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Chapter 1

The Fog Line

The fog found her just north of Bath, the way it always had, as if it had been waiting at the county line with its arms folded.

June Hallett had left Hartford at five in the morning with a thermos of coffee, a garment bag hooked over the back seat, and a dark blue dress she had bought the day before at G. Fox because nothing she owned seemed appropriate for burying her father. The dress had cost sixty-two dollars. She knew this because she had kept the receipt, and she had kept the receipt because she kept every receipt, a habit that had served her well for eleven years as a claims adjuster in Hartford and poorly in every other area of her life. Somewhere around Portsmouth she had started calculating what the whole trip would cost, gas and tolls and meals and the dress, and then she had stopped, because there was no line on any form for what it was actually going to cost.

Editor’s comment: Hartford is already named at the start of this paragraph. Could this one become just "as a claims adjuster"?

The Volvo was a 1979 wagon the color of weak tea, and it did not like fog any more than she did. The wipers made a sound like someone clearing his throat in church. She turned the radio up, lost the Portland station in a wash of static, and turned it off again. After that there was only the engine, the wipers, and the gray pressing close against the windows until the road seemed to be unrolling itself a few yards ahead of her and no farther.

She knew this road. That was the trouble. She knew where it dipped at the Sheepscot and where the old Esso station had been before it became an Irving, and she knew the exact bend where the smell of the tidal flats would come in through the vents, low and green and a little rotten, like the inside of a boot. She had not been home in four years. She had not stayed longer than a weekend in sixteen. And still her hands turned the wheel before her eyes found the sign for the Port Anselm road, as if some part of her had never left at all and had simply been sitting in the passenger seat, waiting to be asked.

The Port Anselm road ran eleven miles down a crooked finger of land into the Gulf of Maine. It passed through spruce woods and blueberry barrens gone red with October, past dooryards stacked with wire lobster traps and faded buoys hung on nails like Christmas ornaments nobody had bothered to take down. There were hand-lettered signs for firewood and night crawlers and, at one house, a sign that read “Fresh Eggs, Honest” with a coffee can for the money. June noted that the can had a rock in it to keep it from blowing away. The town had always trusted people just exactly as far as a rock in a coffee can.

Editor’s comment: Lovely line. It sums up the town in one image.

Then the trees fell back, the road tipped downhill, and Port Anselm came up out of the fog in pieces.

First the white spire of the Congregational church, floating without a building beneath it. Then the gray shingles of the old Grange hall, which had become the Kilgore Library the year before June was born and which still had the words “Patrons of Husbandry” carved over its door. Then the post office, the hardware store with its window full of rubber boots, the Legion hall, and the long slope of Water Street running down to the harbor, where the fog lay thickest and the masts of the boat’sboats stood up out of it like the stubble of a burned field.

She pulled over by the town landing and turned off the engine.

For a while she simply sat there. The Volvo ticked as it cooled. Gulls argued somewhere she couldn’t see. Out in the harbor a diesel engine idled, then caught and went away, its sound fading into the white until she could not tell whether she was still hearing it or only remembering it.

Her father had died on the town pier on SatudraySaturday, October 3, 1987, at approximately six-forty in the morning. That was the phrasing Deputy Sam Beaulieu had used on the telephone, approximately six-forty, and June had been grateful for it. It was the kind of sentence she wrote herself. Walter Hallett, sixty-eight, harbormaster of Port Anselm for thirty years, had collapsed on the planking between his shack and the tide gauge hut, and Hollis Grant had found him when he came down to take his boat out. A heart attack, the doctor said. Quick, the doctor said. As if quick were a kindness he had arranged.

June got out of the car.

The air was cold and wet, and it smelled exactly the way she had known it would, of salt and diesel and herring bait and the particular wet-granite smell of the breakwater, which as a child she had believed was the smell of the ocean itself before she learned that most oceans do not come with one, her. Her good leather shoes were wrong for the pier. She walked out anyway.

Editor’s comment: This is a long sentence even after the comma splice is fixed. Would it read more easily if the aside about the breakwater were trimmed or split off?

The town pier ran a hundred and fifty feet into the harbor on creosoted pilings, broad enough for a pickup to back down to the float. Lobster crates were stacked along one side, and a bait barrel sat under a tarp, humming faintly with flies even this late in the year. At the far end, where the pier met the ramp to the floats, stood the harbormaster’s shack.

It was not much of a building. It had never been much of a building. Eight feet by ten, shingled, with a sinlgesingle window that faced the harbor and a door that faced the town, so that her father could watch the boats and turn his back on everybody else. A VHF antenna was lashed to the roof peak. A life ring hung beside the door, stenciled PORT ANSELM HBR MSTR in paint that had been white once. Someone had left a coffee can of chrysanthemums on the step, yellow ones, already browning at the edges in the salt air.

…

Then the kitchen door banged open and and Roz Pike came through it wiping her hands on her apron.

“Well, look what the tide dragged in,” Roz said.

She was sixty-one years old and built along the general lines of a mooring block, short and solid and not to be moved by weather. Her hair was the same iron gray it had been when June was ten, pinned up with a pencil through the knot. She wore a man’s cardigan over her apron and a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck, and she crossed the diner in about four steps and took June’s face in both her hands, which were warm and smelled of onions.

Editor’s comment: Lovely. It's exactly right for the place and for her.

“Ya look numb as a hake,” Roz said. “When’d ya eat?”

“I had coffee.”

“Coffee.” Roz said it the way someone else might have said “arsenic.” “Sit down. Right there, end of the counter. Harold, move ya bag, she’s sittin’ there.” A man in a Red Sox cap moved his bag. “Ya want the chowder or the hash? Don’t say neither, I’ll know ya lyin’.”

“The chowder.”

“Good girl.” Roz kept hold of her face a moment longer. Her eyes were wet, but her voice didn’t change at all. “Ya father’d be wicked glad ya came, June. Don’t let anybody tell ya diff’rent. Specially ya brother.”

Then she was gone into the kitchen, and the men at the counter turned back to their coffee one by one, and the radio moved on from heating oil to the weather, which was fog.

June sat, the. The counter was cool under her hands, worn to a dull shine by forty years of elbows. The menu was painted on a board behind the register, exactly as it had been in 1971: chowder, hash, fish cakes, beans and franks on Saturday, American chop suey on Wednesday, pie. The prices had changed, and somebody had painted “No Credit, This Means You” in a newer hand at the bottom. Beside the register was a a coffee can with a hand-lettered label: “Walt Hallett, Flowers & Such.” It was half full of bills.