Today, on a Sunday at the tail end of September, only a few of Tuckernuck’s houses were still inhabited. Dionis and Jack had been doing mostly end-of-season maintenance runs. Pulling garbage. Tidying flower beds. Draining the plumbing systems of the houses already vacated for the winter, so that pipes did not freeze and burst. Easy work, in Dionis’s estimation, after the craziness of July and August.
But now she was cold and the transient happiness of sun on water had fled from her veins. Her muscles were sore. She wanted a beer. And her father was late picking her up at Jackson Point.
The sound of a truck engine drew her head around. Dionis rose to her feet, following the battered Dodge Ram with narrowed eyes as it lurched past the entrance to the Jackson Point lot and came further on, swaying to a halt at the boat landing’s edge.
Her father jumped out, leaving the driver’s side door open. “Hey,” he said. “Let me give you a hand.”
She was already lifting some of the knotted plastic bags of garbage from the belly of the work skiff, swinging them toward Jack, who grunted as he hoisted them into his truck’s flatbed. A week’s worth of trash—some of it the unholy detritus that surfaced at the end of the season—had to be delivered to Nantucket’s public waste and recycling center. The bags were already sorted and separated by garbage type: compost, landfill, plastic, and glass. This was the third load Dionis had brought across Madaket Harbor today.
“Temperature’s dropped,” she observed.
Jack scanned the sea, noting the freshening chop. Crow’s feet tightened at the corners of his faded blue eyes. “Nor’easter in the forecast.”
“You’re kidding.” Dionis frowned. “It’s way too early in the season, Dad.”
“Climate change.” Her father shrugged. “Sea’s getting warmer, weather’s getting weirder. Seasons don’t mean anything now, you know that.”
She hoisted the last bag of trash and glanced over her shoulder, toward the town of Nantucket some six miles to the east. Its gray-shingled landscape was impossible to pick out beyond the clutter of new buildings on the Madaket shoreline. But the sky was still relatively clear in that direction.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said skeptically.
“You do that.” Jack grinned at her. “Nothing’s like it used to be. Remember the polar vortex?”
Involuntarily, Dionis shivered. The previous winter had been brutal. Madaket Harbor froze solid between Jackson Point and Tuckernuck, the ice wave reaching so far inland on the Nantucket shore it had swamped the thresholds of houses. It was true; everything seemed more volatile these days, more extreme. But nor’easters usually didn’t hit until well into fall.
“They say there’s a chance this one misses us,” her father added as she joined him in the cab of the truck.
“Let’s put the table between the sofa and the windows,” Meredith Folger suggested, her hands on her hips. One long strand of blonde hair had escaped from its clip and was grazing her chin in a way Peter Mason was tempted to fix, but her green gaze was focused on the bare floor and her lips were set in a firm line. She screamed efficiency and purpose. He knew better than to trifle with either.
Peter surveyed the half-empty living room of the two-hundred-year-old captain’s house. He and Merry were readying themselves for an onslaught of wedding guests. There were nearly a hundred expected in the house Saturday for the reception after the ceremony in the Congregational church, but Peter’s family arrived Thursday and would expect food and beds in the ancestral Mason home. Merry wanted it to feel welcoming. She had already banished a pair of heavy Victorian upholstered rockers and a matching love seat—all of them hideous and uncomfortable, but tolerated by habit—to the attic. As neither Peter nor Merry actually lived in the white clapboard mansion on Cliff Road, and both worked full time, he as a farmer and she as a police detective, they had crammed their weekend with far too much lifting.
“You mean, the dining room table?” Peter had hidden under the mahogany Chippendale as a boy, the sunburned legs of various adults a sprawling stockade that protected him from the world. The difference between the table’s scarred and cracked underside and its glowing surface was an early lesson: things were more complicated than they looked, and rewarded inspection.
“The oak trestle table from the hallway,” Merry corrected patiently. “It’ll work for family dinners in here, in front of the fire.”
“We’re using the dining room on Saturday, though, right?”
“Just for cocktails. A small-plates buffet. Tess is serving the sit-down dinner outside. The tent people start setting up their poles tomorrow.”
Tess da Silva was one of their dearest friends, a restaurant owner recruited to cater the reception. The tent people were coming because Peter’s sister, Georgiana, had convinced Merry to lay down a dance floor and to cover the rear garden with billowing acres of draped canvas. The tent would block half the house’s spectacular view of the granite jetties sweeping into Nantucket Sound, but weather was too variable on the island in late September to risk an unprotected party.
“Once your sister gets here Thursday, we need a place where everyone can gather. The kitchen’s too small.”
She was right, of course—Georgiana was bringing her husband and four kids. The kitchen was an old-fashioned galley, long overdue for a complete renovation—if any of the Masons ever decided to inhabit the house full-time. For all its history and grandeur, the Cliff Road place was used solely for a few weeks each July and August, the family’s real lives being led elsewhere. Only Peter had made Nantucket his permanent home—and he lived miles outside of town at Mason Farms, surrounded by the shifting beauty of the moors and his cranberry bogs, his sheep and the transient cloudscapes that swept over the island.
“This room will feel more casual if we eat in here—more welcoming,” Merry persisted. “We can use the side chairs from the kitchen and those matching ones at the ends.”
She gestured toward a pair of faded, sea blue wing chairs positioned on either side of the hearth. Peter could not remember ever sitting in them. But he could see a shadow of his dead father now in the one on the left, grasping the arms like a throne.
The two of them lifted books, pewter candlesticks, crystal hurricane lanterns, and a decorative porcelain flower bowl from the oak trestle in the hall, piling them willy-nilly on some Windsor chairs. Then they hoisted the table and carried it carefully into the airy living room.
“Right here,” Merry ordered. “Ranged along the front windows. Leave enough space on each side for all of us to squeeze in.”
Peter obliged, then stood back and surveyed the effect. The windows were draped in fern-colored silk. Two worn linen sofas, liberally strewn with squishy needlepoint pillows worked by generations of Mason women, flanked the large open fireplace. Woven mohair throws from Nantucket Looms lay folded on their rounded arms. The trestle table sat perpendicular to these, exposed to the warmth of a log fire and anyone casually grouped around it. The previous summer, Georgiana had swapped out the frayed Chinese carpets that some forgotten Mason whaling captain had brought back from a Pacific voyage for a thick rectangle of woven sisal. The heavy mat would absorb salt air, sand, and sound.