He whips his hand back onto the wheel.
When the pickup truck pulls into the driveway at Ships View, Billy pulls a roll of bills from his pocket, peels off two twenties, and hold them out to Matty.
“Oh, no, sir. I can’t take that.” Matty knows that’s what he’s supposed to say, even though to be honest he wants very badly to take the money.
“You worked, didn’t you?”
He glances at Hazel. “I guess. Yes.” If spending the morning in the presence of an angel is considered work then yes, he worked.
“Then take what you earned.”
“Take it,” Hazel whispers, hitting her hand against this thigh.
“Thank you, sir,” he says. He opens the door of the truck. “Thank you for everything.”
“No sir. Just Billy will do.”
“Billy. Thank you.”
Hazel snaps her gum and winks at him. “See you around,” she says.
“Yeah, sure.” He’s trying to play it cool. “See you around.”
The sun is fully bright now, high in the sky. He can see where the edges of the grass are starting to turn brown—it’s been a while since they’ve had rain. Danny is working in the far garden, but Matty doesn’t hear anyone else on the porch or in the water. His legs and arms are quivering with fatigue, or with relief, or with some combination of the two. The morning he’s had is enough to send his heart soaring up, up, up, out of the truck and toward the cottony threads of cloud above.
30.
Louisa
Dear Daddy,
When are you coming? Mommy says she’s not in charge of your schedule, she has plenty to worry about with the schedules of everyone else in the world. The lobster festival is only nine days away, so you’d better hurry up and get here. August starts the day after tomorrow!
Matty and Hazel went out on Hazel’s granddad’s lobster boat and even though I am POSITIVE there was room for me and for Claire too Matty told us that there wasn’t and me and Claire had to stay with PAULINE because Granny went shopping and Mommy was in town working on her book and PAULINE wouldn’t let us go in the water so we had to stay there and play UNO for the six hundredth time. When you come can you please bring two games from my room that I forgot to pack? They are: RAT-A-TAT CAT which isin a small white box with a cat dressed like the Statue of Liberty on the cover and also TICKET TO RIDE which is in a bigger box with a picture of a train on the cover.
Love,
Abigail
Annie is taking the children on the ferry to Vinalhaven for the day; they will have lunch at Surfside, and a doughnut after at Sea’s Bakery. Louisa had wanted to go to Vinalhaven this summer but she asks if it would be all right if she went instead to the library in Camden, where there is more space to work than there is at the Rockland library.
It takes Annie about a third of a second to answer that it’s fine if Louisa chooses to work—the part she doesn’t have to say out loud is that she’s just as irritated with Louisa as Louisa is with her.
“Great,” says Louisa. “It’s not a choice, though, just so you know. It’s work.”
“Wonderful,” says Annie. “I wish you a fruitful day.”
Camden on a summer Monday: hot, but with a cool breeze sauntering in from the harbor. Crowded, sure. Always. Part of the charm, Louisa supposes, even as she fights a Subaru with Vermont plates for a parking space, and loses.
Eventually she finds a spot along Elm Street, in front of her favorite Camden coffee shop, Zoot; she starts her day with an iced mocha. She walks with her coffee toward the public library and sits on one of the benches facing the water. The park near the library is full of happy people walking dogs and calling out cheerful greetings. Locals, it seems, because all of the dogs appear to know each other. When she’s finished with her coffee, she decides, she’ll stop into The Smiling Cow and maybe pick out a sweatshirt for each of the children. She feels bad that she’s not the one taking them to Vinalhaven. Matty has outgrown last year’s sweatshirt—his armsand legs look like strands of spaghetti poking out of the thin cardboard box of his body. And then she will absolutely, no question, get down to work.
In The Smiling Cow she spends an inordinate amount of time perusing the mugs and the penny candy and the earrings and kitchen magnets before she makes it to the sweatshirts. She’s holding up a navy-blue hoodie with a picture of a moose on it, wondering if Matty would ever wear it, when she hears her name and turns, and then she knows what Steven was trying to tell her on the phone the day she cut him off, because she is looking into the liquid brown, heavy-lidded, carefully made up eyes of... Aggie Baumfeld.
“Aggie?” says Louisa.
“Louisa?” says Aggie.
“What areyoudoing here?” Louisa asks, unable to keep the accusatory tone out of her voice.
