by Grace Palmer
“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.
“Good morning,” she’d said with a bright smile. She had dark hair cut in bangs across her forehead. Her legs were long and tan where they stretched out beneath her jeans shorts. She looked like a yogi or a dancer, maybe.
“I see you here every morning,” Brent said awkwardly. “So just, uh, thought I’d be, y’know. Neighborly, or whatever. Polite-like.”
She’d laughed. It sounded like a wind chime. “Very neighborly indeed. I’m Rose.”
“Brent,” he said. She stood up, brushing sand off her thighs, and stuck out her hand to shake. Brent smiled and took it. He towered over her, and his hand swallowed hers. He kept his eyes fixated on her face the whole time. She was very pretty.
“It’s nice to meet you, Brent,” Rose said. “Should we do this again tomorrow?”
He gave her one more grin. “You bet.” Then, not sure what else to do, he gave her a wave. “Tomorrow it is. C’mon, Henrietta!” he’d called, and off they went.
The next morning, she’d had a bottle of water for him when he stopped. “Thought you might be thirsty, Mr. Ironman,” she teased.
Brent took it from her gratefully. It was awfully nice of her to think of him like that.
Over the next week, it became a ritual. They stopped and chatted every morning on his runs. She liked to watch the sun rise over the water, she said. That’s why she was sitting out on the beach—to start her day in some peace and quiet. Brent liked that sentiment. He learned that she was a young, single mother of a four-year-old girl named Susanna, and a kindergarten teacher at the local elementary school. After a few days, he sussed out that Susanna’s father was no longer in the picture. He didn’t press the issue at all; he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. But the thought made him feel a little giddy for reasons he wasn’t ready to confront.
“Well, you certainly seemed interested,” Dominic said, snapping Brent back to the present moment. “Or have I misinterpreted things?”
“I suppose not,” Brent admitted. “She’s nice, and very pretty. I just … gotta focus on my own stuff right now, you know?”
“I do indeed,” Dominic said, falling silent. Brent liked that about him—he knew when to talk and when to just sit back and enjoy the moment quietly.
“Time for me to be moving along,” Dominic said after a while, standing up. He was a night owl, he’d told Brent, and he did all his best writing late at night. The sun might be on its way down, but Dominic was just now getting ready to start work. “But, if I may offer some unsolicited advice, from an old man to a much younger one—it’d be a shame to let a nice, pretty lady spend all those mornings alone.” He gave Brent a wink and a pat on the shoulder, and then walked inside, leaving Brent to watch the last of the sun’s descent by himself.
31
Sara
“No. Freaking. Way!” Sara said in disbelief.
Russell laughed, bent over with his hands on his knees, guffawing until tears winked at the corners of his eyes. Despite her initial shock when she’d first walked into his house, Sara found herself laughing along with him. Both of them were clutching onto each other to stop from falling as they cackled and wheezed.
“Stop, stop! My sides hurt!” She swatted him, but he didn’t stop laughing for another few minutes. Only when they’d both slid to the floor did they finally calm down and regain their breath.
“This is the most ridiculous scene I’ve ever come across in my life,” she said, eyeing him. “What on earth got into you?”
They’d had a date night planned for a week or two. After their first date over beers and oysters a month ago, they’d hung out at the beach and gone on a few bike rides, but they hadn’t had another proper date. Russell insisted that this time he would cook for her. “Problem is, I don’t know the first thing about cooking,” he’d admitted. “I burn soup. I mess up toast. I do make a mean bowl of cereal, though.”
“No problem,” she’d told him. “You just get the groceries, and I’ll work my magic. You can just sit back and be pretty.”
“Woof, that’s a relief,” he’d joked. “Being pretty is what I’m best at.”
So, she’d shown up to his house that Saturday night, the first Saturday in September, wearing dark blue jeans and a white off-the-shoulder top, expecting him to have grabbed a few ingredients for pasta or something pretty simple like that. To her utter surprise, though, his kitchen counter, dining room table, both living room side tables, and half the floor were absolutely covered in heaps and heaps of plastic grocery bags.
He’d looked at her when she froze in place wide-eyed, shrugged, and said, “I didn’t know what to get, so I panicked and got one of pretty much everything.”
Thus, the laughing commenced.
“One of everything?” she said now, swatting him again. “Are you insane? Who does that?”
“I told you, I panicked,” he said, still chuckling every now and then as he wiped the tears from his eyes. “I didn’t want you to get thrown off your rhythm because I didn’t have some ingredient or something like that.”
“You are absolutely out of your mind,” she replied, shaking her head. “There is no way on earth we are gonna be able to eat all this food. I’m gonna be a whale. You’ll have to take me out of here in a wheelbarrow like Violet Beauregard.”
“Violet who?”
Sara’s jaw dropped. “You’ve never seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?!”
He held his hands up guiltily. “Sheltered childhood. I watched Star Wars and Indiana Jones ’til the VHS tapes wore out, and that’s pretty much it.”
“Good Lord, we have a lot of work to do on you,” she said, wheezing.
“Don’t I know it. Should probably do some work on these groceries first, though. There’s ice cream in one of these bags, and I can’t in good conscience let that melt.”
Laughing like fools, they commenced unloading all the groceries into the main refrigerator and pantry. They stuffed whatever didn’t fit there in the backup fridge Russell had in his garage.
“We could open our own grocery store with all this stuff,” Sara grumbled.
“I get it, I get it, I’m a clown. Sue me.” He smiled ruefully.
Once they’d gotten everything in some semblance of organization, Sara went to work. She’d been cooking extravagant dinners for the guests at the Sweet Island Inn a couple times a week—lobster thermidor, coq au vine, sous-vide steak with twice-baked potatoes. It felt good to flex her culinary muscles and use all the techniques she’d learned at CIA and Lonesome Dove. Tonight, she decided to make a pretty simple garlic shrimp linguine in a red wine tomato sauce. She was going to m
ake the pasta by hand, though, so she set Russell to work rolling out dough and cutting it into long strands as she started setting up the items for the sauce. Russell poured them both hefty glasses of a nice, buttery white wine.
“Looks like you’re doing more drinking than working,” she commented with a glance over her shoulder after they’d gotten going. “Caught ya red-handed.” His cheeks burned and he pretended to roll the pin as hard as he could for a second, making her laugh.
“They say to share your gifts with the world, don’t they?” he retorted. “Cooking is your art. Drinking wine is mine.”
“You are in rare form this evening, Mr. Bridges.”
“Always, Miss Benson. Always. Hey, what kind of music do you like?”
Sara shrugged. “Oh, I’m easy. Anything but opera, pretty much.”
“Great,” Russell said, wiping off his hands on a dish towel and walking out of the kitchen. “’Cause I’ve got a three-hour recording of me yodeling and playing the banjo that I’ve been dying to play for you.”
She grabbed a bag of frozen peas that was near at hand and chucked it at his head as he walked into the open-space living room. He ducked just in time, laughing, so it hit the wall behind him with a chunk and slid to the ground. “You better not!”
“Yes, chef!” he barked. He spun around, clicked his heels together, and gave her a military-esque salute. She just shook her head and sighed, though she couldn’t stop herself from grinning. Russ was a complete and utter goober, and his gooberness was turned up to an eleven out of ten tonight. Still, it made her laugh.
Against her better instincts, she found herself thinking of Gavin. Gavin was anything but a goober. He was stylish, composed, suave at all times.
She’d tried to deny it to herself as often and as loudly as possible over the last month, but the fact remained that Russell and Gavin were both warring for real estate in her heart. Gavin had taken to texting her every now and then since their unexpected phone call. Just a Thinking of you or a What’s up? She didn’t always reply, but even when she did, he rarely said anything back. What kind of game he was playing, Sara didn’t know for sure, but she had to admit that it was effective. She felt like a fish chomping at a lure that kept moving out of reach every time she got close.
Russell, on the other hand, was ever-present. If she texted him, he texted back right away. He double- and triple-texted when he had something to say. He used emojis and sent goofy selfies when the mood struck. He was funny and warm and wide-open to her.
Polar freaking opposites.
She was shaken from her thoughts by the soft crackle of music coming from the other side of the room. She looked up and saw Russell sliding a record out of the sleeve and putting the needle in place.
“A record player, huh?” she asked wryly. “Old school.”
He flashed her a grin. “Can’t beat the sound. I know, I know, I’m a big snob. But my dad raised me on these things. He was a big Motown guy.”
“How come you don’t have any rhythm then?”
“I got the good-looks gene instead. My brother got the rhythm.”
“Who said you’re good-looking?” Sara teased.
“My reflection, mostly,” he shot back as he walked back around the corner and leaned up against the counter next to her. “But I was hoping that, if I play my cards right—and pump you full of enough chardonnay—I might get you to agree with that tonight.”
She laughed and pushed him in the chest. “Shush and go finish rolling out my pasta.”
He gave her the mock salute again. “Yes, chef!”
They chitchatted about their days and various gossip around the island as the low-key jazz crooned from the speakers and their wine glasses kept getting filled and emptied and filled and emptied. Sara tossed everything she’d been preparing—shallots, celery, carrot, tomatoes, basil, parsley, lemon juice, and a hefty splash of Cabernet Sauvignon—into a sauté pan to let it simmer down for a while. Then she went over to help Russell finish slicing all the pasta into nice linguine strands while the pasta water got to a boil.
The forty-five minutes after that passed by just as easily. Eventually, the pasta was ready to cook, the sauce was almost done, and all she had to do was grill up the shrimp real quick and throw it all together.
“Bon appétit,” she said when it was done, sliding a plate in front of Russell at the dining table.
He pouted. “Hey, I helped.”
She leaned down and pecked him on the cheek. “Yes, you did. Like a pro … crastinator.”
He jabbed her in the side with a spoon. “Watch it, Benson. I’m highly respected in Nantucket culinary circles.”
She backed up, hands held high in surrender. “Forgive me, Chef Bridges. I bow to your superior skill.” Laughing, she took her own place at the table.
“Oh, this is heavenly,” Russell said as he took his first bite.
Sara grinned. No matter how often she heard it, compliments about her food never got old.
Russell asked her about cooking in fancy New York kitchens as they both dug in. “What’s that like?”
“Hard,” she admitted. “Fast-paced. Loud. Can’t make mistakes.”
“Sounds intense.”
“Definitely. I love it, though.”
He looked at her quizzically. “You miss it all, don’t you? That life.”
She thought about it before answering. “I’m honestly not sure,” she began hesitantly. “Part of me misses it, yeah. But it wears on you. Feels like you’re in a pressure cooker when you’re at work, and when you’re not, all you want to do is get drunk or sleep. It’s a tough way to live.”
Her answer was the truth. New York was hard, and she really did love the ease of Nantucket. She’d grown up here, and she always used to joke to her colleagues back at Lonesome Dove that she had saltwater in her veins. Cooking in her mother’s kitchen had been an unexpected source of fun and relaxation, too. It was like rediscovering why she’d fallen in love with the art in the first place. When the music was on and she had wine in her system and laughter echoing around her, cooking was pure bliss. She wondered if it was possible to recapture that sense of freedom at Lonesome Dove, knowing that Gavin would always be lingering around the corner.
The conversation wandered on from there, but part of Sara’s thoughts stayed back on Russell’s question. Could she ever go back to New York? In some ways, she’d resigned herself to that door being closed. But the more she thought about it, the less sure she was. Gavin seemed at least conversational these days, which made her think that maybe there was still a possibility of taking her place back in the kitchen at Lonesome Dove. Or at least getting his recommendation to get her hired at a different establishment.
“What’s next?” Russell asked eagerly when they were done eating. His plate was scraped clean, Sara noticed, amused.
“Cleanup time,” she said.
“Ugh, say it ain’t so!”
“Such a drama queen,” she tutted. “Come on, let’s get it done.”
He followed her into the kitchen, plate in hand. They set them down in the sink.
“Hey, Sara,” he said quietly in a weird voice. She turned around to see what he was doing, when—wham!—he clapped a hand on either side of her face and absolutely coated her with loose flour leftover from making the pasta.
“Oh, no you did not!” she shrieked. Grabbing a handful of it herself from the cutting board, she hurled it at him with all her might.
An all-out war ensued. Flour went everywhere, puffs of it erupting back and forth, until they were both white from head to toe and panting heavily.
“I cannot believe you just started a flour fight with me. This is gonna take an eternity to clean up.”
She could see his smile through the floating powder. “Couldn’t resist,” he said. It was tough to make out his facial expression, thanks to the flour caked on his face, but it seemed to her like he was looking at her strangely. When he spoke again, his voice was a little lower, a little husk
ier. “I hope I’m not pushing things too fast, but I gotta say, it’d be awfully nice to kiss you right about now.” He stepped halfway to her. Just a foot or two separated them now.
Sara smiled shyly. “Russell, we’ve been working on this. You have to ask for things if you want them.”
He grinned back. “Right you are. Sara, can I kiss you?”
She closed her eyes and kissed him first in response.
32
Brent
The day had finally come: the big unveiling of Brent’s renovation.
Everyone had come over to the inn for the ceremony. “Did we have to do this so early?” Sara grumbled, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “No human being should have to be up at this hour.”
“Shush,” Eliza said, poking her sister in the ribs.
“Be nice,” Holly reprimanded.
“Sorry, sis, but you gotta see it with the morning sunlight coming through. It’s way better that way, trust me.” Brent was wringing his hands in front of him nervously. That was a Mae habit he’d picked up somewhere along the way. Speak of the devil, his mom came bustling out right then. She had a steaming cup of coffee that she handed to Sara, who took it gratefully, and a cup of tea for Eliza, who murmured her thanks as she took it by the handle.
“Honey, before you start,” Mae began, “I just want to say how proud we all are of you.”
“Agreed,” chimed Holly and Eliza at the same time.
“Definitely,” Sara added.
Mae continued, “You’ve been working your tail off on this thing, and that’s all well and good, but I’m proudest of how you have gone about it. It’s been a tough summer for our family; we all know that. And things were rough for a little bit for you especially. But you’ve poured yourself into this and—well, I’m just grateful. And proud of you. I know without a doubt that your father would be proud of you, too.” Mae was crying now, just a little bit. Brent found that he was, too. He hadn’t expected that. He didn’t have time to check if his sisters were as choked up as he and his mother were, because Mae pulled him into a hug. He closed his eyes to hold her tight.