I spent the next couple of days constantly on the phone to the Willow Island council, checking I had met every compliance order to open Barney’s B and B, sorting out details like fire escapes and safety procedures, maximum number of tenants, procedural conditions for the “serving of food in a public place.” I didn’t tell them about Rose’s biscuits—I wasn’t about to fill out another two hundred forms for jam drops. No, I decided, Rose’s biscuits would just have to be contraband, smuggled over from the mainland and doled out to darting-eyed guests under the cover of darkness.
I was exhausted as I lounged on the couch with Barney, too tired to even begin to try and move Barney’s deadweight lying across my feet. I lay there, reading a book of Duncan’s, watching the text bob up and down, when the phone rang.
“You answer it, Barney, go on, you lazy sod,” I said, flexing my feet underneath him.
He grunted.
“You’re right, we’ll let it ring.”
I heard my own high-pitched, too-hearty voice on the machine.
“Hello, you’ve called Barney’s Bed and Breakfast,” I squeaked—Andrew’s idea, never too early to advertise, he’d said. “Please leave your name and number and we’ll get back to you.” Andrew had wanted me to say, “And one of our reservation staff will return your call,” but I had balked, saying, “It’s not the bloody Hilton.”
My father’s voice came through. “This is Harry de Longland, leaving a message for Lulu de Longland . . .”
“Harry”—I jumped up and snatched the phone—“what are you doing calling in the middle of Parky?”
Harry, Rose, and Michael Parkinson had a three-way date every Saturday night—Rose loved Parky, she said he had a face you could abseil off.
“Harry?”
He didn’t answer.
Barney left the couch and pressed his body against me.
“Harry?”
He made a noise into the phone.
“On a scale of one to ten?”
My mother rustled past me.
“Harry, on a scale of one to ten?”
She put her floured hands up to her face.
“Harry,” I said again, “on a scale of one to ten?”
She kissed me, butterfly wing against my ear.
“Ten, love.”
She was slipping behind the kitchen door.
Disapanishing.
Rose.
She was outside my window then, in bare feet.
I saw the wind lifting Grace’s skirt as she walked toward the dunes, and I started to run to her with Barney as my shadow.
She was walking straight toward the water, and she knew I was behind her, because she kept looking back at me over her shoulder when I shouted her name.
I ran all the way to her and the water was not cold at all, but warm as the eugaries began their dance.
They were tumbling back into the ocean, and Grace’s skirt was getting wet as she followed them.
I shouted at them that she didn’t know the steps, that she had only just begun to dance.
Then Rose turned and leaned in to me, and put her lips to mine.
“There is no such thing as afar,” she whispered.
Grace and Alexis and Betty and Phoebe and Greta and Madeleine and Lauren and Kitty and Audrey and Constance put their arms around one another, smiled up at me, and bowed deep and low.
Rose.
My mother.