Sounds good, she typed to Orion, then shoved the phone into her back pocket and followed Hank.
“Wait for me,” she said. “After I dropped you off I could only find parking in the dirt lot. That’s too far for you to walk on crutches with everything frozen.” He made an indistinct noise and kept walking. As she hurried down the hallway after him, wishing she could be elsewhere, she wondered what she would make for the supper. It had to travel well, but mostly she wanted to impress Orion. Puerile, but still true. Sea scallops? Expensive. Cod? Cod fell apart too easily, hard to make an attractive dish. Maybe mussels. Sloppy to carry, or had to be cooked there. Oysters. Yes, oysters!
It was unsavory, how satisfying she found it to contemplate dinner with Orion nearly under Hank’s nose. The irony was not deliberate, but it certainly was tantalizing.
And if Orion also got oysters? And made some incredibly sophisticated dish? She had to one-up him somehow.
Actually, that would be easy.
* * *
The dirt road to Orion’s was treacherous from the slush and the peanut-buttery mud lurking beneath it. But it was worth the odyssey: Orion made Oysters Rockefeller. The aroma of the bacon made her mouth water before she was entirely inside his house. She gave him a small smile and planted her canvas grocery bag on the granite counter.
“Welcome,” he said. “Sure I can’t tempt you?”
“You’re already tempting me, I’m just not succumbing,” she said.
“It’s all geographically correct,” he boasted, gesturing to the exquisitely assembled meal, resting in a Williams Sonoma dish designed exclusively for baking oysters. She recalled Hank once fashioning something similar out of a bunch of wired-together glass butter trays. Or something. “The oysters are from the Edgartown Great Pond, the bacon’s from Tisbury, and all the veggies are defrosted from my chef’s kitchen garden harvest.”
“Smells lovely,” she admitted.
“Oysters were harvested this afternoon,” he added.
“So were these,” she said, shrugging out of her coat. “I went at low tide.”
He paused a tick, and then returned to fussing over his dish.
“Nicely done,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said, offhandedly. She reached into her back pocket for the shucking knife, waving it in his direction. “You don’t mind, do you? I can open them over the sink.”
He smirked. “Okay, you win,” he said. “The laurel wreath for Authentically Local goes to Anna Howes.”
Her leather shucking gloves were on the top of the heap; she put them on, then grabbed an oyster. She cupped the rounded side in her palm and pushed the tip of the knife into the hinge, running it up and around the edge of the shell and forcing it open. Oysters don’t pry open easily.
“You do that like a pro,” he said, in an almost reverential voice. “I’m a gentleman and intend to remain one but I have to tell you—it’s kinda sexy.”
She laughed and held up one gloved hand. “Sexy as Shackleton,” she said.
“Seeing somebody do something with dexterity—” he pressed.
“Oh, well, if you think this is sexy, you should get a load of my uncle,” she said, before realizing how foolhardy it was to mention that uncle. So she just kept talking. “You’d hardly be able to contain yourself.”
“You know what I mean,” he said.
“Where should I put the shells?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“I’ll take them home, then,” she said. “Chickens can have them.”
Since she was eating her oysters raw, they were able to sit down together at the dining table a few minutes later, with their respective Crassostrea virginica dinners. She eyed his, envying that it was a warm dish. He eyed hers as she squeezed a bit of lemon on each one. She pretended he wasn’t watching, and brought the first oyster to her lips, sucking it into her mouth and swallowing it nearly whole. He watched her without even raising his fork.
“No wonder they’re considered an aphrodisiac,” Orion said, sounding almost pained. His face was pinker than she’d ever seen it. “I could watch that all evening.”
Her stomach flip-flopped. “Ha! Can’t be that much of an aphrodisiac if you’re happy just to watch.”
He grinned, laughed a little. “I’m not sure if you’re combative, or just competitive. You never just accept anything I say, you always have a retort. Do you realize you do that?”
“We both do that. It’s not just me.”
“You’re almost the only person who does it with me, though.”
“Well, that’s a remarkable coincidence,” she said, “because you’re almost the only person who does it with me too.” Along with Henry Holmes, she did not add.
“So . . .” he considered. “It’s kind of special, then, our little banter. Right?”
She shrugged. “Kind of.” She picked up another oyster and brought it to her mouth with a flourish. “Hey. Watch this. This’ll be more special than banter.”
“You little siren,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m determined to keep this aboveboard, and shall therefore avert my gaze.” He turned his face away but then immediately turned it back. “Eventually, I mean.”
“It’s fun to watch, isn’t it?” she said slyly.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, ma’am. So. Ahem. To keep this budding friendship on its current platonic flight path, and since you’re the expert and I’ve never thought about it, tell me: how does one get an oyster?”
“They’re so easy,” she said. “They don’t burrow or anything, they find a rock or a shell right on the floor of the pond and grow in clumps. All you need are waders and a basket, really—maybe a rake, but if you go at low tide you can just reach down and grab ’em off the bottom. It’s ironic they’re considered such a delicacy; clams are harder to harvest. Maybe it’s like lobsters—they got overfished at one point and were basically extinct up here, so suddenly that made them a commodity. And they’re a little harder to shuck than, say, scallops. But otherwise they practically grow in your lap.”
“That’s not fair, you can’t do that. This evening is supposed to be chitchat and repartee. You can’t talk about oysters and your lap in the same sentence. Not unless you intend to seduce me.”
“I can’t seduce you. I’m still trying to research you,” she said quickly. It was pleasing to have his attention, though. She began to stack the slick oyster shells unsteadily, one atop the next on the plate.
“Those two objectives need not be unrelated—seduction and research.”
“I’m really not an expert on seduction,” she said in mock apology. “And I’m only getting to know you because I want to write about you for the paper.”
He laughed. “I don’t believe that for a moment!” he said. “You want a piece of me. All the locals do.”
She had not seen that coming. “Wow, that’s arrogant,” she said, and paused from her shell stacking. “Or condescending. Which?”
“Neither,” he said. “I just mean it’s a cause-and-effect thing. I have money, I have resources, and people hope I’ll do something with it to their benefit. My background made it impossible not to be aware of that. It very nearly defined my grandparents’ relationship to everything.”
“Oh, you poor child,” she said. “How tediously first-world that must have been for you.”
“I’m not judging anyone for it, it’s only human—”
“That’s very big of you—”
“—and so I would like to not be judged, in turn!” he said, so sharply it shocked her. “The having of money does not make me evil, it does not make me selfish, it does not make me indifferent to other people’s needs. Don’t treat me that way. That’s for the fucking Henry Holmeses of the world to do!”
The buoyant music of Django Reinhardt erupted from her back pocket. Hurriedly she wiped her oyster-dampened fingers on her napkin, then pulled out the phone and saw the call was from Hank.
“Sorry,” she said, flustered. “E
xcuse me.” She pivoted away from Orion on the stool, as if he would be able to recognize Hank’s voice if she were facing him. Then she answered and said, “You okay?” in lieu of greeting.
A brief pause. “Probably,” he said grudgingly, which meant he probably wasn’t.
“I’ll be right there,” she said. “Don’t move.” She hung up and looked dolefully at Orion. “I’m sorry, this is a family emergency.”
He nodded gruffly. “Hope it’s nothing serious. Go on. Sorry about the rant.” A small grin. “Need a helicopter ride to the hospital?”
“Ha,” she said, getting up and reaching for her coat.
* * *
“He had a fever,” said the ER doctor, who looked younger than Joanna, which did not reassure her. “But it’s going down now. And he was dehydrated, so we’ve given him fluids, and started him on intravenous antibiotics.”
“Intravenous?” She might have winced. “That sounds serious.”
He waved his hand reassuringly. And it might have reassured her if he hadn’t been younger than she. “It’s just to get his blood levels up—a sort of launch event for his immune system. We worked up the fever, did a blood culture—”
“It’s his leg,” she said, wondering if he were too young to have studied anatomy. “It’s his ankle.”
A nod. “Of course it is, but we wanted to be sure there was nothing else going on. He needs to follow up immediately with his orthopedic doctor. We’ll keep him for another hour or so for observation and then if things continue to improve, we’ll send him home with a scrip for oral antibiotics. He really needs to stay quiet with his leg elevated until he can be seen. Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing too much of it.”
She nodded, feeling hapless. He patted her arm, reassuringly, and left.
She looked at the clock on the ER wall. 2:30 A.M. Too late to call Brian. But she could text.
Have to stay longer because Hank has gotten worse
Ten minutes later, a response.
Sorry to hear it, LMK what happens.
And ten minutes after that:
Really hope things are okay. Thinking of you and your family. Give me an update when you can . . .
That was from Orion.
* * *
The next morning, while still curled up under the musty woolen blankets of her childhood bedroom with a cat purring at her feet, she left an urgent message for the orthopedic doctor asking for an appointment. She left Hank’s landline as the callback number, since he had recently accused her of trying to take all control away from him. So she made a mental note to check the answering machine hourly. Then she pried herself out of bed, wrapped herself in a flannel bathrobe from tenth grade she’d found in her closet, and hurriedly made a fire in the woodstove to take the stale damp out of the air. When it was warm enough to remove layers without her teeth chattering, she got dressed. She put on her good boots, the suede ones she’d worn home from the city, now ringed white from salt. Arranged her hair more carefully than usual. Put on blush and eyeliner. She looked almost like her New York self as she strode into Everett’s monastic office twenty minutes later, triumphant from having traversed ice patches in the parking lot without slipping in her city boots.
“Armed for battle,” he said, eyeing the war paint. “I assume you have something to say that I won’t want to hear. Let me guess. You’re going back to America.”
“No,” she said, although that now seemed like an attractive option. “I need to speak to you off the record about a potential conflict of interest.”
He sighed patiently. “Anna, I already said we’ll make it work. We have to make certain allowances for how tight the gene pool is here. And you’re only reporting facts, you’re not doing features or—”
“Not Hank,” she said. “The other guy.”
“What other guy?”
She grimaced, blinking stupidly. She couldn’t get it out.
The penny dropped. “Smith?” Everett blinked stupidly too. “What’s the connection with Smith?”
“He thinks I’m cute.”
Avuncular delight. “Fantastic! Use it.”
“I might be starting to think he’s sort of cute too.”
He looked amazed. “I did not see that one coming. Doesn’t seem your type.”
“He’s not, but he’s working on it.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, stared at his bare desk a moment, and then looked up at her. “Moment of truth, Anna,” he said. “Can you separate your work from your personal life?”
She took a breath. Moment of truth. Yes. “I believe I can,” she said. “Just like you said about Hank—I’m reporting facts, I’m not doing feature articles or editorializing. There’s no reason for my personal opinion of him to appear in my reporting. But I wanted to mention it now, in case the objective bit doesn’t pan out.”
He stared at her for a long, level moment, his ginger-toned terrier eyebrows puckering. “I’m trusting you,” he finally said. “I’m trusting you because you told me.”
“Thank you, I don’t take that lightly,” she said. “And if I start to feel that the situation is getting in the way of my doing my job with integrity, I will let you know right away.”
“All right,” he said after a moment. He gave her a mischievous grin. “Never took you for a gold-digger.”
“Everett,” she said affectionately, “fuck off.”
* * *
Dear Brian
I think
Dear Brian
I wish
Dear Brian
You are
“HEY,” BRIAN SAID, when she called him that afternoon, huddled in her heaviest coat outside the Journal office. “I was just thinking of calling you.”
“We need some clarity on what our status really is until we get to have The Talk,” she said, trying not to rush, and realizing she was perhaps being rude by not having said hello first.
“Right,” he said. “You found someone.”
“No!” she said, too quickly. She squinted into the sun, and pushed back against the old gray shingles. She took in a deep breath scented with creosote and seawater, and was comforted by it as others might be comforted by their mother’s perfume. The frozen slush from earlier in the week had sand and clay so mushed into it that the ground looked like gritty caramel taffy. “I just want to know what’s appropriate if I do find someone.”
“On the Vineyard in March? From what you’ve said about that place in March, I think the most appropriate thing might be genetic testing.”
She said nothing. He chuckled gently.
“Okay,” he said. “I get it. It’s not a guy. It’s a place. You want to have a monogamous live-in relationship with a place, despite all the stuff you hate about it.”
She stared out over the quiet harbor. Hmm. “I didn’t realize that’s what I was asking for.”
“I did. I want a monogamous live-in relationship with Manhattan, so I get it.”
“. . . Thanks,” she said. The harbor was suddenly mesmerizing, perhaps because she didn’t want to focus on the phone call. A handful of the larger sailboats were at their moorings, but most of the inner harbor was empty, snug behind the long protecting rock jetty. In the summer, every mooring had a boat, and there were ad hoc moorings in the outer harbor too—out beyond the jetty, but still sheltered between the two chops. It was the marine equivalent of a ghost town now.
“I think you’re making a bad choice, but I respect your right to make it,” Brian was saying. “When you realize the folly of your ways, Manhattan will be big enough to take you back. I’ll probably start dating again, though.”
“Heard that before,” she said, trying to make a joke of it. This time, probably, he really would.
HANK’S FEVER WENT down. A little. Not enough for her to relax about it, and his ankle was still inflamed. He contended he was fine and let her know “casually” after the fact that he had informed the doctor of this when the doctor returned her call on the landline. He would not be calling t
he doctor again. Because he was fine. The proof was that he could still beat her at Scrabble. He had come apart the other night and called her during a weak moment, but he would not make that mistake again, not now that he saw how susceptible she was to overreacting.
Orion texted to see how things were.
I’m going to be busy with family things for a few days, she said.
Keep in touch when you can, he texted back. Hope it’s all okay.
From Brian, she heard nothing further.
Celia and Joanna walked Celia’s dog on raw, unsheltered North Shore beaches. Long barrows of eelgrass flanked the shore like soggy black fettuccine and the shifting tides had exposed ten thousand rocks on a beach that had been smoothly sand just two months earlier. “How metaphorical,” she said to Celia. “You can never tell when things will suddenly get rocky.”
Celia stared at her a moment, then burst out laughing. “That’s what you have to show for your English degree?”
They also saw a few movies. Made gleeful idiots of themselves bowling in Oak Bluffs. She took her first yoga class in three years, in a cedar-lined up-Island studio in the woods. Joey Dias began a series called “Librarians of Martha’s Vineyard” for the Newes, which was on the same page as a story about the first microfilm reader coming to the Edgartown Library in the early 1960s. For the Journal, Anna Howes wrote up a piece about the annual Martha’s Vineyard Chili Fest and the money it raised for the Red Stocking Fund. The Chili Fest had been around about as long as she had been alive, but it was immeasurably bigger than in her childhood and almost convinced her the Vineyard had off-season nightlife. Hank continued to pretend he was fine, despite his demeanor seeping into even his most public moments.
Moments she was now paid to describe to Journal readers.
West Tisbury Will Let the River Run, by Anna Howes
After nearly 100 years of sitting silent, the Look Farm will once again operate a grist mill, thanks to a variance granted by the West Tisbury Zoning Board of Appeals. The variance will allow light industrial use in the residential/agricultural zone. The proposal allowed the addition of a culvert to a stretch of Beechtree Brook within the farm bounds, to power a small hydroelectric mill. The hotly contested issue was passed three votes to one, with newly appointed Board Chairman Henry Holmes dissenting.
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