Nantucket Blue (12 page)

“AW, BLESS
, someone’s been snogging,” Liz said the next morning when I walked into the kitchen, which was warm and fragrant from the baking muffins. Gingerbread, I guessed. Liz leaned against the counter, one blue-nail-polished hand on her mama-sized hip, and the other wrapped around her coffee cup. Her curls looked wild, backlit by the rising sun that shone through the sliding glass door.

“What are you talking about?” I asked innocently, and tied one of the new Cranberry Inn aprons that Gavin’s chiropractor girlfriend had stenciled for us and were now part of our breakfast uniform. It was no use. There was a permanent blush on my face. I could feel it.

“Oh, it doesn’t exactly take a detective, now, does it? Your lips are practically bruised—” I put a hand to my mouth. “Fess up, Goldilocks!” She pointed a croissant at me like a pistol.

“No,” I said, pouring myself coffee. I tried to stop smiling, but the corners of my mouth would not be deterred, even with only four hours of sleep. I was a smiling fool. “I’ve got nothing to say.” I added cream and sugar, and stirred.

“There’s no use denying it. You look like you’ve just lifted the crown jewels. Besides, I saw you on the porch last night.” My eyes popped wide. She smiled at me defiantly, rubbing her hands together. “But I could only make out that it was you. I couldn’t see the guy. So, was it the writer? Did he lure you to the annex with sweets?”

“No!”

“Well, don’t be so coy. Who is he? And more importantly, is he a contender for the big bang?”

“No,” I said. “Definitely not.” Zack and I had sworn that these kissing attacks wouldn’t happen again, that it was probably best if we didn’t see each other for at least a week in hopes that our newfound, red-hot attraction would fade. Also, making out with Zack was one thing, but sleeping with him? Forget it. Jules wouldn’t ever speak to me again. Not to mention that it was understood that she would lose her virginity first, since she’d come so close last year. It was an unspoken pact.

“Why? What’s the secret?” Liz’s voice dropped low, her eyebrows arching. “Was it…Gavin?”

“Oh my god, Liz. Don’t be disgusting!”

“Well, you’re acting like it’s so scandalous. What am I to think?”

“Okay,” I said, folding under the charm of her accent. “It’s this guy I know from home. But it’s kind of…bad.”

“All the better, my dear,” Liz said, taking the industrial block of butter from the fridge and pulling the special butter knife from the drawer—the one that sliced the butter into pats with a wavy design.

“He’s my friend’s younger brother.” I couldn’t believe I was telling her this after the way she’d reacted when I’d confessed my virginity. But I wanted to tell someone so badly, and Liz was pretty much my only option.

“How young?”

“Sixteen.”

“Oh, well, what’s wrong with that?”

I looked at the timer on the microwave. Gavin would be here in three minutes to take the muffins out of the oven. He was kind of a control freak about his muffins.

“Are you kidding? A
younger
brother? It’s like the worst thing a friend can do.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. People get together with friends’ brothers all the time. It’s totally natural. Unless your friend has some kind of sick fascination with him. In which case, I suggest you stay far away, lest they try to pull you into their web of perversion.”

“It’s nothing like that,” I said. “I just know she’s going to hate me for it. We had this fight.” I took the chilled ramekins from the fridge, and Liz placed a fat, wavy pat of butter in each one.

“There’s nothing worse than fighting with a friend,” she said, her voice soft. “You can be awful to your mum or sister, but they’re stuck with you, aren’t they? But a friend…a friend can disappear. Have you talked since your fight?”

“She won’t talk to me,” I said. “And I came to Nantucket to spend the summer with her. She told me I was bothering her.”

“Well, she doesn’t sound like a very good friend,” Liz said, putting down the knife and facing me. “That’s a terrible thing to say.” The protective tone of her voice and the sympathetic tilt of her head felt like a cool balm on the place inside where Jules’s words had landed and burned.

“Well, the thing is that her mom—”

“I won’t hear it.” Liz cut me off. “I don’t like the sounds of her, and I say what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her. I like seeing you all aglow. Suits you, actually.”

The oven timer went off, Gavin breezed into the kitchen in his
2004 IYENGAR YOGA RETREAT
T-shirt, lifted the muffins from the oven, switched on the singer-songwriter breakfast playlist, and put on the kettle for his second cup of green tea. And despite the tectonic plates that had shifted last night, my morning began just like any other.

IT WAS ALREADY A ROUGH DAY
at ten o’clock, and it was only going to get rougher. Except for the older Australian couple, all the visitors who were here for the Fourth of July weekend were headed home today; all the rooms were turnovers and required bathroom scrubbings, vacuuming, fresh towels and sheets, and, of course, the dreaded duvet covers.

And they’d all decided to eat breakfast at the same time. The backyard, the porch, and even the big wooden table in the kitchen were packed. Liz and I were sweating as we cleared dishes, refreshed coffees, and refilled butters and jams. Gavin was washing the glasses by hand in the sink—no time to run the dishwasher.

“Excuse me,” said a sunburned woman, holding a writhing toddler. “How do I get a cab to the airport?”

“We’ve got cards on the reception desk,” Gavin said. “Pat’s Cabs. Pat’s the best. Normally I’d call for you, but I’m…in up to my elbows.” He laughed because he literally had suds up his arms. Not amused, the woman disappeared into the living room.

I was about to show her where the cards were before I headed outside with the coffees when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, expecting Liz, but instead found a tall middle-aged guy in Nantucket Reds grinning at me like I was his favorite movie star.

“If you aren’t Kate Campbell’s daughter, then my name is mud,” he said, leaning forward, anticipating my reaction.

“I am her daughter,” I said.

“Paul Morgan,” he said, putting out his hand to shake mine. But I just shrugged, nodding toward my full hands. He squeezed my shoulder instead. “I knew it, I knew it.” He rocked back and forth on his boat shoes, shaking his head. “We worked at the Nantucket Beach Club together years ago. I saw you standing across the room and I felt like it was twenty-five years ago. You look just like her.”

“Are you staying here?” I asked.

“No, I just stopped by for one of Gavin’s muffins.”

“Hate to interrupt, but I need these,” Liz said, taking the coffees from my hands and glaring at me. “We’re very busy, in case you didn’t notice.”

Liz was invisible to Paul Morgan. He kept talking. “Is she still a firecracker? She is, isn’t she?”

“She’s a teacher.” I didn’t want to lie, and I also didn’t want to tell him that she more closely resembled a wet sock.

“I bet she’s a great one,” he said. “She was the prettiest, most vivacious girl on the island that summer. Now, don’t look so shocked; us old people were young once, too.” I studied his face. I was having a crazy urge to go check the diary and look at that picture again.

“Cricket,” Liz called. I turned to see her gesturing at a table full of dirty plates and a family hovering nearby, wanting to sit down.

“It was nice to meet you,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Give your mother my best, won’t you?” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, wrote something on a business card and handed it to me:
Paul T. Morgan, Esquire.
“That’s my cell phone number. If you need anything while you’re on Nantucket, let me know.”

“Thanks.” I slipped his card into the back pocket of my shorts and walked outside, where I made an absentminded, totally unhelpful loop around the yard, imagining my mother’s firecracker self captured and held hostage somewhere on Nantucket, waiting to be shot into the sky.

As soon as we were done cleaning, I flopped on my bed and opened the Emily Dickinson diary. I studied the picture, but it was pointless. You couldn’t see the guy’s face.

I read the next entry, written around a poem about the “majesty of death.” Obviously, Mom wasn’t too influenced by Emily Dickinson.

Dear Emily,

Alarm! Alarm! Call 9-1-1. It’s a LOVE EMERGENCY! On second thought, call the fire department because I am
hot to trot
! Lover Boy and I talked for almost a half hour today. He stopped to chat with me at the reception desk for his whole break.

Hot to trot? Love emergency? Who was this person?

Emily, from his ice-blue eyes to his cute butt, he’s a head-to-tail fox. If you lived now and you saw him strolling under your window, you might even come out of your house. The attraction is undeniable. Right before a guest arrived and asked him to help with his bags, he leaned over the desk and told me I was making it hard for him to concentrate! I nearly had to wring out my underwear.

Oh, Mom. Disgusting!

He has this smile that made talking to him so easy, like the most natural thing in the world. Oh, I found out that he’s twenty-two and just graduated from college. He was a little shocked when he found out I was seventeen, but I have a feeling it’s not going to stop our love OR our lust.

Love, K. No longer the owner of a lonely heart.

I tried to visualize Paul T. Morgan, Esquire. I could see his big smile with the deep lines on either side of his mouth, the perfect top teeth and crooked bottom ones, the distinguished nose and thick head of graying hair. I don’t know if it was just my imagination fueled by hope, but when I closed my eyes and let the image of his face fill my mind, his eyes were glacial blue. Maybe it was time to close Mom’s Second Glances account after all.

“DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING,”
George said when I walked into the annex later that week with his cheddar and chutney sandwich in one hand and a cold lemonade for myself in the other. The sandwich was his reward for finishing three chapters in one week. One look at his dishevelment and you’d have hoped he’d done something significant. There were big circles under his eyes, his T-shirt was rumpled like it’d been slept in, and I could see the plaque on his teeth. He needed a hot shower with some powerful deodorant soap and a vegetable brush. And I’m no neat freak, but it was gamey in the annex. Liz and I had been instructed not to clean in there, for fear we’d mess something up, but now the smell was a little too human. I took a step toward the window. George put a hand up to stop me. “Seriously, don’t touch. I have a system. Each pile is a zone. The zones cannot be messed with.”

“George, it’s a toxic zone,” I said, and opened the window.

It was true that while there wasn’t one patch of clear space in the whole annex, there did appear to be a strange order to the room. The index cards I’d brought him yesterday covered the floor in a rainbow. The bed was blanketed with documents on which I could see George’s now-familiar chicken scrawl. His dresser was stacked with papers, and by the bathroom door was a pile of magazines that were marked with Post-it notes. The one on top was a
Vanity
Fair
opened to a picture of Boaty and his wife, Lilly, sitting in what I now recognized as a classic Nantucket garden, with a weathered wooden bench and a trellis climbing with roses.

“And where should I put this?” I held up the sandwich.

“Oh yeah. Um”—he put a finger to his lips and scanned the room—“there.” He pointed to a chair covered with clothes.

“Really? Like
on
the clothes?” George nodded as if this were perfectly normal. “Oookay.” I cleared a little spot on the chair for the sandwich. He spun around in his chair and focused on the computer like it was about to tell him the secret of life.

“Come on, Bernie, you said four o’clock; it’s four eighteen. I love you, buddy, but don’t make promises that you can’t keep.” George tugged at his hair with one hand and refreshed his e-mail with the other. He studied the screen with intense concentration, refreshed again, and then hooted with glee. “Yes,” he said, pointing to the computer screen. “You the MAN!”

“Who’s Bernie?” I asked.

“The guy who does my transcribing.” He hit a button and the printer sprung to life, spitting out pages. “And I need these interviews now, because I’ve got some momentum, Cricket, and I’ll be goddamned if I lose it. I’m actually on schedule.”

“Who are those interviews with?” I asked as he collected the papers from the printer and scanned them quickly with his eyes.

“Lilly Carmichael,” he said, stacking the papers on his desk. “We talked about their courtship and his proposal. Gotta have romance. The ladies will love it, and let’s face it, they’re going to be the ones buying my book.”

“She looks kind of…”

“Uptight?” George asked.

“Yes,” I said, picking up the
Vanity Fair
with the picture of Boaty and Lilly. She was pretty, but in an overly delicate way. Boaty was leaning forward, animated, like he was in the middle of a story, and she was sitting back, looking to the side. I couldn’t help but think that the photographer was making a statement with this picture.

“Yeah, well. She’s not exactly the life of the party,” George said, tilting his head and raising his eyebrows.

“That’s kind of weird. You would’ve thought he could get any girl he wanted.”

“What can I tell you? Love is strange.”

“Where did he propose?”

“Nantucket, of course. Her family’s been coming here forever. He washed ashore for a summer job and they fell in love. It was a quick engagement. People thought she was knocked up, but she wasn’t. Not for another ten years.” He slapped a Post-it note on the transcription, scribbled something on it, and then looked up with big happy eyes. “Oh, guess what? I got an interview with Robert next week.”

“Awesome.” We high-fived. I knew he’d wanted to interview Robert Carmichael, Boaty’s brother and Parker’s father, for a long time, and that Robert had been hard to nail down. He was going to run for Boaty’s seat in the Senate in the special election next month and was crazy busy.

“I’m going to need you to drive me to their home and pick me up. I’m finally going to use that damn car.” Before he’d broken his ankle, George had arranged to rent a car, but of course he couldn’t drive it and he couldn’t get a refund. So it sat in the inn’s driveway, swallowing money. George claimed he could hear it make a
ka-ching!
cash register sound effect each evening. “You might have to hang out there and wait for me. We’ll get a sense for what the scene is.”

“Right,” I said. Where would I “hang out”? I was picturing some sort of maids’ quarters. Possibly a pantry area stocked with gourmet canned goods. Would Parker be there? Would Jules? I’d stay in the car, I told myself. I’d park in the shade, bring a book.

“And please, please, please remind me to use both my phone and digital voice recorder,” he said, his hands pressed together in a prayer. “If I lost that file, I’d be screwed. In the next few weeks I may need your help a little more than usual. We’re in the thick of it, Cricket. We’re right in the thick of it.”