Chapter 25
“So you’ve been up and back from Grayhaven a lot lately,” Margaret Babcock remarked before Grace had even come all the way through the door. It was Friday evening, and she had come to the Babcocks’ for dinner as Becca had asked.
“Ma,” Becca protested, rolling her eyes good-naturedly. “Let the woman inside first.” She smiled at Grace. “Drink? We’ve got beer, and oh, beer.”
Grace laughed at that. “I guess beer it is.”
Becca went to fetch two bottles while Bab gave Grace a considering look. “What has you up at Grayhaven at all hours, then, eh?” she asked before turning back to the stove.
Grace took the bottle of beer from Becca with murmured thanks while Jacob edged closer to her. The Babcocks’ kitchen was as crowded and chaotic as ever, but whatever was on the stove smelled delicious.
“Jacob has been taking chess lessons from Noah Lawrence,” she told Bab, although she suspected the older woman knew this already. “He’s a very good player, rated twenty-three hundred.”
“Ayuh.” Bab sniffed, seeming unimpressed. “You’ve been up there for hours, though. A chess lesson can’t be that long?”
“Well, sometimes we stay for dinner,” Grace replied with a smile. She’d thought Bab would be a little more subtle in her interrogation, but she was practically bringing out the thumb screws.
“That’s enough, Ma,” Becca chided. “She can be friends with the Lawrences.”
Bab sniffed again and Grace frowned, sensing the darker undercurrents of the conversation. She thought about what Noah had said, about not really knowing the island kids. “Do you know the Lawrence family well?” she asked, and Bab let out a sharp laugh.
“That we don’t,” she stated flatly as she stirred whatever was on the stove with decidedly brisk movements. “My family moved here the same time they did, two hundred years ago now, but we’ve always stayed apart. Lawrences don’t mingle with poor fisherfolk.”
“That’s spreading it a little thick,” Becca interjected with another eyeroll.
She turned to Grace to explain. “My mother’s family and the Lawrences did come to this island two hundred years ago.
The original Lawrence—Josiah was his name—was a whaling captain.
The island was a little more populated then—fishermen and fur traders and whalers, practically a town.
There were even a blacksmith and a butcher.
But then Josiah Lawrence bought the island from the government and built Grayhaven.
The others were allowed to stay, but they had to lease their cottages from him.
Eventually most people left. Ma’s family didn’t. ”
“And have the Lawrences stayed apart from everyone else since?” Grace asked. “That seems kind of old-fashioned.”
Becca shrugged. “No Lawrence has lived here year-round for probably a hundred years or more. When Ma was little, they didn’t come at all.”
“They had a place down south,” Bab explained with another sniff. “On Cape Cod.”
It was the first time Grace had heard anyone referring to Cape Cod as down south. She hid her smile with another sip of her beer. “And Noah’s family?” she asked, unable to hide her curiosity. She wanted to hear the other side of the story.
Becca shrugged again. “Noah’s parents started coming back here after they had their twins.
The house belonged to Mr. Lawrence, but it was Mrs. Lawrence who always loved it.
When they were kids, Noah and Jem were always friendly enough, I suppose.
Jem was so shy, and Noah really looked out for him.
They took my brothers out on a boat once, I recall.
But back then there were a few more of us kids, and truth be told, we looked down at the Lawrences.
Saved us from them looking down at us, you know? ”
Grace nodded slowly. “Yes, I can understand that.”
“Enough talk about all that,” Bab ordered. “So you’re staying up at the big house for dinner, eh?” She gave Grace a shrewd look. “This when Noah Lawrence hasn’t left the estate in six months. We haven’t seen hide or hair of him, have we, Becks?”
“I’ve seen him from a distance a few times, to wave to,” Becca replied fairly, and Bab snorted.
“I don’t think he’s snobby or anything,” she continued.
“I think his brother’s death hit him hard, and that’s understandable.
They were very close. But I’m glad you seem to be friends.
” Her green eyes sparkled mischievously. “If that’s all you are?”
Grace kept her smile in place. “That’s all we are,” she stated firmly, even as her stomach fluttered.
That really was all they were, even if when Noah had suggested she and Jacob stay for dinner after his chess lesson, her stomach had fluttered just as it had now.
Even if when they’d eaten frozen pizzas in the kitchen, she’d noticed—more than she ever had before—how rangy and powerful his build was, how sculpted his jaw, how blue his eyes.
Her gaze had been inexorably drawn to his long fingers as he’d raked a careless hand through his rumpled hair.
The way his old, holey sweater stretched across his broad shoulders when he’d leaned forward for another slice.
It was decidedly inconvenient, for her to suddenly become so aware of him physically, as a man, when they’d very clearly decided just to be friends.
She’d already, Grace had been forced to admit, if only to herself, been attracted to him, but now her body was doubling up on its response to him in a way that felt hard to hide.
She tried her best, though, because the last thing she wanted Noah to realize was just how much she liked him.
And she certainly didn’t need Becca or the narrow-eyed Bab to realize it, either.
“So is he going to stay at Grayhaven?” Bab asked, sounding both curious and miffed. “He’s been here a year and a half already. I thought he would have got it out of his system by now.”
“I don’t know,” Grace replied honestly. Noah had told her, a while back, that he didn’t intend to leave the island save for teeth cleanings and colonoscopies, and at the time she’d sensed he wasn’t actually joking, but she hoped that eventually he’d reconsider.
She knew how grief could make you feel frozen—it was how she’d felt after her dad had died—and it felt, at least to her, that Noah was finally starting to come to life.
Maybe that would make him change his mind about staying sequestered in that gloomy old castle.
“Enough, Ma,” Becca said good-naturedly. “Unless you want to invite Noah here for dinner and ask him yourself?”
“Not that he’d come,” Bab replied with a sniff. “None of the Lawrences ever would.” She gave a grimace of admission. “Not that I ever asked ’em.”
“Maybe you should,” Becca suggested, a teasing glint in her green eyes. “Maybe it’s time for the Lawrences and Babcocks to get along.”
“And maybe Cobscook Bay will freeze over,” Bab replied with asperity. “Wash your hands, it’s time to eat.”
And that, Grace thought wryly, seemed to be that… which was just as well. Hopefully she’d survived Bab’s unsubtle interrogation unscathed.
The rest of the dinner passed pleasantly enough, Becca’s good humor and Lewis’ laidback vibe providing a welcome reprieve from Bab’s terse Mainer personality.
Still, as the meal went on, Grace sensed undercurrents within the family that she didn’t fully understand.
Lewis’ father, she could tell, was absolutely not spoken of, ever, like he’d never ever existed.
Becca was cheerful, almost relentlessly so, but at certain moments Grace thought she saw how exhausted she looked, like it was all so much effort, and she certainly understood that.
Sometimes Lewis would slide her a look that Grace couldn’t interpret; it seemed as if he was both concerned and exasperated by his mom, and Grace didn’t know why.
Jacob, of course, didn’t say a single word through the whole meal, and it wasn’t until the end and Bab was brewing her awful instant coffee that the subject came up.
“The boy doesn’t talk,” she stated in her abrupt, matter-of-fact way.
“No, he doesn’t,” Grace agreed as she brought dirty plates to the sink. Jacob, thankfully, was outside with Lewis, looking at their fishing trawler.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Grace admitted. “He was always quiet, but after I left my husband, he stopped talking completely.”
“Misses him?” Bab guessed, her eyes narrowed shrewdly, and Grace shrugged.
“Maybe? Except…” Jacob hadn’t given any indication that he missed Brad.
Of course, he hadn’t said anything, but even so her son had many effective ways of communicating.
If he’d really wanted to see his father, Grace was pretty sure Jacob would have let her know.
“I don’t think that’s it,” she told Bab. “But I don’t know what it is.”
“Well.” Bab shrugged philosophically as she dumped the seemingly prerequisite and unasked for three spoonfuls of sugar in Grace’s coffee. “There’s nothing wrong with being quiet.”
Grace couldn’t help but laugh at that refreshing perspective, one that Jacob’s teachers hadn’t shared. “No,” she agreed, and accepted the cup of coffee she already knew she was going to have to choke down. “There isn’t.”