The Invisible Husband of Frick Island - Colleen Oakley Page 0,3

or the door, not even when Lady Judy stopped by with enough smoked ham and beaten biscuits and peach cobbler to feed half the island. She left the food on Piper’s stoop and it sat there all afternoon until the sun set. Until Mrs. Olecki retrieved it and set it out in the main house’s toile-covered living room for her current boarders to enjoy for supper.

Piper missed the memorial service altogether, where Tom’s mother, glassy-eyed and catatonic, stood propped up by her brother Frank on one side and her nephew Steve on the other and the Valium that had been pumping through her veins daily since her husband’s aptly named heart attack—the Widow Maker—had made good on its promise. Where Tom’s cousin Steve’s newborn interrupted the reverend with her insistent squalls, eyes screwed shut tight, giving voice to the pain the watermen were too stoic to show. Everyone asked after Piper, murmuring their condolences to every Parrish in attendance. Poor girl, they said, shaking their heads, offering various superlatives: too young, most in love, the worst.

But Piper couldn’t hear them. She was in her bedroom, staring at the dent Tom’s head had left on his pillow when his alarm clock prompted him to get up at 4:30 a.m. two weeks earlier. Piper didn’t dare touch it—not even to try to inhale his scent that surely remained on the floral cover. Nor did she touch Tom’s near-empty mug of coffee sitting in the sink, a film of mold growing on the top layer of liquid still left in the cup. Or the book—Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides—splayed open, pages facedown, on top of the two wooden crates they stacked in the corner to use as a side table in their tiny den. It was as if all of these things, Tom’s things, suddenly sprouted magical properties, transformed into talismans beckoning Tom back to where he belonged—to his bed to sleep, to the kitchen to wash out his coffee mug and hang it on the hook next to the sink, to the threadbare easy chair in the den to find out what happens to the characters of his current novel. They weren’t just reminders of Tom, they were promises. He was going to come home. Of that one thing, Piper was sure.

And then one morning, just like that, he did.

Chapter 2

Four Months Later

Caldwell,” Greta said, walking toward him from her office, the uneven threadbare-carpeted floor creaking beneath her mules. “Frick Island Cake Walk tomorrow—it’s yours.”

Anders affixed a smile to his face. “Great,” he said, looking up from the three-inch article he was writing about the local sheriff filing for reelection.

“Six inches, couple basic quotes, a photo; you can check the archives for past coverage,” she said. The window air-conditioning unit rattled to life across the room. Greta turned on her heel toward it, heading back to one of only two closed-door offices in their space on the second floor of what used to be an old firehouse. (The other belonged to the executive editor, a stooped and liver-spotted gentleman who appeared to be editor in title only, shuffling into the office one day during Anders’s first week. “I’m Harry,” he introduced himself, and then paused for dramatic effect. “But not all over.”)

Anders knew, of course, his first reporting job out of college would be about paying his dues—he’d just rather hoped he’d be paying them at the Washington Post or the New York Times or the Boston Globe, or even the Dallas Morning News, covering state senate bill debates or immigration reform or university protests. In the three months he’d been at the Telegraph, he’d been dispatched to cover four never-ending school board meetings, a pierogi festival in nearby Rehoboth, and a literal cat burglar—a neighborhood feline who snuck into open windows and doorways to steal ball caps and socks and, in one case, a treasured fountain pen.

But Anders also knew he was lucky to have a newspaper job at all—slashed budgets equaling bare-bones staffs at papers all across the country, if not shuttering the doors altogether—and he reminded himself of this as he turned back to the sentence he was constructing regarding the sheriff’s past accomplishments. His plan was to put his head down and do the best job he could do, even on the fluff pieces—especially on the fluff pieces. The faster he proved himself, the quicker he could start working on bigger, more interesting assignments. And the closer he would be to moving up to a bigger, more interesting paper.