Chapter 1 #2
“Dog name.” Was it possible he colored slightly under the beard? The dog left off sniffing me and trotted over to him. “My sister named her.”
He had a half sister, I remembered. Hannah? Hailey? She must be in her teens by now.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
His deep brown eyes met mine. “Could say I came to meet you.” My jaw must have dropped, because his mouth curled in a near smile. “I’m picking up some windows for a job on Bogan Lane.”
Dad wasn’t an ordinary builder—he was a rebuilder, specializing in restoration carpentry.
Memory stabbed me: eight-year-old me perching on somebody’s front porch steps, prattling away as my father painstakingly replaced rotted balusters while teenage Joe watched and handed him tools.
He called me the Pest. I thought he was a jerk.
Four years ago, Dad had made him a partner in the business.
I stuck out my chin. “Don’t let me stop you.”
“I won’t.” He lifted my bag smoothly and loaded it into his utility cart.
I could wrestle him for it. I didn’t need his help. But I didn’t want my mother’s neighbors to see me scuffling—with an older boy!—within five minutes of landing in town. Not that they’d be surprised. Oh, Annie, Mrs. Mosley would sigh. Or, It’s that Gallagher girl again. I winced.
Plus, it was over a mile to Harrisonville, aka the Village, where the year-round residents lived. No big deal, unless you were dragging a hard-wheeled rollaway over crumbling asphalt.
“Thanks,” I said.
He nodded shortly. Conversation over. The dog settled at his feet and sighed. They made a funny pair, the dark, surly man and the cheerful golden dog. He should have had a Doberman. A Rottweiler. I shivered again.
“So. I’ll see you.” I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and started up the hill.
“Sorry your dad died,” he said behind me.
Something stuck like an awl in my throat. Gratitude, maybe, that he’d spoken the awful truth.
I was sick of people avoiding the subject, pussyfooting around died and dead as if my father’s death was something dirty and unspeakable. As if saying the words out loud would summon their own mortality, like Voldemort. But no polite euphemisms—passed, gone, lost—mitigated the terrible reality.
Dad was dead.
It was a relief to have someone acknowledge it. Even Joe.
I waggled my fingers over my shoulder and continued on my way without looking back.
Through the quiet downtown, past quaint storefronts and shuttered restaurants on Main Street. A new coffee shop (closed). A new restaurant (help wanted). Thirteen Moons, the gift shop owned by my best friend Daanis’s family.
My mother’s teal-and-white shop—Maddie’s Candies—was ahead.
The big picture windows, where she made fudge in summer to a sidewalk audience, were dark, but down the street, the lights were on in the Mustang Lounge.
My mother declared eating out was for tourists.
But sometimes Dad would take me to the Mustang after work.
I’d suck pop through a straw, my legs dangling from a bar stool, feeling grown-up and special, while he ordered a beer he never finished.
Sometimes, to my secret resentment, he invited Joe along.
It occurred to me Dad’s death must be a loss for him, too. For Joe. Dad had been his mentor as well as his business partner.
The road climbed past stately Victorian houses and million-dollar mansions, winding under trees and along the cemetery.
Patches of ice lingered in the ditches and shadows.
I breathed in. The mineral scent of the soil, the earth waking from its winter sleep, stirred something inside me, instinct or guilt.
When I’d left the island, five months into the pandemic, Mom told me not to come back. But I could have visited more often. I should have stayed longer at Christmas. Dad had said he understood, but we never got the chance to say goodbye. Another stab.
I swung open our gate and walked up the cracked sidewalk.
The fence had gaps like broken teeth. The siding was peeling.
The wishing well Dad had built years ago was rotting, shingles lying on the grass like leaves.
My father’s talent for restoration had never included home improvement projects.
But there were obvious signs of recent efforts to fix things up.
The sagging gutters had been cleaned and reattached.
The step at the bottom of the stairs, broken as long as I could remember, had been repaired.
My eyes welled. So did my heart. Oh, Daddy…
Maybe, with him gone, Mom and I would draw closer.
Like Marilla Cuthbert and Anne after Matthew’s death in Green Gables.
I could picture Mom bursting into impassioned sobs (okay, maybe not—even my imagination wasn’t that good).
But we’d hug. I’d comfort her. And she would pat my hand and tell me that for all her harsh words and ways, she couldn’t imagine life without me.
Or something like that.
I took a deep breath and tugged on the front door, resisting the urge to knock.
For once, it opened easily. “Hello?” The living room hadn’t changed in fifteen years.
Same boring beige couch, same worn tan carpet, same scratched brown coffee table where Daanis and I had propped our feet to eat popcorn and watch Glee. “Mom? I’m…” Home? Back? “Here.”
“Close the door,” my mother’s voice commanded. “You’ll let the heat out.”
She appeared from the kitchen, solid and familiar in jeans and a sweatshirt, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
Her hair was thick, like mine, and scraped into a bun.
She’d let it go gray even before the pandemic made the color fashionable.
I flung myself at her as if I were six years old again and she could make everything all right.
My mother’s arms closed around me. She smelled reassuringly of coffee and Dove soap. She patted my shoulder briefly, a double tap like a teenage boy congratulating a teammate, before she stepped back. “Where’s Joe?”
Not How are you? Not even How was your trip?
“Um. He was at the ferry. He took my bag.”
“He said he would.”
So…he wasn’t just picking up windows? Huh.
I searched my mother’s face. A little puffy under the eyes, but otherwise the same as ever. “How are you doing, Mom?”
“All right.” She sniffed. “Well. Now you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful.”
I refused to feel hurt. Useful was very important to my mother. “Do you want to talk? Can I get you anything?”
She looked at me like I had two heads. “Neighbors have been by all day, dropping off food. You can help put it away.”
As if funeral potatoes and casseroles made with cream of mushroom soup and cornflakes could somehow alleviate our grief. But if my mom and I were going to bond, we had to start somewhere.
So while Mom peered under foil and wrote names on the bottoms of dishes, I tried to make room in the fridge and the freezer for all the Tupperware. If I squeezed that in there…and put this on top of that…A jar toppled to the floor.
My mother’s breath huffed. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Anne. Let me do it.”
I moved meekly out of the way as she pulled everything out and started to reorganize the shelves.
“Anybody home?” called a man’s voice.
Mom’s face lightened. “Joe!”
“Did he just walk in here?” I wondered out loud.
She shot me a look as she hurried from the kitchen. “Why not? Door’s unlocked.”
Nobody locked their doors on Mackinac. Which wasn’t the point. Slowly, I trailed after her to the living room, where Mom was hugging Joe like the son she never had.
He glanced at me over her head. “Brought your bag.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re a good man, Joe,” my mother said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
It was everything I wanted to hear. And she’d said it to Joe. I was absurdly jealous. “Yeah, I never could have managed that great big suitcase all by myself.”
“Annie.” One word—my name on my mother’s lips—and I was suddenly ten years old again.
I thought his lips twitched under the beard. “Least I could do. Considering.”
“Now, Joe,” my mother said. “It was an accident.”
Any trace of humor vanished. “I’m still responsible.”
“Don’t start with that again. You’re not,” Mom said.
They exchanged a long glance while I looked on, left out and frustrated. It was like they were speaking in some secret code and I didn’t have the key that would let me understand.
“I got Nicole’s casserole,” Mom said briskly. “You tell her I said thanks.”
Nicole was Joe’s mother, I remembered.
“You can tell her yourself tomorrow night,” Joe said.
Tomorrow was the visitation. And the morning after that…
Yearning for my father clutched me so hard I couldn’t breathe.
The morning after that was his funeral.