One Year in Coal Harbor Read online

  “I have to go home!” I called back. “But call me with the recipe! I want it for my notebook!”

  She nodded and waved and closed the door. She looked a little better but I knew there would be a gaping hole in her heart for a while. You can’t replace one dog with another any more than you can replace one person with another, but that’s not to say you shouldn’t get more dogs and people in your life. Even though no one you love is replaceable, you need a dog for the dog place in the heart, I decided, and a child for the child place, if you have a child place in your heart, not everyone does, or a dog place, either, I guess. I’ve known people who have a ferret place, to which I can only say I am thankful I was not born with one of those. A best friend is probably only replaced with a best friend, although I wouldn’t know because through circumstances beyond my control I have never had one. I wondered dispiritedly if I ever would.

  It is a terrible thing to have pockets of emptiness where something or someone should be. I felt it when my parents were missing. Now that I saw them every night, that pocket was filled, but after-school time could be a bit barren. The house was empty in a particularly echoey way after school. My mother used to always be there, except for the year when she was on a deserted island. Since being rescued, my parents had found themselves short of cash. My mom needed a job. Luckily that was when Miss Clarice arrived in Coal Harbor all the way from Duncan, opened her B and B and hired my mom. Jobs in Coal Harbor are hard to come by and my mom probably couldn’t have found one if Miss Clarice hadn’t opened her B and B. I was happy for her but it meant I came home to an empty house. Miss Clarice told my mother there would be no set hours for her, which at first made my mother feel it would all be relaxed and informal and charming, but it turned out what Miss Clarice meant was that she would pay my mother a set fee, for which she would work her as much as she needed, which turned out to be always. My mother didn’t feel she could complain. They both knew there were a lot of people in town who would be more than happy to take her job.

  Sometimes after school I got lonely, and then usually I either went to Evie and Bert’s or helped Miss Bowzer out at The Girl on the Red Swing. She was teaching me how to cook and I was trying to move the romance along between her and my uncle Jack.

  When my parents had returned from being lost at sea it had looked as if a full-scale romance was about to blossom between Miss Bowzer and Uncle Jack but instead they had just drifted along as usual. He, coming in and making remarks about her menu, which he thought she should spruce up for the new element moving into his town houses; and she, studying him with the same detached disdain she reserved for people who didn’t quite live up to her standards. I knew she didn’t like his line of work. He was a developer in a town that didn’t particularly want developing, but other than that he was a fine man. I wanted to tell her she shouldn’t be so picky, people’s professions don’t say everything about them. I wanted to tell him that maybe he should shut up about the menu. He was usually the soul of tact but I think he enjoyed tweaking Miss Bowzer and watching her reaction and didn’t seem to notice that it wasn’t making her like him any better. Nevertheless I could see why he did it. She was really lovely when angry. It made her green eyes flash. It was as if you could see in that flash the storm within her. As if her eyes, like lightning beneath a thunderhead, became the jewel-like advertisement for the power of the storm. I didn’t give either of them any helpful behavioral hints, of course. Even I recognize what someone else might think is none of my business. Once in a state of despair at some offhanded insult Uncle Jack had just made, I did mention when I got him alone that if you’re courting someone, insulting them is probably not a good place to start. I tried to make this sound like a general observation and nothing I had noticed anyone I was related to doing lately, but he seemed to see through this and looked startled. Then he said, “I’m not courting her. Courtship implies marriage and I’m not the marrying kind, Primrose. And clearly neither is Miss Bowzer. Some folks are and some aren’t.”

  This kind of took the wind out of my sails, and anyhow I disagreed. If anyone was the marrying sort, it seemed to me it was Uncle Jack. And as for Miss Bowzer, she was the type who would never marry just because it was expected but if she did fall in love, would do so head over heels and stay married until the end of time. She once told me she was waiting for the type of marriage my parents had, where my mother had followed my father out into the storm, looking for his boat, forsaking all else. That was true love, she said, and rare as rare could be and the only kind for her. She was looking for someone who could do that, forsake all else. And Uncle Jack might not think he was courting Miss Bowzer, but something in his manner said he was. I think we have all kinds of different parts of ourselves stored away and waiting and sometimes some of them get unleashed on us without us even knowing. I could tell he wasn’t being disingenuous or simply lying when he said he wasn’t courting her; he really didn’t seem to be aware that the courting part of him was unleashed and on the loose. Maybe he thought he flirted with her just the same as he did with everyone. He couldn’t help being charming. I thought the flirting he did with her was of a different sort but in case this was just wishful thinking, I asked my mother what she thought.

  “Of course he’s in love with her,” said my mother. “Do you know what they’re like, Primrose? They’re like those magnets that push each other away when they get closer.”

  Jack was her half brother and didn’t look like her. She has a fox face and he has a pig face but in a nice way. He’s tall and blond, broad-shouldered and ruddy. My mother has sandy hair. I have red hair and freckles. None of us look like each other. If you saw us lined up you would never guess we were family. My mother didn’t even meet Uncle Jack until she was older. He was a drifter and was always flitting about developing and doing deals and in the military and in general not available to family. But when my mother got herself lost at sea, the town council looked for a relative for me, and by a fluke Jack showed up in Coal Harbor and solved everyone’s problem. Ever since, my mother had felt an indebtedness to her brother. Part of this was manifested in a determination to figure out a more stable life for him, and I could see that this conversation had started wheels turning in her brain.

  “We should do something to help this along,” she said as she bustled about making dinner.

  “I wouldn’t,” said my father, who was seated on the couch with his newspaper. “Jack always seems to me more than capable of paddling his own canoe.”

  “Well, we can have them both to dinner, can’t we? That’s just civilized.”

  “Uh-huh,” said my dad, not sounding convinced in the least.

  “He’s my brother. There’s nothing more natural than having him for dinner. It’s just that I’ve been so busy at the B and B. We never have had Miss Bowzer for dinner and shame on us for that, the way she lets Primrose hang out in that restaurant.”

  “I help her!” I protested.

  “And was one of the people who watched over her when we disappeared,” my mother went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “I suppose we should plan on Sunday when I’m not working.”

  “But Miss Bowzer works Sunday,” I said.

  “Oh, of course,” said my mother.

  “The only night she has off is Monday and she said the other day that she might have to start keeping the restaurant open then too because she barely kept body and soul together this winter.”

  My mom and dad looked at each other over the top of my head and my mother nodded.

  “You know it’s hard to survive in a small town on one income,” said my mother. “Much better to be married.”

  “Although she seems to have done okay so far,” said my dad, rustling his paper and pulling it up over his face again as if this were his last comment on the topic.

  “So far,” said my mother, pursing her lips. “Monday it is. I’ll just tell Miss Clarice that I must leave early and that is that. Now, let’s think of a menu.”

  “You don’t ev
en know yet if they’ll come,” I said.

  “Well, that’s your job, Primrose. You invite her. Jack just eats TV dinners every night anyway. Why wouldn’t he come for supper? We ought to have him more often. TV dinners have no nutrition.”

  “He likes TV dinners!” I said. “Especially the chicken ones.”

  “Those chicken TV dinners always remind me of rat pieces. Those stringy little legs in there,” said my mother.

  “Even if they are, why ruin it for him?” said my father quietly from behind his paper.

  My mom didn’t bother answering but bustled into the kitchen with a pile of cookbooks and plopped them on the table between us. We had six cookbooks, all from the Fishermen’s Aid Society’s yearly cookbook sale, the proceeds from which went to help fishermen’s families who were suffering for one reason or another. There was never very much money in the fund. Just enough to maybe pay a grocery bill or buy school clothes. I would probably have gotten some of it when my parents disappeared if Uncle Jack hadn’t shown up when he did.

  As if reading my thoughts, my mother said, “I ought to try to find another fund-raiser for Fishermen’s Aid. The cookbook sale is never enough.”

  “But I’m collecting a whole notebook of new recipes,” I protested. “Ones we haven’t used yet. Evie even called me with her freeziolla recipe. Well, I suppose I could always turn my recipes into a real cookbook and send it to a real publisher. A fund-raiser for me. How do you get something published?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that easy,” said my mom. “Who is that lady who lives on the edge of town who published a book about cats? She sure made it sound hard. She said being a writer was like being a cross between a ditchdigger and a pit pony.”

  My dad snorted. “A writer? Wasn’t her book just a bunch of photographs of cats?”

  “Never mind, I just had another idea. Maybe we’ll do a youth cookbook this year with Coal Harbor’s youths’ favorite recipes or something. Let’s think about it. A different twist would be good. I bet people are getting tired of the same old thing. Mrs. Cranston entered her shepherd’s pie recipe three years in a row and I haven’t had the heart to tell her because, frankly, I suspect it’s the only thing she knows how to cook.”

  “Maybe you should write Miss Honeycut,” said my father from behind his paper.

  “The only thing I ever saw her make was lemon cookies for Uncle Jack. And besides, she doesn’t even live here anymore,” I said.

  “No, about money for the aid society,” said my dad.

  “Oh, that Miss Honeycut!” said my mother, snorting with derision.

  Miss Honeycut was our school guidance counselor when my parents disappeared at sea and had been instrumental in getting me pulled out of my happy situation with Uncle Jack and put into a foster home. This had worked out fine because the foster home had been with Bert and Evie but she hadn’t known it would work out fine. Miss Honeycut just wanted me out of the way so she could go after Uncle Jack. Her father had owned about all of the North of England and she had inherited it at his death and gone back there. And that had been the end of Miss Honeycut, or so I had thought.

  “Besides, Miss Honeycut may be rich but she’s cheap,” I said.

  “Maybe so,” said my father. “But she is about to lay a pack of money on Coal Harbor. Listen to this.”

  He began to read an article. Miss Honeycut apparently had written the mayor that she was to disperse some charitable funds on behalf of her dead father and she wanted to do something for Coal Harbor, where she said she had spent some of her happiest years. This, I’m certain, was news to everyone in Coal Harbor. She always looked like she had a pickle up her nose. She always looked at me as if my being in particular was pickle-worthy. But she looked as if quite a lot of other people were a source of great misery too, so I never really took it personally. It did make me feel vaguely apologetic whenever I was in her presence. Loneliness surrounded her like a little fog, and you could tell she didn’t like it but had been taught not to complain. She was valiantly doing the best with what she had. She surrounded herself with colleagues and she talked about her friends all over the world. And she told endless anecdotes in an effort to be politely entertaining and do the right thing. The problem was she was trying so hard to do the right thing that she never really inhabited her life, it seemed to me. It was run by some kind of phantom adjudicator whose standards she never quite lived up to. She held everyone else to this adjudicator’s standards as well, so there was no help for any of us. And it didn’t seem to matter how many so-called friends she had, she never connected especially with one person, and if you can’t connect especially with one person, maybe you can’t really connect with anyone. This is the kind of loneliness that existed for her, different from the just-not-knowing-anyone loneliness. And it worried me because I didn’t have a best friend and I certainly didn’t want to end up like Miss Honeycut, available for deathbed appearances and christenings and not particularly missed in between. I had a bunch of special grown-up friends but that was limited too because they had lives that were complicated in ways different from mine. I couldn’t be a party to them. I was more an accessory. Of course there was Eleanor Milkmouse but she was only a friend of convenience. And maybe even desperation, because it was so embarrassing to have no special friend at all. We didn’t really understand each other. I feared I was Miss Honeycut in a younger format, the difference being that I really wanted a best friend and was sure, given the opportunity, I could have one, whereas I always had the feeling Miss Honeycut could be presented with someone perfect for her and still somehow never make that connection. It was almost as if loneliness had become her best friend.

  The article went on to say that anyone who had a suggestion for a charitable Coal Harbor cause should write to Miss Honeycut, and gave her manor house address, which, I was interested to note, was Honeycut Hall, without even a street name. Imagine, I thought, your home being so enormous and well known that all you had to say was you lived at Honeycut Hall somewhere in the North of England and all your mail got there fine.

  “Excellent,” said my mother when my father finished reading. “What is a better or more fitting use for this money than the Fishermen’s Aid? How much money is involved, does she say?”

  “Half a million pounds,” said my father.

  There was a stunned silence.

  “Is that the same as half a million dollars?” I asked.

  “Considerably more,” said my father.

  “We wouldn’t even know what to do with so much money,” said my mother.

  “Well, don’t tell her that,” said my father. “And apparently it’s only a small portion of the money she has been assigned to give away.”

  “After all, she does own half of England,” I said.

  “We’d only need some of the money,” said my mother. “Just a portion of that would help so many families through a bad winter. Or we could set up a foundation and the interest could help families year after year. We’d never have to have another cookbook drive.”

  “I like the cookbook drives,” I said. “How else are you going to learn how everyone else in town eats?”

  “You’d better write soon,” said my father to my mom. “I have a feeling there’s going to be no end of people pleading their cases.”

  “I will. Tonight,” said my mother, and then we sat down and began flipping through cookbooks.

  But I wasn’t really paying attention. I couldn’t get out of my head the idea that Miss Honeycut’s best years had been spent here, where she had seemed so lonely and out of place. Where had her worst years been, and what was it like for her now in England in her manor house with all that money? Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Owning half of England? But maybe the reason she was cheap was that money hadn’t ever made her that happy and she didn’t expect it to make other people happy either.

  “Chicken?” my mom asked me for the second time, and I tried to pull my thoughts back to the here and now
. “Real chicken as opposed to pieces of rat?”

  “I don’t know. Seems a little dull,” I said. “Unless you want to make cornflake chicken. We haven’t made that in a while.”

  “Ummm,” said my mother, biting her lip and flipping pages.

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking about it. “Let’s make cornflake chicken and mashed potatoes and ersatz gravy and peas and biscuits! Let’s do a Southern dinner. Uncle Jack would like that and I bet Miss Bowzer would too.”

  Ersatz gravy was one of my mother’s inventions. It was supposed to be healthy gravy because it used cornstarch, not fat, as a thickener but it turned out to taste really good too.

  “Ummm,” said my mother, still flipping. “Maybe we can find something a little fancier.”

  “Fancier?” I said. “That’s a Sunday-type supper.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” my mother said, looking uncomfortable.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I pressed. “You think it’s fancy when we have it.”

  “It’s fine for Jack. I just don’t want to serve a professional chef something made with cornflakes, okay? And ersatz gravy is definitely not for company.”

  “You don’t have to impress Miss Bowzer. I’ve already told her about the ersatz gravy and she said she’d like to try it sometime.”

  “Well, Miss Bowzer’s very polite. And I know she serves honest, unpretentious food. Except for that silly thing with the lentils Jack made her put on the menu. But I’d still like to at least look like I know better, especially as Miss Bowzer has never eaten here before. I don’t want her to think we eat things like cornflake chicken and ersatz gravy all the time.”

  “But we do.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have to know that, okay? Or think that even if we eat that way we don’t know better than to cook such things for guests.”

  “And Uncle Jack didn’t make her put it on the menu. He suggested it. You can’t make Miss Bowzer do anything. She did it to reward him because she thought he’d done a fine thing, saving lives in that fire.”