Good Harbor

“No,” she protested, holding him. But the moment had passed.

“Time to go,” he insisted, and picking up the cups, led her into the house and the rest of the day.

IT RAINED HARD THE rest of the week. Joyce spent the mornings stripping wallpaper. Afternoons she sat at the computer and made a dutiful stab at her novel, a story about three sisters, serially married to the same man. Stab seemed like the right word, since all she did was slice at the opening paragraphs over and over.

She met Kathleen for cappuccino at the café on Main Street one gray afternoon and told her about how walking through Charleston, morning, noon, and night, had helped conjure up the world of Magnolia’s Heart: the fine ironwork fences made by slave labor, the paving stones laid by slave labor, the mahogany faces of impassive black women, sitting on blankets in the touristy marketplace, selling baskets woven in ancestral patterns.

“I don’t think I ever enjoyed writing as much as when I was working on Magnolia,” she said. “I actually couldn’t wait to get to the computer to find out what she would do next.”

“You sound happy when you talk about it,” Kathleen said.

“Yeah, but I’m not having much luck on my current project.”

“Why don’t you bring Magnolia and Jordan up here? Doesn’t Jordan have an abolitionist aunt in Boston? They could settle in Gloucester. Think of all the research you could do on Yankee underwear!”

That made Joyce laugh, but she remained unconvinced. “I want to do something one hundred and eighty degrees different. And the truth is, I want my own name on the cover. I want to be invited to talk at the local bookstores and at the Belmont library. Magnolia would call me a dog-faced coward. And she would be right.”

“I understand, but Magnolia is very alive to me. I want to know what happens to her next.”

“Thanks,” said Joyce, who wanted to know, too.

Apart from the checkout girls at the supermarket, Kathleen was virtually the only person Joyce saw all week. Frank called every morning, promising he’d try to come up that night, but by the afternoon there would be a crisis he didn’t want to leave with “the kids,” which is how he referred to Tran and Harlan, the twenty-two-year-old MIT entrepreneurs who had started the company. Their new search engine was to be launched at the end of the summer, and Frank, who had already been down several of these yellow-brick start-up roads, was their key adviser on several fronts. Frank thought their product had great potential, and he was betting on it taking them all, finally, to the Emerald City. Besides, he liked the kids a lot.

Frank would have enjoyed sons, Joyce thought.

“I’ll be there tomorrow night for sure,” Frank said.

“You said that last night.”

“I promise.”

“Sure,” she said, annoyed. “G’night.”

“Good night, Joyce. Love you.”

She drove in and out of Belmont one morning after rush hour, just to check the mail and pick up a sweatshirt and an extra pair of jeans. Mario had left two more messages asking for news of Magnolia. Joyce called him back late at night, when he was sure to be out of the office, telling his machine, “Magnolia is on vacation. She will return when she’s totally rested.”

She left Frank a note on his pillow: “Come up and see me sometime.”

But she wasn’t entirely sure she did want him in Gloucester. Lonely as the evenings could be, she liked knowing the sink wouldn’t generate dirty dishes whenever she turned her back. She liked the peace of going to bed alone.

They almost never had sex. Either Frank was tired, or she was. Or she was angry with him, or he was preoccupied. Or she went to bed hours after he did, or his back hurt. On the rare occasion they lay down together, there was always a moment’s tension. Would one of them make a move? Would one of them turn away?

Maybe this was what happened to people after so many years of sharing a bed, Joyce thought. Maybe we’re normal. Or maybe I’m kidding myself.

She poured a glass of wine and walked into the living room to admire her handiwork; her spackling was improving so much, she decided to go back and replaster one of the first cracks she’d fixed. The phone rang.

“Mrs. Tabachnik?” said a voice too mellifluous to belong to a telemarketer. “This is Father Sherry at St. Rita’s.”

Joyce put down her glass and stood up straight to speak to the priest.

He apologized for not calling sooner; he had been away on a family emergency — then asked, “How may I be of assistance?”

Haltingly, using the word respectfully at least three times, Joyce explained that she and her family were new to the neighborhood, Jewish, and wanted to remove the statue of Mary from their yard.

“Are you the folks who bought the Loquasto house?”

This town is amazing, Joyce thought. “That’s us,” she said brightly.