Local Girls

by Jenny O'Connell

  On my way to Lexi’s car I looked over my shoulder, expecting to find Mona still standing there watching me, waving good-bye. But she was already gone.

  Chapter 5

  “What are you doing here?” The last person I’d expected to see when I opened the front door was Mona. After I’d gotten home from the beach, Lexi had called from the deli to tell me that one of the suppliers screwed up the address and a shipment of five hundred ecologically sensitive recycled paper cups might be delivered to our doorstep within the next couple of hours. I was expecting the FedEx guy.

  Mona shifted her weight from one foot to the other before answering. “I thought we could go into town.”

  I noticed the still shiny Range Rover in our driveway.

  “Lexi’s expecting a shipment for the deli,” I told Mona, stepping aside so she could come in. I wondered if my house felt different to Mona, the foyer smaller, the furnishings older, everything a little more worn compared to Malcolm’s house. If it did, she didn’t let on.

  “Can’t you leave a note or something?” she asked. “Just tell them to leave it.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Mona jingled the keys in her hand and I noticed she wasn’t carrying her purse. “Look, I’m sorry about today, I know it wasn’t exactly fun for you.”

  “It was fine,” I told her. “I didn’t have a horrible time.”

  “Okay, you didn’t have a horrible time, but still. I thought we could go into town and walk around, maybe get ice cream or something.” Mona reached for the pad of paper and the pen on the side table by the front door. She started writing, reading aloud as the pen moved across the page. “Dear Mr. FedEx. Please leave any packages on the front steps. Thank you, Kendra Bryant.”

  Mona tore the sheet off and handed it to me. “Please?” she almost pleaded, holding out the FedEx note like an olive branch, waiting for me to take it.

  It didn’t used to be this hard. This up and down, the trying to figure out how to act, what to say to each other, it used to be so easy, so effortless.

  I took the sheet. “Okay, let me get my shoes.”

  Mona had the Range Rover, which seemed to dwarf her as she sat behind the steering wheel. The thing about Mona is that she’s really petite—not just short; everything about her is smaller than you’d expect. Whenever we stood next to each other I almost felt too big, even though I’m only five foot seven and that’s not exactly gigantic. At one time it felt like it was, when we’d have dances in sixth grade and the girls would line up on one side of the gym, the boys on the other. When the teacher yelled “go”, which now seems completely ridiculous and antiquated, like it was a race or something, it was a mad dash across the polished wood floor to our side of the room. Mona and I always stood next to each other, but when a boy was headed in our direction we couldn’t tell who he was going for, me or Mona. Rarely did the boys not care which one of us they danced with, because most of the time they had a type—small and dark or tall and blonde. Unfortunately it wasn’t always the tall guy who wanted to dance with the tall girl, and I’d end up practically resting my chin on some short boy’s head, wondering if he was trying to get a glimpse down the front of my shirt, especially given his perfect vantage point.

  “Remember when Chris Stewart asked me to dance and he sneezed and blew his nose all over the front of my shirt?” I reminded Mona as she took a right down South Water Street at the four-way stop.

  “That was so gross.” Mona laughed. “Who would have guessed he’d end up playing center on the varsity basketball team.”

  “Are there any hot guys at Whittier?”

  “You mean any who are hot and know how to use a Kleenex? A few.” Mona slowed down, hanging a right onto School Street. “Is that car leaving?” she asked, pointing to a Volvo with its brake lights on.

  “I think so.”

  “Do you want me to try to get closer to town, because I can,” Mona offered, even though in the past, we’d jump on any space we could get no matter where it was. Only tourists thought they could do better, or thought they were that lucky.

  “No, this is fine. I don’t mind walking.”

  How Mona ever parallel parked the Range Rover is beyond me, because the space was barely big enough for the Volvo. But she managed to get in with relatively few tries, and we headed into town.

  The thing about downtown Edgartown during the summer is that you can’t really tell one day from the next, one time of day from another. It’s just always packed. Here it was, a Sunday afternoon, and you’d think people would be home hanging out and relaxing, but instead it was as if the stores were giving things away for free. It wasn’t even like the stores in Edgartown were that useful, mostly clothing and some home knickknacks, a few art galleries, and, of course, T-shirt shops. Unless you were in dire need of a T-shirt emblazoned with MARTHA’S VINEYARD across the front, people could probably get anything sold on Main Street in their own hometowns, but it didn’t matter. The shopping bags dangling from practically every arm on Main Street was proof of that.

  “So what are you going to do with yourself all week?” I asked Mona.

  “I don’t know. Maybe read, go to the beach.”

  It didn’t exactly sound like Mona could fill an entire summer by reading and going to the beach, but I didn’t say that. I nodded my head like those were great ideas.

  “That sounds like fun.” Oddly, for some reason I felt like it was Mona’s turn to talk, like we were alternating conversation, being polite and letting the other person have her say before nodding in agreement. It didn’t used to be like this. We used to talk right over each other, cutting in before the other person finished her sentence because we knew what she was going to say.

  “Mad Martha’s or Scoops?” Mona asked, sounding an awful lot like a tour guide.

  “Scoops, shorter line.” She knew this; we never went to Mad Martha’s, it was tourist hell, as if somehow ice cream tasted better when you waited in line for twenty minutes.

  “Remember when, for April Fools’ Day, Pete and Jack made the SC on the sign into a P so it became Poops?” Mona smiled at me. “For some reason they thought that was hysterical.”

  “Probably because they were thirteen at the time.”

  “Probably,” Mona agreed, only she stopped short of nodding, maybe to add variety.

  Walking down Main Street had become a trip down memory lane, literally. It seemed like all we had to talk about was the past, things we remembered, old news. At this rate we’d be reminiscing about third grade by the time we got back to the car.

  “Hey, Mona!” Emily came dashing across the street toward us, pulling Jilly behind her and almost making her trip up the curb. “We’re going to the yacht club. There’s some sort of beginning-of-the-season kickoff tonight. You guys want to come?”

  Mona looked to me. I didn’t say yes.

  “I don’t know,” Mona answered, still waiting for me to give her some sort of reply.

  Emily didn’t notice. “Well, we’re going to run across the street, I saw a really cute dress in the window and we were going to check it out. We’ll be right back and you guys let us know what you decide.”

  Emily stepped out into the road and ran across the street, not even looking to see if any cars were coming.

  “Do you want to go?” Mona asked me once Emily and Jilly were gone.

  “Do you want to go?” I asked her right back. “Because if you want to go, then go.”

  “I’m not going to ditch you, Kendra. If you don’t want to go, we won’t.”

  “So you do want to go?”

  Mona tucked her hair behind her ear, and then quickly untucked it, covering the sparkling solitaire. “Why are you making this so hard for me?”

  “I’m making this hard? All I wanted to do was hang out with you, get some ice cream. You came to my house, Mona, this was your idea.”

  “I know,” she breathed, shaking her head as if she wished we weren’t having this conversation.

&nb
sp; “Look, you can go with them or we can go get some ice cream.” I crossed my arms over my chest, unable to believe we were even talking about this, as if there was even a question as to what she’d rather do.

  “Can’t we just do both?”

  Yes, we could do both. Of course we could. But that wasn’t the point. Why did we have to do both? Why couldn’t she just tell them that we’d already made plans? Fine, so ice cream and walking around town weren’t exactly grand plans, but that shouldn’t matter.

  I shook my head. “Just make a choice, Mona.”

  “Is that what you want?” she finally asked, her voice almost pained. “You want me to choose?”

  Was that what I wanted? To have Mona choose me over her other friends? To prove to them that ski trips and spring formals didn’t make them any better than me?

  Yes. I wanted that, I wanted Mona to say “Screw the yacht club.”

  But I couldn’t say it. “I’m not asking you to choose, I’m just saying make up your mind.”

  “How about we get some ice cream and meet them there?” Mona suggested, coming up with a compromise.

  I noticed Emily coming out of the storefront across the street, a large shopping bag hanging in the crux of her bent arm. Jilly was right behind her, empty-handed.

  “Well?” Emily asked, skipping across the street to us. “What’d you decide?”

  Mona glanced at me, trying to gauge what she should do. “We’ll meet you there in a bit, we’re just going to get something to eat first.”

  “Cool. We’ll see you there.” Emily nudged Jilly. “Come on.”

  It wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for, and I couldn’t believe that Mona didn’t get it.

  “Was it really that much of a sacrifice?” I wanted to know.

  Mona stepped back, almost as if I’d pushed her. “We don’t have to go, Kendra. Forget it, it’s no big deal. I didn’t know it meant that much to you.”

  She didn’t know? How could she not know? Mona knew me better than anyone else, and all of a sudden she couldn’t take the hint when I said “All I wanted to do was hang out with you and get some ice cream?”

  “You know, I should get home and wait for that package,” I said. “If I’m not there and the guy doesn’t leave it, Lexi will be pissed.”

  “You don’t even want any ice cream?”

  I shook my head. “Nah, I wasn’t really hungry to begin with.”

  “Okay.” Mona was quiet for a minute. “Well, call me as soon as you get out of work. And have fun.”

  “Okay. You, too,” I told her, knowing that the odds were stacked in Mona’s favor.

  Chapter 6

  This was not the way it was supposed to be. I could handle the idea of getting up at six o’clock every morning to go to work when I thought Mona would be doing it with me. In my head I’d had it all figured out. We’d each take the VTA bus to town and meet up for the walk to the inn, each in our identical yellow polo shirts and matching shorts, which somehow we’d find funny rather than sorely lacking in originality. But facing a six a.m. wake-up alone? Knowing that Mona, who needed two alarm clocks to get up for school and still barely made it to homeroom before the bell rang, was still in bed and probably would be for the next three hours while I was taking orders for scrambled eggs? It made me want to pull the covers over my head and forget I ever went to see Wendy at the Willow Inn in the first place. And that I’d be spending my summer dressed in khaki.

  I’d left the job interview with six pale yellow polo shirts embroidered with the Willow logo over my left boob, but I was responsible for providing the rest of my uniform. And the rest of my uniform was khaki.

  “You can wear pants, capris, skirts, or shorts—as long as they’re not up to here,” Wendy had told me, pointing to a spot on her thigh about three inches below indecent. “I just want you to be comfortable.”

  I liked Wendy Louis, the inn’s new owner, partly because she seemed really nice but mostly because she seemed more than happy to hire me, someone with no experience, just because I came recommended from a cash register salesman. Lexi filled me in on Wendy before I went to see her about the job, which is how I already knew that Wendy had been involved with some tech start-up around San Francisco, and when it went public Wendy made more money than God. Lexi said things like that. She made more money than God. For a twenty-two-year-old, Lexi talked like an old person.

  In any case, Wendy could have gone anywhere she wanted, bought houses all over the world, but instead she bought the Willow, even though she had absolutely no experience running an inn. Which is why I figured she was willing to give me a break, even if I also figured there were a million places I’d choose to go before I ended up on the Vineyard. Especially if I had more money than God.

  But here it was, six o’clock on Monday morning, and I was no longer thankful Wendy was willing to take her chances with me. Instead, I was staring into my closet trying to choose between khaki shorts and a pair of khaki capri pants, and not exactly thrilled with either option.

  It was still cool and damp, and it would be every morning when I left for work. The moist fog that rolled over the island at night like a blanket wouldn’t burn off until the sun had been up for a few hours. Still, I knew by noon the temperature would be climbing past eighty and shorts would be the call. I grabbed the shorts and a sweatshirt to throw over my polo shirt on the ride to the Willow.

  I took the bus to Church Street and then walked up Main Street toward the inn. It was still early enough that the sidewalks were empty, free of shoppers who’d stop to look into storefront windows, completely oblivious to the fact that there were twenty other people behind them who weren’t planning to wait while they decided whether it was worth the trip inside to check out the cute plaid sundress or straw hat or bedazzled flip-flops in size 2 that would look so cute on little Amelia.

  It was funny that this was how the postcards always looked in the display racks, the empty streets and still water in the harbor. But it’s not how summer people ever saw it in real life. It was just an illusion they bought into.

  I always wondered how they managed to get those shots with the sun shining and an empty street. Mona once suggested they took those postcard photos in October, long after the tourists stopped coming but before the leaves started turning. We figured they Photoshopped out the few locals on the sidewalks. It was almost as if tourists wanted it that way, as if they didn’t see us. They just saw a place to visit for a while and then leave behind.

  On my way to the inn I only passed a few other people, mostly men who looked like they’d thrown on the closest pair of shorts and last night’s T-shirt, carrying cardboard coffee cups and Boston Globes under their arms. The fact that the T-shirts were emblazoned with MARTHA’S VINEYARD in big block letters were a dead giveaway. They were just visiting.

  The Willow sits at the corner of Main and Tilton Way, just far enough up Main Street to be away from the traffic and shoppers but close enough that you can walk from the VTA stop on Church Street in just under five minutes. Before Wendy bought the inn, the Willow was pretty run-down. Now the outside was painted a brilliant white, and the inside was decorated island chic with tones of blues and yellows on the upholstered plaid, floral, and toile overstuffed sofas, and on the thick rugs running along the polished hardwood floors.

  A covered porch started off the front of the house and ran around to the left, making a giant capital L. And even though the white high-backed rocking chairs invited guests to sit and watch, they were empty this early in the morning.

  I didn’t go in the front entrance, instead following the L to the side door, where guests checked in at the front desk, which wasn’t actually in the front at all but back by the first-floor guest rooms, tucked next to the parlor.

  The reception area was empty, the guest book lying open with a silver pen positioned across the page. I peered down at the lined pages scribbled with names and hometowns. The Griffins from Cambridge, Bob and Jeannie Carter from Short Hills, New Jersey,
a Cate Engles from New York City. I traced the names with my finger until I hit an empty line. From the sign-in dates on the page it didn’t seem like the inn was fully booked yet, but it was getting close. In two more weeks the island would fill up, and by July Fourth it would be a totally different place, with NO VACANCY signs in front of the bed-and-breakfasts and hour-long waits to get a table at Alchemy.

  “Wendy?” I called out, keeping my voice low. It wasn’t even seven yet. There were four guest rooms on the first floor around the corner from the reception area, so I knew there were guests sleeping nearby, and even though it probably would have gotten someone’s attention, I didn’t think they’d appreciate me dinging the silver bell on the front desk.

  I walked past the empty sitting room toward the small dining area, following the smell of frying bacon. As I approached the white swinging door that I knew led to the kitchen, I heard what sounded like a pan hitting the floor.

  “Anyone?” I ventured, poking my head inside. “Hello?”

  Inside, I found not only the source of the noise, but an amazing sweet smell that made my mouth water and reminded me that I’d forgotten to eat breakfast.

  “Kendra! Hi. Come on in, we’re just getting ready for breakfast, so watch and learn.” Wendy was standing beside the butcher block island in the center of the kitchen while a girl kneeled next to her, wiping something off the floor. Wendy was completely unfazed by the mess making its way along the black-and-white checkerboard tiles toward her loafers. Instead of reacting, she continued folding linen napkins.

  “Can you do me a favor and put the muffins on that platter over there?” She nodded toward the counter, where a thick, white ceramic platter awaited a dozen blueberry muffins cooling in a tin.

  The girl sopping up the mess with a wad of paper towels wasn’t familiar to me, but I recognized the girl standing to Wendy’s left. She was a senior at Vineyard High when I was a sophomore. Shelby Dennis. I figured she’d recognize me, too, even if she didn’t know my name, but she didn’t even look up when Wendy spoke to me.