“Yes,” I interrupted her. “What happened after that?”
“I heard he, Donald, took Ida, your grandmother, on his boat and he brought her somewhere and when they came back she wasn’t pregnant anymore.”
“Oh,” I said, appalled. “How horrible.”
“So, Donald went on to marry his wife, you know, Florence, and about a year later Ida, your grandmother, married your grandfather, Joseph.”
I had never heard any of this. I was sitting close to her desk, my elbow resting on it and my head resting in my hand, trying to imagine it all. “Wow,” I said. “If he, The Skipper, loved my grandmother that much, why didn’t he just marry her?”
Mrs. Hummings sighed. “I heard she was very much in love with him, but he didn’t want to break his engagement to Florence. Her father owned the biggest fishing fleet on the Cape and Donald wanted his own boat.”
“I guess my grandmother had nothing to offer him,” I said. “I know her family was poor. I think my great-grandfather was the custodian of a church in P-town until he became the postmaster in Fleetbourne.”
“Your grandmother was supposed to have been very pretty,” Mrs. Hummings said. “Some people said she bewitched him. Donald.”
She was pretty. I remembered her with her long hair braided up in a bun. It used to be chestnut when I was very young, flecked with white before it turned totally white like a young moon becoming full. And she had sea-worthy green eyes, my grandmother, that used to look longingly across the bay. “He took her on his fishing boat?” I asked softly.
“Oh yes,” she said. “He had been given a large fishing boat from his prospective father-in-law. He kept it at the dock in P-town and they sailed in secret, except it can’t be a secret when it has a crew.” She paused, thinking about it. “The boat anchored in the harbor for years. I believe it was called The Man in the Moon.”
Oh, how I knew that name.
* * *
I returned to the Galley and found an expectant Mrs. A. “Did you get the information you wanted from Lorna?” she asked.
I nodded, not answering her, still processing it all.
“Anything I don’t know?”
I smiled at her. “You never told me what you knew so I don’t know what you don’t know. It was all fascinating, but, you know, I’m not one to gossip.”
* * *
It was closing time. Mrs. A watched me as I turned on the cameras and the security lights from inside the store, then followed me outside as I locked the front door and pulled the gate across. I handed her the spare key to the Galley. “If you need to close up,” I explained.
“Well,” she said. “I guess I can tell you everything I know—the whole story about your grandmother. Did Lorna tell you the whole story?”
I stopped. “I don’t know. She said my grandmother was pregnant and she came back on the boat not pregnant.”
Mrs. A nodded. “There’s more to it than that,” she said.
“More to it than what?”
“Well,” she said, “she was past nine months pregnant when The Skipper took her on the ship. She was due, if you know what I mean.”
* * *
Vincent and I had a quick dinner at home and then left the house to walk the beach down to the pier. We walked past the water where I remember my grandmother singing. Had there really been a child? Had it been thrown to the seas? How was it possible that so many in my family were in the clutches of the ocean? We watched the gulls floating on the water, riding the waves, staring back at us and mewing for food. The seals paddled along, barking and huffing together like a Greek chorus. They were all overweight and lazy since they spent their days following the fishing boats into Chatham to eat the overflow of culled fish before retiring to their rookeries for the night. The sky started growing moody, gray clouds were rolling across the bay, and the low growl of thunder echoed off the horizon. Black clouds started silhouetting over the dark gray with flashes of yellow outlining their edges like fringe. Lightning was starting to strike the middle of the bay. There was a fast chop to the water.
It was definitely time to reverse course. I turned back.
“We’d better skip the pier tonight,” I said to Vincent. We both trotted back to the house, trotting together step for step, me and this faithful dog who would trot to the end of the earth with me. There was a loud crack and we picked up the pace. I love watching lightning strike its crazy-quilt patterns across the sky, but I’m not foolish enough to stay on the beach; I usually head the other way, to the safety of my kitchen, and watch through the back door, and that’s where I was heading now. We ran as fast as we could, the rain now pelting our faces and the lightning glowering behind us.
* * *
My cell phone rang almost as soon as I got home. It was an automated announcement from my security company. The alarm had gone off at the Galley.
“I’ll check it out in the morning,” I said to Vincent after I hung up. “Maybe the storm set it off. There’s nothing I can do about it now.”
A bolt of lightning struck nearby with a simultaneous crash of thunder. The storm was overhead now, unleashing its full fury, rain slanting against my windows, with long tendrils of gold lightning stretching across the water, lighting it up in dramatic flashes. My house phone rang. It was Officer Joe Miranda from the Fleetbourne Police Department.
“Miss Aila,” he said. “Your alarm at the Galley was ringing as I was riding by and I got out to investigate. You’d better get here. Someone threw a brick through your store window.”
Chapter 29
By the time I got to the Galley, arriving like a Valkyrie, with thunder and lightning crashing all around me, there was a crowd of people there. A small crowd, to be sure, but when you live in a town where the most exciting thing to happen this year was that the bakery was putting seeds on its rye bread, an alarm ringing late in the night is big news. Several people had gathered around Officer Joe, under a huddle of colorful umbrellas and gossipy conjecture, while Officer Joe himself sat in his car out of the rain. He was waiting for me with his flashlight trained on the broken store window just in case a burglar decided to make an exit. The big front window of the Galley had been completely shattered, glass was all over the street, and the alarm was still ringing.
I couldn’t fathom it for a moment. The Galley looked violated, like a hole had been punched into its heart. I took out my keys with shaking hands.
“Is it okay for me to go in?” I called over to Officer Joe.
He rolled his window down and cupped his hand to his ear over the alarm. “Eh?”
“Can I go in?”
“Sure. Go ahead!” he yelled back. “I don’t think anyone is in there.”
I rolled open the little wooden scissor gate, thinking how perfectly inadequate it was, then opened the door to the Galley and waited there, reluctant to enter by myself. I pointed my finger to the interior and looked back at Officer Joe. I wasn’t sure what the protocols were now, since generally the first thing to do, notify the police, had apparently been done, but I was reasonably sure that letting me enter the store alone was not part of the procedure. Officer Joe got the hint; he climbed out of his car and we stepped into the store together, with him right behind me.
We were in pitch dark.
“You need to put some lights on,” he said helpfully.
“I can’t see the switch box,” I said. “I need a light to see the switch box.”
He shined his light back and forth, illuminating the walls. “Hey, that apple crumb pie looks good,” he said, resting the beam on the dessert case.
“Today’s special,” I said. “Can you please move the beam up about two feet?”
There was the switch box and I crunched across the glass to turn off the alarm and turn the store lights on.
“Oh no. Oh no.” It was all I could think of to say. “Why would anyone do this?” I asked. “You think it was teenagers?”
“Could be,” Officer Joe answered slowly. “But usually if they’
re up to mischief, they wouldn’t stop at one store.”
“Who else would do this?” I asked, trying not to cry.
“Troublemakers,” Officer Joe declared. “People do strange things if they don’t like something. I know there is a rumor going around that you might be selling the store, and it could be that somebody doesn’t like the idea.”
“I am not selling anything to anyone,” I replied huffily. “Just hired a new person to help me.”
“Sometimes people around here don’t go for change,” he said. “I personally like having you here, Miss Aila, but if you wanted to sell, it’s your business; it’s your choice. I would still come in, s’long as the coffee’s good, but—you know folks.”
I was beginning to know folks more than I wanted to. He followed me through the rest of the Galley and, even though the lights were on, shone his flashlight into every crevice, onto every shelf, behind every display case. There were no other signs of damage. We went into the kitchen together. Nothing was stolen; nothing was out of place. Apparently, the damage had been confined to where the glass had fallen and to the old marble front counter that now hosted a moon-size crater with a white brick sitting in the middle. It would all have to be replaced. Officer Joe pulled the brick out and handed it to me.
“What an odd brick,” I said. And it was. Regular brick size and painted white, it looked unusual. “I’ve never seen a brick like this.”
“Must have come from some kind of demolition site,” Officer Joe reflected. “Like a building or something that’s being knocked down.”
“Do you need it for fingerprints?” I asked.
“Nah,” Officer Joe replied. “Not worth dusting it. But you might want to hang on to it for a while, in case you need evidence for your insurance company.”
I put it by the front door as a doorstop.
* * *
Officer Joe began writing copiously on an official-looking pad. “So I’m calling it an act of vandalism.” He looked up to give me instructions. “Call your insurance company first thing in the morning. Give them this report number and tell them to call us.” I signed something and something else again.
We were standing in the middle of a thousand shards of glass. Rain was sweeping in through the broken window, leaving puddles; lightning hovered nearby. I needed to tarp the front of the store and there was no one I could call to help me. The Galley had been my total responsibility for two years, and I now had the dilemma of either leaving it unattended, in order to buy tarps, or staying overnight. Dan would have helped me, I thought miserably. My father would have had ten solutions in half an hour while my mother would have made coffee for the whole town and wrapped everything in plastic.
Officer Joe was still standing there with his flashlight beam on the pie. Then I thought, Well, what are taxes for anyway? I asked him if he would mind keeping an eye on the store while I ran out to buy a tarp, promising him a piece of pie as a thank-you bribe. He agreed and an hour later I returned with a huge plastic trash pail filled with supplies. He helped me staple the tarp to the window frame; we were finished in twenty minutes and he left, happily drinking a large cup of hot coffee and clutching a brown paper bag that contained a Sandwich and a generous piece of apple crumb pie.
I pulled on my new heavy-duty gloves, grabbed my new heavy-duty broom, and began sweeping up the glass. It had the odd sheen and wavy lines of old glass and had been the front window of the Galley for over sixty years. Someone once told me that glass melts, that it’s really a liquid, and slowly, over time, its molecules slide to the bottom, leaving the top thin and fragile. I remember how Dan had adamantly corrected me. Oh no, that was a myth, he insisted. The truth was somewhere halfway in between. Glass was a solid with liquid properties and its distinctive flow pattern was definitely a product of early, primitive manufacturing. He was precise like that, meticulous in his thoughts, careful in all his calculations. The houses he designed were perfectly, environmentally, beautiful. He had been sketching a new house for us with windows everywhere to capture the light. Windows were the soul of a home, he always said.
I needed to clean up the Galley window.
The heavy gloves made it safe for me to pick up the large pieces. They glimmered like broken rainbows, reflecting the lights from the ceiling as I heaped them into the trash pail along with the big piece that came from the center of the store window. It had the store name, The Galley, in large, old-style gold lettering, outlined in black, and the logo, a rolling pin and cup of coffee underneath it, painted a long time ago. I swept up the small delicate pieces that were shaped like little fairy swords. Then I swept up the tiniest glistening crumbs and mopped the rain off the floor until it was almost dry. I stood back to look. Everything was in place. In a few days, it would all be repaired. New glass, a new marble counter. No one would be able to tell how my heart had been fractured along with the front window.
I gated the front door, its spindly little scissor gate seeming ironically useless now, turned on the switch for the cameras and lights, and left for home.
* * *
The streets smelled fresh and clean, with that damp, intimate scent that bathrooms get after you take a shower. The storm was well past, the lightning was receding into the distance like a memory, but I could still hear the fading murmuring of thunder. I counted aloud after a flash, ending when I heard its rumble. “One, one thousand”—that’s how you count off the length of a second—“two, one thousand . . . three, one thousand. . . .” Every five seconds equals a mile in distance: twenty-five one thousands, the storm was five miles away. My grandmother had taught me that.
I drove, weary and anxious to get home. I had always worried what I would do if there was an emergency at the Galley. I had set up protocols of what to do in an emergency after my father died and the Galley became mine. Call the police, call Shay, call the insurance company. I hadn’t done any of it this time, but things still got done. I had handled it. The only problem was that I couldn’t figure out was why it had happened. Was somebody taking offense that I hired Mrs. Ahmadi or was it just a random act? No matter what, I would handle it, but I was getting tired of counting my losses.
I pulled up to my house and let myself in through the back door. It was an old habit, learned in my childhood, to always use the back door to keep the sand out of the house. There, by the door, I glanced down the beach to the dock. It was dark. Sam wasn’t there, a good sign, I thought. I was afraid he was going to take the boat out despite the storm.
Men and boats.
* * *
Vincent was waiting for me in the kitchen, sitting in a small debris field of garbage and very slowly and very guiltily wagging his tail. His head was dropped down and he was looking at me from the tops of his eyes, as if to say, Sorry for the mess; I have no idea how it happened.
I just flopped down into a kitchen chair and sat there staring at the clock. It was after midnight.
“I need to teach you how to use a broom,” I said to him. He came over to me and put his chunky block head on my lap. I ran my hand over his body. His fur was growing in and actually had a shine to it. He was a sandy red color, the scabs were long healed, and even his once raw and battered ear had a coating of soft fur, as if it were natural for them, to have the lumpy, brutalized shape underneath. His eyes were filled with trust and shining up into mine. What did a few piles of garbage mean? Nothing. Nothing. His soul was pure; there wasn’t a drop of garbage in his beautiful soul.
The real garbage was in the mind of the person who had thrown a brick into the Galley.
I pulled myself wearily from the chair and grabbed the broom. I swept everything into a pile and dropped it all in the trash pail, then mopped the floor. Vincent watched me with a remorseful expression the whole time.
I would take a shower, I decided, and call the insurance company in the morning and then close the Galley for the day or maybe until it got repaired. I had spent a lifetime there, anchored to one spot like a buoy sitting in the bay, marking the end
of the shallow water. I didn’t have to stay in Fleetbourne, I realized. I didn’t have to stay anchored.
Maybe it was time to leave the shallows and get out into the ocean.
Chapter 30
Morning came and acted as though nothing had happened. The sun rose over the bay and turned it crystal and gold; the gulls were impatiently walking up and down the beach, crying for food; the waves were imperturbable, lapping rhythmically against the shore, rearranging the seaweed and the broken shells into free-form designs. The beach of broken shells. And a Galley of broken glass. There were a few boats out on the bay doing nothing in particular. I fed Vincent, had a cup of light, light coffee, found all my insurance papers, got dressed, and left for the store, leaving a ringing house phone behind. I didn’t want to contaminate my home with Galley business anymore. My father always conducted all store business in the store. When he came home, he was home.
* * *
Mrs. A and Sam were waiting in front of the store and I realized, regretfully, that I should have conducted at least one little bit of business before I left. I should have called Mrs. A and told her not to come.
“Oh my goodness,” she said as soon as she and Sam got out of the truck. “What happened? I heard an alarm ringing last night, but I didn’t know it was us!”
Sam patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. “What can we do to help you? I was just about to drop my mother off and head to the dock, but I can stay and help.”
“Thank you.” I was grateful for his offer. “But I don’t know what I’m doing yet.” I unlocked the gate and the door and we went inside.
The light coming in through the tarp cast a dark, eerie blue over the store; even with the lights on, we looked like Smurfs.
And All the Phases of the Moon Page 18
