Local Girls : An Island Summer Novel (9781416564171) (11 page)

“For someone who says she's not a morning person, don't you find it odd that you picked a job serving people breakfast?”

“Believe me, I've thought of that. But despite my appearances to the contrary”—I waved my hands across the front of my yellow polo shirt with the Willow Inn logo above my heart—“I do not actually enjoy getting up with the sun.”

“Who are you kidding, you've never been up with the sun.”

“It was an expression.”

“Well, if you'd ever actually gotten up with the sun, you'd know that it can be pretty cool. It's really quiet and there's no one around, it's almost like a different world.”

“I'll have to take your word for it.”

The truck came to a stop in front of the inn. The first guest was already sitting in one of the white rocking chairs on the deck, reading the morning paper.

“Don't just take my word for it. Come fish with me one morning, I'll show you.”

“Like I said, I'm not a morning person.”

“People change. Come on.”

I glanced over at the man reading the
Boston Globe.
Shelby was probably freaking out that I wasn't back with the cinnamon yet.

“Wednesday's my day off.”

“So, is that a yes?”

“Will this require handling worms?”

He shook his head. “It will just require sitting next to me while I fish. I promise there will be no worm touching involved.”

I reached for the handle, opened the door, and stepped out. I stood there watching Henry as he waited for my answer.

I stuck my head in through the open window. “Just this once?”

Henry crossed his heart with his finger. It was something Mona did, too. “Once. If you hate it, I'll never bring it up again.”

“Fine,” I agreed, and started walking up the stone path leading to the deck. “This Wednesday.”

“Great. I'll be in front of your house at five o'clock.”

I stopped on the first step to the deck and turned around to see if Henry was serious. “Five o'clock?”

But before I could back out, Henry was driving away.

I don't know why I agreed to go fishing with Henry. It definitely wasn't because fishing sounded terribly interesting, or even relaxing, because, let's be honest, what could be relaxing at five a.m. other than sleeping in your bed? And as far
as the lack of sunlight making the island look like a different world, the only world I was expecting would be dark and foggy, just like on every other island morning. So it wasn't my need to know what a different world looked like, but my need to know about Mona. I guess, when it came right down to it, I said yes because talking to Mona's twin brother was probably the next best thing to talking to Mona herself. If you didn't count this past year, and I didn't, we'd never gone this long without speaking. Five days with not so much as a voice mail. We'd had fights in the past, stupid disagreements that lasted a day at most. Half the time when we made up we didn't even remember what we had been fighting about. But this was different, and I think we both knew that. We wouldn't be seeing each other in school, passing each other in the hallway and trying not to smile, trying not to laugh at something we both found funny in English class. This was real. And that's what made it so scary.

Every other time we'd fought I could count on the phone ringing, even if I had to wait until ten o'clock at night for it to happen. When Mona's number showed up on caller ID, I knew she was calling to get it over with, to call a truce so we could talk about all the things we'd been saving up all day to say. Only now my phone wasn't ringing and Mona wasn't anxious to share what she did all day. But there was one person who could tell me about Mona, who could help me figure out who she'd become and whether we'd be able to be friends again. And that person was Henry.

It was my first Saturday morning at the inn, but already I'd learned that the weekends were different from the rest of the week. We only had two vacant rooms, the rest filled with couples taking advantage of the relative quiet before high season
kicked in next week, and more guests meant more tables to serve, more special requests, activities to plan, and picnics to make.

“Where is it?” Shelby wanted to know the second I pushed the kitchen door open.

I tossed the bag with the cinnamon on the counter and went to get my apron, but not before grabbing a piece of bacon off the cooling rack.

“Hey, cut it out!” Shelby smacked my hand with the spatula.

I waited until she'd moved over to the sink to rinse out a bowl and then grabbed another piece. God, she made the best bacon.

“I saw that,” Shelby muttered under her breath, even though she was still facing the sink. Shelby saw everything that went on in the kitchen, even when you thought she couldn't see you.

After breakfast hours ended, the rest of the staff left to do other jobs while I stayed in the kitchen with Shelby. It had become our regular routine. I'd prepare the sandwiches while Shelby started making the afternoon tea snacks, pitching in on the sandwiches when she was done. Since I was the newly appointed picnic preparer, it was always just the two of us in the kitchen after the tables were cleared and the dishes loaded into the dishwasher.

“How do you get the bacon so crispy and flat?” I asked, pulling a stool up to the island so I could sit while putting together the lunch orders.

Shelby finished drying the last pot with a dish towel before answering.

“I cook it in the oven instead of a frying pan,” she told
me, and then added, “The strips are laid over a wire rack in a baking pan.”

It was the most Shelby had said to me all week and I felt like I'd found her weak spot—food talk. Knowing what it was like to spend two hours in the kitchen in silence while on picnic duty, I attempted to keep the conversation going with the closest thing I had to food talk—the deli.

“My family's opening a deli over on Winter Street this week.”

Shelby reached above the island, lining up the hole in the pot's handle with the hook on the wrought iron rack hanging from the ceiling. “So what are you doing here?” she asked, stretching to get the hook through the hole.

“What am I doing here now, or what did I think I was doing here?”

The handle finally settled onto the hook and Shelby stepped back from the island. “Am I expected to know the difference?”

“Well, when I took the job my friend Mona was supposed to work with me. But then she couldn't,” I said, adding, “Or wouldn't,” and I realized that was probably a more accurate description even if I did prefer the first take on the situation. “And so now I'm just trying to earn some money for college.”

I waited for Shelby to ask where I was planning to go, but instead she decided to ask about Mona. “Why wouldn't she work with you?”

“She didn't need a summer job anymore.”

“Did she win the lottery or something?” Shelby joked.

I didn't laugh. “Sort of.”

That got Shelby's attention, and so I decided to take a chance and tell her the story. After five days I needed to talk to
someone
about it. It wasn't that I thought Shelby would relate to my situation or anything. I doubted there were too many people who'd had the same problem. I knew Shelby wouldn't turn around and exclaim, “Oh my God! Last year my best friend got a rich stepfather, too!” Not that Shelby struck me as the type of person who exclaimed anything anyway.

“You know what they say,” she concluded when I'd finished the whole story, starting with Izzy meeting Malcolm and ending with the argument in Mona's bedroom. “Money changes everything.”

“Yeah, I know what they say. I just didn't think it applied to my best friend.”

“It applies to everyone.”

At this point I expected Shelby to give me some sort of sign she'd had enough of my ramblings, but when she reached over to help me with the picnic orders, I decided I'd go on as long as she'd let me. After all, now she knew some pretty personal stuff about me and I figured it was her turn to reciprocate. “So what happened? Why'd you quit college?”

“I didn't quit. I left,” she clarified, as if the small distinction made all the difference in the world. “It just wasn't for me.”

“Why?” Obviously Shelby wasn't pregnant, that much I could tell. She wasn't a big stoner in high school, although anything can happen in college. I was figuring either she flunked out or did something to get kicked out.

“What do you mean, why?”

“I mean, I'd think getting out of here would be great. I, for one, can't wait.”

“And where are you going?” she wanted to know.

“California. Stanford, if I get in.”

Shelby laughed. “Really?”

“Yep. Really,” I repeated. “I'm getting as far away as possible.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I've seen the same faces and places for seventeen years. I'm ready for some new scenery.”

“To each her own,” was Shelby's response. She let the last of the picnic basket lids fall shut, the sound of the slamming wicker sounding very similar to the slamming of a judge's gavel. And it had the same effect. Shelby had officially ended our first conversation.

I thought telling Shelby about Mona would help, and it did, a little. Of course, I wished she'd told me I was totally right to be pissed at Mona, but she didn't. Then again, she didn't know Mona well enough, or me either, for that matter. She didn't know Mona before she moved to Boston, before she moved into Malcolm's house. I was thinking about that on my way home, trying to remember what it was like before, when Mona lived with Poppy, as my bus approached the stop near Poppy's house. Before I even realized what I was doing, I'd gotten off the bus and was walking down Mona's old driveway toward the house that had once felt like a second home to me.

Although Poppy's house was off the main road, the gravel driveway was so long you couldn't even see the house from the street. I walked quickly down the driveway, anxious to see the house after all this time, but once it came into view I wasn't prepared for the empty feeling that rushed over me. The same curtains hung in the windows, the hydrangeas in the front garden were blooming, and butterflies hovered over the bushes just like they did every summer. It didn't look like
anything had changed even though
everything
had changed. I followed the slate path around the side of the house to the back patio. The wrought iron patio furniture was still there, had probably been left out all winter without Poppy there to move it into the barn once fall had arrived.

The last time I was at the house, there were people gathered on the patio. It was early October and the leaves were just beginning to change, the tips of their curled edges turning golden orange. I remember standing next to Mona and watching Izzy greet friends who'd come back to the house after the funeral. As we stood there on the patio, a leaf fell from a branch and landed in Mona's hair. She'd reached up and taken it out, but held on to it as we stood there, absentmindedly twirling its stem. Later on, when the guests were gone, Mona and I joined Malcolm in the kitchen, where he was wrapping cold cuts in Saran Wrap and placing leftover pasta salad in Tupperware containers. I was dumping the remains of the three-bean salad into the garbage can when I noticed Mona placing the leaf into a sandwich-size Ziploc bag. After making sure the curled edges of the leaf didn't crack, she carefully ran her fingers along the top, sealing the leaf inside.

I didn't ask Mona what she was doing, and she'd left the island the next day with Izzy and Malcolm. But now I wondered what she did with that leaf and why, at the time, it was so important for her to preserve it.

After the funeral I figured Izzy would put the house up for sale and that would be it. Everything I knew of Mona gone. The summers we used to explore the woods behind her house, the winters we'd sit in front of the potbellied stove in the kitchen, drinking hot chocolate with mini marshmallows, while her grandfather stacked the split firewood into a neat
triangle, all gone as soon as the
FOR SALE
sign was replaced with four letters—
SOLD
.

But no
FOR SALE
sign ever went up, and now, eight months later, the trees were once again green and full, and the spot next to the woods where Poppy kept the firewood was overgrown with tall grass, a few wildflowers with yellow blooms poking up between the logs in search of sunlight.

I pulled one of the chairs out from the patio table and sat down. The legs wobbled, just like they always did. I was there when Poppy put the patio set together, cursing under his breath as he tried to figure out which leg was part A and which armrest was part C. We always used to make fun of him, pretending to fall backward or sideways off the chairs that he'd never quite figured out how to level. While I sat there remembering, a bird floated down toward me and landed on the rim of the birdbath beside the back door. It was then, as I looked past the bird, that I noticed the doors to the barn were open, creating a shadow on the grass from the light inside.

It wasn't a real barn, although it probably was at one time. As long as I'd been coming to Mona's house it was just used for extra storage space, where Poppy kept the lawn mower and tools for the yard. If the doors had been left open all winter, there was no doubt a family of raccoons living inside now.

The sound of me standing up startled the bird and it flew away, high up into the branches of the tree, until it disappeared. I left the chair wobbling from leg to leg and went to check out the barn.

Before I even made it to the double doors I could see something moving inside. I probably should have been scared, at least a little. I was all alone down a long driveway and nobody even knew where I was. But the whole scene was so familiar.
I knew this house as well as my own. I couldn't imagine being afraid.