by Nancy Thayer
“Okay, so I’m going home.” Nash stood up, yanking her back to the present.
How long had she been caught up in the chaos of her thoughts? Long enough to cause Nash to leave. “I’m so sorry, Nash, I’m not usually so hopeless, at least I hope I’m not—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Leaning over, he kissed her forehead.
She inhaled the good strong scent of Nash, soapy and sweaty and masculine and she wanted to take him by the hand and lead him up to her bedroom. Instead, she trailed behind him as he went under the arbor and around the side of the house to his truck. She didn’t want him to leave, but she couldn’t promise herself her mind wouldn’t wander.
“I’m always like this at the beginning of the summer,” she told him as he stepped up into the cab.
“Good to know.” He smiled at her—a genuine, not-forced smile—and took off.
She dragged herself up the steps and into the house by the front door, not wanting to expose herself to any more backyard conversations. She shut the door and leaned against it, suddenly lethargic. She had to do something about this. She couldn’t hide in her house, missing the joys of her backyard and garden. She wasn’t a weakling. The crazy thing was that she hadn’t missed Boyz ever, so why was she turning into such a nut job when she overheard him and his family? On the other hand, what the hell was Boyz even doing here? He should be at Lake George. Did this mean that the gorgeous Autumn had insisted on spending their vacation anywhere except with all the other Szwedas? Darcy could imagine that Autumn had distanced herself from Boyz’s sisters and mother. Maybe that was exactly what Boyz needed.
She had to stop thinking about Boyz! She wanted to reach into her mind with invisible tweezers and yank out all knowledge of him. Or swallow a magic pill that would erase all thoughts of him—that would do the trick.
“Buck up!” Darcy told herself. In the low policeman’s voice she used sometimes when reading stories to the children at the library, she added, “Miss, walk away from the door.”
Behind her back, someone knocked on the door. Darcy let out a small shriek of surprise. Good, she thought. Nash was back.
But she opened the door to find a pretty and rather distraught woman standing there.
“Oh, thank heavens you’re home!” She was wringing her hands. “I’m Susan Brueckner, we’re renting next door for the summer”—she pointed to the house on her right—“and I forgot to buy milk. Otto said he wasn’t coming but now he is and the boys can have their cereal raw—I don’t mean raw—what do I mean? Dry! I mean dry! But Otto has to have milk in his coffee, and he always has a cup in the evening, and I’m wondering if I could borrow some milk? I’ll pay it back tomorrow. The boys—they’re nice boys, truly, Henry is ten, George is eight, and Alfred is six—are unsettled right now, we only just arrived, and I can’t pack them all back into the car and I don’t know where the grocery store is!”
Susan Brueckner was not the normal Nantucket visitor, but Darcy was instantly charmed. Did people even ask a neighbor for anything these days? Susan Brueckner expected the world to be helpful, and Darcy liked her for that. Susan was a pretty blue-eyed blonde, rather—wasn’t the German word zaftig?—plump but comely.
When she paused for breath, Darcy held out her hand. “Hello, Susan, I’m Darcy Cotterill. I’d be delighted to give you some milk. Come in.”
“This is so very kind of you. I’m not usually so disorganized….” Susan followed Darcy down the hall and into the kitchen, her voice trailing off as she looked at the house, the thick Persian rugs, handsome furniture, and oil paintings that had been Penny’s, Penny’s pine table with pink and lavender snapdragons in a white vase centered neatly in the middle. Darcy’s kitchen counters were shining clean, with delft blue and white ceramic canisters filled with flour, sugar, salt, and rice.
Darcy poured milk into a pitcher and handed it to Susan.
Susan said, “Please tell me you don’t have children.”
For a moment, Darcy was puzzled, but when Susan gestured around the room, Darcy understood. If Darcy had three boys, this was not how her kitchen would look.
“I don’t have children.”
“Oh.” Susan put a hand to her chest. “I’m so glad. Oh, sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but my house has never looked so calm, so neat.” Susan took the pitcher of milk and stared down into it. “It is a great disappointment to Otto. I wish I could change, but with three boys…” Susan bit her lip impatiently, holding back, Darcy imagined, a flood of words.
“I’m a children’s librarian,” Darcy said, “so I do understand the chaos children cause.”
“Thank you! And for the milk, too. I’d better hurry back before our house is destroyed.” At the front door, she paused. “I’ve never been to Nantucket before. We live in Boston—my husband’s a lawyer—I didn’t know everything would be so perfect here, so beautified. I wish we hadn’t come here, my boys make so much noise, and all the women are thin and it’s like dust wouldn’t dare exist!”
Darcy couldn’t help laughing. “I promise you, we’ve got plenty of dust. And plenty of normal women. Take your boys to the beach every day, let them swim in the ocean, and they’ll be too exhausted to make noise in the evening.”
Susan’s face lit up. “Oh, what a kind thing to say. You’re so nice. You must be a therapist.”
“Um, no,” Darcy gently reminded her. “I’m a children’s librarian.”
“Of course! Forgive me! I’m not a complete idiot, you know.”
With that, Susan hurried back to her house, waving and calling thanks.
Darcy waved back, smiling, and closed the front door. She was immeasurably cheered. Someday maybe she would have a husband and children, but for now, she curled up on the sofa and picked up her current novel, and she felt even a little bit smug.
5
The next afternoon, not even five minutes after Darcy returned home from work, a tow-haired, straight-backed little boy appeared at her door with Darcy’s pitcher in one hand and a gallon carton of milk in the other.
“My name is Henry Brueckner and my mother says thank you very much,” the boy said.
His dignity was touching. “Thank you, Henry,” Darcy told him, accepting the pitcher. “But this is much more than your mother borrowed. Let me pour some into my pitcher and you can take the rest home.”
Henry looked worried by her words. He was a very formal child, one, undoubtedly, who as the oldest was often made responsible for doing the right thing. Darcy’s offer confused and even dismayed him. How to decide? Should he hurry home and ask his mother or go ahead and accept her offer? After all, Darcy was an adult, so he should respect her decision.
“Come in for a moment,” Darcy said.
Henry looked horrified. “My mother said I shouldn’t bother you.”
“Oh. Oh, I see. Well, stay right there.” She hurried to the kitchen, poured some milk into her pitcher, and returned to the front door. “Now. Tell your mother I took exactly what I loaned.”
Henry’s face brightened. What Darcy said made sense.
“And please tell her I’m very happy to meet such a polite and dependable young man.”
Henry turned bright red. “Thank you,” he said, and turned to hurry away.
“Henry,” Darcy called. “We have a wonderful library here with lots of events for kids your age and story hours for your younger brothers.”
He nodded and rushed off, clutching the carton of milk to his chest.
—
The next day was a rainy, windy, blustery day. After a couple of days on the beach with lots of sunshine, the summer people would be happy to use the library for a change of pace. If there were too many rainy days in a row, the adults and their children came in, restless and grumpy, as if the librarians had caused the weather.
Today so many children flocked in for story time that Darcy and Beverly knew from experience it would be impossible to keep order, so they quickly counted heads and split the children into two groups. Beverl
y took the older children down the stairs to the gallery. Darcy chose the area between two bookcases with the younger children.
“Today I’m going to read The Mousehole Cat,” Darcy announced. She sat on a small wooden chair. The children sat on the floor and some of the parents did the same or perched on the child-size chairs at the perimeter of the group.
As everyone got settled, Darcy recognized Susan and her brood of blond boys. She winked and smiled to them. Susan smiled back. Darcy held the book high as she read; she had the words almost completely memorized. It was a charming story set in a harbor town in Cornwall that was not so different from Nantucket. After she finished the book, she asked the children questions—“Do you have a cat? Do you like stories about dogs? About boats?”—and directed them to books they could take home. It was such a pleasure to see children leaving the library, happily clutching books to their chests. She hoped Susan would come say hello, but by the time the crowd around Darcy had thinned, Susan and her boys were gone.
—
Over the next few days, the sun grew fatter and closer and more intense. After work in the afternoons, Darcy slipped into the restroom and changed into a bathing suit, pulled her sundress back on over it, and walked down to Jetties Beach for a cooling swim. She didn’t go there as often as she should, like a New Yorker never visiting the Empire State Building. Darcy went to different beaches for different reasons. The south shore was good for surf and crashing storms. Darcy preferred the calm waters of the Sound at Steps Beach for swimming, but that was a much longer walk. If she had an afternoon off, she drove out to Quidnet and swam in the sweet waters of Sesachacha Pond or, her favorite, at the end of the harbor at Coskata, a small lonely beach past the Wauwinet Hotel, off a rutted dirt road that required a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Jetties Beach was usually too crowded, but today, by the time she got there, the crowds had thinned out as people left for dinner.
In the late afternoon, wearing a loose cotton dress over her wet bathing suit, her long hair hanging damp and cool down her back, Darcy walked from Jetties Beach over to the narrow cobblestoned lane she called Jelly Bean Road. She climbed the hill and ambled over to Main Street, circling past the crowded downtown area with its shops and crowds and never enough parking spots.
Her pulse quickened as she came to her street. So far she’d stayed away from her garden in the late afternoons, not wanting to be seen by Boyz, not wanting even to think about him. On the other hand, she didn’t want to be a coward, fenced in by her own anxieties. She knew that if, for example, Boyz and his family were playing croquet in their yard, that did not mean she had to hide inside. Her garden was her connection with her grandmother, and more—it was her place. She had to weed and plant and trim. She wanted to have friends over for summer parties, when she strung the trees and bushes with miniature lights so the garden sparkled like a magic land. She had to be able to sit alone on her patio and read until darkness fell, and then let the book drop to her lap and her head fall back on the chaise so she could watch the sky slowly and tenderly transform the sun’s gold into evening’s silver as stars appeared. This was a special time for her, almost a sacred time, and she wouldn’t allow herself to give it up.
At home, Darcy tossed her book bag on a chair and headed for the kitchen. This evening, she was determined to enjoy her backyard. She chose a Pinot Noir from her small wine rack and was uncorking it when she glanced out her kitchen window and saw, in the next yard, something out of place, peculiar, unsettling.
Had someone dumped a bundle of clothes in her neighbor’s yard? But, no, there was movement—and all at once she realized that Mimi, that dear old grandmother, was lying on the ground, unable to rise.
Darcy set the wine down and raced out her front door, squeezed through the narrow passageway between houses, not caring if she broke a few petals off the blue hydrangea, and burst into the backyard.
“Mimi?” Darcy dropped to her knees beside the older woman, who lay facedown in the grass, her blue frock twisted all around her body.
Awkwardly, Mimi turned her head. “Oh, Darcy, dear. I’m so glad to see you. I was sitting in the lawn chair, and got too warm, and stood up to go inside, and bam, down I went like a villain on TV.”
“Did you break anything? Do you hurt anywhere?”
“I might have twisted my right ankle. It hurts like the devil when I try to stand. I use a cane because of my wonky left ankle, so I do seem rather…grounded.”
“Where’s Clive?”
“Off buying groceries, doing errands. I promised him I wouldn’t come outside on my own, but a day like this is irresistible….”
“Let’s see if we can turn you over and get you into a sitting position.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
They discussed the logistics of the maneuver—should Darcy push on Mimi’s left side or her right? If Mimi could lift up a bit, Darcy could give her a gentle heave with one hand on her hip and one on her thigh. They counted to three and Darcy pushed. In vain. Mimi weighed a good one hundred eighty pounds, and many of those pounds were good healthy padding, perfect for protecting her when she fell but difficult to shift. Also, Darcy discovered that Mimi’s upper arm strength was more or less nonexistent. All this meant that when Darcy shoved on Mimi’s hip and leg, she managed to rotate the lower half of Mimi’s body backward, but the upper half of her body stayed put and the lower half was finally, inexorably, pulled by gravity back down to the ground.
Mimi was trembling. She muttered something incomprehensible. For a chilling moment Darcy feared the older woman had had a stroke and lost her ability to speak. Darcy knelt close to Mimi’s head and gently touched her neck. She didn’t know what she was doing. All she could think of was what she saw on television cop shows: If someone was incapacitated, moving her head could cause injury to her neck.
“Did I hurt you?” Darcy asked.
Mimi spoke again, more slowly. “I have grass in my nose.” She was laughing. Her whole body shook as she laughed.
Her laughter was contagious. “Shall I move your head sideways? Does your neck feel okay?”
“Please move my head sideways.”
Carefully, unable to stop laughing, Darcy lifted Mimi’s head and turned it sideways. A sprinkling of dirt and a few stray filaments of grass coated the older woman’s nose and cheeks.
“Shall we try again?” Darcy asked.
“Yes. This time pretend I’m a rug, one of those heavy Persian rugs. Just unroll me.”
They had both gotten giddy and breathless, giggling like children. Darcy positioned herself with her knees firmly on the ground, one hand on her shoulder, the other on her hip.
“On the count of three,” Darcy said.
“Mimi!” Clive was suddenly there. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“I fell, darling, that’s all,” Mimi, still planted facedown in the grass, assured him. “Darcy’s been trying to help me roll over, a Sisyphean task, it seems.”
“You shouldn’t be out here. You promised you’d stay in your chair in the living room.”
“Dear boy, don’t lecture me while my face is in the dirt. It’s hard for me to concentrate.”
“Sorry. Okay. Let me get you up.”
“Can I help you?” Darcy asked.
He studied the situation. “No, thanks. I’ve got this.” Straddling his grandmother’s recumbent body, he wrapped his arms around her upper torso and gently lifted her, turned her, and brought her into a sitting position, her back against the lawn chair. Darcy held her breath, watching to see if there was anything she could do to help. And noticing, in spite of herself, Clive’s body. He was of medium height but had large, wide bones; wide shoulders; large, long-fingered hands. He looked sturdy, strong, brawny; and he gently lifted his grandmother up and into her chair as if she weighed little more than a child.
When he got Mimi settled, he wasn’t even winded.
Mimi was. While Mimi caught her breath, Darcy hurried to rearrange the flurried mess of Mimi’s skir
t and slip. She wore white sneakers with Peds.
“You have such pretty ankles,” Darcy told her.
“I do, don’t I! How nice of you to notice.”
Clive looked at the two of them as if they were lunatics. “Pretty ankles? Mimi, your pretty ankles won’t support you, and you know it.” He glared at Darcy. “Did you bring her out here? Because obviously, she’s not really ambulatory.”
“Stop it, Clive,” Mimi ordered. “I came out here myself, and I was ambulatory enough to get here. My cane is right there, just out of reach. I sat in the lawn chair in the sun for a while, and it was so pleasant, feeling the sun on my face, hearing the birds sing. Only when I decided to go back inside did my ankles give out on me, and down I went, all nicely cushioned by my blubber. Darcy saw me from her window and rushed over to help me.” She grinned. “We were just getting started when you arrived.”
The tension left Clive’s shoulders. He smiled at Darcy. “Well, then, Darcy, thank you for helping her. I’m sorry if I was abrupt. She is such a bad patient, always getting into trouble when she should stay quiet—as her doctor has told her many times.”
