Summer of '69(113)

Then Wifey turns and Kirby gets it. She’s pregnant, roundly pregnant—maybe five or six months along. Kirby does some quick backward counting. Wifey was already pregnant when Kirby told Scottie she was pregnant.

Ahhh.

Wifey notices Kirby staring at her and returns Kirby’s gaze with an unapologetically frank challenge in her eyes.

“Can I help you with something?” she asks.

Kirby freezes. Her mind spins like a wheel on a game show. What should she say? She could pretend to be enraptured by Wifey’s pregnancy. Blair told Kirby that a woman becomes public property once she’s pregnant, and every Tammy, Dina, and Harriet on the street feels compelled to comment on her belly and sometimes even touch her without asking.

Scottie spins around to find who Wifey is calling out. He sees Kirby and his face turns to stone. It’s not hate; she can see that plain enough. It’s fear.

Kirby steps forward, positively beaming. “Forgive me for staring,” she says. “It’s just that you look familiar to me. I’m Kirby Foley. What’s your name?”

“Ann,” she says. “Ann Turbo. Maiden name Herlihy. I went to Mt. Alvernia. Do I know you from there? You’re way younger than me.”

Younger by five years or so, Kirby guesses. She knew a girl who went to Mt. Alvernia—Deirdre Metcalfe—but Kirby can’t fake having gone there.

“I went to Brookline,” she says, shrugging. “Public-school kid.”

Scottie speaks up. “You’re probably mistaken, miss. You don’t know us.”

It’s either the “miss” or the “us” that irks her. He’s waving a verbal billy club, urging her to move along. Of course that’s what he wants. He’s petrified. His internal organs must be twisted up like Monday’s washing.

“Maybe I’m just drawn to you because you’re pregnant,” Kirby says. “I was pregnant not so long ago.”

“You were?” Ann looks behind Kirby for any sign of a child.

“I lost the baby,” Kirby says.

Ann flinches like Kirby slapped her. “No!” she cries.

“It was probably a good thing,” Kirby says. She flashes Ann her bare left hand. “I got in trouble. And the father”—she takes a step closer to Scottie. She’s so close, she could slap him…or kiss him—“was a married man. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time.”

Ann gasps, apparently too overcome for words. Scottie opens his mouth to speak but Kirby raises a traffic-cop hand. “The man had absolutely no integrity and a dishrag for character,” Kirby says. “But I’m sure he’ll pay a price for this somewhere down the road.”

“I should hope so!” Ann says. She’s now Kirby’s champion and Scottie pulls out a handkerchief to wipe sweat off his brow.

“Lucky for you, you seem to have a good man right here,” Kirby says, nodding at Scottie. “An honest, upright man.”

“He’s a policeman!” Ann announces proudly.

“Is he?” Kirby says. She allows herself a direct gaze into Scottie’s green eyes; she might as well be leaping off the bow into the sound. “What a field day for the heat,” she sings. “A thousand people in the street.”

She expects to meet a barrier, a boulder, a concrete wall—but instead she finds something softer. A field of grass.

I’m sorry, his eyes say. I had a wife and a baby on the way. But please know that I did fall in love with you. I’m in love with you still and always will be.

Or at least that’s what Kirby imagines his eyes are saying. It’s good enough.

She grins. “Have a nice day!” she says, and she saunters to the back of the boat.



Because all the ferries to Nantucket are sold out—“It’s July, sweetheart,” the world-weary ticket agent says—Kirby rides to Nantucket on the evening freight boat with her two suitcases perched on the starboard side atop some packing crates filled with dry goods. Kirby is tired—physically and emotionally—but she perks up when the twinkling lights of Nantucket town become visible on the horizon. She picks out the spire of the Congregational church and the clock tower of the Unitarian church, marking north and south, but what she loves the best is the way the lights of the boats scattered across the dark harbor mimic the stars in the night sky.

There are no taxis waiting to meet this boat when it docks, so Kirby makes her slow way with her suitcases—both so heavy they might contain gold bullion—and her beloved Silvertone record player down Easy Street and up Main Street. When she turns left onto Fair, she wants to break into a run.

Home; she’s finally home.

She leaves her luggage on the front step—she will get it in the morning—and tiptoes inside and up the stairs. She isn’t foolish enough to enter her grandmother’s room or her parents’ room but she has no problem waking up Jessie.

Surprise! The third bedroom is crowded—a rounded figure in the bed barricaded by two bassinets. Kirby doesn’t want to disturb Blair, but she takes a moment to gaze at the tiny faces of her new niece and nephew. She can’t tell which is which but it doesn’t matter. She’ll make their acquaintance in the morning.

Down the stairs, down the hall, through the kitchen that still smells of the cooking fireplace even though it hasn’t been used in a hundred years, out the door, and across the lawn to Little Fair.