10. Willow
— ? —
Willow
There is nowhere to go on that island in the season, and there is nowhere at all to go if your surname is Folger.
I sat in Pia’s kitchen with a phone and a list.
“Stay here,” Pia said.
“I can’t stay here.”
“Why not? I’ve got the room. I’ve got four rooms. I’ve got a room I can’t remember the shape of because I never go in it.”
“Because it’s a Folger house.”
“It’s my house.”
“Pia, whose name is on the deed?”
She stopped stirring.
“Right,” she said.
“If I stay here, then when it gets ugly, and it will get ugly, I’m a woman living in her husband’s family’s house while she divorces him.”
“You could stay with the Coffins.”
“Dee Coffin does the Folger lettings.”
“You could stay with Alice Pell.”
“Her husband called me the help.”
“Her husband calls the ferry the help. He’s a horror. She’s actually all right.”
“Pia, I would rather live in the sea.”
“That’s fair. That’s completely fair. Forget I said it.” She put the spoon down. “There’s the Athertons.”
“My mother cleaned for the Athertons.”
“Does that make it worse?”
“It makes it a different thing,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s worse. I know I’d never be able to sit down properly in it.”
Every door on that island opened. That was the trouble.
I could have had a bed in twelve houses by dinner and every single one of them would have been a Folger door or a door that stands open because of a Folger, and walking through one would have meant something that the whole island would have finished reading before I put my bag down.
Archie came in dragging Duck by an ear.
“Mama. Out.”
“In a minute, baby.”
“OUT.”
“Take him,” Pia said. “Take the car. Go and look at something and come back and tell me you’ve thought about it and I’ll pretend you have.”
“You’re not going to fight me on this.”
“I’ve fought you on it all morning and you’ve beaten me on every single one, I don’t lose arguments in this kitchen.” She wiped her hands. “Willow. When you find somewhere, don’t tell me where it is.”
“Why?”
“Because he’ll ask me,” Pia said, “and I’d like to be able to look at my brother and say I don’t know.”
Dee Coffin met me at the end of a lane the next day and started talking before I had the car door open.
“Now I’ll say this at the front, because I’d rather say it than have it sit there. Everybody knows. I’m not going to pretend I don’t know, because then we’re both doing an act, and I’m too old for the act. Mind the step, it’s gone soft.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, before you ask, it’s a rental, so I can’t do anything about the kitchen. The people who own it are from Newton and they come out for two weeks and the rest of the time it just sits here, which I think is a crime, but nobody asks me. Mind that too.”
“What happened to the step?”
“Water. It’s always water. Everything on this island is either water or a Coffin, and I’m the second one.”
I did not know the house from the lane. The Newton people had re-shingled the whole front and put a fence along it and let a hedge get away from them, and there was a porch on it that had never been there.
I stood and looked at a house I had been inside a hundred times and thought, that is somebody’s vacation rental now.
Dee got a key in the lock and shouldered the door.
“Now. There’s two beds, the boiler is temperamental but it isn’t wicked, and there’s a garden the tenants have completely let go.”
Then the door came open and I stopped in the hall.
I knew the smell of it before I knew anything else.
“Dee.”
“I know.”
“This is Ruth Folger’s house.”
“It was Ruth Folger’s house,” Dee said. “Kristina had it on the market before anybody had finished being sad, which was a thing at the time and I said so at the time, and then the Newton people bought it and put in a shower nobody asked for.”
I went down the hall on my own and Dee had the sense to stay where she was, which is the only time in my life I have known that woman to stop talking.
The kitchen has a window over the sink that looks at nothing at all, and a table under it.
Ruth Folger taught me to turn a johnnycake at that table, with the flat of my hand, no spatula, because that is how you know it is ready.
She got me up on the chair myself and talked the whole time about whaling wives and about how everybody on this island is descended from somebody who left or somebody who waited.
She gave me chowder afterwards and never once asked me who my mother worked for.
The table has a short leg. It has had a short leg since I was nine years old. Ruth used to shim it with a folded seed catalogue and swear about it twice a week and never once got it fixed, on principle, because she said it was a good table and it had earned the right to be annoying.
The catalogue was gone. The table rocked.
I stood in that kitchen with my hand flat on it and got my face back on and went out to the hall.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“You haven’t seen upstairs.”
“I know what’s upstairs.”
“Do you?”
“Two rooms and a cupboard everyone calls a room.”
Dee Coffin looked at me for a while.
“Well,” she said. “That’s the fastest let I’ve done all season.”
“How much?”
“For you?”
“Dee. How much?”
“The number on the sheet,” she said. “Don’t insult me, I’m a businesswoman.” And then, going past me down the hall, “It’s off-season pricing and the season’s on, and I’ve written it down wrong, and if anybody asks I’ll say I’m getting old.”
Dee Coffin put both keys in my hand and closed my fingers over them.
“Now listen,” she said. “I do the lettings for that family and I’ve done them for years, and I’d like it understood that this house isn’t theirs and this let isn’t theirs, and if anybody rings me about it they’ll get nothing.
Not Kristina, not the brother, not him. I’ll deny I’ve seen you. I’ll be very good at it.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, it’s my job. And I’d have done it anyway.” She was already walking. “Get the boy in the garden. It’s a shocking garden and he’ll love it.”
He did love it. He got straight into the worst of it and came out with a snail he named Duck.
“That’s Duck,” I said.
“Duck.”
“That’s a different Duck, baby.”
“Duck,” said Archie, and put it in his pocket.
“Snails don’t live in pockets, baby.”
“Duck live.”
“Duck the rabbit lives in your bed. Duck the snail lives in the garden. Those are different Ducks with different arrangements.”
“Duck in bed.”
“No.”
“Duck in bed.”
“We’ll discuss it,” I said, and we did, at length, and I lost.
I got the beds made. I got our bags in. The boiler made a noise on the first go that would have made Levi proud and then behaved itself for the rest of the evening, which Dee had said it would, which was the first thing anybody had told me all season that turned out to be exactly true.
I stood in Ruth Folger’s kitchen with the light going and made johnnycakes badly on a temperamental stove, and the table rocked every time I put a plate down, and I put a folded envelope under the leg because I did not have a seed catalogue.
Then a car came up the lane and stopped and did not come any further.
I went out onto the step.
Kristina got out of the back of it and stood in that garden in the wrong shoes, looking at the house she sold.
“I was going to say something about the house,” Kristina said, “and I have decided against it, which you will find is a first.”
She came and stood at the bottom of the step. She did not sit down, and I did not ask her in, and neither of those things was rude, because we both understood what the other one was doing.
“He’ll offer you somewhere,” she said.
“He doesn’t know where I am.”
“He is a Folger and this is his island. He will know by Thursday, there will be flowers by Friday, and there will be a folder inside the week. There is always a folder.”
“You’d know.”
“I would. And he’ll offer you somewhere better. He’ll find a house with a view and a man on the door, and it will be very beautiful, and he will mean every inch of it.”
“Probably.”
“Don’t take it.”
I looked at her.
“You’ve spent years telling me I don’t belong in that family,” I said. “Now you’re telling me not to take a house off them.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because a woman who has somewhere to go has terms,” Kristina said. “And a woman who is being housed has requests. I have watched the difference in this family for a very long time and I would like you, for once, to be on the correct side of it.”
She looked past me into the hall.
“That house has a short leg on the kitchen table.”
“It does.”
“She would never let anybody fix it.” Kristina put her sunglasses back on. “Ruth was extremely stupid about that table.”
“She wasn’t stupid about anything.”
“She was stupid about the table, the dog behind the fish place, and her grandson,” Kristina said. “In ascending order.”
“That’s three things.”
“It’s a short list. Most people’s is longer.”
And she went back to the car, and she did not say goodbye, and I did not expect her to.
I put Archie down and sat on the step with the last of the light going out over the lane.
At some point a car came up and stopped at the bottom of it, well back, engine off, lights off.
I knew the shape of it. Sal has driven that family since before I existed.
He did not come up. He did not flash the lights or wind a window down or get out and stand about looking noble. He parked at the end of a lane in the dark and sat there in case a woman and a small boy in a house with a soft step needed anything at all in the night.
I did not ask him to be there. I did not want him to be there. But I understood why he was, and I understood that it was not about Michael, it was about a boy asleep upstairs who had done nothing wrong and who still had a grandfather’s name even if the grandfather was dead.
I went in and locked the door and did not sleep much.
When I came out in the morning to put the milk bottle on the step, the car was still there. The window came down, and Sal raised a hand and then the window went back up.
I raised mine back.
That was all. That was everything. Two people who understood something without having to say it out loud.