The Gilly Salt Sisters (10 page)

“If you go against the salt,” Mama had said through her jumble of yellowed teeth, “it will go against you. Remember that, girl.” Claire would watch her mother smooth the covers, her hands two white spiders, and she’d get the shivers so bad that Mama would have to add another blanket.

Was it then Claire decided she wanted nothing to do with the salt and its ominous workings, or did that come later, after marriage and after a string of losses so tangled it made even her into a believer of fate? She supposed that by the time she married Whit, it no longer mattered very much. She had already done all the worst things she could think of. She’d burned down the barn with one careless flick of her wrist and changed her sister’s life forever, and then she’d turned her back on Jo and her mother. Most terrible of all, though, were the sins she’d committed in the name of love. She’d cut the boy she adored out of the flesh of her heart and told herself it was for the best.

Sin did that to you, though—made it easy to carve yourself into pieces, each of them singular and more estranged from the next. Claire had left the farm, it was true, and she didn’t stop there. She’d married Whit Turner, but she didn’t do it out of love and abiding affection. Instead she’d married him out of thirst, pure and simple, and then she’d set about making sure the rest of Prospect thirsted with her.

Thanks to Claire’s rumors, Mr. Upton had suddenly found it difficult to move any Gilly salt. Almost immediately flies began hovering again around his meat counter. By the month’s end, he was stocking only dry goods. He grew gray and hunched, and when Jo came in, hoping to make a sale, he’d simply wave his tired hands with resignation. “Not this week,” he’d say, shooing her out the door. “Maybe soon, though.”

Mr. Hopper removed the salt bowls from his diner at the request of the locals, who were suddenly concerned about their sodium intake, and after a few seasons even the promise of half-priced meals couldn’t lure them into his place. Each time a business slumped, another local household banished the salt from within its walls.

Only down at the harbor did the salt still flow. Without it the docks would have iced over so hard that no one would have been able to walk across them and fish would have spoiled at sea before the men could sell it. Following the lead of Chet Stone and his dour brother, Merrett, the boats bought a few extra crates each month, keeping Jo—and the rest of the town—afloat.

“Someone’s got to use the stuff to keep the luck of it flowing,” Chet said with a shrug when Jo tried to thank him. “If no one else wants to, it might as well be us.”

The fishermen’s leniency infuriated Claire when she found out about it. She couldn’t understand the pull that the marsh held over the town. Why, even Whit was obsessed with the place, asking her from time to time if her mother had a written will and if she was in it. And then, when her mother died not even a year into Claire’s marriage, how angry Whit had been to discover that the whole farm belonged to Jo!

“Who cares?” Claire had asked. “You took me out of the marsh, remember? Why do you all of a sudden want it now?”

She hadn’t liked the answer he’d given. Neither did she like, over the next few months, his multiple offers to Jo to buy the place. Each time her sister refused, Claire was secretly relieved, for the burden of the marsh was not one Claire wished to carry. She would have sworn that it was sinking a bit more each day, and that was fine with her. Better than fine, in fact. If she couldn’t destroy the marsh with her own two hands, she figured, then she would just watch it slide into the bowels of the earth on its own volition, and if the moment ever came to give it a little shove, why, she’d be right there, ready and waiting.

T
he morning after Joanna Gilly made her first official delivery of salt, Dee set out small serving bowls of it—one per table and a few on the counter—the way Jo had told her to. When she was finished filling the last bowl, she stuck her finger into the grains and licked them onto her tongue, where they fizzled, sending little sparks from her mouth to her brain, waking her up but also making her dreamy at the same time. When her father wasn’t looking, Dee sprinkled some of the salt onto the potatoes he’d fried for lunch. He didn’t seem to notice, although he did have seconds, but Mr. Weatherly winked at Dee and nodded his approval.

“I see you took my advice and bought Jo Gilly’s salt,” he said. “Wise move. Claire’s been saying for years that it’s impure. She’s scared off most of the town from it, but I’ve never seen any evidence of the stuff being bad. Things will pick up now. You’ll see. Might take a day or two, but folks will start wandering in for sure, even if they maybe don’t reach for the salt.” He wiped his long fingers with a clean handkerchief. He was finishing the repairs on the shingles out front, but inside, the diner already looked a different place. Cutt had kept the black-and-white-tiled linoleum and the maroon leather booths and stools, but he’d varnished the baseboards and window frames darker while he lightened the wainscoting with cream paint and hung up a bunch of pictures of ships he got cheap from a motel near Wellfleet that was closing.

He and Dee had driven out to a salvage yard and picked out brass lanterns for sconces and found glass buoys and some old fishing nets. The glass balls had looked cloudy and mysterious to Dee, like fortune-tellers’ orbs. She rolled them carefully into the trunk of the sedan, securing them with netting, and wondered what her own future held. Everything around her was low and open—the swaths of beaches, the miles of rolling dunes, and of course the sea itself. This was a place Dee couldn’t keep the future out of if she tried. It would just blow on through with the incoming weather.

She shivered and looked out the big front windows of the diner. The wind was turning a tiny bit colder every day. This afternoon it had pulled some leaves off the town’s few trees and was batting them around in the bored and cruel way cats played with mice. The papery crimson of the leaves was about the only spot of color. Dee could see how it would become completely miserable here in the off-season. In Vermont the winter days had been so blue and bright that the sky practically vibrated. People would whip out their skis, little kids would ride their sleds, and there was a winter carnival with hot cocoa, snowball wars, and ice-hockey competitions. Dee couldn’t begin to imagine what folks did to entertain themselves in wet and colorless Prospect. Depressed, she leaned on the counter and rested her fork on the side of her plate. “So,” she asked Mr. Weatherly through a mouthful of fried potatoes, “what do people do out here for fun in wintertime anyway?”

Mr. Weatherly scowled, and it occurred to Dee that she was probably asking the wrong person. Mr. Weatherly was so stiff and crotchety that she bet he hadn’t had any legitimate fun since he was young. He’d probably grown up going to sock hops and dancing the old-fashioned way in boy-girl pairs. But no one did that anymore, not even in Vermont. It was all strobe lights and disco beats. Mr. Weatherly wiped his thin lips with a napkin. “Are you asking about the December’s Eve bonfire?” Dee said she guessed she was. Mr. Weatherly balled up his napkin. “We have a bonfire on November thirtieth—December’s Eve. The whole town shows. That’s it.”

Dee sighed and scraped her fork through the ketchup on her plate. “Where is it?” Sometimes, if she kept Mr. Weatherly talking, he’d drop a nugget of juicy information right in her lap. He’d never explain it—just drop it and watch her struggle to make sense of it.

“Tappert’s Green.”

Dee pictured the wide circle of shaggy grass she’d crossed on her first day in town. She couldn’t imagine standing around there in the wind and snow. “Do Claire and Jo go?” she asked, and Mr. Weatherly tugged at his cap brim.

“They used to,” he finally said, avoiding her eyes. “But they never stuck around.”

Dee noticed that whenever she asked Mr. Weatherly questions about the Gilly sisters, he took an extra beat to answer, as if he were weighing his words in his head.

Just then the bell above the diner’s main door jingled and a gaggle of women stepped inside, laughing as the wind gusted their skirts this way and that. Dee leaped up from her stool and grabbed her plate, straightening out her apron.

“Dad, we’ve got customers!” she called into the kitchen. Their very first customers. Damned if the salt wasn’t working. Dee grabbed a bunch of laminated menus and headed toward the women, but she soon stopped short. Perhaps the salt had worked too well, she thought, for standing in front of her was none other than Claire Gilly Turner—red-haired as a fox, wrapped in a scarlet coat, and from the looks of it in absolutely no mood to have the likes of dumpy old Dee waiting on her.

D
ee led the group of women—they were five in all—to a corner booth and handed out the menus while the ladies honked away about some town committee they were all on. Something to do with the library, it seemed. Dee noticed how the women waited for Claire to take her coat off first and choose where she wanted to sit in the booth. All but Claire accepted the menus. When
Claire waved hers away with a bored tip of her hand, Dee saw the tiny ripple of panic that that caused around the table. One of the ladies slammed her menu face down on the table, and another just handed hers back to Dee with an abashed look.

“Five coffees, please,” Claire said, not bothering to look Dee in the eye. “And I take mine with extra cream.” Her voice was deeper than Dee expected, almost chocolate in its smoothness. It wasn’t exactly an order Dee needed to write down, but she did anyway, out of nerves. Face-to-face like this, Claire made her feel like a puppy—all paws and fuzz. Her heart froze as Claire suddenly scowled.

“What’s this?” The women around the table froze as well, their lipstick smiles stuck halfway between grimaces and grins. Dee looked down to the dish of salt that Claire was pointing at, full to the brim, the gray grains clumped together in irregular clusters. It didn’t look that appetizing, Dee had to admit.

Claire reached one of her thin arms across the table. The inside of her wrist was paper white and flecked with delicate blue veins. Dee had never seen anyone with hands that white. They reminded her of a Victorian lady’s. She stared, fascinated, as Claire plucked the bowl up with her spindly fingers and transferred it to the tray in Dee’s hand.

“Take this away,” she said, jutting out her sharp chin. “You know, this stuff is absolute poison. And bring us something sweet. I think the ladies would enjoy a little bite after all.” Gratitude lit up the faces of the women around the table, and the plumpest one of them licked her lips, smearing her raspberry lipstick. Claire raised an eyebrow and Dee recognized it as a signal to hustle. At the counter, however, she lingered, observing the table.

“What are you doing?” her father said from the kitchen, putting his hands on his hips. “You should be serving, not slacking.” Dee slid the plates he gave her onto her tray and lifted it up onto her shoulder. He was right. Hard work was its own balm. It erased everything else.

When she returned to Claire’s booth, balancing five mugs and
some plates of coffee cake, she found that the women had spread clipboards and folders out all over the table, so there was nowhere to put the food. She hovered awkwardly, not sure of the best way to interrupt.

“Do you think the first week of August or the second?” the plump woman was asking, knotting up her forehead like she was doing some kind of advanced science, but no one said anything. Claire had her chin cupped in her hands and was gazing out the window, and when she finally answered, it seemed to Dee that she was so bored she could barely think straight.

“The first,” she said, but then changed her mind right away. “No, wait. The second.” And all the ladies had to erase what they’d just started penciling into their calendars. By the time they were done, there were little pink eraser shavings littering the table and floor. Only Claire hadn’t made any notes. She didn’t have a single sheet of paper in front of her. She looked up and finally decided to acknowledge Dee’s presence.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re back.” She waved the flag of her hand. “Just put it anywhere, really.” And Dee knew without a doubt that Claire wasn’t even going to taste the cake her father had risen at dawn to bake. She’d ordered it as a test, to watch what the other ladies would do, to see who would be so weak as to eat a morsel of it and who would close her lips to temptation. Looking around the table, Dee thought she could predict who would pass the trial and who would miserably fail, and she was right. The plump lady sighed and immediately reached for a piece. Claire’s eyes narrowed. “Agnes. My goodness. At least take a fork.”