Elin Hilderbrand - Winter Stroll

Once Jennifer leaves for the caroling party, Kelley decides to have a man-to-man chat with Barrett, and Pierce could probably stand a little grandfather lecture as well.

Kelley has to be quick with the remote-which he is-and firm. TV off.

“Grandpa!” Pierce says.

“I need to talk to you and you,” he says, pointing to the two elders.

“What about me?” Jaime says.

Jaime is seven which is a little young for the things Kelley wants to say. “You should go down to the kitchen and ask Isabelle if there are cookies.”

“Okay,” Jaime says.

“Bring me some,” Pierce says.

“Can’t this wait?” Barrett asks Kelley.

“It cannot,” Kelley says.

The boys reluctantly drop their controllers and sink back into the sofa. If Kelley had been thinking, he would have brought up a bribe-root beer floats, or Starbursts. Or are Barrett and Pierce too old to be placated with sweets? Kelley’s own grandfather had a farm with horses and a pond stocked with trout. Pops was a top-notch grandfather; Kelley can only hope to measure up.

“You two have to take it easy on your mother,” Kelley says.

“I do take it easy on her,” Pierce says.

Barrett is quiet.

“She’s under a lot of stress,” Kelley says.

“She picks wallpaper, and upholstery fabric,” Barrett says. “You can’t tell me that’s stressful?”

“She’s running a business,” Kelley says.

“She yells at us to get our homework done, but she doesn’t help us with it anymore. She makes us unload the dishwasher and take out the trash but half the time she forgets to give us our allowance. She tells us to pick up the slack, but what she doesn’t seem to get is that we lost our father.”

Kelley tents his fingers the way he remembers his own grandfather doing; it feels like a gesture of wisdom. “Your father made a mistake. It’s unfortunate, but you have to remember that he isn’t gone forever. He’ll be back this summer, and you want him to be proud of how you acted in his absence.”

“Why should we care if he’s proud of us? ” Barrett says. “We aren’t proud of him. He’s supposed to lead by example .”

“What you’ll find in life,” Kelley says, “is that everyone is fallible. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone messes up. Even dads.”

“I have a D in Spanish,” Pierce says. He hangs his dark head. Barrett and Jaime are as redheaded and freckled as leprechauns, but Pierce has inherited his mother’s black Irish beauty. “My teacher speaks only in Spanish and I can’t understand her, and then I get in trouble for not following instructions.”

“Idiot,” Barrett says.

“Barrett,” Kelley says, “I want you to stop with the name-calling and with the ill will toward your parents. They’re human beings.”

“They used to be cool,” Barrett says. “Everything was fine. Then Dad messed up and Mom… honestly, she makes everything worse.”

“She dropped a pot of spaghetti on the floor,” Pierce says. “Then she tried to clean it up with the vacuum cleaner, then the vacuum exploded and she cried.”

“Really?” Kelley says. He has a hard time picturing Jennifer in that particular scenario. Mitzi, yes; Jennifer, no.

“She’s turned into a complete psycho,” Barrett says.

“Barrett,” Kelley says. “Enough.”

Kelley tries to remember if Patrick and Kevin were ever this disrespectful. They must have been! When they were younger, and Kelley and Margaret and the kids all lived in the brownstone on East Eighty-eighth Street, there was a lot of squabbling, but Kelley let Margaret deal with the discipline while he spent fourteen-hour days worrying about the overseas markets. Once Kelley left Wall Street behind and moved to Nantucket to run the inn, he used to wake Patrick and Kevin up at the crack of dawn to do DIY projects, and then, as a reward, he would take them to the Brotherhood of Thieves for burgers. They watched college basketball together, and they had a dirty joke contest running for a while. Kelley had never crossed the line of being friends with his sons, but they had had good moments.

“Seriously, Grandpa, there’s something else going on with Mom,” Barrett says. “She’s either all wound up, or else she’s so mellow, it’s like she’s sleepwalking.”

Is she drinking too much? Kelley wonders. And if so, can he blame her? Is she smoking dope? The mere thought of straitlaced Jennifer smoking a joint makes Kelley smile.

“Just remember, your mom is suffering, too. She misses your dad.”

“Do you miss our dad?” Pierce asks.

“Yes,” Kelley says. “Yes, I do.”

“But you miss Uncle Bart more, right?” Pierce says.

“The situations are different,” Kelley says. “Your dad is in Shirley, and I go visit him once a month and I know when he’s coming back. Your Uncle Bart is a prisoner of war. I don’t know if he’s safe and I don’t know when he’s coming back. So I guess you might say I’m more concerned for Bart. But I miss them both a great deal.”

“I like Uncle Bart,” Pierce says. “I want to be in the Marines.”

“They’ll never take you,” Barrett says. “You’re too annoying.”

Okay, Kelley thinks. He’s done here. He tried. He switches on the TV just as Jaime walks into the room eating a chocolate chip cookie.

“Where’s mine?” Barrett says.

“It was the last one,” Jaime says.

Before Barrett can reach out to punch his brother, Kelley turns back to the TV.

“Go back to stealing cars,” he says. “I’ll make some more cookies.”

The boys grab their controllers. Kelley stands in the doorway to the den for a second, watching them. He’s pretty sure that his words of wisdom have had zero effect.

Pierce glances up and smiles. “Thanks, Grandpa,” he says. “Good talk.”

The woman in front of Jennifer at Murray’s Liquors looks familiar, even from the back. It’s something about the angular cut of her hair, and the severe red and black dye job. Jennifer can’t quite figure out who it is… not someone from Beacon Hill, she doesn’t think… possibly someone from here? But how many people does Jennifer know on Nantucket? Not many.

Then the woman spins around clutching a bottle of Smirnoff vodka and a bottle of Kahlúa by the neck and Jennifer sees the snake tattoo jumping off the woman’s neck. It’s not a tattoo that anyone forgets. Jennifer gasps.

“Norah!” Jennifer says. “Hi!”

The woman sniffs at Jennifer and marches out of the store with her purchases.

Jennifer sets her two bottles of cold chardonnay on the counter and tries to collect her wits.

Did that just happen?

Norah Vale, Kevin’s ex-wife? Here, on Nantucket? On the weekend of Genevieve’s baptism? Norah Vale, Jennifer thinks. Cautionary Tale. The way Norah was holding the bottles made it seem like she was heading home to make some Black Russians. Was she living here? Norah Vale grew up on Nantucket. Possibly she was just home visiting her family. The family situation is a hot mess, if Jennifer remembers correctly. The mother has six children by three men, but Norah, the youngest, shares a father with the oldest brother-because, as Norah once phrased it, her mother saw nothing wrong with making the same mistake twice. The father isn’t in the picture anymore, but Norah used to be close with her older brother, Danko, the tattoo artist. Danko was the genius who had talked Norah into the trompe l’oeil python that looks like it’s striking from off Norah’s neck.

Jennifer pays for the wine, takes the bag, and hurries up Main Street with half an idea that Norah Vale is lurking behind a tree somewhere, intending to jump out and harm Jennifer.