The Winters by Betty J. Cotter

Author:Betty J. Cotter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: rhode island, swamp yankee, betty j. cotter, novel, fiction, narragansett, family drama, new england, coastal living, hurricanes, south county
Publisher: Swamp Yankee Publishing
Published: 2012-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Joyce sat on the bare twin mattress in her old bedroom on the farm. She was leaving home for good. It was not as though she had not moved out before – when she went to college, and in and out of the house as she rented her winter cottage on the beach. Each time she had left parts of herself behind, as if knowing the move away from home was only temporary. This time she did not carry the illusion that she would ever return. She was moving in with Michael, and in five months they would be married.

She glanced around the room. The floor was covered in boxes she had obtained at the liquor store in Wakefield. Grand Marnier, with its neat cardboard dividers, was stuffed with breakables nested in tissue paper. Here were wrapped carefully all the knickknacks she had acquired over the years, at county fairs, secondhand shops and summer carnivals, alongside the few valuables she owned – her grandmother’s silver comb and brush set and the tiny antique glass bottles Loretta had given her. Martini & Rossi, deep and wide, and Bartles & James held a lifetime’s accumulation of books, from the yellow-bound Nancy Drew to weathered paperback copies of Walt Whitman’s poems, The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam, her children’s encyclopedia set. Finally, Four Roses had become the repository for all her notebooks, nearly a dozen in all, carefully layered and sealed away.

The boxes were not coming with her. Camille was coming by after lunch, and together they would carry them to the Robinsons’, where they would find a new home in the attic crawlspace. Michael did not like a lot of stuff lying around. He especially hated books, an odd stance for a professor, but a product of his antipathy to dust. He owned two barrister’s bookcases that were already full of his most cherished textbooks and his own collection of Hardy Boys, and Joyce knew she would not be getting any shelf space in this relationship. Yet, she could not keep her belongings at home anymore either. It would have been a sign she could not make a commitment, as though she had left one foot at home in case things didn’t work out. That was no way to start a relationship.

She was actually looking forward to today. Her college friend Althea, the teacher, was coming over to help out too, and it would be the first time she had brought the two together. She was slightly anxious about this bridging of her two lives. Although on the surface they had little more in common than Joyce herself, Camille and Althea were important people to her, and she hoped they liked each other. If they didn’t, it was going to be a long afternoon.

She walked over to her desk, now empty, and sat in the ladderback chair to look out the window. It was Labor Day weekend, and the weather was more August than September, with a milky, overcast sky and humidity that made even the tree branches seem to sag.

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