Of course, every year there remained fewer and fewer who spoke in that distinct fashion. The thought gave Lis pause. She tried to recall how many islanders remained who were in their eighties and nineties, whose speech reflected Ruby’s. Surely there was no one older than a hundred left on the island. Lis’s heart saddened at the thought that islandspeak would be gone from memory within the next twenty years or so. With the older residents would go not only their speech but their stories. As far as Lis knew, there was no written record of the island’s unique history of having been settled by residents of St. Dennis who’d been driven from the town for supporting the British during the War of 1812. She’d heard the tales of near famine and the iron-willed islanders who refused to be defeated by the poor soil that supported little more than scrub pines and hackberry trees.
The stories needed to be written down while there was still time, she realized, preserved for future generations. For her own children, should she have any.
It occurred to her then that there was a good chance that her children could be born into a world from which Ruby had already passed. The thought brought tears to her eyes.
Lis always did have trouble falling asleep after driving for more than a few hours, but now she willed her racing mind to turn it all off. Her worries about Gigi, the island and the stories she’d been raised on, the changes to the old general store, which had her mind settling on Gigi’s contractor—all swirled around in her head.
Lis hadn’t meant to share her frustration and anxiety over her sudden inability to paint, but somehow Ruby always knew when something wasn’t right, and she knew how to draw it out with barely a word. She made you want to bring things into the open, to talk things over whether you felt ready to or not.
Lis had decided to save the story of her breakup with Ted, her fiancé, for another day. There was only so much angst she could take in one night.
She turned over and punched the pillow.
Tomorrow she would think about how best to deal with Alec Jansen and the separate world that was Cannonball Island, and maybe tell Ruby that her engagement was off and try to explain why. Maybe she’d even try to paint. Tonight she would simply be happy to sleep beneath this roof again, where one floor below, Gigi, too, settled in for the night.
Chapter Two
Always an early riser, regardless of where she was or how late she’d been out the night before, Lis was awake before the sun her first morning on Cannonball Island. She was dressed and downstairs before the last wave of watermen stopped in to fill up their thermoses with coffee.
“That Kathleen and Jack’s girl I see coming down those steps?” Joe Compton had called from the ancient counter where Ruby set out the coffeepot.
“It sure is.” Lis smiled. Joe had been a friend of her dad’s. “How’s your family, Mr. Compton?”
“Right as rain.” He nodded as he poured sugar into the thermos.
“How’s Judy?”
“She and Justin have three little ones now,” he told her. Half-and-half followed the sugar. “Living over outside of Baltimore. Justin owns his own shop, fixes computers and builds some custom. Got a nice little business going for himself.”
“Good for Justin. Please tell Judy I was asking about her.”
“Will do. How’s that pretty mama of yours? Did I hear she snagged herself another husband?”
“You heard right.”
“Number three or number four?”
Lis laughed. “Husband number three. It’s been about three years now.”
“She always was something else, that Kathleen.” He hastened to add, “No disrespect meant. You tell her Joe was asking for her, hear?”
“I sure will.” Lis knew exactly what Joe meant. From all she’d heard over the years, her mother had earned her reputation as a bit of a free spirit.
Lis got in line behind a man she didn’t recognize. He gestured for her to go first but she shook her head. “No, no. I’m not in a hurry to get anywhere, but I suspect you’d like to be out on the water right now, checking your traps.”
“True enough. Thanks.” The man served himself, nodded to Lis, then left the store with Joe, who’d apparently paid for both of them.
Lis filled a paper cup with coffee and went to the counter, where Ruby was ringing up a customer.
“Good luck out there this morning, Paul. Hope that storm they warned about stays down around the other end of the bay till you all get your business done and get on home safe and sound.”
“Thanks, Miz Ruby. I hope so, too.” The customer nodded to Lis as he was leaving.
“You still pack ’em in in the morning, Gigi.” Lis leaned on the counter.
“No place else for them to go this hour, less they want to drive to the mainland. I hear there’s a new place over to River Road that’s open at six or so. She gets the fishermen, they say. I get the crabbers and the oystermen. All works out.”
“I can’t believe you still get up this early,” Lis made the mistake of saying. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she could have kicked herself.
“And where else should I be, missy?” Ruby turned those blue eyes on her.
“I just meant . . .”
“I know what you meant. You meant I’m old and I should stay in bed and sleep away the rest of what I got coming to me.” Ruby shook her head. “Plenty of time to sleep when I’m done breathing.”
The last of her customers having left, Ruby went past Lis to the pile of boxes that stood inside the front door. To the left of the door stood a soda cooler. Several crates of both Pepsi and Coke products were stacked side by side in front of the cooler.
“I’m sorry, Gigi.” Lis joined her and started to empty the crates to restock the cooler. “I just meant that you’ve worked hard for a long enough time that you earned some rest.”
“I will take it when I’m good and ready.” Ruby slit the top of the first box with the Swiss Army knife she pulled out of the pocket of her blue and white apron. “Not before.”
Lis knew better than to respond, so she watched in silence for a moment, wondering how to offer to shelve the contents of the box without offending Ruby.
“Well, maybe you could stack these cereal boxes there on that top shelf when you’re done there,” Ruby said, as if she’d read Lis’s mind. “It’s a bit troublesome, reaching up.”
Lis suspected Ruby was having problems with her left shoulder again, but since she seemed a bit touchy, Lis tucked the thought away to ask later. She emptied the last crate, then restacked them by the door for the distributors to pick up and refill. Next she dragged the box Ruby had opened to the shelves where dry cereals were kept.
Ruby acknowledged the gesture with a “Hmmph.”
“It’s nice that you still get deliveries here on the island,” Lis said cautiously. When Ruby was feeling touchy, just about anything could set her off.
“Tom Parsons been delivering to me over forty-five years, his daddy before him.” Ruby slashed the top of the next carton and left it for Lis to empty and find space on the shelves for its contents. “I been a steady customer all those years, expect this place be around another forty-five.” She glanced at Lis and added, “At least that many.”
Lis wasn’t about to step into that trap.
“So you still stock mostly dry stuff, I see. Cereals, canned and paper goods, baking stuff,” Lis said.
“Doesn’t pay to carry perishables. The market over to St. Dennis is bigger, got the room for the big coolers and what all,” Ruby told her. “Got the basics here, newspapers every morning ’cept Sunday. Most folks want a Sunday paper, they pick one up over to the mainland when they go to church.”
“Who goes to St. Dennis for church?” Back when she was growing up on the island, that would have been unheard of.
“Everyone who has a mind to church, that’s who.” Ruby looked up from her task of
opening another box. “Been no preacher here for . . . four, five years or so.”
“What happened to Reverend Foster?”
“Retired to someplace warm. I hear he passed not long after.”
Lis knew what was coming next, so she turned back to the shelf lest Ruby see her smile.
“Folks need to know where they belong.” Ruby delivered the anticipated pronouncement. “Some don’t know when they’re well off. Some move on when they should stay put.”
Lis knew that her great-grandmother was talking about Lis and her mother, her brother, Owen, and everyone else who ever moved off the island.
“I think for some, the prospects are just better somewhere else,” Lis said. “There are some things that you have to leave home to do.”
“And what might that be?”
“Art school for me, to start.”
“Art school be done. Seems to me you can paint anywhere.”
“Can’t find a husband here.” Lis tried to add some levity to the conversation.
“You’d be surprised what you might find hereabouts these days.”
“Gigi, there hasn’t been a man under fifty living on this island for at least fifteen years.” Lis paused. “Except maybe a few of the guys I went to school with when they came back to see their parents. And most of the parents have left as well. Last time I was here, I noticed more than a few of the old cottages were boarded up.”
“Some boards go up, some might have come down since then.” Ruby stood up and stretched. “Times be changing. Might be you should be taking a walk around sometime soon, see what is, not what was.”
“I just might do that.”
“Do you good.” Ruby nodded and walked over to the counter, where she helped herself to a cup of hot water from the carafe she set out every morning for those few early birds who preferred tea. She made her selection from the tea bags she’d put out in a little basket.
“What sort of day do we have today, Gigi?” Lis asked once she’d emptied the boxes.
“Why don’t you go on out and see for yourself?” Ruby took her tea to the old round table under the window on the right side of the room and sat in one of the four ancient wooden chairs. She opened a newspaper and, settling herself, told Lis, “Be a lull here till around nine or so. You go on, now. I have some news that needs reading.”
“I won’t be long.” Lis headed for the side door and stepped outside.
The sun had risen just enough to warm the sand and sparkle off the scrubby tufts of grass. Lis walked around to the back of the building, heading for the path that led over the dune, but she was stopped in her tracks when she approached the back porch. Where previously the floorboards had sagged and the supports had leaned precariously and the roof had threatened to collapse, there was an entirely new structure, top to bottom.
“How . . . ?” she wondered aloud.
She stepped tentatively onto the first step, found it solid as rock, and climbed the next two to the porch, which was similarly solid. The wood had yet to be painted, but there wasn’t a rotted board to be seen and the supports actually seemed to be holding up the roof. Funny Gigi hadn’t mentioned it.
Lis stood on the new floorboards and leaned against the new railing and surveyed the island from the slightly elevated vantage. She paused, her gaze darting across the property from left to right and back again.
Something wasn’t right. Something was missing. It took her but a moment to realize what that something was.
She all but flew back into the store.
“Gigi, where is Uncle Eb’s boat?” Lis asked.
“Hmmm?” Ruby looked up from the newspaper. “Oh. The boat. Alec has it down to the marina.”
“Why?” Lis took a seat at the table across from Ruby. “Why does Alec have our boat?”
“I guess because it be his now,” Ruby said calmly.
“He bought it?”
“Sort of.”
“What does that mean? Either he bought it or he didn’t.”
“Well, no money changed hands”—Ruby folded the section of the paper she’d been reading—“but he paid all the same.”
“How much?”
Ruby’s eyes narrowed. “Now, how do you suppose that might be yours to know? Last I heard, that boat be mine. Came to me through my Harold, left to him by his brother Eben. Don’t remember Harold’s will saying nothing ’bout Ruby and Lisbeth.”
“Gigi, that was a skipjack. One of the old ones from back in Grandpap’s day. It was worth a lot of money.”
“You thinking I be too much a fool to know what that old hull was and how much it be worth?”
“No, I don’t think you’re foolish, but . . .”
“No buts. You think I can do for me or you don’t.”
“Of course I think you can take care of yourself,” Lis said softly, “but sometimes when we trust someone too much, they can take advantage of us.”
Ruby glared.
“Girl, I am one hundred years and three months on this earth. If I can’t tell the true from the false, you might as well set me to my rest right now.”
“The new porch . . .”
Ruby opened her paper and focused her attention on the page in front of her, signaling that the conversation was over.
Lis watched in silence for a few moments, but Ruby had nothing more to say. Lis suspected that Alec was responsible for the porch as well, but there was no point in asking. Not right now, anyway. Lis broke down the cardboard boxes the groceries had been delivered in, folding them flat and stacking them in a pile.
“You still leave these next to the door out front?” she asked.
Ruby nodded. “Tom’ll pick ’em up when he comes back through.”
“What if it rains?”
“Well, then, I expect they’ll get wet.” Ruby still hadn’t looked up. “Less a tarp be spread over the lot.”
“Where would I find a tarp if I needed one?”
“In the shed out by the garage.”
Lis dragged the cardboard outside and set the pile to the left of the door where it would be out of the way. She went back into the store, poured herself a second cup of coffee, and told Ruby, “I think I’ll take that walk now.”
“Take your time.”
The walk to the bay was a short one. Lis took off her sandals and picked her way carefully over the rocky jetty until she found a dry flat spot. She sat and sipped her coffee and watched the boats out on the bay. The local watermen had their own boats, their own crews, their own favorite spots for whatever they were after on that particular day. Generally they were courteous to each other, respecting their neighbors’ territory. She’d heard all the old stories about how out-of-towners occasionally slipped into their waters and tried to lift crab pots that weren’t theirs, how the locals would surround the interlopers until they turned over their ill-gotten catch to whomever they’d poached from. Few made a return trip, her uncle Eben used to say, once they’d been found out by the islanders.
For years the bay had felt the effects of both overfishing and pollution, and watermen all around the bay had suffered terribly. Cannonball Island’s crabbers and oystermen were no exception. Many a family had moved from the island, not to return, and many a father had sold his traps and gone onto the mainland seeking employment. Lis had heard that the bay was making a comeback, and judging by the number of boats out on the water that morning, she believed it was true. The Chesapeake had sustained her family since the early 1800s. She had only kind thoughts for it now.
Her thoughts turned to Alec Jansen, and they weren’t as kind.
She couldn’t help but be curious about how he managed to talk Ruby into making so many changes. The woman had stubbornly refused to listen to Lis or Owen or anyone else whenever they’d suggested making any sort of change in the old general store, so how had Alec succeeded whe
re so many of Lis’s relatives had failed?
“Time was right,” Ruby had told her the night before.
“Yeah, well, time’s been right for a long time,” Lis muttered.
She finished the coffee and dangled her feet over the edge of the rock. In the water below, a large blue claw crab picked at the remains of a fish, probably bait that had been tossed overboard by one of the boats that by now was miles away. Lis peered closer, saw the red tips of its claws, and for a moment she was five years old and watching her older brother empty the bucket in which he’d kept the crabs he’d caught that morning.
“See that red on the claws?” Owen had held up a squirming crab. “That tells you this is a grown-up girl-crab. We call them sooks. The guys don’t have red there on their claws.”
Owen used to catch crabs by hand, but Lis had never learned the degree of stealth required to grab one quickly enough to avoid those claws. She’d been pinched enough by the time she was twelve to no longer make the effort.
She watched the crab feed until it disappeared among the rocks and she lost her excuse to avoid thinking about Alec and what he was up to.
He’d always been a handsome thing, and she couldn’t help but wonder what he looked like these days. Was his hair still as blond, his eyes still as blue? In the seventeen years since they graduated, she hadn’t run into him even one time. Not so unusual, maybe, since she spent little time in St. Dennis even when she was home. She didn’t know if he’d stayed in the town, or moved away as so many others had, including Lis and her brother. She’d had no ties with anyone in town, and so there’d been no one to ask about Alec’s whereabouts. For all she knew, he was married and had five kids.
Lis’s father’s prejudice and suspicions about all things St. Dennis had been drummed into her from the time she could crawl, and as a result, consciously or unconsciously, she’d never been comfortable in the town or among its residents, which had made things awkward when she was in school. Cannonball Island had a one-room schoolhouse that served the islanders through the fourth grade, after which they all went into St. Dennis to continue their education. Lis and Owen had been forbidden to make friends with anyone who hadn’t been born and raised on the island, which drastically cut the list of potential friends—not to mention dates. Owen had mostly ignored his father, but Lis hadn’t been as assertive.
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