Local Girls : An Island Summer Novel (9781416564171)

by O'connell, Jenny

  Before Lexi’s brilliant idea to open the deli, my mom sometimes had the Food Network on in the background while she paid bills or cleaned the house or sewed. After Lexi’s brilliant idea, I think it was the only channel my mom watched. And it wasn’t like any of the shows even talked about making sandwiches, unless it was some funky panini I’d never touch, like goat cheese and asparagus. Still, this spring, no matter what time of day, the Food Network was on in our house and one thing I noticed was that there were two types of hosts on those shows. Either the chefs looked like they taste-tested every single dish they made and never came across a food they didn’t like, or they were skinny little things that resembled glamorous game show hosts more than cooks who spent their days surrounded by pounds of butter.

  Shelby reminded me of the former.

  It’s not that Shelby was fat, because I never saw her stick her fingers in the muffin batter or test a cheese Danish by helping herself to one or two. But you definitely wouldn’t call her skinny either. If I had to describe Shelby’s shape, I’d say she reminded me of the fish sticks my mom used to make me eat for dinner, kind of dense and rectangular. The fact that she reminded me of food would probably please Shelby, only she’d instead prefer something from breakfast, like a French toast stick.

  Shelby was way more into food than looking cute while grating orange zest. I imagined that when everyone was moving into their dorms and checking out the people walking down the hall, identifying who would be the pretty girl, the hot guy, or the girl most likely to end up drunk and passed out in the bathroom stall, they probably looked at Shelby and didn’t think much at all, except that, with her short brown bob and T-shirt and jeans, she looked perfectly average.

  Every morning it was the same with Shelby. She’d boss us around and act like she was doing the most important job on earth. We took it, of course, because we depended on tips. And, let’s be honest, the best thing for tips was a guest who’d just tasted the most amazing lobster eggs Benedict of his life. So none of us pointed out to Shelby that it was just breakfast, even though we all knew Shelby took the first meal of the day way too seriously.

  When breakfast was over and the other servers left the kitchen, Shelby would talk to me like a normal person. I wouldn’t say we’d become friends, and I still did way more talking than she did, but ever since that morning when I told her about Mona, Shelby almost seemed to enjoy our conversations, which was why I decided to see if she could help me with something I’d been thinking about. Not Henry’s kiss—although just about every third thought I’d had all day involved Henry and that kiss—but something that he and I had talked about last night.

  “Hey, Shelby, how would you go about finding someone?” We had six orders for veggie sandwiches on focaccia, and Shelby knew I hated using the paring knife, so she’d offered to slice the cucumbers and tomatoes while I chopped the basil.

  “Is this anyone in particular?” she asked, reaching for another tomato.

  “What if the someone was an old friend you wanted to locate? Where would you start?” I’d been thinking about it since last night. I’d been thinking about a lot since last night. After my parents and Lexi and Bart had left the house, I crawled back into bed and ran through the events of the night before in my head, how Henry’s fingers settled so naturally around my own when he led me toward the courtyard for the ghost tour. How his lips were cool and tasted of mint with just a hint of chocolate. How I’d closed my eyes and felt the hair on my arms stand on end when Henry’s lips parted and his tongue searched for mine, and the goose bumps when he found it for that fleeting second before I pulled away. It shouldn’t have even gotten that far. As soon as Henry moved toward me I should have known.

  When he dropped me off in my driveway I practically jumped out of the truck and yelled good-bye over my shoulder as I ran to my front door. One part of me was afraid of what would happen if I stayed in the front seat with him for even a minute while parked in the darkness. The other part was sick with guilt. The kind of guilt that turns your stomach into knots and forces you to come up with all sorts of excuses for what you’d just done—it was an accident, I didn’t mean for it to happen, the ghosts made me do it.

  I doubted Henry would tell Mona, but even if Mona didn’t find out what happened, I knew. And I refused to be lumped in with the rest of her Whittier friends, even though I’d done exactly what they wanted to do. And I knew there was a way to show Mona that I was different, to show her that I was the one person she could always count on.

  “Well, I guess I’d start with what I knew about this person,” Shelby said.

  “He was here for a summer, or part of a summer.”

  “He?” Shelby raised her eyebrows at me. “When?”

  Before answering, I did the math in my head. Mona’s birthday was supposed to be May 16, but she and Henry were a few weeks early, arriving on May Day. “If I had to guess, I’d say sometime around early August.”

  “And what was he doing here?”

  “Visiting,” I told her, and then added, “Maybe sailing, I think.”

  “Well, was he visiting or sailing?” she asked.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “If he was just visiting, I’d say you don’t have a chance in hell of figuring out who this guy is. But if he was sailing, you may be in luck.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if he sailed he may have been here for one of the races.”

  “And if he was here around the beginning of August, then he could have sailed . . .” I continued, already seeing where this was going.

  “In the regatta,” we finished together.

  I let the idea that I could find the answer to all of Mona’s questions sink in. Only I still didn’t know where to start.

  “So now what?”

  “So now you just go down to the yacht club and ask to see whatever they have on the regatta. There had to be some sort of list of people who sailed in the past.”

  Could it really be that simple? Had Mona been so preoccupied with the idea of waiting for her father to come back to the island to find her, creating all sorts of elaborate ideas of how he’d ask around town until he found the girl he met that summer seventeen years ago, that she never realized all she had to do was walk down to the wharf, go into the yacht club, and ask to see the racing teams from seventeen years prior?

  “Easier still, you could just go to the library and look at old newspapers.”

  I was all for easier. “That’s a great idea.”

  “So what’s the story with this guy you’re looking for?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “You’re willing to go to an awful lot of effort to find out the answer for nothing.”

  “Maybe. So what’s on the breakfast menu for next week?” I asked, knowing Shelby still wanted an answer but also that she wouldn’t be able to resist talking about food.

  “I was thinking crepes with berries and ricotta cheese.”

  “Which berries?”

  “I don’t know what looks good yet, which is why I’ll be heading over to Morning Glory Farm on Sunday.”

  “Don’t you have anything better to do on your day off?” I asked, then realized, from Shelby’s reaction, that I should probably rephrase my question. “I just meant, you’re going grocery shopping on your day off?”

  My second attempt didn’t make it sound any better.

  Shelby finished up the tomatoes and started on the piquant peppers. “You think I’d trust anyone else to pick out ingredients for my meals?”

  I refrained from pointing out that that’s exactly what she did almost every morning when she sent me to Stop & Shop to pick up the stuff she’d forgotten to buy.

  “I could go with you,” I offered, realizing I didn’t have any plans for my day off either.

  Shelby shrugged. “If you want.”

  “Can you pick me up at the inn around twelve?”

  “Twelve o’clock. Don’t be late.”

  Four hours later
I walked out of the inn with my first paycheck. I knew it wasn’t going to be that big—as servers we made the majority of our pay in tips—but I couldn’t wait to tear open the envelope and see the check inside. I waited until the screen door shut behind me and then tore open the flap, trying to read the upside-down numbers Wendy had handwritten below the date. And that’s why I didn’t see Henry sitting on the porch step until I practically fell over him.

  “So where were you this morning?” he asked, reaching up to help me catch my balance.

  I looked up from the envelope and Henry smiled at me. “Was I that bad of a kisser?”

  “Not at all,” I answered, quickly realizing that I actually sounded like I enjoyed the kiss. A lot. “I mean, I wasn’t avoiding you. Shelby just had everything she needed this morning, so she didn’t have to send me out to the store.”

  “I guess that makes me feel better.” Henry grabbed the railing and pulled himself up to face me. “But seriously, Kendra, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable or anything last night.”

  “I know that.”

  “But I did and I’m sorry. It probably wasn’t the best thing to do given the situation.”

  I didn’t know if he meant the Mona situation or that we had been standing next to a haunted house with two pissed-off ghost sisters who enjoyed scaring the crap out of people.

  “In any case, I’d hate for things to get all weird between us,” Henry continued. “I had a really good time with you yesterday and I was hoping you’d come fishing with me again sometime.”

  “I’d like that,” I told him, and meant it.

  “So we can just forget about last night?”

  “Sure,” I lied, knowing full well I wouldn’t forget about his kiss, his hand lightly brushing my waist when he slipped his finger through my belt loop, or the way the moon lit up his eyes when he reached out, placed his hands on my shoulders, and pulled me toward him. “Consider it forgotten.”

  “Hello again.” Izzy looked over her shoulder as I walked into the barn, but then turned to face the canvas propped up on the easel in front of her. “What brings you back here so soon?”

  I couldn’t tell Izzy the truth, that after Henry’s surprise visit I needed to regroup, to remind myself that even though I had no idea where I stood with Mona anymore, or even Henry, at least there was one person who had come back and stayed the same. Izzy.

  I walked past the large, half-completed canvases leaning against the walls and stood next to her. “I was on my way home from work and wanted to see how the painting was coming along.”

  She made a few more strokes of her brush before standing up and stepping back from the easel. “Well, what do you think?”

  Together we inspected Poppy. His denim shirt was almost complete and Izzy had added a baseball cap to cover his bald spot.

  “I like the hat,” I told her.

  “Me, too. He loved his Red Sox.” Izzy reached forward and brushed an invisible hair off Poppy’s shoulder. “Last August, at the reception, we were dancing and he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, ‘Thanks.’ Needless to say, I had no idea what he was talking about, so he just looked at me and said, ‘For marrying someone with season tickets to Fenway.’ ”

  Izzy and I laughed.

  “I could see him doing that,” I said.

  “I only wish we’d been able to take him to a game.” Izzy inhaled deeply and then let out a lingering sigh. “In any case, I’m glad you like it.”

  “Has Mona or Henry seen any of these?” I gestured to the canvases stacked around the barn.

  “No, I guess I never thought they’d be that interested in what I was painting. When we lived here they avoided this place like the plague.”

  “There was no heat out here. Besides, whenever they did come out, you’d make them wash your brushes in turpentine and Mona’s hands would smell for weeks afterward.”

  “They figured that out, huh?” Izzy smiled, and then pointed to a pair of rubber gloves lying across the top of a turpentine can. “Well, at least I’ve solved that problem. And I put a space heater in here this winter. It’s still not all that warm, but at least I can feel my fingers and toes.”

  Izzy picked up her brush and went back to work while I walked around. This time I lingered over the canvases, taking in the details I’d missed the first time around. The way Izzy captured the bursts of silver in Mona’s eyes, her hand reaching up to touch a lock of hair. Even though Izzy had painted it so that Mona’s fingers hadn’t quite reached her hair, I knew exactly what Mona was doing. Izzy had captured it perfectly, her fingers poised, ready to begin braiding. It was a habit Mona had had since third grade, when Poppy first taught her to braid the tassels hanging from their kitchen curtains. Back then she couldn’t even figure out how to tie her shoelaces without ending up with a knot, but she could create a perfect braid.

  Right beside the still-unfinished Mona, Henry’s blond hair and deep brown eyes stood in stark contrast. In real life I could never really see the resemblance, but Izzy had managed to capture a similarity between them, as if they shared a secret that nobody else would ever know.

  Our freshman year of high school it seemed like everyone’s parents were splitting up. There must have been at least four divorces going on in my homeroom during first semester alone, and I knew the same thing was happening all over school. When the morning buses unloaded, it was painfully obvious to all of us which kids were shuttling between two houses, because a few mornings a week some of the kids who were normally on my bus ended up riding different routes.

  One morning we watched Alicia Pinkett get off a different bus, a duffel bag tossed over her shoulder, and I figured Mona would finally realize that even if her dad had stuck around and worked things out with Izzy, it was no guarantee of a happy ending. And I thought that might actually make her feel better. “At least you’ll never have to worry about that,” I commented, nodding in Alicia’s direction.

  “Are you kidding me?” Mona had shot back, making me instantly regret my attempt to show her there were people who had it worse. “At least she still has two parents. At least they know they have a daughter.”

  It was my mistake, and I should have known better. There were only a few times I made mistakes like that with Mona. Most often I felt it was my job to make sure she didn’t feel like she was missing anything at all, to fill in the empty space left by her dad. Like when our fifth-grade class studied genealogy and we each had to create family trees on large white pieces of oak tag. We had two weeks to research our family history and bring in pictures of our relatives, who we were then supposed to make into leaves on our trees. Mona had drawn her tree slightly lopsided, with large, solid branches sprouting from the Jensen side of the tree, each leaf containing a picture of one of Izzy’s relatives. Although she’d tried to twist the branches so they crisscrossed over the tree trunk and obscured the bare branches on the other side, there was no way Mona could hide the empty leaf under her own photograph.

  The day our assignments were due, Mona rolled up her family tree into a tube and stuck it in her desk until just before the dismissal bell rang. When she finally placed her tree on Mrs. Colby’s desk, the poster board unfurled and exposed the tree to our teacher and the classmates lining up for their buses. And that’s when Mona saw what I’d done while she’d been out at recess. Inside the leaf beneath Mona’s photograph there was a drawing of a man who looked just like Mona, right down to the two bright blue eyes I’d dotted with a silver-colored pencil, and the hair I’d filled in with a black pencil. She never said anything to me about it, not then, when Mrs. Colby commented on the interesting way Mona had drawn the branches, or even later when we were alone. But I knew she knew it was me. And that was enough for both of us.

  I laid the paintings of Mona and Henry side by side against Poppy’s old dusty wheelbarrow and took a seat on the couch against the opposite wall. Izzy had moved the faded green plaid couch into the barn a few years ago, when they replaced the family room furniture with
a beige sectional Izzy and Poppy picked out of the Pottery Barn catalog. A sketch pad lay on the floor beside the sofa, and I reached over to pick it up, hoping to get a glimpse of how Izzy’s ideas went from a letter-size sketch pad to paintings that stood almost as tall as me.

  Inside the pad, on thin, almost transparent sheets of paper, I watched Izzy’s paintings take shape. As I flipped from page to page, the rough, suggestive lines began to take form and I watched as an oval and a few lines became someone I recognized in the barn. I found Henry, the entire page consisting solely of his slightly matted hair and left eye. Poppy, without the Red Sox hat. Mona’s grandmother.

  “Hey, Izzy, how do you do this?” I asked. “How do you take someone you know and start to see them differently?”

  “You know, that’s a great question, Kennie. I wish I could say it was as easy as squinting one eye and turning your head some special way, but if it was that easy these paintings would be finished, right?”

  “I guess.”

  I continued turning the pages, watching the images take shape, until my fingers stopped on a page with someone I didn’t recognize. One by one I turned the sheets in the pad until the face became more familiar, the eyes sketched with lines that came together to form diamonds folding into one another; even in pencil, they reminded me of a kaleidoscope. With each sheet I recognized Mona’s features taking shape, only on the fifth page the sketch started to change. The focus of the eyes shifted so the subject was looking away. I continued turning the pages until I came to the finished sketch, to the boy set against the reflection of the blue ocean.

  My breath caught in my chest and I went back and flipped through the pages faster, then faster, until the sketch pad became like one of those animated flip books, the drawings coming together to create a moving picture. Only what I saw wasn’t a moving picture, it was a transformation. And that’s when I knew the subject on that canvas wasn’t just a boy. It was Mona’s father.

  “I think I’m ready to call it a day,” Izzy announced, and then stood up and stretched her hands out toward the roof of the barn.