He proceeded back down Corn Neck Road. In no time at all he came to the seashell driveway, the cottage.
Anthony had come here to hide from the world. But how on earth was he going to be able to hide in a place so small?
Chapter 2
Joy
www.DinnerByDad.com
You might think, chili in the summer? Believe me, I know. But trust me. This dish has enough light flavors and summer vegetables (hello, yellow squash!) for even the longest day of the year. And speaking of long days! When Jacqui comes home after a long day in the courtroom there’s nothing Charlie and Sammy and I like better than to have a fabulous one-pot meal waiting. Cleanup is a breeze, and we can get right out and enjoy our evening. We wait a long time for summer out here, and when it finally arrives we don’t want to miss a minute of it!
Somebody was double-parked, blocking Joy’s spot with a well-worn tan Chrysler Le Baron. (Mid-nineties, she guessed.) “No way, mister,” she said out loud. “No way.” Still June, and already this was starting? No way. She didn’t live through the long, sometimes lonely winters here, the days when the wind whipped right off the Sound and sometimes the only living creatures you saw were your daughter and your dog, to have her parking spot usurped by a summer person. Joy leaned on the horn.
The guy was on his cell phone, of course, and he didn’t turn around.
Joy had twenty-five pounds of flour in the back of her Jeep, and the busiest season of the year was upon her. She wasn’t going to park in any other spot than her own. “Come on, asshole,” she said. Joy had never used the word asshole when she was younger. But single motherhood and years of small business ownership on a seasonal island had toughened her right up.
Her phone buzzed. A text from her daughter, Maggie. Want me to cook dinner? Joy’s heart expanded, not only because Maggie had offered, but also because she was up before ten-thirty, which meant that maybe she wasn’t acting entirely like a teenager just yet. Joy had been a wild teenager herself, given to dramatic emotional swings and inappropriate crushes, which she sometimes indulged in on the streets of Fall River because she had four brothers who were so full of vim and vigor themselves that it was easy for Joy to fly under the radar.
Maggie was thirteen, about to enter the eighth grade at Block Island’s teeny-tiny school, where she would have eight classmates, unless someone new exactly Maggie’s age moved to town (unlikely). The rising junior class had only five students, so in fact Maggie’s class was actually quite large. If such a thing as karma existed in the world, Maggie was gearing up to give Joy a run for her money.
The asshole was still on his phone, so Joy took a second to text back. It’s covered today. I’m making veggie chili. She took the time to insert the proper punctuation in the text, apostrophes in the contractions, a period at the end of the sentence. She couldn’t help herself, and also Maggie shook her head sternly if Joy used too many abbreviations. Abbreviations, like everything else, were for the young.
Dinner by Dad? texted Maggie.
Dinner by Dad was Joy’s favorite cooking blog, and earlier that day she had fired up her laptop to check out the latest post. On Dinner by Dad, stay-at-home dad (SAHD) Leo always had a fresh pot of coffee ready for his wife, Jacqui, before she set off for a day in the city. Sometimes Jacqui left before dawn, especially when she was working on a big case. And still Leo had the coffee ready. It was amazing, really, what Leo accomplished. Leo ran four miles as the sun rose, always had a smile on his face and a slice of sprouted wheat in the toaster. Joy hoped his wife appreciated him.
U got it. Joy allowed herself the U, for the sake of time.
Chili in the summer?
I KNOW, Joy texted back. But it’s loaded with summer veggies. I trust him. Did she ever. She had a substantial crush on Leo. She had been to the Wednesday morning farmers’ market behind the Spring House Hotel the day before—she preferred it to the Saturday one at Legion Park, which was always more crowded because of the weekenders—and she was up to her eyeballs in vegetables. If a batch of chili proved too much for the two of them, she could freeze the extra.
Leo and his family, Joy knew from previous posts, lived somewhere vague and midwestern. They definitely had access to a lake. Sometimes Leo caught their dinner, deboned it right there on the boat, etc. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, perhaps? She couldn’t be sure—Leo could be restrictive with the personal details, if not the recipes.
Me 2, Maggie texted back. DBD 4ever! This was an uncharacteristically warm response, so Joy left it at that. She leaned on the horn again, and the Le Baron began to move.
As Joy waited to slide into her parking spot she gave the driver the finger, because people had to learn, especially summer people. He was still on the phone, not looking in Joy’s direction. “Hey!” she said, leaning on her horn again, until finally he turned. When he did, she lost her nerve; she tucked her middle finger away and pointed angrily at the sign with her forefinger. Private Parking: Violators Will Be Towed.
He waved his free hand at her. She couldn’t tell if he was waving in greeting or apology or just general assholeness. “Asshole,” she said again. He definitely seemed like a New Yorker, but his car had Rhode Island plates, and it didn’t seem like a car a New Yorker would drive. It was a very old Le Baron. If she had to get more specific within the decade, she’d guess ’95. Joy’s father had owned—still owned—an auto repair shop that Joy had worked at intermittently through high school and college, so she felt comfortable making a guess.
She watched as the Le Baron pulled into a spot on Dodge Street. Fine, that was allowed, that was public parking. She got out of her Jeep and opened the back door to access the flour. But she couldn’t help watching as the man inside the Le Baron put his arms down on his steering wheel and then rested his forehead on top of the backs of his hands. Was he laughing? Sleeping? Crying?
She left the flour in the back of the Jeep and moved closer to the car. The guy’s shoulders were shaking. He was definitely crying. Oh, boy. She started to back away.
Then she paused. He looked like such a sad sack, sobbing into his steering wheel, and Joy never had been able to resist a sad sack. In fourth grade, she’d been the only kid to be nice to Oliver Wheeler, who had buckteeth and pigeon toes and glasses that got knocked off every time he played four square. In high school, she had volunteered once a week at the Forever Paws Animal Shelter on Lynnwood Street in Fall River because a boxer mix she found behind an abandoned warehouse with the tip of one ear missing had stolen her heart. Her mother wouldn’t let Joy keep the dog—five children in that apartment was enough!—so Joy had brought the dog into the shelter and walked out with a volunteer position. Even now she drove her former neighbor, Mrs. Simmons, to the cemetery once a year to visit the grave of her dearly departed husband on the anniversary of his death.
But not this time. She had a daughter and a dog and a business and rent to pay: she had enough on her plate. And it had taken her a good long time and a boatload of mistakes (Dustin, her ex-husband, sprang immediately to mind), but finally Joy Sousa thought she’d learned not to borrow trouble.
She turned back toward the Jeep and the flour, and almost ran straight into her best friend, Holly Baxter, who was probably on her way to work for the Block Island Chamber of Commerce. In the summer the island was a lot like Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town book, with every island resident having a job to do to keep the town running. I bake the whoopie pies! Joy could imagine a cartoon version of herself saying in the book. I help the tourists find their way around! Cartoon Holly would say.
“We’re looking over a new application to the chamber. A food truck,” said Holly, without preamble.
“Ooooh!” said Joy. “I hope it’s tacos!”
Holly shook her head. “It’s not tacos. I wanted to talk to you about this in person.” She nodded meaningfully toward Joy Bombs.
“Me? Why? What are they selling?” Food trucks had come and gone on the island over the past few years.
A wor
ry furrow popped up between Holly’s eyebrows. “Coffee,” she said. “Salads. Different things.”
“So what?” said Joy. “Everyone sells coffee. Lots of people sell salads.” But it looked like there was another word trying to come out of Holly’s mouth.
“And,” said Holly, “macarons.”
“Macarons?”
“You know, those little French cookies, they come in tons of flavors, there’s an American Girl doll who bakes them . . . I mean, the doll doesn’t bake them—”
“I know what macarons are,” said Joy.
“I was trying to think of a way I could block it,” said Holly. She lowered her voice. “You know, for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes. What can I say except you’re welcome?” (Holly loved to quote lines from Moana. She had a thing for the Rock.) “Except I couldn’t do it, so don’t actually thank me.”
“Why were you trying to block it for me?”
“Think about it, genius,” said Holly. “You don’t want some food truck selling a baked good practically across the street from your shop, do you?”
“There’s no room for a food truck across the street from my shop.” Joy gestured across the street, which was small and narrow.
“Hypothetically speaking,” said Holly. “This truck is backed by some fancy New York company, apparently they’re putting oodles of money into marketing . . . I don’t know, the whole thing gave me a worried feeling for you. A little bit of a—” She sucked in her breath and her eyes went squinty.
Joy squinted right back at Holly and opened the back of her Jeep. “Grace,” she said.
“Exactly right,” said Holly, looking relieved. “Grace under pressure. That’s the best way to look at it.”
“No, Holly, I mean the doll. Grace is the American Girl doll who owns the bakery.” When they were younger Maggie and Holly’s daughter, Riley, Maggie’s best friend, were obsessed with American Girl dolls.
“Oooh,” said Holly uneasily.
“I’m not worried about some macaron truck, Holly. I think it’s a crazy idea. Nobody wants to buy macarons from a truck. They’ll be gone before the Fourth of July.” Sometimes it worked out for the food trucks, sometimes it didn’t. This time it probably wouldn’t. Block Islanders weren’t, as a rule, seeking French food, and she doubted the tourists were either.
“Definitely,” said Holly, although still her face wore a funny, inscrutable expression.
“And even if they’re not, this island is big enough for both of us. Right?” She hefted one of the flour bags up and wondered if she could handle two at a time.
Joy was in a hurry; the flour was awkward; Holly was rushing off to work—it wasn’t until (much) later that Joy realized Holly never answered.
Chapter 3
Lu
Jeremy appeared like a ghost, startling Lu. She closed her laptop furtively, feeling as though she’d been committing a crime.
She was, in a way, wasn’t she? Deception was a crime, of sorts. A marital crime, anyway.
Lu looked around the kitchen of the rented house. She was unfamiliar with this particular kitchen, its foibles, the dent in the handle of its metal spatula, its lack of a proper Dutch oven, but she was learning.
“Hey, babe,” Jeremy said. “Is there coffee?” He was catching the ferry for a few long shifts in a row—probably they wouldn’t see him again until the end of the week.
Is there coffee? was code for, Are you holding up your end of the bargain? although neither of them ever said that, because the bargain itself was unspoken. “Let me make you one,” said Lu, rising. “Cinnamon?”
“Oh, man, yes!” said Jeremy. “Please.” He looked at Lu fondly, the way you’d look at a child who picked up a guitar for the first time and tried to strum a few notes. Lu tried to look fondly back, but sometimes when she saw Jeremy dressed for work, cleanly shaven, trailing the scent of a fresh, masculine shower, she wanted to put her fist in her mouth and bite down hard, to disguise her silent, guttural scream.
She was thirty-four years old, and she might be losing her mind.
In fact there was mental illness somewhere in their family, long buried like a dog’s old bone. Aunt Vivian, a great-aunt, or possibly even a great-great. Sometimes Lu’s mother referenced her—Oh, dear, I just had an Aunt Vivian moment—but when Lu probed for the details she got very little information.
When Lu delivered the coffee—she would have poured one for herself, but that would have brought her to a total of three, and more than two made her shaky—Jeremy asked, “What’re you up to?” He nodded toward the closed computer. She wondered if he was worried that she might be looking for a job that she could start come fall. Jeremy had grown up in Simsbury and his mother hadn’t worked “outside the home,” as she put it. They’d had a battalion of household help and as far as Lu could tell she hadn’t worked inside the home either. But try saying that to her.
“Oh, nothing,” said Lu. The lie slipped out easily. “Just getting some ideas for dinner.” It wasn’t that Jeremy didn’t want Lu to be working—but, well. When you got right down to it, Jeremy didn’t want Lu to be working. He loved having her home with the boys, giving them her full concentration, while he sailed off to the oncology wards, battling the cancerous demons, all courage and energy, in the freshly laundered scrubs for which she was responsible.
That wasn’t fair, Lu told herself. She picked up Sebastian’s toy tow truck from where he’d left it the night before, on the floor. She put it on the counter and pulled at the boom. She tried not to look at the clock.
Jeremy leaned toward the window, sighing happily. “Smell that sea air?”
“I do,” said Lu. “I love it.” (She did.)
Jeremy’s parents had been coming to Block Island for ages and ages—they’d bought the house on Cooneymus Road back in the seventies, and Lu had visited many times when she and Jeremy were courting. Courting was what Jeremy’s mother called it—an anachronism wrapped in an old shawl from the attic. Lu used it whenever she could, for kicks.
This was the first time the elder Trusdales had been able to convince Jeremy to bring his family along to Block Island for the whole summer, although they’d been asking and asking since Chase was tiny. At first Lu had resisted the idea with absolute conviction, like a union worker challenging a pay cut, because she couldn’t imagine sharing a summer (and she definitely couldn’t imagine sharing a kitchen) with her mother-in-law, but when she found out that they wouldn’t be sharing the elder Trusdales’ house but residing on the eastern side of the island, on Corn Neck Road, she’d eventually acquiesced.
“Our treat,” Nancy said smoothly, back in April. “Though I know you’ll miss your friends, of course.”
Lu, who kept to herself and her computer when the boys were at school, and who did not currently have many friends, had nodded regretfully and said, “I suppose I will.”
It wasn’t so bad. Jeremy would be gone more, of course, because now his commute to the hospital involved a ferry ride, and he’d have to stay overnight when he had a few shifts in a row. But there was a day camp on the island the boys could attend, and a gym that she herself could pretend to attend while the boys were at the camp. Their own Connecticut suburb was not coastal, and Lu, a native daughter of landlocked (often dreary) central Pennsylvania, was looking forward to an island summer. Plus, the boys went to bed early enough that with Jeremy gone she could do some work at night.
“Don’t make anything too good while I’m gone, okay?” Jeremy added now. “You know how I hate to miss your cooking.”
“Of course not!” said Lu pleasantly.
“And I’m not sure what time I’ll get back on Thursday, I’m in the OR.”
“I understand.” The schedules on surgery days always got pushed back due to one complication or another, a hazard of the job, nothing anybody could or would complain about, with people’s lives at stake. Only a real jerk would make a fuss about that. “I’ll save you some of whatever I make, hon. I�
��ll pop it right in the freezer if necessary.”
Hon. Oh, lordy. She never said hon. Who was this stranger wearing her bathrobe, drinking her coffee? Jeremy leaned against the counter, sipping from his cup. A mean little anxious voice in her head said, Go, already!
Still he lingered. “Are you off to the gym today? While the boys are at camp?”
“Probably,” she said, cheerfully, deceitfully. “Pilates at nine-thirty!” Lu had never been to a Pilates class in her life; in truth, she didn’t actually know what took place in one. Some magical strengthening of the core, she’d heard. “I really like some of the instructors here,” she added. (Was she taking it too far?) She made a mental note to find out exactly what classes were offered at the one local, seasonal gym and what some of the instructors might be named.
It was going to be much harder to fake things on a small island than in Connecticut.
Which was not to say it couldn’t be done.
“That’s great, babe,” said Jeremy. “I bet you’ll get to know people, easy.”
Lu said, “Mmmmm.” She wondered if the nurses at the hospital considered Jeremy to be the hot doctor on staff. They probably did. Not that all nurses were female, obviously, and not that only women were allowed to find her husband attractive. There were probably some male nurses and some lovely female surgeons who noted Jeremy’s endearing dimples, his lean torso.
Lu drummed her fingers on the cover of her laptop and smiled her winningest smile and thought, Please go! Jeremy liked to walk to the ferry, even though it was over a mile away, because he enjoyed the fresh air and the exercise before being shut up in the hospital and because he could do part of the walk right on the beach if he chose to. For a guy who was often around death, Jeremy had a very wholesome, uncomplicated outlook toward life.
The Islanders Page 2