A Star for Mrs. Blake by April Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

away.
    “There’s a sea lion!” she called.
    He went in wearing his undershorts. The frigid water nearly stopped his heart, and his privates withdrew like a stunned quahog, but sixty seconds later their bodies were straining together on the heat of a smooth boulder, like the first humans after the tectonic plates crashed, and land rose out of the sea, and the ice retreated a couple of millennia ago. They would live forever on wild blueberries. Nothing else existed in the world but the tide grating over pebbles and her fingertips grazing his thighs. They rested naked on worn towels, a warm breeze crisscrossing their skins, small green crabs bright as silver dollars, living and dying in a hollow of basalt.
    “Yes,” said Cora as they stood on the porch. “We’ll go back to Great Spruce Island.”
    In her pocket was a velvet pouch containing a handful of tiny shells she intended to bring to France. She’d collected some from the island and others at Kydd Cove, where she and Sammy used to go clamming. All you needed was a clam hoe and a strong back, and you could make twelve dollars in a day. How old was he when they stopped going to the cove together? When he’d go instead with his friends and she would be at home, slicing potatoes and stewing onions in pork fat for the chowder, and the door would slam open and Sammy would dash inside—dump the heavy burlap bags because the guys were waiting—
Here’s your clams
,
Ma
—and was gone. At what age did he start skipping school and hanging out at the wharf, picking up information for the life he could already see for himself, becoming a sea captain like his grandfather?
    When Sammy was twelve, Grandpa Harding had come home from the sea. Those were the good years, when Cora was relieved of the guilt she felt for bringing up her son without male influence. If there was mischief in town, he was the one who caused it. His best trick was the time he and his friends stole a toilet house and put it on the principal’s porch. The thing he loved best, besides being a nuisance, was to go fast. Once, sliding down the steepest hill in Hancock County, he had crashed his cape racer and was knocked out cold. Sammy and his grandfather became inseparable, and he calmed down from being a kid who seemed born to make trouble.
    Grandpa Harding had skills a boy could respect. Sammy, the guy who hated to memorize spelling words, became a meticulous knots man. He seemed to crave the discipline of sterning for his grandfather on their lobster boat. The captain could talk sense to anyone—child or man—and he could build anything. Touch any part of his body and it was like iron. His thumbnails were at least an inch across. He could speak Spanish. He’d escaped pirates off Africa and transported English royalty. He knew how to roast a pig. He liked whiskey as well as his wife’s fudge. It was unthinkable that this conqueror would lie down one night on their marriage bed when he was fifty-seven and wake up unable to speak or move his right side. Sammy quit hanging around and smoking in the bait shops to come home and read to his grandpa, and feed him and help him to the bathroom, trying his best to keep him here for one more day. Six months after he was dead, Sammy enlisted in the army.
    “… I’ll have the boat ready when you get back …” Linwood was saying, halfway down with the suitcases. The granite quarry on Crotch Island had started up, the piercing shrieks of the jaw crushers reverberating across the harbor. A white sheaf of seagulls shot up in protest. Cora patted the shells in her pocket and then picked her way after Linwood. The new black pumps were a catastrophe on the rocks.
    The nieces had gathered around, ogling the open bed of the truck.It was a short bed, maybe four feet deep—which was taken up with the carcass of a slaughtered animal. A porcine leg poked through the neck of a burlap sack, stained with brown blood and leaking fresh. The nieces were making faces and