Local Girls

by Jenny O'Connell

  Even if Mona was tired of our conversation, I wasn’t ready to let it drop.

  “God, you’ve changed, Mona. I feel like I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

  She spun around to face me, and even though I was so angry my hands were shaking, I couldn’t help but notice how pretty she looked, her dark hair and pale skin illuminated in the sunlight flooding the deck. It was almost as if she’d been posed there.

  “That’s mean, Kendra.” Mona’s voice was steady and controlled, like she still thought we could work this out. I already knew we couldn’t.

  Before she could say anything else I stood up. “It’s been a long day, I’m going home.”

  “I can drive you,” she offered, only instead of moving she just stood there, squinting in the sun.

  Damn. I’d forgotten I didn’t have the car. I’d forgotten that Mona had access to not one but three cars in Malcolm’s circular driveway. But worse than realizing I had to either take Mona up on her offer or take the bus was realizing that for the first time in our lives, Mona was the one in the driver’s seat.

  “That’s okay, I can take the bus.”

  There was no bus. Just me waiting underneath the VTA sign for five minutes as I imagined Mona standing on the deck outside her bedroom, watching me. And even though I turned toward the beach so Mona wouldn’t be able to see my face, I hated it. I hated that I didn’t know if Mona offered me a ride because she really wanted to or because she felt sorry for me. I hated that she kept her whole life in Boston a secret from me. And I really hated that I probably looked completely pathetic standing at the bus stop kicking rocks with my foot while tourists passed by me as they left the beach. Which was why I finally gave up on the bus and started walking home.

  I didn’t live within walking distance of Malcolm’s house, so it wasn’t like I actually expected to walk the entire way. I was just hoping to catch the bus somewhere along its route and in the process get as far away from Malcolm’s house as possible. But because the only land running along Atlantic Drive was the grassy pasture of the Katama airfield, no matter how far I walked, Malcolm’s gray shingled house was visible in the background, a five-thousand-square-foot reminder that I might have just lost my best friend.

  I kept my eyes on the fence running around the perimeter, only taking them away to watch a bright red biplane taking off down the grassy runway, looking up as it lifted into the air above me.

  “Hey!” someone screamed over the sound of the propeller, startling me.

  I turned toward the road, where a pickup truck had slowed and was creeping along beside me. There could only be one truck that color, a dull, milky pea green. And even if there managed to be another truck that color, I doubted it would have the same brownish red rusty patches running along the bottom of the passenger-side door.

  “What are you doing?” Henry asked, yelling across the empty passenger seat.

  “Walking home,” I told him, even though we both knew it wasn’t likely.

  “Come on, I’ll drive you.” He reached over and opened the door from the inside, pushing it out so I could get in.

  I had two choices: continue walking and hope the bus showed up at some point, or take Henry up on his offer.

  I got in.

  “That’s a long walk,” Henry said as the truck started moving faster. “Isn’t standing on your feet all day enough for you?”

  The front seat of Poppy’s truck was just like I remembered, the vinyl bench seat slippery from so many years of wear. Whenever Poppy and Mona picked me up at my house, Mona always slid over to the middle, saying she liked sitting like that, sandwiched between us. There was no CD player, just a broken cassette player and a radio that only got the AM stations. “I went to see Mona.”

  “And she wouldn’t drive you home?”

  I didn’t have to tell Henry what happened. I could gloss over the entire argument, make it sound completely normal that I’d choose to walk four miles rather than let my best friend drive me home, and hope that Mona would call me and we’d work it out. But I wasn’t that optimistic. And I kind of wanted to hear what Henry would say, whose side he’d take.

  “We had a fight.”

  “What? Like that time you two were fighting over that Snoopy Sno-Cone machine and who got to pick the first flavor?” Henry looked over at me, a serious expression on his face. “The battle between cherry and grape, how you ever managed to settle that one is still a mystery to me.”

  I almost laughed, which I think was his goal. “No, Henry. It’s a little more serious than that.”

  “So what is it?”

  “I don’t know if I can explain it.”

  “Try.”

  I don’t know why it was so hard, but it was. It was more than simply saying that Mona wanted to be with her new friends, because that wasn’t entirely true. She hadn’t actually chosen them over me, she just wasn’t willing to choose me over them.

  So instead I just said, “Mona’s changed.”

  “And that’s bad?” he answered, which wasn’t exactly the response I was looking for.

  “Yeah, it’s bad. She’s not like she used to be when she lived here.”

  “And how was that?”

  “See, this is why I said I couldn’t explain it. I don’t know how.” I lay my head back against the headrest and turned to look out the open window. “Don’t you think Mona’s friends are totally different than her friends here?”

  “You mean you?”

  I turned to face Henry. “I mean all of us.”

  Henry was quiet, and I assumed he was thinking about my question. I watched him in profile as he drove, noticing the straight nose that turned up slightly at the end, the high cheekbones that became even more defined when he smiled, all the features that made him resemble Izzy so much and Mona so little. But even if it wasn’t immediately obvious from the blond hair and tanned arms, which lacked even the slightest hint of pink from the beach yesterday, I could see Mona in Henry’s mannerisms. The way he squinted his eyes while thinking, creating little crinkles at the corners that reminded me of ice crackling in the spring. How he folded his thumb against the palm of his hand and rubbed the small, round pad of skin at the base of his pinky without even realizing it. His bare left foot tucked under his right leg while he drove. The big picture may have been all Izzy, but I had a feeling that Henry’s details had to be his father.

  He looked different from this morning, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. He’d changed his clothes, but it was the same style of shorts, this time in olive green, and just another T-shirt. So it wasn’t that.

  “I guess I’d have to say they’re not the same, but they’re not that different either,” Henry finally answered, if you were even willing to call his circular logic an answer.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Sure it does. Are they exactly the same? No, but who here is exactly the same? I actually think you and Mona are pretty different.”

  “How can you say that? We practically agreed on everything until you moved away.”

  “That’s not true.” Henry flipped on his blinker and slowed down as we approached my street. “Most of the time you’d make a decision and Mona would agree.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No, what you said was that you agreed on everything. What I’m saying is that most of the time Mona went along with you.”

  I didn’t really see the difference.

  “This is it, the end of the road.” Henry stopped the truck in my driveway and waited for me to get out.

  I placed my hand on the door handle but didn’t open it. “Are you going fishing again tomorrow?”

  He nodded. “Every day. Maybe I’ll see you for a little breakfast?”

  “Maybe, if Shelby forgets something.” I stepped out of the truck, shutting the door behind me. When I turned to say good-bye, I finally realized what was different. “You shaved,” I told him, leaning in the open window.

  Henry r
eached up and stroked his chin, puzzled. “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t shave this morning.”

  He smiled, looking a little embarrassed. “I was up at four thirty, give me a break.”

  “That’s not what I meant, you looked fine.”

  Henry shifted the truck out of park and I stepped back so he could leave.

  “See you later, Kendra.”

  I waved as Henry drove away, then turned toward the house and went inside.

  Chapter 8

  I hadn’t really expected Henry to fish on the weekends, but there he was at Stop & Shop, waiting for me as usual, even on a Saturday.

  “You should come with me one morning,” Henry suggested as I paid for the ground cinnamon. This morning Shelby was making her famous lemon curd squares for afternoon tea and discovered, as she seemed to just about every morning, that she was missing some vital ingredient that would absolutely ruin her recipe if not included. Yesterday it was the dark corn syrup for her pecan sticky buns, and the day before that, walnuts for her sour cream coffee cake.

  “I’m not exactly a morning person,” I told him as we walked toward the pickup truck. Since that day he drove me home from the airfield, I hadn’t asked him about Mona, whether she’d told him about our fight or if he’d even mentioned to her that he’d driven me home. It had been five days since our fight, and we still hadn’t spoken. At least while I was at the Willow I didn’t have the time to think about Mona, about what I’d said to her and the look on her face as I left her bedroom. “The last thing I want to do is get up even earlier than I get up for work,” I told Henry, pushing Mona out of my mind.

  Ever since we met up at the grocery store that first day, Henry and I had made our morning meet-ups a regular thing, thanks to Shelby’s inability to write out a grocery list for Wendy. The second time we met up it was awkward. I mean, we’d just seen each other the day before, and how much small talk can you make walking the aisles of Stop & Shop and looking for walnuts? But after the third and fourth time I think we both just got used to it. The third day he was even waiting for me before going in to grab his poppy seed bagel with cream cheese. And now he didn’t even ask if I wanted a ride back to work. I just got in the passenger side of the pickup for the quick two-minute ride down Main Street.

  “For someone who says she’s not a morning person, don’t you find it odd that you picked a job serving people breakfast?”

  “Believe me, I’ve thought of that. But despite my appearances to the contrary”—I waved my hands across the front of my yellow polo shirt with the Willow Inn logo above my heart—“I do not actually enjoy getting up with the sun.”

  “Who are you kidding, you’ve never been up with the sun.”

  “It was an expression.”

  “Well, if you’d ever actually gotten up with the sun, you’d know that it can be pretty cool. It’s really quiet and there’s no one around, it’s almost like a different world.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  The truck came to a stop in front of the inn. The first guest was already sitting in one of the white rocking chairs on the deck, reading the morning paper.

  “Don’t just take my word for it. Come fish with me one morning, I’ll show you.”

  “Like I said, I’m not a morning person.”

  “People change. Come on.”

  I glanced over at the man reading the Boston Globe. Shelby was probably freaking out that I wasn’t back with the cinnamon yet.

  “Wednesday’s my day off.”

  “So, is that a yes?”

  “Will this require handling worms?”

  He shook his head. “It will just require sitting next to me while I fish. I promise there will be no worm touching involved.”

  I reached for the handle, opened the door, and stepped out. I stood there watching Henry as he waited for my answer.

  I stuck my head in through the open window. “Just this once?”

  Henry crossed his heart with his finger. It was something Mona did, too. “Once. If you hate it, I’ll never bring it up again.”

  “Fine,” I agreed, and started walking up the stone path leading to the deck. “This Wednesday.”

  “Great. I’ll be in front of your house at five o’clock.”

  I stopped on the first step to the deck and turned around to see if Henry was serious. “Five o’clock?”

  But before I could back out, Henry was driving away.

  I don’t know why I agreed to go fishing with Henry. It definitely wasn’t because fishing sounded terribly interesting, or even relaxing, because, let’s be honest, what could be relaxing at five a.m. other than sleeping in your bed? And as far as the lack of sunlight making the island look like a different world, the only world I was expecting would be dark and foggy, just like on every other island morning. So it wasn’t my need to know what a different world looked like, but my need to know about Mona. I guess, when it came right down to it, I said yes because talking to Mona’s twin brother was probably the next best thing to talking to Mona herself. If you didn’t count this past year, and I didn’t, we’d never gone this long without speaking. Five days with not so much as a voice mail. We’d had fights in the past, stupid disagreements that lasted a day at most. Half the time when we made up we didn’t even remember what we had been fighting about. But this was different, and I think we both knew that. We wouldn’t be seeing each other in school, passing each other in the hallway and trying not to smile, trying not to laugh at something we both found funny in English class. This was real. And that’s what made it so scary.

  Every other time we’d fought I could count on the phone ringing, even if I had to wait until ten o’clock at night for it to happen. When Mona’s number showed up on caller ID, I knew she was calling to get it over with, to call a truce so we could talk about all the things we’d been saving up all day to say. Only now my phone wasn’t ringing and Mona wasn’t anxious to share what she did all day. But there was one person who could tell me about Mona, who could help me figure out who she’d become and whether we’d be able to be friends again. And that person was Henry.

  It was my first Saturday morning at the inn, but already I’d learned that the weekends were different from the rest of the week. We only had two vacant rooms, the rest filled with couples taking advantage of the relative quiet before high season kicked in next week, and more guests meant more tables to serve, more special requests, activities to plan, and picnics to make.

  “Where is it?” Shelby wanted to know the second I pushed the kitchen door open.

  I tossed the bag with the cinnamon on the counter and went to get my apron, but not before grabbing a piece of bacon off the cooling rack.

  “Hey, cut it out!” Shelby smacked my hand with the spatula.

  I waited until she’d moved over to the sink to rinse out a bowl and then grabbed another piece. God, she made the best bacon.

  “I saw that,” Shelby muttered under her breath, even though she was still facing the sink. Shelby saw everything that went on in the kitchen, even when you thought she couldn’t see you.

  After breakfast hours ended, the rest of the staff left to do other jobs while I stayed in the kitchen with Shelby. It had become our regular routine. I’d prepare the sandwiches while Shelby started making the afternoon tea snacks, pitching in on the sandwiches when she was done. Since I was the newly appointed picnic preparer, it was always just the two of us in the kitchen after the tables were cleared and the dishes loaded into the dishwasher.

  “How do you get the bacon so crispy and flat?” I asked, pulling a stool up to the island so I could sit while putting together the lunch orders.

  Shelby finished drying the last pot with a dish towel before answering.

  “I cook it in the oven instead of a frying pan,” she told me, and then added, “The strips are laid over a wire rack in a baking pan.”

  It was the most Shelby had said to me all week and I felt like I’d found her weak spot—food talk
. Knowing what it was like to spend two hours in the kitchen in silence while on picnic duty, I attempted to keep the conversation going with the closest thing I had to food talk—the deli.

  “My family’s opening a deli over on Winter Street this week.”

  Shelby reached above the island, lining up the hole in the pot’s handle with the hook on the wrought iron rack hanging from the ceiling. “So what are you doing here?” she asked, stretching to get the hook through the hole.

  “What am I doing here now, or what did I think I was doing here?”

  The handle finally settled onto the hook and Shelby stepped back from the island. “Am I expected to know the difference?”

  “Well, when I took the job my friend Mona was supposed to work with me. But then she couldn’t,” I said, adding, “Or wouldn’t,” and I realized that was probably a more accurate description even if I did prefer the first take on the situation. “And so now I’m just trying to earn some money for college.”

  I waited for Shelby to ask where I was planning to go, but instead she decided to ask about Mona. “Why wouldn’t she work with you?”

  “She didn’t need a summer job anymore.”

  “Did she win the lottery or something?” Shelby joked.

  I didn’t laugh. “Sort of.”

  That got Shelby’s attention, and so I decided to take a chance and tell her the story. After five days I needed to talk to someone about it. It wasn’t that I thought Shelby would relate to my situation or anything. I doubted there were too many people who’d had the same problem. I knew Shelby wouldn’t turn around and exclaim, “Oh my God! Last year my best friend got a rich stepfather, too!” Not that Shelby struck me as the type of person who exclaimed anything anyway.

  “You know what they say,” she concluded when I’d finished the whole story, starting with Izzy meeting Malcolm and ending with the argument in Mona’s bedroom. “Money changes everything.”

  “Yeah, I know what they say. I just didn’t think it applied to my best friend.”