Second Nature Read Online Free

Dick would have liked what’s happened between you and Roy?” George asked. “Did you ever consider that?”
    Robin hated to hear her grandfather referred to as Old Dick, but she kept her mouth shut. This is what happened when you grew up on an island, people assumed they had a perfect right to pull you over on a service road and give you marital advice. Maybe Robin’s brother had been right; when he and Kay broke up, Stuart moved into Manhattan. He couldn’t pass a single street corner in town without being reminded of a dozen things he’d done or said. It was like living with ghosts: he couldn’t have a cup of coffee at Fred’s Diner in peace without having some phantom settle down on the stool beside him.
    “My grandfather always despised Roy,” Robin announced. In fact, there wasn’t a man in town her grandfather hadn’t loathed. “He refused to come to our wedding.”
    “Old Dick would never have favored a divorce,” George insisted, but he let her go and watched mournfully as she pulled her truck onto the service road, then headed toward the bridge where the willow trees grew. Once she crossed over, no one on the local police force could stop her; she’d be out of their jurisdiction, driving as fast as she pleased.
     
 
Beside the wooden bridge, the thick twisted roots of the old willows coiled through the muddy earth. Anyone who approached the island for the first time at dusk could easily believe that these willows had once been men; they seemed to cry out loud and their thin branches tapped against the hoods of passing cars. No one knew when the trees had been planted, but they were already old when Richard Aaron first came to the island in 1923. They’d frightened off everyone but the bravest fishermen and the cats that someone had once brought across to drown in a burlap bag but that had escaped to breed in the marshes, living wild on bluefish and sparrows.
    There was no bridge back then, and Aaron had to put on black hip boots and wade through the water to the other side, stepping over hermit crabs and moon snails. He’d paid thirteen thousand dollars cash for the island—a good deal even then, one he’d managed because the previous owner believed that warm air rising from marshes caused malaria and scarlet fever. On the north side the first big Queen Annes were built, with stone fireplaces and fish-head shingles; on the south side were workers’ cottages for the stonemasons and carpenters, some of whom stayed on after their work was through. Off to the west, Aaron built his own house, with bricks carted over the bridge, and panels of stained glass that were tied to the masons’ backs with thick rope, then covered with white muslin to protect them from cracking. He kept five acres of black pine and beach grass and Rosa rugosa for himself, most of which was to become Poorman’s Point after his only son squandered everything on a real estate venture in Florida that went wrong because of hurricanes or bad economic times or simple carelessness.
    Old Dick was not dead, as many people on the island assumed, although he was always talked about in the past tense. He was ninety-one years old and had outlived his son and his sisters and brothers and just about everybody else he considered to be worth two cents. The main house had been closed down for more than twenty years, and Old Dick lived above the garage with his housekeeper, Ginny, who was eighty-four. He couldn’t get out of his bed unless he was lifted, and he hadn’t seen sunlight for years, but when Robin went to visit him he was still able to muster the strength to scream at her. She went only once a month, on the last Sunday, making certain always to bring an apple pie. A good apple pie was the one thing Old Dick wouldn’t scream about, and Robin sneaked slices to him, on paper plates, since Ginny didn’t allow him any sugar or salt.
    And that’s what Robin was going to see Stuart about. Trying to get Stuart on the phone was always