On the Same Page

by N. D. Galland

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  * * *

  Everyone called Hank her uncle, but genealogically he was Joanna’s maternal first cousin by marriage. The family made up about a tenth of the Vineyard population, counting third cousins twice removed, ex-aunts-in-law, and half uncles. This had ensured a needed safety net when each of her very young parents, in quick succession, proved insufficient at parenting and each in turn left the Vineyard. (Mother = uppers, father = booze. Both went away to rehab and never returned. Joanna did not blame them; recidivism ran high in small, depressed communities.) The West Tisbury Elementary School had been the only stable thing in her life, and the family members who were paying attention agreed it should remain so, even though both sets of grandparents lived in Edgartown. So after a series of short-term in-family fostering, her mother’s eldest niece Jen (who was actually a few years older than her mother—don’t think too much about this, it was just one of those families) stepped in and announced she was taking care of little Annie. This meant by association, her husband, Hank, would be doing likewise.

  Joanna lived with Jen and Hank until she graduated from high school and continued to make them her home base when she went off to college, and then grad school, and then real life. Jen had died of a brain aneurysm about five years back. That was horrible. Joanna still went home to Hank’s, on those rare occasions she went home at all. Hank and Joanna—both without any immediate family nearby, despite droves of extended kin—adopted each other for life.

  Most people weren’t quite sure how Hank and Joanna were related. Such ad hoc parenting was not strange on the Island, so there was no stigma and only passing, benign curiosity. The folks she grew up with knew that Hank was her somehow-parent and didn’t sweat the details. On the other hand, many friends he’d made since he was widowed had no idea who she was.

  Some of the enemies he’d made, it turned out, didn’t know who she was either.

  CELIA HELPED HER fetch Hank from the hospital. The pickup was too high for him to navigate in and out of, but her Forester was a workable height. He was a little zonked on painkillers as they were transferring him from the wheelchair to the car in the shadow of the hospital’s high front portico that chill afternoon. Mostly, he seemed mortified about being dependent.

  “Well, that’s just great, being taken care of by a couple of girls,” he said to the nurse overseeing his discharge. She was one of those Joanna had gone to school with.

  “We’re in our thirties,” said Celia.

  “You’ll always be girls to me,” he said. “Is that the title of a song? That would make a terrific song title.”

  “Can’t think of it,” Joanna said shortly, hitching him over her shoulder as she helped him transfer to the passenger seat.

  “I think it should be a song,” he said, dreamy and cheerful. “Anna, you’re a writer, write a song about that.”

  “About a senior citizen who calls grown women girls? Who would the audience be for that, do you think?” she said, securing the seat belt across his belly.

  “Come on, kiddo,” said Celia, grinning. “Give him a break. He’s drunk on morphine.”

  “That’s right,” said Hank happily. “I’m drunk on morphine. You could write a song about that too. Has anyone ever written a song about being drunk on morphine?”

  His smile was so dopey, Joanna smiled back. “I’m not a songwriter,” she said.

  “Well, maybe you should be,” he said. “Y’know, Carly Simon didn’t write most of the songs she got famous for singing, did you know that? Other people wrote them. You haven’t heard of those people, but they made a lot of money too. Hey, it’s cold out here! Maybe if you wrote songs . . .”

  “I’m terrible at rhyming,” she said, adjusting the seat belt for him.

  “Not every song has to rhyme,” Hank argued in a dreamy tone. “Is there a rule saying that a song has to rhyme? I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, fine, I’ll write some songs,” she said irritably, and closed the door. She could hear Celia laughing at them.

  She rode in the backseat, holding Hank’s bag of medications, instructions for care, and the remains of the clothes he had been wearing when he’d toppled off the roof. She’d brought him clean jeans and a flannel shirt to wear. At least, she hoped they were clean, since they’d been folded in a drawer of his dresser, rather than on the floor or his bedside chair, like 90 percent of his wardrobe.

  Celia drove them up the wooded turns of Lambert’s Cove, and then the muddy trenches of their driveway, with dispatch. With some effort, they toted Hank into the house, where they parked him on the sofa with a small table to keep drinks and food and the TV remote. They did a spot check of accessibility—towels, pillows, snacks, cups. The cats were fascinated and horrified, and then bored. Most of the first week, Joanna would be playing nursemaid, but they both assumed he’d find some way to get into trouble, so at least if things were close at hand, he wouldn’t try to wander about too much.

  Once he was settled, Celia, in layers of paisley sweaters, all of which celebrated her cleavage, sat herself down on the coffee table to be level with him. “Okay, now, Hank,” she said, cheery. She reached into the pocket of her outermost sweater and pulled out an amber bottle with a rubber top. “This is a tincture of valerian.”

  “Valerian?” he hooted. “What’s that?” An impish grin, made grotesque by the bruises. “Is it a magic potion?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “It’ll help you sleep. Once the morphine’s out of your system, you might get agitated. This will help you calm down. If you start getting antsy, it will take the edge off.”

  “That’s great, I need to take the edge off!” he said, and examined the bottle, squinting slightly. “Thanks. Valerian. That’s cool.” He glanced back up at her. “You sure it’s not some kind of Game of Thrones potion?” And he giggled.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Joanna called Brian to update him (“So you’re telling me we’re still in limbo? That’s not actually news, sweetheart, we were already in limbo”) and then began her dual vocation as Hank-minder and Journal pinch hitter. That first week, she wrote (particularly badly) about an intramural junior high basketball game, and also (not quite so badly, but nothing to crow about) an issue with the transfer station—that is, the dump—in Edgartown. She wrote a profile of a new minister coming in to the UU church, which let her trot out her interviewing skills. She tossed off a review of Yellow Satin at the Film Center, because the usual reviewer hadn’t had a chance to view it, and she’d seen it on the mainland hours before she got Celia’s call about Hank.

  When she drew up her invoice for the Journal, she realized if she made that amount per week, then by the following month she either would be living on her savings or losing her apartment. Jobs of any sort were scant in a summer resort in mid-January. If she had been a mental health worker, they’d have lassoed her into service at Community Services. Otherwise, slim pickings. Anyhow, she wasn’t going to be staying here, she was going back to New York to almost-certainly-not-break-up with Brian.

  “I’m going to need to freelance for the Newes as well,” she informed Everett after attending her first editorial staff meeting. She said it in a stage whisper, since they were in his office and the door was never closed.

  “They won’t use you,” he said immediately.

  “Well, I’m going to ask anyhow.”

  He grimaced. “So try. I can’t stop you, but I don’t like it.”

  “I know that. I’m sorry, I wouldn’t do it if I could see some other way.”

  He gave her a sternly avuncular look. “You have to promise me you will not take ideas I’ve thrown at you, and write them for the Newes. Or use sources that you generated while you were here.”

  “No, of course not! I’ll write as much as I can for you, the more the better. It’s just, if there’s not enough . . .”

  He shrugged, and settled back in his chair. “Anyhow, they won’t use you.”

  “Re
member I used to write for them? In high school?”

  “Of course I remember that, I was your boss,” he said. “You did the restaurant reviews. Before we realized that doing restaurant reviews was a stupid idea because the restaurants stopped advertising if they didn’t like what you said about them.”

  “So I’m still in their system, right? The bookkeeping system or whatever?”

  He shrugged and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk and fiddling with his amber plastic reading glasses. “That was fifteen or twenty years ago, and I haven’t worked there for more than a decade, so I have no idea. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter—if you’ve got a byline in this paper, they won’t hire you to write for them. But I’ve got another assignment for you, if you need cash.”

  “You know I do.”

  “There’s a big ZBA meeting tonight in West Tisbury. Cover it for us.”

  She grimaced. Hank had served on nearly every board in town—appointed or elected—but the Zoning Board of Appeals was his recurrent favorite because—Joanna felt—it allowed him to play petty dictator, allowing or forbidding deviations from the established old-school norm. It was an appointed post, so he tended to cycle in and out at regular intervals, leaving the impression that he had been on the board unceasingly since 1972. Therefore, she knew a little about how the ZBA worked, not because she read the paper but because, with her aunt Jen, she’d had to listen to him vent after each meeting, and then help Jen calm him down. But that had been a child’s-eye view, intrinsically associated with the tone of sarcasm and the smell of beer.

  “I have no idea how to cover a ZBA meeting. Can I just take notes?”

  “Anna. No. You’re not a stenographer.”

  “All that bureaucratic legalistic language wrecks my head. I will screw something up.”

  “Look holistically at what you learn, and decide what the story is, and tell us why we should care. Okay? Make it lively and brisk and informal. And, eh . . .” Seeing her anxiety not diminishing, he plunged ahead with a Country Journalism Lecture: “Remember it ain’t the New York Times. You don’t need to impress upon the reader how smart or important you are. You want to come across as familiar with things—geography, people, political situations—”

  “I know squat about the political situation, Everett, that’s the—”

  “So take your best shot at figuring out what matters,” he said. “But don’t listen to them—the ZBA officers, I mean. We don’t care what they find interesting. We care about what our readers find interesting. Show it to me, I’ll do a heavy edit so you can see what to emphasize going forward. Okay? You’ll get the hang of it. We’ll be leading with the helicopter.”

  “See that’s what I mean—what helicopter? I’m going into this blind.”

  “Look it up in the archives. Rich summer guy wants to use a helicopter as a personal shuttle right from his property. Which by the way is next to Beechwood Point, protected wetlands. The building inspector gave him a cease and desist right after Christmas and he ignored it. He sent an appeal to the ZBA, wants a variance.”

  “What’s a variance?”

  He looked dismayed. “Did you or did you not grow up under Hank Holmes’s roof? It’s, you know, a variance. He appealed back at the start of the month so, in case you really don’t remember growing up under Hank Holmes’s roof, the ZBA advertised a public hearing for tonight. That starts at five fifteen at the Town Hall, and after the hearing, they’ll vote on the appeal. Don’t look like a deer in the headlights, Anna, just sit with the Newes guy—James Sherman, I think it’s his beat. ’Kay?”

  “Eh . . . but . . . isn’t James the enemy? Aren’t we supposed to hate him?”

  Everett looked curiously at her. “Well, if you want to get technical, yes, but you used to work alongside him, so just give him a nice smile and I’m sure he won’t hurt you. The Newes team is the genteel one, it wouldn’t be like one of them to get nasty.”

  “So nasty is our job?”

  “Nah, but we’re a little scrappier.”

  “Roger,” she said.

  “So, write something up, and I’ll edit it, and then you’ll know what you’re doing. Got it?”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “And be confident about it. Remember: the reporter is always in control because he gets to have the final word.”

  SHE LEFT THE Journal office early so that she could tend to Hank before heading out again for the ZBA meeting. The vague shadows were already lengthening, the roads beginning to darken even without a canopy of leaves to darken them. Already she was bored with how bleak and gray everything was here this time of year. The English language lacked variants enough for the word gray. Leaden, gloomy, somber, dull, steel, ashen, grim, cloudy, overcast, dismal. Only, if you put them all together it created the impression of a riot of colorlessness, something decadent in its own right, like the English moors or a storm at sea. The gray of a Vineyard winter did not deserve such a comparison. It hadn’t as much energy. You’d have to take just one word at a time and slowly, slowly, dribble each one, solitary, across the whole of a week, or a month, or a season.

  That’s what she was, once again, driving home through. And home was barely more welcoming. Hank was mellower than the worst of her childhood five o’clock memories of him, because he was on painkillers. But he was not a good patient.

  She felt for him. He had been a “strapping youth,” once, and the best kind of Yankee—a blue-collar Renaissance man, jack-of-all-trades and master of whichever one he happened to be doing at the moment. Fisherman, carpenter, lumberjack, part-time inventor and entrepreneur, farmer, back to being a fisherman, maker of artisanal objets d’art repurposed from found objects. His hands were excellent for practical things, like welding and sanding and gutting fish and shucking oysters. Things it was hard to do while doped, lying horizontally for twenty hours of the day with a leg propped up on pillows.

  Joanna came in, greeted him, and turned the flame on high beneath the smallest pot on the stove, which had just enough water to fill a thermos with tea. The thermos had been her big expenditure since landing here.

  “And what gossip has Everett assigned to you this week?” he asked, as she was turning on the oven. That oven needed cleaning badly, like everything else in the house. He’d been a widower for five years now, and the scruff was becoming entrenched. Even the cats, who had been Jen’s more than his, were growing scruffy.

  “I’m covering the ZBA meeting tonight,” she said, pulling the remains of a turkey lasagna out of the refrigerator and thinking—fleetingly—about the chicken bastilla Brian was headed for at a friend’s dinner party. The weight of the casserole dish had been stabilizing a jar of pickled mushrooms and a large block of cheese, and both required some assistance to keep from tumbling. She missed her organized, clean, nearly empty mini-fridge in Queens.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said. “The helicopter pad’s on the docket, isn’t it?” His voice was dripping with distaste. “Helen mentioned it. You don’t even need to go, I can tell you right now they’re going to reject it. As they should. Those damn summer people and their outrageous sense of entitlement.”

  “Everett said you know the guy who—”

  Hank laughed. “Smith. Yeah. We’ve been . . . introduced. We’ve exchanged a few words in public. I have given him plenty of reasons not to like me very much.” He sounded pleased about this.

  “How unusual for you,” she said.

  Hank laughed the inelegant but sly guffaw that made him lovable, no matter how truculent he was.

  “So you either get a super-early dinner or you wait until I’m back,” she said, returning to point.

  “It’ll take five minutes,” said Hank. “I’ll wait until you’re back. Eating alone with myself is even more depressing than eating alone with you.”

  “Wow, high praise,” she said. She turned the oven off, picked up the lasagna again.

  “That came out wrong,” he said, more amused than apologetic.

  She opened
the door to the fridge and tried to sort out how to fit the lasagna back in given the new configuration. “Do you want anything to hold you over until I get back?”

  “I could use a beer,” he said.

  “How about something solid.” She rested the dish as best she could on a bag of wan-looking romaine lettuce, closed the door, and returned to the stove.

  “If I had a rock I could throw it at the television.”

  “I’ll take that as a no,” she said, tossing a tea bag into the thermos and carefully pouring in the water. “Hey, I saw some honey in the pantry, I’m going to open—”

  “Don’t open that!” he said vehemently, glancing back over his shoulder at her. “Don’t touch it. That’s a special gift. That’s from Paul’s first hive. It’s local and unfiltered and very special. It has the honeycomb still in it.” He returned his attention to the television.

  “Are you saving it for a special occasion?” she asked. “The jar is so covered in dust, you can hardly see the contents.”

  “Honey doesn’t spoil,” he said, in a defensive tone, as if to the television.

  “I know that, but it’s not like it improves with age either,” she said. “What are you saving it for?”

  “It doesn’t matter, I don’t want you to open it.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Is there any other honey in the house?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t like honey.”

  “Then why are you holding on to that honey?” she demanded, trying to tamp down her exasperation.

  “Because it’s mine,” he said. “But tell you what, I’ll leave it to you in my will.”

  “Oh my God,” she muttered, screwing the top on the thermos. “I’ll just buy a jar from Paul.”

  “He doesn’t sell it commercially,” said Hank.

  “Then I’ll ask him for a jar,” Joanna said.

  “The bees aren’t producing any honey this time of year,” he said triumphantly.

  “But honey doesn’t spoil,” she said, imitating his tone. “He can give me some from the same batch as the stuff that is gathering cobwebs in our pantry. Then you can have your honey and I can have my honey and we will label them and nobody touches each other’s honey, and we’ll all be happy, okay?” she said, more exasperated than she wanted to be. Senior citizen, she rebuked herself. Broken leg.