Sea of Tranquility by Lesley Choyce Page A

mother-daughter bonding. That was an important part of what this vacation was all about, after all. She didn’t have to read an article in
Cosmopolitan
to realize that kids didn’t spend enough time with their overactive mothers these days. Complicated lives. Who didn’t have a complicated life? Certainly, Elise Sanger had one.
    Angeline was not only insistent, she was imperative. They would go knock on the door of the old woman, Sylvie. Not hardto find her, they said in the Aetna Canteen. Take the road from the wharf and when it splits, go left, out towards the sea, front of the island. Only a few of the “old ones” living out that way. Most sons and daughters had built homes away from the sea. Newer houses down thisaway, here by the government wharf. Closer to the ferry, easier to get back and forth to the mainland.
    Elise thought she heard some kind of a blast off in the distance.“A gun?”
    â€œOnly them at the junkyard. Phonse and the rest. Old cars and such. Men and their little odd jobs,” the canteen woman said. She wore a little button name tag that read “Binnie.”
    Maybe it wasn’t a gun, some kind of air-compressed tool ripping a rear-view mirror off a car. What did she know about such things? Thought of her husband and son around all those rusty cars. Was it safe?
    â€œThe whole island’s safe, ma’am,” the woman said.“Not like some places on the mainland.” It was a stock phrase for tourists. Binnie was working up a number of stock phrases for the summer tourists, if they ever got here. Seems that summer was a little slow gearing itself up. Everyone on tenterhooks, worrying about the whales and whatnot. Some slow returning this year, the whales were. Now these tourists back from Moses’ boat tour and no whales. Poor old Moses giving them a freebie on him… lobster dinners yet (lunches as the mainlanders insisted on calling them). If Moses was buying, she’d give him twenty-five percent off. And of course, there were no tips unless the tourists decided to go the extra distance. This husband had left an American five. Nothing to write home about, but it was a start. Undeclared income. No taxes to be paid on that bit, anyway.
    Angeline thought the gravel made a little song underneath their feet. She studied the coltsfoot flowers growing by the side of theroad, the pretty green spires of horsetail plants, saw a frog in a pond. Dragonflies the size of model airplanes. Small yellow birds sat on spruce boughs and chirped so loud she thought she might have to cover her ears.
    Mother and daughter walking down a dirt road on an island. An enchanted island, Angeline was certain of that. Yet it somehow seemed so much more real than where they lived in Upper Montclair. Maybe that life had all been a dream. She was just now waking up. Waking up to blue sky, shredded cotton candy wisps of clouds. The smell of sea everywhere. Old barns, tilting to one side as if a giant had been leaning against them, taking a rest. Ravens sitting on the ridge posts, louder than the chirping yellow birds, big awkward voices echoing against the forest.
    The road looked less and less travelled. Fewer driveways with cars, gravel giving way to grass and dandelion beneath their feet, two tracks and a hump in the middle, little blue flowers in the hump, and a well-placed bony boulder or two that was hungry for the undercarriage of the car of anyone willing to drive here without caution. Then a little driveway off to the left, a footpath really, leading through tall trees and opening up into a clearing.
    An old house with weathered grey wood shakes on the walls, the same weathered shingles for a roof. Moss on the roof and lichen. Yellow and orange. A scruffy-looking chimney, tottering. Sylvie’s house. Old woman in a shoe. Not quite. But this was better.
    Robins hopped around in the early summer grass. A harmless snake lay on a flat slate stone, relaxing, slowly