Catboat Road

Kate Rounds

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Mrs. Robinson, meet Holden Caulfield—if Holden were a smart, sexy teenage lesbian in love with her mother’s best friend.

For Candace “Ace” Ragsdale, Mrs. Forest is an irresistible force of nature: luscious, tantalizing—and maybe not completely out of reach.

No one in her family is moored to social convention—but they’ve each learned to surf the wave of the unfamiliar and make the most of chaos. From Ace’s womanizing-yet-worshipful brother to her elusive-yet-loving parents, we watch this well-meaning family weave its way into a rich tapestry of townspeople, often to comic effect.

The backdrop is the Massachusetts seaside town of Horton, cut off from the world. On the surface, boats sway on their moorings, while below bubbles a primal brew of salt and sea life—much like the Ragsdales, a decidedly modern family whose humor and goodwill skim breezily above an ocean of smoldering emotions.

Into this infinite chaos careens a rebel grandmother who shows up to help the family save the town windmill, whose mysterious energy whips up the coastal disturbances of a changing world. As this spectacle of public conflict and private anguish unfolds, we’re fully on Ace’s side as she pilots the turbulent waters of love, sex, and traditionally non-traditional small-town values.

Sujets

• Romance contemporaine
• Fiction
• Romance
• Contemporary
• Lesbian
• Contemporary history
• Literature
• LGBTQ+
• Literary

Informations

• Publié par: Bywater Books
• Date de parution: 06 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612942469
• Langue: English

Extrait

For my sister Andrea Rounds.

“What we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.”

—Sancho Panza

From Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
1
From our position on the stairs, Sawyer and I could see Mrs. Forest sitting on a stool in our kitchen, sobbing.
Our mother—Willamena “Bill” Ragsdale—had a dishrag on her shoulder, as if Mrs. Forest might projectile-spit, like a baby, onto her shirt. Bill removed it to dry a wineglass; it squeaked and sang as she wiped the rim. Mrs. Forest watched like she might as well be dead.
“It’s so cliched,” she said.
Mrs. Forest’s husband Lee was cheating on her with some chick in his office.
Mom motioned Mrs. Forest to come to her side of the butcherblock island. Now it was a desert island: our mother alone with Mrs. Forest, her incarcerated breasts and the spoon-curve ass you could cup in your hand while you slow-danced in the living room, the way we’d once seen our parents do after they’d been smoking weed on the couch, making no effort to keep the smoke from drifting up the stairs.
I don’t think I knew it then, or understood, that passion is like a painting that could fall off the wall and still be beautiful.
Bill held Mrs. Forest’s head to her chest. “He’s a good man,” Mrs. Forest sniffled.
“In the beginning, maybe. Now he’s kind of an A-hole.”
“Brett and Levi like him.”
Mom laughed. “Our kids used to like us, too.”
Mom was just trying to make Mrs. Forest feel better. We still liked our parents, mainly because they were hard to piss off, unless we did something unethical, like ghosting or canceling. When it came to smoking pot and body art, they were like, whatever.
Sawyer was eighteen, I was seventeen. We were Irish twins, occasionally the same age, and old enough to make our own decisions.
Mom leaned her elbows on the butcher block and stared up at Mrs. Forest, whose feet clutched the rungs of the barstool, her sequined ballet slippers dangling from her toes.
My mother’s most distinctive trait was her laser focus on the person she was talking to—like no one else existed. Today it was all Mrs. Forest.
There were no kids on the stairs; no husband Rags Ragsdale selling ads for our local paper the Horton Frigate ; no philanderer at the Bowsprit, running his hand up the thigh of his mistress, Ethel, instead of hard at work at Medical Arts.
Bill and Mrs. Forest were drinking red wine, joking about the sun and the yardarm. Were you supposed to wait until the sun was over or under it to start “cocktails”?
It was noon.
Our dog, Crack, hung around the kitchen in hopes of licking up some crumbs. Tracking the conversation with his eyes, he pricked up his ears at key points, occasionally letting out a little squeal. He was a small mixed breed whose defining features were his intelligence and that he was a loser as a guard dog.
“Ace,” Sawyer hissed, passing me the butt of a joint. It was hard to imagine that the ladies couldn’t smell it. We watched a perfumed river of perspiration run into Mrs. Forest’s cleavage.
Reading my mind, Sawyer offered me a Starburst from his pocket. “We could, like, totally touch her ass,” he exhaled.
“I suppose you found out the usual way,” Mom was saying.
“They always want you to know; otherwise why not delete their texts?”
“You’re a lovely woman. You can do better than Lee,” Mom said. “So what are you going to do?”
Mrs. Forest sighed, breasts rising toward her dimpled chin. “And this Ethel? She’s not even an admin; she’s a coworker at Medical Arts.”
Our mother pulled strands of hair away from Mrs. Forest’s eyes, stroking her face with the back of her hand. “Two physical therapists.”
Professional touchers! People who know how to massage and manipulate.
“Shit!” I said.
Luckily, my mother and Mrs. Forest were too buzzed to hear me. They took turns pouring from the bottle, which stood like a little sentinel between them. I knew the wine would be reddening their teeth. Mrs. Forest’s often had a whisper of lipstick, as if de Kooning had started a brushstroke and then thought better of it.
At some point, Mom had laid out a plate of the plainest Carr crackers. Mrs. Forest got up to get another bottle from the rack by the sink, hauled cheddar cheese and bread and butter pickles from a Shaw’s bag. She plucked cracker crumbs from her sweater.
Crack licked them off the floor. He weaved between the stool legs, looking hammered. “When they’re not screwing, they’re probably practicing screwing, like it’s some kind of maneuver,” Mrs. Forest said.
“Which it is.” Our mother sometimes made blanket statements about sex, as if she were an expert.
Maybe she was. She wasn’t my idea of sexy: small, skinny, put-together. When she laughed, she squinted, which made her look vulnerable and blind. She wore glasses as a fashion accessory, adding “dashes” of color with knockoff cell-phone cases dangling from her wrist. Men loved a woman who took care of herself—not one with loose, wild lines, all the perfect imperfections, that make art, art.
“What do you mean by that, exactly?” Mrs. Forest turned her head to the side, the way Crack did when he wanted to understand human words.
“If you’re not in love with someone, maneuvers are everything.”
“Are you trying to make me feel better?”
“Sometimes all you want is good sex.” Bill turned sad suddenly. “Those kind of secret, special things that people do.” She was waiting to be wrapped in Mrs. Forest’s arms; it was her turn.
I could take a lot of things from Bill, but not vague, unnamed desires that hovered like something alive in the room.
• • •
After Mom walked Mrs. Forest to the driveway, Sawyer and I headed for the kitchen. Sawyer sat on Mrs. Forest’s stool, as close to her ass as we could get.
“Sawyer,” Mom said, returning to the kitchen. “I want you to do something with that Christmas tree that’s still in the driveway. We’re the only family on Catboat who still has a tree. It’s January 2nd, for Chrissake . And it could start a fire. It makes us look . . .” She was like a browser, searching. “Haphazard.”
“Spontaneous combustion?” Sawyer draped his long arm over Mom’s slender shoulder, leaned down and breathed, “We love you, Mom.” I was slightly taller than Bill, which gave me a heart-stopping glimpse of her undefended scalp, but Sawyer was the only one in our family who was actually tall. (We often accused our mother of having had sex with any number of available males. Including Dr. Lee Forest, who was a hot bro—which might explain, though not excuse, his fooling around. Sawyer was also the only one with dark hair.)
My hair could be anything: I dyed it, spiked it, streaked it, highlighted it, what Bill called “frosting.”
“Yeah, we love you, Mom,” I said
“When you call me by my given name, I know something’s up.”
“Mom’ is your given name?” I said.
“Candace,” my mother said, using my real name, “You may discover this someday. When you become a mother, your name in that baby’s mouth is so precious and so forever . The name your parents give you or any pet names your friends or partners give you, they don’t mean anything. The M sound for mother is universal in any language, did you know that? Doesn’t matter if it’s Urdu or Russian; it’s all the same. And it breaks your heart, the way your kids eventually will.”
“Wow, buzzkill, Mom . . .” Sawyer pulled the shirt cuffs from his jacket sleeves like a gangster. He often wore incongruous dress shirts.
“No need to be dramatic.” Our mother looked at Sawyer as if she were shocked by her own DNA. His hair shone black. He had summer-sky eyes and pink cheeks; he was adventurous with facial hair. He was thin, but surprisingly buff, considering he did almost no exercising. A T of chest hair ended at his belly button. He was a chick magnet.
“Anyway,” Sawyer said. “for someone who flunked out of high school, that was a brilliant speech.” Our mother had a degree in sociology from NYU.
Mom was an art therapist at Horton High. Sometimes the art was more successful than the therapy. We never made fun of her “clients,” like other kids; bullying was against our principles. We were friends with one of her students, Chippie Holbeck, who was good at things we were not, like sports and driving.
“ Le Forest is a shit,” Sawyer said, eager to get to the dirt. You couldn’t do much to mangle the name Lee , but my brother and I tried.
“We were listening on the stairs,” I said.
“Why bother to hide, if you’re going to tell me everything anyway?”
“You have no boundaries, Mom.” I tossed an empty wine bottle toward the recycling. It hit the rim, rolling toward the refrigerator. “You would have just invited us to get tanked with you and Mrs. Forest.”
“You can call her Susan, you know.”
“You call her Suzie,” Sawyer said. “That’s quite intimate, Willamena.”
The landline rang. No one had a landline anymore. Grandma Gretchen had given us the Felix the Cat wall phone as part of her “cleaning house” process. She was a political activist who spent much of her time on the road.
“Declutter,” she’d said.
No one used old Felix. Mostly we got robocalls and scammers. This time it was Grandma Gretchen.
When Bill hung up, Felix’s tail moved back and forth like a metronome. “Your grandmother was arrested,” Bill told us. “In New Jersey, of all places.”
“What this time?” Sawyer tipped the plate upward, letting the rest of the cheese and pickles fall into his mouth. Crack waited expectantly, but no go. “Pipeline? Pythons?” It would be news if Grandma hadn’t been arrested.
“Turbine. When they spring her, she’s coming up here.”
Our town was in the middle of a battle over a wind turbine. There was a shitload of comments on the Frigate website. Right-wing climate deniers claimed that among the tu