She shows him the check. All thismoney.For her, and her baby, and Danny if he’s going to stick around, which she believes now he really will. Like Kristie said to Louisa on the porch that time, the only people who say that money can’t fix problems are people who have plenty of it. Because this money would fix some real problems. This money would equal solid hope, and she breathes easier just holding it.
Danny whistles. “Holy shit,” he says.
“Louisa gave it to me. What do we do? I don’t know if we should take it. What do you think?”
He doesn’t answer right away.
“Danny? It’s not like anyoneowesme this.” She so badly wants that fresh start that Louisa talked about, though. She really does.
She can tell he’s getting his words in perfect order before letting them out. “What do I think?” he says at last. “I think on one hand you are owed everything you didn’t get because your father made a mistake and a bad decision, and you are the one who suffered from that decision.”
“And my mom.”
“And your mom. But on the other hand—you aren’t owed anything, not really, because the universe doesn’t work like that. The universe doesn’t make everything even for us.” He gestures to the shadows running across the grass, the wide expanse of water, as calm and flat as a dinner plate, the crescent of moon on the rise. “Without that guy you wouldn’t be here at all, for one thing. For another, this family was never yours and it isn’t yours now. One lobster dinner isn’t going to change that. One check isn’t going to change it. But that’sokay. It’s really okay. We don’t needthisfamily, Kristie.
“What we need is, we need to go off and start our own family. You and me and this little chicken.” He hovers his hand over her belly. “May I?” She nods, and he rests his hand on the baby. “I think if you take this money, and we take what I have saved, and we head out west, we’ll be in good shape to make a really good life together. But if you don’t take it, we’re going to be okay too.”
“Yeah,” she says. She lays her hand on top of his hand on her stomach. She squeezes. “We’re going to be okay.”
Danny excuses himself to use the bathroom before they find their hosts and say goodbye, and Kristie lingers for another moment, watching out the window as the sky darkens completely.She thinks about all the turns her life could have taken but didn’t, and all the turns her life has taken but easily could have missed. She could have followed Jesse down his dark path. She could have wasted her whole life in Miami Beach and had nothing to show for it in the end. She could have gone home to Altoona sooner, and had more time with her mother, or gone later or not at all, and had none. She could have never left Altoona in the first place. She could have read her mother’s letter and decided to let bygones be bygones, never getting on that Greyhound. Then there would be no Danny, no baby, no future in Oregon.
She could spend her whole life lamenting the fact that she started out behind—or maybe, maybe, she can recognize the areas where she’s ahead, and understand that she’s going to doso rightby this baby, starting now, with the money to help her, and going all the way through. She’s going to do so right.
Outside, the foghorn on the breakwater blows. All summer Kristie has thought of that sound as mournful, but now she wonders if it might be more hopeful than she gave it credit for.
47.
Louisa
Departure day. Louisa packs her bathing suits and her shorts; she packs the water shoes she wears on the rocks because she lacks the bravura and balance of her children; she packs her Pitcairn notebooks, both empty and full; she packs her carefully cushioned Damariscotta mug, and her jar of Blue Razz Conserve from Nervous Nellie’s in Deer Isle, and her laptop. She zips her duffle and carries it down the stairs and sets it outside the door with the other luggage. How they will fit everything they brought here plus all of the items they’ve accumulated over the summerplusSteven is anybody’s guess. Luckily, Steven packed light, and car packing is his superpower. She supposes Matty is leaving a piece of his heart behind, so that might account for some extra room.
The day before Kristie and Danny came to dinner Louisa told Steven what she wanted to do with the Emergency Fund. She expected a fight, but instead of raising his verbal fists Steven nodded,as though she’d told him that some of the glasses in the dishwasher didn’t get clean and they’d have to rerun it. Then he took her hand and knotted his fingers through hers and she thought that she had maybe never loved him as much as she did in that moment.
“It’s the right thing,” he said. “It’s okay.”
“But the house,” she says. “Now we can’t help keep the house.”
“Not yet. But if All Ears sells, maybe we can then. We’ll have to wait and see. Or maybe the Pitcairn book will be a runaway bestseller.”
“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure not, in fact.”
Now that Louisa has given the check to Kristie, the window for making excuses has slammed shut. She’ll have to finish the book while starting up the school year. She’s made her own bed, with sheets woven from procrastination, and now she will have to lie in it.
She finds her father on the back porch, sitting in the rocker, though not rocking, looking out at the water. Not so far from them a sailboat glides by. Beyond the boat, on the far side of the harbor, hangs a curtain of fog, turning the outline of the Samoset ghostly and ethereal, even in midmorning.
“Daddy?” She slides the screen door closed behind her. “We’re almost all packed up now. Steven is just putting the last few things in the car. I’m sure we’ve left a hundred other things behind.” Hair elastics, paperbacks, bottles of nail polish—who knows what? There’s always a package from Annie the week after they get home, filled with the left-behinds dug out from underneath the couches, behind open closet doors. “You’ll come out and say goodbye, won’t you? The kids will want to say goodbye, and Steven too.”
He turns and faces her then, and his eyes are clear and bright. He’s in there right now, the real Martin Fitzgerald, the Chief, present and accounted for.
“Sit with me,” he says, indicating the love seat beside the rocker.
She sits.
“I remember something,” Martin says.
“What’s that, Daddy?”
“I remember the first time you came here after Matty was born. He would have been how old?”
