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Sunday
The evening with Minnie was enlightening for Cameron and Olive, if Sunday is judging by their faces and the questions they asked, but Minnie had stopped short of revealing the real catalyst for Sunday’s departure from Tangier almost forty years earlier, and she knows that the time has come to take her girls right to the source.
“Where are we going?” Olive asks from the back seat of the golf cart that Minnie has kindly loaned them for the day. She’s agree to walk wherever she needs to go or to hitch a ride from a neighbor, and Sunday appreciates this small kindness.
“Here,” Sunday says, pulling the cart over to the side of the road and parking in gravel. She turns off the power and leaves the key in the ignition. Tangier is a classic small town where front doors don’t need to be locked, and a golf cart with a key left dangling in the ignition isn’t going anywhere. “It’s time for me to talk to someone, and I’d like for you to be with me when I do.”
Cameron looks dubious, and Olive’s eyes grow serious. “Mom, are you in some sort of trouble?” She looks at the weather-beaten house that they’ve parked in front of. “Does someone you don’t get along with live here?”
Sunday shakes her head and takes a deep, fortifying breath. “No. Remember how I told you last night about my high school boyfriend, Irvin?” The girls watch her but say nothing. “This is where he lived. His mother is still here.”
Minnie had assured her on her way out the door the night before that she’d find Mavis Kull, Irvin’s mother, still living here. The woman has to be nearly as old as Miss Williams, her former teacher, but she’s living in the house alone, with nothing but a little dog and daily food deliveries from the local, makeshift version of Meals on Wheels that helps out the elder islanders and those who are housebound due to various disabilities.
Sunday walks ahead of the girls, determined not to lose her nerve. She knocks on the door loudly, hoping that she won’t scare Mrs. Kull, but that she’ll rouse her from her recliner and her daytime television, which she can see flickering through the window that looks into the front room.
A woman so old and wrinkled opens the door that Sunday nearly does a double-take; Mavis Kull had been a short, muscular whip of a woman with steely eyes and a sharp tongue when Sunday had dated her son. Now she’s wizened and shrunken, and she looks at Sunday without recognition.
“Mrs. Kull?” Sunday asks, stepping back politely so that the screen door still separates them. Olive and Cameron stand behind her, and she can feel their nervous energy the same way she can smell the salty air of the bay all around her. “It’s Sunday Bellows. I don’t know if you remember me—“
Mrs. Kull reaches forward and unlatches the screen door. “What are you, some kind of idiot, Sunday Bellows? Of course I remember you. Now get in here before you let all my warm air out.”
Sunday steps through the door, as she’s been directed to do. “These are my daughters, Mrs. Kull. This is Cameron, and Olive.”
“They don’t look a whole helluva lot like either you or your good for nothing husband,” Mrs. Kull remarks, looking each of the girls up and down. “Don’t care for your husband’s politics a whole lot, and I sure don’t like the looks of him—he’s a bit shifty for my taste.”
Sunday bites her tongue, holding back her comments about on Mr. Kull, who was well known as the island cad, having had reported flings with women Sunday had admired greatly, like Miss Williams, and also Dr. Pembroke, the island’s only doctor and a woman who had done her medical training at Harvard. No one knew what it was that Bob Kull had to offer all of the women who flocked to him, but it’s none of Sunday’s business and the man has been dead for at least twenty-five years, so none of it really matters now.
“We’re divorcing,” Sunday says flatly, hoping to end the discussion of Mrs. Kull’s dislike for Peter.
“Sounds about right,” Mrs. Kull says with obvious distaste. “You always were a runner.”
“May we sit down?” Sunday asks, looking at the couch across from Mrs. Kull’s reclining chair. “We won’t stay long.”
“Might as well sit. But my program comes on in thirty minutes, so let’s make a point rather than just talking about the weather.” Mrs. Kull lowers herself slowly into her reclining chair and her dirty pink slippers rise off the ground as she moves the handle to lift her feet and extend them.
“I wanted to apologize,” Sunday says quickly, sitting on the three-person couch with her daughters on either side of her. They are silent and she can feel their uncertainty as they wait to see where this conversation goes. “I left and never gave anyone the chance to do…anything.”
“Damn straight,” Mrs. Kull says, staring at her with a gaze that could bore holes in a steel door. “You left and my Irvin was heartbroken. Wasn’t fair at all, if you ask me.”
Sunday swallows and takes a moment to gather her thoughts.“I didn’t ask you, and that was intentional. I left Tangier because I was afraid you and my mother and any number of other people would have tried to convince me to stay. And I thought that maybe Irvin would try to stay here instead of going to college, and that’s not what you wanted him to do, is it?”
Mrs. Kull finally averts her gaze, moving her dentures around in her mouth as she looks at her muted television stubbornly.
Next to Sunday, Olive coughs lightly into her hand.
“I left so that your son could do what he needed to do, and so that I could do what I needed to do, because I didn’t believe that a seventeen-year-old girl should have to give up her own hopes and dreams just because of one mistake.”
Mrs. Kull huffs angrily. “Mistake, my ass,” she mutters. “A child isn’t a mistake.”
Cameron gives a small gasp of recognition. “Mom, you werepregnant?”
Sunday turns to look her daughter in the eye. “I was,” she admits. “I was pregnant, and I wanted to give my child a far better life than the one I could have given him here on Tangier Island. I wanted him to have the kind of life that your little one is going to have, Cam. A life with educated parents, with the promise of travel and success and a future. I knew I could never give him that if Irvin and I had had the baby ourselves and tried to make a go of it.”
“Your parents would have let you live with them, Sunday Bellows, you know they would have,” Mrs. Kull says forcefully. “Or you could have married my son and I would have put you up here until you could get your feet under you.”
“Nope. Not an option, Mrs. Kull. My house was filled with anger and contempt, and your house wasn’t entirely stable either.” It’s all she’s going to say on the matter, but she can tell by the wilting look in Mavis Kull’s eyes that she’s hit a nerve; Mavis knows that she’s referring to her husband’s comings and goings. “How is Irvin doing these days?” Sunday asks, switching tacks smoothly so that she can prove her point.
Mrs. Kull capitulates. “He’s living in Maine with his wife and their three children. Irv is a dentist.”
