The Captain's Daughter by Meg Mitchell Moore

Author:Meg Mitchell Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

24

LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE

Mary

Andi had given Mary a bunch of smoothie greens that were technically past their sell-by date and now Mary was in her kitchen making them into a salad. “They’re perfectly fine,” said Andi. “I’d eat them myself, I would, we just have to abide by the date. Per the health board.” The greens still had firm stems and bright, healthy leaves.

Mary had planned on a salad with the greens, avocado, and tomato slices, but first she had to clean up the kitchen, which was small and cluttered in the best of circumstances and downright impossible to work in the rest of the time. Vivienne was a famous non-cook; she said it proudly, like some people would say, I don’t smoke or I don’t shoot heroin.

To make room for the cutting board on the small square of counter, Mary moved three different piles of mail, a hairbrush, a flatiron, a tube of mascara with the top loose—all Vivienne’s—and her own copy of The Fault in Our Stars, which she was reading for the sixth time; she could quote certain passages out loud, if anyone asked her. (Nobody ever did.) Mary loved The Fault in Our Stars. When the movie had come out two summers ago she’d gone with Tyler to see it, and she’d weeped through the entire second half while Tyler had tooth-murdered the leftover popcorn kernels and snorted at all of the best parts. She should have known then.

Mary also loaded Vivienne’s breakfast dishes into the dishwasher—Vivienne’s breakfast was always the same, two heavily buttered English muffins with instant coffee—and then she started in on a sticky substance on the Formica. It was a Thursday, and Mary had the day off. Vivienne went to work at one on Thursdays because the salon was open until nine.

Someday, Mary thought, she would have her own tiny house, and it would be clean and orderly, with gleaming counters and nice food stored neatly in the cupboard.

Her fetus-tracking website told her that the baby was an inch and a half long, the size of a prune, with little indentations on the legs that were planning to turn into knees and ankles.

She was thinking about that when Vivienne came into the kitchen, dressed for work, her hair wet from a shower. Vivienne plucked the hairbrush from the pile Mary had made on the table and began to work it carefully through her hair, pulling gently when she snagged on a tangle. While she brushed she watched Mary.

“I saw that jerk Tyler Wasson in Ellsworth,” Vivienne said, after a while.

“Oh yeah?” said Mary. She was trying to make her voice sound uninterested.

“Yeah. He was with his mom, coming out of Cadillac Mountain Sports.”

Mary had liked Tyler Wasson’s mom. She felt an unwelcome ping of nostalgia. But she didn’t like to think about the girl she’d been then: that girl had been innocent and trusting and zero percent pregnant. She worked off the skin of the avocado the way Daphne had shown her and shuffled the nostalgia to the back of her mind.

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