My Dearest Friend (41 page)

He stood by the meat cooler for a while, hoping inspiration would strike. A whole dead chicken was truly a repulsive thing, all puckered and goose-bumped. It was the end of May. It was warm enough out to cook something on the grill, but they were moving in a week, and the grill was stuck behind packed cardboard boxes in the garage. He had done that much; he had decided to go back to Kansas City to teach. But he hadn’t managed to feel relaxed about the decision.

“Hello, Jack.”

Daphne’s cart rolled up against his, metal clinking companionably.

“Daphne.” First he just looked at her. He hadn’t even seen her for over a month. Life with Hudson obviously agreed with her. She sort of glowed. But then, hadn’t she always? She was wearing a blue dress that set off the dancing blue of her eyes.

“Hudson tells me you’re not staying on at Westhampton. That you’re going back to Kansas City.”

“Um, yes, that’s right.” They sounded so formal, Jack thought, so terribly proper, as if he’d never had his hand up her skirt. But he had come to attention at the sight of her,
come out of his slouch and into an almost military stiffness, his body of its own accord going into this attitude of respect. “It will make Carey Ann happy to be around her family and friends. And I’ll be able to teach freshman English, and even, eventually, I hope, teach literature there. In any event, I knew I wouldn’t have a chance in hell of getting tenure here.”

“What about your writing?” Daphne asked.

“Oh,” Jack said. It surprised him that she remembered that he wanted to write, that she spoke of it as if it existed: “your writing.” “Well. That will happen sometime, I suppose. I have a family to support and all that.”

“I thought Carey Ann’s father offered to support you all for a while so you could write.”

“Yes, he did, that’s true, but—I mean, you know, man of the house and all that. Pride and responsibility, you know.”

“What about happiness?” Daphne said.

Jack looked down at his cart, shifted it slightly, as if it had been in someone’s way. “Of course it would make me happy to write, but I’ve got others to think about.”

“Don’t you know Carey Ann and Alexandra will be happy if you’re happy? And as for her father—well, Jack, don’t you know
now
that the ultimate happiness in life comes from making our children happy? I’m sure Mr. Skrags would be just thrilled to give you a chance you’d never have otherwise in life.”

Jack stared at Daphne. Suddenly a shiver passed over him, streaking down his spine, and he went cold all over. Here it was, the message from fate, Daphne in her toga passing along the wisdom of the ages, and he was chilled with comprehension. Or perhaps it was just the refrigerated air from the meat cooler wafting up his left arm. But he had never thought of it that way, that helping him out would make Mr. Skrags happy. Why hadn’t he thought of that? People generally liked to help others if they could.

Still, would it be the
right
thing to do?

“Still,” Jack said, “would it be the
right
thing to do? To let myself be supported by my father-in-law?”

Daphne laughed. “Jack. Life is far too short to limit yourself to doing only what is ‘right.’ Good Lord, do you think I’d be living with Hudson now if I’d paid attention to what was ‘right’?”

“Hello, Daphne! I’ve been calling you all day! Where have you been? I wanted to
chat with you about the spring dance.”

Jack turned savagely toward the fat old biddy waddling up toward them with
her
cart, wanting to yell at her: “Not now!
Not now!
” But Marcia Johannsen came inexorably on, unaware of the fact that she was interrupting one of the most crucial conversations of Jack’s life.

“Marcia, Jack, I think you know each other,” Daphne said graciously.

Jack realized he was glaring at the woman who was extending her hand with a smile.

“Yes, yes, hello,” he said, taking the woman’s hand and shaking it. “Nice to see you again.”

“Nice to see you. Daphne, the committee meeting for the dance is going to be on Thursday night instead of Wednesday. Will you still be able to make it?”

“Let me check,” Daphne said. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a small leather appointment book. Taking her time, she flipped through till she found the right date. “Umm,” she said. “I have something that evening, but I can rearrange it. What time?”

Were these two women going to stand here talking about a fucking dance
forever
?

“…  at Linda Hutton’s,” Marcia Johannsen was saying. “Since she’s going to be in charge next year, it seems only—”

“Excuse me, ladies,” Jack said politely, wanting to murder them both. They all shifted their grocery carts so that he could roll away from the meat section and down the aisle to frozen foods. Despairingly he reached in and grabbed a brightly colored cardboard box destined for a hungry man and tossed it in his cart. Dutifully he picked out the items for Carey Ann and Alexandra and wheeled off zombielike to the checkout counter.

Well, he was a fool, wasn’t he? After all, Daphne Miller, soon to be Daphne Jennings, was only a mere woman, a former college secretary, as lost in the whims of the world as every other human being. Why had he endowed her with special powers? Because he had needed to, he guessed. And that was foolish. Really, when was he going to grow up? Right now. He’d grow up right now, and start making his own decisions! And his first decision was that he’d stop by the liquor store for a six-pack and some of the huge salted pretzels they sold from a glass jar. He’d buy something for Carey Ann too, to help with her cramps. Korbel wasn’t too expensive and Carey Ann really loved
champagne. It would be a nice gesture, and she’d be pleased that he had been so thoughtful. Then he’d tell her that he’d decided to take her father up on his offer for a year or two, and see how she reacted. She’d already said seven hundred times before, that if that was what he wanted to do, it was fine with her. He’d just check to see her reaction to be sure it really was okay.

He loaded his groceries into the car, then walked down the little mall to the liquor store. He bought the beer, the champagne, the pretzels, and carried them to his Honda and stashed them carefully on the floor of the passenger side. As he was going around the front of his car to the driver’s side, someone honked at him. He looked up. There was Daphne, driving up the parking lot in the brown Volvo. She waved. Jack waved back.

Daphne was now almost in front of Jack’s car, her head bent at an angle as she rolled down her window. She didn’t stop her car, but she did slow down.

“Hey, Jack!” she yelled, as if they had never been interrupted, as if they were still in the midst of a conversation. “Do it! Take it! Go on! Be brave! It’s all right. You can take what you’re offered!”

Jack watched, speechless. The brown Volvo passed on up the line of parked cars. Daphne stuck her head out the window and looked back at him.

“Go on!” she yelled.
“I dare you!”
Her smile was brilliant.

Then she drove away.

B
Y
N
ANCY
T
HAYER

Nantucket Sisters

A Nantucket Christmas

Island Girls

Summer Breeze

Heat Wave

Beachcombers

Summer House

Moon Shell Beach

The Hot Flash Club Chills Out

Hot Flash Holidays

The Hot Flash Club Strikes Again

The Hot Flash Club

Custody

Between Husbands and Friends

An Act of Love

Family Secrets

Everlasting

My Dearest Friend

Spirit Lost

Morning

Nell

Bodies and Souls

Three Women at the Water’s Edge

Stepping

Read on for an excerpt from Nancy Thayer’s

Ballantine Books

It’s like a morning in Heaven. From a blue sky, the sun, fat and buttery as one a child would draw in school, shines down on a sapphire ocean. Eleven-year-old Emily Porter stands at the edge of a cliff high above the beach, her blond hair rippled by a light breeze.

The edge of the cliff is an abrupt, jagged border, into which a small landing is built, with railings you can lean against, looking out at the sea. Before her, weathered wooden steps cut back and forth down the steep bluff to the beach.

Behind her lies the grassy lawn and their large gray summer house, so different from their apartment on East 86th in New York City.

Last night, as the Porters flew away from Manhattan, Emily looked down on the familiar fantastic panorama of sparkling lights, urging the plane onward with her excitement, with her longing to see the darkness and then, in the distance, the flash and flare of the lighthouse beacons.

Nantucket begins today.

Today, while her father plays golf and her beautiful mother, Cara, organizes the house, Emily is free to do as she pleases. And what she’s waited for all winter is to run down the street into the small village of ’Sconset and along the narrow path to the cottages in Codfish Park, where she’ll knock on Maggie’s door.

First, she waves back at the ocean. Next, she turns and runs, half skipping, waving her arms, singing. She exults in the soft grass under her feet instead of hard sidewalk, salt air in her lungs instead of soot, the laughter of gulls instead of the blare of car horns, and the sweet perfume of new dawn roses.

She flies along past the old town water pump, past the Sconset Market, past the post office, past Claudette’s Box Lunches. Down the steep cobblestoned hill to Codfish Park. Here, the houses used to be shacks where fishermen spread their nets to dry, so the roofs are low and the walls are ramshackle. Maggie’s house is a crooked, funny little place, but roses curl over the roof, morning glories climb up a trellis, and pansy faces smile from window boxes.

Before she can knock, the door flies open.

“Emily!” Maggie’s hair’s been cut into an elf’s cap and she’s taller than Emily now, and she has more freckles over her nose and cheeks.

Behind Maggie stands Maggie’s mother, Frances, wearing a red sundress with an apron over it. Emily’s never seen anyone but caterers and cooks wear an apron. It has lots
of pockets. It makes Maggie’s mother look like someone from a book.

“You’re here!” Maggie squeals.

“Welcome back, Emily.” Frances smiles. “Come in. I’ve made gingerbread.”

The fragrant scent of ginger and sugar wafts out enticingly from the house, which is, Emily admits privately to her own secret self, the strangest place Emily’s ever seen. The living room’s in the kitchen; the sofa, armchairs, television set, and coffee table, all covered with books and games, are just on the other side of the round table from the sink and appliances. In the dining room, a sewing machine stands on a long table, and piles of fabric bloom from every surface in a crazy hodgepodge. Frances is divorced and makes her living as a seamstress, which is why Emily’s parents aren’t crazy about her friendship with Maggie, who is only a poor island girl.

But Maggie and Emily have been best friends since they met on the beach when they were five years old. With Maggie, Emily is her true self. Maggie understands Emily in a way her parents never could. Now that the girls are growing up, Emily senses change in the air—but not yet. Not yet. There is still this summer ahead.

And summer lasts forever.

“I’d love some gingerbread, thank you, Mrs. McIntyre,” Emily says politely.

“Oh, holy moly, call her Frances.” Maggie tugs on Emily’s hand and pulls her into the house.

 * * *

Maggie acts blasé and bossy around Emily, but the truth is, she’s always kind of astounded at the friendship she and Emily have created. Emily Porter is rich, the big fat New York/Nantucket rich.

In comparison, Maggie’s family is just plain poor. The McIntyres live on Nantucket year-round but are considered off-islanders, “wash-ashores,” because they weren’t born on the island. They came from Boston, where Frances grew up, met and married Billy McIntyre, and had two children with him. Soon after, they divorced, and he disappeared from their lives. When Maggie was a year old, Frances moved them all to the island, because she’d heard the island needed a good seamstress. She’s made a decent living for them—some women call Frances “a treasure.”

Still, it’s hard. It isn’t that kids made fun of Maggie at school. Lots of kids don’t have fathers, or have fathers who live in different houses or states. It’s a personal thing. The sight of a television show, even a television ad, with a little girl running to greet her father when he returns from work at the end of the day, or a bride in her white wedding gown being twirled on the dance floor by her beaming, loving father, can make a sadness stab through her all the way down into her stomach.

Plus, her life is so cramped by their lack of money.

When a friend asks her to go to a movie in the summer at the Dreamland Theater, Maggie always says no, thanks. She can’t ask her mom for the money. In the winter, when friends take a plane off island to Hyannis where they stay in a motel and swim in the heated pools and see movies on huge screens and shop at the mall, they ask Maggie along, but she never can go. She
hates
the things her mom makes for her out of leftover material saved from dresses she’s sewn for grown women. Frances always tries to make the clothes look like those bought in stores, but they aren’t bought in stores, and Maggie, and everyone else, knows it.

Frances
never
makes her brother Ben wear homemade stuff. Ben always gets store-bought clothes—and nice ones, ones that all the other guys wear. Their mom knows Ben would walk stark naked into the school before he’d wear a single shirt stitched up by his mother. Ben’s two years older than Maggie, and bright, perhaps brilliant—that’s what his teachers say. Everything about him’s excessive, his tangle of curly black hair, the thick dark lashes, his deep blue eyes, his energy, his temperament.

During good weather, he’s outside, his legs furiously pumping the pedals of his bike as he tears through the streets of ’Sconset, or scaling a tree like a monkey, hiding in the highest branches, tossing bits of bark on the heads of puzzled pedestrians. He’s a genius at sports and never notices when he skids the skin of both knees and elbows into tatters, as long as he makes first base or tackles his opponent.