As Waters Gone By Page 7

  And he did it to himself.

  To the two of them.

  The soft sheets irritated her skin, as if woven with metallic threads. She reached for the ear plugs and turned off the bedside lamp.

  Moonlight glared through the window. She’d forgotten to pull the shade. In the early days, when he was still writing to her, Max complained about the light always burning in his unit, throwing his circadian rhythms off kilter.

  Emmalyn draped her forearm over her eyes. The moon shone on.

  6

  She’d neglected to pull the shade. And to set the alarm on her cell phone. An ooze of light woke her. She bolted upright and looked through the tall window at a cornflower sky and the back end of the ferry, halfway across the water to Bayfield.

  It would be close to an hour before the next ferry. And that would make her too rushed to get back before the roofing crew arrived. Shouldn’t the homeowner—maybe owner was a better word choice—be there while they worked? She would have kicked herself if her muscles hadn’t been in the mood to complain this morning.

  Now what? She guessed furniture hunting could safely wait another day or two. But paint? She needed to know what the island had to offer. A hardware store? The prices couldn’t be cheap. But she might be able to get started on the outside trimwork.

  She calculated more delays in moving from The Wild Iris to the cottage. “Cheaper by the week,” Boozie had said. After yesterday’s discoveries and today’s negligence, that might prove more important than she realized.

  Boozie Unfortunate. Someday she’d hear the story behind that most unfortunate of names.

  Emmalyn dressed and finger-combed her hair, then thumbed a note into her phone to pick up—yes, she’d sunk that low—a baseball cap. Weren’t there caps on the stepback cupboard of Madeline Island souvenirs near The Wild Iris cash register?

  Outside the door of Random Room 37 sat a rectangular thermal lunch bag. Inside was a breakfast burrito. Tucked into the outside mesh side pocket, bottled water. How long had the bag been sitting there? Maybe she could borrow The Wild Iris microwave one more time.

  When the plan you’re rushing toward is abandoned, nothing else seems worth hurrying for. Sounded like Boozie, but it came from her own thoughts. Didn’t it?

  She and Max had rushed toward a goal for five years of their nine-year marriage. Every month for five years. Then Max took all the hurry out of it.

  Armed with a hooded sweatshirt over her left arm and the straps of her purse and the thermal lunch bag in her right hand, she descended the stairs toward whatever the day would hold, into the yawning breach of uncertainty. First stop, the souvenir cupboard in the café.

  Perfect. A Wild Iris cap—sedate gray with all the bright colors in the iris emblem. She flipped the tag of The Wild Iris bibbed apron, just to check, but decided to wait until the only things getting it dirty were her cooking escapades in her renovated kitchen.

  One of the book club ladies manned the register, slow with the credit card machine, but rapid-fire with conversation.

  “Is Boozie here?” Emmalyn asked. “She made me breakfast. I wonder if I could heat it up in the micro—”

  “Island Time already grabbed you by the heart?” Boozie bounced into the dining room, a silver 1920s sheath skimming her thin form. A silk magnolia hair clip held back her lion mane. Black army boots grounded her. How could her steps be so light in those anchors?

  Emmalyn stuck her credit card back into her way-too-fancy-for-this-life purse, never mind that she’d gotten it B.C.—Before Crisis. “I thought Island Time was a phrase used in Jamaica or Hawaii.”

  “An island is an island, mon,” Boozie said, extending a plate toward her. “Wild raspberry scone?”

  She shook her head, then acquiesced. “If I weren’t putting in so much manual labor, I’d have to refuse the excess carbs, Boozie.”

  “Are you a beer drinker?”

  What? “No.”

  “Think how many calories you’re saving right there. Tea or coffee?” She nodded toward the window table, vacant since one of the book club ladies was behind the counter. You break up a set . . .

  Emmalyn reined in her thoughts. “Coffee. Please.”

  Boozie reached behind the book club lady, grabbed a Wild Iris mug from the shelf, and inked something on the bottom. She handed it to Emmalyn.

  M. That’s all. She’d written M with a permanent marker. Permanent.

  The Wild Iris manager/owner/cheerleader pointed toward the coffeemaker at the wait station. “Family. Help yourself.”

  Emmalyn dropped her purse and jacket in an empty chair at the window table and made her way to the coffee. “Oh, can I rewarm my—”

  “As if you’d have to ask.”

  She scooted past the cook and Pirate Joe, who mumbled, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue. Life and death are in the power of the tongue” as he wrapped cloth napkins around real eating utensils. Unmatched. But real.

  Less than a minute in the microwave and her meal steamed and stimulated Emmalyn’s sense of smell. Sausage and sage? And Stilton? Interesting breakfast combination. She patted a free hand against her middle. “Enjoy being flat while you can.”

  Pirate Joe’s eyebrows seemed to inch up his forehead. Usually a woman with her hand on her middle like that, uttering a phrase like that, meant something else entirely.

  This was not the time to explain how wrong he was.

  She grabbed a fork from the pile of clean cutlery on the counter in front of Pirate Joe. “Eating like this . . . ” No, that was wrong. “The Wild Iris feeds its customers well. Too well.” Ugh. That would have to do.

  “Here,” Pirate Joe said, tossing her an orange, which she caught against her chest. “Just got these in. Vitamins and fiber and all.”

  She exited the kitchen before she got entangled in a conversation about the importance of fiber.

  “So,” Boozie started, “I don’t know if we mentioned that the ferry is spot-on punctual.”

  “I see that.” Emmalyn peeled the orange, starting the first cut with her thumbnail. Max insisted on using the tip of a spoon, but Emmalyn loved the way the orange fragrance lingered on her hands.

  “Are you going to make the next ferry?”

  “Probably not.”

  “And you’re okay with that? Weren’t you going furniture shopping?”

  “And paint.” Emmalyn took her first bite of the inventive burrito. “This is a crepe!” What had looked like a fast food breakfast turned out to be delicate and beautifully balanced in taste and texture. She could feel a food-swoon coming on.

  “Paint, we can help you with. Unless you’re thinking exotic colors.”

  Emmalyn glanced at the décor. Orchid. Lime. Paprika. Cornflower blue. “White. I was thinking white. Lots of it.”

  “Eggshell finish?”

  “Eggshell would be great.”

  “How many gallons?” Boozie’s thumbs flew through a text to some unknown underground white paint supplier.

  “Five?”

  Boozie’s thumbs paused. Her eyes widened. “Big cottage?”

  “Small cottage. Big problems.”

  “Is your car locked?”

  “What? Yes.”

  “Really?” Boozie scrunched her nose.

  “Force of habit.” Like always knowing where she was in her cycle. Like checking for bargains on pregnancy tests she’d never use now. Like keeping her mental file of clever but easy-to-spell baby names updated. Alphabetically and by gender.

  Boozie focused on the text. “Done,” she announced. “Five gallons of white interior eggshell paint will be sitting behind your car in The Wild Iris lot in ten minutes.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Find things people need?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I listen.” She giggled. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m more proficient at talking than listening, right? All a ruse to cover my mad eavesdropping skills.”

  Emmalyn’s smile burbled fr
om deep inside. Nothing had seemed funny for so long. So very long.

  “What else do you need?” Boozie asked.

  She swallowed another bite of the savory crepe. “I need to start looking for furniture. It’ll be a while before the cottage is ready for it, but sooner or later I’ll have to find a bed, a small couch, some chairs, lamp tables, lamps, a couple of dressers . . . ” She pulled the list from her pocket. “Oh, and some porch furniture.”

  “Was anything salvageable?”

  Her wedding ring tightened like a steel band. The stone—still sparkling somehow—felt heavier than normal. Not larger, just heavier. Yes, she could have answered. Our first three years of marriage. Maybe four. Even after we shifted gears and started pursuing having children, fighting for it, battling against medical realities. The first years’ worth of memories are worth preserving.

  “The bed frame?” Boozie’s voice sounded as if it originated across the lake, not right across the table.

  No. After a while, even the bed had become a place of desperation.

  “You’d need a new mattress, of course. I’d recommend Ashland or Duluth. I know good places in both towns. More selection in Duluth. That goes without saying.”

  “The cottage had a mattress on the floor.”

  “Ohhh.” Boozie drew out the word as if imagining the laziest of vermin who wouldn’t even have had to scale those pesky bed frame legs.

  “I got rid of all the old furniture. Someone came by and traded me firewood for it.”

  Boozie leaned back, grinning, as if proud of her strange little community. “What a blessing.”

  “Yes.” Another rusty word: blessing.

  The morning crowd filtered in and out of The Wild Iris. Boozie acknowledged some with a nod, others with a hug. She directed traffic and answered managerial questions and shook her head as she acknowledged the clunk of the cookie jar lid twice in succession. Turning back to Emmalyn, she said, “Other than the bed, how new does this furniture need to be?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  Boozie leaned toward two older gentlemen trading barbs as they guzzled coffee and argued over the date of the first measurable accumulation of snow for the upcoming season. Emmalyn hoped they were both wrong.

  “Stockton, did your mom ever sell off her trailer?”

  Oh, Boozie. Please. A trailer?

  “Still killin’ the grass in my backyard. Mothers,” he muttered.

  In her mind, Emmalyn crossed the room, grabbed the gentleman by his earlobe, and insisted, “You take that back.” The man looked to be in his late seventies or early eighties. His mother was still alive? And they still bickered?

  Reminder. Her mother and sisters deserved a phone call. One of these days.

  “Tell M what you have available for sale. Anything she could use at her cottage? Nice stuff, Stockton. Nothing with antlers. Nothing mauve, either. Do you think your mom would part with some of it?”

  “Might be. She’s planting bulbs this morning.”

  Planting bulbs. At a hundred and thirty years old, give or take. Emmalyn’s stiff, barely forty-year-old limbs mocked her.

  “Let me know when you’re done there,” Stockton said. “You can follow me out.”

  Emmalyn turned to Boozie, who by this time had stood and began clearing their table, her sequined sheath catching the light streaming through the front window. “And the nearest Ikea is . . . ?”

  “Farther than you want to drive,” Boozie countered, “and more than you want to spend.”

  “Guess I’m going Dumpster diving, then.” Emmalyn glanced up at Boozie. No reaction. The clatter of dishes had covered her comment. Good.

  * * *

  Stockton’s mom spent her retirement years buying and selling antiques. Her trailer—an eighteen-wheeler kind of trailer—bulged with possibilities. For a brief moment in the trailer, picking through iron bedsteads and wicker rockers, Emmalyn felt a surge of anticipation long dormant. She could envision something—the cottage reborn. A comfortable place, worn enough around the edges to respect its history, with a story behind each nail, each warped floorboard, every piece of furniture.

  If the island had a full newsstand, she would have picked up a copy of Cottages magazine on the way from the treasure hunt to her place. Her place. The one she saw in her mind’s eye. Not the one with a hole in its roof and more mouse evidence than charm.

  Dreaming, anticipating, planning.

  As quickly as that wave hit the shoreline of her heart, it receded, carrying little bits of hope out to sea. Anticipating what? Creating a cute, cozy place in which to be miserable about how it had all turned out? Pretending hope still existed for Max to want what she wanted? And what was that? What dream did she dare entertain now, with Max’s sentence almost over and no resolution to whether he’d put their marriage on hold or put it out of his mind? The dream of children? Too late for that.

  Two small bedrooms upstairs. All that had happened, all that had turned from improbable to impossible, and her first thought on seeing the smaller of the bedrooms was where she could put the crib.

  Or that the wicker dresser would make a sweet changing table, the dresser she’d told Stockton and his mom to add to her tab. It would be delivered along with the rest of the furniture she’d purchased as soon as she was ready for it.

  So, good goal—start thinking clearly before the paint dries.

  * * *

  Out of habit, she checked her face in the rearview mirror before exiting the Prius that she’d parked in back of Cora’s truck. Sun filtering through the pines and birch trees that hugged the backside of the cottage mottled her appearance. She hadn’t aged that much in the past five years, had she? Emmalyn dug in her purse for her lip gloss before catching herself. She’d crammed a baseball cap on her head, was about to pull work gloves over her scuffed manicure. Lipstick wouldn’t have its traditional impact.

  She grabbed the Wild Iris pottery mug from the car’s cup holder—“Just bring it back later,” Boozie had said—and made her way to the front of the cottage. So few clouds marred the sky, she could have counted them. The great lake showed its aggressive side, flicking an occasional whitecapped wave to remind the world how tough it could be when riled.

  “Breathe deep.”

  Emmalyn flinched. God didn’t sound like that, did He? That sounded more like . . .

  “Some people take shallow breaths when the wind’s blowing,” Cora added from her rooftop perch, one hand on the chimney while she gestured with the other as if a Lamaze coach. “But if you breathe deep when the winds are strong, your lungs fill even faster, I say.”

  Emmalyn turned to face the water again and hide her amusement at her roofer’s homegrown philosophies. Breathe deep when the . . .

  . . . when the winds are strong.

  “Wait there,” Cora said. “I’ll be right down. We need to talk. Privately.”

  Emmalyn closed her eyes. If she focused, she could feel the skin of her face warming, pore by pore. Despite the brightness making her eyelids mere shades, she relaxed her facial muscles. The wind stirred the scent of water, rocks, fish, pine, sun-baked leaves. She drew a breath and forced her lungs to expand farther than she thought they could, then exhaled. Again. Autumn in the upper Midwest. Almost an apple tartness to the air.

  A sharp sound like a baby’s brief cry stirred her. It came from a long-legged bird skittering along the shoreline as if the sand and rocks were on fire. It dipped its beak into the spaces between rocks, then hurried on without giving away whether it had found what it was looking for or come up disappointed. It danced far down the shore by the time Cora joined her.

  “Have you walked this beach yet?” Emmalyn asked her.

  “Been kind of busy.” She brushed sawdust from the knees of her jeans.

  “Want to talk as we walk? Or do you need to show me something with the roof?”

  “Let me tell my guys where I’ll be. They’re good to go for a while.”

  Emmalyn started toward the
water, picking her path through the tufts of sea grass and down the small embankment of sand. Those used to living on the water probably had a name for that. Erosion had eaten away chunks of the sand bank in front of the cottage. As she looked farther down the shore, she saw the sand swallowed by rock cliffs with trees jutting over the water and pines playing “I can lean farther than you can without getting wet.”

  She waited for Cora’s crunching footfalls to catch up to her.

  “You’re one blessed woman to have this for your wake-up view every morning.”

  Emmalyn considered Cora’s assessment. Blessed kept showing up in conversation. One of these days, she’d have to take it seriously. “It’s a captivating view. No doubt about that. Do you live in LaPointe itself or . . . ?”

  “We’ve got an old farmstead. Inland. Although on an island only three miles wide, you’re never far from a view.”

  They walked side by side at a pace that gave snails an advantage.

  “What did you need to talk to me about, Cora?”

  “I have a painter for you. He does real nice work. And I happen to know he could use the income right now. But he’s . . . ”

  “What? Expensive?”

  “On parole. He needs someone to give him a chance. I didn’t think it would be right if you didn’t know that much, so you can decide if you’re his chance.”

  The wet sand turned to small stones. Emmalyn bent to pick one that startled her with how different it was from the rest.

  “Let me see that,” Cora said, holding out her palm. “Could be you have an agate there. Nice find.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Nick’s a brilliant young man. Sharp mind. If he gets his feet underneath him . . . ”

  “I’ll be alone out here most of the time, Cora. Don’t you think I should know the reason he’s on probation?” The irony poked at her eardrum with a toothpick.

  “Parole. A little different from probation. And it was what some call creative bookkeeping.”

  “Theft? Wait. Embezzling? How old is he?”

  Cora’s steps slowed further. “Nineteen. His uncle runs one of the kayak businesses for the Apostle Islands. Nick has kept the books for him since he was sixteen. Prepared his taxes. Smart kid.” Cora snagged a stone shaped like a fat L and underhand tossed it to Emmalyn. “I don’t know if it was the risk that appealed to him or if he thought he wasn’t getting paid enough. Never heard the whole story.”