“If he saw you now,” says Louisa, “he’d think he chose wrong.”
The smile Nicole gives Louisa is filled to the top with rue. “No way. Never. I’m a mess. Clearly. But you— My mom’s kept me updated on you, over the years. A professor! I mean, wow. She saidyou’re writing a book! And you have three kids, I only have one and I can barely manage.How do you have everything so together?”
Louisa nearly spit-takes her drink. “Are you kidding me? I don’t have anything together.”
“Well, you could have fooled me. My mom talks about you like you walk on water.”
“Just that one time,” said Louisa. “And to be honest I didn’t go very far.” Nicole cracks up at this, which Louisa appreciates. “For real, though. You’ve only been around me for what, like forty-five minutes? An hour? It takes a little longer than that for the cracks to show through. But believe me, they’re there.” Louisa ticks her problems off on her mental fingers. Sick father. Strained marriage. Unfinished book. Newly discovered love child, badly done by. Hole in the safety net big enough for a dead seal to fall through.
“I think you’re just saying that to make me feel better. I can’t seem to do any of it right,” says Nicole. “I don’t know why I’m always messing things up.” She lets out a weight-of-the-world sigh. “Maybe I shouldn’t have left in the first place. Maybe that was my mistake, looking for greener pastures when I had the pasture in front of me all along.”
“The way I figure it,” says Louisa, “we spend about half our lives trying to get away from our roots.” She shrugs. “And then we spend the other half trying to get back.”
“Ha! That’s so true, right?”
Louisa thinks about Aggie:I hope you know how lucky you are, Louisa.She thinks about Nicole asking her how she has everything together. She thinks about Pauline, who has told Nicole things about Louisa, good things, that Louisa didn’t even know Pauline was aware of. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time for Louisa to start feeling as lucky as she looks to other people.
The bartender wipes down the bar next to them with great attention, and then he rearranges the napkins and the lemons andlimes, which do not need rearranging. Two men come in and survey the available seats. They choose to sit next to Nicole, even though at least six other bar seats are open. They look like fishermen, brawny, tanned faces, tattoos.
One look from Nicole and the men are introducing themselves. They are Captain Jeff and First Mate Noah. They run a tourist boat out of Camden in the summer, and in the fall they pull traps out of Rockport. In the fall, they’re in bed by 7:00p.m.“But in the summer we live it up,” says Captain Jeff, wagging his eyebrows at Louisa. She must be getting drunk, because she wags her eyebrows back. Louisa watches Nicole slip on a coat of pure charm as she acts like a fisherman is an exotic creature, like she hasn’t grown up around three of them. Before she knows what’s happening, Captain Jeff and First Mate Noah have bought them athirdround of drinks.
“I don’t know if I can,” says Louisa when the fresh drink appears in front of her.
“Of course you can,” says Nicole. “You just drink right up, Louisa. The band is starting. The night is young.”
“It’s notthatyoung,” says Louisa. “It’s middle-aged at best.” But she picks up the third drink anyway and swivels in her chair to watch the band. They’re good! They cover some old stuff—the Ramones, some Stones, which the fishermen really get into. All of the band members are older than Nicole and Louisa. Maybe fifty, or even sixty; they have weathered faces and long, out-of-style hair. They look happy. When the lead singer starts the chorus of “Satisfaction” he tips his head back and sings to the ceiling and Louisa imagines she can see what this guy would have looked like in high school, the girls going crazy for him.
“Satisfaction” ends, and Louisa looks around for Nicole. She’s walking toward the band! She’s talking to the singer! He’s bending his head toward her to hear, and Nicole has her hand on his shoulder. She’s speaking directly into his ear. When she gets back to Louisa her smile is as wide as the day is long.
“What’d you do?” Louisa has to yell to be heard.
“Nothing.” Nicole’s dimples deepen.
The music starts again. Two bars, then four. The song is “I’ll Melt with You”by Modern English. Nicole and Louisa scream. They were both babies when this song came out, but that doesn’t matter: they recognize it for the happy high school dancing romantic anthem that it has been forever and ever. They take over the dance floor at the Myrtle Street Tavern on the last night in July, as summer turns the corner in Rockland, Maine, and they dance like two friends with everything ahead of them and nothing behind.
August
34.
Matty
Eight o’clock in the morning, the first day of August, Matty is in the deepest, darkest sleep, his shades pulled all the way down, the covers over his head.
“Matty?” It’s Claire’s voice, and then the door opens a few inches and then it’s half of Claire’s face peeking at him. “Matty! Sorry, I’m sorry I woke you up, but Hazel is looking for you.”
“Hazel? For what?”
“Idon’t know,” says Claire, irritated. “She didn’t tellme.”
“Did you ask her?”
“Nope,” says Claire. Her face disappears and the door closes.
Matty gets out of bed, pees, brushes his teeth, looks with a critical eye at his hair, and then grabs his Yankees hat from the bathroom doorknob it’s hooked over. He can hear someone clattering around in the kitchen so he slips out the front door, barefoot. Hazel is standing in the side yard. She’s not looking at her phone; she’s notshifting her weight or playing with her hair or anything. She’s just standing in the grass, very still, facing the water, waiting.
“Hey,” says Matty.
“Hey! Did Claire wake you up?
