Anders nodded and, his appetite having returned, picked up the crab cake to resume eating.
“Probably why I had an imaginary friend as a kid.”
Anders inhaled the bite of crab in his mouth and he pounded on his chest, eyes watering.
“You OK?” Piper looked at him with concern.
Anders grabbed the water bottle and unscrewed the top, taking a sip. “Yeah. Yep.” He cleared his throat. An imaginary friend! “What was her name?”
“Bernadette Gertrude Pinkerton.”
Anders sat back in his chair. “That’s quite a distinguished name for an imaginary friend.”
“She was quite distinguished.” She grinned and Anders couldn’t help grinning back—that is, until he remembered that his recorder was sitting in his back pocket, having missed the surprising snippet that would have been a perfect anecdote for the podcast.
But even more surprising—it was the first time since sitting down with Piper that he had remembered the podcast at all.
* * *
—
For the next two weeks, Anders redoubled his efforts, determined not to miss anything for his podcast. He started going over to the island on the Friday noon ferry, asking Jess to cover for him with Greta, just so he could spend a few extra hours with Piper at the market. There were rarely any customers—a local would pop in every now and then for a half gallon of milk or a paper sack of flour—so he spent the time asking her questions about the island and climate change and insects while helping her mop or take inventory or rearrange potato chip displays.
And then, side by side, they’d perform her closing duties and she’d leave at three to go meet Tom’s boat. Anders wouldn’t see her again until Saturday morning, when, after breakfast, she would take him to other hidden spots on the island—places Anders had passed but not given much thought to, like the abandoned schoolhouse that used to house upwards of forty kids during Frick Island’s prime or the baseball field surrounded by a rusted, broken-down fence. Every two weeks Mr. Gimby religiously ran over the grass with his riding lawnmower, though Piper said it hadn’t seen as much as a game of catch in more than a decade.
She shared other things, too—like how her mother had spent seven years studying the effects of global warming on the island. When she presented her findings along with a $9 million erosion-reduction proposal to the Army Corps of Engineers, they responded by offering half that amount to buy people out of their land and move off the island altogether, saying it was a waste of money to build barriers that sea-level rise would eventually overwhelm. And instead of being mad at the Army Corps, Frick Islanders were furious with her mother.
Piper talked about how the island was dying—and not just because of climate change, but because the residents were literally aging and dying off, without a new generation to take their place. Anders was right in assuming that Bobby, the kid he gave the camera to, was the only child on the island, besides a baby (belonging to Tom’s cousin Steve) and the Gibbons twins, who were two years from being full-blown adults and were already looking at moving to the mainland once they graduated. They didn’t want to be watermen and there were no other jobs on the island to be had.
Every Monday Anders would record another episode, and despite not having any new revelations—he still didn’t know who set fire to Tom’s boat or why BobDan lied about it or how Piper’s delusion began—the podcast steadily grew in numbers.
He was up to more than thirty thousand listeners (thirty thousand!), and he began to wonder if they were drawn to it for the same reason he found himself drawn to spending more and more time on the island—to hear what else Piper had to say.
Turned out, crazy or not, she was a natural storyteller—animated and riveting—and Anders felt he could listen to her melodic, lilting voice read all 2.4 million words of the United States tax code and never want it to end.
And perhaps that was why, when Piper invited Anders to come over on a Wednesday to pick crabs in the island’s cooperative building, even though it meant he’d have to take another day off work, Anders didn’t hesitate before saying yes.
At least that was what he told himself, anyway.
It was for Piper’s voice.
It was for his podcast.
It was not for how when she smiled, her dimples grew so deep it looked like Bill Gibbons had carved them himself with his whittling tool, or how when she got irritated, her nose burned pink and she cried out “son of a monkey!” or “holy barnacles!” or once—when she dropped an industrial-size mayonnaise jar while taking inventory at the store and it splattered all over the freshly mopped floor—“Frank Sinatra!” or how when she looked at him with her big, intelligent cow eyes, it somehow made his insides turn soft as bread dough.
It had absolutely nothing to do with any of that.
Chapter 19
Piper sat on the wooden bench at the marina, thumbing through the worn copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, waiting for a boat carrying a man for the second time that day. This time it was the ferry and Anders Caldwell, instead of Steve’s skiff and Tom.
Anders Caldwell. A few months ago she didn’t think she’d even remember his name by now, much less be looking forward to seeing him. But she was. Aside from his debilitating neuroses—Who didn’t like the beach? Or seafood? Or butterflies, for Pete’s sake?—she liked how plainspoken he was. Or maybe she just liked how interested he appeared to be in what she had to say. Of course, it was his job to ask all those questions, but having a man truly listen when you spoke—well, she had lived long enough to know that was a rare thing indeed. It reminded her of the beginning with Tom, when he wanted to know every little thing about her, and they would talk breathlessly until the wee hours of the morning, as if the sun might not rise the next day. As if they might never see each other again.
Or maybe it had nothing to do with Anders specifically, and more that she just liked being around somebody.
She felt so lonely when Tom was gone. She was used to being a waterman’s widow, of course—the nickname coined for the women during crabbing season who knows how many decades ago—but she’d never felt it more than she had this season. Fortunately crabbing season would be over in a few weeks—though she wasn’t particularly looking forward to winter either, when everybody holed up in their homes, hiding from the cruel weather.
Or maybe he was just a nice distraction from everything else in her life that seemed to be going awry.
“Piper!” Anders’s voice pulled her out of her reverie. She looked up at where he was waving from aboard the docking ferry and stood to greet him, an involuntary smile pulling her lips skyward.
“Hey,” he said, after disembarking and reaching her. His cheeks were ruddy from the ride over, his now-familiar cowlick standing at attention. He hopped out of the boat effortlessly—a marked difference from mere weeks earlier, when she sent him off with the twins white-knuckling an orange life preserver—and shouted his thanks to BobDan, who had kindly agreed to bring him over on his return from the 4:00 p.m. run to the mainland instead of the noon, so Anders wouldn’t have to miss a whole day of work.