink coffee past noon.”
“You make a hell of a sternman, though.”
“Don’t even,” said Eliza. She looked at the sky, which was cerulean, with scattered puffs of clouds. Eliza didn’t know which kinds of clouds they were, but she bet Zoe, the budding scientist, would know. “A beer, then?”
He laughed kindly. “You sure that’s a good idea, Eliza?”
The vomiting, the scrub grass, the ride of shame home in Russell’s pickup. She said, “I’m sorry, about all of that. I’m really sorry. What a rookie move.”
He straightened and said, “That’s all right. I’ve seen people drink too much before. I’ve seen you drink too much before.” He had: summer before senior year, the night they camped out on Turtle Island, and other times besides. Russell gave her the full force of his smile. Other fishermen were standing around in little knots or heading back to their trucks. A couple of them glanced over at Eliza and waved: Elton Cobb, Merton Young. She no longer felt like a stranger out here; she was turning back into a daughter. She was going native.
She tried not to remember how Russell’s hand had felt holding hers under the table at The Wheelhouse the other night.
She thought of what she’d said to Rob: You draw pictures of things for other people to make with their hands. What a mean-spirited thing to say. She’d had to call back four times before he’d talk to her, before he’d accept her apology. And even though he had, it was still, and would be forever, a thing she’d said: she couldn’t unsay it.
“I’ll behave myself,” she promised. “You have a beer, and I’ll have a decaf. We’ll go to The Cup, since they have both.”
———
The day before, when Eliza and Mary had returned to Mary’s car, Eliza had used her AAA account to call for service, and after fifty-five minutes a tow truck from a garage in Gouldsboro had come out and jumped the battery. Mary’s car had started right up. Now the only acknowledgment between them was a quick, shy smile on Mary’s part and a (she hoped) cryptic answering nod from Eliza.
After they had their drinks, Eliza sat down, and then Russell sat down, and then the Thing They Would Never Talk About pulled out a chair and sat at the table too. Invited or not, it was there. Fine, thought Eliza. She’d waffled on the decaf and then ordered a Sauvignon Blanc, liquid courage with a side of flowery peach, and she took a minute to feel the effects of the inappropriately large sip she started with. Then she thought, Let’s do this.
“You know when I said the other night that I don’t think about it?”
Russell nodded. She loved that she didn’t have to explain herself more than that.
“That’s not true,” she said. “I do think about it.” She took another giant sip to try to tamp out the burning feeling in her heart.
Russell waited, his gaze on hers.
I don’t have a nineteen-year-old kid, if that tells you anything, she’d said to Mary.
“I think about it. I’ve never stopped thinking about it. When Zoe was born, I thought about it constantly. When she was born early I thought it was punishment for what I did back then.”
“Eliza—”
“No, wait, let me finish. I thought I deserved it. She was so tiny. So fragile and vulnerable! Like a shedder.”
Russell smiled.
“Those first few days of her life all I could think was, ‘If there’s something wrong with this baby it’s all my fault.’ ”
Russell’s hand, on the table, twitched—it looked almost like he wanted to cover hers with his own. She put her hands in her lap, because she was afraid they might want that too. She went on: “That’s one reason I dropped out of med school, I think it was sort of a penance. Like I didn’t deserve it all, like I had to pay the price.” She lowered her gaze back to the table and asked, “Do you? Think about it?”
Russell took a long sip of his beer and didn’t answer.
“I didn’t, for a while,” he said. “I got over it, and I met Beatrice.”
“Beatrice Prince,” said Eliza. She added softly, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Russell ignored that. He was much classier than Eliza was, all things considered. He said, “But she didn’t want to have kids, and that’s what really killed me. Because you know I did want that, Eliza. I always wanted that. A family.”
She felt like someone had taken a pair of pliers to part of her heart and twisted. “Do you wish—do you wish we had done things differently?”
“Yeah,” he said. No hesitation.
“Really?”
“Of course I do, Eliza, you knew that back then, you knew that’s how I wanted to do it, keep the baby, get married.”
Eliza tried on the next words for size. “Do you think we made a mistake?”
“Yeah.” He took a long pull of his beer and set the bottle down, tracing the bottle with his fingers. “I always thought it was a mistake. But you didn’t ask me. You just went.”
“You knew I was going. I told you.”
“You told me. You didn’t ask me.”
“You knew, and you let me go off alone. Why’d you let me go off like that, to Bangor? Without you? Why’d you let me go at all?” The inside of Val’s Civic, the antiseptic smell of the room, the kind face of the doctor leaning over her, Val brushing her hair out of her eyes after it was all over.
“I was mad,” Russell said. “I was so mad at you, Eliza.” He twisted his hands together and stretched them in front of him, cracking his knuckles.
Eliza thought of all kinds of things then. She thought of the day she and Rob brought Zoe home from the hospital, and how they set her car seat in the center of the dining room table and stared at her, awed by her perfect little features, cowed by the responsibility now pressing down on their shoulders. She thought of Evie’s first day of kindergarten and how she wore ribbons on the end of her braids. She thought of the way Judith had said, “Who gets married in the winter?” when she and Rob had planned a December wedding. But it had been gorgeous, the bridesmaids had fur muffs, the ballroom of the Ritz was decorated like an ice castle, and the Christmas decorations were up in the Public Garden.
“But even after—you never once tried to get me to stay, not once that whole time, not ever. You never tried to get me to come back.”
Her first two months at Brown, Eliza felt like a gorilla in a land of gazelles. Everyone around her was so assured in the world, so confident. Eliza reread her mother’s letter a dozen times a week, wearing the paper down so that it felt like suede.
Russell’s hands were steady around his beer bottle now. “You think you would have been happy here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes roamed the café, caught on the menu board. “Yes. Maybe.”
Russell snorted. “It’s not that I let you go or made you go or anything else. You went. You did what you needed to do. You never thought you belonged here. You wouldn’t have been happy.”
“I might have been,” she said. “My mother was happy here. My mother was the happiest person I’ve ever known.”
Russell nodded and said, “Okay, Eliza. Okay.”
“Russell,” she said, thinking of what she’d heard from Val, about Beatrice Prince taking Russell’s money, thinking of the almost-broken reverse gear.
“What?” His voice cracked a little bit.
“Do you need money?”
The corner of his eye twitched. “Do I what?”
“Do you need money? Because—” She lowered her voice,
like she was offering him drugs or human organs. “I can help you out, if you need help.”
“Are you goddamn kidding me?”
She felt the same shame she’d felt at The Wheelhouse, trying to refuse the sternman pay. She whispered, “No.”
“I don’t need charity from you, Eliza.”
“I didn’t say charity.”
“You said money.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Yes it is.”
“Of course it’s not. It’s a friend helping out a friend.”
“Why is it—”
“What?”
“I mean, how’d you turn from what you were into—” He paused.
“Into what?”
“Into a person who thinks money fixes everything?”
Were they really doing this? They were. Fine. “It fixes a lot, Russell.”
He stood and put his beer bottle on the table, hard, so she jumped.
“Bullshit.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Russell. Of course it does.” She felt her voice growing sharp. “Of course money fixes things. That’s the point of fucking money. To make things easier. And better. It’s not noble to pretend it doesn’t. It’s just stupid.”
“Well, then, I guess I’m stupid. That’s what you think really, isn’t it?”
“That’s not what I meant. You know it’s not.”
“Didn’t go to college, I guess you think I can’t understand the basics. I’ve been running my own boat for years now, Eliza. Years.”
“I know you have. I’m sorry, Russell, of course you have. I just thought—”
“Thanks for the beer, Eliza. I’m going to get going now. I have an early day tomorrow.”
“Just like that?” she said. Her throat was burning. She still had half a glass of wine left.
“Just like that.”
Eliza sipped the wine slowly, giving Russell time to leave. Then she left a ten-dollar tip on the table for Mary because money did help, of course it fucking helped, and walked slowly back toward her father’s house. At the last second she changed course and veered back to the wharf. There were a few guys milling around, a couple of trucks left, but nobody paid her any mind.
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