The Captain's Daughter

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  She had received Rob’s preliminary sketches for the home she was thinking of building in Naples, Maine. She was smitten. She simply adored lake culture; she thought it was quaint and genuine after so many summers of her life spent on the ocean. She thought pontoons were a fabulous and welcome change from yachts; she thought her grandchildren would leap at the chance to own a water trampoline they could access from the dock; her son was simply dying to do some serious hiking off the Kancamagus Highway. She was over the moon about the sketches. She couldn’t wait to get started. Could he get her in by, say…

  “No promises,” said Rob. “I’m sorry.”

  “No promises,” agreed Nadine Edwards, sounding only a little bit disappointed. “But maybe if you could just say that, at the latest—”

  “I would love to work with you, Mrs. Edwards,” said Rob, politely but firmly. “I’m so happy you liked the sketches. But I won’t be able to say until the work is well under way when it might be complete.”

  Nadine was sorry Rob had had such a difficult time with Christine Cabot—Rob, Nadine was happy to share, was not the first person who had had a difficult time with Christine Cabot. Christine Cabot had fired her dog groomer, her hairdresser, her dry cleaner. Her landscaper, twice. Her driver. “She’d fire her kids if she could,” confided Nadine. “I think she did fire one of them.” (“I bet it was Jonathan Junior, the cokehead,” said Eliza to Rob, later.) “I mean,” continued Nadine, “I love her to pieces, but she is absolutely impossible to deal with. And I would love to hire you to build my house, Rob.”

  Rob considered this proposition. He felt a few things. He felt an instant solidarity with Nadine Edwards. He felt an urge to look immediately for GCs who had no relation to Mark Ruggman. He felt a touch of heartburn, from the scrumptious seafood risotto Eliza had made for dinner that night. And he felt something else, something blooming inside of him, something that at first was difficult to identify. But after a moment it became obvious: it was the certainty of his own good fortune.

  ———

  Andi and Daphne were determined to keep The Cup open through the whole of the winter even though there were days when they had not a single customer. Three days after the start of the new year, Mary was sitting at table twelve at The Cup with Andi, who was teaching her to do the bookkeeping, when she felt a dull ache that radiated around her belly. It went away, and then it came back again, more insistently, a seizing, aching pain deep inside. “Um,” she said. “Andi?” She gasped.

  “Oh, shit,” said Andi. “Holy shit, Mary, is it happening?”

  Mary nodded and whispered, “I think so. I mean, I don’t know. But I think so?”

  Twelve hours later, in the obstetrics wing of Maine Coast Memorial in Ellsworth, in a room with pale green walls, Mary gave birth to Patrick Charles Brown. (“I would have named him Charlie,” said Mary. “But come on, I can’t do that to him. Charlie Brown.”) Patrick weighed six pounds and two ounces and his blood type was O positive and his eyes were indigo and he had a set of lungs on him like you wouldn’t believe—the nurses said they thought his screams could be heard in Bangor and beyond.

  Mary’s body recovered quickly from the birth, the way teenage bodies do, and she was back to her old slip of a self in no time at all. (“Not fair,” said Vivienne, but she was making googly eyes at Patrick while she said it.)

  Daphne and Andi permitted Mary to bring Patrick Charles to The Cup during the slow midwinter days, and, if all went well, they were going to allow the same thing when things picked up.

  “It’ll get better, come summer,” said Daphne a minimum of four times a day.

  “No question,” agreed Andi.

  Trap Day came in April, and the boats filled the harbor once again. Then Memorial Day arrived, and the summer people started to come back, and then it was June, and then the season was in full swing.

  “I told you it would happen,” said Daphne.

  “I told you,” said Andi.

  Patrick grew too big to stay in his little car seat, so Daphne bought a Pack ’n Play for him and Andi stocked it with toys and he played in there making his lovely little baby noises and giving the customers something to smile at. Often the customers thought he was Andi and Daphne’s baby, and Mary didn’t mind that.

  When Vivienne wasn’t working at A Cut Above she came and took Patrick for walks by the harbor to look at the boats, or fed him little spoonfuls of the mushed-up organic food that Andi and Daphne insisted he eat. Vivienne remembered a surprising amount about babies and there were certain times when only she could quiet Patrick—she did a little rocking thing with him over one shoulder that was pure magic.

  This is not to say things were not difficult for Mary sometimes. No matter how much help she had she was still a young, single mother who never had enough money and who always felt the great weight of responsibility pressing down on her slender shoulders and who sometimes got really scared about the future and who sometimes cried in the dark hours of the morning when Patrick had gone back to sleep and she hadn’t. But she was managing.

  Sometimes Mary jumped when the door to the café opened, especially if she was in charge on her own, remembering the time Josh had come in and Charlie Sargent had saved her.

  Mary thought about Charlie Sargent a lot, at the most unexpected times, and in some way she felt that Patrick, although he was a fatherless boy with four mothers, had a real and true father guiding him along, and ushering Mary into this unexpected adulthood she’d found herself in. Mary Brown wasn’t religious and she didn’t believe in any god, but sometimes she directed into the universe a message of gratitude for all she’d been given, and that could have been considered a prayer.

  And maybe—who knew?—someday the door would open and somebody would walk into the café who would smile at Mary and cause a particular thump in her chest, and her universe would tilt, but she had loads of time for that, and maybe she didn’t need that at all. Anyway, for now she had everything she needed, and then some.

  ———

  When Charlie Sargent had been gone for six months and Zoe and Evie were well settled into the school year and their activities and Rob was hard at work Eliza saw a flyer on a bulletin board at the Barton Public Library advertising for hospice volunteers. Cell phones were not permitted in the Barton Public Library, but Eliza took hers out anyway and surreptitiously snapped a photo of the flyer. The librarian behind the reference desk shot her a disapproving look, but Eliza just smiled and tucked her phone back into her bag.

  It took Eliza over a month to make the call. Then, after she did, it took her six weeks to complete the mandatory thirty hours of training. By the time she had done so it was almost summer all over again and she was busy organizing the girls’ camps and activities and making sure Rob had plenty of time to travel back and forth to the property in Naples, Maine, where he was in the middle of overseeing construction of Nadine Edwards’s summer home, which was exactly five hundred square feet larger than Cabot Lodge, and whose patio placement required no filling in for the slope of the land.

  So it wasn’t until September that Eliza was able to dedicate the required five to eight hours a week to her hospice volunteer duties.

  She held the hand of an eighty-four-year-old pancreatic cancer patient while the light went out of her eyes. She sat by the bedside of a seventy-eight-year-old man suffering from Parkinson’s who could hardly swallow. She helped record the childhood memories of a sixty-one-year-old man whose liver transplant had failed and who wasn’t eligible for another. She gave primary caregivers a break to run errands or cook dinner or even sit in a café with a book for half an hour and know that their loved ones were not alone.

  Eliza wasn’t the medical expert in any of these cases—she deferred to the hospice nurses, as her training had dictated, and she never mentioned her time in medical school. The deaths she saw in other people’s homes were not the first she’d seen, of course, but she realized that she was seeing them now through a different lens, and that so
me were awful, and some were peaceful, and that the best two things people could have at the end of their lives were a say in how it all went down and somebody to be with them so that they were not alone, so that they were not afraid of the dark.

  By then Deirdre was busy starting work on the next EANY gala. Even though Brock had eventually agreed that Deirdre could look into adopting an East African baby, Deirdre had decided that she could help more children by helping all the children. That’s what she told the world, but privately she told Eliza that she didn’t think she had it in her, to start from scratch again with the diapers, the middle-of-the-night wake-ups, the teething. She sort of felt (she whispered) like Brock had called her bluff.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” said Deirdre every time she and Eliza got together, about the hospice work. “I don’t know how you can be around all of that sadness when you don’t need to.”

  “It just feels like the right place to be,” said Eliza. It was hard to explain to anyone, so she didn’t really try, but if she had to condense it into a single word she would have said that it felt like homage.

  The Barnes’s newish dog—found, of course, by Evie—was a brown-haired, crooked-eared mix named Jupiter whose scraggly little body contained so many different breeds it was really difficult to pick out even one. Jupiter was in training to be a hospice paws volunteer. He was enthusiastic and he was trying really hard, but he had a little work to do in the patience category before he was ready to take his act on the road. He’d get there, said the trainer. He obviously had the heart for it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Lindsay Mazotti, Molly Burnett, and Bob Truog, all physicians, were incredibly generous with their medical expertise. Dave Considine and Brad Mascott were equally so with their sailing and boating knowledge, as was Phil Bennett of the Hinckley yacht company. Cathy Burnett shared personal details of her husband Bob Burnett’s battle with glioblastoma with me and I am grateful to her for that. Jennifer Thibodeau and Victoria Abbott from Maine Family Planning procured the proper medical advice and appointments for one of my characters. Lisa DeStefano of DeStefano Architects shared her professional expertise, as did Judy Anderson of Alexander Haas. Sue Santa Maria and Priscilla Hare put me up in their beautiful home in Owls Head, Maine, and fed me when I first started this book and needed a few days away. Kelly Doucette and Lisa Broten helped with legal matters in the story. The other member of the Newburyport Writers’ Club, Katie Schickel, always offers invaluable friendship and a professional sounding board. The members of the Newburyport Mom Squad: you know who you are, and you rock. Besides being two of the best besties out there, Jennifer Truelove and Margaret Dunn are always ready to name a boat or a lighthouse, complete a metaphor, or share a laugh or a trip. In addition, Margaret offered just the right editorial insight at just the right time. Elise Willingham helped keep the household moving for much of the past year.

  Phillip Torrey, who fishes out of Winter Harbor, Maine, answered so many of my questions about the world of lobster fishing with such delightful detail and enthusiasm that I feel ready to apply for a lobster fishing license myself. (Not really—don’t worry, state of Maine.) I am grateful for Phillip’s patience and expertise, and I admire the hard work he and all of the fishermen up and down the coast do day after day in all sorts of conditions. The book How to Catch a Lobster in Down East Maine by Christina Lemieux Oragano also shed a lot of light on the world.

  Thank you to the team at Doubleday for their hard work all around. My editor, Melissa Danaczko, is brilliant, patient, forgiving, and always willing to push a little harder to make a book better. Every writer needs that. Margo Shickmanter, a talented editor in her own right, scooped up many dangling pieces of story line and kept the details in order, and Mark Lee and Lauren Hesse kept publicity and marketing moving in the right direction. My agent, Elisabeth Weed of The Book Group, is a formidable presence in the agenting world and at the same time a warm, supportive, and absolutely necessary part of my writing life. Thank you always to my in-laws, Cheryl Moore and the Destrampe family. I never thought I would thank my parents, John and Sara Mitchell, for moving me to Down East Maine my senior year in high school (I’ve almost gotten over it), but I can safely say that without that experience this book would not exist and so for that and many other reasons I thank them. My sister, Shannon Mitchell, is a tireless cheerleader and a generous and loving aunt. My daughters, Addie, Violet, and Josie, are endless sources of amusement—and sometimes bemusement—and also laundry, love, inspiration, and support. I began this book years ago, put it down for a good long while, and eventually came back to it. My husband Brian’s belief in it and in me never wavered, and for that and pretty much everything else he does and is I count myself the luckiest of the lucky.

  As I was finishing the final edits on this book my father-in-law, Frank Moore, lost his battle with lung cancer. I conceived this book and wrote most of it before he became ill, but now I see that some of the best qualities of Frank and some of the best qualities of the character of Charlie Sargent echo each other—hardworking men who loved their families and lived lives that might have looked quiet from the outside but brimmed over from the inside. I like to think of the spirits of both living on.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Meg Mitchell Moore is the author of the novels The Admissions, The Arrivals, and So Far Away. She worked for several years as a journalist for a variety of publications. She lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts, with her husband and their three daughters.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.