Billy Frost is dead at the age of seventy-three. Harper takes a stab at writing his obituary in her mind as the nurses come in to clean him up and prepare him for the fun-filled ride to the morgue. William O’Shaughnessy Frost, master electrician and avid Red Sox fan, died last night at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, in Oak Bluffs. He is survived by his daughter Harper Frost.
And… his daughter Tabitha Frost… and his granddaughter, Ainsley Cruise… and his ex-wife, Eleanor Roxie-Frost, all of Nantucket, Massachusetts. What will surprise people the most? Harper wonders. That Billy has a daughter identical to but completely different from the cute screw-up who delivers packages for Rooster Express? Or that Billy used to be married to the famous Boston fashion designer Eleanor Roxie-Frost, more commonly known as ERF? Or will the shocker be that the other half of Billy’s family lives on the rival island—that fancy, upscale haven for billionaires? Harper’s twin sister, Tabitha, hasn’t set foot on Martha’s Vineyard in fourteen years, and Harper’s mother, Eleanor, hasn’t been here since her honeymoon, in 1968. Harper’s niece, Ainsley, has never been here. Billy had been sad about that; when he wanted to see Ainsley, he had to go to Nantucket, which he did, religiously, every August.
You sure you don’t want to come with me? he used to ask Harper.
I’m sure, Harper would say. Tabitha doesn’t want me there.
When will you girls learn? Billy would reply, and Harper would mouth along with him. Family is family.
Family is family, Harper thinks. That’s the problem.
Nothing back from Reed. Harper imagines him eating pie. Reed’s wife, Sadie, is famous for her pies; her mother used to have a stand along the side of the road, and Sadie has capitalized on that artisanal pie-making endeavor and turned it into a gold mine. She rents a small commercial kitchen and storefront in Vineyard Haven—it’s a scant mile from Harper’s duplex—and cranks out the pies: strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry-peach, lobster pot. A lobster pot pie costs forty-two dollars. Harper knows this because, near the end of his life, Billy Frost became a fan. One of his female admirers (and there were many) dropped off a lobster pot pie all warm and fragrant and filled with claw and knuckle meat in a thick sherry cream sauce under golden pastry, and Billy declared that he had died and, against all expectations, gone to heaven. When Billy got really bad but could still eat, Harper had felt it her duty to buy him a lobster pot pie. She had entered the shop—the Upper Crust—with trepidation, knowing she was most likely going to come face-to-face with her lover’s wife for the first time.
Harper was forearmed, but seeing Sadie had come as a shock. She was far shorter than Harper had expected; her head barely cleared the top of the pie case. Her hair was cut short like a boy’s, and her eyes bulged, giving her the expression of a cartoon character perpetually caught by surprise.
Sadie didn’t seem to have any idea who Harper was. She displayed no wariness, just a pleasant smile that revealed a gap between her two front teeth. Harper knew that some men found a gap like that sexy, although Harper never understood the attraction. If her own teeth had looked like that, she would have beat it straight to the orthodontist.
“Can I help you?” Sadie had asked.
“My father is dying,” Harper blurted out.
Sadie’s eyes popped a little more.
“He wants a lobster pot pie,” Harper said. “It’s the one thing he’s been asking for. Mrs. Tobias dropped one off last week for him, and he can’t stop talking about it.”
“Mrs. Tobias is an excellent customer,” Sadie said. She tilted her head. “Is your father Billy Frost, by any chance?”
“Yes,” Harper said. She felt like she was on a roller coaster, cresting, cresting…
“Mrs. Tobias told me he was sick. You know, he installed some light fixtures for me when I first opened this shop. He was the only electrician who was willing to do it. Everyone else said I had to call the contractor who had wired it back when it was a scented-candle place, but that guy had long ago gone to jail.”
“Buttons,” Harper said, almost involuntarily. Billy had absorbed much of Buttons Jones’s business when Buttons was indicted for tax evasion.
Sadie retrieved a lobster pot pie hot from the oven. For a second, Harper thought the pie would be free of charge, a gift for a man who had long ago done Sadie Zimmer a solid.
“That’ll be forty-two dollars,” Sadie said.
Harper has a hard time imagining Reed and Sadie together at home. She knows which house is theirs—it’s in West Tisbury, near the Field Gallery—but she’s never been inside. She can more easily imagine the Zimmers sitting side by side in the sand in front of the fire at Lambert’s Cove. Maybe Sadie has a beautiful singing voice, whereas Harper—although she loves to sing at the top of her lungs in the Rooster Express delivery truck—can’t carry a tune. It isn’t a competition, Harper knows, not in a column-of-pros-and-cons way. Love is a mystery.
One of Billy’s nurses, Dee, pokes her head into the room. “How you holding up?”
Harper tries to nod—Okay—but all she can do is stare. “I can’t reach Dr. Zimmer,” she says, then she worries that she has just given it all away. “I mean, I know he’s not on call, but I thought I should tell him. Billy was his favorite patient.”
Dee gives Harper an indulgent smile, and Harper nearly expects her to say that all Dr. Zimmer’s patients are his favorites; that is the wonder of Dr. Zimmer. Then Harper worries that Dee is waiting for her to vacate the room; after all, she is no longer a paying customer.
But instead Dee says, “You were good to him, Harper. In some ways, you’ll probably find this is a blessing.”
A blessing? Harper thinks angrily. She wants to tell Dee to go eat some more cake, but then she wonders if maybe Dee is right. For the past ten months, Harper’s entire existence has consisted of worrying that Billy was going to die. Now that he’s gone, she is, in a way, free. There is nothing else to worry about. But she is left with a heavy mantle of grief, sadness so intense and piercing it should have another name. Since her parents’ divorce, when she was seventeen, Billy has been “her” parent. He was her friend, her hero, her unfailing ally, her everyday companion. She could not have dreamed up a better father—and now he’s gone.
Gone.
Harper wipes away her tears, sucks in a sustaining breath, and says, like the brave soldier Billy believed her to be, “Onward.”
“Atta girl,” Dee says. “I’ll go fetch Billy’s things.”