by Grace Palmer
“Okay.”
She leaned down and gave Eliza a kiss. “Now, where did I leave my boyfriend?” she mumbled under her breath as she turned and disappeared back into the tide of partygoers.
Eliza closed her eyes and took a few more slow breaths. Then, wincing as she got back to her feet, she went off to find her brother and sisters.
It took her fifteen minutes to wrangle them all. But eventually, they snuck off to the beach and wandered down fifty yards or so from the fire.
“Who’s going to read it?” Eliza asked, holding out the letter.
“You are, duh,” Sara fired back.
Eliza balked. “Me? Why me?”
“You’re the oldest,” Holly said. “I thought that was a given.”
“I don’t want to read it! What if I cry?”
Holly snorted. “As if I won’t?”
“Maybe Brent should read it then,” Sara suggested.
“Nuh-uh,” he said, shaking his head and holding up his hands. “That’s not my cup of tea.”
“You’re the guy.”
“And you’re the one with a lot of excuses. Maybe you should read it.”
“Why would I—”
“Shush,” Eliza interrupted. “We’ll play odds-and-evens. Fair?”
“Fine,” everyone grumbled. Odds-and-evens was the age-old Benson method for settling familial arguments. On the count of three, everyone threw up either one or two fingers. Whoever was the odd one out lost. Most times, it was an even split, so they had to keep going until there was only one loser.
But tonight, on the count of three, Eliza looked down and saw that she was the only one holding up two fingers. She groaned. “That’s not fair! It’s my wedding day!”
“You lost, fair and square,” Brent reminded her. “These rules are sacred. No going back.”
She wanted to keep complaining, but he was right. Besides, she was the eldest. If anyone was going to take charge, it might as well be her.
So, with a deep sigh, she broke open the wax seal with her thumb, withdrew the pages from within, and held them under the light of Brent’s cell phone. Then she began to read.
31
Mae
The party was over. The caterers and wedding staff were just finishing up their final tasks, and all the revelers had disappeared one by one. Eliza and Oliver had slunk off together, drunk and in love. Holly and Pete took the kids home after they found Alice curled up under a table, fast asleep. Debra and her date, Sheriff Mike, Lola, Marshall and the pretty young lady he’d brought (Lena something or other, a veterinarian)—each of them swept by to give Mae a kiss on the cheek and convey their best wishes to the mother of the happy couple, then went off into the night to settle into their own beds in their own homes.
Mae understood the sentiment, certainly. There was no place like home. But she was content to sit here for a while under the fairy lights. She soaked up the silence. After hours of chaos, it was actually quite nice to hear nothing at all aside from the normal sounds of a calm Nantucket evening. Waves, crickets, breeze in the treetops. Pure bliss.
She opened her eyes when she heard the gate to the cottage’s backyard squeak open. Dominic rounded the corner, looking much the same as he had before—dapper, handsome, reserved, though he was on the far end of a handful of very strong whiskey drinks, so perhaps a little more flushed in the face than he might have been otherwise.
He came up to her with a kind of delicateness in his manner. Pulling up a chair, he set it down across from Mae and then sat down in it. He leaned back to look up into the night sky for a few long moments. Mae watched him and smiled. An unusual man, certainly. A lot went on in his mind that no one but him would ever be privy to. That was just the way things were, she supposed. There wasn’t much that she could do about it other than ask to be let into his heart whenever he could find a way for her to do so.
Eventually, he brought his gaze from the sky back down to earth, then to Mae. “I owe you a great number of apologies,” he said, with the air of someone who’d been thinking of what to say for a long time.
“Oh, Dominic, it’s quite—”
He held up a hand to cut her off. “Please forgive me for interrupting. I believe I know you well enough by now to say that it is quite in your nature to be apologetic when the fault is all my own. I can see your frustration written in you, and I know that I am the one who is responsible.” He sighed and scooted closer to her, taking one of her hands between his. “I came to you from a place of great sadness. In all the years since my daughter’s passing, I chose to turn my face away from it. It wasn’t until I came to you that I saw how grief ought to be handled. You are strong and wise, Mae. I hope you recognize that, because every person in your orbit sees it in you and draws strength and wisdom from your example.”
Mae bit her lip. She wanted to cry. None of this felt real. Between the buzzing surge of the champagne she’d drunk, the ethereal glow of the fairy lights overhead, and Dominic’s musical words, this felt like something out of a storybook, out of a dream. His hand was warm, though, and she could smell him—whiskey and books and cologne, all mingling together—and the beach just beyond the hedges, too, the brine and the sand and the gentle onrush of cool air as the storm edged closer to shore.
“I hope it is not a reach to tell you that I believe I love you, Mae Benson. To tell you that I believe that you helped me through something I did not know I needed help with. I hope I haven’t brought an undue burden into your life.”
“Dominic,” she whispered. She cupped his face in her free hand. “You haven’t brought any burdens anywhere, as far as I’m concerned. I only have simple words, not pretty words like yours, so I hope it’s all right if I just tell you that I love you, too. I only want to know what’s in your head and in your heart. That’s all. If you tell me those things, then—well, then I think I’d be a very happy woman with you.”
He smiled, slow and unsure at first but then gathering steam as her words settled into him. His eyes sparkled behind his glasses. She felt the rasp of his beard beneath her hand, lush and warm. He cleared his throat. “Then I suppose I ought to ask, just one more time to be sure: Is today the day you kick me out of the inn?”
Mae laughed. It was a callback to their old ritual, born on those quiet coffee mornings when she’d fallen in love with this man, little by little, like slipping into the ocean and finding that it’s neither as cold nor as scary as you feared from your old vantage point way up on the shore.
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “Not tomorrow, either.”
“That is certainly a relief,” he said.
He kissed her, then, because there wasn’t much else that either of them could say that mattered anymore. All the good words were taken. A kiss would have to do the rest.
Early that morning, before the wedding.
Mae had sat down at Dominic’s writing nook in the early hours of the dawn, before Dominic was awake. Taking one of his treasured fountain pens, she put it to a piece of parchment paper and began to write. She didn’t have a plan for what she was going to say, but as the pen found paper, the words flowed easily. She wrote what her heart said. And, though she’d never considered herself much of a writer, in the end, it came out just right.
“To my wonderful children,
First off, I ought to ask for your forgiveness. It would be better if I could tell you all these things in person. But every time I think about even starting to say what I’d like to say, I end up teary-eyed, and I plan on spending far too much time on my makeup for Eliza’s wedding to ruin it like that. So a letter will have to do, I’m afraid.
I’d like to start by telling you a story. Your father built the house on Howard Street with his bare hands. It was a gift to me, or so he said. Secretly, I think he did it because he wanted to show off a little bit. That’s all well and good—I liked seeing your father show off, and if he did it for my sake, well, so much the better.
In typical fashion, though, he couldn’t bear
to wait until he was done to reveal the secret to me. He was never much good at keeping secrets. He blindfolded me and drove me there, back in the days when we were staying in a cramped Nantucket bungalow far away from everything else. He sure took his time with the big reveal, too. Made me get out of the car and walk through the doorframe he hadn’t yet built into the kitchen he hadn’t yet finished. But I will remember for the rest of my days what he said when he finally let me take that blindfold off. He untied it from around my head and I blinked and blinked until I understood what was happening. Then he looked me in the eye and told me, “We are going to raise our family here.”
Children, that is exactly what we did. You came quickly, one after the other, and each of you brought a new kind of joy into our lives. It was like learning that there were new colors being dreamt up, colors you’d never thought of before! Who knew there was an Eliza color? A Holly, a Sara, a Brent color?
But as much of a blessing as children are, it is a scary thing sometimes, being a parent. You have to learn to live with a kind of fear that gets hold of you and won’t ever let go. I watched each of you sleep, I watched each of you cry, I watched each of you be sick and get hurt. And more often than not, I just had to sit and watch. There wasn’t a darn thing I could do about it, at least not without doing you more harm than good in the process. Sometimes I had to tell you no. That is just as hard for a parent as it is for a child, you know. I want to give you the world, and that is not nearly as straightforward as it sounds.
Grow up you did, though, and as you did, you each inherited a richer and more beautiful world than anything I could’ve handed to you on a silver platter. That’s not to say it was easy getting there. Though I think each of you is in such a gorgeous and happy place in your life right now, it wasn’t always this way, nor will it stay this way forever. We had our bumps along the path, didn’t we? And there are bumps yet to come. If I’ve learned anything in my time, it’s that there are always bumps to come.
Now is the part where I must ask for your forgiveness a second time. I’ve never been much good with my words. I’m a straightforward woman at heart, I suppose. So if what I say next comes off as naive or cheesy, then do me the kindness of never telling me that. I mean these things sincerely, in my own way.
What gets us through the bumps is love. The beauty of that is that the world is full of as many kinds of love as there are people. You can love a dog, a man, a child, a beach, a moment, a cloud, a wave, a wedding, a word, a kiss, a fruit, a glass of wine, a shooting star. You can love your siblings and your mother and your father. You can love each of them in different and conflicting ways and that is okay, because if you hold that love truly in your heart than it can live there for as long as you let it, even if there is anger or grief or sadness there, too.
I have grief. I have sadness. Even anger, for your father being taken away from us far before I thought we would have to reckon with that possibility. What I’m learning (and yes, even an old dog like me can still learn a new trick or two) is that the things that hurt us are often the soil for the seeds of the love that is yet to come. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we are a forward-looking family, and that means we have to keep our eyes on the horizon. Let the hurt stay where it is. But when you wake up every day, choose to water love on top of that. It is what gets us through the nights. It is what keeps us together. It is what makes us whole.
Lastly, I ask for your forgiveness once more, because I’ve rambled for an awfully long time. This is supposed to be a night for celebrating, not for an old lady lecturing you on the meaning of life. I leave you with this: I love each of you with all my heart. For as long as I am here with you and forever afterwards, I will continue to love you. Promise me this, though: that you will love each other and that you will keep loving all those in your life who deserve such love. It is the best thing we can give to ourselves and to our fellow humans. At the end of the day, perhaps it is even the only thing.
With love forever,
Mom (and Dad)
Get Book 4 in the Sweet Island Inn series, NO LOVE LIKE NANTUCKET, now!
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She built the Sweet Island Inn with her bare hands. But can Toni Benson build a life of happiness for herself?
Toni Benson’s life has been a roller coaster.
Years ago, the heartbreak caused by a cheating ex-husband left her in tatters.
Then she discovered the run-down fixer-upper that would become the Sweet Island Inn.
For a while, things were good.
But when her brother Henry’s tragic death sends her reeling all over again, she’s back to square one.
So she sets off on an overseas journey, in hopes of learning from scratch what kind of woman she is meant to be.
She wasn’t looking for love.
But it found her anyways.
Follow Toni’s journey around the world as the Nantucket native navigates an explosive romance, an unbearable tragedy, and the prospect of starting life anew in her sixties.
In the end, only one thing is certain: there is no love like her love for Nantucket.
Travel back to the very beginnings of the Sweet Island Inn and follow along with the soaring highs and heartbreaking lows of Aunt Toni’s story in NO LOVE LIKE NANTUCKET, the fourth installment of author Grace Palmer’s beloved Sweet Island Inn series.
Click here to get swept away in NO LOVE LIKE NANTUCKET!
Or check out a sneak preview below:
Eighteen years earlier.
Atlanta, Georgia—June 15, 2000
Looking back on it, it would be easy for her to see that this was the kind of day that would change her life forever.
But at the time, it seemed to Toni Benson like it was just any other day. Just a normal Thursday in the middle of June, two weeks shy of her ninth wedding anniversary to her husband, Jared. The sun was shining; the birds were chirping; not a thing looked out of place.
Work that day went by in a flash. She spent most of it thinking about the surprise she was planning for her husband and browsing the Internet to double-check all the reservations she had made.
She’d never been much good at keeping secrets, especially not from Jared. He was the more mysterious of the two of them, certainly. As a matter of fact, in nine years of marriage and nearly twelve years of dating, she’d hardly learned much about him at all.
He always said, with the same sort of exasperated, ‘Why are you even bothering with this?’ kind of tone, that there just wasn’t much to know. He had a mother he didn’t talk to and a hometown not worth mentioning. No father figure, no siblings, no past to speak of.
If she pressed him on it—when she’d had a glass of wine, say, or if she was just feeling a little nosy—he’d mention something vague about small town life. He’d been born in either Kansas or Arkansas—she never could remember which—and then, according to his version of events, he’d more or less shown up one day at the law firm where she worked as a paralegal. Fully formed, fully handsome, toting a charming smile and an impressive binder with which to pitch the firm’s partners on his budding software company.
That was that, as far as origin stories go. He’d stayed behind after his presentation to flirt with her a bit, while she made excuses to linger and help him take down the backdrop he’d set up. Neither of them had been in any great hurry for him to leave.
Eventually, he’d asked to take her to dinner, and she’d pretended to ponder it for a bit before saying yes. He was awfully handsome, which made her a bit wary, but he seemed genuine enough. He had dimples set on either side of a country boy’s aw-shucks kind of smile, and that felt like something that could be relied upon.
One date led to another, and before she knew it, they were moving in together in a little house in Virginia Highlands, an up-and-coming neighborhood near Atlanta.
It was fun for the longest time. Jared loved to take Toni on weekend drives in his little Mazda convertible around the rich neighborhoods in Cobb County.
They’d slow down or stop outside the gates of the truly jaw-dropping mansions to ogle. He would whistle and slap Toni on the thigh to point out this ironwork fountain or that fluted marble column, which always made her laugh.
He was like a little kid on those excursions, just excited to see parts of the world that blew his hair back. And if he seemed a little overly keen on the trappings of the rich folks—well, who could blame him? They were awfully nice houses, after all. Anybody would get a little bit jealous, standing outside the gates of a home like that.
His excitement made her excited about life, too. He could be such an infectious, spontaneous guy, the kind of guy who shows up late to a dinner and immediately orders three bottles of wine for the table. Not because he was rich, though his software company had at long last begun to show some real promise in that department. But because it was simply a fun and spontaneous thing to do.
Which was why she was thrilled and nervous alike to be the one taking the lead in the “fun and spontaneous” category for their Fourth of July plans.
“You think he’ll like this one, Solange?” she asked nervously. Her fellow paralegal, Solange—a gorgeous, slim woman with skin like caramel and perfect, voluminous ringlets that Toni, with her stick straight blonde hair, was eternally jealous of—looked over to Toni’s computer screen for the umpteenth time that day.
“Stop,” Solange counseled patiently. “You’re freaking out. He’s gonna love it. He loves you. You love him. What else matters?”
Toni bit her lip. “Everything matters, Sol. I want this to be fun. And you know Jared. He can be, I don’t know… particular, sometimes.”
That was true, too. For every memory of fun, life-of-the-party Jared she had, there was an equal and opposite memory of a time when he just hadn’t at all reacted the way she thought he would to something.