Beauty: A Novel (18 page)

What Easy knew was that the best thing he could do was never let Carol MacLean and Easy Parsons see each other again.

Carol said, so level it came out like a threat, “I don’t own a majority of Elizabeth’s Best, but I own a lot more than anyone else, and I’m confident I can put together a majority if it came to that, if you wanted to pursue it, Baxter.”

Easy was so amazed at the danger in Carol’s voice that at first he didn’t get what she’d said.

Baxter said, “I’m not sure what you’re saying, Carol.”

Carol looked at Baxter and said, “The company is not for sale.”

Easy didn’t know the details like Carol, but he knew the company had to have fresh fish to make a go of it. That was the whole plan. Reaching the end of the rope, even with the toothfish money, would not take all that long.

She said to Easy and Baxter both, “I’m not going to sell it, and I’m not going to let you assholes sell it for me.”

Easy, all of a sudden, was getting less tiny and weak and beside the point. Baxter looked calm as a seal in sun and smiled at Easy like they had a secret, as if now he thought that, because of Easy, Carol would never refuse a sale.

Easy could see that Carol wasn’t surprised by Baxter’s play. She’d worked with Baxter before. She faced Easy like he was the one she didn’t know. She said, “I am sorry about the amendment, and I’m sorry if I disappoint you by refusing to sell to Baxter Blume. I plan on making the company go. If it doesn’t go, I will do my best to look out for your crew.” She could have been an out-of-town lawyer talking nice about boat repossession.

She was a businesswoman in a business that had just gone broke. If she didn’t sell, she was sneaking into people’s houses and setting their savings on fire. He guessed she would know about that. She didn’t need to hear him say it.

As best he could tell, she had forgotten him. He must have been nuts to think he had to worry about her being heartbroken and about how he’d have to leave quick and clean so she didn’t hurt too much from losing him. He was the one who hurt too much. She had her company. And she was ready to choose her precious company not just over him—who wouldn’t understand that—but over every single investor to the last penny. She was choosing against a town, his town, his family and every other family named on the Town Hall stairs. Easy hated that, and he still loved her. Oh, man.

He left—what he should have done before he got in the elevator to come up.

Loaves and Fishes

C
arol couldn’t bear to watch him all the way to the elevators. Instead, she looked at Baxter, and wondered if he saw her differently now.

She heard the elevator.

Baxter seemed pleased to have gotten something wrong for a change.

He said, “Call me if you change your mind.”

Then he dropped his newspaper outside someone else’s door and walked away down the emptied hall.

Carol went in their room holding the toothbrush Easy had given her.

She put the toothbrush on the bedside table and sat on the bed and wept like an angry kid because it was so unfair. No matter what she did, Easy had to go. If she sold to Baxter, she could at least give all the investors, including herself, a nice profit. The town wouldn’t hate her, and she could face her poor job prospects with money in the bank instead of broke. But that wouldn’t keep Easy here. He couldn’t fish here. He’d make money on his investment, but then what? He was a fisherman, and they both knew she was not. She couldn’t ask him to come ashore and follow her. He belonged on the water. That was who he was and who she loved.

If it would have kept Easy, she would have sold to Baxter. But Baxter couldn’t give her Easy, and if she couldn’t keep Easy, she was going to keep her company. That was who she was. She cried because all she had was everything she’d ever wanted—her own company—and no matter how well she ran it, she would lose it in no time, exactly the same amount of time it would take her to lose the town’s investments.

And she had managed to send Easy away mad, which probably was best. If he went away mad, he’d forget about her that much more easily. She cried because she couldn’t do anything else, because Easy hated her and was right to hate her, and she’d made it that way.

She stood up and folded her new dress and put it in the Harry’s bag with the Manolos.

She straightened the bed for no reason. She looked out the window over the early, sun-shined Public Garden that was opening into spring and had beds yellow with the first crocuses and forsythia. There was blue overhead.

Easy had paid for the room and left money for a cab. She used it. On the ride back to Elizabeth, she wondered how long her body would remember him. She closed her eyes to keep what she could.

She didn’t go
to the plant. She called Anna Rose Taormina and said, “May I come over?” Carol was not going to be at the plant while there was any chance of seeing Easy’s boat.

Anna Rose said, “I’m across Lincoln from you and up eight houses on the left. Don’t go to the side door. That’s my oldest daughter and her boy now. Come in the front door and through to the kitchen.”

Carol drove. It was a two-tone house, with a four-foot statue of Mary in a shell beside the step. Carol parked looking uphill and walked up the granite steps taken, like everyone’s granite steps, she’d learned, from Elizabeth Island quarries.

The entry hall was half of what it had once been, but it still had the full stairs. The living room was narrowed. Everything was heavy curtains and photographs and Catholic bric-a-brac.

Anna Rose called, “Come back here.”

Past a wall that shut off what would have been the dining room, Carol came to what must always have been the whole kitchen. It had not been remodeled since the fifties. It was big and bright, and its windows looked out over other people’s roofs to the tin reflection of the outer harbor. She didn’t see any boats.

Anna Rose stood beside her stove. She wasn’t much taller than the stove or the linoleum counters to either side. She wore her black tunic and black pants.

She said, “Sit down at my kitchen table.”

Carol would just as soon have turned around and gone to work, but she sat on a chrome and red-plastic-seated chair beside the red enameled kitchen table.

Anna Rose sat down on a straight-backed wood chair. She was older than Carol, but not by all that much, and Carol felt like a girl visiting someone’s mother.

Carol touched her long fingers along the painted-over chipping in the enamel at the edge of the table. It was a table like the one she and her father used to sit at. Before she could reach standing up, Carol had knelt on a chair to help him make hamburger patties, both pairs of their hands in the bowl. She’d done her homework there at the table while he smoked.

Anna Rose said, “I have called both of our United States senators. They are going to talk to me. Their staffs were expecting me to call. They will try to help. Also, you need something to drink. I have coffee and tea, and I have sherry for the priest, but we are too busy to drink that now.”

Carol said, “Easy is going out so his crew can make money before the regulations take effect.”

Anna Rose said, “Ignacio has both of his boats going out also. They call their crews, and they take their boats out. If they are already out, they come in so they can go out. You don’t know, but you’ll learn. We will get through this. We get through everything. Remember, Christ was with the fishermen first. Which is true, but I never say it to the senators until after they have done something for me.”

There were no surprises left, but Carol felt as if it was only now sinking in. She said, “I don’t think we’re going to get through it this time.”

Anna Rose said, “You know how I know it will be fine? Because the men called their crews and took the boats out. They think they have to do that, but you and I know they are better out of the way. I say, Good riddance.”

Carol said, “This morning, Baxter Blume offered to buy Elizabeth Island’s Best for one and a half times what we paid, and I turned them down.” Carol could hardly believe she had turned them down, but she would turn them down again. It wasn’t just a company; it was her. She was no longer the Beast. She didn’t bury companies anymore, and she wasn’t going to bury her own company. She couldn’t fire her own people. Elizabeth had become her home, and she had to believe that as a businesswoman and as her father’s daughter and finally as a CEO, she could make everything work.

Anna Rose said, “Of course you turned them down.”

“I should have sold.”

“You did right, Carol. Who cares about one and a half times some money on selling your own family?”

Carol had expected Anna Rose to realize it had been the wrong decision. She had hoped that Anna Rose would hate her and tell the rest of Elizabeth Island to hate her.

Carol said, “The fresh business was our margin. Without that, we’ll run through all the cash reserves we have. If I shut it all down right now and fire-sale what I can gut, and throw in whatever we get for the toothfish, if it clears, maybe, maybe, I’ll have a quarter of the total investment. With what the plant building would bring when nobody has to match the fat boys and there are no useful prospects, that might, in the best case, get us to half the total investment.”

As if she hadn’t heard a word, Anna Rose said, “Carol, you don’t know tomorrow. I don’t know tomorrow. That is why the men take the boats out as fast as they can and I call the politicians. To be ready for tomorrow.”

Carol looked down at the green, smoke-swirled linoleum floor. She saw that Anna Rose wore black house slippers and black socks.

Carol spoke to the slippers. She said, “You and Buddy lost half your investment in two weeks. So did Dave Parks. So did Easy. Easy wanted me to sell. He thought I cared about my company more than I cared about him, and I did. We were together last night and this morning. Until he left.”

Anna Rose said, “Carol,” and would have gone on, but Carol shook her head.

“Hopefully you lose only half. Probably it’s more. So will Annette Novato and Ben Garcia.”

Carol bent over as if she were going to fall through the linoleum, and in one clumsy movement, she was on her knees before Anna Rose. She knelt by the chrome leg of her father’s kitchen table and put her cheek onto Anna Rose’s lap.

As soon as she knew Anna Rose would not push her away, Carol began to cry. She knew she was too big, but she put her bare arms around Anna Rose’s heavy knees, and she cried for the second time in a day. She cried for everything and for never having had a lap to cry on.

Anna Rose smoothed Carol’s hair and said, “Many people like Easy very much, and Easy said he liked you very much as soon as he first saw you, which it is not like Easy to say. Easy is a lonely man. That is why he fishes so well. Sometimes the good fishermen have big families, and the fish are how they afford their families. Sometimes the best fishermen have no families, because the fish are their family. But lonely does not always go on forever. People change.”

Carol stopped crying. She felt her hair being stroked like a girl who has someone to love her after she’s lost everything and deserved to lose it.

Anna Rose said, “You know how I know it will be fine? Because the fish are in the ocean. Ignacio and Easy are good fishermen, and they say there are fish. They say if they could get observers on their boats, it would be no question to anybody.”

Carol heard that.

Something went off and she lifted her head. Baxter was not in the room; he would have been terrified of women crying and consoling, but he was not far outside. Carol didn’t know where it was leading, but she was having a knee-jerk.

She said, “Observers?”

“Observers,” Anna Rose said. “The fish are coming back slowly, but they are coming. Observers would see that. Without observers, we have to find another way. To you I can say, Fishes and loaves. I cannot say that to the senators right now, because they might think I don’t insist they do their job. They might think someone else can take care of the fishermen. But observers are too expensive when the government has spent all its money on computers that can say when Easy and Buddy are lying about how much cod has to be thrown back. And do you know who is telling the computers what to say? Researchers who have gone out to catch fish themselves. And do you know who took those researchers out? The worst fishermen, the fishermen who couldn’t get their own boats or who couldn’t catch enough fish to keep the boat they got from their fathers, the fishermen everybody laughed about. They didn’t know where the fish were, and they didn’t know how to catch them. So the researchers told the computers, ‘No fish.’ And when the real fishermen and I and other wives tell the judge that we need real observers on real boats, the judge says we have done that and there’s no money to do again what’s already been done.”

Carol said, “Observers.” That was it. The government might not want to pay for observers, but Carol did, and she thought that she could. She also sensed something else, about the judge, but first things first. She said, “How much did the toothfish bring?”

“Oh, I see. You’re back to work. Good. So for the toothfish, I got, we all of us got, a lot of us were calling, two million, one hundred and forty-five thousand dollars. In one day we got it. All of it is in the bank as money, by wire or by credit card, which Dave got the girl at the bank to help me with.”

Carol stood up and said, “Thank you, for everything.” Her voice was still thick from crying, but the pieces had fallen into place.

She cleared her throat of emotion so she could speak as happily and irreverently as Baxter. She said, “Also, do you know people at the Boston papers and television stations?”

Anna Rose stood up and spread her legs in a position of solid readiness and studied Carol. “You have a big
also
, don’t you? Yes, I know all the newspaper and television people, the ones that can help, and they know me. We have had lots of practice together. The world has been trying to kill fishermen for a long time, and the way you keep fishermen alive is to make noise. What noise do you want?”

“Can I tell you in a little while, maybe an hour?” Carol had to change the judge’s mind. She had two million dollars’ worth of observers to do it, and she thought she could make the judge look good in the bargain.

“I will call and tell them to expect something.”

Carol turned, and Anna Rose said, “Wait. I have done clean laundry for my grandson who is too tall to belong in our family but we love him just the same, and he is just your size. I think if you are going to be doing for the harbor, and doing it with judges and politicians, which otherwise why do you need papers and televisions, you would look more like one of us in blue jeans and a flannel shirt.”

Anna Rose disappeared into a room off the kitchen and came back with the jeans and shirt. Carol stepped into the laundry room to change. She didn’t need a mirror to tell her that the jeans and shirt fit well enough. She was glad to be in them.

She came out with her suit over her arm, and Anna Rose said, “Also, don’t forget this is your home now, this island and this house, and you are in Taormina clothes.”

Carol nodded gratefully. This was the loneliest day of her life, and she wasn’t from fishing stock and she wasn’t from this harbor, but she understood her work, and she was doing her best, and she thought she could pull this off, and something else for the judge came to her.

At the door, she turned back to Anna Rose and said, “So this injunction the judge ordered?”

Anna Rose said, “What?”