Osprey Island

One person Bud had neglected to introduce was both a new and an old face to Osprey Island, but he was standing in the shadow of the deck’s overhang against the stone wall of the basement, hoping that Bud wouldn’t notice him there. Roddy Jacobs would have preferred to hide in that shadow until the sun had set and he could slip away in darkness than be forced to wave jubilantly at the crowd and endure some patronizingly tactful speech about how glad they all were to have Roddy Jacobs back on the island after so long—God, Roddy, what’s it been? Twenty years?—while old-timers and people who knew enough back then whispered to their neighbors about just what had Roddy Jacobs been doing with himself for the last twenty years? And wasn’t it charitable of Bud Chizek to hire him on to work grounds and maintenance at the Lodge with his old high school buddy Lance Squire during the busy summer season ahead? Didn’t even come back in time for the funeral, they said. That boy waited till his father’s body was cold in the ground before he was going to set foot on this island again.

Roderick Jacobs Sr. had passed on toward the end of the winter. Heart attack. Boom. Gone. Wherever in the world Roddy had been keeping himself, he’d apparently been keeping up with obits in the Island Times, waiting for the one death that conditioned his return. A few weeks later he’d shown up on his mother’s doorstep. Eden still lived in the same house, a clapboard box on the scrubby side of the island up by Lovetsky’s Auto. She had offered Roddy the guest room, his old bedroom, but he preferred the cottage out back. If you could even call it that: forty square feet, maybe, more like a small shed. Roddy outfitted it with a bed, a sink, and a woodstove, and split enough firewood to last the next winter and beyond. And when Bud Chizek hired Roddy on at the Lodge, people figured he was back for good.

There were people who said it was a recipe for disaster—after all, Roddy’d left under such a pall of indiscretion. Most Islanders had found it in their hearts after twenty years to pardon him—they blamed his youth, his mother—but some still felt that having Roddy Jacobs back on-island was just asking for trouble.

It was a tremendous relief to Roddy when Bud adjourned the barbecue and sent people dispersing in all directions—the girls scuttling up the hill toward the staff barracks, waiters scraggling up the beach toward Morey’s Dinghy, where they could get started on the drunks they’d work diligently to maintain until Labor Day. Squee and Mia eagerly resumed their Ping-Pong, so excited to be reunited after another school year apart that they couldn’t keep the ball on the table. Roddy watched as Suzy Chizek made her way across the lawn and ducked under the deck to ruffle her daughter’s hair and kiss her forehead. “I’ll be in the room, Miss Mia-Mi,” she said. “Squee, you look after her, OK?”

Squee grinned—he was two years older than Mia and relished the notion of watching over her—and Suzy crossed to give him a fluff and a kiss as well. He stood for it, if not happily then at least with patience. “It’s good to see you, kid,” Suzy told him.

Squee nodded vigorously.

Suzy gave the Ping-Pong table an affectionate smack as she passed, and as she disappeared up the stairs and into the Lodge above them, Roddy breathed another sigh of relief at being granted a little more time to figure out how the hell to say hello to Suzy Chizek for the first time in twenty years.

Two

WHERE THE OSPREY MAKES ITS NEST

The first Europeans on Osprey Island were a British sugar baron andhis family who “purchased” the lovely (and profitably wooded) islandfrom the Manhanset Indians who had, until then, called it home. Thebaron christened the place “Osprey Island,” and dubbed himself thefirst “civilized” settler of the five-mile dollop of dense forest, downymarsh and pebbled beach. The Manhansets were summarily evictedand an exciting era in the entrepreneurial exploitation of OspreyIsland had begun.