But his eyes. His back muscles. The way he brushed her hair out of her eyes . . . his thumbs.
No. It was a one-night stand, that was all. That was fine. She was entitled to that. It was summer! She was an adult! She’d been tipsy!
Joy’s “office” wasn’t so much an office as it was a small section of the shop’s kitchen that she’d claimed for herself. No walls separated her desk and filing cabinets from the baking area, where right now Olivia Rossi was walking two of the newly hired college kids through how to fill the pies. When summer really ramped up, Joy would need the extra bodies. “It might seem easy, but it’s not,” Olivia was saying. Olivia was the only person Joy knew who actually looked good in a hairnet. “For one thing, it’s really easy to get tired. And it’s no joke making sure you scoop the same amount into every pie.” Joy smiled. Olivia was only sixteen, but she’d worked for Joy the previous summer and she was preternaturally diligent. Who said the younger generation had no work ethic?
Maggie was handling the counter, though she’d already told Joy that with her new nannying job she might not be available as much as she’d planned on. Joy didn’t correct her, though she knew she’d been hired as a mother’s helper, not a nanny. Lu had told her as much, when she’d introduced herself to Joy. “I’ll be there with her almost all the time,” she’d said. “I’m just looking for an extra set of hands so I can get some things done around the house.”
Joy tried hard not to resent women like Lu, who spent their days at the beach with their children while their husbands ferried back and forth to work.
These were the same women who spent ten or more dollars a day at Joy Bombs, so in fact she had to be careful about how much to resent them. It was just that sometimes Joy watched these women herding their children around and showing off their toned shoulders and, sometimes, having the gall to complain about it. That made her want to scream.
“I’m so excited about my job,” Maggie had said right after Lu and Joy had met. “Lu is so nice. And the boys are super-adorable. Her husband is gone all the time at the hospital. She’s alone so much! She really needs help.”
I’ve been alone for a decade, thought Joy. I really needed help. Joy had been one hundred percent on her own since the day Dustin walked out. Her family, close-knit as long as you were within a ten-mile radius, had released her like a kid letting go of the string on a helium balloon—they were sad at first, but once she was out of sight they sort of forgot about her. Sometimes Joy had to remind herself that that’s why she was strong. Every solitary challenge she’d surmounted had added to her strength, muscle fiber by hard-won muscle fiber, until she was rock-solid.
“Isn’t she so nice?” Maggie had said.
“Definitely,” Joy said, and bit her tongue so hard the act became actual rather than rhetorical. “So nice.” Maggie was genuinely excited. And these days she opened the window to her soul only so often; if Joy didn’t clamber through it at just the right time, it shut again. Bam.
When Maggie walked back to the office now, Joy could see that the soul window was definitely closed. “Can I spend the night at Riley’s?” Maggie jutted her chin forward just the way she had when she was three and wouldn’t try sweet potato.
Joy squinted at her and said, “Who’s behind the counter?”
“Nobody’s here,” said Maggie. “If the bell dings, I’ll hear it and I’ll go out. So, can I?”
“You were just at Riley’s two nights ago. Why don’t you spend the night at our house? We can watch Pitch Perfect again. I’ll make caramel popcorn!”
Maggie’s eyes narrowed. “I knew you’d say no,” she said viciously.
“I didn’t say no! I just said you were . . .” But Joy didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence because Maggie said, “I knew it!” and huffed her way out of the kitchen.
“What’s happening, Mags?” Joy whispered. For years and years it had been the two of them against the world, shoring up to face the island winds. Now talking to Maggie was like walking through a minefield. No, it was worse—it was like walking through a minefield at night when someone had taken your night-vision goggles and given them to Riley because they looked better on her.
Her phone chirped again. What do you say? We’ll do something summery. Show me something on this island I haven’t seen.
Maggie was back, like a whack-a-mole that kept popping up. “Well, can I or not?” she demanded.
Joy picked up her phone. She texted, I’m in. I’ll text you when I’m done here. Then she summoned all of her patience and smiled sweetly at Maggie. “Of course, darling. Since you asked so nicely. Of course you can spend the night at Riley’s.” She was trying for a joke but the tone was off, and she could see that she’d irritated Maggie.
Her phone rang. She answered without looking. “Joy Sousa.” She heard the bell signaling that somebody had come into the shop and she motioned to Maggie to go back to the front. The caller was Geoff Billings, and the news wasn’t good. He wasn’t going to be able to get the replacement shipment out when he thought he could, because someone else in his office had mistakenly promised Joy’s order to another customer. Instead of being two days late, the butter would be five days late.
Joy said, “Five days?” She closed her eyes and inhaled. She’d have to rethink everything about the next week. She’d get behind on production, and she had three large orders scheduled to go out to Boston on Monday. Almost as bad, what if people on the island came in search of whoopie pies and, finding none, flocked to the Roving Patisserie for macarons instead?
“This is unacceptable, Geoff,” she said. Her words sounded sharp and she thought, Good. Let them. “I’m going to have to figure a few things out here. I’ll be in touch.” She might have to find a new supplier. She might have to get her own cows! (Obviously not practical.) She ended the call and laid her head down on the desk, the way she remembered doing in second grade during mandatory rest time, when Mrs. Willingham was her teacher. Mrs. Willingham had long chestnut hair and wore big hoop earrings and had a tinkling laugh. Maybe Joy could go back to second grade, before she had the weight of a business and a rental increase and a teenager on her shoulders. In second grade, her biggest worries had been how to improve her dismal four square skills and who to invite to her eighth birthday party at Forrest’s Family Fun Center in Taunton.
“If you’d stayed close to home, sure and I’d be helping you out too,” Joy’s mother had told her when Maggie was four and Joy called to tell her Maggie had caught the flu at preschool. (Her mother’s lilting brogue and many of her native phrases had never been snuffed out on the streets of Fall River.) “Come home and I’ll help you now,” her mother had said.
Maybe she should have gone back home that day, thought Joy. The punishment for wanting total independence was the same thing as the prize: total independence. She was about to dive headfirst into a big vat of self-pity when suddenly there was a touch on the back of her neck. She looked up, startled. Anthony. Her cheeks warmed.
“Hey,” he said. “I decided to wait. Maggie said you were back here. You look like something happened. How can I help?”
Joy felt a sudden prick of tears. It wouldn’t be a good idea to cry in front of the man she’d just slept with. She would come off as mentally unstable. But. They were four simple words, and nobody ever said them. How can I help?
She lifted her face to him, and it felt like she was lifting it to the sun after a long, dark winter. His body somehow seemed to carry all of her favorite scents: cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg. (Maybe she was attracted to him because he smelled like a bakery. Was there such a thing as whoopie pie pheromones?) When he bent down to kiss her she didn’t even look around first to see if Olivia Rossi or the newly hired college kids could see her. All of a sudden she didn’t care.
Chapter 23
Anthony
Joy said she needed some time to get a few things done and walk the dog. Anthony could go home, and she’d pick him up in ninety minutes. She’d drive, because he stil
l didn’t have a car, and anyway his house was right on the way to where they were going. When she pulled up in the yellow Jeep she gave two successive short honks, but he was watching out the window—he didn’t need the honks.
“Hey,” she said, smiling, when he hurried out. “Hop in. It’s really close, where we’re going.” The top was down. The sun was still up.
He buckled his seat belt, suddenly shy. He felt like he was on a high school date—excited and anxious, almost sweating, certainly uncertain. His eyes fell on the Jeep’s door. In the little pocket there he saw a cherry ChapStick and a pack of Trident spearmint gum, along with a package of tissues. The cherry ChapStick also reminded him of high school; his first girlfriend, Tricia Sanders, had been a prodigious user.
Joy turned down a narrow road across from a large yellow farmhouse. Anthony had been up and down this road many times by now, but he hadn’t noticed the house or the road. Not long after, she pulled into a parking lot, where there was a wooden sign reading Clay Head Trail.
“A hike?” he said doubtfully. He wasn’t dressed for hiking—he was wearing sneakers without socks, and he’d put a long-sleeved plaid shirt, unbuttoned, over his usual gray T-shirt.
“Just a tiny one,” she said. “Not even a hike. A small walk.” She slung a backpack over her shoulders and pointed east. “The ocean is right over there. But you won’t know it until we’re right up on it. These trails are twisty. We get a lot of migratory songbirds out here. And if we’re lucky, we’ll see a yellow-crowned night heron. They’ve got these plumes that come out of the back of their head, makes them look like balding men.”
He said, “I hear the night herons are much cooler than the day herons,” and then held his breath until she laughed. This modest joke had been a risk—in the past six months, he’d given up on both laughing himself and encouraging laughter in others. But she laughed, and he exhaled.
It wasn’t a long walk, nor was it arduous in any way: Joy had told the truth (another point in her favor). About a third of a mile in, they came to a fork. Joy hesitated. “Sea level?” she asked. “Or up?”
“Up,” he said, immediately regretting it—he was prone to vertigo. The trail twisted and turned some more, and now they were headed up, up, up, until at last they stood on top of a bluff overlooking the ocean. Joy indicated a labyrinth of trails winding away from the water. “You can wander on these paths forever,” she said. “It’s called ‘the maze.’” She pointed. “And if you look all the way down there—see? It’s the North Lighthouse, which you can also get to by following Corn Neck Road to the end and then parking and walking along the rocks. This”—she stomped her foot—“is all clay. That’s where the trail gets its name. Maggie used to make little clay figures when we came up here.” She seemed to be lost for a moment in a parental reverie, so Anthony remained quiet and enjoyed the view. He avoided looking straight down, because of the vertigo.
He thought about a young Maggie building clay figures, and the image made him smile. He wondered if Maggie had had stripy hair and funny T-shirts back then; he wouldn’t put it past her. Then he thought about Joy, hiking up here, knowing that if Maggie fell ill or scraped her knee or broke her finger it would be up to Joy and only Joy to take care of her. It must have been difficult and sometimes scary for Joy to hoe that lonely row alone.
His thoughts turned to Cassie. “Look at Mommy,” Cassie said once, trying to get Max’s attention for a photo at the playground. And Anthony found himself standing just off to the side, saying, “Look at Daddy!” They weren’t working together. They were competing, volleying Max back and forth like a tennis ball.
In the final, rotten days of their cohabitation he and Cassie had given up saying hello to each other—they’d let go of all of the casual niceties that you’d bestow upon a virtual stranger. Cassie had begun to speak to him through Max: Look at that, Max! Daddy is having another drink. He started to do it back: Max, is Mommy just getting back from meeting with her art dealer? That meeting took a very long time. Obviously the barbs from their words flew over Max’s head, but it wasn’t fair or right for either of them to throw them.
“Look!” cried Joy. “Down on the beach. See that? It’s a baby harbor seal.”
Grateful for the interruption, Anthony steeled himself and looked down. He imagined that he was swaying, then falling. He reprimanded himself. All he could see was a gray lump of rocks. “I don’t see it,” he said, unbelieving.
Joy pointed. “There!”
He saw just the lumpy rocks. He peered and squinted. At last one of the rocks began to move toward the water, and it turned out it wasn’t a rock at all. “What do you know,” he said. The seal seemed awkward and uncomfortable, like a slug with flippers, though it moved quite quickly. “How old is it?” he asked. “Is it old enough to be out on its own?” He felt concerned for the seal.
Joy chewed her lip. “Probably over six weeks, at least. If the mother isn’t with it. After around that age, the baby sticks with the mother, but the mother mostly ignores it.” Almost under her breath she added, “Which is the opposite of my experience.”
“How do you know so much about seals?”
She shrugged—she looked delightfully sexy when she shrugged, and he felt his pulse race. “The harbor seal is our state mammal,” she said. “Knowing the details is in the residency requirements.”
They stood on top of the bluff and watched the seal’s progress. There was something so optimistic about its shifting, unrefined locomotion that Anthony felt a sudden spring of hope. You go, girl, he thought. He was guessing at the gender, but the sentiment was exact. Shouldn’t they all, once beached, get the chance to make their way back to the water? Shouldn’t he? He had made a mistake he’d been led to believe was unforgivable. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe, in fact, forgiveness could take an unexpected form. The seal—bumbling, yes, but stalwart and somehow proud—was a testament to possibilities. He reached for Joy’s hand and realized that she was reaching for his at the same time. The vertigo he felt now wasn’t uncomfortable or frightening so much as it was bracing, restorative.
“What are you doing after this?” he whispered.
“I’m free,” she said. “I’m free as a yellow-crowned night heron.” She pressed her body close to his and moved one hand up until it was covering the back of his neck. Her hands were small, but somehow she seemed to be holding his entire body with just the one.
Chapter 24
Joy
For the next three and a half weeks Joy had one of the best summers of her life, and this was including the summer she was sixteen and dating Tad Formosa, which was the same summer her best friend Krista’s grandmother allowed the use of her unoccupied house near Craigville Beach in Centerville.
Was it because of the sex? Maybe. Yes, definitely it was partly because of the sex! She wasn’t going to lie about that. But there were many more things too.
They hiked Clay Head Trail again; this time they did spot a yellow-crowned night heron. (“Endangered!” said Joy proudly. She felt like she’d given birth to the heron herself.) They biked up Corn Neck Road and then walked out to North Lighthouse at sunset. They kissed leaning against Settlers’ Rock and Joy thought her stomach might drop right out of her body. Joy had always wanted to kiss someone at sunset leaning against Settlers’ Rock.
Maggie taught Anthony how to clam. All the island kids knew how to clam, and Anthony was exactly the right amount of impressed. For all of his professed non-experience with dogs, Anthony was a top-notch dog walker, and Pickles had taken to him like a border collie to a Frisbee. Anthony fixed a hinge that had been loose in Joy’s kitchen cabinet for months. Joy knew how to do that, but somehow she never got around to it.
Anthony didn’t talk much about his life before coming to the island, or of his plans for after he left. Joy didn’t press him. She understood that island life was transient and that you were allowed to leave part of yourself behind and forget all about it once you approached the breakwater. Hadn’t she done
the same thing, all those years ago?
One day, when Anthony had gone to sleep at his own cottage because Maggie and Riley were sleeping at Joy’s, she woke up in the morning, forgetting he wasn’t there, and reached for him. She felt a little surge of panic when she found his side of the bed empty. Uh-oh, she thought, frowning at the panic. You, Joy Sousa, are getting attached.
She got behind on keeping the books at the store. When she finally took an afternoon to catch up, she was startled to see how much lower this summer’s sales were than last summer’s. She’d felt busy. She felt busy all the time! Thank goodness for Bridezilla’s wedding. Even so, she was going to have to put the money she’d started to put away for Maggie’s college toward the rent increase. She was going to have to ask Dustin to chip in to replace the college savings.
She texted Dustin. There’s something i need to talk to you about. Call me when you can, and then she put it out of her mind.
They went to Tiger Fish for dinner with Holly and her husband, Brent, leaving the girls at Holly’s house watching a Gossip Girl marathon. They booked a horseback ride that took them on the beach and right into the surf. One night they watched the moon rise from Beacon Hill. They cruised the stalls at the farmers’ market at Legion Park.
Fun, yes. Sex: definitely, yes, please. Love? Nobody said love. Why should they? It was a summer romance, that was all.
But every so often now, kissing Anthony goodbye, or waking up next to him on the nights when Maggie was at Dustin’s or sleeping over at Riley’s, she found herself thinking, Well, maybe. And then, finally: Yes.
Chapter 25
Lu
Lu knocked on Anthony’s door. “I made way too much summer vegetable lasagna,” she said without preamble, when he opened it. “And Jeremy is doing a double shift. Could you find it in your heart to help me? Tonight?” It wasn’t like she could have made less lasagna—a lasagna pan was a standard size. But the boys didn’t like all the summer vegetables (Chase eschewed mushrooms in all forms, and Sebastian harbored a grievance against eggplant) and Lu loved this dish; she hated to see it go to waste. She would roast a pan of broccoli too, since the boys would eat that and she could throw the leftovers into a salad the next day. “Unless you have plans with Joy,” she added hastily. “But I thought Maggie said that she and Joy had something to do tonight—”
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