The Line Tender

by Kate Allen

  I nodded.

  “It’s good to see you out and about.” He poured a glass of poop-brown water from a Tupperware pitcher and handed it to me. “Here. You’re sweating like a pig.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Lipton iced tea. Sweet but no longer cold. “Do I smell like fish?”

  “Like what?”

  “Fish. I was working with Sookie.”

  Mr. Patterson raised his eyebrows. “How did that go?”

  “Okay, I think.” I took a sip of tea. “Did you know Sookie was going to help my mom with a research project?”

  Mr. P shook his head.

  “Yeah. She was gonna tag great white sharks,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure it out, but I think I need to go to grad school first.”

  “No, you’re smart,” he said. “You’ll make sense of it. What did Sookie have to say about it?”

  “Not much,” I said. “There was this other guy, Vern Devine. His name is on the front of the proposal.”

  “Why don’t you call him?” Mr. Patterson asked.

  “What?” I asked. “No. He lives in Maine and besides, I guess he’s really old.”

  Mr. Patterson looked at me in disbelief.

  “Sorry. That’s not what I meant,” I said.

  Mr. Patterson took another sip of tea. “I haven’t been to Maine in a long time. Bea and I used to spend a couple of weeks of the summer in South Freeport. I like Maine. All of those pine trees and islands. Not so many people up there.”

  Mr. Patterson brought the hot iced tea to his lips, his long, liver-spotted fingers gripping the glass. He wore a chunky gold ring and kept neatly trimmed nails. I wondered if it helped his French horn playing to have such long fingers, like a pianist. He cleared his throat and started again.

  “We used to take a boat—barely seaworthy—out to French’s Island, sit on the beach, and drink Moxie.”

  I pictured Mr. Patterson and his wife on a scratchy wool blanket at the edge of the tide. At first I imagined them in their seventies and then I guessed what they looked like in their twenties. I put Mr. Patterson in a pair of white shorts with skinny white legs sticking out and I gave Mrs. Patterson a big sunhat and a bathing suit, imagining Moxie bottles in the sand.

  “That stuff tastes awful,” I said.

  “We thought it tasted pretty darn good.” He looked at his glass before putting it on the wooden table. “Whole lot better than this weasel piss.”

  “This stuff is terrible,” I said, parking the glass on the porch floor. “Do you miss Mrs. Patterson?” I asked. It was a dumb question, but I wanted to hear him talk about her more.

  He didn’t answer directly. “My wife—no matter where we went—she wore red lipstick as bright as a stoplight. I always wanted to kiss her, but I knew I’d get that junk all over my face.” He clasped his hands over his stomach. “Most of the time I did it anyway.”

  He must have read my mind because he said, “You think I always looked like this?”

  I gave him the palms-up gesture. Maybe.

  “When I look in the mirror, I think, ‘Who is that old man?’ I still feel like I’m nineteen years old. Honest.”

  I didn’t know any nineteen-year-olds who sat on the porch all day and listened to a police scanner. But I liked the idea.

  “I remember things from decades ago better than the stuff that happened last week. I remember when Stuffy McInnis from Gloucester was traded to the Red Sox in 1917. Played with Babe Ruth in the 1918 World Series. Before the Curse. What a fielder!”

  “Who’s Stuffy McInnis?”

  He threw his hands in the air. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Lucy! He was part of the hundred-grand infield—Eddie Collins, Frank Baker, Jack Barry. But that was before his stint with the Sox.”

  “One hundred thousand dollars between four guys? He couldn’t have been that good.”

  “These are 1909 prices!”

  “Okay, okay. Tell me something else you remember,” I said, even though I loved Sox trivia and riling up Mr. Patterson.

  He scrunched his lips while he retrieved a thought. “My mother’s rhubarb pie. She made it every June when my sisters and I were young.”

  “I like rhubarb pie,” I said.

  “I have a terrible sweet tooth.”

  “Do you like gummies?”

  “Do I like what?”

  “Gummies—Gummi Bears, Coke bottles, worms.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said, fanning himself with the TV Week. I forgot about the heat for a minute.

  “You’re pretty chatty today,” I finally said.

  “Maybe I’m delirious from the heat. It’s a good thing you checked up on me.” He grinned and gestured across the street to my driveway. “Your father doing okay today?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t talk about himself much. Was he always like this?”

  Mr. Patterson’s brow wrinkled like he was thinking carefully about his answer.

  “What do you remember?” he asked.

  “I remember a real dividing line between what it was like before she died and what it was like after. They were just my parents and I didn’t worry about anything.”

  Mr. Patterson nodded.

  “But now, Dad seems a lot less happy. He works a lot. He used to read to me, or we’d draw together at night. We haven’t done that in a long time.”

  “I knew your mom her whole life. She was born in that house, just like you were,” Mr. Patterson said, pointing at my house again. “She was one of my favorite people on earth. And I remember when she started bringing your dad around. He was quiet even then, and we were all a little skeptical. But he turned out to be a good man. Took care of your grandmother when she got sick. And, boy, was he good with you when you were little. He’d take you on walks in the backpack all over town. He brought you and Fred down to the water and showed you the tide pools.”

  “So why is he so weird now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Mr. Patterson said. “But I think it might be that your mother helped him connect with people. She invited his friends to dinner. She handed him the phone. If he was prone to turning inward, she helped him look outward. I know everyone is wired differently, Lucy, but you can’t be an island.”

  I couldn’t help looking at Mr. Patterson, sitting on his worn cushion beside the two radios, wondering if he was a bit of an island himself.

  I took the photo of Mom, Dad, and Sookie out of my pocket and handed it to Mr. Patterson. He studied it closely.

  “They were good friends.” Mr. Patterson looked at me for a moment. “Tell your dad I’ll be over to see if he needs anything at the store.”

  “I’ll let him know,” I said, peeling my legs off the porch planks. “I have to clean myself up.”

  When I walked in the door to my house, I headed straight to the bathroom for a shower. Dad was in the kitchen, eating a snack.

  “Why do squids have three hearts?” I asked, walking up the stairs.

  “Good question. I don’t know,” he said.

  Before shedding my clothes, I took the photo out of my pocket and tacked it on my bulletin board. As I scrubbed off the fish guts, I thought about calling Vernon Devine, but I chickened out.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  I worked on some sketches for the field guide at the kitchen table. One of Mom’s books was open to a photograph of a white shark. In my sketchbook, I drew the outline of the shark’s body.

  “I feel like all the sharks I draw look like sandbags,” I yelled to Dad in the other room.

  He half laughed. “What?”

  Dad hobbled into the kitchen on one crutch.

  “Like nothing is going on inside. Do they even have bones?” I said. “I get how the human body is put together, but I don’t get what’s happening inside a shark.”


  Dad started flipping pages until he came to an anatomy shot.

  “That’s what’s going on,” he said, pointing to an illustrated cross-section of a shark. I saw a number of labels for familiar organs—liver, kidney, intestines—but there was nothing human-like about the way the shark’s organs were arranged. Besides, when I drew people I sometimes thought about muscles and bones, but never the heart.

  “This isn’t helping,” I said.

  “Here’s the vertebrae. It’s not bone. It’s cartilage. It’s lightweight and flexible, so they can move quickly,” he said. “They don’t have swim bladders, so heavy bones would make them sink.”

  I traced the backbone with my finger and decided to start with the shark’s skeleton. I drew two pages of long, flexible zippers and noticed that a shark has no rib cage. I wondered what protected the organs or kept them in place.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  When Dad fell asleep on the couch again, I picked up the phone. I tried to picture what Vern would look like on the other end. Was he one of those old men with white hair like Jacques Cousteau who wore scuba suits well into their eighties? Who probably swam a mile in the ocean every morning before breakfast? Vernon Devine’s phone rang six times before a woman answered.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Uh, hi. I’m looking for Vernon Devine.”

  There was a pause, which gave me just enough time to realize what an idiotic idea this was.

  “Vern is taking a nap now. Is there a message?”

  “My name is Lucy Everhart. My mom was a shark expert who worked with Vernon Devine. Her name was Helen Everhart. I found one of her research proposals from a few years ago, and I’m curious about an idea that she and Mr. Devine were working on when she died.”

  I took a breath and wished I hadn’t said the part about her dying. Yes, it would probably make the woman on the phone feel sorry for me and I would have an easier time getting my message to Vernon, but sometimes I didn’t like the pity I received when people found out I was motherless. It made me wonder if things were worse than I thought.

  But the woman on the phone just kept an even voice and took down my information. “Okay, I think I have everything,” she said.

  There was another pause.

  “Do you know about Vern, dear?”

  “No, ma’am. I know nothing about Vern—other than the fact that he was my mother’s mentor.”

  “He has dementia and talking on the phone has become difficult. When he picks up the receiver, he just stands there, quiet. He might listen to the things you say, but he won’t say anything back.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling deflated.

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “Massachusetts.”

  “Would you be interested in coming to see him? If it’s a good day, he can be quite talkative. It’s really his short-term memory that is lacking, but he may remember your mom.”

  My mind was racing, but my lips were totally disconnected from my brain and I said, “Yes.”

  “Would you like me to ask him some questions about your mother? Maybe I can gauge whether or not the trip would be worthwhile.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “All right, Lucy. I will ask him when he wakes up.”

  “Are you Mr. Devine’s wife?”

  “Good Lord, no. I’m his nurse. My name is Marion.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  That evening, I took a break from drawing sharks to pick at a mysterious casserole with Dad. I was separating all of the mushrooms from the noodles when the phone rang.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hi, Lucy. This is Vern Devine’s nurse, Marion.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I asked Vern about your mother this evening and I had to call you right away.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, anxious for the rest of the story.

  “Vern led me over to some pictures on the wall and pointed to a photo of himself and a woman on a boat. And then he pointed to another photo of the same woman, and another. There were three pictures of this same woman on the walls of his library. I said, ‘Who is that, Vern?’ and he said, ‘That’s Helen.’ I would say that he clearly remembers your mother.”

  “Okay,” I said, not knowing what to say.

  “Come and see Vern, Lucy. He would love to see you and I bet he’d be able to tell you something about your mom’s project.”

  My heart was pounding. I looked at Dad with his mummified boot perched on a chair. There was no way he could ever drive with a broken right foot, even if he wanted to.

  “I’ll think about that. Thank you, ma’am,” I said.

  “What are you thinking about?” Dad asked when I hung up the phone.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  But it was something.

  21. Company Lunch

  At almost noon, i took my second shower since Fred died. Under the steady stream, I was trying to figure out how to get to Maine to see Vern. I couldn’t explain why I wanted to drive one hundred twenty-five miles to ask an old man with memory problems what he and my mom knew about the white sharks coming to Massachusetts. But I was certain that if Fred were here, he would be begging my dad to drive us.

  When I turned off the water, I heard Dad calling my name.

  “What?” I screamed back.

  “Sookie and Lester are here,” he yelled.

  “What?” I yelled. “Why?”

  “Lucy,” he said, in tone that told me I was being rude. “Come down.”

  I stood dripping in the tub. If this was about cleaning fish, I wasn’t going to be amused. It was hard to get excited about pulling fish bowels out of a good-looking mackerel and then repeating it a few hundred times, but more important, I wanted to talk to Dad about going to see Vern.

  When I rubbed the towel over my arms, my wrists looked smaller, my freckled arms seemed gangly. I knew I hadn’t been eating much because of the swallowing problem, but my body was starting to show signs of weight loss after only two weeks.

  I raked a brush through my wet, gnarly hair and put the mermaid necklace over my head. I found some old clothes and headed down the steps, preparing to be marinated in fish entrails.

  I followed the voices to the living room and saw Sookie and Lester with my dad.

  “Hi,” I said, hesitant to move farther than the doorway. The room felt smaller than usual, like the four of us were in a closet together. I stared at Lester. He’d lost a couple of pounds too, which Lester theoretically could have spared, but the new shape was wrong on him.

  “You know I can’t get on a boat,” I said to Sookie.

  “We’re not takin’ the boat out today,” Sookie said. “We’re going to lunch.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “Yeah, why the heck not? Lucy, you’re on the payroll. We’re havin’ a company lunch today. You wanna come?”

  “Sure,” I said. I was still having trouble swallowing food and I wasn’t hungry, but I got the impression that company lunches didn’t happen every day, and that I should accept.

  “Well, let’s get goin’.”

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  A waitress named Susie put three plastic cups of soda on the counter and then pulled three straws out of her apron pouch without looking down. I scrunched the white paper down the straw, making a tight accordion. Then I picked up a drop of Coke with the bottom of my straw and sealed the top with my thumb. Using it like a dropper, I released a small splash of soda onto the crinkled paper, and watched it expand outward instantly.

  “What’s that?” Lester snorted.

  I looked down at the wet mess on my paper placemat. “My mom showed me the trick when I was three. She called it ‘the worm.’”


  Lester nodded. He wasn’t going to say anything bad about my mom.

  “I could get used to this,” Sookie said, taking a drag off his straw. He put his cup back on the counter. Sookie’s hands were red and cracked like winter hands, and he had sausage fingers.

  We talked about the Red Sox. I told Sookie and Lester the chatter I’d heard on Mr. Patterson’s radio about the odds of the Sox calling up a shortstop from the minors named, Nomar Garciaparra.

  “What’s his name?” Lester asked.

  “Nomar,” I said.

  Susie put a plate in front of me, and I looked at my burger as if she had presented me with the side of a whole cow. It was going to be a challenge getting through it, no doubt.

  “Watch your bait, Sookie,” Susie said, as she delivered Sookie’s meal. “Did you hear about that poor fisherman?”

  “What? No,” Sookie said.

  “On the news, this morning,” Susie said. “Guy was fishing with a rod. He reeled in his line and saw the fish had gotten away with half the bait. And then, wham! Shark comes up and snaps up the rest of the bait and swims away. Fisherman said it looked like a great white.”

  Sookie shook his head.

  “Where did it happen?” I asked.

  “Off the Cape,” Susie said, shrugging. “You guys need anything else?”

  I shook my head. I had plenty.

  “Where are they all coming from?” Lester asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But they’re looking for the seals.”

  “What time you want to go fishin’ tomorrow?” Lester asked Sookie.

  “Early. I got no excuse.” Sookie manhandled his burger and ripped off about an eighth of a pound like a bear. “You busy tomorrow, Lucy?”

  I tapped a fry on my plate, but before I could answer, Sookie asked, “Aren’t you eatin’ anything?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t swallow.”

  “Why not?” Sookie asked.

  “I think it’s nerves. From the accident.”

  I could feel Lester’s body freeze.