my face for fun?” Susie poked her nose into Giulietta’s lap, and Giulietta fondled her ears. “I tell your father I am carrying his child. Soon enough, it is not a lie. The local priest marries us. I am wearing a lace tablecloth for my veil.” She kept staring at the necklaces of light on St. Kitts. “It is good, living in Naples with money. When your father’s work there ends, we go to Scotland and I see the trap I have made for myself. He travels to Edinburgh, to London. By then we speak very little. He leaves me in that freezing house under the evil eye of Beatrice.”
“So you ran away,” Els said.
Giulietta looked at Els and then to Toad Hall, as if she was gathering strength either to tell Els why she left or to run for the safety of the cottage. She stood up so abruptly that Susie jumped back; then she tossed the shawl into Els’s lap and hurried to Toad Hall. When her mother looked back before shutting the door, Els wasn’t sure if she was weeping or if it was simply a trick of the moonlight.
CHAPTER 44
Els looked around the Christmas Eve dinner table at her mother, the Flemings, Tony and Lauretta, and the Oualie gang: Liz, Jason, and Boney. She’d found her tribe. To humor Giulietta’s insistence on making a traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes, she’d closed the pub for the day and set up the secret garden for eleven, using Cairnoch’s formal linens and silver. When they all toasted the cook, Giulietta preened. Els could have sworn she was flirting even more than usual with Liz, too, but she didn’t want to call her on it and disrupt the holiday merriment.
At half ten, after the guests departed with overstuffed bellies and armfuls of gifts, Giulietta retired to Toad Hall to ready herself for Midnight Mass.
Announcing he’d help wash up, Liz drew Els to the gallery, where he and Jason had rigged a Christmas tree in Jack’s tradition: a dried century plant stalk in a bucket of sand, its skeletal branches twined with fairy lights and hung with empty beer bottles on ribbons. The breeze tinkled the bottles.
“I failed Gift Wrap 101,” Liz said, and pulled a package from behind the bucket. It was swaddled in newsprint and tied with yellow nylon rope.
“I hardly deserve a gift.”
“The giver gets to judge worthiness,” he said.
Jack would have had some pithy quote to that effect, but when she looked into Liz’s eyes—deep blue, expectant—she bit back that observation and tore off the paper. Inside was his cornflower-blue linen shirt, the one he’d worn on the first night at Sunshine’s, the day he’d given her Susie, the afternoon of Jack’s funeral.
“I thought your wardrobe might be a little thin,” he said.
She shook out the shirt, freshly laundered but unironed, pulled it over her sundress, and hugged it to her. Liz leaned in and kissed her lightly, and she put her arms around his neck and kissed him back. “I have something for you too,” she whispered.
She led him to the lounge, where she’d stashed a flat package behind the bar. He weighed it in his hands before gently removing the wrapping.
She’d cribbed Iguana’s lines from the photo in Liz’s brochure to paint a watercolor of the boat in full sail against a muted sunset. She hoped the painting would touch him as much as the shirt touched her. That it might demonstrate that her envy of his love for the yacht and the sea had softened into a kind of acceptance.
“I’ll give it a place of honor,” he said. “In the saloon. No, in my cabin.” He tucked the painting under his arm. “Got a day group tomorrow. My guess is that they’ll want to end up at Sunshine’s. Meet us there if you like.” He kissed her, and again, and then walked down the hill. At the gate, he looked back at her for a long beat, waved the painting, and turned toward Oualie.
Christmas was two hours old, but Els was still pacing the gallery, trying to sort out her mother’s shift in mood toward agitation and wariness since Mass. She wished she’d never committed to open for brunch later that morning, even though reservations were strong, so she could hang out at Oualie with Giulietta. She feared that any day now her mother would announce her departure, or simply disappear, leaving her with so few of the answers she craved.
Jack bubbled out