here, but a customer nearly tripped and I had to at least pretend I was going to move the blasted thing,” Kate said.
“I’ll take care of the flour if you fix me a snack,” Helen said cajolingly as she stooped to pick up the sack.
“Deal,” Kate replied gratefully, and bustled off with a smile. Helen waited until Kate’s back was turned, lifted the sack of flour easily on her shoulder, and sauntered toward the workstation, where she opened the sack and poured some flour into the smaller plastic container Kate used in the kitchen. While Helen neatly stacked the rest of the delivery in the storeroom, Kate poured her a bubbly pink lemonade, the kind that Helen loved, from France, one of the many foreign places she was dying to visit.
“It’s not that you’re so freakishly strong for someone so thin that bothers me. What really pisses me off,” Kate said as she sliced some cherries and cheese for Helen to snack on, “is that you never get winded. Not even in this heat.”
“I get winded,” Helen lied.
“You sigh. Big difference.”
“I’ve just got bigger lungs than you.”
“But since you’re taller, you’d need more oxygen, wouldn’t you?”
They clinked glasses and sipped their lemonade, calling it even. Kate was a bit shorter and plumper than Helen, but that didn’t make her either short or fat. Helen always thought of the word zaftig when she saw Kate, which she had a notion meant “sexy curvy.” She never used it, though, in case Kate took it the wrong way.
“Is the book club on tonight?” Helen asked.
“Uh-huh. But I doubt anyone will want to talk about Kundera,” Kate said with a smirk, jingling the ice cubes in her glass.
“Why? Hot gossip?”
“Smokin’ hot. This crazy-big family just moved to the island.”
“The place in ’Sconset?” Helen asked. At Kate’s nod, she rolled her eyes.
“Oh-ho! Too good to dish with the rest of us?” Kate teased, flicking the condensed water from the side of her glass in Helen’s direction.
Helen play-shrieked, and then had to leave Kate for a moment to ring up a few customers. As soon as she finished the transactions, she came back and continued the conversation.
“No. I just don’t think it’s that strange for a big family to buy a big property. Especially if they’re going to live in it year-round. It makes more sense than some old wealthy couple buying a summer home that’s so huge they get lost on the way to the mailbox.”
“True,” Kate conceded. “But I really thought you’d be more interested in the Delos family. You’ll be graduating with a few of them.”
Helen stood there as Delos ran around her head. The name meant nothing to her. How could it? But some echoey part of her brain kept repeating “Delos” over and over.
“Lennie? Where’d you go?” Kate asked. She was interrupted by the first members of the book club coming early, wound up and already in the throes of wild speculation.
Kate’s prediction was right. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was no match for the arrival of new year-rounders, especially since the rumor mill had revealed that they were moving here from Spain. Apparently, they were Boston natives who had moved to Europe three years ago in order to be closer to their extended family, but now, suddenly, they’d decided to move back. It was the “suddenly” part that everyone spent the most time discussing. The school secretary had hinted to a few of the book club members that the kids had been enrolled so far past the normal date that the parents had practically had to bribe their way in, and all sorts of special agreements had to be made to ship their furniture over in time for their arrival. It seemed like the Delos family had left Spain in a hurry, and the book club agreed that there must have been some kind of falling-out with their cousins.
The one thing Helen could confidently gather from all the chatter was that the Delos family was rather unconventional. There were two fathers who were brothers, their younger sister, one mother (one of the fathers was a widower), and five kids, all living together on the property. The entire family was supposed to be unbelievably smart and beautiful and wealthy. Helen rolled her eyes when she heard the parts of the gossip that elevated the Delos family to mythic proportions. In fact, she could barely stand it.
Helen tried to stay behind the register and ignore the excited whispering, but it was impossible.