Polly arrives first, as Harper had to feed Fish and let him out, then change her clothes—she had fallen asleep in the black outfit she wore to the reception—and brush her teeth and wash her face in an attempt to make herself look respectable. Harper is wearing white denim shorts, a pale blue golf shirt that used to belong to Billy before Harper requisitioned it for gardening purposes, a Red Sox hat, and her father’s watch. She is the world’s most underwhelming mistress.
Polly, by comparison, is wearing… well, here Harper blinks. She’s wearing one of Harper’s mother’s designs—the Roxie—in amethyst purple, a color that makes her skin look like polished bronze. Harper knows nothing about fashion, but she would know her mother’s dress, that dress, anywhere—it’s a linen shift with an obi. Obis were a fashion statement made popular by geisha girls in Japan. Eleanor’s entire empire is based on reworking a symbol of female subservience and turning it into something empowering.
“I like your dress,” Harper says.
“I like your watch,” Polly says. “Stylish. Makes a statement. I should get a man’s watch.”
“It was my father’s,” Harper says.
“You have my condolences,” Polly says. “I heard I missed meeting your mother yesterday by a minute or two. I went to Farm Neck for a late lunch.”
“That’s not all you missed,” Harper says.
Polly smiles in an inscrutable way. Now would be the time for Polly to say something encouraging, maybe dust off the old chestnut about the man who sees his friend down in a hole and jumps into the hole with him because he’s been there before and knows the way out. Polly clearly found her way out—she looks fantastic! Harper wonders if she’s still seeing Sundae Stewart. Sundae and Cassandra K. have split, that much has been well documented—at which point Polly vaporized from the story. Maybe Harper doesn’t have to leave; maybe she can ride this out. But then she thinks of Jude’s text: SCUM. Scum—like you find in a ring around the bathroom sink or like peanut butter that has collected inside the lid of the jar. Harper has to go.
“Anyway, here it is,” Harper says, pointing to the house. It’s only now that she thinks to worry about the state of things inside. Harper has been here periodically to grab things for Billy, but no one has been in to clean, and the weather has warmed up considerably, but Harper hadn’t thought to open any windows. So when she unlocks the door and she and Polly step inside, they are both assaulted by a wave of stale, hot, foul-smelling air.
Polly keeps her game face on. Surely this isn’t the worst house she’s seen on the island. Right?
“Your father was a smoker?” Polly asks.
“Pack a day,” she says. “Hence the congestive heart failure at age seventy-three.”
“Did he have a dog?” Polly asks.
“No,” Harper says. “No dog.” Technically this is true, but Fish was over here all the time, and Billy had no rules, so Fish used to lie across the sofa like a fat pasha. Polly can probably smell him, and although huskies aren’t known as shedders, Fish still leaves hair wherever he goes.
Harper knows that Polly will not approve of the wall-to-wall carpeting, but Billy was adamant that he liked the feel of it under his feet. Much friendlier than wood floors, he said. Harper is sure Polly will also not approve of the recliner or the clunky old coffee table reclaimed from the dump or the Jaws poster hanging on the wall in the powder room. Billy had been inordinately proud that the movie was filmed on the Vineyard. If Harper closes her eyes, she can hear Billy’s voice, clear as day: You’re gonna need a bigger boat.
Harper says, “I’ll give you the grand tour.” She leads Polly through the living room into the dining room, where the table is covered with old onion lamps, broken fixtures, wires, cords, outlet covers, bulbs of various shapes and sizes, and a pile of unpaid invoices.
Harper will have to deal with what’s owed, referring Billy’s current customers elsewhere and dismantling the business. It might be a good thing she got fired.
The dining room has four tall, skinny windows that look out onto the backyard, which is a nice size but completely unkempt—woods and unmowed grass, in the midst of which is a patch of overgrown vegetable garden. Billy had allowed Harper to put it in back when she was still working for Jude, and in the first season they harvested zucchini, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and one enormous misshapen pumpkin that won honorable mention at the Ag Fair.
“Windows,” Polly says, like a toddler learning new words. “Yard.”
They head into the kitchen, which Harper knows is the weak link. It features peeling linoleum floors, stained Formica countertops, and particleboard cabinets, several of which are loose on their hinges. With a stranger standing next to her, Harper can see how terribly the house presents, but she never gave it any thought because it was what it was: Billy’s house. The fridge is a hundred years old, but it kept Billy’s beer cold. Billy would rather have eaten takeout from the Home Port every night than spend money on renovating the kitchen. But the kitchen looks so bad that Harper feels she should apologize.
“Needs work,” Polly says with a rise of her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “Rest of the house?”
They wander through the three bedrooms upstairs, including the lavender bedroom that belonged to Harper before she finally moved out a week after her thirty-seventh birthday. They peek in the two underwhelming bathrooms—the tile floors are fine, but the sinks and tubs and toilets are outdated. And one of the bathrooms is Billy’s and still has a can of shaving cream on the sink, along with his green comb. The green comb had been Billy’s since the beginning of time. It probably cost him five cents at a drugstore on Charles Street in Boston in 1978, but it’s so deeply ingrained in Harper’s mind as Billy’s comb that it’s as if his beating heart is there on the bathroom counter. Harper struggles not to lose her composure in front of Polly Childs.
They peer into the shallow linen closet, then into the deeper closet that holds the washer and dryer.
“Laundry,” Polly says. “Good.”
“Well, yeah,” Harper says. The house is an eyesore, she understands this anew, but at least they aren’t hanging out at the Laundromat every Saturday.
Polly turns to Harper and says, “Listen. I’m not going to bullshit you.”
Harper nods. “Good.” Although really, she could use a little candy coating, a little pie in the sky.
“You have two options,” Polly says. “We sell this as a teardown, lot only. Listings in Vineyard Haven have taken a nosedive lately. This town can’t decide what it wants to be. And Daggett Avenue is… meh. So it would be listing at six, closing at half a mil.”