“Three. And I’ll be honest with you. He’s alittlebit of a doozy.”
“Bad attitude, or bad habits?”
“Little bit of both,” admits Bianca. “Mostly I would classify him as high energy. But he’s nothing you can’t handle, Amy. You’re one of our most reliable foster moms. As long as you don’t take your eyes off him for more than ten seconds you should be fine. I’m joking! Sort of. You’re one of our stars, so naturally I thought of you first.”
Amy takes a deep breath and walks back up the stairs to her bedroom/office, holding the phone to her ear and thinking.Bianca’s flattery is almost working. She sits in the chair and leans back. She’s not used to looking out for herself. She’s used to looking out for her children, and her husband, and her students, and, this summer, for everyone involved inMuch Ado About Nothing.
What would Shakespeare say? WWSS?Let every man be a master of his time. That’s what he’d say, and he’d be right.
“I’m so sorry, Bianca,” Amy says. “I would love to help out, I really would.” Her instinct is to offer excuses. School is starting! (It is.) She’s repapering the downstairs bath! (She’s not.) She’ll be out of town for two days! (She won’t.) Bianca should definitely ask her next time! (Should she?) But she simply says, “This time I can’t. The timing doesn’t work for me.” It might not sound like a big accomplishment to anyone else, putting her paw down in just this way, but to Amy it is. To Amy it’s substantial.
She ends the call. The yellow legal pad is looking at her accusingly. “I said no!” she tells it. “You should be grateful. I don’t want to hear any more lip out of you.” She uncaps her fountain pen, presses the nib to the paper, and watches the ink flow as she writes.
Act 1, scene 1. Setting.
That was the easy part.
She doesn’t want to count her chickens, but if she can get something on paper before next spring she may have an in with a hot new summer theater on Block Island she’s heard is looking for emerging voices.
Epilogue: September
Sam
The island really does clear out after Labor Day; Maggie wasn’t kidding when she told Sam that! The weekends are still lively—there are weddings and bachelorette parties and older couples no longer tied to their children’s school calendars. But the weekdays are very quiet. Maggie is in school. Some businesses have closed; others have reduced hours. The beaches have vast stretches of unoccupied sand.
Sam needs some rhythm to her days while she gets her new life off the ground, so she’s offered to walk Maggie’s dog, Pickles, each afternoon.
Maybe Uncle Timothy is right; maybe Sam will tire of the solitude out here when winter sets in and the wind starts whipping and the ferry service is sometimes interrupted for days at a time by inclement weather. But so far she thinks she’s going to be okay. Every other Sunday she’s going to take the ferry to Point Judith, where her mother or father will pick her up at the dock and drive her to Narragansett for dinner. She’ll sleep in her childhood bed, and take the early ferry back on Monday morning. She promised her parents these biweekly visits in exchange for them not bringingup college for at least a year. In a year, she’s told them, she’ll be happy to reassess.
One Thursday in the middle of September she’s walking Pickles near the ferry dock, having just come off Ballard’s Beach. She glances toward the passengers filing across the parking lot, as she always does, just out of habit, then does a double take. One of the passengers looks a lot like someone she used to know. One of the passengers looks a lot like Tucker. But she’s been seeing Tucker look-alikes all summer: What’s one more, really, to add to the pile? He’ll probably turn his head and she’ll see a giant mole or a scar that distinguishes him from Tucker.
Then, as he draws closer, she realizes something. It’sTucker. It’s Tucker! What is Tucker doing here? She’s wary, given how they parted, but her heart is thrumming too.
“What areyou doing here?” She’s trying not to smile, not right away, not too easily, but she’s smiling anyway.
“I’m looking for you. I tried to call you like every day after you left. I missed you like crazy. I thought you’d fallen off the earth.”
“I got a new phone number,” she says. “My old phone got wet, and I figured, why not start fresh with a different number?” She squints at him. “This is Pickles, by the way.” Pickles regards Tucker, reserving judgment. “I guess you saw the TikTok about the play.”
“Yeah. It was awesome. I sent you like a million more DMs after I saw it.”
“I wasn’t checking my DMs,” she says. “I only went on to post the video—the rest of it I’m not ready for.”
“Sure, yeah. I get that.”
(Anyway, thinks Sam, the play opened a little over a month ago; why’d it take so long for him to come?)
As if he’s reading her thoughts Tucker says, “I really wanted to see that play, you know. But Tink said I had ‘obligations’ during that time. She wouldn’t sign off.”
“Tink,” says Sam. For an instant it all comes rushing back to her. The whiteboard, the rules, the content—and, yes, the camaraderie, the nightclubs, the fame, the fun. Then the humiliation, the loss of control over her own life and her own reputation. The anxiety and stress. “How’d you get out? Jailbreak?”
“Yeah. Something like that. I mean, no. Actually, I left Xanadu for good.”
“You did?”
“Yup. I was done with the whole thing. Honestly, I should have left sooner, right after you did. It was so toxic, that place. But I needed the money.” He puts his hand gently on the back of her neck, the way he used to, and he says, “I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner.”
Sam’s first instinct is to say,That’s okay.Her first instinct is to try to keep Tucker from feeling bad about any of it, to protect him. “I didn’t make it easy to get found,” she says. But then she asks herself why she needs to protect someone else from pain that was hers. Shouldn’t it be the other way around—shouldn’t Tucker be more concerned about her than she is about Tucker?
