Josie and I had grown close over the years we worked together. She had four boys and often said, with her formidable stature—she’d been captain of the volleyball team in college—and penchant for chaos that a house full of boys suited her just fine. But after too much wine one night, she’d admitted she and Cal had tried for a fifth, and she’d miscarried. And now they were done trying. Four children, all healthy, was more luck than she could ask for, she’d said, with a wistfulness in her voice. When she’d excused herself to the bathroom, her eyes were wet as she left the table.
I knew they’d been trying for a girl. I saw the way she ran her fingers absentmindedly through Kat’s hair when she stood near her. She brought the girls gifts when she visited the house: hairbrushes with their names written on them, tiny barrettes Kat would let Josie put in her hair (forget it if I tried). She’d taken pleasure in buying clothes for Maddie, and I knew when we lost her, Josie felt as if she’d lost one of her own. And I knew our friendship blurred the lines when it came to my job.
I said this to her on the phone, admitted I felt guilty, and told her I would understand if she wanted to ask someone else to write the column. But she’d refused. Our readers don’t want someone else, she’d said. Our readers want you.
I didn’t argue with her. I wanted to write the column. I hadn’t wanted to stop writing the column. But the words wouldn’t come. I’d sit at my desk, the screen blank and the cursor blinking at me. Sometimes, I’d sit for ten minutes before I gave up. Other days, hours. In the back of my mind all those voices rising up. Who are you to write a parenting column?
What sort of mother doesn’t notice a necklace in her daughter’s crib? What kind of mother doesn’t know her child is choking twenty-two feet away from her?
I’d written the first column years ago after Josie and I went to lunch and I told her how, the night before, Jess had lost her tooth. Kat had been up teething all night. I’d spent the night rocking her in the chair, and when I woke up, morning had come but the tooth fairy hadn’t. I had only stray change in my purse, and when I tiptoed into Jess’s room to leave the money under her pillow, the coins clanged as they slid from my hand to her mattress. Jess opened her eyes, and even though my hand was already out from the pillow, I saw she heard them fall from my hand. I saw she knew what it meant too.
I told Josie, in that moment, I felt like a failure. How there was an awful sinking I’m the worst mother in the world feeling.
I told Josie I wanted a do-over. Josie laughed, and said, Honey, don’t we all. Then she said maybe our readers would connect to something like that. So I went back to my desk and wrote my first column.
I wrote about how you can love your child with something that surpasses logic and reason and words, and you can still screw up. Even with the best intentions and loftiest goals, sometimes, as a parent, you fail. I wrote how so many of these moments stare back at you and say, See, you were told being a parent would be harder than you imagined, the hardest job in the world, and you didn’t believe it.
Did you?
?3
Jack
The spare key to the truck had wedged itself between the pages of the Ford manual. I emptied the glove box onto the front seat, swearing at the hair bands that were tangled with the bungee cords coiled in a tight circle. Now that Jess had her license, I let her take the truck once in a while. Between the clothes on the backseat and the flip-flops strewn on the floor, it looked like she’d moved into the old truck.
I thought about stretching out on the backseat and letting Hope calm down before I went back in the house. But after twenty years together, I knew to keep away from her until she cooled off. The boat wasn’t great for sleeping, but it’d do for the night.
The drive to the dock was less than a mile if you stuck to Main Street, but I took the road by the water. The one I drove six mornings a week, before the sun came up, to Hope Ann, my lobster boat—and home away from home.
Hope used to call it that, with a smile. Now she called our house my other home. She’d call me on my cell to ask if I’d be home for dinner. You know, your other home, she’d say, and I’d hear her frown through the phone.
The light in the center of town blinked yellow. I slowed, turned into the lot, and parked in front of the shop in the space marked Down East Lobster—the only space open even at this time of night because of the Wharf Rat, the local bar on the harbor. Boon had put up the sign last summer one morning after he’d circled the waterfront for more than an hour and ended up in a parking spot in the goddamn next fucking town. Quinton Boonalis was sweet and good-natured, Hope liked to say, until he wasn’t. I thought the sign was foolish, with the town dead for almost nine months out of the year. But Boon had never gotten used to the changes in our hometown. As kids growing up in Alden, the town seemed to have sprouted up from the water. Evergreen-dotted cliffs shot straight up out of the Atlantic, and the lowlying roads near the mouth of the bay sat underwater in the highest of tides, as if the surrounding water was intent on reclaiming what had been rightfully hers.
Now, some thirty-odd years later, the influx of visitors and summer people had changed the geography of Alden, with new bridges connecting the once-submerged roads to make access possible to houses perched high on pilings.
As much as Boon complained about the changes in Alden, we both knew the summer folk were good for business. And business was what mattered to Boon.
When we started Down East Lobster Supply, I’d fish and Boon would sell. Now I still fished, but we had a handful of guys from Alden who sold their catch to us. We sold some of our lobster out of the shop, or to local restaurants. But it was our shipping business that allowed us to keep our price per pound competitive. The Freshest Lobster in Maine Delivered Straight to Your Kitchen was how we grew from some kids just out of high school hauling traps to lobster dealers.
Not that we were rolling in it. But it was a living. A tough one at times, with long hours and hard work.
And some years were not worth thinking about. When the recession plowed in the summer of 2008, lobster prices dropped below the price of ground beef. Record harvests glutted the market. Too many lobsters, not enough buyers.
That was two years ago, and some of the guys were still having a tough time of it. Hank Bitts had fired his stern man and brought his wife aboard in his place. One less man to pay.
They were loyal, our guys. Mostly because of Boon. Last I’d looked in the books, we had five hundred out to Tom Clover, whose engine had shit the bed at the beginning of the season, two-fifty out to Hank Bitts for a root canal for his wife, and almost a thousand out to Stan Grady, who was waist deep in legal bills after his wife caught him almost as deep into Dawn Milney, the busty hygienist from Village Dental.