Katie closed her eyes to summon patience and knelt on the floor with her child, an old peach-flowered pillow barely providing cushion under her knees. After eight minutes of separating Lego pieces into piles, she walked back into the kitchen to get cereal bowls. “Honey, we’ll put them in bowls by colors. That way you can keep better track.”
“Okay, Mom.” Huck smiled. There was nothing Katie hated more than Legos, but her son would never know. She spent half an hour helping him construct a wing of a Lego heli-jet they’d brought from Hood River in a huge Ziploc bag. Once Huck hit a stride, she left him to finish the next stage on his own. She had more organizing of her own to do before George arrived in less than a week.
Next, she lined up her cosmetics in neat, obsessive lines on the bathroom windowsill. She then folded her son’s shirts as if they were new and for sale, all physical steps to giving an upended life a sense of order.
Katie felt fidgety this early Monday evening. She had so much to do, but, she remembered, none of it needed doing just then. While Huck constructed his flying masterpiece, she plunked herself down on her bed, the springs creaking loudly beneath her. She’d wiped the bedroom dresser several times since they’d moved into the Porter family’s second cottage, and it was even dustier now.
She stood up suddenly to open the windows. The cooler breeze and the sounds of cicadas buzzing like tractors flowed into her teeny bedroom. She knew she felt out of sorts; a half-happy and half-sad cocktail that, when mixed together, turned melancholy.
Today was only ten weeks since her mother died. The carved ebony box she’d brought from home beckoned her from the crooked shelf of the bedroom closet. She’d carried it on the plane in her purse, the velvet pouch inside holding half her mother’s ashes. Katie had purposely placed the box behind sweaters when they arrived. She didn’t want to see it every day. Some days, she hoped, she’d forget it was there.
Now she grabbed the box and held it in her hands as she again sat on the edge of the bed. The thin mattress listed, and she had to push her feet against the floor so as not to slide off. She traced the pattern of inlaid enamel flowers of the box. Once the cancer vanquished her mother, she implored her daughter to face life with a strong, authentic smile. Though Katie felt her eyes get hot, she used the box to summon resolve over sorrow.
The early evening sun now streamed sideways through the lace curtains of the musty cottage. Speckles of dust floated in the air and reflected like bits of mica. Katie reminded herself this was simply the beginning of her eastern adventure. Everything that could be in place was in place, just like those products on her bathroom windowsill.
Her landlord in Hood River had thankfully allowed her to end the lease four months early, and she knew it would be easier to move out here with nothing holding her back. Six hours a week were already guaranteed by the tutoring company, and that newly posted Bridgehampton Middle School job for a special ed substitute had her name on it. She’d have her couches, boxes, and car sent in September if all went as planned.
Katie stood to touch the scrimshaw etchings of ships on the bedroom wall, wondering which members of the Porter family had a history of whaling. Nautical charts hung everywhere. Heavy doorstops made of shipping rope held doors ajar, and an antique brass telescope dominated much of the living room. She figured the family must be attached to the quaint flea-market aura of it all.
In old family photos, she studied George on a college tennis team with championship cups thrust in the air. In another, George with his father, now deceased, at the stern of a sailboat, both looking up at the sail’s tack in the wind. They were ruggedly handsome men. Some of the photos and maps were nailed to the hallway walls an inch apart, others several inches. The mismatched angles all over the hallway jarred Katie’s methodical brain.
Katie was hardly in a position to tell the Porter family she preferred the clean white lines of the lofty one bedroom in an old Hood River, Oregon mining factory she and Huck had just moved out of. The white Formica shelves had given her possessions a sense of geometric order, all fitting together like Legos.
After a quick shower, Katie was upbeat about the progress she’d made unpacking. She changed into clean yellow shorts and a T-shirt, and then said to her son, “Honey, let’s bike, look around a little. I want to get out of the cottage before it gets dark and see the town again.”
“I don’t want to leave, Mom. Now I can’t find the yellow light for the wing, can you . . .”
“C’mon,” Katie said. “I’m getting excited about living here. They seem to surf more than windsurf from what I can see, but I’ll figure that out. And for you, good news: there’s a really good candy store on Main Street. Let’s go.”