“How are the Warner boys?”
He grimaced. “They’re trying to get me laid. Said it will help with getting over the divorce.”
“It’s final next week?”
“That’s what the lawyer says.”
I took my hand off Momma’s necklace, reached out, and touched his shoulder. “I know I keep saying it, but I’m sorry, Kenny.”
“You know what? It’s going to be a relief.” He kicked at a shell on the path. “I hate to say it, and it took me a few months to even realize it, but honestly, it was a relief when Sally left me. It was a long time coming. I think this divorce was coming at us from the day we met.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
“I’m just ready to move on with things,” he said. “And you’ve got to be tired of talking about it.”
I looked away from the water. The old Soikie mansion, shut down for the season, loomed on the hill. Orphan clouds covered the stars here and there, and it was obvious that by the morning they would be banded together, blotting the sky. There was still enough light for us to pick our way down the stairs. Kenny lowered himself down and sat, dangling his legs off the seawall.
I sat down next to him and when my knee bumped against his, he didn’t move it away. Even with the cold, the night felt intimate and close, the dark holding the two of us inside, and from our perch on the seawall we could see the entirety of the ocean spread before us.
“You’re shivering,” he said.
He was right, but I wasn’t even sure I felt cold anymore. If anything, I felt like I was burning up, like I was in some sort of fever dream, but I didn’t stop him from wrapping his coat around me. It was warm from his body heat, and I could smell the particular combination of soap and sweat and cologne that was Kenny. I leaned my head back to look at the clouds.
“It’s too cold for a dress like that,” he said.
“I wanted to look pretty for you, Kenny.”
“You always look pretty to me, Cordelia,” Kenny said. I glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at me when he said it. He was busy leaning over and pulling a rock from the ground. He cranked his arm back and then lightly swung through a throwing motion once, twice, three times before finally chucking the rock into the darkness and the water. He’d been a pitcher in high school. Not very good, by his own admission, but the throw was fluid, and I imagined that he would have been something to watch back then, young and lithe, unspoiled from the failed marriage yet to come. “You’ve always been easy for me to be with, Cordelia,” he said. “I don’t appreciate that as much as I should.”
I closed my eyes for a minute, warmed by his coat, and then I shifted sideways and turned so I could look straight at him. “Do you want to talk about that, Kenny?”
He stared at me and we were both quiet. He lifted up his hand, touched the pearls around my neck, and then dropped his hands back to his lap. I could hear the shush of the water, and I wasn’t sure what to do. I waited for him to move again, but when he did, it was to stand up. “Yeah, I do want to talk about that, Cordelia.” He crouched down beside me and brushed the back of my neck with his hand before reaching out and tugging on the lapels of his coat, pulling it tighter around me. “But not tonight, okay?”
The next morning, Thanksgiving morning, the weather was up—a soft cold rain hovering over the island—and it had the feel of a storm coming. October leaves were burning with colour, the trees starting to be stripped bare. I’d fallen asleep thinking that I’d dream about Kenny, but instead I’d had the deep, peaceful, dreamless sleep that I almost never got. I woke up feeling great, but when I went to get dressed, I saw Momma’s necklace on the bedside table where I’d taken it off and put it before going to sleep. I pushed the clothes to the side and stood there looking at the pearls before finally pulling them out and stuffing them in the pocket of Kenny’s jacket. Even in the rain, the coat still carried some of his scent, and I liked the way it hung large and heavy on me. It was too early to go to Rena’s, so I stopped at the Coffee Catch for a while to kill some time. I kept looking for Kenny to come wandering in, but it was mostly just the old farts who were waiting for the diner to open so they could go nurse their coffees there instead. Finally, around eight, I ordered a latte for Rena and headed over to her house.
She gave me a hug, glanced at Kenny’s jacket but didn’t say anything, and then took the latte with a gleeful sigh. “I swear to god, the Coffee Catch is the greatest thing to happen to Loosewood Island since indoor plumbing.” She leaned against the counter and held the cup in both hands. “Do you think anybody would mind if, instead of cooking a Thanksgiving dinner, I just sat down and drank my coffee? We could do frozen pizza. I’ll cook turkey next month.”
Like most of the families on the island, we celebrated both the American and Canadian holidays, and for somebody like Rena, who loved any excuse to decorate the house and get the family together, it was the best of both worlds: she could decorate for Canadian Thanksgiving, do Halloween, and then decorate for Thanksgiving again. She’d already hung turkey cutouts and miniature Canadian flags. “You’re the one who always insists on hosting,” I said.
“Please. Like you want to cook for everybody?” she said, smiling at me. “I’m just tired. Guppy had a bit of a cough last night, and it kept me up.” She looked again at Kenny’s jacket hanging on my shoulders. “And how late were you up?”
“Late enough,” I said. “But, well, there’s this.” I reached into the pocket of Kenny’s jacket, pulled out Momma’s necklace, and told her about what had happened on the day Carly moved back to the island.
“The whole time?” Rena said. She held the necklace up by her fingertips, her arms extended, the pearls dangling down in front of her. She lowered her arm and let the necklace pool into the palm of her hand. I could tell she was having trouble not crying.
“I thought maybe Carly had told you.”
“No. No, I just thought they were gone.” She shook her head. “What are you going to do?”
She closed her hand around the necklace and then pulled it close to her chest, almost cradling it. I wasn’t sure if she even realized she was doing it, but it gave me a few seconds to compose myself, because I was taken aback at the question. “What am I going to do? Not, what are we going to do?”
She was staring past me, at the wall or just into space, but when I said that, she brought her focus to my face. “Don’t play that with me, Cordelia. You know as well as I do how you’ve set things up in this family. It’s never been a democracy.” She didn’t sound angry, but there was an edge in her voice, and she reached out and pressed the necklace into my hand and then turned to the pantry and started pulling out flour, salt, vanilla, all of the things she thought she needed to start cooking. It reminded me of the way that I sorted gear and prepped for a day on the water, and it meant that she was done talking about the pearls. I hesitated, and then I just slipped the necklace back into the pocket of Kenny’s jacket, hung it up in the hall closet, and began to carry folding chairs into the dining room.
When Tucker came home with the twins, around eleven, I took off. I had lunch at the diner and spent some more time reading at the Coffee Catch, but even though I saw all sorts of people—John O’Connor, Jessie, Matt Frieze, Petey Dogger, Principal Philips, Chip and Tony—the one person I was looking for was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t until that evening, when I was turning up the walk to Rena’s, that I saw Kenny.
Sometime in the afternoon the rain had turned into a heavy squall, with dark clouds and the kind of rain that hurts your face, and I ducked under the cover of Rena’s porch to wait for him. He was hunched over, his hood pulled up and hustling through the weather, coming from the other direction than me. I’d planned on wearing a dress, but with the weather making a nuisance of itself, I’d ended up wearing jeans, and instead of wearing one of my own coats, I had settled on Kenny’s jacket again; I had the idea that maybe Kenny would decide to walk me home after we finished dinner so that he could get his jacket
back.
He popped up the steps, pushed his hood back, unzipped his coat, and then pulled a tie out of his pocket. He held it out to me. “Here,” he said.
“Here?” I took the tie out of his hand. “Here … as in? Because, if you must know, I greatly prefer flowers. Or beer.”
“Here, as in, can you tie it for me?” He gave a crooked smile and ducked his head, and I realized he was embarrassed. “She always used to tie them for me. Not that I wore a tie all that often, but, well … And I know you’re the one who did it for Woody after your momma …” He sort of trailed off and then shifted side to side. “I don’t know. It’s Thanksgiving. Thought I should dress up.”
I pulled the ends of the tie apart and reached up to drape it around his neck. He leaned over for me, lifting his collar while I slid the tie back and forth a couple of times to get the length right. While I twisted the long end over the short and then made the loop, he reached out and tugged at the zipper of my—of his—jacket.
“Nice jacket,” he said. “A bit big on you.” He moved his hand over and touched my chin. “No necklace?”
“Not tonight,” I said.
He shook his head. “Pretty necklace, but it’s not your style. You look good without it.”
I cinched the knot tight and then straightened the tie. I looked up at him again, and he was staring right at me. I let my hands fall to my sides, but neither one of us moved to step back. I took a breath and put a little more weight into my toes, my body moving toward him slowly, almost imperceptibly.
“Make some room up there,” Daddy called out from what felt like far away.
Kenny and I both took a step back, the space between us suddenly wide and safe. I saw Daddy walking briskly through the storm and up the steps. He stomped his feet on the porch and then unzipped his slicker. “Christ in a bucket,” he said, breathing heavily. “I can’t say I’m thankful for this kind of holiday weather.”
“Always some kind of weather, right?” Kenny said. He tapped Daddy on the shoulder, raised his eyes at me, and then stepped through the front door. Daddy pulled his slicker off and folded it over his arm. He had a bottle of wine in his other hand. He looked at me and then shook his head.
“What are you doing, girl? You and Kenny?”
“It’s none of your business.”
He shook his head again. “You’re my daughter, and you’re a Kings, and that makes it my business. You aren’t thinking, Cordelia.”
“Kenny is a—”
“Kenny’s a good man, and I wouldn’t have a problem with you two being together, but the man’s marriage just dissolved. You need to let the wreckage settle. This isn’t the right time.”
“There’s never a good time,” I said.
“Some times are better than others,” he said. “All I’m saying is, give it some time. It’ll be better if you do.”
He stared at me, and I could see that he was waiting for me to nod, but I couldn’t. “No,” I said. “It’s not like you have some sort of crystal ball, like you know everything’s going to work out nicely in the end. You can’t make me let go of this.” I did my best to look defiant, but Daddy surprised me: he stepped to me and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me tight against his chest. He was warm and smelled like he’d always smelled, a mix of cologne and the sea.
“Oh, honey, I’m not trying to make you let go of this. I’m not trying to make you do anything.” I resisted for a breath, and then I hugged him back. He kissed me on the top of the head and then ran his hand behind my neck and ruffled my hair. “I love you, sweetie. You can wait or you can decide not to wait, whatever you think is right, and whatever you do, I’ll be behind you. You just have to trust me. Things will work out the way they’re meant to. They always do.”
We looked up at the sound of the front door opening. Guppy stood there, leaning halfway out into the night air. “It’s raining,” she said. “You should come inside.”
I let go of Daddy and pointed my finger up at the roof. “We’re on the porch. It keeps the rain off of us.” She raised an eyebrow at me, a trick that she’d recently perfected, and we rewarded her with a laugh and followed her in.
Inside of Rena’s house, all the lights were blazing, and with the heat of the oven and the crush of the whole family, plus Kenny and George and Mackie, and with Trudy and Fifth walking around and sniffing at everything and jumping on each other and surfing for scraps, the house was cozy. Daddy was sweating and complaining about how stuffy it was. He already had his sweater off. Kenny kept fidgeting with his tie; I’d never seen Kenny wearing a tie before, but I could imagine him, in different circumstances, wearing one every day, working in some brightly lit, overwhite office, his suit jacket hung on a coat hook, shirt pressed, shoes shined. He would have been miserable.
I was glad the weather was up, because otherwise I knew that all of us—all of us except Rena, Carly, and George’s wife, Mackie—would have been itching to be on the water. It wasn’t as bad for Tucker. He’d actually gotten some fishing in: he’d only been having to deal with the crappy weather for the last four weeks, which still meant more days on shore than the captain of a new boat was comfortable with, but at least it was something. We had to deal with the weather and the law. We’d been relying on the island fishermen to help pull our traps. With the weather cutting fishing time, and with Timmy’s traps already needing coverage, there was a lot of extra work to go around. The good news was that since we’d found the ghost ship, there hadn’t been any more of those James Harbor buoys in the water. As sure as I was that Oswald Cornwall hadn’t been spending much of his time fishing, our waters had been left alone since he’d taken the bullets through the back of his head. The other good news was that by tomorrow, Timmy and Etsuko were going to be back on the island with my new godson, and the cops of all of the various incarnations seemed to have decided they were done with us.
Daddy finished transferring the turkey to the serving platter and then slid the carving board against the back of the counter. He was sweating enough that he had to wipe his forehead with a paper towel. I watched him throw the paper towel in the trash and then lean against the counter. He looked up to see me staring and frowned at me. I knew I was driving him crazy, but I couldn’t help it. I’d asked him about his fainting in the doctor’s office, and after blustering, and then after being pissed off that George had told me about it at all, he’d made me promise not to tell my sisters. “They’ll just worry.”
Rena clapped her hands. “To the table, everybody.”
Daddy picked the platter of turkey back up and set it in the middle of the table before sitting down next to Carly. Stephanie was sitting on the other side of her, and from the angle of Stephanie’s arm, it looked like her hand was resting on Carly’s leg. I was glad to see it. Stephanie had been quiet since we’d found the ghost boat, shaky on her feet. Daddy said she’d been fine on the Queen Jane the few days they’d been able to get out on the water, but it was clear, at least to me, that the whole incident had put a strain on her. At the head of the table, Tucker reached over and poked a finger in Guppy’s tummy, making her laugh and squirm, and then he let her blow raspberries on his arm. Kenny sat directly across from me, with George and Mackie on his left. Rena, the last one to the table as always, stood behind her chair and then lifted up her wineglass to quiet us.
“A toast, I think, is in order. First of all, to Guppy and Fatty, thank you kindly for setting the table.” Rena put her forearm on the back of her chair and leaned over. She was wearing a dress instead of her usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt, but she hadn’t taken her apron off, and it hung loosely from her neck. I noticed the silver chain she was wearing—a gift from Tucker, I guess. Almost without thinking, I touched my thigh; I’d slipped the pearl necklace from the pocket of Kenny’s coat to the front pocket of my jeans.
Rena stood straight, lifting the glass up so that the straw-coloured wine filtered the light from the kitchen behind her. “Perhaps it’s so obvious that I don’t even need
to say it, but I’m going to say it anyway. I’m thankful that we are all here this year, in light of everything that has happened”—I glanced at Guppy and then Fatty, knowing that neither one of them knew about Oswald Cornwall—“and I don’t want to forget how lucky we are to all be here together. Carly,” she said, and my sister smiled, an openmouthed grin, careless and unguarded, like almost everything about Carly, “it makes me so happy to have my baby sister back home.”
“She’s not a baby,” Guppy said, and we all laughed.
Rena raised her glass up and said, “To family.”
I couldn’t help staring over at Kenny as Rena said it, watching the way he said those words, “To family,” along with us, the way he looked like he believed it. He was looking across at Carly and Stephanie and smiling, and I thought that maybe, despite everything that had happened with Sally, he recognized that there were relationships worth having.
On the island, a mermaid’s kiss is what we call it when a man gets taken out of the water after floating facedown for a couple of days: the delicate bits are all eaten away. Fish get at the soft tissue of the lips, the ears, the eyes, the nose. Bone exposed, flesh torn away and left as flaps and white streaks. In the painting The Mermaid’s Kiss, Brumfitt takes us to the rocks down right near where the wharf is now, where the fishing boats pulled up even back in Brumfitt’s time. The sun glows with a creamy intensity that comes only a few days a year on Loosewood Island; you can almost feel the heat glazing off the sand and the rocks. High enough in the corner that you might not notice them at first, gulls circle greedily above the body. The boy—even if you didn’t know the family history, or that this was Brumfitt’s grandson, the next in the line of Kings boys to be taken by the sea, it is obviously a boy—is tangled up in nets, floating in the shallows. Two men, one old, the other in the prime of his life, stand ankle-deep in the water, hauling at the nets. There seems to be no argument that this is Brumfitt and his only living son.
The Lobster Kings Page 23