Turned out, crazy or not, she was a natural storyteller—animated and riveting—and Anders felt he could listen to her melodic, lilting voice read all 2.4 million words of the United States tax code and never want it to end.
And perhaps that was why, when Piper invited Anders to come over on a Wednesday to pick crabs in the island’s cooperative building, even though it meant he’d have to take another day off work, Anders didn’t hesitate before saying yes.
At least that was what he told himself, anyway.
It was for Piper’s voice.
It was for his podcast.
It was not for how when she smiled, her dimples grew so deep it looked like Bill Gibbons had carved them himself with his whittling tool, or how when she got irritated, her nose burned pink and she cried out “son of a monkey!” or “holy barnacles!” or once—when she dropped an industrial-size mayonnaise jar while taking inventory at the store and it splattered all over the freshly mopped floor—“Frank Sinatra!” or how when she looked at him with her big, intelligent cow eyes, it somehow made his insides turn soft as bread dough.
It had absolutely nothing to do with any of that.
Chapter 19
Piper sat on the wooden bench at the marina, thumbing through the worn copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, waiting for a boat carrying a man for the second time that day. This time it was the ferry and Anders Caldwell, instead of Steve’s skiff and Tom.
Anders Caldwell. A few months ago she didn’t think she’d even remember his name by now, much less be looking forward to seeing him. But she was. Aside from his debilitating neuroses—Who didn’t like the beach? Or seafood? Or butterflies, for Pete’s sake?—she liked how plainspoken he was. Or maybe she just liked how interested he appeared to be in what she had to say. Of course, it was his job to ask all those questions, but having a man truly listen when you spoke—well, she had lived long enough to know that was a rare thing indeed. It reminded her of the beginning with Tom, when he wanted to know every little thing about her, and they would talk breathlessly until the wee hours of the morning, as if the sun might not rise the next day. As if they might never see each other again.
Or maybe it had nothing to do with Anders specifically, and more that she just liked being around somebody.
She felt so lonely when Tom was gone. She was used to being a waterman’s widow, of course—the nickname coined for the women during crabbing season who knows how many decades ago—but she’d never felt it more than she had this season. Fortunately crabbing season would be over in a few weeks—though she wasn’t particularly looking forward to winter either, when everybody holed up in their homes, hiding from the cruel weather.
Or maybe he was just a nice distraction from everything else in her life that seemed to be going awry.
“Piper!” Anders’s voice pulled her out of her reverie. She looked up at where he was waving from aboard the docking ferry and stood to greet him, an involuntary smile pulling her lips skyward.
“Hey,” he said, after disembarking and reaching her. His cheeks were ruddy from the ride over, his now-familiar cowlick standing at attention. He hopped out of the boat effortlessly—a marked difference from mere weeks earlier, when she sent him off with the twins white-knuckling an orange life preserver—and shouted his thanks to BobDan, who had kindly agreed to bring him over on his return from the 4:00 p.m. run to the mainland instead of the noon, so Anders wouldn’t have to miss a whole day of work.
Anders strode toward her and then slowed, his eyes darting from side to side. “Is Tom . . . coming?”
“Nope! This is a women-only activity.” She turned to lead Anders away from the dock and he followed. “The men catch the crabs; the women pick them. It’s all very 1950s.”
“Oh,” Anders said, and then abruptly stopped walking, eyes narrowed in concern. “You do know that I’m not a woman, yes?”
—
The Frick Island Crab-Picking Cooperative formed in the late eighties upon the FDA’s shocking discovery that the watermen’s wives on the island had—for decades—been steaming and de-shelling crabs in their own kitchens and selling plastic tubs of the unregulated meat to restaurants and grocers on the mainland. They immediately intervened and demanded rules! Gloves! Hairnets! Stainless steel sinks! And more regulations!
So a rectangular building was constructed and all the women started picking their husbands’ hauls together and enjoyed the camaraderie so much, they wondered why they hadn’t been doing that all along. They didn’t wear the required hairnets and gloves, of course, unless an FDA rep came for an inspection, which only happened twice in the forty-plus years since.
“You start with the crab like so.” Lady Judy clutched the crustacean in her left hand and a curved wooden-handled knife in her right. “First you peel off the back.”
Piper looked on as Anders made sure his recorder was pointed squarely at Lady Judy and watched intently as she narrated her quick movements, deconstructing the crab and popping the white meat into a plastic tub on the table, the same way Piper had watched when she and Tom got serious and he suggested she might want to pick his haul like the other wives. Piper dissected exactly one crab, and though she enjoyed it from a scientific perspective, she had no desire to do it again and decided to leave picking to the experts at the co-op.
Currently those experts included Steve’s wife, Jane; three other watermen’s wives; and Pearl Olecki and Shirlene, whose husbands were not watermen but whose fathers were, and they had spent their childhoods alongside their mothers picking crabs and saw no good reason to stop. The women were
