Nantucket Blue - By Leila Howland Page 0,49

I didn’t want to lie, and I also didn’t want to tell him that she more closely resembled a wet sock.

“I bet she’s a great one,” he said. “She was the prettiest, most vivacious girl on the island that summer. Now, don’t look so shocked; us old people were young once, too.” I studied his face. I was having a crazy urge to go check the diary and look at that picture again.

“Cricket,” Liz called. I turned to see her gesturing at a table full of dirty plates and a family hovering nearby, wanting to sit down.

“It was nice to meet you,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Give your mother my best, won’t you?” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, wrote something on a business card and handed it to me: Paul T. Morgan, Esquire. “That’s my cell phone number. If you need anything while you’re on Nantucket, let me know.”

“Thanks.” I slipped his card into the back pocket of my shorts and walked outside, where I made an absentminded, totally unhelpful loop around the yard, imagining my mother’s firecracker self captured and held hostage somewhere on Nantucket, waiting to be shot into the sky.

As soon as we were done cleaning, I flopped on my bed and opened the Emily Dickinson diary. I studied the picture, but it was pointless. You couldn’t see the guy’s face.

I read the next entry, written around a poem about the “majesty of death.” Obviously, Mom wasn’t too influenced by Emily Dickinson.

Dear Emily,

Alarm! Alarm! Call 9-1-1. It’s a LOVE EMERGENCY! On second thought, call the fire department because I am hot to trot! Lover Boy and I talked for almost a half hour today. He stopped to chat with me at the reception desk for his whole break.

Hot to trot? Love emergency? Who was this person?

Emily, from his ice-blue eyes to his cute butt, he’s a head-to-tail fox. If you lived now and you saw him strolling under your window, you might even come out of your house. The attraction is undeniable. Right before a guest arrived and asked him to help with his bags, he leaned over the desk and told me I was making it hard for him to concentrate! I nearly had to wring out my underwear.

Oh, Mom. Disgusting!

He has this smile that made talking to him so easy, like the most natural thing in the world. Oh, I found out that he’s twenty-two and just graduated from college. He was a little shocked when he found out I was seventeen, but I have a feeling it’s not going to stop our love OR our lust.

Love, K. No longer the owner of a lonely heart.

I tried to visualize Paul T. Morgan, Esquire. I could see his big smile with the deep lines on either side of his mouth, the perfect top teeth and crooked bottom ones, the distinguished nose and thick head of graying hair. I don’t know if it was just my imagination fueled by hope, but when I closed my eyes and let the image of his face fill my mind, his eyes were glacial blue. Maybe it was time to close Mom’s Second Glances account after all.

Twenty-five

“DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING,” George said when I walked into the annex later that week with his cheddar and chutney sandwich in one hand and a cold lemonade for myself in the other. The sandwich was his reward for finishing three chapters in one week. One look at his dishevelment and you’d have hoped he’d done something significant. There were big circles under his eyes, his T-shirt was rumpled like it’d been slept in, and I could see the plaque on his teeth. He needed a hot shower with some powerful deodorant soap and a vegetable brush. And I’m no neat freak, but it was gamey in the annex. Liz and I had been instructed not to clean in there, for fear we’d mess something up, but now the smell was a little too human. I took a step toward the window. George put a hand up to stop me. “Seriously, don’t touch. I have a system. Each pile is a zone. The zones cannot be messed with.”

“George, it’s a toxic zone,” I said, and opened the window.

It was true that while there wasn’t one patch of clear space in the whole annex, there did appear to be a strange order to the room. The index cards I’d brought him yesterday covered the floor in a rainbow. The