That Summer Place: Island Time / Old Things / Private Paradise

Six

Michael was outside cutting wood when the air began to fill with the smell of rain. Daylight had faded away and the wind was picking up, so he went inside. He hung his jacket on the old iron coat-rack, next to where his grandfather’s tool belt still hung on the exact same hook as it had for almost forty years.

He’d kept that belt around long after his grandfather had died. The canvas was frayed, the edges were black with grease, and the leather was cracked. At first he’d told himself he kept it around because they didn’t make tool belts like they used to, with a slot for a flashlight and for tools.

Hell. Now they made tool belts out of space-age, NASA-developed weave that was stronger than canvas and leather could ever be.

The truth was, he’d kept it for sentimental reasons. And he still used it. Maybe he wore it because he was trying to recapture his past. Maybe he was just old and needed something from his youth to cling to.

He turned away, not really giving a damn why he wore the thing. He just did.

He crossed the room and started a fire, then went into the kitchen where he made some soup. He stood at the stove and ate right from the pan. He ate most of his meals that way, when he was home alone and too lazy to dirty a plate or to bother with sitting down at a table.

Unless there was a football game on TV, then he sat down in front of his big screen while he ate from the pan.

Single people had singular habits. He drank milk and orange juice from the carton while standing at the open refrigerator, his arm resting on the door. He dipped his toast in the jam jar. He didn’t pick up his socks or make his bed unless someone was going to join him in it. He usually left the cap off the toothpaste and squeezed the tube from the middle.

He knew himself pretty well, he thought as he crossed the room. He picked up the latest issue of Money magazine, then set down a glass of Jack Daniel’s on a small table and sat in an old comfortable chair in front of the older rock fireplace that blazed and crackled with a fire.

He propped his feet up on a tired leather ottoman and relaxed—something he couldn’t seem to do much of lately. At some point he had lost the ability to sleep on planes. Hell, sometimes he even lost the ability to sleep in a hotel room, and it didn’t seem to matter how exhausted he was.

At this moment, though, he wasn’t tired. But he knew he could easily fall asleep in the old chair if he just closed his eyes. There was a comfort in knowing he could do something easily, something that had until now eluded him.

He chose to sip his drink and look around him instead of escaping to sleep. He had a strong sense that he was where he belonged, in a place that seemed to fit him better than his sleek glass offices or his huge home.

He’d gotten so he only lived in three of the rooms in that enormous house on the water. Usually he came in through the garage, because when he walked in the front doors he felt as if he were walking into the Guggenheim.

Here he was surrounded by old things. He liked old things.

He took his glasses out of his flannel shirt pocket and slipped them on, then began to read the magazine. The Asian markets were on a downtrend and the Wall Street wizards expected the NASDAQ to drop. Some hotshot at Merrill Lynch predicted Letni stock to drop and profits to be down.

Michael had been reading about and hearing those rumors for over a year. But each quarter the company proved to be stronger than ever. This magazine issue was barely a week old, yet just yesterday, before he’d loaded the boat with supplies and motored to the island, Letni had released to the public the profit reports for the last quarter.

They were twice as high as he had expected.

He laughed and tossed the magazine into the fireplace, where it curled into dark flame that was as black as the magazine’s predictions. He watched it burn, then picked up his drink and mockingly raised his glass to the jackass who’d written the article.

Michael toasted him with two extremely crude words.

By eight o’clock Catherine and the girls had polished off six cans of cream soda, a can of cheese Pringles, a box of Wheat Thins and two containers of Allouette spread, five apples, a slab of Tillamook cheese and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s Wavy Gravy ice cream—Aly’s idea of dinner.

“One more piece and we’ll have the outside frame done.” Catherine stuck her spoon in the empty ice cream carton and scanned the table for a piece that had a flat edge.

Dana was chewing on a handful of smoked almonds—a gift from Catherine’s mother—and eyeing the small puzzle pieces with a determined look on her face. It seemed that Dana was driven to find that puzzle piece.

But not Aly. She had given up on the puzzle frame and was putting together Gene Simmons’s chalky face. Even upside-down Catherine could see that in the photograph his tongue was sticking out.

She suddenly wished they were putting together a picture of Bambi, Thumper and Flower. She sighed in that quiet, tired way, when you knew time had slipped past far too quickly, then went back to the puzzle.

A few minutes later she had an awful thought. “If this puzzle is missing any pieces I’m going to scream.”

Almost simultaneously she spotted the last outside end piece.

Aha!

She locked her eyes on it and casually set down the empty ice cream carton. Then she leaned forward and quickly reached across the table to snatch up the puzzle piece.

At that very same moment the lights went out.

It didn’t take Catherine long to remember that whenever a storm hit Spruce Island, the power went out. The sudden and complete island darkness could jar your memory quickly.

There were no streetlights here. Just the stars and the moon, and on some rainy nights, not even that.

What she saw in the darkness was the remembered image of her father cursing at the old generator behind the rental house. She could remember her mother holding an umbrella and scolding her dad for cursing, and how Catherine always got to hold the flashlight so her dad could see inside the generator while he cursed at it.

So she and the girls went outside, loaded with one big old metal flashlight and a huge Mary Poppins-sized umbrella. Dana whipped the flashlight back and forth across the ground. She was on slug patrol.

Aly carried the umbrella. Catherine stumbled on a rock and almost fell on her face; she couldn’t see because Dana, her slug-fearing daughter, had the flashlight shining near her own feet instead of the path that ran toward the north end of the yard.

Catherine stopped and turned around. “Dana.”

“Huh?”

“Keep the flashlight ahead of us so I don’t fall and kill myself.”

Dana never even looked up at her.

Huddled under the umbrella with Aly, Catherine tapped Dana on the arm. “I promise no slugs are going to suddenly leap up from the ground and latch on to your face like that monster did in Alien.”

“Oh, Mom.”

Catherine stopped in front of a small wooden garden shed with a trap door. “Ah, here it is. Voila!” She paused and waved her hand dramatically. “This, my girls, is a generator…I think. Hold the flashlight up, Dana.”

“Does it work?” Dana asked, glancing up for only one brief second before she turned her gaze back to the grass.

“I don’t know. It used to drive your grandpa nuts, though. I’d come out here with him and hold the flashlight. Like you are, Dana. Aim it here, sweetie. That’s right. I can still remember him banging on this metal thing when he couldn’t get it to work. He made so much noise you could have heard him hammering on it all the way across the island. He used to say a generator is like a mule. It needs a swift kick to get going.”

A few minutes later, the wind had picked up and the rain was coming down so hard it bounced back up from the ground. Over five times Catherine had read and followed the old instructions that were engraved on a metal plate attached to the lid, and still nothing happened.

“Who writes these things?” she muttered. “Probably the same people who write software manuals.”

She took the flashlight from Dana and banged the generator a good one.

The motor gave a half-hearted start, then suddenly died.

“Oh Mom! It almost started!” Dana reached for the flashlight. “Let me try.” She hit it a few times.

The generator started up with a loud coughing rev like a huge lawnmower.