The From-Aways (9 page)

“I don’t kill ’em. I just bag ’em.”

“Give it,” I say. I won’t let my nonfather fuck up Billy Deep, who was an upstanding and only sometimes libidinous seafood salesman last I knew. I wrest the sack away from him and drop it.

The cat slinks out of the bag, raises its hackles, and hisses. I see rows of sharp milk teeth, the pink of its tongue. It’s a calico cat covered with black and marmalade patches, including a broad one on its head like a helmet. Each foot is orange from paw up. Ginger Boots. It crouches low to the ground before darting away, a domestic bell tinkling around its neck.

“You owe me thirty bucks,” Billy says.

That Carter would do something like this is sick, pathological. And the worst part of it is that lately I’ve been wondering about the vacancy in my family portrait. I’d started to wonder what he’d look like standing there. I’d let myself imagine showing up at his door and him crying and saying how happy he was to see me and that Crazy Marta forbade him to ever talk to me and that he didn’t just use her for a shitty folk song after all and that he was so glad to have me back. But after this? Taxidermied cats? Fuck that delusion. I’m back to the original plan.

“Tell me you’ll stop doing this, Billy,” I say.

“Tell them to stop building that big house,” he says. “Tell them not to raise my father’s rent.” He claps me on the back, the way an older man might. “Hell,” he says. “You’re a newspaper lady. Lead the call to arms.”

L
EAH IS SITTING
at the
Star
’s computer, aggressively typing and retyping. I’m cross-legged on the desk next to her shooting pencils at the wastebasket, mostly missing. We’ve been arguing over this piece for half an hour and Charley’s on us to finish so we can go to print and go home, but Leah and I are still at it, having too much fun fighting to compromise. The headline in question:
NONMARINE
OCCUPANCY
ZONING
LAWS
CHANGING
THE
COAST
.

“I’m so bored,” I say. “You say zoning, and immediately I’m so bored I want to gouge my eyes out.” I use a pencil to mime some gouging.

“You keep saying that,” Leah says. “But you can’t tell me what would be better. Give me one better suggestion. And don’t even try bringing up—”

“Kept women!”

“No!” she says. “We’ve been over this. A woman supported by her husband is not necessarily a ‘kept woman.’ And you don’t know that the Elm Park women are kept. They could be independently wealthy professionals.”

“There are two papers in front of you,” I say. “One says, ‘Kept Women vs. the Lobstermen.’ The other says, ‘Boring-Ass Treatise on Zoning.’ ” I weigh the imaginary options in my hands. “You know I’m right,” I say.

“But you’re not!” Leah clonks her head down on the table, but she’s laughing.

Charley appears. “Give it to me,” she says. “I can’t stand listening to the two of you for another second.”

Leah types and clicks. “It’s uploading,” she says to Charley.

“You wench. You went with zoning, didn’t you?” I say.

“I did,” she says, standing and stretching. Pleased with herself. “Bar?”

“Sure,” I say.

At the Uncle, we argue about the headline for another hour. Even though it’s already gone to print. Even though Jethro covers his ears and asks us to please, please, talk about anything else.

W
HEN
I
GET
home, Rosie is sitting on the brown couch that is also my bed. She has my guitar out and is strumming an open G, over and over again. One of her breasts rests in the valley of the guitar. It never occurred to me that if I had a decent pair, they might interfere. She strums and stares at me pointedly.

“You know I love to sing and you never even told me you could play guitar?” she says.

“It’s not like that,” I say. “It’s complicated. I don’t want to talk about it.” Rosie has showered recently. A warm, steamy clean hangs over the apartment like a weather system.

“Complicated how? Do you not like my singing?”

“I like your singing fine,” I say, and plop on the couch next to her.

She strums again, thoughtful. “It’s pretty,” she says.

“A G chord is like that.”

“I mean the guitar. The Dove.” She runs a finger over the lacquer pick guard. It
is
a Dove, I see now.

My mother loved birds. Back in Connecticut we heard the mourning doves when we woke up,
oo-waoh,
and the barred owls dolefully hooting at night. Sometimes she’d point out an owl, sleeping in the hollow of a tree, the hole seemingly stuffed with fluff. All this was fine till she started hooting at them. She’d stand out on our wraparound deck and hoot and hoot, trying to call the owls down. I gave her a lot of shit for that. I said she was going to become the crazy bird lady of Mystic. But she kept at it. I got looks, a mix of pity and disgust, from our neighbors. From the cigar-smoking ones, the compulsive laundry-drying ones, and especially the just-clearing-sticks-from-my-yard-which-is-the-thinnest-damn-excuse-for-spying-ever ones. But fuck all of them. Did they want to take care of her?

One night, Marta slid open the glass door, her body set against the black, and said,
Pssst, Quinn, come here. Pssst, pssst.

I went out into the dark, into the spring cold, and stood on the deck with my mother. She was barefoot and wore a white nightgown, the kind with cutouts at the bottom. The hem swirled around her ankles as she paced about the deck, calling between cupped hands
hoo, hoo, hoo hoo
.
It’s “Who cooks for you,”
she said.
That’s what it sounds like. Their calls. “Who cooks for you!”
So I sat on the deck railing, feet dangling like a child’s as I smoked through half a pack of cigarettes and my mother continued hooting.

Then, dead silently, this owl the size of a football came and perched on a branch not three feet from the deck. He had drag-queen eyes that owl, rimmed in black, with a weird filmy lid that slid back and forth instead of blinking and a white mask like a Venn diagram. His head sat densely on his chest, no neck to speak of, and he did not so much cock his head as rotate it around. The strong yellow curve of his beak barely parted when he hooted, but she was right. My mother in the moonlight, her white nightgown bright in the dark, the soft bulge of her freckled arms exposed to the air, was right. This owl was asking a question.

I thought about my answer. Who cooks for you? Is that like, Who does your dirty work? Or is it more like, Who loves you? One of my mother’s favorite expressions was
Can’t it be both?
She resolved all manner of crises this way. I think that was the case with Who cooks for you. That it might mean both of those things.

“Play me a song,” Rosie says, and slides over. She’s wearing three pairs of earrings, which means today was a dark day. I know she needs more metal when she’s low. A Polaroid of the big-house construction is on the kitchen table. There’s a note scrawled at the bottom, a stamp in the corner. The house is growing tall, taking shape.

I found the guitar in my mother’s closet when I was packing up the house. Carter’s, for sure. The strings were stiff as hell. Before I left Connecticut I bought a book and a new pack. As the old strings unspooled, the whole body of the guitar seemed like it would fall apart with a groan. But the new strings bend easy now, ring clear. I’ve been getting better, practicing while Rosie is at work. I’ve even been working on a few songs of my own. Scrawling lyrics and chords in a little green notebook. I sit next to Rosie and take the guitar.

“I can’t, really.”

“Frankly, we’re beyond me believing such crap,” Rosie says. She’s wearing gray sweatpants, rolled at the waist, and her hair is tied back with a red rubber band. “Sing to me.” She rests her head on my shoulder, and I realize that Rosie is deeply sad these days. Outside the sun is going down an hour earlier than it used to. Rosie has weathered nineteen Menamon winters. She knows another one is coming for us now.

But damn if Marta Winters didn’t ruin me for life. If loving her didn’t magnetize me so I cleave to the crazy ones with sad streaks a mile wide. The birdcallers and the Polaroid senders. The late-night wanderers and radio song requesters. I reach my arm around Rosie and pull her close. I smooth her hair down. I tug on her ear. “Not the best day?” I say.

“Just the same, you know?”

And I know what that’s like, because it used to be that way with Marta and me. How after she was gone, an enormous question mark floated behind my eyelids. The way it seemed impossible to wake up and do the same little necessary things all over again and how the best thing to do was not to question it. Because if you questioned it everything seemed hopeless and got you down real low.

I could tell Rosie everything I know about survival mechanisms, but what I really want to tell her is that I don’t feel that way anymore. That since I came here, to town, to her house, every day I wake up clutching this private feeling of excitement like a rag in my fist. I wake up, realize where I am, and a jump start goes through my heart, like, What will she say today? Will she make me eggs? Will I buy her a drink? Will she touch my shoulder and will I think about that for days and days? Because I know that, even though half of this town is in love with Rosie, I’m the one who can love her best. The one who gets her and knows what she needs before she even needs it. The one who will cook for her. I feel a rumbling in my chest like the first pull of a lawn mower, the vacuum before the roar. Because I can’t let Rosie know this. Because I don’t want her to know and then feel bad that she can’t give it back to me.

“All right,” I say, adjusting the guitar. I play her an old tune of my father’s, all the way through, without even skipping the bridge. You wouldn’t believe what a new set of strings can do for an old groaning guitar. I hold the last chord down tight, letting it ring out. When I let go my fingers are string-dented.

“I like that,” Rosie says. She takes my hand and squeezes each fingertip. And just like that, I sketch Rosie into my family portrait. Into the gaping hole I now know better than to save for Carter. See us there, two girls, arms looped strong together.

Rosie says, “Was that a Carter Marks song? He comes by the Stationhouse every Sunday. He’s an excellent tipper.”

11

Leah

H
enry sits on the sofa in our living room, which has a low ceiling supported by beams. The thick carpet is a deep green. On the windowsill is a CB radio tuned to one of the lobstermen’s channels. I turn it on and hear,
She don’t know I’ve gone buggin’ and if she finds out she’ll have my head
. I click the dial off.

I hear rain pelting the roof. The stone fireplace has a picture of a boat on the mantel and the room is full of armoires and sea captain’s chests and things that belonged to Henry’s parents. I look through them when Henry isn’t home. The desk’s first drawer is full of stray knobs and keys and bolts. Another had recipes in it. Plain index cards rubber-banded in a stack. The recipes were written in pencil, in what could only have been June Lynch’s slanting hand. Recipes for cod bakes. Lobster rolls. Corn casserole. Blueberry slump. Whoopie pie. Strawberry rhubarb pie. There was a red splotch on the last one and I shivered when I saw it. I turned, thinking I might see June there behind me, in flour-dusted jeans with her sleeves rolled up, wanting to show me how to roll out the dough. But there was no one, and I was a little disappointed. I shut the cards in the drawer.

Most of this house spooks me most of the time, and I love it. Back in the city, when Henry and I talked about moving to Maine, we ran our mouths until it sounded like something we’d talk about forever but never actually do. His stories about Menamon grew and grew in my mind. A place with lobsters so thick in the sea you could barely go swimming, he said, tweaking me all over, a thousand lobster claws pinching. A place where lifelong grudges were held over stolen pie recipes and county fair ribbons. A place where children were tough; they raised animals for 4-H and butchered them too. They worked on boats and in fields and in shops. They learned to build things and to shoot, the value of money and how to behave at a funeral. And they were happy, these children, because no one had allergies or learning disabilities or nannies.
No one?
I said.
Surely some
—

No one,
Henry said, his eyes lit up, twinkling.

He talked about his parents’ house, and we dreamed about living there, but we’d have had to pay the bank a fair amount to get it, and the amount just seemed too much. So we gave up on that idea and I tried to find something on Craigslist. The people of Hancock County, it seemed, did not often use Craigslist. And then, one day, Henry showed up with a stack of photos and a ring of keys, a green ribbon tied around them.
These are for you,
he said. He was grinning, beaming, prouder than I’d ever seen him. Embarrassed too for being so proud. They were the photos of this house, his parents’ house. The keys, to open its doors.
How did you
— I said, and Henry just told me he’d worked, saved, found the money to pay off the bank. He’d
made it work,
he said.