I never liked Diane Douglas.
I was meant for wonderful things, that’s what my senior English teacher, Ms. Collier, she of the stylishly cropped gray hair and nonchalant printed scarves, always told me. I was meant to go off and write Something Important. The Great American Novel, maybe, or a small but meaningful book of poetry.
Do you know what I’ve written, Eliza? Shopping lists. Recipes. Thank-you notes (you can’t escape your upbringing, no matter how you try). A couple of letters home that went unanswered. Which breaks my heart for you, because I would love to leave you with more family than you have.
That’s it, until now. Now I am writing my magnum opus, my masterpiece. My letter to you.
In her father’s driveway, Eliza saw the familiar blue pickup and Val’s ancient, rusty Civic. That car had been brand-new when Eliza was a senior in high school, two thousand years ago. Frugal didn’t even begin to describe the way Val was about cars.
Val ran one of the two restaurants in town—one of three, now, if you counted the new café, The Cup. Four, if you included The Wheelhouse, which was really just a bar. Although a lot of the locals turned their noses up at The Cup, Eliza was not planning on turning hers. She could tell from her father’s descriptions (“fancy-pants coffee,” “avocado smoothies,” “bread with little seeds and things stuck in it”) that she would embrace the menu at The Cup with guilty, open arms.
After Joanie died, Val stepped into the role of Eliza’s proxy mother—she never got married, never had her own kids. And Joanie’s parents never forgave Joanie for embracing a life so different from the one she’d been groomed for; they shifted their focus entirely to the three children who had remained loyal and near. So it was Val who bought Eliza her first box of tampons, her first real bra, her one and only prom dress. It was Val who helped get together the application to Brown, and Val who came to every one of Eliza’s cross-country meets when Charlie was hauling. It was Val’s house Eliza went to after school each day the first dreadful year after Joanie died, when Eliza couldn’t bear to go to her own empty house. And it was Val who’d taken Eliza on that awful trip to Bangor in that car, all those years ago. Eliza felt a little spasm of something terrible when she thought about that.
She parked behind her dad’s pickup and had no sooner gotten out of the car than Val appeared, wrapping Eliza in a giant hug. Val smelled like maple syrup and cinnamon (the pancakes at Val’s were to die for—Evie always got two servings and ate them both); she smelled like the ocean and vanilla. She smelled like home. It was unnerving how much Val made Eliza think of what she’d lost and at the same time about what she’d gotten instead.
“I’m so glad you’re here. I need to run home to feed Sternman, but I didn’t want to leave your dad.” Sternman was Val’s stout old Lab. “He doesn’t know you’re coming,” said Val. “After you called me I decided not to tell him, thought he could use a surprise.” She looked at Eliza with an expression that Eliza couldn’t quite read, and then she said, “Oh, Eliza. I’ll come in with you for a minute.”
Eliza wasn’t sure what she was expecting when she walked into her childhood living room, where her dad was dozing in his old leather recliner, circa 1982, a rare gift to himself after a good season. Val entered before Eliza and went to stand protectively behind Charlie. She touched Charlie gently on the shoulder of his good arm and said, “See who’s here!” Charlie opened his eyes and looked around with a startled expression that reminded Eliza of a bewildered old dog who’d been flung out of sleep. She felt a ball of dread begin to form in her stomach.
Eliza knew about the sprained arm, so she wasn’t surprised by the sling; she knew about the gash on the head, so she wasn’t surprised by the bit of shaved scalp and the line of stitches above Charlie’s temple. She knew that head wounds bled like crazy and often looked worse than they were. But something else wasn’t right. Charlie had just visited Barton in March, only three months before, and he’d been his regular old self then. He’d even gone into Evie’s fourth-grade class with a lobster trap and a V-notch to show the kids. (Every iteration of both kids’ classes had seen this routine numerous times, but they never tired of it.)
Now he looked frail—not at all like the big strong ox who had hoisted her up on his shoulders so she could work the hydraulic hauler for the first time; not like the man who’d won the trap race three years running at the Lobster Festival; not like the man whose big hand had taken hers at her mother’s funeral and had crouched down and whispered, “We’re gonna be okay, me and you.” Charlie Sargent was sixty-four years old now, but after one fall on the deck of his boat he looked one hundred and ninety.
“Hey, Dad,” she said. She bent and kissed him very carefully on the cheek, avoiding the stitched-up area on his head, avoiding the sling. “It’s so good to see you. Russell had me worried there for a minute, but you look fine to me. Right as rain.” She could hear the falseness in her words rolling around her throat in the same way that the Bloody Marys from earlier in the day were rolling around in her stomach. She never said things like “right as rain.” (Who did, really, besides Mary Poppins?)
She sat down on the edge of the worn-to-bits sofa. She’d wanted to buy Charlie a new one the previous year but he wouldn’t have it. She’d wanted to do lots of things for him at all different times and he wouldn’t have most of them. He said things like, “What I have’ll do just fine” and “You and Rob don’t need to spend your money on me.” She couldn’t get him to understand that in Rob’s world you didn’t spend money and then find it was gone—it was practically a renewable resource, like sunlight.
“He’s going to be just fine,” said Val, but there was a catch in her voice that made Eliza look more carefully at her. Val handed Charlie a cup of water and shook two Advils out of a bottle that was sitting on the side table and said, “Here, Charlie, it’s been four hours.” To Eliza she said, “For the pain.” If Eliza didn’t know better she’d think they were an old married couple. Charlie took the cup unsteadily. She leaned forward to help him lift the cup to his lips, but he regained the balance in his arm and did it on his own.
“I’ll be just fine,” repeated Charlie, when he’d swallowed the pills and handed the cup back to Val. “Might have to take a couple more days off of hauling, that’s all.” He smiled and looked a little bit more like himself.
“A couple more?” said Eliza. “I think it’s going to take longer than that!”