Barefoot Read Free Page B

wherever she went.
    I’ll miss you, she said. But I’m going.
    The cottage had been built in 1803—back, Vicki thought, when life was both busier and simpler, back when people were shorter and held lower expectations. The cottage had originally been one room with a fireplace built into the north wall, but over the years, three “warts” had been added for bedrooms. All of the rooms were small with low ceilings; it was like living in a dollhouse. That was what Aunt Liv had loved about the cottage—it was life pared down, scaled way back. There was no TV, no answering machine, no computer or microwave or stereo. It was a true summerhouse, Aunt Liv used to say, because it encouraged you to spend most of your time outside—on the back deck overlooking the yard and garden, or down the street at ’Sconset’s public beach. Back in 1803 when the woman of the house had cancer, there were no oncologists or treatment plans. A woman worked right through it—stoking the fire, preparing meals, stirring the laundry in a cauldron of boiling water—until one day she died in bed. These were Vicki’s thoughts as she stepped inside.
    The cottage had been cleaned and the furniture aired. Vicki had arranged for all of this by telephone; apparently, houses that sat dormant for three years were common stuff on Nantucket. The house smelled okay, maybe a bit too optimistically like air freshener. The living room floors were made from wide, buttery pine boards that showed every scratch from a dragged chair, every divot from a pair of high heels. The plaster-and-wood-beamed ceiling was low, and the furniture was old-ladyish, like something out of a Victorian bed-and-breakfast: Aunt Liv’s delft blue high-back sofa, the dainty coffee table with a silver-plated tea service resting on a piece of Belgian lace. There were the bookshelves bowing under the weight of Aunt Liv’s summer library, there was the fireplace with mismatched andirons. Vicki moved into the small kitchen, appliances circa 1962, silver-threaded Formica, Aunt Liv’s china, which was painted with little Dutch girls in wooden shoes. The caretaker’s bill was secured to the refrigerator with a magnet advertising a restaurant called the Elegant Dump, which had been defunct for years.
    The west bedroom was sunny. That would be Melanie’s room. Twin beds were made up with the pink-and-orange-striped sheets that Vicki remembered from her childhood. (What she remembered most vividly was staining the sheets during her first period. Aunt Liv had sensibly pulled out the hydrogen peroxide while Ellen Lyndon had chirped with over-the-top sentimentality about how “Vicki is a woman now” and Brenda glowered and chewed her cuticles.) Vicki would take the largest bedroom, with the king bed, where she would sleep with the kids, and Brenda would sleep in the old nursery, a room just slightly bigger than Vicki’s walk-in closet at home. This was the room Aunt Liv had always occupied—it was called the old nursery because both Aunt Liv and Vicki and Brenda’s grandmother Joy had slept in cribs in that room alongside the family’s baby nurse, Miss George, more than eighty years earlier. Once Aunt Liv had arthritis and every other old-person ailment, Vicki’s parents suggested she take the big bedroom—but that didn’t suit Liv. She stopped coming to Nantucket altogether, and then she died.
    There was a flurry of activity as everyone piled into the house, dragging luggage and boxes. The cabbie stood by the car, waiting to be paid. That was Vicki’s department. She was going to pay for everything all summer. She was summer’s sponsor. She handed the kid twenty bucks. Enough?
    He grinned. Too much. “Thanks, ma’am. Enjoy your stay.”
    As the cab pulled away, Blaine started to cry. Vicki worried that all the change would traumatize him; there had been a scene at breakfast when he’d said good-bye to Ted, and then he’d knocked Melanie off the airplane’s steps. He was acting out.