“That’s a sweet thought. I appreciate it.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“Let me go home and give it all time. You know how I am, Kit. I work things out in my own good time. It’s like rehearsing a piece. Takes me a while to get it right. A lot of that work I have to do alone.”
Her voice is at the foot of the stairs when she says, “Good night, Kitten.”
“Night, Mom.”
Fenno hears Daphne climb the stairs, run water in the bathroom, and then he hears the creaking of the ladder to the alcove where the children are sleeping.
Sun floods the house, adamantly, staking a claim. This time, Fenno is the first one up. He goes straight to the kitchen and, before filling the kettle, looks outside. The tree hasn’t budged, though the wind continues to agitate its boughs. Fenno will call the police department; something must be done to avert its inevitable fall. But first, tea. And, for the others, coffee.
He uncovers Felicity’s cage and ferries her to his shoulder. She nudges his neck with her beak, mutters in his ear what Walter calls her cranky nothings.
After emptying the dishwasher, he lines up cereal boxes, counts out bowls and spoons. Or did Walter promise pancakes? He is checking on ingredients when Lucinda’s greeting startles him. Felicity utters a sharp scold.
“Hello, you empress, you,” Lucinda says to the parrot, but her hands are at her sides. She hasn’t asked to hold or even touch her son’s bird; no doubt she remembers the rivalrous nips Felicity gave to anyone venturing too close to Mal.
“Heavens, you’re looking snappy,” says Fenno. While he’s thrown a feed bag of a jumper over flannel bottoms, Lucinda is dressed for the outside world, in a cotton dress with sandals. She wears lipstick and pearl earrings.
“Can I ask you,” she says, “if there’s a Catholic church in town?”
“Goodness.” Certainly he’s seen churches, but, heathen that he is, Fenno hasn’t noticed their denominational flavors. “Consult the telephone book?”
“Never mind. There are whole weeks these days when I go without Mass. I just wondered. Habit.” She sits at the table. “Speaking of which, I’d love a cup of that tea.”
While he’s filling a second mug, she says, “You’ll be glad when this weekend’s over.”
He carries their tea to the table. “Mostly I’m glad the storm is over.”
“Walter tells me you’ve closed your shop. I’m so sorry. It was such a wonderful place … just to be. So tranquil.”
“Yes,” he says. “ ’Twas.” He recalls the many times he and Lucinda sat together like this, over tea, in Mal’s kitchen while Mal slept in his bedroom. There was a period of two or three months, at the very end, when Lucinda and Fenno overlapped a good deal—and Mal slept a good deal. They would speak surprisingly little about Mal, less about his illness. Fenno remembers how easy it was, after a time, to be silent along with Lucinda, as they are now. They sip carefully, faces down, letting the steam penetrate their skin.
He appreciates, too, that she doesn’t ask him if he’ll be “all right.” (What if he said, to the many people who make such inquiries, that he just might not?) She doesn’t make him spume forth a righteous indictment of Amazon or rehash the benighted state of book publishing or bemoan the growing disliteracy of humankind. And that’s the silver lining of closing the shop: he doesn’t have to natter on about such dismaying topics, day after day, with the customers who do still care about saving books or those who simply don’t want the world as they know it to change in any way.
He’s lucky. Walter, who claims to be wallowing in “a windfall of high-cholesterol-saturated cash and we are not talking the good kind,” has lately insisted on paying their entire rent (which, he points out, he paid on his own before Fenno moved in). Even if they were to split up, Fenno’s inheritance—invested with minimal risk—will keep him afloat, if he’s frugal, for another two decades. In a pinch, he could return to Scotland. (He has imagined becoming a bookseller in Dumfries, his hometown. The thought is not inspiring.)
“I think I’ll do a little exploring,” Lucinda says, startling him. “Head downtown and see what I find. Maybe I’ll come back with something rich and naughty. A coffee cake?”
“Well, no one here will object to that. But just so you know, nothing’s likely to open for another hour or so.”
She nods. “Though I already spoke to Zeke. He’s returned to his habit of waking at dawn. I think he’s proud of that. He says he sometimes wakes up dreaming that he’s left the cows waiting too long. He hasn’t milked a cow in over forty years. Fifty. He jokes that it’s time to start a new herd. Just a few heifers. Now that he’s retired from politics for good.” Seeing Fenno’s concerned look, she smiles and says, “I’m just thankful he’s all here.” She touches her right forefinger to her temple. “I never stopped to think how fast that could go. If he has another stroke …”
“Don’t think about that.”
“Why not, Fenno? I wasn’t the least bit prepared when this happened. I just want … well, I don’t know. I got my wish, about Kit. And it’s funny that that’s how I think about it. A wish granted. Not a prayer answered. What does that say about me?”
“That you have a complicated relationship with God.” What he won’t venture is that perhaps she sees God for the phantom that He is.
“You can say that again.”
“Say what again?” Kit joins them. “Are my children really still in bed?”
“Unless they’ve run away,” says Fenno.
Lucinda gazes happily at Kit, as if they are lovers who just spent their first night together. “The sea air will do that to children.”
“Make them run away?” says Kit. He sits beside her.
She puts a hand on his. “Make them sleep the sleep of the enchanted.”
“Me,” says Kit, “it just makes me hungry.”
She goes to the refrigerator and pulls out a loaf of bread. “Toast? I’m going to have a little something and go for a walk before everyone else is up.”
“Absolutely,” says Kit. “Toast for me.”
Fenno says that he’s going to lie down again, that all the talk of sea air and sleep has him wondering why on earth he’s not still in bed. He wants, of course, to leave them alone with each other. The smell of toast, as he leaves the kitchen, makes him hungry, but once he’s upstairs, the prospect of their host’s deluxe sheets, warmed by Walter’s body on this brilliant, chilly August morning, makes him glad that things, however imperfect, are exactly as they are: the house and the town still standing; the children sound asleep; Lucinda in the kitchen with the human form of her wish fulfilled; Walter, face creased, lips chapped, hair damp, making space for Fenno in their borrowed bed.
——
An hour later, Fenno and Walter wake together, to the sounds, directly beneath them, of children exulting while adults try vainly to quiet them down. What makes Fenno sit up is the sound of a car door closing in front of the house.
“Uh-oh,” says Walter. “Here comes the surprise contestant in our reality show, Look Who’s Coming to Carnival. It’s Kit’s long-lost transgendered twin, stolen from the maternity ward by a Mormon missionary who converted to Islam. She’s dressed as the Angela Lansbury teapot in Beauty and the Beast.”
“Stop. Please,” Fenno says. Looking out the window, he sees Daphne standing beside her car with Kit.
He hurries into his clothes and goes downstairs. Daphne and Kit are coming in the front door.
“You’re not leaving us just yet?” he says.
“Not without saying good-bye—and thank you,” says Daphne. “I was just organizing the car. I wouldn’t miss Kit’s blueberry pancakes.”
“Did I hear the word blueberry followed by the sacred password pancakes?” Walter, calling down from the bedroom.
Kit is at the cooker. It seems to Fenno as if they’ve done little other than eat for the past two days. But he will eat pancakes—greedily, too. Kit asks Fenno to make another pot of coffee.
&nb
sp; Walter comes into the kitchen rubbing his hands. Fenno sees him make yet another stop at the back door and remembers that he meant to call the police—though somehow the tree seems a great deal less ominous in the placid daylight. As Walter passes Fenno, he murmurs, “We should have brought in those cushions. They are going to take days to dry out.”
Orange juice, syrup, milk, butter; glasses, forks, a bowl of sugar. Quickly, efficiently, Walter helps Fanny and Will lay the table for another meal.
“Did Lucinda go out for her walk?” Fenno asks Kit.
“She told me not to wait breakfast. She mentioned a Portuguese bakery she saw when you walked her from the ferry. She wanted to find it again.”
“If I miss her,” says Daphne, “tell her I’m sorry. The traffic’s going to be something else. All the people who would have been traveling yesterday traveling today.”
Kit stacks pancakes on plate after plate.
“I’m thinking,” says Walter, “we could find a decent museum today.”
“What museum?” says Fenno.
“Wherever there are rich people, there are museums,” says Walter. “They like having wings named after them, rooms full of art. I’ll go online. But no way am I playing another game. I think I got in my lifetime ration of Uno.”
“I saw Monopoly,” says Will. “We never played that.”
“I hate Monopoly,” says Fanny. “It’s all about money.”
As at times is life, Fenno does not tell her. Money and real estate.
“No games for Didi,” says Daphne, taking her plate from Kit and sitting beside her granddaughter.
They eat noisily and gratefully, all of them. Walter tells Kit that his pancakes are better than the ones served at his own restaurant. Fenno wonders if the Sunday Times will be available at the corner market or whether the storm has knocked out delivery. Daphne tells her grandchildren that when they next come to visit her in Vermont, there will be a puppy to visit as well. She and Bart have decided it’s time to get a dog. She meant to keep it a secret, but she simply can’t. Their responses come loudly, rapid-fire. What kind? Boy or girl? How old? They turn to their father. Why can’t they get a puppy, one that will be a friend to Didi’s puppy?
“William! Frances!” Kit puts a finger to his lips.
Walter laughs after a moment of silence. “Dogs are the best, aren’t they? I think it’s time for a new dog in my life, too.” He looks at Fenno. “Our life.”
“Before everyone makes dog plans,” says Daphne, “I really have to run. I’m sorry. But I forgot to give you something.” She goes into the living room and returns with the bag Fenno carried from her car two days before, the one festooned with ribbon. She hands it to Walter. “Just to say thank you.”
“Completely unnecessary, but who doesn’t love presents?” He holds the bag in his lap and reaches inside.
“I wish I could say that I made it, but I’m not the crafty type,” she says. “Never had time for things like knitting and quilting. I don’t know how anyone does.”
Walter pulls something white from the bag, a fabric something, peppered with black squiggles. He murmurs appreciatively. “Delicious.” He holds it against his cheek. “A blanket. Feel this,” he says to Fenno.
Fenno is standing, about to offer tea. He sets down the pot and takes the blanket. It’s exquisitely, expensively soft: white cashmere patterned with a design that becomes, as Fenno unfolds it, careful to keep it away from the table, a musical score. “How lovely. How unusual. Is it … actual music?”
“Mozart,” says Daphne. “A Little Night Music. Corny, I know. It’s not the piece that matters. I just love the idea of wrapping oneself in music on a cold night. Silly not to think of it last night, when we were huddled by the fire.”
It’s a generous house gift, surely more expensive than several bottles of decent wine. Fenno wonders if there is an element of guilt in her extravagance, a hint of what she knew she would not be able to give. It also reminds him of the gift that he’s brought from New York for Kit—which he will present to him, tactfully, once his mother has left; also, once Lucinda returns.
Wind rattles the windows. Sunlight swells and dims repeatedly as a few tattered clouds fly north, stragglers orphaned by the mother storm.
“Now,” says Daphne, “it really is time to say my good-byes.”
The rest of them follow her out to her car. Kit looks as if he wants to say something to her, but he is silent.
“Can we help name the dog?” Fanny asks her grandmother.
“I’ll certainly consult you both,” says Daphne. She holds the twins against her, an arm around each. “Oh, Will, not long and you’ll be taller than me.”
Walter tells her how to get back to Route 6. Kit hugs her, closes her door after she’s fastened her seat belt, and tells her to drive safely. He directs her as she backs the car through the gap in the hedgerow; the tourists have emerged from hiding and are once again wandering the town in hapless droves.
“Do you like books?” Walter says to the children. “I mean, lots of books? Books galore?”
“Yes,” says Fanny. “Definitely.”
“Some books are okay. Books about wars and presidents,” says Will.
“So I found out,” Walter says, “that there’s a giant library sale in Wellfleet, which isn’t far away. I say we head down there, check it out, have lunch at this great sandwich shop, then come back and find out if we still have a beach.”
“Where would the beach go?” asks Fanny, worried.
“That was a joke,” says Walter. “Although interesting things will have washed up, that’s for sure. Lots more of those stones you love, I bet.”
“What kind of sandwiches?” Will asks.
“Just about every kind you can think of. Plus pizza.”
This sells Will on the notion of a book sale.
Kit wanders back from the street. “I wish she’d waited.”
Fenno wants to tell Kit that she was generous enough, to remind him how hard it must be to share a grown child with a grandmother who shows up like some sort of religious apparition—and then, unlike an apparition, sticks around.
But where is that grandmother?
“What time did she depart on her adventure?” asks Fenno.
“An hour and a half ago. Maybe two.”
“Perhaps she found a church after all.”
“How about,” says Walter, “Fanny, Will, and I strike out on our own adventure while you two clean up the kitchen. How many times have we cleaned up that kitchen? I’m leaning toward paper plates from now on, however eco-hostile and déclassé.”
Kit hesitates. “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely,” says Walter. “And I need to get out of here. Does anybody else have a virulent case of cabin fever?”
Kit takes the children inside to apply sunscreen and use the bathroom. He gives them the parental homily on Walter’s absolute authority and then makes sure they buckle their seat belts in the back of Walter and Fenno’s rental car.
“Modern parenting,” Kit says to Fenno as they wave the expedition off, “emphasizes just what a servant you are to your kids. On the other hand, having them captive in a backseat means you can have the squeamish talks without eye contact. Helps with the birds and the bees.”
They stand in the sun for a moment, and then Kit begins to pick up the larger stray branches that blew down from trees surrounding the lawn. Random objects have snagged in the privet: a sodden ice-lolly carton, a length of yellow plastic cord, and a silvery plastic tiara that winks, just out of reach, at the very top. Fenno finds a rake in the shed and uses it to pry the tiara free.
The Sunday paper makes it, a few hours late, to the local sundries shop. On the front page is the usual almost-hurricane photo: Times Square emptied of its customary crowds, lashed with rain, littered with crippled umbrellas, its wet pavements a canvas for all that showgirl neon. Fenno and Kit sit at the picnic table, swapping sections. (They favor the same ones: art over sports, books over nuptia
ls, political opinion over breaking news.) At noon, there is still no sign of Lucinda. Surely no church service, even the most liturgically tedious High Mass, would last so long in Provincetown.
Fenno realizes that the number of her mobile is programmed into his own. Walter, the professional host, insisted that they record all their guests’ numbers on both of their phones. So Fenno goes upstairs and fetches his mobile from the chest of drawers. When he rings Lucinda, he becomes aware that the ringtone in his ear is echoing from somewhere below.
He hurries down to locate the gadget before it segues to voice mail. In the small den where Lucinda is staying, it rests on a shelf next to her return ferry ticket and a pair of reading specs.
“Bloody hell, she’s just like me,” he says to Kit when he goes back outside. “She left her phone behind. Walter’s always scolding me when he tries to ring me at the grocery and hears his call going through to our bedroom.”
Is this like Lucinda, to wander off for hours? Neither of them knows her well enough. (Supposing she jumped on one of those whale-watch voyages he’d seen her reading about, forgetting she couldn’t ring them—not even having the number of the house where they’re staying?)
When Walter answers, the ambient rumpus makes it clear he’s at the sandwich shop. “We bought half the library! Nancy Drews, Lightning Thieves, Calvins and Hobbeses, and everything under the sun about Abraham Lincoln and World War Two! Plus I got an amazing Cajun cookbook from the nineteen-fifties! Pre-Emeril!” he shouts. “And here we are eating again!”
“Lucinda’s not back yet.”
Walter can’t hear him.
Fenno raises his voice and repeats himself.
“Call her!”
“She didn’t take her phone.”
“Maybe she found her Prince Charming!”
“That is not amusing, Walter.”
“Yes! The pastrami and the veggie wrap—here! Fenno? I can’t talk now—sorry! Pandemonium rules!”
Fenno shouts at Walter to call back when they leave the restaurant—though what can Walter do?
He says to Kit, “You don’t suppose we ring the police at this point.”