Julien tried a smile, but it felt unnatural. “I’d do anything for my guys,” he said.
Eleanor, Esme, Rosamund, and Clarice studied him. He felt on display. He should have grabbed a burger on the way home and eaten it in front of the television instead of this.
“Tell us,” Eleanor said, “how is Nora?”
Julien’s mother, Nora, lived at a retirement facility here on Nantucket. She was approximately the same age as Eleanor, but she had several physical health issues that made it difficult for her to get around by herself. And she loved the community aspect of living in a place like that.
Julien guessed that Eleanor looked down on his mother’s decision to live there.
“She’s doing well,” Julien said. “I’m sure she’d love to meet up with you soon.”
“We should really stop by and say hello,” Eleanor said. “And your sisters?”
“Quinn and Lily are just fine,” Julien said.
“They’re off the island these days,” Eleanor noted.
“Yes. But not too far. They come back when they can,” Julien said. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Eleanor knew everything about him and his sisters and his mother. She made it her business to know everything there was to know about people in Nantucket.
“Why don’t you sit down with us?” Eleanor suggested.
“I can bring you another chair,” Esme assured him.
But Julien didn’t want to sit around with Eleanor and her friends, talking sinisterly about the people of the island. He wanted desperately to go home. “I came in to see Ben, actually. But it looks like he’s not in tonight?”
“He’s at home,” Esme affirmed. “He should be in tomorrow.”
“That’s all right,” Julien said, lacing his fingers through his hair. “I’ll catch him another time. It was wonderful to see you ladies. Maybe I’ll come to the next council meeting. It’s nice to feel involved.”
“We’d like that,” Clarice said, showing too many of her tiny teeth. “Take care, Julien.”
Julien had to fight himself to keep from running out of there. He traipsed down the steps and hurried through the puddle-filled streets to his truck. Blinking furiously, he drove the ten-minute route back to his tiny house on the beach, where he changed into a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and tried to get warm in front of the television. It wasn’t till a full hour later that he realized he still hadn’t eaten.
“Frozen pizza it is,” he muttered to himself, grateful to hear his own voice.
It had been a strange night. He wanted to eat, sleep, and forget about it.
5
Thankfully, the leak in the roof wasn’t in either of their bedrooms. After the rain cut out that first night, a night during which Hannah and Minnie had sat in the living room, avoided one another’s gaze, and eaten the Thai food they’d had delivered an hour or so after they arrived, Hannah crept upstairs to assess the damage. Droplets continued to come from the roof, forming a massive puddle in the middle of the hallway. The wood was worn, cracked, and drooping. Hannah squatted down to press her fingertips against the wood to find that it was sort of squishy, maybe from winter snow and springtime rain. The real estate agent hadn’t mentioned this—nor had Natalie.
“Fixer-upper” was certainly the word for it.
Maybe because the wood was so damaged, one of the floorboards curled dramatically away from the others. It gave the impression of having been slotted into place at another time. Even the nails meant to keep it in place were loose, poking out dangerously. Although this particular area of the hall wouldn’t be often traversed, as it was about ten feet from Hannah’s and Minnie’s bedrooms and another fifteen feet from the bathroom,Hannah didn’t like the idea of rusty nails sticking out like that. Pulling her sweatshirt over her hand, she tugged at the nails till they came out.
The floorboard flipped up along with the last one, revealing a pocket beneath the floor.
And within that pocket was a plastic bag, slightly clear, so that Hannah could see a shoebox within it. Hannah’s heartbeat quickened. The plastic bag was speckled with rainwater, but it had done a great job of protecting what was inside. The shoebox was as dry as a bone.
Hannah’s pulse raced. Downstairs, she could hear her daughter’s music, playing from Minnie’s phone. Hannah had promised Minnie a television, but it wasn’t going to arrive till the end of the week, and the house felt eerily empty without it. It was as though, without other people’s stories on a screen, Hannah and Minnie didn’t know how to carry their own story.
Before she opened it, Hannah tried to imagine what was inside the shoebox. Optimistically, she imagined stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She imagined a map to buried treasure. She imagined old photographs of beautiful women who’d once lived in the house. Maybe whatever she found would be so interesting that even Minnie would want to know more. Maybe Hannah and Minnie could find a way back to one another, through fascination with whatever was in this box.
Slowly, Hannah shuffled the top off the box to find a stack of what looked to be letters. Excited, she reached for the one on top, eager to dig in. But that was when she heard from downstairs the sound of her daughter, sobbing. She put the lid back on the shoebox, carried it to her bedroom, and hurried downstairs.
In a heap on the sofa that had come with the house, a sofa that seemed clean enough, Minnie was crying into her thighs. A sad song played on her phone speaker, and her backpackwas open, revealing the books and journals Minnie had packed from Miami. For Hannah, who’d loved Minnie since she was merely an idea in her mind, seeing Minnie like this nearly broke her. She dropped onto the sofa and wrapped her arms around her daughter, willing her daughter to feel her love. It was then that she saw the photograph beside Minnie of her and her ex-boyfriend Gavin at the formal autumn dance, to which Minnie had worn a plum gown and slow-danced with the boy of her dreams. After returning home that night, Minnie had privately told Hannah that she’d never been happier.
Hannah had loved that Minnie opened up to her then.
