After breakfast—or whatever that meal counted as—Uncle Chet perked up and took the helm. I didn’t trust him, so I stayed close by, sitting on the bench where he had slept and watching the shoreline. What if he got drunk again? I didn’t want to wake up in the Azores. Not today anyway. Not that I could even tell where we were. At least when you are driving down the road, you see signs that tell you where you are and how many miles to your next exit. Here, I had no clue. I figured as long as I could still see the shore—and the shore stayed on the same side of the boat—we had to be heading home.
I had grown so used to the familiar arc of Keech Harbor and Hazard Point that I hardly noticed them anymore. But these coves and headlands were all strangers to me. Their hills and curves were exotic configurations of rock and pine and shoreline and utterly new to me, although they really weren’t very far from where I had lived my whole life. My dad had been all over Down East Maine blueberry picking when he was my age, but I was hardly ever out of Keech—except for camps. I understood now why people came here on vacation. It was all incredibly beautiful.
Cheddar came and sat next to me. We sat in silence for a few moments.
“Are you going to be a CPA like your dad?” he asked.
“No. I’m going to study finance.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How about you? What’s your major?”
“Undeclared, I guess. I dunno,” he shrugged. “I’m going to work in the family biz so it doesn’t really matter what I major in.” He was back to his soft-spoken mumble, as if he didn’t want to commit to anything he said.
“You could study anything?”
“Yeah. Rocks for jocks. Frigging basket weaving if I felt like it. Whatever. I dunno. Where will you work after college?”
“I don’t know.” I laughed when I said it. What a funny question. How would I know that?
“That’s kinda cool, not knowing,” he said, and it hit me that, of course, his life was already mapped out for him.
“Does it bother you, having to work at the company? I mean, what if you wanted to do something else?”
“I don’t mind. I dunno. It’s not like I have some burning desire to be a doctor or anything. I figure the company pays for stuff, sailing, fun, prep school, college. Then it will be my turn to pay it forward for the next generation. I want my kids to grow up sailing and going to private school—no offense, not that there’s anything wrong with, you know, public school—”
“None taken. I was supposed to go to Pike’s school. But things happened.”
“Huh. That’s where I went, too. Imagine that. I wonder if we would have been friends. You’re way smarter than most of those girls I went to school with, by the way.”
Pepper joined us, squeezing in. It was the best place to sit on the Plunger, as it got the least spray and wind. “This is going to take for-frigging-ever,” she said.
“It’s okay. At least it’s a pretty day.” I shrugged.
“Chet’s making good time,” Cheddar said about his dad, as if he weren’t there, but he was just a few feet away at the helm. “He’ll get us home. He’s got a big meeting Tuesday.”
“Tuesday!” I shouted.
“Yeah, I mean we’ll probably get home late tonight, but I know for sure he’s got to be in Boston Tuesday morning.”
“How come it’s going to take longer to get home than get there?” I asked.
“This is the ocean, not Route 95!” Pepper shouted at me. “Who knows what time he left. Who knows what the tides and currents were like last night. Who knows what time we got there and how long we drifted around the bay.”
“Okay, Magellan, relax. We’re on our way home now,” Cheddar reassured her.
“Yeah, but while we’re up here tooling around, Meredith is digging her claws into Pike,” Pepper fumed.
“Give it up, Pep. People are gonna do what they wanna do,” Cheddar said.
“People hardly ever get to do what they wanna do,” she said, imitating his voice. “Oh look—shearwater!” Her mood changed instantly at the sight of the bird.
Cheddar ducked below deck and returned with binoculars, a guidebook, and a beat-up spiral notebook.
“Gannet!” I shouted, pointing starboard.
“How can you even tell? It just looks like a big gull,” she said.
“Audubon camp, three years in a row. See the black tips on his wings?” I pointed out like a true dork. “Northern gannets are the largest seabirds in the North Atlantic—they are in the same family as the brown- and red-footed boobies.” I couldn’t seem to stop myself until I heard Ched snort.
“Yeah,” he said, laughing and thumbing through the guide, “It says here they can have a wingspan over six feet!”
We took turns scanning, identifying, and jotting our bird observations in the notebook—species, date, location. We gave up when the herring gulls became so numerous that we didn’t notice anything else.
“I’m bored!” Pepper said and slammed the notebook down. “You’re pretty pink,” she said, her tone changing when she noticed my sunburn.
“So are you.”
Then we both looked at Cheddar.
“Holy crap, you’re cooked, Ched!” Pepper said.
“You’ve gotta get out of the sun, Ched,” I said.
We got up, took our stuff, and headed below deck. I paused at the top of the stairs.
“Don’t worry, he’ll get us home,” Cheddar whispered to me.
“Play cards? Crazy Eights? Gin rummy?” Pepper asked. We sat on the bed where we had slept, and Cheddar disappeared into the bathroom.
“Use spray!” She shouted at him.
I won at rummy, but Pepper ruled Crazy Eights. Then I fell asleep.
Sometime late Sunday night, we motored into Hazard Point. I woke up on the Plunger again, this time alone. Pepper was back at the big house. I wandered up the hill and found her in the kitchen, eating oatmeal for dinner. She was annoyed to find that Pike and Meredith had taken off alone somewhere and demanded to be chauffeured around trying to find them, but Cheddar refused.
“We’re all wiped, and I have to get Claire home,” he said. I didn’t ask, but I guess she didn’t have a license either. She must have been tired because she didn’t fight him on it. I followed Cheddar out to his dad’s massive Suburban. Uncle Chet snored in the back seat while Ched drove me home.
I was exhausted and sunburnt. My French twist had fallen out slowly over the journey home, spilling bobby pins all over the boat, but the layers of hair spray stayed, and the constant wind sculpted my hair into a rigid nest. Flo insisted on helping me comb out the knots. I think she was hoping to get some details out along with my snarls, but I didn’t say a word.
It was a quiet week. I didn’t hear a peep from the Point at all. I ran into Pixie at the library, and she said the crew had gone home to their real houses for a few days. I thought she would maybe want to get together and do something, but she didn’t offer.
But I did get a call. From Mom. I couldn’t wait to tell her all about graduation, my summer, the Admiral’s Ball, my scholarship, everything. Well, almost everything.
“Hey peanut! Imagine my surprise,” she began, “when I look in the mailbox and there’s my daughter on the cover of the New England Bee!”
“Mom, did you get the other clipping?”
“You were in the Bee twice?”
“No, the Keech Town Crier. My valedictorian picture. Didn’t you get it?”
“Oh, yes, I got that too. I am very proud of you. Your stepfather and I are both very proud of you.”
“I gave the valedictorian speech. I came in top in my class. Number one. I wish you had been there.” I couldn’t believe I blurted that out. It was true though. I had wished that.
“We couldn’t get away from work,” she said. “It was too close to the end of the fiscal year.” Whatever that meant.
“You could have called.”
“We sent a check … and I’m calling now!”
“All I did to get on the cover of the Bee was go to a party. In a borrowed dress.” Another sore spot between us. In town, it was a big event to go prom shopping. She missed that, too. It’s a day trip to a mall down the coast. Mine came from the Sears catalog. Meredith’s mother probably went with her. Probably told her how great she looked in everything.
Silence, then:
“The doctor and I thought we’d come for a visit, and you could introduce me to your new friends.”
That turd face. What a joke. His doctorate is in business administration, but she puts Dr. on everything. “Let’s not and say we did,” I told her. That was the Pepper-preferred put-down for shooting down ideas. I hung up the phone so hard it rang.
Dad brought the Bee home that evening. And there we were on the cover—well, most of us anyway. Poor Meredith had been cropped out. old school summer fun in maine, the headline announced.
“Look at that, a daughter of mine on the cover of the Bee,” he said. I wondered how many copies he had bought and given out at the office.
Then, later that night, I got a call from Pepper.
“Ha! Did you see it? What a riot. Must have blown the headband clear off Meredith’s head when she saw that. Ha!”
“She was the only one not in vintage, so maybe that’s why. But more likely, she was cropped out to fit the shape of the magazine cover,” I said.
“But more likely … she’s an ass. Wait till you hear what Uncle Finn has planned as a ‘thank you.’ Remember, he said he’d make it up to us.”
Make it up to us? I felt like it was us who owed him a favor.
“He’s taking us out on a research vessel. He’s going to photograph sharks! In a shark cage! And then he’s taking us to his place in Nantucket!”