The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “I hurt my wrist,” said Maggie, at the same time that Lu said, “I think her wrist might be broken.”

  Now Joy could see the unshed tears in Maggie’s eyes. She hadn’t noticed the way Maggie was sitting, with her right palm over her left wrist. She’d been too busy thinking snarky thoughts about the ice cream. She was suddenly reminded of her daughter at age five, when Joy had forgotten to put the money under Maggie’s pillow for a tooth and Maggie, struggling to be very brave, had said that she understood and that the Tooth Fairy probably missed the last ferry and would have to come the next night.

  “I think you should have it looked at,” said Lu.

  “Let me see,” said Joy, more gently. Maggie moved the hand that was covering her wrist and Joy bent over it. Lu was right: she could see the swelling. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “How’d this happen?”

  “I fell off my bike,” said Maggie, at the same time that Lu said, “She fell down the steps at Mohegan Bluffs.”

  “You what? All of them?”

  “No. Just the last few.”

  Small consolation. “What were you doing out there at night?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Maggie.

  “I wish Jeremy were here,” said Lu quickly. “He could have a look. You see how it’s starting to bruise there, just near the bone? And I didn’t want to have her try to turn it, but I don’t know if she could.”

  “I can’t,” whispered Maggie.

  “Oh, honey,” said Joy. She was a terrible mother, not to have noticed immediately that something was wrong. “We do need to get this looked at. In the car.”

  “My bike—”

  “I’ll come back for it tomorrow. In the car, okay?”

  Still Maggie stood there, and then Lu said, “Maggie, let me talk to your mom for a sec.” It was then that Maggie decided to get in the car. Of course she listened to Lu.

  Once Maggie had left to get in the car, Joy turned to Lu and said, “I still don’t understand what happened—why she— Oh, never mind. It’s not important now. What’s important is that she’s okay. Thank you for calling me.”

  “Of course.” Lu hesitated. Then: “Do you mind if I say something?”

  Very much so. “No,” said Joy.

  “Don’t be too hard on her.”

  Joy set her teeth together.

  “About the grounding,” said Lu. “She’s had quite a night. I’m sure she’ll tell you all about it.”

  I’m sure she won’t, thought Joy grimly.

  Lu touched Joy lightly on the shoulder, and there was something about the touch that made it all come roiling to the surface—all of the disappointments of the summer: her disappointment in Anthony, and her terror at the thought of Maggie growing up and leaving her alone, and her worries about her business and the money and the goddamn macarons, and how she might one day in the very near future be an old lady who lived alone with one or more cats, without even the benefit of the grave of a loved one to visit, as Mrs. Simmons had.

  It took every ounce of Joy’s self-control not to slap away Lu’s hand. But she did flick it. “In the future,” she said coldly, enjoying the look of dismay on Lu’s face, “if my daughter comes here, and she’s hurt, I’d appreciate if you’d call me right away. Maybe forgo the ice-cream celebration.”

  “I’m sorry—” said Lu. “I just thought . . .”

  Joy didn’t let her finish. She made her angry way to the Jeep. Maggie was already in, seat belt on, eyes straight ahead. If Anthony were to have looked out his window he would have seen the Jeep reverse and start down Corn Neck Road on the way to the Block Island Medical Center, where Joy knew from Olivia Rossi that her mother, an ER nurse who had trained at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, was on the overnight shift.

  Chapter 48

  Lu

  Lu had missed a call from Jeremy while she’d been talking to Maggie and Joy, but she wanted to sit for a few minutes before calling him back. She wondered if she’d done right by Maggie. It felt like a privilege and a responsibility, being trusted by a girl Maggie’s age—a girl right on the cusp. She hoped she hadn’t messed up.

  While she was mulling that over she checked her email. Abigail Knowles was back from vacation. I’m back from Italy! Sono tornato dall’Italia! Totally jet-lagged but ready to get to work! Give me a call when you have a chance to chat! I am so super excited about this project!

  Lu couldn’t put off a phone call much longer. Abigail Knowles’s trip to Italy had been a welcome reprieve, and now it was over. Era finito. (Lu had taken two semesters of beginning Italian in college.) She logged on to the website of the Wilder Literary Agency, and clicked through to Abigail’s bio. There was a photo there. It showed a young (very young!) woman with a humongous smile and long brown hair. She lived in Manhattan; she had a German shepherd named Mogley. Her biggest sale was a nonfiction book called The New New Feminism. Lu didn’t know what that meant, but she was intrigued.

  (Feminism is a luxury, Lu’s mother used to say. A luxury for women who have time to worry about such things. Lu’s father had walked out on her mother when Lu was seven and her sister was eight, and from then on they’d all fought to keep their heads above water, the three of them. Almost everything was a luxury.)

  Lu cleared the ice-cream bowls, loaded them into the dishwasher, and sat down again. She wondered if the new new feminism of today’s wives and mothers might be more difficult to articulate and so it came out in silly quibbles about who unloaded the dishwasher last and whose turn it was to bring in the garbage cans. (Lu always did the dishwasher and the garbage cans because Jeremy was never home.) Really it was only after she’d become a mother that she saw the invisible shackles so many women wore. Even pretty Jessica, with her workout clothes and her cozy relationship with her MIL, wore shackles. She just might not have admitted it to herself.

  But Lu admitted it. She felt her shackles tightening. She felt them in the set of Jeremy’s jaw. She felt them in the way Nancy’s eyes pinched together when she disapproved of something Lu had done or (more likely) when she disapproved of something that she hadn’t done. She felt them when Chase had a nightmare and she stroked his hair until he fell asleep. When she prepared to creep out of the room and his little hand reached out and clutched at hers—even in sleep trying to keep her there.

  Maybe, if she told Jeremy about the blog, she could continue working on it as a hobby, maybe Jeremy would be okay with that. But she didn’t want to be a casual blogger, treating conferences like an excuse to get a new outfit and paint her nails and get drunk while the husband stayed home with the kids. Not that Jeremy could stay home with the kids: he had to work. Lu wanted to speak at the conferences. She wanted to develop really good recipes, produce the splashiest cookbook, identify the next rung on the ladder and climb it. She wanted to be the best. And to be the best she needed to treat Dinner by Dad like a job, not a hobby.

  Enjoy them while they’re young! her mother would tell her if she were here. They won’t be young forever, it goes so fast.

  But the career years go by fast too, Lu wanted to scream. Those are also finite. All of it goes by too fast, life goes by too fast. By the time Chase was off to college she’d be—well, old. Older. Old. Over fifty. She’d be tired. She’d definitely be out of touch. She’d have no connections; she’d be starting from scratch. She felt the shackles tightening around her. And if there was a third baby, she’d never get going.

  When Joy saw Lu come into Joy Bombs the next day she stiffened visibly. “Hey,” Lu said. She tried to sound both upbeat and nonchalant—a tricky balance. She placed a large order: a dozen whoopie pies. She’d bring them to Nancy, who was taking the boys to lunch. Maggie had texted to say she had a hairline fracture in her wrist but that her cast was waterproof and she’d be back tomorrow. Lu also ordered a triple decaf cappuccino with a shot of almond syrup, and a raspberry whoopie pie to eat there. She didn’t want the almond syrup, but it cost seventy-five cents extra, and she wanted to spend as much money as she could, be
cause she noticed that it wasn’t very crowded in the café. The Roving Patisserie probably was a legitimate threat.

  When the pies were boxed up and the coffee was done, Lu asked Joy to sit with her for a minute.

  “I don’t know,” said Joy. “I’m sort of busy.”

  “I’m sure you are,” said Lu, looking at the empty tables. “I can tell. But I won’t keep you long. I promise.”

  “Okay,” said Joy. She slid into the seat across from Lu. “Shoot.” She was fiddling with a coffee stirrer. Her hair was tied back in a messy bun, and she looked tired.

  “Listen,” said Lu. “I want to apologize to you for the other night. I’m sorry I didn’t call you sooner, right when Maggie showed up. I’m sorry I was the one to hear her story first. Did she tell you what happened?”

  “She did,” said Joy. “After a while. And I felt like such an idiot, there was a text I had seen earlier in the summer, something about going for it, about someone who was older, and I got caught up in everything else, and I completely forgot. I let this happen. I basically broke her wrist for her.”

  “No, you didn’t,” said Lu firmly. “You didn’t.” There was something else she’d come to say too. “I’m sorry I took her away from you so much this summer. I’m sorry if I did anything—anything—to offend you.”

  Joy’s face underwent a transformation. Her tight lips loosened; her eyes drooped. Her shoulders slumped forward. She looked like a blow-up doll whose air had suddenly been taken out. “No,” she said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I should be apologizing. I overreacted. I think . . .” She swiped at her eyes, and tied a knot in the coffee stirrer. “I think she likes you better, and that’s why I got so mad.” She started to cry.

  It was funny how certain actions really showed your genetic heritage. Joy looked just like Maggie when she cried, in the same way that Lu and her sister laughed alike because they both held their hands over their mouths the same way. (Lu had decided that this was because they were always trying to hide the gaps in their front teeth.)

  “No!” Lu cried. “Of course she doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t like me better.”

  “She does.” Joy nodded. “She does.”

  “It’s not that. It’s not you. It’s just the nature of mothers and daughters, that’s all.”

  “How would you know?” asked Joy. “You have sons. Dear little sweet, loyal sons.” She wiped her eyes with a napkin.

  Lu considered this. “You’re right,” she said. “I don’t have a daughter. But I was a daughter, don’t forget. A thousand years ago, I was a teenage girl with a mother.”

  Lu’s mother would have been over the moon if Lu had confided in her, and Lu refused to tell her anything. What had Lu’s mother ever done to Lu, except for at one time know her so intimately that Lu couldn’t bear to expose her to all of the humiliations involved in her growing up?

  “Did you tell your mother everything?” Lu asked Joy. She sipped her drink. The almond syrup turned out to be a really nice addition, well worth the extra cash.

  “Definitely not.” Joy tied another knot in the coffee stirrer. “My mother was far too busy keeping up with my brothers to pay much attention to what I was doing. I was sort of a wild child, on the streets of Fall River.”

  “There you go!” Lu felt triumphant. “See? It’s not that different.”

  “I don’t know. It is, though. I have all these brothers, and I have a dad—it was chaos, all the time. Nobody was focused on just me, it was nobody’s job to do that. And that was fine. But Maggie is my responsibility, she’s all mine. I mean, Dustin exists, obviously. But he’s . . .” She paused. Her eyes flashed.

  “Negligible?” offered Lu.

  Joy smiled, a little. Progress. “Right. His influence is pretty negligible. It’s all on me, when you get right down to it. And I don’t think I’m doing a very good job. I’ve been taking my eye off the ball. For part of the summer I was caught up in Anthony, who turned out to be a jerk and a liar . . .”

  Lu winced. Anthony had told her about what had happened with him and Joy. She understood why Joy was angry, but she also thought Anthony deserved another chance.

  “Sorry. I know you’re friends with him. But he did turn out to be that way. And at the same time I’ve been obsessed with my business, which has been sucking wind, and also with the Roving Patisserie, which I think was put on this earth in general and specifically this island to torture me. And Maggie slipped through the cracks. For the first time ever, she slipped through the cracks. I’ve never let that happen before.” Joy’s voice broke. “I’ve never let that happen.”

  Lu thought about her first crush, her first kiss, her first time having sex (with Sean Townsend, on his decrepit brown basement couch, with a runaway spring sticking into her back the whole time). She thought about the time she and two of her friends had been thrown out of a seven p.m. showing of Fargo for pouring wine coolers into their soda cups. “Don’t you think it’s possible that she slipped herself through the cracks?” she asked. “Like, on purpose? Because she’s growing up?”

  “I don’t know. I think I deserve the blame. I overreached. My expectations were too high. It’s too hard to do all of the things I was trying to do and be any good at them.” Joy pulled a face that was wry and self-mocking. “Isn’t this essentially the argument women have been having since time began? Whether or not we can have it all? I thought we were done with that question. I’m exhausted by it.”

  “Me too,” Lu said softly.

  “And now I know the answer, for sure. The answer is, we can’t.”

  “No!” said Lu, sudden tears stinging her eyes. “No, don’t say that, please don’t say that!”

  “Whoever said we could was not a single mother or had a high-end nanny or only needed four hours of sleep a night or something. Because the rest of us, the ones with credit card debt and Bridezillas? And vet bills and college to save for, and a seasonal business that operates at a loss every single winter? We can’t have it all. We have to pick.” Joy looked so sad and defeated that Lu felt herself crest a wave of indignation.

  “You’re wrong,” Lu said. “You have to be wrong.”

  Joy shook her head sadly. “What would you know about it?” she said. “You have no idea.”

  Lu felt like Joy had slapped her. “You have to be wrong,” said Lu. She tried to tamp down the vehemence in her voice, but it escaped anyway. Lu realized how difficult it would be to explain everything to Joy, how Lu looked to her as a role model, a success story. A trailblazer, in a very real way—someone who had struck out on her own, and made it work. If she wasn’t actually making it work, what did that say to those who hadn’t yet had the courage to strike out?

  “And now I’m zero-for-three. I messed up all of them, in one summer. Kid, job, relationship.”

  Lu let an appropriate amount of time pass, and then she said, “Public service announcement. I don’t think Anthony is a jerk.”

  Something flashed across Joy’s face. “What is he, then?”

  Lu leaned back. She took another sip of her cappuccino and considered the raspberry whoopie pie on the plate before her. She thought for a long time about the answer to this question. She didn’t speak until she felt that she had it right. “A guy who got messed up by his mistakes,” she said. “A guy who sometimes panics and does the wrong thing. Like all of us.” She shrugged and popped the whole whoopie pie into her mouth.

  Joy snorted, but there was something glittering in her eyes. It could have been anger or indignation, but it also could have been hope.

  Chapter 49

  Joy

  Maggie and Joy were making a Thai mango salad with peanut dressing, courtesy of Dinner by Dad. Maggie had relaxed her silent treatment soon after the neon-green plaster cast had been applied to her wrist and seemed to have accepted her punishment with something approaching equanimity.

  Joy, despite what Lu had told her, had stopped looking for Anthony around every corner, behind every coffee cup, and was try
ing to focus on her business and her mothering. She had recently listened to a podcast about the teenage brain and had decided to try to remember in all of her dealings with Maggie that Maggie, like everyone her age, was operating without the full use of her frontal lobe and would be doing so for another full decade. (Astonishing, Joy thought; how was it that the driving age was sixteen and the drinking age twenty-one when the one hundred percent thinking age was twenty-five? Only the rental car companies seemed to understand this.)

  Of course, they were still on precarious footing—more provisory détente than signed peace accord. Dinner by Dad had posted this particular recipe weeks earlier in the summer and Joy had bookmarked it but hadn’t made it yet. Dinner by Dad had given them the option to add crispy baked tofu or grilled chicken to the salad.

  “Which do you think Charlie would choose?” asked Maggie. She speculated about Dinner by Dad’s boys like they were celebrities. Which they were, sort of. They were the most famous foodie children you’ve never seen, except in charcoal drawings.

  “Definitely chicken,” said Joy. “Sammy would choose tofu. And Jacqui would have whatever Leo is having, because that’s how she rolls.”

  “She’d be tired from work,” Maggie surmised.

  “She’d just be happy to have someone put a meal in front of her!” Joy added.

  Together Joy and Maggie debated the merits and drawbacks of each protein source. Chicken might be faster; tofu might be healthier. But there was the thing about the soy and the estrogen, so maybe not. In the end, chicken emerged victorious. “Actually, un-victorious, if you’re the chicken,” noted Maggie. Maggie’s sense of humor was coming back!

  “Nice job with the pepper,” said Joy a few minutes later. Maggie’s knife skills were excellent, even encumbered by the cast. Joy gave herself partial credit for that because she’d taught Maggie to use real knives, sharp knives, when she was six. But the rest of it was Maggie’s particular blend of instinct and confidence, the stuff you couldn’t teach. “I’ll do the dressing,” added Joy, “and you do the jalapeños. Don’t forget the—”