Eliza leaned in too. “You did? Is everything okay?”
“Not really,” whispered Mary. “Not at all. I’m just…well, I’m sort of…no, not sort of, I’m pregnant.” She choked out the last words like they were a rotten bit of food.
“Oh, sweetie,” said Eliza. She half rose from her seat. And immediately, a shadow passed over the table and Mary made a nervous jumping motion and looked up: Josh.
“Thought you were meeting me at the bar,” he said to Mary.
“I was, I was looking, I just stopped to say hi.”
Eliza wanted to say, Excuse me, young man, is that how you greet your pregnant girlfriend? But because she was trying not to pry she stuck out her hand and said, “Eliza.”
He accepted it. Wimpy handshake, awful sign, an indication of bad breeding. Eliza had made sure her daughters could shake hands with a vise grip; she’d been taught that way by her father. “Josh,” he said.
“Nice to meet you,” Eliza said. It was a reflex, even if she didn’t mean it.
“Yeah. You too.”
Eliza thought, Yeah? She said, “You have a good haul today? Russell and I, we had a pretty good haul, for early July. It’s starting to pick up, right?”
“Yeah,” said Josh. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
“Got a couple of shedders.”
“Yeah.”
“It’ll be August before we know it.”
Josh shrugged and looked at Mary and said, “Let’s go.”
Mary gave Eliza a funny look—sort of wry, sort of self-mocking—and rose from the booth.
“Mary—” said Eliza, but she was gone, melting into the crowd.
Now Eliza could capture that slippery thought: now. It was something about young love, brought on by the jukebox and the atmosphere and all of the memories that were unearthing themselves and standing in front of her, asking for attention.
It was this: that your whole life was a quest to recapture the feeling you had the very, very first time you fell in love. She tried not to think about the long-ago night on Turtle Island, the tent, the sleeping bags zipped together, arms and legs and lips and necks and the heat they gave off. Oh, man, the heat. A flame like that is going to burn itself out.
When Russell came back she was so lost in that thought—drunkenly, she believed that it explained everything about the human condition—that she didn’t notice him until he had regained his seat across from her. She thought maybe she should try to explain her thought to Russell, but when she looked at him she saw his face was pulled tight with irritation.
“Sorry,” he said, “to be gone so long. I was just talking to the guys about something.”
Eliza smelled gossip, and sat up straighter. This sounded promising. “What? Something good?”
“That guy who was over here, talking to you, Josh—you know him?”
“No, I only just met him.”
“They think he’s pulling some shit, stealing from traps.”
“Really?” In Little Harbor, in any lobstering community, that was one of the gravest offenses that existed. You didn’t touch another person’s traps without permission, period. And if you did, and if you got caught, Lord help you when the wrath of the vigilante justice system rained down upon you.
“That little shit,” she said. It wasn’t her usual way to describe someone, but Russell had brought back a fresh beer for each of them and she was feeling agitated and feisty and local.
“They said we better watch out for Charlie’s traps. He’ll know now that they’re going untended. That guy’s no good.”
“Wow.”
“Don’t say anything to Charlie, though. I don’t want him to worry. I’ll keep an eye on his traps.”
“Okay,” she said. “I can help, anytime. And, thank you, Russell.”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
To change the subject she said, “It’s so funny being back here. It feels like I never left.”
“But you did.” A new note crept into Russell’s voice. It almost sounded—well, to call a spade a spade, it sounded accusatory. And also a little wounded.
She kept her voice purposefully light, even blithe, and said, “I did.”
There was a long pause then and Eliza studied the table in front of her. Across the room someone made a whooping noise and someone else said, Motherfucker! You’d get kicked out of the club in Barton for yelling that.
The table was rough and scratched with the history of a million bottles of beer, a thousand fishermen’s hands resting where hers were now. Back when you could smoke in public places in Maine and the smoke hung thick and impenetrable around the bar there would have been an ashtray on this table, right next to the napkin dispenser. Eliza had to go to the bathroom and her stomach was roiling from the beer but she didn’t want to get up. She was rooted, and she remained rooted until Russell said, “Do you ever think about it?”
“What?”
“You know what.”
Oh. Oh, God. They were going to talk about it. They were going to talk about the Thing They Would Never Talk About.
“No.”
“You don’t?”
“We were eighteen, Russell. It was another lifetime. We were babies.”
Then Russell was reaching under the table and grasping her hand, and that felt so familiar that her thoughts got tangled with each other. It was too loud in the bar all of a sudden, and the universe was tilting, and it felt like each piece of her colliding worlds was contained in that fraction of a moment. Also, there was no air in the bar. Where had all the air gone?
“I have to go outside,” she managed. “I’m sorry, I—” She slid out of the booth and pushed her way through the crowd. She heard footsteps behind her, and then Russell’s voice.
“Liza? Eliza, you okay?”
She walked toward Russell’s truck, taking deep, shuddering breaths. “Yeah,” she said. “Sorry, I couldn’t—I just couldn’t breathe all of a sudden.” She leaned against the truck and looked up at the sky. Night had fallen while they were in The Wheelhouse, and a fingernail of a moon hung just above them. Russell stood next to her, close enough that his hip pressed against her waist. Her thoughts were all mixed up. Your whole life was a quest to recapture the feeling you had the very, very first time you fell in love. The fight with Rob, her dad, missing her family but also, weirdly, missing the place where she was at that exact moment. How could you do that, how could you be homesick for a town you’d left lifetimes ago when you were in that town right then?
She was going to ask Russell that, and so she turned her face toward his, and that’s when she saw that he was looking at her in a certain, familiar way, and then he was leaning toward her and she wasn’t sure if—
But as it turned out, her stomach, that unpredictable, capricious organ, had its own ideas for the evening.
“I’m going to be sick,” she said. “Oh, God—”