No Beach Like Nantucket

by Grace Palmer

  “They gave me up, Eliza. Do you know how much I’d give to have a relationship with my parents? With my father?”

  She didn’t know what to say. How could she possibly respond to this? She didn’t know anything about broken families or drug addiction or foster care. She’d grown up in a home full of warmth and love and family members who cared for each other.

  He pointed at Winter. “If she can have that, she deserves it. No matter how distant or infrequent or whatever. If she has a father, you can’t keep them apart. That’s wrong. That’s not what a good mother should do.”

  “Are you calling me a bad mother?” she managed to choke out. Now, there was fury swirling in the chaotic mix of her emotions.

  “I’m just telling you what’s right.”

  “You’re telling me to give up my daughter.”

  “I’m telling you to give her a father.”

  “You’re supposed to be her father, Oliver.”

  He shook his head sadly. “I’m not and I never will be. I can’t be. That’s not how things work.”

  “It has to,” she said. The sadness had won out over the anger, though neither was leaving her anytime soon. “It has to work like that.”

  He kept shaking his head, again and again, like a metronome. “It doesn’t,” was all he said. “It doesn’t.”

  Eliza wanted to cry forever. She wanted to sleep forever. She wanted to take her baby and run until she couldn’t run anymore, just to get away from all of this.

  But she didn’t do any of that. She couldn’t.

  So she did the only thing left to her to do.

  She stood up and left.

  33

  Brent

  Thursday night.

  To literally no one’s surprise, Frank needed Brent’s help again. He’d called at the crack of dawn that morning, chipper as all get-out despite the early hour.

  “Mornin’, superstar! Figured you’d be up this early. Think I could wrangle you down here this evening? You ain’t even gonna believe what’s happening in this neck of the woods. I’ve got problems up to my eyeballs.”

  Brent let loose a long sigh and a yawn in rapid succession. “Yeah, man, you got it. No worries. I’ll be down there this evening, around five or six.”

  “Swell, buddy, just swell. See you then.”

  The charter trip was relatively uneventful, but the cumulative fatigue of burning the candle at both ends week in and week out was starting to get to Brent. By the time he pulled up in front of Frank’s house and climbed out of his truck, he barely had the energy to pick his feet up off the ground.

  Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it—Frank had energy enough for both of them. He came bounding down the driveway, all smiles, and grabbed Brent by the shoulder. “I’ll tell you what, man, you really are a lifesaver. So let me give you the rundown on what we’ve got going on inside …”

  Brent was only half listening. Partially because he was asleep, and partially because, just before they stepped across the threshold and into the guts of Frank’s home-to-be, he looked to his left and saw something he hadn’t seen in weeks.

  Rose was home.

  Brent had never done a faster job in his life. He cut Frank off pretty early in his rambling so that he could focus on diagnosing the problem at hand. It didn’t take long to spot the issue. On a normal day, it might take two or three hours to get the work done—another issue with a load-bearing wall; physics really was not Frank’s strong suit.

  Today, it took forty-nine minutes.

  The sun hadn’t even finished setting by the time Brent was dusting off his hands and packing up his stuff. “Finished already?” Frank asked, amazed.

  “Yessir,” was Brent’s curt but polite response.

  “Well, hold your horses for just one sec. Are you sure you—”

  “Yep, got that squared away.”

  “And what about the—”

  “That too.”

  Frank scratched his head with a tape measure and looked absolutely befuddled. “I gotta ask, son … how’d you do all that?”

  Brent smiled, gently removed the cash from Frank’s hand, and gave him a wink. “My father taught me.”

  Then he was gone, slipping out of the house with a happy whistle on his lips.

  He’d had the vague beginnings of a plan in his head as he was working. Something involving knocking on Rose’s door and—well, that was actually as far as he’d gotten. The underlying question was … what did he want?

  Actually, to back up a step, the underlying question was, why was he thinking about Rose in the first place? Didn’t he have Ally in his life? Didn’t he like how fun she was, how spontaneous she was, how much excitement surrounded her at all times? Didn’t he like the possibility she represented? He supposed he did. That’s what he’d been telling himself and others since they met. It was at least mostly true.

  But maybe not one hundred percent. Maybe there was still a little bit left in his heart that was calling out to Rose. He had a long ways to go yet in figuring out just how his emotions worked, but he had come a long way from where he once was. Progress was progress. This was not the time to turn his back on what he felt. More than anything, it was simply time to find out what that feeling meant.

  So, he hopped the low bush that separated Frank’s yard from Rose’s, strode over to her door, raised a fist to knock, and—

  The door flew open.

  “Rose.”

  “Brent.”

  “I was gonna …”

  “Knock? I’d certainly hope so.”

  Brent tilted his head, confused. “But you were coming out.”

  She blushed, looked downward like there was suddenly something really interesting happening at her feet. “Yeah.”

  He followed her gaze. “With two bottles of beer and a plate of cookies.”

  “Yeah.”

  He understood immediately. “Who was that for, Rose?”

  Her blush deepened, but to her credit, she raised her eyes up and met his. “It’s a real hot day. Thought you boys could maybe use something refreshing and a snack.”

  “So you were coming over to Frank’s.”

  “Yeah, I was.”

  “We’re all done for the day.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “No, I suppose not. Frank does seem a little needy sometimes.”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  The fast-paced rat-a-tat of their back-and-forth died down. They were both left just looking at each other, wanting to say something but not having much of anything to say. It was obvious that there were two conversations happening. One was about cookies and beer and needy neighbors. The other was about things much harder to verbalize than that. Affection. Longing. Loss. Regret.

  “Mooommyyy!” came a voice from the back. It was followed by a blonde whirling dervish that attached itself to Rose’s leg with a whoompf on impact. Rose, for her part, looked grateful for the distraction.

  “Yes, honey?”

  “I’m hungry. When’s dinner?”

  “Five minutes, baby,” Rose said absentmindedly. “Spaghetti.”

  Susanna, Rose’s daughter, made a scrunched-up face, as if she couldn’t remember whether or not she liked spaghetti. Undecided, she shrugged and skipped away without once looking at Brent. When she was gone, Rose smiled.

  “Spaghetti, huh?” Brent commented. He was beginning to regret coming over here. This had been a bad idea. What was he hoping would happen? Dramatic music and roses falling from the sky? Slow-motion reunion and he and Rose ran towards each other in a grassy meadow? That wasn’t real life. That wasn’t how things worked. Real life was messy and uncertain and vague around the edges. It was hard enough to figure out what you wanted in life. It was darn near impossible to communicate that to another person. Especially one who might not want the same things.

  He turned to leave before he had any other stupid ideas.

  “Wait!�
� Rose said. She grabbed his bicep. Both of them looked down at her hand on him. There was a sudden pang of tension, like someone had yanked on the invisible wires that held the world together and sent a humming vibration along them. Rose blushed again, the reddest yet, and let her hand fall away.

  “Yeah?”

  She bit her lip, then blurted, “Yes, it’s spaghetti.”

  Brent raised an eyebrow.

  “Do you—would you—do you want to have some?” she asked awkwardly.

  Oh, how the tables had turned. A year ago, he was the one tripping over his words. Now, it was Rose’s turn to get red in the face.

  “I’m not sure if that’s a good idea,” Brent replied carefully. “I’m not sure if any of this was, actually.”

  She nodded slowly, like part of her actually agreed with him. Then, just as slowly, just as carefully, with a tiny smile blossoming in one corner of her lips, she said, “My mom taught me how to make it. Family recipe. I’d tell it to you, but I’d have to kill you right after.”

  He smiled a little too. “I’m quaking in my boots, Rose.”

  “So I can’t tell you. But you can come try it. If you want to. Stay for dinner, you know?”

  Brent took in a deep breath and weighed his options. He could turn and go home and forget all of this ever happened. Call Ally and see what trouble they could get into tonight.

  Or he could say yes, go inside, and eat spaghetti with Rose and her daughter.

  “All right,” he said, nodding. She smiled, turned, and gestured for him to come inside. He checked his phone as he crossed the threshold. There was a text from Ally waiting for him.

  Whatcha doin, sailor boy? it read.

  He put it back in his pocket without replying.

  34

  Holly

  Moving day.

  Just a week ago, Holly would’ve said that this day couldn’t come fast enough. It had been circled on the calendar in bright red marker for months. But one phone call had poisoned everything.

  “They stole it from us,” she’d said to Pete again and again. “They stole our home.”

  He tried to console her as best he could. But the truth was that she was more or less inconsolable. It felt like she’d had this vision of happiness for her life unfolding in that home, and now that the home was no longer theirs, that vision might never come to pass.

  “It isn’t like we’re gonna be living on the streets in a refrigerator box,” Pete had replied with a smile one of the first times she said they’d stolen her home. “Although the mortgage would be a lot better …” She’d fixed him with a cold glare in return. He hadn’t made the joke again.

  She knew the wise thing to do would be to let it go. But how could she? Someone should pay.

  “Not gonna happen, darling,” was Pete’s reply to that proposal. “We just have to accept it and move along.”

  That was a horrible answer.

  They did still have a home to move to, after all. In the wake of that terrible call from Judy breaking the news of the house thievery, Pete had made quick work of presenting Holly with three of their backup options. She’d chosen one, reluctantly. She was standing in the driveway right now, looking at it.

  But there was no magic in this home. Try as she might to picture that blissful domestic happily-ever-after, she got nothing but staticky blackness instead when she closed her eyes. It didn’t feel right, mostly because it wasn’t.

  And yet, there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

  “Need a hand with that, babe?” Pete asked, jerking his head towards the box in her hands.

  “No, I’m fine,” she mumbled. She followed him down the drive and into their home. Inside, she set the box down on the growing pile they’d already transported from the moving truck and stopped to look around.

  The ceilings in here were low, and the floors were done in an ugly faux-hardwood linoleum that had last been fashionable before Holly was born. It wasn’t a bad place, by any means. It had four walls and a roof and it was still in Nantucket, after all. The seller had been courteous and helpful in expediting closing so the Goodwins could still stick to the schedule they’d had planned. She ought to be grateful for all that.

  It just felt really hard to summon any gratitude at the moment.

  The afternoon trickled by in a daze. The kids were helpful in five-minute bursts every two to three hours at best, so it fell to Pete and Holly to do almost all the unloading. They’d rented a truck to bring all their boxes and clothes and such. The movers they hired would be here tomorrow with the bulk of the furniture. That meant they were spending the night in sleeping bags. Could be better, could be worse. Just like everything else about this house.

  Mom came over in the early evening to check the place out and help Holly with some unpacking. Holly was careful not to be too obvious with her discontent. Mom seemed awfully frazzled anyway, though she wouldn’t admit to there being anything wrong with her.

  “Oh, nothing, dear. Just been a bit of a long week, that’s all.”

  “You sure, Mom?”

  “Yes, yes, nothing to fret about.”

  Soon after, she’d gotten a call and returned to the inn in a hurry. She wouldn’t say what it was about. “She was acting a little weird,” Holly remarked as she watched her mother scurry down the driveway.

  “You think?” Pete said. His stomach rumbled loudly. “Say, I’m ravenous. What do you think—pizza night?”

  “Sure, honey,” Holly said distractedly. “Whatever you want.”

  That’s how they ended up on the floor, pizza in hand, playing an ancient game of Monopoly that Holly had unearthed from a junk closet during the packing up of the house in Plymouth. As they argued and rolled dice and tried fruitlessly to explain to Alice and Grady that it wasn’t wise to spend all their money in the first ten minutes of the game, Holly took a minute to sit back and force a smile on her face.

  She might never get over the house theft. That would be a sore spot for a long, long time, she figured. But in this moment, she realized, she had a lot going for her. They had a home. They were home.

  Maybe gratitude wasn’t so hard to scrounge up after all.

  35

  Mae

  Saturday afternoon.

  What an awful week it had been.

  It had all started with the arrival last Sunday of Dr. Frederick Patrick Hoffman, Sr. That was how he’d written his name on the website’s reservation form, all spelled out like that. Mae had raised an eyebrow at first, but figured it was merely a funny little quirk. Some people were quite proud of their names, after all. Not a thing in the world wrong with that.

  Oh, if only she had known what she was in for.

  As it turned out, Dr. Frederick Patrick Hoffman, Sr., was every bit as stiff and difficult as his proper name implied. And he was not shy about letting Mae know that his expectations were quite high.

  “Mrs. Benson!” came the voice she’d quickly learned to loathe. “The towels you provided this morning were rather unsatisfactory.” The man who owned that voice walked around the corner into the kitchen moments later, holding the towel in one outstretched hand, pinched between two fingers like it was absolutely soiled. Though, to Mae’s eye, it was spotless. She’d seen dirtier towels in hospital surgical theaters. It wasn’t as though she was slob or a slouch. On the contrary, Mae knew exactly how hard she worked to provide an outstanding hospitality experience for each and every one of her guests.

  But nothing was ever good enough for Dr. Hoffman.

  “I’m terribly sorry!” Mae exclaimed apologetically. She scurried over and took the towel from his hand.

  “I would prefer if you did not snatch things from my grasp,” he grumbled underneath his walrus-like mustache, which had gone white with age.

  “Oh, please forgive me,” Mae said. She was blushing red as a beet now. “I didn’t mean any offense.” What was it with this guy? He held the towel out for her to grab, then got mad when she grabbed it? She took a sneaky glance down a
t the towel in her hand. It was soft, pristine, smelled fresh. Merely the latest in a long string of insatiable complaints from the rigid, bone-thin man standing in front of her at military attention.

  He harrumphed in response.

  Mae was a forgiving spirit by nature, and she’d done her level best to give Dr. Hoffman a proper Nantucket welcome. But she was no pushover, either. And the fact of the matter was that this gentleman was getting awfully close to pushing her over the edge. He’d hardly taken two steps into the inn on the first day before he was commenting on the “dirty crown molding” and the “aroma of dank humidity.” His tone matched his manners which matched his name, and she was sick to death of hearing him pick and poke at every tiny aspect of the inn.

  So that was one thing weighing on her. But it was hardly the only thing.

  There was the ever-present specter of Toni’s phone call. She hadn’t heard another peep from Toni since they’d last spoken over two months ago, when she first mentioned the likelihood of the inn being sold. That was worrying. Could her home and livelihood be snatched away from her at any moment? The questions kept her up at night. She found it best to think about it as little as possible. But when she was trying to fall asleep at the end of each long day of apologizing profusely to Dr. Hoffman, she couldn’t stop her thoughts from wandering in that direction like unruly sheep.

  What else was there? Oh yes, of course—the Debra crisis. Mae, Lola, and Debra had a long-running joke that Debra’s ex-husband was like Punxsutawney Phil, the infamous groundhog. If he didn’t call Debra on the anniversary of their decades-old divorce, it was going to be a good year. But if he called, everyone on Nantucket was in for a very bad time indeed.