Annie laughed again, mostly because Kevin seemed to have taken on Earl’s gift of over-gab. “And John has a twelve-hour shift ahead of him. Well, I hope you had your fill of beer because I don’t have any. And how does frozen pizza sound?”

“Terrible. But I hate to keep mooching off Earl and Claire, so, no offense, but pizza’s better than nothing.” Kevin had been sleeping on the sofa in the elder Lyons’s house since he and Earl had purchased the former Littlefield place. With Kevin’s background in construction and Earl’s jack-of-all-trades talents, they’d been rehabbing and reconfiguring it into the Inn one hammer, one nail at a time. Their crew was competent, but small; many tradespeople didn’t stay on the island off season, mostly due to a lack of housing that they could afford. So far, the only habitable place on the grounds of The Vineyard Inn was Annie’s cottage. The workshop with her soap-making studio was close enough to being finished that she could use it, but Kevin’s upstairs apartment hadn’t yet been started.

Right then, however, all they could do was have dinner. So Annie got up from the chair, and he followed her inside.

* * *

“Okay,” Annie asked as she preheated the oven, “what will we do with Mother?”

Kevin plunked down in the rocker. “I’ll pick her up Saturday. She’s coming in on the noon boat.” He no longer called the big boat the “ferry,” a sure sign that he was settled there.

“After that? Like, where’s she going to sleep?”

“I have no clue,” he replied. “You?”

“I guess she won’t want to wrap up in a sleeping bag and sit in front of a campfire drinking beer.”

“Not unless retirement has dramatically changed her lifestyle. We could always play it safe and book her at the Kelley House.”

“No,” Annie said. “She’s our mother. We can’t stuff her in a hotel like she’s a visitor from out of town. Besides, if I ever want to get to know her better, it’s only going to happen if we spend time together. Face-to-face.” She took the pizza from the freezer.

Kevin looked around the room. “We can always shove your furniture against the wall and blow up an air bed for her.”

Given the compact seven-hundred-square-feet of total space that Annie had wanted for the cottage, she knew that her queen-size air bed would be a tight fit. “How far along are the bedrooms?”

“We’re Sheetrocking now.”

“Is one close to being finished?”

“Maybe the one at the top of the stairs. The bathroom’s ready because we‘ve been using it as a template for the others. So the workers can see what goes where.”

“Can you get that room done by the end of the week?”

“I’ll have to ask Earl. He’s in charge of the schedule. . . .”