The Lobster Kings (32 page)

More days than not, we were stuck on the shore having to talk to the authorities, weeks wasting away. At least I was going to have a better Thanksgiving than the Cornwalls were: Oswald’s body still hadn’t been released. One of the problems with living on an island that is contested territory is that when you find a faceless body on a boat, you end up with Mounties and FBI agents duking it out over jurisdiction. And of course there were DEA agents and the RCMP Drug Enforcement Branch, plus Coast Guard, local cops from the municipalities on both sides of the border closest to Loosewood, and all sorts of people with badges. With the haggling between the Coasties and the DEA, and the paperwork of getting a tortured, drug-boat murder victim across the border, it wasn’t clear when or even
if
the Cornwall family would be able to have a funeral.

Petey Dogger’s brother told me that the cops were convinced it had something to do with Eddie Glouster, that there’d evidently been some sort of feud going on between Eddie and Oswald, but there wasn’t anything to pin on Eddie. They’d hauled him in and searched his apartment and his boat, but they drew a blank. He was so clean, Petey’s brother said, it was like he’d planned for the cops to come for him. Also disturbingly, they’d never come across the rest of that black fellow: just the finger that we found on the boat. The cops were able to identify him off the fingerprint. Not surprisingly, he was somebody who had been known to spend time with both Oswald and Eddie and who had some priors for dealing drugs, but that was the best the cops could do. Kenny’s theory was that Eddie—or whomever it was that killed the guy—weighed the body down and dumped it over the side of the boat.

The night before Thanksgiving, I met Kenny down at the Fish House. He was planning to join us at Rena’s for Thanksgiving proper, but we’d been spending a lot of our free time on land together, and it seemed natural to meet up for a drink. By the
time I got to the Fish House, close to nine o’clock, the soft breeze had started to carry its first hint of rawness, and the people sitting outside had started edging closer to the heaters. Kenny was sitting with Chip and Tony, but they stood up to go just as I arrived.

“Taking an early night. Hitting the water tomorrow and need to be back home before the turkey’s out of the oven,” Chip said. Tony nodded at me, and the two Warner boys walked off into the night.

Kenny leaned forward and grabbed the empty pitcher. “Should I refill this,” he said, “or do you want to walk down to the seawall?”

I looked around the patio. It was a mix of islanders and family members who’d come home for Thanksgiving. Some people only celebrated the Canadian version of Thanksgiving—which was what we were doing tomorrow at Rena’s house—and some only celebrated the American, but with Loosewood Island’s peculiar geography, most people ended up doing both. It made for a lot of turkey.

“This might be the last nice night of the season,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Kenny had on a heavy work jacket that I hadn’t seen before, and we walked down the path toward the water. The ocean unfolded itself in front of us, endless and inviting. The wind wasn’t coming hard off the water, but what wind there was had a chill that presaged the storm. I was wearing a dress and no coat, and realized that I was touching my neck the way that Momma used to touch her own neck: I’d been wearing her necklace earlier that evening, and I hadn’t taken it off. There was a little gust, and I shivered. Even though Kenny just drifted along by my side, I hoped that he’d put an arm around me to keep me warm.

“How are the Warner boys?”

He grimaced. “They’re trying to get me laid. Said it will help with getting over the divorce.”

“It’s final next week?”

“That’s what the lawyer says.”

I took my hand off Momma’s necklace, reached out, and touched his shoulder. “I know I keep saying it, but I’m sorry, Kenny.”

“You know what? It’s going to be a relief.” He kicked at a shell on the path. “I hate to say it, and it took me a few months to even realize it, but honestly, it was a relief when Sally left me. It was a long time coming. I think this divorce was coming at us from the day we met.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s easy.”

“I’m just ready to move on with things,” he said. “And you’ve got to be tired of talking about it.”

I looked away from the water. The old Soikie mansion, shut down for the season, loomed on the hill. Orphan clouds covered the stars here and there, and it was obvious that by the morning they would be banded together, blotting the sky. There was still enough light for us to pick our way down the stairs. Kenny lowered himself down and sat, dangling his legs off the seawall.

I sat down next to him and when my knee bumped against his, he didn’t move it away. Even with the cold, the night felt intimate and close, the dark holding the two of us inside, and from our perch on the seawall we could see the entirety of the ocean spread before us.

“You’re shivering,” he said.

He was right, but I wasn’t even sure I felt cold anymore. If anything, I felt like I was burning up, like I was in some sort of fever dream, but I didn’t stop him from wrapping his coat around me. It was warm from his body heat, and I could smell the particular combination of soap and sweat and cologne that was Kenny. I leaned my head back to look at the clouds.

“It’s too cold for a dress like that,” he said.

“I wanted to look pretty for you, Kenny.”

“You always look pretty to me, Cordelia,” Kenny said. I glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at me when he said it. He was busy leaning over and pulling a rock from the ground. He cranked his arm back and then lightly swung through a throwing
motion once, twice, three times before finally chucking the rock into the darkness and the water. He’d been a pitcher in high school. Not very good, by his own admission, but the throw was fluid, and I imagined that he would have been something to watch back then, young and lithe, unspoiled from the failed marriage yet to come. “You’ve always been easy for me to be with, Cordelia,” he said. “I don’t appreciate that as much as I should.”

I closed my eyes for a minute, warmed by his coat, and then I shifted sideways and turned so I could look straight at him. “Do you want to talk about that, Kenny?”

He stared at me and we were both quiet. He lifted up his hand, touched the pearls around my neck, and then dropped his hands back to his lap. I could hear the shush of the water, and I wasn’t sure what to do. I waited for him to move again, but when he did, it was to stand up. “Yeah, I do want to talk about that, Cordelia.” He crouched down beside me and brushed the back of my neck with his hand before reaching out and tugging on the lapels of his coat, pulling it tighter around me. “But not tonight, okay?”

T
he next morning, Thanksgiving morning, the weather was up—a soft cold rain hovering over the island—and it had the feel of a storm coming. October leaves were burning with colour, the trees starting to be stripped bare. I’d fallen asleep thinking that I’d dream about Kenny, but instead I’d had the deep, peaceful, dreamless sleep that I almost never got. I woke up feeling great, but when I went to get dressed, I saw Momma’s necklace on the bedside table where I’d taken it off and put it before going to sleep. I pushed the clothes to the side and stood there looking at the pearls before finally pulling them out and stuffing them in the pocket of Kenny’s jacket. Even in the rain, the coat still carried some of his scent, and I liked the way it hung large and heavy on me. It was too early to go to Rena’s, so I stopped at the Coffee Catch for a while to kill some time. I kept looking for Kenny to come wandering in, but it was mostly just the old farts who were waiting for the diner to open so they could go nurse their coffees there instead. Finally, around eight, I ordered a latte for Rena and headed over to her house.

She gave me a hug, glanced at Kenny’s jacket but didn’t say anything, and then took the latte with a gleeful sigh. “I swear to
god, the Coffee Catch is the greatest thing to happen to Loosewood Island since indoor plumbing.” She leaned against the counter and held the cup in both hands. “Do you think anybody would mind if, instead of cooking a Thanksgiving dinner, I just sat down and drank my coffee? We could do frozen pizza. I’ll cook turkey next month.”

Like most of the families on the island, we celebrated both the American and Canadian holidays, and for somebody like Rena, who loved any excuse to decorate the house and get the family together, it was the best of both worlds: she could decorate for Canadian Thanksgiving, do Halloween, and then decorate for Thanksgiving again. She’d already hung turkey cutouts and miniature Canadian flags. “You’re the one who always insists on hosting,” I said.

“Please. Like you want to cook for everybody?” she said, smiling at me. “I’m just tired. Guppy had a bit of a cough last night, and it kept me up.” She looked again at Kenny’s jacket hanging on my shoulders. “And how late were you up?”

“Late enough,” I said. “But, well, there’s this.” I reached into the pocket of Kenny’s jacket, pulled out Momma’s necklace, and told her about what had happened on the day Carly moved back to the island.

“The whole time?” Rena said. She held the necklace up by her fingertips, her arms extended, the pearls dangling down in front of her. She lowered her arm and let the necklace pool into the palm of her hand. I could tell she was having trouble not crying.

“I thought maybe Carly had told you.”

“No. No, I just thought they were gone.” She shook her head. “What are you going to do?”

She closed her hand around the necklace and then pulled it close to her chest, almost cradling it. I wasn’t sure if she even realized she was doing it, but it gave me a few seconds to compose myself, because I was taken aback at the question. “What am I going to do? Not, what are
we
going to do?”

She was staring past me, at the wall or just into space, but
when I said that, she brought her focus to my face. “Don’t play that with me, Cordelia. You know as well as I do how you’ve set things up in this family. It’s never been a democracy.” She didn’t sound angry, but there was an edge in her voice, and she reached out and pressed the necklace into my hand and then turned to the pantry and started pulling out flour, salt, vanilla, all of the things she thought she needed to start cooking. It reminded me of the way that I sorted gear and prepped for a day on the water, and it meant that she was done talking about the pearls. I hesitated, and then I just slipped the necklace back into the pocket of Kenny’s jacket, hung it up in the hall closet, and began to carry folding chairs into the dining room.

When Tucker came home with the twins, around eleven, I took off. I had lunch at the diner and spent some more time reading at the Coffee Catch, but even though I saw all sorts of people—John O’Connor, Jessie, Matt Frieze, Petey Dogger, Principal Philips, Chip and Tony—the one person I was looking for was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t until that evening, when I was turning up the walk to Rena’s, that I saw Kenny.

Sometime in the afternoon the rain had turned into a heavy squall, with dark clouds and the kind of rain that hurts your face, and I ducked under the cover of Rena’s porch to wait for him. He was hunched over, his hood pulled up and hustling through the weather, coming from the other direction than me. I’d planned on wearing a dress, but with the weather making a nuisance of itself, I’d ended up wearing jeans, and instead of wearing one of my own coats, I had settled on Kenny’s jacket again; I had the idea that maybe Kenny would decide to walk me home after we finished dinner so that he could get his jacket back.

He popped up the steps, pushed his hood back, unzipped his coat, and then pulled a tie out of his pocket. He held it out to me. “Here,” he said.

“Here?” I took the tie out of his hand. “Here … as in? Because, if you must know, I greatly prefer flowers. Or beer.”

“Here, as in, can you tie it for me?” He gave a crooked smile
and ducked his head, and I realized he was embarrassed. “She always used to tie them for me. Not that I wore a tie all that often, but, well … And I know you’re the one who did it for Woody after your momma …” He sort of trailed off and then shifted side to side. “I don’t know. It’s Thanksgiving. Thought I should dress up.”

I pulled the ends of the tie apart and reached up to drape it around his neck. He leaned over for me, lifting his collar while I slid the tie back and forth a couple of times to get the length right. While I twisted the long end over the short and then made the loop, he reached out and tugged at the zipper of my—of his—jacket.

“Nice jacket,” he said. “A bit big on you.” He moved his hand over and touched my chin. “No necklace?”

“Not tonight,” I said.

He shook his head. “Pretty necklace, but it’s not your style. You look good without it.”

I cinched the knot tight and then straightened the tie. I looked up at him again, and he was staring right at me. I let my hands fall to my sides, but neither one of us moved to step back. I took a breath and put a little more weight into my toes, my body moving toward him slowly, almost imperceptibly.