First mate's log:

November 5, 1968

I voted for president for the first time, absentee ballot. (I don't count when I got elected president of the island. I mean President of America.) Four years ago, I was only 20, so I couldn't have voted even if we weren't shipwrecked. It was a tough choice this time, because I liked things about both candidates, but I decided to go with Nixon because I believe in law and order and that's what he's going to fight for. The Professor mentioned some "checkers speech," from when I was just a kid, but if Nixon likes checkers, that makes me like him even more. The Skipper, who voted for Nixon, too, and I will listen to the returns on the radio.

Carol Brady's diary:

November 6, 1968

Well, we'll soon have a new president. I think Johnson did his best and I voted for his vice president, but Humphrey lost to Eisenhower's V.P. These are difficult times and I'll try to give "the new Nixon" the benefit of the doubt, but I don't know if anyone can bring this country together. And I say that from this somewhat idyllic island where our conflicts are relatively small.

We still have our family squabbles, nothing major, and the court hearing and adoption ceremony will be in three weeks. (The kids will take the day off school.) I'm nervous and excited about that, and it feels more immediate than politics, even after a very contentious campaign.

November 11, 1968

Brady's Island doesn't have enough people for us to have our own newspaper, but we get The Blenford Bugle, which publishes twice a week, on Sundays and Thursdays. The Skipper and I pick it up on the ferry and take some to Garst's General Store, while 13-year-old Joey Williams is the paperboy who takes it on foot around to the homes that have subscriptions. (There's not much point in having a bike on this island, outside of the four blocks of paved street.)

The Skipper gets a subscription but I mostly read the funnies. The news is too depressing most of the time. I don't usually read the syndicated columns, but Mary Ann does and today, when I stopped by the diner after the lunch crowd left, she showed me the "Dear Libby" advice column from the Sunday paper, which we brought back on the morning ferry. I was embarrassed by the first letter because it said, "Dear Libby, My boyfriend Ralph says he loves me for my mind. But for my birthday he bought me a bikini. Signed, What Do You Think?" I didn't want to talk about bikinis with Mary Ann.

It turned out she wanted me to read the other letter. That one goes, "Dear Libby, we have a terrible problem in my family. I have three children of my own, and three additional children from a recent marriage. I had no idea three new children could cause so much trouble. Should I continue pretending to love these new children and wait until they wreck my marriage? Or should I get out now? Signed, Harried and Hopeless."

I thought the letter was sad but it wasn't until she pointed it out that I saw the similarities to the Bradys and Martins. "Yeah," I said, "but isn't this column published all across the country? It could be about anybody."

"But what if it is about them? Alice has told me about how the children argue a lot more than they used to, and there was that whole fuss about Jan being allergic to Tiger."

I nodded. "Who do you think wrote the letter? Mr. or Mrs. Brady?"

"Oh, definitely poor Mrs. Brady. She loves her husband but she's always had doubts about the island, and even though she's known the Brady boys for years, it's probably very different living with them and being a stepmother."

I nodded again, but now that I've had time to think about it, it was probably Mr. Brady. It must be really stressful for him to do building plans for a whole island, to get the population up to 500 next summer, and he's got to work from home, with six noisy kids and a barely tamed dog. His life before the rescue was pretty easy in comparison, just designing a few huts and looking after his sons with Alice's help.

Could Alice have written the letter? No, it says "my marriage." I don't think I'll talk to her or the Skipper about it though, just in case Mary Ann and I are wrong.

November 12, 1968

The children and some of my friends on the island were behaving strangely and at first I couldn't understand why. I noticed some funny looks from some of the other women at yesterday afternoon's boating lesson, but I tried to ignore them and concentrate on what the Skipper was saying.

Then after dinner, Mike and I were reading The Blenford Bugle in the living room. It publishes twice a week and we get it delivered by Joey the paperboy, who gets it from the ferry. I don't mind reading a Sunday paper on a Monday evening, because it's just so wonderful to have any kind of newspaper on our island. I let the children look at it after school, although I do worry about the violence in the news, but they're more interested in the sports and funnies of course. I try to hold off until Mike is able to relax in the evening after a hard day of work. (He loves the challenge of his designs for more buildings by next summer, but it is stressful for him at times.)

I was reading in Section B, "Local News," about a wedding of a Blenford acquaintance, Marjorie Mack, who is Mrs. Smith's personal assistant. The story was supposed to continue on page 5 but I couldn't find that page. Mike hadn't seen it but he offered to go over to Garst's and get another paper.

To our surprise, Marcia came in and offered to get it. Since it was dark out, Mike wanted to send Greg with her. (So far, there is no crime on the island, giving Officer Carter little to do but help his two sons with homework and projects, but that's not to say there might not be dangers here, as there were before the rescue.) Greg didn't want to miss his favorite mystery show on the radio, which was on a commercial break at that moment. Marcia said it was a rerun and she'd fill him in.

When the two of them came back from the store, they gave me a fresh copy of the Sunday paper. But I found a big ink spot all over B5! The wedding story was there, but something else was gone, although I couldn't think of what it was at first.

Then later, when all the children were still upstairs but it wasn't yet bedtime, they were mysteriously quiet. Mike thought they were just reading but it seemed odd to me. Alice thought we should grateful for a little peace.

Today, while Mike was on the current building site rather than at home, I had visits from three other wives. One was our next-door neighbor Joan Dittmeyer, who came over to borrow some sugar and sweetly asked, "Is everything all right with Mike?"

"He's wearing a hard hat, isn't he?" I asked, thinking of the dangers of the building site.

"I mean, is he happy?"

"Well, he's under a great deal of stress with work, as I'm sure Larry is."

"Of course. Thanks for the sugar, Carol."

"Any time, Joan," I said and watched her leave through the sliding glass door in the kitchen and out to my backyard.

Then someone knocked on the front door and I went to answer that. (Alice was on the ferry, getting groceries on Blenford, and the kids were in school.) It was Martha Rietz, a mother of two girls: Karen, who's a year younger than Marcia, and Sharon, who's Bobby's age. She's very talkative, so even when she was asking me if everything was all right with Mike and my family, I could hardly get a word in edgewise. At one point, I thought something was wrong with her marriage, to the island electrician, because she was talking about what an adjustment it'd be for her if she married someone who had children of their own. When she left, with the fashion magazine she'd initially said she'd come over to borrow, I still wasn't clear on the real reason for her visit, but I had the feeling that rumors were spreading about my marriage.

After Martha left but before Alice and the kids came home, I got another visitor. This time it was Alma Bernstein, another next-door neighbor. She didn't beat around the bush but instead showed me the "Dear Libby" advice column, from B5 in the Sunday Bugle. One of the letters was from someone who has three children and has remarried, to someone with three children of their own. The letter-writer is very unhappy and asks, "Should I continue pretending to love these new children and wait until they wreck my marriage? Or should I get out now?"

Ordinarily, I'd read that and feel sorry for the poor woman, or man, but I realized that other people, including Marcia, had read it and thought that Mike or I wrote it. I assured Alma that I did not write the letter. "...I'm very happy with Mike, and his boys, and even if I weren't, I wouldn't air my dirty laundry in a public advice column. And Mike is even more private about his feelings than I am."

"I understand," she said, "but unfortunately not everyone is going to see it that way."

"Is there a lot of gossip about us?" I asked quietly.

"Well, you know, this is a very small community. Not as small as when you were shipwrecked, but still more like a village than a town. And it is named after your family, and you have the most kids, so you get talked about a lot anyway, not always negatively."

"Oh." That wasn't exactly reassuring, but I appreciated her honesty, especially compared to my other next-door neighbor.

"Anyway, I thought you should know, since I got the impression yesterday that you hadn't seen the column."

"No, I hadn't. And thank you."

She nodded and said, "I need to get home before my girls do."

I wondered if her children, if all the children, on the island knew about the letter, and if that made it harder for my children, and step-children, to face. I haven't talked to them yet, or Mike. I'm afraid to bring it up, especially if they don't know about the letter. And I have to admit, there's a part of me that wonders if Mike wrote it. I'm also afraid of finding out.

The worst part is that we're all supposed to go over to the Blenford courthouse two weeks from tomorrow, the day before Thanksgiving. Will Mike go through with it, even if he thinks his step-daughters are ruining our marriage? Libby advises, "Give it some time. It might just work out," so maybe he'll take that to heart and give the girls another chance. Or maybe he didn't write it, and we're all worrying about nothing.

November 14, 1968

When we went over to Blenford yesterday, I handed Mr. Engstrom a letter when the Skipper and the other ferry passengers weren't around.

To my surprise, he chuckled and said, "Mrs. Carter will sure have a full mailbag."

"Officer Carter's wife?"

"No, Elizabeth Carter, known to her loyal readers like you as Dear Libby."

"Oh, I don't usually read her, but, um, Mary Ann showed me her Sunday column."

"Are you Ralph?" he teased.

"No, but I'm worried about Harried and Hopeless."

Mr. Engstrom sighed and stopped joking. "I think a lot of people are, not that I've opened the letters of course, but I've got a lot addressed to the same place as this letter."

I would've talked to him about it more, but then Mr. Falconer, Mr. Garst's assistant who picks up special orders in Blenford, came over to ask me a question about the weather.

I know it'll take awhile for the letter to get from Blenford to Honolulu to Libby's house on the mainland, but hopefully we'll see some kind of reply published by the end of the month, especially if a bunch of people are writing to make sure Hopeless isn't Mr. or Mrs. Brady. And if it is one of them, well, maybe he or she will see that a lot of people are rooting for their marriage to succeed.

November 19, 1968

It's been a week since I found out about the letter to Dear Libby, a week and a half since it was published, and the only family members I've talked to about it are Marcia and Alice, both yesterday. The children were on their very best behavior, which ordinarily would be wonderful, but I worried that it was because they blamed themselves for a possibly impending divorce. I still didn't say anything, until Marcia brought it up.

I assured her that I didn't write the letter and she pointed out that you can't tell if the writer was a man or a woman. I didn't know what to say, especially given my own doubts.

I brought it up with Alice, since she's known Mike much longer and in some ways better than I have. She said it was impossible that he could've written the letter, but she sounded like she had her own doubts.

I think I'll talk to Mike tonight. We can't keep living like this, with secrets and misunderstandings. And every time I leave the house and see other people, like at my boating lessons or at Garst's, I wonder what they're saying behind my back. The letter may not have come from this island, but it's harming us nonetheless.

November 20, 1968

Wow, Dear Libby came all the way to Brady's Island to set the record straight! I guess she did get a bunch of letters and she wants to tell the Brady-Martin household face to face that "Harried and Hopeless" lives in the Midwest. I found out who she was because she guessed that I was "Unmated First Mate," while the Skipper, who wrote to her, too, was "Concerned Captain." Since there's no hotel on Brady's Island and we can't take her back to Blenford until tomorrow evening, "Troubled Tycoon" and "Anxious Heiress" have offered to let her stay at their mansion tonight.

The Skipper had me escort her to the Brady-Martin house, but I left her there to give the family a little privacy, even though everyone's been talking about them. Maybe now some happy gossip can spread.

November 21, 1968

Poor Libby had to come all the way to the island to tell us that the troublesome letter came from Kingsford, Illinois. While I'm sad for that family, I'm very happy that mine is united and loving. The children, Alice, and some of our concerned friends wrote to Libby, and I must confess that I wrote but didn't send a letter, as did Mike. When Mike and I talked, we promised we would communicate better. It was before we went to sleep, and we decided to wait until the next evening, after supper, but then we ended up having to wait a little longer because the children asked to listen to one of their favorite radio shows, "if it's OK with you, Mom and Dad."

Imagine our surprise when the columnist turned up on our doorstep during a commercial break! I felt bad for her having to make the trip, but she said she'd always wanted to visit the tropics, and the Howells, who wrote, too, were hosting her that night. Anyway, it's a happy ending and next Wednesday we'll really become a family.