by Grace Palmer
She needed to get to the pizza shop.
She drove like a madwoman there, and when she arrived, she didn’t even bother finding a parking spot, or even locking the car behind her. She just jumped out, caution lights flashing and door wide open, and ran into the pizza shop with a lunatic’s smile on her face. “Where is it, where is it …” she mumbled under her breath as she looked madly around the shop.
“Oye! Chica!” Alejandro, the owner, smiled and whistled at her from behind the counter. He had a piercingly loud whistle. Holly felt the redness flush in her cheeks as the whole shop looked at her. She smiled, embarrassed again, and jogged over to where Alejandro was waving another envelope at her. She thanked him, and he gave her a wink. “Drive fast,” he said.
She tore open this envelope on her way back to the car. This time, she read it out loud to herself.
“The kiss that launched a thousand ships / I leaned but almost missed your lips / It was the first, but there’d be more / As we watched the boats return to shore.”
It clicked at once for Holly.
“The marina!” She raised her fist up in the air triumphantly, like she’d just won a gold medal at the Olympics. Again, everyone inside and outside the pizza shop looked at her with concern in their eyes. She’d better get going—someone was bound to call the police soon and report a crazy woman yelling nonsense in downtown Nantucket.
She couldn’t get to the docks fast enough. As she drove, she remembered the memory that Pete’s poem was about. This must’ve been their third, or maybe their fourth date. They’d had dinner—lobster, of all things—at a white tablecloth restaurant downtown. Pete had proudly paid with crumpled five- and ten-dollar bills he withdrew from a Batman wallet. Savings from summers cutting lawns, he said, and Holly remembered being so touched that he would use that on her for this silly, overly fancy, perfect, perfect dinner. Fifteen-year-old girls are impressed by the littlest of things. But even now, more than a decade later, she didn’t think it was such a little gesture. It was love in the form of sweaty, triple-folded cash, spent on something that neither of them needed but both of them had remembered forever.
After dinner, they’d gone for a walk, and meandered down to take a seat by the docks and watch the fishing boats come back into harbor. He’d looked at her then with such goofy, Pete-like intensity in his face, the moon lighting up his eyes, and he’d leaned in to kiss her. But she’d already been leaning in to kiss him, because she didn’t see how they could go a single second longer without kissing each other. They’d bumped noses on the way in. They’d laughed it off, and then Pete had said, “Try again?” They had done just that, and the second time had been magical. One of the fishermen had hooted and hollered as his boat passed them, but they hadn’t stopped kissing.
She parked at the marina—properly, this time; she’d had quite enough public attention for the evening, thank you very much—and half jogged down to the docks. There! At the end of one of the small wooden piers, she saw an envelope sticking out from between two planks. She scurried down the stairs and retrieved it.
Like the others, she ripped this one open and scanned it eagerly.
I waited here on bended knee.
Between the moon, the stars, the sea.
The words were said, the question spoken.
A promise that would never be broken.
I love you now. I loved you then.
I swore our love would never end.
There’s one more thing that’s left to say:
Come back to me, my Hollyday.
Pete was waiting for her at the beach. She hesitated at the mouth of the dunes. She could see him, outlined against the dark ocean by the moon at his back. He was facing away from her, towards the waves, but when he heard her approaching, he turned around. There was just enough ambient light for her to see him smile.
He had stuck a candle in the sand at this feet. She could swear she saw a half-dozen broken matches dropped on all sides of it. She laughed to herself. For some unknown reason, Pete had the hardest time lighting matches. He’d always just hand her the package and say, “You do it.”
This was a quiet beach, not quite secret but close to it, tucked away at a non-touristy part of the island. Few people came here. But Holly had on the day Pete had asked her to marry him. He’d had one of her friends invite her on a casual sunset walk. When they’d arrived, he was waiting for her, with a path of rose petals and candles leading from her to him. He’d said some sweet things that she’d been far too overcome with emotion to commit to memory the way she should have. She mostly remembered pulling him up and kissing him and squeezing him tight. He was hers. She was his. Her Pete. His Hollyday.
“I missed you,” he said as she walked up. She stopped about a yard short of him, just out of arm’s reach.
“I—”
“Let me go first, if that’s okay,” he interrupted with a soft smile. She fell silent and let him continue. “I’ve had a lot of time to think while you were gone. I know you needed this time, and I think I did, too. But it wasn’t hard to make up my mind. I choose you, Holly. I choose you over everything. You and our kids are the only thing that matters to me. I chose you back in high school, and at the pizza parlor, and at the docks, and I chose you here. I’ll keep choosing you, every day for the rest of our lives. I love you. I want to be with you. Whatever you need from me, you have it. It’s yours. I’m yours.”
Holly didn’t trust her voice to say anything. The tears coursing down her face would have to be answer enough. She ran and jumped on Pete. She had just enough time to see his eyes widen in surprise before she tackled him into the sand and kissed his stupid, silly, perfect face as if her life depended on it.
In so many ways, it did.
37
Brent
One Week Later
Brent woke up on Sunday morning, a week after his first date with Rose, with a big smile on his face. He’d been waking up with a smile on his face every day since their night at the drive-in theater. A big, doofusy smile, but one that he couldn’t wipe off if he tried.
Life is meant to be enjoyed, isn’t it?
Yes, Dad! he wanted to shout from the rooftops. Yes, it is.
Life was good. He had spent the week going over the renovation once more with a fine-toothed comb, making sure everything was shipshape, and then helping his mom out with a few dozen other little handyman tasks around the inn and the house on Howard Street. It felt good to be needed. To be useful. To be wanted. He still dreamed about his dad most nights, but that was fine, because it didn’t have the same sheen of terror over it, and he no longer woke up in a panic in the darkness. He’d started dreaming about Rose, too, though that was a whole can of worms he wasn’t ready to crack open quite yet. He told himself every time he looked in the mirror to take things slow, one day at a time, and that seemed like good advice for sure. No need to rush anything, slap a label on it, or start layering expectations on top of whatever little spark had been kindled.
They hadn’t seen each other too much. With school starting up again soon, Rose was spending a lot of time down at the elementary school getting ready for the fall semester, so she’d been very busy. But she and Brent still spent all day every day texting back and forth. He laughed out loud at least a half-dozen times a day. All the women in his family had commented multiple times on how he was just radiating happiness. He’d told them enough about Rose to keep them off his back, but as with his reluctance to put a label on his relationship with her, he didn’t want to spoil anything by talking her up too much to his mom or sisters, so he kept the details sparse. He’d swung by on an evening run so that Henrietta and Susanna could meet. They’d gotten along like gangbusters. Henrietta liked just about everybody, so Brent had been confident that she and Rose’s daughter would get along. But Susanna must have been something extra special, because Henrietta took to her the second they first laid eyes on each other. She’d jumped all over Susanna, smothering her with doggy kisses. Susanna had squealed
with laughter and promptly declared that she and Henrietta were best friends now, so Brent would have to back off. Rose had scolded her, telling her to be polite to Mr. Brent, but he had just laughed.
Speaking of Henrietta, she was lapping at his hand right now. He’d snoozed just a few minutes later than normal—it was a Sunday, after all—and she was anxious to go for their normal morning jog on the beach. “All right, all right, girl, calm down,” he said. He yawned and got dressed to head out. He smiled to himself. Maybe Rose would be out on the beach catching the sunrise like she usually did. She’d taken to bringing Susanna along every now and then, and the thought of his dog and her new best friend getting along so well encouraged his smile a little wider.
He filled Henrietta’s water bowl in the kitchen so she could get a drink before they went exercising. When she’d had her fill, they set out at an easy pace towards the beach. The sun had already climbed over the water’s edge and it looked like it was about to be an absolute stunner of a day. The summer heat had been fading more and more, leaving a gloriously nice autumn in its trail.
Life was good. It couldn’t be said often enough.
When they reached the sand, Brent started to go a little faster. He took a deep inhale of the ocean’s breeze, letting it fill his lungs and rejuvenate him. About a mile down the beach, he rounded the bend. He was full of expectation—from this point on, he could usually see Rose sitting in her spot, waiting for him.
But she wasn’t there.
He tried not to get too disappointed. He was a little late, after all, thanks to him sleeping in past his alarm. He’d text her when he got back and see if she had a little bit of time to hang out today. Maybe they could take Susanna and Henrietta to the beach for the afternoon. Could even make a picnic out of it, perhaps.
As he got closer and closer to her spot, though, he thought he could make out something sticking out of the sand. When he got a few dozen yards away, he saw that it was a bright pink envelope. He slowed his pace as he approached. To his surprise, he noticed something written on the outside in loopy, precise teacher’s handwriting—Brent Benson, Ironman. This had to be from Rose, then. A smile stole across his face. He wondered what it would say as he plucked it out of the sand and opened up the letter.
The smile didn’t last long.
Dear Brent,
This wasn’t how I wanted to do this. But I practiced in the mirror a bunch of times, and I couldn’t get through the whole thing without breaking down. So I had to write it instead. I’m sorry for that.
What I spent all week trying to find the words for is: I can’t do this.
You are special. I knew that the first time I saw you running on the beach. Don’t ask me how—maybe it was the smile or maybe it was something else, I’m not sure. But I just knew right away—that’s a special guy right there.
Perhaps that’s part of the problem. You are special—too special for me. I’m too fragile for you. I had my heart hurt by the stuff that brought me to Nantucket. And, after just that one date with you, I knew with one hundred percent certainty that there was something between us.
That’s why I have to do this. I can’t expose my heart again. It hurt too badly last time. I can’t be a good mother to Susanna and I can’t keep living my life like a responsible adult if I’m broken beyond repair. It’s taken a long time to even get this far in my recovery. I can’t afford to take a step back.
I know I made you promise that you wouldn’t break my heart. The crazy thing is, I believed you when you said you wouldn’t. I think you believed yourself, too. But there’s always a chance. It’s unavoidable. There’s nothing guaranteed in this life. Not even the love of a good man like you.
I’m rambling now. I’m sorry for that, too. I know this is going to hurt you. But believe me when I say it’s for the best. Better for me to stop things now, before they get too far, then realize down the road that I’m just too broken and scared to open my heart again.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry a thousand times over, and I can’t say it enough.
I wish you the best. You deserve happiness. I wish I could be the one to give it to you.
With all the love in my heart,
Rose
By the middle of the afternoon, Brent had read the letter perhaps one hundred times. He’d also had eight beers and six or seven strong chugs of Jack Daniels whiskey straight from the bottle, and he was getting very, very drunk.
His dad was a liar after all. Life wasn’t meant to be enjoyed. If he was ever enjoying life, that meant it was just setting him up for another fall. Happiness just meant he wasn’t paying attention to what lay beyond the next curve in the road.
He took another glug of whiskey. Screw it. Screw this. Screw everything. Henrietta looked at him mournfully. He couldn’t bear to look back at her. He needed to get out of this house right now, because if she kept looking at him like that, he was liable to start crying, and he just did not want to do that right now.
“Don’t look at me that way,” he snarled at her.
She just tilted her head and looked back.
“Stop it,” he ordered again.
She nuzzled his hand with her nose.
“All right, I’m gone,” he said with finality, standing up suddenly. Henrietta leaped back, tail wagging. Maybe she thought the two of them were going out. She was half right—he was going out. He wanted to go talk to his damn father.
He was going to go down to the marina and take Jenny Lee out to the Garden of Eden, and he was going to yell at Henry until the SOB spoke back to him. He’d stay there all day and night if he needed to. He wanted an answer, and his father was going to give it to him.
Brent was unsteady on his feet, but still sober enough to hear the voice in his head telling him that this was a bad idea. Unfortunately for that voice, he was drunk enough to ignore it outright. He snatched his keys off the coffee table, dropped them, bent down to pick them up again. Then he marched out the door to where his truck was parked around the side of the house. He climbed in and took off down the road, growling under his breath.
Rose. She had led him on. She had set up him just to rip everything away. He tried to muster up some anger at her, but he couldn’t. The truth was that he understood. He knew how it felt to have your future suddenly and irrevocably shattered. He was sure that, on some level, she thought it was her fault that Susanna’s father had left her. Just like he was sure that, on some level, he still thought it was his fault that his father had died.
He had spent over a month believing that he’d exorcised that demon from his soul. But it turned out the sly devil had just been waiting in the shadows for the right moment to rear his ugly head again. And boy, now that it was back, it was back with a vengeance. Your fault, your fault, your fault, it said again and again like a wicked chorus. You did it. You deserve this. You deserve to be miserable.
Right now, Brent was having a hard time disagreeing.
He flew screeching into the marina parking lot, though now that he was here, he barely remembered the drive over. He was much drunker than he’d realized when he left the house. Bad idea … said that cautionary voice again, but it was much weaker and quieter now and even easier to ignore than it had been before.
“Go to the Garden. Talk to Dad. Go to the Garden. Talk to Dad.” He mumbled it under his breath over and over. Whether it was convincing himself that this was a good idea or simply trying to remember what on earth he had come here for, Brent wasn’t sure, but he kept saying it as he fumbled his keys out of the ignition and started to stride unsteadily towards the docks.
He was halfway across the parking lot when he saw a face. Now, why was that face familiar? He stopped in place, swaying, and racked his brain trying to remember. Where had he seen that man before? Fat face, sunburned, wearing fishing gear that looked like it had never been … Bingo. That was the jerk who’d insulted Brent back in early August. Right around here, actually. What had he called him? Son, that was it. He’d called him son. B
rent didn’t like that. He didn’t like the memory, either. In fact, he liked it so little that he walked up to the man where he stood right now fueling up his boat, cocked his fist back, and swung it as hard as he could towards the man’s face.
Time slowed down as his fist went through the air. He was vaguely aware of someone shouting his name in the distance. “Brent! Brent! Stop what you’re—” It was Roger. Just like last time, as if this was some sickening replay of the same event that had happened almost six weeks ago.
But Roger was way too far away to stop him. Besides, the fist was flying already. It was going to make bloody, violent contact in three, two, one …
Boom. Boom.
Two hits in quick succession.
The first hit was Brent striking the man in the jaw. The second hit was Sheriff Mike Dunleavy, pile-driving Brent into the ground with a tackle like a middle linebacker. Brent’s head smacked against the gravel, and he blacked out.
He came to in the jail cell. He was surrounded by slick concrete. It smelled pretty awful in here. Like blood. Or, wait—that was blood. Brent’s own blood. The side of his head throbbed something terrible, but when he tried to reach up to touch it, he realized that his hands were handcuffed behind his back. That explained why his wrists and shoulders were aching, too. He could feel bits of gravel still ground into his cheek where he’d hit the ground after Mike had tackled him. He was still pretty drunk, though a little less than he’d been before.