Island Girl Read Free Page A

when the city decided the Island should be a park. Year after year they came with their sheriff and their bulldozers, pushing us back farther and farther until we finally took a stand in July 1980. Banded together and said no more. We would not be moved.
    There are only seven hundred of us left, but instead of chasing us away, the hardships make us stronger, more determined to hold on to the homes and the life we love. Which is why another blast from the ferry had me pedaling faster. I could not afford to miss that boat.
    My bike is a black 1946 Schwinn. Brand-new when my grandmother brought it over after the war and in its prime when my mother claimed it as her own in the fifties. But now, just like me, the poor thing is well past its best before date. There won’t be anything worth passing on, so I never bother with the lock when I leave the bike at the ferry dock. If some kid pitches it over the wall into the eastern channel, I won’t mind. In fact, I can’t think of a more fitting tribute for the old girl than to be laid to rest among the other bikes at the bottom of the gap.
    Jamming the Schwinn into the last available spot, I raced aboard the Ongiara , the small ferry that trundles back and forth between Toronto and Ward’s year-round—the one meant for Islanders. The 8:30 A.M. serves mostly commuters, and I moved through the crowd as I used to every morning, calling hello to people I knew, nodding to those I only recognized. There was a time when I missed my daily commute. Missed the small talk, the gossip updates, and the money that came with working in the city. But like Grandma Lucy, I’ve come to prefer the pace and freedom of working from home. And I have always known how to stretch a buck until it screams—something Liz’s father used to admire about me.
    “Ruby, darlin’,” he’d say. “There is nothing sexier than watching you clip those coupons. Gets me all hot and bothered just sittin’ here.” That much was true. Doubtless because I was building a healthy sum in the coffee tin we were filling for our future together.
    His name was Gideon, he hailed from Oklahoma, and he was just another draft dodger who found his way to the Island during the sixties and seventies. I was no child when he arrived in 1974. No breathless virgin waiting to be wakened to the joys of sex, but the day that man stepped off the ferry, I stood perfectly still on the dock, barely breathing while I watched him come down the ramp.
    Gideon may have been a hayseed back home, but to me he was a dark and exotic mystery. A man who smiled easily, knew every sensitive spot on a woman’s body, and played a mean guitar. Grandma Lucy warned me about him from the start, but I fell in love anyway. Made us a nest in my room and gave birth to his daughter a year later. I even thought about marriage every time I clipped a coupon or stashed another bill in that tin.
    Liz was almost two years old when Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to all the artful dodgers in January 1977. I left Chez Ruby early that day, heading home to celebrate. Mary Anne met me at my front door, told me Gideon and my money had hopped on the ferry an hour earlier, bound for the city and a train to warmer climes. She knew because she caught him packing the coffee tin into a duffel bag when she dropped by to check on Grandma Lucy.
    “I have spent long enough on this godforsaken spit of land,” he’d said. “And I am sick to death of leaving my balls at the dock.”
    She tried to stop him, ending up on her backside in a snow-bank for her trouble. I haven’t heard from him since and don’t care to either. He was just another man I have loved. Another man who has a daughter who looks just like him. And Grandma Lucy was right again.
    I made my way to the front of the Ongiara where old Benny Barnes had taken up his position at the railing. Benny’s family has lived on the Island as long as mine, maybe longer, but I don’t remember him aging. As far as I can tell, he has