'Count me out,' Rob said. 'I have to work on Lawyers from Hell.'
Mother sighed. The whole family was still anxiously waiting to see if Rob had, by chance, passed the bar exam in July. Since he and his bar exam review group had whiled away the summer inventing a role-playing game called Lawyers from Hell instead of doing anything that even vaguely resembled studying, the odds were slim.
'I really ought to be back in Yorktown working on it,' Rob said. What he meant was that he wanted to be back in Yorktown talking about bits and bytes with Red, his new girlfriend, who was helping him turn Lawyers from Hell into a computer game.
'How on earth did you get here anyway?' I asked, taking Rob aside.
'We came over on the ferry yesterday,' he said.
'Well, I figured out that much,' I said. 'I meant, what are all of you doing up here in the first place?'
'Dad called to say they were flying home from Paris and could I meet them at Dulles Airport,' Rob said. 'Their plane got in very early yesterday morning. And Aunt Phoebe and Mrs. Fenniman hitched a ride up to Washington with me so they could catch a flight to Maine to go birding. But the flight got canceled because of the hurricane, and instead of going back to Yorktown, Aunt Phoebe convinced Mother and Dad to come up here with her. What are you doing here?'
'Looking for a little privacy,' Michael put in.
'Good luck,' Rob said with a snicker, and slipped out of the room--probably to call Red and indulge in a little long-distance whining. Or heavy breathing.
Well, Rob isn't the only one doomed to disappointment in his love life for the immediate future, I thought, glancing at Michael as I sat back down beside him. Here I was, sitting with the man of my dreams on an overstuffed sofa by a roaring fire, just as I'd imagined in my fantasies about this weekend. But having to share the experience with my entire family took a lot of the fun out of it.
I felt guilty about resenting their presence. They were all trying so hard to make us feel better. Of course, this meant that every five minutes one of them would pop up with either a new remedy for seasickness or a new tactic for preventing pneumonia. And I'd taken a head count and compared it to the number of bedrooms and figured out that I'd probably be sleeping on one of the sofas.
'Now the phone's out,' Rob announced, shuffling back into the room and throwing himself on the other sofa.
'Usually happens in a storm,' Aunt Phoebe said, shoving a cup of herbal tea into my hands.
'I wouldn't mind so much if I could just use my laptop,' Rob said.
'Can't you just ran it on battery?' Michael asked.
'I could, except the battery's old; it only holds about a fifteen-minute charge,' Rob said. 'And it takes me ten minutes to boot up and figure out how to open my word processor.'
'I tell you what,' Dad said. 'Let's ran an extension cord up to the Dickermans' house. I'm sure they wouldn't mind.'
Whether the Dickermans would mind or not was irrelevant; I doubted they could resist Dad when he got his mind set on doing something.
'Ugh,' Rob said, and sneezed. A patently phony sneeze, I thought; obviously designed to serve as an excuse for not sloshing out in the rain with Dad. But it served its purpose. Mother, Aunt Phoebe, and Mrs. Fenniman immediately turned their full attention to medicating Rob. I took advantage of the distraction to pour my herbal tea into an already-moribund potted plant.
'Come on, Meg; you can help me ran the extension cord,' Dad said, picking up a flashlight. 'You, too, Michael. Fresh air will do you a world of good.'
I didn't really want to go back out into the rain. I wanted to curl up someplace quiet and sleep for a few years. But it didn't look as if I'd get any peace and quiet in the cottage for a while, with Aunt Phoebe and Mrs. Fenniman arguing about the weather and trying to pour their potions and philters into me. Not to mention the way my stomach reacted to the smell of all the food. Maybe fresh air was a good idea. I sighed, then got up and followed Dad and Michael to the coatrack beside the kitchen door, where we rummaged through a rather random collection of rain gear. We finally found slickers for all three of us, though Michael's was too short, mine nearly dragged the ground, and Dad's was glow-in-the-dark pink with lime green and yellow spots.
Then we repeated the rummaging, this time in the gardenshed. Underneath a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, a collection of antique life jackets, a gas grill, odd parts of three unmatched croquet sets, and several dozen mildewing stacks of
'That should do the trick,' Dad said, and we set off for the Dickermans' house.
I'd forgotten how dark Monhegan nights could be. In clear weather, you could see three times as many stars as in the city, and the sight of the moon rising over the ocean could inspire even me to poetry. But when clouds obscured the moon and stars, as they did tonight, you could really understand the deep-seated human tendency to fear the dark.
The darkness relented only slightly when we passed by our nearest neighbors, with whom Aunt Phoebe shared her treacherous, muddy little lane. Like Aunt Phoebe, they had only oil lamps and gas appliances. Some residents ran their own small electrical generators--including, apparently, the Dickermans--but these contraptions were noisy and generally less reliable man the old-fashioned alternatives--not to mention so expensive that their owners tended to keep their wattage low to avoid bankruptcy.
The flashlight wasn't much help, and I felt strangely comforted by the luminous glow of Dad's raincoat as he bobbed along ahead of us.
Suddenly, just as we reached the head of the lane, the glow disappeared.
'Dad?' I called, and hurried to reach the point where I'd last seen the glow-in-the-dark raincoat. I tripped over something large and hard and fell flat on my face in the gravel road.
'Your luggage is here,' Dad said. The glow hadn't disappeared entirely, I realized; it was now--like me-- horizontal.
'Are you two all right?' Michael said, coming up beside us.
'I will be if you take your foot off my hand,' I said, trying not to make it sound like an accusation.
'Sorry,' he said. 'I can't see a thing.'
'Damn that little weasel,' I said. 'He might at least have run the luggage up to the house.'
'Maybe he was scared of getting stuck in the mud,' Michael suggested.
'Well, we can take it up on the way back,' Dad said. 'Let's get up to the Dickermans' house before they go to bed.'
The Dickermans, to my surprise, were thrilled to have Dad run a power cord down to our house. Of course, Dad had forgotten to mention that this was a commercial arrangement, the Dickermans being the founders and owners of the Central Monhegan Power Company.
'I didn't know Monhegan even had a central power company,' I said. 'Of course, it's been several years since I've spent much time on the island,' I added hastily, seeing the hurt look on Mr. Dickerman's broad, friendly face.
'Well, really it's only one generator,' Mr. Dickerman said. 'Quite a bit larger than the ones individual households and businesses use, of course.'
'And a bit quieter, obviously, if you've got it anywhere around here.'
'Oh, it's noisy enough, but we've put it up on Knob Hill,' Mr. Dickerman said. 'It's pretty much out of the way up there, and the noise doesn't bother folks as much. Jim does most of the work on it; he's always been handy that way, Jim has.'
'And so nice that he's found something to do without leaving the island,' Mrs. Dickerman put in. She was a sweet, motherly person; I never could figure out how she and her mild-mannered husband had managed to produce so many rowdy and unpleasant sons, at least half a dozen of them. 'All my other birds have flown the coop, but Jimmy's happy as a clam, staying here with us, where he can tinker with the generator. Does you good to see how happy he is, up at the electric plant, when he's working on those machines of his.'
'Don't forget Fred,' Mr. Dickerman put in.
'Fred's only here between jobs,' Mrs. Dickerman said. 'You remember Jimmy, don't you, Meg?'
I did, actually, with something that approached fondness--he was the one Dickerman of my generation who wasn't loud, extroverted, and an inveterate bully. The worst had been Fred, whom I now recognized as the driver of
