Red Hook Road (47 page)

After the briefest hesitation, Iris continued down the ramp until she stood only a few feet from him. The lenses of her glasses hid her expression.

Ruthie glanced from one of her parents to the other. She seemed flummoxed, as if she were struggling to find something to say, some diplomatic bit of dialogue to smooth over the awkwardness. Daniel hoped she was not going to engage in the supremely ridiculous act of introducing him to his
own wife. Instead, however, Ruthie turned and took a step closer to Matt, who had his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his khaki shorts as he accepted the congratulations of the dozen or so assembled guests.

“Hello, Iris,” Daniel said.

“Hello,” Iris said, her voice cracking slightly. She cleared her throat and tried again. “How are you?”

“I’m well,” he said. “And you?”

“Fine.”

“And your dad? How’s he doing today?”

“He had a bad night. His chest was a little congested, but when I left him he seemed to be doing better. He was sleeping.”

“Are they worried about his chest?” Daniel asked.

Iris nodded. “If it gets bad enough he might need a ventilator.”

“He’ll hate that,” Daniel said.

She nodded, chewing on her lower lip. “I don’t think he’ll agree to it.”

“Has he said he won’t?”

“No, I haven’t been able to bring myself to ask him. Maybe because I know what his answer will be.”

Matt cleared his throat and the small crowd quieted down. Jane had brought Bill Paige with her, Daniel saw, so that was still going on. Samantha was there and Matt’s sister, Maureen, and her daughters. All together he counted about a dozen guys from the yard, most of whom had, at one point or another during the long period of restoration, given Matt the benefit of their advice.

All but a few of the boatbuilders had been John’s friends, and as they watched his kid brother fumble for something appropriate to say, they grew strangely solemn, remembering the many launches John had participated in, a number of them sending boats that he had helped design under way. The last boat they’d seen John launch was one of the first he’d designed all on his own, a twenty-six-foot Jet Drive tender, which the yard had built for a couple from Long Island. John had never been at a loss for words, and surely this occasion, most of all, would have found him with plenty to say.

“Um,” Matt said. “I guess you all know the story of how my brother found this boat.”

“Tell it!” said one of John’s friends.

Matt hesitated.

“Go on, Matt,” another said.

Matt shoved his balled-up fists deeper into his pockets and rocked back and forth on his feet. He cleared his throat once, and then again, before continuing. “So, he was up in this boatyard in Machias, and she was just, like, rotting in a corner. He took one look at her, and he knew he had to have her. John said he knew right away that the
Rebecca
could be as beautiful and sea-kindly as her namesake. If he’d been able to finish the job, she may well have ended up that way; as it is I think he was wrong. She’s beautiful, all right, but she can’t hold a candle to Becca. Or to her sister,” he added quickly.

“She looks just fine, Matt,” one of the builders said.

“Let’s get her in the water and see if she floats!” another said. There was laughter at this. Matt hesitated again.

“Go on, son,” an old man carrying a fishing pole said.

Matt flushed but continued. “I guess I just want to thank everybody who helped me finish her, especially my mom, who gave over her barn to John to build her in.”

“Hear, hear!” one of the builders said.

Jane waved off their cheers, but she could not help but smile. The morning the truck came to take the boat down to the yard, Matt had finally given Jane a tour. She had not quite been able to believe that, in the end, Matt had managed, despite his inexperience and lack of resources, to build something his brother would have been proud of. She had been so pleased and impressed that she had refrained from asking him where he found the money to pay for it all.

Now, however, Matt gave her and everyone else who had gathered for the launch an idea of where the money had come from. “Thanks to Ruthie, for all her support,” he said. “And to her dad, Daniel. If it weren’t for him the Alden would still be in the barn.”

Iris turned to Daniel, her eyebrows raised. He shrugged sheepishly.

Ruthie was moving through the crowd, handing out plastic cups of champagne. When everybody had one, she took an unopened bottle out of a brown paper bag and brought it to Matt.

Matt lifted up the bottle of Veuve Clicquot to show to the crowd. “We don’t really need to christen her, because she’s sailed under her name since 1938, but we thought she deserved a bottle of the good stuff, anyway.”

He tried to hand the bottle to Ruthie, but she refused it.

“Your mom should do it,” she said.

“No,” Jane said. “You go ahead.”

“Come on, Ruthie,” Matt said, pushing the bottle into her hands.

Ruthie held the bottle at arm’s length for a moment. Once the boat was in the water there would be no turning back. She had no doubt that Matt would find some way to come up with the money for the insurance, and as soon as he did his master captain’s course they would be on their way to the Caribbean. She wished desperately that Becca were here to christen the boat, and to sail away on it in her place. She took a deep breath and stepped to the bow of the boat, clutching the bottle gingerly. Matt had scored the bottle with a glass cutter so that it would break without damaging the paint on the hull, and she was afraid it would explode in her hands.

Matt had prepared for her what he wanted her to say, going so far as to write it on a scrap of paper. “May God and King Neptune bless and keep her,” Ruthie read aloud. “And may she bring fair winds and good fortune to all those who sail on her.” She swung the bottle and cracked it against the bow. The bottle exploded, spraying her with champagne.

Everyone cheered and downed the contents of their plastic cups. Then the builders swung into action. One got up into the Travelift’s driver’s seat and turned on the motor. The others started walking on the tracks alongside the boat as the hoist rolled out over the water. Only once the Alden had reached the end of the tracks did they allow the rest of the crowd to join them. Four men took hold of each end of the canvas straps, and on Matt’s order the driver pushed the lever to lower the boat. With a jerk the steel cables slowly unwound, lowering the boat into the water. When she was about halfway down the man working the winch paused, and Matt grabbed the rail and vaulted aboard. He held out his hand for Ruthie. She hesitated for a moment, and then allowed him to help her up over the rail. With another jerk the boat resumed her descent into the water. There was barely a splash when she was all the way down. Matt
unhooked the rear strap and the builders standing on either side of the Travelift eased the boat back along the channel between the tracks. Once the stern was free they loosened the strap at the bow and she moved out into the deep water of the bay. For a moment Matt disappeared, gone below to hook up a pump to deal with the water seeping into her hull. It would take a while for the wood to swell and seal shut the leaks in the planking.

Matt came back up on the deck and began unfurling the sails. One after another they opened, snapping in the breeze. The boat seemed to rise up in the water as the sails climbed up her two masts. Is there anything as beautiful as a wooden sailboat moving away across a sunlit bay, a bright white arrow piercing the blue of the sea?

Afloat, at last.
Rebecca
.

Ruthie stood at the kitchen sink, working the meat from thirty-five pounds of shedders with her bare hands. Her hair was flecked with bits of lobster shell, her shirt drenched with the brine that insulated the lobsters’ tender new shells from their soft flesh. A jagged shard of pink had sliced open the pad at the base of her thumb and she had to keep rinsing away the blood that seeped to the surface. She had been standing at the sink for two hours, and her back and shoulders ached. A shelf of dark clouds hung low and threatening in the sky over the little East Red Hook harbor, and although it wasn’t raining, the air was thick and close, dense with humidity unusual for Maine. With her wrist she wiped a bead of sweat from her nose.

It was coming on five o’clock, the celebration was due to begin at six, and she still had half a dozen lobsters to go and a host of other jobs to finish before the guests arrived. The task would be easier, she thought, if someone, anyone, had offered to help. But that was unfair. She had said she would do it by herself. And there was good reason for everyone’s absence. Mr. Kimmelbrod, still in the hospital more than a week after his fall, had last night once again shown signs of minor chest congestion, and Iris did not want to leave him on his own. She had arranged for Samantha to spell her at the hospital and promised to come home as soon as the girl arrived.

Having read the sky and the falling barometer, Matt had decided to sail the
Rebecca
from the open harbor of King’s Boatyard to East Red Hook’s sheltered cove. The trip should not take too long, and at least he would arrive before the other guests.

When Ruthie had all the meat free of the shells, she mixed in the celery and mayonnaise, and put it into a blue crockery bowl. In two matching
bowls she put the coleslaw she had made from cabbages she grew herself in her small garden plot out in the side yard, and the potato salad. Ruthie put the bowls on the picnic table and then hesitated, wondering if it was too early to put out mayonnaise; if it would spoil. But the blue bowls looked so pretty against the red gingham tablecloth. The strong wind blowing in from the water forced Ruthie to weigh down everything on the table with rocks from the garden, and she worried that the Mason jars of flowers would topple. Early in the morning she had gathered the last of the lupines and the first of the tiger lilies from the overgrown meadow beyond the Grange Hall, and now their heads drooped in the unusual humidity.

Ruthie sat down on the screen porch with a pile of forks and began wrapping them in the gingham-printed paper napkins she had ordered on the Web to match the tablecloth. She had no idea how many to roll. The first year there were at least thirty people at the celebration. Last year there were fewer, but still not less than twenty. But how many would come this year? Ten? Five?

Preparing for the celebration had made Ruthie gloomy, irritable, even resentful, and not merely of the fact that she was obliged to do it alone. Fighting against everyone’s resistance had exhausted her, and there were times when she had just wanted to throw up her hands and remind people that she hadn’t really wanted to do this either, that it had been Mr. Kimmelbrod’s idea, and for his sake they should all just stop bellyaching and force themselves to be, if not eager, then at least merely willing.

A reluctance to attend the party this year had not been confined to members of the immediate family. Even the few close friends and neighbors to whom Ruthie had issued invitations seemed less than eager. Some had begged off, claiming other plans, others had murmured something noncommittal before turning away. If she reminded them that the event was meant to be a celebration of John’s and Becca’s memories, they tended to look sheepish, as if they had forgotten that, and were ashamed of their forgetting. Or maybe they were just thinking that John and Becca had died a long time ago, and that it was long past time to move on. And Ruthie thought that perhaps they were right, it was time to move on, and that was the most terrible thought of all.

As if to drive this cruel wisdom from her mind, she allowed herself to
be overcome by obsessiveness. She pulled the most wilted flowers from the bouquets, wiped the plates clean of nonexistent dust, set the napkin rolls out in an artful arc. She scrubbed the downstairs bathroom and put a votive candle on the back of the toilet. She unloaded the dishwasher, washed all the pots, and scrubbed down the counters so that if anyone came inside they would find the kitchen sparkling clean. She cleared the dining room table of its piles of old newspapers and magazines and hid them in the coat closet. She set out the folding chairs in the yard in neat little conversation circles.