“Dad, I’m a physician. I can’t just bail.”
“Don’t you work, like, three days a week?”
“Three shifts,” she said. “Which are longer than an average workday.”
“You work in the ER.”
“The ED. It’s really more of a department than a room.”
“Whatever.”
Her dad was getting frustrated, as Dudley Codman was prone to do when things weren’t going his way. The man was loud and intimidating, like a dictator or the head of a drug cartel. But it all unraveled when somebody crossed him.
“Elisabeth,” he said with a beleaguered sigh. “Have another doctor cover for you. No one plans to see you specifically. Don’t random people just show up with a stab wound or whatnot looking for anyone with a pulse?”
“Also a medical degree. And we have precious few stab wounds. But I get what you’re saying.”
On some level, her father was right. It is simple to trade shifts, and unlike her colleagues, Bess isn’t opposed to working holidays. In fact, she prefers it. She likes doing people favors, plus emergencies tend to be better during times of celebration. There aren’t so many drug seekers and paranoid moms.
“I’m already taking off Memorial Day weekend,” Bess told him, counting backward in her head.
If she did as asked, she would arrive ten days earlier than planned. That was no kind of option.
“And finagling time off for Flick’s wedding was a major coup,” she said. “They sort of expect me to work holidays.”
“Why? Because you’re a divorcée?”
“Almost-divorcée. And it’s not quite that blatant. But, yes.”
“Listen, I don’t have time to argue,” he said. “You’ll go to Nantucket, help your mother pack, and drag her out of that crapshack she calls a home. Now, if you’ll excuse me, one of my companies is about to release earnings and I’m positive they’re going to post a miss.”
“Dad, I’ll talk to her when I’m there. I’ll call her tonight! Surely nothing will happen between now and—”
“Listen, Bess,” he snapped. “If you don’t go, your mother will end up in a pile of rubble on the beach.”
“Jesus, Dad.”
Dudley’s intrinsic mobster was leaking out.
“We’ll spend months trying to sort out which pieces are bones,” he went on. “And which are rocks.”
And then the line went dead.
So, “dire”? Yes, he made it seem quite dire, right down to the shards of bone.
“I don’t know, Cissy,” Bess says now, once she catches up to her mom, a sixty-five-year-old lady who can outrun her three kids and probably half of the Nantucket High track team. “Dad made it sound pretty treacherous.”
“If it were that bad, don’t you think he’d be here?”
“He says the house is going to fall over the bluff.”
“As if I’d let that happen.”
Cissy jams her fingers into her mouth and emits a sharp whistle. Two terrified seagulls flap away from their telephone-pole nest. She whistles again, and then juts her thumb out toward the road.
“We’re hitchhiking?!” Bess yelps.
“Don’t be such a pansy.”
Bess stands openmouthed, a bead of sweat crawling down her back. There goes Cissy Codman, folks driving by must think. Up to her usual antics.
Bess’s mother is famous on that island. No, infamous. When Bess returned to the island to finish high school, Nantucketers almost seemed surprised that Cissy was something more than a municipal agitator.
“My mom will be here in thirty minutes,” Bess might say.
“Your mom?” was the reply. “You mean Cissy?”
“My mom wanted me to drop this off.”
“Who’s your … Oh, ha ha ha. Why didn’t you just say Cissy?”
And so Bess started just saying Cissy. It was a joke, but then it stuck. Her mother didn’t seem to mind, or even notice.
“Cis, let’s rent a car,” Bess says. “Obviously no one’s keen on picking up a couple of grifters and this isn’t exactly a thoroughfare.”
“Have a little patience, why dontcha? Honestly, Bess.”
Bess sighs, though a smile slips out. God, she adores that crazy woman. Bess fixes her eyes on the horizon. A few cars motor by, then nothing. She grows hot and impatient. How much longer will they wait? Alas, fortunately or unfortunately—Bess cannot decide—a white, wood-paneled truck appears in the distance. It approaches and then rolls to a stop.
“Is that…” Bess says.
“Just friggin’ fabulous.”
Cissy drops the bike and then the suitcase.
“Go to hell, Chappy!” she screams, and raises both middle fingers.
“Mother!”
“Polished as ever,” the man says, and leans across the passenger seat to leer at them through the open window. “What a mess, eh? Well, Bess. Welcome home.”
“Thanks,” she mumbles.
“Here, hop in.”
“This is fucking perfect,” Cissy grouses, but she throws the luggage and bike into the back nonetheless. “I guess you’re the only option, on account of my daughter’s baggage situation.”
Baggage situation, Bess thinks with a smirk. How painfully appropriate.
“Are you even allowed to drive?” her mother asks the man, their neighbor Chappy Mayhew, as they rumble away from the airport. “Don’t you still have that DUI conviction on your record?”
Chappy laughs and shakes his head. Bess can’t help but smile. Yep, she’s in Nantucket all right. Or, as Cissy would say, it’s “just fucking perfect.” Welcome home indeed.
3
Saturday Afternoon
“So how ya been, Doc?” Chappy asks as they splutter toward Baxter Road, Bess wedged between him and her mother.
Cissy has her eyes closed and her head pressed against the frame of the car. She keeps emitting small burps, as if she might be sick.
“Fine,” Bess answers curtly. “I’m just dandy.”
“So what brings you to our lovely island all the way from California? Far as I can remember, you haven’t been round since your wedding. And that was, what? Two years ago?”
“Four,” she says.
Chappy whistles.
“Wow. That’s a long time away from your mom.”
“Give it a rest, Mayhew,” Cissy says. “She visits us in Boston and I go to San Francisco at least once a month.”
“You do?” Bess says, and cranes her neck to look at her.
“Anyway, mind your own damned business.”
“Wouldn’t that be a treat?” he says with a snort.
It would be tough for Chappy to mind his own damned business, given that he lives in the gray saltbox directly across from Cliff House. Within shooting distance, as Cissy would say, with some degree of cheer. Chappy’s been their neighbor since before Bess was born, and even if they didn’t live so close, Cissy Codman is impossible to ignore, with that incessant biking, her town-meeting intrusions, and the general propensity to raise hell.