Which was when Grandma tugged Maddie’s sleeve. “This was your mother’s favorite part. Not the drumming, but the dancing. By the time she was ten, she knew every step.”
Sometimes, when Maddie least suspected it, the mention of her mother—no matter how brief—caused a groundswell of emotion in her. Like now, when she fixed her eyes on the dancers and willed her sorrow to quiet. But it was hard not to try and picture her mother at ten, twice as old as Maddie had been when Hannah died in the horrible accident, too long ago for Maddie to have a clear memory not only of it but, sadly, also of her mother.
“You look so much like Hannah,” many people had commented when Maddie came back to the island in July.
It might be true. The only photo Maddie had seen of them together was of her motherHolding baby Madelyn, as someone had scrawled on the back. But in the picture, Hannah’s head was bent, looking at her precious bundle, so the camera hadn’t captured her face. If there were other photos—on the island or in Green Hills—neither her father nor Grandma knew where they were.
“Cameras were a luxury we couldn’t afford,” Grandma once explained.
“It was too hard for me to keep them,” her father had said. “Every time I saw one …” He’d returned to the newspaper he was reading, his sentence trailing into oblivion.
There was no reason for Maddie to disbelieve either of them.
But now, out of the blue, as she sat on a folding chair in the headquarters of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), above the singing and the drumming, she almost heard her mother’s soft voice: “My little pumpkin.” Suddenly, Maddie remembered that Hannah had often called her that. All these years, she hadn’t recalled it until now. In addition to the groundswell inside her, a film of moisture now coated her eyes.
Do not cry, she admonished herself, biting her lip.Not here. Not now.
But, longing to hear the voice again, she closed her eyes. And forced herself not to whisper: “Mommy.” The word was, after all, how she still thought of her mother. Having been so young when Hannah died, Maddie hadn’t grown past the “Mommy” stage into the “Mom” or the “Mother” ones. Four decades later, it remained the same.
“Hey!” Rafe gave his mom a playful elbow in her side. “Are you sleeping, or what?”
Quickly, she opened her eyes and rallied a smile. “I’m listening,” she claimed. “Everything is fabulous.”
“Yeah,” he said above the noise. “Too bad Grandpa didn’t stay. He would have loved this.”
She nodded in reply, but she honestly didn’t know how Stephen Clarke would have felt. Maybe his stomach would have been roiling. They’d both lost so much—he, his wife, and Maddie, her mother—though she’d also lost the connection to her roots, these roots. Scanning the room, the flashing colors, the enraptured faces singing in rhythmic chants, the audience absorbed, pensive, happy, she let herself meld into the wonders of her community, her people, hernow.
In this place, in this world, her loss slowly eased.
After the festivities, Maddie was determined to become one with the group, the way Rafe was doing. She began byhelping to clean up. Weaving around the tables, stacking a large tray with plates and utensils, she said hello and nice-to-meet you to everyone she encountered, young and old, some of whom she recognized from Grandma’s summer celebration. It was much easier to socialize there than at the “must attend” faculty events at Green Hills College.
She moved to a table where two elderly men were musing over olden days, one a clear-eyed, patient Wampanoag; the other, a weathered, grumpy, fair-skinned man—perhaps a non-tribal guest.
“Too bad about Arnie’s bait shop in Menemsha,” the Wampanoag man said to his companion.
“Decades of hard work down the drain,” grumpy guy answered. “Where’s everybody going to get their stuff?”
“Wholesalers, I expect.”
“Or stop fishin’. Ain’t there nobody to take it over?”
“Changing times, my friend.”
Both men shook their heads.
“I hope no one scoops up the place for a T-shirt shop,” said the Wampanoag man. “There are already too many of those down-island.”
Grumpy guy scratched his beard and harrumphed. “Might depend on what the town can get for the lease. Most likely, they’ll get more from a washashore.”
Maddie continued collecting the used dinnerware, trying not to reveal that she was eavesdropping.
“Not necessarily. I expect they’ll be fussy about who gets in there.”
“But when times change, stuff like this changes, too. If that happens, it’ll screw up the whole harbor.” Grumpy guy pronouncedharboras if it had an “ah” at the end. Then he harrumphed again.
As Maddie moved to the table next to the men, grumpy guy then said, “Hey, you. Girl. You’re not from here, are you? You wanna take over a bait shop?”
She smiled. “No, thank you.” She continued on her mission, musing about what she’d heard. She’d seen the sign ARNIE’S BAIT & TACKLE since she could remember; it was down the road from Mr. Fuller’s ice cream shack. As a kid, she’d always sprinted past by the gray-shingled bait shop, afraid that worms would crawl outside and “get” her.
