Hearts Ahoy

by Stephanie Taylor

  Hearts Ahoy

  Stephanie Taylor

  For Bella May

  2007-2020

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  About the Author

  Also by Stephanie Taylor

  1

  “Caller number six this morning is getting an all-expenses paid cruise to paradise!” The theme song from the TV show The Love Boat came over the radio and Julia smiled as she flipped on her turn signal and swung the car into the parking lot. A cruise sounded nice. “All we need is for you to call and have the answer to our question of the hour.”

  “And what’s the question of the hour, Matt?” The female deejay on the morning show that Julia always listened to prompted her co-anchor cheerfully, her voice full of anticipation.

  “I’m glad you asked, Marla!” The theme song faded out behind their voices. “Before eight-thirty this morning, we’ll be asking caller number six about the biggest songs of 1985. We’ve got one in particular we’re looking for, but that’s the only hint you’ll get from me—“

  Julia turned off the ignition of the car and the radio went silent. She took a moment there in the parking lot of the high school where she’d worked for the past fourteen years, breathing in and out five times slowly.

  “It’s Thursday, Jules,” she said, flipping down the visor and eyeing herself in the mirror. She fluffed her blonde hair and leaned in closer, inspecting the shock of gray at one temple that blended in with the highlights she still dutifully sat in the salon for every eight weeks. “It’s almost Friday. So pull up your big girl pants and go in there. You’ve got things to do.”

  She put the visor up and grabbed her purse and her flowered lunch bag, then joined the steady stream of tired-looking teachers holding travel coffee mugs and stacks of folders as they trudged through the frost and the partially-melted snow that still lingered on the lawn and in shaded areas.

  “Morning, Julia,” Jack Nusbaum raised a hand in salute as he pulled open the heavy door and held it for her. “How are things?”

  “Hey, Jack.” Julia smiled at him gratefully and stamped her boots on the thick, sturdy black rug just inside the doors. “Things are fine, I guess. I’m at that point in the year where I’m unconvinced that these freshmen will ever grow up and become successful, self-reliant adults, but…somehow they usually manage to, right?”

  Jack shrugged. “Either that, or their parents will be supporting them forever.”

  “And who will support us? We aren’t that far from retirement, you know,” Julia said wryly. It was a familiar refrain, this light-hearted banter about kids ill-prepared for the real world and the very distinct possibility that there wouldn’t be anyone to care for Generation X in their golden years.

  “Speak for yourself,” Jack said in mock-horror. “I’m years from retirement. Not because of age, mind you, but because I thought having four kids after I turned forty was a great idea, and now I’ll be working until I’m eighty to support them.”

  Julia gave Jack a sympathetic smile as she headed down the hallway to her classroom. “Hang in there, Nusbaum. You’ve got this,” she called over one shoulder. He lifted his coffee thermos in silent salute and kept walking.

  The heater in Julia’s classroom had just kicked on for the morning and she unwound the hand-knitted scarf her daughter had given her for Christmas, pulling it from her neck and draping it over the back of her rolling chair. She’d been teaching freshman English at Greenway High for more than a decade now, and her routine was solid and predictable: wake up at five; make coffee and read on the couch in her robe; call her daughter, Christina, at six and talk for a few minutes; shower and dress and get out the door with coffee number two before seven-fifteen.

  Once in her classroom, she usually turned on the radio for a bit and graded papers or answered emails. A few of her coworkers had entreated her to play something more modern like Pandora or Spotify on her computer, but Julia loved the familiar feeling of her favorite deejays chattering in the background as she moved about her classroom. Sure, she’d told them, she used the other music services when she went to the gym, but she had a morning routine and it worked for her—she didn’t want to mess with it.

  But it was this inability to budge that sort of had her stuck, and she knew it. Her husband, Will, had died unexpectedly three years earlier, and in that time, she’d refused to change anything about her life. Julia wouldn’t move out of her house, she eschewed all thoughts of taking a vacation to a new place, and she rejected all suggestions that she redecorate her bedroom or rearrange her furniture. Uh uh, she thought, no way. Why should she give up the things that brought her comfort? Change her patterns? Erase the memories or familiarity of Will and her life with him and Christina? Just because their daughter was away at college didn’t mean that Julia had to go crazy and change everything. She liked the life she had.

  Julia turned on the radio and picked up an eraser from the tray in front of her white board. With broad strokes, she swept it across the board and deleted all her notes from the day before on verbs and adverbs. Today they’d talk about some of the most common mistakes she saw on Facebook: the proper use of their/there/they’re or your/you’re; the right way to use “then” or “than”; and common misspellings that drove her bananas, like “definitely.”

  A song that took Julia back to being a teenager in the late eighties ended as she uncapped her Expo marker.

  “Hey, listeners,” Marla said with great exuberance. “We’re looking for caller six…RIGHT NOW! Pick up those phones and burn up those phone lines! If you can answer our question correctly, you’re going on the big cruise at the end of March, and you know you want this!”

  “Why do they want this?” Matt interjected. “Wait, let me guess,” he answered his own question jovially, “they want to win this prize because it’s an all expenses paid cruise to Hawaii!”

  “More than that, Matty, it’s a cruise where you’re almost guaranteed to find love!”

  “How are you almost guaranteed? That sounds like a dangerous promise to make.”

  “Because—this cruise has a theme, and it’s alllll about love. It’s the second chance at love cruise!” Marla nearly shouted.

  Almost without thinking—actually, entirely without thinking—Julia crossed the room to her desk and picked up her iPhone. She punched in the phone number that she’d heard them repeat so many times that it was burned into her brain. In the background, Matt and Marla kept bantering about the cruise and how people were almost destined to fall in love as they sailed into the sunset, but in her ear, the phone began to ring.

  “Caller six, we’ve got you!” Marla sing-songed.

  Julia took the phone away from her ear and looked at the radio.

  “Hello? Are you there?” The voice was coming from both her radio and her phone, but with a slight delay. Julia put the phone back to her ear.

  “Hello?” she said tentatively. Her own voice reverberated back through the radio and filled her room.

  “Caller six, what’s your name?” Matt boomed in his deep radio announcer voice.

  “Julia Delmonico,” she said.

  “Well, hey there, Julia!” Marla said. “I’ve got a question for you, and if you answer it correctly, you’r
e going to Hawaii. And not only that, but you’ll be cruising Polynesian-style with a boatful of other people looking for love.”

  “Are you ready for this, Julia?” Matt asked. Julia could picture him leaning over Marla’s shoulder, sharing her microphone with her excitedly as they waited for her to either hit the jackpot or blow it entirely with whatever question they were about to ask her.

  Lucky for Julia, she had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of music from the eighties. She couldn’t remember her own sister’s birthdate some days, and most of the time she forgot to take the trash out for Friday morning pick-up, but if someone needed to know who sang “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” or who the original members of Depeche Mode were, Julia was your girl.

  “Okay, Julia. Are you ready?” Marla asked.

  “I’m ready,” she said, feeling a wave of calm wash over her. One of her coworkers stopped and poked her head in the door to listen.

  “Alright, Julia—for the chance to find your soulmate on the cruise of a lifetime, I need to know the answer to the following question.” A drumroll started in the background and the deejays paused dramatically. “Julia, which British duo had four top 100 hits in 1985, and please give us the name of one of those songs.”

  Julia’s mind whirred rapidly. 1985. She’d been ten that year, and heavily into Top 40 music and MTV. She could see the pastels and bright pops of color of the album covers and music videos spin around as she closed her eyes and let the answer come to her.

  Her eyes flew open. Without hesitation, she said: “The band was Wham!, and one of their top songs that year was definitely ‘Wake Me Up Before you Go Go.’”

  “Julia DELMONICOOOOOO!” Matt shouted, dragging out her last name. “You’ve GOT IT, GIRL!”

  Julia nearly dropped her phone. Claire, the fellow teacher who’d stopped in the doorway to see what was going on, ran into the room with both hands over her mouth, her eyes popping like the buttons on the shirt of their ample-bellied principal, Ed Stubbs.

  “I won?” Julia squeaked, looking at Claire as they both waited to hear the final verdict.

  “Yes, you won!” Marla confirmed. “I’m so happy for you, and we want to hear all about it when you get back, okay?”

  “Okay,” Julia said, feeling dazed. She answered a few questions about which suburb she lived in and what school she taught at, and then before she knew it, Julia was shuffled off to a woman on another line who took her personal information and promised to call back with more details about the cruise.

  “I won,” Julia said to Claire, setting her phone back on the desk and standing in the middle of the classroom in shock. “I guess I just won a cruise to Hawaii.”

  “I’m so excited for you, Jules!” Claire said. Her eyes were shining with unshed tears. The women had been friends and coworkers for most of the years that Julia had been teaching at Greenway High. “This is a huge deal.”

  Julia nodded, biting back her own tears. It was a huge deal. For the first time in three years, she hadn’t let her own hesitation stop her from doing something, and now it seemed that she was actually going on a vacation to somewhere she and Will had never been, and she was going to be out of her routine and her comfort zone.

  And, on top of that, she was expected to be looking for love. Her face fell as she stood there, processing the whole situation.

  “Julia?” Claire asked. Her own face shifted and mimicked Julia’s fallen expression. “Are you okay?”

  Julia wasn’t sure that she was really okay, but she pasted a bright smile on her face and nodded excitedly. That was a discussion for her to have with Christina, not for her to dump on a coworker at seven-thirty on a Thursday morning just as freshmen were about to start streaming through her door.

  “I’m great, Claire. Everything is wonderful.” She turned up the wattage a few more notches to convince her friend, but before she had the chance to say anything else, the first bell rang and a swarm of tired, ill-tempered fourteen year olds descended on the fluorescent-lit classroom.

  2

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” Julia said, pouring another mug of coffee on Saturday morning when her daughter emerged from the bedroom, wild-haired and tired. “I’m glad you’re home.”

  Without saying anything, Christina reached for the coffee and started topping it off with milk and sugar. She was a few inches taller than Julia, and her long, straight hair was pulled up in a ponytail that flopped over her strong, athletic shoulders.

  The women sat at the kitchen table together, and Julia lifted her coffee to her lips and smiled as she watched her daughter wake up.

  “I had to come home,” Christina finally said. She set down her coffee mug and rubbed both eyes. “My mother called and told me she was going on some sort of love cruise.”

  “Oh, kid,” Julia said, reaching across the table to touch her daughter’s hand, “I don’t have to go if it’s going to freak you out—I just got excited about sun and sand here in the doldrums of February.” She nodded at the window next to the table and they both looked out at the gray skies and at the rain that slicked the wooden deck behind the house.

  Christina shook her head. “No, Mom. It’s not freaking me out. I’m really happy for you. I came because I thought we could shop for a bathing suit and stuff.”

  “What?” Julia laughed. When she’d called her daughter in Seattle to tell her the news and she’d immediately promised to leave after her last class on Friday and drive down to Portland for the weekend, Julia had expected a long lecture about how wrong this whole situation was, and how ridiculous it would be for her to take the cruise. “You’re happy?”

  Christina’s eyes filled with tears and she focused on the rim of her coffee mug, cupping it in both hands on the table. “Yeah. I mean,” she shifted around in her chair uncomfortably, “Dad has been gone for three years now. And as much as I don’t want to admit it, he’s not coming back. I just want you to be happy.” Christina’s words began to ride the waves of a sob as she spoke about her father. “I think he’d want you to go, Mom. I really do.”

  “Oh.” Again, this was not what Julia had been expecting. It would be disingenuous of her to pretend that the same thought hadn’t occurred to her over the past two days; she’d certainly spent some time lost in thought, wondering whether Will might actually want her to move on after three years. But the thought had always come to her unbidden as she helped a student re-craft a paragraph on endangered species, or right in the middle of a meeting with another teacher, and so she’d pushed it away repeatedly, unwilling to admit to herself that her late husband might actually support something like this cruise.

  “Do you want to go?” Christina ventured. Her eyes searched her mother’s face. “Do you think you’re ready?”

  Julia shrugged like a teenager and looked at the rain again. Was she ready? Maybe. Probably. She was forty-four and her only child was twenty and mostly away at college studying to become a psychologist. The only living things she came home to at night were the plants on the windowsill and a cat who only emerged from hiding to rub against her legs while she opened the mail and to eat a can of cat food in the evening. Would it kill her to get out there and at least see what finding love looked like at her age?

  “I think I do want to go,” Julia finally admitted. “Weirdly. But I have no expectations—none. I know from talking to friends that the dating pool for middle-aged women is more like a shallow puddle.”

  Christina laughed; the tears were gone from her eyes. “Mom,” she said, shaking her head like her mother was some sort of hilarious relic from another time. “There are men everywhere. Just go on Tinder sometime.”

  “Christina Elizabeth Delmonico!” she said with a sharp intake of breath. “I hope like hell you aren’t on that hook-up app, meeting boys who only want one thing—“

  “Mom,” Christina said, laughing again, “oh my God, please stop.”

  “I’m serious. I know all about Tinder. And I can assure you that it’s not for me, and I hope it’s not for yo
u.” Julia had accepted that there might be boys in her daughter’s life, but when she’d pictured her baby away at college, she’d envisioned chaste dates to football games, and Thanksgiving visits home with nice boys from nice families. Boys with career goals and good heads on their shoulders.

  “Well,” Christina said. She paused, and the odd silence got Julia’s attention. “It’s definitely not for me, Mom.”

  Julia frowned as she watched a small electrical storm pass over her daughter’s face. Something was brewing there, and Julia knew it. She waited.

  “There’s something I need to tell you—I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while—and now things are changing a bit, and we’re both, you know, going in different directions,” she said, flicking a nervous glance out the window. “So even though it’s Saturday morning and this is totally random, I wanted to tell you this.” Christina paused and took a huge breath, holding it in for a moment and then letting it out slowly. “I’m not into Tinder because I’m not interested in boys like that.”

  Julia gave a sharp, relieved laugh: her daughter wasn’t into boys like that! That was great news! She blinked a few times, feeling the endorphins flood her body. But wait—Christina was watching her face carefully, and that look of torment was still in her eyes. They sat there for a moment, living for the last time in a world that felt familiar to both of them. From that moment on, it would always be just a tiny bit different. Altered, if only slightly.

  “Ohhhh,” Julia said as the realization of her daughter’s meaning settled in around them. “You aren’t into boys like that.” Christina’s eyes softened and she watched her mother with both hope and desperation; Julia’s response to this revelation would mean everything. She stood up and walked around the table, holding her arms out. “Okay, sweetheart. It’s okay.”