Red Hook Road (30 page)

Following John’s specifications, Matt had replaced the twin berths in the stateroom with a queen-sized bed, comfortable for couples. He’d refinished the clothes cabinet and the drawers, polished the knobs and handles and replaced those that were missing. The one piece of cabinetry that had proved a challenge was the side table. It was an odd design; the edged tabletop was fairly straightforward, but at two corners it had posts capped with elaborately ornamented finials, similar to half of a four-poster bed. One of the finials was in good shape, but a decapitated post with a splintered top was all that remained of the other. Matt had scoured catalogs and Web sites searching for a matching finial, had even posted pleading messages on the Alden Internet discussion groups, but no one had ever seen anything quite like the little table. For a while Matt debated just shearing off the posts at the base. They were so exceptional that no one would notice their absence; the table would seem like any other. But
finally Matt couldn’t bring himself to lop them off. John, he knew, would have carved a new finial, and he owed it to his brother at least to try.

There were men at the yard who specialized in this kind of fine, finished cabinetry, but Matt was not one of them. His area of expertise, if you could call it that, was sanding, the job they still had him working down at King’s, long after other guys who had started with him had moved on. It was a mindless job, requiring only a minimum of arm strength and a reasonably steady hand. You could have trained a smart monkey to do it. Whenever he got discouraged about his inadequate skills and correspondingly low status at the yard, he reminded himself that sanding beat scraping and painting the bottoms of hulls. But despite his inadequacy and lack of experience, after many months and dozens of false starts, he had managed at last to carve something that, if you didn’t look too close, strongly resembled the original finial.

Flush with this success, today he had set himself the infinitely easier task of replacing a six-inch strip of ornate molding on the side of the table. Matt plugged his router into the extension cord and, holding the heavy tool in one hand and the bit case in the other, climbed up onto the deck. Before he stepped down into the cabin he glanced down at Ruthie. It was so odd how much she reminded him of Becca, and yet how utterly different they were. Was it only her shape that was like her sister? That, and some undercurrent of sweetness. For all her sass, Becca had been sweet. Kind. Like John. And like Ruthie.

The contoured grip handles on the router’s plunge base had begun to wear through, and as he climbed down Matt reminded himself that he should drive into Newmarket and see if the Ace Hardware sold replacements. Yanking the extension cord behind him as he went, he walked through the unfinished main cabin and down the hallway between the galley and the stateroom’s private head. There was a single step from the hallway down into the stateroom and he stumbled, catching himself right before he hit the ground. He’d taken that step a thousand times, maybe more, and still it tripped him up nearly every time, especially when he wore John’s boots.

“Shit,” Matt said, dropping the bit case and getting a firmer grip on the router. “Spaz.”

“Spaz” had been one of John’s favorite nicknames for Matt. As big as he was, John had been as agile as a gymnast, sure-footed even when shinnying up a sixty-foot spar in the middle of a storm. Matt possessed none of his brother’s fluid grace.

Setting the router down on the finished side table, Matt knelt down and dug around in his bit case until he found a three-inch pattern-making bit. He fitted the bit into the router, turned the machine on, and locked the trigger. The grinding, metallic whine of the router’s small motor reverberated off the mahogany walls and ceiling. Gripping the router handles, Matt began carefully to carve the bit of molding. He stepped back to get a better look at what he was doing, and caught the toe of his oversized boot on the extension cord. When he tried to kick loose the cord, it wrapped itself around his ankles, like a lasso thrown to hobble an escaping bull. Matt stumbled, caught himself for an instant, and then started to go down. He flung out one hand to break his fall and tried to keep hold of the router with the other, but the foam padding on the handle chose that moment to tear. The machine bolted out of his grip, ricocheted off the top of the side table, and swirled through the air like a furious wasp, crashing into the deck beam and gouging out a splintered chunk of the polished wood. Matt lunged for the router, but it bounced off the face of the cabinet, managing to crack both doors. He hurled his entire body at it, knocked his chin against the side of the table, and missed. The router, like a thing possessed, smashed through a sole board and plunged down into the bilge.

“Fuck!”

He grabbed the cord, trying to drag the router back through the splintered hole. He could hear it crashing around in the bilge, ricocheting off the sides, grinding through thousands of dollars’ worth of wood. “Fuck! Fuck!” He hauled on the cord, but it raced through his hands like the warp of a lobster trap, burning his palms. The router dropped back down into the bilge. He could hear the wailing shriek of the steel bit tearing through wood.

Grabbing hold of the electrical cord, he started pulling it, hand over hand, in the other direction, hoping he could jerk the plug loose from the socket, but there was too much slack. He tore out of the stateroom and tripped again over the step, landing on his face and leaping up without
even noticing the blood streaming from his swelling nose. As he ran he could hear the router rolling and crashing around the bilge like a lotto ball in a rotating drum.

And then silence.

He scrambled up the ladder to the deck. Jane stood below him in the shadow of the boat, holding the unplugged end of the extension cord. She stared at him with narrowed eyes and a set, grim mouth. Ruthie stood beside her, hair tousled around her head, face still soft with sleep. The old T-shirt reached barely to Ruthie’s naked thighs and she stood barefoot, her toes leaving little circular prints on the dusty floor. Behind her the blankets were pushed halfway off the mattress.

Jane’s chest heaved with the exertion of her run across the yard. She dropped the end of the cord to the ground. Matt rubbed his nose and looked down at the blood smeared across his hand.

Jane turned to Ruthie. She looked the girl up and down, Ruthie blushing beneath her gaze.

“That’s John’s shirt,” Jane said.

Ruthie and Matt sat in the cab of his truck in the parking lot of the Bait Bag, Ruthie eating her fried clams and Matt his lobster roll, a stained paper bag of onion rings on the armrest between them. They’d thrown on their clothes and raced from the scene of their humiliation, and then, once they were in town, had ended up here. Matt had suggested getting something to eat.

“Do you think we should?” Ruthie had said.

“There’s no point in hiding now,” Matt said.

“Your mom won’t tell anyone, will she?”

Matt laughed grimly. “Hardly. But
she
knows, so what’s the point of skulking around?”

“Well, my parents don’t know.”

“Are you embarrassed? Do you think they’ll be pissed off at you if they find out you’re seeing me?”

“No,” Ruthie said. She didn’t really know if she was lying. She wasn’t embarrassed. Not of Matt. She liked Matt. More than liked him. But Iris
would
be upset. Or, if not upset, then certainly disappointed. Especially once she knew that Ruthie didn’t want to go back to Oxford.

“You’re right,” Ruthie said. “I’m sick of sneaking around. Let’s just get something to eat, like normal people.” She reached across and grabbed his hand, pulled it to her lips, and kissed his knuckles, bloody from his mortal combat with the router. “You’re my boyfriend, right? There’s no reason people shouldn’t know.”

Were Matt not so distracted by his internal calculations of what his calamitous accident with the router was likely to cost him both in cash and in labor, he might have allowed himself to react to the word. He had
never, after all, been anybody’s boyfriend before. He’d hooked up with plenty of girls. Well, four. And he’d gone out with more. But he’d never thought of himself as anyone’s boyfriend.

Despite their calculated flagrancy, when they arrived at the Bag they saw no one they knew other than Doreen Darling, who worked the pickup window and was famously taciturn. She was not likely to gossip. The only other diners were a group of Finnish backpackers who had, Ruthie supposed, taken a wrong turn on their way to Otter Cliff in Acadia National Park or to the vertical expanses of granite that so attracted climbers to Clifton. Certainly the 940-foot Red Hook Hill could not have been the destination of these ruddy-cheeked men and women, with their heavy-treaded leather-and-mesh hiking boots and tall backpacks festooned with carabiners, lengths of webbing and rope, and patches of their blue-crossed flag. Wherever they were headed, there was no danger of them noting the relationship of two total strangers sharing a greasy meal in a Ford pickup.

Ruthie dipped a clam in tartar sauce but hesitated before putting it in her mouth. “I’m sorry about the boat,” she said.

“Yeah.” Matt rubbed his forehead. The headache that had started as soon as he saw Jane standing next to Ruthie’s nearly naked body was getting worse.

“Will you be able to fix it?”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t have a choice.”

“Is there any way I can help?”

“You’re sweet, but unless you’ve been keeping some serious carpentry skills a secret all this time, there’s not a whole lot you can do.”

Ruthie couldn’t muster up a smile. Instead, she ate the fried clam she was holding and licked the grease and tartar sauce from her fingers.

Once they were done Matt said, “Let’s go get a beer at the Neptune.”

There was no chance of the Neptune being populated solely by reticent acquaintances and disoriented Finns, and while Ruthie might have been able to handle a few familiar faces at the Bait Bag, she was not ready for the stir their entry into the bar would cause. The guys from the boatyard would surely be there, as would the younger summer people, those who would rather drink a two-dollar beer sitting next to a fisherman than a five-dollar G&T in the company of their parents’ yacht club friends. There would likely be no one in the Neptune that Ruthie and Matt
didn’t
know, and while she understood that their relationship was now going public, she wasn’t yet prepared for such a blatant coming-out party.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

She was sure, but the disappointment in his voice made her wonder if she was being selfish. “Do you need a drink after what happened with your mom?”

“Screw my mom. I need a drink after what happened to
Rebecca
.”

To Ruthie, the calamity had been their discovery. To Matt, that was just icing on the shit cake of John’s boat’s destruction.

Matt turned the key in the ignition and the Ford coughed once before coming to life. “So, we’ll get a beer?”

“I’m sorry, Matt. I really don’t feel like it. But you should go.”

“That’s all right. So what should we do? Just go for a drive? Or do you want me to take you home?”

“No. I don’t want to deal with my parents, either.”

“So what do you want to do, Ruthie?” His voice betrayed a hint of impatience.

Ruthie looked up the road toward the center of town. Although it was nearly eight o’clock, long after closing, the lights in the library were all on. She felt a sudden longing, random but keen, for the tidiness of the library, its smell of binding glue and furniture wax, for the bright, orderly world it contained and embodied.

“You know what?” Ruthie said. “I think there might be a concert or a lecture at the library tonight.”

“A concert,” Matt said.

“Or a lecture.”

“A lecture,” he said. He began backing out of the parking lot.

“You should just drop me off,” Ruthie said. “Go to the Neptune. I’m sure I’ll be able to get a ride home afterward.”

“I don’t mind going with you,” he said, unconvincingly.

“Seriously, Matt. It’s fine. It’s actually better if you don’t come. It’ll probably be full of my parents’ friends, and the last thing I want is for my mom to hear about us from one of the library ladies. I want to tell her myself.”

By now they’d reached the library. Matt drove past, and then turned
into the parking lot of the neighboring Key Bank. He parked on the far side of the lot, where the stream of people entering the library would not be able to see them.

“I can’t just leave you in town in the middle of the night,” he said.

“It’s not the middle of the night. And, seriously, I told you, I won’t have any problem getting home. Who knows. My parents might even be here. They come to the library events all the time.”

That seemed to convince him. “You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.” She opened the car door and leaped lightly to the ground. “Go on. It’s fine. Call me tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

Halfway across the parking lot, Ruthie turned and ran back to the car. She tapped on the window and Matt rolled it down. She leaned inside and gave him a soft kiss, gently tugging on his lower lip with her teeth. “Love you,” she said lightly, as if the omission of the noun in the sentence made it somehow less startling. Then she turned and walked briskly toward the lit-up library, her hands shoved into the pockets of her jeans.