It only rang once before Stephanie answered the phone.
Stephanie and Carly had been together for a few years now, ever since Carly had set up shop teaching second grade in Portland after college. Daddy seemed to keep himself surprisingly oblivious to the idea that Carly and Stephanie might be lovers. Carly had always been after boys in high school, and despite her dating a few different women in college, it had seemed to me just to be another way of acting out her women’s studies classes and showing that she wasn’t “under the yoke of patriarchy.” It took me a while to realize that she and Stephanie were serious.
“How’s the lobster business?” Stephanie asked.
“Keeping me in cashmere,” I said, our usual exchange.
“So you excited about the news?” Stephanie said. I didn’t say anything, and then Stephanie stumbled nervously. “Carly hasn’t told you yet? I figured that was why you were calling.” And then, muffled, the phone pulled from her face, “you haven’t told your sister yet? I thought you were going to call.”
Carly came on the line. “So much for keeping surprises, I guess.”
“What are you doing home on a weekday? Did you get fired?”
“Jesus. That’s your first thought? That I got fired? And, what, you called on a weekday hoping I’d be at work so that you could leave a message?”
I loved Carly, but sometimes it seemed like she’d never gotten over the day I accidently dropped Mr. Pickles over the side of the Queen Jane. She wasn’t always angry with me, but where Rena had settled into her role as a mother—as the middle sister and the peacemaker—Carly and I had taken more antagonistic roles in our relationship to each other. She accused me of overreaching, and I accused her, more or less, of being a spoiled brat.
“You getting married?” I said.
“What?”
“I heard lots of you folks have been heading down to Mass now to get married since that ruling last year.”
“No, we’re not getting married.” To Stephanie, I heard her say, “She said lots of you folks have been heading to Mass now to get married.” There was something indistinct from Stephanie, Carly laughing, and then back on the line to me. “Honey, it’s 2005. You can’t call gay people ‘you folks.’ You sound like one of those people from Alabama who say ‘the gays.’ ”
“Give me a break, Carly. Rena’s the one who thought you shouldn’t tell Daddy, not me. And I’ll say what I’ve always said, whatever makes you happy.”
“And I’ll say what I’ve always said, it’s not about whatever makes me happy. It’s just the way it is.”
“I didn’t call you to pick a fight,” I said, though at that moment it felt exactly like I had called her to pick a fight. “I was calling about Daddy.”
Even through the phone lines, I felt like I could see Carly stand up straighter. She and Stephanie had a small apartment near the Maine College of Art, where Stephanie worked part-time teaching pottery. It was a light, small place with a galley kitchen that they’d kitted out with junk sale furnishings, and despite the fact that it was a one-bedroom, even after Daddy visited in the winter of 2002, he still referred to Stephanie as Carly’s roommate. They had an old Bakelite rotary phone in the kitchen, though I’d been teasing my sister about buying a cordless, and I heard her moving something around on the counter, the beep of a microwave. “What about Daddy?”
I knew she was holding the phone tighter than she needed to, because I would have been doing the same thing. When you go through what we did as teenagers, losing Scotty and Momma, and having Daddy beat another man’s hand flat with a hammer and then disappear for a couple of months of psychiatric treatment, you never get over your wariness.
“What about Daddy?” she said again.
“What about your surprise?”
“I’m moving back to the island.”
“Bullshit.”
“Nope. Happened real quick. Sally Treat told Principal Philips yesterday that she’s finished. She’s off the island once the school year ends. I’d mentioned to Principal Philips a year or two ago to give me a call if anything came open, and he gave me a call. I’ll be teaching kindergarten through third grade come September. You just can’t keep the Kings away from Loosewood Island, I guess. I’ve been itching to get back.”
It felt like I’d been hit in the head by a rock. Sally and Kenny were leaving Loosewood Island? Sally had told Prinicipal Philips this yesterday, but barely twenty minutes ago, when I’d seen Kenny at the docks, he hadn’t bothered to tell me? Jesus. Kenny was leaving.
“Cordelia?”
I tried to swallow, but my mouth felt dry, like I was coming off a four-day drunk.
“Cordelia?”
I tried to sound breezy and natural, but the idea of Kenny leaving made the words hard to get out. “How’d you pull that off without Sally or Principal Philips telling Daddy?”
“I told him I wanted it to be a surprise for Daddy’s sixtieth birthday,” she said. “He won’t say anything to anybody just so that he can have the satisfaction afterwards of telling people that he was the only one who knew, that he knew something Woody Kings didn’t.”
I didn’t say anything about Kenny keeping it secret from me. Instead I said, “Daddy’s only fifty-seven.”
“Yeah, but that’s almost sixty, right? He’s getting older, you know, and it will be good to be home again.”
I didn’t like that she said it out loud, that Daddy was getting older. I looked through the window; rain had started falling steady again, over the harbour and the rest of the island. Everywhere else it was spring, but on Loosewood Island it was shit season, mud everywhere, no good for lobstering, not good for much of anything but catching up on chores and resting up for the hard work to come. One boat moved slowly through the harbour, but I couldn’t tell whose it was through the rain. Maybe Timmy’s boat or Chip and Tony Warner’s boat. “What’s Stephanie going to do?”
“She’s coming with me. She’s going to set up a small studio, do pottery, sell pots and cups and stuff to tourists in the summer, wants to try lobstering once the tourists head home, figures she can be a sternman during the season,” she said. “Thought I’d ask Daddy if he could take her on. No pay to start.”
“Not sure that’s a good idea,” I said, except that even as the words came out of my mouth I realized that Daddy would be so happy to have Carly back home again that he’d take Stephanie on no matter what.
“You don’t think we should come home because we’re gay?” Her voice had turned hard.
“No, Carly, I’m not talking about you coming home. I’m saying that I don’t think it’s a good idea for Stephanie to try to work as a sternman: she’s five-foot. It’s hard to imagine her carrying a wire trap on dry land, let alone hauling one out of the water when it’s oozing mud and full of bugs,” I said. “I don’t think the lobsters care much one way or the other if she’s gay.” I waited for a laugh, but none came. The truth was that despite my protests, I wasn’t sure that having Stephanie on the Queen Jane would be so bad. Maybe it would slow Daddy down a bit. With Stephanie on board he’d be more likely to take few breaks throughout the day. “Might be tough, living on the island. You know how it is. The boys here aren’t exactly the progressive type. You move here with Stephanie, the two of you living together, it’s not going to be much in the way of a secret.”
“Wasn’t thinking of keeping it a secret,” Carly said. “We’ll lay it out like it is.”
“Well, that’s probably for the best, but it’s up to you and Stephanie.”
“Jesus, Cordelia. Just come out with it. You don’t want me moving back.”
“Carly—”
“You’re afraid that I’ll come back and rock the boat and maybe with both me and Rena on the island you won’t have as much of Daddy to your precious self. You’re still such a child, Cordelia.”
“That’s not true, and that’s not fair,” I said. I paused and waited for her to say something, but she was quiet, and I hoped she realized that she’d
stepped over the line. “I’d love to have you back.” I thought I meant it, but I wasn’t entirely sure if it was true or not.
It’s true that some part of me wanted to keep Carly in Portland. I already had one sister on the island, and Carly was the baby, the one whom we circled the wagons around after Scotty died and Momma drowned herself, and she still acted like a baby plenty of the time, throwing tantrums when she didn’t get her way. And maybe that was some of what made me worried about the idea of Carly coming back. I wanted to please Daddy as much as Carly and Rena did, but I went about it differently.
If I’d been a different person, maybe it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to worry about it, but I showed my love to Daddy in the only way I knew how. I told him I loved him, but more than anything, I tried to be the kind of person I thought he was: I pushed back at him as hard as he pushed me, I worked the water like he worked the water, and I tried to be the kind of daughter who could replace the hole left behind by the death of his son, and maybe help him through Momma’s death, too.
A few Christmases ago, Daddy had told me that I looked like Momma but I was nothing like her. “You’re a Kings through and through. And Rena, she might act like your momma, trying to take care of us and step in with the mothering, but it’s an act. Now, Carly,” he said, “well, that’s different. She only looks like your momma a little, but she fills up a space like your momma used to. Turns her hands out, pauses on the same words. Sometimes having her back on the island is like having a ghost in the house.”
And I was jealous. I hated him for saying that, and I hated Carly for being more like Momma than I ever could be. But that wasn’t the sort of thing I could tell my sister. “I don’t get to see enough of you up in Portland, and you know I don’t love talking on the phone,” I said. “I only call you because if I don’t call, I won’t get to talk to you at all. You want to move back to the island, move back to the island. It would make Daddy happy,” I said, and those were words that I knew were true.
“Yeah, it would make Daddy happy. He keeps dropping hints, you know? And speaking of which, you called because of Daddy. What’s wrong?”
“He fainted,” I said. “I found him passed out on the kitchen floor yesterday.”
“Jesus.”
“He was annoyed at me for fussing over him. Claimed it was just a dizzy spell. I browbeat him into going to the doctor. He’s up in Saint John. He just called to say that they’re keeping him in the hospital overnight for some tests.”
“Well, he’s taking care of it,” Carly said. “That’s something, at least.”
“The fact that he’s going to see a doctor is what’s gotten me the most worried. I’ve been working on him for years just to start getting his annual physicals, and he agreed, but you know what he said? He told me that if any doctor shoved a finger up his ass he’d shove his fist into that doctor’s face.”
“That’s Daddy. Always a charmer.” She paused. “You’re seriously worried about it?”
“I don’t know. He’s only fifty-seven, but that’s old for a lobsterman, and with his dad’s heart kicking out at fifty, it makes me nervous. He isn’t going to live forever, is he?” I said. The boat that had been moving slowly in the harbour completed its circuit—what it was moving around for in this weather, at this time of year, I didn’t know—and headed back toward the wharf. It was George Sweeney’s boat, I realized. Just the sort of foolish errand he liked to engage in, wasting gas and exposing himself to the weather when there was no need. “Are you serious?” I asked. “About coming home to stay? Because if you come home and don’t stay, you’ll break his heart. You can’t get here and realize that Loosewood Island isn’t as welcoming of two lesbians as you think and then take off again for Portland. I’m serious. You know how Daddy gets when he’s excited about something. Remember what he was like after the twins were born and Rena told him she was moving home? She was all he could talk about.”
“Things have changed, Cordelia,” Carly said. “Trust me. I’m sure that most of the island already knows that Stephanie and I aren’t just roommates. That’s not going to be a problem.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. I guess I just wanted to give you an out before you told Daddy.”
“Don’t you think Momma would have wanted me to come home?”
We were both quiet for a few seconds. I stepped over to the doors and put my forehead against the cool glass. I didn’t want to talk about Momma. “Sure,” I said. “Probably.”
“You remember that story Daddy told us when we were kids?”
“Which one?”
“The one about how he was taken under the water by a wave and then Grandma rescued him from a mermaid?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s like that,” she said. “The point of the story is that we’ve all got a place we belong, and I’ve had fun in Portland, but I’m ready to come home. I’ve got a job, and I’ve got Stephanie, and I’m ready to come home. I’ve been scrubbing and scrubbing, but I guess I can’t get Loosewood Island out of my skin.”
“What about Stephanie? She doesn’t have Loosewood Island in her skin. She’s never even been here.”
“She knows what she’s getting into,” Carly said.
I liked Stephanie, but I didn’t think she knew what it meant to be a sternman and to work the water, and I didn’t know how she’d handle the winter, when the island mostly emptied out, stores and restaurants shut down, and the ocean beat at us. If Stephanie thought that living in Portland had prepared her for living on the island, she was in for a rude awakening. She’d been born and raised in Iowa, for god’s sake, her father an insurance agent and her mom staying at home with Stephanie, her sister, and her two brothers. She’d never even seen the ocean before she’d gone to Brown, never eaten a lobster until she moved to Portland and started dating Carly. She looked like she belonged ensconced in a suburban McMansion somewhere; she was blond and petite and had a cute little turned-up nose that made how good she looked seem less threatening, made her seem like somebody you’d like before she ever opened her mouth. Most of the time when I saw her she was wearing khakis and a T-shirt covered with clay and glaze from her studio, but once or twice we’d gone out somewhere nice for dinner and she’d put herself into a dress, and I’d wonder how anybody could help but fall in love with her.
No, I didn’t think Stephanie knew what she was getting into by agreeing to move to Loosewood Island—and I didn’t know how things would turn out for me, with another sister at home and with Kenny gone—but instead of saying that, I promised to call Carly when Daddy came home the next day, and promised not to tell him that she was coming home until she told him herself. Then I hung the phone up, opened the glass doors, and looked out over the water.
My house wasn’t something I’d have been able to afford on my own. Daddy let me live in this house free and clear, and he hadn’t been subtle about the fact that there was room in the house for a husband and children both; he reminded me all the time that early thirties wasn’t too old to get started. He’d set up the same sort of deal for Rena and Tucker, too. Other side of the harbour, but waterfront, same as mine. He’d even bought bunk beds to put in each of the twins’ rooms, thinking ahead to when the kids would want to have sleepovers. Rena and I both offered to pay rent, but he said not to mind it. He had two other houses that he rented out to summer folk as well as the fish shop, the warehouse where the lobster pounds sat, two buildings on Main Street that held six different businesses that operated year-round—which was more impressive when you figured that Loosewood Island only had about three dozen businesses open during the off-season—and his own house, the house I’d grown up in. He didn’t have loans on any of them, and that’s the way he liked it. He was old-fashioned about being in debt and always said if you dealt in cash you didn’t have to keep buying whatever it was that you bought. He was no dub—a fisherman who couldn’t cut it—and that was part of things, but part of it, too, was that he seemed to understand that things were changi
ng on Loosewood Island before anybody else did, and he bought before the tourists hijacked the island. There were lots of things about Loosewood Island that he seemed to understand better than anybody else, and sometimes I wondered if there was more to those stories he told me about Brumfitt than he let on. Either way, it worked out well for the Kings.
Maybe somewhere else, men would have been jealous of him. Even without him flaunting his money—his house had beautiful views, but was as old and beaten down as any other lobsterman’s—every one of the boys in the harbour knew he had the money to buy something bigger and newer than the Queen Jane, that he had enough put away to weather the downs of the markets, the crash in lobster sales after the terrorist attacks in New York, that he could even weather the weather itself. But this was Loosewood Island, and more often than not I thought of our name as a description. Kenny was right about Daddy. He was the king of the harbour just as his father had been the king of the harbour, and his grandfather before, and there would come a day, probably, when I’d take over. We made decisions as a group—to shorten the season, to fish less traps, to stop letting cruise ships dock in the harbour—but anytime we made a decision, big or small, there was always the moment when every man would look to Daddy to see if he agreed.
Daddy was the reason we had the lobster co-op. Loosewood Island only has one wharf, though a few of the more ritzy cottages that are in sheltered coves have put in deepwater docks for their yachts so that they don’t have to bother with the harbour. The lobstermen own the wharf. And I don’t mean that like some silly gang slogan. I mean it in a purely literal sense. When Daddy said we should start a co-op, the lobstermen went together to buy out the old, crooked mainlander dealer who was nickeling and diming us to death. We could have forced him out—it’s amazing how quickly somebody recognizes a deal when their truck burns up and their boat mysteriously sinks—but we offered him a fair price. When he took the money and left for Florida, we started the Loosewood Island Lobster Co-op. This would have been twenty years ago or so, before I started lobstering, before Scotty died.
The Lobster Kings Page 10