Chapter 6: A Nice Offer

Carlene Dow got out of the Subaru in a white wool coat, carrying a tray of whoopie pies.

The captains were hauling gear off the wharf, and every one of them stopped to watch her.

"Mercy!" she called, soft and warm. "There you are. I brought pie."

I came down the planks with my hands in my pockets.

Armand was still asleep in the attic. I had left him there on purpose.

"Put it down, Carlene," I said.

"It's only whoopie pies. Chocolate. Josiah said you used to love them."

"I used to."

She set the tray on a stack of traps and folded her small hands in front of her.

She was twenty-eight and looked about nineteen.

She smiled at the captains, and she knew each of their names.

"Josiah and I want no hard feelings," she said. "He's willing to be generous."

"Is he."

"You keep the Dora B. You keep your father's house, and your mother's rocker, and the lot behind it."

She tilted her head.

"All you have to do is take back this silly Hail, in front of the Counter."

She smiled.

"And go on being a guest of the Hall."

"A guest."

"In the room off the kitchen. You know the one." She lowered her voice a little, helpfully. "Josiah says you'd be grateful."

The wharf had gone very quiet.

I looked past her at the old man in the co-op cap and at the others behind him.

I looked at the whoopie pies.

I took one off the tray, and bit it, and chewed.

"Too sweet," I said, and dropped the rest into the harbor.

A captain behind me laughed out loud and coughed it into his sleeve.

Carlene's smile didn't move.

"Tell Josiah this," I said. "The Bay isn't his to be generous with. It wasn't mine to give him either. It was my father's."

"Oh, sweetheart," she said gently. "You'll lose. Dwight's only the start."

"Then I'll lose on my own wharf."

"You'd be so much happier in the kitchen."

She stepped close, and I smelled her lilac soap.

She bent her head toward my ear and kept her voice sweet.

"He never touched you, did he?" she said, very low. "Not once, the whole year."

I did not move.

"He told me he couldn't make himself," Carlene whispered. "Not with you."

Then she patted my arm, picked up her tray, and walked back to her car.

It was true.

On the first night, Josiah had shown me to a room off the kitchen.

He said the Compact asked nothing more of a Luna than her colors on the Wall.

He said he would come to me when he was ready.

He had never come.

I had told myself it was kindness, and I had been grateful for it, for a year.

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