A Simple Thing (5 page)

“Does everyone farm?” Susannah asked.

“Not everyone,” Jim said. “Many people grow food for their own families. We grow vegetables to sell at the San Juan farmer's market once a week, and we raise chickens and alpacas. And we've just started experimenting with small grains, for bread.”

“And you fit this in after teaching?” Susannah said.

Jim laughed. “Right. No. When I took the teaching job, our neighbors, Joel and Bob Baltimore, helped us out with the spring planting. I took over again in mid-June, when school ended. We shared the produce and the profits last summer. Joel and Bob have a small farm, too. Worked out well because they took in more money than usual, and it gave me time to teach and Fiona time to work on her business.”

“Fiona has a business?”

Susannah saw Betty draw her lips together in a thin line, but she said nothing.

“Yeah,” Jim said. “She started an import business last year, importing yoga gear from India and selling it to studios and customers, mostly in Vancouver and Seattle. She's in India now for a few months.”

Yoga. Susannah had tried several yoga classes and it had driven her crazy. Lying there in corpse pose thinking about her breathing almost gave her a panic attack.

They turned onto the driveway, and Hood hopped out to open the gates as they passed through. They drove by two tall windmills, silver blades spinning in the breeze. At last they pulled up in front of a one-story white clapboard cottage, with a black roof and a peaked gable over the front door. To the left of the cottage, a few hardy chrysanthemums, dahlias, and marigolds bloomed behind a chicken-wire fence. A grove of gnarled apple trees and a faded red barn with a sagging roof stood just beyond the garden. On the other side of the barn Susannah could see fields, some fallow, some bursting with winter squash, and beyond that the forest, stretching narrow trunks to the sky. The air had the rich, loamy scent of decaying things and new life all at once.

“My house is right there, over that rise.” Jim pointed to a hill just beyond the farm, further inland. “And Mom's place is there, by the water.” Susannah saw a small, shingled gray house overlooking the bay.

“It's an estate,” Susannah said.

Jim grinned. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Bill Gates, Paul Allen, the Pavalaks—we all have our spreads in the San Juans.” He turned to Quinn. “Your house was built in the twenties. Rumor has it the original family ran a bootlegging operation here.”

“Bootleggers!” Quinn said.

Jim smiled. “We lived here for years. Then I built our new place three years ago. We wanted something simpler.”

Susannah stared at the cottage, which would be considered an instant “tear-down” in Tilton.

“Our new place is six hundred square feet,” Jim said. “It's got a solar-powered water pump for the well, wood-burning stove for heat, a combination of solar panels, batteries, and a generator for electricity. Small, efficient, cozy, cheap—we love it.”

Susannah looked at him. She couldn't imagine a family of four living in six hundred square feet.

“ ‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,' ” Jim said, as if reading her mind.

“What?”

“Edward Abbey. I'm a fan.”

Susannah tried to take it all in.
If he tells me they compost their own waste,
she thought
, I'm leaving
.

She walked to the back of the truck to help unload and caught sight of the bay through the trees, a few hundred yards beyond the house that would be hers for the next nine months. A large madrona tree grew on a bluff above the water, its red bark peeling back in curls from the smooth white trunk beneath. Wooden steps led down to a dock. The late afternoon sun had broken through the clouds and cast a path of brilliant scattered light across the water. She looked up and saw a hawk gliding in effortless circles above the trees at the edge of the bay.

She felt a nudge against her shoulder and looked down to see Quinn.

“This is cool, Mom,” he said. “Where are the chickens?”

She put an arm around him, gazing at his sweet, freckled face. “I don't know,” Susannah said. “Maybe behind the house. You go look for them after we unpack.”

She walked around the side of the truck, where Katie leaned against the cab, kicking at rocks while Hood and Baker peppered her with questions. “Why did you come here? What was your school like? Do you have an iPhone? Did you see
X-Men
?”

“How do you know about
X-Men
?” Katie asked.

“Duh! We can read,” Baker said. “We have the Internet; we get newspapers every week. Did you think this was like
Lost
or something?”

“I don't know,” Katie said. “This was my mom's idea.”

“ 'Duh to that, too,” Hood said. “Kind of obvious.”

“Come on,” Susannah said, nodding toward the bags Jim had unloaded from the truck onto the grass. “Let's get this stuff into the house.”

Hood and Baker each picked up a bag and headed into the cottage, following their dad. Quinn was already inside. Katie hung back, just outside the front door.

“I still can't believe you brought me here,” Katie said, as Susannah reached for a suitcase. “There are only two kids my age,
two
.” She paused for emphasis. “I can't even text anyone at home because my phone hardly works. This is totally unfair. You're trying to control everything, even more than you did at home.”

“What I'm trying to control, Kate,” Susannah said, “is your tendency to do reckless, dangerous things. I'm trying to keep you alive until you have the judgment to make better choices.”

“You're trying to make sure I make
your
choices,” Katie said. “But I'm not you.”

Susannah looked at her daughter, tall and angular where Susannah was short and curvy, outspoken where Susannah was reticent, impulsive where Susannah was cautious.

“Oh, honey,” she said, “I know you're not me. And I don't want you to be.”

“Yes, you do,” Katie said.

Susannah couldn't help but feel a sense of shame when she thought of herself at Katie's age, of what she'd done that year.

“No,” Susannah said, her voice firm. “I don't.”

Chapter 5

Betty 2011/1950

Betty leaned against the truck, watching the Delaneys unload their gear and her grandsons trot around Katie like prize stallions at a show. She could see right away that Katie and Hood were attracted to each other; my God, you could practically smell the pheromones in the air. She could also see that Susannah was very protective of Quinn, who was an interesting kid but nervous as all get-out, and even more protective of Katie, who wasn't about to let anyone protect her from anything. She wondered what had happened back home that had led Susannah to make the move to Sounder.

The screen door of the cottage slammed, and Jim came out and leaned against the truck next to her.

“She's an attractive girl,” Betty said.

“Who?”

“Katie,” Betty said. “Who do you think I meant?”

“Well, Susannah's attractive, too.”

Betty rolled her eyes. “You're as bad as your sons. Worse. You're married. And so is she.”

“I know. All I said was she's attractive.” He shook his head. “She has her hands full with Katie, that's for sure.”

Betty fumbled for the zipper on her parka and zipped it up against the evening's chill. “I guess that's why she's here.”

“Think she'll like it?” Jim said.

Betty turned her head to look at him. “I think she's scared.”

“What, of living here?”

“A little. Of her daughter. Of something back home. Of I don't know what. Doesn't she strike you as nervous?”

Jim put both hands in the pockets of his fleece and looked at the sky.

“A little. She's interesting, though. She seems kind of high-strung, but she's tough, and has a good sense of humor. She's got a great smile. I think she'll stick it out.”

Betty eyed her son. His boys were not the only males on this island who could use a little female companionship. And this Susannah, in spite of the anxiety that radiated from her, was a pretty woman, with a wide, ready smile that lit up her whole face, thick brown hair, and a curvy figure you couldn't help but notice. She was sensitive, too, one of those people who seemed to intuit the moods and yearnings of everyone around her before anyone said a word. Betty recognized it right away. Jim was that way, too. It made a person very compassionate, but it was a hard way to walk through the world.

That's why Jim had married Fiona, Betty thought, because Fiona was not a worrier and not exquisitely tuned in to the feelings of others and not raw like that, like him. She remembered when he'd first read
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,
at age ten, and sobbed for hours when the ogre shaved Aslan's mane. The fact that Aslan had been mocked and tormented bothered him even more than the lion's death.

Betty liked Fiona, her daughter-in-law, who was hardworking and more than competent but, if truth be told, mighty hard to please. Fiona had spent seventeen years on Sounder, and in that time Jim had fixed up the cottage; renovated the Laundromat so Fiona could run it; built that little cabin they lived in now because Fiona wanted a new place that would be less work; and started raising alpacas because Fiona wanted to start her own crafts business with items she knit from the wool. But she'd tired of the Laundromat after a few years and turned the work over to Frances Calvert, the postmistress. Then she'd abandoned the knitting project a few months after she began, and two years later the alpacas still roamed the meadow, eating bales of good grass hay that could be going to the goats, who at least produced milk.

Now Fiona had started an import business, something to do with yoga and yoga mats and yoga clothes, which made no sense at all to Betty, given that Americans had been crazy for yoga for a good thirty years now, leaving Fiona and her yoga bags well behind the trend. Still, Fiona was convinced that the
quality
of her yoga mats and eye pillows was going to set her company apart and bring in some much-needed money as high school and college loomed for the boys.

Fiona's new business required frequent trips off-island, to Seattle and Vancouver, visiting yoga studios and gyms, and now this long trip to India. Betty knew there was tension between her son and his wife, but kept her mouth shut. She knew, too, the kind of longings that could hit women at midlife, as the children you'd nurtured for so long grew into their own people, leaving you with a strange kind of freedom and emptiness that was hard to fill. All the blather about men and their midlife crises—Betty shook her head. In her experience,
women
were the ones who found those middle years most unsettling, who were most likely to make dramatic changes. But then, what did she know? Sure, she'd done some wild things in her forties, but Bill had died two months after she turned thirty-five. Who wouldn't have gone a little crazy under such circumstances?

“Why do you think she left her husband behind?” Jim said.

Betty, her mind on the absent Fiona, was startled. “Who?”

“Susannah. I don't know; it's hard for me to imagine Fiona leaving and taking the kids for
nine months
. It's tough enough having her gone for
two
months, like now.”

“Well, keep wondering. What goes on between two people in a marriage is impossible to fathom from the outside,” Betty said.

Which she, of course, knew better than anyone else.

 

Her own marriage had been unorthodox, to say the least. She'd met Bill the year she turned eighteen and graduated from high school. She had never had a boyfriend before. She had lots of friends, boys and girls, because she was athletic and loved to laugh and was great at party tricks, like blowing smoke in perfect round O's whenever she wanted. But she was all legs and angles and frizzy hair. Her sister Bobbie was the beauty, with silky auburn hair and blue eyes and a succession of boyfriends who took her out to dinners in fancy restaurants and wrote her sappy poems. And her sister Mel's wide-set dark eyes and rich brunette hair gave her an exotic look that intrigued men in spite of her grumpiness. The boys who came through the house with Bobbie or Mel or Jimmy, her brother, loved to tease Betty about her wild hair, tell her jokes that were a little too racy, or take bets on how far she could throw a baseball. She was every guy's little sister.

But then one day Bobbie brought home Bill Pavalak, a former sergeant with the U.S. Army Air Corps, and a buddy of Bobbie's current beau, Dick Hudgens. Bill had dark brown hair and green eyes and the whitest teeth she'd ever seen, with a slight gap between the two front teeth that saved him from being comic-book handsome. He wore a leather bomber jacket and khakis and looked at her so intently when they were introduced that she felt a stirring deep in her belly and a sudden dampness between her legs.

Later, when she asked Bobbie about him, Bobbie said, “Oh,
Bill
. He married his high school sweetheart and they got divorced after the war. I don't know what happened, but he's sworn off women for life. So he's always hanging around with Dick.”

“What does he do?” Betty said.

“He works for Boeing. But he hates it. He wants to go to Alaska and work on a fishing boat or something.” Bobbie picked at her red nail polish. “I wish he'd go. I haven't had a moment alone with Dick in
weeks
.”

“I'll go to a movie with him, if you want to do something alone with Dick,” Betty said. The thought of Bill's green eyes made her bold.

“Really?” Bobbie looked up from her nails. “That would be
perfect
. You wouldn't have to worry it would be like a date or anything; like I said, he wants nothing to do with women.”

“Of course it's not a date,” Betty said, her face warm. She dropped her head so her hair hid her face.

A week later, Betty and Bill went to the movies to see
All About Eve.
Afterward, they ate seafood salad and shish kebab at the Northern Lights on Third Avenue and Seneca. They talked about Betty's secretarial job at the lumber company, and then about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Betty had dreamed for years about playing first base for the Kenosha Comets, but now the league had been sold and the teams were starting to dissolve. They talked about crab fishing in Alaska in the frigid waters of the Bering Strait, the dangerous machinery, the number of men who died on the job each season—almost one per week.

“Yeah, but at least they don't die sitting at a desk pushing papers,” Bill said.

Betty quoted a line from the movie they'd just seen: “ ‘You have a point,' ” she said. “ ‘An idiotic one, but a point.' ”

Bill's eyes widened, first in surprise, then in recognition, and his face split into a grin and he leaned back in his chair and laughed and laughed.

“You're a clever little thing,” he said.

Betty felt that same warmth deep inside, and a flush of pleasure at being called “a clever little thing.” She'd been told often that she was clever, but no one before Bill had ever called her “a little thing,” let alone said something like that in such a warm, possessive voice. Later that night he kissed her, pressing her back against the smooth wood of the railing on the front porch of her mother's rambling old Queen Anne house, his hands resting gently on her hips. His touch was so electrifying that she forgot to worry whether or not Mel or Bobbie or one of the boarders might still be awake, peering through the window, or whether Grammy might be wandering the house with a rolling pin, as she often did at night, making sure no intruders threatened, or whether Smelly the dog would erupt into a frenzy of barking and start leaping against the windows. Betty kissed him back.

Bill took her out almost every night after that, sometimes just for walks or a ferry ride, other times to dinner or a show. He bought her feminine little things as gifts, the kinds of things she, a confirmed tomboy, had never owned before: a beret in powder blue to match her eyes, a pair of lace gloves, a rhinestone brooch. He listened to her stories and jokes, his eyes never leaving her face. She was smitten.

Bobbie was disgusted. “He's
divorced,
Bets,” she said. “He wants to be a
fisherman
. Go dancing with him, but for God's sake don't fall in love with him.”

Betty never asked about his first wife. It was his business, she figured, and what's past is past. Then, one June night they were at a Seattle Rainiers game, and Betty was keeping score in the program, marking called strikeouts and wild pitches and an unassisted putout in the third inning. Bill looked over her shoulder at the scorecard.

“You are a hell of a woman,” he said. “You know what an unassisted putout is?”

“Sure,” Betty said. “My dad was a baseball fan, and after he died I kept listening to games on the radio and going to games with Jimmy. It's something I share with my dad, even though he's gone.”

Bill shook his head. “A hell of a woman,” he repeated. “You're about as different from Jacqueline as you could be.”

Betty was still, her pencil poised over her scorecard.
Jacqueline
. He pronounced it the French way, zhak-LEEN. Betty immediately thought of someone petite and delicate, with dark curly hair and dark eyes and flawless porcelain skin.
Jacqueline
.

Bill put one hand over Betty's, to still her pencil, and the other under her chin, turning her face toward him. “You've never asked about her,” he said. “I want to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“We were high school sweethearts,” he said. “I enlisted in the army the day I graduated in 1944 and got my orders two days later to ship out to Killeen, Texas, for training. I was eighteen and I'd never even been on a plane before. I was scared. The day before I left I asked Jacqueline to marry me. I wanted—” He stopped. “I wanted some connection to home that seemed permanent.”

Betty heard the sharp crack of a bat making contact with the ball, and the crowd roared around her.

“She was very dependent on me,” he said. “Even in high school. She wouldn't go to a movie in case I might call and want to do something. She read all the books I liked. It was flattering—for a while. My mother adored her.

“My unit was shipped over to Belgium the day after Christmas in 1944.” He nodded in response to the question on Betty's face. “Yup. Battle of the Bulge. I don't want to talk about that.” He paused. “Then the war ended and I came home and there was Jacqueline, wearing my ring, all excited and proud. I didn't want to marry her; I was a different man. But I couldn't exit gracefully.”

He shook his head. “So a year later I exited with no grace at all, and had an affair, and broke Jacqueline's heart and my mother's, and moved up here to escape my shame. Now you know.”

He cupped Betty's face in his hands. “But you're entirely different,” he said. “You're opinionated and strong and your own person. I'm crazy about you, Betty.”

Her heart careened inside her chest. The crowd roared again.

“I missed two plays,” Betty said.

Bill grinned at her, picked up her scorecard, tore it into pieces, and then threw the pieces up in the air like confetti. The bits of paper floated down over them as he leaned forward to kiss her, his lips warm and forceful against hers.