Five days after the storm, Helen Simmons was laid to rest next to her beloved husband in the Island Cemetery, where, visitors to the cemetery noted, the most beautiful flowers were left every year on both graves in late June.
Later people said that if the winds hadn’t been so strong because of the storm, if the lights hadn’t gone out, things might have turned out differently for Leonard Puckett. If the rescue squad had been able to get there sooner. If, if, if.
“It was just—life, and then no life. Just like that,” Bridget Fletcher said for a long time after that, to anyone who would listen. “No matter what anyone tried to do. The life was just gone.”
When Bridget began the first semester of her MFA program at Boston University in the fall, the first story she attempted was about witnessing the death of a great man. Most everyone in her seminar dismissed it as maudlin, or flat, or insipid. Unrealistic. Bridget, unused to the evisceration that was an MFA seminar, felt hot tears rise. “But it really happened,” Bridget insisted—which, everyone in that program came to learn, was not a defense of a poorly done story. She put the work away for a long time.
Years later, when Pauline Morrison would read the debut novel by the hot new entry on the literary scene, one Bridget Fletcher, she’d recognize a small scene in the middle of a chapter—not crucial to the overall plot—in which a young shop owner performed CPR on a customer, thereby saving his life. In fiction, Pauline (who was no writer herself) understood, we can sometimes change that which we could not change in real life.
Lu Trusdale’s agent, Abigail Knowles, was at first worried and disappointed when she learned that Dinner by Dad’s creator was a woman. “I don’t know, though,” she said. “You know what, let me talk to my boss.” She spoke more quietly into the phone, like she was the one with the secret. “I’m actually really quite low down here. I’m just starting out. Huxley has the real power. I’ll have to talk to him.”
Forty-five minutes later she called back. “Huxley reminded me about Elena Ferrante,” she said. “Nobody knew who she was for the longest time but that didn’t keep those books from selling bazillions of copies.” It was a basic tenet of human nature, Huxley had reminded Abigail, that people loved secrets and scandal more than they loved almost anything else. “In fact, he said the mystique was partly why the Ferrante books sold so well. Also they were brilliant. But anyway, Huxley says we organize a PR campaign around the idea of this mystery dad. We’ll keep with the charcoal drawings. Once you get really big, we’ll do a reveal.”
Abigail gave Lu the names of a couple of PR people who might be interested in helping. “The first one is pricey,” she said. “But we’ve had a few authors who have used her, and she’s supposed to be the best. Her name is— Hang on, I’m just looking it up. Okay, here it is. Do you have a pen? Shelly Salazar.”
It took a long time for the Trusdales to find a good nanny. Sebastian bit the first two, and Chase scared away the next one when he put the pet hamster in her sneaker. When they were in between nannies Lu had to call on Nancy’s help, which Nancy managed to offer both willingly and judgmentally. Sebastian’s first trip to the emergency room happened when Lu was in New York, meeting with the designer for her cookbook. Chase’s soccer playoff game was the same day she had a photo shoot scheduled with three other up-and-coming food bloggers for the New York Times to be used as part of the big reveal. Chase scored, and he looked immediately for Lu, and Lu wasn’t there. Lu missed Sebastian’s school play when she was speaking at Sapor! in San Francisco.
Sometimes Lu had to speak directly to herself in the mirror, out loud. She had to say, You. Wanted. This. Now go and get it. Testing recipes for a cookbook was painstaking and time-consuming, and she had to rent industrial kitchen space and hire an assistant to do it, because it was too difficult and disruptive at home. It was a lot of work to keep up the blog and at the same time manage advertisers and affiliate sponsors without letting them take over. As Dinner by Dad’s visibility increased, so did Lu’s (and Leo’s) responsibilities. The social media alone sometimes felt like a full-time job. The money helped, of course, although it didn’t do all the heavy lifting, because money never did. There were rocky days in the marriage and there were smooth days, but overall there were far more smooth than rocky. When Lu was in the thick of it, cooking, writing, tweeting, thinking, learning, responding to readers’ comments and queries, it felt like she was on the only correct path, and that it was straight and sure.
In March on Block Island you might have a series of rainy days followed by an early spring stunner, sunshine all over, crocuses thinking about poking their heads out. The next day you could have a wind kicking up from the southeast, holding the ferries back. Temperatures could be in the forties or in the sixties or the thirties or the seventies.
Almost nothing was open. Well, Joy Bombs was, from seven o’clock to ten o’clock each morning so the locals could get a cup of coffee before they walked their dogs on the beach or caught the ferry to the mainland for some shopping or took their places in the various year-round island businesses—the schools, the police station, the medical center. The post office was open full-time, as was the diner at the airport, and the bookstore managed to find enough customers three days a week. The Spring House Hotel served dinner Wednesday through Saturday.
Maggie’s school hours were regular, and she was surprisingly busy with after-school sports or other activities. On the weeks when Anthony retrieved Max from Cassie on the mainland and brought him to the island they felt like a real family, the four of them. They went sledding in front of the Spring House Hotel and iceboating on Sachem Pond.
It took Anthony some time after his father’s death to convince Dorothy that theirs was a story that needed to be told. In the abstract, she was uncertain. Her grief was tremendous, all-consuming, palpable, and complicated, like all grief is. Then he showed her the first three chapters when he was home for a visit. She poured a glass of scotch, disappeared into Leonard’s study, and turned up the Puccini. An hour or so later she found Anthony in the kitchen and pressed the pages into his hand.
“Do it,” she said, her eyes damp. “Keep going. Write it.”
And he would. He did. Finally, after such a long time of trying and failing, Anthony Puckett had something to say.
Fame and Infamy: A Memoir of a Father and a Son was harder to write than both of Anthony’s novels combined. He showed an early draft to Huxley Wilder, whose belief in Anthony returned once he had his twenty grand and a promising new manuscript. After he read the draft, Huxley swooned. (Not literally.) Huxley was eager to start shopping the book around. He began dropping hints about it during his various lunches with editors. He had nine editors from six different houses drooling over it before the manuscript was ready to submit. And they both knew that early attention like that could drive a book up and up and up, all the way to the sky.
Chococoa Baking Company Chocolate with Creamy Vanilla Buttercream Filling Whoopie Pie
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg
2 cups all-purpose (or gluten-free) flour
1/2 cup Dutch process chocolate
11/4 tsp baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 cup buttermilk
Preheat oven to 375 degrees (190 C). Line 3–4 large baking sheets with parchment paper.
Place the butter, sugar, vanilla extract, and egg in a large bowl and beat together until light and fluffy.
Sift flour, chocolate, baking soda, and salt into the bowl and mix together.
Add buttermilk and stir until combined.
Using a level 2-inch (5 cm) ice cream scoop or heaping tablespoons, make 24 scoops. They will vary in size.
Leave at least 3 inches (7.5 cm) of space between each one.
Bake in oven 10–12 minutes, until firm to the touch. Transfer to a wire rack.
Creamy Vanilla Buttercream Filling
&nbs
p; 3/4 cup (11/2 sticks) butter, unsalted, softened
3/4 tsp vanilla extract
31/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 tbsp milk or cream
Place butter and vanilla extract in a large bowl and beat together with a wooden spoon until combined (or use electric mixer on low speed).
Sift in the confectioners’ sugar. Add the milk or cream and beat together until light and fluffy. Use immediately or store in refrigerator.
Take two cooled whoopie pie lids of about the same size and place flat side up. Using a small ice cream scoop, place a scoop of vanilla filling on one lid. Place together gently, being careful not to press too hard.
Makes enough for 12 whoopie pies
Adapted from the award-winning Chococoa Baking Company recipe.
© 2014 Chococoa Baking Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Acknowledgments
I have experienced neither the crazy highs of Leonard Puckett’s writing career nor the abysmal lows of Anthony Puckett’s, but I have been around the block enough to realize how lucky I am to be here. Elisabeth Weed of The Book Group has been my tireless, optimistic, hardworking, and clever agent from the beginning, and I am grateful. My new editor Kate Nintzel’s brilliant, indelible mark is all over this book, and thank goodness for that. It improved by leaps and bounds with her touch. Thank you to Vedika Khanna for steering me through the nitty-gritty details. I’m still getting to know everybody else at William Morrow, but I feel so warmly welcomed. To borrow a phrase from that famous redheaded orphan, I think I’m gonna like it here. A big thanks goes to Jenny Meyer for handling foreign rights.
Pam Gasner of the Block Island Historical Society was kind enough to give me a tour of the island and share some tidbits about life there. Kate Butcher, Molly Fitzpatrick, and Vincent Carlone answered various island-related questions for me. Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University helped me sort out the details of weather events on Block Island. Block Island is truly a special place and such a rewarding location to set a book. Though I don’t live there, I did my best to understand it and to honor it. I tried to keep geographical liberties to a minimum, but I may have taken a few, especially placing a couple of imaginary cottages close to the water in service of the story. I hope the island understands. Kathryne Taylor of one of my favorite food blogs, Cookie and Kate, answered my many questions about food blogging, and many of her recipes inspired my fictional food blogger. Dianne Jacob also helped me understand the industry.
The inspiration for Joy Bombs came from a local whoopie pie shop in my town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Julie Ganong and Alan Mons of Chococoa Baking Company and Café, who reinvented the whoopie pie long before Joy did, generously gave me insight into their fabulously successful business. (If you visit Newburyport, you really need to stop by.) Joy Bombs’ motto, “Reinventing the whoopie pie,” is a twist on Chococoa’s “A twist on the classic whoopie pie.”
My friends and neighbors, Marc and Cindy Burkhardt, have been beyond generous with keys to their beach house to allow me some writing time away from home. (I especially appreciate the upgrade to an ocean view this year.) Newburyport wouldn’t be the same without my mom squad, who have never met a cocktail menu or a dance floor they didn’t like, and my mental stability wouldn’t be the same without my frequent runs with Jana Schulson.
Jennifer Truelove, always a willing researcher, this time helped me find the right T-shirts for Maggie to wear and create the perfect titles for Leonard Puckett’s body of work. The other third of our trio, Margaret Dunn (along with Wally Dunn), let me pretend to be a playwright for a weekend to join her retreat in Maine when I was working on the first draft of this book.
My parents, John and Sara Mitchell, and my sister, Shannon Mitchell, have never been ashamed to make up ninety percent of the audience of a book reading all on their own, and for their love and unwavering support, and that of the Moore and Destrampe families, I thank them.
Addie, Violet, and Josie: you are turning into such smart, interesting, independent, funny, talented young women right before my very eyes. I am so fortunate to have a front seat to your show, which often requires a good amount of audience participation. In this case I don’t mind.
A bookseller recently dubbed my husband, Brian Moore, my “number one fan,” and not only do I feel incredibly lucky to be able to agree with that, the sentiment goes both ways, forever.
About the Author
MEG MITCHELL MOORE worked for several years as a journalist for a variety of publications before turning to fiction. She lives in the beautiful coastal town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, with her husband and their three daughters. The Islanders is her fifth novel.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the islanders. Copyright © 2019 by Meg Mitchell Moore. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph © Ibai Acevedo (woman); © Sandra Cunningham / Trevillion Images (background)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JUNE 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-284008-0
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-284006-6
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