The Identicals(114)

“Reed is gone, too,” Harper says. “His neighbor said he drove him to the ferry but didn’t say where he was going.”

“When I saw your car pull in, I figured something like that,” Tabitha says.

Harper pulls a champagne flute from the new glass-front cabinets. The kitchen bears no resemblance to the unsanitary stinkhole it used to be. Harper sees that Tabitha bought new stemware from Tiffany—the champagne flute still has the blue-circle sticker on the base.

“These seem pretty fancy,” Harper says. “Are we going to make any profit after all this work?”

“Huge profit,” Tabitha says. “The glasses are for show. We’ll take them with us when we sell.”

Now that the house is such a showpiece, Harper doesn’t want to sell; she would like to live here herself in Billy’s new old house. But that isn’t the deal, and she can’t argue with the phrase huge profit.

Tabitha lifts the bottle and pours a token amount of champagne into Harper’s flute. She raises her own glass. “There’s a man still left in this house,” she says.

“There is?” Harper says. “Is Tad still here?”

“No,” Tabitha says. “Billy. His ashes are on the mantel. What do you say we give him a proper scattering?”

Billy, Harper thinks. She closes her eyes and sees her father in the hospital bed. How many hours did she spend playing spades with him on the little Formica table attached to his bed? Harper remembers all the way back… to the phone calls that used to come for her father in the middle of the night when they lived on Pinckney Street. Apparently there were emergencies in the city of Boston that only Billy Frost could fix: half the rooms at the Park Plaza had lost power; the walk-in fridge was on the fritz at Locke-Ober; there had been an electrical fire in the boiler room of the public library. Billy was the electrician of choice among Boston’s elite in those days. His career wasn’t as glamorous as Eleanor’s, but he had held his own. He was popular with union bosses and local politicians; nearly everywhere they went—Southie, Chinatown, Fenway—Billy bumped into someone who owed him a drink.

When Eleanor asked him for a divorce, he had been more resigned than angry, as if he’d figured that day would come sooner or later. And in many ways—most ways, even—he had been happier in his life on the Vineyard. Harper can see him on the beach at Cape Poge, patiently pulling the hooks from the mouths of every fish they caught, his motions competent and assured. Billy was a man who always knew what he was doing. She pictures him in his usual seat at the Lookout, turning to see her walk in, grinning, signaling the bartender, Sopp, and calling out, “A beer and a dozen Malpeques for my old lady, please!”

Harper tries to imagine Billy as a young man, setting eyes on Eleanor Roxie for the first time. They met at the Country Club in Brookline, at a Christmas party Eleanor’s parents threw every year. Billy had come to the party as the date of Eleanor’s first cousin, Rhonda Fiorello, but Eleanor didn’t care for Rhonda and had no qualms about stealing her date away. Eleanor was twenty-one, a senior at Pine Manor, and Billy, an older man at twenty-three, had done two years at UMass, Boston, in electrical engineering before switching to trade school. Harper had seen pictures of her parents in their beautiful youth, and she marvels that the attraction they felt for each other in 1967 had endured fifty years… if Eleanor was telling the truth about Billy sneaking over to her house in the middle of the night.

Harper has been so caught up in her own drama that she hasn’t been able to mourn Billy’s passing. She hadn’t planned on scattering Billy’s ashes at all, mostly because she couldn’t bear to do it alone. But now that Tabitha is here, the decision seems appropriate.

“Let’s do it,” Harper says. She and Tabitha touch glasses and drink.



Harper drives, because the Vineyard is still, technically, “her” island, and Billy was “her” parent.

“You knew him better than I did,” Tabitha says. “And I never knew him here. Where would he want his ashes to be scattered?”

Harper has been wondering the exact same thing. She decides that part of Billy should rejoin the land, and part of him should rejoin the water surrounding it. Part of him should stay with Harper, and part of him should go to Nantucket with Tabitha. It’s hard to know how to feel about the ashes. They aren’t Billy, but they aren’t nothing, either.

“We’ll scatter a quarter at the harbor in Oak Bluffs and a quarter at Farm Neck,” Harper says.

“The golf club?” Tabitha asks.

Harper nods. If there’s one thing Harper is sure of, it’s that Billy would want to have his remains fertilizing the tee at the third hole.

“I never wanted to go back there again,” Tabitha says.

“Oh, well,” Harper says.



Farm Neck has closed for the day, and Harper worries that they will be denied access to the course. She asks at the front desk for Ken Doll, who appears within seconds looking as dapper as ever—tie, matching pocket square, shiny buckled shoes. He smiles when he sees the twins, which Harper supposes is nothing short of a miracle, seeing as how Harper invited disgrace right in the front door of this private club.

“Harper,” he says. “And Tabitha!”

He’s excited to see Tabitha, Harper realizes, and she feels the ancient hurt of people always preferring her sister. But in this instance, she knows she should be grateful.