Chapter 11
“Say it again,” Lucy demands.
“No.”
“Say it the way he said it.”
“I’ve said it four times.”
“And I’ve made the same noise four times, which is the arrangement,” she says. She is cross-legged in the middle of my bed with my coffee in one hand and a curling iron in the other, which is a combination I have asked her not to attempt since 2016. “Go.”
I look at the ceiling. “He said, ‘I have been asked to attend a benefit at the Maritime Museum on Sunday. I would ordinarily send money and remain at home.’”
“And then…”
“And then he said, ‘May I ask you to accompany me.’”
Lucy puts her face in a pillow and screams again. Even muffled by the pillow, it’s the kind of scream that would have brought Denny over from the boatyard if he heard it.
“He didn’t say it like a question,” I tell the ceiling. “That’s the trouble. He said it like a sentence he’d been practicing.”
“He wrote it down first.”
“He absolutely wrote it down first.”
“Where’d he get the second ticket?”
“From Mabel. At her desk at the Historical Society, at two in the afternoon, with the door open.”
Lucy sets the curling iron down very slowly, which is how I know she’s understood the implications. “So everyone knows.”
“Everyone knew by four. Harriet called my mother’s cousin in Camden about it, and my mother’s cousin in Camden has not spoken to me since the funeral.”
I look in the mirror and sigh. The dress is a problem, and it’s a problem I created for myself.
It’s deep red silk with a neckline that always seems to be on the edge of revealing something and a skirt that swirls around me with every step.
I wore it once and then hung it at the back of my closet because it makes me look like a woman who has decided something.
Apparently I’ve made that decision because I’m going to wear it. It’s the earrings I keep changing.
“They’re fine,” Lucy says. “You’ve changed them three times.”
“The gold ones drag.”
“Then wear the garnets.”
I look down at the little velvet box on my dresser.
The garnets were Gran’s. She wore them to the same three events for forty years, and the backs have gone thin and soft where her fingers went.
She would have loved tonight—loudly, publicly, and entirely without shame—and she’d have gotten nine questions into Julian before the coats were off.
I put them in for the warmth of having her at the party.
The small sorrow comes with them, the way it always does, and I let it.
Lucy watches me in the mirror. For once, she doesn’t say anything about my face.
Then she looks down.
“You’ve shaved your legs for a roof.”
“It’s a fundraiser. It’s civic.”
“It’s for the roof of a building you have never once been inside without a tray in your hands.”
“I’m attending an event, Lucy.”
“You’re attending a man.” She hops off the bed and uses pins and the curling iron to put up my hair in a way I’ve never managed to do myself. “Deirdre Fanning thinks he’s a werewolf, by the way.”
“Deirdre Fanning thinks the mailman’s a werewolf.”
“She does think that. She’s said it twice, at the post office, to the mailman.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was Presbyterian.”
I laugh so hard I have to hold on to the dresser.
The nervous part isn’t silly, though. That’s what I can’t explain to Lucy, standing behind me with pins between her teeth and her easy certainty about the world.
I’ve fed Julian, or at least put food in front of him, multiple times.
I’ve kissed him. Repeatedly. I’ve had his hand under my skirt on my prep counter, which Lucy does not know and will not, not tonight, possibly not ever.
But he’s never taken me on a date. Everything meaningful between us has happened in my rooms. My kitchen. My porch. My house. Tonight he’s the one holding the door, and I don’t know the rules on his side of it.
A car pulls up outside at exactly seven. I know that engine now. It’s the low, expensive purr of the black thing he drives, and it stops in front of my cottage the way I imagine everything in Julian’s life stops when he decides it should.
Lucy scrambles to my window. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, no.”
“What?”
“Come look.”
“I’m not going to gawk at my date out my window.”
“Penny. Come look.”
I come look.
Julian is getting out of the car. He’s in a dark suit, and I have seen this man in beautiful clothes for weeks now, in cashmere and tailored coats and shirts that fit him like an accusation, but I have not seen him in this.
The suit is black, or so close to black that the difference doesn’t matter, and it’s cut exactly for the body underneath it, which is to say a body that has no business belonging to a man who spends that much time alone with old books.
He shuts the car door. He straightens his cuffs. He looks up at my house.
“I have to go,” I tell Lucy, “before you say anything.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were going to say something.”
“I was going to say,” Lucy says, walking me to the front door with her hand on my elbow like a coach sending a fighter out, “that if you don’t marry him, I will.”
“You don’t even like men who own cuff links.”
“I’m revising my policy.”
He raps his knuckle lightly against the door frame, twice, the way you’d wake someone gently.
I open the door.
Julian looks up at me, and whatever he was about to say doesn’t happen. He simply looks. I’ve been looked at before, but not like this, not by a man who is already still and finds somewhere further to go. I feel the red dress in a way I didn’t feel it in my own mirror.
“Penny,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You look—” He actually hesitates. “There isn’t a sufficient word.”
“You could just pick an insufficient one.”
“Extraordinary,” he says.
Oh.
Behind me, Lucy gives a muffled gasp.
Julian helps me into my coat and holds out his hand. I take it, and his fingers close cool and sure around mine. He walks me down my steps as though I might otherwise forget how.
“Have her home by midnight,” Lucy calls from my doorway.
Julian glances back. “I make no promises.”
Lucy screams. I get in the car before she can do it again.
The Maritime Museum is in the old granite warehouse at the foot of Water Street, and it is always colder inside than out, which everyone knows and no one has ever fixed.
A forty-foot whaleboat hangs on steel cables at a threatening angle over the punch table in the main hall, and no one would dream of straightening it.
Tickets are ninety dollars. It’s for the roof.
It has been for the roof since I was in high school.
There’s a valet tonight, which in Black Harbor means the Pelletier boy in a borrowed vest running back and forth between cars with the frantic dignity of the recently employed.
Julian doesn’t hand him the keys. He parks the car himself, a little apart from the others, and comes around to open my door before I’ve found the handle.
“You don’t trust the Pelletier boy,” I say, taking his hand.
“I don’t trust anyone with a manual transmission and something to prove.”
The silent auction runs along the west wall, and I will read every sheet of it before the night is over, because I am my mother’s daughter.
Ardith Peavey has donated a quilt to it eleven years running and bought it back every single year, and last year she got into a bidding war with herself and paid three hundred and thirty-two dollars for her own quilt.
Julian helps me take off my coat and then his hand arrives at the small of my back as we walk in.
It’s the oldest gesture available to a man walking a woman into a room, and I have had it done to me by an insurance agent.
Julian is not an insurance agent. His palm is cool through the silk, cool and steady and completely motionless, with no drift and no thumb doing anything conversational about it.
It rests there for the length of the entrance hall, five seconds, maybe six, and my whole back goes warm underneath it.
Every thought I had prepared for tonight walks out of my head and down the hill into the harbor.
I can hear my own pulse, in a public building, at a fundraiser for a roof. I want him to move that hand about four inches, and I want it so specifically that I have to look at the floor and concentrate. I’m a grown woman and I am concentrating on a floor.
Then his hand comes away, and the warmth goes with it inside of a second, and I spend ten minutes quietly furious about the architecture of entrance halls.
“Penny,” says Mabel Libby, materializing next to us. “Julian. That dress.”
“Thank you.”
“I have said for six years that you should wear red. You may quote me later, when I’m unavailable.” She has a ship’s wheel brooch on and the expression of a woman whose entire evening has already been worth it. “Come and look at the roof plans.”
“Mabel, no one wants to look at roof plans.”
“Then they should not have come to a party about a roof.” Mabel takes Julian’s arm without asking and steers the pair of us towards the auction tables at a speed I cannot account for in a woman of seventy-five.
The canapés are from Portland. I know it immediately and I know it professionally and I say nothing to any living soul for a full fifteen minutes.
“You’re counting,” Julian says.
“I’m not counting.”
“You’ve looked at that tray four times.”
“There are nine crab things left and there were forty. That’s a fifth of a tray for a hundred and ten people.” I take a stuffed mushroom off the tray, mostly to give my hands a job. “Someone costed this on paper, and on paper it’s beautiful.”
“Would you prefer to leave and go and make something?”
“Desperately.”
“Say the word,” he says, “and I’ll get the car.”
He has a champagne flute in his left hand.
He has had it since we entered the room, and the level in that glass has not moved a millimeter.
He carries it the way you’d carry a program and tilts it correctly when he laughs at Doris Alden’s story about the 1978 storm.
At half past eight, he sets it down on a passing tray as full as it was when we walked in.
He is also standing closer than a man needs to stand at a fundraiser.
He’s not touching me, but he’s close enough that I can feel the cool coming off him down my whole left side.
I have now spent an hour in a granite building wanting to put my mouth on the half an inch of bare throat above his collar. I remind myself I’m here for the roof.
Julian is good at this in the way I’ve noticed since the first dinner party.
He remembers everyone. He asks Mabel about a book she mentioned three weeks ago.
He asks a retired ferry captain about his granddaughter’s college applications and Doris about the window she was having replaced.
He gives each person his full attention, asks exactly the thing that makes them light up, and deflects every question about himself so smoothly that the person asking walks away feeling they’ve had a wonderful conversation.
I’m learning to watch for it now. The way he gives people exactly enough to feel warm and never enough to feel informed.
“You do that on purpose,” I say quietly when we get a moment alone beside the auction tables.
“Do what?”
“Make everyone feel important enough that they forget to ask about you.”
He looks at me for a second. “You noticed.”
“I notice a lot about you.”
“Yes,” Julian says. “I’ve begun to find it alarming.”
He says it like a compliment. I decide to take it as one.
We stroll around the museum until we reach Case Four.
Case Four is the big one along the north wall with the exhibit about the early merchant trade, the years when Black Harbor stopped being a fishing beach with opinions and started being a port.
Three half-models sit on brackets, a ledger lies open under glass at a page no one has ever read, and there’s a bell.
Dr. Ines Cardoso has run the museum for two years. She came up from a real one in Boston, she’s roughly my age, and she has extremely good shoes. She catches us at the case because she catches everyone at the case.
“The Anne Sewall,” she says. “Our first square-rigger. Launched 1802, lost in the Indies trade in 1806. She’s the reason there’s a breakwater.”
Julian looks at the card for a while.
“Seventeen ninety-nine,” he says.
Dr. Cardoso’s smile stays precisely where it is. “The registry has her at 1802.”
“The registry has her re-registered in 1802. She was re-rigged that winter at Wiscasset. She went in a brig and came out a ship.” He says it the way you’d give someone the time.
“The tonnage on the second entry is fifty-one greater than the first. A vessel that gains fifty-one tons in a shipyard has not been built that year. It has been altered.”
“That’s an argument.”
“It is.” He inclines his head in the small nod that turns a correction into an offer. “But it is not the reason. The reason is in your own case.”
He points, with one finger, at the bell.
“Bells were cast for the launch. That one has a date on the waist, beneath the crown. It is turned three-quarters away from the glass, which is why no one has read it in some years.”
Dr. Cardoso puts her drink down on top of a display case, which I suspect is a firing offense in her own building.
Then she crouches down in a cocktail dress not designed for crouching and angles her phone flashlight up under the crown of a two-hundred-and-twenty-seven-year-old bell while eleven people watch her do it.
She stays down there long enough that the people around us stop talking.
When she comes up, her face has the dazed happy look of someone unwrapping a truly fantastic gift.
“Seventeen ninety-nine,” she breathes. “Where did you read that?”
“Somewhere.”
“No. Where. I’ve got the Salem abstracts and I’ve got Pratt and I’ve got the insurance filings, and no one has ever put the re-rig against the tonnage. No one. Would you come in on a weekday? There’s a whole wall out there I don’t trust.”
“That’s very kind,” Julian says.
It’s the voice he uses for declining things, but she’s far too happy to hear it.
I stand there holding a paper napkin with a stuffed mushroom on it, and not one other person in that room finds any of it strange.
That’s the part. Mabel is beaming. Doris is telling someone he’s a great reader.
Everyone inside forty feet has filed the last ninety seconds under isn’t he clever and gone happily back to the auction.
What I feel is harder to file. There’s a warm, ridiculous pride in it that I have no right to feel, because I didn’t teach that man one single thing.
Underneath the pride is something quieter and sharper.
I have just watched him hand a stranger the best evening of her career out of a pocket he will not let me look into, and it hurts, and I would rather it didn’t.
Then he says near my ear, “There’s an alarming quantity of copper vessels in my kitchen. I don’t know what any of it is for. Come and tell me, if you have an afternoon.”
“Tomorrow after five,” I say before he’s finished, and his mouth curves.
“Tomorrow.”