“But what will I do?”
“You’ll be a lady of leisure.”
The thought of herself as a lady of leisure makes Kristie laugh out loud, as tired as she is. She’s worked her whole life, from her first job taking pizza orders at age fifteen. She’ll never be a lady of leisure—it’s not in her DNA.
“I can work,” she says. “I want to work.” Maybe she’ll look for a job that doesn’t require lifting boxes or being on her feet all day. Maybe she can be a receptionist at the YMCA just down the street. She’s walked by there and seen all the exercise equipment lined up along the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the harbor. Maybe she could sit at the desk and check people in. “Anyway. Your jobs are seasonal,” she whispers. “This baby is coming in the winter.”
“I can save up though. I have been saving up. That’s how we do it in Maine. We work really hard all summer, and we hibernate all winter. Or!” His voice gets excited, like he’s a little kid off to the circus. “Maybe we’ll go somewhere where there’s no winter.”
“No way,” she says. “I tried that in Florida. I’m all done with that. All that—” She can’t keep her eyes open anymore; she lets them fall closed, and her own voice sounds very far away, like she’sspeaking into a tunnel. “All that sun all the time. It’s kind of awful, after a while. Relentless.” Even when it’s sunny in Maine it’s a paler kind of sun, cooler, less intrusive. She feels more protected here. She is learning to appreciate water so cold you have to brace yourself just to get your feet wet, and a craggy shoreline in place of endless hot sand.
Her fingers are still intertwined with Danny’s. He’s rubbing the knuckle of her thumb back and forth, back and forth. “You know where I want to go?” he says.
“Where?”
“Portland. Not the Portland here. Oregon.”
“That sounds nice,” she says groggily. “Tell me about it.”
“I’ve never been. But man it looks amazing. Online I saw pictures of a Japanese garden, with a teahouse and a waterfall and everything. Want me to show you?”
“Tomorrow,” she murmurs. “So sleepy.”
“Okay. I’ll show you tomorrow. There’s a gondola that takes you into the clouds. There’s a giant rose garden too. They call Portland the City of Roses. It’s basically a landscaper’s dream. We can get a little bungalow.”
“Bungalow,” she repeats. It sounds like a magic word.
“And you know what the very best part is?”
“What?”
“No snow. You know what that means?” She moves her head on the pillow a tiny bit to approximate a shake. “It means alotof people need their lawns mowed.All year long.Nothing seasonal about that.”
She falls asleep imagining her and Danny and the baby in a covered wagon, Kristie in a bonnet and floor-length plaid, Danny in a wide-brimmed hat, heading west, seeking their fortune.
When she wakes up she answers Louisa’s text.
40.
Matty
Here’s Matty, on the old ten-speed that’s lived in the detached garage at Ships View forever. It’s so old, from, like, 1978, that it has the curving handlebars that look like a ram’s horns. They’re covered in ripped and peeling foam. The gearshift is so rusted that it’s a miracle it still works. Matty has to use an old rag he finds on the garage workbench to clean the cobwebs off it.
Matty cannot believe how messed up his family has become this summer. A few days ago, Claire went missing and they all had to look frantically for her and it turned out she had hitchhiked to Renys.Hitchhiked!She could have been kidnapped, and cut up into little bits and left by the side of the road. Luckily, she came home all in one piece and with a new Connect Four game to show for it.
If Matty has to play another game of Connect Four with Claire he thinks he might lose his mind.
He puts a beach towel and his water bottle and a ten-dollar billfrom his allowance money into his backpack. Before he gets on the bike he checks his phone to see if Hazel has texted him back. He waited twenty-five hours after her departure, and then he sent the following:
How’s it going?
So far there’s been no reply, and the panic is beginning to mount.
Then there is the matter of his parents. Because his father hasn’t made it to Maine for even one second of the summer he’s worried his parents are going to get a divorce. Yes, he knows his father is busy at work, and he knows the company is trying to raise money or whatever, but still it seems like an enormous betrayal on his dad’s part not even to try to come up.
He rides the bike east on North Shore Drive, toward the post office and the lighthouse, past the little pond where his mom has told him a moose once stood still for a whole day. Back in Nashville Hazel is getting ready to start high school; southern schools go back earlier than those in Brooklyn. He pulls in at the general store next to the post office and orders an egg sandwich. He puts it in his backpack along with the towel and the water bottle.
His biggest worry as the bike flies down Main Street is that Hazel will forget—maybe has already forgotten—that she ever knew Matty, and while he is reliving the glory of their kiss over and over and over again she will be presenting her smile,her heart,maybe even a glimpse of her perfect stomach, to boys who are not him.
