No Regrets

sea was everywhere. Still, it was nice for him to come home from standing against the icy winds on the bridge and riding the troughs and peaks of storm-tossed waves, pleasant to share his evenings with Ruth.
    She tended a big vegetable garden and strawberry patch, and either froze or canned what they didn’t eat during growing season. In a good strawberry year, Ruth sometimes had a stall over in Anacortes where she sold berries to people waiting for a ferry. She was a pretty fair cook and joined Rolf in a drink or two before dinner.
    Theirs was an idyllic life, or so it seemed to those who knew them.
    Northwest islanders are a different breed, content to be far away from city traffic and problems. Their lives revolve around the arrival and departure of the ferries that comeand go each day, bringing in supplies and visitors, taking residents off-island when they have business in Seattle or Bellingham or Vancouver, British Columbia. Lopez Island is almost as close to Canada as it is to the mainland of Washington State, a fairly self-sufficient community caught between two countries. The island certainly proved to be the perfect place for Rolf and Ruth.
    They made friends on Lopez, and Rolf had a large circle of friends among the other pilots in the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association, so the Neslunds had ample opportunity to socialize. The ship pilots were an extremely tight-knit group, as loyal to one another as any military men who have fought wars together. They took care of their own, and Rolf Neslund was definitely one of their own.
    As it turned out, Rolf would work as a pilot for eighteen years after their marriage, but Ruth never felt alone; she had neighbors she could count on. Through the early years of their marriage, it seemed that the couple had made a good match. Rolf was gone quite a bit and Ruth had her friends on the island to have coffee with, or to invite in for supper. She had her garden, of course, and she was always looking for antiques or other items she could refurbish or resell.
    She continued to look around for reasonably priced pieces of real estate. Rolf didn’t care much about real estate investments, but he wasn’t against putting his money to work—as long as Ruth took care of all the paperwork, and saw that payments were made.
    One drawback, perhaps, to living on an isolated island with a small population was that everyone knew your business; there were very few secrets. If married couples had loud arguments, details of the encounters soon spread. When somebody got drunk in a bar or even at home, peopleknew. Actually, there were only two public places to drink on Lopez: the Islander-Lopez or the Galley. They were close together, and lots of rumors passed back and forth.
    Ruth and Rolf had their share of arguments over the years. What they argued about was not initially obvious, although it would become more so as the years passed: It was almost always about Elinor. Oddly, Ruth would always deny that she knew precisely what Rolf’s relationship with Elinor Ekenes had been. She insisted that she and Rolf never really spoke of Elinor, and she was vague and uninterested in talking about the situation. But everyone knew that Ruth frowned whenever she heard Elinor’s name. It was apparent to close observers that she knew more than she would say about Rolf and Elinor. Indeed, she remained terribly jealous of Elinor, and believed that Rolf was still carrying on with her—even after she and Rolf had been married for two decades.
    Over the years, Ruth had deftly rearranged the truth to her own satisfaction. She maintained that Rolf had never spoken to her of any affair with his late wife’s sister, and he certainly never told her that Rolf and Erik Ekenes were his sons. She said she had never asked him about the boys directly.
    She insisted that she knew very little about the boys: They lived in Vancouver, British Columbia—a whole other country, albeit only a short distance by sea from the San Juan Islands. She was lying, of course, but her friends believed she only fibbed to save face.
    The truth was that Ruth had met Elinor in Vancouver in 1960 or 1961, and of course she actually lived in the same house with Elinor and Rolf. Ruth knew the facts of the whole situation, but she chose to pretend she didn’t.
    This was pretty hard for neighbors to believe since Elinor’s sons sometimes came to Lopez Island to spend part of their vacations at the Neslund home on Alec Bay. Ruth allowed them