SHE HAD TO STAY BECAUSE HANK WAS NOT HEALING AS quickly as he should have been. Members of various family branches, and Hank’s friends, were good about stepping in and taking care of things in her stead when necessary, but there was a bigger issue, which was that he wasn’t healing. He was uninterested in discussing this fact in person, so she doubted she could get him to engage with her remotely if she moved back off-Island. Therefore, she was staying put.
Still, after a few weeks of writing news briefs, and penning too many obituaries that could not include the word heroin even though everyone knew about it, she fantasized about running away to the big city to spend her days asking rock stars what their favorite breakfast cereal was. Even in early May, the Island felt small, gray, depressed, inbred, unwholesome, and stale. There was a dearth of twenty- and thirty-somethings. Very few of her childhood friends could afford to live here as adults; those who were here had young children and were too busy for friends who didn’t also have young children. Plus, they all now tended to treat her, their friend-the-reporter, with the uneasiness one feels about passing a cop on the highway. Even Celia’s baking schedule grew suspiciously busy, given it wasn’t yet Memorial Day.
She continued to fret about money. She wasn’t paying rent, but that was temporary. If she were to move in with Hank again after Memorial Day, when she had to move out of Helen’s, they’d probably slay each other. Because of the seasonal Vineyard rental market, she was too late to find a year-round place: landlords with vacancies were already seeking big-money summer tenants. In late September, the price would decrease for the winter, on the condition that the winter tenants vacate again come summer. For generations this had been called the Vineyard Shuffle and it was a topic she’d covered at ZBA and selectmen’s meetings. She knew the stats and they were not in her favor. Martha’s Vineyard had more houses than it had year-round residents. But most of those were vacation homes and stood empty while thousands of residents scrambled to find proper housing. She could barely keep track of where Celia was living from year to year. So plainly it would make sense to retreat to New York as soon as possible. Until she remembered that she no longer had a place to live there either, since she’d sublet her apartment. But at least in New York there might be options.
But this was moot, because she couldn’t leave the Vineyard until she knew what was going on with Hank’s health. She stopped by twice a day. As well as carrying out her usual tasks, she perused the trash. Twice she found empty prescription pill bottles, the labels removed with an X-Acto blade, which left stab wounds on the orange plastic bottles. Hank always did that when he tossed out prescription bottles, but she was stymied that he’d not told her what he was on now. Unless there was some other hidden illness, it meant he was still on narcotic pain meds. She would not make plans to leave until she had more information, and trying to get information out of an old Yankee was . . . well, that was its own metaphor, really. It was like trying to get information out of an old Yankee.
All in all, she was in existential limbo once again when Lewis called from the Newes.
“Hi, Joey,” he said, cheerily. “How’s our best profiler?”
This time he had caught her, not in a Journal edit meeting as usual, but outside in Hank’s vegetable plot. She was kneeling on the damp earth, enjoying the sun’s wan attempt to warm her back, weeding around the seedling carrots and peas that Celia had planted for him, while Hank himself was prowling, circumambulating the yard on his crutches, reacquainting himself with the chickens, checking to see how the woodpile, the disassembled Jeeps, and the jury-rigged outdoor shower had all survived the winter.
She’d been listening to Nina Simone on her headphones, so when she took the call she stayed hands-free and continued to weed.
“Can’t complain,” she said.
“We have a piece I’d love you to do. A new ‘On the Same Page.’ One of your portrait pieces, maybe a longer one this time since it’s a big get.”
“All right, I’ll bite,” she said, as she decided the green fuzz she’d been examining was an excess of carrot seeds germinating together. “Who is it?”
“You already know a little bit about him because you covered a ZBA meeting for us, where he came up. His name is Orion Smith, he’s a seasonal—”
She started laughing, trying to turn her mouth away from the earbud mic. “No,” she said. “Sorry, I have to recuse myself from that one.”
“Why?”
She glanced in the direction Hank had gone, but he was on the far side of the house out of sight.
“Personal reasons. I’m prejudiced. You should ask somebody else.”
“I don’t have anyone else.”
“I could take somebody else’s story, then, free them up, and they could do this.”
“It’s not as if you’re all interchangeable, Joey. That’s the kind of slapdash amateur attitude they have at the Journal. Anyhow, I’m serious, I’ve got nobody. We’re not covering any meetings in Aquinnah or Oak Bluffs this week; that’s how understaffed I am. Chris has the flu, Rosemary’s at a conference, Jane’s mother is on her deathbed, and Charles is on personal leave.” She had no idea who these people were since she almost never stepped foot in the Newes office, but she understood his desperation. “It’s on the same page with a piece about building the airport as a naval training base in ’42. Can you put your prejudices aside and give him a chance?”
She calmed herself by taking in a slow, deep breath of soil-scented air. “I have to go off-Island for the next couple of weeks. Checking out a job possibility with a New York paper.”
“Oh.” A pause. “I thought you were going to be staying here.” And then, almost sheepishly, Lewis said, “I was planning to offer you a full-time staff position this summer.”
She couldn’t speak for a moment. Then she realized that wasn’t the fantastic offer she thought it was at first. “You mean full-time through the summer, right?”
“No,” he said. “I mean full-time, year-round. You’d have to bone up on news reporting, but we get so many compliments on your community coverage, and we should capitalize on that.”
“Oh!” she said. And then: “Thank you.”
“People want to be profiled by you—I mean high rollers from L.A. and New York who come here to avoid media attention. I was at a preseason cocktail party last week and three different people approached me to say, ‘Hey, I love that Joey Dias guy. When I’m here this summer, let him know I’d be available for an interview.’ They are all names you’d recognize.”
“That’s classy, how they’re suggesting your paper needs their picture in it.”
“No, you’ve got it backward,” he said. “It’s street cred for them. Everyone wants to talk to you if you’re rich and famous . . . except on Martha’s Vineyard. Here we only want to talk to you if you belong here. In less than three months, Joey Dias’s attention has become the high-water mark for belonging here.”
“I’m flattered, I really am, but I don’t think I’m the right person to do a piece on Mr. Smith,” she said, wondering if those other green things in the corner were volunteer potato plants. “Anyhow, I won’t be around for the next few weeks.” Remembering the pieces she still owed him, she hurried to add, “I’m going to be interviewing the Shelton family and Carol Lee’s backup singer by phone, so don’t worry about those.”
“Well, then you could interview Smith by phone,” he said.
She tried to think fast, and she fumbled. Lying by omission, it had turned out, was something she was regrettably adept at. Lying by commission, not so much. “I’m not comfortable taking on new projects, because if I get this job I’m interviewing for, I’ll be starting right away. Sorry. It came up suddenly.” She glanced around again, making sure Hank was not close enough to hear this invention. He was still out of sight.
A disappointed pause from Lewis. “I didn’t realize you were planning to leave the Island.”
“I wasn’t. But I can’t afford to live here as a freelance journalist.”
“Oh. Well . . .” He paused. She realized she had cornered him into something she’d had no intention of cornering him into. “What if I offered you a staff position now? Full-time? Permanent?”
She sat upright, her knees pressing damply into the earth. “Er . . . full-time? Starting right away? With, like, benefits and everything?”
“That’s what I meant, yes.”
“Wow. Well. Thanks, that’s a nice offer.” Head spinning. Couldn’t think straight. She didn’t care if the Newes painted the Island with a romantic patina, working on staff there had been her childhood fantasy. Plus: a regular paycheck? Where she could walk the beach every morning? “I don’t mean this to sound like I’m working you, but you realize that a big New York glossy is going to offer a lot more than you can.”
He must have been expecting that, because his response was immediate: “But I can offer you life on the Vineyard. That’s a mic drop, I think they call it.”
She laughed, mostly from nerves. “Wouldn’t expect you to know that lingo.”
“Stole it from my daughter,” he confessed. “Not even sure I used it correctly. So . . . can we talk about this?”
“Of course. Can we talk numbers?”
They talked numbers, and benefits—it had been years since she’d had benefits. She would not get rich. She could never afford a home in her own hometown. But she could get by, save a little, master the Vineyard Shuffle, and inhabit the place she loved most in the world. Inconveniently, yes, it was the place she loved most in the world.
“I’d like to say yes . . .” she said cautiously.
“Wonderful! I’m so pleased. Your first assignment is to profile Orion Smith.”
“Lewis,” she said. “Please. No.”
“You’re a reporter, being objective is part of the job. I need it for next week; that’s when the court date is expected to be announced. Put the other pieces on hold until then. Thank you, you’re terrific.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” she said, trying to sound calm. “I said I’d like to say yes. I didn’t say I am saying yes. Can I just sleep on it?”
“Sure. Of course. Call me tomorrow, we’ll take it from there. Paolo Croce will be thrilled; he asks after you at least once a week.”
She sat there for a long moment, noticing birdsong and, distantly, a car downshifting around a bend on Lambert’s Cove Road. How ludicrous to be in such a situation, as if she were the heroine of a Shakespeare comedy. Rosalind and Viola would have handled it with panache. All she could think to do was berate herself for being the author of her own misfortune.
A moment later, Hank hobbled into view, clucking to Brunhilde through the chicken wire. Joanna decided she was finished weeding for now and stood up, rolling her shoulders back and brushing the topsoil from her jeans. After kneeling so long in sunlight, it almost felt like spring. She went inside and kicked off her garden boots in the mudroom. In the kitchen she put a low flame under the chowder pot, sliced some bread Celia had dropped by earlier, and dropped it into the toaster.
“How’d it go?” she asked Hank when he entered through the back door.
“Big improvement. This time, I didn’t fall and break my ankle,” he said with a grin. “Sure takes the wind out of you, though.”
“Sit down,” she said, gesturing toward his recliner. “I’m getting dinner on for you, but I just got a new work assignment so I’ve got to head home and deal with things.”
“Of course you do,” he said. “Me and Wolf Blitzer, we’ll manage to survive without you.”
She gave him a quick, almost nervous smile. “I’ll stop by in the morning,” she promised.
BACK AT HELEN’S, as dusk gathered outside the house, Joanna stared stupidly at the tinkling white lights of the living room. They lit the room with a pale, speckled glow that illuminated her just enough that she could see herself, ghostlike, in the plate-glass windows.
Finally, she called Everett at home.
“Now what have you done?” he asked, tired humor in his voice.
“You’re the only person I’ve been absolutely honest with,” she said.
“Oh God,” he said, the humor evaporating. “What have you done?”
“Nothing yet. But I’ve been given an offer it’s hard to turn down. I’m wondering if you can beat it.”
“Orion Smith is paying you to relocate to Costa Rica.”
“The Newes offered to hire Joey Dias as a full-time staffer.” She paused. “I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t see it coming, I swear. But it kind of solves several problems all at once.”
A pause. “Aw, crap,” he said quietly, as if in self-rebuke.
“I love working with you, Everett, and I’m so grateful to you for putting up with everything, so before I said yes, I just wanted to see if you could, you know . . .”
“I can’t,” he said at once, funereal. “Especially now, when we have to be careful about what stories we put you on. I suppose you could just do features, but we’re not a features-driven paper like they are.” A brief pause. “Oh, I get it, that’s what they want you for? They want you for the color pieces. Your whole job will just be writing flattering profiles of people.”
“Not flattering,” she said, bristling a bit. “Kind.”
“Well, whatever you want to call it, that’s your strength, so, you know . . . go for it. Congratulations. Probably good to take a breather from us right now anyhow.”
“I’ll miss you too,” she said, stung.
“Sorry,” Everett said. “I didn’t meant to be . . . to sound . . . Look, this is coming out of nowhere, I’m just thrown, okay? My inner editor is trying to figure out how I could have avoided this. I know I didn’t handle things well, but I didn’t realize I’d handled them this badly—”
“You didn’t, it has nothing to do with any of the messed-up stuff. I need enough money to live on, and they have it. Orion Smith isn’t even part of that equation.” An awkward pause. She stared at her eerie reflection and realized how metaphorically apt it was: she needed to be more transparent. “Except for the part about their hiring me to coerce me to write a profile of Orion Smith.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” he said. “After all these months of pretending there’s no story there, now Lewis wants to celebrate the man who’s wasting taxpayers’ money? You recused yourself, of course. Right? Please tell me—”
“I tried to. Lewis wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“I used to not take no for an answer; look where it got us.”
“Yes, I know. He seems pretty desperate.”
“I wasn’t? Oldest trick in the book, an editor telling a writer I’m desperate for you to work with us. He doesn’t even get points for originality.”
“He wants the piece done before the lawsuit is filed. He wants to give the outsider a human face.”
“Well, do your best, whatever happens,” he said. “Are you pulling the plug on us right away? You’re still working on a few pieces; how do you want to handle that?”
Suddenly she was terrifically tired and didn’t want to be a grown-up anymore. “Let me sleep on it,” she said. “I think as long as Joey Dias gets Lewis the Orion Smith profile, he’ll allow me some wiggle room. I suppose I should come clean to him about being Anna Howes, though.”
“If you decide not to, I’ll keep your secret.”
“You’ve certainly kept enough of them this winter. Thank you. And again, I’m so sorry for all my bungling.”
“Live and learn,” he said. “There was no wreckage. Except a punctured romance.”
She let out a deep breath. “Thanks, Everett.” She waited for him to hang up.
Then she set the phone down. She’d call the Newes in the morning. Make it final.
And then try to figure out a way for Joey Dias to interview Mr. Orion Smith.
* * *
The Newes already had Orion’s email address, and before noon the next day they’d set Joey Dias up with an in-house account: jd@mvineyardnewes.org.
Dear Mr. Smith,
I’m Joey Dias from the Vineyard Newes. I’m looking forward to writing about you. Unfortunately I’m traveling for a bit and won’t have very good phone or even internet reception, so it looks like we’ll have to do this mostly as a Q&A email exchange. I do mean exchange, as I’m sure to have follow-ups to my initial questions. Hope this arrangement works for you. I’ll be sending the initial questions later today. Thanks so much, looking forward to it.
–JD
The response came quickly.
Hello Joey-
Great to (virtually) meet you. I’m a fan of your writing and honored to be worthy of your journalistic attention. I understand that we need to start this as an email, but let’s connect in person, or at least by phone, some point soon. I’d love to show you around my property, since my owning it is—at present—what connects me most to the Vineyard. Plus it’s a gorgeous place and it would feel exotic to show it off. So let me know when you’re back, and I’ll have you up there for coffee? Give me dates, I can work around them. Thanks! PS: Call me Orion.
* * *
Hello Orion,
Thanks for the kind words. I don’t think I’ll be back on the Island before deadline—the opportunity to interview you came up unexpectedly and I already had plans. Sorry about that. Let’s see how the email exchange works. If it proves too difficult, we can either delay the pub date or see if one of my colleagues at the Newes can do a follow-up with you. Best, JD
* * *
Hi Joey,
Where are you going to be? In case you haven’t heard (ha), I have a helicopter—could come meet you almost anywhere along the northeast corridor. I can even give you an aerial tour of the estate, and get you back to America in time for dinner. Let me know!
-Orion
* * *
Dear Orion,
What an extraordinary invitation! Thanks! Unfortunately I’ll be in Peru, which is probably out of helicopter range LOL.
Anyhow, as my editor probably mentioned, a photographer will come out separately to take a photo of you. So I think we’ve got all the bases covered even though we won’t get to meet in person. I’ve done this before, so I’m confident I can present you to our readers with a credible sense of familiarity. Thanks for understanding the situation.
-JD
* * *
Hi Joey-
Well let’s start with the email, then. But I feel pretty strongly that we should have at least a brief meeting in person. I’m sure you hear this from people a lot, but I’m enough of an extrovert that it’s hard for me to imagine anyone really grasping my personality without being in the room with me. More than that, though, I’m feeling sensitive around issues of transparency due to recent personal reasons. So call me a diva, but I consider it a necessity—even though I already know and really do admire your work—that we have a chance to connect in person. Ciao. OS
* * *
Joey Dias asked Orion Smith, via email, to meet at Hubert’s Bakery. It was where he’d first met Joanna one-on-one, so now it could be the last place as well. It was early May, but it wasn’t spring. There were some flowers, and maples with fat leaf buds, but it wasn’t spring. The air was fresh but still had a nip that no longer plagued the off-Island sections of New England. People still wore jackets. It was the tipping point of the year, when half the Island thought winter would never end, while the other half—caretakers and landscapers and retail or boutique owners—were already overwhelmed by summer’s approach.
She drove Hank’s truck to the commercial cluster of shops and businesses and parked it where it wasn’t visible from the bakery windows. She cut the motor, took a deep breath, pulled the key from the ignition, and tossed it into her canvas bag.
She took another deep breath.
And another one. She realized she was chewing on her lower lip, and made herself stop. Her discomfort moved into her body and her forearms began to itch. She tried to ignore this, pulled the sleeves of her jacket down firmly over the wrists, and opened the door. Placed one foot on the ground. Then pivoted, and placed the other foot down too. She did not want to go into the bakery. If an osprey had flown past offering to carry her away if she would just do him the courtesy of turning into his favorite fish, she would have gone with him. Anything was better than this imminent humiliation. At least, since they’d be in public, there would have to be a limit to his outrage.
Feeling as if she’d swallowed a radioactive ice pick, she willed herself to walk to the door of the bakery. She looked in through the glass panel before she entered. There were only three customers inside, and two young women hovering behind the display cases, prettifying and neatening in the post-rush-hour calm. She could see Orion, relaxing at the larger table, looking about calmly, waiting to meet the writer he already knew he was going to charm.
She took yet another deep breath. Eventually the worst would be over, but it couldn’t be over until after it started, so she had better just start it. She reached for the handle. She opened the door.
All heads in the room turned slightly in the direction of the opening door, and then almost immediately all but one head turned away again. She could feel Orion staring at her, without her glancing in his direction. She began to walk toward his table, not able to look up.
As she approached, she could feel the air between them stiffen. “What are you doing? Don’t sit here,” he said.
She sat, her eyes still nervously averted. She wished she were wearing a broad-brimmed hat to shield her entire face.
“Go away,” he said firmly. Calm, but cold. “We have an understanding. Honor it. I’m waiting to speak to someone.”
“My name,” she said quietly, almost a whisper, “is Joanna. Dias. Howes.” Finally she glanced up at him. How awful to see his face without a smile on it.
He stared back with a blank expression, and then a puzzled look puckered his face. His eyes opened a little wider, his brows pulled closer together, and his jaw went slack. It was almost worth it just to see him lose his slick.
“Yeah,” she said. “You got it.”
He stared. She braced herself for the verbal attack, hoping he would contain himself in public. He just stared.
Then he burst out laughing. He laughed so hard he had to hold his head steady between his hands. Everyone in the bakery stared at him.
“What,” she said. She felt almost sucker-punched.
“This is absurd,” he said, looking up, containing himself.
“I thought you’d be angry.”
“I’m furious. Of course I’m furious. But it’s too absurd not to laugh at.” His eyes glittered. “Okay, we’re going for a walk,” he said, and stood up so abruptly his chair squeaked against the floorboards. The onlookers all pretended to stop looking.
“Where are we going?”
“Private conversation. Stand up. Let’s go.”
He wasn’t the sort to hit anyone, but murder might not be out of the question. “Where, though? We’re surrounded by parking lot.”
He glanced outside, seemed surprised to find that she was right, and sat down again.
“Your ability to disorient me grows exponentially,” he said. And continued to stare, until the others in the shop lost interest and stopped paying attention for real. He shook his head slightly, although she wasn’t sure if he realized he was doing so. The effect was of somebody contemplating but then rejecting an attack tactic.
“I wouldn’t trust you to follow me if I drove somewhere private.”
“I don’t blame you. I mean, I would follow you, but I don’t blame you for doubting me about that.”
“Are you evil?” he asked, as if he were asking her astrological sign. “Why are you doing this?”
“I needed the money. I had to write for both papers. But I couldn’t openly write for them both.”
“You couldn’t have gotten a job as a receptionist or something?”
“Do you know what the unemployment rate is like here in the off-season?” she retorted. “And anyhow I’m not qualified to be a receptionist.”
“You write features for national magazines, you can manage an optician’s front desk, for Pete’s sake,” he huffed.
She was reassured by this exchange, because it showed he was calm enough to have a conversation. “There’s your privilege showing again,” she said. “You wouldn’t have learned this at your country club, but there is actually a receptionist skill set, and my interviewing rock stars about their favorite breakfast cereal doesn’t mean I have that skill set. That’s like saying, ‘You’re a nurse, why not teach kindergarten,’ or ‘You’re a real estate mogul, surely that qualifies you to be leader of the free world.’ Anyhow, like I said, the unemployment rate.”
“You know that I am going to get you fired,” he said, pleasantly, almost giggling. “I can’t believe you’ve put yourself in this position with me. The paper might decide they don’t care, but it’s now my ambition to personally eradicate your duplicitous tendencies. So please respect my need to make the effort.” His eyes continued to bore into hers. “Man, you are a piece of work. It’s a shame, because I genuinely liked you.”
“I’m very bad at being dishonest,” she said. “It’s not how I normally roll.”
“I’m not even a little interested in that,” he said, with a dismissive swat of one hand. “To expect me to care shows how clueless you are. I think that’s what smarts the most.” He gave her a loaded look, as if he already anticipated her response.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“It’s not just that I don’t know who you really are. It’s that—if you’re running around being preoccupied by keeping all your falsehoods straight—you’re not really seeing who I am either. It’s like . . .” He paused, shook his head wonderingly. “I’m at a loss for words, which never happens, so fuck you for that too, by the way . . . It’s as if you’re playing chicken with me, without telling me. So you don’t see me as me, ever. You see me as ‘the person you have to not lose the game of chicken to.’ I don’t merely feel fooled, I feel unseen. Which is a crappy way to feel after spending weeks getting to know someone.” His jaw had been tightening as he spoke and now he leaned back in the bowback chair, nearly gritting his teeth.
She wilted. She had not even considered that, which of course made his point strike home more.
“So,” he continued, “why should I want to know anything about you, when you clearly don’t have any interest in me?”
“I’m really sorry that it feels that way to you—but we can make up for that, right now, with the interview. You will have my undivided attention and I want nothing more than to see the real you.” She thought that was a pretty good recovery.
But he looked appalled. “You’re only doing that because you’re getting paid for it. You don’t actually want to do it—you said you tried to get out of it.”
She opened her mouth to retort—although she had no idea what she would have said—but he cut her off.
“Here’s what needs to happen,” he said. He lowered his voice and leaned across the table toward her, gesturing her to mirror him. It unnerved her to have their heads so close together. “You will write up this profile of me,” he said, almost directly into her ear. “You’ll show it to me. You’ll show me that you’ve made the effort to know me, to see me. That’s what I will accept as an apology. Not words, but actions.”
“Yes, fine, of course,” she said.
“Then,” he continued quietly, “we will destroy it, and I will tell the Newes I have changed my mind and don’t want to be written about. You will not get paid for it. If you’re getting paid for it, it’s not an apology. You don’t have to agree with me, but do you understand me?”
He pulled back slightly so that they could look directly at each other, their faces close enough to kiss. She nodded.
“Good,” he said, and then leaned in closer again. “If I like what you write, I won’t blow the whistle on you, and you can go ahead and write for the Newes for the rest of your life if you like, as long as you never touch a story related to me again.”
“Got it,” she said.
“I’m not done. If I don’t like it, I will blow the whistle and you will never write for either paper about anything.”
Now she was the one who pulled back to make eye contact. “So you’re ordering me to suck up to you,” she said in a flat tone. “I understand you’re pissed off, but really? How’s that going to make it better—knowing that you can force me to flatter you on paper? I didn’t know you were that guy. That bully.” He fidgeted in displeasure and she felt her face warm with the heat of righteous indignation. “I’ll do it if you want but please own up that that’s what you’re doing. You held the moral high ground here until you said that.”
He looked appalled. “I’m not expecting you to flatter me.” He took a breath, let it out slowly. “I don’t mean you have to make me look good. I mean you have to show me that you see me. If you examine me and you see warts, write about the warts. But see my warts because you’re looking at me, not because you’re trying to keep me from seeing your warts. Understand?”
“Yes,” she said, wilting again. “Then, what?”
“Then after you write the article, that’s it. We’re done. Whether or not I reveal you to your boss, after this exercise is carried out, I never want to speak to you again. I wish that I felt otherwise but I can’t imagine how I could. I’m sure you understand that.”
She nodded, looked down.
“All right, now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s schedule an interview. I think you should come to the house. I have some old photos and letters I can show you.”
Joanna held up her backpack. “Why not just talk now and get it over with?” she said. “I already know most of it.”
He gave her a dry, disbelieving stare. “Really?” he asked.
ON THE SAME PAGE: ORION SMITH
By Joey Dias
Orion Smith has been in the news lately, due to the legal battle he is preparing to face with the town of West Tisbury. As has been previously reported in these pages, Mr. Smith is in the process of suing the town for the right to fly and land his personal Jet Ranger 505 helicopter on his North Road property overlooking Vineyard Sound.
Mr. Smith has few local friends, and is generally perceived as a wealthy seasonal resident out of touch with the Island way of life. But a closer look reveals a more complicated picture. Mr. Smith was born at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital in Oak Bluffs in the middle of a hurricane, and the circumstances of his life have hardly calmed down since. His youth resembles a novel written collaboratively by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, with perhaps a touch of Dickens.
Mr. Smith’s mother, Miranda Pleasance, was the only child of a prosperous family in Ontario County, upstate New York. Her parents were not happy with her choice of spouse: John F. Smith, a man whose background was as unremarkable as his name. Mr. Smith, the son of a deceased mechanic from Rochester, New York, had worked as a handyman on the Pleasance Estate Orchard (Ltd) before he met Ms. Pleasance. An aspiring writer, he would spend his lunch hours with a pencil and notebook in the orchard, seeking inspiration. Here, he noticed Miranda Pleasance walking through the fields with her camera one summer, stalking butterflies and bugs for nature photographs. Fascinated with her stillness, he began to draw her likeness into his notebooks. Soon he was writing poetry about the woman in his drawings (“it was bad poetry,” says his son Orion, “but it served its purpose”). Eventually, John Smith got up the nerve to introduce himself.
A courtship developed quickly, but Ms. Pleasance’s parents were appalled when they found out. Miranda and John wed in secret in late summer, and by Christmas were expecting a child. By that time they had revealed their marriage, and were living in an outbuilding on her parents’ property, which Mr. Pleasance had grudgingly made available to them. They visited Martha’s Vineyard the following June, where her mother had grown up summering in a long-held family home off North Road. They were not welcome in that house, but childhood friends of Ms. Pleasance, who found her outlier marriage exotically countercultural, made them welcome in Oak Bluffs. Orion was born at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital in August. That makes him a native Islander.
Unfortunately there were complications from the moment of his birth, and his mother was medevaced to Mass General, but did not survive the journey. His distraught father, trying to cope with the shock and grief, left the newborn with his in-laws. They immediately took legal action to keep primary custody of their infant grandson, fired Mr. Smith from his position, and threatened him with fictitious legal action if he attempted to contact his son. They legally changed his surname to Pleasance.
Until he was twelve, Orion Pleasance lived only with his maternal grandparents, who ensured that during this period he would be raised in a manner that befitted any member of the Pleasance family. His was a country-club upbringing, with golf, tennis, sailing, skiing, and summering on Martha’s Vineyard in the North Road house his parents had been denied access to the summer he was born. Ironically, his grandparents were well-known philanthropists in Ontario County, and gave chiefly to social welfare organizations that helped single-parent households. Orion did not even know that John Smith, who had returned to his family home in Rochester, was alive until he was ten; he was able to discover the elder Mr. Smith thanks to his relative fluency with the internet, which his grandparents were literally not plugged into yet. Once he had informed his grandparents that he knew he was not an orphan, he was allowed occasional day visits with his father. By this point his father was working as a helicopter mechanic for Skycroft Aviation in Rochester, supporting his widowed mother, who had recently retired from her job of thirty years as a bakery manager. The hours young Orion spent with her in her kitchen, baking cookies and breads, counted as some of the happiest of his young life.
If all of this sounds extraordinary, it is only the beginning. On the fourth of July after he turned twelve, Orion Pleasance ran away from his grandparents’ house during the family’s annual Independence Day party, and moved in with his father and grandmother in their small house in Rochester. He was, he explained in a letter to his grandparents, “determined not to ride the wave that would have drowned [his] father, and live a more authentic life among people who truly loved [his] mother, rather than just a romantic re-imagining of who she should have been.”
When financial bribery failed to lure their grandson back to them, his maternal grandparents—rather than create a fuss—told curious friends and relatives that they had sent him off to a private school in Europe. They ceased to have anything to do with him personally, but did create a trust fund for his college education. Young Orion began to use his father’s family name of Smith and spent his high school years in the working-class neighborhood of Rochester as an apprentice—first informally and then officially—to his father (who, in addition to working as a helicopter mechanic, had continued to write “terribly bad poetry,” and instilled in his son a love of literature). A charismatic and smooth-talking teenager, Orion charmed the owner of Skycroft Aviation to teach him how to fly, and earned his private helicopter’s license at the age of 17. He skipped his high school graduation ceremony to take the test for his commercial pilot’s license.
Orion matriculated at Columbia University, relying on the money from his grandparents. He majored in English, but spent all of his nonacademic time working as a commercial helicopter pilot. With the gift of gab and a disarming demeanor, Orion grew his acquaintanceship with his various corporate passengers into invitations to cocktail parties, and then dinner parties, and—making a comfortable income once he’d graduated and was working full-time—he invested in Skycroft Aviation, until at the age of 26 he bought the company. From then on, he continued to invest, now in real estate and occasionally small businesses.
At 28, he married Lucy Bragg, whom he had briefly dated in college, and they settled in New Haven, Connecticut. At 30, he finally reconnected with his maternal grandparents, who were so astounded by his professional success they attempted to reintegrate him into their social circles in Ontario County, with limited success. He bought their Vineyard vacation home from them—where he had spent his summers—then weatherized and upgraded it. Here he installed both his father and paternal grandmother, who lived there year-round until his grandmother’s death three years later. At that point, his father retuned to the mainland, where he now oversees the apple orchard where he met his wife (the apple orchard, too, was purchased by Orion from his grandparents).
Orion’s wife was, in his words, “an old-school socialite” who encouraged him to reconnect with his grandparents. Their relationship grew strained beyond repair when, instead of accepting an invitation to spend the summer with his grandparents, he volunteered for a two-month stint with an NGO that operated in the Congo, piloting a helicopter used to deliver humanitarian supplies. Shortly after his return, the couple separated, and eventually divorced.
“He is a magical human being in many ways,” Ms. Bragg acknowledges in a phone interview from her Connecticut home. “Unfortunately, ‘magical’ and ‘good husband’ are not phrases that go easily together. I’ve never wished him anything but the very best, although we came to realize that we had very different ideas about what that meant.” Ms. Bragg has since remarried, to Mr. Jacques Lawson-McDonald, an investment banker with Roth-Barnwell.
Orion Smith continues to oversee his various enterprises, chiefly Skycroft Aviation and some real estate projects. Belying his quick wit and conversational abilities, he is loath to speak much about his personal life. Most of the information in this story comes from archival sources, often provided by Mr. Smith himself, but with only the occasional addendum or editorial comment from Mr. Smith’s own lips. This is not due to modesty—while gracious, he doesn’t pass as modest—but rather from an almost impish desire to see how people will respond to what they do know. “A stranger meeting me at a public forum forms a very different impression of me than would someone I’m dating, for instance,” he says breezily. “I’m sure that’s true of all of us, I’m just a little more aware of it. It’s interesting to see how different people respond to their different impressions of me. I’m sure I seem like a gratuitous jerk to many residents of West Tisbury, not least of them Henry Holmes [the chairman of the Zoning Board of Appeals, the committee whose rejection of Mr. Smith’s helipad permit sparked the lawsuit]. I’m not saying I’m not a jerk, but I’m not a gratuitous one, and I think Mr. Holmes might acknowledge that if he knew the whole truth about me . . .”
* * *
It went on for several more paragraphs, mostly describing Orion’s property. He read in silence, as she tried to track where he was reading on each page, and what expressions he was trying not to make. Cool jazz was playing quietly from a Bose radio in the pantry. Spring sunshine glared across the granite countertop, uplighting the reader. Outside the sky was blue and colder than it looked from in here.
He lowered the manuscript to the counter. He continued to stare at it for a long moment, almost as if he were too shy to look straight up at her.
“That’s not such a bad person you’re describing there,” he said at last, nodding with his chin to the pages.
“Not at all,” she agreed. “Spectacularly interesting. Almost too good to be true, by the standards of . . . well. By my standards,” she concluded, blushing.
“Not by mine, though,” said Orion. “You left out an important detail.”
“I couldn’t possibly have included everything,” she said. “I already blew through my word count, but there’s a limit—”
“It wouldn’t take very many words,” said Orion. “You just neglected to mention that I’m dropping the lawsuit.”
This was so unexpected that it took a moment to land. “Wait. What?”
He shrugged. “I maintain that my argument is a valid one,” he said. “But there’s something to be said for seeing things from the other person’s point of view. Context matters a lot. So. In the context of Martha’s Vineyard’s Vineyardishness, I am not contributing to the fabric of the community.” He leaned back on his stool, shrugged a little, and said, almost airily, “Mea culpa.”
Joanna blinked. “How did you just come to see that now? This article isn’t about that at all, it’s just about you. Why does this article accomplish what the ZBA, half the Island—and me—couldn’t convince you of over the course of months?”
Orion gestured to the manuscript pages lying before him. “There are many ways you could have told my story, but you told it in a way that spoke specifically to your audience. I like the guy in that story. Which, as I figure it, means I must like that audience. Which means I like these people, and what they’re made of, and what they value. So I should value it too. And that means reassessing things. A lot of things.”
For a moment she could barely breathe. Then relief flooded through her and she sighed. “Thank you,” she said. “If that is true, then I feel like slightly less of a loser.” A pause. “You won’t be reassessing me, though. I mean us.”
“Should I be?” he asked. He glanced in her direction briefly, then returned his attention to the manuscript. He’d sounded almost wistful.
“I wouldn’t, in your place,” she said. “I don’t deserve it. I might have helped you to see things in a new light, or whatever, but it doesn’t change the past, it doesn’t make me not duplicitous.”
“True,” he said. “On the other hand, if you hadn’t been duplicitous, we might never have arrived here, today, at the moment when I decide to drop the lawsuit. This moment is a good place to have ended up.”
She wanted to receive this as something positive, but was troubled by it: “You’re saying the ends justify the means.”
“No,” he said peaceably. “I’m just pointing out that you were able to forge something good out of something that wasn’t so good. In any case, shut up and be glad about it.”
She was a little glad about it. “Does this mean you won’t rat me out to my new boss?”
He put a finger to his temple and frowned, a parody of somebody in deep thought. “Hmmm. Nope, I’m not going to rat you out,” he declared. And then, the first ghost of a smile since the night of Hank’s phone call: “In fact, go ahead and run the story if you like.”
“But . . . that’s not what we agreed to. The agreement was that I would write this as an exercise—”
“Yes, but you did such a good job, I sort of want to show it off,” he said, now with a genuine grin. “Even if I drop the suit, nobody will know what a terrific native Vineyarder I am. Unless the piece runs.”
“All right then,” she said. “So, we run it, and then . . . that’s it.”
A pause.
“That’s it,” he agreed. Their gazes were locked on to each other’s like tractor beams.
A pause.
“And we never see each other again. Not deliberately,” she said.
A pause.
“That was the agreement,” he said.
A pause.
“Feels weird that’s the case,” she said finally. “Feels strange that once I get up and walk out of this house, I’m never coming back.”
He nodded. “It does. Most endings are not so mutually deliberate. We should count ourselves lucky to be so well prepared.”
She nodded, feeling sad.
“Of course,” he continued, looking away suddenly as his tone of voice changed, “we initially agreed the piece wouldn’t run, and then we changed our minds and agreed it will run. So, clearly, we are capable of changing our agreements.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we could change the agreement about never seeing each other again.”
Their eyes sought each other out again. They’d been doing a lot of staring at each other since he’d first realized who she was. A constant sizing up of each other’s intentions.
“I think we need to stick with the plan,” she said. “At least for now.”
He pouted a little. “Why is that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I feel weird seeing someone I can’t tell Hank about,” she said. “Not telling him just perpetuates the cycle.”
“Why can’t you tell him about me? Surely he won’t disapprove after reading this, especially once I drop the suit. I mean, I still think he’s an ass, but I accept that he’s in your life, so I’d like to think that could be mutual.”
She shrugged. “Probably eventually. But I’m moving back in with him in a few weeks—nothing’s available for rent after Memorial Day, you know that if you’ve actually been reading the papers—”
“Yes, I know that, Joanna Dias Howes, please give me some credit.”
“—and we need to get into a good groove with each other. He’s not used to sharing his space anymore and I’m not used to living under someone else’s roof. It’ll be easier once he’s off crutches, but we’re going to need some time.”
“I understand that. But why does that mean you can’t date? I wouldn’t be moving in with you.”
“There’s been a little too much drama around Orion Smith lately to be able to add you back into the mix right now, even as a good guy.”
He stared out the window for a moment, assessing something. “So,” he ventured, “if I went away for a month and came back in June, maybe I could take him out for a beer.”
She grimaced. “Hank doesn’t go to bars. He prefers to drink at home, so nobody can accuse him of driving drunk.”
“I could bring him home in my helicopter.”
“Bit of a logic gap there, Mr. Smith.”
He grinned. “Good point. You’ll have to invite me over to his place for a beer.”
She wouldn’t let herself show her pleasure at this. “Don’t hold your breath. It’s kind of a catch-22. He’d have to decide he wants you in his house before it’s okay for me to invite you to his house.”
He got up from his stool and walked to the window, gazing out toward Vineyard Sound. “So,” he said, musing, “I have to figure out a way for him to realize he wants me in his house.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” she said.
“I could tell him I want to get involved in town politics, but I need his advice on how best to do it.”
She laughed aloud, from nerves. “That’s a bit too hot for a first date, sonny.”
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Got a better suggestion?”
She thought about it. “There are a few things you have in common,” she said.
“Other than being duped by you, you mean?” He looked back out the window
“Yes. I’ll let you know if I think of anything.”
They parted moments later with a handshake, which began without eye contact—deliberately—but then slid into a handshake with eye contact, which led to a brief hug, and then a kiss on the cheek. And that was all. Even the look they were exchanging contained within it the knowledge of how limited it was. Orion watched her, with a slightly forlorn expression darkening his pretty face, as she walked out the antique front door, across the tamped-earth parking area, got into the cab of the pickup, circled slowly and then drove off. In her rearview mirror she watched him, standing in the doorway, head cocked slightly as if he were still trying to make sense of her leaving him when they were no longer enemies. That was not how he had intended to play his turn.
* * *
“You wrote this,” said Hank from his recliner, chucking the paper at the dining table. It slid across the patched oak veneer, knocking over the pepper grinder and half unfolding.
“Yes. You knew that,” she said, spooning seafood stew into a series of Tupperware containers she had opened on the counter. The cats were weaving around her ankles, hoping she’d spill some to the floor. The house was almost eerily still without the television on.
“Why don’t you write a piece about me?” he said.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Really? You don’t talk about yourself ever. At all. You talk about what you care about, but—”
“That’s a part of who I am,” he said heartily. He couldn’t see her directly without looking over his shoulder toward the kitchen area, but his neck was too tight to manage this in comfort. So he was speaking heartily, in part to make up for lack of eye contact.
“I know that, Hank. I value that about you immensely. It makes you one of the good guys. But you’d have to be willing to talk about all the underbelly stuff. You’d have to be willing to talk about Jen, and your experiences in Vi—”
“I don’t have to talk about Jen,” he retorted complacently. “I can tell you my opinion about my favorite breakfast cereals. I hear that’s the thing to talk about these days.”
“Sure, if you’re being interviewed for Impeccable magazine. If you’re being interviewed for the Vineyard Newes, not so much, I think.”
He paused for a heartbeat, and relaxed back into his chair. Then: “I can talk about Jen to the Vineyard Newes,” he said.
“You don’t even talk about Jen to me,” she said. “Me as a family member. You’re definitely not going to talk to me as a journalist.”
“Well, all I’m saying is that it would be nice to be asked,” he said.
“I’ll have Lewis ask you,” she offered, setting the soup pot in the sink.
“That elitist asshole,” said Hank. “He’d never ask me.”
“He asked Helen.”
“That’s because Helen was retiring from the ZBA.”
“Retire from the ZBA and I bet he’ll ask me to write about you.”
He laughed. “Nice try.” A pause. Joanna began to press the tops onto the Tupperware containers of stew. There were six. Four to be frozen, one for dinner tonight, and a smaller one for Hank’s lunch tomorrow. She opened the utility drawer to search for a Sharpie.
“So you met this guy, huh?” Hank said into the quiet, possibly just for the sake of saying something.
“Orion Smith? Yes.”
“Tell him you were my niece?”
“I did.”
“That must have gone over well.”
“I didn’t tell him at first,” she said. “So when I did tell him, it pissed him off that I hadn’t told him from the get-go. But he actually had no trouble talking to your niece. In fact . . .” Did she dare go this far? “In fact, I think he’d like to meet you.”
He started laughing, and smiled his diagonal-smirk smile. “Oh, now, that would be a meeting for the ages. I don’t think that would end well.”
“Even now that he’s dropped the lawsuit?”
“Without apologizing.”
“Don’t you think his dropping it is its own kind of apology?”
“No,” said Hank at once.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not,” said Hank. “I’m going to go out and walk around a little.” He sat upright so that the recliner folded into a regular chair. “Hand me my crutches.”
He was back to wearing a boot, and in general his demeanor was much better than it had been. He still drank more than she wished he did, but that predated the accident and was probably never going to change.
She dropped the Sharpie, grabbed his crutches and handed them to him, then helped him up out of the recliner. As she turned back toward the kitchen, her eye caught movement in the driveway: a UPS truck had left something on the threshold and was pulling away. She went through the mudroom to the front door and saw a rectangular package on the porch about the size of a serving tray, addressed to Henry Holmes, ZBA Chair. There was no return address.
She picked it up and brought it into the house. “Package for you.”
He hobbled to the table where she’d set it. “Get me some scissors,” he said. When she did, he snipped the packing tape and tore it open.
Wrapped in plastic, with a card attached to it, was a custom-made Scrabble set. The box was mahogany, and she knew that the board within, which she had played on more than once, was stiffened leather, the tiles hardwood with gold-leaf embossed letters, and the tile racks brass.
The card was linen paper. Hank, staring at the box in wonderment, impressed despite himself, opened the card and read it aloud, at first with a slightly ironic tone that gradually diminished as he realized the writer.
Dear Mr. Holmes, I hear you’re an expert Scrabble player. I am loaning you my board to enjoy as long as it pleases you. I only ask that if, and when, you are ready for me to retrieve it, we can play together once. Or more. As you see fit. Meanwhile, please give my greetings to your niece. I hope she’s not giving you any grief. In case she is, enclosed please find my card. Call or write anytime if you need to grouse about her. Meanwhile, have a lovely spring, I hope your ankle heals soon, and I look forward to that Scrabble game. Most sincerely yours, Orion Smith.
P.S. Thank you for your many years of service to this beautiful town.
Hank looked at Joanna. She was beaming. “Sheesh, you must have charmed the pants off him.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” she said. “But . . . you know . . . don’t you think this counts as an apology? Or at least an olive branch?”
He considered the box. “That is one hell of a Scrabble game. Did you tell him what I did to ours?”
“Of course not. Just mentioned you were a good Scrabble player. Believe me, I’m as surprised by this as you are.”
“You’ve got a grin on your face that suggests otherwise.”
She tried to stop grinning. But couldn’t. “I’m obviously happier about it than you are, but I really am just as surprised.”
“Who said I wasn’t happy?” Hank said. “It’s a nice board.” He looked bemused. Trying to make sense of a generous gesture coming from a person he had written off as a selfish ass. “It’s sort of a bribe, isn’t it?”
“No,” she said. “If he’d sent it to you before the ZBA ruled on his helicopter, that’d be different. I think it’s just a nice gesture.”
He was examining the box without actually touching it. “Maybe,” he allowed, a bit grudgingly.
“Want to play?”
He glanced up at her. “You and your word games.”
“You always beat me at Scrabble, Hank.”
He chewed his lower lip a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “I do.” A pause. “Let’s play tonight. You coming by for dinner?”
“Like every night for the past two weeks, yes,” she said. “Here’s the stew ready, and Celia put aside a loaf for us at Hubert’s. I’ll figure out something green for veggies.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “Why don’t you come by ’round six.”
THE AFTERNOON FELT brief. She drove to Edgartown, which felt a hundred miles away (it was twelve), to finish setting up her desk at the Newes, with her own dust-gathering manual typewriter. She organized notes for her next “On the Same Page” interview, which would be with the director of one of the Island conservation groups, on the same page with an article from 1934 about the extinction of the heath hen. On her way back up-Island, she stopped at her favorite consignment store in search of a spring wardrobe, although Celia had offered her some colorful hand-me-downs. Then she drove to Helen’s and weeded the young potato plants. She went for a walk on Lambert’s Cove Beach, where the eelgrass was scant along the shore now but the bladderwrack kelp was in abundance. The water was azure blue and incredibly clear but still needed a good six weeks of solar gain to be comfortably swimmable.
She walked a mile to Split Rock and then back again. In all that time, she passed a couple in matching corduroy jackets and baseball caps letting their black Labs tear along the sand; a fellow in his sixties dressed in canvas and rubber waders, bass fishing; and a young mother beach-combing with her twin preschoolers, who were squealing over a dead crab. The beach was sandy again, the rocks covered by the caprice of the wind gods, and all was well with the world. In a month there would be parking lot attendants requesting beach passes of all the cars entering the small dirt parking lot, and the dogs would only be welcome in the early morning (per a recent Annual Town Meeting). The water was a pure deep blue, the sky cloudless, there was the slightest verdant mist across the dunes as the leaf buds of beach plums and roses strained close to bursting. In a week, perhaps ten days, there would be green. In a fortnight, it would be impossible to remember that it had ever been winter. That’s how spring came to the Vineyard—very late, but very fast.
She walked down the long wooded path from the beach back to the parking lot and drove back to Hank’s. He would be able to drive soon, so she’d be yielding up the truck. Hopefully he could manage until she moved back in, come Memorial Day weekend.
As she approached the parking spot beside the house, she saw there was another car there, an old red Jeep that looked vaguely familiar. There was no adornment on it, not even dump or beach stickers, to hint at the owner’s identity. A deep thrumming sensation in her stomach warned her she knew who it was, but she brushed the idea away as impossible. She got out of the truck, leaving the keys on the passenger’s seat. Walked around the red Jeep to the door. In the mudroom she took off her boots, unzipped her spring jacket, and opened the door to the main part of the house.
“Look who’s here!” said Hank, with a jubilance that sounded almost ironic, given his lack of tendency toward jubilation. “It’s Joanna. You know Joanna, don’t you?”
Orion smiled politely with a formality she had never seen before. In his left hand he held a Sam Adams, not yet opened, water droplets dewing on the cold glass. He offered her his right hand to shake. “Yes, of course,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
She took his hand, hoping she was not trembling. “Nice to see you too,” she said, looking at his browline rather than his eyes. “That was a good photo they got of you to go with the article.”
He dipped his head to the side, almost shyly. “A good photographer can work wonders.”
There was a moment of silence. The three of them coexisted in a place of exquisite social awkwardness. What have I done? wondered three unspoken voices. What am I doing here?
“As I was just telling Mr. Smith here—” Hank finally said, gesturing with unnecessary intensity toward the table, where the Scrabble board sat waiting in its box. “Somebody loaned me this really nice Scrabble board. It seemed a shame not to use it.”
“Playing with me wasn’t good enough for you?” she asked archly.
“It’s not that,” said Hank in a mollifying tone as Orion pursed his lips in amusement. “It’s just, you know, when two people are always playing the same game together, they kind of fall into patterns, and if you shake it up by bringing in another person, then it’s a whole different game, and, you know, anything can happen.”
Her eyes darted back and forth between the two of them—two nervous men, each wanting to hold their own space without puffing out their display feathers and riling the other one. “Are you just talking Scrabble, or did the demigod of metaphors spike your beer?”
Hank blinked in confusion. “What?”
“Both, I think,” said Orion comfortably. “And if that is an invitation to play, then I accept.”
“Okay then,” said Hank, and began to hobble toward the table. As he sat, he pushed the crutches in Joanna’s direction without looking at her, knowing she would be there to catch them. She leaned them against the back of the couch where he could reach them.
Then she looked at Orion, who was now behind Hank and out of his line of sight. He let his guard down enough for her to see that he was both amused and amazed that this was happening.
“Um. Take a seat,” she said, since Hank had forgotten to invite him. Mechanically, she held out her arm, gesturing to the free chair closest to him.
“Thank you,” said Orion. He nodded his head, but it looked almost like a stilted bow. She could see his eyes taking in the chaos of the house around him. It made her feel embarrassed for Hank. But there was no malice or mockery on Orion’s face. He reached for the chair. “This one?” he asked Hank almost obsequiously, even though it was clearly the one she’d been referring to.
“Yeah, sure,” her uncle replied. “Make yourself at home.”
Without intending to, she took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh, because she had not been breathing for nearly a minute. Hank didn’t notice, but Orion looked at her, concern mixing into all the other emotions he was juggling. “You okay?” he said quietly.
She nodded. Orion sat. Again there was an awkward pause between the three of them. There was a purity to their discomfort, because none of them could pretend that it was anything else.
“I notice you’ve got some Jeeps out there,” said Orion. “I’m guessing you have some mechanical abilities.”
“I dabble,” said Hank with a shrug.
“I putter about with engines myself,” said Orion. “Not as much as I used to. But always nice to meet a fellow gearhead.” He smiled.
Hank looked thrown at Orion’s placing them in a shared category. “Well, sit down, Anna,” he said gruffly. “Let’s set up the board.”
“I can do that, if you like, Mr. Holmes,” said Orion, reaching for the board.
“Don’t call me Mr. Holmes,” said Hank, as if this should have been obvious. “The name is Hank.”