One Year in Coal Harbor (3 page)

My mom didn’t bother answering but bustled into the kitchen with a pile of cookbooks and plopped them on the table between us. We had six cookbooks, all from the Fishermen’s Aid Society’s yearly cookbook sale, the proceeds from which went to help fishermen’s families who were suffering for one reason or another. There was never very much money in the fund. Just enough to maybe pay a grocery bill or buy school clothes. I would probably have gotten some of it when my parents disappeared if Uncle Jack hadn’t shown up when he did.

As if reading my thoughts, my mother said, “I ought to try to find another fund-raiser for Fishermen’s Aid. The cookbook sale is never enough.”

“But I’m collecting a whole notebook of new recipes,” I protested. “Ones we haven’t used yet. Evie even called me with her freeziolla recipe. Well, I suppose I could always turn my recipes into a real cookbook and send it to a real publisher. A fund-raiser for me. How do you get something published?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that easy,” said my mom. “Who is that lady who lives on the edge of town who published a book about cats? She sure made it sound hard. She said being a writer was like being a cross between a ditchdigger and a pit pony.”

My dad snorted. “A writer? Wasn’t her book just a bunch of photographs of cats?”

“Never mind, I just had another idea. Maybe we’ll do a
youth
cookbook this year with Coal Harbor’s youths’ favorite recipes or something. Let’s think about it. A different twist would be good. I bet people are getting tired of the same old thing. Mrs. Cranston entered her shepherd’s pie recipe three years in a row and I haven’t had the heart to tell her because, frankly, I suspect it’s the only thing she knows how to cook.”

“Maybe you should write Miss Honeycut,” said my father from behind his paper.

“The only thing I ever saw her make was lemon cookies for Uncle Jack. And besides, she doesn’t even live here anymore,” I said.

“No, about money for the aid society,” said my dad.

“Oh, that Miss Honeycut!” said my mother, snorting with derision.

Miss Honeycut was our school guidance counselor when my parents disappeared at sea and had been instrumental in getting me pulled out of my happy situation with Uncle Jack and put into a foster home. This had worked out fine because the foster home had been with Bert and Evie but she hadn’t
known
it would work out fine. Miss Honeycut just wanted me out of the way so she could go after Uncle Jack. Her father had owned about all of the North of England and she had inherited it at his
death and gone back there. And that had been the end of Miss Honeycut, or so I had thought.

“Besides, Miss Honeycut may be rich but she’s cheap,” I said.

“Maybe so,” said my father. “But she is about to lay a pack of money on Coal Harbor. Listen to this.”

He began to read an article. Miss Honeycut apparently had written the mayor that she was to disperse some charitable funds on behalf of her dead father and she wanted to do something for Coal Harbor, where she said she had spent some of her happiest years. This, I’m certain, was news to everyone in Coal Harbor. She always looked like she had a pickle up her nose. She always looked at me as if my being
in particular
was pickle-worthy. But she looked as if quite a lot of other people were a source of great misery too, so I never really took it personally. It
did
make me feel vaguely apologetic whenever I was in her presence. Loneliness surrounded her like a little fog, and you could tell she didn’t like it but had been taught not to complain. She was valiantly doing the best with what she had. She surrounded herself with colleagues and she talked about her friends all over the world. And she told endless anecdotes in an effort to be politely entertaining and do the right thing. The problem was she was trying so hard to do the right thing that
she
never really inhabited her life, it seemed to me. It was run by some kind of phantom adjudicator whose standards
she never quite lived up to. She held everyone else to this adjudicator’s standards as well, so there was no help for any of us. And it didn’t seem to matter how many so-called friends she had, she never connected especially with one person, and if you can’t connect especially with one person, maybe you can’t really connect with anyone. This is the kind of loneliness that existed for her, different from the just-not-knowing-anyone loneliness. And it worried me because I didn’t have a best friend and I certainly didn’t want to end up like Miss Honeycut, available for deathbed appearances and christenings and not particularly missed in between. I had a bunch of special grown-up friends but that was limited too because they had lives that were complicated in ways different from mine. I couldn’t be a party to them. I was more an accessory. Of course there was Eleanor Milkmouse but she was only a friend of convenience. And maybe even desperation, because it was so embarrassing to have no special friend at all. We didn’t really understand each other. I feared I was Miss Honeycut in a younger format, the difference being that I really wanted a best friend and was sure, given the opportunity, I could have one, whereas I always had the feeling Miss Honeycut could be presented with someone perfect for her and still somehow never make that connection. It was almost as if loneliness had become her best friend.

The article went on to say that anyone who had a
suggestion for a charitable Coal Harbor cause should write to Miss Honeycut, and gave her manor house address, which, I was interested to note, was Honeycut Hall, without even a street name. Imagine, I thought, your home being so enormous and well known that all you had to say was you lived at Honeycut Hall somewhere in the North of England and all your mail got there fine.

“Excellent,” said my mother when my father finished reading. “What is a better or more fitting use for this money than the Fishermen’s Aid? How much money is involved, does she say?”

“Half a million pounds,” said my father.

There was a stunned silence.

“Is that the same as half a million dollars?” I asked.

“Considerably more,” said my father.

“We wouldn’t even know what to
do
with so much money,” said my mother.

“Well, don’t tell
her
that,” said my father. “And apparently it’s only a small portion of the money she has been assigned to give away.”

“After all, she
does
own half of England,” I said.

“We’d only need
some
of the money,” said my mother. “Just a portion of that would help so many families through a bad winter. Or we could set up a foundation and the interest could help families year after year. We’d never have to have another cookbook drive.”

“I like the cookbook drives,” I said. “How else are you going to learn how everyone else in town eats?”

“You’d better write soon,” said my father to my mom. “I have a feeling there’s going to be no end of people pleading their cases.”

“I will. Tonight,” said my mother, and then we sat down and began flipping through cookbooks.

But I wasn’t really paying attention. I couldn’t get out of my head the idea that Miss Honeycut’s best years had been spent here, where she had seemed so lonely and out of place. Where had her worst years been, and what was it like for her now in England in her manor house with all that money? Shouldn’t
these
be the best years of her life? Owning half of England? But maybe the reason she was cheap was that money hadn’t ever made her that happy and she didn’t expect it to make other people happy either.

“Chicken?” my mom asked me for the second time, and I tried to pull my thoughts back to the here and now. “
Real
chicken as opposed to pieces of rat?”

“I don’t know. Seems a little dull,” I said. “Unless you want to make cornflake chicken. We haven’t made that in a while.”

“Ummm,” said my mother, biting her lip and flipping pages.

“Yeah,” I said, thinking about it. “Let’s make cornflake chicken and mashed potatoes and ersatz gravy and peas and biscuits! Let’s do a Southern dinner. Uncle Jack would like that and I bet Miss Bowzer would too.”

Ersatz gravy was one of my mother’s inventions. It
was supposed to be healthy gravy because it used cornstarch, not fat, as a thickener but it turned out to taste really good too.

“Ummm,” said my mother, still flipping. “Maybe we can find something a little fancier.”

“Fancier?” I said. “That’s a Sunday-type supper.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” my mother said, looking uncomfortable.

“What’s wrong with it?” I pressed. “You think it’s fancy when
we
have it.”

“It’s fine for Jack. I just don’t want to serve a professional chef something made with
cornflakes
, okay? And ersatz gravy is definitely not for company.”

“You don’t have to impress Miss Bowzer. I’ve already told her about the ersatz gravy and she said she’d like to try it sometime.”

“Well, Miss Bowzer’s very polite. And I know she serves honest, unpretentious food. Except for that silly thing with the lentils Jack made her put on the menu. But I’d still like to at least look like I know better, especially as Miss Bowzer has never eaten here before. I don’t want her to think we eat things like cornflake chicken and ersatz gravy all the time.”

“But we do.”

“Well, she doesn’t have to know that, okay? Or think that even if we eat that way we don’t know better than to cook such things for guests.”

“And Uncle Jack didn’t
make
her put it on the menu. He suggested it. You can’t
make
Miss Bowzer do anything. She did it to reward him because she thought he’d done a fine thing, saving lives in that fire.”

“What about steak?”

“Steak doesn’t take any cooking skills. It’s like saying, I couldn’t be bothered. I mean, if you’re going to make steak for company, you might as well go all the way and just meet them in a field and chew on a raw cow.”

“I know what!” said my mother, stabbing a cookbook page with her finger and looking elated. “Lamb!”

We found lamb chops in the bottom of the freezer at the general store. They were expensive and slightly freezer burned and Mr. Barrista warned my mom that they’d been sitting there for a long time but it didn’t seem to matter to her, it was elegance ho. Besides, she said, the cost would just get lost in the general bill at the end of the month and she would economize somewhere else.

For the next week I was very excited about the dinner even if I wasn’t mad for the menu, except for the ersatz gravy, which my mother had agreed to make as a compromise because let’s face it, serving grilled lamb is basically like serving grilled steak and requires no feats of imagination.

Both Miss Bowzer and Uncle Jack had accepted the invitation immediately, which I took as a good sign. But
when they got to our door they looked startled to see each other and then I realized I hadn’t told each the other was coming. I hadn’t done this on purpose but I might have unconsciously.

“Ah, Miss Bowzer,” said Uncle Jack, looking very pleased after the initial surprise.

“Oh,” said Miss Bowzer. And then she clearly couldn’t think of anything else to say and blushed right down her neck.

I showed them in and we sat down on the couch. My dad, who had just gotten in minutes before, washed the worst of the fishy smell off his hands with lemon and then joined us.

I was wearing my nicest sweater. Miss Bowzer wore a polka-dot dress and
lipstick
and looked uncomfortable without an apron on. She kept wiping her hands on her dress, realizing it wasn’t an apron and probably that her hands weren’t dirty, and then cracking her knuckles. It was not the most attractive mating display. My father kept pouring Uncle Jack scotches and giving him sympathetic looks. My mother was way perkier and more cheerful than usual. So much so that she bordered on the manic. But she hadn’t been able to get out of work as early as she had demanded and had had to run home and throw dinner together and now even though she was caught up and had things cooking, she couldn’t seem to slow down again. When Miss Bowzer saw that my mom was wearing
blue jeans and no makeup she looked even more uncomfortable and overdressed. I wanted to pull her aside and tell her my mom simply hadn’t had time to glam up, even though the truth is my mom never wears makeup or fancy clothes. I thought Miss Bowzer looked really nice and someone should mention it but it was as if we’d all taken an unspoken vow not to mention
the dress
. This, of course, made it much worse because under normal relaxed circumstances someone would have complimented her on her good grooming. You ought to appreciate the effort, any effort people make.

Uncle Jack alone retained his savoir faire as if he were completely at home with people who would really be better off heavily sedated. He kept everyone entertained with tales of developing land down island. And every time Miss Bowzer started to look especially uncomfortable and out of place, he leaped in and engaged her in questions or asked for her opinion on some business venture. Miss Bowzer was always happiest when offering an opinion. She was one of those people who knew exactly what she thought about any subject you’d care to proffer. So it was a comforting activity for her and for a while after, she’d look relaxed again. Miss Bowzer didn’t seem to mind Uncle Jack’s development adventures as long as the development was happening someplace else. Although I thought we might be in trouble when she said, “Just tell me who but a total skunk would want a lot of
strangers coming in and gunking up the waters and chopping down the trees and clogging the roads and putting up artificial light at night when it’s no business being anything but dark, and turning the west coast of Vancouver Island into a concrete mess like Florida?”