work they’d be out doing again tomorrow morning.
“Fine, you can come,” I told Victor. “Bring Joy, too, if you want.”
I took no pleasure in his childlike faith that I wouldn’t queer his pitch: by, for instance, telling Joy about the little black books. He was right, though; I wouldn’t. After a divorce you think it's all going to be so clear and simple. But it isn’t.
It just isn’t. “Sam will be home, too.”
“Oh,” he said, wincing as the outdoor cold hit him. Despite the sunshine bouncing whitely from every snowy surface, the air was bone-frigid and the sky was the dangerous pale blue of thin ice.
In the yard, chickadees quarreled around the bird feeder. A single cardinal perched silently on a branch above, bright as a drop of blood. “Okay, thanks,” Victor said.
And then he did vamoose, probably convinced that if I had time to think it over, I might change my mind.
But part of Joy's legend was that when she’d been away from here attending beautician school, she had supported herself with a strip club act featuring a live snake: perfect training, I thought, for any woman who dated Victor.
I wouldn’t have missed meeting her for the world.
Besides, I hadn’t told him whom else I’d invited.
The poor sap.
Chapter 3
H is head ?” my son Sam repeated happily, his eyes shining.
It was five-thirty in the evening, a perfect night for Eastport's winter festival: the stars glittering like ice chips in the clear black sky, snowflakes condensing from the humidity rising from the harbor into the frigid air. Barrel-fires along the breakwater sent up orange flares around which people huddled, stomping booted feet and cupping paper containers of hot spiced cider in mittened hands.
“ You, ”Sam said again, “found his…”
Sam's the kind of kid who likes the goriest parts of the scariest movies, which I’d always thought was strange because in real life he is the gentlest creature. So a few years earlier, I’d sat him down and asked him why.
Gravely he’d explained that he knew what he was supposed to be feeling, and was able to, at such spectacles. He was twelve, then, and his father and I had been fighting forever; the next day I’d gone out and hired an attorney.
“Sssh,” I told him now. People were turning curiously. Everyone knew what had happened at Faye Anne's. But no one had approached to ask me for the details yet, and I hoped they wouldn’t. “I’ll tell you all about it at home.”
“Okay, but…” For the festival, the storefronts on Water Street were garlanded in strings of colored bulbs. In the park behind the library, kids from the middle school were having a snowball skirmish, taking turns firing down on one another from the bandstand.
“… but I want to hear all about it.”
Four men in tailcoats and top hats strolled the sidewalk, singing “Silent Night.” Which this wasn’t: we were waiting for the boat parade but one of the vessels had blown her electrical system, and the crowd was getting restive. Running the bilge pump and lighting a Christmas tree at the same time hadn’t been on the agenda, apparently, and now a deck seam was spurting.
At last a loud cheer went up as a thirty-foot wooden Eastporter, the classic little fishing boat so emblematic of Maine lobster, popped on bright as a flashbulb in the dark waters off the far end of the dock. Buddy Teachout had papered the abovedecks of his vessel in aluminum foil, tied a red ribbon around the operator's shack, and aimed floodlights at it.
“Wow,” Sam said, looking handsome in his red quilted vest and a stocking cap. Taller than me, with dark hair and hazel eyes like his father, he was fit and muscular from scuba diving in Passamaquoddy Bay—when he wasn’t at school he had a small business finding antique bottles underwater and selling them on eBay—and from working out in the college weight room. And he carried himself well; living away, I saw somewhat reluctantly—but with relief,