“I was mad,” Russell said. “I was so mad at you, Eliza.” He twisted his hands together and stretched them in front of him, cracking his knuckles.
Eliza thought of all kinds of things then. She thought of the day she and Rob brought Zoe home from the hospital, and how they set her car seat in the center of the dining room table and stared at her, awed by her perfect little features, cowed by the responsibility now pressing down on their shoulders. She thought of Evie’s first day of kindergarten and how she wore ribbons on the end of her braids. She thought of the way Judith had said, “Who gets married in the winter?” when she and Rob had planned a December wedding. But it had been gorgeous, the bridesmaids had fur muffs, the ballroom of the Ritz was decorated like an ice castle, and the Christmas decorations were up in the Public Garden.
“But even after—you never once tried to get me to stay, not once that whole time, not ever. You never tried to get me to come back.”
Her first two months at Brown, Eliza felt like a gorilla in a land of gazelles. Everyone around her was so assured in the world, so confident. Eliza reread her mother’s letter a dozen times a week, wearing the paper down so that it felt like suede.
Russell’s hands were steady around his beer bottle now. “You think you would have been happy here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes roamed the café, caught on the menu board. “Yes. Maybe.”
Russell snorted. “It’s not that I let you go or made you go or anything else. You went. You did what you needed to do. You never thought you belonged here. You wouldn’t have been happy.”
“I might have been,” she said. “My mother was happy here. My mother was the happiest person I’ve ever known.”
Russell nodded and said, “Okay, Eliza. Okay.”
“Russell,” she said, thinking of what she’d heard from Val, about Beatrice Prince taking Russell’s money, thinking of the almost-broken reverse gear.
“What?” His voice cracked a little bit.
“Do you need money?”
The corner of his eye twitched. “Do I what?”
“Do you need money? Because—” She lowered her voice, like she was offering him drugs or human organs. “I can help you out, if you need help.”
“Are you goddamn kidding me?”
She felt the same shame she’d felt at The Wheelhouse, trying to refuse the sternman pay. She whispered, “No.”
“I don’t need charity from you, Eliza.”
“I didn’t say charity.”
“You said money.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Yes it is.”
“Of course it’s not. It’s a friend helping out a friend.”
“Why is it—”
“What?”
“I mean, how’d you turn from what you were into—” He paused.
“Into what?”
“Into a person who thinks money fixes everything?”
Were they really doing this? They were. Fine. “It fixes a lot, Russell.”
He stood and put his beer bottle on the table, hard, so she jumped.
“Bullshit.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Russell. Of course it does.” She felt her voice growing sharp. “Of course money fixes things. That’s the point of fucking money. To make things easier. And better. It’s not noble to pretend it doesn’t. It’s just stupid.”
“Well, then, I guess I’m stupid. That’s what you think really, isn’t it?”
“That’s not what I meant. You know it’s not.”
“Didn’t go to college, I guess you think I can’t understand the basics. I’ve been running my own boat for years now, Eliza. Years.”
“I know you have. I’m sorry, Russell, of course you have. I just thought—”
“Thanks for the beer, Eliza. I’m going to get going now. I have an early day tomorrow.”
“Just like that?” she said. Her throat was burning. She still had half a glass of wine left.
“Just like that.”
Eliza sipped the wine slowly, giving Russell time to leave. Then she left a ten-dollar tip on the table for Mary because money did help, of course it fucking helped, and walked slowly back toward her father’s house. At the last second she changed course and veered back to the wharf. There were a few guys milling around, a couple of trucks left, but nobody paid her any mind.
She sat down and breathed in as deeply as she could: it was the complicated, briny, utterly alive smell that meant she was home. Something inside her loosened and she began to cry, for her mother, for her father, who couldn’t drive, couldn’t haul traps, couldn’t see right. For the little baby who had never been born, who would never row a skiff from the dock to a mooring, would never giggle when he touched a piece of bait for the first time.
She wiped savagely at her face and thought, What if this is where I was supposed to be all along?
Lesson Number Four: When you’re choosing a cantaloupe, go by smell, not by feel. A ripe cantaloupe smells like a cantaloupe. An unripe cantaloupe smells like nothing at all. If you’re planting tomatoes mix a little limestone into the soil. And there’s so much more I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you about love and sex and how to shape your eyebrows and how to learn to drink coffee and choose a lipstick and what to do when you make a mistake and how to cook chicken cutlets the way your father likes them and not to be scared of childbirth and dozens, maybe hundreds, of things like that, but the truth is I’m running out of time
Her mother had died before she finished the letter. No more lessons. Not even a period at the end of the last sentence. That was the ending: no ending at all.
Her phone buzzed, giving her a start. A text from Evie.
I GOT THE PART! I GOT IT. FERN, IN CHARLOTTE’S WEB.
30
BARTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Deirdre
Deirdre was serving lunch to the decorating committee in forty-five minutes, and she was in a tizzy.
Judith Barnes had told Deirdre that there were always unanticipated disasters in the final few weeks before a big event, and, since Judith Barnes could raise tens of thousands of dollars with her eyes closed, her ears plugged, and a set of Crest Whitestrips on her teeth, Deirdre took her at her word. It was Judith who’d told Deirdre that the decorating committee could be one of the trickiest fund-raising committees to manage—they seemed innocuous, but, oh boy, did they ever have opinions.
At the moment, though, all was on track. She had most of the silent-auction items on deck. The RSVPs were coming in, and soon it would be time to finalize the seating arrangements, which were promising to be more complicated than the seating arrangements at her wedding fifteen years ago at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford.
But she was almost there.