On the Same Page

by N. D. Galland

  “Despite Chairman Holmes’ obstructionist inclinations, this is a win for the traditional character of the town,” said BOS chairman Bernie Burt, who attended the meeting as an audience member. “The farm has been in the family for generations, and for more than a century, a small mill was operational on this site. We have that in the historical record.” The mill fell into disuse in the 1920s, when the original culvert carrying water from the stream was broken during a botched Prohibition raid on a nearby still. The culvert fell into disrepair and was destroyed by Hurricane Carol in 1954.

  “The stream has a stronger current than it did a century ago,” says jubilant property owner Lucy Look-Dawson. “There’s higher water volume—that means we can divert some of the flow but keep most of the stream undisturbed. This is the best possible outcome. We’re thrilled.” The Conservation Commission and DEP had previously reviewed the project, issuing an Order of Conditions. Both groups will continue to monitor the situation as the culvert is being rebuilt, to ensure that no damage will be done to the surrounding area, and to ensure that the plan is built to approved specs.

  Lone dissenting officer Henry Holmes argued: “Moving water around constitutes trespassing. . . . If other properties have water rights to that stream, then diverting the water is actually theft.”

  To which Ms. Look-Dawson replied, placing a two-inch pile of correspondence on the table before Mr. Holmes, “All of the abutters are in support of this. We want to power the mill mostly so that school kids can come and see how to grind flour. We’re working with the Heritage Grain Project and Whole Loaf Bakehouse to develop a grain-to-table project that will make sure the local kids understand how bread is made, and encourage their families to buy from local farmers.”

  While the other three members of the ZBA commended the project, Mr. Holmes continued to balk, saying, “The culvert is within the setback zone, where construction isn’t allowed.”

  “It isn’t construction,” commented Mr. Burt. “It’s a pipe . . .”

  * * *

  Nice article, said Orion’s text. You get brownie points for mentioning Henry Holmes’ obstreperousness.

  “Did you really need to include the quote about water theft? Jesus,” complained Hank, dozy on pain meds and beer.

  PS: Stop trying to get yourself kicked off the ZBA beat, said Everett in an email.

  HANK SHOUTED WITH pain in the middle of the night. The orthopedic doctor had warned Joanna to be vigilant—especially after Hank had canceled his follow-up appointment—and Celia had swapped vehicles with her in anticipation of things getting worse. They were worse.

  Somehow, between his crutches and the hay cart, Joanna got Hank safely over the icy ground and shoehorned him into the Forester. His ankle was so swollen it pushed over the edge of the boot like a cupcake top, and each breath sounded like he was about to break into Gregorian chant. His breath had the sickly-sweet stench of rotting meat. When she put her hand to his brow, he was very hot and her palm came away damp. The route to the hospital had never seemed so long, even breaking the speed limit the whole way on the dark empty roads.

  She had to wait an agonizing hour in the empty ER waiting room before anybody would tell her anything. At 3 A.M., a soft-spoken Jamaican nurse called her into the hallway to explain that Hank had osteomyelitis. Infection of the bone.

  “I didn’t know bone could get infected,” she said weakly.

  “They are going to have to drain the wound,” he said. “And that means opening it up and possibly removing all the metal that is in there, because the metal causes a reaction—you know, there is a foreign body in the wound and the body doesn’t like that.”

  “So . . . so what does that mean?” she asked.

  “He’s back on intravenous antibiotics right now, and we need to keep him here for a day or two to monitor him, make sure the antibiotics are working and that he doesn’t get sepsis.” She just stared. “As soon as it’s drained and the swelling has gone down, sometime tomorrow, the orthopedist can immobilize the injury with external fixation. Like a cast, or a surgical sleeve,” he added, seeing her confusion. “And then you may take him home.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then it’s just as if you’re resetting his recovery back to day one. But hopefully it will all go smoothly now.” And he smiled reassuringly.

  Reassuring smiles were a dime a dozen in that ER.

  IV

  April

  JOANNA SPENT THAT DAY AND THE NEXT TRYING TO DISTRACT herself. First with a thorough cleaning and airing of Hank’s bedroom and his corner of the bathroom, which the cats protested raucously. Then by contemplating the immense project of tidying up all the junk in the yard, but it was too muddy. March on the Vineyard equaled mud, and it was only the first of April. Instead of tackling the yard, she baked piles of food to get them through the next few weeks—casseroles, lasagna, chowder.

  Hank came home after forty-eight hours in the ICU. His swollen, angry shin and ankle were now exposed and haloed by a sinister-looking bit of metal scaffolding, a sort of open-air Death Star/Erector Set mash-up. It took up more room than the boot had, making locomotion even clunkier and more cumbersome. He was furious at fate, and trying not to act furious at Joanna. Or at the patient home health aides who once again paraded through. She trimmed her schedule to be at home more often, as when she’d first arrived.

  Orion texted her in the middle of that Thursday morning edit meeting at the Journal while Everett was crowing about the pinkletinks.

  Each spring, the two papers competed, compulsively, to report the first pinkletinks. This year, a plumber had heard the shrill chorus of spring peepers—as pinkletinks were called off-Island—on his way out of a client’s house off Lambert’s Cove Road. Being nonpartisan, he had informed both of the papers, and both had immediately posted it online. But the Journal came out the day before the Newes, so the Journal got to herald the good news in print: It’s spring! You read it here first! Everett, with close-lipped grin and terrier eyebrows raised high, was triumphant.

  Hope things are better with the family emergency . . . and if so . . . dinner? Tonight?

  Her happily partnered friends in New York always warned her that saying yes to a spontaneous dinner was a terrible idea. But she wasn’t in New York, and she was not enthusiastic about sharing reheated casserole with Hank while he sniped yet again about that asshole Orion Smith and then insisted upon using a Sam Adams lager to fortify the effect of his pain meds. She texted back under the table.

  Will meet you but will bring my own food again.

  Almost immediately, Django Reinhardt’s music began to play between her hands. All eyes at the table jerked in her direction. Reddening, she slid the ringer volume to mute and stared very deliberately in Everett’s direction to demonstrate that she was not distracted. “. . . because when the shadbush blooms, that means the shad are running,” he was explaining.

  “Actually I don’t think that’s true anymore, because of climate change,” said petite Sarah.

  “I saw some in bloom,” said Rosie, the Goth reporter with runic tattoos. “So I guess we could get a shot of that.” She did not sound enthusiastic. Joanna could almost hear her thoughts: This isn’t our thing. This is the Newes’ thing. Are we so pathetically short on real reporters that we have to write about flowering shrubs instead of issues?

  Under the table, Joanna felt the phone shudder slightly between her hands: a voice mail message. After a brief discussion about how heroically the herring were running, the edit meeting ended and she was able to huddle in a corner and check the message.

  “I know you don’t want to accept a gift from me, but I would love to cook you my grandmother’s favorite recipe. Baked scallops with mushroom and cheese. Doesn’t that sound delicious?”

  She pulled her coat on and stepped outside into the sunshine, shielding herself from the harbor breeze behind the scraggly yellow of a forsythia bush. “Baked scallops with mushrooms is my favorite food group,” she said into the
phone, as soon as he answered.

  “So come eat them,” he cajoled.

  She considered this as she watched a trio of seagulls circle, arguing, over Beach Road. “How about I pay you for the value of my share of the dinner. That way it’s like we’re going Dutch.”

  “All right.” He chuckled. “I’ll even give you a bill. It can be a business expense.”

  That evening she heated up a slab of tuna casserole for Hank, played a game of Scrabble with him while he ate it, and helped him to get into bed. He did not ask where she was off to. He was too dampened. It was early, but he was supposed to be horizontal most of the time anyhow. The narcotic painkillers meant he’d lost the Scrabble game, but also that he did not mind much.

  She arrived at Orion’s to a kitchen so full of tantalizing scents she felt she could almost recline against the aroma. “Four more minutes till it’s out of the oven,” he said, pacing slowly before the stove. “Exactly long enough to mix you a Manhattan.” He headed toward the smaller pantry.

  “Just a glass of wine,” she said. “Add it to my tab.”

  “Yes, so about that tab,” he said, rerouting toward a small refrigerator that sat on the counter beside the regular icebox. “What were you planning to pay?” He opened the door of the smaller icebox and pulled out a bottle of white wine.

  She improvised. “A dinner like that would run about thirty bucks at a respectable restaurant. With the wine, let’s call it forty.”

  “We don’t eat at the same restaurants,” he said. “I was thinking something closer to a hundred, and that’s just for what’s on the menu.” He opened a drawer near the stove, which moved silently on its expensive runners, and retrieved a bottle opener. “When you consider the added artisanal value of an heirloom recipe . . . I think we’re talking more like two hundred.”

  “Well, nice seeing you,” she said, reaching for her coat.

  He grabbed her arm with his free hand. “Wait, now,” he said, soothingly. “You don’t have to pay in currency.”

  “We agreed—”

  “Oh, you have to pay,” he said, with a sly smile. “But not in cash.”

  For one dizzy moment she thought he was pulling a Fifty Shades of Grey. And she felt something inside her clench as she admitted to herself that yes, she would allow that.

  “You are transparent, Anna,” he said, releasing her. He turned his attention to opening the wine bottle. “I don’t mean anything indecent. I mean you can pay me back some other way. I would consider it fair payment for you to tell me some stories.”

  “. . . what?” she said. Erotic stories? she hoped.

  He gestured vaguely around. “This whole area. Before I settled in. How you used to picnic here, and all that. Give me a child’s-eye view of the North Shore, of West Tisbury, of the Vineyard for year-rounders.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded, twisting the corkscrew in deep. “Absolutely. I want to learn from the natives.”

  “Mmmm . . . a typical Vineyard childhood is notably lacking in misadventures,” she said. “Winter’s mostly frozen mud and spring’s a lot of thawing mud. That’s when skunks come out of hibernation and the ticks start looking for blood meals.”

  “If you’re attempting to disenchant me, you’ll have to try harder than that.”

  He uncorked the bottle and smiled at it approvingly. She thought for a minute about comical misdemeanors but could summon nothing anecdotal. A rural childhood was more romantic in Charlotte’s Web than in real life, unless she wanted to wax poetical like a particularly soapy “On the Same Page” piece.

  “Okay, how about this,” she finally offered. “When we were kids, my friend Celia and I biked everywhere, and often on the main roads, in the summer, drivers would stop and ask us for directions. One Memorial Day, a car from off-Island slows down by us on the road—”

  “How did you know it was from off-Island?”

  “Well, it had New York plates, but if you’re from here, you can tell an off-Island car anyhow.”

  “Really? Very intriguing. How?”

  She realized she had no answer. “It’s like Justice Stewart from the sixties talking about pornography. I know it when I see it. We all do. The Island gives everything a patina of some kind—oh, shut up,” she said without malice, at his mocking laughter.

  “Go on with the story,” he said, as he went to the larger pantry for a wineglass. “Tell me what happened with the car that was missing a patina.” He poured her a glass of wine, then turned the oven off and opened the oven door, from which escaped such a savory new aroma that she was distracted for a moment.

  “Ahem,” he said. “Patina. Bikes. Girls.”

  “Right. It’s a big car, a fancy car, so automatically we don’t like it—”

  “I would expect nothing less from you than knee-jerk disdain—”

  “—but we mutter to each other and agree that we’re nice girls so we’re going to be good.”

  “That’s very big of you, since obviously an off-Island driver has no intrinsic right to be treated respectfully.”

  She glared comically at him. “So it stops, and the driver rolls down the window and asks us how to get to the Chilmark Store. We were near Priester’s Pond, where you’re sort of equidistant between North Road, South Road, and Middle Road—you can take any of them and end up at Menemsha Crossing. At the same moment, Celia points one way, and I point the other, and we both say, ‘That way!’—completely straight-faced because we’re both sincere. Then we each realize that the other one is also right, so at the same moment, we each reverse the direction we’re pointing in, and say, ‘Or that way!’ And then we burst out laughing at ourselves. The guy in the car harrumphs, rolls up his window, and drives off in a huff. We fell over on the side of the road from laughing so hard.”

  She gave him a How’s that? look.

  He grimaced. “Nah. I expected stories about a seriously darkened youth,” he said. “I’m not impressed. Try again.”

  She could not talk about her private childhood, with failed parents who ceded her to other failed family members until finally she landed with a couple of functional alcoholics—Jen and Hank—who loved her fiercely but were cowed by her aspirations to move off-Island and live among the heathen Manhattanites. She could not reveal the terror that her own grudging attachment to the Island might entrap her like a gnat in honey and keep her as phobic of America as Hank was. She was not going to ruin a dinner date with this attractive, graceful man who did not know there were disassembled jeeps rusting by the chicken coop. Those stories were staying locked in the basement. On the Vineyard, those stories were sadly unoriginal, common as watercress in spring. She would not let them define her.

  “How about the morning my high school classmate’s dealer came to the bus stop and beat him up, right in front of me?”

  “Better. I’d be more impressed if you were the dealer.”

  “My mom did that, it’s not really my scene.”

  He sobered. “Oh. Shit. I’m sorry, Anna.”

  She shook her head and went for glib. “It’s fine. I had a good childhood, grew up with salt-of-the-earth types who made sure I knew how to forage for mushrooms and milk a goat and shuck a scallop. If I’d gone with my mother, I’d have grown up in an off-Island suburb somewhere, spent my time hanging out at a mall or something. Blech.”

  He laughed, grateful she’d made it a joke. “Your Island snobbery really is endless, you know that?” he said, with a cocked eyebrow. He turned to open the oven door all the way and reached for a mitt. “Dinner’s ready, but I need another story or you still owe me two hundred bucks.”

  They talked as if they were kids who had met on the playground, as if there were no looming lawsuit, or at least no newspaper coverage of it. Admitting she’d been stymied in her internet sleuthing, she asked him about his professional life. “I buy things and then I keep them for a while and then I sell them,” he said. “It’s not worth a conversation, it’s the most boring thing about me. Let’s talk
about interesting things.” So they discussed books and music and New York nightlife, something Joanna had nearly forgotten existed. They even perused national—not local—politics. He suggested a game of Scrabble, which she agreed to. The Scrabble box he brought out was mahogany, the board of stiffened leather, the tiles hardwood with gold-leaf embossed letters, and the tile racks brass. It probably cost as much as a plane ticket to New York. Or at least a helicopter ride. The game ended in a draw.

  He was a perfect gentleman and did not make any kind of move on her. She left before it was indecorously late, needing to get home to check on Hank before lights-out. If she had stayed out as late as she wanted to, and then returned to find him face-planted in the bathroom, she would never have forgiven herself.

  IT RAINED HARD overnight, and despite the dazzling blue sky come sunrise, the ground was the sort of mud that tries to suck one’s boots off one’s feet. The cats would not set paw outside. Hank, up and about for his thirty minutes of morning verticality, was confined to the back porch. His exposed shin was surrounded by its column of slender steel donuts. It looked angry, and cold. She tossed the food scraps out of their ceramic holder into the run, through the window in the chicken wire. Setting the bowl down on a hatchet-scarred oak stump, she went inside the coop, opened the yard door for the hens to go out, and scouted the nesting boxes for eggs. Three hens were hunkered down on nests of wood shavings and straw. Early spring was a broody time of year for them, and the Cochin muttered warningly at Joanna when she reached under the mottled feathers.

  “Oh, stop,” she muttered back, closing her hand around one warm egg. “If you were raising chicks you wouldn’t have time to sunbathe. I know how you like to sunbathe. Really I’m doing you a favor.”