JOANNA HAD THE DECK TO HERSELF, BUNDLED FIVE LAYERS thick to keep out the damp. The saltwater of the sound, teal-gray under a hazy sky, wafted the scent of her childhood across the bow. The movement of the boat soothed her. She remembered her grandmother’s dining room in Edgartown, with its undulating set of floorboards intended to remind some returning whaling captain of this precise sensation after years away from home.
She had been years away from home, herself. Not at sea, but on the mainland, which was just as far away. She was returning now to calamity.
From the bow of the ferry, it was hard not to love the Island for itself, even in the clammy gray air. Even if you dreaded what its human population might have in store for you once you arrive. The bluffs of West Chop, the lazy stretch of the North Shore unfurling up-Island toward the Aquinnah lighthouse. It wasn’t a dramatic landscape, just the cobbled moraine of a dying glacier. Perhaps it was not even beautiful. But Joanna could never view it without feeling a primal attachment. That is why she rarely came home to visit.
The ferry turned to starboard at the channel entrance buoy and steamed southwest into the harbor, entering the sheltered water between the Chops. A helicopter slowly crossed her line of sight, droning inland. Helicopters. She wondered if Hank had been medevaced to Boston. She paced across the breadth of the foredeck from starboard to port, past the bright orange life-saver ring, and stared at the bland brick building facing the harbor from East Chop. The hospital. She didn’t know if Hank was still in there, or if he was even still alive. She didn’t know whom to call to ask. Feeling anxious and impotent staring at it, she trudged inside to the lunchroom.
Under the fluorescent lights, the scant array of passengers looked depressed and nauseated. Most people sat ignoring a large television screen showing an infomercial. In the past, it had been Fox News. It always seemed ironic, that the primary means of reaching a liberal mecca included forced exposure to illiberal media. Perhaps it had been the Steamship Authority’s idea of a hazing, she thought. Too unsettled to listen to what these new talking heads were saying, she turned her attention to the closest Formica table with nobody at it, near the coffee dispensers.
There were copies of both Island newspapers on this table, lying slightly askew as if forgotten by a distracted traveler. One was a slender, old-fashioned broadsheet, much larger than the New York Times, the sort of paper an Edwardian butler would iron for his master before serving it at breakfast. Its elegant masthead featured decorative scrolls and some invented coat of arms, and was crowned by a poetic quote, which changed each issue. This issue’s, appropriate to the season, was from Twelfth Night: “When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day—William Shakespeare.”
The second paper was smaller and thicker, stuffed with advertising supplements, splashed with color, bedecked with peppy weather icons and taglines for articles waiting inside.
Each paper sported a photo above the fold. The larger paper—the Newes—featured a large black-and-white shot of smiling teenagers standing hand in hand, in medieval costumes, on the lip of a stage. The depth of field created an almost three-dimensional effect, the foreground and background figures artfully blurred, those in the middle distance sharp and luminous under stage lights. “CAMELOT enchants at the newly refurbished Performing Arts Center,” the headline announced.
The smaller paper—the Journal—had a sans serif headline that read: “Vineyard youth lead state in marijuana use.” There was a gripping color photo of a back door at the high school, featuring a DEA officer with arms akimbo staring toward the camera at three teenage boys with their backs to the viewer.
Some things would never change. Those weeklies had defined themselves by their differences since the day, back in Joanna’s childhood, that some disaffected Newesies had rebelled and huffed themselves halfway across the Island to launch the Journal. If Hank didn’t survive his injuries, he’d want an obit only in the Journal. The Newes would cloak him in the pastel hues of an old-school Island sage, while the Journal would celebrate his rabble-rousing.
The purser’s Yankee accent, over the ferry’s speaker system, was distorted and gruff. “All vehicle drivers and passengers, please return to your vehicles on the freight deck. All walk-off passengers will disembark from exit number four on the starboard side of the vessel, mezzanine deck. Please refrain from standing on the staircase while the vessel is docking. Thank you for traveling with the Steamship Authority. Vineyard Haven.” She could almost recite it in time, and despite her intention to resist childhood comforts, its familiarity soothed her like a rough seafaring nursery rhyme.
As always, the ferry jerked fitting into the slip, everyone by the passenger-exit door swaying with the movement as if genetically conditioned to expect it. Once the ferry docked, the gangway was hooked up, and some two dozen of them, a drab school of minnows with faces averted against the drizzle, tramped down the ramp to the paved dockside. She squinted into the afternoon dim, looking for Celia.
Celia was about Joanna’s height, but a little broader everywhere—hips, breasts, hair, laugh, personality. Celia was the one who’d called to say Joanna’s uncle Hank fell off his roof in the winter storm. She was the one who’d looked up the earliest bus from Manhattan to Woods Hole, and which boat it met. She had not said the words “I’ll pick you up at the ferry,” but Joanna knew she’d be there.
And she was. Wearing her black wool ushanka hat with the earflaps pulled down, and a long down jacket with peace symbols quilted onto it, Celia was the most fashion-forward neo-hippie-chick on the Island. She waved wearing black wool mittens, and Joanna, seeing her, began to run. They fell into each other’s offered bear hugs.
Without preamble Celia said, “He’s gonna be okay, kiddo, he broke his leg in some horrible way, and a bunch of organs are bruised, but otherwise he’s okay.”
Joanna exhaled a short, fierce sob and then pulled herself back together. “Celia. Thanks so much for—”
She waved this away. “Where’s your luggage?” and as Joanna was saying, “On the cart,” she added, “He’s out cold on morphine so they told me to just take you straight home, you can see him tomorrow morning,” and was already steering her toward the luggage cart.
“Thanks,” Joanna said, suddenly exhausted. It was not the calamity she’d ruminated on for the past eight hours. She had assumed a broken neck at least. A broken leg was no big deal, especially for a retiree . . . surely? Plaster him up in a cast and he’d be fine. The adrenaline from hysterically rushing home suddenly failed her. She probably hadn’t needed to come. It was shameful, but she was almost relieved not to go straight to the hospital.
“I stopped by and put the heat up,” Celia added, pulling the sole piece of luggage off the metal cart. “There’s plenty of firewood but I figured he wouldn’t begrudge you some propane. And I’ve got groceries in the car for you because God knows what he’s got in the fridge.”
“You are an exceptional human being.”
“Oh, c’mon, you’d do the same for me. Is that all you brought, kiddo? I take more than that when I’m going on a cruise for a week, and all I need on a cruise is my bathing suit.”
She shrugged. “I’ve learned to pack light.”
“All right,” Celia said jovially. “Let’s go.” She pulled Joanna’s wheelie behind her as if Joanna were a toddler who couldn’t have managed it on her own, and Joanna followed, feeling the wet seeping into the seams of her suede city boots. Celia came from one of those happy families, the ones Tolstoy said were all alike, and for thirty years she had shared the emotional largesse with Joanna.
Minutes later, they turned up Lambert’s Cove Road, a wiggling semicircular loop off State Road, providing access to the North Shore. Many of the seasonal rich and famous had their houses off of it—musicians, politicians, actors, writers, people famous for reasons it was hard to put a finger on. They passed the mailbox of Joanna’s second cousin, who had no money but had inherited a family parcel of land and lived in what was hardly more than a shanty, down a mile-long dirt driveway that she shared with a famous chef, a fashion designer, and a pig farmer whom they’d been in second grade with. Tashmoo lapped gently a few dozen yards from her front door, sapphire-blue and smelling of marsh sand. Joanna had spent every childhood November scalloping knee-deep in her briny waters.
Farther up-Island—farther west—the road wound cheerily alongside ancient, lichen-covered stone walls, the scrawny oaks and dense underbrush occasionally yielding to picturesque vistas that were not safe for a driver to look at because there was the next turn already. Near the up-Island end of Lambert’s Cove Road, they turned left onto the dirt driveway of Joanna’s childhood home, with deep wheel ruts and dead tufts of grass in the middle strip poking up through the sodden snow. Pebbles pinged the undercarriage and they were jolted about, even in the insulated comfort of Celia’s Forester.
Hank had built this house almost single-handedly, even though he wasn’t a trained carpenter. Or plumber, or electrician, or tile layer, or painter, or roofer. It had no architectural charms at all, but Joanna had been raised here and it felt homey. Even the apron of random crap around the driveway was comfortably familiar. One summer, Joanna had lost a boyfriend who had been mightily enthralled with her until she brought him here. As he drove into the yard, he’d gazed upon both half-disassembled Jeeps, and the five half-disassembled grills; upon the enormous collection of fishing gear literally falling out of the garage doorway; upon the messy pile of metal-mesh crab and lobster traps; at the toddler-size mound of compost . . . He’d smiled wanly and said, as if it were a joke, “Gee, Anna, I didn’t realize you came from white trash.” And she had nothing to say in response to that, so she said nothing. He did not ask to meet her grown-ups. She never saw him again. Years later she learned he had become a Wall Street tycoon, with a summer house less than a mile distant from Hank’s.
All of the junk she remembered was still there, and more besides. A couple of dress-making dummies, a three-foot pile of rusting cast-iron skillets, many heaps of empty planting boxes, unfamiliar lawn furniture. But it was all indistinct through the gathering sleet. They hurried into the house, which was never locked. Celia had turned the heat up high, and it was toasty inside. As they shed coats and boots, two cats greeted them with noises of complaint.
“I fed them,” Celia said. “They’re lying, ignore them. I let the chickens out this morning too, but make sure they have water.”
She had carried Joanna’s wheelie into the overstuffed mudroom and now pulled it directly across the carpeted plywood floor of the living room, to the door of Joanna’s childhood bedroom on the far side. The floor in here was a few large sheets of particleboard, painted dark green, with braided rugs thrown over it. The bed was still a mattress and box spring on the floor—Joanna’s choice, as a girl. She had suspended a sheet over it, nailing it into the popcorn ceiling, and pretended for several months that she was living in a tent, in solidarity with the dispossessed Native Americans. Or something.
“Want me to help you make up the bed, kiddo?” Celia asked, after she’d brought in the bag of groceries.
“I can do it,” Joanna said. “You’ve already done so much.”
When she was alone, she checked the refrigerator and saw that Celia’s “groceries” included a pot of homemade chicken soup, with a stickie note commanding, Eat some of this tonight, Joanna. No, seriously, eat some. She smiled, grateful for the mothering. She put it on the stove, sliced and toasted some bread, and glanced around the familiar space. Five mounds of papers—“piles” would be too respectful a word—almost buried Hank’s computer. Bills, bank statements, viral internet memes he wanted to read to visitors, newsletters from the ACLU, the National Libertarian Party, the VFW. Both newspapers on the table, of course. Hank tracked how they talked about West Tisbury politics, so that he could write her long rants about which paper was being biased (usually, according to him, it was the Newes). It all smelled of Aging Male Person, and of course Cat. Today was too cold and wet, but tomorrow she would open all the windows and air the place out. She’d probably end up staying a few days once he was home, just to make sure he could get around on his crutches. It was Tuesday. She would be back in New York by the weekend.
As the soup was heating, she grabbed a chipped bowl from the cabinet above the washing machine and set it on the countertop. A pot of vegetable waste, intended for the chickens, sat by the sink. She looked out over the expansive front yard, full of winter rye that Hank would be plowing under in a few months, leaving furrows in the earth that would fill with mud that smelled like sour milk. She’d forgotten how many smells there were associated with her childhood.
So here she was, back home, on the resort paradise isle of Martha’s Vineyard.
* * *
She’d been home less than three hours when Everett called from the Journal and asked her to come in.
“You don’t miss a trick,” she said. “I’m headed to the hospital in the morning. I’ll stop in on my way home.”
Then she remembered she hadn’t called Brian.
After a decade of her renting tiny studios in the outer boroughs, she’d gotten cold feet when her sweet, redheaded IT-geek boyfriend asked her to move in with him to an apartment on Central Park West that he’d just bought. Bought! On Central Park. Two weeks ago he’d surprised her with the revelation that they could now cohabitate; she had surprised them both with the revelation that she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Brian, the most agreeable human being in North America, was confused, wondering how he’d miscalculated so badly when he’d offered Joanna everything he believed she wanted: a prewar building with a doorman, stability, walking distance from both green space and shops, proximity to eight million other people when he disappeared into his introverted geek/maker zone, stability, a pet Yorkie, her favorite café close enough to frequent in her slippers, pleasant sex, and stability.
“I’m not sure I’m ready for that much stability,” she’d said at the time, over coffee in their favorite bakery in Carroll Gardens. She was trying to joke.
“All you ever talk about is needing stability,” he’d countered, bemused, watching her fiddle with her espresso spoon. “Let’s find a way for you to be more comfortable with this.”
He’d suggested—in a reasonable, friendly tone—that they take a few days apart so that Joanna “could sort out what you think the hang-up is,” and then they would meet and talk it through. Not one neuron in Brian’s brain believed she would reject him, given time. It was human to have doubts; it was human to get over them.
She knew she wanted to be with him—at least, she thought she did—but she couldn’t stop embracing opportunities to avoid “The Talk.” The first time they were supposed to meet, she’d leapt at a sudden now-or-never chance to fly to Austin to interview an emerging music producer. Two days later, she’d postponed again because she’d conveniently had a touch of food poisoning.
The re-rescheduled talk was supposed to be this evening.
He answered on the second ring, and chuckled sadly once she’d explained where she was and why, and how long she’d need to stay here. “You’re getting really good at delaying this,” he said.
THE NEXT MORNING she woke under flannel sheets and musty wool blankets. One of the cats was pressing its cool wet nose against her ear and purring loudly for breakfast.
“Subtle,” she grumbled. “Did Hank train you, or did you train him?”
She made herself some eggs. Then she shrugged herself into her wool coat and started to head outside, thought better of it, shrugged out of that coat, and wrapped up in an old down jacket she found in the mudroom, whose rips were patched with duct tape. She slipped her feet into an old pair of Uggs under the bench. She went out squinting into the unexpected sunshine carrying vegetable scraps, tossed the scraps through a window in the chicken wire, made sure the water wasn’t frozen, and opened the door of the coop. Inside here it was warm and stuffy and smelled like cracked corn and dirty down comforters. She felt like Goliath. The hens muttered among themselves in disgruntlement as they hopped off the roosts or out of the nesting boxes. They all went straight out to the yard for the scraps, grumpy as every generation of chickens Hank had ever raised. She checked the boxes for eggs, but there were only three. The ladies didn’t lay much in the long nights. How disconcerting that she even remembered that; she thought New York had erased her rural life. That had been the plan.
She went back inside, put the eggs away, and took a quick shower. Three tiles at about head-height, loose since friends at her junior prom after-party played Bathing While Drunk in the bathtub, were still loose. The grout between them, which had always been in danger of flaking away, was finally gone. There were probably a bazillion generations of mold spores reproducing promiscuously in the damp dark within.
She dressed in yesterday’s travel clothes, bundled up in her aunt Jen’s ancient nylon down coat, a step up from the one with duct-tape patches. She shoved her hair into a knitted cap, found the keys to Hank’s green pickup truck under a pile of mismatched gloves in the coatroom.
It was a Wednesday in January, so there was no traffic anywhere as she drove past the Tashmoo Overlook, then through the brief stretch of Tisbury’s commercial zone of auto mechanics, grocery stores, and office buildings. She skirted the archetypal-New-England-small-town Main Street of Vineyard Haven and zipped down through Five Corners onto Beach Road, the causeway between the harbor and the Lagoon. Today was a brisk beauty: bright blue sky, darker blue harbor, the Lagoon a muted mirror of the harbor. The new ferry pushed through the gentle swells, headed back to the mainland, passing a couple of masochistic pleasure boats. She sped over the drawbridge to the brick behemoth.
Martha’s Vineyard Hospital was the largest repository of local artwork on the Island. Its corridors were lined with donations from scores of local artists, both year-rounders and summer people: photographs of life here a hundred years ago; uncountable seascapes and rural landscapes and harbors; abstracts; ancient marine charts. Joanna’s theory was that the hospital had been made as inviting as possible so that people would actually use it. New Englanders did not go in much for admitting they needed help. Celia, on the other hand, posited that since a huge percentage of summer visitors somehow ended up there—usually thanks to Lyme disease or moped accidents—the artwork was to make up for lost opportunities to sightsee.
Two of the nurses looked familiar to her from high school chorus. They both wore wedding bands, and she wondered in passing what the odds were that a local kid could grow up to find both a good year-round job and a good year-round partner here. It had never occurred to her to even aim for that. She felt slightly sucker-punched by her own lack of imagination.
No, she didn’t mean that. She meant she was lucky to have escaped being caught in that trap.
“He just woke up,” said one of the nurses in a firmly cheerful voice, following her into the room. “He’s fine, and he can go home later today.”
Hank looked hideous under the recessed fluorescents, hooked up to various machines that disturbed her too much to look at directly. He’d clearly been in need of a shave before he went up on the roof—there was about five days’ growth of beard. His hair looked styled for a punk rock performance, and his skin tone, where there were no bruises, was sallow. One leg, draped discreetly with a sheet, was elevated on three white pillows and the ankle swaddled in some kind of sheath. It was unnerving to see that tugboat of a man so vulnerable.
“Howdy, cowboy,” Joanna said. “You get bucked off a mustang?”
He took a moment to register that she was not a hallucination. Then his lips twisted toward an almost perfectly straight diagonal slant, as they always did when he was trying to disguise his pleasure with sarcasm. “Oh, God. Who brought you back here?” he asked. His tone was soft. The drip beside the bed had morphine.
“Celia.”
“Damn gossip.”
“Were you planning to keep this a secret?”
“I didn’t want them to make you come running back from New York. Don’t you have a job?”
“Freelance,” she said cheerfully. “I don’t have to punch the clock.”
“Don’t you have a life?” he said.
“Freelance,” she said again, in a more insistent tone because it wasn’t entirely true. “My life fits in my suitcase, and there’s this awesome new thing called the internet that lets me stay in touch with everyone.” She wasn’t sure he knew about Brian. They’d been dating less than a year.
“Don’t you have plants to water?”
“It’s all under control,” she said, although it wasn’t. Celia had called at 3 A.M., so Joanna had assumed it was to report an imminent death. She’d caught a 4 A.M. Greyhound to Boston that was delayed for hours in the death throes of a nor’easter before it transferred her to a bus for the Cape. Before she’d left New York, she’d had the presence of mind to clean the bathroom, chuck the garbage, and make the bed. But she hadn’t thought about her plants or her mail. She wasn’t even sure what she’d packed. “I’m here until you’re back on your feet,” she said.
“That’s going to be at least another week,” he said ruefully.
More like two, she thought, now that she’d seen him, but she said nothing.
He was dopey enough that further conversation was useless, so she waited until a woman hardly older than she was, a doctor in purple scrubs, came in through the open door and asked if Joanna was family, and would she like to know what was going on with him. This was how she came to know of Henry Holmes’s Complete Medical History.
It wasn’t just a low-energy pilon fracture and a slew of bruised organs. He’d been having sundry health crises for years, which she’d never heard about because he was a Yankee Male. High blood pressure, dizzy spells, heart murmur, breathing problems, pneumonia, three bouts of Lyme disease, once with babesiosis, which had hospitalized him . . . That was three years ago and she’d never even heard about it, although she’d seen him since. She managed to keep her surprise from the doctor, lest the doctor stop telling her things.
“Will you be taking him home?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling a fraud because the doctor seemed to think they actually lived together. “You better tell me what I need to know, because he will play down whatever you tell him.”
The doctor nodded. “Of course. We’ll be sending him home with prescriptions for painkillers and blood-clot prevention medication. He’ll need to elevate his leg and ankle for the next five to ten days to minimize swelling. He should just get up for about thirty minutes at a time for meals and to avoid blood clots, and to use the bathroom and have a sponge bath, otherwise he needs to be on the bed, torso flat on the bed, and the right foot raised up on two or three pillows.”
That was far more than she had anticipated for a broken leg, but it was better than planning his funeral. She tried to estimate how many gallons of chowder she’d have time to make while she endured Hank’s ranting about the doctor’s orders when he got home. There would certainly be ranting. Would it be better, or worse, if she hid the rum?
“Make sure he does basic stuff like wiggle his toes now and then,” the doctor was continuing, “that will also help with the edema. You’ll need to drive him to any appointments and help to make sure he doesn’t trip or anything until he gets used to the crutches and the boot.”
“He won’t have a cast?”
The doctor shook her head. “Luckily the surgeon got to him quickly for the ORIF. That means he’s full of plates and screws, and when you take the insult of the injury and add to that the insult of the surgery, you don’t want to put on a cast. The boot is better; he can take it off to shower eventually, and check skin tone and swelling. But he can’t do any weight-bearing for six to twelve weeks.”
“Oh,” Joanna said, sounding more dismayed than she wanted to. “How long before he’s, like, totally back to normal?”
“He should be at ninety percent improvement in six to twelve months,” she said, nodding to make sure Joanna understood how great this news was.
“Oh!” Joanna said, unable to hide her alarm.
The doctor looked confused, then smiled reassuringly. “You don’t have to play nurse for that long,” she said. “He definitely needs someone around for three or four weeks, because he’ll be on prescription pain meds, but he’ll have started physical therapy by then, and after twelve weeks he shouldn’t even need the boot anymore.”
She smiled tightly through a claustrophobic wave of panic. “So I should plan to be around for a while.”
“Well, the first few days, we’ll be sending a visiting nurse to help out, especially with the sponge bath and stuff—you’re not his wife, are you?”
“Ick,” Joanna said without thinking. “Sorry, that was rude,” she added, in response to the doctor’s quizzical expression. “He’s my uncle. He raised me.”
“Right, so you probably don’t want to give him a sponge bath, that’s what the visiting nurse is for. But otherwise, unless there are complications, he won’t need you around by, where are we now, mid-January? Assuming no complications, then by early March, you should be off-duty.”
There could be no such thing as “no complications” with Hank the patient. Joanna felt edgy: she had left behind her successfully transplanted life on an hour’s notice, and now she was on a rock in the Atlantic Ocean in midwinter, to take care of a vinegary crank who would not want her to tell him what to do. She’d have to find a subletter. She’d have to ask her upstairs neighbor, who kept her spare key, to water the plants and check her mail since generous Brian, even at his most wanderlustful, was never one to cruise the subway out to Queens. Where was her extra mail key? Did she have her research notes for the article she was polishing for Upstate magazine? Was she going to miss her college roommate’s birthday? What should she do about Brian and his invitation and The Talk they had to have?
“I’ll be back later today,” she assured Hank, pretending none of these things were on her mind. She pecked him on his forehead and headed out.
BACK OVER THE drawbridge, under a glaring-pale winter sun. A few seagulls were scoping the rocks along the causeway and skimming over the boatyards and empty docks, their shadows pulling long even in late morning. This stretch of road was dreaded in summer, almost constantly backed up from Five Corners halfway to the bridge; now she was the only car in sight. She turned into a cramped dirt lot near the shipyard. She barely registered the familiar harborside miscellany of her childhood: a clatter of overturned, weathered dinghies, frazzled ends of great hempen lines, battered buoy-floats. A trio of retired marine pilings, still bound by heavy nylon ropes, lay horizontal as a traffic barrier. She parked by these, being careful not to block other cars, and walked through a stiffening breeze that smelled faintly of sea air and diesel fumes. She was headed for the cedar-shingled building of the Journal offices.
This building had housed a health food store once, and a cluster of offices decades before that, but its inner layout had been gutted and inside it now functioned like a barn for scriveners. Low-walled cubicles circled a big open space around a wooden conference table. Up a set of unfinished wooden steps was another worktable in another open space. Off of this were private offices for the publisher and the managing editor. An old family friend, Everett, was that managing editor, although he wore a number of other hats too.
She introduced herself to the smiling young woman seated behind a sanded-pine counter, who gestured Joanna to go on upstairs unescorted. She was thrown by the laissez-faire attitude; in New York she could never go anywhere inside any office unless she showed ID and then let herself be shepherded. Upstairs, two young women sat at the central table working at laptops, with intense expressions on their faces—one looked displeased, the other delighted. Neither of them registered her presence. The muted taps of fingers on keyboards were the only sound besides the soft drone of premillennial heating.
There were two office doors, and only one was open. A man of about seventy years sat behind an old barn door resting on metal trestles. Artisanal office furniture was trendy in New York, and expensive; but this, Joanna knew, was not artisanal, it was probably recycled or donated. The total cost would have been at most twenty dollars for some bracing.
A computer was sitting like a shunned orphan on a smaller table in the corner. Everett—shortish, stocky, and gruffly avuncular, somewhere between a human Yorkshire terrier and the Lorax—sat on an old wooden chair, deep in thought.
She said his name as she walked in, and he perked up.
“Joanna Howes!” he said with mock formality, then stood and crossed the spartan room to hug her. “My favorite New Yorker. How’s things in the city? If you want a break from Hank duty while you’re here, how about some local reporting?”
She’d been expecting this—why else would he ask her to come to his office? Having Everett as her boss again would feel like regression. She was supposed to go home to New York and pitch to The New Yorker. But she’d be here awhile, and hackneyed as it sounded, the rent wouldn’t wait. “Sure,” she said. “Love to. What do you have in mind?”
“It’s freelance,” said Everett, returning to his seat. “Of course. I can’t put you on staff since you’re only here temporarily.”
“I better be here temporarily,” she said. “Have you seen his leg?”
“Not yet, but I heard. That’s what he gets for trying to fix his own roof at seventy.”
“In a storm,” she amended. “He’s lucky he’s alive. I’m sticking around until he’s self-sufficient.”
“He’s an ornery old bastard and he’ll be walking again in a month, Anna.”
“He better not. He’s going to push himself too hard and reinjure it, we both know that.”
“Well, we don’t put people on salary unless they’re staying put. We both know you’re not staying put.”
“This is true.”
“I’ll pay you per piece—and we’re understaffed at the moment so there will be plenty of work while you’re here. I mean, I can put you on half—”
“How can you be understaffed in winter, if all your writers are year-rounders and there’s nothing going on?”
“Now is when they all go on vacation,” said Everett patiently, as if that should have been obvious. Which it should have been, were she thinking like an Islander. “Or get the flu or fly to Cuba for cheap medical care or go into rehab or have their annual nervous breakdown. But there’s still commission meetings and school sports and the Steamship Authority and the housing problem. And the opioid crisis isn’t going away either, but I won’t put you on that since you don’t have a real news background. No offense.”
“Actually I’m glad you realize that.”
“I love your features,” he said, as if in compensation. “That profile you did of Nina Brown—”
“Thanks,” she said. She flashed the weary smile of somebody accustomed to compliments for primarily one thing. The Nina Brown piece had come out five years earlier, for the online mag Impeccable. Brown overdosed five hours after the interview, so the profile was never going to go out of date. Half the planet had read it by now, indifferent to how old it was. It had included a strangely mesmerizing passage on Brown’s opinion of various breakfast cereals, about which she had waxed kinesthetically for ten minutes. That bit went viral for about a week—“rock star’s favorite cereal” meme—and the article had become Joanna’s calling card without her making the effort. Because of it, she’d gotten enough freelance assignments to quit her copyediting job and pay her Outer Boroughs of New York City Lifestyle bills without really feeling like she was doing anything useful.
She was too shy to be a serious investigative reporter. But her quirky upbringing had wired her to adapt, chameleon-like, to other people, so put her in a room alone with almost any willing subject—celebrity, convict, politician, cult leader, activist, billionaire, geek, poet—and she could coax them into showing their most engaging selves. Being in the same room with them was key, though, so that meant she was off the clock as long as she was stuck on Martha’s Vineyard in winter doing Hank Patrol.
“How many stories a week can I file?” she asked Everett now, staring across his desk at him. “How much can I make? I came home too suddenly to find a subletter, so even if I’m staying at Hank’s, I’ve got to make rent in New York for February.”
The door was open and the young women outside, although they weren’t listening, could hear them clearly, so Everett took a moment to think, then pulled a small notepad from his vest pocket and wrote a figure on it. He turned the pad to face her. She read the figure. It wasn’t enough. She made a wry face.
“I can get you some guest posts on the arts blog, and the community blog, if that helps. And I can put you on some of the weekly beats for now, but only until my regulars get back. Do you want me to do that? I could put you on an hourly payroll for that, if you like.”
She almost said yes, then reconsidered. “If I’m freelance, I can write for other papers, right?” she said. “If I need more cash?”
He frowned. “Theoretically, I guess. But the Newes won’t hire anyone who’s freelance for us. They have a formal policy against it. I think it’s even posted somewhere in the newsroom.”
“That’s stupid,” she said crossly.
A small shrug. “Well, it fits their zeitgeist. One reason I left there.”
“What if I just don’t mention to them that I’m freelancing here?”
“We read each other’s papers, Anna, they’ll see your byline.”
“How ’bout I just do pieces for you without a byline?”
He gave her an overly patient look. “We don’t do that except for news briefs and editorials, and I’m not going to change policy to accommodate a freelancer trying to game the other paper’s system.” A beat as he considered her grimace. “I promise to give you as much work as possible. I’m glad you’re here, Anna. It will be a treat to work with you again.”
“I feel the same way,” she said quickly, and meant it. Then the afterthought: “And it’s okay that I’m related to almost everyone I’ll be reporting on? Or grew up with them or was their lab partner in school or something?”
He shrugged expansively. “Hazard of a small-town paper. If you ever feel like you’re too close to a subject, let me know and I’ll figure out a way to take you off the story.”
“That probably won’t happen, honestly. I haven’t lived here since high school, and Hank’s not going to get up to anything.”
“Let’s see about that,” said Everett with a chuckle. “I’ve known that guy my whole life and I’ve never seen him not get up to anything. Give him my best, I’ll swing by the hospital to say hi. How much longer is he in for?”
“He’ll be out this afternoon,” she said. “Come by the house tonight and distract him so he doesn’t climb the walls with boredom. Maybe a Scrabble game, you’ll beat him pretty easily while he’s doped up.”
Everett smiled affectionately. “He’ll find something interesting to do. He always does.”
“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.”
“Remember 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.
He laughed the Hank Laugh again. “All right,” he said. “And since I don’t eat honey, I’ll have mine after you no longer have yours, so that makes me the winner.”
“Hank, you’re already the winner,” she said. “Look who you get as your primary caretaker.” She bowed, ironically, but he was still looking toward the television.
“Yeah, Anderson Cooper,” he said.
“I thought you liked Christiane Amanpour.”
“Not since she cut her hair,” he said.
THE OLD MANSARD-ROOFED building that functioned as the Town Hall had once been the elementary school. That was before Joanna’s time, but scores of her family had passed through it. For years after it was converted, and clearly in her memory, one upstairs room was kept, museum-like, as it had been on the last school day: the rows of lift-lid student desks, the dusty chalkboard with broken chalk still in the tray, the out-of-tune piano, the cloakroom, the American flag. A slate tablet on the wall had listed students’ names in colored chalk to mark which multiplication tables each had memorized.
That was long gone, though. The Town Hall had been renovated and expanded, and now all board meetings took place in what had been that classroom. Now it was painted sage-green, carpeted, and wainscoted. It was accessed from the second-floor common area through broad double doors. The large windows were still there from the old days—or rather their energy-efficient descendants were—but now on the walls, in lieu of slate multiplication tables, hung survey maps of the town, and an oil painting of a stone wall by one of the town’s celebrated homegrown artists, who decades earlier had been a student in that classroom.
There were so many people gathered to witness this particular ZBA meeting that nearly a score spilled out over the threshold into the common space, rumbling to each other. Hank would have been here, were he allowed to stay upright for more than thirty minutes at a stretch.
She excused herself as she brushed by two men at the back of the crowd. She blanked on names, but she knew them: the owner of one of the Menemsha fish markets, all wool and canvas and an air of melancholy, leaning his shoulder against the wall, and Celia’s boss at the bakery, a short, potbellied, avuncular flirt in a blue flannel shirt. As Joanna passed them, she heard them talking about that idiot Holmes who fell off the roof trying to adjust his satellite dish during a snowstorm. The story had already morphed into a wisecrack. Despite herself, she slowed and turned her head in their direction.
“Hey, Anna,” said the fisherman, casually, as if they ran into each other every day and he had not just been mocking her injured uncle. “We were just talking about Hank there. How’s he doing?”
“Does he need a care package?” asked the baker with a puckish smile. She knew, from some hazy memory, that he meant a bag of pot.
“I’ll ask,” she said, although Hank only tended to self-medicate with alcohol and Jeffrey Toobin. “Thanks. He’s doing fine.”
As she continued toward the boardroom, each gave her a New England wave: two fingers raised briefly and laconically from whatever height their hand happened to be.
“Hey, Anna!” said a cheery redheaded woman she nearly walked into. Joanna recognized her as the vet who’d tended her childhood pets, including her long-gone Nubian goat. “How’s the baby?”
She smiled politely. “You’re thinking of my cousin Lisa.”
The vet laughed, pressed her fingers over her brows. “Of course. You always looked alike. Well, when you were ten you did.” She laughed again and shrugged. “Anyhow, hope you’re well, nice to see you.”
She kept walking, swiveling around legs and purses and backpacks. The crowd smelled of damp wool and a more prosaic scent, a musky, musty human scent. Everett had said a press seat would be held for her, so she politely nudged her way through the bottleneck in the doorway.
Along one side of a wooden table, the four ZBA officers sat facing into the small room. Two men and two women, all wore varieties of the local winter uniform of flannel shirts, jeans, and work boots. She knew from her childhood civics catechisms that four ZBA officers made up a quorum, but the board was supposed to have five. Like many town committees, they were no doubt scrambling for membership.
Behind the audience lurked the public access camera and its operator, a volunteer for MOCC—Martha’s Own Cable Channel. In the front row, the back of his head in view of the camera, was a sixtyish Jimmy Stewart doppelgänger. This was James Sherman, her counterpart from the Newes. Beside him was the sole remaining empty chair. She moved with her jerky pivoting gait toward it.
She remembered the lanky, bespectacled James Sherman vaguely from her adolescence. He had been a reporter for the Newes when she’d interned there writing the doomed restaurant reviews. He’d been pleasantly aloof when he was around, and he’d done a few other things to make ends meet, including working at the boatyard doing some specialized boat-mending task she couldn’t place now, something that sixty years ago might have been a full-time calling, but wasn’t anymore. She settled into the padded chair beside him and held up her backpack shyly as if to justify her presence.
“I’m filling in for Susan,” she said, lowering the pack to the floor.
He looked suspicious, but then recognized her, and grinned. “Joanna Howes?” he said. “Are you back on the rock?” Then a look of understanding: “Oh, to help out Hank.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry to hear about that. Damn, he was lucky,” said James. He made a show of moving his own bag to make room for hers. “That could have been so much worse. And he’s lucky to have you here. How long you down for?”
“Long as he needs me.” She settled in beside him and reached into her backpack.
“So, wait, hang on. I thought you had a glamorous international career interviewing famous people. You’re writing for the Journal?”
“Just temporarily while I’m helping Hank. I’m a little out of my depth with town government, though.”
He made a dismissive expression. “It’s just the Journal—no offense, but c’mon, it’s an advertising rag.”
The Journal was not an advertising rag. The Journal was a scrappy everyman-style paper created by disgruntled former Newes workers who felt the Newes had abrogated its responsibilities to working-class Islanders (who made up the majority of year-rounders) in favor of an elegantly romanticized perception designed to cater to genteel summer residents. Most of the original Journal founders had moved on to other projects off-Island, or reinvented themselves into something nonjournalistic. But. Big but. She’d grown up aware of the animus between the two papers.
Hank preferred the Journal, of course, while Jen and Joanna had been drawn to the art and poetry that regularly graced the pages of the Newes. Joanna had been rhapsodic when she was offered the restaurant-reviewing gig there in high school, an internship Hank and Jen had argued about for an hour before she’d been allowed to accept it. Once on the job, she remembered Everett—who had been the Newes’ community editor, and thus her boss—dissing the unprofessional snarky tone of the Journal. The same paper he now ran.
“I mean, it’s a pretty good rag,” James was continuing, “but it’s a rag.”
“You realize that’s an insult,” Joanna said. “I mean, it’s a pretty good insult, but it’s an—”
“It’s a statement of fact,” said James calmly. “The Journal succeeds if it has enough ads. The Newes succeeds if it has enough subscribers. They’re not even the same species.”
“If you say so,” she muttered. She settled the laptop on her lap and opened it, turned it on, tried to shake off her emergent pique.
“I think it’s fine to have a little outlet like that on the island,” he continued, placidly, as if she had no connection to the paper he was dissing. “Helps people appreciate the quality they’re getting with the Newes. Plus, it keeps everyone on their toes, you know?”
She recalled the elegant old homestead that housed the Newes, and the affectation of disused manual typewriters (not even electric!) collecting dust beside the sleek Macs that had replaced them. It was, indeed, an elegant paper. Her pique was superseded by nostalgia. “Actually, I wish I could freelance for both papers,” she said. “Then maybe there’d be enough work to pay the bills.”
“Hm,” he said, cleaning his glasses with the hem of his sage flannel shirt. “Too bad the Journal has a policy against that.”
She grimaced. “It’s not the Journal’s policy, it’s the Newes’ policy.”
He grimaced back. “I’m pretty sure it’s the Journal’s.”
“That’s not what the Journal says.” She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket, rested it against the laptop screen, and launched the voice-memo app.
“Why would the Newes care?” puzzled James, almost to himself. “We get first pick of writers because we’ve been around longer and we have the reputation. And I’m sure we pay better. We’re not going to lose someone we want to the Journal, so why would we be precious about it? The Journal doesn’t want to lose people to the Newes because people want to write for the Newes more.” Noticing a hurt look on her face, he added, “Even you! You interned with us all those years back, not with the Journal.”
“I don’t think the Journal had internships back then.”
“See, that’s what I mean,” he said, comfortably. “We’ve been around longer, we’ve got it down, we just do our thing. I bet you’re only working for the Journal because Everett called you, right? If the current Newes editor knew you and called you at the same time, you’d be working for us now, you know it and I know it. The Journal is an upstart, and there’s nothing wrong with that, even if it is totally preoccupied with a crass commercial agenda—but Everett’s the one making things complicated and trying to start a competition for writers.”
“I don’t care who started it. I just want to write things and get paid for them.”
“Amen, sister,” he said, and then the hearing began.
When she was a girl and Jen had to work late, Hank—who had a more flexible schedule than Jen did, especially in winter—would get stuck watching Joanna, so she’d been brought to more than a few such board meetings. Despite her discomfort about trying to pass as a newshound, there was something cozily familiar about this room.
The plump, gray-haired chair of the ZBA, Helen Javier, was dressed in the requisite layers of flannel and denim, but her rubber boots sported a paisley design and she radiated such an earth-mothering energy that, had she been wearing a wreath of flowers in her hair, one might have asked if they were growing there by the roots. Joanna had known her since toddlerhood and had always adored her, occasionally fantasizing that somehow she might be Helen’s changeling offspring.
“Hello, Anna! Thanks for coming home from the big city to take care of that damn fool,” she said, then turned vaguely in the direction of the camera. “We’ll start the hearing by reading correspondence on the helipad, and then the plaintiff will state his case, then we’ll open it up to public comment.” Shifting her gaze now to the densely packed audience: “When it’s your turn to speak, we ask you to say who you are before speaking.”
Spread before her on the table was an array of notes and letters. Most of these were printed copies of emails, a couple were typed on textured stationery, and two were handwritten on lined notebook paper, one neat and one scrawled. Helen pushed some of the papers toward the other officers and they each took turns reading aloud. Joanna typed and watched at the same time.
“To the ZBA”—this in an email—“My family has lived seasonally on the North Shore for three generations. We appreciate it because it is so delightfully rural and quiet . . .”
“Dear Chairman Javier,” began a missive typed on ivory stationery with an embossed letterhead she couldn’t quite make out. “We are aware that there is a town bylaw expressly forbidding helicopter landing anywhere in town except the airport. Please keep it that way.”
Next was an email from another neighbor saying almost the same thing. And then another. Then three more. Then a final email: “Mr. Smith is an upstanding gentleman and people should be allowed to transport as they please. I recommend, and request, that you allow him the helipad but restrict usable hours. That should suit everyone. I know my neighbors will give me all kinds of grief for this but it seems fairest.”
When the correspondence was complete, Helen announced that it was now time for Mr. Smith to have his say.
A bland fellow in an expensive navy suit, about forty, stood up from the front row. He held a briefcase and was adjusting his maroon tie. His physique screamed College Crew Team, as did his haircut. In Manhattan he would have been just another suit and Joanna would not have registered him in the sidewalk throngs at rush hour. Here, in this rural village in midwinter surrounded by plaid, denim, and camouflage-green flannel, he looked almost provocatively ridiculous. At a guess, Joanna thought he surely used more hair product than the rest of the room combined (including all the women, even the school librarian) and his expensive shoes were hopelessly impractical for January in the country, but sure looked sharp. He did not seem nearly hip enough to have his own helicopter. After a beat, he sat down and decided to talk from his chair.
“I’m here on behalf of Orion Smith,” he said.
Ah, that explained it. A minion, she could see all the ZBA members thinking to themselves.
“Hello,” said Helen gruffly, glancing down at the agenda, the margin of which she tapped absently with a pencil.
The Minion continued, looking grim. “Mr. Smith received a cease and desist order from the West Tisbury zoning inspector in late December, informing him he was not allowed to use his own personal helicopter on his own private property.”
“That’s right,” said Helen, too patiently, looking back up at him. “It’s against the bylaws to have a helipad anywhere but at the airport, so he can’t land a helicopter on his property.” Thumbing through papers in a manila folder in front of her, she went on. “If I recall correctly, Mr. Smith disregarded the cease and desist and brought the helicopter back just a week or so ago, making several trips to bring over multiple parties from the mainland?”
“That’s correct. After he filed for an appeal, which is his right to do, he was using it to shuttle guests to a private party at his home, as the ferries had stopped running for the night.”
“Is Mr. Smith unable to appear in person?” asked another board member.
“Mr. Smith’s tenancy is seasonal and he is currently traveling on business. At his request, I am appearing as his proxy to appeal the decision.”
Once Minion Lawyer was finished, Helen called on comments from the crowd. It was a Thursday afternoon in winter, so they were a lackluster group, but a united one.
And they were familiar to Joanna. Even the ones she didn’t know, she knew. A particular type often tended toward Island government: hefty men, not fat so much as gristly, radiating a repressed bluster. Each man absolutely definite about his place in his own world, but grudgingly cognizant that the real world was much bigger. As with Hank—an exemplary model—they were boisterous with each other, but with outsiders they tended toward a sheepish belligerence. After decades of painful experience watching their homeland transmogrify into a real estate market, they were wary of being tricked or cheated out of their diminishing resources. Easily a third of the faces in the crowd were that man.
Everyone was against the helipad, even those who lived miles away from Mr. Smith’s property. A mousy middle-aged woman in batik rayon could barely bring herself to speak at all, but speak she did, sounding like an NPR announcer. She spoke on behalf of the Wetlands Protection Act, a piece of legislation that required only a 200-foot buffer but which implied far more, as they all knew perfectly well, but which couldn’t state more than 200 feet because of lawmakers who were actively determined to poison the planet. Helen very graciously caused her to stop talking. Then there was a brash man in his thirties who started off in a normal voice but—without anyone naysaying him—worked his way into a lather of defensiveness against the big-city rich people who don’t give a crap about other people’s quality of life. Joanna’s money was on his heading straight from here down-Island for a few beers to blow off steam after. An eight-year-old girl, speaking with permission because she was not a registered voter, said she was worried that if she flew her kite on the beach while the helicopter was flying by, it would suck her kite into its rotors and destroy it.
“Hard to top that one,” said one of the board members. “I make a motion to close the hearing.”
Another seconded it, and all four voted in favor.
Immediately, the same member said, “I make a motion to reject the appeal.” This was immediately seconded, and the board unanimously voted to reject.
Helen turned to the Minion Lawyer to make sure he understood that was the end of the matter. “It’s in the bylaws,” she said, not unkindly. “If Mr. Smith doesn’t like the bylaws, he has to take it up with the Planning Board and ask them to change the bylaws. And in the meantime, ‘cease and desist’ means cease and desist. No more helicopter rides.”
“What will happen if he continues to use the helicopter?” asked the Minion.
“I just told you that he can’t do that,” said Helen. “We’re not allowing him to do it.”
“What happens if he continues to use it anyhow?”
The four officers all sat up straighter, as if they’d been tugged. They glanced at each other in surprise. “We don’t have to deal with scofflaws very often,” said Helen. “Generally people are law-abiding.”
“Maybe we confiscate the helicopter?” one of the other board members posited, half joking.
“Can we do that?” asked the third. All eyes turned to the administrator who was seated with the largest pile of folders at one end of the table. Other than the Minion Lawyer she was the only person in the room who looked as if she might work in an actual office, and this impression was based mostly on the fact that she had manicured nails. “Rachel?”
“You should ask town counsel,” Rachel said. “I think she’ll tell you to threaten Mr. Smith with legal action, but I’m not sure.”
Said the Minion, “It sounds like there is no answer. Currently, the official position is that nothing will happen if Mr. Smith ignores the cease and desist order and continues to use his personal transportation device as he sees fit.”
There was a millisecond of perfect silence in the room. Every set of eyes was staring at the lawyer. Then several grunts burbled up from the audience.
“Are you serious?” demanded Helen, finally.
“How can you enforce a ruling when there are no consequences for disobeying it?” he asked.
“There are consequences,” said Helen in a forbearing tone. “We’ll find out what the consequences are and communicate them to Mr. Smith.”
“Please communicate them to me,” he said briskly. He stood again, and held out a card. “Here is the best way to reach me.”
After another pause, the officer directly across from him reached out and took the card. She read his name aloud, but nobody took notes. Finally, looking bemused, she offered the card to the clerk, who nodded toward her large pile of files. The officer shrugged and tossed the card onto the pile.
“We’ll let you know,” said Helen, in a voice of bored dismissal. The suited minion nodded tersely and turned to exit, picking his way past faded Levi’s and weathered L.L.Bean. Joanna didn’t like him much but she felt bad for him anyhow, because she knew that in most parts of the East Coast he would seem relatively normal.
After another pause, the board members all exchanged glances and rolled their eyes.
“What an asshole,” James Sherman muttered under his breath beside Joanna, in a distinctly nonjournalistic tone.
“Any other business?” Helen asked.
AS SOON AS Joanna got home, she turned the oven on again and put what was left of the turkey lasagna in to heat it up. She went into the pantry to check how many Sam Adams were still left (meaning: how many Hank had gotten up to drink while she was at the ZBA meeting, and the answer was miraculously only one) and her eye fell on the spot where the coveted honey jar had been. There was now an empty spot on the dusty shelf, like a missing tooth.
“Henry Holmes,” she said in a scolding tone, speaking over the evening news.
“Joanna Howes,” he said in exactly the same tone.
“Did you really think I would steal your honey?”
“Oh, so you noticed it was gone?” he said slyly. “That means you had your eye on it, so it’s good I did something about it.”
“You are amazing,” she grumbled. “I can’t believe Anderson Cooper puts up with you.” She crossed past him into her bedroom to get a sweater.
Sitting on her bedside table was the honey jar.
“Oh!” she said, and back in the living room Hank burst into his Hank Laughter.
“Thank you,” she said, coming out of the bedroom and, of course, now feeling bad that she had pressured him to give it up, because that’s how these things work.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “It’s going to taste even sweeter than it would have if I’d just let you have it when you first asked.”
That evening, after feeding Hank and double-checking his meds, she exchanged a few “sitting here in limbo” jokes with Brian via text, then wrote up a brief, clear, and objective description of the meeting. She emailed it to Everett along with her notes, feeling as proud and nervous as she had after her first restaurant review.
An hour later, he sent it back to her, not one sentence left unchanged:
A large crowd was present this week to witness the West Tisbury Zoning Board of Appeals resoundingly reject an appeal from Orion Smith of New York City, a seasonal resident who sought to build a helipad for his personal 5-seater Bell 505 Jet Ranger helicopter on his North Road property near the much-loved protected wetlands of Beechwood Point. Mr. Smith defied a cease and desist order earlier in the month by using his helicopter on at least two unauthorized trips, and has made it clear (through a representative who appeared in his stead) that he intends to continue to do so. The ZBA is waiting for the town counsel to advise on Mr. Smith’s actions. “We don’t have to deal with scofflaws very often,” said Ms. Javier, by way of explaining why counsel was required. This is Mr. Smith’s third contentious run-in with the ZBA over the past 12 years; he had previously sought variances for a 5-hole golf course and an oversized outbuilding, neither of which were granted.
“I didn’t know any of that,” she said to Everett the next morning in his office, trying not to sound defensive. Or pathetic.
“I know,” he said kindly. “Sort of ironic, since Hank was chair of the ZBA for at least one of those, and I think they even got into a shouting match in public. Hank is reliable for good copy that way.”
The next day, the Newes published James Sherman’s version: “The West Tisbury Zoning Board of Appeals did not grant an appeal by Mr. Orion Smith, who wishes to build a helipad on the North Road property where three generations of his family have summered.”
She blinked at the sentence.
“Susan’s gone for another couple weeks,” said Everett over her shoulder, seeing what she was reading. “I’m keeping you on the West Tisbury beat. That means selectmen’s meeting every Wednesday, and a couple of Planning Board meetings, maybe an assessors’ meeting and I think the Conservation Commission meets next week.”
“I thought you wanted me to do features,” she said, feeling pallid. “Not news.”
“When I said no news, I meant no investigative journalism,” he said cheerfully. “Covering town politics isn’t news, it’s just official gossip. You must deal with that all the time in the big city.”