Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [4]
Alice raised an eyebrow. “Gosh, is everyone in this town called Perkins?”
“Just about,” Daniel said, clearly excited to have a bit of inside information. “According to Ned, that family owns half the land around here. They’re fishermen, like his people. Ned went with one of the Perkins cousins back in high school.”
“Lucky her,” Alice said.
“Now now,” Daniel said. “Hey, Ned even taught me a little poem one of them wrote. You ready to hear it?”
Before she could protest, he was reciting it, almost singing, in his best James Cagney voice:
A Perkins runs the grocery store
A Perkins runs the bank
A Perkins puts the gasoline in everybody’s tank.
A Perkins sells you magazines
Another sells you fish
You have to go to Perkinses for anything you wish.
You’ll always find a Perkins has fingers in your purse
And when I die, I think that I
Will ride a Perkins hearse.
Alice rolled her eyes at her husband. “Okay, darling, I catch your drift.”
They turned the car around and pulled onto Shore Road. Daniel drove slowly, looking this way and that. Through a long bank of pine trees on the left, you could see the ocean. Here and there, clapboard houses with American flags out front dotted green lawns. Cows grazed in fields of grass.
“It’s somewhere off of this road,” Daniel said.
They had brought a map, which she held unfolded in her lap. Daniel expected Alice to know how to read it, but to her it looked like a mess of veins and muscles she had seen in her high school biology textbook years earlier. She half expected him to snap, “Oh, give me that!” But Daniel wasn’t the type. He only laughed and said, “I guess we’ll have to follow our noses, since I clearly chose a daydreamer for a co-pilot.”
That was when Alice saw them, a small assembly of women and men in smocks, sitting up on a hill, painting at easels.
“There’s an artists’ colony here,” Daniel said. “Ned told me bohemians are buying up the lobstermen’s shacks. I thought you’d like that. They have a summer school. Maybe you could take a class.”
Alice nodded, though she felt her body tighten. She willed herself not to grow dark. But she could already feel her mood shifting. She stared out the window.
Off to the right was a plain wooden saltbox with a sign out front that read RUBY’S MARKET. To the left was a small green building that she might have taken for a house were it not for the word PHARMACY inlaid on a plaque above the porch.
There was no sign for Briarwood Road. Ned had told Daniel to take Shore for two miles, until he came to a fork. Then he was to turn left onto a dirt path, and follow it all the way to the ocean.
“He says we’ll think we’re driving straight into the woods, but we’re not,” Daniel said.
Alice sighed, preparing herself for what was probably a patch of overgrown brush that Ned had decided to call his own.
They passed the entrance twice and had to turn around. But on the third try, they turned at what hardly seemed like a fork. Alice gasped. The road was from a fairy tale, a long stretch of sand inside a tunnel of lush pine trees. When they reached the end, there was the ocean, sparkling in the sun, dark blue against a small sandy beach, which was nestled between two long stretches of rocky coast.
“Welcome home,” Daniel said.
“This is ours?” Alice asked.
“Well, three acres of it’s ours,” he said. “The best three acres, too—all this land along the water.”
Alice was elated. No one she knew back home had their own beach house. She could not wait to see her best friend Rita’s face when she came here and saw it.