I.O.U Read online

  But there was one thing I knew for sure.

  I had to get out of there. Right then. Now.

  Before they started to lower Mom’s coffin into the ground, and I had to watch.

  I pushed tactlessly through the crowd, leaving my family to cope. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, as if they were all sucking the air out of me. I stumbled out from under the canopy, past the graves of some of my family, and I kept walking until I found a tree by the side of the cliff, a tree that looked old enough, thick enough, and strong enough to support my sorrow.

  I leaned against it, facing the ocean.

  But there was nothing to see except a frightening white eternity of fog into which a person might step off and never be seen again. In three hundred years, there had been three thousand shipwrecks off the coast of Cape Cod alone, and days like this were the reason why. Ship captain fathers went down with their sailor sons, entire families drowned en route from Europe, without ever setting foot on the New World of their dreams. My family, the Cains, was a sea family, too. Not mariners, in the sense of being the hardworking ones who hauled the nets, but lucky merchants of the sea. And we’d gone down, all right, our golden days ended, as sure as if somebody had pulled a plug on our little boat of a business, and let the sea come rushing in.

  I turned back, and stared at the grave site.

  They were all there, gliding slowly about in the fog like characters in a surrealistic movie. My husband, Geof. My sister, Sherry, her husband, Lars, and their children, Heather and Ian. My father, Jimmy Cain, and his second wife, Randy. My employees at the foundation, and my employers, too. My mother’s doctors, and their nurses. My father’s ex-employees. My mother’s friends, my friends, and quite a few people I didn’t recognize at all. Why had they bothered, any of these people, to come out on this miserable day for this miserable family that—

  “Jenny, dear?”

  I looked up to find that my mother’s most loyal friend, Francine Daniel, had followed me. Long after everyone else had sidled away from my mother’s bedside, Francie had continued to visit her, holding her limp hands, gossiping with her as if she heard, as if she understood, and might even reply. Now, Francie’s kind, round, auntly face looked pale and pinched, her gray hair looked as limp as mine felt, and she held her coat bunched against her chest to ward off the chill. Her brown eyes held an expression of such deep concern and love that something inside of me almost cracked. But I didn’t let it. I couldn’t allow that.

  “I’m all right, Francie.”

  “Good, honey.”

  “Francie? Tell me something. What was she like, as a friend to you?”

  “She was a wonderful friend.”

  “Was she fun to be with?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “When Sherry and I were little, what kind of mother was she?”

  “As sweet as you can imagine.”

  “That’s how I remember her. Why’d she get so sick, Francie?”

  “Oh, Jenny.” She sighed. “These things happen.”

  “But you were here, and I was at college—”

  “I can’t tell you anything—” She sighed again. “—that you don’t already know. Honey, you don’t want to dwell in the past. We all loved your mother, and she loved you girls, and that’s all that’s important now. I know it’s hard, but you have to let her go.”

  “But Francie—”

  She put her arm around my stiff, resisting shoulders and gently led me back toward the green canopy where the gravediggers were lowering my mother’s coffin into the ground, the very sight I had most wanted to avoid. Geof came walking toward us, and when I saw the worried expression on his face, I had to stoop suddenly to pretend to read the inscription on the gravestone of one of my father’s sisters. Her grave lay just outside the green mat of artificial grass the cemetery had put down around the freshly dug grave, and a corner of the green mat had rolled up. Under that corner, I glimpsed a flat bronze marker. I reached out to uncover it fully, in order to see which of my other aunts or long-dead cousins was buried there.

  But Francie grasped my elbows and pulled me to my feet.

  With her own foot, she kicked the green mat back into place, covering the flat, bronze marker. “I’ll take her,” Geof said to Francie.

  She turned me over to my husband. I was so tired, so confused, and so sad, that I didn’t even mind being treated like a small child being passed from one adult to another.

  “It’s almost over,” Geof said, hugging me to him. “Only a little while longer, and we’ll be home again. I’m proud of you. You’ve been wonderful, Jenny, through this whole thing. Just hold on for a little while longer, and then we’ll be home and you can get some rest.” He brushed my hair with his cheek. “I love you very much.”

  “Did you see me nearly fall into the grave?”

  “No, what happened?”

  “It felt as if somebody pushed me.”

  “You mean on purpose?”

  I backed down again from the sheer unlikelihood of it. “I guess not. I mean, surely not. They said, ’forgive me.’ I mean, they sort of hissed it, in this kind of angry whisper. And then they said it again, and they also said, ‘it was an accident.’” I shrugged. “So I guess it was an accident.”

  He hugged me tighter, and led me to the waiting limousine.

  I knew Geof was right: I desperately needed some bone-deep, narcotically forgetful, sleep. But I thought he would probably rather not know that my mom’s kind of “rest” sounded pretty attractive to me at that moment. I was so tired, from so many years of… so much. I wondered if those stories of afterlife experiences were true. Did my mother fly into a long tunnel of light, and then into the waiting, cradling arms of a being of love? I hoped so. No, on second thought, that wasn’t what I hoped for her at all. I wanted her, after all those years of immobility, to run and leap and scramble into heaven, shouting and singing and carrying on like a wild woman. It was only for me, at that moment, that the idea of being cradled and comforted forever sounded wonderful.

  I didn’t lean on Geof; I took his hand and matched his long stride.

  I held myself—and my pride—erect all the way to the limousine, where a liveried driver waited beside an open door.

  2

  FROM THE HARBOR LIGHTS MEMORIAL PARK, WE TRAVELED IN the black limousine back to my sister’s house, through the white mist that hangs like a soft curtain in my memory. There were nine of us in the car, counting the driver: Geof and I, my sister, Sherry, and her husband, Lars, their two children, and Dad and Randy. I sat up front by the driver. Geof had deposited me there because, I suspected, he sensed correctly that I wouldn’t want to be squeezed into the back seats with the rest of my family.

  I could see only the lines in the road, the lights of oncoming vehicles, the brakelights of those in front of us and, now and then, sketchy outlines of the peaky gables on private homes, and the flat roofs of office buildings. The limo driver leaned forward at a 45-degree angle toward the steering wheel, and his brow furrowed with the effort of seeing well enough to keep us on the road. We all drew in our breaths and the children shrieked at one point when headlights came at us suddenly as we crested a hill. This is frightening, I thought, I should feel afraid. But I liked the feeling of being cocooned in cotton, of moving forward blindly into white nothingness.

  “Well,” my stepmother said in her Betty Boop voice, “I thought it was a lovely service.”

  Nobody responded.

  There were cars following us back to Sherry’s for an open house and buffet. Slowly and carefully leading the way, our driver took a short cut, slicing through the harbor industrial district rather than winding through town. Unfortunately, the route he chose took us past the former home of Cain Clams, which had been our family business for three generations—until Dad sunk it, and it ended up being sold to Port Frederick Fisheries.

  Inside the car, the silence lengthened and grew awkward as we approached the plant. Its roofline appeared through the fog—wh
ich I hoped would swallow it up whole, as diners had once gulped our clams. But there was no such act of divine mercy. Or even luck. Instead, we rounded a bend in the road and voilà! hit a patch of clear weather that allowed us to view the canning plant in painful detail. Beyond the plant, we saw the wharf and dozens of little boats, their masts looking like toothpicks poking out of the fog.

  “Let there be light,” Geof murmured.

  Lars Guthrie, my brother-in-law, laughed softly.

  The two sons-in-law didn’t have to worry about hurting their father-in-law’s feelings; Dad never listened to anybody.

  “Remember how it smelled?” my sister asked.

  “Pee-u,” her son said. Ian was a tall, skinny ten-year-old, whose wrists and ankles always seemed to immediately outgrow his mother’s every attempt to cover them. I glanced back at him, and smiled at the sight of at least four inches of bare arms and a couple of inches of bare legs above his good black dress socks. Like his twelve-year-old sister, Heather, Ian wasn’t even born yet when the plant folded, but he’d heard the rest of us discuss it, usually in sepulchral tones, all of his brief life. He held his nose, sounding comically nasal. “Yuck. Fishy.”

  “Stinko,” Heather agreed.

  I smiled at my pretty, coltish niece.

  With our windows rolled up, we couldn’t tell if Port Frederick Fisheries smelled as bad as Cain Clams used to smell, particularly on humid days. I remembered it as the scent of failure. Sherry seemed to regard it as the smell of humiliation. All those years later, we still couldn’t eat clams without gagging. “When I first met Jimmy,” our stepmother said brightly, “I thought he always smelled like clam dip.”

  There followed another silence, an appalled one.

  Somehow we each resisted the temptation to say, “When you first met Dad, Randy, you were his new receptionist and he was a married man.”

  A handsome fellow, even when unshaven, uncombed, and fresh out of bed, James Damon Cain III looked particularly elegant on this morning of the funeral of the woman to whom he had been married for twenty years. It was strange to think he had now been wed to Randy for almost that long. Their years together surely had been easier than the twenty he spent with my mother, I mused, paved as they were with lots of money (from trust funds the bankruptcy hadn’t touched) and with virtually no responsibilities.

  Dad hadn’t said a word yet.

  I wondered what he was thinking as we drew abreast of the old plant site, where, in the fog which had gathered again, the metal buildings appeared like spaceships floating on a sea of their own steam.

  Port Frederick Fisheries, which now owned the lands and buildings, had long since replaced our 100-year-old wooden plant with these structures that looked as if they could last a lot longer than a mere single century. PFF had taken the architectural drawings that Dad had commissioned for the additions he had planned—the ones that threw us into bankruptcy—and then they had simply redesigned them to fit their own purposes. The first thing they’d done, though, was to remove the old wooden sign that my great-grandfather had erected and which his son and then my father had repainted through the years, the sign that said, “CAIN CLAMS, Purveyors of Fine Seafood Products Since 1869.” The new sign was a block of capital letters painted onto the front of the foremost steel building: “PFF.”

  “Like graffiti.”

  My stepmother turned her head toward me. “What, Jenny?”

  “Their sign. It looks spray painted. Like graffiti.”

  “It doesn’t look at all like graffiti,” my sister said.

  “PFF,” I pronounced. “Pretty Fine Fish.”

  On the jump seat, Ian giggled.

  “Pretty Fat Fish,” he said.

  “Ian,” his father warned him.

  I smiled back at my nephew. “Paltry Fish Fry.”

  Heather, on the other jump seat, said, “Pasty Fish Fingers.”

  “Yuck,” Ian said, and giggled again.

  “Stop that,” their mother admonished, not to them, but to me.

  “Oh, Put your Face in a Fan,” I told her, and her children flew into paroxysms of laughter. To them, I said, “Pack a Fresh Flounder. Pickled Fish Fillets. Pat a Fat Fisherman.”

  “Pat a Farty Fisherman!” Ian squealed, and then laughed so hard that he slid off the jump seat onto his grandfather’s shoes. “Part a Fatty Pisherfan!”

  “Ian, get up from there,” Sherry demanded, while his father picked him up by his shirt collar and hauled him back onto the jump seat. The children tried valiantly to get themselves back under control, but it was impossible. Every time they looked at each other—or at me—they burst into giggles again.

  The person responsible for this unseemly outburst also had a hard time getting herself under control. I laughed and laughed along with my niece and nephew, and it wasn’t until I heard the silence that I realized they were all staring at the back of my head. My hysterical tears of laughter had turned into plain old tears.

  My stepmother practically climbed over the seat, trying to reach for one of my hands to hold.

  I jerked away from her, and fumbled for tissues in my purse.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  So many losses.

  “Jenny?” Geof said.

  How had it all happened?

  “I’m fine,” I snapped.

  And why to us?

  “Particularly Fine Fish,” Ian whispered.

  I turned my head and tried to smile at him.

  “Shh!” His sister reached across the car to swat his arm, and then she glanced back at me, looking frightened.

  At the Guthries’ house, which had been designed in a determinedly anti-New England style by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, the pillars of Port Frederick society moved through the buffet line sedately, as befits pillars, scooping up salmon and tuna, roast beef and chicken wings.

  With determinedly dry eyes and with fresh makeup borrowed from Sherry’s dressing room, I sat in her bay window, trying to be invisible. I didn’t want to be comforted. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I didn’t want to stumble, or offend, or lose control, or run away, or make a fool of myself. But despite my best efforts to hide behind Sherry’s draperies, people kept making the mistake of approaching me with Chinette plates full of food and with sympathetic faces full of good intentions. They kept trying to say the right things, which were invariably the wrong things. I kept taking offense—and, as the afternoon wore on, trying less and less hard to disguise it—thus making awkward situations all the worse by piling my own rudeness upon their innocent tactlessness.

  One of the people I unintentionally insulted that day was Calvin Farrell, my mother’s obstetrician, who had delivered Sherry and me. The white-haired old man strolled over to the bay window to say hello, accompanied by his longtime nurse, Marjorie Earnshaw. Some people thought, because Doc had never married and because Marjorie was divorced and because they’d been working together so long, that she’d probably been his mistress for many years. Personally, I doubted it. I had a feeling that Doc Farrell viewed Marj as neuter, like his office furniture, and that she viewed him as a necessary means to a desired end—retirement security.

  “Doc,” I greeted him. “Marjorie.”

  “Jennifer—” was all he managed to get out before I interrupted him.

  “You doctors certainly make me appreciate broken legs,” I told him, stepping right up onto one of my pet soapboxes. “You look at a broken leg, and you say, look! It’s broken! Because he fell off the roof, because the ladder slipped, because he propped it backwards against the house, because he was nervous because his wife was watching him and she got exasperated when he screwed up little jobs, and so he really wanted to do this one thing right—get the cat off the roof— and so he was thinking about his wife and heights and how he was afraid the cat would scratch him and so he screwed up again and fell off the roof and broke his leg and killed the cat by landing on it. Because. And so. Magical words.” I snorted. “That’s all I ever wanted you doctors t
o say. Because. And so. I wanted you to say, Jenny, your mother lies vegetating in a mental ward because… and… Fill in the blanks. All I ever wanted any of you to do was to fill in the blanks.”

  “I’m sorry,” the good doctor said, and let it go at that.

  Marjorie protested, “Jenny, that isn’t fair—” But she got no further, because he openly nudged her in the ribs and then grasped her elbow to move her away from the threat of me. Even I realized that for Calvin Farrell, considering his usual gruff persona, it was a moment of supreme tact and restraint, particularly in reining in Marj, who’d never been shy about expressing her opinion to anybody at any time.

  They backed away, a smart move on their parts.

  I, however, was not getting any wiser as the day progressed.

  The next person I insulted was Samuel Hayes, the young owner, editor, and publisher of The Port Frederick Times. Sam’s father had run the town’s only newspaper before him, and his father before that. Ours was a town of family businesses, all right, many of them into their fourth and fifth generations, most of them inextricably intertwined, with cousins sitting on corporate boards with their uncles who married their mothers’ sisters whose fathers owned…

  “Listen, Sam, I have a bone to pick with that paper you run,” I said, when he made the mistake of walking up to me. Sam was only thirty-one, but he was a hardwood chip off the old-fashioned block of his father, even to the point of dressing like the old man, complete with rimless glasses, suspenders, and a red bow tie. I fished a clipping out of the pocket of my skirt—I’d been carrying it around with me for two days, waiting for just such an opportunity as this—and waved it at him. “This is my mother’s obituary. Now listen to this… ‘Mrs. Margaret Mary Cain, aged 60—’”