Osprey Island

From my canoe on the Connecticut River I have often watched the male enter the eyrie with his catch. After he eats the head, his matetakes the remainder from him and feeds the young the choice center part, bit by bit, saving the tail for herself.But in Florida, Fred Truslow, who photographed ospreys so beautifully for this article, saw a male depart from etiquette.“He brought back a pound-and-a-half weakfish and sat there nibbling,” Fred said. “When he ate beyond the head, the female cluckedimpatiently. When he reached the halfway mark on the body, she grewstrident. And when he ate the tail section, she flew off with an angryscream. A few moments later she was back with a fish of her own.This she divided—center part for the youngsters, head and tail forherself.”

—ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”

SUZY’S FIRST OFFICIAL ACT as head housekeeper was to clean the Squires’ cottage. Lance would be coming back from Merle’s, and word from Merle was he wanted his son with him, which worried everyone, since Lance had never particularly wanted Squee around when Lorna was alive. Still, they tried to understand. Squee was all Lance had left of his wife. It made sense he’d want to cling to him. Wouldn’t you? they murmured, pausing to chat in the aisles of the IGA, at the bar, as they shuffled out of the Episcopal Church.

Suzy gathered the housekeeping girls that morning. “Let’s just get in there and do it. A whole crew of us, it shouldn’t take that long.”

She was wrong. It took six of them all day. “Remember,” Suzy kept saying as they uncovered another den of mouse corpses—trapped on sticky-tape, bloody and desiccated—inside a kitchen drawer, “the rest of your work this summer is going to feel like a piece of cake after this.” By afternoon the girls were rolling their eyes, and Suzy shut up about it. When she and Brigid started going through the bedroom, collecting Lorna’s things, folding her clothes into discarded produce-packing boxes from the IGA, they were on their last legs.

“How well did you know her, then?” Brigid asked, standing at the closet door, surveying the contents, unsure where and how to delve in.

“In high school, I guess I knew her pretty well . . . better than I wound up knowing her, I guess.” Suzy sighed heavily. “It was hard, with Lance . . . she just kind of cut off other people.”

Brigid reached for an empty box. “He couldn’t be so altogether dreadful as everyone imagines, could he?” She sat down in the open mouth of the closet and dug in. They had designated a “Lance” mound on the bed, to be dealt with later, and Brigid began riffling through the closet, sorting “Lance” and “Lorna,” bed or box.

“Yeah, he probably is . . .” Suzy chuckled bitterly a moment, then sobered up. “No,” she revised herself, “he’s probably not . . .”

“Do you know him well, then?”

Suzy let out another spurt of hard laughter. She didn’t think very far ahead when she said, “Well, I knew him.”

Brigid turned around to see Suzy’s face, and grinned. “Oh, did you . . . ?”

“It’s a really small island,” Suzy said. “You grow up here and it can get a little incestuous.”

“So, you and Mr. Squire . . . you were a couple, then?”

“Me and Lance? Oh, god no.” Suzy tried to laugh, but her discomfort was growing.

Brigid stopped what she was doing. “But you . . . ?” she prompted.

Suzy shook her head regretfully, swallowing hard. She was an idiot to have said anything. “Unfortunately,” Suzy managed to get out, “very unfortunately, yes.”

Brigid let her jaw drop as she attempted to picture the scene of it. She wasn’t just going to let the subject go.

Suzy reached for the packing tape. “It was such a huge mess . . .” She had to dig herself back out of this somehow. “I mean, Lance and Lorna, they’d been together for a couple years at that point. And not that Lance didn’t fuck . . . Not that Lance didn’t mess around, back then at least . . .”

Brigid was about to speak, but then didn’t.