No Home Like Nantucket

by Grace Palmer

  Eliza rolled her eyes. She really hoped that Maggie wasn’t setting unrealistic expectations for Gary’s friend. She was fun but could get a little carried away sometimes. Eliza needed to make it clear that she had no interest in romantic relationships of any kind right now. But what about Oliver? chimed an annoying voice in her head. She shushed it. This was a fun night out with an old friend, nothing else.

  She grabbed Holly’s keys from the side table as she hustled downstairs and out the door. Firing up the minivan, she headed towards the restaurant where they had planned on meeting. Driving this Mom-mobile made her chuckle. “Is this what my life is going to be once this baby is born?” she mused as she checked her makeup in the mirror. The image of Goldman Sachs powerhouse Eliza Benson piloting a big minivan through the streets of Manhattan made her laugh.

  She parked outside the restaurant and hurried in. She was out of breath by the time she saw Maggie and Gary in a booth towards the back. “I’m with them,” she explained to the hostess, and then walked back towards where they were seated. Gary’s friend was facing away from her, so she couldn’t see what he looked like just yet.

  Maggie met her halfway and pulled her into a tight squeeze. “Dang, girl! You really are a stunner. I love this dress on you, and that lip color is awesome too.”

  “Thanks, Mags,” Eliza mumbled.

  “This is my fiancé, Gary,” Maggie said, stepping aside to let Eliza and Gary shake hands.

  He was tall, with orange hair, freckles, and the slightest gap between his two front teeth. Eliza thought he looked like a handsomer version of the boy from the cover of Mad magazine. “Eliza, great to meet you. Maggie’s told me a lot about all the trouble you ladies used to get into back in high school.”

  Eliza grinned. “Whatever she told you, it’s a lie.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” he chuckled.

  “You gotta meet his friend!” Maggie interrupted, grabbing Eliza’s arm and steering her around Gary to where his friend was climbing out of the booth behind them. “You’re gonna love him. Eliza, this is Oliver! Oliver, Eliza Benson.”

  Eliza froze in place. She looked up as Oliver, Pianist King of the Bar, rose to his full height and offered her his hand to shake. There was a smile playing on his lips and a fiendish glimmer in his eye, but he didn’t give anything away as he said, “Eliza, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Oliver.”

  Eliza wanted to cackle like a maniac. What were the odds of this? Sure, Nantucket was a small island full of random connections between its residents. But even so, this was too funny to be real. Since when was there a rom-com writer pulling the strings of her life? Something about Oliver’s expression told her to play along, though, so that’s exactly what she did. Biting back her laughter, she took his hand and said, “Oliver, was it? Nice to meet you, too. I’m Eliza.”

  Maggie looked back and forth at them, pleased as punch. They probably held each other’s hands just a moment too long, because Maggie’s brow furrowed and she said, “Am I missing something here?”

  “No, not at all,” Oliver said quickly. “Just my normal social awkwardness, that’s all.”

  Maggie shrugged and clucked, “Let’s get something to eat, shall we?”

  They all settled around the booth. Gary switched sides so that it was Eliza and Oliver sitting across from each other. It took everything in her to stop from smiling like a fool every time Oliver caught her eye, but somehow she managed.

  “What brings you back to Nantucket, Eliza?” Gary asked politely after they’d put in orders for a couple of appetizers.

  “Gary!” hissed Maggie. Eliza could hear her kick him under the table. “I’m so sorry,” she turned to Eliza and explained. “I already filled him in on everything, and he should’ve known better than to ask.”

  “It’s all okay.” Eliza chuckled. “It’s been a sad summer, yeah. But the future looks bright.”

  “Does it now?” Oliver asked, that same glimmer in his eye shining brighter and brighter with every passing minute. That same blanketing intensity that Eliza had felt when they first met enveloped her once again. It was the oddest thing. Like he was touching her without actually doing so.

  “Tonight does, at least,” she shot back with a wry smile.

  “Agreed!” Maggie chirped.

  “Sorry, Eliza,” mumbled Gary with a hangdog look on his face.

  “Don’t worry about it at all,” she reassured him. “Let’s just have some fun, yeah?”

  They hung out and noshed on half a dozen different appetizers. Maggie caught Eliza up on the babysitting/nannying business she’d spun up. It sounded like she was doing really well, with eight employees and lots of rich clients. The wealthy families who came to stay on ’Sconset during the high season were always eager to hire her employees to watch their kids so the parents could have nights out to themselves.

  Oliver was mostly quiet, though he chimed in every now and then with little jokes and jests that seemed like they were meant for Eliza’s ears only. He was as clever as she remembered, and very quick on the uptake. He seemed intent on keeping up the charade that they’d never met, too, which got funnier and funnier with every passing moment. It turned out that he and Gary went all the way back to high school, when they’d been in a band together.

  “We would’ve made it big time, too,” Oliver said, “if Mr. Square over here hadn’t decided that his talents lay more in engineering than in shredding guitar solos.”

  “You played the guitar?” Maggie turned to her fiancé. “You never told me that! When am I getting serenaded?”

  “That was a long time ago,” Gary said, rubbing the back of his head like he was embarrassed as they all laughed. “But I’ll serenade you anytime, darling.” He started crooning some horribly off-tune old rock ’n roll number. Maggie groaned and threw a bread roll at his head.

  Oliver leaned over towards Eliza and held his hand up to stage-whisper, “We never let him anywhere near a microphone, though.” She nearly spit out her water laughing.

  Eliza was stuffed after a while. They’d polished off an awe-inspiring amount of food between the four of them. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m about to burst,” she said, looking around. “Do you want to walk off a little bit of this food?”

  “That’s a great idea!” Maggie agreed. “Why don’t we go down Main Street and check out some of the shops?”

  They gathered their things and went meandering down the main shopping drag. Gary and Maggie were strolling slowly hand in hand, so Oliver and Eliza drifted ahead of them a little bit. When she almost tripped on a curb, Oliver held out his arm. “Grab on,” he said with a grin. “Can’t have you falling on your head out here in the darkness.”

  She hesitated, but took his offer, looping her arm through his and holding on to make sure she didn’t stumble again. Heels might’ve been a bad idea.

  They chatted as they walked along, stopping every now and then to look into the windows of some of the cute shops that lined Nantucket’s Main Street. The night was warm, but the breeze rolling down from behind them was cooling, with a hint of salt lingering on her tongue after each gentle gust. Oliver told her stories about some funny incidents that had happened in the bar over the last few weeks. Mostly drunk people getting up to drunk people antics, but the way Oliver told it made everything seem funny and dramatic.

  “You’re a big exaggerator,” she said accusingly.

  “Who, me?” he protested with a grin. “I would never. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

  “Mmhmm. Color me skeptical.”

  “What about you?” he asked after a beat.

  “Don’t change the subject. We were making fun of you.”

  He poked her. “Yeah, well, I’m sure we’ll circle back around to that soon enough. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What’s next for you?”

  Eliza stopped for a second. “That’s a heavy question,” she said.

 
“Only if you let it be.”

  She thought about what she might say to answer it. What was next for her—in her mind—hadn’t ever changed. One way or another, she was going to go back to her life in New York. Minus Clay, of course, but all the other pieces would be in place. She’d have the apartment to herself, and soon a baby to fill it with joy. Aside from that, though, she was still going to work hard and make a lot of money and spend her days being endlessly successful. That was what her life had always been about. That’s what had always been next. What other options did she even have?

  “Back to New York, I guess,” she said finally.

  “Hmm,” Oliver said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just, ‘Hmm.’ That’s all. Nothing to it.”

  “Now who’s full of secrets?” She poked him in the side like he’d poked her, drawing a laugh out of him.

  He didn’t get a chance to answer before Maggie and Gary caught up with them. “You two really seem to be getting along well!” Maggie said excitedly. Eliza was sure that she and Gary had been gossiping about her and Oliver throughout their whole walk. Maggie was always pretty good at playing matchmaker, but even she couldn’t take credit for this one.

  Eliza wondered what “this one” even was. She had just told Oliver that she had a life to go back to, and she meant it. That would happen sooner rather than later. Her whole summer had been like a dream, and she was bound to wake up any minute. She might as well start preparing herself for that mentally. In the meantime, though, she could enjoy herself tonight. Might as well. Real life loomed in the distance.

  “Let’s go dancing,” she said suddenly. She looked up at Oliver. He still looked a little disappointed, if that was the right word, but he perked up a little at the prospect of keeping the night going. “I’ve got a feeling this guy knows his way around a dance floor.”

  Maggie raised an eyebrow and smiled. “All right! I’m in. You never used to be this fun!” she teased.

  “I’m still not this fun,” Eliza fired back. This was all an act, a vacation from her real life, which was very serious and important. She worked at Goldman Sachs and had a nice apartment in Manhattan and everything she touched was successful. “Serious” and “important” could not be reiterated enough. She was not fun. She was not spontaneous.

  But maybe—just maybe—she could be.

  Part III

  Autumn

  30

  Brent

  One Month Later

  “Time flies” was an expression that always made Brent laugh. Sometimes it did, but a lot of times it most definitely did not. When he had been at the marina on the night of his dad’s accident, every second had felt like a lifetime. But over the last month, time seemed to be running through his fingers like sand at the beach. There just wasn’t enough of it to do everything he wanted to do. But he sure was trying.

  He’d thrown himself into his routine with a newfound gusto. He started every morning the same way. Rising before the sun was up, he shoved his feet into his running shoes and got moving before his eyes were even fully open. He went slow at first, just jogging to loosen up his joints, until he got to the beach. Then he started to open up his stride. He ran four or five miles just about every day. He ended each run the same way, too—sprinting as fast as he could. Some days, the ocean wind in his hair and the sun peeking up over the horizon made him laugh like a maniac. It felt good to be alive. He’d spent a whole summer feeling the exact opposite. But gosh, he’d just forgotten how nice it felt to really feel his body. Sweat on his tongue, wind in his face, legs churning, lungs burning. Lord almighty, that was a good sensation.

  He’d found a running partner, too. While cleaning up his worksite one night, he’d heard a noise. He took a peek in the small dumpster he’d rented for the job and found a little stray dog in there. She was absolutely filthy and stunk to high heaven. But Brent fell in love with her on sight. He coaxed her out with a spoonful of peanut butter and petted her until she was comfortable enough to fall asleep in his arms. Poor thing must’ve been exhausted, because she hardly even woken up when Brent took her upstairs to his mother’s room at the Sweet Island Inn and gave her a bath. It took a good twenty minutes before the water coming off the dog’s fur stopped sloughing off black and sludgy. It turned out that she was a soft blonde. When he’d showed her to Mae, his mother laughed. “Blonde, just like all of you children! She was meant to be a Benson.” Brent couldn’t agree more. He’d named her Henrietta, after his father, and when he’d told Mom about that, he could’ve sworn he saw the faintest suggestion of a tear in her eyes.

  Once Henrietta was cleaned up, collared, and had been to the vet to get her shots, she stuck to Brent like white on rice. Wherever he went, she went. Henrietta loved running along the beach in the morning just as much as him. He loved racing her and seeing her gallop wild and free out there. She’d get to their beach exit a few seconds ahead, then stop and look back at him with her tongue lolling out. She had taken to licking the sweat off his face, too. Once upon a time, Brent would’ve thought that was gross. But, in his eyes, Henrietta could do no wrong. They were just two gutter dogs, loving on each other.

  Henrietta liked to hang around while he worked, too. That was a good thing, because Brent wasn’t doing much else aside from working. After he got back from his runs, he scarfed down a quick breakfast of toast and coffee that Mom always set aside for him, and then he got to work. The project Mae had hired him to do was no mean feat. The back house was in bad shape; Aunt Toni said she’d never been able to spare the time or expense to get it right. Transforming it into what Brent had in mind was going to be one heck of a task. But he was feeling up to the job.

  He’d started by pretty much gutting it to the studs and then rebuilding it back up. New flooring, new tiling in the bathroom, new cabinets and fixtures in the kitchen. He grouted the tiled floors and fixed up the insulation in the walls where it had gotten messed up. He repainted the outside so it would gleam white in the Nantucket sun.

  It felt like he was doing the same work on the house as he was doing on himself. Gutting his soul to the studs and building it back up. Days were easy, relatively speaking. There was always work to do. That kept his mind off things, even when it tried to stray towards unwanted memories of being on a job site with his father. He’d learned everything he knew about handiwork from his pops. What tool went where. How a responsible man kept his workspace clean. He’d learned to sing while he worked, too. A song on your lips lightens the load on your back, Dad used to say. Dad liked country. Brent sang Bruce Springsteen, mostly.

  Nights were harder, though. There was nothing to distract him from the demons in his head. No singing, no hard labor. Just darkness, whether he closed his eyes or kept them open. He didn’t sleep much the first night, nor the next, nor the one after that. Matter of fact, it took nearly two weeks before he slept through until morning without a night terror. Every time he woke up screaming, though, Henrietta woke up, too—she slept in bed next to him—and nuzzled him back to sleep. He was starting to think that she was his guardian angel.

  So, mostly, he tried to keep working. It was best that way. He liked his days long and sweaty. Mom usually came out around noon with a sandwich and a glass of lemonade for him. She didn’t linger very often. Just gave him his food and a kiss on the cheek and went back inside to keep up with her own work. She didn’t peek at the work too closely, either. She kept saying she wanted to be blown away once it was all said and done.

  One of the guests, Dominic, liked to come close to sunset when Brent was finishing up. He was some sort of writer, it turned out, working on a novel about something or other. He told Brent he’d decided to extend his visit at the inn indefinitely because he was liking it so much. The two men often shared a drink at the end of a hard day—beer for Dominic, but Brent stuck to just water or lemonade. He’d made a promise to his mother to stay on the wagon and he had every intention of keeping that oath. The shakes of withdrawal those
first few nights were something that Brent never wanted to repeat again. He’d done it twice now—that was enough to last him a lifetime.

  For his own part, Dominic seemed to be close with Brent’s mom, too. Brent liked the idea of her having a friend, and Dominic seemed like a nice guy.

  “Coming together nicely, isn’t it?” Dominic said one evening. He and Brent were seated in a couple of ratty lawn chairs that Brent had found while scavenging through a back closet. The sun was on its way down, though it still had a ways to go before nightfall.

  “I think so,” Brent commented, eyeing the day’s handiwork. “Still got a few things to throw together, but I like the progress I’m making.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly been putting the work in. It’s admirable.” Dominic clinked his beer against Brent’s glass of ice water.

  “Thanks.” Brent chuckled. Dominic had a funny way of choosing his words. He wasn’t sure whether to chalk it up to his profession or his nationality. Either way, Brent liked the way things sounded when Dominic said them. Admirable had a nice ring to it. It sounded like a real honor.

  “How is your lady friend?” Dominic asked after a sip.

  Brent blushed and wiped a bead of sweat off his lip. “‘Lady friend’ is a bit of a stretch,” he mumbled, embarrassed. “We’ve never really talked.”

  That wasn’t quite true. On one of Brent’s first morning runs, he’d noticed a woman sitting at the foot of the dunes, looking out at the morning waves. She was there the next day, and the day after that, too. By the fourth day, they’d taken to waving to each other, and by the eighth, Brent worked up the guts to stop and say good morning to her.