“I’m Dick Davenport, the neighbor,” he says. “Would you be looking for Dr. Zimmer?”
Dick Davenport? she thinks. The name fits him perfectly: he’s half barbershop quartet, half 1970s porn star. “I would be,” she says, wishing she had paid attention at Winsor when they were learning about tense in English class. Would be is the conditional? Past conditional?
“He’s not home,” Dick says. “I took him to the ferry around lunchtime. I was just stopping by to drop off this Laphroaig as a thank you. Reed collected my newspapers while I was home in Atlanta.”
“Oh,” Harper says. Dick looks like he wants to hand her the Scotch. “You took him to the ferry? Was he going somewhere?”
“Yes,” Dick says. He gives Harper a conspicuous once-over. “You’re very, very pretty. You aren’t single by any chance, are you? I would love to take you to dinner. How about tonight? I happen to know the new reservationist at the Covington.”
Harper is completely blindsided. The neighbor of the house where Reed is hiding—or was hiding, as he has apparently left on the ferry for parts unknown—is asking her on a date. “Thank you, but I can’t. I’m having dinner with my sister tonight.”
“I’ll take you both out,” Dick says. “Is she as pretty as you?”
“Maybe another time,” Harper says. She takes a few steps backwards until she is an arm’s length away from the Bronco, and she watches as Dick sets the Scotch inside the screen door. She slips into the driver’s seat, doesn’t bother with the seat belt. She can’t get out of there fast enough.
Dick waves. Harper throws the car in reverse.
When she gets back to Billy’s house, Tabitha is sitting on one of the brand-new kitchen stools, drinking a glass of champagne. The bottle is on the counter next to her, and Harper blinks, thinking she’s seeing things. It’s Billecart-Salmon rosé, the same champagne that Harper brought to Nantucket fourteen years earlier, the champagne they drank together on the end of the dock while skimming their feet against the water’s surface. Does Tabitha realize this? Did she choose this champagne on purpose? She must have: very little escapes her sister. So is this a sign, then? Tabitha has forgiven Harper? She’s ready to move on? For real?
Harper is unconvinced.
“Get a glass from the cabinet,” Tabitha says. “I’ll pour you a teensy bit.”
“Did you find Franklin?” Harper asks.
“Called him, went straight to voice mail. Went to his house. His truck is there, but he’s not home. I peeked in the windows.”
“Reed is gone, too,” Harper says. “His neighbor said he drove him to the ferry but didn’t say where he was going.”
“When I saw your car pull in, I figured something like that,” Tabitha says.
Harper pulls a champagne flute from the new glass-front cabinets. The kitchen bears no resemblance to the unsanitary stinkhole it used to be. Harper sees that Tabitha bought new stemware from Tiffany—the champagne flute still has the blue-circle sticker on the base.
“These seem pretty fancy,” Harper says. “Are we going to make any profit after all this work?”
“Huge profit,” Tabitha says. “The glasses are for show. We’ll take them with us when we sell.”
Now that the house is such a showpiece, Harper doesn’t want to sell; she would like to live here herself in Billy’s new old house. But that isn’t the deal, and she can’t argue with the phrase huge profit.
Tabitha lifts the bottle and pours a token amount of champagne into Harper’s flute. She raises her own glass. “There’s a man still left in this house,” she says.
“There is?” Harper says. “Is Tad still here?”
“No,” Tabitha says. “Billy. His ashes are on the mantel. What do you say we give him a proper scattering?”
Billy, Harper thinks. She closes her eyes and sees her father in the hospital bed. How many hours did she spend playing spades with him on the little Formica table attached to his bed? Harper remembers all the way back… to the phone calls that used to come for her father in the middle of the night when they lived on Pinckney Street. Apparently there were emergencies in the city of Boston that only Billy Frost could fix: half the rooms at the Park Plaza had lost power; the walk-in fridge was on the fritz at Locke-Ober; there had been an electrical fire in the boiler room of the public library. Billy was the electrician of choice among Boston’s elite in those days. His career wasn’t as glamorous as Eleanor’s, but he had held his own. He was popular with union bosses and local politicians; nearly everywhere they went—Southie, Chinatown, Fenway—Billy bumped into someone who owed him a drink.
When Eleanor asked him for a divorce, he had been more resigned than angry, as if he’d figured that day would come sooner or later. And in many ways—most ways, even—he had been happier in his life on the Vineyard. Harper can see him on the beach at Cape Poge, patiently pulling the hooks from the mouths of every fish they caught, his motions competent and assured. Billy was a man who always knew what he was doing. She pictures him in his usual seat at the Lookout, turning to see her walk in, grinning, signaling the bartender, Sopp, and calling out, “A beer and a dozen Malpeques for my old lady, please!”
Harper tries to imagine Billy as a young man, setting eyes on Eleanor Roxie for the first time. They met at the Country Club in Brookline, at a Christmas party Eleanor’s parents threw every year. Billy had come to the party as the date of Eleanor’s first cousin, Rhonda Fiorello, but Eleanor didn’t care for Rhonda and had no qualms about stealing her date away. Eleanor was twenty-one, a senior at Pine Manor, and Billy, an older man at twenty-three, had done two years at UMass, Boston, in electrical engineering before switching to trade school. Harper had seen pictures of her parents in their beautiful youth, and she marvels that the attraction they felt for each other in 1967 had endured fifty years… if Eleanor was telling the truth about Billy sneaking over to her house in the middle of the night.
Harper has been so caught up in her own drama that she hasn’t been able to mourn Billy’s passing. She hadn’t planned on scattering Billy’s ashes at all, mostly because she couldn’t bear to do it alone. But now that Tabitha is here, the decision seems appropriate.
“Let’s do it,” Harper says. She and Tabitha touch glasses and drink.
Harper drives, because the Vineyard is still, technically, “her” island, and Billy was “her” parent.
“You knew him better than I did,” Tabitha says. “And I never knew him here. Where would he want his ashes to be scattered?”
Harper has been wondering the exact same thing. She decides that part of Billy should rejoin the land, and part of him should rejoin the water surrounding it. Part of him should stay with Harper, and part of him should go to Nantucket with Tabitha. It’s hard to know how to feel about the ashes. They aren’t Billy, but they aren’t nothing, either.
“We’ll scatter a quarter at the harbor in Oak Bluffs and a quarter at Farm Neck,” Harper says.