“I went to the library yesterday to look up old issues of the Gazette,” I told her after she’d passed up four baskets in a row.
“And what’d you find?”
“Nothing. They covered the regatta but the pictures were old and too far away. I couldn’t tell who anybody was, even if I knew who I was looking for.”
“So, really,” Shelby started, inspecting a handful of raspberries before continuing. “Why the interest in this missing guy?”
I didn’t answer right away, and instead stood there waiting for Shelby to make her decision. She decided to pass.
“Mona wants to find her dad.”
“Why?” Shelby sounded genuinely curious.
“Because she doesn’t know who he is.”
“Why doesn’t she just ask her mom?” Shelby made it sound so easy.
“Because her mom doesn’t even know his last name; she was eighteen and he was a summer guy.”
Shelby selected four pints of raspberries and moved on to the strawberries. “So she asked you to help her find him? I thought you two were still in a fight.”
I hesitated. “Not exactly. Well, not exactly about the asking for help, yes about the fight,” I clarified.
Shelby looked up at me. “Not exactly? What does that mean?”
“I thought I’d surprise her.”
Shelby continued to watch me but didn’t say anything. Apparently my answer wasn’t good enough. She wanted more.
“She’s always wanted to know who he was, ever since I can remember,” I continued, defending myself even though Shelby hadn’t actually accused me of doing anything wrong. Yet. “And so I figured if I could find him she could finally stop wondering.”
“You think it will be that simple, just hand over the guy’s name and announce ‘Here’s daddy’?”
“It’s what she’s always wanted.”
“And you’re sure of this?”
I nodded. “Absolutely.”
“Then more power to you.” Shelby handed me three pints of strawberries and I stacked them in my arms. “I just hope you’re right.”
Me, too, I thought. I wasn’t completely naive. I didn’t think that I’d just show up on Malcolm’s doorstep, use the pineapple door knocker, and wait for Mona to open the door so I could announce the winning name like some game show host. This was a big deal, I realized that. But if I could really figure out who he was, then Mona would have the missing piece of the puzzle, and I would have been the one to give it to her.
We ended up picking out strawberries, raspberries, and some blackberries for the crepes. Shelby insisted on refrigerating the baskets right away so the berries wouldn’t lose their flavor, and that meant we had to go back to the inn and store them in the refrigerator overnight.
For the next half hour I watched as Shelby washed every single basket of berries by hand before drying them and placing them into ceramic bowls covered in cellophane.
“Don’t you ever get tired of this place?” I asked her, referring to the Willow.
Shelby was on her knees, rearranging the contents of the refrigerator into some sort of elaborate organized system that I couldn’t quite figure out. “Not really.”
“Is that why you came back?” This time I meant the island.
“I came back because I wanted to.”
“See, I just don’t get that,” I told her, sitting down on a stool.
“I know you don’t.”
“So explain it to me.”
Shelby sighed, sat back on her heels, and seemed to be gathering her thoughts for a very long, complex explanation. “No.”
No? That was it? “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean no. Why don’t you explain to me why you don’t get it instead?”
Now it was my turn to gather my thoughts for a very long, complex explanation that turned out not to be so long or complex. “Well, I guess I don’t want to end up like my sister.”
“What’s wrong with your sister?”
“Nothing’s wrong with her, I just think she took the easy way out.”
“Do you think I took the easy way out?” Shelby wanted to know, and I didn’t know how to answer.
“I guess I don’t know your situation well enough to have an opinion.”
Shelby stood up, closed the refrigerator door, and came over to the island where I was sitting. “My situation is that I went to UMass thinking I’d figure out what I wanted to do. And I did. Only what I figured out was what I didn’t want to do. And what I didn’t want to do was sit in a classroom all day learning stuff I didn’t care about.”
“Okay, well, I get that. But the thing with my sister is that she never even tried to figure out what she cared about. She just settled for what she knew. She just picked what was safe.”
“And that bothers you?”
“Yeah, it bothers me. She could have done anything, gone anywhere, but you know what she’s doing? Living at home with her high school boyfriend and running a deli.”
Shelby laughed at me. “You make it sound so absolutely horrible.”
I stopped short of saying it was.
“What about your parents? They’ve lived here their whole lives, right?”
“Sure, but that’s different. They’re old.”
“They weren’t always,” Shelby reminded me, stating the obvious.
“What I mean is, what happens when Lexi wakes up in ten or fifteen years and realizes she had all these opportunities she never took advantage of? All these risks she could have taken if she’d just had the guts to take them?”
“I don’t know the answer to that, Kendra. Maybe she’ll regret it, maybe she won’t.”
I almost asked Shelby if she regretted leaving school, but it was obvious she didn’t miss it for a minute. “So where do you go from here? Are you going to work at the Willow forever?”
Shelby was quiet and I felt like it was the first time she’d ever even thought of it, the idea that this was it. That at nineteen she was in exactly the same place she’d be for the rest of her life.
“Forever is a long time, Kendra.” She went over to the counter and stacked up the now empty berry cartons. “Right now, I’m just thinking about tomorrow’s breakfast.”
Chapter 15
My conversation with Shelby really bothered me. Equating my parents to Lexi and Bart was ridiculous. You couldn’t even compare the two. First of all, my parents knew each other in high school but they didn’t even hang out together. And they didn’t go on a date until years later, when my dad ran into her again while delivering mail to the airport where my mom was working at the time.
I’d learned that my talks with Shelby were usually like that, more confusing than anything else. On one hand, I’d started to feel like we were friends. She rarely talked about herself or her family, but I’d just sort of decided that’s the way she was. She didn’t share a lot. In that respect, she was the absolute opposite of Mona: I seriously doubt there was anything I didn’t know about Mona when she lived here. Maybe that’s why I’d found spending time with Henry so easy in the beginning; why, because of Mona, I felt like I knew everything about Henry as well. I knew he broke his arm playing hockey, that he’d cried when the doctor reset the bone, that Izzy had gotten out her set of markers and drawn the Bruins logo on his cast so he’d feel better. But now that we were spending so much time together, I realized how little I really knew about Henry, and instead of finding comfort in the fact that he was so familiar, it was the process of discovering new things about him that I looked forward to the most.
If you didn’t count Shelby, and I was still on the fence about that one, Henry was the closest thing to a really good friend I had these days.
So that’s why Monday morning when Henry picked me up to go fishing I decided to ask what he thought about my conversation with Shelby. After all, Izzy had her chance to leave the island, a full scholarship to art school in Providence, when she found out a few weeks into her freshman year that she was pregnant. She nev
er made Mona feel like she’d have made any other decision, but maybe Izzy could have been a famous artist if things had turned out differently, maybe she could have traveled around the world meeting fascinating people, painting exciting new things instead of working in a gallery selling another artist’s work to some obnoxious lawyer from Connecticut.
I wouldn’t say I was psyched to get up at four thirty on a Monday morning, but I’d started to look forward to fishing with Henry. Our mornings together had become a regular thing. I didn’t join him fishing every day—I wasn’t lying when I said I wasn’t a morning person—but he’d always at least be at Stop & Shop when I got there to pick up Shelby’s missing ingredient, waiting to help me roam the baking aisle.
Although at first I spent time with Henry because I wanted to know more about Mona, now I found our mornings together intriguing because I wanted to know more about Henry. I thought I knew him, that after spending so much time at Mona’s house and with her family I had Henry all figured out. He was sort of quiet, not terribly social, and way more practical than Mona. I didn’t think we’d share anything in common, besides sharing his sister.
And I wasn’t totally wrong. Henry was different from Mona, but in a way I really enjoyed. Whereas Mona and I would talk nonstop for hours, Henry forced me to learn how to sit in silence on the banks of the pond and not feel the need to speak. And it wasn’t easy at first, but it was getting easier. Mona and I pretty much saw eye to eye on everything, but when Henry asked me questions, he wasn’t afraid to disagree with my answers or challenge what I thought. He managed to surprise me (he could say the entire alphabet backward) and be predictable at the same time (he was always at my front door at five o’clock sharp for fishing). It was the best of both worlds, having someone who felt like a friend you’ve known forever and yet with so many unknowns at the same time.
Ever since the night of the ghost tour, and the following day when he came by the inn to see me, Henry acted as if our kiss had never happened, which is what I’d told him I wanted. But now that we spent so much time together I wasn’t so sure that was true anymore. Things had changed that night he’d pulled me against him in the shadows. I don’t know if it was the creepy stories or standing together against the house with the moon illuminating the tree branches above, or if it was just that we were the only two people who understood Mona, but something was different. Now when I looked at him I didn’t just see Henry. I saw Henry with the soft lips that had barely parted before I pulled away. Even though I couldn’t see him in the shadows, I could feel his presence. The way he’d grabbed my hand without hesitation and led me toward the ghost tour. The way his shoulder touched mine as we followed the guide’s lead. But even though he wasn’t the same old Henry I used to think of, there was one thing about him that hadn’t changed. He was still Mona’s brother. And that meant no matter how soft his lips were, I wouldn’t be getting anywhere near them.
“Do you think Izzy wishes she’d gone back to art school?” I asked Henry as he cast his line out into the water, breaking its smooth surface.
He was facing the water, focused on the fishing line. I could only see Henry’s profile, how the back of his hair curled up slightly where it met the collar of his shirt, the unshaven stubble running down his cheek and along his jawbone. I wanted to reach out and touch his face, see if the stubble was velvety or prickly. For some reason I thought it would be soft.
“Probably,” Henry answered, still watching the line. “She used to talk about going back to school, but she hasn’t mentioned it in a while. She was painting at home while we were in school for a while, but the smell was really getting to us all, so Malcolm rented her a little studio.”
“Have you ever been there?”
“No, but I dropped her off once on my way to practice.”
“Aren’t you curious about what she paints all day?”
Henry turned to look at me. “I guess I just figured she painted the same stuff she painted here in the barn. Remember those wildflowers that Mona thought looked possessed? Poppy wouldn’t even let my mom hang one in the house.”
Henry wasn’t kidding. With their long, spiraled stems topped with wild bursts of color, those flowers always looked vaguely crazy to me.
“I’ve gone to the barn a couple of times. She’s not doing flowers anymore. She’s doing people.”
Henry didn’t seem that surprised. “Anyone we know?”
“Family, some friends. You should go see sometime, she’s really good.”
“I know she’s good,” Henry answered, but I don’t think he understood.
“I mean she’s really good.”
Henry turned to me. “So let’s go.”
“Go where?”
Henry tugged on the line, feeling for resistance. “To the barn. You can show me.”
“I didn’t mean we had to go today, now.”
“I didn’t mean now, I meant when we’re done fishing.”
So that’s how, forty-five minutes later, Henry and I ended up at Poppy’s house.
“God, it looks the same,” he told me, staring at the single-story ranch house he used to call home. Henry turned off the engine but he didn’t get out of the truck. He just sat there looking at the house, taking it in.
“That was the first thing I thought, too.”
“But it’s totally different, too. Look.” Henry pointed over to the woodpile. “He never would have let it get overgrown like that.”
Henry had noticed the yellow wildflowers growing between the logs. “I know.”
“It’s weird being back here.”
“You haven’t been back at all?”
Henry shook his head. “Not since the funeral. I think about him, you know, but being back here just reminds me that he’s really gone. I could almost forget that being in the city, but here it’s so much more real.”
I didn’t know what to say. “We don’t have to get out if you don’t want to. We can just sit here.”
It wasn’t as if I could come up with some magical words that would make Henry feel better, so I didn’t even try. Instead, I reached for his hand and laced our fingers together.
“It sucks, you know?” Henry kept the palm of his hand against mine and pulled me toward him until I was filling the empty space we usually kept between us. It was the closest we’d been since that night of the ghost tour, but this was entirely different. I wasn’t thinking about kissing him or how nice it felt to be resting my head against his shoulder. I was just thinking about how I wished I could make everything go back to normal again. For both of us.
“I know,” I told him. “It really sucks.”
We must have sat like that for five minutes, my head against his shoulder, my hand resting on his lap. We were so close, and the woods so quiet, I could hear every beat of his heart, each breath he inhaled.
“Come on.” Henry squeezed my hand and I looked up at him. “Let’s go check out the barn.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “We don’t have to.”
“No, I’m sure,” he told me, holding on to my hand for a few more seconds before letting go.
“Not a single flower,” Henry commented, taking his time as he took in all of the canvases. “I can’t believe it. I was convinced she was a frustrated florist wannabe or something. Wow.” He stopped in front of Poppy. “She painted the hat.”
“Just a few weeks ago. It wasn’t there before. I like it better, don’t you?”
Henry nodded. “She’d come back here a few times a month. We all thought she was packing up the house and stuff. I guess she was painting.”
“What do you think of this one?” I pointed to the painting of Henry. “Pretty good-looking guy, don’t you think?”
Henry smiled and came over to me, rubbing his chin in a pretty convincing imitation of an art buyer. “This is obviously the pinnacle of the artist’s work,” he observed. “And the subject, well, what can I say? It’s sheer perfection.”
He pulled me over next to him. “What do
you think?”
“I think it’s really good.”
Henry put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to face him but I backed away, moving out of his reach.
“What about this one over here?” I asked, standing in front of the canvas with the unfinished boy. Izzy still hadn’t gone back to it, one of the few paintings that hadn’t progressed since my first visit.
“Who is it?”
“I have no idea. I thought maybe you’d know.”
I watched Henry, waiting for a glimmer of recognition, a sign that he saw what I saw.
Instead, Henry said, “I don’t know. Maybe when she finishes it I’ll have a better idea.”
I glanced at the canvas again, wondering if I was the only one who saw the resemblance.
“Hey, it’s quarter to seven, you’ve got to get to work.” Henry turned toward the door and motioned for me to follow him. “And thanks.”
“For what?”
Henry laughed at me. “Just thanks.”
Chapter 16
Fourth of July is always crazy on the island, but when it falls on a Friday and all of the guest rooms are booked, it’s insane.
“How many?” Shelby asked, slicing a thick pat of butter and spooning it into the frying pan.
“Two Cheddar, one veggie, and one ham and Swiss.”
“I should have known better than to put omelets on the menu today.” Shelby shook her head and started cracking eggs.
I picked up my two orders of blueberry pancakes with strawberry syrup (Shelby’s version of a patriotic red, white, and blue complete with star-shaped bananas on top) and headed back out to the dining room.
“That was insane,” Shelby commented later on when the breakfast rush was over and we started in on the lunch orders. Just about every single room had planned a picnic, which meant we had to make more than forty sandwiches in the next hour.
I suppose I should have felt at least a little guilty as I wrapped Shelby’s chocolate chip cookies in cellophane and placed them into the wicker picnic baskets next to the turkey sandwiches. Here I was doing exactly what my sister had asked me to do—make other people’s lunches. The deli was probably packed ten deep with beachgoers picking up their orders. Last night Lexi couldn’t wait to tell me that they’d had their busiest day so far.
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