‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
‘How’s the foot?’
‘Better…Not true. It keeps opening up.’
‘I told you not to walk on it.’
‘I’m not good at taking orders.’ She glanced at the cauldron. ‘What’s cooking?’
‘Tar.’
‘This is for you.’
The whiskey was his brand—Imperial—noted and logged on her last visit.
‘It’s by way of a thank you for coming to my aid…albeit a little slowly at first.’
‘You want some?’ he asked.
‘Is it any good?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t think so. It was the cheapest one in the liquor store.’
She tried it nonetheless, mixed with Coke. As soon as he had cleaned up and changed his clothes he joined her on the deck and poured himself a glass.
‘It’s my birthday,’ she said.
‘Happy birthday.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Shouldn’t you be out celebrating?’
‘That’s exactly what my father said when I spoke to him earlier.’
‘Sounds like a wise man.’
Lillian smiled.
‘I’ll do something over the weekend,’ she said. ‘My brother and sister are coming up. They’re throwing a surprise party for me.’
‘Some surprise.’
‘My cousin let it slip. Poor Alice, she was never the brightest flame.’
They sat in silence, staring at the stars.
‘I don’t have a present,’ said Conrad, ‘but I can offer you supper.’
‘Well, that depends what’s on the menu.’
‘Lobster and caviar?’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Where’d you think they came from?’
‘I don’t know. Lobsters, I suppose, but caviar…’
‘It’s been a good year for sturgeon.’
‘You catch them here?’
He pointed at the ocean, adjusting a little to the southwest. ‘About there. Got six hundred fathoms of net fishing just off the bar. We’ll haul the gear tomorrow, set it again, keep it up till the spring run drops off at the end of May.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘Come with me.’
He fired up the generator and led her over to the old whaleboat house beside the barn. It was here that they prepared the sturgeon roe. He talked her through the operation, demonstrating how they separated then salted the eggs. When she asked if they did good business, he shrugged. He didn’t tell her that they’d made enough in the last month alone to see them good till the end of the year. Before leaving, he took a couple of tins of their own caviar off the shelf, gifts from a grateful buyer at the Fulton Fish Market eager to do more business with them. Then he plucked two lobsters from a wooden tub and asked her to choose between them.
‘I reckon we’re good for both,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’
She set the table while he cooked. She remarked on the beauty of the sideboard, and he told her that it was made from the wood of one of the tall elms on Amagansett Main Street felled by the ‘38 hurricane. He explained that the house too was a victim of that apocalyptic storm. It had started life in East Hampton, on the western shore of Georgica Pond, put up as a summer home by a New York publisher at the turn of the century. Shattered by the high winds, it had lain derelict throughout the war before Conrad bought it, transporting it along the beach on skids to the plot of land he’d just purchased on Napeague. A section of the roof, the back bedroom and one corner of the main room were all missing, and all were replaced with lumber and shingles recovered from the old Amagansett Gun Club, sold off by the members when they decided to upgrade their bunking quarters out on Montauk.
The barn had arrived a few months later, dismantled in Amagansett then re-erected, piecemeal, beside the house. After more than two hundred and fifty years of service, the Van Duyns no longer had need of it. Ten
