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

pieces of advice. Anders couldn’t remember the first two, but the third made so much sense, it stuck with him like a piece of gum to a shoe: Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

Which was how Anders found himself sitting on a fiberglass bench in the middle of a passenger boat destined for Frick Island wearing a long-sleeved dress shirt and khaki pants as if he were heading into a budget meeting at the New York Times. Unfortunately, the August sun blazed like a furnace in the cloudless sky, raising the temperature of everything it touched to burning, causing his shirt to feel more like a stifling down coat by the second.

At least he had forgone the tie.

The boat rocked heavily as it churned through the water, and the motion roiled the Pop-Tarts still digesting in Anders’s stomach. That plus the familiar tang of the sea air conjured vivid and unwelcome recollections of his last deep-water venture on a boat. He closed his eyes.

An old man stood at the helm, speaking into a handheld mouthpiece tethered to the dashboard by a spiraled cord, but Anders couldn’t hear him. The latest episode of This American Life filled his ears, with the goal of drowning out everything unpleasant around him—the crackling voice distorted by the boat’s ancient speakers, the vague lurching in his stomach, and the all-too-top-of-mind realization that Anders was smack in the middle of the ocean, at the mercy of an ancient boat captain on an even older boat, with no control over the destination or his motion sickness or the strength of the sun’s rays.

After thirty long minutes, a strip of trees appeared on the horizon, and Anders breathed a small sigh of relief that the end was in sight. That is, until the boat chugged closer and he had a better view. Shacks—about ten of them—sat on the shore, each with its own wooden dock reaching into the water like a crooked finger, the planks like the keyboard of a broken-down piano. Anders knew these were crab shanties he’d read about in his research—the shelters where watermen sorted through their catch and stored supplies—but he did not know they would have all the craftsmanship of a clubhouse nailed together by a child. Each one looked less sturdy and in a greater state of disrepair than the one before. After the last shanty, the ferry pulled up alongside a small dock parallel with the shore, rather than perpendicular. Just beyond the dock sat another small white shack with a hand-painted sign:

Frick Island Marina

Captain BobDan Gibbons

555-6728

Anders blinked. Marina? This tiny building with one dock and a couple of benches? It was like stumbling upon a lone apple tree and calling it an orchard. When the boat was secure, Anders stood, Ira Glass’s voice still blaring in his ears, and followed the other passengers shuffling forward to disembark. When it was his turn, Anders stepped off the boat, dug a crisp ATM-fresh twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket, and dropped it in the bucket proffered by the captain, but then froze. He had no idea where he was going. He stepped to the side to let the last few passengers walk around him and pulled out his phone.

He knew the day’s festivities took place in front of the Methodist church, but when he punched in the address and nothing came up, he realized he had no service. He looked up to ask someone where the church was, but the passengers that had been near him had already dispersed, halfway down the road leading away from the dock. Before he could decide whether to follow, a rumble of a deep voice caught his attention. He removed one of his earbuds and turned his head, coming face-to-face with the captain, still holding the bucket.

“Straight down the road there, take a right at the general store. Sign says Blue Point. Can’t miss it.” The man’s voice was as grizzled as his skin and his accent warbled, as if he were talking around a mouthful of marbles. Anders just stared at him.

“You going to the Cake Walk, ain’tcha?”

“I am,” Anders managed.

“Well, go on, then. Although, weather like this—prolly get canceled anyway.”

Anders looked up at the cloudless sky. For the heat? he wondered.

“Storm brewing to the east—see the wind picking up on the water?” The word “water” came out “wudder.”

Anders did not, but he nodded anyway so as to placate the senile old man.

On the sunbaked road leading away from the docks, every building Anders passed looked to be larger incarnations of the crab shanties—houses built with wooden slats or shingles, sanded by wind, salt air, and time. A few had their own hand-painted, often crooked signs declaring what they were—a restaurant called the One-Eyed Crab, an antiques store, and a post office. A rusted-out Chevy with no windshield and three flat tires sat in front of the antiques shop as if it had died there one day and no one bothered to move it. Although where would they move it to? Surely there was no mechanic on the island, for it was the first car Anders had seen. And it would take a barge to get it off the island—probably the same barge that got it over here in the first place, which couldn’t be cheap.

At the end of the road, as promised, Anders came upon a building with a sign that announced: Blue Point General Store. Anders stood for a minute in front of it, considering the rickety stairs leading to a cement slab porch, the air-conditioning unit that precariously hung out the front window at an angle and looked like an insurance claim waiting to happen, the way the building sloped slightly to the left as if a strong breeze had one day pushed it sideways and it never recovered. This was, according to Wikipedia, the only market on the island. The only place residents could buy their groceries. And it was a far cry from a Food