Vineyard Fear Read Free Page B

girls?”
    That’s when I learned that Mattie and the girls were going to Colorado to stay at John’s mother’s ranch.
    â€œSo you’ll be living the jolly bachelor life, eh?”
    â€œThat’s an oxymoron. The bachelor life is not the life for me. I have a theological crisis whenever Mattie has to be away. Sleeping alone in a double bed is evidence that there is no God.”
    â€œWhy don’t you just go out to Colorado with your wife and avoid this existential predicament?”
    â€œI thought you of all people would understand. Bluefish, my boy! Clams! Quahogs! I haven’t had a fresh bluefish since last summer. I haven’t had mussels. I haven’t had a clam boil. I haven’t had one single littleneck on the half shell. Life is not always easy, you know. We have to face tough choices.”
    â€œWell, my favorite woman is right here, so I don’t have to chose between her and fish.”
    â€œYou’re a lucky man.”
    A few days later, when Zee told me about her New Hampshire plans, I didn’t feel so lucky, but at the time I could not but agree with John.
    John’s house was off the West Tisbury Road. In the wintertime, When the leaves were off the trees, you could catch a glimpse of the ocean from a couple of his upstairs windows. If some developer had gotten hold of it, he probably would have called it Ocean View Farm, or some such thing.
    In preparation for the arrival of Dr. Jack Scarlotti and his band, I turned on the water and electricity, made sure there were no leaky pipes and that the toilets all flushed, and vacuumed and dusted the house, including the fine, big library where a few thousand of John’s books tended to slow me down a lot as I examined titles and fingered through pages when I should have been working. I made sure there were blankets and sheets in the linen closets, opened screened windows so the place could air out, turned on the bottled gas for the stove, mowed the large lawn, and checked the barn and fences for needed repairs.
    Behind the barn the grass was high in the field where the twins kept the horses that wintered at a farm up toward Chilmark. The horses would stay at that farm this summer, I reckoned, since Jen and Jill would be in Colorado with their mother instead of here. I liked the twins although I simply could not tell one from the other. I realized to my surprise that I would miss them. Was I becoming a sentimentalist?
    I unlocked the tack room, where the twins kept their saddles and other riding gear and grooming supplies, enjoying, as always, the smell of leather and oils and the scent of horsehair and sweat that gets into tack, and the smell of hay and grain that is usually mixed in with it. Everything was fine, so I locked the door again and wentback to the house, closed the windows, locked up, and went home. As I drove I saw Geraldine Miles walking slowly toward me on the bike path that paralleled the road. The bike paths on the Vineyard are popular with walkers and joggers, and Geraldine was limping along with an intent look on her face. In the warm spring air, she wore long pants and a long-sleeved sweatshirt. I considered offering her a ride, but changed my mind. She was walking because she wanted to be walking. I drove past and she never glanced at me.
    On May 24, I got another call from John Skye. Jack Scarlotti and company would be coming over the next day on the one-fifteen boat from Woods Hole.
    I went to the A & P and bought juice, instant coffee, bread, oleo, bacon, and eggs. As is customary on Martha’s Vineyard, I paid a lot more for the food than I would have on the mainland. Such is the price of island living. All businesses overcharge and claim that it’s because of the cost of bringing in supplies on the ferries. The overcharges are, of course, much greater than the freight costs, but it is a convenient lie shared by the businesses, and islanders tolerate it because they must. Once the