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 direct attacks over many months did nothing to dissuade him; however, he recently changed tactics and is now attempting a smear campaign against Moby. Quincas is a Brazilian staffer at Pequot with whom Becca is enamored.

Dear P:

So, how was your Valentine’s Day? I’m trying to think of how to describe the expression on my face as I ask that, but I’m not really coming up with words worthy of the giggly-school-girl-trying-to-play-it-cool-ness I feel. I had a scrumptious time with a perfect gentleman (darnit), and I don’t want to say too much more about it because I will hex it. But don’t be surprised if, in the near future, I talk about Quincas so much that you grow sick of his name. I can imagine you scanning my letters for the letter Q and simply skipping over entire paragraphs in which it appears. I will forgive you.

Meanwhile, not even a lovely Valentine’s dinner can prevent me from noticing the reality that it is February on Martha’s Vineyard. This is a special time of year here: it separates the wheat from the chaff. Anyone who’s here now (from now to April) is really and truly a year-rounder (not like certain people I could mention who claim to be year-rounders but then run off to Florida for a couple of months in the winter). It’s my first February here since high school, and it’s amazing how much hasn’t changed. Or maybe it has – maybe things are much livelier than they used to be, but nearly 20 years in Manhattan have changed my expectations, and so things seem as quiet as they were back in 1985, say. (And even quieter than they were back in the glory years of the Wintertide Coffee House. )

But “quiet” is one of those deceptive words that implies . . . well, quiet is usually coupled with “peace,” isn’t it? But that’s not always accurate here. Because sometimes, the quieter things are on the surface, the more subterranean roiling is going on.

I don’t know of anyone who isn’t falling prey to some kind of subterranean roiling right now. Kids (and their parents) going stir-crazy with cabin fever; Abe obsessing on destroying Richard Moby by spreading the most ridiculous lies about him; recovering alcoholics struggling to stay on the wagon; small-business owners and the self-employed trying not to lose their minds, or their shirts, during the off-season, especially in a recession; wash-ashores wondering if they should wash back off-shore and return to America; Brazilians wondering if they should return to Brazil; friends, families and lovers trying not to get on each other’s nerves when there are so, so, so few distractions.

It’s a conundrum of life on the Vineyard: in the summer, when life is moving a mile a minute, things don’t actually get all that complicated, because there is no time for them to get complicated. Along comes winter, we slow down, take a breath, and then quietly wallow in convoluted small-town melodrama for 6 months. In the summer, “issues” spark brightly and flare out, or at least we get easily distracted from one issue by the bright burst of a new one . . . in the winter, our problems with everyone and everything around us become smoldering slow burns. There’s a reduced workload for cops, but an increased workload for mental health workers (That’s actually a wild assumption on my part; I have not made use of the services of either, myself, touch wood.)

So in such a setting, it is oh-so-easy for Uncle Abe to lose any semblance of balance when it comes to Moby. He’s been trying to start a boycott of Broadway Nursery. This might have worked if he’d, y’know, gone around to each of the growers/farmers/nurseries and explained rationally how the whole community would suffer from Broadway’s incursion. But no, Abe had to hire this creepy con artist, Perth, who’s specialty is manufacturing fraudulent “news” on Web sites that look real; now Abe is circulating print-outs of this “news,” trying to scare people into believing Moby is evil. (Most recent example: he set that fire in Australia in order to profit from re-greening the devastated area.)

Moby might, in fact, be a little evil, but he’s not evil because of the garbage Abe is disseminating. There’s also the possibility that he might not be evil; he might just represent something-Abe-doesn’t-approve-of, which is not actually the same as evil. For a self-described libertarian, Abe’s having a hard time grasping that concept.

I am so proud of myself, I wrote this whole letter and only mentioned Quincas once. You have no idea what an act of willpower that was! Hee hee.

Becca

Be part of the Your Name Here campaign: any person or business donating $250 or more to Martha’s Vineyard Community Services can get a mention in Moby Rich. For more information, please contact Sterling Bishop at 508-693-7900.

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