“Nothing specific, but, I mean, it’s been a whole day, a hundred things have happened, a hundred different things, and we all tried to get in touch with you and none of us could. Christine Cabot is driving me out of my fucking mind and I can’t concentrate with the girls in and out, and Zoe wanted a ride somewhere and when I couldn’t take her because I was on the phone with Ruggman, and I can never get Ruggman on the phone, she completely flipped out—”
Rob never swore. Well, sometimes he swore, but when he did he used temperate, harmless swears, like bastard and damn it: gentlemanly swears. Sometimes he apologized after: it was adorable. He never pulled out the big, bold swears. In fact, Eliza felt that she’d had to rein in her own tendencies over the years, tendencies born of hour upon hour upon hour spent in a workingman’s world. Normally she would have made a joke out of Rob’s swearing just now, but she was starting to get peeved. A hundred things happened every day, and Eliza was there for most of them. When Rob worked for Mo Francis he was gone thousands of hours a week, and he was commuting back and forth to Boston every single day, and he was at the beck and call of not only Mo but all of Mo’s clients, and guess who took care of the hundred things every single day?
Welcome to motherhood, she wanted to say.
“Come on, Rob, don’t scare me like that. I was hauling traps today, that’s all, and I didn’t bring my phone with me.” She was about to continue, to tell him all about what it had been like to be back on the water, about how hard she’d worked and how good she’d felt and how rotten the herring had smelled but how she’d stuck her hands right in the bait box anyway. Before she got a chance he spoke again, more sharply.
“What do you mean you were hauling traps? I thought your dad’s arm was in a sling. I thought he couldn’t work! You just said he had to get his stitches out.”
“His arm is in a sling. I didn’t go with my dad. I went with Russell.”
A long, pregnant pause.
“Huh.”
“What’s that mean?” She saw Russell slap one of the men on the back by way of goodbye and walk back toward her. More boats were coming in now, the harbor was almost full, and there was a line of skiffs tied up at the wharf. It was a gorgeous sight that set Eliza’s heart rocking. They were hours from sunset but pretty much everyone out there had put in a legitimate twelve-hour day. Eliza’s back muscles were beginning to ache, and her legs quivered. Even her forearms hurt, especially her forearms! She opened the passenger side of the truck and leaned against the seat. Somebody else stopped Russell to talk, a guy about her dad’s age. The truck directly in her view had a bumper sticker that said FUCK THE WHALES AND SAVE THE FISHERMEN. Lovely. It would be fun to try to explain that one to Evie, shepherdess to the vulnerable mammals of the world.
“Whose phone is this? Is this Russell’s phone?”
She didn’t answer.
“Eliza?”
“Yes. This is Russell’s phone.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Was Rob giving her permission? “Okay, what?”
“Okay, nothing. Okay, that makes sense.”
Was Rob jealous of Russell? That would be like Eliza being jealous of Kitty Sutherland. Would Eliza be jealous if Rob spent the day hauling traps with Kitty Sutherland? That image was enough to make her nearly laugh out loud: Kitty Sutherland hauling traps, wearing a Lilly Pulitzer headband and pedal pushers and rosy-pink nail polish that matched her rosy-pink lipstick. Kitty Sutherland getting her hands dirty in anything other than Canyon Ranch mud bath.
Actually, the image of Rob hauling traps was pretty funny too. He would absolutely get a sunburn, he had such Aryan skin.
No, Eliza would not be jealous if Rob hauled traps with Kitty Sutherland.
But then again, Rob and Kitty didn’t have the same history together that Eliza and Russell had. They didn’t, for example, have the Thing They Would Never Talk About.
She studied the craggy shoreline and the curve of water that led out of the harbor. There was still a boat moving in from the distance, kingly, postcard perfect.
“I’m sorry, Eliza, but I thought you were going back up there for your dad, and now you’re riding around on lobster boats with your ex-boyfriend. I’m just a little confused about what exactly you’re doing there.”
She closed her eyes and tried to think of the nicest things she could about Rob.
She thought of the way her heart still cartwheeled when they kissed, and how sex with him was more than sex, it was an anchor to the world. She thought of the way it felt to lay her head on his chest at the end of the day. She thought of how his hands had looked holding five-pound Zoe for the first time. She thought of the way at a party he always searched the room for her if she was talking to someone else. She thought of the way he was so patient teaching Evie how to serve a tennis ball—Evie’s serve had been awful when she’d started playing tennis and now it was killer. When Eliza got sick, he brought her apple juice, which was the only kind of juice she liked, and he brought it in a tall glass with crushed ice and a bendy straw, which was the only way she drank it.
Rob said, “Eliza? Are you there?”
Deep breath. There were so many more things. He was always very kind to ladies of the seventy-five-plus set at the club. He managed to combine a sort of Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey charm with a dash of appropriate and refined flirting; he made the ladies think fondly of their first beaus, of dancing to Glenn Miller and drinking Singapore Slings.
“You know what I’m doing here,” she said.
“I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure. It’s been, what, five days since your dad told you he’s not coming to Boston for treatment? And now you’re hauling lobster traps?”
Eliza fingered a little tear in the pickup’s seat. “The reason I was hauling, Rob, is because I was helping. My dad needed help, because he can’t haul his traps right now, and they’d been sitting out there for days. So I helped haul them and reset them.”
“I see.”
“Do you? I’m not sure you do. You’ve never lived in a place like this, you don’t understand how it works.”
“I understand the concept of people helping people out, Eliza, I’m not the Bubble Boy.”
Except for the bubble of money that you’ve always lived inside, thought Eliza.
Rob went on. “What it sounds like to me is that you’ve spent, what, a bunch of days in Little Harbor since the girls got out of school, and I know your dad is sick, and I know that’s awful, Eliza, and we all want to help you help him, but I wonder if you’re latching on to something else.”
“What something else is that?”
Russell, seeing Eliza was still on the phone, stepped away again.
“Come on, Eliza.”
“What?”
“The idea that the life you’re playing at is more appealing than the one you actually live.”
“Rob, I’m not playing!”
But he was still talking, he talked right over her. “If that life was so appealing, Eliza, you never would have tried so hard to get out of the place you came from.”
“What do you mean? Away from people who work with their hands?”