ON ANY OTHER day, James would’ve sat at the Bean until noon and then walked up to the bakery for lunch with Barb. Kale and chorizo soup, maybe, with a slice of bread still warm from the oven. Today, he’d stormed off the outside deck right after that girl captain— replaced by a girl!—had the balls to ask for navigation pointers. On auto-pilot, he’d already climbed to the top of the ferry landing and turned left, stomach growling, before remembering that the bakery and lunch were now off-limits. Damn.
Anna Crosby rushed out of the art gallery across the road, leather shoulder bag slapping against her hip, calling, “James, wait!” So he couldn’t turn around and head back to his mother’s house—his house—without looking like a goddamn idiot. Eyes firmly forward, he strode up the main road, breath shortening, as if focused on an actual destination. As long as he kept moving, Anna wouldn’t catch up—not in those heels.
Just past the captain’s cottage and Prime’s Grocery, the road bent away from the harbor to parallel the island’s eastern shoreline. Shingled cottages clustered together, overlooking Bird Island, protected from winter winds by the big hill. James knew the owner of each and every place—even “the rental,” currently occupied by Patty and Billy, which stood between the mayor’s house and the schoolteacher’s.
Tucked into the road’s next curve to the right was the bakery, an old bait shed that Barb had tacked onto the north side of her house and fitted out with ovens and a kneading table. The blue door was shut tight, and uncut grass tickled the legs of the empty garden table. The left downspout had fallen down again. All Barb’s problem now— she could fix her own goddamn gutters. Mow her own grass, too, after the nasty things she’d screamed at him last night.
Diagonally across the road was Anna’s house, a lone sentinel guarding its bluff-top ocean view, with every blade of grass trimmed to perfection. Anna always headed straight home after coming in on the ferry, so she’d stop following him now. He strode past her house without looking back, following the road as it turned right again and inclined up the steep hill.
Two head-high concrete walls ran like motorcycle escorts up either side of the gray pavement. The left wall hid the lighthouse and keeper’s cottage, where James had grown up. Waves groaned against the bluffs, the soundtrack of childhood. It had all been so simple back then, because everything he needed—boats, meals, an open horizon for dreaming—had been right here on this tiny island.
The open horizon was still available, at least. He’d go down to West Harbor, check on Joe—maybe even score lunch.
He was still panting from the steep climb when the two walls ended. On the left was the lighthouse driveway. On the right side, a squared-off hedge took over—the only pruned privet on the entire island.
“Morning, Captain James!” one of the commuters called out from above the hedge. He’d already changed out of his pinstripes for this forced day off. “I was hoping to see you. What happened—”
James increased his pace—though his lungs were burning.
“James? I heard you were fired, for dealing drugs! That doesn’t sound right. . .”
Two lousy buds of pot. For Joe, to help ease his dying. James had tried to talk through the whole mess with Mack on the ride back to the island yesterday afternoon, but all the harbormaster said was, “Lloyd’ll get over it.” Then he’d asked James how often to change the spark plugs in his four-stroke outboard—as if James knew anything about modern motors.
When they got back to the island, Mack had invited him for a birthday beer in the fish shack on the dock. Somehow that had turned into a six pack each, which made James late for Barb’s birthday supper. . . and gave Mayor Frank time to make the rounds with his over-dramatized version of events, so now James’s reputation was on the rocks locally as well. Dealing drugs, my ass.
The privet faded away to the right, paralleling the side road that would eventually circle back to the Malloy cottage and the quieter side of the harbor. James forged on straight ahead. He hadn’t been up to the very top of the big hill since last fall, partly to avoid the Inn’s makeover—the old building had been gussied up like a Newport mansion! A sign blaring its new name, the Skye View Inn, arched over raked gravel. The long driveway curved around under a portico, ending at the concrete patio that everyone had been grousing about all spring. Poured without any permits—Parker Dane’s latest improvement.
Now that Joe was dying, who would protect West Brenton from that creep?
The only familiar section was the one-story schoolroom, tacked onto the right side of the building like a frumpy Quaker lady on the arm of a green-lapeled city slicker. Windows open to the spring sunshine, the drone and response of teacher and students carried all the way out to the road.
Once past the Inn, James spotted the island’s two big trees, towering over a thin line of scrub forest. Strange to see them from enough distance that the branches of his Norfolk pine and Joe’s sturdy oak interlaced into one canopy; usually he walked to Joe’s along the north side of the island, passing close enough to smell pine sap. They’d been planted forty years ago, either side of the old dividing path that separated the cottages and commerce of the white folks from the wilderness of West Brenton and the Narragansett tribe. Now that path was overgrown—though the two peoples it divided still didn’t mingle much at all.
Their trees would outlive Joe, James realized.
He filled his lungs with salt air and kept moving forward. West Brenton was wide open, a random mix of low-growing native shrubs and stiff tufted grass; the Narragansetts had never thought their half of the island needed “improving.”
He wasn’t ready to put on a brave face for Joe quite yet, so instead of following the foot path down to West Harbor he headed out to the Monument on the island’s southwest tip. Maybe those solid stones and that ocean view would provide some perspective.
As soon as he stepped onto Monument Point, the crash of breaking waves grew more insistent. Steep bluffs fell away on either side; to his right was the calming blue oval of West Harbor, a narrow beach, and smoke rising from Joe’s chimney. Over the even steeper drop-off to his left were white ocean waves breaking against black rocks.
Nobody knew why Joe’s ancestors had chiseled granite blocks and piled them into a square-edged ten-foot tower. It had already stood up to a hundred years of hurricanes and winter gales—as well as all the kids, both native and white, who’d tried to climb it. James leaned against the outside face, where he’d be hidden from any passersby. Not that too many people came down this way, now that the island’s tribe had dwindled to three. He could breathe here, think things through. . .
But before he could find any answers, a woman’s voice interrupted.
“Thought I’d find you here,” Anna Crosby said.
Startled, his eyes swiveled around and dropped to the open neck of her blouse—no longer hidden under the black coat she’d worn on the ferry. And those wedge heels had been replaced by orange flip-flops, so she must’ve stopped in at her house before following him up here. If he’d looked over his shoulder even once he would’ve spotted her, but he’d been too focused on escape. “Class cancelled?” he asked, dragging his eyes back to the neutrality of open ocean.
“Class? Oh—well. . . I just didn’t feel much like painting today.” The careful diction still hinted at her years running a London art gallery. “I came back on the morning boat instead. Which was quite strange. . .”
He swallowed hard, trying not to think about that girl gripping the Homer’s wooden wheel—and then Anna touched the frayed cuff of his sweatshirt.
“I spoke with the new captain,” she began. “She seems nice enough—”
“That damn girl couldn’t even come into the dock right!”
“She’s a woman,” Anna replied, removing her hand.
“Whatever.” James slid both fists into the safety of his sweatshirt pouch. “She’s driving my boat, working with my deckhand. Trained him myself.”
“Billy, trainable?”
He didn’t bother to match her smile.
“Whatever happened between you and Lloyd,” Anna said, “it’s not the new captain’s fault.”
She didn’t have any idea what had happened yesterday afternoon! Probably devoured every tasty tidbit of Mayor Frank’s story, just like everyone else. James tightened his fists, torn between conflicting wants: a return to solitude, or distraction from his own swirling confusion.
“Why aren’t you having lunch with Barb?” she asked next.
James leaned down to pick up a small stone, which he side-armed off the edge of the bluff. “She threw me out last night. Doesn’t want to date a guy who deals drugs.”
“After two years together in that tired double bed, you still call it dating?”
He blushed. How many private details had Barb shared during all those winter tea breaks with Anna? Women.
“She does tend to over-react,” Anna said. “And then she holds a grudge. One of my trips ashore last winter, she asked me to bring back some of that fancy tea she drinks. I forgot. She didn’t speak to me for an entire week.”
James tossed another stone over the edge.
“Probably makes you want to just sail out to sea,” she mused, “not talk to anyone at all. . .”
James turned toward her again—though this time, he managed to keep his eyes focused on her face. “How’d you know that?”
“Because I feel exactly the same way,” she said, boldly holding his gaze.
He looked away, tossed yet another stone. “Brenton’s too small for a city girl like you.”
“I’m not much of a city girl these days,” she replied. “If I moved back to London, I’d probably show up right on time for gallery openings. Around here, ‘fashionably late’ is impolite. And this blouse is at least five years old—quite provincial.”
His lips tugged sideways into a half-smile. Anna’s clothes were far more upscale than the usual island attire—despite today’s flip-flops and unpainted toenails. Of course, retiring so young—she was only six years older than James—meant she could dress however she wanted.
“Besides, I’d miss this view.” She waved her hand out at the gray-green humps of Block Island and Point Judith. The mainland stretched north, completely unconcerned with who was running the Brenton ferry or how outdated Anna’s blouse really was.
James crossed his arms over his chest. Even the waves surging far below seemed to be taunting him: “No job! No girlfriend! No life!” Between him and the sea an osprey circled, looking for food and chirping at its mate. So sure of its place in the—
“Why don’t you join us for dinner tonight?” Anna asked. “I’m making Nathaniel’s favorite—steak, and jacket potatoes.” Her live-in nephew had somehow managed to finish high school without either leaving the island or setting foot inside the schoolroom. “Might even manage a salad, if Prime’s has any decent lettuce.”
Nathaniel was a great kid—but James should say no. The flirty pressure of her fingers told him this invitation was for more than just a meal. But then he remembered the gaping whiteness of his own empty fridge, and stopped looking for a polite way out.
“What time?” he asked instead, looking over at her again, reaching for a smile. “Wouldn’t wanna be fashionably late.”