On the third trip down, my arms laden with dusty cubes of cardboard, I looked at him and said, “I’d take your comments more seriously if you were actually offering to help, but since all you’re doing is criticizing, I don’t see why I should listen to you.”
“How, exactly,” my aunt Frances asked, “do you think he could help? He doesn’t have any thumbs and only weighs thirteen pounds.”
My aunt was six inches taller than me, twenty-nine years older, and had lived in Chilson longer than I’d been alive. Her late husband, Everett Pixley, had been a Chilson native, but he’d died so long ago that I wasn’t sure if my few memories of him were my own or were generated by photographs. Since then, Aunt Frances had made a living taking in summer boarders and teaching woodworking classes. In all the years she’d been a widow, she’d never once taken a serious interest in another man until December, when she started spending time with Otto Bingham, her new across-the-street neighbor, and I was crossing my fingers that the romance would blossom permanently.
Aunt Frances and I looked at Eddie, who was now inspecting the wall and voicing the occasional “Mrr.” Finally I said, “If he’s not going to help, he should at least keep quiet.”
She laughed. “Are we talking about the same Eddie? Here, I’ll take those to your room.”
I handed over the boxes gratefully and went back up the creaking wooden steps for the last load because, in spite of the chilly weather, it was time for me to get packing.
My winter home was a large room in Aunt Frances’s rambling boardinghouse, a place of pine-paneled walls, claw-foot tubs, ancient board games, and a massive fieldstone fireplace. My summer home was much different: a cozy houseboat that I moored in one of Chilson’s marinas. Not one of the fancy marinas that came with spa and tennis court privileges, but one that normal people might be able to afford if they didn’t eat out much all winter.
Yes, Uncle Chip’s Marina was my summer neighborhood, and it was about what you’d expect from a name like Uncle Chip’s. The marina office and shop had been built in the fifties and not updated since, and the amenities amounted to a small strip of grass next to the docks that held a couple of picnic tables and a metal grill box for anyone who wanted to haul out some charcoal.
In spite of all that—or perhaps because of it—the marina was a friendly place where someone always hosted a Friday night party, and even though the close quarters of living in a marina could get a little much by August, I’d forget about it by Thanksgiving, and come April I’d be longing for a warm evening on my small houseboat’s front deck, reading and sipping the occasional adult beverage.
I gathered up the last of the boxes and descended from the murky attic. When I got off the last step, Aunt Frances collapsed the stairs and pushed them back up into the ceiling. If I’d tried to do the same thing, I would have needed a step stool, but I had become accustomed to my compact and efficient size years ago and it no longer bothered me to let the taller folks take care of things that those folks could do more easily.
Most of the time, anyway.
“Is Tucker coming up to help haul your things to the marina?” Aunt Frances asked.
I shook my head. “I talked to him last night. He’s working on a big project and can’t get away.”
“So, when are you moving?” my aunt asked, dusting off her hands.
“Not that you want to get rid of me,” I said, laughing.
“You can stay as long as you like—” she began.
“As long as I start paying boarder rate,” I finished. “Don’t worry. All my stuff will be out by the end of the month.” Since I moved twice a year, I’d pared my possessions down to the minimum, but it still took a while to get settled. The houseboat cleaning itself was a chore of large magnitude. Chris Ballou, the marina manager, gave me access to the warehouse where my boat was stored out of season, and for the next couple of weeks I’d be spending my spare hours in that cavernous space, dusting and washing and scouring.
“Speaking of boarders,” Aunt Frances said, taking the top boxes off my pile, “this might be the last year I take in any.”
I stopped. “What? Why?”
“Because I’m sixty-two years old,” she said dryly.
“Sure, but you’re a young sixty-two,” I protested. “And you’ve never said anything about it being too much work before.”
Although, since I was living on the houseboat, how would I know if it was too much for her? I never saw her clean and the only meal I ever stopped by to eat was the occasional Saturday breakfast. This was a meal cooked by one of the six boarders, which, in addition to often being entertaining, was also a critical part of the boarding agreement.
“There’s no better way to discover a person’s true character,” Aunt Frances always said, “than to see how he behaves in a kitchen emergency.” And, since my aunt had secretly match-made her boarders into happy couples for decades, I had to agree with her methods.
Now Aunt Frances rearranged her hold on the empty box. “I make enough money from teaching during the school year,” she said. “I don’t have to take in boarders if I don’t want to. And there are so many things I don’t have time to do in the summer. I can’t remember the last time I went to Mackinac Island, let alone Pictured Rocks.”
Oh-ho! I grinned, then wiped it from my face before my aunt could see. This was an Otto-induced change, I was certain. And while it might be the end of an era—children who were products of some of my aunt’s earliest matches were traveling north with their own children—it was always better to leave a party while it was hopping.
“Well,” I said, “I hope you’re not thinking I’m going to take on your boarders.”
My aunt snorted. “With your cooking skills? They’d make their regrets and abandon you within a week.”
“Really?” I frowned. “You think they’d last that long?”
“Only if you get two different kinds of cold cereal.”
She dropped the box on my bed, gave Eddie a fast pet, and scampered out before I could find a rubber band to shoot at her.
• • •
I stopped by the marina the next day after work to make sure Chris would have my houseboat set up for me to start cleaning that weekend.
“Hey, Mini Cooper,” he said lazily. “What’s new with you?”
Since his uncle Chip, the marina’s owner, was almost seventy, Chris was probably somewhere in his forties, but if you went by his speech patterns, you’d think he was twenty. And though the marina was always spick-and-span and shipshape, I rarely saw Chris lifting anything heavier than a twelve-ounce can of beer.
My best friend, Kristen, was sure that he hired elves to do the real work, and I was starting to think she was right. Another of my good friends, Rafe Niswander, said Chris was one of the last of a dying breed of Up North men and that we should encourage him in all ways. Of course, Rafe and Chris were also friends, so I had a good idea of what kind of encouragement he meant—the kind that came in a six-pack.
How Rafe and Chris had become friends, I really didn’t know. They had to be a decade apart in age, and in spite of Rafe’s summery, laid-back attitude, he had a top-notch work ethic and was the best middle school principal Chilson had seen in years. When Rafe wasn’t being the principal and wasn’t wasting his time lounging in the marina’s office, he was renovating a mess of a house that was next door to the marina. He was also taking his own sweet time about it. He kept saying he wanted it to be perfect and ignored me when I kept telling him that perfection was an unattainable goal.
“Hey yourself, Chris,” I said. “My aunt was making fun of my cooking skills, can you believe it?”
He grinned. “Sure can. Good thing you’re not running the boardinghouse, eh?”
“True fact. I’d run it into the ground inside of a week if I took over.”