Mere's Reckoning

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 24: Mere's Reckoning

The catalog arrived on a Thursday in December, in a flat-rate Priority Mail envelope, the envelope carried across the channel on the morning ferry in the canvas sack with the rest of the mail, the catalog traveling the last 1.4 miles of its journey the way all things traveled the last 1.4 miles — on the Constance, on the water, across the channel — and the catalog was from a company called Island Retail Solutions, based in Portland, a company that specialized in helping small rural stores adapt to changing markets, and the company's existence was itself an adaptation, a business that had been formed in response to the same forces that were changing the stores it served, the forces of access and tourism and the bridge-connected future.

Mere had not requested the catalog. The catalog had arrived the way catalogs arrive — unsolicited, uninvited, triggered by some algorithm or some mailing list or some demographic profile that identified Dunmore General Store as a potential customer, a store in transition, a store that would soon face the changes that the bridge would bring — and Mere had opened it and looked at it and set it on the counter and looked at it again.

The catalog showed what her store could become. The pages displayed merchandise that her store did not carry: artisanal jams, locally roasted coffee in branded bags, handmade soaps, scented candles, greeting cards with watercolor paintings of lighthouses, tea towels printed with nautical motifs, refrigerator magnets shaped like lobsters, oven mitts with anchor patterns. The merchandise was not food or hardware or the supplies of daily life but was the merchandise of visiting, the goods that visitors buy, the souvenirs and the gifts and the decorative objects that say: I was here, I went to this place, I brought something back from this place, and the something-brought-back is the evidence of the visit, the visit's artifact.

She looked at the catalog the way she looked at the tide — with the understanding that the thing she was observing was coming whether she approved of it or not, the understanding that her approval was not required, that the force was the force and the force would arrive and the arrival would change the shore.

She did not order from the catalog. Not yet. Not because she objected to the merchandise — the merchandise was not offensive, was not wrong, was not a betrayal of the store's identity — but because the ordering would be the acknowledgment, the first concrete act of preparation for the bridge, the first step toward the store that the bridge would require, and the first step was the hardest because the first step was the step away from the store that was, the store that had been, the store that Mere had built over thirty years, shelf by shelf, item by item, the store that reflected the island's needs and that would need to reflect different needs, and the reflection's change was the reckoning.

She set the catalog on the shelf behind the counter, beside the phone book and the tide table and the folder of invoices from her suppliers — the bread company, the dairy, the hardware distributor, the beer distributor, the companies that had supplied the store for years and that would continue to supply it but whose deliveries would change when the bridge opened, the deliveries no longer constrained by the ferry schedule but freed from it, the freedom meaning more frequent deliveries, smaller quantities, fresher stock, the logistics of a bridge-connected store different from the logistics of a ferry-dependent store, the difference not dramatic but structural, the way the channel's difference between flood and ebb is not dramatic but structural, the same water but different conditions.

The store at six in the evening, after closing, was the store at its most itself. The customers gone, the register closed, the day's receipts counted and recorded in the notebook that served as the store's bookkeeping system — not a computer, not a spreadsheet, but a notebook, a handwritten record of the day's income and expenses, the notebook the same kind of notebook that Harlan used for his crossing log and Carl used for his catch records, the same spiral-bound, college-ruled, $2.99 notebook from her own shelves, the store supplying its own record-keeping materials, the self-sufficiency complete.

Mere sat on the stool behind the counter. The stool was wooden, three-legged, the seat worn smooth by thirty years of Mere sitting on it during the slow hours, the hours between the morning rush and the afternoon rush, the hours when the store was quiet and the bell did not ring and the only sound was the hum of the cooler and the occasional creak of the building settling into its foundation, the settling a slow process, the building adjusting to the earth the way the earth adjusted to the building, each one accommodating the other.

She looked at the shelves.

The shelves held the inventory she knew. The inventory she had chosen, item by item, over thirty years. The canned goods in their rows, Campbell's and Progresso and the store brand, the brands she stocked because the island's people bought them, the buying the choosing, the choosing the identity. The bread shelf, empty now at six — the bread sold by noon most days, the sixteen loaves insufficient for the demand by late morning, the insufficiency a measure of the bread's centrality, the bread the first thing bought and the first thing consumed and the first thing missed when it was gone. The hardware aisle — nails and screws and bolts in their bins, the bins plastic, labeled in Mere's handwriting, the labeling a system that worked because the system was Mere's and Mere was the system and the system did not need to be more sophisticated than the woman who operated it.

The shelves would change. The inventory would change. The bridge would bring customers who did not need Campbell's soup and ten-penny nails. The bridge would bring customers who wanted the artisanal jams and the locally roasted coffee and the tea towels with the nautical motifs. The bridge would bring the visitors, the day-trippers, the people who would drive across in ten minutes and park at the store and come inside and look at the shelves and expect to find not the island's necessities but the island's image, not what the island used but what the island represented, and the representation was different from the use the way a photograph is different from the thing photographed, the photograph capturing the surface and the use knowing the depth.

Mere knew the depth. She had lived in the depth for thirty years. She had stocked the depth — the specific brands, the specific quantities, the specific arrangement that reflected not what the island looked like but what the island needed, and the needing was the truth, was the reality beneath the image, and the bridge would privilege the image over the reality, would bring customers who wanted the image and did not know the reality, and the not-knowing was not their fault but was their condition, the condition of visitors, of people who come to a place from outside and who see the outside of the place and not the inside, and the outside is not false but is not complete, and the incompleteness is the gap, and the gap is what Mere would need to fill — fill with the artisanal jams and the tea towels and the souvenirs, fill with the merchandise of visiting, the merchandise that the catalog offered and that Mere had not ordered but that Mere knew she would eventually order, because the eventually was the bridge, and the bridge was coming.

She swept the floor. The sweeping was the same sweeping, the same broom, the same arc, the same starting corner, the same finishing door. The sweeping had not changed in thirty years and would not change with the bridge, because the sweeping was the floor's requirement and the floor did not care who walked on it, did not care whether the footprints were a lobsterman's boots or a tourist's sneakers, the floor accepting all feet equally, the floor democratic in its surface, and the sweeping was the floor's maintenance, the daily care that the daily use required, and the care would continue because the floor would continue.

But the floor that served four hundred people was not the floor that would serve the tourists and the commuters and the mainlanders who would drive across. The floor might need to be replaced. The floor might need to be refinished. The floor might need to become a floor that looked like a floor rather than a floor that was a floor, the distinction between appearance and function the bridge's distinction, the bridge's gift to the store — the gift of needing to look like what it was in addition to being what it was.

Mere swept. The bristles moved the day's dirt from the center to the edges and from the edges to the door and from the door to the porch, the dirt joining the larger dirt of the outdoors, the outdoor dirt that was the island's dirt, the sand and the salt and the dried mud and the pine needles and the decomposed granite that constituted the island's surface material, the material that the feet carried into the store and that the broom carried out.

She thought about expansion. The store had room — the back section, the section beyond the retail floor, the section that was currently storage and that could be converted to additional retail space, the conversion requiring walls to be moved and shelves to be added and the storage relocated to the basement or to the shed behind the building. The expansion would cost money. The money would come from the increased revenue that the bridge would bring. The increased revenue would come from the increased customers. The increased customers would come from the bridge. The bridge was the source, the origin, the cause, and the cause produced the effect and the effect was the expansion and the expansion was the store's adaptation, the store's version of Carl's trap-moving, the store's version of Harlan's course-correction around the construction zone, the adaptation that the bridge required of everyone it touched.

She had been practical all her life. Practicality was her gift, her talent, the thing she brought to every situation, the assessment of what was and the determination of what must be done about what was, the gap between the assessment and the determination small, the gap crossed quickly, the crossing not tortured or deliberated but executed, the execution the practicality, the doing of the thing that must be done.

The bridge required practicality. The bridge required the assessment of the new conditions and the determination of the response and the execution of the response, and Mere was capable of all three, was equipped by thirty years of running a store on an island to assess and determine and execute, because running a store on an island was itself a continuous exercise in practicality, a continuous response to conditions — the weather that delayed the bread delivery, the winter storm that reduced the customer count, the summer influx that exhausted the inventory, the supplier that raised prices, the cooler that broke, the roof that leaked — each condition a problem, each problem a response, each response a practicality, and the practicalities accumulated into a competence, and the competence was Mere's, was the thing she carried the way Harlan carried the channel's knowledge, in the body, in the hands, in the thirty years.

But the practicality was not the whole of the reckoning. The whole of the reckoning included the feeling, the feeling that the practicality did not address, the feeling that sat beneath the assessment and the determination and the execution, the feeling that was not practical but was real, and the real was the harder thing, the thing that the broom could not sweep and the catalog could not answer and the expansion could not accommodate.

The feeling was this: the store that survived would survive as a different store.

She had said this on the porch, in October, to the porch regulars, said it in her way, which was the way of a statement offered without emotional weight, without the tremor in the voice that signals feeling, offered flat and level and factual, the way she offered everything, because Mere did not display her feelings, did not perform them, did not offer them for public consumption, but held them, kept them, maintained them the way she maintained the store — privately, daily, in the back room, in the space behind the counter where the public did not go.

The store survives. But it survives as a different store.

The different store. She could see it. She could see the artisanal jams on the shelf where the Campbell's soup was. She could see the locally roasted coffee where the Folgers was. She could see the tea towels where the work gloves were. She could see the tourists where the lobstermen were, the day-trippers where the year-round people were, the visitors where the residents were. She could see the different store the way a person sees a room after the furniture has been rearranged — the same room, the same walls, the same floor, but different, oriented differently, serving a different function, and the function was the identity and the identity was the store.

The store's identity was the island's identity. This was the connection, the link, the thing that made the store's change a mirror of the island's change. When the store stocked artisanal jams instead of Campbell's soup, the change was not just a change in inventory but a change in constituency, a change in who the store served, and who the store served was who the island was, and who the island was was changing, was being changed by the bridge, the bridge bringing new who and the new who bringing new needs and the new needs changing the store and the store changing the island and the island changing the store, the cycle complete, the cycle continuous, the cycle the bridge's engine, the engine of change that the bridge powered and that could not be stopped because the bridge could not be unbuilt.

Mere sat on the stool in the quiet store and looked at the shelves and the shelves looked back.

The shelves did not judge. The shelves held what they were given — Campbell's or artisanal, Folgers or locally roasted, work gloves or tea towels — the shelves indifferent to their contents, the shelves performing their function regardless of what the function required them to hold. The shelves were the store's skeleton, the store's infrastructure, the permanent structure that the changing inventory rested on, and the permanence was a comfort, the only comfort, the knowledge that the shelves would remain even if the things on them changed.

She would order from the catalog. She would order in January, after the holidays, after the new year, after the turning of the calendar that would begin the countdown to March, to the bridge's opening, to the ferry's ending, to the store's transformation. She would order a small quantity — a case of jam, a dozen bags of coffee, a selection of the tea towels — and she would put them on a shelf, one shelf, one small section of the store, and she would see how they sold, and the seeing would be the data, and the data would tell her how much more to order, and the ordering would be the expansion, and the expansion would be the adaptation.

She was practical. She was always practical. The practicality was the armor and the tool and the method and the identity. But beneath the practicality, in the space behind the counter where the public did not go, in the back room of the reckoning, Mere felt the thing she did not display.

She felt the loss.

Not the loss of the ferry — that was Harlan's loss, Harlan's crossing, Harlan's ending. Not the loss of the traps — that was Carl's loss, Carl's ground, Carl's eleven percent. This was her loss, her own, the loss of the store that was, the store that had been hers for thirty years, the store that she had built and stocked and swept and maintained and known, known the way Harlan knew the channel, by daily presence, by accumulated attention, by the body's education in the specific needs of a specific community.

The specific community was changing. The specific needs were changing. The store that met the specific needs of the specific community was changing. And the changing was the loss, was Mere's loss, was the loss of the thing she had made, the thing she had been.

She locked the door. She turned off the lights. She stood on the porch in the December dark and looked at the harbor and the water and the mainland lights across the channel and the bridge lights to the north, the construction lights that had become part of the island's nightscape, the lights as constant as the stars and brighter, the lights the bridge's presence in the island's darkness, the presence that would not go away, that would only grow brighter as the bridge neared completion, brighter and brighter until the bridge itself was lit, until the bridge carried its own lights — lane lights, tower lights, the illumination that the structure required — and the lights would be permanent, would be always-on, would replace the darkness that the ferry had respected, the darkness that the ferry had crossed without eliminating.

She walked home. Carl was in the kitchen. Carl was eating soup — Campbell's, cream of mushroom, the brand and the variety that Carl had eaten for thirty years, the eating a habit so deep it was no longer a preference but a physical need, the body expecting the soup the way the body expected the air, by entitlement, by the right of long association.

She sat across from him. She did not eat. She watched him eat. She watched his hands — the cracked hands, the lobsterman's hands — holding the spoon, the spoon moving from the bowl to his mouth, the motion automatic, the eating not a pleasure but a fueling, the body refueled for tomorrow's hauling, the fuel Campbell's cream of mushroom, the fuel available at Mere's store, on the shelf, in its place, where it had always been.

She would keep the Campbell's. She would keep it on the shelf. She would keep it beside the artisanal jams, the Campbell's and the jams coexisting the way the year-round and the summer people coexisted, the way the ferry and the bridge coexisted for these last months, the coexistence not comfortable but necessary, the necessity the condition, the condition the island's.

She would keep the Campbell's because Carl ate the Campbell's and Carl was the island and the island was the store and the store was Mere and Mere would not betray the store's identity entirely, would not surrender the shelves entirely to the visitors' merchandise, would not let the tea towels displace the work gloves completely, would hold a space, a section, a shelf for the things that the island's people needed, the real things, the Campbell's and the nails and the Folgers and the bread, the bread that arrived on the ferry every morning and that would arrive on a truck every morning after the ferry ended, the bread the same bread, the loaves the same loaves, the shelving the same shelving, white on the left, wheat next, rye next, sourdough on the right.

The bread would not change. The bread was the constant. The bread was the thing that the bridge could not alter, could not make artisanal, could not turn into a souvenir, because the bread was not an image but a need, not a representation but a reality, and the reality was the island's hunger, and the island would be hungry after the bridge the way it was hungry before the bridge, and Mere would feed it, would stock the bread, would shelve it in the morning, would sell it by noon.

The store survives. It survives as a different store. But within the different store, on a shelf, in its place, the Campbell's cream of mushroom and the bread, white on the left, the things that do not change, the things that the bridge cannot change, the things that are the island's hunger and the island's identity and the island's need.

Mere's reckoning was complete. The reckoning was this: she would adapt and she would preserve. She would add the jams and keep the Campbell's. She would expand and she would maintain. She would serve the new customers and she would serve the old. She would be practical and she would feel the loss. She would sweep the floor and the floor would be the same floor, and the sweeping would be the same sweeping, and the sameness would be the anchor, the thing that held the store to its identity while the bridge tried to pull it loose.

The anchor held. The store held. Mere held.

The December dark held the island and the store and the woman inside it, and the holding was the night's work, the dark's work, the same work the dark had always done, holding the island until the morning, holding the store until the bell rang, holding the woman until the bread arrived.