His whole face dripped and dropped. He was suddenly so old.
“I’ll find out who you should call. You’ll definitely be needed.”
She ate her sandwich quickly. He licked his fingers between bites—also new.
“I’m going to make cookies later,” she said.
“The peanut butter?”
“Yes.” She’d been thinking of oatmeal. “Do you want to nap on your sofa here or go upstairs?”
“Dammit, I’ll decide what I want to do!” He banged his fist on the desk, and his plate jumped.
“I’ll be back soon,” she said, and took both plates back to the kitchen. She crossed the desire line between Meadowlea and Leeward Cottage and knocked on the front door this time.
Maisie appeared next to her ankles and Polly reached down to stroke her. Her long coon cat fur was silky and kempt. That poor dog.
“Shore?” Agnes said, startling Polly, who let out a shriek. She was jumpy and undone.
“Sorry! I mean sure.”
Their old formulation. Shore? Sure. Which should have been reassuring, but nothing was at the moment.
Agnes had come out prepared with her hiking rod/snake stick. She planted it firmly on every other riser as she descended and then every fourth step ahead of her, pulling herself up alongside it as if it were an oar. She claimed it had nothing to do with her old lady concerns about falling, which she’d done twice, both times on her face, resulting in much dramatic bruising. They headed out to the road and crossed over onto the shore path away from the houses, and then they both spoke practically at the same time. Maisie looked up at the voices. Agnes claimed the cat knew over three hundred words, including the names of several kinds of fish.
“So what happened?” Polly asked.
Agnes sighed. “It’s absurd. Seela accused Robert of stealing a piece of jewelry. I’m not sure what. They want to charge him with stealing the belt, too.”
“No!”
“It’s nuts.”
“It’s sickening,” Polly said.
Agnes crunched across the rocks for a while, huffing audibly.
“Is this too much?” Polly asked, meaning after Agnes’s surgery.
“Whatever it is I’ll bail him out tomorrow. I called Gabriel Marin. He can go to court with Robert, too.”
“Court?” Polly had assumed Agnes would fix it today.
“Who knows? If he has to stay in jail for a night, they’ll all take care of him over there. They’ll certainly be on his side.”
“I hope so.” Polly took a deep breath of the salt air. “I feel old this afternoon.” She gauged where to step, raising her arms for balance. Her sneakers cupped the round rocks. “And here’s something else I have to tell you.” She described the dog.
“I know about that dog,” Agnes said. “He’s been there for years.”
“You know? And you never helped him?”
“Polly, I wouldn’t last very long as a year-round person if I judged how people live.”
“But you love dogs!”
“Yes. And I deplore putting them out on ropes, or throwing them in ditches, or drowning kittens, or separating calves from their mothers. I despise all of it. But you can’t fix everything.”
“You can do your best.”
“I do. I don’t eat them. And I’m not stopping you from helping.”
The ocean rearranged the rocks in quick raining sputters, deep drumrolls, and a sustained syncopated clacking as the sea pulled back. The gulls spoke adamantly, and an engine vroomed.
“Dick called the shelter about it,” Polly said.
“Good for Dick.”
Polly looked at her for signs of mockery, but Agnes had shifted. She was appreciative. She was so predictably unpredictable!
And that was the last word for some time. They drifted into the mammalian comfort of being together. Stones, plants, birds, and well-known spots heralded the next stage of the year. It was all reassuringly familiar. The gray sea looked as cold as it was, the heavily wooded land across the harbor as inimical to habitation as ever. When the wind shifted, the buoy bell clanged, and then another shift carried the sound out to sea.
“I couldn’t get Archie on the phone. I’m going over there first thing in the morning,” Agnes said. “I won’t abide this.”
They rounded the point of the Sank and climbed from the cold sand onto the narrow path along the cliff. Quickly they were a story above the water and looking down on flat granite ledges and out to a sea flecked with small islands, hunched and bristling with green spines. This was free to all. The coastline was open to everyone. Not true of the path, which belonged to the houses behind it, but the shore, the beach, the ledges, all public, all America’s, and no person’s. The horizon and beyond it, the sense of infinity and the sensible conviction of democracy, intertwined. Agnes was right about deeding the Sank to a land trust. Polly would have to find a way to square it with James.
She’d wondered as she opened James’s letter earlier if there was an argument inside. But he only wrote a newsy note and the dates of his visit. Did that mean he thought his objection to breaking the trust was the last word on the subject?
“I’m tempted to go look in the windows,” Agnes said of WesterLee, Archie’s house that sat just above the Sank. When they were little, they recited the names of the houses from the bottom of Fellowship Point to the top in a singsong. WesterLee, Meadowlea, Leeward Cottage, Rock Reed, Outer Light. Polly taught the ditty to her children. It hurt her heart that she couldn’t remember Lydia’s voice. They hadn’t even made a recording.
Polly looked over at the large gray shingle-style cottage with its deeply sloped roof and angled wings and walled porches and half columns set on shingled balustrades. It was thought to be the best house on the Point architecturally: William had done his brother that favor when he drew the designs. Polly knew it well from going over daily when James was in residence every August. “I’d rather not,” Polly said. “It’s trespassing.”
“On Archie? You actually care about him today of all days? Anyway no one’s there. Wait—is that what I think it is?” Agnes pointed.
Polly followed her gaze over the cliff, down to the ledge. She knew what she was seeing, no matter how little of it she could actually see. It was a rope swing, a piece of rope with a log tied at the bottom to make a seat. “Who hung that up?”
“Beats me,” Agnes said. “Who even knows the spot anymore? What am I saying, though? If there’s anything that endures it’s the lore about spots like this. Shall we walk down and have a swing?”
“You first.”
“Oh, Pol, how has it happened that we can’t even get down there now? Do you remember the last day you went onto the ledges?”
“No.” Polly heard her friend’s mournful tone, yet her focus was elsewhere, in the past, on the rope swing, flying back and forth while the kids shouted let go, let go with every trip out over the water.
“But there was a last time. An unforeseen and uncommemorated last time. I don’t remember it. That, more than anything, describes aging to me—the letting go of one activity after the next, with no fanfare. Just realizing later that the last time has come and gone,” Agnes said.