For days after the dinner at the Buchanans, Nicola tries to pretend that none of them exist. She doesn’t go over to Juliana’s. She doesn’t call David. Shedefinitelydoesn’t call or text Jack. The kids arrive for the Dolphin Program, and they’re all so busy that the days fly by. Anytime she’s out on the island, she keeps her eyes peeled for one of Eben Horton’s glass floats.
One of the local interns, Madison, throws a party when her parents go to Boston for a night (Madison is young enough that these things matter) and Nicola stays until the very end.On a Wednesday!There’s no celebrity DJ, no signature cocktail, no raw bar, and yet Nicola has as much fun as she’s had all summer. More, maybe! When her mother calls to check in, they barely talk about David. As small as Block Island is, Nicola is living in a whole different world.
Then, the next Sunday, a week after the dinner, she gets a text from David that saysGO FOR A WALK WITH ME?At first, she thinks it’s a joke. David wants to go for a walk? David has never chosen to walk when he can drive, and drive fast. She texts back, asking him what bar he wants to meet at. Poor People’s Pub? Ballard’s? Keep it closer to home and go to The Oar?
NOT A BAR, he replies.I WANT TO GO FOR A WALK. SRSLY.
She thinks about it.OK. NATHAN MOTT PARK?Nathan Mott Parkis a series of trails that connects to the Greenway trails and the Enchanted Forest. Madison has told her that in mid to late summer you can sometimes find blackberries growing on the trails.
WANT ME TO PICK YOU UP?
She answers that it’s okay, she’ll take her bike. It’s about three miles from where Nicola lives to the entrance of the park, and she wants the exercise. She begins to regret her decision as soon as she turns onto Center Road, though. The hill is absolutely vicious, and each muscle in both quads stands on high alert as she fights every urge to get off and walk.
A man in his sixties walking a doodle tells her encouragingly, “You’ll get there!” Easy for him to say, he’s walking, and downhill, but she presses on, oddly buoyed by his belief in her.
David is standing near the sign at the entrance. She can’t read his expression; are they going to talk about the dinner? Are they going to talk about Juliana? Nicola joins him and they read silently, learning that the park was the gift of Lucretia Mott Ball, and that she was responsible for the statue of Rebecca at the Well in the center of town, erected by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. David points to that part and says, “Didn’t take, did it? The whole temperance thing.”
Okay. They’re not going to talk about it.
“A thousand bachelorette parties would agree with you.”
Thirsty from the bike ride, Nicola downs at least half her water bottle. Another car pulls up, and out jump two young women. Nicola drinks more water while the two young women gaze at David while trying to look like they aren’t gazing—he does, she forgets sometimes, give off the vibe of an Almost Famous Person, so tall and model-ish. The women finish gazing and go on ahead, and Nicola and David start down the path after them.
“So what’sup?” she says. “Why the sudden interest in nature?”
“I’ve always been interested in nature.”
She snorts. “No, you haven’t.” To the left of them are open fieldsbordered by stone walls, once used by farmers. The trail leads first into a set of dense shrubs. The scientist in Nicola wants to be aware of her surroundings, trying to identify shad and arrowwood and bayberry. (She’s an aspiring marine biologist first, yes, but she also picked up a weird amount about botany.)
There’s a long pause, and then here it comes. “I want to talk about Juliana.” He takes a deep breath. “No joking around, okay? I really want to talk.”
“Go ahead,” she prompts. “I’m all ears, no jokes.”
They come out of the shrubby part of the walk and into an open field. In front of them flits a little orange butterfly, an American copper. It stays just ahead of them as they cross the trail, as though it’s showing them the way, which Nicola thinks is very hospitable of it. Nicola waits for David to say something.
They cross the open field and start on a gentle uphill. David sees something on the ground, a funny-shaped, sharp-looking thing. “What is that?”
“Oh, that’s a deer husk.” Nicola explains that the husks come from the oriental chestnut, left by deer in the fall, who break them open to eat the sweet meat inside.
“Encyclopedia Nicola,” he says, and then they’re both quiet for a little longer. Then David finally begins. It’s the same story Jack told her early in the summer, but from a different point of view—and as anyone knows, point of view iseverything.
The party at Fashion Week, LookBook’s round of fundraising. Taylor in Europe with her father, the all-night walk around the city. When David met Juliana, when he fell in love with her, she was smart and she was ambitious and she had a work ethic that you can’t make up.
“Aren’t all of those things true of Taylor too?” Nicola says judiciously.
“Yes,” he acknowledges. “Yes. On paper.” But, he explains,something differentsparked during that night. Not only did David thinkJuliana was fascinating—where she’d started and where she was headed, and the grit it took to get from one place to the other, the almost impossibly tall hill she’d climbed—but instantly David was struck by how Juliana valued him, David, as his own person, his own entity, with his own past that was worthy of value. He told her about the race cars right away. It didn’t feel embarrassing to share his passion with Juliana, it felt—normal. It felt exciting.
“That’s not the way it was with Taylor. Which I didn’t even notice in college, you know? I couldn’t believe someone like Taylor was interested in someone like me, so I didn’t let myself think too much about it.”
“Someone likeyou?You’re a catch, David. You must know that. It was a match made in New Haven.”
He snorts, then turns serious, shaking his head. “I didn’t feel like a catch at Yale. I always felt like an imposter there. Everybody I knew was so polished. So bred for it. Juliana felt like an imposter in her life too. We connected on that right away.” He gazes into the middle distance. “With Taylor, in the beginning, all the way through college even, I felt like I gave her just as much as she gave me. But by the time I met Juliana that had changed.”
“What’d you give her?” Nicola is genuinely interested in the answer to this question.
“I felt like I could soften her hard edges, you know? She had thisbarrieraround her, and I was the one who could break it down. I think part of it is her mom leaving and never really coming back, and part of it is the money, and part of it is just how she looks—”
“Like a supermodel.”
