The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “Huxley!” Anthony said. “Great to hear from you.” It was great to hear from Huxley, especially after the thing with the car earlier that day. He had thought he was stranded before, just by virtue of being on an island, but now, with the Le Baron temporarily out of commission, the word stranded took on a new meaning. Hearing Huxley’s voice, which had its very own swagger to it, something vaguely Clint-Eastwood-meets-Harrison-Ford-meets-Bryan-Cranston, gave Anthony a brief flash of hope. Maybe all was not lost. Maybe Huxley had some good news for him. Maybe the publisher had had a change of heart.

  “Yeaaaah,” said Huxley throatily. “Maybe not so great. So listen, buddy.” Huxley and Anthony were close to the same age. How had Huxley earned the right to “buddy” him? Buddy was what a father was supposed to call a son. It was what Anthony called Max. Last Anthony had checked, Huxley Wilder was not his father.

  “I’m listening,” Anthony said warily.

  “What do you want first? The bad news, or the bad news?”

  “Just give it to me straight,” said Anthony. “Please, Huxley.” Anthony was sitting at the little formal table in Fitzy’s uncle’s living room, his bare feet on the ornate carpet. He stared at the decanter, the two glasses sitting next to it. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “You probably should be nervous. There’s been a miscalculation.”

  “A what?”

  “We owe more to the foreign rights agent. They miscalculated.”

  “They what?”

  “They miscalculated, something about the advance from Turkey, I don’t know how it happened, but anyway I had to cut them a check for twenty grand today, which means you have to cut me a check for twenty grand.”

  “Shit, Huxley.” Anthony stared hard at the piano. ivers & pond, it said. boston. Who was Ivers, who was Pond? Anthony sighed and stood and walked over. He hit one of the keys. The piano let out a weary, malnourished plink.

  “What’s that noise?” asked Huxley. “What are you doing?”

  “Just tickling the ol’ ivories,” said Anthony morosely.

  “The what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Where you hiding out, anyway?”

  “Who says I’m hiding?”

  “Word on the street,” said Huxley. “I ran into Shelly Salazar the other day when I was at lunch with an author.”

  Both the word lunch and the word author hit Anthony where it hurt. He used to eat lunch; he used to be the author. He wondered what bright young thing had taken his place, but was too proud to ask.

  “If you must know . . .” said Anthony, “I’m in an undisclosed location.”

  “Oh, come on, now.”

  “I’m in a cottage where time stopped in the 1820s.”

  “Ha!” said Huxley. “Ha, ha!” The sudden, barking laugh startled Anthony like a gunshot. “Very funny.”

  “I’m not joking, exactly,” said Anthony.

  “The Old West?”

  “Something like that. The Old East.”

  “Well, wherever you are, I hope you’ve brought your checkbook. I’ll need it by September first.”

  It didn’t cost Anthony anything at all, not a penny, to hit the end button and bring the call to a stop. Huxley might have been in mid-sentence; hell, he might have been in mid-word! Anthony would never know.

  Outside the window the beach grasses were dancing up a storm. Personification. Also: cliché. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Onomatopoeia. How far he had fallen. Once he had been “a young master of both plot and human emotions” (Kirkus, starred) and “a writer not only to watch, but one to savor, word by word” (Publishers Weekly, starred) and even “simply put: simply stunning” (The Washington Post). Now he was a recreational grammarian.

  Anthony took two steps toward the decanter on the sideboard with its mysterious golden liquor. Brandy? Sherry? Nectar of the gods? The two glasses set out beside it looked so inviting, so much more inviting than just one would have looked. He supposed this was why staging by realtors was so effective.

  He couldn’t cut Huxley a check for twenty grand, because he didn’t have twenty grand. Was this the time to fall on the mercy of his parents? His mother might give it to him; his father might not. He dialed his parents’ number, and when his mother answered he said, “Mom, hey.”

  “Anthony!” his mother said. “I’m so happy to hear from you. How are things in . . . where are you again?”

  “Block Island,” he said. “And things are, well . . .” He couldn’t get it out. His parents were swimming in money, practically drowning in it, and yet he couldn’t say the three simple words: I need money. “Not so good.”

  “Anthony?” said Dorothy. “Send me an address. I’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll bring lasagna!”

  “No, Mom,” said Anthony. “Thank you, but . . . no. I don’t need any lasagna.”

  “It might be good for us to spend some time together. There is something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. For a long time, really.” There was a pause. “It’s about your father. In a way.”

  “About Dad? Is he sick?”

  “Sick? No! Of course, the doctor is keeping an eye on his blood pressure, always, because of that nasty family history, but, no—nothing like that.” She cleared her throat. “Maybe this matter is better discussed in person. Maybe I should come there.”

  Anthony closed his eyes. “No, Mom. I’m really not ready for visitors. I’m sort of . . .” He glanced at the decanter again. Rehabbing wasn’t the right word. Recovering? Re-something? He glanced at the clock. Nearly six-thirty, and he had to unearth the bike from the garage and stop by the grocery store for something to bring too. The last thing he felt like doing was eating some sort of pasta with a stranger. But he had said he’d be there, and it seemed like the least he could do was not let someone else down.

  “Mom?” he said. “I have to go. I’ve actually got somewhere I need to be.”

  “Well, imagine that!” said Dorothy. “A social life already!”

  “It’s not exact—”

  His mother interrupted him. “Off you go, then, my tale will keep for another day.”

  He would get a bottle of wine for his hostess—a Sauvignon Blanc, maybe, or a Sancerre—and, as much as he’d want to partake, a bottle of Perrier for himself. For just one evening he’d pretend to be a regular guy with an almost-ex-wife and no kids.

  So tonight he’d eat the artichokes—he’d choke them down if he had to. He’d sip a seltzer, make polite conversation, and he’d begin the long process of clawing himself back to humanity.

  Chapter 16

  Joy

  It had seemed like a harmless idea at the time—invite someone new to dinner—but now, released from the confines of the Jeep and faced with the realities of a stranger (and a man, and a nice-looking man, at that!) in her home, eating at her table, Joy began to feel very nervous.

  She’d read Dinner by Dad’s blog post three times, smiling each read-through over his story of the origins of puttanesca sauce as a favorite of long-ago prostitutes who used the aroma to lure in customers. (Not a story for the kids! Leo had said with an electronic chuckle, and Joy imagined Leo sitting at his computer, shaking with private mirth.) She carved out the artichokes ahead of time, obviously, because who wanted to do that in front of guests, and by the time the doorbell rang she had the sauce simmering on the stove and the artichoke hearts boiling companionably on the burner next to them. The rest of the ingredients were prepped, sliced, whisked, measured, and awaiting their turn.

  But she was nervous about being alone with a man. That was understandable. Wasn’t it? He didn’t seem murdery but maybe he was. Maybe she shouldn’t have invited him to her house. As an extra precaution, she texted Holly: If you don’t hear from me by 10 p.m. please come by and check on me.

  Holly texted back, ??

  The wine he brought was a Sancerre, a good one, and although she felt funny opening it for just herself she didn’t feel funny enough not to do it, so she poured a healthy glass. Then
she poured Anthony a glass of the seltzer he had brought and sliced up a lemon to go along with it.

  The elements of the meal came together beautifully, if she did say so herself. (She did.) The artichoke hearts were tender and flavorful and the puttanesca had just the right amount of zing to it.

  And the conversation came together almost as well as the meal!

  Anthony was a freelance journalist. He’d told her his last name: he was Anthony Jones, not Anthony What. His marriage had been brief, the split fairly amicable, although he preferred not to talk in depth about it. His wife had cheated on him. “Not much to tell,” he said, shrugging. “It’s the oldest story in the world. And this”—he pointed with his fork at his plate—“is the best meal I’ve had in months. Maybe years.”

  She smiled. “Just wait until dessert,” she said. She’d made a simple banana chocolate bread pudding with mint crème anglaise. This was not a Dinner by Dad recipe, because, as any avid reader knew, Sammy, the younger of the two boys, did not like bananas. (Oh, how Leo lamented that fact; bananas were so easy, and so portable.)

  “You have parents, don’t you?” she asked. “What are they like? What do they do?”

  He hesitated and said, “My father is an . . . an entrepreneur.”

  “Oh!” she said. “That sounds interesting. In what area?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try me.”

  “It’s . . . sort of complicated. And boring.”

  “Ah. Technology?”

  “Of a sort.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “My mom keeps up the house. She brings my dad a scotch every night at five o’clock. He works in a home office most of the time. My mom never . . . had to work. Never wanted to work, I guess?”

  “How old-fashioned,” Joy said. Then, because it felt like a judgment (privately it was), she added, “And sort of adorable.” She didn’t really believe that.

  He stiffened and said, “Depends on how you look at it. But that’s enough about me. Tell me about yourself.”

  Maybe it was the wine, or maybe it was the fact that nobody had asked her about herself for a long time, but Joy found herself opening up like a properly steamed mussel. She told him about her business, and about the very real threat posed by the Roving Patisserie. She told him, because he asked, about her divorce. She told him that she had been twenty-six years old, the mother of a two-year-old, married to a guy who truly thought he was Kurt Cobain without the mental illness, when Dustin had come to her one day and said, “I’m out.”

  “Just like that?” said Anthony, appropriately horrified.

  “Just like that,” she confirmed. “He said that he really needed to focus on the band, if he was going to get anywhere.”

  “And did he? Get anywhere?”

  “No. That’s the worst part, or maybe the best part. Of course he realized it was never going to happen. Of course he grew up. Of course he got a regular job, with health insurance and a 401(k). And when he got remarried, of course he did it better the second time around. He was more ready for it. I mean, we were so young! Just kids.”

  She kept going. There was more to say!

  She talked about her parents and her grandmother, the late, great Fionnula, and about her four brothers and their wives. All of her brothers had married their high school girlfriends, and all of Joy’s sisters-in-law still teased their hair the way they had in high school and vacationed for one week each summer on Cape Cod. They favored deep and unhealthy tans, had no problem fighting with their husbands or children in public, and would fall on their swords for any member of their family. The sisters-in-law didn’t understand Joy at all, she told Anthony. Who would move so far from family? Who would get a divorce? Who would let themselves become a single mother?

  “I guess I’m sort of the lone sheep,” Joy said. That wasn’t quite right. “The black wolf.” She was mixing her animal metaphors. She blamed that on the Sancerre.

  She told him about the first time she took the ferry to Block Island with Maggie to start their new life. She couldn’t work out how to back the car onto the ramp. Everybody else seemed to know how to do it perfectly and she was holding up the other cars. She’d started crying, and a ferry worker had said, “Hey, miss, step out of the car. Let me do it for you.”

  “I’m not even sure I should go!” she’d sobbed. In the car in front of her a middle-aged man poked his head out the window to see what the holdup was. If he hadn’t been blocking her way she would have driven off the ferry, back to Fall River.

  The ferry worker couldn’t have been more than eighteen, with wide, white cheeks and an official Block Island Ferry hat and the loveliest green eyes. “Of course you should go,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you? You bought your ticket, didn’t you? Come on out, come around, and sit in the passenger seat so your girl doesn’t get scared. I’ll back you up.” Thinking about it now, Joy could have cried. “The kindness of strangers, I guess.” The Sancerre was half gone already. The edges of the evening were going from softly blurred to downright out of focus. She said, “Are you sure you don’t want a small glass?” She pointed at the bottle.

  He was sure.

  A pall fell briefly over the evening when Maggie called to ask permission to stay overnight at Riley’s. Joy walked into the other room to take the call. “You just spent the night there last night . . . oh, okay, yup, sure, no, I get it.” She tried not to let her deflation show in her voice. Don’t act desperate around your child, she reminded herself. Desperation makes you pathetic, and teens can smell pathetic for miles. Even so, she was astonished by how quickly the tears sprang to her eyes when she thought about Maggie sitting on the couch with Holly and Holly’s husband, Brent, and Riley, watching a movie, perhaps passing a bowl of popcorn back and forth, laughing at the funny parts the way Joy supposed all nuclear families did.

  In reality, of course, she figured that Riley and Maggie were in Riley’s room with their phones, Snapchatting the summer kids, or out for ice cream at Mia’s Gelateria, or just wandering downtown like a couple of hooligans, looking for some excitement. Joy had done the same sort of thing when she was young, and admittedly the streets she had wandered had been far more dangerous than these.

  She returned to the kitchen, feeling prematurely alone.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Just my daughter.” While she’d been gone Anthony had rinsed their dinner plates and stacked them by the sink. A tear leaked out and she turned away. Wine did tend to make her weepy, and she’d had a lot, but no need to turn her heart inside out in front of her dinner guest. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice the tear.

  “Hey,” Anthony said. “Hey, hey. Everything okay?” Anthony wiped at the tear with his thumb. Instantly a charge went through Joy’s body. Wow, she thought. Wow.

  After that there was a new energy to the evening, Joy was sure of it. Over dessert, which they ate at the small kitchen counter, Anthony’s bicep pressed close to hers, and neither of them moved away.

  She drank more of the wine. She thought of Mrs. Simmons saying that Joy would be alone forever. The skin on her face felt very alive where Anthony had touched her. She thought, Can something like that happen this fast?

  She thought, No way.

  She thought, But maybe.

  After dessert, Anthony declined Joy’s offer of coffee. He said he’d better be getting on his way. Joy wondered if he meant that to be code for, Do you feel it too? She hadn’t said that Maggie wouldn’t be home, but the knowledge definitely opened up options.

  “Okay,” said Joy. She meant that to be code for, Yes, I definitely feel it. She stood. The air was positively singing with possibility. She leaned in and closed her eyes.

  She met empty air.

  Anthony let three of his fingers fall against her cheek. He whispered, “I can’t. I’m sorry.” Joy’s eyes flew open. “The dinner was amazing,” he said. There was something complicated in his eyes, something inscrutable.

  “I understand,” said Joy. Th
at was code for, I don’t understand at all. I am humiliated but I am going to play it off.

  Well, thought Joy, that’s that.

  She packed the leftovers into Tupperware and stacked them in the fridge. She texted Holly to let her know that she wasn’t murdered. She poured just the teensiest bit more wine into her glass—why not?—and drank it standing up, shocked that she could have misread the signs so completely. She could blame part of it on the wine, but really, couldn’t she put some blame on her own inexperience? Why had she gone on and on about her sisters-in-law? Why had she made a dish that prostitutes used in order to lure in customers? Why had she had so much Sancerre?

  And why did she care? You don’t need a man, she reminded herself. You are a strong and independent woman, a business owner who scratched out her own living on island soil, and who will continue to do so, no matter what the Roving Patisserie is up to. They are fleeting, and you are for real, forever. You don’t need anyone! You just need Maggie and Pickles and Joy Bombs. It’s the four of you against the world.

  When the doorbell rang ninety minutes later Joy had already brushed her teeth, walked Pickles, spoken to Maggie on the phone to say good night, set her alarm for the morning, put her hair in its messy evening bun, paid the electric bill, and cleaned out some old food from the refrigerator. She was trying not to miss Maggie too much but, really, the silence when she was gone was deafening. Thank goodness there was nothing for teens to do on the island in the winter—once October came, she’d have Maggie back to herself.

  “Oh, for the love of Pete, Pickles,” she said. “Who could that be?” Maybe it was Holly, with more wine. Maybe it was Maggie—she’d changed her mind, she wanted to sleep at home (bless!). She opened the door. And there, on her doorstep, wearing the same gray T-shirt and a sheepish expression, was Anthony Jones.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “I came back.”

  “You came back.” She held the door open, and he stepped inside. Joy reached for her messy evening bun and released her hair. Her heart was beating very, very fast. Her cheeks felt warm. “I thought you couldn’t,” she said.