“He doesn’t have any work gloves,” Ben growls. “Idiot. In the morning I will go to the Garrett’s Hardware and get him a pair of decent ones.”
After all this drama, dinner is anticlimactic. There’s a lot of clinking of spoons and requests to pass things. I resist the urge to cut up Cass’s food for him, as his bandaged hands make him closely resemble a mummy or a terrible burn victim.
“Walk him back to the Field House, you! He won’t be able to turn the key in the lock,” Grandpa Ben orders.
He’s suggesting I go to Cass’s apartment alone now? What happened to the knife salesman?
“It’s true, honey. Those hands must be so sore. I wonder how you’ve been able to do anything at all, Cassidy. You must be made of tough stuff.”
Cass shrugs, clearly embarrassed.
Tough stuff, Mom? Really?
All her vigilance and caution have apparently faded away in the light of Cass’s hands. Mom loves a victim. Even a self-inflicted one.
Or maybe it’s his charm, not his hands. Because that can make anyone’s caution fade away.
Certainly mine.
It’s a cloudy, moonless night, hard to see on the unlit High Road. I stumble and Cass’s palm catches me immediately under the elbow.
“Ow.”
“Don’t do that!” I say. “Your hands are hurting.” I yank my elbow away.
“Blisters, not shrapnel. It doesn’t feel any worse than it has for a while. Really. It’s not—”
“If you say it’s not a big deal again I will hit you.”
Cass starts to laugh, then laughs harder, until he has to stop on the darkened road. I can vaguely make out the flash of his eyes and his teeth, but not much else. “You send more mixed messages than any girl on the freaking planet,” he says when he finally catches his breath. “You need to come with a goddamn YouTube instructional video.”
“I do not. I’m very clear.”
More laughter. Now he’s practically wheezing. It’s hard to listen to someone laughing so hard without starting to smile yourself. “I’ve never given you mixed messages. The messages just changed. That’s all.”
“And changed again, and again, and again.”
“I’m not like that.” My voice thickens. Am I really some kind of confusing tease like the ditzy heiresses in Grandpa Ben’s movies? The ones you want to smack sense into? I’m not. Right?
“Watch out, the lawn mower’s right there,” he says, hauling me expertly around it with a little arm swing, like a dance move. Then he’s opening the door. No key.
“You didn’t lock it.”
“Course not. What are they going to steal? I don’t see Old Mrs. Partridge sneaking in to grab my gym shorts and a can of tuna.”
“But the whole reason I’m walking you home is so you don’t have to fumble with the key!”
“I wasn’t the one who came up with that excuse,” he reminds me, “but I was damned if I wasn’t going to go with it.” He reaches in to flick on the switch and the light slants out into the night, casting him in shadow, glinting off his hair, blinding my eyes.
“G’night, Gwen.”
As I hit the bottom of the stairs, he calls, “The whole reason?”
Chapter Twenty-five
Dad’s rapping at the screen door with his knuckles. “C’mon, Gwen. You too, Nico. You don’t get a choice this time. I need ya.”
Nic unfolds himself from the couch, dropping his Men’s Health fitness magazine with a decided plunk, looks at me, shrugs.
Both of us have done this for years. All the years since he left. Dad shows up, tells us he needs help, and we trail along, without knowing quite what we’ll end up doing—scraping barnacles off the bottom of his boat, picking up supplies for Castle’s at Walmart because the Sysco delivery is late . . . playing mini golf at Stony Bay Smacks and Snacks.
But we haven’t had a mystery trip once this summer, and I wonder now if it’s because of the standoff between Nic and Dad.
We slide into the front cab of Dad’s truck—me in the middle, Nic, huge feet propped on the glove compartment, slouched down. Dad frowns as the engine sputters for a second before kicking in. He swerves impatiently around a bunch of summer kids gathered in a cluster by the Seashell gates, then peels down the road.
“Gonna give us a clue, destination-wise?” Nic asks after a while.
“Clamming,” Dad says. “Stuffed quahogs are the special this week, and you know they taste better when we dig ’em up than defrost ’em. Esquidero’s is running a quahog week too, bastards, and I’m damned if they’re going to screw me out of my special.”
“Nothing else?” Nic’s voice has an edge to it now.
“I need a reason to see you guys?” Dad asks, barely pausing at a stop sign. “Neither of you are working at Castle’s this summer. You skip out on dinner, Nico. Every time, lately.”
Nic begins drumming his thumb against his knee. Shifts the station on the radio from some angry talk show guy ranting to mellow rock.
Dad shifts it back.
I can’t help feeling like there’s more to this than clams. Am I here to be a buffer? An ally?
“What’s up with you and the Almeida girl these days?” Dad asks Nic abruptly as we pull off to the side of the road by the causeway. The clamming is better here, the water always shallower than at either of the island beaches.
Nic’s head jerks in surprise. Dad is always hands-off in the relationship-discussion area. That’s Mom’s turf. “What do you mean?”
“What I said. You two still—”
“Yeah,” Nic interrupts. “Why?”
“You being smart?” Smaht. Dad’s accent is always stronger when he’s angry or uncomfortable.
“About what, Uncle Mike?”
Dad glowers at him. Nic glares back for a second. I want to knock their hard heads together.
Nic relents. “Yeah. Always. Both of us. Why?”
“My job to ask.”
“Since when?” Nic seems to know how belligerent that sounds. He clears his throat, and adds, “We’re good. You don’t need to worry about any grandnieces and -nephews any time soon.”
Dad grunts. He and Nic have identical flushes of color on the backs of their necks. “Good, then.”
“Can we do the group hug now?” I ask. “This is just so sweet. I know I feel a lot closer to both of you since you’ve poured your hearts out this way.”
Nic jabs me in the rib with an elbow, but he’s smiling slightly. Dad looks like he’s considering grinning, then decides against it. “Get the rakes.” He jerks his head toward the truck bed.
Rakes resting over our shoulders, buckets in hands, we wade out into the water.
Nic bumps his rake against my calf. “What was that?” he asks, voice low. “No glove, no love, from Uncle Mike?”
I shrug.
“He’s never said a word to me about it before, not ever, not once. Not when I actually could have used it,” Nic continues. “Why now?”
“Maybe he thinks it’s time he did.”
But if Dad picked this as a family bonding moment, his technique needs work.
We fan out in the water, working separately, not talking.
Anyone who knows anything about clamming knows it’s sandy, gritty, backbreaking work. In cold weather, your fingers nearly freeze as you scrabble in the grainy sand searching for the quahog shells. In summer, the back of your neck burns since you’re stooped over for hours. It’s not getting out in the open ocean, like fishing. It’s not even standing on a pier casting out and the excitement of a tug on your line.
Still, I’ve always loved clamming. When I was little, I liked the muddy sand fights with Nic, the competitions Grandpa Ben would judge: who got the most clams, the biggest, the smallest, the weirdest shaped. I loved the meal Grandpa Ben would make afterwards, clam chowder with fresh summer corn and tomatoes on the side, or spaghetti with clam sauce rich with garlic and parsley. I still love those, but there’s just something about mucking around in t
he water, concentrating on what you can find and feel with your fingers, thinking about things without letting them weigh you down.
Today it isn’t working, though.
The whole reason?
My fingers sift automatically. I slap a horsefly off my arm.
Pulling up one more big quahog, nearly the size of my outspread hand, I toss it into the wire basket, then take a deep breath and put my silty palm to my heart, inadvertently leaving a print on my white tank top.
The basket’s nearly full.
I squelch my way to shore, wiping sweat off my forehead and no doubt leaving more sand. My hair clings to the back of my neck, sticky with sand and salty water.
“What’s up with the kid?” Dad says from behind me. I hadn’t heard him come closer. “Aidan Somers’s boy?”
“He’s teaching Em to swim. His name is Cass, Dad. He’s not just his father’s son.” I see a tiny pocket open in the sand, the smallest blowhole, plunge my hand in, close my hand around the hard shell.
“That one’s too puny. Uniform size, pal, you know that.” He squints at me. “I knew him. Aidan Somers. Did. Years ago. The boy looks like him.”
“I guess,” I say cautiously. Where is this going?
“Worked at the shipyard at Somers Sails. Summer I was seventeen.”
I straighten up, wipe my hand on my shorts. I never heard Dad ever had a job outside of Castle’s, where his own father started. And ended.
Nic comes up next to me, cocking his head at Dad, then shooting me a quick, astonished look.
“Best summer of my life,” Dad adds. “Those boats. God.” He tips his head back, closes his eyes, face softening. “My job was crewing, getting them to whoever paid the big bucks to own ’em.”
“I didn’t know you could even sail,” Nic breaks in, at the same moment I say, “Why don’t you have a sailboat of your own, Dad?”
He leans back. “The kinda boats I could afford . . . Messing around in an O’Day—compared to the ones at Somers’s? No contest. Sailed a Sparkman and Stevens down to Charleston with Aidan Somers. That boat . . .” He has a faraway look in his eye—Dad, who is not a dreamer. “Felt as though it never touched the water at all. Closest I’ve ever gotten to . . . heaven. All came together. I was good, good at it too. Somers—Aidan—offered me a job.”
Nic and I have both stopped rooting around in the sand and are standing there, listening like it’s a fairy tale. Mom and Grandpa Ben are the storytellers. Not Dad. Ever focused. Not looking back.
“And—?” Nic asks.
“Your bucket’s only half full, Nic,” Dad says. “Keep at it, both of you. And? And nothing. Pop died, Luce turned up pregnant, Gulia couldn’t deal with her kid. I had no business taking off sailing. End of story.”
I exhale, not realizing I’d been holding my breath.
Dad and Nic take Dad’s boat out, motoring across Stony Bay Harbor to wash the quahogs and put them on ice. Consolation prize, Dad sends me home with a bucketful of clams. I’m wearing a pair of Nic’s gym shorts because I didn’t want to get my own too disgusting (and let’s face it, his always are). The way my feet drag more and more slowly up the hill is not just because the clams seem to be reproducing in the basket, making it heavier, but I swear, my feet are increasing in density too.
By the time I get to the top to take the turn by the Field House, there’s a river of perspiration pouring down my back. Cass’s tomato-soup-red BMW is parked outside the Field House, no sign of him.
But then there’s a low rumble and a squeal of brakes and the silver Porsche pulls in, Spence at the wheel, the rest of the cockpit full of the Hill crew—Trevor Sharpe and Jimmy Pieretti and Thorpe Minot. They’re all windblown and laughing. Spence is wearing a tangerine-colored shirt. He tips his elbow on the horn. “C’mon, Somers! Get your working-class ass out here!”
They’re a millennial update of The Great Gatsby . . . casual, careless, confident. The Field House apartment door opens and Cass comes out . . . one of them.
I’d gotten used to seeing him around Seashell, fitting in. His hair messed up by the wind and from him running his hands through it, his T-shirts sweaty, rumpled, the wrong color. But now he’s all Hill Boy—dark blue shirt that’s probably designer, judging by how it sculpts his torso so perfectly, pants that actually have a freaking crease in them. I doubt he ironed them himself. Nothing wrinkled, nothing out of place.
“Look how well he cleans up!” Thorpe calls, laughing. “C’mon, Sundance, let’s get out and get you to forget your troubles.”
What troubles?
“Look what IIIII’ve got.” Jimmy waves a dark brown glass bottle of some expensive-looking beer. “Plenty more where that came from.”
Cass is laughing. He shakes his hair off his forehead in his “I’m just out of the pool” way, which at this moment seems as though he’s shaking off not water but the dust of this crummy island. He slides over the back passenger door, shoving Jimmy to the side with a hip, still smiling. He doesn’t look over toward me, doesn’t see me.
I have the weirdest feeling of loss. As though while Cass was on the island he was becoming a little bit ours, a little bit of an island boy. But it looks as though, after all, he really belongs across the bridge.
Chapter Twenty-six
“‘Her body was like that undiscovered country that he had long yearned for and never found. And so he took her, planting his flag in her uncharted regions, as only a man can take a woman he yearns for, pines for, throbs to possess,’” I read to my rapt audience.
Mrs. E. is not alone in her taste for romance novels.
The reading circle has expanded to include tiny Mrs. Cole and Phelps, Big Mrs. McCloud, and Avis King. I can hardly be accused of corrupting minors, since Mrs. Cole is the youngest at seventy-something, but I feel uncomfortable anyway. Maybe because my mom loaned me the book. Or because during one of the pirate’s more exotic seductions of the pregnant princess, Avis King made me reread a paragraph three times while she and the others tried to decide if the pirate’s feats were physically possible. And really, his flag?
Jump-starting this discussion, Avis King, growling in her pack-a-day voice: “He’d have to be extremely physically fit.”
Mrs. Cole, high-pitched and defensive: “I’m sure pirates were. All that sacking and pillaging.”
Avis King: “Clarissa, you’re all in a muddle, as usual. Vikings sacked and pillaged. Pirates spent a lot of time on the high seas on cramped boats without room to exercise.”
“This pirate certainly gets a lot of exercise,” Mrs. Ellington says approvingly. “I do like these modern romances. None of that foolish cutting away to the next scene just when things are getting good.”
Big Mrs. McCloud, imperious as a queen: “Pirates all had bad teeth too. Scurvy.”
Avis King: “Let’s just move along, girls?”
But we can only continue a short way before there’s more speculation. “The princess must be having a boy if she’s interested in getting up to all that with the pirate in her condition.
“Oh Clarissa, that’s a myth,” says Avis King. “There was no difference at all in how I felt about Malcolm when I was expecting Susanna or William.”
“I don’t know . . .” Mrs. Cole muses. “I barely wanted to eat at the same table as Richard when I was with child with Linda, but with Douglas and Peter . . .” She stops, smiling reminiscently.
Mercifully, the ladies all ask for iced tea at this point. Mrs. Cole follows me into the kitchen. “This is hard,” she says softly, in her whispery little-girl voice. I assume she means the pirate and the princess and concur.
“Well, it is kind of explicit, and that can be unnerving.”
“Oh heavens”—she flaps her hand at me—“not that! Do you think I was born yesterday?”
Well no, which is part of what makes it awkward.
“No, it’s that dear Rose has headed up all our summer traditions. Now she spends so much time sitting about. Doing nothing. Planning less. That’
s what I hate the most. The not planning. Like there’s no future there,” she confides, softly. “She’s the oldest of us, but never seemed that way. I don’t know what Henry Ellington’s thinking, leaving her on her own so much. When my Richard broke his hip, our children and grandchildren were there all summer, waiting on him hand and foot. Drove him crazy, if you must know. But far better that than this . . . absence.”
Just then the phone rings. As if summoned, it’s Henry Ellington. “Gwen? How’s my mother doing?”
The problem is, having discussed his mother with him a grand total of once, I don’t know how much truth he wants. I say something about her appetite being good, and how she’s gotten to the beach, and he cuts in with, “What about resting? Has she been getting her naps on schedule? Same time every day?”
Does it really matter about the time? She naps, but yes, we’ve occasionally come back later from the beach or gone for a drive to some farm stand in Maplecrest where they have these elusive white peaches Mrs. Ellington craves. I stammer that I try.
“I’m sure,” he says, his voice softening. “I know Mother’s will of iron. But do your best. I’ll be coming down to see her today, as a matter of fact. But I’ll probably get there while she’s napping. Then I’d like to make dinner. Would you be offended if I sent you out to the market for us? It’s my father’s birthday and she’s always sad. I thought I’d make her his favorite meal—that was their tradition.”
Indeed, Mrs. E. is fretful and out of sorts by early afternoon. She agrees to go up to bed slightly early, then keeps calling me back to open a window, close a shade, bring her a cup of warm milk with nutmeg. She fusses that I put in too much honey, not enough nutmeg, the milk is too hot, there’s a scalded skin on top. Finally, she lets me leave. I sit outside her door sliding my back down the wall, checking my texts from Viv and Nic, waiting for another summons, but all is quiet, so I inch slowly down the stairs, stepping over the fourth one that creaks like the crack of a rifle if you hit it the wrong way.
I’m lying in the front yard, shoulder straps pulled down for tan line elimination, reading the antics of the pirate and the princess, when I see Mom and her current cohorts coming out of the Tucker house across the street. Buckets and mops in hands signals that they’re done. Which means that the Robinsons’ stay on the island is done. So long, Alex. I get up to walk over. Spotting me, Mom gives a cheery wave, and then fans her hands over her face in a gesture of exasperation meant to convey that her existing cleaning team hasn’t gotten any better. Angela Castle, who is Dad’s cousin’s daughter, is hauling the vacuum cleaner down the stairs, wearing a sour expression and a shirt cut down to her navel. According to Mom, Angela only consented to this job in hopes of winning the hand of some Seashell summer guy. “As if,” Mom said, “we haven’t all outgrown Cinderella. Yuh, that’ll happen. Because nothing says sexy like mopping your floor.”