No Beach Like Nantucket

by Grace Palmer

  Holly took a deep breath, stifled both her laughter and her sadness, and turned to look at Thomas behind his desk.

  “Good afternoon, Principal O’Shaughnessy,” she said gravely, inclining her head in greeting. She turned back to Grady. “Grady, do you want to tell me what I’m doing here?”

  Good start, she congratulated herself. She was mad, make no mistake about it, but she also knew that she had a role to play here. So, even if she didn’t exactly feel the way she was acting, she had to keep it up anyway. For Grady’s sake, if nothing else. Pulling pigtails today turned into stealing cars and dealing drugs a few years down the line. She needed to nip this in the bud, like a good mother should. She fixed him with her sternest Momma Bear glare, crossed her arms, and waited for him to respond.

  “I’m—I’m sorry—it wasn’t my fault—it was Danny, he—”

  “Grady Carl Goodwin!” she interrupted. “Tell me the truth right now. Lying or blaming others is not going to help you.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the principal steeple his fingers together and watch mother and son act out their respective parts over the rim of his eyeglasses.

  Grady’s head fell and he gnawed at his bottom lip. That was his telltale giveaway. The lip preceded tears, ten times out of ten. Holly felt a pang in her chest. She wanted to sweep him up and hold him tight, tell him everything was going to be okay.

  But she couldn’t, not yet. She had a role to play first.

  “I’m sorry,” he whimpered, this time in a soft, sad voice that wrenched her heart out of place. “I shouldn’t have put glue in Sally Bryant’s hair. It wasn’t nice of me.”

  It took every ounce of willpower for Holly not to burst out laughing. As exhausting as the last three or four months had been since Grady’s behavior had taken a turn for the worse, this was an unforeseen development. He put glue in a little girl’s hair?

  She managed to squelch the laughter as she sighed, rubbed her temples, and took a seat in the other chair in the office. This is important, she counseled herself. Remember Kathy Swanson’s kid, Jeremy? He used to color on the walls with permanent marker, and now he’s tending bar at a strip club in Southie. Nip this in the bud before it’s too late.

  “If I may …” Principal O’Shaughnessy began. He arched an eyebrow at Holly as if to ask for her permission. She glared at Grady once more, then nodded and let him continue. “Young Mr. Goodwin here has been on a bad run, shall we call it?” he said.

  Holly did her best not to roll her eyes. The principal, Thomas, was a reasonably good guy. He was married to Holly’s dentist, so she and his wife chitchatted about school stuff every now and then when she went in for cleanings. But he was an insufferably long-winded speaker. Holly could swear that he lapsed into a nonsensical British accent from time to time, though he was born and raised in Plymouth, as far as Holly knew.

  “That seems like a fair way to describe things,” Holly replied.

  “He and I have spoken at length about this, and I’m sure you’d like to do the same. But, if you don’t mind, I’d like to let you do that at your leisure at home, and instead take this time for you and me to talk, Mrs. Goodwin. Is that suitable for you?”

  Holly nodded. She looked at Grady. “Go. Wait for me outside. Do not even think about moving from that waiting room, am I understood?”

  Grady nodded back, bottom lip still trembling. She could tell that he was fighting tears. It hurt her heart. He slid from the seat, dropped down to his feet, and pushed through the door.

  They both watched him go. When it clicked shut, she looked back to Thomas.

  “It’s been a tough semester for him,” Holly began. Her stern Mom face had left with Grady, and in its place was the mask of sheer exhaustion. Life had come full circle indeed. Returning from Nantucket in September, she’d felt alive in a way she hadn’t felt for a long time. But that energy, like Grady’s baby giggles, seemed like nothing more than a distant and possibly invented memory.

  “That it has,” Thomas agreed.

  “It’s just that his dad has been working a lot, and Grady’s going through kind of a stage or whatever where it’s been hard to get through to him, and Alice is well, I don’t even know, she’s doing her own thing, like opposite but equal, and it’s just that—”

  Thomas held up a hand. “I understand, Mrs. Goodwin.”

  “It’s Holly, please.”

  “If I may, it appears to me as a long-standing professional in the educational field that what Grady needs is a firm hand at the reins, so to speak. He needs a father figure. A mother is good for love and care, but a father must set the lines to be followed.”

  Holly had to bite her lip to stop from saying something rude. Thomas had just crossed the line from windbag to jerk. How dare he? She was every bit as capable of being as “firm a hand at the reins” as Pete was. Being a woman had not a thing to do with that. She wanted very much to be insulted.

  But there was also the fact that, all stereotypical concepts of gender roles aside, Holly herself just wasn’t that good at being an authority figure. Her thoughts since stepping into the principal’s office confirmed that, didn’t they? It had nothing to do with being a woman or a man or a mother or a father. It had to do with the fact that Holly herself wanted unconditional love from her kids and she wanted to love them unconditionally in return, and she had an awfully hard time doing anything but that.

  So, as she wrestled with those thoughts in her head, she just nodded curtly to Thomas. It was all the cueing he needed to launch into a long spiel about the importance of the father in the home, and how a young boy is wild at heart but needs strict boundaries, and blah blah blah. Whatever, Holly thought. Let the man babble. Her own train of thought was taking her far away from this cramped, overly colorful principal’s office.

  Truth be told, she was thinking about Pete. She didn’t want to lose him again. She’d lost him once before, or had come very, very near to it, and the thought of going through that roller coaster of emotions a second time filled her stomach with acid. She wondered what he was doing right now. He was probably in his cubicle at the firm’s office, hunched over a laptop and churning through case files on some horribly boring corporate merger or debt issuance. She wondered if he was thinking about her.

  More than likely, he wasn’t. He was a one-track kind of guy, her Petey. Never much good at multitasking. She loved that about him. Well, mostly. It was cute to see him utterly engaged in something, even if it was something as simple as a crossword puzzle. When he used to bathe Grady and Alice during their bedtime routines, he was so careful and thorough about it. He’d shampoo and rinse out their hair with careful, thorough hands, and wrap a careful, thorough towel around them, making sure not to spill a drop of water on the bathroom tile. She used to sit on the bathroom counter and just watch him do it, scared to say a word in case it broke his concentration.

  Pete hadn’t handled the bedtime routine himself in over a year now.

  “Holly?”

  She glanced up at Thomas. Apparently, he was done. She nodded again, said, “You’re one hundred percent right. I’ll talk to Pete once we get home.” That was a shot-in-the-dark reply because she sure as heck hadn’t been listening to a word that this misogynistic, old-fashioned buffoon was lecturing about. But it did the trick, because he gave her a toothy smile—had he gotten veneers?—and walked her to the door.

  Holly collected her miserable-looking son from the waiting room, and they went home.

  3

  Eliza

  As it turned out, motherhood was hard.

  Not all of it, of course. Parts of it were downright blissful. Like, the question that Eliza asked herself each and every day: Would looking at her daughter ever get old?

  If the last three months were any indication, then the answer was “definitely not.” Eliza had spent God only knows how many hours since January just staring at her baby since the day she was born. Sleeping, eating, tummy time—Eliza could watch all of it over and over and over. It w
as like Winter was the first baby to ever be born. Since Eliza was the one who’d been blessed enough to deliver her into this world, it had become her responsibility just to gaze at her daughter around the clock.

  It didn’t hurt that Winter was beautiful—not just by her mother’s standards, but by anyone and everyone’s. Eliza had lost track of how many people stopped her on the sidewalks and streets of Nantucket to grab her by the arm and gush over how jaw-droppingly gorgeous her little girl was.

  It was true. Winter was Gerber baby material. Diaper commercial material. A future pageant queen, runway model, an A-list celebrity. Who could deny it? Who could stop her? No one. Her daughter would conquer the world.

  “My angel,” Eliza murmured over and over in that sing-song mommy voice. She’d sworn she would never use it but had nevertheless busted it out the second she was given Winter to hold in the hospital on the day she was born.

  As a matter of fact, Eliza had gone back on a lot of things she’d sworn she would never do. Motherhood thus far had been full of ironies like that. It was hard to wrap your head around things when it was just other moms telling you about their experience. “You won’t sleep through the night for the first year”—yeah, right, get real. “You’ll be so tired that you’d sell anything but the baby just to get a full night’s rest”—c’mon, that’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?

  Wrong on both counts. Eliza was tired in a way that she didn’t know was humanly possible. Every time she heard Winter crying in the middle of the night, she sat bolt upright in bed, heart racing a million miles an hour. It took a long time to unwind and go back to sleep after that. Especially when she knew that, in just a few hours, she’d have to do it all over again.

  Thankfully, Winter was in an unusually good mood this morning. She’d only woken up twice last night, which was a new personal record.

  Eliza walked over to Winter’s crib and gazed adoringly down at her daughter. Sure, she didn’t smile much, and she didn’t giggle like Eliza’s niece and nephew had done when they were Winter’s age. But she was utterly beautiful, and she was hers.

  Winter held her little fist towards to her mother and gave her a look. That was all she needed to say.

  “Come here, baby,” Eliza said to her, reaching into her crib and pulling her out. They walked out into the living room and took a seat on the couch across from Oliver.

  Her daughter was cool to the touch in her arms. Eliza had asked the doctor about that. Actually, she’d asked the doctor about everything, arriving in his office for each appointment precisely on time, carrying yellow legal pads bearing line after line of questions written in neat cursive.

  But he’d said it was nothing to worry about. “She runs cool, that’s all. No biggie.” That had been his reply. Eliza was of the opinion that medical advice shouldn’t ever be couched under the phrasing of “No biggie,” but Dr. Davidson, the best pediatrician on Nantucket, was infamously laid-back, much to Eliza’s chagrin.

  In some ways—though not many—Eliza found herself missing the buttoned-up professionalism of the life she’d left behind. On Wall Street, at Goldman Sachs, in the finance world, everything was “biggie.” There were no small fish, no unimportant details. People did their job and they did it well or they didn’t get a chance to do it anymore. They cared—way, way too much. Eliza had developed a hunger for caring about stuff. Not in an emotional way, though. God forbid anyone try to be vulnerable or have a heart while working in the business she’d once been in. But she’d cared in the way that alpha wolves care about the well-being of their pack. Ruthlessly but passionately.

  Now, though, she was living in a “no biggie” world. Everyone on Nantucket might as well get that phrase tattooed on their forehead. Late delivery? No biggie. Missed reservation? No biggie. Anything and everything that went wrong was met with “no biggie” or something similar. It had been tough at first to let go of her frustrations, but she was getting better at it with each passing day.

  That didn’t mean she didn’t bring some of her Wall Street attitude towards her new job at the Sweet Island Inn. She’d more or less taken over the business side of things: advertising, reservations, and so forth. Mae had been more than happy to let those tasks go. Same with Toni. They both recognized that Eliza had an aptitude for those affairs. And it was true—she did. Reservations were increasing, new systems were in place for garnering customer reviews, and so on and so forth. It pleased Eliza to have things humming along efficiently.

  And when she came home at night, back to the little bungalow that she now shared with Oliver and Winter, things were humming along there as well. She looked over now, from where she sat on one end of the couch with Winter at her breast, to where Oliver was sitting on the other end. He was reading the newspaper, just like he did every morning—an old-school quirk that she loved in him.

  “You know, all that stuff is online way before it gets printed and arrives on our doorstep,” she teased, poking him with a bare foot.

  He peered at her over the top edge of the paper with a faux-serious expression. “A citizen of the world reads the New York Times every day,” he intoned.

  “Yeah, an old citizen of the world, maybe.”

  He poked her back. He was wearing plaid pajama bottoms, the ones she’d gotten him for Christmas. “Bite me, Benson.”

  She chuckled. “Don’t start with me today.” Winter cooed in Eliza’s arms, and she looked down.

  “How’s the little princess doing this morning?” Oliver asked.

  Eliza tilted her head to get a better look at Winter’s facial expression. “Stern, I’d say.”

  “Just like her momma.”

  Eliza glared playfully at her boyfriend. It was still weird calling him that. She wasn’t sure why. High school girls had boyfriends. A woman of Eliza’s age and stature had … well, also boyfriends, she supposed. But there was a different feeling to it.

  Boyfriend just sounded too impermanent. Since the night he’d spilled a beer on her in the bar—which he’d later admitted had been only ninety-five percent accidental—Oliver had been a fixture in her life. She couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t there.

  What she loved most about their life together was all the little stuff. It felt like she’d gone thirty-plus years without ever really taking the time to smell the roses. Oliver made her slow down. She wondered how much goodness she’d let pass her by when she wasn’t paying attention.

  There were so many good things ripe for the noticing. There was the smell of clean bedsheets mingling with the beach breeze whenever it was warm enough to crack open the window of the laundry room. There was the Nantucket sunset that she could see from her bedroom each night. The sight of her mother, bustling around the kitchen of the Sweet Island Inn with an apron tied around her waist and her hair frizzy from the heat of the cooking, happy as a clam, firmly in her element.

  There was all that and a million things more that Eliza couldn’t remember right now and didn’t want to. If she was busy remembering all the things she’d loved recently, she wouldn’t have enough brain space to recognize the things that she could be loving right this very second. Like how Oliver was trying to sneak his cold toes up the hem of Eliza’s sweatpants to warm them up on her calf. And how cute he looked with bedhead. Like how their little home was always warm and smelled good and was filled up with laughter. She chose to focus on those things. She was learning to let go of the relentless thrum of ambition that she’d spent three decades attending to, along with the bitterness that accompanied the end of her tenure at Goldman Sachs. For the most part, she was pretty successful at it.

  Life was good.

  “What are your thoughts on the topic of pancakes?” Oliver asked, one eyebrow arched.

  “Strongly in favor,” Eliza said with a smile.

  “I motion to commence pancake proceedings.”

  “Seconded.”

  “Let us put it to a general vote, then. Winter?”

  The baby cooed, right on cue.<
br />
  “Let it be so. Motion passed. Pancakes incoming.” He stood up, folded the paper neatly and set it on the coffee table, then strode into the kitchen to get breakfast going. Eliza watched him go, with a permanent smile on her face. Her calf was cold where Oliver’s toes had touched her. But, like everything else about her life on Nantucket, that too was no biggie.

  4

  Holly

  The drive back to their house was silent. Grady, who lately thought it was hilarious to shout out the color of the vehicle every time he saw a punch buggy—and usually slug his sister in the shoulder while doing so—didn’t utter a peep. Again, Holly had an almost overpowering motherly urge to reach over and touch his forehead, to reassure him. He hadn’t cried—he was fighting it very hard—but he was awfully close to it.

  She was just about to give into that urge when her phone rang. She glanced down at it in the cupholder. Pete’s name was lighting up the screen, and his ringtone—“Mambo No. 5,” for which he had a goofy little dance he’d concocted and surprised her with on their wedding night way back when—echoed tinnily.

  “Hey,” she answered.

  “Bad news.”

  She sighed. “I really wish it wasn’t. Grady got sent to the principal’s office today.”

  “Sorry. Can’t avoid this one. What’d he do?”

  “Put glue in Sally Bryant’s hair. They had to cut it out.” She could tell Pete was holding the phone away from his mouth as he tried not to laugh audibly. She bit her lip. She wanted to laugh with him. Not necessarily about this and not necessarily right here and now—she wasn’t that lax of a mom—but she just missed the feeling of laughing with Pete. When he really got going, he’d alternate between snorting and whistling through his front teeth. It always made her laugh that much harder. They’d fall all over each other laughing. Well, they used to. Not in a while, though. Not since … when was the last time? Maybe when Grady got a bucket stuck on his head last fall while trying to goof off during yard-work chores. That had been priceless.