Local Girls : An Island Summer Novel (9781416564171) (19 page)

Sure, I was curious about the deli, how my mom's curtains
had finally turned out after she decided to ditch the coordinated tiebacks and go with the simple denim valences Lexi and my dad preferred. Bart didn't have an opinion about the window treatments, and I'd noticed that for the most part he deferred to Lexi and my dad on most matters. But when Bart did speak up they listened to him, like when Lexi suggested they start serving smoothies and Bart was dead set against it, saying the last thing they needed during the lunch crush was to be standing over a blender while the line of hungry customers continued to grow. Because apparently that's what had been happening during peak hours, the line extending out the front door until it snaked along the sidewalk, people pressing their noses up to the window as they tried to read the large blackboard Lexi had the construction crew hang on the back wall, the sandwich descriptions written in colored chalk.

The blackboard menu was Lexi's idea, and even I had to admit it made sense. First of all, if the deli ran out of something or decided to try a new sandwich, all Lexi had to do was write it on the board or erase it with the gray flannel eraser she'd ordered from a school supply company. Second of all, Lexi had great even, round handwriting, something she inherited from my mom, whereas my handwriting was more like my dad's, sort of lopsided and narrow and scratchy. In eighth grade Lexi almost ran for class secretary, thinking the position simply required neat handwriting, because that's what a secretary did, right? Take notes on a legal pad. She decided to withdraw her candidacy when she discovered the position required attending meetings, hitting deadlines, and pretty much taking orders from the president, who eventually ended up being a girl Lexi couldn't stand, so it was probably for the best.

Lexi had a track record of big ideas and little follow-through,
which included the paper route she started but never managed to finish (I guess the
Gazette
didn't remember all the customer complaints when, four years later, Lexi applied for the receptionist position), the bedroom that remained half pink, half yellow after Lexi decided maybe repainting her room wasn't such a great idea after all (my mom ended up finishing it while she was at school one day), and the Christmas she decided to knit us all gifts, only to discover knitting wasn't exactly her forte (she ended up giving me a king-size Snickers bar instead). But even I had to admit that, after almost three weeks, the deli seemed to be going okay so far.

Right before the deli finally opened, I overheard my mom talking to my dad in their bedroom. Her voice was hushed and serious and my dad was silent as he listened to her suggest that, maybe, it might make sense for him to go back to the post office. My dad didn't answer right away, probably considering the odds of the deli ever succeeding without him and my mom there to help Lexi and Bart. Obviously they decided to table the option, because as far as I knew it was never brought up to Lexi, and my dad never put on his U.S. Postal Service–issued navy blue pants and light blue shirt with his name embroidered on the front pocket. Standing there outside their room, though, holding my breath so they couldn't hear me during the stretch of silence while my mom and I waited for his answer, I realized for the first time that maybe I wasn't the only one who doubted the Pot Belly Deli would get off the ground. Or that if it did, it wouldn't end up like so many other Vineyard businesses, with a
FOR LEASE
sign taped in the window at the end of the season. Maybe that's why my parents didn't pressure me to work at the deli or visit on my days off, like Lexi did. Maybe they were trying
to insulate me from the possibility that my entire family had made a huge, disastrous decision.

If Shelby didn't show up I could always walk over to Winter Street and surprise them all. Lexi would be so thrilled she'd probably name a sandwich after me (her new thing was to give each sandwich its own special name, so a warm tuna wrap with cheddar, red onions, and tomato was now a Hot Tuna Meltdown). The night before, Lexi was debating whether her own namesake sandwich should be served on a whole wheat bialy or stuffed into a pita pocket. This had become the level of conversation in my house.

God, I hoped Shelby showed up.

Thankfully, before I was forced to decide between the deli and going home to an empty house, a car pulled up to the curb and beeped its horn.

I got up off the step and went to meet Shelby.

“So what were you planning to forget for tomorrow?” I asked, getting into the car.

“I don't know,” she answered, putting the car into drive. “You'll just have to wait and see, won't you.”

It was a quick ride to Morning Glory Farm and in less than ten minutes Shelby and I were browsing the baskets of fresh fruit, looking for just the right berries for the coming week's crepes. You'd have thought she was a food inspector the way Shelby picked up each basket, checked to make sure the good berries on top weren't merely masquerading a bunch of smushed brown ones on the bottom, and then made a mental note of the contents' condition before moving on.

“I went to the library yesterday to look up old issues of the
Gazette,
” I told her after she'd passed up four baskets in a row.

“And what'd you find?”

“Nothing. They covered the regatta but the pictures were old and too far away. I couldn't tell who anybody was, even if I knew who I was looking for.”

“So, really,” Shelby started, inspecting a handful of raspberries before continuing. “Why the interest in this missing guy?”

I didn't answer right away, and instead stood there waiting for Shelby to make her decision. She decided to pass.

“Mona wants to find her dad.”

“Why?” Shelby sounded genuinely curious.

“Because she doesn't know who he is.”

“Why doesn't she just ask her mom?” Shelby made it sound so easy.

“Because her mom doesn't even know his last name; she was eighteen and he was a summer guy.”

Shelby selected four pints of raspberries and moved on to the strawberries. “So she asked you to help her find him? I thought you two were still in a fight.”

I hesitated. “Not exactly. Well, not exactly about the asking for help, yes about the fight,” I clarified.

Shelby looked up at me. “Not exactly? What does that mean?”

“I thought I'd surprise her.”

Shelby continued to watch me but didn't say anything. Apparently my answer wasn't good enough. She wanted more.

“She's always wanted to know who he was, ever since I can remember,” I continued, defending myself even though Shelby hadn't actually accused me of doing anything wrong. Yet. “And so I figured if I could find him she could finally stop wondering.”

“You think it will be that simple, just hand over the guy's name and announce ‘Here's daddy'?”

“It's what she's always wanted.”

“And you're sure of this?”

I nodded. “Absolutely.”

“Then more power to you.” Shelby handed me three pints of strawberries and I stacked them in my arms. “I just hope you're right.”

Me, too, I thought. I wasn't completely naive. I didn't think that I'd just show up on Malcolm's doorstep, use the pineapple door knocker, and wait for Mona to open the door so I could announce the winning name like some game show host. This was a big deal, I realized that. But if I could really figure out who he was, then Mona would have the missing piece of the puzzle, and I would have been the one to give it to her.

We ended up picking out strawberries, raspberries, and some blackberries for the crepes. Shelby insisted on refrigerating the baskets right away so the berries wouldn't lose their flavor, and that meant we had to go back to the inn and store them in the refrigerator overnight.

For the next half hour I watched as Shelby washed every single basket of berries by hand before drying them and placing them into ceramic bowls covered in cellophane.

“Don't you ever get tired of this place?” I asked her, referring to the Willow.

Shelby was on her knees, rearranging the contents of the refrigerator into some sort of elaborate organized system that I couldn't quite figure out. “Not really.”

“Is that why you came back?” This time I meant the island.

“I came back because I wanted to.”

“See, I just don't get that,” I told her, sitting down on a stool.

“I know you don't.”

“So explain it to me.”

Shelby sighed, sat back on her heels, and seemed to be gathering her thoughts for a very long, complex explanation. “No.”

No? That was it? “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean no. Why don't you explain to me why you don't get it instead?”

Now it was my turn to gather my thoughts for a very long, complex explanation that turned out not to be so long or complex. “Well, I guess I don't want to end up like my sister.”

“What's wrong with your sister?”

“Nothing's
wrong
with her, I just think she took the easy way out.”

“Do you think I took the easy way out?” Shelby wanted to know, and I didn't know how to answer.

“I guess I don't know your situation well enough to have an opinion.”

Shelby stood up, closed the refrigerator door, and came over to the island where I was sitting. “My situation is that I went to UMass thinking I'd figure out what I wanted to do. And I did. Only what I figured out was what I didn't want to do. And what I didn't want to do was sit in a classroom all day learning stuff I didn't care about.”

“Okay, well, I get that. But the thing with my sister is that she never even tried to figure out what she cared about. She just settled for what she knew. She just picked what was safe.”

“And that bothers you?”

“Yeah, it bothers me. She could have done anything, gone anywhere, but you know what she's doing? Living at home with her high school boyfriend and running a deli.”

Shelby laughed at me. “You make it sound so absolutely horrible.”

I stopped short of saying it was.

“What about your parents? They've lived here their whole lives, right?”

“Sure, but that's different. They're old.”

“They weren't always,” Shelby reminded me, stating the obvious.

“What I mean is, what happens when Lexi wakes up in ten or fifteen years and realizes she had all these opportunities she never took advantage of? All these risks she could have taken if she'd just had the guts to take them?”

“I don't know the answer to that, Kendra. Maybe she'll regret it, maybe she won't.”

I almost asked Shelby if she regretted leaving school, but it was obvious she didn't miss it for a minute. “So where do you go from here? Are you going to work at the Willow forever?”

Shelby was quiet and I felt like it was the first time she'd ever even thought of it, the idea that this was it. That at nineteen she was in exactly the same place she'd be for the rest of her life.

“Forever is a long time, Kendra.” She went over to the counter and stacked up the now empty berry cartons. “Right now, I'm just thinking about tomorrow's breakfast.”

My conversation with Shelby really bothered me. Equating my parents to Lexi and Bart was ridiculous. You couldn't even compare the two. First of all, my parents knew each other in high school but they didn't even hang out together. And they didn't go on a date until years later, when my dad ran into her again while delivering mail to the airport where my mom was working at the time.

I'd learned that my talks with Shelby were usually like that, more confusing than anything else. On one hand, I'd started to feel like we were friends. She rarely talked about herself or her family, but I'd just sort of decided that's the way she was. She didn't share a lot. In that respect, she was the absolute opposite of Mona: I seriously doubt there was anything I didn't know about Mona when she lived here. Maybe that's why I'd found spending time with Henry so easy in the beginning; why, because of Mona, I felt like I knew everything about Henry as well. I knew he broke his arm playing hockey, that he'd cried when the doctor reset the bone, that Izzy had gotten out her set of markers and drawn the Bruins logo on his cast so he'd feel better. But now that we were spending so
much time together, I realized how little I really knew about Henry, and instead of finding comfort in the fact that he was so familiar, it was the process of discovering new things about him that I looked forward to the most.

If you didn't count Shelby, and I was still on the fence about that one, Henry was the closest thing to a really good friend I had these days.

So that's why Monday morning when Henry picked me up to go fishing I decided to ask what he thought about my conversation with Shelby. After all, Izzy had her chance to leave the island, a full scholarship to art school in Providence, when she found out a few weeks into her freshman year that she was pregnant. She never made Mona feel like she'd have made any other decision, but maybe Izzy could have been a famous artist if things had turned out differently, maybe she could have traveled around the world meeting fascinating people, painting exciting new things instead of working in a gallery selling another artist's work to some obnoxious lawyer from Connecticut.

I wouldn't say I was psyched to get up at four thirty on a Monday morning, but I'd started to look forward to fishing with Henry. Our mornings together had become a regular thing. I didn't join him fishing every day—I wasn't lying when I said I wasn't a morning person—but he'd always at least be at Stop & Shop when I got there to pick up Shelby's missing ingredient, waiting to help me roam the baking aisle.

Although at first I spent time with Henry because I wanted to know more about Mona, now I found our mornings together intriguing because I wanted to know more about Henry. I thought I knew him, that after spending so much time at Mona's house and with her family I had Henry
all figured out. He was sort of quiet, not terribly social, and way more practical than Mona. I didn't think we'd share anything in common, besides sharing his sister.