The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  The sky was pale, with stripes of white clouds that seemed as if they’d been laid out in lines. Sebastian found a piece of driftwood that looked exactly like antlers. “These could have fallen off a moose,” he reported, holding them up.

  “Could have,” said Lu.

  When Sebastian ran ahead to show Chase, Jeremy said, “So.”

  Lu said, “So.”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  Lu couldn’t find her voice to ask what he’d been thinking.

  “I think we should make this change . . .”

  She held her breath. “What change?” she whispered finally, nearly drowned out by the sound of the waves.

  “This change to make your thing possible.”

  “You do? You really do?”

  There was a wild smell to the air too—raw, a post-storm, briny, alive smell.

  Jeremy took her hand and squeezed it. “I do. If this is what you really want.”

  Lu let go of Jeremy’s hand and stopped walking. She faced the ocean. She was terrified. This was it: Her chance to say, No, I don’t want it. No, I’m too scared. Let’s go back. Reverse. Keep things how they are, don’t change.

  She watched as each wave crashed onto the sand and then pulled itself back out before the next one came. They were endlessly repetitive and also different each time: enduring and capricious all at once.

  A seagull screeched and dipped and then settled briefly next to Lu before flying off again. The waves looked like each time they came ashore they were taking giant breaths and then releasing them. Lu took her own giant breath and let it out slowly.

  “Okay,” she said, turning back to Jeremy, who had come to stand beside her. You can’t ask for things and not take them when you get them, Lu, she told herself. You can’t wait for everything to be perfect. Sometimes you have to jump first and think later. It was time; she was ready.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  Chapter 66

  Joy

  Joy had to wait in a line fifteen people deep and spend upward of seventy dollars to do what she did while Maggie was off getting the paper and walking Pickles. It was insane, really, how many people were lined up at the Roving Patisserie. Well, summer wasn’t over yet—it had just been briefly interrupted. She noted with some satisfaction that the boy who was taking orders—this would be Hugo, of course—was flustered, overworked. Maybe he was hungover.

  Finally it was her turn. “Hello!” she said brightly. “I’ll have . . . let me see. A salade Niçoise.” Hugo had an iPad for order-taking; he tapped on it and then looked up at her, half expectant, half annoyed. Good. She wanted both. “Oh, and also a macaron,” she said, giving the word a bit of a French twist, just for fun. (She’d taken two years back at B.M.C. Durfee High School in Fall River, but rarely trotted out her accent, which Madame Girard had called “impeccable.”)

  Hugo didn’t seem impressed. “What flavor?” He yawned.

  Behind Joy the line thrummed with impatience. “What flavors do you have?” she inquired.

  “They are all listed right there.” Hugo pointed to a sign bearing a list of the twenty-four flavors.

  “Hmm,” said Joy thoughtfully. “Raspberry. Oooh, that sounds good. Mocha, yum.” She kept going. (She heard someone behind her say, “What’s the holdup up there?”) “Orange cream,” she read. “Boysenberry. Wow.” Across Hugo’s face passed a look of irritation, quick as a lightning strike. Finally she said, “You know what? I’ll have one in every flavor.” This had been her intention all along, of course. “Also, may I please speak to the owner?”

  Hugo glanced behind him. “He is . . . occupied. Busy.”

  Joy flashed Holly’s Chamber of Commerce ID. “I’m so sorry, but I’ll need to speak to him anyway. I work for the town. It’s an important administrative matter.” She felt gleefully, ridiculously important saying this.

  “One minute,” said Hugo. He went to the small window on the side of the truck and called a string of French words too fast for Joy to understand. “Wait over there,” he said, pointing.

  When Joy had her order—it had cost her seventy-two fifty—she stood off to the side and waited until a short balding man wearing a white apron appeared. He was such a stereotype of a French chef that Joy wanted to pop him right into a cartoon. She wanted to put him on Instagram. But what would she say for her caption? @Joybombs. Ran this guy out of town today. #Majorwin.

  His name was Luca. She had to put the bag with all her food on the ground to shake his hand. Again she showed Holly’s ID. At first Luca thought she was there to assess storm damage, of which, he assured her, the truck had sustained none: they were within their rights to be open for business.

  Joy chortled gracefully, professionally. “That’s not why I’m here,” she said. She explained her mission. She’d been charged with overseeing the proper use of all summer business permits. Then she shook her head regretfully and told Luca that the Roving Patisserie had been found to be in violation.

  “But why?” asked Luca. He looked so genuinely perplexed that Joy almost felt sorry for him. But then she thought about her little shop. She thought about the fingers-to-the-bone effort she’d been putting in for a decade now. She thought about the time the compressor on the walk-in freezer had failed and the repair had cost so much that she’d had to beg Harlan for an extension on the rent payment for three months until she could get herself back on track. She thought about Harlan’s mother moving into her long-term care facility.

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “You have a permit. But according to our records, you do not have a roving permit.”

  “Eh?” He began to glower. He looked like he might start to chase a villain around while waving a rolling pin, with his chef’s hat lifting off of his head and following several inches behind.

  Joy glanced down at the place where a clipboard would have been if she’d thought to bring one. “My records show that your permit is a single-use, single-space permit.” She’d made that up.

  “Pardon me?”

  “That’s right.” She decided to repeat it, because it sounded so legitimate. “You were issued a permit for a single location, and each time you move your truck you are in violation of the permit.”

  Luca blinked at her and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “What is the . . .” He paused, maybe searching for the right word. He looked worried. She almost felt bad for him, again, but then she thought about Bridezilla, and Harlan, and Dustin’s uselessness, and she kept going.

  “The penalty?”

  “Yes, this is it. The penalty. What is it that you want?”

  “Well,” said Joy. It had not occurred to her to think too much past this point. And she knew Luca was asking the question literally, but she found that in her mind she was answering it in the abstract. I want my island back, she wanted to say. I want you to take your golden-skinned son and your twenty-four flavors and your high-end truck and the backing of your New York financiers and I want you to go back where you came from, because if you aren’t going to stick around and put your kid in the school and your tax dollars in the coffers and your butt in the bleachers at basketball games that our kids take hour-long ferry rides to get to, then you don’t deserve to be here right now.

  “We are almost done here anyway,” Luca said. “It has been—how do you say it?—a shit summer for the business. And this is the . . . what is it, the ultimate straw.”

  Now she was perplexed. “But how can you say that? I drive past your truck all the time. There’s always a line.”

  “Lines, yes. But the overhead is high, and the profits are low. So many expenses! You can’t imagine what it costs, to get the ingredients here.”

  Oh, she thought, oh, but I can.

  “All of the ferry times and the missed shipments and the timing and the spoiling.” He waved his hand toward the line, which was now only five deep. “And people wait and wait and they buy only one or two macarons, and that is not enough to sustain us. My boss has
lost money on us this summer. I have lost money for him.” Luca looked disappointed in himself and Joy felt her sympathies begin to shift.

  He shook his head sadly. “We are only, what do you call it, men for hire, my son and I. It is a man in New York who has the money, who owns the truck, who made the plan. If it is not a success this year”—he made a poof motion and the accompanying sound—“then we will not be back next year. We knew that from the start. And it is not a success this year.”

  “So what will you do?” Joy asked.

  “We will go back home.”

  “New York?”

  “No, no. No. Home. Paris. France. So the penalty for this—this permit situation. Can you tell me more about that? I will have to let my boss know. I was not aware . . .”

  Joy felt something change then, a shifting of the tides. “You know what?” she said. “I’m just the messenger here. But let me put in a word with my boss and I’ll see what I can do about making this just a warning. Since you’re leaving soon and everything, it really doesn’t seem right to shake you down for a fee.”

  His relief was almost palpable. “Really?” he said. “I would be so grateful. You would do that for me?”

  She nodded magnanimously. It was such fun to wield power! Perhaps she should run for public office. “I would, Luca. I would do that for you.”

  After Luca had returned to the bowels of the truck, Joy opened the container and took a peek inside.

  Instead of a composed salad, the way a Niçoise was often served, the Patisserie had cut up the beans into bite-sized pieces, pan-fried the boiled potatoes to leave little crispy bits in the salad, and done the eggs in a medium boil, so that the yolks hadn’t gone all chalky. Besides the usual suspects—the olives, the cherry tomatoes chopped in half—she thought she spied some chopped fresh herbs, and a deep sniff told her she was right. Tarragon? Chervil? She didn’t see any anchovies in the salad, but when she dabbed her index finger into a piece of the (she had to admit, beautifully torn) butter lettuce and put it to her lips, she thought she tasted anchovy. The bastards must have minced it and put it right into the dressing.

  Even though Joy was about as loath as could be to say it, it sort of had to be said: that food truck had turned out a genius of a salad.

  Chapter 67

  Anthony

  Anthony, walking down Water Street, turned when he heard his name. Joy. His heart thumped and turned over, once, twice, experimentally, like an engine trying to start in the cold. He turned around. He’d missed her so much, but now here she was in front of him, and his heart was still full of his father’s death. It was hard now to find room for anything else.

  “I just heard about your father, Anthony. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” She held up a copy of the Block Island Times. Leonard’s author photo was on the front page. “I wish I knew sooner. I just found out. Anthony—” She raised an arm like she was about to hug him, but something in his face must have stopped her because she let it fall.

  Every time Anthony forgot for a fraction of a minute and was then reminded, he broke anew with the realization. His father was gone. “Thank you,” he said formally.

  “Can you come by the shop for a minute? Can I make you a coffee?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t want to leave my mother for too long. And I don’t really want to see anyone.”

  “Just for a minute? We just reopened.”

  “Okay. Just for a minute.” They made the short walk to Joy Bombs in silence. Olivia was working behind the counter, doing her usual thing. There was a small line. Anthony didn’t want to see any people. He felt raw. His sleep had been fractured; his organs felt swollen and tender.

  “Here,” Joy said. “Come back to my office. I’ll get you a coffee and bring it to you.”

  Anthony sat in the corner of the kitchen at her desk, which was piled high with paper and order forms and a manila folder that said invoices in Joy’s beautiful, crooked handwriting.

  When she returned with the coffee, Joy said, “Your mother was able to come. That’s really great.” She squeezed his hand.

  “My mother’s been here for several days,” he said. “Even before . . . It’s a long story. It’s a very long story. Cassie and Max were here too. My mother and I are leaving on the last ferry today. The funeral is on Sunday. My mother—” He was supposed to be good with words, but, of all of the words in the universe, there were none that felt right for Dorothy.

  The kitchen smelled like the remnants of that day’s baking (chocolate, lemon) and also like something surprising (basil?), and even besides that there was something else, something particularly Joy, something as wild and unsettling as the ocean itself. The way the light caught Joy’s face and her hair: his heart lurched. He might never have an opportunity to say what he wanted to say.

  “Listen,” he said. “Give me one more chance to say I’m sorry about the whole mess. I’m sorry about my secret past. I just need to say that, before I go.”

  “I just need to say that I don’t care that you plagiarized.” Joy’s voice was gentle. “I never cared about that. I cared that you lied to me, Anthony, that you didn’t even tell me you had a son.”

  “I know,” said Anthony. He shook his head. “I know. It’s terrible. And I love my son so, so much. You don’t even know.”

  “Of course I know. I’m a parent too. I’m divorced. I have a daughter. You didn’t have to hide any of your things from me. You didn’t have to be ashamed of them.”

  Anthony looked around the kitchen. The giant mixer, the prep tables, the cart that held dozens of empty trays waiting to be filled—it was all so familiar, so strangely intimate. He felt an ache in his throat.

  “I was ashamed of everything, Joy. Ashamed of my whole life before. When I came here, I just wanted to hide out. I didn’t even want to talk to anyone, never mind fall in love with someone. I wasn’t expecting any of this—I wasn’t expecting you, Joy Sousa. And once I met you, and Maggie, and even Pickles—and you all liked me the way I was, the guy without a past—I didn’t want to suddenly become the guy with a past.”

  Joy smiled. “I’m pretty tough, Anthony. I can handle a past. It wouldn’t have mattered to me.”

  “I know that now,” he said. “I even knew it after the first ten days with you. But by then it seemed like it was too late.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  They were both quiet for a moment.

  “I had this whole When Harry Met Sally list ready for you. The day of the storm. I looked for you, but I couldn’t find you. And then, my father—” His voice broke.

  She squeezed his hand again. “A When Harry Met Sally list? Like at the New Year’s Eve party?” The corners of her mouth turned up, just a little. He nodded. “I want to hear it.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. If that’s okay with you. If you feel up to it.”

  “Okay, then,” he said. He took a deep breath. He’d had this list ready since they’d fought out by Settlers’ Rock. “Here goes. I love how tough you are. I love that your daughter is fierce and independent because that’s how you are, Joy. Heck, I love that your name is Joy and that you pull it off. I love that you picked this island out of all the places in the world and you said, I’m going to set up shop here, and you did it. I love how you look in just your underwear. I love that you make fun of the tourists even though they’re the ones who buy most of your whoopie pies. I love that you drove that old neighbor of yours to the doctor once and instead of pretending you didn’t notice his shirt was on inside out, you told him so he could fix it before he embarrassed himself. Speaking of shirts: I love Maggie’s T-shirts, and I love that you actively seek out more of them for her. I love that you brush Pickles’s teeth.” He took a deep breath. He was surprised by how readily everything had come out. Grief could do that to you, though. It could open all of your pores, let all kinds of emotions escape, not just the sad ones. “I love how you brush your own teeth, for that matter, the way you come at them so earnestly, like you�
��re doing the most important job on the planet.”

  Joy was smiling. “But I don’t go too rough on the gums,” she said. “My dentist is very clear about that.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re totally gentle on the gums.”

  She nodded crisply. “Okay,” she said. “That’s a decent list.”

  “Now you say, ‘You say things like that, and you make it impossible to hate you.’”

  “Oh, brother,” she said. “I’m not going to say that.”

  “Because it’s not true?”

  “No,” she said. “Because I’m going to do this instead.” She kissed him, long, deep, and then he drew back, and then he kissed her. This was what he needed. This was solace.

  “Do you think you could come?” he asked, when they paused. “To the funeral?”

  She hesitated. “You don’t want me there. Do you?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, then I’ll be there. Of course I’ll be there. If you want me.”

  “Max won’t be there,” he said. “He’s too young. But Cassie will. It might be strange for you to meet them. But then again, it might not.”

  “As it turns out,” she said, “I’ve met them both. Sort of accidentally.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I’ll tell you the whole story, another time.”

  “Okay.”

  Her smile was whole and open. Her eyes were a mix of fondness and kindness and possibly—dare he say it?—love. She didn’t know about Dorothy, and what he’d found out about his father’s career. She didn’t know everything that had happened in the bookstore. There was so much left to talk about, so much left to say. “Definitely,” she said. “Another time.”

  Taken alone, they didn’t mean much, those two words: another, and time. But together—oh, the promises they held.

  Epilogue