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Olive’s eyes are wide and she’s sitting on the edge of the couch, her drink set down on a brown wooden coaster on the coffee table and long forgotten.
Sunday watches her girls, thankful that her sister is willing to tell them a story that she’s never been able to tell.
“Anyhow,” Minnie goes on, setting her own drink on a small table next to her chair. She folds her hands over her slightly rounded stomach. “When your mom and I were young, we had a brother who you probably know about. Jensen was our parents’ pride and joy. He was the oldest, he was a boy, and he loved the water, which endeared him to our father in ways that nothing Sunday and I ever did could do. Jensen and our father went out fishing a lot when he was a boy, and then he joined our dad at fifteen, working long hours on the boat and bringing home the fish that kept our family in a home and with food on the table.”
Cameron is listening wordlessly, but Sunday can see on her face that she’s taking it all in and calculating as she goes. “Wasn’t Jensen sixteen when he died?”
“He was,” Minnie confirms, nodding and rocking back and forth in her chair. “He was indeed.” She’s silent for a moment as the memory of her brother hangs there in the room with her. “Sunday was twelve and I was eleven, and we were waiting for Dad and Jensen to come home one evening, sitting right there in the kitchen at the table as our mom shucked corn for dinner.” She points at the round kitchen table with six chairs around it. “But they missed dinnertime, and when someone knocked on the door, you could already feel that it was going to be bad news.”
“Who was it?” Olive asks, chewing on her thumbnail.
“It was Officer Mullins,” Minnie says. “His kids went to school with us, and you could tell that he wasn’t happy to be on our doorstep that night.”
The memory of it floods back like a wave knocking Sunday off her feet, and suddenly she’s drowning in it. Her eyes fill with tears. “Our mother screamed the minute she opened the door and saw Officer Mullins standing there under the porch light. It was winter. It was cold and raining, but she left the door wide open as she fell to her knees right there.” Sunday nods at the entryway, which is only partially visible from the front room. “I remember the chill that blew through the room, and it never left this house after that night.”
“No, it did not,” Minnie agrees. “Our dad was in the hospital on the mainland, suffering from hypothermia and three cracked ribs from when he hit the side of the boat, but they had no idea where Jensen was.”
“I should add that aside from torrential rain, the water was choppy and they probably should have come in an hour sooner than when they tried to turn back, but they got caught in a situation they couldn’t control.” Sunday’s eyes are faraway as she remembers the scene: the hospital with its white sheets, grim nurses, and antiseptic smell. Her mother looking gray and ashen as she sat next to her husband’s bedside, purse clasped tightly in her white-knuckled hands.
“They found Jensen the next day,” Minnie says, swiping at her eyes. “Our father started drinking immediately, and that’s when things went really wrong around here.”
“Was Tangier always a dry island?” Cameron asks, clearly caught up in the story.
“It was, but it’s not hard to find alcohol if you want it.” Minnie shrugs. “Plenty of people bring it right onto the island in coolers, tucked under the fish they catch, and they walk from house to house, making deliveries and collecting cash. You’d be surprised how many wives believe their husbands are abiding by the rules of a dry island, only to find those same husbands out in a workshop, getting tanked on firewater. Our dad didn’t even try to hide it, he just told us that what happened in our house stayed in our house, and Sunday and I obeyed, because that’s what you did in those days.”
“You obeyed, or you paid for it,” Sunday adds, looking glassy-eyed.
“And we paid for it,” Minnie says, still rocking back and forth rhythmically, as if the motion were soothing her and making the words easier to share. “Our dad had always been a bit emotionally distant from the females in the house, but with alcohol in the mix, he became downright abusive.”
Cameron sucks in a sharp breath, and Olive shakes her head in disbelief; their father is and has never been a stellar, hands-on, loving dad, but he’s certainly never been abusive. If anything, his absence has always been easily explained away by his political commitments, and they’ve not only let him off the hook, they’ve given him credit for his work. Of course, neither girl has ever known anything different, but Sunday knows that Peter’s emotional distance and occasional lack of physical presence has damaged her girls in different ways than her own father’s abuse damaged her and Minnie. As with so many daughters, those Daddy issues run deep, and young girls grow into women who end up paying for those issues over and over and in so many ways.
“What happened?” Olive asks, still biting her thumb as she hangs on every word. “What did he do?”
“Oh,” Minnie says, turning her eyes to the ceiling again. “He yelled, screamed, shoved, hit with a belt. He pulled our mother’s hair and brought her to her knees in the kitchen if he didn’t like what she’d made for dinner. He told us girls we were never going to amount to anything, that no man would ever want us, so we’d be stuck cleaning houses and living on government assistance. He told us we weren’t smart enough for high school, let alone college, and one time he had a friend over who was as drunk as he was, and when the man put his hands on Sunday in a way that was not appropriate for a grown man to be touching a thirteen-year-old girl, our dad laughed. He did nothing.”
Sunday is looking at the floor, burning with rage at the memory. It had happened right here, in this room, and she remembers it now as if it had just happened yesterday. Mr. Dougherty, the man who owned the bait and tackle shop, was drinking whiskey with her father here, in front of the fireplace, when he’d made some joke about Sunday starting to look like she was “ripe for the picking.” Sunday had stopped where she was, halfway between the living room and the kitchen, her blood running cold. She’d expected her father to shout at Mr. Dougherty, to throw him out on his ass, maybe even to treat him to a dose of the anger that he regularly treated her and Minnie and their mother to, but instead he’d laughed.
“Sunday’s alright,” he’d said lazily, nursing both a can of beer and a whiskey from his chair by the window, “but Minnie’s going to grow the kind of curves that a man likes to see on a woman. Might as well wait for her to ripen, Bill.”
At thirteen, Sunday had only a hazy idea of what was being said about her and her sister, but she’d known it was bad. Very bad. She’d turned around to talk back—something she knew well and good would bring her nothing but trouble, but that she’d been prepared to do anyway—only to find Bill Dougherty standing right behind her. He reached out with both hands and planted them firmly on her hips, pulling her close to him with a sharp yank. Sunday had stumbled, but ended up flat against Mr. Dougherty’s chest, his erection pressing against her insistently. He smelled like fishing bait and alcohol, and his body was hot next to hers. She’d nearly vomited.
“I could always sample the older one while I wait for the younger one,” Mr. Dougherty said, his breath hot and rancid on Sunday’s cheek. “You know what they say: old enough to bleed, old enough to breed—“
“Knock it off, Bill,” Sunday’s dad had said from his chair, not even bothering to set down his beer to defend his daughter. “Leave her alone. She’s just a kid. Still plays with Barbies, for god’s sake.”
Sunday had yanked away from Bill Dougherty then and hurried through the kitchen, out the back door, and into the summer evening. She’d run and run and run—all around the island and not stopping for breath—and from that night on, she slept with a chair under the knob of her bedroom door, and with her window latched tightly, even in the middle of a hot, muggy summer.
“What the hell…” Cameron looks angry now. She sets her water on a coaster next to Olive’s drink and stands up. “I’m glad I never met him.”
“You’reluckyyou never met him, babe,” Sunday says, watching the fury rise in her daughter. “He died when I was twenty and I didn’t even bother to come home.”
“No, she did not,” Minnie says, sounding accusatory and a little hurt. “Your mother had flown the coop, and never bothered to come back.”
“But wait,” Cameron says, pacing in front of the fireplace like a detective in a small town crime show, piecing together the puzzle at hand. “If you were thirteen when that happened with your dad and his friend, but you were sixteen when you left the island, what went on during those years?”
“I was seventeen,” Sunday confirms. “And in those next four years I avoided home at all costs. I was out from morning until night, going to school, hanging out with friends—“
“And Irvin,” Minnie interjects.
