Chesapeake Tide by Jeanette Baker Page A

She could have added that before he was twelve he could maneuver a trawler in seas that would make a lesser man lose his lunch, and by sixteen he could find the best netting spots on the bay without using a loran. Before he was eighteen years old he could out-harvest and out-shuck every fisherman on the water.
    But she said none of those things. Her interest would be too obvious and there would be questions she didn’t care to answer. But the memories were strong and private and deeply personal. Russ Hennessey was as close to a legend on the water as an ordinary mortal could be. He’d handcrafted his own fishing lines and fought his first shad at six years old. He’d worked as a deckhand on his daddy’s trawlers, pulling up bucket after bucket of soft-shelled crabs, glistening wet and cobalt-blue as they squirmed on the dock in the shimmering heat of summer afternoons. And somewhere, after his first shad and before his first beer, not too long before, he’d tasted the softness of Libby Delacourte’s mouth. And later, much later, in a sweltering vortex of heat and need and pubescent longing, he’d stepped across the line separating childhood from adolescence and pulled her along with him, leaving the former behind forever.
    Russ Hennessey had loved her. It was as simple as that. He’d loved her from the time she was seven years old, and she’d repaid his devotion by leaving town with Eric Richards, without so much as a word of explanation or even a goodbye. She’d carried the guilt of her behavior around for years, imagining a dozen different scenarios by which she could absolve herself. It appeared that her time was nearly at hand.
    â€œI never did like that girl he married,” Nola Ruth said, stringing out the words with her Louisiana drawl. “You remember her, Libba. She was a schoolmate of yours, the Wentworth girl.” She appealed to her husband. “What was her first name, Cole?”
    â€œTracy.”
    â€œThat’s it. Cheap thing.” Nola Ruth fanned herself. “They had a child, a daughter, but Cora Hennessey had her doubts.”
    Libby drained the last of her lemonade. “About what?”
    â€œNever mind,” answered her mother. She nodded at Chloe. “Little pitchers—”
    Chloe rolled her eyes and stared at the bay.
    Her grandfather laughed. “What she means is Russ and his wife tried for years to have a child. When they finally gave up, Tracy announced she was pregnant.”
    â€œIt happens that way sometimes,” said Libby.
    Nola Ruth stared at her husband over her daughter’s head. Their eyes met and he shook his head slowly. Only Chloe noticed and wondered at the unspoken message that passed between them.

Five
    V erna Lee Fontaine hummed as she wiped down the counters of her health food/coffee shop. The herbs she’d hung from the ceiling in the back room were dried and ready to grind, and she’d decided to keep them in containers beneath the glass counter where people could see them. Occasionally, she would break into song, her rich, throaty alto filling the empty spaces in the room and rattling the prisms dangling from the tree branch that served as a jewelry stand.
    Her grandmother hobbled in from Verna’s house in the back and lingered in the doorway, smiling at the picture the younger woman made. She was tall and lush, with full breasts, narrow hips and long, lovely legs that just now were exposed through the slit of the calf-length, flowered skirt she’d knotted around her waist. She had golden eyes, a small pert nose and a thick mass of tawny ringlets twisted on top of her head and secured with a chopstick. Only the caramel color of her skin and the fullness of her lips revealed her African heritage. Verna Lee was approaching forty-two, but no one looking at that vivid, expressive face would have marked her as a day over twenty-five.
    Drusilla sighed. Watching Verna Lee flit effortlessly