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“I thought you might be needing friendly company,” Malaika said, explaining why I’d found her in the parking lot outside the Privateer Club when I’d finished with the meeting. She’d been sitting with her car door open, talking on her cell phone while she waited for me. Now she slipped the phone back in her purse and stood gracefully, shutting the car door and locking it. “Let’s go and sit on the boat.”
She was always surprising me. “You have a boat?”
“It’s more Darryl’s than mine,” she said, naming her husband. “You can’t keep a mariner away from the water, and I figured letting him have this was better than having him off on a big ship for months at a time.”
“Was Darryl in the navy?” I had only met her husband once—a tall and quiet man who’d kept his focus on the barbecue and left us to ourselves.
“Not the navy. The merchant marine,” said Malaika. “He came out of King’s Point the year we got married, and went out to sea on the freighters, but when the kids came along he didn’t want to be gone so far.” Like me, she was wearing high heels, but she stepped with more certainty onto the long sunbleached wooden dock edging the water. “Then he was a New York harbour docking pilot, but that got tough, too. Lots of guys were getting laid off back about ten years ago, and I was doing okay with my real estate, so Darryl just decided he would rather do his own thing, work his own hours as a maritime inspector. That,” she said, “is how we ended up with this.” We’d stopped beside a slip that held a fair-sized sailboat, maybe forty feet in length. “Darryl inspected it for somebody who ended up not buying it, and he just couldn’t let it go.”
I didn’t know much about boats, but I could sympathize with Darryl. This one did have graceful lines that made it stand out sleekly from its neighbours.
It also had a chrome and canvas canopy that gave us shade as we climbed aboard. Malaika asked, “You want to go below, or sit up here?”
“Up here, please.” The breeze felt refreshing after the confines of the Privateer Club’s luncheon room.
Malaika settled back into the curve of molded fibreglass that formed the bench seat facing me. “How did it go?”
“Really well. Their education committee is going to discuss it when they meet, and let us know.”
“No, I meant how did it go with your grandmother?”
“Fine.” Because she looked less than convinced I explained, “She came late and left early, so that made things easier.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Nothing.” I shrugged it off. “Guess that was better than having her yell at me.”
“I told you not to worry. She’s not going to go off on you in public. When she speaks to you, she’ll be polite.”
I doubted she was ever going to speak to me, and said as much. “She cut my father dead, and never said a word to Niels while he was living here, so I can’t see her changing now. Why would she?” Without meaning to, I turned my gaze across the deep blue water of the bay where sunlight danced and glittered in a thousand points of light. On the opposite shore I could just see the steeply pitched roofline of Bridlemere sheltering deep in the trees like a recluse. “We’re no longer her family.”
“Family,” said Malaika, very firmly, “doesn’t work like that. A family’s not some club you join or get kicked out of. Lord knows I have cousins I’d be happy to disown, but even if I did, they’d still be family.”
“I’m just saying. If she wouldn’t talk to Niels, she isn’t going to talk to me. He was the peacemaker.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. You’ve been doing all right yourself, keeping our trustees from killing each other.”
“You’re doing that,” I pointed out. “I’m the reason they’re fighting, remember?”
“You don’t think they’d fight if you weren’t here?” She sent me a look that knew better. “Frank and Sharon have been trading words since I first got involved with the historical society. And Harvey and Don, so I’m told, have been mad at each other since middle school. Some fights are rooted so deep they’re a force you can’t stand against. Best to get out of the way.”
“Yes, well, Sharon won’t let me get out of her way.”
“She’s a difficult woman,” Malaika agreed. “But you’re managing her fine.”
I’d managed Sharons every day in high school. I’d just never figured out how to make friends with them. I wasn’t even sure they had friends. Followers and allies, yes, like Eve and Harvey, but that wasn’t truly friendship.
Friendship was somebody letting you sit on a sailboat to cheer you up after you’d first met your grandmother.
It was working. I was gradually relaxing to the gentle rocking of the boat, the creaking of the mooring ropes, the rhythmic slap of water on the hull below. I’d never spent much time on boats, apart from being taken out from time to time on the old wood-and-canvas two-man kayak that my dad had kept in our garage. I’d been too small to be much help—he’d done the paddling—but I’d always liked the feel of being buoyed above the water, and the soft splash of the paddles as they dipped into the river. I’d loved that kayak, but eventually it had started leaking and my dad had disassembled it into its canvas bags and it had sat and gathered dust until at some point it had ended up at Niels’s house in Saratoga Springs. I’d seen it there in his garage when I had first moved down to stay with him. “I’m going to get it fixed,” he’d said. “We’ll take it on the lake.” We never had. For all I knew, it was in pieces in its storage bags still, somewhere in his house. He’d left a lot of things in pieces.
As though following my thoughts, Malaika asked, “How’s Rachel doing? Is she ready to go back to college?”
“Sort of. I mean, she’s all packed up and organized. Whether she’s mentally ready or not, I don’t know.”
“It might do her good to get back into a routine.”
“It might.” I looked away from Bridlemere and let my gaze slide down the shoreline, almost down to Millbank, until I saw the patch of tall reeds and the arching trees that framed the caramel-coloured siding of my brother’s house, its back towards the water. “I’m not ever really sure what’s going on with Rachel. She just lets you in so far, you know?”
She sympathized. “She goes back this Saturday, right? Well, at least you’ll be getting a night in the city. Are you and your man going to take in a show while you’re there?”
“He can’t make it,” I said. “He had something come up.” I was careful to keep my tone light but she glanced over anyway, making me wish I was wearing my sunglasses as I deliberately searched the small harbour for something to draw her attention to.
Several slips over, a grey-haired man seemed to be readying a smaller sailboat to take it out onto the bay.
He looked so familiar I shielded my eyes from the brightness with one hand to see better. “Isn’t that Frank?”
“Where?” She looked too. “No, that’s one of the Fishers—I don’t know which one. Maybe Jim. There are three brothers, I always get them mixed up. But you’re right, there’s a family resemblance. The Fishers are one of the old families here, like the Wildes. They all married each other. They used to own most of Cross Harbor, the Fishers. They owned this marina, too, until a year ago.”
“Really? What happened a year ago?”
“Harvey decided the Kiersted Group needed more waterfront property.” Her side-eye spoke volumes. “When Harvey decides that he needs something, he won’t give up till he gets it.”
Having dealt with Harvey too, I felt a little sorry for the Fisher brothers, and it must have shown on my face because Malaika said, “No need to feel too bad for them. They still have millions in the bank, they just don’t flash their cash around.”