you got any made? I mean you needn’t make fresh.”
“I think so.” I went to the electric percolator on the counter and lifted it. Heavy. Behind me, there was a faint scrape of a chair leg on the linoleum. I opened up a few cabinets, looking for coffee cups.
Joseph cleared his throat. “You must be the daughter, then. Mrs. Schuyler’s daughter.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, I’m sure sorry I ruined the big day for you.”
“Oh gosh, that’s nothing. I mean, he’s alive, isn’t he? That’s got to be good luck. Thanks to you. The day’s not ruined at all. Do you want cream or anything?”
“I’ll get it.”
The chair scraped again, and from the corner of my eye I saw him step to the icebox and open the door. He stood about an inch under six feet, and he still wore his yellow oilskin overalls atop his wet shirt, though his hair was beginning to dry in soft little waves around his ears. I turned toward him and offered the coffee cup.
“Thanks,” he said, dribbling a bit of cream from a small blue pitcher. “You?”
“Yes, please.”
He moved the pitcher over my cup and tilted it so the narrowest possible rope of yellow-white cream fell inside. “Say when.”
“When.”
He moved away, putting the cream back in the icebox, and I turned to the window so he wouldn’t catch me looking at the place where his hair met the back of his neck. I didn’t know much about boys, had hardly spent any time around a boy, and I couldn’t tell how old he was. Twenty? Twenty-one? Older than me, for certain. Though his skin was fresh and unlined, there was something fully grown about his shoulders, something wide and weight-bearing. And his voice had an easy, mature timbre, not like a boy’s voice at all.
Older than me. Maybe not all that much, but enough. Not a boy, after all, but a grown-up, a man who worked for his bread, whereas I was still a child, only just graduated from school. Eighteen last February. Eighteen going on eight, as unworldly as a kitten in a basket.
I stirred my coffee and sucked the spoon. Joseph came up next to me, not too close, and said, “How do you like the Island? You came up the other night, didn’t you?”
“Oh, it’s beautiful.” I set the spoon on the saucer. “How did you know? When I came up, I mean.”
“Miss Schuyler, here’s the first thing you need to know about the Island. Everyone knows each other’s business. All of it, about five minutes after it happens, if not sooner. Spreads through the air or something.” He paused to sip his coffee. “Also, I saw Isobel driving you back from the ferry.”
“Oh, of course.”
The window overlooked the lawn and the tents. Sometime during the fuss of the past hour, an old rust-red Ford truck had driven onto the grass, and a couple of men were now unloading crates from the back. Crystal and china, I guessed. I could just see the edge of the dock, and the tip of Popeye’s boat tethered up on the other side against the pale blue sky.
“It’s got the whole island buzzing,” Joseph said.
“What has?”
“Why, the wedding. Mr. Fisher’s a big man around here.”
I shifted my feet and looked down at the still, muddy surface of my coffee. “I don’t really know him that well. He’s been awfully nice to Mama.”
“I hear they met at your school? Your mother and Mr. Fisher?”
“Yes. Last year.” I paused, and the silence seemed so heavy and almost rude, given the tender, friendly way he’d asked the question, I rushed on. “At Isobel’s graduation? One of the events. I don’t really know which one, there’s so many of them, ceremonies and parties and things. My mother was a secretary in the president’s office, you see, ever since my father—well, since my father …” I stuttered to a stop, brought up short in the middle of all that flustered babbling by the thought of my father.
“Killed in the war, wasn’t he?” Joseph said, without embarrassment.
“Why, how did you know?”
“Like I said, the Island’s been talking about this for weeks, Miss Schuyler. Not that I listen to gossip much. But you can’t help hearing a few things, even without trying. My grandmother, she runs the general store in town. There’s nothing she doesn’t know.”
I glanced at him, and though he stared straight ahead, holding the cup to his lips like he was fascinated by the unloading of crystal and china, I thought he was smiling a little.
“Is that so?” I said. “What else have you heard?”
“Oh, just this and that.”
You know, it’s a funny thing. I didn’t know this boy, this man. Just his name and face and approximate age, and the fact that he trapped lobsters for a living, that he could swim, that he was the kind of fellow who would jump in the sea to save another fellow from drowning. He was a stranger, but he wasn’t. We’d held a bleeding, broken man between the two of us; we’d watched the eternity of life pass before us. Now we shared a pot of coffee. Stared out the same window, breathed the same air. So he wasn’t a stranger, but he was.
I set down my cup and turned around to hop up and sit on the counter. The clock on the opposite wall pointed its sharp black hands to a quarter past seven. A quarter past seven! I thought I’d lived a lifetime. I crossed my arms over my disgraceful nightgown and said—not to Joseph but to the room at large—“He taught at Foxcroft for eleven years. My father. He took a leave of absence to join up, so when he was killed, Miss Charlotte gave Mama a job to make ends meet. She’s like that, Miss Charlotte. Sort of tough and horsey, if you know what I mean, but heart of gold.”
“What did he teach?”
“Art. That’s why he volunteered, because he heard about what the Nazis were doing, looting and destroying all those treasures, and he couldn’t just—couldn’t stand by, he said …”
“A good man, then.”
“He was. Oh, he was. Of course, I was only eleven years old when he died. So maybe I never saw him as a real person, as somebody ordinary and fallen.”
“No,” Joseph said. “He fought for something he believed in. That’s a hero in anyone’s book.”
“Everybody fought. Mr. Fisher fought.”
“Yes, he did. Lucky for your mother, he got out alive, though.”
“Yes, lucky for her.”
“They say she’s a real beauty, your mother.”
“Mama? Oh yes. Haven’t you seen her?”
“Not up close, no. Just the photograph in the local rag.”
“Sometimes I just stare at her, you know, thinking it’s not possible anyone could be that beautiful. She was so young when she married Daddy. Only just eighteen. Can you imagine being a widow at twenty-nine? But she loved him so much, she just couldn’t look at anyone else for ever so long.”
He moved a little, turning his head to look at me. “What about you? Happy about all this?”
“Me? Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“No reason.”
“Mama’s happy, the happiest I’ve ever seen her, at least since Daddy died. You can’t mourn forever, can you?”
“That’s true.”
“And I guess Mr. Fisher loves her back, because he’s not marrying her for money, that’s for certain.”
“A