The Way Life Should Be (23 page)

Cook minced onion in olive oil until translucent; add tomato paste until blended. Then add rice. Slowly add white wine and an equal amount of lobster water. Continue stirring and adding liquid as rice cooks, 20 minutes or so.

Melt butter in a separate pan. Add shrimp; cook until pink. Remove shrimp and add scallops; sear until golden. Add shrimp and lobster to the risotto pan. Fold in. Season to taste.

The meal ready, the adults gather around the table. Josh sits ensconced in the window seat working on his bracelet, outside the circle but warmed by its glow. Looking at him, I think how safe he must feel—the smells of food in the house, his mother nearby. Each week he draws closer, stays longer. I watch him sitting quietly in the window seat, leaning his shoulder against the side of the bookshelf, his back to the huge black pane.

The meal is winding down.
I bring out a plate of
taralli,
a southern Italian spicy cookie made by shaping a dough of flour, eggs, seasonings, and olive oil into circles, boiling, then baking them a crispy golden brown. I made them yesterday, knowing that we wouldn’t have time tonight. I ask the group to identify the unusual combination of tastes, and with each bite the flavors emerge: black pepper, fennel, cinnamon.

Having finished the macramé bracelet, Josh wanders over to
the table, gets Tom to tie the bracelet off, snip the ends, and fasten it around his wrist. While Tom is tying, Josh sniffs a
taralli
and takes a bite. His grimace tells us he isn’t having any of it. After fishing three Oreos out of the glass cookie jar on the counter, he disappears into the den, back to his movie.

Flynn has brought decaf espresso—“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Tom asks, and Flynn drawls, “You callin’ me a moron?”

“Or an ox,” Lance says dryly—and makes it in an old-fashioned French press.

We sit around the table eating the crunchy biscuits, sipping espresso out of Rebecca’s bone china. She produces a bottle of port and pours it—deep red, blood viscous—into small crystal goblets, and passes them around.

Flynn downs the port like a shot of tequila, and Lance rolls his eyes.

“I have an idea,” Flynn announces. “Let’s play a game.”

“Please, no,” Lance groans.

“Don’t be a knocker, Lance,” Flynn says.

“What’s a knocker?” Eileen asks.

“A knocker is someone who knocks you down for no good reason,” Flynn says.

“Another of Flynn’s delightful Australianisms,” says Lance.

“Knock, knock,” says Flynn. “So here’s the game. Each of us has to tell something about ourselves that nobody else knows.”

The silence is deafening. Then Rebecca offers, “That nobody knows, or that nobody here knows?”

“That nobody here knows,” Flynn says decisively, as if it’s a game he has played many times before. “We’ll just hear from a few people each time. Two this week, two next week, and so on.”

“You’re scaring us. This is way too premeditated,” Lance says.

“I’ve played it before,” Flynn says. “Don’t be a drag, Lance. It’s fun.”

“So, why don’t you start, then, Flynn? Tell us something we don’t know about you,” Rebecca says.

“Okay, I will.” He holds up his empty port glass. “Why are these little babies so tiny?”

Rebecca fills Flynn’s glass.

“Sip, don’t gulp,” Lance stage-whispers.

“What nobody knows about me,” Flynn says, “is that I’m going to help Angela launch a restaurant.”

“What?” I say, setting down my glass.

“What?” Tom says.

Flynn nods. “You heard me.”

“What are you talking about?” I splutter.

“I think it’s time,” he says. “The coffee shop is no longer a challenge. We need to take on something new.”

“That’s crazy,” I say. “I don’t know the first thing about running a restaurant.”

“Nor do I,” says Flynn. “That’s where the challenge comes in.”

Rebecca turns toward me in surprise. “I didn’t know you’d decided to stay.”

“I haven’t!”

“Yes, she has,” Flynn assures her.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Let’s move on,” Flynn says. “We’ll come back to it, Angie. Lots of time to ponder. Just know that you can count me in.”

“I need to point something out,” Lance says. “Telling us that you might help Angela launch a restaurant she wasn’t even thinking about is hardly revealing a lifelong secret.”

“Are you accusing me of cheating?”

Lance shrugs.

“I
invented
this game.”

“I’m just saying.”

Flynn sighs dramatically. “All right, fine,” he says. “Here’s a secret. I don’t know how to swim.”

“What? Really?” Lance seems genuinely astonished. “Are you making this up?”

Flynn shakes his head.

“How can that be? What about…the time we jumped off that picnic boat in Somes Sound?”

“Life jacket.”

“What about all those times at Echo Lake?”

“Lounging. Tanning. Wading.”

“The vacation in St. Bart’s?”

“Boogie board. Remember?” Flynn says.

“Yeeesss.” Lance nods slowly.

“Happy now?” Flynn says.

“I’m not sure,” Lance says, “but I guess that qualifies.”

“All right then,” Flynn says. “Since you were so officious with me, why don’t you go next?”

Lance smiles. “I actually do have a deep, dark secret.”

“You used to be a woman,” Flynn says. “No—I would have figured that out.”

“Close,” Lance says. “I used to be a Chippendales dancer.”

A murmur goes around the table.

“Were not,” Flynn gasps.

“Was, too,” says Lance. “When I was a student at Northwestern, in Chicago, I needed cash. So I went to a tanning salon, pumped some iron, got blond streaks in my hair, and next thing I knew, ten-dollar bills were being stuffed in my G-string.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” Flynn murmurs.

“Well, at first I didn’t want to freak you out, and then it seemed like too much ammunition,” Lance says.

“That’s our relationship in a nutshell, isn’t it?” Flynn says.
“Well, for what it’s worth, Lance, I think it’s
awesome.
”

“The older I get, the more I do, too.” Lance sighs. “Ah, glory days.”

Early the next morning
, I throw my orange parka over my pajamas and walk to the Dory Cove dock, Sam sniffing along behind me. It’s damp outside, the kind of damp that turns chest colds into pneumonia. Even the wood on my porch is sodden. This is tricky weather for dressing; it’s easy to feel too hot or too cold, so you have to wear layers.

The tide is low, so I venture down to the shore and perch on a flat rock. Far out, white boats bob in the steely bay. Last night’s snow looks as light as foam on the shore. Sam runs up and down the banks, leaving a crazy Braille of dark prints. The cold twists up my legs like a vine, and I pull my coat tighter around me. I wonder if this place, with its rocky hills and surrounding ocean, is anything like Ireland—the pallid sky, the inhospitable shore. In one of my last conversations with my mother, I asked, “Where are we from, exactly?” (knowing she’d be flattered by the plural “we,”—Irish, not Italian—and pleased that I wanted to know about her people, our shared history).

“Your grandmother was raised in a sod hut near Roscommon, in the middle of the country,” she told me. “Your grandfather grew up on the streets of Dublin. Quite a ladies’ man.”

When I was growing up, my father sometimes joked about my mother’s Irish background, saying that she was descended from a wavering line of drunks and potato eaters. For her part, my mother expressed little interest in going back to her homeland. Her parents—both first-generation immigrants—had died when she was young; for her, the ties of family were severed when she lost them.

“Why have you never gone there?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think I picked up on my parents’ shame about where they came from. The poverty and the alcohol and all that. It was too close.”

“Do you think you’ll change your mind?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe one day you’ll go with me.” But she died before either of us was ready to take that trip.

It is only six A.M., but already I can see lobstermen in the distance, throwing out traps. I think of my hardy forebears, Irish and Italian, who lived in the elements and rooted pleasure out of the simplest of things. I remember what Lindsay said about my mother and me, each of us seeking a place to call home. Maybe we both were following the immigrant’s path, in quest of adventure but drawn toward the intuitively familiar. I suspect that my mother loved the Pacific Northwest for many of the reasons I am beginning to feel at home in this place—its snaggletooth shoreline, the lemony warmth of the sun, lush evergreens against grays and browns. Even the damp. Maybe she found her Ireland out west, and maybe, just maybe, I have found mine here, on this island off the coast of Maine.

CHAPTER 23

“So you can’t swim, huh?”

“Please. I made that up. Threw the dogs a bone.”

“Yeah, right.”

Flynn and I are kneeling on the floor, unpacking a foam-peanut-filled crate of coffee cups with the Daily Grind logo printed on the sides, which he ordered off the Internet.

Only…

“Flynn, did you see this?” I hold up a mug.

“Bonzer, aren’t they?”

“Look closer.”

“What am I looking at?” It takes a moment to compute. “‘The Doily Grind.’ Oh, shit.”

“The Doily Grind.” I start to giggle, and before I know it I am laughing so hard that I clutch my stomach and fall over. “The—Doily—Grind!”

“Jesus, it’s not funny. This cost me a hundred bucks.”

“Oh, come on,” I gasp. “It is funny.” Trying to collect myself, I sit up. “I’m sure you can get your money back.”

He pulls another mug out of the box and looks at it, clearly vexed. Then he paws through the polystyrene packing peanuts, flinging them this way and that, to find the receipt. “It’s a typo,” he says, clutching the invoice.

“Yours or theirs?”

“Fuck all, it’s probably mine.”

I can’t help it, I start giggling again. “Look, you can still sell them. They’re collectors’ items!”

“I’m taking this box down to the harbor and smashing every one.”

“That sounds cathartic,” I say. “But how about this—Nonna’s a big crocheter. I’ll get her to make some doilies. And you can sell them. A coffee—and doily—shop. The Doily Grind.”

He looks at me edgily. “What is a doily, anyway?”

“It’s a little decorative—I don’t know—mat. Fun word, isn’t it? But hard to say. Doily. Doily. Try it five times fast.”

I can tell he’s beginning to relent. “Doily, doily, doily, doily, doy-lee…,” he says, and the combination of his Australian accent and my already near-hysteria overwhelms us both. We howl with laughter, gasping ideas—We’ll put doilies under coffee cups! Feature a doily a day! Start a newsletter—
The Doily News
!

The bell tinkles and Lance walks in.

“
The Daily Doily
!” Flynn shouts, holding up a mug for Lance to see.

“What the hell is going on?” Lance asks, kicking a path through the peanuts. “This place is a mess.”

“Says the exotic dancer.” Flynn struggles to his feet. “Lance, you will never be able to pull that holier-than-thou crap on me again. I’ve got your number.”

“And baby can’t swim,” Lance says. “Maybe we’ll have to get you one of those floaty swimsuits with foam in the sides. I think I saw them at Target in Bangor.”

“He says he was lying about that,” I tell Lance, sweeping up the foam peanuts with my arm. Electrostatically charged, they hop and scatter.

“Yeah, right.”

“That’s what
I
said!”

“Well, just for the record, I was lying, too,” Lance says.

Flynn puts up his hands, as if pushing the thought away. “You’d better not have been. And even if you were, I now have an indelible image in my mind of you in a sparkly G-string, dancing on a table. You’ll never take that away.”

“And Lord knows I wouldn’t want to,” Lance says dryly.

“Want a mug?” I ask, handing one to Lance. “You’re in luck; we’re having a sale—only five dollars with purchase.”

“That’s the spirit,” Flynn says.

Lance looks at the mug and does a double take. A grin spreads across his face.

“With us now?” I ask.

“Oh, yes indeed,” he says.

“I get it—a ‘White Christmas’ theme,”
Flynn says. “White Bolognese, Tuscan white-bean puree, fennel and Parmigiana salad, custard gelato.”

I hadn’t thought of that, but the menu
is
awfully white.

It’s the fifth night of Hanukkah, and Rebecca’s crystal menorah sparkles festively in the center of the table. We’ve all brought presents for Josh, which Rebecca says should be spread out over the remaining days but which we all insist he open now.

Lance and Flynn have gone in together on the entire
A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Lance warns that the books may be a little old for Josh, but Flynn insists it’s never too early to develop a morbid sense of humor. Tom has brought a small oil painting by a local artist, a stylized view of sunset over evergreens, all purples and oranges and greens. Eileen gives Josh a leather-bound 1863 edition of Bulfinch’s
Age of Chivalry or Legends of King Arthur,
with gilt edges and marbled endpapers, which she
tells us she stumbled on at a library sale. My gift is the most vulgar—three video games I found at Wal-Mart: Harry Potter’s Quidditch Match, Jack and Daxter, and Spyro the purple dragon. Sometimes, I figure, vulgar is just what a boy needs.

“How lucky are you?” Rebecca asks him. “Not an educational one in the bunch.”

“I can take them back,” I tell her, but Rebecca says, “As long as I didn’t buy them, I feel no guilt! And obviously Josh is thrilled.”

Josh, sitting amid the detritus of wrapping paper and gift bags and wadded-up sheets of tissue, gives me a thumbs-up. “Thanks, guys!” he says, disappearing with the first Lemony Snicket book and all three video games.