No Love Like Nantucket

by Grace Palmer

  She’s about to reach the edge of the belt and grab her bag. But when she looks up, she sees that it’s gone. Someone else has taken it already.

  She whirls around and scans the airport lobby in bewilderment. It’s a herd of people, most as tired and irritable as she is. They’re wheeling suitcases of all colors and shapes. But she doesn’t see hers. Until…

  Bingo. She spots the thief.

  Even in her deep state of exhaustion, she can tell that the man currently wheeling her bag towards the exit is handsome. He’s tall and broad, with salt-and-pepper hair and a smooth olive complexion. The hand gripping the suitcase handle looks strong and capable, and in profile, she sees a razor-sharp jaw, covered in a day or two’s worth of artfully curated stubble. The suit he’s wearing screams that he’s a businessman of some sort—navy, neatly pressed even after a long flight, with polished brown leather shoes to match.

  “Excuse me!” she calls ahead. But the man takes one step for every two of hers and still manages to widen the distance between them.

  She yells it again, “Excuse me!” And still, he does not turn around.

  Growling, she lowers her head like a sprinter and charges forward. A few other travelers leap back in alarm, though she pays them no mind.

  Finally, she catches up to the handsome businessman, seizes his forearm, and yanks him back towards her.

  He turns around, and she sees that she was absolutely right about his good looks. He’s got thick, dark, expressive eyebrows that are currently arrowed downwards in irritation.

  “Sí?” he snaps. “Qué te pasa?”

  She doesn’t appreciate his tone at all. The fact that she didn’t understand what he said doesn’t help matters. However, embarrassingly, Toni is a little out of breath from her mad dash to catch up with this man and stop him from running away with her luggage. So it takes her a second to get her wind back, swallow, brush the flyaways out of her face, and announce, “You have my bag.”

  She points down at the suitcase to illustrate what she’s saying. To her further annoyance, though, the man shakes his head dismissively, not even bothering to look where she’s pointing.

  “No,” he replies curtly in a faint Latin accent, “I do not.”

  He starts to turn around again as if that settles it. In alarm, Toni grabs his forearm a second time.

  “Yes,” she repeats with a stubborn set to her mouth, “you do. Black bag with a red ribbon. That’s mine.”

  The man clicks his tongue, a habit that has always driven Toni up the wall. Jared used to do that.

  “Qué quilombo, chabona,” he mutters under his breath. Toni doesn’t know any Spanish that wasn’t taught in Señorita Smith’s ninth-grade class at Nantucket High, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the man didn’t say anything nice. “Madam,” he continues, “my bag is black with a red ribbon. This is mine. Thank you.”

  He looks like he’s about to turn away for a second time, but before he can, Toni bends down and grabs the luggage tag tied next to the red ribbon on the handle. “Look!” she exclaims. “Toni Benson. That’s me. Can I have my bag now, please?”

  The businessman frowns. He leans over next to her and pulls the tag rudely out of her hands. Examining it himself, he clicks his tongue again, then straightens up.

  “Oh,” is all he says.

  Toni is inches away from picking a fight with this guy. A mix-up, sure, no problem. But he doesn’t have to be such a pig about it, does he? She’s had a long flight. A long week. Her brother is dead, her home is forever tarnished.

  She tries to remind herself that maybe this guy is going through something similar, to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, there’s that thing they say about strangers—“You never know what battles someone else is fighting.” It’s not out of the question that he needs her patience just as much as she needs his.

  But the condescending set to his mouth says otherwise.

  The man spends one long moment looking at her. Despite the condescending twist of his mouth, he really is quite lovely to look at. Those gray eyes are piercing, almost to the point of being harsh. She feels seen in a strange way. It’s not nice, but it’s not necessarily unpleasant, either. It’s as if the whole rest of the airport disappeared in this man’s vision and she is all he can see.

  Then he blinks and nods and is gone without saying another word.

  Toni shakes her head. Sorrow and sleep deprivation are dealing her a nasty double whammy. Forget the glass of wine she’d been envisioning throughout the entire flight—she just wants to get straight to bed.

  But by the time she finds her driver, gets to her hotel, checks in, and makes it to her room, the insatiable craving for sleep is gone. It’s late at this point, nearly midnight, and she’s been traveling for just under thirty-six hours. Surely her body and brain could use the rest?

  And yet, sleep will not come.

  She lies in the soft queen bed, staring at the whirling blades of the ceiling fan overhead. Her mind, far from being quiet, is racing.

  She misses her brother. Henry would’ve known what to do with that man at the airport. He would’ve probably ended up befriending the guy and inviting him over for a whiskey at the hotel bar.

  She misses her home. The thought of the Sweet Island Inn sitting vacant and dormant is weirdly unsettling. For eighteen years, it’s been a beehive of comings and goings. She’s had guests come and never leave. She’s watched them grow; she herself has grown. Now, though, it is just a building. Some essential part of it feels snuffed out.

  Most confusingly, she misses the family she never had. On the flight from Newark to Bogota, there had been a family seated on the other side of the aisle. A handsome redhead man and his petite brunette wife. She had a baby on her lap, while her husband was kept busy playing UNO with their polite little boy, whose legs were too short to reach the floor, so they swung back and forth beneath his seat. Toni had watched them for a while. It made her heart ache to see something so simple—a mother holding a baby, a father teaching his son how not to tip his cards. How many moments are there like that in the life of a family? Thousands—millions, even. This foursome would probably never remember this flight. But it is stamped in Toni’s memory indelibly, all the more special because there was nothing special about it to them.

  She wonders what it would have been like if everything had gone right. Would she have been the one holding a sleeping baby while her husband played games with their son? Perhaps.

  What else would be different? There would be no Sweet Island Inn, of course. She might live in Atlanta, not Nantucket.

  And maybe her brother would still be alive.

  That’s a preposterous thought, and she does her best to dismiss it out of hand. But it lingers anyway, like a stain she cannot scrub away. She tells the empty hotel room, “That’s ridiculous,” and for a second, that does the trick.

  But when her voice fades away, the thought crops back up again, as stubborn as Henry himself.

  Toni sits upright with an irritated growl. Forget sleeping. Maybe that glass of wine is what she needs after all.

  Throwing off the comforter, she goes over to her suitcase and quickly pulls on a pair of jeans, a white cotton top, and slips her feet into her sandals. She tucks her room key into her back pocket and makes her way downstairs to the hotel bar.

  It’s mostly empty when she gets there. There is only one other drinker, a chic-looking woman with long, dark hair, contemplating a martini set on the marble bar top in front of her. Behind the bar, a man in suspenders and a black felt driver’s cap browses his phone idly.

  Toni slides into one of the big, high-backed black leather chairs and folds her hands in her lap. The bartender glances up. “What can I get you?” he asks in a lightly accented voice. He doesn’t even bother going with Spanish first. She must really look out of place.

  “Uh, Malbec, please,” she says. It’s what that guest at the inn years ago had recommended so highly.

  He nods
and turns to pour her the glass of wine. When it is full, he sets it down on a cocktail napkin in front of her and shifts his attention back to his cell phone.

  Toni takes a tentative sip of the drink. “Oh my!” she gasps out loud when she does—the fashion designer from Argentina wasn’t lying about the country’s famous wine. It is dry, full-bodied, and so rich, with vanilla and dark chocolate swirling between layers of juicy oakyness.

  She looks around, sees the woman at the other end of the bar looking at her, and turns her eyes downward in embarrassment. The bartender doesn’t seem to notice anything that’s happening beyond his cell-phone screen.

  “It is good, no?”

  Toni glances back up. It was the woman at the bar with her who spoke. If Toni’s not mistaken, she had a French accent. No speakers anywhere else in the world have quite that same manner of speaking in a single string of syllables, all flowing, lilting highs-and-lows.

  “It’s amazing, honestly,” Toni said. “I was ready to be disappointed.”

  The woman laughs. It sounds like a wind chime. She’s so effortlessly classy, Toni thinks to herself, the kind of woman who can be drinking in a hotel bar at midnight by herself and look like she’s precisely where she’s meant to be. For her part, Toni feels like a wreck. Underdressed, exhausted, and somehow tight, as if there are wires of tension under her skin and behind her eyes that are being pulled taut.

  “They do know their wine, these porteños.”

  Toni nods. “It would certainly seem so. I’m sorry, what was the last thing you said?”

  “Porteños,” the woman repeats, enunciating carefully. “It means ‘people of the port.” She waves a hand around as if to indicate the whole city. “People who live here in Buenos Aires, you know?”

  “Ah,” Toni says. “Got it.” She feels dumb and American already, and so wildly far from home that she wonders why on earth she ever thought this was a good idea.

  The woman smiles, though, and that makes her feel a little better. “Where are you from?” she asks.

  “America,” Toni says after taking another sip of the wine. She can already feel it working its way through her system, sandpapering off some of the edge that has been rubbing her the wrong way ever since the encounter with the businessman at the airport. “The Northeast. A little island up there called Nantucket.”

  “Nantucket, yes,” the woman muses. “I have heard of this. It is beautiful, is it not?”

  “Very.”

  “You are a long way from home, though.”

  Toni laughs bitterly. “It certainly feels that way,” she says in a near-whisper.

  “And what brings you to the land of tango?”

  “Oh, you know…” Toni says, gesturing vaguely. She feels a sudden lump in her throat. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that people would ask that question. She knows that’s stupid—it’s one of the first things she asks all the guests of the inn—and yet it just never came up in her planning. Now, with the question thrust upon her, the thought of answering honestly, of explaining that her brother has died and she badly needed to run from her grief, feels ridiculous.

  “…Just taking a little ‘me time,”” she finishes lamely. She crosses her fingers next to her thigh and hopes the woman does not press further.

  Thankfully, she doesn’t, though it’s hard to say whether it’s because she doesn’t care or because she notices Toni’s sudden reluctance.

  “We could all do with more of that,” the woman says with another flash of a friendly grin. “I am Camille, by the way.” She slides out of her seat gracefully and comes over to Toni. Toni is prepared to shake her hand, but the woman instead leans forward and kisses her once on each cheek. Mae loves to do that, too, and in this small, simple gesture, Toni feels a sudden rush of affection for this kind stranger.

  “I’m Toni,” she answers quietly. Part of her is concerned that she is about to fall weeping into Camille’s arms. She’s feeling very unstable all of a sudden.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you, Toni,” says Camille. “I am going now. Will you be here for some time?”

  “Until I finish the wine, I guess.”

  Camille laughs again. Like everything else she does, it is elegant.

  “I meant in the city, Toni.”

  “Oh,” Toni says, blushing. “Yes. For some time.”

  “Good. Perhaps we will share a drink together again, then. Adieu.”

  And then, she is gone, whisking away to the elevator bank and disappearing within.

  Toni watches her go, then finishes her wine quietly. When it’s done, she charges her tab to the room before going back upstairs.

  In the dark silence of her hotel room, she undresses and slips once more under the comforter. This time, sleep rushes on her quickly. Her last thought before she falls gratefully into its arms—and she knows it’s a silly thought for a woman approaching sixty years of age—is that maybe this trip won’t be so bad.

  After all, she made a friend today.

  3

  Atlanta, Georgia—July 1, 2000

  Toni glanced nervously at the package strapped into her passenger seat. Maybe this was going too far.

  But who could blame her? Over the last two weeks since she’d officially booked the lake-house cabin, Toni’s excitement had turned into anxiety and her anxiety into excitement, over and over again like a snake eating its own tail until she couldn’t tell where one stopped and the other began.

  Which was not to say that going to the bakery and having them design a cake in the shape of a log cabin was necessarily justified. But if she didn’t do something to channel her nervous, bubbling energy, Toni felt like she might just explode.

  So that is how the log cabin ice-cream cake came to be sitting on the front passenger seat of her car—seat-belted in for safety, of course, Atlanta traffic being what it was—as she headed home on her lunch break to surprise Jared with all that she had in store for him: the cake, their plans, her love.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” she urged the drivers in front of her. Everyone in town seemed to be moving slow as molasses today. It was like they were purposefully trying to delay her and make her even crazier than she already felt.

  Little by little, she inched closer towards home. She slid from the highway onto the frontage road, from the frontage road onto her street, from her street into her driveway.

  Jared’s car was parked out front. He often worked from home or from a nearby coffee shop if he wasn’t out at a client meeting. He’d probably be a little irritable at her unexpectedly interrupting him, but oh well, the grouch would just have to get over it.

  Toni was smiling to herself, humming a little as she got out of the car and scurried around to the other side to carefully extract the cake. She strode up to the door and wriggled it open with her free hand. It swung inward on quiet hinges, and she slipped into the house.

  With any luck, Jared had his headphones on and wouldn’t have heard her coming inside. There was a little voice in her head that kept repeating what he’d said that night outside the restaurant on his thirty-fifth birthday—“I don’t like surprises”—but she dismissed it.

  This wasn’t just any old surprise. In her head, it was everything. She’d show him that, and when he saw it through Toni’s eyes, Jared would get it. He could be so sharp like that sometimes. She’d never been the best at phrasing her thoughts, but Jared knew her inside and out. If she fumbled over how to express something, he could just get it in an instant and say it exactly how it ought to be said. It was nice to be understood like that.

  She pushed the door closed behind her with a hip, wincing as the latch clicked into place. Her heart was beating fast, she noticed, so she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  It felt—stupidly, she knew, and yet she couldn’t deny that the feeling in her chest—like she was holding her marriage in her hands, in the form of this silly little cake. All she had to do was go down the hallway to Jared’s home office and show it to him, and the rest of their live
s would cruise easily along, no more friction, no more problems.

  She slipped off her shoes so she could sneak up more quietly and stifled a nervous giggle. Then, moving toe to heel with each stride, so she didn’t cause any of the wooden floorboards to groan, she rounded the corner and turned down the hallway.

  The sides of the hallway were lined with pictures of them from the last twelve years, in roughly chronological order. Toni walked slowly, looking at each of them and smiling as she passed.

  There was one from shortly after their first date when they’d gone to Six Flags, the two of them both screaming and throwing their hands in the air as a roller coaster took their breath away.

  There was one from their first Christmas together. They’d gone to Nantucket and celebrated with Henry and Mae and Toni’s nieces and nephews. It was snowing in the picture, and they were all bundled up like little felt bowling balls. Jared’s nose was bright red. Toni had teased him by calling him Rudolph all week long.

  There was the snapshot that Jared’s buddy Carlos had taken of the moment he proposed to her. They’d gone to a botanical garden, and Jared had dropped to a knee in the middle of a cloud of beautiful monarch butterflies and revealed a ring in a velvet box. Toni only remembered bits and pieces of the speech he gave, but who cared about details like that?

  Then, the wedding and the honeymoon, a cluster from each of them. She’d always particularly loved the black-and-white shot of the two of them walking out through the doors of the church, holding hands, with grains of rice forever suspended in the air above them. She looked so happy in that one.

  The last picture before she reached the doorway to Jared’s office was of just Toni. Jared had snapped it during a summer trip back home to Nantucket. She was wheeling her bike down the beach towards the water and gazing calmly into the distance. She was wearing a simple white dress with her hair loose and long and sashaying idly in the soft breeze. In the distance, a squat white lighthouse kept an eye on the horizon.

  She’d always loved that one. It was beachy and romantic. But as she looked at it now, she didn’t get the same warm fuzzies she usually did whenever it happened to catch her eye. Normally, she would’ve said that she looked at peace, perfectly content, even though the picture didn’t show much of her face.