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Nothing doing. She’d had enough of dusty old books for the day. “Got any family?”
“Sure. Parents, siblings. They’re good people.” She was about to ask how many brothers, see if he could beat her three, when he stood, nudging Jeeves, who looked ready to drift into a contented dream of ham bones and squirrels. “Well, I’d better be going. Miss Cavendish told me to be sure to be back by high tide.”
Ginny hesitated before pasting on a smile. “Sure, sure. It was nice to meet you, Freddy. And I’ll see you at the next meeting.”
He nodded, raising a dramatic hand to his chest as he stepped backward. “And remember, Ginny: ‘This above all: to thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’”
Bold words, she thought, watching him jog away with Jeeves at his heels,for a man who just lied to my face.The stretch of hard, wet sand behind her, dotted with limp seaweed and driftwood, was proof enough of that, even if she didn’t have the worn calendar from her father’s lobstering boat.
There was no way Miss Cavendish told him to make the walk short and hurry back before high tide, because high tide wasn’t for another five hours. Clearly, Freddy had just wanted to get away from her, her questions, or both.
It wasn’t so bad a lie. Probably, he was just a private fellow who didn’t want to tell too much of his past to a stranger. It was none of her business, really.
Still, it bothered her. Why was someone as friendly as Freddy so closed off about himself? Her questions hadn’t been all that prying.
Nothing she’d write in a letter to Mack, of course—he might not like the thought of her talking to a handsome pirate-veteran—but interesting, all the same.
twelve
MARTINA
MAY 13
By the time she’d scrubbed the last of Gio’s shirts in her bucket swirled with soap flakes, Martina was convinced: Shakespeare was telling her to go back to church.
Reading the play had been difficult, pausing for words even the library’s dictionary couldn’t help her translate, but she understood enough to know that Ophelia should have taken Hamlet’s advice and fled to a nunnery, rather than drown herself over a foolish man.
Still, she couldn’t judge the poor woman. Martina herself hadn’t been to Mass since Boston. For a while, she’d pretended that her swing-shift schedule made it impossible, or that she had no car to drive to St. Patrick’s north of Bristol, with its brick steeple pointing to heaven. But the truth was that she had weekends off and there was a bus station only a short walk from the trailer camp.
No, Martina had stopped attending because the devoted of St. Patrick’s were not the familiar faces of the many “aunts” and “uncles” who lined the streets of Mamma’s neighborhood. They were strangers, probably mostly Irish Catholics rather than Italians.
Or maybe it was the church’s name, the same as her husband’s,that kept her away. A silly thing. But then, so many choices in life were based on emotions instead of logic.
Martina hefted the basket of damp clothes and ducked out of the low bathroom door, remembering how it had felt to sit and kneel beside her mother and sister, in Italy and then in America, watching the sun dance patterns on the stained glass.
You could eat bread and wine anywhere and know God was there, but the Eucharist was different. There was something holy and reassuring about joining with others in prayer, spoken in the same reverent tones learned from childhood.
Yes, she would do it. It was Wednesday now. Plenty of time to plan, to tell the children, to iron her best dress.
After hanging the clothes on a line she’d rigged up outside the trailer, Martina made her way to the front office, where a bank of boxes marked with unit numbers served as mailboxes.
She smiled, pulling out a letter in Mamma’s distinctive hand. But when she opened it back at the trailer, after setting a pot of sauce to simmer in the narrow kitchen, she frowned. Shorter than normal, just a page. Mamma’s letters were always in Italian—she had long ago declared that whoever had created English spellings must have been drunk—and always long, with weeks of news added one paragraph at a time.
This one began not with hovering questions about their health and the children’s grades at school but with a single line, set off by itself.
Your husband came by yesterday.
Martina stared at the letter, reading the line a second time. That couldn’t be. He was in the navy.
Then again, he might have been granted leave again. And her mother’s apartment was the first place he’d look.
But why? His parting tirade had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with them, especially the children. That’s whyshe’d used her maiden name for her new job and encouraged the children to do the same.
She read on. Mamma had demanded to know what he wanted, and Patrick worked his usual charm, saying he only wanted to check on his family.
He wasn’t wearing a navy uniform, but his suit was new and his shoes shined. Not that that’s a compliment.L’abito non fa il monaco.
Roughly, “the robes don’t make the monk,” a favorite saying of her mother’s, who had taught Martina not to judge a book by its cover.
