The Tide Comes Back

The Mugs Were IN THE THIRD box or the seventh. Maggie had stopped counting somewhere around midnight, when the headlights of the rental truck finally caught the cottage's front door and she'd sat in the cab for a full minute with the engine running, staring at a house she hadn't seen in four years and hadn't lived in for thirty-eight.

She'd found the coffee by feel. The jar was Eileen's, a wide-mouthed Ball with a faded label she couldn't read in the dark kitchen. It would do. Everything about the next three months would do, in the functional, stripped-down sense of a woman who had recently learned how little she actually needed.

The kitchen smelled like damp plaster and old lavender, her mother's sachets still tucked in drawers that had swelled shut over four Maine winters. April light, thin and sharp, came through the window above the sink. Below the hill, the harbor sat flat and gray, and a ferry she could just make out was pulling away from the terminal at the foot of Main Street, its running lights still on against the early morning.

Maggie drank her coffee and tried to feel something useful.

The cottage was an 1890s cape, four rooms down and two up, white clapboard that had gone the color of old bone. Her father had kept it painted every five years like a man keeping a promise. After Dennis died, Eileen had stretched that to eight, then ten, then never. The lilac hedge along the stone wall had grown into itself. The cold frame at the back of the garden had collapsed under the weight of a winter she couldn't place. One apple tree, unpruned for years, had thrown its branches out sideways like a woman reaching for something on a high shelf.

Maggie set the jar of coffee on the counter, where it left a ring on the laminate. Her mother would've put a coaster down. Her mother would've had coasters, actual coasters, not the junk mail Maggie had been using in her rental apartment in Portsmouth for the last eight months.

Eight months since the divorce was final. Eighteen since Gerry had looked at her across their kitchen table, the one she'd refinished herself the summer Nell started kindergarten, and said he wanted to talk about the future, which turned out to mean his future, specifically. A different arrangement. A phrase he'd probably practiced in the car.

Thirty-one years of marriage, and the man had rehearsed it like a quarterly presentation.

She didn't want to do this, the tally. The accounting of a thing that was already accounted for. But the cottage had a way of pulling old numbers out of the walls. She'd been twenty-four when she married Gerry Trask, and fifty-five when she'd signed the separation papers on a Tuesday afternoon in a lawyer's office that smelled like new carpet. Her father had been dead thirty-four years now. Her mother four. The cottage had already been sitting empty by then, and Maggie had been too deep in the long unraveling of her own life to come up and deal with it.

Now she was here, and the unraveling was done, and there wasn't much left on the spool.

She'd driven up from Portsmouth the day before, five hours in the rental truck because the bridge traffic through Bath was a punishment the state of Maine had apparently decided to make permanent. The settlement had given her half. Half the house in Portsmouth (sold, split, gone), half the retirement account (deferred, taxed, reduced), and the cottage in Sandpiper Bay, which was hers outright because it was Doyle property and Gerry Trask had never put a nickel or a minute into it.

Fix it. List it. Leave.

She'd said it out loud in the truck, somewhere north of Brunswick, like a woman rehearsing a presentation of her own.

The plan was simple. Ninety days, give or take. Patch the roof if it needed patching, clear out four years of neglect, find a real estate agent, and sell the only thing her mother had left her. The money would be enough for a deposit on something small, somewhere else, somewhere that didn't smell like lavender and guilt. She could start over. People did it all the time. Women her age especially, according to every article Nell kept texting her from Seattle, as if her daughter thought reinvention was something you could hyperlink your mother into.

Maggie was fifty-six years old. She didn't want reinvention. She wanted a clean counter and a forwarding address.

She rinsed the jar, set it upside down on the drainboard, and made herself walk the house.

Downstairs, the kitchen, a parlor with a braided rug that had faded to the color of dust, a front room where Eileen's reading chair still sat by the window with a library book on the side table, its due date nearly five years past. A small bathroom with a medicine cabinet Maggie did not open. Upstairs, two bedrooms under the eaves, one that had been hers until she was eighteen, the other where her parents had slept, and then just her mother, and then nobody. The wallpaper in Maggie's old room was the same roses-and-trellis pattern Eileen had hung when Maggie was twelve. The paste had given up in two corners, and the paper curled away from the wall like something trying to get out.

She stood in the doorway and didn't go in.

The house didn't feel haunted. That would have been easier, more dramatic, something to push against. It felt patient. Like it had been sitting here with its swollen drawers and its leaking gutter, waiting for someone to come back and make a decision about it. Maggie's mother had been the same way. Patient the way Maine women were patient, which looked a lot like stubbornness if you didn't know the difference.

She went back downstairs and looked out the kitchen window again.

The man next door was in his yard.

She'd noticed his house when she pulled in the night before, a shingled cape set close to hers on the uphill side, tidy in the way that a house is tidy when someone has kept up the outside and stopped thinking about the inside. His lawn was half dead, patchy and brown in the spots where the snowmelt had pooled. His porch light was on, which either meant he was an early riser or he'd forgotten to turn it off, and at this distance, both seemed equally likely.

He was tall, thick through the middle, with a white beard cut short and the unhurried posture of someone used to standing in one place for long stretches. He was holding a mug, not a jar, and he was looking at her cottage with the focused attention of a man assessing weather. His gaze tracked the roofline, paused on the south gutter (which was, she'd already noticed, pulling away from the fascia), moved to the chimney, and then slid to the window where she was standing.

Maggie didn't step back. She'd spent too many years stepping back.

He looked away first, not fast, not embarrassed, just the easy rotation of someone who'd finished looking. He took a drink from his mug, set it on his porch railing, and went back into his house.

So that was the neighbor. She'd have to introduce herself eventually, or he would, and one of them would make small talk about the weather and the other would say something about the cottage and they'd both stand at the property line doing that polite negotiation of people who share a fence and don't want trouble. She'd done it in Portsmouth. She'd been good at it. She'd been good at all the maintenance of other people's comfort.

She needed milk, and bread, and an excuse to see whether Main Street was the same or whether Sandpiper Bay had finally done what every other town on the midcoast had done and traded its hardware stores for gift shops.

The walk down Pettengill Lane took four minutes. The lane dropped steeply toward Main Street, and the harbor opened up below her as she went, wider and bluer than it had any right to be in April. Main Street ran downhill to the ferry terminal at the water, and she could see the Osprey tied up at the dock, the same boat or its replacement, she couldn't tell. Three doors up from the terminal sat a diner she remembered, the Sandpiper, though the sign looked newer. Across from it, Nadeau's Hardware was still exactly where it had always been, a store that smelled like sawdust and nails and hadn't updated its window display since the first Bush administration.

She bought milk and bread at the small grocery near the top of Main Street. The woman at the register didn't recognize her, which was fine. Maggie didn't recognize the woman either. Thirty-eight years was a long time, and she'd left this town the way you leave a place at eighteen, completely, and with the absolute certainty that you'd never need it again.

Walking back up the hill, she passed a real estate office in what had once been the old bank building. Barstow Realty, the sign said. She made a mental note and kept climbing.

Back at the cottage, she pulled on the barn coat she'd found on a hook by the back door, Eileen's, still here, smelling like her, and went out to the yard.

The yard was worse up close. Worse than the photos the lawyer had shown her, worse than what she'd been able to see in the truck's headlights. The stone wall along the road was sound, but the garden beds behind it had gone to weed and bramble. The peony row, her mother's pride, had been swallowed by grass so thick it looked deliberate. The picket gate at the end of the front walk had one hinge rusted through and hung at an angle that made the whole cottage look drunk.

She walked the property line. Down past the apple tree, along the lilac hedge, back toward the fence that separated her lot from the neighbor's. The fence was a simple post-and-rail affair, cedar, probably put up when the houses were built, and it had the silvery gray look of wood that had been bleached by a hundred winters. In most places it was solid. But the section nearest the back of both houses, where the hill started to slope toward the harbor, was leaning. Not dramatically, but enough that you could see it if you were looking. It tilted toward his side, like the whole thing was quietly trying to leave.

She made a note. Add it to the list. There was always a list.

Back inside, she opened boxes until she found plates, opened more until she found the silverware, gave up on the mugs. The jar would do for another day. She ate toast made in a toaster she'd had since graduate school (the one thing she'd kept that Gerry hadn't wanted), standing at the counter the way her mother used to stand at this counter, and the parallel hit her hard enough that she had to set the toast down and put her hands flat on the laminate and breathe.

Eileen Doyle had stood right here. Every morning for decades, after Dennis died, she'd stood in this kitchen and drunk her coffee and looked at the harbor and gone on with it. Not bravely, not dramatically, just consistently. Maggie had admired it from a distance and never once asked what it cost.

She picked up the toast. She finished it. She washed the plate.

This was the other thing about being fifty-six and starting over. You knew that the big feelings would come and that they would also pass, and you didn't have to make a production out of either one. Grief arrived. You let it. You washed the plate.

By nine, she'd unpacked the kitchen boxes, found the mugs (box eleven), scrubbed the counters with a sponge she'd brought from Portsmouth, and made a second cup of coffee in a proper mug that said PORTSMOUTH GARDEN CLUB, SPRING TOUR 2019 on the side. She'd done those gardens. All twelve stops on the tour. Designed the beds at the Wentworth, planted the window boxes at the historical society, spent three weekends on her knees in the public library courtyard while Gerry's firm got the credit because Gerry's firm had sponsored the event. She'd been the woman behind the brochure. For thirty-one years, she'd been the woman behind every brochure Gerry Trask had ever printed.

But that was the tally again, and she'd already done the tally. She put the mug in the cabinet with the others, handle facing left, and went to find her work gloves.

The front walk needed clearing. She could do that much today, at least. Pull the dead stuff, rake the beds, cut back the worst of the lilac before it leafed out. Just enough to make the place look lived in, which it wasn't, and wouldn't be, because she was leaving in ninety days.

She found the gloves in a box marked TOOLS/MISC and pulled them on. They were her good ones, goatskin, broken in properly. She'd grabbed them on the way out of the Portsmouth house because they were the one pair Gerry had never borrowed and returned dirty.

Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. A text from Nell. How's the cottage? Send pics. Three time zones away in Seattle, her daughter was up early, or hadn't gone to bed yet. Maggie typed back. Standing. Barely. More tomorrow. She put the phone away before Nell could respond with another article about women over fifty starting fresh in unexpected places.

Outside, the April air had the specific bite of a Maine spring, cold enough to sting but soft enough to make promises. A wind came off the harbor carrying diesel and salt and the particular green smell of mud flats at low tide, and it hit her somewhere behind the ribs, not with nostalgia exactly, but with recognition. She'd grown up breathing this air. Her lungs still knew it. The harbor below was waking up. She could hear a truck backing up somewhere near the terminal, and the faint clang of something metal against something metal, and underneath all of it, the steady, low complaint of gulls.

She knelt at the front walk and started pulling weeds from between the flagstones. The roots came up in long pale strings, almost translucent, gripping the cracks with a stubbornness she recognized.

After an hour, she sat back on her heels and looked up.

The neighbor was on his porch again. Same mug, same posture, same unhurried attention. He was looking at her cottage's south gutter, the bad one, with the expression of a man who'd been watching it get worse for four years and had opinions about it.