In this year-long serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after two decades to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Abe has a paranoid hatred of Richard Moby, the CEO of an off-Island wholesale nursery, Broadway. Convinced that Moby wants to destroy Abe personally, and all Island-based landscaping/nursery businesses generally, Abe is obsessed with “taking down” Moby. A series of increasingly disastrous failures (one of which resulted in his breaking his leg) has done nothing to dissuade him. Mott is Pequot’s long-suffering general manager.

Dear P:

That old childhood chant (is it Gilbert & Sullivan? Mother Goose?) is bashing around in my head: “Whether the weather is cold, or whether the weather is hot, we’ll be together, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.” It’s not a happy thought.

The other day, Ye Olde Weather Gods saw fit to remind us ONCE AGAIN that we are New England In Winter. It started to precipitate again. I say “precipitate” to be precise; I suppose the Eskimos have a word for what fell out of the sky, but we don’t, because we speak English, and for all the bad press the English weather gets, it doesn’t get THIS. It was as if Dreariness had materialized as a bunch of hydrogen and oxygen molecules that were technically H2O, but otherwise unsure of their identity.

So the other day, this stuff was precipitating onto a dirt road that was already iced over from previous visits of the Weather Gods. Everyone at Pequot can plow the road — but now nobody dares do so without Abe’s permission. Earlier in January, Mott did the normal thing when it snows: he attached the snow-plow to the Kabota (that’s a tractor, city-kid) and began to push the snow off the drive. This was around when Abe had first hired Perth, the Australian con artist, to start his “misinformation campaign” against Richard Moby (that’s still going strong but I’ll spare you the details), and Abe was in a worse-than-usual headspace.

When Abe arrived at Pequot, instead of thanking Mott, he snapped at him for using large machinery without his authorization, and rather dramatically forbad Mott, or any of us, from ever doing so again. Abe then proceeded to hardly ever show up at work any more, or even answer his phone, so from then on, the snow fell and those with vehicles just drove over it as well as they could. The road’s a mess now. So when it began precipitating the other day, we were all stuck in the front office. But we’ve actually been stuck in the front office for a month now.

It’s a time-honored tradition on the Vineyard to get laid off for several months each winter. The Pequot staff is used to it — everyone’s re-hired as they’re needed, and the whole crew is back on by mid March. But this year, Abe had convinced himself that if he let anyone go, Moby would hire them (as Island liaison for part of his scheme to overtake the Vineyard, I guess), so he’s kept everyone on the payroll even though there is literally nothing to do. I don’t know how he affords it. We all come in every morning just in case he shows up. He doesn’t. Eventually, we leave. We all pass the time. I’ve improved my chess, and taught Quincas how to play poker (no poker face on that guy). Mott tries every day to get Abe to alter this absurd scenario, but he gets nowhere.

So we were all at work (where there is no work) and this precipitation kept precipitating, and nobody dared try to drive out. But all seemed well because, lo and behold, Mott had a case of beer.

Abe had come in to the office that morning, early, and when the weather stranded us here, he went into his private office in back, to take a nap. When we started on the beer, Mott went in to offer Abe a bottle. He came out a few minutes later, white as a sheet, and shakily asked me to go with him outside, into the weather. “I want a witness that I’m doing this,” he explained, as he poured the entire bottle of the-beer-he’d-intended-for-Abe onto the road, and then hurled the bottle against a tree, smashing it.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“That beer was full of rat poison.”

“How do you know that?” I was shocked.

“Because I put the poison in myself,” he said.

The unflappable Mott said this, did this.

“I’m losing my mind, working for a madman,” he went on. “I really need to take some time off.” He rested his hand on my shoulder. “You’re in charge of everyone’s sanity until I come back.”

He ignored my protestations, just got in his truck and drove off through the slippery slush.

Yikes.

Becca

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Vineyard novelist Nicole Galland’s critically-acclaimed works include Crossed: A Tale of the Fourth Crusade. Visit her Web site, nicolegalland.com.