Chapter 14: Thanksgiving 1992

It was evident that Kelley had gone to great lengths to make herself look more appealing than I'd ever seen before. Her eyes were accented, and her lip gloss was a deeper shade of red than usual. Her hair had grown considerably since I'd seen her two weeks before. She wore a long green parka and a matching beret. In other words, she was beautiful, which made the outcry from the hard-of-hearing passenger quite credible.

Kelley had tried to suppress a grin when she heard him exclaim, "Get a look at the redhead!"

She removed her glove-covered hands from her pockets and extended them as I approached. I dropped my bag and reached for her hands. We stood at arms length and took each other in.

"It you don't kiss me soon, that loudmouth is going to think you're my sister," I said.

"I'm going to kiss you, but first I want to take a good look at you." She peered into my eyes for several seconds, searching; I was sure, for a sign of my faithfulness. Satisfied, Kelley leapt into my arms.

Her lips were soft and yielding, becoming tense and impatient. Her tongue bored its way into my mouth, probing. Kelley pulled away, smiled, and lowered her head. "I'm also going to make you glad you let me talk you into coming to this island," she whispered in my ear.

I picked up my bag, put my arm around her, and guided her out of the terminal.

"It's over there," she said, pointing to a Jeep. "I hope you can drive a standard transmission," she said, handing me a single car key.

I'd never driven a car that required depressing a clutch to change gears, but I recalled the tractor that I'd used to mow the grass at the park when I was fifteen. It had a clutch and three forward speeds.

The metal body of the Jeep was different shades of olive drab, the color made popular during the Second World War. There was a combination of hard and clear plastic to shield passengers from the weather. I opened the passenger door and picked Kelley up to lift her into the seat. She threw her arms around my neck and peppered me with kisses before allowing herself to be hoisted through the opening. I ran around to the other side and tossed my bag in the space in back of the seats.

"How did you drive it here?" I asked, suspecting that she'd never driven anything but cars with automatic transmissions.

"You have to push that pedal down and move this doohickey until it clicks. Be careful or the engine will stall," she advised, sounding deadly serious.

There was a frayed schematic depicting the location of the gears on the dashboard. It showed that Kelley had parked the vehicle in second gear.

"In other words, you drove all the way here in second gear," I laughed.

"I tried to change gears, but it makes an annoying noise if you don't do it right."

"Is this the only car your uncle has?" I asked, as I depressed the clutch and practiced moving the floorboard gearshift through the various gears.

"I'm afraid this is the only one," Kelley said, before adding. "Don't expect too much, Honey. It's sort of depressing really."

I was turning the key in the ignition, but did a double-take when I saw the way she was squirming in her seat. "What's depressing?"

"It's everything, the condition of the house, my room is cold, Uncle Isaac doesn't remember me, and he has a domineering housekeeper. My mom warned me not to come." Kelley sounded downhearted.

I started the Jeep, shifted into first gear, and released the clutch, causing the engine to die. After going through the same procedure, we were moving toward the exit gate. I didn't dare shift into second.

"What was that about making me glad I let you talk me into coming to this island?" I asked, as I paid the parking attendant.

"I fully intend to make up for the way I treated you two weeks ago. It's just that we may have to outwit the housekeeper. She's a bully."

I successfully coaxed the transmission into second gear. "You had every right to treat me badly. I disappointed you by not being forthcoming about Megan and Patricia."

Kelley looked at me, adoringly. "I know now that you had your reasons for taking Patricia with you to visit your family. I'm glad you didn't go though with your plan though. I don't think I could stand it if you'd had sex with her."

"Thanks for having faith in me," I said, smiling when I was able to change gears without hearing a complaint from the transmission. We were sailing along the narrow road at thirty miles per hour. That's when I discovered that the brakes didn't work. "FUCK!"

"You have to pump the brakes," Kelley informed me. I followed her advice and got the speed down to twenty-five miles an hour.

After getting lost a couple of times, I was relieved when we came to a stop at the end of a narrow lane. "That's the house," Kelley said, looking down at a flat roof covered with black tar. The sides of the house were shingled, and the structure hugged the side of a ridge. There was smoke coming from a chimney. I could see the ocean in the distance. "Turn around and back in, Honey, or else Ingrid will throw a fit."

"Ingrid?" I asked, as I found reverse on the schematic.

"She's the housekeeper I was telling you about. She wants the Jeep parked facing out so she doesn't need to turn around in case of an emergency," Kelley informed me.

We got the vehicle parked per orders from Ingrid, and Kelley led the way down a long ramp to the back door. We entered a small room, but the door to the house was locked. Kelley gave me a see-what-I mean look as she knocked on the inner door. Eventually, the housekeeper opened it and told us to remove our boots.

"I hope you brought slippers," Kelley said, as we entered what turned out to be a combination kitchen and sitting room. I was taking in the furnishings and the atmosphere when Kelley introduced me to her uncle.

"Uncle Isaac, this is Sammy Oldham, the light of my life."

Uncle Isaac was seated in a wheelchair, with a cat sitting in his lap. He extended his right hand. "Welcome to my house," he said. I took his hand in mine, and looked into his eyes. His hand felt soft and limp. His white hair was thin and long, as were his eyebrows, white, thin, and long. I released his hand and watched it return to rest on the cat's back.

"And this is Ingrid," Kelley said, directing my attention to the tall housekeeper. She wore her hair in a long braid, reminding me of Patricia, only Ingrid's braid was wrapped around her head. She could have been thirty-nine or fifty-nine, depending on which part of her body you used to judge her age. She stood erect, appearing youthfully militant, but her high forehead was so wrinkled that it sent my estimate of her age soaring upward.

"Welcome to our home, Mr. Oldham. You may put your bag in the loft. I hope you will find the accommodations... ," Ingrid was saying when Kelley interrupted the housekeeper...

"He's staying in my room. It's this way, Honey," Kelley said, pointing in the direction of a hallway.

I suddenly felt the temperature in the kitchen. It was a combination of penetrating heat, with a cold draft. The source of the heat was a black, cast iron stove that stood five feet high and had to be three feet in diameter at the girth. The cold draft I felt was coming from Ingrid and Kelley.

"Isaac is opposed to your occupying the same bedroom. Tell them Isaac," Ingrid said.

The white haired man looked befuddled. His eyes roamed from the housekeeper, to me, to the cat on his lap. "That's right," he said, stroking the cat's fur.

"Uncle Isaac," Kelley objected. "Sammy and I are in love. My parents let us sleep together and his parents don't object when I stay at his house. We travel together all the time, and I visit him at his school. We're lovers."

Isaac stared blankly at Kelley. "What did you say your name was?"

"I'm your ... don't you remember me, Uncle Isaac. My mother and I visited you at the university. Aunt Sophia combed my hair and said she wished she had a little girl like me. Don't you remember?"

"Isaac left the university twelve years ago," Ingrid put in for no apparent reason.

Isaac spoke in an offhanded way. "Sophia was my wife."

"Yes, she was," Kelley said, attempting to spark his memory. "Aunt Sophia adored me."

Isaac's eyes shifted from the cat to Kelley when he heard his wife's name. "Who did you say you were?"

Kelley looked at me, frustration showing on her face. I shrugged, hoping she would give up trying to make her uncle remember who she was. I unzipped my parka and headed for the stairs that led to the loft above the sitting room. Kelley followed me.

"Aren't you forgetting something, Mr. Oldham?" Ingrid asked.

We turned. "The key to the Jeep," she said. I tossed it to her and she caught it.

The loft was cramped, but there was one redeeming feature. "Look at the view!" I exclaimed. "Can you see the water from your room?"

"No, I'm on the back side of the house," she said.

I sat on the bed and looked out the window at the distant water. Several houses dotted the landscape, and there were grey clouds in the sky.

Kelley pulled me onto my back. "This is insane. My room is across the hall from theirs so it may be better if I come to you in the night," she whispered.

I pulled her down for a kiss and felt her body relax on top of me. We ravished each other for several minutes before we heard a crashing sound downstairs, like a pan had been dropped on the floor. We jumped, the mood ruined.

"I'll work on your uncle. Ingrid is putting thoughts in his head. It might be fun to go against her wishes," I offered.

"I don't want you playing head games with him, Sweetheart. It would be cruel. I'd never forgive myself if you upset him and something tragic happened," Kelley whispered.

"There's no point in our staying. Let's leave as soon as we can get a flight," I pleaded.

"I told my mom that I would spend Thanksgiving with Uncle Isaac. We'll leave on Friday."

"He doesn't know who you are," I pointed out.

Our whispers must have gotten louder than we realized. Ingrid called us to lunch.

"Maybe I'll play some mind games with her," I whispered to Kelley. She urged me not to take on Ingrid. I retrieved a pair of sneakers from my bag and we went downstairs.

Surprisingly, we discovered that Ingrid was a good cook. She served a bowl of clam chowder and freshly baked bread for lunch, and the codfish at dinner was so tender that it melted in our mouths. She refused to believe that my compliments were sincere.

Kelley kept trying to make her uncle remember who she was. I felt sorry for her. Her efforts became embarrassing.

We used every excuse we could think of to get out of the house. We went for long walks, but it was so cold that we didn't dare unzip our parkas. "I'm afraid your thingy will break off if I touch it," Kelley joked.

We hugged, but we didn't dare kiss for fear that our lips would freeze and become stuck together.

Tuesday night was the worst. My room was probably the warmest in the house, being open to the large room below where the stove was located. A loose shutter banged constantly, and knowing that Kelley was at the other end of the hall made my balls ache.

Her attempt to sneak up to the loft was thwarted when a creaking board woke Ingrid. I listened as Kelley explained that she was on her way to the bathroom. Ingrid, angry to have been awakened, stood guard in the hallway until Kelley flushed the toilet and returned to her room.

On Wednesday morning, I worked up a sweat cutting wood for the stove, and then I nailed the shutter in place, so tight that it would never interrupt anyone's sleep again. Ingrid pretended that she'd never noticed the loose shutter. I asked her if there was anything she needed from the store. She explained that the green grocer and the fish market had delivery boys, but that she would make a list of staples that I could pick up. She handed me the key to the Jeep, told me where the store was located, and said she would expect us back in an hour.

"I've made reservations for us to have dinner at two P M tomorrow," she said as Kelley and I were putting our boots on.

It was a big disappointment when we discovered that making out in the Jeep was impossible because the heater didn't work, and the cold wind penetrated the flimsy plastic.

I got a shopping cart and rushed through the aisles of the store while Kelley attempted to make flight reservations to get us off the island. There were no flights to the mainland on Thanksgiving, but she discovered there was a ferry leaving at seven P M. When I came out of the store, she excitedly told me that she had made arrangements for us to rent a car in Hyannis, which we would drive to Boston. "I got us a room at the Copley Plaza Hotel," she boasted.

"Perfect," I congratulated her on her ingenuity.

"I need to make one more call," she said. I put the groceries in the Jeep while she called the airline to change our reservations to fly home on Friday afternoon.

"How do you propose we get to the boat tomorrow?" I asked on the way to the house.

"I suspect there's a taxi service. A lot of people come here without bringing their cars over. Anyway, Ingrid will be so happy that we're leaving that she'll be glad to drive us to the ferry."

We talked about the best time to spring the news that we were leaving early and decided to wait until after Thanksgiving dinner to reveal our change in plans.

Lunch was a wonderful creation of omelets and biscuits, topped with honey. "Isaac only has eggs once each week," Ingrid said.

I decided the housekeeper had Isaac's best interest at heart. She seemed devoted to him, and he to her.

"Do you ever get a break from this routine?" I asked.

Ingrid regarded me haughtily. "I leave him alone for an hour when I have an appointment. Otherwise, we get along well in each other's company, don't we, Isaac?"

Isaac smiled as if he agreed with her.

"You don't have any help at all?" I asked, beginning to feel sorry for her plight. No wonder why she was such a narrow-minded bitch.

"We have help when we need it," she answered, dismissively, and I dropped the subject.

Kelley and I went out for a walk. "I want you rested for tomorrow night so get plenty of rest tonight," she said, teasingly.

"It sounds like you're going to have your way with me," I laughed, putting my arm around her waist.

"We're going to break in my diaphragm. Are you looking forward to doing me bareback?"

"I'm looking forward to doing you, period." I answered, and felt her hip bang into my thigh, playfully.

We fell silent as we continued to walk. I contemplated being in a warm hotel room with Kelley and her diaphragm, until the cold air caught my attention. We were on an island, surrounded by water. I watched my breath drift into the air, thinking that if it were not for Kelley being at my side, I would be very lonely. How do the islanders stand living here in the winter?

Kelley's interruption of my thoughts was a welcome surprise. "The drive from Hyannis to Boston will give us time to talk," she said.

Was that what she'd been thinking while I'd imagined the warm hotel room, what made the island so cold, and the isolation inhabitants of the island must feel?

"What would you like to talk about?" I asked.

"Us," she said. "I would like to talk about our future together."

"That sounds serious," I said, already wondering if she expected a commitment from me before breaking in her new diaphragm in the warm hotel room.

She must have read my mind. "It's our immediate future that I want to talk about. Let's face it, Sammy, we're apart more than we're together, and that's the way it's going to be until June. After that, we'll be together constantly, except when one of us is traveling. I want to know what you think about when we're apart, what you feel."

I took her hand and started walking back to the house. She must have sensed that I was incensed. "I do not doubt you, Sammy. I know you're faithful," she said.

"If you want to have a discussion about our future, we'll have it tomorrow evening," I said, wanting to cool down. I needed time to consider what I wanted to say about our future together.

We passed the afternoon reading. Uncle Isaac had taught Philosophy, but he had a collection of classic literature on the bottom shelf of dusty books. A book of Francis Bacon's essays caught my attention. I read Of Love twice and was totally confused. I found Of Marriage and Single Life more to my liking. I reread one passage and pointed it out to Kelley:

"Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses, so as a man may have a quarrel to marry when he will; but yet he was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question when a man should marry, 'A young man not yet, and older man not at all.'"

She read the passage and handed the book back to me. "Are you suggesting that Bacon is speaking about you?" she asked, clearly miffed.

"I thought it was funny," I said, trying to explain why I'd had her read that portion of the essay.

"I think you're saying that you're not ready for marriage as long as you have me for a mistress. Is that all I am to you?"

"Kelley, that's only one part. Read the entire essay."

She took the book back, and thumbed to the previous page, like she had it bookmarked.