Still Summer

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  When the time came, Tracy went to Champaign on a basketball scholarship. Janis went to Triton Junior College and toyed with marketing, as well as with every boy in a twenty-mile radius. Janis was so winsome with her thick auburn blunt cut and her perky rear end that Tracy couldn’t believe they’d come from the same gene pool. Janis turned Dave on and off like a faucet until, in dental school, he made a play for a sassy classmate.

  Rapidly, Janis had given her hand but, unlike Tracy, not her last name. Dave’s surname was Chawson. “It might be dental,” Janis opined, “but it’s not musical.” Olivia, meanwhile, had turned a junior-year-abroad romance in Italy into a romance. Even the ending had been appropriately tragic, hence Livy’s triste return to her homeland.

  “She’s going to have to sit on my lap if we’re going to fit that stuff in here,” Holly groused as Olivia began the prodigious task of overseeing the loading of her luggage. Put that there—no, no, that has glass in it—on top, that’s right. . . .

  “At least you won’t feel her,” Janis said. “Do you think she weighs a hundred pounds?”

  “Why are we taking her on a cruise?” Holly asked sotto voce.

  As only a teacher could do, Tracy gave Holly the Look. She whispered, “Because she’s a widow, and we love her, and for your information, she paid for everything except the airfare! Be nice!”

  It was Tracy’s loyalty, not Olivia’s royalty, that inspired this devotion, which drove Holly mad. She had been by far the more affectionate friend, the one who never failed to write Tracy when Tracy was downstate at school, who went to see her play, and fail, in the quarterfinals at state, who welcomed baby Cammie home with a hand-smocked cradle skirt and coverlet, who never forgot a birthday, who co-hosted Tracy’s Christmas open house. Yet nothing was too good for Olivia. Holly understood, but she did not accept. . . .

  Tracy’s daughter, Cammie, would later say that had it not been for the tendency of everyone except Holly to oblige Olivia’s noblesse, things might have turned out another way. Lives might have drifted on, uninspired, perhaps, but unscarred.

  But in that moment, as the three of them piled out of the car and engulfed Olivia, the umbrella of years collapsed over them and bound them close. They were again a complete set. The ineradicable tenderness and surplus of memories they shared were all that mattered.

  “Do you believe I’ve just flown nine hours and I’m going to turn around and fly nine more tomorrow?” Olivia asked. “All because of you nutballs?”

  “Is that an Italian word?” Holly asked.

  “Nuttaballa,” Olivia said.

  “But you’re a jet-setter,” Janis said. “You used to fly to Paris for a weekend to shop.”

  “Europe is teeny. The sea is big,” said Olivia.

  “You were always profound,” Holly said with a grin.

  And they pranced and hugged again.

  Day Two

  Lenny went home to his family for the short breaks between charters.

  It was only fitting. Lenny was the captain, and Michel, though he carried the title of captain for the benefit of their guests, was well aware that this was a fiction. Michel was only working his way toward buying into a half share of Opus. And he had a long way to go.

  Lenny would jump in the van that would meet him at the harbor and drive him to a meadow outside the town of Charlotte Amalie. There was a meadow there and a dusty track that led to a four-room house, built of stucco and air, where sisal rugs and buckwheat-filled mattresses and pillows made up most of the decor. All that a strong breeze might not blow away were the massive ebony dining set given them as a wedding gift and the love between forty-six-year-old Lenny and his twenty-six-year-old Polynesian wife, Meherio.

  After the navy, after having been a master carpenter in Colorado, and a horse trainer, and latterly skipper of a dive boat, Lenny had married the first woman he’d ever actually loved. It seemed to Michel that Lenny had taken his time about it. But he’d made up for lost years. In this place of paper lanterns and passing fancies, Lenny now had the aggregate all men long for: a lifework, a love, a child.

  And he had Michel, a partner for whom any erstwhile loner would be grateful. Lenny relied on Michel. Though Michel’s experience was shallow, his instincts were keen.

  Just before the pumper arrived to flush out the heads, Michel accepted with grace the four one-hundred-dollar bills pressed into his hands by their debarking clients, a retired military diver, his wife, and their two grown sons. He hoped, as he hoisted their luggage, they would not want to linger and chat.

  There was so much to do.

  He knew that his prescience about a certain sail’s likelihood of giving out—in a certain place at a certain time—was clumsy compared with Lenny’s. The stitched place on the Opus’s mainsail wasn’t as long as Michel’s fingernail, but Lenny had spotted it and had it double sewn. A new sail would cost the gross revenue of two charters of four guests, twenty thousand dollars. When it came to Opus, Lenny was as discerning and alert to every sound and activity as a mother was to a newborn. Although they were betting against the odds, Lenny was confident that the weather would continue to pour forth honeyed days and warm, spangled nights. But Michel knew that June could be dicey, and storms could roar out of navy night skies. Still, the extra six thousand paid by the woman who wanted these dates was needed money. It would help tide them over in the off-season. Lenny and Meherio would travel to Trinidad, where Lenny would work for five months as a scuba instructor. Michel would help Quinn Reilly, running the pub for him while Quinn made his annual pilgrimage to Ireland to see his ninety-year-old mother and father. Michel would live upstairs from the bar in a spartan room. Every penny he squirreled away would put them closer to transferring ownership of the boat from the Bank of America to themselves.

  So with determination, and a certain resignation, Michel tied on a bandanna and attacked the boat, grimy and smeared after a week of close-quarters occupancy. It was always an unsavory rec-ord of a fine time: smells, spills, hair, and trash. This was okay. The maintenance he did was nothing compared with what Lenny had done on his own, in the restoration of Opus. She’d been towed into St. Thomas by a salvager, a derelict, abandoned by her elderly owners after a fire off Tortola. Two days in the inflatable with a handheld radio and a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke had doused the couple’s fire for the seafaring life. Lenny had claimed her for dimes on the dollar.

  As he bagged trash, Michel watched as Lenny, unable to wait, leapt over the side of the boat and waded up to the place where Meherio waited in the parking lot. She had tied a tangerine-and-violet pareu with a gold ring beneath her breasts. Her breasts were like bronzed pears. Their baby son was hitched on her hip in a sling. Meherio’s sister, who owned one of the local van taxis, had brought her to the landing. Michel had to believe that Meherio was indifferent in bed or never washed her feet. Otherwise it would be impossible to live with a woman so radiant and apparently imperturbable and not succumb to worship.

  Michel thought of the Australian girl who sold opals at the studio between Reilly’s and the outdoor market. The Australian girl was blond and curvaceous and had a grating tendency to hum show tunes, even during sex. Although she gave rambunctiously of her body to Michel, she took care that he left no fingerprints on her heart. This wounded Michel, because although he did not love her, he wanted her to love him.

  He shook his head to banish the daydreams of the ways in which Meherio and Lenny would spend their next hours, just as he opened the windows in the cabins to ventilate them.

  He checked the battery levels, did a test of the radio, made sure the bilge was dry, checked the amas to make sure the canned goods and batteries were in good order, put the charts for the upcoming crossing in a waterproof zip folder on Lenny’s desk in the cockpit, turned all the lights on and off and replaced a few burned-out bulbs, yanked on the jib and ran the sheets, topped off the tanks with wash water. Barely anything had been used on the last charter, since the wife of the military diver wanted no mo
re than to eat restaurant meals each night and toddle between St. John and St. Thomas with their string shopping bags. They would refuel again at Soper’s Hole, no reason now. He checked the rigging and lines for frayed places and inspected the ground tackle. Then he began to scrub—floors, toilets, seats, and then, with fresh rags, the stovetop, refrigerator, oven, and, finally, the deep triangular saloon, all furnished in fine maple. He collected his trash bags and leapt out to bin them, vacuumed and brushed the overstuffed cushions, and stripped the beds and table linens for Meherio to launder.

  Every time he cleaned Opus, he marveled that this gleaming and magnificent creature, a fifty-three-foot trimaran with hulls as graceful as archangels’ wings, had once been a crusted wreck. Lenny had spared nothing, bartering his own sweat work and, later, Meherio’s sewing for the finest leavings of other wrecks. The cockpit and steps were furnished in teak and brass. The windows were etched with musical notes. The double-bed berths felt like small rooms, not submarine bunks. In a pinch, they’d had a smaller guest, perhaps a child up for adventure, bunk in one of the amas, the side hulls, without ever disturbing the portion Lenny had walled off in one for his emergency locker, in the other for his canned goods. Lenny had taken every opportunity to pull in light and configure space. Even Michel’s smaller berth, and Lenny’s, which lay aft, could be opened to combine into one lavish suite. Opus would run a nimble eight knots with good winds, in flight like the gull she was. Michel had seen her do eleven when only they were aboard.

  Michel and Lenny met while both worked on the same huge dive boat. One day, both of them made the simultaneous observation—looking out over the roiling and bobbing sunburned bodies of divers in every shape and size—that this sight put them in mind of the sinking of Titanic. In the following days, they appraised and admired each other. Michel envied Lenny his instinctive sea skill, a preternatural sense of what might glide from behind a rock, his scent for a squall that no radar could detect. Lenny valued Michel’s utter patience with fools. He had a knack for knowing what people needed before they knew why they were as disgruntled as hungry toddlers: be it a joke, a compliment, some casual assurance, a snack, a word of encouragement. He could jolly an Italian hotdog out of his determination to go down alone, when Lenny had to walk away from the fool’s bravado just to keep his temper. He could stop short of coddling the most egregiously wealthy German burgher and remain genial without obsequiousness. At the end of the day, Michel’s pockets bulged with tips. Before Opus was even seaworthy, Lenny asked Michel to consider throwing in with him. And though Lenny had scores of acquaintances, a year later he had chosen Michel to be best man at his wedding.

  Michel finished a cursory inventory of the batteries and winches, the dozens of small rings that could rupture, clips and clamps that could work their way free, whatever could crack or slacken or snap, and sat down to make his list of provisions.

  As he gathered food, he would also shop for gossip among his friends. He would have a beer with Quinn Reilly, owner of Reilly’s Irish Pub and Hard Goods on Rosalia Street, and listen to Quinn’s lamentations about the girl he was trying to woo (in more than one sense) away from his rival at Charlotte Amalie’s other Irish bar, The Quiet Man. He would convince the baker, Marie, to trim his hair in exchange for a thrilling tale about two brothers who’d gotten drunk and knifed each other on their rented sailboat. He’d heard that Avery Ben, the jeweler who had crafted a bracelet of titanium and pearl for the fiftieth birthday of Michel’s mother, had sold his signature ring to a little woman from Dallas who looked as though she couldn’t afford sunglasses. She didn’t even dicker on the price, though Avery would have come down from forty to thirty thousand dollars! Abel, the knife sharpener, had just learned he was a grandfather, gift of his beautiful daughter in Arizona.

  These were Michel’s surrogate family. They looked after the bag in which he kept his grandfather’s pocket watch, his books and photographs, his letters from his mother. They thought of him when he was away.

  Among island immigrants, Michel was typical.

  They said of people who came away from the home of their birth to live rough by the sea that they were either wanted or unwanted.

  Michel was one of the latter.

  Not quite the scion of a prosperous family who exported lush French designer clothing from Montreal, he had failed to finish high school, done the obligatory stint as a deejay, refused college, and ceded his place at the urbane firm of Eugène-Martin to his brother, Jean. Michel took without pride the proffered handout his father sent him every six months. It almost, but not quite, paid for essentials.

  Michel trod a fine line between an established man and a vagabond. He hoped to cross it.

  He had not fallen into drug use or filth, like the American boy, Asa, whose parents were millionaires ten times over. Asa stood behind a pushcart with blank eyes and clean hands, selling fruit ices, and would do this until he was an old man. Michel took risks but also cared for himself. He went to mass when he was in port and visited the doctor every six months. If he had to save up to see a dentist, he did. He flew home to his family at Christmas.

  His first stop would be Reilly’s, where he would trade on that old friendship for a favor. Friendships grew old quickly in these salt islands, where so many stayed for so little time. As he wandered into the perpetual gloom of the tavern, Michel called to Quinn, “You’ll have to open the hardware for me. I need can openers. We’ve let the last one rust up.”

  “You let it rust or did Lenny?” Quinn asked. “Does he know?”

  Michel cast his eyes down, and Quinn nodded in sympathy. Never once would they need to open the tinned food or rip apart the freeze-dried ready-to-eat military meals that Lenny insisted on buying, calling them good nutrition at a great price. But Lenny would be furious if he knew that there was only one working can opener on Opus, that Michel had left the last can openers in storage too long without attention. The coruscating air worked away at everything.

  Because it was his day off, Quinn was on his fifth pint and it not yet noon, so he insisted that Michel come back the following morning. Michel told him about their charter: four American ladies who’d been friends since school days, a crossing from St. Thomas to Grenada, lots of free sailing, and not much of the boredom of putting in and out for trinkets. The ladies would amuse themselves—reading, sunning, gossiping. He and Len would provide the occasional dive or tale, a board game or a movie on a rainy night. There would be no honeymooners at postnuptial war or carping teenagers.

  Michel bade Quinn good-bye and told him to look for his return in a few weeks, give or take. Upon leaving the pub, he began to work his way down Rosalia Street, into the market, and onto Center Cove Road, adroitly hoisting cases of bottled water and wine into the back of Lenny’s pitted old Dodge truck. He caught himself hoping that four American ladies could somehow provide a bit of amusement. For three months, he’d brought his fluent bonhomie to bear on newlyweds who shook the boat with their moans and spats, family reunions of families who would have been better off dismembered, even six squabbling Boy Guides or Scouts or whatever they were called in the States. He’d laughed when he’d seen one of Lenny’s notes in the log they kept in a cursory way: “Weather, sailing fine. Guests loud.”

  Michel glanced at his list.

  “Drinks with little umbrellas,” Bridget, the charter broker, had written. Lots of them. To amuse Michel, she’d drawn a little sketch of a lady in a bikini with a martini glass as big as she was. One of the ladies, Tracy, was a vegetarian who sometimes ate fish. All were coffee drinkers. No absurd egg or wheat or peanut allergies. Michel leaned on the truck hood and added liqueurs to the usual checklist and a fierce, good rum, Barbancourt white from Haiti, some Australian wines, shellfish, and chicken. No spices were wanting. In the morning, he would buy his produce, when the market food was new, eggs, bread, and vegetables, just enough for the first couple of days. They would not load up for the whole crossing now, but pick up more stores in St. John, because Lenny w
as fanatic about quality. Lenny would chart the course, bake cinnamon rolls, make flawless eggs Benedict, poach monkfish in lemongrass and wine, chop vegetables for gazpacho, braise Cuban beef with fried plantains. He would keep the drinks tart sweet and plentiful, snowy with chopped ice. Michel would tell the jokes and lead the dives, strip off his shirt when hauling on the halyards to make it look like hard work and give the old gals a bit of an eyeful.

  One of the women was a certified diver.

  One had proposed to try a dive.

  Ten tanks, and the compressor would do. More than do.

  He must not forget the can opener. And peanut butter was running low. He scribbled a note.

  Michel picked up the bedding from Meherio.

  By the time the ladies were settling into their rooms at the Golden Iguana tonight, Michel would have played with Lenny’s baby, Anthony, phoned his mother, spent an hour in the bed of the Australian girl, brought aboard and stored everything but the morning produce and bakery, and have thrown himself into his cabin for a rapturous twelve-hour sleep.

  After he made the beds, read a page of Tom Wolfe, and began to drift off, Michel hoped the ladies’ swimsuits would not have skirts. This vexed him unreasonably. American women were too fat, as a rule, but Michel preferred the ones who let it be rather than try to hide it.