“How’s things?” you’d hear islanders asking.
“Oh, you know. Selling lots of bait,” they would say. Or maybe, “Not biting. Need better bait, I guess.”
Bait was always at the front of the store and by the register. If the store had a public toilet (most didn’t; unreliable plumbing), there might be some toward the back too, for the people waiting to use it.
I peered into the bookstore, at the same storefront it had occupied when we left, though its name had changed to Sound Books & News, and it had been painted, reorganized, with racks of postcards and orca magnets and crab key chains by the door. It was Filgate’s Books before, named for the old salt who owned it. My dad and Danny Filgate had been good friends, though Danny was a generation older. He, like my dad, was an autodidact who read everything from the Wall Street Journal to Toni Morrison to pulpy airport paperbacks. He had refused to sell bait. He catered to the islanders. You might wander into the shop and find a gathering of fisher-poets: fishermen and — women who spent long hours on the water composing verses — often ballads and other old forms — in their heads. They weren’t readings, these gatherings; they were dramatic performances, sometimes with musical interludes on banjo or harmonica or fiddle. The gatherings took place in the off-season, so tourists didn’t often run into them. But if one happened to wander into the shop when the fisher-poets were there, it was another of those things that make people fall in love with the islands. The locals set the scene and the mood, like the cast of characters in a Melville novel.
I assumed Danny must be dead. He couldn’t have lived to see his business like this: it looked orderly, sanitized; a display of T-shirts with famous novel covers printed on them on the wall behind the cash register.
I sat on the steps outside City Hall, a newer building that looked like a lot of government buildings — squat and gray and featureless — easily the ugliest building in town. The old City Hall had burned down after the quake. The new one housed a small public library, a state police precinct, and various other municipal entities. It opened in fifteen minutes. Something else that hadn’t changed about Orwell was the pace. Nearly ten o’clock and shops up and down the street were just starting to show signs of life.
The sun had burned through the clouds; it was getting warm — dew had started to form between my breasts and under my arms. I pulled my sweater off over my head and thought about taking it back to the car, or putting off the visit to the clerk’s office, going up to the cemetery first. A few late-season tourists milled about, looking relaxed. A couple walked by me and said, “Good morning,” as they passed. They wore small bemused smiles, their cheeks flushed; they weren’t holding hands, but they bumped into each other as they walked, arms brushing intentionally. They had clearly been having sex all night to the sounds of the sea.
I hated them a little bit, for having sex on my island, though I knew that was what people did on seaside vacations. When my mom was a teenager, she spent summers housekeeping at lodges and motels all over the islands. I thought of her stripping one dirty sheet after another. I might’ve done the same, if we had stayed.
There were two motels, a bed-and-breakfast, and half a dozen vacation rentals in Orwell. Most people didn’t stay on our island. Most people stayed in Friday Harbor or Rochelle, on San Juan Island. Or in the smaller, more expensive places on Lummi and Orcas. The ferries only made a couple stops a day in Orwell. There wasn’t much to do here, other than stroll and eat seafood, so it was sold more as a romantic getaway than a family destination.
When Matt found out about the cottage, he had asked why I hadn’t told him about it, why I hadn’t brought him out here. He wanted to go crabbing and eat mussels right out of the shell on the shore; he wanted to visit the Benedictine nuns on Shaw Island who raised heirloom cattle and sheep. This was just a destination to him, an experience. A place with no context. I was crazy, he told me, for having access to something like this and not taking advantage of it. He was right, that I was privileged in a way most of my peers weren’t. Owning property was getting harder and harder in cities like Seattle and San Francisco. The fact that my family had a “vacation home” made me slightly embarrassed.
I had tried to explain to him why I never came back, why I never talked about it. The death of a parent he understood, but the harrowing aftermath of the earthquake was lost on him. He was only a year older than I — he had been thirteen at the time of the quake and had only vague memories of the media coverage. He had moved to Seattle from Brooklyn in 2006. Aside from the tail end of a hurricane or two, he hadn’t experienced a natural disaster. He had never felt an earthquake; they were as mythical as Sasquatch to him.
The clack of unlocking doors broke my daze. I wasn’t the only one on the stairs waiting for City Hall to open. A tall man stood off to my right, on the top step. He nodded. I smiled back and stood, stretching. An older woman in a pantsuit swung the door open, remarked on the beauty of the day, and held the door for us. I took my time up the stairs so that the man would go through first, but when I reached the top, he had paused to wait for me.
“You were here first,” he said, and nodded toward the entrance.
“I’m not in a hurry,” I said.
He led the way, and I followed behind, looking him over. He was wearing official-looking work clothes: thick cotton button-up with a crewneck showing at the top, dark, sturdy slacks with a belt, and steel-toed boots. Like a uniform, but not a uniform. No patches or decals. Like it was his day off, but he still needed to look the part. Law enforcement? I wondered. Fish and Wildlife? He was clean-shaven, with trim brown hair, but he’d been wearing a hat of some sort that had flattened the sides and left squirrely waves on top. We both followed signs for the clerk’s desk, and the lady bustled along behind us, asked us to take a seat while she answered the ringing telephone.
We sat in two wooden armchairs with a table of magazines and a potted plant between us. He picked up a Sunset, looked at the cover, then glanced up and offered it to me. The cover story was “Ten Island Getaways.”
“No thanks.” I laughed.
“I guess we’ve made it,” he said, putting the magazine back.
“A clean getaway,” I said.
“Do you live here in Orwell?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. I looked at the manila envelope in my hands. All I had to do was file the deed, then the cottage would be mine. “I grew up here. I’m just back to take care of some family business.”
He nodded.
“Do you live here?” I asked.
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“Ma’am?” I repeated, and laughed. He was maybe three or four years older than I.
He blushed, chewed the inside of his cheek. I couldn’t tell if he was trying not to laugh or just embarrassed.