Local Girls : An Island Summer Novel (9781416564171) (2 page)

Mona's ferry wasn't in sight yet, so I walked to the edge of the water, where waiting families shared overpriced muffins from the Black Dog. They were all there, the Vineyard vacationers you saw in travel brochures and websites. There was the little boy who'd undoubtedly whined until his mom purchased the stuffed black lab puppy now clutched under his arm. His brother with the shark-tooth necklace. The girl with the rope bracelet. A mom in Lily Pulitzer Capri pants.

They might as well have been wearing the same T-shirts—
I WENT TO MARTHA'S VINEYARD AND ALL I GOT WAS EVERYTHING I ASKED FOR
.

“Kendra!”

I turned toward the voice calling my name and recognized Ryan Patten down by the gazebo. He waved and started walking toward me. When you lived on the island, you didn't really expect to see people you knew at the ferry this time of year. Maybe in November when you were heading off-island to Target, or in March when everyone was going stir-crazy from the long, gray winter, but for three months during the summer the ferry was for strangers.

“What are you doing here?” Ryan asked, pulling a leash, and a very large dog, behind him.

“Mona's on the nine o'clock.” I pointed to the golden retriever sniffing the grass and flicking his tail against Ryan's leg. “Who's that?”

“Dutch. He's along for the ride. My cousins and aunt and uncle are coming for a visit. You know how it is.”

I nodded as if I did, but I didn't. Nobody in my family ever moved off the island. “So, what are you doing this summer?”

“Renting bikes at Island Wheels. What about you?” Dutch pulled at his leash and I followed along as Ryan let him continue sniffing the trail of whatever he thought he'd found.

“Working at the Willow Inn. We start tomorrow.”

“We?”

“Me and Mona,” I told Ryan, lowering my voice as if there was any chance she could hear me from the ferry.

I hadn't told her yet. The job was my surprise. We'd always talked about working at one of the inns for a summer. It met all three of our criteria. One, no lines. The idea of scooping ice cream while a line of exhausted parents and their demanding kids impatiently shouted out orders for Oreo cookie frappés wasn't exactly appealing, no matter how much free ice cream you could eat. Two, no retail (see number one, but replace pissy parents and their whiny kids with pissy women who don't understand why there are no more size 6 Bermuda shorts on the rack). And three, no nights. Serving breakfast at the Willow Inn was perfect. Technically, there could be times when people would be anxiously waiting for their morning coffees, but with only nineteen rooms, it wasn't like there'd be a line for the blueberry muffins. Besides, we'd always figured people were still optimistic that early in the morning, and
therefore nicer to be around. By the end of the day they'd be sunburned, cranky from spending twenty minutes in traffic on Main Street, and downright rude after driving around for an hour, looking for a parking space, only to discover a ticket on their windshield when they returned. The Willow didn't serve dinner, just breakfast and picnic lunches for guests. Spend three minutes with a hostess trying to placate families who have been waiting over an hour for a dinner table, and you'd understand why.

Luckily, the guy who sold Lexi the cash register for the deli knew someone who knew the new owner of the Willow, and two weeks after Lexi placed an order for the Sam4s register with integrated credit card capabilities, I had secured jobs for Mona and me.

“Does Kevin know she's coming back?” Ryan asked.

I shrugged. “I don't know. She e-mailed me with her ferry time and that was it.”

Mona hadn't seen Kevin since she left, that I did know. She only came back to the island once after she moved, last October for her grandfather's funeral, and I'm sure I would have known if Kevin had gone to Boston to visit her. Kevin went out with Melissa Madsen for a few months this winter, but I was still sort of hoping they'd get back together when Mona returned, and then everything would be just like it was before she left. At least for the summer.

“It's here.” Ryan pointed past the houses hugging the shores of the harbor and I could see the ferry come into view, white peaks of water cresting on either side of the bow as it made its way toward us.

“Hungry?” Ryan asked, and then pointed to the hand I had clutched against my stomach.

What could I say? That seeing the ferry coming toward us, the ferry with my best friend on it, had turned my stomach upside down? That all of a sudden the idea of seeing Mona again made me nervous because I didn't know what to expect?

“Yeah,” I lied, and rubbed my stomach as if all I needed was a good bowl of cereal. “Starving.”

We started walking toward the dock. “Where are you meeting your cousins?” I asked.

“Where they walk off. They got to Woods Hole late and missed their ferry, again. Couldn't get another reservation for the car until Monday, so they'll have to go over tomorrow and pick it up.”

Ryan began telling me how his cousins missed their ferry every year, but even though I nodded in all the right places as if I was listening, all I really heard was the ferry engine revving loudly as it slid into place against the dock.

“You know what I mean?” Ryan finished. He looked to me for a response.

“Exactly,” I answered, even though I had no idea what I was agreeing to.

We stood there with Dutch and watched as the front door to the boat's belly opened up to expose rows of idling cars. Once the guys working the controls for the ramp gave them the go-ahead, the cars slowly moved across the steel incline, forming a steady, orderly procession as they took turns driving off the boat and past the ferry building before accelerating in the direction of their rental house or relative's house or, in Mona's case, their new stepfather's summer estate.

I stood on my tiptoes trying to see if I could spot Malcolm's
black Range Rover inside. Last summer, when Malcolm married Izzy in the backyard of his house overlooking South Beach, Mona and I wrote “Just Married” along the side of the car with a bar of Ivory soap. The soap was from Mona's grandfather's house. We couldn't find a bar in Malcolm's six-bedroom summer “cottage,” where every bathroom had a bottle of L'Occitane almond shea soap on the sink and a matching bottle of body wash in the shower but not a bar of Ivory soap in the whole place. L'Occitane seemed to be the soap of choice in Malcolm's house, and it smelled amazing. It was actually the second thing I noticed the first time I went to Malcolm's house with Mona. The smell. It wasn't sweet like the air fresheners my mother seemed to have inserted into every electrical outlet in our house. And it wasn't comforting, like the lavender sachets the Willow Inn placed on the guests' pillows every night. The only way I could describe it was manly, like a combination of fresh-cut grass, seawater, and limes. Even though Malcolm had hired an interior designer from Vineyard Haven to decorate his summer home, it was definitely a house that had been occupied by a man. Malcolm didn't have any kids, even though Izzy told Mona he was married briefly to his college sweetheart. By the time Malcolm met Izzy, he'd been divorced for way longer than he was married, which is why the
first
thing I noticed about Malcolm's house was that it was way too big for a single guy with no kids.

“There are my cousins.” Ryan nudged me and waved to a family walking toward us. “I guess this is it. Tell Henry I said hi and have fun with Mona.”

“I will,” I told him, realizing I'd almost forgotten about Mona's twin brother.

And that's when I saw it, the shiny black hood making its
way out of the ferry doors and down the ramp. The back passenger window was open and I waited for Mona to poke her head out and scream my name. Instead I watched as Henry waved in my direction.

I waved back and walked toward the car, now pulling up against the curb to let the cars behind it pass by.

“Kendra!” Mona jumped out and ran toward me, her arms outstretched like in those slow-motion sequences in the movies. When she reached me, the force of her hug knocked me backward, quite a feat for someone who was at least four inches shorter, and fifteen pounds lighter, than me.

“You look so great,” she told me, giving me one last squeeze before taking my hand and pulling me toward the car. “Mom, look at her, she looks exactly the same!”

Well, not exactly the same—my hair was longer and not as blonde as when Mona left the island last summer, but I didn't point that out. Instead I let her tow me toward the Land Rover.

“Kennie!” Izzy reached through the open passenger-side window and held her arms out.

I leaned in and let her hug me. “Hi, Malcolm,” I said over Izzy's shoulder.

Malcolm smiled at me. “Hello, Kennie.”

“I know you girls have a lot of catching up to do. So don't let us stop you. Are you going with Kennie?” Izzy asked Mona.

“Yeah,” I answered before Mona could even get a word out. “I can take you to the house, Lexi let me borrow her car.”

“Great.” Mona reached into the backseat and grabbed her purse with one hand and my elbow with the other. “Let's go.”

The line of cars was thinning out by the time Mona and I wove our way back through the parking lot to Lexi's silver Honda. Up ahead of us the black Range Rover inched up to the stop sign, paused briefly, and then turned right toward Edgartown and disappeared, leaving just Mona and me.

“There it is.” I pointed to the Honda and Mona slipped down the narrow opening between the passenger's side and the car in the next space. She stood there waiting for me to find my keys, and when I fished them out of my pocket and looked across the roof of the car at her, she smiled at me.

It should have felt like the hundreds of other times I'd picked Mona up—from her house, from school, from Kevin's hockey games. Since Lexi and Bart, my brother-in-law, moved back in with my family, I'd been the one with the car, the one who always drove. Mona was always the passenger, the one who changed the radio stations and flipped through the stack of CDs on the backseat until she found something we both liked. But even though I was about to get in the driver's seat, and Mona would be sitting to my right like always, something felt different, even if I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

“It's open,” I told Mona, who then grabbed the door handle and pulled.

And that's when it struck me, why this didn't feel the same. For the first time Mona wasn't waiting for me to pick her up, to take her where she needed to go. For the first time I was the one waiting for Mona.

Most of the cars from the ferry had beelined it out of there, which meant that we were the last of the stragglers leaving Vineyard Haven.

“So tell me everything,” I told Mona, glancing over at the Louis Vuitton bag perched on her legs, its intertwined
L
s and
V
s marching across her lap.

“There really isn't much to tell.” Mona laid her right hand across the monograms as if to hide them, then reached for the radio dial to turn up the music with her other hand. As she sat back she pushed the purse to the floor, where it fell out of my view.

It was almost as if she was trying to hide it from me, like she didn't want me to see. If she'd dangled her purse in front of me and gushed, “Look at this! Can you believe it?” I don't think I would have been as bothered. I probably would have grabbed the purse and agreed. I would have shared it with her, like we'd shared everything in the past. Instead she wanted to keep it to herself.

“You know everything already,” Mona told me.

Normally that would have been true. Only this time it wasn't. I didn't know Mona carried around six-hundred-dollar purses. Or that her nails were filed into perfect square tips and edged in white polish. I didn't know if she planned on seeing Kevin this summer or even how she felt about being back on the island. Almost worse, I didn't even know
what to say to her. Maybe nine months ago I did, when she'd just started at Whittier Academy and I was the only friend she could talk to. Like clockwork, I'd come home from school and there'd already be an e-mail from her, a voice mail on my cell phone, an instant message on my computer screen.
Miss U!
she'd write, or
Where R U? Call me!
There was always an exclamation point, as if without it I wouldn't feel the urgency of her need to talk to me, to talk to someone who knew her before she moved into Malcolm's town house on Beacon Hill, before she was supposed to make friends with the private school girls who used to pass her by on Main Street during the summer as if she were invisible.

All she wanted to do was come home, she'd say, and I always made sure I had the right words ready and waiting every time. It will get better, I'd tell her, everyone is going to love you. But even as I assured her that everything would turn out fine, I wasn't so sure. When Mona left the island at the end of Labor Day weekend last year, I had no idea when we'd see each other again. I didn't expect her to come back to Malcolm's house off-season, and the fact that Zilda, Malcolm's housekeeper, had been practically cleaning the place with a toothbrush before they left meant they probably weren't planning to come back, either. Before Mona left we'd made plans to see each other over Christmas break, what seemed like ages away back in September. But then she'd come back to the island less than six weeks later for Poppy's funeral. When she left that time there was no talk of getting together over Christmas vacation or spring break. It was almost as if when Mona's grandfather died, her last connection to the island died as well.

After Mona returned to Boston that time the voice mails tapered off and the e-mails became few and far between.
When we did talk on the phone, the conversations became less and less about how much she wanted to come back to the island and more about the new friends she was making, her plans for the weekend, the ski trip they were organizing over Christmas break. I started to do more listening than talking then, not even reminding her that we'd talked about her coming back to the island for a visit. Or that she didn't even know how to ski.