Page 74 of Penny for Your Saints

We find the rodent-chewed charging cable and stuff it into a canvas tote bag Loulu found in one of the other banker’s boxes along with the laptop—scurrying from the scene as quickly as possible.

A few towns over, we make a stop at an outdoor strip mall that will serve our needs.

We divide and conquer; myself and Louise sent on a mission to the dollar store for affordable non-perishable food along with some basic toiletries and supplies for a brief stay at the Penny’s lost cottage. Frank stays with the car, chain-smoking cigarettes in the front passenger seat while Caz runs into the ServoCity to pick up a working charger for the laptop along with a few new burner phones and prepaid sim cards while Quentin hits the outdoors store.

Louise and I return with a bounty of seventy-nine cent boxes of mac and cheese, unpopular flavors of recent seasonal pop tarts, three five gallon plastic containers of spring water with little plastic spigots on the side, and a few canisters of powdered sports drink mix as Caz hustles back to the car with his charger and phones.

Tin-tin, back to his right mind after the heat and once again in full command of his superhuman charisma, sweet talks the girl at the Western Cliff Athletics into a free hydro flask covered in store branding and a twenty percent discount for his purchase; a rigid inflatable boat that can seat the five of us, a portable air pump, five plastic paddles, five black vest-style personal flotation devices, three bottles of white gas, an ultra light camping stove made for backpacking, two LED head lamps and a stack of “just add water” meal packets.

We stop for dinner just west of the Sagamore bridge and get dinner at a small Greek diner that makes a more than passable moussaka before making our way down toward Windy Neck.

It’s been nearly pitch-dark since three thirty in the afternoon, so we don’t have to worry about the cover of darkness, the new moon and a windless night conspiring to give us optimal crossing conditions.

“Your parents must have been pretty loaded to afford some private island shit,” Caz blurts out nervously as we inflate the boat at the grassy edge of a sand dune—Frank and Q’s headlamps diffused by gas station napkins and a bit of cello tape casting around dimly in the darkness and salt air.

Louise doesn’t say anything to this at first, but as she helps to steady the bow of the boat—slowly inflating under Frank and Quentin’s shared efforts with the pump, the words eventually seem to find her.

“I didn’t really think about my parents as being rich when I was a kid,” she admits, a hint of embarrassment tinging her usually proud voice. “I never really knew anything else. Went to good schools, met other kids with similar families.” She shrugs timidly. “It wasn’t until I went away to college that I started to see just how small of a slice of the world I was seeing,” Louise confesses earnestly. “I guess that’s what privilege is though, right? Not even knowing that you just don’t know.” Her voicegoes quiet and I think about my own childhood in and out of bloc apartment buildings like concrete jungles in the south of France, my Jiddu’s home in the Mellah.

I was too young to know enough to point out on a map—the dirty drug dens my Baabaa dragged me to and from across the eastern seaboard of the US. I can’t imagine it looked anything like the life of the pampered Penny princess.

I do my best to ignore the flare of resentment that rises in me. Being poor never made my mother bitter, even if it drove my father to the most toxic depths of depravity—chasing paper until it put him in the grave, a penniless criminal.

Obviously, Louise’s life hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. I feel a stab of guilt as I accept my own role in her most recent trauma and turn my focus back to our imminent crossing.

The paddling is harder than I expect, despite how relatively calm the dark waters appear as we push off from the beach. This section of the rocky shore is virtually uninhabited this time of year—all the seasonal houses in the area shuttered for winter, the locals tucked away inside their warm homes—far from the edge of the sea.

We make landfall on a small strip of sand amidst the rocks and patches of seagrass. The tiny spit of land can’t be called an island—not really. It’s barely one hundred yards across at its widest point—the small stone cottage with its slate roof appearing to sprout from the ground.

The door to the cottage, ironwood with green oxidized bands of metal across the front, boasts two different embedded combination spinner locks.

With an ease that only a lifetime of practice can produce, Loulu spins the tiny clicking wheels this way and that until both locks pop free, and the door opens—a slight musty and close smell emanating from the sea shack.

Before we light the lanterns or un-shroud our headlamps, Louise and Quentin hurry around the small space—affixing a stack of old newspapers we picked up at the diner to the windows with duct tape.

I stand outside the small cabin to confirm that the folded paper blots out the light from within as the others increase the brightness inside—before confirming our stealth and slipping back into the cottage.

In the newly lit space, everything comes into focus.

For a rich family, the vacation home is shockingly humble in its size and furnishings, though its very existence still speaks to a wealth of which I have only ever dreamed.

A beam runs across the center of the ceiling, dripping with ropes, fine plastic nets, buoys and a few moth-eaten life preservers that were once a bright orange, but have been bleached by sun and time; they appear to be for function rather than mere decoration.

The low, exposed ceiling vaulting is stained a dark brown. The same stained wood is built into a maze of shelving on the far wall, with one small window embedded in the center of the shelves; loaded with books, old coffee cans full of colored pencils and markers, a full corningware set, and an oversized brass kettle patinated with age.

On the opposite wall is the old wood stove with its modest hob and small dusty stack of driftwood, and an iron box of matches on the brick safety pad beneath it.

In the space between the wall of shelves and the wood stove is a round wooden table encircled by a set of four wood and canvas folding chairs, and two metal framed daybeds that look out through the large picture window in the ocean-facing wall currently papered over by the Morning Metro Star.

I give the room another once over before the words slip out of my mouth, breaking the silence.

“Where are you supposed to take a piss?”

“Pfft!” Caz can’t contain the laugh that blows a raspberry through his closed lips.

“There’s a composting toilet in a little wooden booth outside,” Louise answers without so much as the hint of a smile, tears already running in silent, salty streams down her face.

A hush falls over the cabin as we set about settling in; Tin-tin helping Loulu to push the day beds together; gathering all the pillows and blankets they can to furnish us with a place to sleep, even if only for the night.

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