One Green

The lake was forty-two degrees at seven o’clock on Saturday morning. Gideon lowered the thermometer on its string off the end of the dock, counted to sixty and pulled it up. It was one degree warmer than the week before. At that rate the water would be fit for a child in a small boat sometime in June.

He had known that, and he had planned for it. Biscuit sat on the lawn thirty feet above the waterline, on two old fenders so that her hull was clear of the wet grass.

He had spent three evenings on her. He had washed six years of dust off her with a bucket and a sponge. He had driven to a chandlery in Burlington on Tuesday for twenty-five feet of new mainsheet, red, and a tin of polish. He had gone over the mast step and the rudder pins and every inch of the sail. This morning at six he had stepped the mast, set the sprit and run the sail up. It hung in the still air now with hardly a wrinkle in it, a small white square with a faded number. She looked like a toy somebody had left out overnight. She also looked ready, and that had mattered to him more than he could explain to himself.

He had bought a life jacket in Burlington too. It was navy blue, it fitted, and it had cost sixty-four dollars. He had it on and buckled by half past seven, which was absurd. He walked the dock once to make sure the three soft boards he had replaced were flush. Then he went and stood on the grass.

Up on the north wing Paquette’s blue tarps were lashed down for the weekend. The valley had been stripped to the boards since Tuesday, and the first sheets of copper lay stacked by the chimney. It was the only work on the property he was sure of.

At two minutes to eight the cottage door opened.

They came down the flagstones and across the lawn, the small woman in the navy fleece and the child in the purple coat. The yellow life jacket was buckled over the coat. The red boots came down squarely with every step. Tilly was carrying a large glass jar in both arms, hugged against the front of the jacket.

He looked at his watch when they stopped in front of him. It was eight o’clock.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” said Tilly. She was studying his chest. “That’s a different one.”

“I bought it on Tuesday. Is it better?”

“It’s the right size.” She seemed to feel that this covered it. “This is my Mémé. Her name is Lucille. She’s staying the whole time.”

“Mrs. Bouchard,” Gideon said.

Lucille Bouchard looked at him as she had on the dock ten days ago. Her eyes were Camille’s, and they were no warmer. “Mr. Hallett,” she said. She had a folding stool under one arm and a thermos in her hand. She opened the stool on the grass about five yards off, sat down on it and unscrewed the thermos. She did not take out a book or a telephone. He understood that she intended to watch him for an hour without doing anything else, and he respected her for it.

Tilly set the jar down on the grass between her boots. It was a mayonnaise jar, the large size, with the label soaked off and a blue metal lid. It was empty.

She unscrewed the lid and laid it beside the jar. She dug in her coat pocket, brought out a single piece of lake glass and held it up so that he could see it. It was green, about the size of a nickel. She dropped it into the jar, where it rang against the bottom, and screwed the lid back on.

“That’s one,” she said.

He found that he had to clear his throat. “One what?”

“One Saturday. Maman said it’s eight Saturdays for the lessons, in a row. If you miss one it goes back to one. I asked how I would know which number it was, and she said I could keep count however I liked.” Tilly put her hand on the lid. “So I’m keeping it. One green for each. If you miss, I take them all out and start again.”

“She asked how many,” Lucille said from the stool, in a dry voice. “Her mother doesn’t lie to her about numbers.”

“No,” Gideon said. “I’ve noticed that.”

He looked at the jar. It was a very big jar for one small piece of glass. Tilly did not know what the eighth one stood for. She only knew that someone had promised her a number, and she had made sure the number would be kept where she could see it. He thought of the folded yellow paper in his wallet. She had found a better way of keeping the same contract.

“Why green?” he asked.

“Because I have the most green. I have enough green even if you miss a lot.”

“I don’t intend to miss any.”

“That’s what you’d say either way,” said Tilly, without any unkindness. She picked the jar up again. “Is that the boat?”

“That’s Biscuit.”

She walked over and went all the way round the boat, slowly, with the jar in her arms. She looked at the scrape on the port side. She read the name on the transom, moving her lips. She looked up the mast to the top.

“It’s very small.”

“She’s eight feet long. She’s built for one sailor about your size. A grown man can’t fit in her without his knees round his ears.”

“Did you try?”

“Once. Children laughed at me.”

Tilly took that in with interest. “Why is it on the grass?”

“Because the lake is forty-two degrees this morning. I measured it. Water that cold is dangerous, even in a life jacket. Nobody’s sailing off this dock until it’s a good deal warmer, and that’s my rule. It goes next to your mother’s.”

“How warm?”

“Sixty, at least.”

“When is it sixty?”

“June, most years.”

She nodded. He could see that the rule had pleased her, probably because it came with a number. She set the jar down very carefully by Biscuit’s bow.

“I can show you my boards,” she said. “You can come, but you have to walk behind.”

He glanced at Lucille, who lifted one shoulder. He followed the yellow jacket down to the dock.

Tilly stepped onto the planks without hesitating. She walked the first few as though they were a hallway in her own house. He kept two paces back. The grey water moved a little under the boards, and there was a thin skin of mist on it further out. The swim raft was still up on the beach for the winter.

At the third pair of pilings she stopped. Her boots were side by side on a board that looked like all the others.

“This is the sixth,” she said. “The sixth board is at the third post. I’m not going past it today.”

“All right.”

She turned round to look at him. She had clearly expected more than that. “Aren’t you going to say it’s safe?”

“It is safe. I checked every post under this dock and I put three new boards in the middle. But I’m not the one who fell off it.” He stayed where he was. “You told me you’d go to the seventh when you’re ready. You’re the only person who knows when that is. I taught a lot of children off this dock, Tilly. The ones who got pushed never liked the water afterward. The ones who took their time ended up better sailors than the brave ones.”

“Why?”

“Because they’d looked at everything first.”

She thought about that for a while. Then she looked past him, down the sixty-odd feet of dock still ahead of her, to the end where the new timber was.

“I went off there,” she said. “I was looking at a fish. It was in August. I didn’t have a jacket then, because nobody had made the rule yet. It was cold all the way in and I couldn’t tell which way was up. Arlo was on the porch having his break and he saw. He ran the whole lawn. He jumped in with his kitchen shoes on, and they’re ruined now. He had to get new ones.”

Gideon’s hands had closed inside his pockets. He kept his voice easy with some effort.

“I’d say he made a good trade.”

“Maman bought him the new ones. He didn’t want her to. She did it anyway.” Tilly looked down at her board. “I don’t like the end.”

“You don’t have to like it. It’ll still be there in June.”

She stood a moment longer. Then she turned round on the sixth board, precisely, as if there were a line painted on it, and walked back to the shore. He followed her. Up on the kitchen porch a lanky young man with a red beard was leaning in the doorway with a mug, watching the dock. When he saw Gideon look, he did not look away. He lifted the mug an inch, and he was not smiling. Gideon nodded to him. He owed that young man more than he could say, and he was not permitted to say any of it.

“Do you know any knots?” he asked, when they reached the grass.

“I can tie my boots, but these don’t have laces.”

“Then we’ll start with the one every sailor needs. Sit down. The grass is wet, so sit on this.”

He had brought a square of old canvas from the boathouse. He spread it beside the boat, and she sat on it cross-legged, with the life jacket riding up round her ears. He sat on the wet grass facing her and took two lengths of line out of his jacket, each a yard long. He gave her one.

“This is a bowline. It makes a loop that won’t slip and won’t jam. You can tie a boat to a dock with it, or pull a person out of the water. There’s a story that goes with it. Make a small loop, like this, with the long end underneath.”

She copied him. Her fingers were quick and careful.

“That loop is a rabbit hole. This long piece standing up is a tree. And this short end is the rabbit. Now, the rabbit comes up out of the hole.” He passed the end up through. “He runs round behind the tree.” He took it round. “And he goes back down the hole.” He pulled it snug, and the loop held.

Tilly had got as far as the tree. She was frowning at her rope.

“Why does he go round the tree?”

“Because that’s how the knot works.”

“That’s why the rope does it. Why does the rabbit?” She looked up at him. “A rabbit doesn’t come out of his hole and go round a tree and go straight back in. That’s silly. He’d only do that if something scared him. So you have to say what scared him.”

On the folding stool, Lucille made a small sound into her thermos cup.

“What would scare him?” Gideon asked.

“A fox. Or a hawk. There’s a hawk that sits on the flagpole.” Tilly thought. “It should be the hawk. If it’s a fox, the fox would just follow him down.”

“So the rabbit comes up out of the hole.”

“He comes up out of the hole. He sees the hawk. He runs round the back of the tree so the hawk can’t see him, and then he goes back down the hole, fast.” She did it as she said it. The end went up, round and down, and she pulled. The knot closed. She held up a perfect small loop and looked at it with her mouth slightly open.

“That’s a bowline,” he said. “You tied it the first time, and that almost never happens.”

“I fixed the story first.”

“You did. I’ve been telling it wrong for years.”

“It wasn’t wrong, it just wasn’t finished.” She was already picking the knot apart to do it again. She tied it four more times, muttering about the hawk. On the fourth she did it with her eyes shut, because he told her sailors had to manage in the dark.

Then she laid the rope across her knees and looked straight at him. In the flat morning light her eyes were very clear, with the brown wedge in the left one.

“Are you going to close the inn?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You said that before. That was ten days ago.”

“It’s still true. I’ve found out some things since. The roof can be mended, and it’s being mended now. There are eight more rooms than anybody’s been able to use. Your mother’s kitchen is better than the people in New York understood. Those are all good.” He rested his arms on his knees. “But the inn lost a lot of money last year, and I have to show that it can stop losing it. I don’t know yet whether it can. I’ll know more after Memorial Day. I’ll know for certain on the twenty-sixth of June.”

“The Saturday.”

“Yes.”

She counted on her fingers against the rope, and her lips moved. He realised she was running the weeks.

“That’s after eight,” she said.

“It is.”

“So you have to come to all of them anyway. Even if it’s going to be no.”

“I’d come to all of them if it had already been no.”

She gave him the foreign-coin look again. Then she nodded, once.

“Winnie says it for sure,” she said. “She says nobody’s closing it. But she doesn’t know. She only wants it.” She began to coil the rope round her hand, as he had done with his. “You don’t know and you said so. That’s better. I can ask you again and it’ll be a real answer.”

“You can ask me every Saturday.”

“I will.”

At nine o’clock Lucille stood, folded the stool and said, “Matilda.” Tilly got up off the canvas. She asked whether she could keep the rope, and he said she could. She collected the jar from beside the bow and held it up to the light to check the one piece of green in the bottom.

“Next time is two,” she informed him, and went up the lawn.

Lucille stayed behind a moment. She screwed the cup back onto the thermos.

“You didn’t push her on that dock,” she said.

“No.”

“Hm.” It was Winnie’s sound, with a French accent. She followed her granddaughter up the grass, and that was all he got. He stood beside the little boat with a wet seat to his jeans and one Saturday to his name.
***
Winnie lasted in the office until a quarter past ten. Then she announced that she was seventy-one and the numbers would be the same in the morning, and she went to bed.

That left the two of them, the rolltop, a pot of coffee and three hours of paper.

Camille had come straight from service. She had taken off her jacket and wore a grey T-shirt, with the bandana still tied over her curls. She sat on Winnie’s side of the desk with the blue binder open. Gideon had the reservations book, his legal pad and the plasterer’s schedule. The single window was black, and the lamp made a circle on the blotter that both their hands kept crossing.

“Rooms first,” she said. “Go.”

“The fourteen in the main house are a hundred and ninety-five a night for a lake view, all year, and they have been since 2019. That’s too low from June to October and about right now. I want two seasons. They stay at one ninety-five until the middle of May. From Memorial Day they go to two sixty-five for the lake side and two twenty-five for the garden side, with breakfast.”

“Will people pay two sixty-five?”

“There’s a motel in Shelburne that charges two forty in July for a view of a car park. Yes.” He turned the pad toward her. “The north wing rooms will be the freshest in the house, so they go on at the same rate. At sixty percent occupancy through the season that’s the first profitable summer this building’s had in a decade. But that depends on getting sixty percent, and I can’t promise it.”

“You can’t. The kitchen can get you some of the way.” She put her finger on a page. “Now mine. The window does ninety-six thousand on two mornings a week. I want five, Wednesday to Sunday, from the middle of June.”

“You told me you had one oven and nobody else who can laminate.”

“I told you what stops me. I didn’t say it couldn’t be got round.” She was speaking quickly now, as she did when she had already done the thinking. “The weekday mornings won’t be Saturdays. I’d plan on seven hundred dollars, not eighteen hundred. They’d still be mornings the kitchen is already lit and I’m already here. I’ll need the second oven and the sheeter. I’ll also need one trained baker, a real one, at twenty-four dollars an hour. Arlo won’t be good enough for another year.”

“Forty-one thousand for the equipment.”

“And a little more for the electrical. It pays for itself by September if I add the wholesale.”

“Tell me the wholesale.”

“There are two cafés and a grocer in Burlington who’ve asked me, every year, for croissants and kouign-amann. I’ve always said no because I’d nothing left to sell them. I’d start with forty dozen a week, at a price that keeps my cost at thirty percent. Somebody has to drive it up there by seven.”

“Forty minutes each way.” He was writing. “Can the van that fetches the linen do it?”

She stopped. “The linen comes from Burlington.”

“Tuesdays and Fridays. It drives up there empty.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I read the contract on Thursday. It’s the dullest thing I’ve ever read, and I’ve read bank covenants.” He kept his eyes on the pad, because she had nearly laughed. “That’s two delivery days at no cost. What else?”

“Flour. If I’m buying thirty bags a week in season, the mill in Quebec will sell me the pallet price. That takes twenty-six dollars a bag down to twenty-two. I asked them in March.”

“You asked them in March, before we’d bought you.”

“I ask them every March. Every year I haven’t had the volume.” She turned to her last tab. “And weddings. Winnie turned away six last year because she couldn’t sleep the families. With twenty-two rooms she can. A wedding takes the whole house for two nights and the lawn for one. I’ve costed the food at a hundred and sixty-five a head and I can do a hundred and twenty people out of that kitchen, with two extra hands. One of them is worth three ordinary weekends.”

“How many could you take in a season?”

“Ten or twelve. I wouldn’t do more. The regulars need somewhere to sleep in July.”

“Has anybody asked for this year?”

“One has. Haskell, for the twenty-sixth of June. Winnie’s been holding them off since February because of the roof.”

He put the pen down. “That’s the day of the board meeting.”

“I know what day it is.”

“I’d have eight directors in the dining room at eleven, and a bride on the lawn in the afternoon.”

“Then your directors can see what the place is for,” Camille said. “Or I can tell Winnie to turn her away. You tell me which goes in the true numbers.”

He considered it. The thought of Desmond and the board walking past a hundred and twenty chairs on the grass was either the best idea he had heard all month or the worst.

“Tell Winnie to book her,” he said.

Camille wrote it down. He noticed that her writing was the same as on the paper in his wallet.

They worked through it line by line. She caught him twice. Once he had counted breakfast as free, and once he had left the high-school girl’s wages out of the weekday mornings. He caught her once, on the price of copper pans. Each time the other one said “Yes” and changed the figure, and they went on. By midnight there was one page between them, in two hands, with a total at the bottom that neither of them quite believed.

“It’s too good,” she said.

“It is. We take ten percent off every line and see if it still stands.”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen.”

She bent over the page to do it. A curl had come loose from the bandana and lay against her cheek. There was a smear of something dark at the corner of her lower lip, chocolate from the night’s dessert. She was saying the numbers under her breath as she wrote them.

He had been careful all evening, and all week. He had watched her hands and her pen and the binder. For perhaps three seconds now he stopped being careful. He looked at her mouth, and he remembered exactly what it had tasted like on a July night with gunpowder in the air.

She looked up, and she saw where he was looking. He watched her understand it. Colour came up from the neck of the grey T-shirt into her face. Her lips parted and then closed. For a moment neither of them moved, and the old clock on Winnie’s filing cabinet ticked loudly.

Then she capped her pen.

“That’s enough for tonight,” she said. Her voice was almost steady. She closed the binder and stood, and took her jacket off the back of the chair. “The fifteen percent will keep. I start at five.”

“Camille.”

“Chef,” she said, but she said it to the door, and without much force. “Good night, Mr. Hallett. Turn the lamp off.”

He heard her go down the back corridor and out across the kitchen porch. He sat alone with one page of numbers in two handwritings.

He put the lamp out. Through the window he could see the cottage, and a light that came on in it and went off again very quickly.
***