The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley (autobiographies to read .TXT) 📗

stared down at the glistening breading, just out of the fryer, a bead of water from his hair trickling down the side of his face and dripping from his chin onto the plate.

Chapter 5

The first person Piper laid eyes on when she and Tom walked into the One-Eyed Crab Thursday night was Jeffrey Wallace, running plates to a table, a dingy white rag hanging out of his back pocket, swinging to and fro like a horse’s tail.

She tried to shrink, avoiding his notice, while knowing it was an impossibility in a restaurant—and island—this small. She loved Jeffrey, of course, in the way you love a distant cousin, even if you don’t like them that much, because they’re family. And they were family in a sense, considering she and Tom and Jeffrey grew up together from the time she moved to the island, being the only three kids in the same age range, and she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. But ever since she’d turned him down when he asked her to his senior prom her sophomore year (anybody with two eyes and half a brain knew she’d be going with Tom, who was also a senior), he’d treated her with nothing short of disdain. And she didn’t have the energy to deal with him tonight.

Frankly, she was exhausted. She had waited on more people than usual at the market today, thanks to the influx of tourists looking for fresh-picked crab meat and Mr. Garrison’s famous crab cakes, which they had been mixing and forming since four o’clock that morning.

Not to mention, she hadn’t been sleeping well recently, what with the absence of Tom’s snoring—though she recognized the irony in that. Shouldn’t she be sleeping better?

She flicked her eyes from Jeffrey to Emily Francis, a girl of fourteen, who could probably get owners Mack and Sue convicted of every child labor law ever written if anyone on the island actually cared about those kinds of things. She was standing at the upturned stack of crates, clutching menus and gazing at Piper as though she had suddenly forgotten the English language.

“Can we please be seated?” Piper asked, flashing her a smile.

“Um . . . well,” the girl stammered. “I’m supposed to save the tables for groups of—”

“Three or more,” Sue said, swooping in and shooting Emily a look. “But we can make an exception for you and Tom, Pipes.”

“Thank you, Sue,” Piper said. She followed Sue to a table, shrugging out of her rain slicker and chatting about the downpour and the influx of tourists (neither one mentioned how it was even smaller than the previous year) thanks to the Cake Walk. Once seated, Piper fluffed her hair, though the rain and wind were no match for her tightly wound and belligerent curls. Sue didn’t offer menus; Tom and Piper rarely strayed from their usual—crab cakes for Tom, grilled catch of the day (cobia, this week) for Piper, extra coleslaw. And if they did, like most locals, they knew the options by heart.

“You kids want the usual?” Sue asked.

“Please.” Piper nodded.

As Sue left to gather an iced tea for Piper and a Pepsi for Tom, Piper and Tom sat in a long silence, until she remembered the joke Mr. Olecki had shared with her that morning as she helped Mrs. Olecki in the kitchen of the bed-and-breakfast. She opened her mouth just as Sue arrived with the drinks.

“Oh, you’ll like this, too, Sue,” she said.

“Like what?” Sue asked as she placed the translucent tumblers with worn Pepsi logos on the table.

“This joke,” Piper said. Sue waited patiently. “So this man passed a pet store, and the sign in the window said ‘Talking Dog for Sale.’ Curious, the man went in and said to the dog, ‘Tell me about yourself.’ The dog said, ‘Oh, I’ve had the most marvelous life. I was born in Great Britain and worked as a service dog in the Royal Guard, helping protect the Queen herself, and then I moved to the Alps, where I spent years rescuing avalanche victims, and now I spend my days with the owner of this store, curled at his feet by the fire at night, reading to him.’ Flabbergasted, the man turned to the owner and said, ‘What an amazing dog. Why on earth would you want to get rid of him?’ And the owner said, ‘Because he’s a liar! He never did any of that. He can’t even read.’”

Sue chuckled and Piper sat back, pleased with herself.

“Food’ll be out soon,” Sue said, turning away from the table.

As they waited for their meals, Piper curled the length of white straw paper around her index finger and studied the tourists two tables over. “What do you think?” she whispered, cutting her eyes to the prim lady holding her purse in her lap, as if she were afraid it might get snatched at any second. When Tom didn’t respond, she said, “I’m gonna go with craft blogger, waiting to be discovered as the next Martha Stewart. She owns entirely too much decoupaged furniture—end tables, coffee tables, even the headboard of her bed. She just couldn’t stop. Her friends and family were finally forced to stage an intervention, as they couldn’t bear receiving one more Mod-Podge-and-magazine-cutout-covered flowerpot or stool or picture frame for their birthdays or Christmas.”

It was a game they’d been playing for years, sizing up the tourists visiting the island and guessing what they did—trying to top each other for the most outlandish careers or hobbies. Piper sometimes felt guilty for the inherent unkindness of the contest, but there was no malice in it, and what was the harm, she reasoned, if the people in question couldn’t hear them? She wondered what Tom’s assessment of the current woman would be—his were always so much more creative, funny, unexpected. But before she could find out, a man approached the table, standing behind the chair opposite Piper.