stands. “Matthew will ride Edana. Turn the other bay loose, unless you think she’ll shape up next year.”
He looks at me for verification. I shake my head.
“Turn her loose, then. And you’ll” – he tucks some coins beneath the edge of his teacup – “you’ll ride Corr.”
Every year I wait and wait for him to say it. Every year when he makes his decision, it eases my heart.
But this year, I feel like I’m still waiting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
By lunchtime the next day, I’m in poor spirits. When I find Gabe already missing by the time I get up, I decide to take matters into my own hands and go to the Skarmouth Hotel to find him. At the hotel they tell me he’s at the piers and at the piers they tell me he’s gone out on a boat, and when I ask which boat, they laugh at me and say maybe one that had a drink in the bottom of the glass.
Sometimes, I hate all men.
When I get back, I rant to Finn about how we never talk to Gabe anymore. “I talked to him this morning,” Finn tells me. “Before he left. About the fish.” I manage to contain my fury, but only barely. “Next time you see him, I need to talk to him,” I tell Finn. “What fish?”
“What?” Finn answers. He is smiling at a porcelain dog head in a faraway fashion.
“Never mind,” I say.
Then I take Dove to the beach for the afternoon high tide and she’s irritable and sluggish, in no mood to work. She’s had plenty of days like that in the past, of course, but they’ve never mattered. Not that it matters today, either, but if she’s like this on the day of the race, I might as well not get out of bed.
When I get her back to the house, I turn her loose in her paddock and toss a flake of hay over the fence. It’s cruddy islandgrass hay, I know, though I’ve never cared much until now. I glower at Dove’s hay belly and open the door to the house.
“Finn?”
He’s not here. I hope he’s out fixing the stupid Morris. Something on this island ought to work.
“Finn?” I ask again. No reply. Feeling guilty, I go to the biscuit tin on the counter and rattle the coins that we’ve stashed inside. I count them, then put them back in the biscuit tin. I imagine what Dove might do with better feed. I pull them back out again. I think that this will only buy her a week’s worth of better feed, and use up all of our money. I put the coins back in.
We’re going to lose the house anyway, unless I do something.
I fist my hands and stare at the tin.
Leaving a few of the coins in the tin, I stuff the rest in my pocket. Without Finn or the probably still dead Morris here, there’s no chance of me getting a ride to Colborne & Hammond, the farmer’s supply, so it’s out to the lean-to, shoving Dove out of the way to reach Mum’s bicycle. I check the tire pressure and teeter off down the road, avoiding potholes. I’m glad that Finn’s storm prediction has yet to pass, because Colborne & Hammond’s is in Hastoway, all the way past Skarmouth. My shins will be sighing enough from the ride without soaking them in rainwater as well.
I pedal off the gravel road and onto the asphalt, glancing behind me to make certain no cars are coming. They rarely are, but since Father Mooneyham got knocked into the ditch by Martin Bird’s truck, I’m careful to look.
The wind is coming straight across the hills as I pedal. I have to lean against it to keep the bicycle from tipping. Ahead of me, the road winds to avoid the more formidable outcroppings. Dad said that when they first paved the road, it looked like a scar or a zipper, black against the muted browns and green hills around it. But now the asphalt and the painted lines on it have faded so that the road seems like just another part of the crooked, angular landscape. There’s patches on the road, too, where craters have opened up in it and been sealed with darker tar. It’s like camouflage. At night, it’s almost impossible to stay true to it.
Behind me, I hear the sound of an engine separate itself from the sound of the wind, and I pull over to the side to let them pass. But instead of passing by, the vehicle stops. It’s Thomas Gratton in his big sheep truck, a Bedford whose headlights and grille make it look like Finn when he’s making his frog face.
“Puck Connolly,” Thomas Gratton, ruddy faced as always, says through the open window. He’s already opening his door. “Where are you headed on that?”
“Hastoway.”
I can’t quite figure how I make it off the bicycle, but the next thing I know, Gratton is lifting it over the side of the truck bed for me and saying, “I’m headed down there myself.”
I know good fortune when I see it, so I climb in the passenger seat, moving a tin, a newspaper, and a border collie out of my way before I settle.
“Also,” Thomas Gratton says, pulling himself into the truck with a groan, as if it takes a bit of doing, “have some biscuits. So I don’t eat them all myself.”
As we drive off down the road, I eat one and I give one to his dog. I cast a sly look to Thomas Gratton to see if he’s noticed – and if he’s noticed, if he minds – but he’s humming and gripping the steering wheel as if it might get away. I think about him and Peg talking about me and wonder if I’ve made a mistake trapping myself here in the cab with him.
For a moment we ride in comparative silence – the truck rattles as if the engine is climbing out of the compartment, so
“How’s that brother of yours?” Gratton asks me.
“Which one?”
“The heroic one with the cart.”
I sigh so deeply that the collie licks my face to cure me. “Oh, Finn.”
“He’s a dedicated one. Do you think he’s up for an apprenticeship?”
An apprenticeship with the butcher would be a very wonderful thing indeed. It pains me to say, “He can’t stand the sight of blood.”
Thomas Gratton laughs. “He’s picked the wrong island.”
I think, not fondly, about the dead sheep I investigated earlier. And also about Finn haunting Palsson’s bakery. If he could apprentice anywhere, I’m certain it would be there. Where he could put salt in his hot cocoa. They’d have to apprentice someone else to pick up the kitchen after him, though.
“Oh, what have we here?” Thomas Gratton says. It takes me a moment to spot what he does, which is a lone dark figure picking its way parallel to the road. Gratton stops the truck and rolls down his window.
“Sean Kendrick!” Gratton calls, and I start at that. And it
Sean doesn’t answer right away. His expression doesn’t change, but something about his face does, like he’s shifting to a different gear. “Just clearing my thoughts.”
Gratton says, “Where are you clearing them to?”
“I don’t know. Hastoway.”
“Well, you can clear your thoughts in the truck. We’re headed the same way.”
For a moment I am completely struck by the injustice of this, that I’ve been offered a ride and now I have to share it with Sean “Keep Your Pony Off This Beach” Kendrick of all people. And then I see that Kendrick, too, has seen me, and is uncertain about getting into the truck, and that pleases me. I would like to be terrifying. I glower at him.
But Gratton’s expression must counteract mine, because Sean Kendrick glances back the way he’s come and then starts around to the other side of the truck. My side. Gratton opens his door and tells the dog to get in the
