“Help,” Ruth said.
Kitty was still muttering that she was plenty goddamn smart for any goddamn school, and Gloria was staring Ruth down.
“Help me, Mrs. Pommeroy,” Ruth said, and Mrs. Pommeroy said, helpfully, “Ruth isn’t calling anyone dumb. She’s just saying that Gloria is a little bit smarter than Kitty.”
“Good,” said Gloria. “That’s right.”
“Oh, my God, save me,” Ruth said, and she ducked under the kitchen table as Kitty came at her from across the room. Kitty bent down and started whacking at Ruth’s head.
“Ow,” Ruth said, but she was laughing. It was ridiculous. She’d only come over for breakfast! Mrs. Pommeroy and Gloria were laughing, too.
“I’m not fucking stupid, Ruth!” Kitty slapped her again.
“Ow.”
“You’re the stupid one, Ruth, and you aren’t even from here anymore.”
“Ow.”
“Quit your bitching,” Kitty said. “You can’t take a slap to the head? I got five concussions in my life.” Kitty let up on Ruth for a moment to tick off her concussions on her fingers. “I fell out of a highchair. I fell off a bicycle. I fell in a quarry, and I got two concussions from Len. And I got blown up in a factory explosion. And I got eczema. So don’t tell me you can’t take a goddamn hit, girl!” She smacked Ruth again. Comically, now. Affectionately.
“Ow,” Ruth repeated. “I’m a victim. Ow.”
Gloria Pommeroy and Mrs. Pommeroy kept laughing. Kitty finally quit and said, “Someone at the door.”
Mrs. Pommeroy went to answer the door. “It’s Mr. Cooley,” she said. “Good morning, Mr. Cooley.”
A low drawl came through the room: “Ladies…”
Ruth stayed under the table, her head cradled in her arms.
“It’s Cal Cooley, everyone!” Mrs. Pommeroy called.
“I’m looking for Ruth Thomas,” he said.
Kitty Pommeroy lifted a corner of the sheet from the table and shouted, “Ta-da!” Ruth waggled her fingers at Cal in a childish wave.
“There’s the young woman I’m looking for,” he said. “Hiding from me, as ever.”
Ruth crawled out and stood up.
“Hello, Cal. You found me.” She wasn’t upset to see him; she felt relaxed. It was as if Kitty had knocked her head clear.
“You certainly seem busy, Miss Ruth.”
“I actually am a little busy, Cal.”
“It seems you forgot about our appointment. You were supposed to be waiting for me at your house. Maybe you were too busy to keep your appointment?”
“I was delayed,” Ruth said. “I was helping my friend paint her kitchen.”
Cal Cooley took a long look around the room, noting the dreadful green buoy paint, the sloppy sisters wrapped in garbage bags, the sheet hastily tossed on the kitchen table, the paint on Ruth’s shirt.
“Old Cal Cooley hates to take you away from your work,” Cal Cooley drawled.
Ruth grinned. “I hate to be taken away by old Cal Cooley.”
“You’re up early, buster,” Kitty Pommeroy said, and punched Cal in the arm.
“Cal,” Ruth said, “I believe you know Mrs. Kitty Pommeroy? I believe you two have met? Am I correct?”
The sisters laughed. Before Kitty married Len Thomas-and for several years after-she and Cal Cooley had been lovers. This was a piece of information that Cal Cooley hilariously liked to imagine was top secret, but every last person on the island knew it. And everyone knew they were still occasional lovers, despite Kitty’s marriage. Everyone but Len Thomas, of course. People got a big laugh out of that.
“Nice to see you, Kitty,” Cal said flatly.
Kitty fell to her knees laughing. Gloria helped Kitty up. Kitty touched her mouth and then her hair.
“I hate to take you away from your hen party, Ruth,” Cal said, and Kitty cackled fiercely. He winced.
“I have to go now,” Ruth said.
“Ruth!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed.
“I’m being banished again.”
“She’s a victim!” Kitty shouted. “You watch yourself with that one, Ruth. He’s a rooster, and he’ll always be a rooster. Keep your legs crossed.” Even Gloria laughed at this, but Mrs. Pommeroy did not. She looked at Ruth Thomas-concerned.
Ruth hugged all three sisters. When she got to Mrs. Pommeroy, she gave her a long hug and whispered into her ear, “They’re making me visit my mother.”
Mrs. Pommeroy sighed. Held Ruth close. Whispered in her ear, “Bring her back here with you, Ruth. Bring her back here, where she belongs.”
Cal Cooley often liked to affect a tired voice around Ruth Thomas. He liked to pretend that she made him weary. He often sighed, shook his head, as though Ruth could not begin to appreciate the suffering she caused him. And so, as they walked to his truck from Mrs. Pommeroy’s house, he sighed and shook his head and said, as though defeated by exhaustion, “Why must you always hide from me, Ruth?”
“I wasn’t hiding from you, Cal.”
“No?”
“I was just evading you. Hiding from you is futile.”
“You always blame me, Ruth,” Cal Cooley lamented. “Stop smiling, Ruth. I’m serious. You always have blamed me.”
He opened the door of the truck and paused. “You don’t have any luggage?” he asked.
She shook her head and got into the truck.
Cal said, with dramatic fatigue, “If you bring no clothes to Miss Vera’s house, Miss Vera will have to buy you new clothes.”
When Ruth did not answer, he said, “You know that, don’t you? If this is a protest, it will backfire in your pretty face. You inevitably make things harder for yourself than you have to.”
“Cal,” Ruth whispered conspiratorially, and leaned toward him in the cab of the truck. “I don’t like to bring luggage when I go to Concord. I don’t like anyone at the Ellis mansion to think I’ll be staying.”
“Is that your trick?”
“That’s my trick.”
They drove toward the wharf, where Cal parked the truck. He said to Ruth, “You look very beautiful today.”
Now it was Ruth who sighed dramatically.
“You eat and eat,” Cal continued, “and you never get heavier. That’s marvelous. I always wonder when your big appetite’s going to catch up to you and you’ll balloon on us. I think it’s your destiny.”
She sighed again. “You make me so goddamn tired, Cal.”
“Well, you make me goddamn tired, too, sweetheart.”
They got out of the truck, and Ruth looked down the wharf and across the cove, but the Ellises’ boat, the Stonecutter, was not there. This was a surprise. She knew the routine. Cal Cooley had been ferrying Ruth around for years, to school, to her mother. They always left Fort Niles in the Stonecutter, courtesy of Mr. Lanford Ellis. But this morning Ruth saw only the old lobster boats, bobbing. And a strange sight: there was the New Hope. The mission boat sat long and clean on the water, her engine idling.
“What’s the New Hope doing here?”
“Pastor Wishnell is giving us a ride to Rockland,” Cal Cooley said.
“Why?”
“Mr. Ellis doesn’t want the Stonecutter used for short trips anymore. And he and Pastor Wishnell are good friends. It’s a favor.”
Ruth had never been on the New Hope, though she’d seen it for years, cruising. It was the finest boat in the area, as fine as Lanford Ellis’s yacht. The boat was Pastor Toby Wishnell’s pride. He may have forsworn the great fishing legacy of the Wishnell family in the name of God, but he had kept his eye for a beautiful boat. He’d restored the New Hope to a forty-foot glass-and-brass enchantress, and even the men on Fort Niles Island, all of whom loathed Toby Wishnell, had to admit that the New Hope was a looker. Although they certainly hated to see her show up in their harbor.