A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [11]
Agnes loved the campus and its cinnamon beach plums intermingled with fuchsia roses, a hardy species that managed to survive the northern New England coastal winters, the roses always in bloom in June and again during the first weeks of September. She wished she knew birds, because Fenton was a birder’s paradise. They were in the marshes with the goldenrod and the stiff, clean air. It was well-known that many of the residents of Fenton—the true natives, all 148 of them—lived well into their nineties, a fact Agnes didn’t think could be attributed entirely to genetics. Flowers set in Fenton water lasted for weeks. (Agnes drank a great deal of the local water, imagining it as a preservative.) She was charmed by the jumbled roofline of the village and the stretch of expensive honky-tonk beach houses. She was endlessly captivated by the squat curves of the lobster boats just offshore, with their engines thrumming and the lone silhouettes on the sterns. She even liked the 1940s look of the naked telephone wires stretching along the beach road to the village, suggesting a thread-thin link with the outside world. There was at Kidd a vast sense of natural privilege, of entitlement, of having something others spent millions to get—houses with views of the Atlantic—and which was, incidentally, no small attraction for the parents who sent their children there.
Agnes realized suddenly that she might have missed the exit. She did this all the time, daydreamed when she should be paying attention to her driving. She glanced at the handwritten directions on the seat beside her. She could get off at the next exit, at which time she could orient herself. It had been a long drive, and there was a cramp running all along her right thigh from her knee to her buttocks. She tried to maneuver the leg into a different position but couldn’t. She had to apply a steady pressure to the gas pedal.
The clock on the dashboard read 12:00 noon. Agnes was hungry despite the stop in southern Maine. She couldn’t imagine Nora’s house as an inn. Agnes had visited the place before, but only when Carl Laski had lived there, and once again for his funeral. She remembered it as primitive and dark, with a dismal kitchen and a warren of tiny rooms upstairs. Her own bedroom had lacked sufficient heat and had had on the bed a crazy quilt of velvet and silk that Nora had found at a flea market. It was frayed at some of the seams, but it was a wonderful object to behold, the labor astonishing. Agnes hoped Nora had kept the quilt. Agnes had heard, in lengthy letters written in Nora’s precise and upright hand, of all the renovations and of their exorbitant cost, and of Nora’s belief that the inn would soon begin to pay off some of the monstrous debt. The money that Carl Laski had left Nora was gone now, but Nora’s last letter had sounded optimistic. The inn was booked through to the end of February. Nora complained about having to write letters and not being able to reach Agnes via e-mail, but Agnes believed Nora enjoyed the letters, the writing of them as much as the receiving of them.
Agnes drove for what seemed like a long stretch and then pulled into a rest area. She parked her car, grabbed her backpack, and went inside the building. After visiting the bathroom, she stood in line for a coffee and a doughnut and then found a table at which to sit. When she’d finished the doughnut, she wiped her hands on