Nantucket Blue - By Leila Howland Page 0,51

her arrival like she was a gorgeous, petulant diva. Whether I was serving coffee at the inn, buying sunscreen at the pharmacy, or picking up a ham-and-cheese croissant for George at the Even Keel Café, Kayla’s name was uttered again and again under the gray restless sky.

The shops on the harbor boarded up their windows in preparation for the destructive winds. Surfers, who I could pick out by their wet-suit tans and I’m not a preppy or tourist snarls, looked more purposeful and had a gleeful spark in their eyes. Many guests canceled their trips or went home early, hurrying to get tickets on the last ferries and planes, leaving the inn less than half full in the height of the season. Those who stayed played the board games that’d been around for decades and read books by the fire in the library. They ate slices of Gavin’s blueberry and peach pie and sipped tea or red wine, feet curled under them, peeking out the windows, analyzing clouds, reveling in coziness and anticipation. They wanted a hurricane story. I did too.

But Kayla stood us up, swirled her windy skirts, moved out to sea, and cooled her temper over the deep impartial ocean, leaving us with three days of rain. Fat, ceaseless drops filled the sidewalk cracks, overflowed puddles, and sent little streams twisting down Main Street. The grass in the backyard was rain drunk, so green it was practically humming.

The deluge gave George new drive and power. He was like the water wheel in the Industrial Revolution–era mill we’d toured for social studies in the seventh grade, cranking out chapters ahead of schedule, appearing in the kitchen for pie and dances of glee, and then disappearing back into the annex for another round of Coke Zero–fueled productivity.

With so few guests and such a light cleaning schedule, Liz and I finished early and went to the one movie theater on Nantucket. It doesn’t look like a theater from the outside. It’s just a regular-sized gray-shingled Nantucket building that’s also a restaurant and bar. I’m not sure if it’s because people were in a hurricane mindset where normal rules didn’t apply, but the ticket taker didn’t card us and he let us bring drinks into the theater.

We drank Irish coffees with whipped cream as we watched a romantic comedy. It was about this girl who works in a New York City flower shop and falls in love with a corporate lawyer who wants to build a megamall next door. It was dumb, but I still loved it, because in the dark, in the glow of someone else’s story, I was free to think about Zack—how he tasted like mint and salt, how his hands left little swirls of energy where he’d touched me.

It had been over a week, and Zack and I hadn’t texted, talked, or seen each other. My guilt had started to subside, heading out to sea with Kayla. I watched the lawyer kiss the florist girl, the city sparkling behind them. As a spare, sweet folk song filled the theater and the girl on screen gave in to the lawyer’s lips, loosened his tie, and staggered to pull off her funky cowboy boots, my cell vibrated with a text. It was Zack:

I’m breaking our rule. Join me?

Twenty-seven

THAT NIGHT, I picked up Mom’s diary again, skipping over her make-out sessions with “Lover Boy,” which she described in way too much detail for me to handle. There are certain words one just doesn’t ever want to associate with one’s mom and her activities. Words like “hard-on.” It was especially gross now that I had a picture of Paul Morgan, Esquire, in my head. Instead, I started looking for romantic clues, places, and things I could mention that might dust off some shiny magnetic piece of her and pull her back out to this island. Once she was here, I’d arrange a meeting with Paul in one of their favorite places, and their old love would bring Mom fully back to life. I’d have to be subtle. I’d have to make it seem like it was her idea. I found an entry that looked relatively innocent and, pencil in hand, searched for key words.

Dear Emily D.,

Lover Boy and I dared to meet in public today. It was hard to get away. Aunt Betty took me to the yacht club for tennis (Aunt Betty’s athletic, for a seventy-three-year-old biddy) and she insisted on us having lunch with her friends afterward. But finally (after