Chapter 8 - The Shore Line
The house in Camden sat three miles south of the harbor, at the end of a dirt road that smelled of salt marsh, balsam fir, and woodsmoke.
It was a cape, built in 1948 by an uninspired carpenter who had nonetheless understood how to frame a roof against fifty pounds of wet snow per square foot. The shingles were cedar, weathered to the color of an old silver coin, and the kitchen had an iron sink with two separate brass faucets that had to be primed with a leather washer before the well water would come up.
It was October.
The sugar maples on the ridge behind the pasture were dropping leaves that looked like small, irregular tongues of fire across the gravel.
Juniper was sitting on the granite front step, wearing Beckett’s old red-and-black wool hunting jacket. She had an anatomy textbook open across her knees—pre-nursing at the community college in Rockland started on Monday—and a mug of black coffee sitting between her boots.
I came out with a plate of toast.
My hair had grown an inch.
The scar was there—three small, white, puckered stars along the parietal ridge, like an incomplete constellation that had lost its fourth member. It didn't hurt anymore, except when the barometer dropped before an easterly gale, and then it gave off a dull, rhythmic throb that reminded me I had a skull and that the skull had an interior.
“Dad called,” June said.
I sat on the opposite end of the granite step. The stone was cold through my jeans, but the sun was high enough to keep the wind from cutting.
“What did he say?”
“He finished the bridge,” she said. “The big one. The one of the Kennebec crossing. A gallery in Portsmouth is putting it in their window next month.”
“Did he sell the carriage house?”
“The closing was yesterday,” June said. She picked up a crust of toast and broke it into three pieces for the chickadees that were hopping through the dry fern stalks by the foundation. “He’s moving to a two-room flat above the boatyard in Belfast. He bought a twelve-foot peapod with an old spruce mast. He said he’s going to learn how to caulk seams with oakum.”
“He knows how to caulk,” I said. “He’s been caulking Laurel’s leaks since 1989.”
We sat in silence for a while.
A lobster boat was working the ledges off Curtis Island, the muffled *thump-thump-thump* of its diesel engine carrying across the water like an irregular pulse.
“Delaney posted something,” June said.
I didn't answer.
I watched a gull drop a blue mussel onto the flat rocks below the lane, waiting for the shell to crack so it could get at the orange meat inside.
“She’s in Arizona,” June said anyway. “Some kind of holistic center near Sedona. She’s not using filters anymore. She has a whole series about ‘de-influencing’ and the ‘prison of aesthetic expectation.’ She has seven hundred thousand followers on the new account.”
“She’ll always have seven hundred thousand followers, June,” I said. “The world is full of people who would rather watch an edit of a life than live one.”
June turned a page of her textbook. The illustration was a cross-section of the human heart: the superior vena cava, the right atrium, the tricuspid valve—all of it rendered in bright, clean medical primary colors that didn't look like real blood at all.
“Do you miss the clinic?” she asked.
“I have a clinic,” I said. “I have twelve veterans in Rockland and seven high-school girls whose parents work the fish plant. It’s plenty of clinic.”
“They don't have five-hundred-dollar centerpieces,” June said.
“No,” I said. “They have cod liver oil, bad heating systems, and teeth that need work. But when they bleed, they don't look around the room to see who’s holding the camera.”
Bellamy’s car came down the dirt road.
The Lexus was covered in gray road dust from the turnpike, and she had a box of fresh cider donuts on the passenger seat that she had bought at the orchard outside Augusta.
She didn't get out immediately. She sat with the engine idling, watching us on the step, her sunglasses pushed up into her dark hair.
Then she opened the door, leaned over the roof, and held up a manila folder.
“The final accounting from J.P. Morgan,” she shouted over the wind. “The Rye house sold to a hedge fund guy from Greenwich who wants to tear it down and put up a faux-Norman farmhouse with six heat pumps.”
“How much?” June asked.
“Enough to pay for your master’s degree,” Bellamy said, walking up the path with the donuts, “and enough to make sure your grandmother Laurel has to live in a two-bedroom condo in Boca Raton where the HOA doesn't allow minks on the clubhouse terrace.”
She sat down between us on the cold stone.
She took a donut, broke it in half, and gave the larger piece to June.
“Dr. Arispe called my office yesterday,” Bellamy said, looking at the scar along my hairline.
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to know if you were still an elder daughter.”
I took the other half of the donut. It was still warm, the cinnamon sugar sticking to my thumb where the graphite used to be on Beckett’s fingers.
May you like
“Tell him,” I said, looking out past the maples toward the gray line of the Atlantic where the tide was beginning to turn, “that the position has been eliminated due to a complete restructuring of the board.”
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