Chapter Three
Before I could find an answer, we heard a knock on the door. Jamie practically leaped to his feet in one motion, and I sat up.
“Come in,” I said, and Mommy appeared, bright-faced, her hair having been blown about by the boat ride back from Bar Harbor.
“Hi,” she said. “I found the perfect dress for your birthday party.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to see it.”
“How is everyone in your family, Jamie?”
“Everyone’s fine, thanks, Mrs. Baxter.”
“And your lunch with Grandfather Charlie?” she asked me.
My first test, I thought, and who better to be the participant but my mother?
“It was beautiful up there, and he was delightful as always.”
Mommy looked behind her shoulder. “And your father?”
“Working on something,” I said.
“Okay. I’m sure Grandfather is excited about your party next weekend. He’s approved everything. He doesn’t have that many opportunities to show off the Crest.”
“He could,” we heard Daddy say. “Lots of great new business deals to celebrate.” He paused, looked at Jamie and me, and walked on.
Mommy smiled. “We’re going to the Earl for dinner tonight,” she told me. “Don’t forget.”
“Okay,” I said.
“See you soon, Jamie,” she said, and left for her room.
Jamie rose. “I’d best be getting on home, but there is so much more I want to tell you,” he said.
“I have the time. Sit and tell me it all before you leave. I’m not into doing any homework.”
He laughed and sat. “Okay, so I made this deal with my father. The deal is I work like I’m working for a year, and then I get half the business.
I’m in charge of three of the six boats, and I get the profits they make.
It won’t make me a millionaire like your father, but it’s a good living.
And I didn’t have to make any initial investment.
It’s all there for me. ’Course, I worked for it. But I didn’t demand it. He offered it.”
“That does sound like a good deal for you.”
“I hope it’s not just for me. There’s another part to it, the agreement.
My father was a little surprised I asked for it, but he agreed.
Not easy to keep secrets from my father.
He—and your father, too, I imagine—has that Birdlane bird’s-eye view.
They’re a step ahead of you all the way.
Both are and will never stop being fishermen.
You have to anticipate every change in the wind and turn of the current. ”
“Well, what is it? What else did you ask for?”
He turned to me, beaming.
“I get the cabin on Crystal Lake, which you know is only five miles from here, the only lake on Birdlane. It will be mine, deed and all,” he said proudly.
“You mean to use as a home?”
“Exactly. It has a full kitchen, a small living room, and a good-sized bedroom. All the furniture is there and still quite good. Can’t get a better view of the Birdlane Island seashore. You know that. You’ve been there often. Remember, you wanted to make it your dollhouse when you were little.”
“Yes,” I said, smiling. “I left one of my dolls there looking out the window.”
“It’s still there.”
“My mother thought that was funny, too.”
“Well, now what I’m saying is, I’d have a business and a home by the time you graduated from high school. Your doll would never leave that window until we could afford a real house.”
I was silent, although the words were waiting at the tip of my tongue.
This was a Birdlane man’s marriage proposal.
The woman was supposed to jump to yes or fill in the gaps.
Their shyness made the men that way. But I couldn’t help pretending I didn’t understand.
Maybe I didn’t want to. We were just talking about my rushing my life, and now this!
“What are you saying exactly, Jamie?”
“After that year I worked, you’d be eighteen,” Jamie said.
“You wouldn’t need your father’s permission to get married.
I know in the beginning moving out of a palace and into my cabin will be quite a step down, but we could have our own life, children, everything.
Maybe after a while your father would approve of it, but I want to be sure you understand, although he might not, probably wouldn’t, that I’m not asking you to marry me so I would get money.
I’m not some fortune hunter. I really love you, Lisa, and always have. ”
Jamie was everything any young woman should want in a man, I thought.
He’d always been hardworking, responsible, and caring.
Maybe we would make each other happy. We would have children and make an effort to be good parents, and maybe the pleasant years would pass uneventfully as we grew older together, loving and needing each other.
If I looked back at all the things he didn’t do because of his devotion to me, I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes, but would that yes be a yes of appreciation or one of deep-down, eternal love, the love his birthday present signified?
Now that I was confronted with such a choice, my mind was electrified with the reasons to say yes and the reasons to say no.
Why was Jamie so confident at seventeen?
True, he was months away from being eighteen, but he seemed and sounded so much older than other boys in the senior class, even some of the graduates I knew.
Was that what came with being a fisherman, especially on Birdlane Island?
You weren’t judged by what age you were but by what you accomplished when you competed with much older men.
When Jamie’s agreement with his father was done, he’d be so young compared to other boat business owners.
But he had grown up working in the business, just like Daddy had.
Jamie’s confidence came from his experience.
He knew what he could and couldn’t do. He was really asking me to trust him with my life, my future.
Perhaps what he had said about me was just as true for him. We were both older than our ages.
But did I want to be? Very few of my classmates ever talked about what they wanted to do when they were older or what they wanted to be.
At seventeen, you certainly weren’t too young to think about it.
The big decision should have been made at the start of the senior year.
Were you going to go to work after you graduated, or were you going to go to college?
Mr. Martin, the school guidance counselor and assistant principal, said if you went to college, you probably wouldn’t have to decide on a major until you started your third year.
I thought most people liked to put off the decision as long as they could.
Some were quite immature about it. Listening to them talk, most of them wanted to be rock stars or movie stars.
Daddy wasn’t so wrong about the young people in school.
They dreamed aloud of leaving Birdlane and living in some big, exciting city with bright lights and parties every day.
It seemed almost nobody in my class or the ones just above and below was happy being a Birdie or thought of themselves that way.
Some were very dramatic about it, like Joan Hatfield, who had burst out crying at lunch, saying, “I’m suffocating on this island.
I feel like jumping into the sea and swimming way out. ”
“You’d drown,” Juliana Albee had said. She took everything literally.
“I’m drowning here!” Joan had cried.
Maybe I was more like her than I thought.
Jamie’s proposal, his plan, made me think deeply about so much so quickly, but I didn’t want to wake up twenty years from now and look longingly at the horizon, forever wondering if I would have been happier going beyond it, searching like Ahab in the book we had read in English class, Moby-Dick, for my own white whale.
“You’re not afraid to be a fisherman’s wife, are you?” Jamie asked during my deep, thoughtful silence.
“What? Why would I?”
“It’s not terrible to have that fear. My mother has admitted her fear many times. Storms, the dangers out there… there have been some tragic accidents over the years, like the Kendricks, father and two sons. I’m a good sailor, and I maintain my father’s boats, the engines.”
“I know you do, Jamie. I’m from here, too, born and bred to the sea. We know what it’s like to go out and challenge the sea almost daily. Our first breaths are of sea air. I know women from far away don’t know or feel that. Your mother was from Montpelier, Vermont, right?”
“Right,” he said. “My father always calls her ‘the city girl.’ She gets dizzy just looking at the waves. She’s never been on any of his boats and hates waving goodbye from the dock. You’ve heard my father laugh at her.”
“Right,” I said, smiling.
He looked down, the sadness enveloping him like a shadow.
Thinking so deeply, philosophizing, worrying, remembering the worst things, all at once, could turn a day without clouds into a gloomy one.
I hated to see Jamie feeling sorry for himself or thinking even for a second that he wasn’t good enough for me.
“So it’s safer to marry a librarian,” I said, “who might get hit by a car one day carrying too many books?”
Jamie laughed. It felt good to pull him out of any darkness. At least I could do that for him.
“So what about my plan, my idea?” he asked, with so much eagerness and hope in his eyes.
“I’m not saying no, but we have time to think about all that, and as you said, you have a whole year after graduation to become your own boss.”
He nodded, but he wasn’t happy with my answer.
“Ayuh, ayuh, ayuh,” he said, suddenly becoming more of a Maine Birdlane person. It was our way of saying a strong yes. Maybe Maine and Birdlane ran too deeply in my blood for me to even think I could leave.
“I do love you, Jamie. I depend on you more than anyone I know.”
He leaned over to kiss me again, softly on the lips, while he stroked my hair. Then he laid his head on my lap and looked up at me.
“I’m warning you,” he said, “I’ll be ruthless if anything or anyone tries to take you from me.”
I touched his lips, and then he took my hand and kissed it.