She found her way under the plyboard tunnels beneath the scaffolding to
the front door of the restaurant and let herself in. No one was there yet but
Ella; Carrie came early to help her prep. Walking through the kitchen doors,
she blinked at the morning light streaming in from the back wall of windows
overlooking the bay. Around her in the kitchen, things burped, bubbled,
steamed. She smelled oil, rosemary, yeast. For a moment she thought she was
alone among the cupboards and counters, the wheeled chopping blocks, the
stoves, refrigerators, dishwashers, everything that still could, in the mix of
antique and modern, making noises at once like an orchestra tuning up.
Then she saw the tiny woman with her head in one of the refrigerators,
rummaging through the shelves. She straightened abruptly and turned, her arms
full of eggs, two kinds of cheese, mustard, pickle relish. She smiled at
Carrie. Her hair was a mass of white curls, her face pale and seamed like a
piece of old diner crockery, the only color in it her periwinkle eyes. The
corner of the egg box slid. Salad dressings and sauces, Carrie guessed, and
went to help her.
“Thanks, Hon.”
“Do you want me to make them?”
“No. I want you to start on the crab bisque. But take the note up first.”
She was, everyone swore, Hal and Tye’s mother. Carrie didn’t believe it.
Nobody could be that old and move the way Ella did, everywhere at once, it
seemed, even during the most chaotic of All-You-Can-Eat Nites. And she was
elfin; how could she have come out with those tall, big-boned sons, themselves
at least half the age of the inn? Whoever and however old she was, she knew
everything about everything, though she could be half a heaping tablespoon
short of explaining, even, for instance, the why of the note Carrie picked up
off the countertop to take upstairs.
She went the quickest way, through the back door of the kitchen, down a
battered wooden walkway to the only staircase, of the four built to give
guests access from every floor to the grounds, that didn’t threaten to pitch
her back down through a rotting tread. Lilith Fisher lived in one of the
turret suites that once overlooked the lovely gardens and the yachts at the
docks. Now it overlooked a weedy lawn and a couple of fishing boats. She was
said to be writing a book about the history, the celebrities, the gossip
surrounding the inn during its glory. Carrie had never seen her actually
working at the big desk cluttered with books, papers, and old photos in the
turret. Hal, it seemed to her, was the one doing the writing: every morning a
note, elegantly hand-penned in real ink on heavy, deckle-edged paper tucked
into a matching envelope with his wife’s name on it, asking her to join him
that evening for dinner.
Lilith opened the door when Carrie knocked, then flowed away, scarf ends,
sleeves, trouser hems fluttering as she said into her cell phone, “No. No!
Really? He really did that?” She reached the far wall and flowed back, seeing
Carrie this time, tossing her a preoccupied smile. “I can’t believe it.
After all you did to protect him.”
Like Hal, Lilith was long-boned, tall, still willowy despite her ivory-white
hair. She wore it coiled on top of her head, an untidy cinnamon bun held in
place by a couple of colored pencils. Her eyes, behind half-moon glasses, were
big, sunken, luminous, the creamy green the sea sometimes turned during a
nasty storm.
Carrie held out the note. Lilith took it on an ebb turn and surged again.
“No. Yes. I will.” Carrie backed a step toward the door; Lilith whirled
abruptly, midroom, swirled back to her. “Of course, Heloise. The mourning
doves. They can watch for him from my turret.”
She dropped the phone in a pocket and finally stood still. “Thank you,
Carrie.” She opened the envelope; her eyes flicked over the note, then at
Carrie again, some memory surfacing in them as frigid as an iceberg in a
northern sea. “Please tell Ella that I will take my dinner alone tonight.”
And that was that for the lovely, old-fashioned note.
“Okay,” Carrie said, confused as always, wanting to ask why? What did he?
Couldn’t they at least talk about it over dinner even though that might mean
a few broken plates? Lilith’s eyes flashed at her again, this time without
the chill, reading her expression, Carrie guessed, or maybe, in some nebulous
way, her thoughts.
Lilith pushed her glasses up toward the cinnamon bun, worked a pencil back
into place. She turned, gazed down at the bay through the turret’s curved
windows, where Hal and his brother Tye, tiny figures in a small, rocking boat,
sank lines into the shipping channel to see what they could lure up from the
deep.
“We have no more plates to throw,” Carrie heard her murmur. “We broke them
all long ago.”
“What?” Carrie’s voice came out in a whisper.
Lilith dropped her glasses back down onto her nose and peered more closely at
the boat. “Ask Ella to send Hal’s jeans up with my dinner. I’ll mend that
back pocket. How’s your father this morning?”
Carrie, staring incredulously at the tiny nail-paring-sized blur that was Hal
’s jeans, answered absently, “He was lying on his back in a broken rowboat
talking to a crow about fearsome porpentines.”
“Really? He said porpentines?”
“He did. Dead sober.”
“And the pickup? Did you get the brakes fixed?”
Carrie nodded, sighing. “I had to use some of my creel money, though.”