Werewolves in Their Youth

That Was Me

THE FOUR TAVERNS of Chubb Island, Washington, were haunted almost exclusively by local drunks. The summer people did their drinking on the porches and decks of their summer houses or, when that paled, under the paper umbrellas at the bar of the Yang Palace. At the V.F.W., and at the Chubb Island Bow & Rifle Club, out on Cemetery Road, they poured gin and vodka, but to the summer people these places were to be avoided, being just a hair too laughable to be legendary. From time to time, particularly toward the end of August, when tedium, hot weather, and the dwindling promise of another summer agitated ancient Viking fibers in their brains, a party of adventurers from the pink and yellow houses along Probity Beach might attempt a foray into the Chubb Island Tavern, the Blue Heron, Peavey’s, or the Patch. But they never stayed long. The local drunks — there must have been about sixty-five or seventy of them, many related by blood or sexual history — were a close-knit population, involved in an ongoing collective enterprise: the building, over several generations, of a basilica of failure, on whose crowded friezes they figured in vivid depictions of bankruptcy, drug rehabilitation, softball, and arrest. There was no role in this communal endeavor for the summer islander, on leave, as it were, from work on the cathedral of his or her own bad decisions.

It was unusual, therefore, to find not one but two attractive strangers at the bar of the Patch on a Friday night in early spring, studying the glints and gas bubbles in their beers: a man and a woman, with an empty barstool between them. It was not yet seven, and the Patch, a dank, ill-lit, cramped cement structure that had once served as the main building of a long-defunct strawberry-processing plant, was almost empty. In the corner across from the door, Lester Foley — elected by a plebiscite of local drunks to the mayoralty of Berthannette, a minute township made up of a general store and a post office, a failed Shell station, and the Patch — was sleeping, curled into a ball that did not seem large enough to be composed of an entire man.

The man at the bar spun away on his stool from the dispiriting sight of Lester, rolled up like a potato bug with his hair matted down and a mysterious rime of white feathers on his beard, and gave his attention to the Patch’s decor: promotional posters listing the locations and dates of all the games the Seahawks had lost that season; the threadbare baize of the pool table; a small black-and-white photograph of a freak three-pound strawberry that had turned up in the summer of 1948; and the blinking, pink or blue names of several beers. The stranger was a dark-eyed young man, thickset but small of stature, better dressed than the usual Patch customer, even for a Friday night, in a tweed blazer worn over a crew-neck sweater that looked like lamb’s wool but might even have been cashmere. Only the fresh wad of black tape that bound up his stylish bronze eyeglasses, and the day’s growth of stubble on his cheeks, argued at all in favor of his admission, on a pro-tem basis, into the Chubb Island losers’ guild. There was something in the way his handsome jacket strained at the shoulders, in the gray shadow on his jaw, that implied a deep reserve of resentment, a list of grievances carried around in the billfold, on a sheet of paper split and tattered with much refolding. He looked like the kind of customer who drinks wordlessly, and without apparent pleasure, all evening, like a patient given control of his own morphine drip. He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.

“I thought this was a happening place,” he said now, to nobody in particular, still gazing out into the neon gloom of the barroom.

Mike Veal heard the remark but took advantage of a continuing pressure problem with the Rainier tap to let it pass. The customer was drinking a bottle of Pilsner Urquell, which Mike had found only after much digging around on his hands and knees, with his arm plunged far into the icy recesses of the No. 2 cooler, behind the box of microwavable Honey ’n’ Jalapeño Cheesy Pork Pockets. And of course Lester Foley had nothing to say on the subject of the happeningness of the Patch.

“Why don’t you put a buck in the jukebox?” said the woman from her stool. “I bet they even have your favorite song.”

She was a long, bony woman, with an intelligent face a little raw around the nostrils. In spite of her naturally blond hair and a backside that projected with a certain architectural audacity out over the rear edge of her stool, the predominant impression she seemed likely to leave in the mind of a man surveying a barroom on a Friday night was one of elbows and knees. Although she was dressed like a familiar type of weather-beaten, llama-raising, herbalistic island woman — denim overalls and duck boots, hair pulled back from her forehead by a plain blue elastic headband, face naked but for an uncertain streak of mauve on the lips — no one would ever have mistaken her for a native. She straddled her barstool with an equestrian aplomb that suggested both a genteel upbringing and an overeager attempt to look as though she belonged. A copy of Un Sexe Qui N’est Pas Une, in the original French, protruded from the right pocket of the big shearling coat she had draped over the seat of the stool between her and the man. Her fingers were devoid of rings.

“ ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,’ ” she continued, with a vague wave toward the jukebox.

“Is that my favorite song?” said the man. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a fat wallet. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s on there,” said Mike Veal helpfully. “James Brown’s greatest hits, on CD.”

The woman nodded. She raised her bottle of light beer to the man. “ ‘This is a man’s world,’ ” she sang, in a cracked little high-pitched James Brown wail. Then she turned away from him, folding back up into herself, as if she didn’t want him to get the idea she was flirting. The man took a dollar from his wallet and walked over to the jukebox. He fed several more dollars into the slot. “Sex Machine” began to play, as irritating and irresistible as a ringing telephone. The woman took a swallow of her watery, pale beer, her eyes comically wide, as if amazed by her own thirst.

“This your first time in here?” Mike asked her.

She nodded. “It always looked so hopping. Cars in the parking lot.”

“It’s early yet,” said Mike, looking at his watch. “They’ll be showing up any time.”

The tides of carousal on a Friday night on Chubb Island could be unpredictable. In general, the flow from Heron to Patch, Tavern to Peavey’s, was even and steady through the evening, but sometimes a special event, a darts tournament or a personal milestone such as a divorce, a birthday, or an acquittal, could bottle things up for an hour or two. “Unless all of them died in, like, a car crash or whatever.” He smiled with unconscious pleasure at this thought.

She nodded again and took another swallow.

“From the island?” said Mike.

“No,” said the woman, “but I’ve been coming here my whole life.”

“Family has a house?”

“On Probity Beach.”

“Nice.”

“I have a house of my own now. On Rhododendron Beach. I’ve been living here almost six years.”

“You’re a year-rounder, and you never been in here before?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I guess I never had a reason before.”

Leaving the question begged by this statement unasked, Mike went on tinkering with the Rainier tap. The woman lowered her eyes to the scuffed veneer of the bar, which was giving off its faint early-evening sting of ammonia. Originally, it had been the bar of Rudolph’s, a dive in a Quonset hut out at the old Navy airfield, which burned down back in 1956. There were some senior members of the losers’ guild who claimed they could still smell the fire on it.

The woman dabbed an indecipherable sketch with her fingertip in the mist on her glass. “Do you know a guy called Olivier?” she said, not looking up.

“Sure.”

“He comes in here?”

“Does he?”

“I thought he did. I thought …”

“Are you looking for him?”

“No.”

“Here,” said the man, returning from the jukebox with his wallet clutched in one hand and a twenty-dollar bill in the other. He handed the bill to the woman. “From yesterday.”

“Oh, yes,” said the woman. “But it was only seventeen.”

The man nodded. “I’ll take the difference in beer.” He held up his empty bottle to Mike Veal and gave it a shake. “Olivier?” he said.

“Olivier Berquet,” said Mike, studying the two with fresh interest. “I guess he’s, what, a Frenchman?”

“And I’ve heard an awful lot about that little Frenchman, let me tell you,” the man said. “The Phantom Frog of Chubb Island.” He turned to the woman. “How’s that for a title? Can you get a poem out of that?”

“What’s your name?” the woman said to Mike Veal.

“Mike.”

“Mike, am I allowed to say ‘fuck’ in this bar?”

“I wouldn’t try to stop you.”

The woman turned to the man. “Fuck you, Jake,” she said.

The door opened and, as always happened on a cold night when someone came in from outside, a low, mournful moaning filled the bottommost levels of sound in the barroom, humming around the ankles of the customers like a roiling cloud. The Korg sisters, Ellen and Lisabeth, walked in, followed in short order by New Wave Dave Willard, Harley Dave Sackler, Debbie Browne, Ray Lindquist, Nice Dave Madsen, and a number of other employees of the Gearhead plant, just down the road from Berthannette. Gearhead made accessories and specialty parts for sport-utility vehicles. It was the island’s largest employer and the source of a small but steady current of the Patch’s income. There had been an employees’ meeting tonight, after work, which was why the bar had remained empty for so long. Now, with a great deal of sorrowful moaning and gusts of cold wind, it filled up quickly.

Lester Foley was awakened. This was done by Harley Dave’s cracking open a can of beer next to his ear, which was followed by uproarious general laughter when he scrabbled awake like a dog at the sound of a can opener grinding away on its evening Alpo. Lester grinned his foolish feathered grin, took the beer that was his reward for making everyone laugh, and started in on one of his trademark mayoral disquisitions whose interminability was relieved only by their total lack of sense. The former handyman had been drinking steadily since 1975. In June of that year, Lester had got a job putting up a boathouse and dock for a summer family named Lichty, whose handsome young son, a boy of fifteen, took to tagging along with Lester and helping him with his work. In the evenings they hid in the driftwood piles down at the dark end of Probity Beach, smoking marijuana and drinking beer. On the first of July, they drove out to the Nisqually reservation and for twenty dollars filled the hatch of Lester’s VW squareback with illegal fireworks. On the fifth of July, at two o’clock in the morning, at the end of the sturdy fir dock Lester had built, a Silver Salute with a defective fuse burst prematurely, before Lester and the boy could get clear of it. The explosion, which the investigator from the Chubb Island Fire Department had estimated as equal to the force of half a stick of industrial-grade dynamite, killed the Lichty boy and blew off Lester’s right thumb and forefinger. Since then he had not worked much. It was rare that anything he said managed to be succinct or intelligible.

“You can’t trust a woodpecker,” he was insisting now to the Korg sisters, with that special undissuadableness of his. “They’re just too goddam unreliable. I could have told you that from the get-go.”

“Who said anything about a woodpecker?” said Lisabeth Korg.

By eight o’clock, there was not an empty stool at the bar, quarters were lined up seven deep on the lip of the pool table, and so many people were dancing around the jukebox that Mrs. Magarac, the owner, who had come straight from her twelve-step meeting, could barely navigate from the bar to the farthest booths with a sweating tray full of beer.

“Well?” said the woman at the bar to the man she had cursed. The crowding of the Patch had forced them onto adjoining stools. She drew her bottle of beer across the air before her, taking in the noise and laughter and smoke. “Any likely prospects?”

“Oh, my God,” said Jake. He closed his eyes. There was a migraine translucence in the skin around his eyes. He rolled his bottle of Pilsner Urquell, his fourth, across his brow.

“What about her?” the woman said.

“Which one?”

“With the red hair. I know her. I think she works at the Thriftway.”

“Oh, yeah.” He still had not opened his eyes. “I’ve seen her. Curly.”

“Cute, I think.”

“I dislike this,” said the man. “Can I just tell you that? I never came to a bar like this before. Why should I start now, just because—”

“You never came to this type of bar before, or you never came to a bar in this manner?”

“Grace, I think I’d better — I think I’m going to split.”

“Don’t be a wiener, Jake.”

“No, I’m just—”

“Come on, weasel,” she said, aiming at him with an index finger. Looking at it, he went cross-eyed for a moment. “We made a deal. About tonight.”

“Yeah, I know I made a deal,” he said. “And I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to go home alone, with a big goose egg in the romance department, while you zip off with Monsieur Olivier, on his little scooter, with his scarf tucked into his lapels—”

“He’s here. That’s him.”

Jake’s eyes snapped open and he checked out Olivier Berquet, just walking into the Patch. If he had really been expecting a natty little loafer-wearer, crest embroidered on the pocket of his blazer, sweater knotted cavalierly around his neck, he must have been disappointed. Olivier Berquet was not French at all, as it happened, but Québécois — a big-handed carpenter with a tall man’s stoop, long blond hair, and a massively handsome face, craggy and pitted, a face that looked as if it had been carved with a pneumatic drill by a tiny workman dangling from the sheer granite cliff of Olivier’s forehead. He wore a black motorcycle jacket, ripped blue jeans, and Roper’s boots. He was well known on the island both for the quality of his work, which was high, and for the terrible treatment his wife received at his hands, which — though never definitively established in a court of law or through some famous public incident of the sort popular among the Patch’s patrons — ranged, by local rumor, from the merely callous to the outright mean. At one time or another, he had troubled the evenings of all the island’s bartenders. Now he had begun dancing, working his hips and bobbing his big Gutzon Borglum head. He was a good dancer, consciously so, leggy and languid, his movements not so much in time to the music as in illustration of it.

“He has a big butt,” said Jake. “I’ve noticed that’s something you like.”

“Jake,” said Grace, not responding. She pointed to Jake’s other side. He turned. The woman with the curly red hair, who was in fact a checker at the Thriftway in Probity Harbor, was standing beside him. He knew her after all: Brenda Petersen. She and some of her friends had washed Jake’s car for him one Saturday morning almost six years earlier — his first summer on the island — to raise money for their senior-class trip. Since then their paths had crossed without issue or remark at least a couple of dozen times. Her bright red fusillade of skyrocket curls was her most striking feature, but her youth, her plumpness, and a startling lack of shyness all worked in her favor.

“Hi, there,” she said. “Brenda.”

She held out her hand, angled with a textbook display of confidence.

“Jake,” he said.

“I was wondering if you wanted to dance with me—” She registered the way Jake’s mouth hung open, the way Grace shifted a little on her stool. “But if you two are together I’ll just go back over to my table there and shoot myself.”

Jake turned to Grace, with a face that begged for mercy, his mouth forming inaudible words. Grace held out her hand to the girl and they shook.

“Grace.”

“Hi. Brenda.”

There was a wordless moment. “We’re just friends,” said Grace, with an embarrassed laugh. “Go on and dance, Jake.”

The contrast between Olivier’s and Jake’s styles of dancing, had there been anyone in the bar sober or interested enough to notice it, was marked. Jake seemed somehow to wear not just his clothes but his entire body too tightly. He chopped at the air with his hands. He and Brenda didn’t speak to each other — the crowd on the dance floor had forced them up against the jukebox, which was clanging loudly with Tom Petty’s cover of “Feel a Whole Lot Better.” Brenda’s best friend, Sharon Toole, shimmied up alongside her at one point, rolling a mocking but not unfriendly eye in the direction of Jake’s dogged, cramped performance, and the two of them exchanged a smile.

Jake’s departure from his place at the bar seemed to increase the male traffic around Grace. She remained folded carefully up into herself, legs crossed at the knee and then again at the ankle, fingers fitted carefully around the throat of her beer, but there was a perceptible rise in the volume and good humor along the adjacent barstools in Jake’s absence.

Among those whom Grace found herself talking to was Lester Foley, who had come right toward her, in his off-kilter headlong style, head angled one way, shoulders another, listing to one side like Groucho Marx after a severe blow to the head. He had been drinking for an hour now and was at the nightly peak, such as it was, of his physical aplomb and his powers of concentration. At some point he had gone back into the men’s room to run cold water through his hair and comb it back neatly with his pocket comb. There were still a number of feathers in his beard.

He reached out his right hand, with its three grimy fingers.

“Now you stepped in it,” he said. He laughed a wicked little laugh.

“Pardon me?”

“I told you this would happen. I told everyone. Hell, I even told myself!”

“Leave her alone, Your Honor,” said Mike Veal, looking a little uneasy. “Just ignore him,” he said to Grace.

She had not let go of his hand.

“Lester,” she said. “They used to call you Les.”

“No more or less,” he said, automatically.

“Do you remember me?”

“Sure I do,” said Lester, without any great sincerity.

“My parents had the place next door. Next to the Lichtys.”

He pulled his hand from hers. “The Lichtys.” He scowled and squinted at her as if trying to read a surprising text printed in very small characters on her face. His wrinkles smoothed out, leaving a staff of clean pink lines on his forehead. The color left his cheeks. He was working harder than he had in quite some time.

“I used to hang around with Dane a lot,” said Grace. “Their son. I braided your hair once, you probably don’t remember. I used to give Dane these crazy things, with seaweed braided in, and little sand dollars and junk we found on the beach.” She had started to braid the air on either side of her head, but now she put a hand to her mouth and laughed, as if she had embarrassed herself again.

“Grace Meadows,” he said. “Blond girl?” He looked for confirmation of this recollected scrap of a summer fifteen years before. “Dane’s girlfriend? Used to ride around on that motorbike of his. Go swimming with him in that cold, cold water. Always smoking my cigarettes. Grace Meadows, that you?”

“That was me,” said Grace, too softly to be heard over the music.

“Uh-huh. Well.” Lester stopped squinting, and left off trying to read her face. He rummaged around in the pocket of his filthy down coat and pulled out a surprisingly crisp one-dollar bill. “Well. You were crazy then, and I don’t doubt that you are probably crazy today. Everyone is crazy nowadays, which looking around I’m sure you probably noticed by now.” He laid the dollar bill on the bar. “A beer, please, Mr. Mike.”

“Put that away,” said Mike, flicking the dollar back toward Lester. He drew a pint and handed it to him. “But after this one you’re cut off.”

Lester opened his mouth to protest, but a big blond hand clapped him on the shoulder.

“Good evening, there, Mr. Mayor,” said Olivier.

“Oh, no,” said Lester. He peeled himself out from under Olivier’s hand, and, with a last squint sidewise at Grace, ducked around to the farthest corner of the bar, where he stood for a time with his knobby fingers wrapped around the untouched pint of Rainier.

“I love that guy,” said Olivier without apparent affection. He looked avidly at Grace, his eyes crinkling in a way that some uncharitable islanders might have described as patented, or even ominous.

“I thought I’d see you here,” he said.

“I’m having a hard time believing it, myself,” said Grace.

“Why didn’t you come tomorrow, like I told you? We aren’t playing tonight.”

Olivier was the drummer for a local band known variously as the Tailchasers, the Chubb Island Four Piece, and Olivier and Bo and Johnny. They had a more or less permanent ongoing engagement at each of the four island taverns, which is to say that they played nearly every Saturday night at one of them, until the complaints mounted or Olivier got into a violent dispute with the proprietors, at which point, sufficient time having elapsed in the interval since their last appearance, they moved along to the next stop in the circuit.

“I know,” said Grace. “You said you play country music.”

“Most of the time.”

“Well, I don’t really like country music.”

Olivier cocked his head and stared at her, his forehead crumpled in mock perplexity at her chilly tone. He was smarter than he looked — a condition as rare on Chubb Island as it is anywhere else. Mike Veal handed him the beer he had ordered and Olivier drank down half of it in a swallow.

“I’m not bothering you,” he said. “I should go?”

She shook her head.

“How’s the car?” he said, after a moment.

He saw that her gaze was focused on Brenda Petersen and the dark little jerking man she was dancing with. “Who is that guy?”

“That’s my husband,” she said. “His name is Jake.”

“Your husband?” For a moment he looked puzzled. “That’s cool,” he said, with the eye-crinkle on again.

“We’re getting a divorce.”

“Oh.”

“We haven’t had sex with each other in three and a half years,” she went on, with a sudden sweep of her arm. “We stopped living together back in January. We haven’t had sex with anyone else, either.”

“Huh.”

“No sex. At all.”

Her husband had stopped dancing. He was standing in the middle of the dance floor, just standing there, watching Grace, looking as if — over the stomping of bootheels, over the labored whooping of off-duty sheriff’s deputy Royce T. Sturgeon, over the dog-kennel laughter of a Friday night in the Patch, over the sounds of the islanders all around him as they shook their hair, their long key chains, the fringes on their vests — he had heard or could guess every word that Grace had just said.

Grace saw Brenda Petersen pulling on his arm, asking him if everything was all right. “I have no idea why I just told you that,” Grace said to Olivier. “I know I shouldn’t be saying it at all.” She turned and took hold of both his hands in hers. “I want you to forget what I said.”

“Three and a half years,” said Olivier. ”Shit.”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” she said. She stood up, or rather toppled in a more or less controlled manner off the stool, landing somehow on both feet. She still had not let go of his hands. “Come on.”

“Tell you what,” said Olivier. “My buddy John just came in the door, over there. I have to get with him for just a minute and then I’ll take you up on that, all right?”

Grace watched him go.

She looked over at Jake again and saw that he was watching Olivier, too. He was rocking a little on the soles of his feet, and a weird, broken smile emerged. When Olivier came within a few feet of him, Jake held out his hand vaguely.

Over the ten years since his arrival on Chubb Island, Olivier Berquet had been involved in seventeen minor altercations in taverns, and four out-and-out brawls, in which teeth were scattered to the night air and men went to the urgent-care center to have bits of parking-lot gravel tweezed from their palms and cheeks. His name had appeared twice in the police log of the local weekly, the Clam, and when he was convicted of battery there had been an item on page 1. It took less provocation than a drunken, jealous, hard-up man out on a despairing date with his estranged wife to get Olivier swinging, as everyone in the room well knew.

On the jukebox, Jim Morrison shouted the last words of “Break On Through” and the song cut off. People stopped dancing. The cue ball slammed into the nine.

“Is there a problem?” Olivier said, calmly, rubbing his chin.

Jake reached out for Olivier’s right hand, and grasped it.

“I just wanted to wish you all the luck in the world,” he said.

There was no great sarcasm in Jake’s tone, and in its absence Olivier seemed a little confused. He nodded warily, letting Jake work his hand up and down, the way he might have shaken with a man in an airport holding a Bible and a stack of brochures.

“Yeah,” said Olivier. “Whatever, dude.”

As the next song, “Born on the Bayou,” came on, he pulled his hand from Jake’s and jived his way heavily across the Patch and over to John Bekkedahl, a fat, bearded man wearing a Sturgis T-shirt. “Fuckin’ yuppies,” he muttered. Somebody laughed.

Grace went to Jake, who was standing by himself, still holding his hand out.

“What happened to Brenda?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said Jake. “She thinks we’re screwed up.”

“We are.”

“What’s the story with Olivier?”

“I think I scared him off with my evident madness.”

“Do you want to dance?”

“No,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

“Meaning what?” said Jake.

Not quite sure of the answer, they didn’t leave. They stayed past last call, keeping each other company at the bar, while the Patch, one by one or in twos and threes, exhaled its customers. Olivier went home with Carla Lacy, whose husband was on a boat in the Bering Sea, working fourteen-hour shifts feeding tuna carcasses to a rendering vat. Brenda Petersen left with a tall, good-looking kid named Al or Alf from Tacoma.

At last, Mike Veal threw on the overhead lights, driving the remaining patrons from the inky crevices of obscurity and glamour into which they had tucked themselves. For them it was like coming to in an emergency room, and they went out, sour and incoherently sad. A few diehards headed down the road to Peavey’s, where the bar clock was known to be kept only seven minutes ahead of Pacific Standard. Still Jake and Grace remained on their stools, waiting out the ten-dollar bill that Jake had fed the jukebox. Mike Veal went around snuffing the neon signs, stacking chairs, and upending the other barstools. When he pulled the plug on the jukebox, they took the hint and settled their tab. Jake waited while Grace went to the toilet, and then they made cautious progress down the back hall and out into the chilly night.

As they came through the back door Jake stumbled over Lester Foley, who was sleeping under a pile of blankets beside the Dumpster. Grace stopped.

“Grace,” Jake murmured.

“Sh-h-h.” She knelt down beside Lester, and then, gently so as not to wake him, peeled a lank strand of hair from his hollow cheek.

“Grace, what are you doing?” said Jake. “Come on.”

“Nothing,” she said. “Be quiet.”

She drew two more strands of hair from the oily mass under his stocking cap and wove them with the first into a stiff, skinny braid. She looked around in the gravel and mud at her feet and picked up the discarded cap from a bottle of Oly. Biting her lip, she squeezed the cap between her fingers until it curved inward on itself like a jagged whelk. She threaded the tip of the braid through it, and pinched it closed. Looking at her handiwork, she rocked back and forth on her toes, the leather of her duck shoes creaking.

“He’s just sleeping it off, Grace,” Jake said. He gave a tug on her collar, and she tipped back onto her heels. “He’ll be fine.”

“He knew Dane Lichty,” Grace said.

“Not the way I do,” said Jake.

Jake’s car, a Honda station wagon, was parked at the far end of the lot. Jake started toward it, then stopped, and seemed to sag a little to one side. “Can’t do it,” he said. “I think I’ve had too much.”

“Just get in,” called Grace, running under the steadily increasing rain toward her car. “I’ll take you.”

They climbed into a raked, round-finned old Volvo P-1800 that looked gray in the halogen glow of the Patch’s security flood but was really an elegant pale yellow, somewhere between the color of a manila folder and the back sheet of a parking citation. Grace had bought the car three days before from Olivier Berquet, for six hundred dollars. A few years back, Olivier had flipped it over on Cemetery Road, racing to make the ferry, but he had not mentioned this to Grace, although everyone else knew the story. Olivier had suggested to Grace that she have someone look it over, knowing somehow that she never would.

There was a flat, dishpan rattle as Jake closed the door on his side. Grace switched on the radio but did not start the engine. The only sound that emerged from the speakers was a fly-wing hum in the left channel.

“You always wanted one of these,” said Jake.

She nodded.

“Hey,” she said. “Now I finally get to see your place.”

“It’s small,” said Jake.

“Is it too small?”

“I’m all right,” he said. He rested his left hand on the knob of the gearshift. After a minute she laid hers on top of his.

“Nobody knows,” she said.

“Nobody knows what?”

“Nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen.”

“It’s nice that we can share that,” said Jake.

The rain dripped from the fir trees that overspread the Patch’s back lot, and seeped slowly in through the windshield frame on Jake’s side. The remaining unbroken panes in the greenhouse of the old strawberry plant, a gaunt ruin on the other side of the parking lot, chimed with rain.

“Well,” Grace said. “I guess neither of us got lucky.”

She twisted the key in the ignition, and turned out of the Patch’s lot, onto the island highway. The last ferry of the night, of course, had pulled in at the Eastpoint dock eighteen minutes earlier. The cars in the opposite lane were strung like Christmas lights for a mile, coming out of Berthannette, and it must have been hard for Grace and Jake to be in her car as it filled up with the flash of other people’s headlights, then went dark again, and to know that everyone who passed them was headed for home.