17. Carrington
CARRINGTON
The restaurant on the harbor didn't take reservations. A girl of about sixteen stood inside the door with a clipboard, wrote COLE at the bottom of a list of eleven names, and said forty minutes.
"Forty," Carrington said.
"Maybe thirty-five." The girl put the pen behind her ear. "We call them out the door. You'll hear it."
Outside, the sidewalk ran along the top of the seawall.
A dozen boats knocked against their fenders in the swell, and the street smelled like diesel and fried batter.
Somebody had a radio on in a wheelhouse.
Two women in waders hosed down a deck at the end of the pier and argued about something the whole time they worked.
Grace leaned over the rail.
"Not past the sign," Lucy said, and Grace stopped.
Carrington was the only person on that sidewalk in a dress. Grace came back along the rail and planted herself in front of her.
"You're wearing red," Grace said.
"I am."
"But you don't wear red."
"I do tonight."
Grace looked at her a second longer, then came and stood beside her with their arms almost touching. She had started standing that close to her back in February, and Carrington had never once mentioned it, in case mentioning it made her stop.
The night's menu was chalked up in yellow beside the door, and Grace worked her way down it out loud with her chin up and her hands behind her back.
"Dungeness," Grace said. "Razor clams. Halibut cheeks. Steelhead. Chowder, cup or bowl." She stopped. "Gee-oh-duck."
"It’s gooey-duck," Lucy said.
"That's not how it's spelled."
"Nobody down here cares."
"What is it?"
"A clam about the size of your arm."
Grace looked at her. "No."
"Ask them to bring one out and you’ll see."
Then Grace read the board again from the top, faster, to prove she could. Six weeks ago, she had been reading with a finger under the words and stopping at anything longer than five letters. Now she was reading a seafood menu out loud on a windy sidewalk because she wanted to.
Lucy stood with Grace's coat folded over one arm, the sleeves of her cardigan shoved up, and she was watching the two women with the hose. One of them hit the other one in the leg with it. They had a short argument about that, and Lucy laughed. Grace turned around to see why.
"There's a booth up front by the window," Lucy said. "If she's done before you are, I'll take her over and you won't have to stop."
Carrington wanted to tell her they didn't need the booth. She opened her mouth to say it. Then a car came up the street, parked badly, and Ines Duarte got out of it.
Ines ran Duarte Marine Works out of a yard four hundred feet down the pier, and she had driven every piling on this side of the harbor since 1978.
She was seventy and would not sit down in an office.
She had told Carrington so twice on the phone and had been perfectly nice about it both times, and then she had picked the night and the restaurant herself.
Her daughter walked around the front of the car holding the hand of a girl of about nine.
"My Sofia," Ines said. "And that's Pilar. She says she isn't hungry. We'll see."
Devika arrived on foot from the other direction with Agatha Whitlock, who had been Carrington's outside counsel for nine years and had brought her folio.
Then five women were shaking hands on four feet of sidewalk with nobody sure who initiated.
Lucy had crouched down and was getting Grace's arm into her coat sleeve.
Devika made it as far as introducing Carrington before the girl with the clipboard leaned out and called for Cole, party of eight.
Devika had the file out of her bag before they were through the door, and she held it out at the level of Carrington's elbow, which was what she had done at every acquisition Cole Developments had made in two years.
"I don't need it," Carrington said.
"You'll want to read the second page."
"Not tonight."
Devika put it back in the bag and didn't say anything else about it. She kept looking at her all the way to the table.
The long table was at the back, under a window that looked out over the harbor.
Somebody had rolled brown paper the length of it and set a jar of crayons in the middle.
Pilar dumped the jar out and had the crayons in color order before Grace had her chair pulled in.
Then she pushed the greens across without asking, and Grace took them.
The food came on trays. Crab in the shell, corn, a bowl of melted butter with the skin already forming on it, bread in a napkin. Ines dropped a whole crab on Carrington's plate and told her not to be delicate about it.
"So, you want my crew all year," Ines said.
"No, just eleven months."
"Nobody stops at eleven months. They take the eleven, then they come back for the year after that, and by then I've turned down two seasons of work I could have had."
"Then give me the eleven and we'll talk in the spring."
"You'll come back?"
"I will."
"Good," Ines said. "The last person I met with told me she was doing me a favor."
Ines laughed and cracked a claw open with her hands.
Sofia, who scheduled the crews, had the drawings out on the paper by then.
She was marking the tie-up points with a crayon because there was nothing else on the table to write with.
Agatha leaned over, read them upside down, and asked how long the tide window was, which was the only thing on that page worth asking about.
It was the easiest hour of work Carrington had done in six weeks.
Carrington pulled her rings off and dropped them beside the water glass before she started on the crab, and within four minutes, she had melted butter up to her second knuckle.
Lucy was working through the shells for the two girls, breaking the legs at the joint and laying the meat on their plates as she got it free.
Pilar told Grace that her grandmother had a boat with a hole in it.
Grace said that Kayla's hamster ate a whole Hershey bar and lived.
Pilar said that wasn't true, and Grace said it was, and after that the two of them were fine.
"You're not from the harbor," Ines said to Lucy.
"No. The Heights."
"Bus?"
"Yes, two transfers."
"There used to be a direct one." Ines pointed a fork at her. "They cut it in ‘96."
"My landlady's still angry about it," Lucy said.
"She should be."
Sofia said something to her mother in Portuguese and Ines waved it off without turning her head.
Then Lucy asked Pilar whether the boat with the hole in it was fixed yet.
Pilar said no, and Sofia said yes, and Pilar said not properly.
Grace laughed at that, out loud, with her mouth full, and Lucy reached over and rubbed her back until she swallowed.
Carrington sat with butter on her fingers and a crab shell in pieces in front of her and listened to all of it.
"How old is yours?" Ines asked her.
"Seven."
"Mine's nine, and she thinks she runs the place." Ines wiped her hands on a napkin and dropped it on the pile. "Bring her down some morning. She can watch the crane come out."
"She'd like that," Carrington said.
"Both of you come. It's loud. Nobody minds noise down there."
At half past eight, the two girls got permission to go look at the aquarium tank by the front door, and Pilar took Grace by the sleeve and towed her away.
A server cleared the plates, pulled the brown paper off the table with them, and carried the crayon jar away.
Ines pushed her chair back and pushed one arm into her coat.
"I'll sign in the morning," Ines said. "Sofia will give you the dates."
"There's one problem, and it's the barge," Sofia said. "If it isn't here by the fifteenth, everything scheduled after it moves back a week."
Carrington turned to answer her. "Then we don't wait on it. There are two other barges on this coast, and I'll pay for whichever one is closer."
"Before I forget," Ines said. She had a pen out and one of her own cards turned over on the table.
"If you're coming down to watch the crane, I need names for the gate.
Nobody gets on that dock who isn't on the sheet.
" She wrote while she talked. "Carrington Cole.
Grace Cole." Then she looked up across the corner of the table. "Lucy what?"
"This is Grace's nanny," Carrington said.
She wanted to stand up and walk out of the building.
Nanny. She had said nanny about the woman who came up the stairs behind her on the worst nights and got the pins out of her hair one at a time.
Who stood in her kitchen at ten o'clock cooking her eggs because nobody else was ever going to.
Who had never once, in four months, asked her for a single word about any of it.
And the worst part was that nobody had asked. Ines had only wanted Lucy’s last name to write on a gate sheet, and Carrington had given her that instead, before anybody made her, because it was the first thing in her mouth and it always had been.
Ines's pen stayed where it was.
Lucy had a crab leg in her fingers and wasn't finished with it. She worked the meat out, laid it on Grace's plate, and put her hands in her lap.
"Harper," she said. "Lucy Harper."
Ines wrote it under the other two.
"The fifteenth is fine either way," Agatha said to Sofia. "I'll write the second barge in as a backup, and you won't be waiting on anybody."
Then the table moved on. Sofia answered her, Ines pulled her collar straight, and everybody went back to work.
Carrington sat with both hands flat on the table and nothing left on it to pick up.
The butter had dried into the creases of her knuckles and it pulled every time she moved her fingers, so she stopped moving them.
She could say something nice about Lucy now, which was worse. Bosses said nice things about the people who worked for them. She could fix it later, in the car, with nobody listening, but she knew that wouldn’t erase what she had said. So she just sat there and said nothing.
Lucy was four feet away on her left with her hands still in her lap, and Carrington could not make herself turn her head that way.
She looked across the room instead. Through the gap between the bar and the front window, she could see the two girls at the tank with their foreheads almost resting against the glass.
Pilar was pointing at something down in the bottom of the tank, and Grace had both hands cupped around her eyes to see through the reflection.
The server came back with the check in a plastic tray and set it down by the water glasses. Ines was already on her feet in her coat and she still got a palm flat on the tray before Carrington was halfway there.
"No," Ines said.
"It's a business dinner."
"You didn't pick the restaurant." Ines slid the tray toward herself and put a card in it without looking at the paper. "You can pay for the pilings. That's a bigger check."
Carrington put her hand in her lap. Her rings were still lying beside the water glass.
Grace came back two minutes later at a run, talking before she got to the chair.
"It's not one lobster, it's four," Grace said. "They're all in there together and one of them is sitting on the others. Pilar says that one’s the boss, but I don't think lobsters have a boss. And there's a sign that says pick one, but you can't take it home; they're for eating."
"You can pick one," Lucy said. "Then somebody eats it."
Grace thought about that. "Oh," she said. Then: "I don't want to."
"Then don't."
Lucy pulled Grace's coat off the chair back and held it open, and Grace pushed her arms into the sleeves.
Ines shook Carrington's hand at the door and told her the crew started at seven and to come before nine or not bother.
Carrington said she would. By the time they had gone outside, it had already turned cold and the lights were on all the way down the pier.
Grace was asleep against Lucy's shoulder before they reached the car.
Lucy got into the back with Grace, and Carrington drove.
It was thirty-five minutes to Cliffside on the ridge road and she drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.
Behind her, in the mirror, Lucy had her arm across Grace to hold her upright during the turns and she was looking out the window at nothing.
Twice she started to say something and stopped, because Grace was asleep right there and anything worth saying would have woken her.
At the last light before the ridge road, she looked in the mirror longer than she needed to, and the woman behind her leaned on the horn.
Somewhere past the water tower Grace woke up. "Can we go there again?" she asked, most of it into Lucy's sleeve.
"Yes."
Grace was out again before the next turn. It was the only thing anybody said the whole way home. She had answered Grace before the question was finished. Lucy had been sitting two feet behind her the whole way and Carrington hadn't said a word to her.
She let them in through the courtyard door at twenty past ten.
Lucy carried Grace up the stairs with the shoes hooked in two fingers of the hand under her knees, and Carrington went ahead of her and opened the bedroom door, pushed the closet door shut until it latched, and turned on the nightlight in the socket beside it.
Then she waited on the landing with a hand on the banister while Lucy got her into bed. She worked out what she was going to say, and cut it to eleven words, and then to six.
Lucy came out and pulled the door to an inch off the frame. She set Grace's shoes against the wall at the top of the stairs.
"Goodnight, Ms. Cole," she said to Carrington and walked away.
Carrington stayed where she was and listened to the courtyard door open and close. Then she followed her down.
Out along the path, the low lights were glowing and the grass had gone wet.
Lucy was thirty feet ahead and she didn't turn around, though the gravel was loud enough that she had to have heard it.
Carrington caught up to her and walked beside her the rest of the way.
Neither of them said anything for a few minutes.
She wanted to turn Lucy around and make her stand there until one of them said something, but she kept her hands where they were, even though nobody would have seen them.
Near the end of the path, Lucy stepped off onto the grass beside the gravel. Carrington stayed on the stones in heels.
At the cottage door Lucy stopped and turned around.
"Lucy, I—"
"It was true." Lucy shrugged and went inside.
Lucy shut the door, and a light went on behind the curtain in the front room. A minute later, it went off.
Carrington stayed on the gravel pathway.