End of Summer

End of Summer

         “Joe, be careful with that now,” Maggie said. She watched the burly man wrap his arms around the small table in the hallway and shuffle it out the front door, the back leg just missing the door’s salt-washed frame. Once the table was out of sight, Maggie let out a short breath, a hiss in her throat like the deflating of a rubber tube. All of the furniture in the weathered fisherman’s cottage had to go; there were red tags on the items that were going with her to the tiny apartment on the mainland, blue tags for the items that might bring in some money from the antique shops on the island.

         It was very late in the season to be leaving Nantucket. Most of the seasonal shops and restaurants had begun closing up. Many doors were already locked and bolted, with hand-painted wooden signs left in the shops’ bay windows which read: “See You Next Summer!” Maggie had decided to leave after the Labor Day exodus when the ferries swelled with bodies, all leaning over the railings to look into the water like lemmings braced to escape the return to work and school. At eighty-four years old and a frail five feet tall, Maggie was not about to join the countless families waving goodbye in their boat shoes and madras shorts. They always brought the island to life in the summer, out of its long rest, when mothers and children from the mainland returned to their seasonal homes amid the dunes, the men visiting from the city on the weekends. The handful of year-round residents, the true Nantucketers, got through the summers by providing services to the wealthy seasonal residents, yard maintenance and construction, housekeeping and laundry. Then there were the owners of the antique shops and boutiques.

         Maggie had kept house for many of the residents over the years, seen children grow from one summer to the next, little bodies shrieking in terror and glee as they tottered away from settling waves, bodies that one day suddenly transformed into iron, running through the surf and slapping down into the cold darkness without fear. The water hovered around sixty degrees at its warmest. Maggie had shrieked and paddled among the waves in another life, but she hadn’t touched the surf in years. Instead, she was content to listen to the whoosh and rumble of the shifting tides, to taste the briny mist that carried on the air. She wasn’t even aware that the air could taste otherwise.

         Joe peeked through the doorway, panting. He eyed the writing desk in the living room, then the sofa, blue tags dangling from both. “Hey Maggie.” He crossed his thick arms over his chest. “The sofa too?”

          Maggie was at least twenty-five years his senior, all the Nantucketers chose familiarity over formality. The last time Maggie had been addressed as “Mrs. Kent” was by the realtor on the mainland. She never liked the sound of it; it reminded her how the summer residents addressed one another across their high fences.

          had seen Joe jump and dive into the surf, and had made his lunch when he had worked for her husband, Burt, to become a plumber. She and Burt had a son, Jimmy, just about Joe’s age, but he had died far from the little island in Vietnam. They had mourned his death, praised him as a hero, but felt content that at least he had been brought back to rest in the sandy soil. Years later, when Burt died, Joe took over the plumbing business and made sure to look after Maggie. After he helped her move, he would follow her to the mainland. The island had changed. The new summer crowd, with bigger houses, hedge walls along the old open sand paths, and jet-fueled one day visits had changed it. The Nantucketers knew this, and had begun to move away; many of them had already left for the mainland.

         “The sofa’s not gonna fit in that shoebox with everything else,” said Maggie. “Why, you like it? Want it?” She put one hand on her hip and wagged her finger at the sofa. “You can take it if you want.”

         “Nah, I got one, and it’d just be more hassle.”

         “Yeah.” Maggie licked her teeth. “I’m glad so much is staying anyway. It belongs here. That desk there,” she wagged her finger at the writing desk, “that desk was my father’s you know. Nicest thing we had, can’t remember why we even had it. He was a fisherman, you know, didn’t really use it.”

         “A gift maybe?”

         Maggie paused and licked her teeth again. “Could be. Either way, pretty sure it’s older than me, and made here just like me.” She chuckled and winked at Joe to hit the point home.

         Joe pounded across the living room in his heavy boots, the floorboards creaking beneath him. He crossed his arms and surveyed the furniture around the room. Some pieces, the sofa, the tall cabinet against the back wall, were too large for him to move without help. “Hey Maggie, I’m gonna need to grab a couple of other guys for some of this stuff.” He tugged off his baseball cap and rubbed his hair. “Like the sofa, bed upstairs. I can come back with’m tomorrow, we should be able to get all this stuff out, at least the stuff with red tags.”

         “Ok. You can’t get’m today though?”

         “Nah, I got my guys doing jobs off the island. You gotta remember too, Maggie, they gotta come out here for the day now. The younger guys with day jobs don’t live out here anymore.”

         “Yeah.” Maggie knew this too well. Everyone, even the hard-headed natives who had struggled and cut corners to avoid it, was moving off of the island. It was changing. The old neighbors were almost all gone, and the new residents came and went in their planes like the gulls touching down on the surf only to lift right up again – blink and you might miss them. They didn’t want to be seen. They came to get away, to build snow globes and then look out over the landscape, at the salty breeze rippling across the dune grass and the shimmering water. They raised their wide glasses of after-dinner wine to the bleeding sunset before heading back to the airstrip so they could make it back to the office by nine the next morning. It hardly mattered now, whatever perceptions they had developed; they were dropping onto the mainland like marbles onto the floor. There was even a chain store on Main Street. Joe had stopped by one day, shrugged his shoulders as he told Maggie: “first of many I guess.”

         Joe walked over to the stone fireplace, the mantle now bare except for two large photographs. The first was of Jimmy, square-jawed and dressed smartly in his uniform. The other was of a much younger Jimmy, maybe fix or six, sitting atop his father’s shoulders like a gargoyle. They both smiled and squinted to fight back the bright sun and salty mist that blew on their faces from the water opening out behind them. Joe picked this photo off the mantle and held it out to Maggie. “What about these? Don’t wanna forget these, do you?” Everything else that had crowded the mantle, like most other small objects in the house, had been boxed and already put into Joe’s truck. The two photographs made the mantle look stark, the cottage more empty.

         Maggie’s lips pulled back into a tight grin, as though she had hit her elbow against the wall. Her eyes moved from one picture to the other, and a low hiss floated up in her throat. “Oh they’re not going Joe. Those’r staying here.” Her grin pinched up at the edges of her mouth and she looked up into Joe’s eyes.

         He paused before answering, and then, almost whispering, asked Maggie if she was sure that’s what she wanted to do.

         “Well,” she put her hands on her hips, nodding to herself. “Yeah, I think so. I thought about it. I just couldn’t take’m down, you know? Couldn’t take’m down and stuff’m in a box like junk.” She nodded more heavily, her eyes focused somewhere beyond the floorboards. “They should stay I think. They belong here. Don’t you think, Joe? Course I never thought I’d leave’m here, you know?” She coughed. “But, this way they’ll stay.” Her voice shook as she looked up again, a small bird standing in the hallway.

         Joe swallowed and placed the frame back onto the mantle. He stared at the picture of Jimmy in his uniform, thought of him resting under the sand and silt. Maggie stood in the doorway to the living room, iron bracing against the waves, a true Nantucketer. No matter where she ended up, some shoebox apartment on the mainland, away from the rumble of the surf, the snow melting onto the wet sand when winter came, she would remain here as well. Joe smacked his palms together and conjured as broad a smile as he could. “Sounds right to me Maggie.”

         Joe worked until dusk, moving boxes he and Maggie found hidden behind furniture, lifting everything he could by himself and loading it onto his truck until it was full. Maggie pointed out which items were especially old or fragile, and so required special attention. A couple of times, while stopping to catch his breath, hands on hips, Joe caught himself studying the photos on the mantle. They wouldn’t stay there long, he knew, not after Maggie left. The house would be sold, or, much more likely, leveled, and some monstrous, shingled snow globe would take its place. But that didn’t matter. Maggie was leaving as much of herself on the island as she could, the only way to honor her past, to keep her soul here to tickle the sea grass on the wind.

         As the sun melted into the briny black of the horizon, Joe finished off the iced tea that Maggie had made for him, unsweetened, and said he had to get going. “Gotta make the ferry off Maggie. I’ll leave my truck in the garage tonight, then have a couple of fellas help me unload it in the morning. Then we’ll come out and take care of the bigger stuff, and get everything together that you’re bringing with you to the new place.”

         “When should I expect you?” Maggie asked. She took his glass and walked into the kitchen.

         Joe scratched his hat. “Oh, I’d say around lunchtime, noon, one. Maybe I can get another truck out here too.”

         “Ok, well you know I’ll be here.” Maggie laughed as she rinsed the glass in the sink.

         “Alright then. See you tomorrow.” Joe waved as he headed out the door to his truck.

         “See you tomorrow,” Maggie called after him. She listened as the truck started up; the tires ground against the sand and gravel driveway as Joe backed onto the road. The grinding of the wheels blurred into the rumbling of the ocean as the truck drove away, and Maggie ran the glass under the faucet. She took a sip to wash the lingering taste of salt from her tongue, and looked out the cottage’s kitchen window to the rolling dunes in the distance. Those dunes had burned her feet like a skillet when she was little, and Jimmy’s feet as he kicked off his sandals, sticking out his tongue as she yelled for him to be careful, and ran down to the water where she could not catch him. He was there every time she looked out the window; he sat perched atop Burt’s shoulders whenever Maggie walked down to the surf. The pair hovered at the edge of the water, an iron statue lost in the horizon. Maggie had to leave them here, was glad to leave them together, a part of the island, where they belonged.