Chapter Three
It was nine-thirty before we got free of the city traffic. Imogen was in and out of the bag of snacks, consuming chips, popcorn, cookies, and soda.
“I have a super-fast metabolism,” she explained. “I have to eat constantly just to maintain my body weight.”
Staring straight ahead at the road, I rolled my eyes. No wonder she hadn’t made any female friends at her office. That kind of remark was likely to get you shunned in the dog-eat-dog looks competition of New York. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
I’d hoped to make good time, but unfortunately, along with her birdlike metabolism, Imogen had a bird-sized bladder. We stopped twice before we got out of Connecticut.
In the darkened cab, Imogen chatted about her life, and about her boyfriend. A lot about her boyfriend, Wade Cadwallader. “He was so sweet. The nicest guy. But then he wasn’t. But then he was again. But then he wasn’t. At all. When I first moved up, he took me everywhere in New York. He grew up in the city and wanted to share it—the museums, the shows, Central Park in the spring. It was all so beautiful and amazing.”
I nodded to show I understood. I, too, had been seduced by New York, though I wondered just how much Imogen had been seduced by the city and how much by Wade Cadwallader.
“But then, this fall, Wade got so moody. Sometimes he would be the charming gentleman I know he is deep down, but other times he was cranky and snarky. Instead of taking me out, we’d sit in my apartment, your apartment, that is, and watch sports on TV, all night long. Nothing I said was right, nothing I cooked tasted good. He drove me crazy.”
I nodded again. An old story, really. A person tries hard in the beginning of a relationship, but then gets comfortable and lets his or her natural jerkiness come out. I’d heard this sad tale from countless roommates and coworkers before.
“I’d be ready to call it quits,” Imogen continued, “but then he’d show up the next night and take me out dancing, like nothing had happened. Honestly, it made my head spin.”
“Was he having problems at work, or something else that could have affected his mood?”
In the light of the dash, I saw Imogen shrug. “Not that he told me. I never really understood his job. It was something at a big financial company.”
Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers do “something at a big financial company,” much of it highly technical and difficult for others to comprehend. As we used to say when I worked in venture capital, “If your mom understands your job, you don’t have a very good one.”
“So a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” I said.
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
We rolled along silently for several miles, Imogen eating continuously. At least she was no longer crying.
“What about you?” she asked. “How did you meet your boyfriend?”
“In middle school.”
“And you dated all that time, with him in Maine and you in New York?” Imogen was no doubt rethinking her whole moving-to-be-with-a-guy-you’ve-spent-ten-days-with strategy.
I laughed. “We dated none of that time. I had an enormous crush on him, but I was in seventh grade and he was a junior, the quarterback on the football team with a cheerleader girlfriend. After eighth grade, I went away to boarding school and never talked to him again until I moved back to Busman’s Harbor last March.” I looked into my mirror and pulled out to pass a particularly slow-moving car. “My crush came roaring back as soon as I saw him. We got to be friends, and later I found out he liked me, too.”
Imogen’s brow wrinkled. “But if you didn’t move back to Maine to be with your boyfriend, why did you?”
“To help run my family’s clambake business.”
It was the tiniest sliver of the truth. The previous March, when I’d heeded my sister’s panicked plea to return to Maine to save the Snowden Family Clambake from foreclosure, I’d gone home feeling nothing but dread. What if I didn’t succeed? What if my mother lost her house and the private island where we held our clambakes? What if my sister and her husband lost their livelihoods? But working against more obstacles than I could ever have foreseen, we’d succeeded.
At the end of the tourist season, I’d intended to go right back to New York, but it hadn’t worked out that way. I’d never expected to call Busman’s Harbor home again, but, to my complete surprise, I’d found I loved living near my mother, my sister, and my wonderful almost ten-year-old niece. I’d even learned to work with my pain-in-the-rear brother-in-law. And, completely unexpectedly, I’d fallen in love—with my middle-school crush, Chris Durand.
“And now you live with your boyfriend?” Imogen asked.
Another complicated question. “Not officially, but he stays over most nights. I only have a studio apartment, so you’ll be staying at my mom’s house.”
Imogen chewed on that for a few moments. “Thank you,” she said into the darkness, “and thanks to your mom.”
Between my conservative driving of the unfamiliar vehicle and Imogen’s frequent bathroom breaks, it was 2:00 AM by the time we rolled over the Piscataqua River Bridge into Maine and almost 3:00 before I took us off the exit at Freeport.
“Are we there yet?” Imogen’s squeaky voice made her sound like a petulant child.
“We have an hour left,” I said, “but we’re making a stop.” A short time later, I pulled into the parking lot at L.L.Bean. “This is where everyone in Maine goes to buy a winter coat at three in the morning,” I explained. “Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, then, now, and always.”
When I climbed out of the cab, the cold air hit me like a punch in the chest. The temperature had dropped steadily as we’d made our way north. “You go on in. I want to get my coat.” I pointed to the building where she’d find the women’s clothing section, though watching her tiny figure scurry away, I wondered if she should be headed to the girl’s department.
I stood on the truck’s bumper, turned the combination dial on the padlock, rolled the big door partway up, and pulled out my black down coat. I was pleased to see the load hadn’t shifted at all. Julio and Mike had done good work. I shut the door and replaced the padlock, twisting it to obscure the combination. As I jumped down from the truck, something caught my eye—a dirty white Toyota Camry.
There were about a half-dozen cars in the customer parking lot at that hour. The Toyota was in the row behind my truck, off a little to the left. Even in the dim light of the parking lot, I could see the front New York State plate.
Zipping up my coat, I walked toward the car. It was empty. I circled around it, questioning my memory and my sanity. No way it’s the same one. It was a common brand, a common color. A streetlight threw enough illumination that I could see inside. A folded newspaper sat on the backseat; a pair of black gloves lay on the dash on the passenger side. Absolutely nothing extraordinary. Until I saw the Yankee cap sitting in the driver’s seat.
I turned toward the entrance and hurried inside.
* * *
Inside the building, I looked warily for the Toyota’s driver. Could it possibly be the same car? Neither New York plates nor Yankees caps were rare in Maine, particularly around the holidays. And if he were here, how would I even recognize him without the baseball cap? I shook off my misgivings and let Leon Leonwood Bean’s wonderful store win me over.
I slowed down and meandered, taking it all in, the colorful clothes and the holiday decorations. Christmas at L.L.Bean was a family tradition. During my childhood, my father’s sister had laid claim to Thanksgiving, so that day was spent in the relaxing atmosphere of her antique house, surrounded by cousins, aunts, and uncles—the fishermen, lobstermen, shipbuilders, and teachers who populated my late father’s family. Christmas was left to my mother’s father, a quiet, socially awkward professor of philosophy, who never gave much of an indication he was interested in my sister, Livvie, and me, or in our mother, for that matter.
It had always been a glum little Christmas, just the five of us in Grandfather’s Riverside Drive apartment. The saving grace was, we always stopped on the way down to New York at L.L.Bean, where we were allowed to pick out our own presents. My mother had lost her mother when she was five and never got into making the kind of fuss over Christmas that other moms did. I was much older before I realized this ritual of choosing our own gifts was odd and other kids’ presents came wrapped up under the tree. Christmas might be devoid of magic—our grandfather always seemed surprised to find it was the day and unfailingly presented Livvie and me with twenty-dollar bills—but our dreams always came true on Christmas Eve at L.L.Bean.
I wandered through the warm building into the women’s department upstairs and found Imogen trying on sweaters. “Look what I got!” Beside her was a pile of long silk underwear, tights, plaid wool shirts, lined jeans, flannel pajamas, a green corduroy skirt, a red Christmas sweater with reindeer on it, a quilted bathrobe, and an enormous bright pink down coat.
“Um, Imogen, it’s not really my place to say, but didn’t you just lose your job?”
“I’ll put it on the old plastic,” she said, waving her card under my nose.
I tried one more time. “You know you have to pay that off eventually.”
“My dad pays it. Help me carry this stuff. I want to stop in the shoe department for warm slippers and winter boots before we check out.”
I helped her gather the clothes, swaying a little when I bent over. Being awake for twenty-two hours had caught up to me. “Let’s get a move on,” I urged. “You’re not going to the Arctic, just an hour farther up Route 1. And my mother’s house is heated.” I stared at the packages of long underwear. How long was she planning to stay?
“I want to be prepared.” Imogen tried on boots and slippers and made her final choices. At the checkout counter, she whipped out her credit card and dragged it through the swiper with the wrist snap of someone who’d had a lot of practice.
In the parking lot, I opened the back of the truck once more to stow the purchases. Imogen gazed into the dark interior. “I loved living with this furniture,” she sighed. “You’re doing the right thing bringing it home.”
Before we pulled out of the lot, I made a point to notice—the dirty white car was still there, but this time it was occupied, the silhouette of a man wearing a baseball cap inside.
* * *
“So, all the moodiness, is that why you broke up with Wade?” I knew I risked bringing on the waterworks again with this question, but he was the only person I could think of who might have a reason to follow us to Freeport.
“It was the night of the eggnog.” There was a quiver in Imogen’s voice. “He came to the party, but I could tell he didn’t want to be there. He ignored me from the moment he arrived. Then, suddenly, everyone was throwing up. Never in my life had I ever needed my boyfriend’s support more than that night, but when I looked for him, he was gone. He’d slipped out during the commotion. Can you imagine?”
“That’s awful.” I could see how it had been the final straw.
“I called and texted him to phone me. Finally I sent a text, breaking us up.”
“How’d he take it?”
“At first, he texted back like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Why was I so upset, he kept asking. I was so mad, I ignored him. Then, he couldn’t stop apologizing. He called and called, filled up my voice mail, begging me to take him back. But I’d had enough by that point. If it was the first time he’d been a jerk, I might have forgiven him, but it wasn’t.” She sighed. “I love that man,” she said dreamily. Then the steel returned to her little voice. “And I hate that man.”
“Was he ever overly possessive? Or violent?”
Imogen was horrified. “No, no, no. Nothing like that. Sometimes he was devoted, and sometimes he acted like I wasn’t even there. That’s all.”
“What kind of car does Wade drive?”
Imogen laughed. “He doesn’t have a car, silly. He lives in Manhattan.”
Her words reassured me, but I kept careful watch as we rode along. At that hour, Route 1 was deserted. If anyone had followed us, I would have seen him. Probably my overeager imagination, I told myself. It couldn’t have been the same car.
We didn’t see a single car as we drove down the peninsula into Busman’s Harbor. The town was still, not a light burning in a window. In seven hours, we’d gone from The City That Never Sleeps to The Town That Takes Its Rest Very Seriously.
I pulled the big truck just far enough into my mother’s driveway to be sure I’d cleared the sidewalk. I wanted to accomplish the final piece of the journey without waking the whole neighborhood. I opened the back of the truck and we pulled out Imogen’s Bean shopping bags and overnight case. “We can bring your big suitcase in tomorrow,” I whispered. Before I closed and locked the door, I looked around at the truck’s shadowy contents, the outline of my grandfather’s sofa and bureau, the boxes that held the paintings. I had done the right thing. My mother would be so pleased I’d brought it all to Maine.
I led Imogen into the always unlocked house and up the stairs. I put her in the pink princess room Mom had decorated for my niece, Page. Imogen was so tired; I thought despite the two new nightgowns, she might fall into bed in her clothes. Back down in the kitchen, I left a note for Mom saying Imogen had arrived and thanking her. I left the keys to the truck next to the note, in case Mom had to get out of the driveway in the morning. Then I crept out the back door. Except for a nap on the train, I’d been up for twenty-four hours. I was eager to get home.
The air was bracing, cold and dry, the stars bright overhead. I stared up at them as I made the short walk to my apartment over Gus’s restaurant. That was a sight you’d never see in the city. Everything had its trade-offs.
Le Roi, my Maine coon cat, greeted me at the top of the stairs. Maine coons have lots of doglike traits and welcoming me home was one of Le Roi’s. “Hello, boy. Finally here.” I swept my hand down his big, muscular body as an acknowledgment of his efforts.
Ten minutes later, I was in my warm bed, Chris breathing rhythmically at my side.