Faith realized she was no doubt expected to make some comment about all this. She had been in a semicomatose state with the heat, drone of the wheel, and singsong cadences of Eric's seemingly guilt-ridden, seemingly self-righteous defense. She sat up, stretched, and looked at Eric, who was · standing over her about to get back on the wheel.
“Well, I'm sure she knew what she was doing. From all I've heard about Matilda, she was a very determined lady, and she must have wanted to give you a place to live. An incredible place to live.”
Eric laughed. "It is, isn't it?" He paused. "It's the house of my dreams.”
Faith moved back into the shadow from the boathouse. "It's the house of anybody's dreams. I wouldn't mind having it myself and I don't even like houses as a rule. You do things for a house you would never do for anyone or anything else, not even your husband, and what do you get back? You have to do the same things all over again in a while. So it has to be an extraordinary house to be worth it, and you've got one.”
All's fair in love and real estate, Faith thought to herself, but just the same she would look behind her on dark nights for a while if she was Eric or Roger. If the two of them died without issue, the house reverted to the Prescotts. That was as good an invitation as any, and the Prescotts were certainly crying bloody murder all over the island. It was bad luck and lousy timing for them. If Matilda hadn't clung so tenaciously to what was left of her life, like one of the limpets on the granite ledges in the view from her windows, the Prescotts would have gotten everything. She had changed her will only after the fire had destroyed Roger and Eric's house.
But, Faith continued to reflect, then the Prescotts would have been at each other's throats instead of at Eric's and Roger's. They couldn't all have lived in the house. She stood up and stretched some more.
She could see Samantha and her faithful shadow, Arlene, valiantly trying to keep Benjamin from tearing himself to ribbons on the razor-sharp, barnacle-encrusted rocks near the shore. They were showing him the tiny crabs and other things that inhabited the tidal pools.
Samantha was a Pix in the making, or a Pix product, depending on whether you were looking at the apple or the tree. She had shell collections, rock collections, bird-feather collections, and fern collections, all carefully labeled, which would have put many a botanist, ornithologist, or whatever to shame.
Arlene seemed to know everything by osmosis. She didn't have Peterson's field guides, life lists, or Latin names, but she knew what would make you sick if you ate it, on which offshore islands the gulls nested, and the best places to dig for clams. What was even more important to Faith at the moment was that they were both the kind of adolescent girls who adored children.
Just as the adult world could be divided into cat lovers or haters, child worshippers or tolerators at best, there seemed to be a very clear distinction between those girls who baby-sat for the money and were perfectly adequate at keeping your child safe, even somewhat entertained and clean, and those girls who were happiest pushing a stroller, playing games, and marveling at the antics of small beings. Many of them seemed to move straight from horses to kids. Faith thought of suggesting this topic to a psychologist friend of hers for a scholarly monograph, "From My Friend Flicka to Rock-a-bye Baby.”
She gazed out at the three tiny figures by the water's edge again. She had been thankful to have Samantha on the payroll and now it looked as though Arlene would join her. Not onlywas it close to an embarrassment of riches, but the girls seemed to be having fun.
It wasn't that she didn't have fun with Benjamin. She completely adored him. They were moving from the tactile, physical communication of babyhood to the tactile, physical, verbal, you-name-it relationship of the toddler. Somewhere along the line he had lost that sweet, milky baby fragrance and taken on a sweet, sweaty little-boy smell. It had happened before she realized it.
But talking to someone who referred to himself mainly in the third person, and who rarely achieved sentences longer than three words and these mostly self-involved, did pall occasionally, and it was then that she greeted Samantha with open arms. Arms that were opened to place Benjamin squarely in Samantha's.
Faith sat down again and leaned back against the boathouse. As long as they looked so content at the shore, she'd wait a bit longer before getting Ben for lunch.
From where she was sitting she could see Eric's profile. He was extremely good-looking. His normally blond hair was bleached almost white by the sun; he had blue eyes to match and a good body. He'd taken off his shirt, and she could see he was slim without being skinny. All that potting and loading and unloading the kiln had evidently been good exercise—nice muscles. She finished her inventory by looking down at his hands. They were large with long, tapering fingers The kind of hands a statue has. In fact, it would not have been too adulatory to say he looked like a statuePraxiteles, not Michelangelo.
Not my type though, Faith thought. Too much of a piece. Tom's slightly off-center nose and rusty-brown hair strayed across her mind. Benjamin might have the same hair. His strawberry-blond curls were beginning to darken. It was too soon to tell about the nose.
Faith hadn't asked, nor cared; but Pix had told her that Roger and Eric, contrary to public belief and often derision, were not gay. They were college friends, one from Iowa, one from Texas, who shared a common passion for clay. They became partners and built up a thriving business in New York, producing unique ceramic pieces as well as an elegant line of dinnerware, much of which appeared in at least one room in the Kips Bay Decorator Show House and went from there to penthouses, country homes, and favored dwellings on both sides of the Atlantic. Needing change and more space, they had come to the island on the recommendation of a printmaker friend who lived nearby on the mainland. They had been here for six years, going their separate ways for a month or two in the dreary winter months, but otherwise living and working together in what seemed like an easy harmony.
Eric was a master at glazes, although they both did everything. His current woman friend was Jill Merriwether, who operated a small gift shop in Sanpere Village. Jill didn't sell their work. Her line tended to run to objects with blueberries on them, clam-basket planters lobster potholders, balsam pillows, books about Maine, and jam, usually strawberry and blueberry, made by a number of people on the island. The shop was, in fact, called The Blueberry Patch. Faith had bought Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal there for Benjamin, and it was rapidly supplanting Goodnight Moon as the most-requested bedtime story. She figured she had read it about twenty times since buying it, and so far neither Ben nor she was tired of it.
Sanpere was an idyllic place, but still she imagined it must be pretty horrible in the off season. The population dropped drastically—from 3000 to 1200—although according to many islanders this was a blessing—and the cold weather forced an existence just ripe for cabin fever. She had met a friend of Pix's who had lived here one winter between jobs, and she had told Faith that by January she was going to every meeting on the island, even AA, just for the company.
“Don't you miss the city, Eric?" Faith wondered aloud.
“Of course I do, and when I can't stand it anymore I go down, and then after a week I miss Sanpere and can't wait to get back. That's how I know this is right for me. If you aren't satisfied in New York, then you must either be nuts or have found a spot that's better for you. Roger feels the same. He goes to the city even less often than I do, and it's usually for the business."