Episodes 9 and 10: Homesick

Alessandra, Ralph, and Barbara’s Breakfast Bar

Excerpt of Episode 9

“It takes more than sunshine, soil, and rain to make a flower grow.”

Thus spake Alessandra, in her speech to the mostly-white-haired Board of the Junior Foreign Aide Brigade. (That’s how Alessandra thought of her speech—at sixteen, she was a budding nihilist, misunderstanding Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a call to rather than a warning against a philosophy of nothingness. She was well on her way to driving her parents crazy with her philosophizing, and if they complained, she shot back with “To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task,” and other exasperating Nietzsche-isms.)

Alessandra was a homegrown islander, and so, although love and creature comforts were available to her in moderate supply from the day she first graced this earth, she spent almost the whole of her childhood longing with every fiber of her being to get away.

The Junior Foreign Aide Brigade, or JFAB, seemed as good an escape plan as any.

Read the rest of Episode 9 here

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Excerpt of Episode 10

“I am leaving the pension,” her landlady says one day. Her landlady likes to practice her English with Alessandra, though she speaks it thickly, hesitantly. “I do not know if the new owner will rent to you.”

“Why?” Alessandra says, confronting the misery of change externally imposed. Is this what it feels like to be an adult? The constant thrust of unasked-for change?

“I am going to help my son start the wheat farm,” the landlady says.

“But you have no experience with farming,” Alessandra says. As if her landlady had asked her permission. Or even her opinion.

“Ah, Alessandra, all it needs to make the wheat grow is the sunshine, the dirt, the rain, the love.”

There is no rhyme or reason to it that Alessandra can divine, but suddenly there are tears streaming from her eyes, and then the tears turn to wracking sobs. She was wrong, all those years ago, declaiming to the JFAB Board, and now she knows it, and it’s too late.

Read the rest of Episode 10 here.

Episode 8: The Many Uses of a Meat Mallet

Sheriff Tom decides

Excerpt

You may wonder why the islanders have an almost verbatim transcript of the confession carried around in their heads, or why there are some variations on the theme. For instance, some people assert Gloria went into detail here about Seamus’s sexual prowess; others say that’s hogwash—Gloria is too circumspect to reveal lurid details, and somewhere along the line someone must have padded the story.

As if it needed padding.

The answer to the question—how do the islanders know what Gloria said?— isn’t terribly interesting, but you might as well hear it, so you can focus on Gloria’s story.

After the arrest, Sheriff Tom carried Gloria’s confession in his heart and in his head until it felt like the words were strangling him, and one night, months later, when he’d had too much to drink (which is ironic, as you’ll soon see), he shared the story with Larry. The two men were sitting in Retha’s Bar and Grill. Retha and several others heard, and each of them told just one other person, someone they trusted to take the secret to his or her or their respective grave, and in very short order the entire island knew this part of Gloria’s history.

So now, many of the islanders are purveyors of the cautionary tale, and they tell it word for word, like the old oral histories.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe, here

Episode 7: The Many Uses of a Meat Mallet

How Gloria - and Mo - came to Looser Island to run The Dog House Cafe

Excerpt

Mo is a Great Pyrenees—a mix, Gloria is quick to say, because on Looser Island owning a pure breed is considered just this side of shameful. It is pretentious, a sign you think of your pet as a status symbol, like a flashy car or an expensive piece of furniture. (And therefore it comes as no surprise to anyone that Cherry Duluth has a purebred Pomeranian). Mutt is the preferred type, though the Coombs’s greyhound is forgiven, because she’s a rescue from racing. Anyway, whatever Mo is mixed with, the percentage of non-Great Pyrenees must be very, very small; the dog reportedly weighs in at one hundred fifty two pounds. His outer coat alone (he has three coats) consists of six-inch-long hair. That’s how he got his name, Gloria explains to anyone who asks. Within a week of adopting Mo, Gloria and every item of clothing she owned was covered with a layer of beautiful white hair, and she decided if she called him Mo she could say she was wearing mohair.

Together they get the proverbial double take, like a team in a slapstick routine or a child’s picture book: Tiny and Mr. Big Go for a Walk.

At some point—no one can remember when—Gloria took over the island’s only fine dining establishment and renamed it La Maison du Chien. If you don’t remember your high school French, that translates as “The Dog House.” Pursuant to the unwritten rules of the island, everyone refused to use the French name, and insisted on calling it The Dog House Café. Within a year after Gloria commissioned the sign, with its French words and curlicued letters, and hung it over the entry, the sign was completely covered by clematis and other greenery, and the islanders quickly forgot it had any other name.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe to receive episodes by email, here.

Episode 6: Once More into the Fray

Larry has been hired by Katie Marchel to sue the Apple Cart Grocery for discrimination (Katie’s French, and Lauren makes her re-stock the French onion soup and the French fries . . . ) And then the call comes: the agency’s found a child for adoption.

And her name is Katie.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe to receive episodes by email twice weekly, here

Excerpt:

Larry goes to his study to draft a letter demanding that the Apple Cart Grocery cease and desist harassing his client, but of course he finds he cannot write such a letter, not to Lauren, she of the husky laugh that makes anyone nearby want to laugh too, even if it’s not clear what the joke is, who orders chocolate volcano cakes just for Larry, because she knows they’re his favorite.

. . .

Beatrix shoves his hand with her nose. You’re being ridiculous, she tells him.

“Once more into the fray,” he mutters.

And then he realizes he’s got it wrong. The Shakespearean quote is “Once more unto the breach.” From some forgotten dusty corner his brain dredges another, later part of the quote:

“Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage.”

Can he find hard-favour’d rage against his friend?

No, he cannot.

And then he remembers “Once more into the fray” is actually a quote from the movie, The Grey. The movie where everyone dies in the end.

So much for the value of perseverance.

Episode 5: Once More into the Fray

Image by Natalia Tench from Getty Images (text added)

Can Larry make peace with his role as the island’s only attorney, to support Ruth’s dream of adopting a child? Mind-reading, retired-greyhound Beatrix can help.

Read Episode 5, and subscribe to receive episodes twice weekly here.

Excerpt:

“You realize it may be difficult, at your age, to keep up with a child,” Janet says, and it is obvious that she’s said it so many times she no longer recognizes how crude the words sound, how the arrow of her words pierces the tender, vulnerable places guarded by Ego and Id.

“I’m pretty spry for sixty-one,” Larry says with a grimace.

That’s a lie. His back hurts, his legs are weak and spindly, his cholesterol level is high and he’s occasionally borderline anemic. Larry is all angles and prematurely stiff joints, his only claim to health that he is not overweight, but he’s become used to massaging the truth until he can state it as he wants to, with only the slightest twinge of conscience.

He says it again, for good measure: “I’m pretty spry.”

“We’re confident we can handle it,” Ruth says, serenity sitting as softly on her shoulders as a worn and comfortable shawl.

It works like Jedi mind-control. Janet writes “pretty spry” and “confident they can handle it” on a notepad, and then she says, “Well, I don’t see any reason you shouldn’t be approved. And since you’re willing to consider older children, I imagine you’ll hear from us fairly soon. Within six months, I think.”

“And we have a dog,” Larry says, belatedly, though he can’t tell whether he thinks that’s a factor in their favor, or whether he’s pleading with his wife to decide Beatrix is enough. “She’s a greyhound,” he adds. “Her name is Beatrix,” and then he closes his mouth with a snap, to keep more words from running out.

“A case worker will be in touch to make sure the dog is appropriate,” Janet says.

Larry and Ruth exchange glances, knowing the reality is that Beatrix will be the one evaluating the situation, not the other way around, knowing that it won’t do to say so, lest the inimitable Janet think they are senile as well as merely old.

Prologue

Image from Unsplash by Hannah Lim @hannah15198

Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

Every day in the whole of human history can be seen, in retrospect, as the beginning of Something, the occurrence of some event that will result in the avalanche of events that form the complete story in the as-yet-unimagined future.

Some chapters unfold gently, like a mother’s kiss on a sleeping child’s forehead. Others descend mercilessly, like the slash of a vengeful deity’s sword.

On the day this story had its inception, none of the human inhabitants of Looser Island was aware of the threads of fate converging on this tiny island in the Salish Sea, the sequence of events that would start with the discovery of a man hiding in a dumpster, would lead almost but not quite inexorably to another man’s death, and would ultimately touch each and every one of the islanders irrevocably. None of the islanders realized their reality, so predictable in its casual chaos, was about to be thrown off kilter forever.

It’s possible the dogs knew.