The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “Of course not,” said Joy. Her voice was her regular voice, but inside she was roiling. She had forgotten all about the text she’d seen earlier in the summer, but the memory came flooding back to her now. What had it said? Do u rly think I should go 4 it. How could she have forgotten?

  The lack of a male role model in the household meant that Maggie was looking to older boys—she shuddered—for affection, and who knew what else. Joy had been distracted this summer, with the business, with Anthony, and she’d taken her eyes off Maggie. And now Maggie was telling Lu things she wasn’t telling Joy.

  She let her pride fall to the floor, where it landed with a thud that was almost audible. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m not sure I know exactly who you’re talking about.”

  “Oh!” said Lu. “Oh. No, I’m sorry, of course I thought if I knew, you’d know. How funny.” It wasn’t funny. Lu felt sorry for Joy, Joy could see it right there on her face. Poor single Joy, couldn’t keep track of the one child she was lucky enough to have. “It’s Hugo! The boy who works at that food truck, the Roving Patisserie? I think his parents must own it. He has floppy brown hair . . . super-cute. Have you tried the salade Niçoise? It’s to die for!”

  A clattering sound came from behind them and both Joy and Lu turned to look. Olivia Rossi stood there, with narrowed eyes and a hand on her hip. On the floor in front of her was a small pile of spoons that had been knocked from the counter. Olivia looked stern and disappointed, like an English nanny. Had she heard the conversation? “No backup boxes,” she said. Her expression turned sphinxlike, unknowable. “We’re completely out of stirrers,” she added. Her voice was low and even, giving nothing away.

  Just then a shadow fell over the table. Joy looked up to see Maggie turn away from the table. Where had Maggie come from?

  “Figures,” Maggie said. “Figures you’d do something like this. I knew I couldn’t trust you.” A flash of yellow Converse, and she was gone.

  Joy and Lu sat for a moment in stunned silence. The shop door closed behind Maggie. In the back, they could hear the clattering of pans as Olivia Rossi prepped for that afternoon’s baking.

  “Is she mad at me?” asked Lu finally. “Or . . .”

  “Or me?” whispered Joy.

  “I’m not really sure,” said Lu. “Maybe both?”

  Chapter 36

  Anthony

  Anthony returned to Fitzy’s uncle’s cottage. For a little while he tried to comfort himself, as one does, by falling back on one of the most basic of human instincts: self-righteousness. Wasn’t Joy, after all, very attached to her dog, going so far as to brush Pickles’s teeth with a toothbrush? And at the same time didn’t she let Maggie run a little wild around the island, coming and going as she pleased, riding her bike at night, chopping with very sharp knives? And also, who did she think she was, shoveling an endless number of calories into Anthony? (Didn’t she understand that not every night had to be a dessert night?) Wasn’t she a bit unnecessarily hung up, all these years later, on the wrongs that had been done to her by her ex-husband? Did she possibly worry too much about the competition that had come to the island in the form of the Roving Patisserie, and was it possible that she talked about it a little too much? Everyone knew that whoopie pies and macarons were not the same thing.

  It didn’t work. He didn’t actually believe that any of Joy’s quirks were flaws. If anything, they caused him to love her even more. He wanted to bury his face in her hair, her neck.

  At the same time, an unwelcome guest visited Anthony: the thought of the twenty grand he owed Huxley. August was nearly here; he had to come up with the money by September. This was a fact Anthony had managed to push down all these weeks, to bury under Joy’s bed, but now it crawled out and reared its ugly, ugly head.

  The liquor in the crystal decanter caught Anthony’s eye. He’d managed to avoid even a sip of tequila with Shelly Salazar, but now the contents of the decanter called to him with the force of a Siren. Hear my music, sang the tawny liquid. Launch your ship upon these rocks.

  To distract himself, he thought he’d try to call Max. He hadn’t talked to him in—what was it? Four days? Longer? He’d lost track.

  He patted his pockets. No phone. He checked the kitchen, the bathroom, the deck. Negative. He went out to the Le Baron and searched under all of the seats. Nothing.

  Plot twist, thought Anthony glumly. Extremely inconvenient plot twist.

  The next time he passed the decanter, he reached for the stopper, and for one of the glasses that sat on the tray waiting for the guests who never came. He poured. He sniffed. He drank. The liquor went down easy, warming him from the inside out. How much harm could just a little bit do? Hardly any. And if a little bit did hardly any, a little bit more surely wouldn’t hurt. He had poured such a small portion the first time around.

  Chapter 37

  Joy

  When Maggie got home, Joy was at the door waiting. In her hand she held an e-cigarette, as small and innocuous-looking as a flash drive, that she’d found in Maggie’s backpack. Part of Joy, the detached part, was curious to see how Maggie would react when presented with the incontrovertible evidence. The rest of her was just mad.

  Maggie’s face went white, and her freckles stood out like sentinels. “I don’t know what that is,” she tried.

  “Of course you know what it is. I know what it is.”

  “You do?”

  “I do.” Joy wasn’t going to tell Maggie that she’d googled an article called “What Every Parent Should Know About Vaping.” “I know way, way more than you think I do. This is a vape pen, and I’d like to know what it was doing in your backpack.”

  Maggie blinked. “I think it’s Riley’s,” she said, after a long pause. She leaned closer to the pen, as if looking for a name tag. (Interesting, thought Joy. She hadn’t thought Maggie’s first reaction would be to toss her best friend under the bus.) “Yes, it’s Riley’s. She must have put it in my bag.”

  “Where did Riley get it?”

  Maggie shrugged. “I don’t know.” She furrowed her brow and looked pensive. “Maybe from Hugo?”

  “Who’s Hugo?”

  “Just this kid.”

  “Just what kid? I know everybody on this island. I don’t know anybody named Hugo.”

  “He’s here for the summer. From France.”

  “France, like macaron-ville France?”

  “I think so,” said Maggie in a tiny voice.

  “Fabulous,” said Joy. “Really wonderful.” Not only did Maggie have vaping equipment, it could be traced back to Joy’s mortal enemy, the owner of the Roving Patisserie. Lu had been right.

  “Don’t tell Holly, Mom, please. Riley will kill me.”

  “I’ll worry about what to tell Holly later.” (She had already told Holly.) “Right now I’m going to worry about you. Have you used this?”

  Maggie hesitated.

  “Maggie! Answer me.” Joy hated the way her voice sounded, loud and shrill, and she also hated the way she felt, on the precipice of a severe panic attack, filled with a burgeoning rage.

  “Once or twice,” said Maggie finally. “Okay, and now you’re going to freak out.”

  “I’m not freaking out!” Joy could feel her blood pressure skyrocket, and she almost couldn’t see for the anger. She was definitely freaking out.

  “You are. You’re freaking out all over the place. What’s the big deal? Everybody vapes. The summer kids all do it.”

  “The big deal! It’s a gateway drug, and I’m sure not everybody does it. I’m positive not everybody does it.”

  “It’s not a drug. It’s just, like . . . flavored air.”

  “It’s not just flavored air. And it’s a gateway activity. It leads to other activities. Regular cigarettes. Pot. It can make it harder for your body to fight germs. You can get popcorn lung!” She had learned that from the same article.

  Maggie blanched. “You made that up. There’s no such thing.”

  “I did not. Ther
e is.” Joy reached for her phone, to prove it. Siri, she wanted to say. Help me raise my daughter.

  “You don’t have to show me. I don’t really want to know.” Maggie then treated Joy to some statistics about everybody in France smoking and four-year-olds drinking wine and eating beurre blanc sauce. “French people are so much more sophisticated,” Maggie finished.

  “I don’t care what French people do,” said Joy. “I care what you do.” She realized this was a completely unoriginal version of what mothers had been saying to their daughters since the beginning of time, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “You are completely and totally overreacting,” said Maggie. She folded her arms over her chest. “This is so typical.”

  “You’re thirteen years old, Maggie! If anything, I think I’m underreacting.” How was Maggie managing to make her feel old and stodgy? It wasn’t fair. She wasn’t stodgy. Hadn’t she, Joy, smoked a bunch of weed junior year in high school when she was dating that pothead Marco Brotelho? You bet, but she’d been sixteen her junior year, almost seventeen. Maggie was thirteen. Joy had brought her beautiful baby girl, heart of her heart, to live on this beautiful island so she could breathe the purest air, be surrounded by some of the world’s most natural beauty, protected by miles and miles of ocean and within glimpsing distance of any number of endangered species. Now that beautiful baby girl was letting some summer assholes fill her young, unsullied lungs with poison. And her mind with who knew what. No, Joy wasn’t overreacting. She was reacting exactly right. Confident in her rightness, she was figuring out what to say next when Maggie pulled out the big gun. And aimed. And fired.

  “You’re just mad because Anthony doesn’t want to be your boyfriend anymore. Because you’re mean and boring, and he finally figured it out.”

  Joy could see right away that Maggie regretted that. But the barb had lodged deep, right away, right in the middle of her ribs, where it took Joy’s breath away. There was no way she was going to be able to pry it loose.

  She had never really punished Maggie before. She’d never had to! Maggie had always gotten along so well in the world in general, and on the island in particular. Maggie knew how to put air in the tires of the Jeep, and how to make a cheese soufflé. She had been ten when she’d learned how to gut and fillet a fish. She could swim out of a rip current and get herself home from anywhere on the island on her bike. She’d always taken excellent care of herself, like a baby lizard or an infant snake.

  But this. This was too much.

  “You’re grounded,” said Joy.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “For how long? I have to babysit tonight.”

  Joy hesitated. She didn’t know how long groundings typically lasted, never having doled one out before.

  “How about for the rest of the month?” asked Maggie. (It was the last day of July.)

  Normally Joy would have appreciated the humor in that. But she was so angry. And she was scared.

  “Indefinitely,” she said. “You can babysit, but except for that, you’re grounded. Maybe forever.”

  Chapter 38

  Lu

  When Maggie came that evening there was no trace of the surly girl from the day before. Lu had set her up with a picnic dinner to have with the boys on the beach.

  When I was a boy, wrote Lu, times were different.

  I know this seems like a very basic, very obvious thing to say. Members of each generation think that their own growing-up years were a simpler time. But I don’t think you can argue with the fact that ours really, truly was. When I was the age my boys are now we played baseball and kickball on summer nights like these. The games went on forever. The nights went on forever. Am I waxing too nostalgic for you, readers? I apologize if I am. There’s something about summer evenings that makes me feel that way. The word “nostalgia,” as any Don Draper fan knows (please see Season 1, Episode 13, “The Wheel”), comes from a Greek compound consisting of the words “homecoming” and “pain.” And when I’m feeling nostalgic, the thing that eases that pain is comfort food. I’m talking fried chicken. Meatloaf. Mac and cheese. Chicken potpie. Food that sticks to your ribs, and sticks to your heart.

  Lu paused. Too corny? Well, she could adjust it later if necessary. Anyway, her readers tended to respond well to corniness. Again, she was willing to bet that was because they believed she was a man. Too much emotion from a woman was, well . . . expected. Unsurprising. Sometimes annoying. But from a man? Charming, of course. Attractively vulnerable.

  She was working on a recipe for mini–chicken potpies. Both her fictional boys and her real boys went crazy when their food came out small; they ate twice as much overall when it was a third the size. It was an elegant equation.

  She stretched her arms above her head and rolled her head from side to side, easing the tension in her neck. Lu had been able to work so much more with Maggie here to help that her body was starting to complain about all the sitting. Maybe she should actually start taking some of the exercise classes she’d been pretending to attend this summer. (She wouldn’t.)

  She’d have to figure out the proportions for the mini-pies—and, oh, dear, would there be any proper ramekins in this kitchen? She knew she’d seen a pot big enough to boil lobsters out in the garage, and boiled lobster meant butter, and butter typically required ramekins, so she rooted around in the very back of all of the cupboards, and there she found them, under a half-used package of lobster bibs and next to a jumble of crackers. Her mind raced briefly ahead to lobster potpie, but she reminded herself to focus on the recipe at hand. Maggie was a huge help, but Lu didn’t have unlimited time.

  When she returned to her computer she saw that a new email had come in from Abigail Knowles of the Wilder Literary Agency.

  I love the sample cookbook pages you sent over, thx! I think it’s going to be really easy to pull together a proposal from these. I’ve spoken to my boss Huxley and he’s totally on board. I am currently out of the country on vacation (Italy!) so we might have to wait to talk. When I’m back, we’ll set up a phone call to discuss strategy and timing. As soon as I found you, I knew I had to have you. Can I have you?

  Could Lu reasonably expect to become a man, to acquire a man’s voice, while Abigail Knowles was in Italy? Unlikely. Because she had the house to herself she tried it quickly, deepening her voice. “Hello,” she said. “May I have Abigail Knowles’s office, please?” It was ridiculous. At best she could maybe come off as a prepubescent boy, but certainly not a mature man, a married father of two. Why, exactly, had she let herself get into this situation in the first place?

  She looked at the kitchen clock; she looked out the window. She rechecked her post-in-progress and hit save. Then she got up to stretch her legs and check on the laundry.

  Lu was only in the laundry room for two minutes, maybe less, but in that time Maggie and the boys returned from the beach. It was amazing, Lu thought when she came back down, the way it took no time at all to transform a scene of peace and tranquillity into one of utter chaos. A sand pail was upended in the entryway just outside the kitchen, and shoes and towels were thrown every which way. Sebastian’s nose was running.

  “Mommy, I need you!” called Chase from the downstairs bathroom. He was using that singsong voice that, try as Lu might, she could not keep from grating on her nerves; he sounded like a child on a bad television commercial, not like his true, authentic self. Sebastian was beginning to pick it up too.

  “Just a minute,” she called combatively. She fixed her eyes on Maggie, who was staring at Lu as one would stare at a friendly apparition that had appeared unexpectedly.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” began Maggie slowly, and, because she guessed what was coming, Lu, in her head, said, I peeked at your computer.

  Lu stared hard at Maggie’s T-shirt, which showed a gravestone with a water droplet on it and the words RIP Water You Will Be Mist.

  “I peeked at your computer,” continued Maggie. “Which I know I
shouldn’t have done.”

  Lu had a queer sensation in her stomach.

  “And I can’t believe . . . you are . . . are you . . . are you Dinner by Dad?” Sebastian had wandered off; there was nobody to hear, but Maggie lowered her voice anyway.

  “Maybe,” said Lu carefully, assessing. “Possibly.” Her first instinct was to chide Maggie for looking at something that wasn’t hers. For snooping. That was against the rules of general civility and the rules of being in someone else’s house as well.

  But something stopped her, and later, when she had time to think about it, she figured out what it was. It was the ghosts of girls from time immemorial being told to follow the rules, stay quiet, not make a fuss, never do anything that might get them in trouble. Don’t speak up, don’t have an opinion, and if you have one please express it very quietly and in a way that won’t offend anyone around you. Be good girls, now, her mother used to tell Lu and her sister. Or: The way you’re sitting/standing/eating/thinking: that’s not very ladylike.

  When Lu excelled at Stanford Law she heard her mother once confess to an aunt her concern that Lu might never find a man if they all thought Lu was smarter than they were. “Men don’t like that,” she’d whispered to the aunt. At the time, listening from the kitchen, Lu had felt herself swell with outrage and indignation. But as time went on she came to see her mother as the product of her own background and upbringing. Two daughters, no husband, the responsibilities of their little world all squarely on her shoulders. Her mother had worked her whole life at the same job, nine to five as a receptionist at a dental office, fifty weeks a year, while her heart grew unhealthy and her ankles got thick and her vision went blurry and time ticked away and her daughters watched soap operas after school. She didn’t know any better—who on earth would have taught her?