Red Hook Road (43 page)

He stopped them after a few moments and leaned over and poked Samantha’s score. “You died too soon,” he said. “You see? Take it from here.”

As Mr. Kimmelbrod turned away from Samantha, his left foot seemed to freeze. He hovered in place for a moment, arms clamped to his sides, his face an expressionless mask. Then, with a near audible creaking of his ancient bones, he fell over to one side, his stiff body crashing to the ground like a wooden plank dropped from a great height.

Iris leaped to her feet and pushed through the crowd to her father’s side. She tried to kneel down next to him, but bodies pressed in from all sides.

“Give him air!” an authoritative voice ordered. “Move back.”

The crowd eased and as Iris bent over her father she saw Jane with one arm outstretched, pushing people back. With the other hand Jane held her cell phone to her ear, and spoke calmly into the phone.

“An ambulance,” Iris heard Jane say. “And an escort. Make it fast.”

Ruthie and Matt were driving swiftly up Red Hook Road on their way back to the hospital. Iris had sent them home early the night before, although she herself had refused to leave. She had not left Mr. Kimmelbrod’s side once in the three days since his fall.

Ruthie was behind the wheel and Matt sat in the passenger seat, leafing through a sheaf of papers. “Shit,” he said. “Even if I finish the next course by the end of the summer, I won’t have enough sea time to get the upgrade.”

Ruthie said, “Why do you need the upgrade? When you took the first captain’s course you said that the six-pack license was going to be enough.”

The course for Matt’s captain’s license had cost them $665, plus the cost of getting down to Boston and staying there for two long weekends, money neither of them had. It had been a struggle to make ends meet even after the library started paying Ruthie. She had taken holiday shifts at the Haverford’s and even, as her mother had predicted, earned a few hundred dollars after the first frost harvesting the tips of evergreen boughs and making Christmas wreaths. In addition to working at the yard and on the
Rebecca
, Matt had also made wreaths, and had managed to get hired at the UPS store over Christmas. But the
Rebecca
drank up their money faster than they could earn it, and they were perennially broke. In the end, Ruthie had let Matt put the money for the course on her credit card. A month later, at the cash register at the food co-op, Ruthie had been obliged to watch as the checkout clerk—a hostile vegan with a sallow face—snipped Ruthie’s credit card in half. With less than four dollars in her pocket, Ruthie had spent a humiliating ten minutes pouring bags of rice, black beans, flour, and quinoa back into the bulk bins.

“Yeah, uh, turns out they won’t give me the insurance unless I’ve got a minimum fifty-ton license.”

“But the boat doesn’t weigh anywhere
near
that.”

“It’s not about what the boat weighs, it’s just a licensing requirement. Anyway, that’s the least of our problems. How the hell are we going to afford the insurance?”

“What was the quote?”

“I don’t even want to tell you.”

“Come on, Matt. What was the quote?”

“Thirteen thousand dollars.”

“What?” she said. “That’s
insane
.”

“It’s not really insane. I mean, think about it. We need a million-dollar liability policy. And the Caribbean is, like, prime hurricane zone. Do you know how many boats went down in Hurricane Ivan?”

“No.”

“A lot. It’s just, you know, that’s what insurance costs. You want to be a charter boat captain, you have to pay the insurance.”

They were coming up on Jacob’s Cove, and Ruthie pressed her foot more firmly on the gas. Once they were safely past, she said, “Matt? Can I ask you something?”

He was reading again, flipping through pages as though a better answer lay somewhere between the lines of what he’d already read.

“Matt?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you really want to be a charter boat captain?”

“What do you mean? Of course I do.”

“Nothing. I don’t know. It’s just … you were totally miserable taking that class.”

Ruthie had accompanied Matt on one of his Boston weekends, entertaining herself while he was in class by visiting with those of her friends who were enrolled in various Harvard graduate programs. Matt’s class let out at six, and on the first evening they met up with a group at the Cantab Lounge to drink beer and listen to Little Joe Cook reprise his 1957 hit “Peanuts.” The next evening, however, Matt claimed to be too drained from sitting in class all day to deal with another late night, and sent
Ruthie out on her own. The third night was the same. Ruthie was sure he just hadn’t liked her friends and preferred lying around watching ESPN to going out with them again.

He had gone to Boston alone the next time, and had returned gloomy and depressed. When she confronted him he claimed that the lectures were dry and dull and he was unused to sitting in a classroom, but she had been sure there was more to it than that.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Matt said now. “I mean, come on. How can you ask that?”

When John had taken on the project of rebuilding the
Rebecca
, the restoration, while foolishly expensive, made sense. With every board foot of mahogany and piece of sandpaper, with every inch of sailcloth and handful of nails, John had been building a future for himself and Becca. There was no way John could have afforded a new boat of the Alden’s size and quality, even with the proceeds from the sale of Becca’s violin. Restoring the Alden was the only way he and Becca could realize their dream, conceived in the first days of their falling in love and nurtured tenderly throughout their courtship and engagement, of sailing the Caribbean.

Matt had resumed the project three years ago with not even a clear idea of carrying John’s plans through to their full, logical conclusion. His only motivation back then had been a vague compulsion to finish what John had started. He had refused to admit defeat despite a multitude of mistakes and setbacks because to do so would have been a betrayal of his brother’s memory. Early this past winter, when he realized that he was close to finishing, he had been forced to confront the question of what to do with the
Rebecca
.

The
Rebecca
was a good boat, with solid bones and a decent provenance: John Alden had built her for a New York plastic surgeon who had operated on the nose of Bette Davis, and the blue-eyed star had signed the boat’s log not once but twice. Even so, she was worth little more than what Matt and John had put into her. There was not much of a market for restored boats, whatever their history, especially if they were rebuilt in someone’s backyard. The men who could afford the indulgence of a wooden boat wanted one with the most advanced and state-of-the-art aerodynamic design, with a tank-tested keel and a carbon fiber rig. They
wanted a boat built for them from the ground up, in a prestigious yard like King’s, and they were willing to pay a million dollars, sometimes a lot more, to get it.

So even if he could have brought himself to part with the
Rebecca
after all the work and love he and his brother had sunk into her, Matt wouldn’t have been able to sell her. But neither could he afford to keep her as a pleasure boat. The only option Matt could see was the one that John had always intended.

Matt said, “What about you, Ruthie? Are you, like, maybe projecting a little, or something?”

“No.”

“So you’re into it. You want to take her down to the Caribbean and run charters with me.”

When Matt had first broached the possibility of following through on John and Becca’s plan, with him as captain and Ruthie in Becca’s role as chef and hostess, she had been under the influence of the warm and expansive feelings engendered by her very first Christmas in Maine, complete with tree, tinsel, sugar cookies, and carolers singing on the steps of the Red Hook Town Hall. Matt’s idea had struck Ruthie then as an attractive, sunny fantasy. She had managed temporarily to overcome her trepidation about sailing by concentrating on the Caribbean part of the plan. She loved the idea of visiting the islands; she imagined herself lying on the deck of a boat (tied up in a snug harbor), reading novels and eating mangoes plucked moments before from the tree.

And if Ruthie didn’t have Becca’s natural maritime gifts, at least she knew how to cook; she had managed to learn that from her sister. As the winter progressed, she spent hours surfing the Web for recipes for flying fish and cascadura so she would be able to give their imagined clientele an authentic Caribbean culinary experience. It had been a welcome escape from the long, dark days, when it was so cold that her wet hair froze on the walk between the door and her car. She had happily reported to Matt that the temperature of the Caribbean sea was twice that of the Maine coastal waters. But after a while, as Matt doggedly took ever more concrete steps toward getting his captain’s license and preparing both himself and the
Rebecca
for this future, a feeling of dread began to overtake Ruthie. Her
volunteer job had, as promised, turned into an actual one, with its own line in the town budget, complete with a tiny salary and health insurance. She did not need Jamaica or St. John’s; the cozy library, fires blazing in both the massive stone fireplaces at either end of the reading room, was respite enough, even from the most bitter weather. She reveled in the most mundane of tasks: helping elderly patrons log on to the Internet, sending out overdue notices, shelving. One of her favorite jobs was to work the reference desk. The desk lent a real authority to the person sitting behind it, and Ruthie was constantly amazed that people expected her to provide answers to the most complicated and esoteric questions. But there was a reference book on every subject, and if those failed there was the Web, so Ruthie could, with the help of the
Dictionary of Collective Nouns
, tell a patron that a group of dragons was referred to as a dreadful; or, after a glance at the
Encyclopedia of Bad Taste
, provide another with the name of the inventor of the Lava lamp (Edward Craven Walker, born in 1918 in Singapore). Ruthie had managed to make herself so indispensable in such a short time that, rather than close the library when the rest of the staff went to the state librarians’ conference in Augusta, the chief librarian had left her in charge.

Those few days in March when she was the queen of the Red Hook Library had been the most pleasurable of her entire life. Matt took the excuse of her absence to work on the
Rebecca
, and thus she had not felt guilty about leaving him. Keys in hand, she had arrived at the library so early that it was still dark outside. She’d started up the computers and the copiers, checked in the books that had been dropped into the return slot the night before, and wandered through the rooms turning on lights. In each section she had carefully reshelved the display books and spent a long time choosing new ones. For the children she laid out
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
, one of her favorite books when she was a child, and a few choice selections of the Frances oeuvre, including
Bread and Jam for Frances
, which she considered the most delightful children’s book ever written. For the teens she went with a fantasy theme and, avoiding Harry Potter, offered them
Half Magic
, Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials
, and the
The Wind in the Willows
. Let them find the Gossip Girls books on their own. In the periodical room she fanned the
National Review
with
The Nation
and
Commentary
, with a
stray, inexplicable issue of
Heeb
that had somehow ended up in the collection. There was not much she could do with the new releases, other than to place Lorrie Moore prominently in the middle of the display and to put all the cat mysteries spine-forward. The patrons of the Red Hook library had an insatiable appetite for murder mysteries featuring cat sleuths, and Ruthie was not worried about those books finding their readers. It was the other, less popular volumes that she was concerned with. Each of them was a lost child looking for its mother, or a lover searching for a soul mate, and Ruthie was the matchmaker, tasked with the joyous job of introducing them. There was nothing, she thought, that she was better at. Around mid-morning she noticed a young woman—in her late teens perhaps—slowly spinning through the rotating rack of paperback romance novels. The girl came in every week or so and left with a pile of these paperbacks, always choosing the ones with covers festooned with heaving bosoms and Regency gowns.

“You like those, don’t you?” Ruthie asked her. “The Regency romances?”

“I love them,” the girl said, tucking a lank strand of hair behind an ear still pink from the cold.

Ruthie selected a volume from the rack. Like the others, the picture on the cover was of a young woman in an elegant frock, but this one was not so décolleté. “Have you read this one?”

The girl shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Why don’t you give it a try,” Ruthie said. “It’s one of my favorites.”