Red Hook Road (40 page)

The two movements were short, no more than eight minutes because of how fast Samantha was playing, and when she drew out her final, climactic note, her face was damp with sweat. Iris leaped to her feet and shouted, “Brava! Brava!” The audience joined her, giving Samantha the first but by no means the last standing ovation of her life. Samantha’s face flushed as she stood proudly before the assembly, many of whom had last seen her on the wedding day. If on that day she’d been out of her element, today she was entirely in it. She bent forward and, with a flourish, acknowledged their applause with a bow.

Iris continued clapping until Samantha had retreated to the house to return the violin to its place. Only later did she look around for Daniel. She hoped that Samantha’s performance would have convinced him of the girl’s promise, and of their own responsibility in helping her achieve it. She found him at the cooler, sending Bill Paige’s Geary’s splashing into the melted ice, one by one.

“Wasn’t she amazing?” Iris said.

“She’s great,” Daniel said. He took a beer for himself, opened it, and tossed the top into the cooler.

“Do you understand now why I’m so eager to help her?” Iris said. “She’s exceptional.”

“Her talent was never the issue.”

“Her talent is the
only
issue.”

“You and I both know that isn’t true.”

Before they could argue any further, Ruthie and Matt interrupted them. Ruthie held Matt’s hand like she had always held her father’s, gripping his two middle fingers in her fist.

“Samantha totally rocks,” Ruthie said.

“Doesn’t she?” Iris said, glancing at Daniel.

Daniel drank deeply from his bottle of beer.

Ruthie looked from her mother to her father, and back again. “Is everything okay?” she said.

“Everything’s fine,” Iris said. “So, you two are dating?”

Ruthie nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”

“I don’t know,” Ruthie said. “I guess we were worried that you’d think it was weird for us to be together.”

“I don’t think it’s weird,” Iris said.

Ruthie pressed closer to Matt, who stiffened momentarily and then slipped his arm around her waist. Ruthie said, “Matt and I have something we want to ask you.”

Iris caught Daniel’s eye, and they were at once united in a familiar moment of parental trepidation.

“I’m going to stay here this coming year, in Red Hook, with Matt,” Ruthie said.

“Oh, Ruthie,” Iris said.

“What? You said you wanted me to have a plan.”

So Ruthie really did intend to mimic the worst of Becca’s decisions, Iris thought.

She looked to Daniel for support, but whatever unity they had moments ago experienced seemed to have passed. He wasn’t going to back her up. “Staying in Red Hook isn’t a plan,” Iris said.

“Yes, it is. It might not be the plan you wanted, but it’s a plan. Matt and I—were hoping you’d let us live here over the winter. We could take care of the place.”

“I’m getting pretty good at carpentry and stuff,” Matt said. “I could build you another set of bookshelves for the living room, and fix the spring on the back door. I could lay in a cord of wood for the fire. Whatever you needed done around here.”

Iris said, “But what would you do, Ruthie? Where would you work?”

“At the library.”

“The library?”

“Yes. Mary Lou Curran convinced the director to hire me.”

“How much can you possibly earn at the library?”

“Well, they’re not exactly paying me.”

“They’re not paying you,” Iris said flatly. “Well, then how ‘exactly’ is that a job?”

“They will pay me, when they get their new budget. They just can’t pay me now. So for the first little while I’ll be volunteering.”

“And how will you support yourself?”

“I’ll get a part-time job.”

“There are no part-time jobs, Ruthie. Not in Red Hook.”

“Becca always worked.”

“Becca taught sailing. I don’t think that’s really an option for you. Particularly in February.” God, how Iris missed sailing with Becca. Even when they weren’t getting along, they would still sail together. Becca used to tease her that the water was the only place where you could trust Iris to mind her own business. They rarely talked on their sailing excursions, exchanging little more than terse warnings about the boom or instructions to come about or trim a sail. They would enjoy an easy, companionable silence, the kind of silence Iris used to have with Ruthie when they were sitting in the same room, each immersed in her own novel.

Since the accident Iris sailed alone.

Ruthie said, “I know I can find something to tide me over until the library comes through. I can work at one of the inns. Or at the market. I’ll find something. And we don’t need much money. Not if you let us live in the house while you’re gone.”

“Are you going to pay the bills, Ruthie? Are you going to pay to heat the house? Do you know how much that would cost?”

“She and Matt will be the caretakers,” Daniel said. “We’ll pay them what we’ve always paid Jane.”

“We can’t take away Jane’s income. That wouldn’t be right,” Iris said.

Matt said, “My mom watches a lot of houses in the winter, Mrs. Copaken. One more or less isn’t going to be a big deal.” His voice was surprisingly firm, and Iris saw Ruthie give him a grateful squeeze.

“Call me Iris, not Mrs. Copaken,” Iris said automatically, and then
flinched. She had said that precise thing so often to John that it had become almost a mantra.

“I have a job,” Matt said. “At the boatyard. I can pay the bills, and I can even pay rent.”

Iris gazed at her daughter for a long, wordless moment. Then she said, her voice gentle, almost pleading, “Ruthie, why are you doing this?”

“Dad?” Ruthie said. “You don’t think this is a bad idea, do you?”

Daniel shook his head. “I think you’ll be fine.”

Iris was not surprised that Daniel had agreed. That had always been his job. To agree with the girls, to support them, to indulge them. She was the taskmaster, the planner, the one who determined the rules and meted out punishment when they were broken. While on occasion she had resented their roles, had wanted to be the good guy just once in a while, she knew that it was she who had determined what parts they’d play to begin with.

Though she wasn’t surprised by Daniel’s reaction, she was shocked by her utter failure of insight into his motivation. Always before she would have known what his true feelings were. And now she hadn’t the faintest idea if he really thought it was a good idea for Ruthie to live some pale simulacrum of Becca’s life, or if he opposed the idea but could not bring himself to express it, or if he just didn’t care.

How had it come to this? That she had so little insight into the mind of the man who she’d always believed she knew better than she knew herself? And Ruthie. How had they reached a point where Ruthie paid so little heed to her mother’s point of view? How had she lost them? What had Iris been
doing
? Where had her mind been, when it should have been focused on her family?

Iris felt her energy for discord simply drain from her. “Fine,” she said to Ruthie. “You can stay here in Red Hook and volunteer at the library, or knit sweaters, or weave Christmas wreaths. You can do whatever you want.”

The intensity of their discussion had not gone unnoticed, and it was only when Iris had turned away from Daniel and Ruthie that she realized that many of their guests had quietly taken their leave. She considered calling out that there were still fireworks to come, but honestly she didn’t care anymore.

Within an hour the yard was empty but for the detritus of the celebration. The picnic table was crowded with empty beer bottles and plastic cups. A large green garbage bag propped against the leg of the table overflowed with lobster shells and paper plates. Empty folding chairs were arranged in crooked rows facing the place where Samantha had played. A few other chairs were scattered across the lawn, one down on its side. The white plastic chairs seemed to glow in the dim light.

Daniel, having just helped a trembling Mr. Kimmelbrod to his room, came down the porch steps. He gazed out over the empty yard. Nothing, he thought, looked as bereft as a party after the guests had gone. He took the green garbage bag, tamped down its contents with his foot, and began gathering the rest of the garbage. He collected the trash, tied up the bag, and tossed it into the bin. He gathered up the beer bottles, filling two recycling bins. Then he began to work on the chairs. He snapped them closed and stacked them inside the barn. He crossed the yard, climbed over the seawall, and made his way across the rocks over to the dock. It was almost dark now.

When he looked back toward the house he could just barely see Iris’s figure through the screened windows of the porch. She was sitting in her customary chair, her head bowed. There was a light on in Mr. Kimmelbrod’s bedroom; the white curtains glowed yellow against the darkened house. Daniel did not know where Ruthie and Matt were.

Daniel turned his back on the house and walked down the length of the dock. He could hear the water splashing gently against the wood. Over the water a loon gave its mournful cry. It was chilly, and the air raised goose bumps along his bare arms. He had piled the fireworks about halfway along the dock, and when he reached them he kneeled down and chose one of the smaller cakes. The black box was covered with pictures of bursting rockets. It was called, for no reason that he could think of, Meet the Neighbors.

Daniel set the box at the end of the dock. He took the lighter from his pocket and rolled his thumb across the wheel a few times before it caught. He lit the fuse and stepped back. For a moment the cake fizzed and popped, and then it went off, shooting up into the now-dark sky.

Daniel watched as one after another the effects went off, blue, red, white. Short staccato bursts and then larger ones, like giant umbrellas opening up beneath the stars. When the last light fizzled and fell toward the bay, Daniel sat down, wrapped his arms around his legs, leaned his forehead against his knees, and thought about where he would be next summer, because he knew now—had known for a long time—that he would not be here, in this broken place, spoiling the darkness of a Maine summer sky with a lot of cheap effects, noise, and smoke.

Though it was filled with people and with nearly 130 years of history and ghosts, the house felt empty without Daniel. It was more than nine months since he had packed up his belongings and moved out of their apartment in New York—long enough to gestate and give birth to a baby—and yet Iris still felt as if she were stuck in the first trimester of her separation from her husband, lonely, lost, unable to grasp the ramifications of her new situation.

Iris made a pot of tea, but instead of drinking it, she held her mug in her hand and drifted from room to room. In the kitchen she opened the cupboards and gazed at the unopened boxes and tins of Daniel’s favorite cereal, the Italian coffee he preferred, the cookies he ate in the evenings before bed. On her first shopping trip after arriving in Maine she had automatically loaded his favorite foods into her cart, not realizing the pointlessness of her purchases until she was standing in the checkout line. She hadn’t returned the items to the shelves, had brought them home, as if by laying in a stock of shortbread cookies and Wicked Ale she could lure her husband home. Daniel’s favorite foods now sat gathering dust in her pantry.