The Gilly Salt Sisters (6 page)

Her father materialized in the diner’s empty doorway. “Are you coming?” he shouted over at her, seeing she was awake. “Bring the suitcases. Work’s waiting.” She looked around for any sign of life but didn’t see any, so for once it seemed reasonable to listen to her father and do his bidding.

They were to live over the diner, as it turned out. Cutt hadn’t told her that part of the plan, and as she climbed the rickety staircase in the back of the building, Dee wondered that she never thought to ask. But grief had turned her indifferent to life’s big decisions, even while it made the tiniest choices impossible. Dee never knew what to eat in the morning, how to fix her hair, or what to say to her father. As a result she ate everything, gained weight, left her hair in tangles, and went days without letting two sentences fly out of her throat.

At the top of the stairs, she found a series of rooms so dingy she wondered what they’d been used for. Storage, maybe. They had the closed-up and dusty feel of an old person’s attic, but Dee thought she could make her room nice enough. It had a dormer window that looked out over the town’s main street, and the sloping ceiling made it feel cozy. She slid the window open, moved the sagging iron bed frame underneath it, and started putting her clothes away in the beat-up bureau leaning in the far corner. There wasn’t any closet, but that was okay. Dee barely had any clothes.

After she put everything away, she went for a walk and discovered that Prospect had the bare essentials: a post office, a library, a bank, and a store. At the far end of Bank Street, there was a wide-open circle of patchy grass called Tappert’s Green. There were still a few families picnicking on it and some greedy gulls nosing around for leftovers, but in spite of the surface cheer the place still had a bad vibe to it. Dee couldn’t put it into words, but she noticed that a couple of town dogs crossed the street when they streaked past it. In the middle of the field, Dee made out a charred circular outline in the grass. She shivered. It seemed like the kind of place where witches would be burned if Prospect got the opportunity, and then she found out the town still had a living pair and that when it came to fire, they weren’t to be trusted at all.

O
n their third day in town, Cutt hired a man named Timothy Weatherly to do some renovations in the diner. Dee found herself looking forward to having an eyeful of muscles around the place to ogle, but when Mr. Weatherly arrived, she saw he was a stringy old man in saggy overalls and a faded baseball hat. He was about as appealing as a day-old serving of Cutt’s meat loaf. Cutt didn’t seem to mind him, though.

“I want to theme the place,” he told Mr. Weatherly. “You know, make it nautical. Boat pictures on the walls. Brass lights.
Nets, buoys, and ships’ wheels. The whole nine yards. Think you can handle that?”

Mr. Weatherly just worked his mouth in a tight circle and Dee could tell he was thinking that those trimmings might thrill the tourists, but they wouldn’t do squat for the mood of the locals. “Aye,” he said. “Whatever you want.” And he went to fetch his tools from his truck.

While they reupholstered booths and sanded down the counter together, Dee listened to her father grill Mr. Weatherly on everything from how cold it got in the winter to where to buy the freshest eggs.

Mr. Weatherly answered his questions with patient monosyllables, and then, without warning, he suddenly stared straight at Cutt and asked, “You set yourself straight with Jo Gilly yet?”

Dee observed as her father put down his sandpaper and wiped his forehead. “What?” he said, a little tremor of annoyance creeping into his voice.

A funny look crossed Mr. Weatherly’s thin face. Not fear, exactly. More like a case of minor nerves, Dee thought. Like he was going to say something he hoped no one else would overhear, and since there was nothing she liked better than some juicy gossip, she leaned forward to catch his words.

“There’s a marsh about a mile outside of town in that direction”—he jerked his thumb behind him—“out past the church of St. Agnes–by–the–Sea. Place belongs to the Gilly sisters, or it used to until the younger sister almost burned the older alive in the salt barn and left the place behind.”

Dee inched closer to the conversation at the counter, forgetting her broom and pan in the far corner of the restaurant. Mr. Weatherly took off his cap and scratched the side of his head slow like, the way he did everything. “This was, oh, twelve years ago, I’d say, in ’68. Crazy time, right? Even out here in Prospect. Hippies rolling through in their pot-filled vans, the damn war in Vietnam making folks argue when they met one another on the streets. My brother lost his only boy over there, you know. Sad times.”

Dee’s father, who was a veteran of those kinds of times, nodded, and she said a little prayer that they wouldn’t veer off into man talk about battles and presidents and all the things no-good politicians hadn’t done for the common citizen. She was in luck, it turned out, because Mr. Weatherly scratched his head one last time, jammed his cap on again, and got back on point. “Times were better then out there on Salt Creek Farm,” he said. “Tough, but better.”

Unconsciously, Dee nodded and saw her father give her the snake eye. She hustled back to her broom but managed to sweep her way close to Mr. Weatherly again.

“Joanna’s a solitary kind of soul,” he was saying. “Not like her sister, Claire. You’re not going to see Jo in town much, but when you do, make sure you treat her nice. She’s the one who lives in the marsh now, and our fortunes tend to flow with her salt. You’ll find that out soon enough.”

“I thought your luck would depend on the sea,” Dee said, ignoring the glare from her father.

Mr. Weatherly shook his head and bent to his sanding. “Nope. On the salt. And by the way, don’t let Jo’s appearance scare you none. Remember, she was in that terrible fire. Just treat her nice. And if she offers you any salt, you best say yes and accept it. Her sister won’t like it—she tells everyone it’s tainted—but I know better and keep some around on the sly anyhow. Mark my words. You won’t be sorry.”

Cutt scowled. He was still a navy man and didn’t take his threats lying down, Dee knew, especially not ones from a wrinkled-up woman who didn’t have anything to scare him with but salt. “We’ll see about that,” he muttered, whacking a nail into the counter. “We’ll just see.”

What about the other sister?
Dee wanted to know.
What happened to her?
But Mr. Weatherly, sensing Cutt’s foul mood, pulled his cap down low and shut up for the rest of the afternoon, and all she had to entertain her was the never-ending
rasp-rasp-rasp
of sandpaper followed by the hot stink of fresh varnish on old wood.

J
oanna Gilly—craggy, weather-beaten, and boasting the surprise of a glass eye—arrived at the diner two days later, just as Mr. Weatherly had suggested she would. But Cutt didn’t spring for the salt, even though they were opening the next day.

Morning rolled around, and Cutt and Dee unlocked the front door, but just as Joanna had predicted, not one person took up a seat on the barstools. Nobody sat in any of the booths either. The weather was still nice, and the streets were plenty full of late tourists, but it was like the diner had some weird force field pulsing around the door. At the end of the week, Cutt finally turned off the grill in disgust and closed the place early.

“The old girl was right,” he muttered, crashing pots and pans, and Dee kept her distance. Her father hated it when other people were right.

“Well,” she pointed out from the safety of the other side of the kitchen, “at least if we take her up on her offer, we know we’ll get some business.” Cutt’s only answer to that was another crash from the stack of cookware and a fat scoop of silence. He hated it even more when Dee was right.

W
henever Dee’s father went and fouled things up for himself, he ended up turning to God. The time he drove over Mr. Dutton’s pasture fence after a bender, for instance, put him in church for a straight month, but that was an extreme example. Usually Cutt popped in to Mass on a Sunday and fortified himself with a midweek confession. Dee sometimes wondered if her father was so devout because he messed up so much or if maybe it was the other way around. Maybe weekly salvation made it that much easier for him to sin. Whatever the case, she wasn’t surprised when, on their first Sunday in town, Cutt decreed that they would attend church.

“It’ll give us good faces around here,” he said, straightening his only tie and giving her the once-over to make sure her
blouse wasn’t unbuttoned too low or her hair combed out too big. “We’ll let all the folks know we’re godly sorts. The kind that can be trusted.”

Dee was surprised to find herself actually half looking forward to the outing. It wasn’t that she loved church—she just wanted to get away from the diner. It had been only a week, but the cramped rooms over the top of it were getting smaller by the day for her.

If she was feeling shut in, she knew it was her own fault. She was only seventeen and should have been in school, but she’d forced her father to make a deal with her. If she came with him to Prospect, she made him promise, he would let her skip her senior year and work in the diner. If anything was more boring for Dee than church, it was high school, and she also didn’t relish the idea of starting a social life over with a whole new pack of kids. “Anyway, it’s not like I was ever Student of the Month,” she reminded Cutt.

He poured an extra finger of drink when Dee pointed that out. “It’s not what your mother would have wanted if she were here,” he said.

Dee spread her palms over her plump thighs and forced herself to take a deep breath, but she couldn’t resist sarcasm. “Well, then, I guess that’s one good reason we can be thankful she’s not.”

She didn’t see her father’s hand coming, but the pain was nothing less than she deserved. Cutt got up and staggered out of the room, and they never spoke about the subject again, not even when they drove past the high school on their way out of town, where all the students were milling around out front before the bells rang, excited as a bunch of yapping puppies with new bones.

Dee would be the first to admit that in Vermont she didn’t have the most sterling of reputations. In fact, her name hadn’t just been dragged through the mud of her old town; it had chemically bonded to it. And not just the scummy topsoil either. She meant all the way down deep to the bedrock where the worms hung out.

Her father had no idea how she’d spent her weekends at home, and she knew that giving him that information wouldn’t have
done squat for her current quality of life. For all his bottle-tipping and foul-mouthed ways, Cutt wanted nothing more than to be a good servant of the Lord down in his guts where it counted, and he expected the same out of his daughter.

The thing was, though, Dee wasn’t easy because she’d set out to be. It always just seemed to happen. Her first time was at a party when she was fifteen, with Dylan White, senior all-star quarterback. He’d taken her by the hand and led her upstairs to a spare room, where he fed her shots of rum, and before she knew it, the sweet liquid had entered her veins and turned her legs loose and her heart looser.