The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “They do,” he said. “Dinner with friends. I’ll see Joy later, and in the meantime I’d love to have dinner with you and the boys.”

  It made Lu feel useful to have another adult to cook for. Her mind had actually formed the phrase to have a man to cook for, but she knew how politically incorrect that was, so she pushed it right back into the recesses of her brain. Was there a name for that, the part of the brain where you put inappropriate thoughts? Jeremy might know.

  It wasn’t only about the lasagna, though. Now that she knew that Anthony wasn’t just her summer neighbor who was dating the mother of her mother’s helper but that he was in hiding and that his father was the one and only Leonard Puckett, she wanted to know more about him. She was intrigued!

  When Anthony showed up two hours later, he was carrying a small bouquet of wildflowers—a lovely touch. Lu put them in water and cut up the lasagna. She served the boys at the kitchen island, and she and Anthony sat at the little table in the kitchen. Chase had found a chopstick and was using it to pick out all the mushroom pieces.

  “So,” Lu said, once they were settled. “I have so many things I want to ask you, now that I know who you are.” She still couldn’t quite believe it. She had read A Room Within when it had come out, after that fabulous review in the Times. Everybody had read that book when it came out! “For one thing, are you close with your father?”

  Anthony started. “Not really—not anymore.”

  “Not since you brought shame upon the family name? Chase, put that down.” Chase was holding the chopstick alarmingly close to his brother’s nostril. Lu caught the look on Anthony’s face and said, “I’m sorry.” She had overstepped. It was a bad habit of hers, assuming a familiarity with a new friend that she hadn’t yet earned.

  “No, that’s okay. It’s not that. It’s more that—well, it happened before I brought shame on the family name. When I was a kid, we were close. But when I was in college we sort of lost that. It was like, my whole life, my dad was this icon, you know. A star! In the book world, anyway. And in our house, for sure. I revered him.”

  Lu nodded and speared a piece of broccoli. She’d finally gotten the hang of this oven, and of the too-shiny rimmed baking sheet. (So many times she wished she’d brought her own from home; she’d written a whole post once on the joys of roasting vegetables on a stained, blackened sheet.) But this time she’d nailed it; the broccoli was lightly charred on the outside and still tender when you bit into it. Little bit of sea salt. Just the way she liked it: it was better than popcorn.

  “A lot of people feel that way about their parents.” He sighed heavily. “And then at some point, he became human. I guess when I became a writer myself. Then, after what happened earlier this year—I mean, what I did, not what happened—he didn’t want to talk to me at all. He must be so ashamed.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s my own fault.”

  “But I’m still sorry. At the same time, I can imagine it being hard on him. He’s so big-time. I’ve been reading your dad’s books . . . forever! In college . . . man. I used to avoid studying so I could read them. They were like crack.”

  “It wasn’t like being Mick Jagger’s son, but it was still a big deal. He sells a lot of books. He makes a lot of money. He has a lot of fans. He was interviewed by Travis Weaver earlier this summer!”

  “I know,” said Lu. “I actually saw that.” She thought Travis Weaver was a little pompous, but she watched him anyway because she liked his hair and sometimes they did a decent cooking segment. The day Leonard Puckett was on she’d learned a new trick to try with gazpacho: soak the bread before adding it to the blender. “He was great! So charming. It’s so funny that I didn’t know then that that was your father.”

  “Can I be done?” asked Sebastian and Chase at the same time. They must have planned it ahead of time.

  “You two can skedaddle,” Lu told them. “Just put your plates in the sink first.” They’d done a passable job on the broccoli but had made a poor showing with the lasagna, as expected. Charlie and Sammy were much more reliable vegetable eaters. “I always wanted to be a writer,” she continued, turning her attention back to Anthony. “I guess that’s why I—”

  (She almost said it. Out loud.)

  “Why you what?” He seemed genuinely curious, which Lu appreciated.

  “Why I liked law school so much,” she recovered. “There was lots of writing. Everybody else got tired of it, but I never did.” That was true. “In college, I was an English major. I was crazy for Virginia Woolf. Money and a room of one’s own, and all of that.”

  He nodded approvingly. “Good choice,” he said. “From one English major to another.”

  “My senior year my housemates and I adopted a cat and I named her Lily Briscoe.”

  “I love it. Lily Briscoe the cat.” He laughed sincerely.

  His laughter felt like an achievement to Lu. She didn’t feel like she’d made Jeremy laugh at all lately, either because he hadn’t been here or when he was she was too busy covering her tracks to indulge in humor. And they used to laugh so much! All the time, laughing until they got stitches, laughing until the cows came home. Even during sex, they used to laugh.

  Chase’s and Sebastian’s plates rattled as they went into the sink—Lu knew she was walking that fine line between teaching them table-clearing manners and risking broken dishes she’d have to replace. They were very excited because Maggie had seen a notice for an event at the Island Free Library. The library was having an exotic-animals person in, which was exactly up Chase’s alley. Lu imagined the exotic-animals person might bring a lizard or an iguana; perhaps, if they were lucky, a chinchilla or a nonthreatening but impressively long snake the children could take turns wearing on their necks. She knew, of course, that Chase, having glimpsed the poster downtown, was hoping for a wallaroo or a Siberian tiger.

  Once the boys had disappeared into the living room and turned on the television, Lu asked, “So, really, what was it like? Being the son of someone like that?” Jeremy would have disapproved of television time immediately after dinner. He wanted them to play wholesome board games, but he was never here to play them.

  Anthony moved the last bit of broccoli around his plate. It was extra-charred, and if Lu had known him better she might have asked him if she could have it. “It was all I knew,” he said. He squinted at his plate. “I don’t really have a point of comparison, you know? I mean, I guess what I would mostly say is that our worlds revolved around him, my mother’s and mine. We traveled where he needed to go, we stayed quiet when he needed to work, we ate dinner at the same time every night because he worked best when everything around him was really controlled. He was like a god to me, you know? And then . . . I don’t know. I showed him my first story, and everything changed.”

  “Probably he was jealous.” To Lu that seemed obvious. When she’d first read A Room Within she’d been blown away.

  “No,” said Anthony. “Not of me. Never. Leonard Puckett doesn’t envy anyone.”

  “Of course he does. Everyone envies someone. Even Virginia Woolf! She envied Katherine Mansfield.”

  “She did? I didn’t know that.”

  “She did. It was a whole thing. I wrote a paper on it. Anyway, look at your father: he had all this commercial success, but then you came along and wrote, essentially, the Great American Novel.”

  Anthony shifted uncomfortably. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.

  “No, really. A Room Within is amazing.”

  “Thank you,” said Anthony. “I really appreciate that, I do. But then I went and did that stupid thing, and ruined all of it.”

  It had been a really unwise thing to do, Lu agreed. “Why’d you do it?” she asked. “You’re so talented on your own.”

  Anthony took a long time to answer. Finally he said, “It was a bad time for me. A real low point. I didn’t—I didn’t have my head on straight. I’m just starting to feel like I do now, a little bit. Don’t judge
me. I mean, if you can help it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lu assured him. “I don’t judge anyone.” This was untrue. She judged Nancy. She’d judged the heck out of Jessica. She judged careless food bloggers who didn’t test their recipes enough before publishing them. But she wouldn’t judge Anthony. She needed a friend, and he was turning out to be a good one. She wasn’t going to judge her way out of that. “Also,” she said, “I have my own secret. Want me to tell you?”

  Anthony’s eyes grew wide. “Of course,” he said. Lu lifted her wineglass, took a generous sip, and told Anthony everything about Dinner by Dad. Everything. The talking felt invigorating and purifying, like the middle stage of a juice cleanse, and when she was done Anthony said, “Wow. Holy cow. I can’t believe it. I’m so impressed! I’m going to go home and read all of your posts.”

  Lu was secretly delighted, and also scared. A writer like Anthony Puckett reading her posts! “You don’t have to read all of them,” she said. “That would take you a while. I’ve been doing it for two years. Don’t tell Joy, okay? Maggie doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Really! I’ve never told anybody the whole story, except for you, right now.”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” said Anthony. “Scout’s honor.”

  “Were you a Scout?”

  “Never.”

  “Me either.” Lu’s mother hadn’t been around to drive Lu and her sister to afternoon activities, so they’d been limited to those that took place at school.

  “Wait,” said Anthony. “Your husband doesn’t know?”

  She shook her head. “No. He— I can’t tell him. He has . . . a very firm idea of how things should go. And this isn’t in his plan.”

  Anthony nodded. “Okay,” he said. Then: “To secrets,” lifting his seltzer can.

  Lu raised her wineglass. “To secrets.” They tapped, and they smiled at exactly the same time, and Lu felt like she’d found something she hadn’t even really known she’d been missing.

  Chapter 26

  Anthony

  All through the better part of July, every time Anthony started to tell Joy the truth, something stopped him. He hadn’t been this happy with a woman since . . . since when? He was going to say since he’d first met Cassie, but the truth was he hadn’t ever been this happy with Cassie. He’d never been himself with Cassie, from whom he had no secrets, and yet he felt completely himself with Joy, who knew only half the story.

  Joy made him laugh. She was so passionate about everything: sweet pickles versus dill (dill, always, unless on a cheeseburger), gelato versus ice cream (gelato), thick-cut fries versus shoestring (oh, always, always shoestring). In bed, they were—well, it was going very well. One night When Harry Met Sally came on television, and they watched it, both ridiculously riveted. It turned out they both liked romantic comedies: Sleepless in Seattle. You’ve Got Mail. While You Were Sleeping. “But this one’s the best by far,” she said. He concurred.

  He loved to watch her cook in her tiny, mismatched kitchen, even though, by her own confession, she was more baker than cook. Without the help of her favorite food blog (a coincidence so fantastic he, an erstwhile novelist, would never have dared to construct it in fiction), she said she’d be nothing. Maggie had the true culinary talent in the kitchen. Maggie’s face took on an earnest look—almost pinched—and when she was really concentrating the tip of her tongue slipped out of the side of her mouth. He would never be able to tell them about the kitchen he and Cassie had put in at their Newton home, about the six burners on the range, only one of which was ever used, mostly to boil water for tea or the occasional hard-boiled egg. (To Cassie food was more about subtraction than addition.) Joy was an enthusiastic eater—even voracious.

  Anthony learned that the island had an ecosystem he hadn’t understood, couldn’t have understood if he hadn’t met someone like Joy. Bob Herbert fixed the Le Baron; it ran like a dream. The locals fed on the tourists, and the tourists fed on the locals. Both sides were unapologetic about their parts in this arrangement. And underneath it all thrummed a vibrant and teeming community. The islanders didn’t, as he would have imagined, wait through summer to get to winter. Nor did they wait through winter to get to summer. They took each season in stride.

  You could only be a part of this ecosystem if you were relentless, optimistic, resourceful, and self-sufficient, and if you taught your offspring to be the same. So Anthony found himself captivated by all of the island tricks Joy and Maggie knew. If you wanted any beach to yourself, you walked the dog at sunrise. If you wanted a good table at Eli’s, you went on a Wednesday. If you wanted clear water and soft sand, you braved the crowds at Ballard’s, but if you wanted to hunt for shells and sand dollars, you went to Surf Beach.

  He was smitten. He might love her. He would tell her the truth soon.

  It turned out Anthony Puckett was a dog person, after all! Finally he understood what all the fuss was about regarding dogs. They asked for almost nothing, and when you gave them even the little that they asked for, they looked at you with such adoring eyes that you felt loved as you’d never felt loved before. You got so you always had a sense of where the dog was: under the table, sitting by the door, sleeping on the deck, chewing a bone. He took to walking Pickles mornings on the beach. Pickles had lots of local friends: a Lab mix named Titan, a boxer named Sadie, a beautiful golden retriever named Olive.

  Maggie was remarkably independent. She was perfectly capable of making a meal for herself or for the three of them. She disappeared into the bathroom and came out with streaks of different colors in her hair. She did her own laundry. When she wasn’t being industrious, she was having a childhood Anthony would have killed for. She went off on a bike with her friend Riley, when she wasn’t helping in the shop or working for Lu. She was learning how to sail a Sunfish. Once she sat all day on the deck of the cottage and read from a battered copy of A Wrinkle in Time.

  “Yours?” Anthony asked Joy, pointing to the book, hungry for a little piece of the girl she had once been.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I wasn’t much of a reader.”

  He couldn’t tell her the truth.

  Once, Maggie said, “Anthony, did you have a favorite movie as a kid?”

  The answer was right there, as though it had been waiting only for the question to be asked: The Karate Kid. Cassie didn’t know that. Nobody had ever wanted to know that before.

  Anthony dared to order Maggie a shirt from Amazon with a pun about a bear and a deer, holding his breath when she opened it. “I love it,” she proclaimed. “I really love it. Thank you, Anthony.”

  The only thing marring Anthony’s happiness was the absence of his son. There was always a part inside of him crying out, Max! Max! Max!

  He called Cassie again and again.

  “Sorry,” she said. “He’s at camp.”

  “He has a playdate.”

  “I’m working, Anthony, he’s with the sitter.”

  Once: “He’s staying with your mother. Call him there.”

  He did, and nobody answered.

  He tried getting tough: “You can’t keep me from our son!”

  “Oh, can’t I?” And then silence. His bluff had been summarily called. He couldn’t go home to the house where he wasn’t welcome.

  But occasionally she yielded and he was permitted short conversations with Max. It was enough—just—to sustain him.

  Once he had a ghastly dream wherein his father was standing over him with an unabridged copy of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. I’m sorry, Anthony croaked up at his father. I’m so, so sorry. His father lifted the dictionary, and Anthony covered his head with his hands.

  Another time it was his mother, cutting the crusts off of his peanut butter sandwiches at the kitchen counter, her back to him, her hair perfect. But when she turned around there was a giant hole in her dress where her heart should have been, and her eyes were flat and empty.

  In a panic he tangled himself in the sheets; he thrashed and kicked, trying to get out.

 
“What?” said Joy. “You okay, baby?”

  Nobody had ever called him baby before, except maybe when he was an actual baby, and if that had happened he didn’t remember it. He sank back into the pillows, sweaty and relieved. He rummaged around under the sheets until he found her hand, and when he had it he didn’t let go.

  He had to tell her. But if he told her and he lost her, he’d die.

  He couldn’t tell her.

  His mother called him every three days. More often than not he was too busy to answer her.

  Ready for a visitor? she texted.

  Not a good time, he replied.

  We still have to talk, came her answer.

  Once he and Joy walked by Island Bound Books after returning a moped they had rented to ride out to Charleston Beach for a picnic. Anthony couldn’t help but steal a glance at the window. Was The Thrill of the Chase still there? Front and center. Not only that, there was a poster now in the window, with his father’s photo and big red letters proclaiming Author Event! August 7. The photo was a three-quarter shot. Leonard had his arms crossed over his chest and an extremely satisfied smile on his face.

  Oh, brother, thought Anthony. You’ve got to be kidding me.

  Now would be a good time to tell Joy, he thought. You have a natural entry point. He gave it a feeble try. “You ever read that book?” he asked, tilting his head toward it. He thought he might do it. He might say, That’s my father. He might say, I’m that guy’s son. He could say, There’s more to the story.