Not that she could explain any of this to Sheila Rackley.
Sheila had pulled her phone out of her bag and was texting while she was talking to Deirdre. The woman was intolerable. Why had Deirdre put her on the decorating committee? Could she even decorate?
“Kristi’s been keeping Sofia busy!” said Sheila, eyes fixed on her screen. Tap tap tap.
“I guess so,” said Deirdre. The morning was bright and sunny; she kept her sunglasses noncommittally over her eyes, although Sheila had used hers to push back her hair, revealing harsh brown roots at the base of her scalp.
“I don’t know how you can stand so much time away from Sofia in the summer. I couldn’t do it.” Deirdre looked to the right and to the left of Sheila; Sheila’s children were nowhere in evidence.
“Oh, brother, Sheila.”
“What?”
“Grow up. We’re not seventeen. This isn’t study hall. Stop trying to stir the pot.” She massaged the invitations.
“I was just making conversation!”
“Uh-huh,” said Deirdre.
“I was!” Sheila’s phone buzzed, and she glanced down at it.
“Excuse me, Sheila.” Deirdre moved past Sheila and up the walk that led to the post office, where she was finally going to get her beautiful gala invitations in the mail.
29
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza
“Buy you a coffee?” said Eliza.
Russell glanced up at her, then back down, and concentrated on the knot he was using to tie the skiff to the float at the end of the wharf. A cleat hitch. Russell said, “I don’t drink coffee in the afternoon, keeps me up past my bedtime. You know that.”
“I’m not even a lobsterman and I can’t drink coffee past noon.”
“You make a hell of a sternman, though.”
“Don’t even,” said Eliza. She looked at the sky, which was cerulean, with scattered puffs of clouds. Eliza didn’t know which kinds of clouds they were, but she bet Zoe, the budding scientist, would know. “A beer, then?”
He laughed kindly. “You sure that’s a good idea, Eliza?”
The vomiting, the scrub grass, the ride of shame home in Russell’s pickup. She said, “I’m sorry, about all of that. I’m really sorry. What a rookie move.”
He straightened and said, “That’s all right. I’ve seen people drink too much before. I’ve seen you drink too much before.” He had: summer before senior year, the night they camped out on Turtle Island, and other times besides. Russell gave her the full force of his smile. Other fishermen were standing around in little knots or heading back to their trucks. A couple of them glanced over at Eliza and waved: Elton Cobb, Merton Young. She no longer felt like a stranger out here; she was turning back into a daughter. She was going native.
She tried not to remember how Russell’s hand had felt holding hers under the table at The Wheelhouse the other night.
She thought of what she’d said to Rob: You draw pictures of things for other people to make with their hands. What a mean-spirited thing to say. She’d had to call back four times before he’d talk to her, before he’d accept her apology. And even though he had, it was still, and would be forever, a thing she’d said: she couldn’t unsay it.
“I’ll behave myself,” she promised. “You have a beer, and I’ll have a decaf. We’ll go to The Cup, since they have both.”
———
The day before, when Eliza and Mary had returned to Mary’s car, Eliza had used her AAA account to call for service, and after fifty-five minutes a tow truck from a garage in Gouldsboro had come out and jumped the battery. Mary’s car had started right up. Now the only acknowledgment between them was a quick, shy smile on Mary’s part and a (she hoped) cryptic answering nod from Eliza.
After they had their drinks, Eliza sat down, and then Russell sat down, and then the Thing They Would Never Talk About pulled out a chair and sat at the table too. Invited or not, it was there. Fine, thought Eliza. She’d waffled on the decaf and then ordered a Sauvignon Blanc, liquid courage with a side of flowery peach, and she took a minute to feel the effects of the inappropriately large sip she started with. Then she thought, Let’s do this.
“You know when I said the other night that I don’t think about it?”
Russell nodded. She loved that she didn’t have to explain herself more than that.
“That’s not true,” she said. “I do think about it.” She took another giant sip to try to tamp out the burning feeling in her heart.
Russell waited, his gaze on hers.
I don’t have a nineteen-year-old kid, if that tells you anything, she’d said to Mary.
“I think about it. I’ve never stopped thinking about it. When Zoe was born, I thought about it constantly. When she was born early I thought it was punishment for what I did back then.”
“Eliza—”
“No, wait, let me finish. I thought I deserved it. She was so tiny. So fragile and vulnerable! Like a shedder.”
Russell smiled.
“Those first few days of her life all I could think was, ‘If there’s something wrong with this baby it’s all my fault.’?”
Russell’s hand, on the table, twitched—it looked almost like he wanted to cover hers with his own. She put her hands in her lap, because she was afraid they might want that too. She went on: “That’s one reason I dropped out of med school, I think it was sort of a penance. Like I didn’t deserve it all, like I had to pay the price.” She lowered her gaze back to the table and asked, “Do you? Think about it?”
Russell took a long sip of his beer and didn’t answer.
“I didn’t, for a while,” he said. “I got over it, and I met Beatrice.”
“Beatrice Prince,” said Eliza. She added softly, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Russell ignored that. He was much classier than Eliza was, all things considered. He said, “But she didn’t want to have kids, and that’s what really killed me. Because you know I did want that, Eliza. I always wanted that. A family.”
She felt like someone had taken a pair of pliers to part of her heart and twisted. “Do you wish—do you wish we had done things differently?”
“Yeah,” he said. No hesitation.
“Really?”
“Of course I do, Eliza, you knew that back then, you knew that’s how I wanted to do it, keep the baby, get married.”
Eliza tried on the next words for size. “Do you think we made a mistake?”
“Yeah.” He took a long pull of his beer and set the bottle down, tracing the bottle with his fingers. “I always thought it was a mistake. But you didn’t ask me. You just went.”
“You knew I was going. I told you.”
“You told me. You didn’t ask me.”
“You knew, and you let me go off alone. Why’d you let me go off like that, to Bangor? Without you? Why’d you let me go at all?” The inside of Val’s Civic, the antiseptic smell of the room, the kind face of the doctor leaning over her, Val brushing her hair out of her eyes after it was all over.