The Rattled Bones by S.M. Parker

Author:S.M. Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When I return home, I shower and get a text from Hattie: Did any Coast Guard hotties board your boat today?

Me: sadly, no

Hattie: What a waste

Me: why do I even bother going out to sea?

Hattie: IKR? Unless you can lick the face of one of those GORGE boys, what’s the point????

Me:

It feels good to joke with Hattie. Do the normal things like everything is normal.

I brew St. John’s Wort for mental clarity.

I ask Gram to the small front parlor so she’s away from her kitchen, the chores that keep her busy in that space. I need her full concentration.

Our parlor was created when formal visits were customary. I know the walls have heard their share of difficult conversations. Births, deaths, hardships, and celebrations. Maybe even discussions on the fate of Malaga Island residents. Did my ancestors support profit or humanity? I want to think the latter, but I know it’s naive. Every early Maine settler fought hard against the harshness of the climate. I’ve always believed that the struggle against the elements was enough to unite us along the coast, even today. But Malaga’s history tells the opposite truth.

Gram joins me, takes a seat in the wingback chair. I grew up knowing the story of each one of our well-used antiques, but that chair was different. I was young when it arrived from Portland, brought by an elderly man who drove it to our doorstep saying Gram’s grandfather had saved his family from starvation when that old man was a small boy. I remember the story not making sense: How could the thin, wrinkled man with his missing tooth and heavy limp have ever been a young boy?

That man told me and Dad and Gram about the winter my great-grandfather stocked his family’s shed with salted cod and crammed their cellar with potatoes. I want to believe my family helped the islanders in a similarly charitable way. Or maybe the islanders helped my family.

The old man said he could never repay the debt, but wanted to give us a chair he’d crafted with his own hands nearly sixty years ago. And his chair was beautiful. My small fingers traced the carvings on the dark wood arms, followed the lines of intricate fish forever swimming upstream within that wood. It was a year later when I found my great-grandfather’s name carved into the inside of one of the legs. NATHANIEL IKABERTH MURPHY: SAVER OF MEN. I’d been under the chair looking for a rogue Lego but I’d found a piece of my family history. I never told Gram or Dad about his name being carved there. I liked thinking I had a secret tucked away in my very own house.

Now I think my family has always had secrets.

I pass Gram her mug, and she settles against the rise of the handcrafted chair. “Let’s get to your business, Rilla. I’m not growing younger.”

“I need you to tell me about our finances.” Counting other people’s money—making assumptions about what they can and can’t afford—is something Dad raised me never to do.

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