Snow Island by Katherine Towler

Author:Katherine Towler [Towler, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59692-974-6
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2002-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

— CHAPTER 15 —

The heat lasted through July and into August. For three weeks, the island had no rain. “My tomatoes,” Mrs. Brovelli said one day when she came by the store. “I water them every day, but they still don’t look good.”

Evelyn Daggett kept the shades pulled over the windows up at the house and lay on the sofa in the afternoons, sipping cold coffee and fanning herself with a folded newspaper. She didn’t even feel like smoking, she said. The idea of striking a match made her cringe.

Alice left Will in charge of the store when she had to deliver groceries to the summer people’s houses. Most of the customers waited on themselves when he was there and charged their purchases, or helped him make change if he got confused. Alice would drive off with the truck loaded with groceries first thing in the morning, before the heat got bad. As she coaxed the truck up the hill to Snow Park, it seemed she led two separate and simultaneous existences: one making deliveries and tending the store and putting food on the table, the other sitting with Ethan in the dark with her arms around him, smelling the vague scent of oil paint that clung to him.

She went to meet him whenever she could, when her mother did not stay at the store until closing, and there was no one to watch her head off down the beach. He would bring a blanket out, and they would lie hidden behind the hedges. When they talked, he told her about his paintings, and what he had to do to care for his mother, and how he wished sometimes that he’d never left the island and gone away to school, that he had stayed like everyone else. Most of the time, they didn’t need to talk; they found each other in the fit of their bodies as they lay side by side. The silence of this meeting was stunning to Alice, how she could know him so completely in the touch of his skin.

One night when her mother was up at the house, she sneaked off down the beach after closing the store. The lighthouse door was open, and when she called, he told her to come in if she wanted to.

Ethan stood halfway up the spiral staircase with a paintbrush in his hand. A kerosense lantern sat on the step below him. “The Coast Guard radioed,” he said. “The inspector’s coming tomorrow.” He dipped the brush in the paint can and moved it over the metal step.

“Do you have to do the painting tonight?” Alice asked.

“When the hell else am I going to do it? It’ll take two coats to cover. If I’m lucky the fucking paint will be dry by the morning.”

Alice remembered what he had told her about the last visit by the inspector. If he didn’t get the lighthouse painted, inside and out, by the next inspection, he would be out of a job.

He kept his eye on the paintbrush, swabbing it back and forth.

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