“No, you don’t,” Angelo said. “I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
Sam laughed. “I understand what you’re saying. We all tend to run in concentric circles no matter where we live. But I don’t know if I can run in concentric circles here. It sort of feels like, well, a dog chasing its own tail. I mean, the orchard is the way it is. It’ll never change.”
“How do you know?” Angelo asked. “Have you asked your family if they would be open to changes?”
“A little,” Sam said.
“Have you had a courageous conversation?”
“A what?” Sam asked.
“My mom is a teacher.” Angelo laughed. “She is all about courageous conversations … about students, teachers, and parents having the courage to talk with someone about something that bothers or upsets them, rather than just letting it fester.”
“You mean I should ask my parents why they named me Sam?” she asked. “To find out they wanted a boy? Or ask them if they would consider making their menu hipper or more trendy?”
“Why not?” Angelo asked. “Sometimes you have to reveal your soul for the world to see.”
“Have you done that with your parents?” Sam asked.
Angelo nodded. “I told them I might leave the city one day,” he said. “For the right opportunity.” He hesitated. “Or the right girl.”
“You’d move?” Sam asked. “For someone?”
“Of course,” he said. “Wouldn’t you?”
Sam felt as if she’d been hit by a brick. She looked at Angelo, and then at Power Island, and everything appeared off-kilter, as if she’d just emerged from a roller coaster.
Sam finished the rest of her beer, set it on the swim platform, and walked a few feet away from the boat, then dove into the water. When she came up, everything had returned to normal, until Sam saw a familiar-looking boat dropping anchor not far from her.
Connor’s Honor read the name on the back of the boat.
No, Sam thought, quickly diving back under the water.
“Sam?” she immediately heard when she surfaced.
Connor was standing on the back of his boat. As water cascaded over her eyes, Sam could still picture herself on it, as if she were watching an old movie reel.
“Sam,” Angelo said, repeating her name in stereo. “I think that guy is yelling for you.”
“Who?” Sam asked. “What? Where?”
“Are you trying to act like a journalist?” Angelo joked, pointing at Connor in front of the whole world. “That guy. Right there.”
“Oh,” Sam said. “Right.”
“Sam?” Connor called again. “What are you doing here?”
Sam trudged through the shallow water until she was a few feet from her former boyfriend. He looked the same as he always had—boyish, blond, and happy as a Lab—although he’d gained a bit of weight over the years. A little boy and a little girl ran around on the boat, and a woman was trying to capture them.
“Wow,” Connor said. “I never thought…” He let his sentence trail off, shaking his head. “How’s New York?”
“Great,” Sam said. “Great job. Great friends. Everything’s amazing.”
“I’m happy for you,” Connor said.
“How are you?”
“Good,” he said. “Busy. Summer season is bonkers for the fishing charters … well, your family knows how summer is. Took a mental health day.” He turned and nodded at the boat. “Brought my wife and two kids.”
Sam smiled. “I heard. I’m so happy for you,” she said, echoing Connor’s words.
His kids screamed as his wife—a friendly-looking woman Sam didn’t know—who slathered suntan lotion over their bodies, their arms outstretched.
Sam turned and looked at Angelo, who had jumped onto the back of the swim platform and lay flat to catch some rays.
Courageous conversation, Sam could hear him say.
“I’m not so great actually,” Sam heard herself saying. “I finished culinary school and got a great job with a not-so-great boss … I quit. And I came back here to sort of lick my wounds.”
Sam hesitated. “And there’s something else,” she started. “I’m sorry.”
Connor’s eyes grew wide.
“For pretty much everything,” she continued. “Stringing you along. Not being the person you wanted me to be. Not being the person I wanted to be.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Connor said. “Water under the boat,” he added with a smile.
“No, I do,” she said. “I’m finding I tend to get into situations I know aren’t exactly right, and then I … well, run.”
“Did you run home?”
She nodded.
“Are you running from that guy over there?”
Sam nodded again.
Connor’s face grew calm. His eyes scanned the water, the island, the horizon. He kneeled down on the back of the boat, looked Sam in the eyes, and said, “Don’t. Remember cross-country?”
Sam nodded once more.
“Beautiful scenery,” he said. “But you don’t really notice it when you’re in full sprint.” He stopped and smiled at her. “You can have a nice life here. You can have a nice life in New York. That’s not settling, Sam. It’s just understanding what you want and need to be happy.”
“Daddy!” the little boy suddenly screamed. “Swim!”
“You’re being summoned,” Sam laughed.
“So are you,” Connor said, nodding somewhere in the distance.
Sam turned, looking at Angelo, the lake, Michigan, the sky.
“It was good to see you, Sam.”
“You, too.”
Sam began to make her way through the water when Connor called, “Thank you.” She turned and smiled.
“By the way, is that the necklace I gave you on your thirteenth birthday?” he asked.
Sam looked down at the necklace around her neck. “It is,” she said. “Now I wear the key to my recipe box on it.” She stopped. “Which I got on my thirteenth birthday, too.”
Connor stood on the back of the boat and took the hands of his children. “You’re not running from everything,” he said, “if you always keep a piece of home near your heart.” He smiled. “Say hi to Miss Nelson,” Connor said to his kids.
“Hi!” they yelled. “Swim now, Daddy!”
Sam watched Connor get in the water and then help his kids in one at a time.
Sam waved to them and then quietly sneaked up on Angelo, humming the creepy soundtrack to Jaws as she got within a few feet of him. He sat up quickly, as if he had been napping, his stomach hardening. Before he could do anything, Sam was splashing him.
Angelo jumped into the water, hunkered into the chilly lake, and began to approach Sam, one hand imitating the fin of a shark.
“Dun-duh,” he hummed, turning the tables on Sam. “Dun-duh.”
As he got closer, the humming intensified—just as it had in the movie.
Sam screamed and began to swim away, but Angelo lunged and caught her leg. He began to fake-bite at her ankle, but Sam kicked to try to get away, and Angelo groaned in pain, reaching for his lip.
“Ow,” he said, before noticing a small trickle of blood in the water. “This is just like Jaws. I better get out before I really get hurt.”
“Oh, no,” Sam said, standing and following him back to the boat. “I’m sorry.” She stopped. “I’m saying that a lot today.”
Sam jumped onto the boat, followed by Angelo, and grabbed a towel. Angelo pressed it to his lip for a second. “No damage,” he said. “I’m New York tough.” He smiled. “I take it you apologized to the guy on the boat?”
“Connor,” she said. “My ex.”
Angelo pressed the towel to his lip again. “Did you do this much damage to him?”
Sam nodded. “Worse,” she said. “Hurt his heart a lot, I think.”
Angelo walked over to Sam. “You had a courageous conversation,” he said with a smile.
“I did,” she said. “I listene
d to you.”
For a second, the two stared into each other’s eyes. The sun warmed their bodies, relaxing Sam, and she felt—for the first time in ages—a desire not to run, but to be still, to be here, just in the moment. Angelo leaned forward, his body edging toward Sam’s. She moved her face toward his.
Is this it? she wondered. Our first kiss?
A boat suddenly honked its horn, and both of them jumped, the top of Sam’s head hitting Angelo’s chin and lip, causing him to grunt again in pain.
“Are you OK?” she asked, looking closely at his lip.
“Yes,” he said. “I think you’re trying to tell me something.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sam said. “See, I said it again.”
Angelo smiled. “Ow,” he said.
Sam reached into the cooler and grabbed another bottle of beer. “Maybe this will help,” she said.
Angelo put the cold bottle against his lip, wincing at first before his face relaxed a bit. “Better,” he said. He then opened the beer and began to take a sip, wincing again as the bottle touched his lip, before downing half the Oberon. “Much better,” he said.
Sam laughed. She turned to crank up the radio but stopped when she saw Connor and his children—both bobbing happily in their life jackets and splashing their father—playing in the lake.
“Are you OK?” Angelo asked.
Sometimes you have to reveal your soul for the world to see, Sam could hear him say to her.
“There’s something I want to show you,” Sam said, immediately starting the boat.
“Actually, it’s something I need to say,” she said to herself, the engine drowning out her words before they could reach Angelo.
Sam guided the boat to a remote inlet that led to a bay, which was sheltered on three sides by a parenthesis-shaped slice of land.
“Looks like an episode of Lost,” Angelo said.
“I think both of us watch too many old movies and TV shows,” Sam laughed.
The bay was quiet, silent compared to Power Island, and the boat’s engine echoed off the surrounding dunes and trees, causing birds to take flight. Sam shut off the engine and looked over the edge of the boat, steering this way and that.
“There!” she finally said excitedly. “Look.”
At first, Angelo searched the shoreline and then the surface of the water, but he couldn’t understand what Sam was wanting him to see. But then he saw it: the wooden bones of an old shipwreck sat at the bottom of the clear water. The ribs of the ship were splayed open, like those of a long-dead animal in the middle of the desert. Massive beams lay between those wooden slats, and a giant mast sat cockeyed in the sand. The entire ship was illuminated by the sun, which filtered through the lake like prismed spotlights, and magnified by the water as if it were under a microscope.
“Wow,” Angelo said. “What happened?”
“Kids found this when I was a little girl,” Sam said, staring into the water. “They thought it was a hot tub, or something silly like that. Turns out it was a shipwreck from the 1800s, a schooner supposedly carrying wheat and beer.”
“Let’s go,” Angelo joked, acting as if he were ready to dive off the edge of the boat.
Sam laughed. “Want to see it up close? We can snorkel.”
“Sure,” Angelo said excitedly. Sam pulled out the gear; they sat on the swim platform and put on life jackets and flippers, then hopped into the water.
Sam held up her mask.
“Before you put on the mask, blow into it like this first,” Sam said, demonstrating to Angelo and then pulling hers over her eyes. “Keeps it from fogging up.”
She watched Angelo mimic what she had just done.
“Ready?” Sam asked, putting in her snorkel and going face-first into the water.
The two swam over the top of the shipwreck. Seaweed and moss undulated off the wooden beams and ribs. Fish of all colors and sizes darted around the old ship. This underwater world reminded Sam of her life in Michigan: quiet and stunningly beautiful yet haunting, unmoving, never changing.
Sam heard a rumbling and came to the surface to find Angelo talking nonstop.
“It’s so beautiful,” he was saying. “How deep is this? What happened?”
Sam smiled at his childlike inquiries and began to answer them all.
“This belongs to the state of Michigan,” Sam said. “No one can touch or move any part. There are shipwrecks like this all over the coastline.” She realized she still had her mask on and sounded as if she had a cold. Sam removed her mask and looked at Angelo. “Haunting, isn’t it? The past, just stuck in place.”
Angelo took his mask off, a raccoonlike ring remaining around his eyes, and tilted his head, water dripping from the ends of his dark curls. “It’s also sort of romantic, too,” he said. “There’s a wonderful history that people are reminded of when they see this, a way of life that has passed but was rich and fascinating and beautiful. It reminds me of going into those old restaurants in New York, buildings that have been around for centuries. You can almost hear the walls talk.” He looked at Sam. “There’s something important about history. My family’s past—my mother’s heirlooms from Italy and her parents—mean the world. We are who we are based on the history and sacrifices of all those who came before us.”
The orchard, Sam thought. The recipe box.
Angelo looked down at the ship’s skeleton once again and, as if on cue, said, “Sometimes you have to reveal your soul for the world to see.”
Sam playfully splashed Angelo. “What is it with you?” she asked. “You always know the right thing to say.”
“Maybe I’m just a nice guy,” he said.
Maybe, Sam thought. Just maybe.
“Now, according to your grandma, I heard you baked something extra special for me,” he said, and winked. “I’m getting hungry.”
“Follow me,” Sam said, swimming to the boat, taking off her snorkeling gear, and heading for the cooler. “My family’s strawberry shortcakes.”
She pulled a few shortcakes from a bag, put them in a bowl, and then opened a Tupperware container and spooned out deep red strawberries along with their sugary juice. She handed Angelo a bowl and a spoon. He took a bite, shut his eyes, and groaned. “So good,” he said. “Tastes like summer.”
“Fresh strawberries from my grandma’s garden,” Sam said. “My family shortcake recipe with my own twist.”
“What’s the twist?” he asked.
“I like more of a biscuity shortcake,” Sam said. “They stand up well to the firm strawberries but are still tender enough to soak up all that juice.”
“See?” Angelo said. “You can honor your history and still write your own.”
“There you go again,” she said, digging into her own bowl. She shook her head. “Aren’t we supposed to be young and having fun on a summer day?”
“I’m down for that,” he said. “Hand me another beer.”
Sam popped open a beer, took a swig, and handed it to him.
“I think I like Michigan, Michigan,” he said with a sexy wink, his dark lashes falling heavily.
And I think I might like you, Jersey, Sam thought, as the two floated above the skeleton of the old ship.
strawberry shortcakes with fresh strawberry sauce
Ingredients for Shortcake
2 cups all-purpose flour
¼ cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1½ cups heavy whipping cream, cold
Cinnamon sugar
Ingredients for Sauce
1 pint fresh strawberries
¼ cup granulated sugar, or to taste
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
In a large bowl, combine the flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, and salt.
Gently stirring with a fork, gradually mix in the whipping cream until combined. The mixture should hold together, but barely.
Form the dough into eight 2- to 3-inch balls
using your hands.
Roll the dough in the cinnamon sugar.
Place the balls 3 inches apart on an ungreased baking sheet. Bake 25 to 30 minutes, until golden brown.
Cut the tops off the strawberries and slice them. Add the sugar. Let the berries meld with the sugar to form juice while the shortcakes bake.
Top the shortcakes (served warm or cool) with the strawberry mixture and whipped cream or ice cream.
part nine
Rhubarb Sour Cream Coffee Cake with Cinnamon Streusel Topping
Twenty-four
Summer 2017
“How was your day?” Willo asked, when the two returned to the pie pantry. “You both look rested and all cleaned up.”
“Looks like you got some sun,” Deana added.
“It was amazing,” Angelo said. “Sam took me to Power Island and then to see an old shipwreck. And, best of all, she made me strawberry shortcakes.” He hesitated and a mischievous twinkle came into his dark eyes. “Oh, and she apologized to an old boyfriend.”
“Connor?” Deana and Willo gasped at the same time.
Sam playfully hit Angelo in the shoulder. “I did,” she said. “Total coincidence. His boat anchored near ours off Power Island. He was there with his family.” She hesitated and looked at Angelo. “Something Angelo said made me want to clear the slate. Move on.”
Willo walked over to Angelo and put her arm around his back, giving him a sweet side hug. “Attaboy,” she said. “I think you’ve earned another free piece of pie.”
“I think I might need some dinner first,” he said. “I’m full of beer and strawberries.”
“Not a bad combination,” Willo joked.
“Hey, it’s so pretty out,” Deana said. “We were thinking of going to the Sunset Inn for some fresh fish and…” She stopped and nudged Angelo. “… more beer. Your dad is joining us.”
“I was thinking maybe we’d just get a pizza and head to the beach to watch the sunset, if that’s OK with you.” Sam ducked her head and looked at Angelo, who smiled sweetly at her. “He’s had a long first day. Thought it might be nice to chill. Rain check for tomorrow?”
“Sounds good,” Deana said.
Willo looked at Angelo. “Your curfew is ten P.M., young man,” she teased. “I have rules at my house.”
The Recipe Box Page 20