The Gilly Salt Sisters (21 page)

“This is all we have,” she said, and turned on her heel.

Still, it hurt when Jo stepped into the diner the next day to deliver salt and saw Whit sitting with a blond girl at the counter. She wasn’t anyone Jo recognized from town, but a summer girl, high above Jo’s station in life. She was wearing a madras skirt, a grosgrain ribbon in her hair, and shoes so white they made Jo’s heart speed up. Whit blushed a furious red when he spotted Jo, and then he put his arm around the girl and swiveled his stool so his back was to her.

“Can we get some more fries here for my friend, old man?” he drawled, lazy as anything, winking at Mr. Hopper.

Jo dropped the bag of salt on the counter, her breath a hot animal in her chest. “You can pay me next time,” she told Mr. Hopper. “I have to go.” Keeping her eyes down, she hustled out of the diner before Whit decided to say anything. She wanted to rip the ribbon out of the girl’s hair, muss up her skirt, and stomp on her silly white shoes.
Someone
, Jo thought,
should straighten that girl out
. Someone should tell her that love didn’t waltz up to you while you were sitting at a diner counter swinging your feet, that
it was in fact more like pulling a twelve-hour day in the marsh—something you had to work up to slowly before you could really stand it on a regular basis.

But that wasn’t something easily said. Jo hadn’t ever told it to Claire, after all, who could have used it the most, and given that general failing, what business did she have informing anyone else? No business, that’s what. No one wanted to hear her story anyway, she thought as she straightened her spine and started back toward the farm. Considering her history with Whit, maybe that was for the best.

A
lthough Jo kept catching glimpses of Whit around town—at church, of course, and in the narrow aisles of Mr. Upton’s store, or as he cruised down Bank Street at the helm of his family’s convertible—the encounters felt harried and uncomfortable to her. Whit always clearly saw her, but he never acknowledged her, or if he did, it was invariably in a snide manner that Jo found bewildering. “Hey, Gilly girl,” he’d call, “how’s the salt treating you?” And then, just when Jo thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did. On the second-to-last weekend of the summer, right before Whit was due to return to boarding school, Ida Turner had the poor grace to up and die, and life for everyone in Prospect ground to a spectacular halt.

The Turners never said what the actual cause of death was, but rumors flew along Bank Street, whipping through queues in the post office and the pharmacy, turning heads at the diner, and lingering in the aisles of Mr. Upton’s grocery.

“I heard it was a heart attack,” Timothy Weatherly said at the hardware counter, plunking down a quarter sack of nails and a length of rubber hosing. Dotty Friend, the proprietor’s buxom wife, snorted and rolled her eyes.

“That’s not possible. That woman had no heart. I bet you it was some kind of cancer and that she had it awhile. That would explain why she was so skinny.”

Timothy Weatherly worked the plug of tobacco in his mouth and thought about that. Whatever had gotten Ida must have been something terrible indeed. At least more terrible than
she
had been.

Per Ida’s instructions all the town flags were flown at half-staff for three days following her death, and the windows of the municipal buildings were draped in black crepe. Jo’s mother shrieked with victory when she heard the news and then insisted on presenting herself at Ida’s funeral swathed in a giant red shawl. The three of them squeezed into a pew at the back of the packed church.

“Besides her being a Turner and trying to grab up all our land, why did you hate her so much?” Claire whispered to Mama. Frankly, she said, she personally admired Ida. At least she’d traveled off the Cape and seen a little of the world, which was more than Claire could claim for her own sorry self. “Is it possible she wasn’t really so awful?” she asked as Jo eyed the brass-and-mahogany coffin covered with wreaths of expensive and fragrant roses. Flowers like that were fit for a queen, Jo thought. It seemed a shame to waste them on the dead.

“Shh,” Mama admonished. “Listen, Claire. Ida Turner came straight up from dirt, and now she’s about to go back in it. Along the way she snatched everything she could and cast off anything she thought would weigh her down. You don’t want to be like that.”

After the service they waited in line to shake hands with Whit and his father, Hamish. By the time their turn came, the church was empty.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Claire’s mother said primly, her red shawl giving away her real sentiments. “Ida was… someone we won’t soon forget.”

“Condolences,” was all Jo said. Whit held her hand longer than she was comfortable with, however, longer than convention dictated.

“Jo…” he began, but she stepped away from him before he
could get anything else out. Whit always did like to have the last word. This time she’d let him.

A
fter Ida’s passing, the sky lowered and turned a shade darker, the pear tree’s anemic leaves began skittering off the branches, and banks of clouds threatened but did not bring rain. The summer people began packing up and leaving, and the afternoon winds cooled. Jo started counting the days until Whit left town again. She didn’t hold out hope for any sort of formal good-bye, certainly not given his family’s current circumstances, so she was surprised to catch him lurking at the edge of the marsh on his final morning in town. He was making notes, she saw, in a tiny leather notebook.

“Solving for
x
?” she asked, dropping her wooden paddle on the narrow dike between two collecting basins.

He looked up but didn’t smile. “Something like that.” But Jo knew Whit too well for small talk. He didn’t look right. He had dark semicircles smeared under his eyes and the sickly cast of someone who hadn’t seen the sun for days. His hands shook when he jotted in his book. Jo stepped closer and peered at what he was writing. It looked like some kind of accounting. Dollar signs and scribbles filled the pages, along with too many minus signs.

“Looks like you’re short a bob or two,” Jo joked, and then she recoiled as Whit kicked at the dirt. He was in no mood for joking.

“That’s what my father told me,” he said, wiping a tear away from his cheek. “We’ve overextended ourselves. We own a lot, but none of it is going up. No more new sailboats for me, he said. There’s enough for my education and a few extras, and that’s about it. When I’m done with college, I get to come back here”—he squinted spitefully around the marsh—“and fill my father’s shoes. ‘I hope you’ll do a better job of it, son,’ he told me. ‘And I hope you leave off your mother’s foolishness.’ ”

Jo cocked her head. “Fool” was one word she’d never have applied to Ida. “What do you mean?”

Whit sniffed. “Mother was always banging on about this place. I guess she had the idea that if she could get her hands on it, if she only had the salt to her name and could harness its power, the family coffers would fill right back up. But she left one curious thing in her will. It said I was forbidden ever to marry you. That if I did, I would be immediately disinherited.”

Jo paled. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “And if the salt could be controlled, do you think we’d be as close to the bone as we are?” Whit was clearly grief-addled, but she understood that instead of mourning like a normal human being he had taken on his mother’s cause of trying to snatch up the farm, as if he could cancel out his recent loss by gaining something Ida had always wanted so badly. But things didn’t work that way on Salt Creek Farm. In the marsh, loss was permanent and irrevocable. “Give it up,” Jo said. “The salt’s not going to bring back what your family lost, and this land will
never
sit in Turner hands. Your mother needn’t have worried about you marrying me for that.”

Whit flipped his notebook closed, stuffed it in his pocket, then rocked back on his heels, his composure regained. He looked down his nose at Jo like he’d just dealt her a crooked hand of cards. When they were younger, Jo reflected, his impish cheating had been charming and funny, but now it had an edge to it that was unsettling. She saw that she was never going to crack the beetle shell he’d grown around him while he was away—not today, not tomorrow, probably never.

“I don’t exactly get how the salt works, Jo,” he said. “But my mother was no fool, and if she thought it would save our family’s legacy… well, I’m not going to drop this.” And without saying anything else, he turned and sauntered back down the lane, whistling as if he were happy, when Jo knew better.

“It’ll be a cold day in hell before you have any say over the salt, Whit Turner!” she shouted after him, but he pretended that he didn’t hear. Secretly Jo worried a little that Whit had more up his sleeve than she knew.

Mama shrugged off those concerns when Jo came into the
kitchen and related what had happened. She turned back to her bread dough, kneading the knot of it in smooth, even turns. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Plots like Whit’s don’t just pop out at you like a jack-in-the-box toy. The future gets laid brick by plain old brick, so slow you don’t even know it’s happening.”

“I guess you’re right,” Jo mumbled.

Mama smacked her palms together and flipped the bread over on the counter. She paused, the mass of deflated dough spread in front of her, possibility risen and punched back down by her own two hands. “Of course I am,” she said, but her fingers stayed stuck in the dough, and Jo knew she was thinking about the day that Henry had drowned, how Mama had been standing in the kitchen then, too, and how it must have been a kind of explosion, that moment, when all her worries about the future collided with all the bad luck from her past, and how Jo was the spark of that combustion, another brick in the wall of her mother’s daily misery.

“Let me,” Jo said, nudging Mama over at the counter and placing her own hands in the bread.

“Thank you,” Mama said, her voice husky, her back stiff.

“Next time I see Whit,” Jo said, beginning to roll and push the dough with the same even strokes as her mother, “I’ll remind him again that we’re stuck to this land like barnacles.”

“Make that man-eating barnacles,” Mama said, and Jo laughed, rolling the dough in an easy swoop, passing it from one hand to the other, paying as little attention to it as she did to the act of combing her straight brown hair or buttoning her work shirt in the morning.

It was the last time she’d ever do anything so easy again.

T
he leaves were just beginning to kindle into russet the afternoon Ethan returned from his final fishing trip the summer after he and Claire graduated, in 1967. As always, they’d agreed to meet under the town’s pear tree at sunset. Claire was wearing a new skirt she’d sewn, and her bare legs were starting to get cold as the sun went down. She was casting an eye around her, making sure no other amorous couples were headed for the shrubbery, when she heard a disembodied voice rise out of the thickening dusk.

“Whoever it is, he’s not the one for you.” She turned to see Whit Turner ducking into the shadow of the tree. She seemed to run into him when she least wanted to. He’d stayed in town after graduating college, just as everyone predicted, but he’d kept a careful distance from Claire’s family. Whenever he and Jo saw each other in town, they pointedly ignored one another, but whenever he saw Claire, he usually winked, unless he was close enough for him to give her hair a twitch the way he used to when she was a child. Before she could stop him, he edged close to her and did that now, and she shivered. His fingers lingered along her blouse collar. “Definitely not the one for you,” he said again.